Stay centre-right course to win political argument

There’s a future for centre-right politics down the road, beyond ‘peak insanity’ on climate change and identity.

What has gone wrong with centre-right politics: is it our leaders, or our beliefs, or has the world changed? It’s a bit of each, as I will try to show, but there’s no reason it can’t be fixed.

Consider the Reagan, Thatcher and Howard governments. They each had a point, a program and a purpose. There was a fundamental point that each was trying to achieve, a clear program to bring it about and a moral purpose to what they were trying to do.

The Reagan administration’s objective was to erase the humiliations of the Carter years, by restoring the economy, rebuilding the military and staring down the old Soviet Union, because America was a “shining city on a hill”, the “last best hope of mankind”.

The Thatcher government’s objective was to overcome decades of decline, to stop subsidising businesses going broke, to turn renters into owners and to lift the dead hand of the union movement, because the country that had given the world its common language, the mother of parliaments, the industrial revolution and the emancipation of minorities had become the sick man of Europe.

The Howard government’s objective was to end its predecessor’s culture wars, to reform the tax system to reward earning over spending, to end the something-for-nothing mindset via work for the dole and to privatise inefficient government businesses so that it could truly be said that anyone with the right to live in Australia had won the lottery of life.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at Camp David presidential retreat in 1984.

Contrast the Anglosphere’s more recent centre-right governments. All of them have had their successes and strengths but in all three countries it has been hard to sustain the centre-right’s traditional claim to be better economic managers given the political turmoil, or to discern the centre-right’s traditional commitment to sound finances and personal and economic freedom amid the lockdowns and the spending sprees. In Australia, and even more so in Britain, the centre-right’s usual scepticism about utopian schemes degenerated into ruinously expensive and technically dubious measures to achieve net-zero emissions.

But there’s a further difficulty here. For Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the big task was to defeat the Marxism embodied in the old Soviet Union. For today’s centre-right leaders, the big task is to counter the cultural Marxism that permeates vast swaths of our institutions and makes good government more difficult than ever; in some ways a more dangerous foe because it’s internal.

When Reagan famously said government was not the solution, government was the problem, many people believed him, after several decades of higher spending, more bureaucracy and crushing rates of tax. But what if “post-material” voters’ concerns are less insufficient family income than a supposedly imminent climate catastrophe; and less to protect the democratic way of life than to atone for intergenerational racism and colonialism? To such voters, more government is indeed the solution rather than the problem.

How do political parties whose program has been to advance freedom, to protect institutions and to strengthen the country flourish then, when more and more of their one-time voters think economic growth hurts the environment and that the country is fundamentally shamed by the dispossession of its original inhabitants?

Having it so good for so long hasn’t made us spiritually content, just sent us down the burrows of trying to solve ever more First World problems. While the Marxist left failed to persuade voters that unfairness meant the state had to control the economy to promote equality, it has never abandoned its goal to destroy liberal-capitalism, just changed tactics, trying to subvert the culture via a long march through the institutions.

The neo-Marxist left has turned out to be much better at persuading people the planet needs to be saved than that the economy needs to be nationalised. So now it’s not socialism but environmentalism that requires vast government controls over how our electricity is produced and how we warm our houses, and soon how we feed ourselves and how we move around, to combat climate change.

Likewise, the left has been good at exploiting our humane instincts to undermine our cultural practices so that ending discrimination no longer just means treating everyone the same, it means taking coercive measures against white privilege and male privilege. It’s no longer enough to treat minorities with respect; there have to be pride weeks, and the pretence that biological men are really women if that’s what they say they are. And the societies that were the first to abolish slavery and to empower minorities, and to become essentially colour blind, are now thought to be those that are the most guilty of racism and oppression. Naturally, the further people are from having to deal with real disadvantage and real injustice, the stronger are these misconceptions.

So along with patient reiteration of the economic facts of life, that lower taxes and less regulation are the key to economic growth and greater prosperity, there’s now this further key challenge for the centre-right: to counter the climate and identity obsessions that are weakening our economies and sapping our societies, and that our strategic competitors – such as communist China, imperialist Russia and Islamist Iran – occasionally may pay lip service to but don’t share. Indeed, their cyber propaganda units cynically whip them up, knowing that it makes the West more polarised, fragmented and divided.

There’s no conspiracy here, just generations of students, fed a pervasive diet of leftist propaganda, that because Anglosphere societies were once somewhat exploitative and prejudiced they’re basically illegitimate, even though they’ve also pioneered human freedom and social justice.

