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The collective contemporary conservative memory of global government responses to the Covid pandemic has been to fume against government over-reach of rolling lockdowns and forced mandates. This comes mainly from narrow perspectives based in liberalism and economics.
Indeed, time may well judge the government responses poorly, and re-evaluations by some who were surely rationalist cheerleaders of the original response have already started. This liberal re-evaluation aside, I argue that there are deeper conservative values that the pandemic and its forced responses have stirred in our community, and these could provide a useful and uniting platform for willing conservative politicians.
This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
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Take for instance the novel idea of introducing the conservative virtues of duty and sacrifice, as demonstrated through the pandemic response, into political discourse making the case against the modern welfare state. Duty and sacrifice are precepts that are associated with giving rather than taking, not normally heard in peacetime political rhetoric. The explicit introduction of these precepts into populist political dialogue could assist in laying the moral foundations for defending conservative policies more broadly. It could also present a wedge issue against progressives who endlessly virtue-signal these very values, but at the same time keep their conflicting hedonist consumption habits.
Recent federal elections in Australia have included robust debate about the level of entitlements that government should provide. This debate has extended to workplace entitlements, welfare entitlements, health care, agricultural and industry entitlements, to name a few. Occasionally these entitlements, which start as demands from vocal advocacy groups, having gone unchallenged for so long enough, become linked with rights. This confusing conflation is usually not legally accurate but holds in the popular mind and increases pressure on governments to keep providing these entitlements.
If we now say the government shouldn’t endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices to live in remote regions, it is treated as an affront to Aboriginal rights. Or if we advocate the orderly processing of asylum-seeker claims, it is a human rights violation. And so it goes, with a measured climate-change response offending the environmental rights of unborn generations, defunding advocacy groups is undermining minority rights, and so on.
Once the idea of an entitlement takes a grip in the public mind, any proposal to reduce it can be easily opposed on moral grounds, based on misapplied notions of inequity and unfairness. So in the recent election, Labor leaders successfully prosecuted a scare campaign based on the morality of retaining certain health-care entitlements for example, a strategy now known as Medi-scare.
When the moral ground is so furiously hijacked, how can a conservative respond?
Every one of us sacrificed something during the pandemic, and we did this through a sense of duty to our greater communal good. People were largely eager to rise to the occasion and comply obediently with restrictions, as if this were fulfilling something within themselves, and contributing to the safety of their families and the community. But the dominant public and political narrative was one of imposing and policing rules, rather than commending people for their sense of duty and personal sacrifice in following these rules.
Duty helps give people their moral worth. Without duty to yourself, you expect handouts rather than productive employment. Without duty to family, you expect the state to raise your children. Without duty to your country, we couldn’t have any level of taxation. It was in duty to community that the silent majority valiantly bore the impact of imposed Covid lockdowns on their families.
We ask less and less of people in the modern welfare state, where government takes over a growing burden of the individual’s responsibility from cradle to grave. This leads to a declining sense of individual duty, and while this may not necessarily mean we are prone to greater immorality, it does mean there is a growing hollowness in our lives. In my opinion a government, having contributed to this void through its activity, could successfully argue that by retracting some of this activity, it would return greater moral worth to an individual’s daily actions.
Take the last election campaign successfully led by a truly conservative leader in Australia, that of Tony Abbott in 2013, as an example. To great derision from the leftist intelligentsia, he campaigned on the slogan, “Stop the boats, end the waste, scrap the carbon tax and pay back Labor’s debt and deficit”. By any objective measure Abbott was wildly successful in the first three claims but fell on his sword in trying to pay back Labor’s debt. The key reason is that the first three promises required only competent action by government, but reducing national debt necessitated some level of sacrifice by individuals as well. Abbott campaigned on an “action plan” for his government but there was little rhetoric and even less detail on the contribution individuals would need to make as part of that plan. So when his first budget was handed down, it was met with howls of outrage at its lack of fairness. People had not been prepared for the sacrifices they would need to make, and neither was a case made for the moral dignity in taking greater ownership of their lives. Budget repair cannot be secured through the waving of a magic wand by the government, nor in our Westminster democracy should it be. It requires all of us to give up some of our entitlements, accept our duty and improve our moral selves.
It is also unjust that some individuals are penalised solely due to their levels of acquired wealth, as in recent superannuation changes. If action is to be taken to repair the debt that we all created, we should all shoulder some burden that is commensurate with our ability to sustain ourselves with a little less help from government, and it should motivate our innate desire to be our better selves, not leave it all to those who have managed to save more through their thrift and enterprise.
Anxiety, fear and guilt are well-known emotive responses targeted by politicians that have a record of successfully shifting political sentiment. People might also respond to calls to moral duty and sacrifice, to their family, their community and their country. Australians have already proven themselves ready in this regard through their resilience in the pandemic.
J.C. Cole is an economist based in Sydney.
“Duty helps give people their moral worth.” Entitlement does the opposite. It is a moral cancer that eats into all parts of society. It enslaves and eventually destroys those who think they will benefit from it at no cost.
What a refreshing article which goes to the core of many of the things a more conservative approach has to offer.
