Redefining conservatism
Australia’s new cohort of independent parliamentarians redrew the framework for conservatism in the nation’s politics at the 2022 federal election.
Australia does not have a Conservative political party. The coalition’s dominant Liberal Party sits to the right of centre on the political spectrum, with the governments it leads only tugged to the right by its more conservative National Party and its regional constituency.
Conservatism respects the culture, traditions and institutions that have created what we have today. But in Australia, it has become shackled by a perspective that is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, male and nostalgic for a world long past - when life’s journey was a linear ‘hatch, match and dispatch’ experience and success defined by accoutrements like home ownership, now beyond the aspirations of many.
Despite post-mortem denials, the Nationals and their leader, Barnaby Joyce, held the coalition government to ransom on climate action and the adoption of a net zero carbon emissions target at the cost of decimation of affluent Liberal heartland seats in inner city seats.
These are the preferred residential zones of Australia’s economic elite - business leaders, professionals, entrepreneurs and socialites - hardly the enclaves of radical lefties. Some were electorates the Liberals had never previously lost, in the process trashing the careers and aspirations of several senior ministers.
Voters replaced them with independents, all of them successful professional women. With shared concerns about the climate crisis, integrity in government and tackling gender and other inequality, these women tapped into conservative communities that felt abandoned by the federal government’s luddite responses to all three.
The Morrison government completely misread the electoral tea leaves on these issues. From the Prime Minister to the backbench, the government sat within the echo chamber of the bile and right wing gibberish emerging from the Murdoch-owned media.
Within the cacophony of mutual shoulder slapping and kid glove interviews, all lost sight of the fact that the three issues on which the independents were campaigning, including climate action, were conservative heartland issues.
The command-and-control, born-to-rule culture and attitude in which the coalition’s male parliamentarians thrived were no longer acceptable to a community which had long embraced collaboration and ambiguous hierarchy as the norm in work and social settings.
These were the settings from which these successful independents emerged. The drubbing they dished out on election day will surely confine the iconic former Prime Minister, John Howard, to barracks after he proved he was way out of tune with voters by remarking that these smart independents were no more than “anti-Liberal groupies”.
This insulting remark was designed to diminish and smacked of desperation, but denied the reality that these candidates were exactly the sort of people, especially women, that the Liberal Party should have been fielding. In a few syllables, he delivered the coup de grace to the Liberal’s chances of the female vote.
By and large, these women personify the new conservatism, which has expanded its focus to include ‘triple bottom line’ success metrics, including performance on environmental, social and governance issues. Yes, ESG. The stuff everyone except the Liberal Party appears to wrestled with for more than a decade and ultimately taken on board.
Progressives have argued these issues for years and, in doing so, have become conservatives, based on the dawning reality that the planet’s resources are finite and the biosphere that sustains us is threatened by our own largesse and narcissism. They are the flag bearers for conservation of resources, protection and restoration of the environment that sustains us.
These are shared by all - rich and poor, the elite and the masses. Uncared for, our environment, our water resources and, therefore, our food supply and health will likely become the biggest contributors to global instability, inequality, dislocation, mass migration and, ultimately, war.
Realism and pragmatism rather than ideology will be the only path to preventing or mitigating this. It is no accident that the pre-eminent issues of the conservative independents are aligning with the priorities of our most progressive Greens party.
Our modern conservatives recognise that success on matters like the environment, equality and integrity have been an unheralded part of our evolution and intrinsic to the economic fundamentals that define our quality of life. Our progressives understand that it is how we mine these resources and not those in the ground that will shape the society we leave to future generations.
It is therefore unsurprising that the common understanding of these superficially disparate political groupings must be that it is not only past legacy that we build upon, but the legacy we are building on which history will judge us.
It is a bridge that the governing Liberal-National coalition found it beyond their imagination to cross. It will rely on others build the span to enable the coalition’s reconnection with a more contemporary and nuanced conservative constituency.
Photo by Josh Withers on Unsplash