Former prime minister John Howard. Picture: AAP

At least in the Anglosphere, higher education once correlated with voting right. Now it’s the opposite. Richer voters have been shifting left while poorer voters have gone in the other direction; hence the Republicans’ success in the flyover states, and the Tories’ success in the red wall, and the Australian Liberal Party’s sudden loss of its up-market, so-called teal seats to pseudo-greens.

Australia’s most successful living leader, John Howard, often characterised the centre-right in our country as “economically liberal and socially conservative”.

But in this new era, it’s said, we should stop being economically liberal to win poorer seats and stop being socially conservative to hold richer seats. Even though repeated experience teaches that governments can’t create wealth, although they can redistribute it; and there’s a point at which redistributing wealth away from the individuals and the businesses that have generated it just starts to make everyone poorer. And even though repeated experience is that evolution is far better than revolution at bringing about lasting beneficial change.

In Australia, nominally Liberal-Nationals governments and oppositions – defying the Howard dictum – have lately tried to be economically conservative and socially liberal, only to end up aping the centre-left, usually disastrously, because why would voters go for the fake left rather than the real one?

Instead of shifting to the left, where they can’t credibly compete, on the grounds that it’s needed to win elections, centre-right leaders need to understand the roots of this leftward drift, often fostered by their own unwillingness to call it out.

As someone who brought our party out of opposition in record time, I know something about creating a contest and winning a political argument by turning climate change from a moral issue about saving the planet to an economic one about soaring power prices, and by insisting that the most humane action was to end the deadly people-smuggling trade.

Because that’s what political parties need to succeed: a purpose to sustain them and a credible program to advance it. For a centre-right party it’s not enough to be slightly less spendthrift, slightly less overbearing and slightly less politically correct than our opponents because it’s impossible to win where there’s hardly any fight. No one knew this better than Thatcher, who declared “I am not a consensus politician; I’m a conviction politician” because she knew it was conviction and courage that created leaders’ political character.

For the centre-right, a way to win would be refusing to close down any fossil-fuelled power stations until there’s a reliable alternative; and getting to net zero (if we must), without putting the lights out and killing heavy industry, via emissions-free, proven, reliable nuclear power.

It would be reducing the regulatory burden on business, especially small business, because that’s the best way to boost productivity, wages and people’s ability to pay their bills.

It would be giving young people more chance to own a home of their own, via tax advantaged savings schemes, because there’s a moral quality to owning something rather than just occupying it.

It would be giving parents more control of their children’s education, in schools that have better teachers and more academically rigorous teaching, savouring the great books as much as critique-ing them.

But it’s one thing to win government, it’s another to hold it and to make something of it.

Thanks to the left’s long march through the institutions, centre-right governments, despite winning elections and having mandates, must expect sabotage at every turn.

The established media will be hostile; the bureaucracy will be sullen; the legislature will be obstructive; and the unions will be bolshie; so the internals will be difficult too. Hence the importance of strong leadership, which sees politics as a calling rather than a career or a vanity project, to draw like-minded people into our parties and our governments.

A party that hopes to win an election must be a broad church, but not to the point of being endlessly elastic about its beliefs. Labor-lite Liberals, for instance, those who want the Liberal Party to be Labor without the unions, might even be better off in another party, working to make that better rather than the Liberals worse.

There are lots of people who have every right to be in public life but no entitlement to identify as centre-right; yet paradoxically, at least in Australia, the only people conservative parties ever seem to expel are the conservatives!

When the migrants who flood into Western countries are much more positive about them than their own leaders, and when the cultural heritage that created the West is neglected and even derided by those who should be its guardians, it’s easy to be glum and to fear our civilisation might have entered the decadence prefiguring its collapse.

Yet we’ve been here before and always come back.

As Thatcher once observed, the facts are conservative. Come the next serious recession, people will rediscover the importance of wealth creation. Faced with military aggression, they’ll realise our society is not quite so unjust after all. When the lights start to go out, they’ll realise having reliable power is more important than cutting emissions. And when the lawsuits proliferate, they’ll realise telling young people they’re trapped in the wrong body wasn’t such a smart idea.

My sense is that peak insanity on climate and identity already may have passed. I have no doubt that our best days are yet to come if we can but fight the good fight, stay the course and keep the faith.

This is an edited version of a speech former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott delivered to the Danube Institute in London on Thursday night.