Australia barely bucks the trend as West slides left

All over the Western world, the political paradigm is moving left. Centre-left parties are moving left across the board and centre-right parties are moving left on economics and social issues, with the big exception being immigration and nationalism, where they are moving right. Isolationism is also growing, on both Left and Right, and anti-immigrant sentiment surging on the Right.

Australia is experiencing all these dynamics and the way we fit into the Western trends is fascinating. But in a couple of key respects we are bucking Western trends. Whether we can keep doing so is critical for our future.

In Britain the Labour Party has moved far to the left under its leader Jeremy Corbyn. He wants a massive cut to defence capability, opposes Britain’s nuclear deterrent and favours old-style socialism; his foreign policy — replete with paeans of understanding if not praise for terrorists from Gaza to the old Irish Republican Army — is a reheat of 1960s radicalism.

He promises endless social spending and radical action on climate change. In the US, senator Bernie Sanders, who is murdering the centrist Hillary Clinton among young voters in the Democratic primaries, offers a very similar program. In Europe, centre-left parties have moved left or been sup­planted by more radical parties.

Throughout Europe and North America, almost all centre-left ­forces favour higher taxes and increased social spending, and more or less no effort at fiscal consolidation. The $US19 trillion debt is no bar to the appeal of Sanders’s policies. Like Corbyn, Sanders is the enemy of defence spending.

The Australian Labor Party fits into this leftward paradigm very neatly, with two crucial exceptions. It is now committed to massive hikes in taxation, $100 billion worth if its own pronouncements are to be believed, and Whitlamesque increased social spending as far as the eye can see. There is only the faintest lip service to one day addressing the nation’s $40bn odd — and growing — budget deficit.

On identity and social issues Labor is now almost universally in favour of gay marriage, whereas only a few years ago its leaders had the opposite view. It wants to tamper with national identity wherever that comes up for debate. Republic? Yes. Change the Constitution to introduce race-based ­categories in pursuit of indigenous recognition, and substantive change to existing practice? Yes, emphatically.

Heavy-handed legislation to restrict speech on grounds of racial offence? Yes absolutely. And so on.

But there are two big exceptions where Labor is bucking the destructive leftward drift of Western centre-left politics. The first is national security. It has committed to spending 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence. Given Labor’s record in government, it is fair enough to be sceptical about whether it would deliver.

But the commitment itself is crucial and, in its way, heroic. Bill Shorten and his team stand with the Coalition government on military deployment in the Middle East and on the substance of all the terror laws. And of course they are deeply committed to the US alliance. They do this while keeping the broad Labor movement together. This is a very high political achievement from Shorten and his team, especially the Victorian Right, and, even from opposition, makes a big contribution to Australia’s net security position.

That the NSW Labor conference rejected the creepy, offensive and idiotic efforts to ban Labor politicians from taking sponsored trips to Israel or force them if they do to spend equal time in the Palestinian territories is a sign of Labor’s health. The most important dynamic in the Left’s pathological, nearly demented obsession with Israel is the self-loathing of the West, which starts with an exaggerated critique and morphs into psychotic disorder, which pervades the contemporary academy. Israel as a Western culture in the Middle East is the recipient of vast irrational hatred. That Labor as a culture resists this impulse, which has infected so many centre-left parties in Europe, is greatly to its credit.

The other way Labor defies the Western centre-left consensus is in its support for strong borders. This ALP attitude too is a big contribution to Australian security.

On the centre-Right, parties are also moving left, especially in terms of supporting social welfare payments to the middle class. Nearly 40 years after the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions the old centre-right mantras of deregulation, low taxes and small government have less and less marketable political appeal. It is not that these policies are exhausted but that, while the rhetoric was strong, the implementation was very patchy and therefore the promise remains unfulfilled.

In 12 years of the Howard government, the Liberals never had the ideological self-confidence to reduce the top income tax rate, as Paul Keating did. The new right-wing populism of the likes of Don­ald Trump in the US and Marine Le Pen in France and even, in many moods, Nigel Farage in Britain favours heavy social spending for the middle class and especially older voters.

The electorate has lost faith in the ability of government to cut its size in a way that delivers real benefits. The young, meanwhile, have lost faith in democracy altogether.

The American young show this in not voting, or voting for Sanders, and the Australian young show it in the devastating Lowy poll that revealed a plurality of the young that no longer believes democracy is the best political system.

Another variation of the move left is evident in leaders such as Britain’s David Cameron and New Zealand’s John Key.

They accommodate the centre-left impulse on social issues such as gay marriage and, where possible, even on identity issues, such as Key wanting a republic and a new flag. By doing this they earn the space to conduct very modest and incremental economic reform.

One way the Liberals and the Nationals buck the Western norm, though, is in being in favour of the world’s biggest immigration program. This is a magnificent success for Australia and a key to our national security and economic development. We can achieve this because we can control our borders. We are almost unique in the Western world in this and treat immigration generally in a calm and constructive manner.

In moving from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull, the Liberals have moved a little to the left. Very modest fiscal repair at best, very modest deregulation at best, continuing solid performance on national security and a delicate, piecemeal negotiation on social issues is the very best we can expect from any centre-right government in Australia today.

Whether it’s enough to meet our nation’s circumstances is ­unclear.