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It’s an especially encouraging article at a time when a leftwing and entitled approach is increasingly being seen by the electorate as desirable. That’s been witnessed for example by the emergence of the phenomenon of the Teals – which while relatively small has been strategically important in election results.
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The non left side of politics has failed to argue the virtues of a less left-of-centre approach embodying the virtues explained in this excellent article.
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What we’ve seen in recent times from the Coalition ( particularly the Liberal Party component of the Coalition) is a GOTCHA style of politics. The GOTCHA approach is a complete anathema to the approach being advocated so well in this excellent article.
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Of course Labor are no slouches at GOTCHA politics either but it’s been the Coalition’s main approach in recent times.
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Arguably the GOTCHA approach got Scott Morrison over the line but with a lot of help from a naive Shorten Opposition. Some of his frontbenchers seemed to tell voters if you don’t like all we’ve got then you can get lost. Many took that advice and voted for Scott Morrison.
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But the game has changed. Labor in response to GOTCHA politics are now the masters of the small target approach. At the same time people have well and truly also woken up to GOTCHA politics. They’re understandably tired of it.
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However GOTCHA politics is mainly what the Dutton opposition is about. Peter Dutton is frozen in time while the electorate has moved on.
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And accordingly the Dutton opposition is failing comprehensively in the polls – so much so that core support for the Liberals is in danger of being permanently eroded.
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The Liberals’ vote at the last election dropped to a 70 year low. However it gets a lot worse than that. In every poll since then the Dutton opposition has polled lower than that disastrous election result. And with the Aston by-election we recently saw the first government gain from an opposition at a by-election since 1920! The results continue to be astoundingly bad for the Liberals.
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To my mind the more conservative side of politics has a lot to offer in these times. There’s so much potential for the sorts of approaches advocated in this article. Argued well they can appeal to the Australian people.
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The Australian people will understand the difference between a “handout” and a “fair go” if it is effectively pointed out to them. Current policies on both sides of politics are riddled with handouts while many are missing a “fair go”.
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But arguing the approach in this article is well beyond the current Liberal leadership – a leadership Labor and the left mainstream media would be thrilled with.
Hmmmm. Closing down remote indigenous communities sounds like a good idea, well it is a good idea but where do the people in those communities go? Usually to the nearest town and that’s not a win for the people in those towns who in most cases have enough dysfunctional Aboriginal people as is.
When I say dysfunctional I mean people who mostly have no intention of working because they don’t know how and anyway, they’re very used to ‘sit down money’. They would still need welfare payments, housing, health services and money to encourage them to send their children to school. Those children are often exposed to physical and sexual abuse in homes crowded with not just their family but also relatives and blow-ins.
A lot of them simply can’t look after their children properly but they’re not afraid to have babies – Costello’s ill-designed Baby Bonus is a Government Policy they’re well aware of. Those babies are soon old enough to run amuck (Alice Springs is one of many examples) so the wider community must bear the cost of extra Police and legal costs and to also pay for expensive magistrates who don’t apply the law anyway.
If we had a similarly perceptive Liberal leader as the writer of this article there would be so many winning policy approaches possible.
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There were quite a few positives coming from individual responses to the recent pandemic. Helping one’s neighbour and taking responsibility for one’s own actions were two I noticed.
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Entitlement took a back seat for most as the true good nature of most Australians came to the fore to help others. I saw many examples in my neighbourhood.
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There’s so much potential to harness self help more and to leverage the power of our free enterprise economy more to reduce the culture of entitlement. That’s the way to reach our economic potential. It’s the more effective way to deliver a fair go than providing handouts.
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Such an approach would help in all the problem areas of the economy like : aged and disability care, education, housing, aboriginal affairs and even fighting inflation.
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The tendency for leaving more and more to government goes hand in hand with an entitlement culture and it holds us back economically.
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For example some would like to see the private sector in education choked of funds and destroyed … to be replaced by their socialist nirvana of all government schools. Yet that aim would drastically reduce overall sources of funds available for education, innovation in education and the pluralist advantages in having a private education sector.
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For example to move students from private schools to government ones would about double the government cost of each student moved. So overall there would be fewer funds available per student for education.
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Others on the left advocate policies that would drastically reduce private sector investment in the housing rental market – supposedly to help renters.
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And even if the Labor government doubled its allocation to government housing it would make very little difference to the availability and cost of rental accommodation overall. It would be such a small overall component of the rental market.
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And it’s unlikely the electorate would tolerate doubling the funds anyway over what’s already been allocated by Labor.
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On top of that public housing is likely to cost far more to construct. I seem to recall the construction costs of sub standard flats in the first grotesque multi story inner city public housing towers costing more than the cost of a well constructed private houses with gardens at the time.
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Tax policies need to be used to encourage more private rental accommodation not too discourage it as is the current trend.
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Self help and leveraging the private sector more need to be encouraged in all facets of our economy. It’s what the Coalition and Labor parties should be advocating rather than, for example, delivering handouts on childcare and housing ( handouts to those on joint incomes up to $350,000 in the case of childcare).
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The leadership in this should be coming from the Liberal Party. But what we’re getting is GOTCHA politics.