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James Allan
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
The great and recently deceased playwright Tom Stoppard was once asked what he most despised. This, by the way, is a terrific question. Stoppard is reputed to have paused and then answered: “What I most despise are conservatives who don’t conserve.” The sting is more acute when you realise that Stoppard was one of a very few conservatively inclined writers in today’s world. Nor did he live off public grant-giving bodies that uniformly shun anyone on the political right. Nope, his plays actually made money – a lot of money – because they were so good.
But think about Stoppard’s point. Today’s right-of-centre political class is so lacking in cultural confidence that it rarely can summon up the will to conserve anything that just 30 or 40 years ago most all of us would have considered to be of great value and importance. An education system that instils a sense of the West’s greatness, and not just its flaws? Nope. Too hard. A university system which didn’t let its standards plummet over the past three decades, drive out any academics with views to the right of your average Lib Dem MP, become a factory for race grievance politics graduates and didn’t also become a ponzi scheme, visa-granting machine dressed up as an ‘export industry’? Again, nope. In fact, as I have noted more than once in the past, our unis here in Australia got worse every single year of the nine years of coalition governments before Anthony Albanese came in and supercharged the descent.
What about conserving our military and its ability to be an effective force? Or just the morale of our soldiers? Or our domestic legal system from the imperial effects of a wholly undemocratic and malign international law? Or our ability to open mines and drill, baby, drill? Or, during Covid, even just conserving a mere handful of the civil liberties that took centuries to achieve? Or a world where merit mattered, not some orgy of DEI special-pleading victimhood? Or an economy that didn’t go backwards in terms of GDP per person? Or, heck, an ability to stand up and bluntly tell us what a woman is? Or that no one gives a flying you-know-what that someone’s words might have offended someone else because being offended is part of life in any and all liberal democracies? All negatives here too I’m afraid in terms of conservatives conserving. I mean, we’re at the point with conservatives in this country that it’s not even clear that the party of Robert Menzies can conserve itself all that much longer. Maybe that’s in part because it has overseen such mass inwards immigration from peoples whose cultural worldviews are illiberal and intolerant and sometimes openly antisemitic that where we’re going won’t require conservation but re-making.
I hope I’ve given you a taste of why Tom Stoppard might have picked as he did when asked what he most despised.
Related to this decline in our self-belief and our patriotism and our core belief that all cultures are not equal – that some cultures are obviously better at uplifting the lives of women, fostering open debate, creating wealth, making scientific advances – is the observable fact we have let our schools and universities produce far too many white-collar workers who are humanities and social science graduates indoctrinated into holding a fundamental loathing of our culture, country and its institutions. Three decades ago those on the political left thought that the Australia or Britain or Canada it had inherited was a jewel of a place to be born, but could be made better. Today, far too many on the political left (and some on the right too if we’re being honest) basically believe that Australia, Britain and Canada are just irredeemably bad. Who cares that just about all other countries on Earth are worse on any criteria they purport to value? And meanwhile the political right has just pusillanimously let this all happen. Go along to get along. The left can launch steroidal culture wars for decades but when voters on the right want to push back its politicians cower just because the left claims ‘Why do you insist on fighting the culture wars?’
I’ll tell you why. Because these wars touch such 90-10 issues as men playing women’s sports, child transgender surgeries, an impoverishing Net Zero agenda that is all performance art, even ongoing attacks on the ability to speak freely that are now seriously worrying. (As an aside, when is Angus Taylor going to announce some promises to repeal some of the worst of the Labour laws attacking free speech?) So you’re damn right I want my side of politics to fight the culture wars. Thus far in these three decades of the culture wars conservative politicians have made second world war France’s leaders look like some sort of Churchillian tigers of incredible fortitude and willingness to fight.
Or maybe it’s time to give up on the old team and move over to the One Nation party. I know this new team largely lacks political experience. But the flip-side of that is that its candidates aren’t cookie-cutter types who joined the Young Libs in uni, worked for some politico, jerry-rigged a pre-selection and have never run a business or had a real job. (And yes, that’s too sweeping and too generalising but at its core it’s true that the coalition’s MPs are the lowest calibre of the past half-century, if not in the entire country’s history.)
More importantly, given where the West is right now, the single most important virtue of any right-of-centre politician or party is political bravery. The courage to shun focus groups and stand for principles. The courage to not care what the Australian Broadcasting Corporation thinks, an organisation without a single identifiable conservative journalist or producer or presenter – that being Ultimo’s working definition of ‘impartiality’. Because the single best virtue that Pauline Hanson brings to the table is undeniable bravery. And a willingness to say what she believes, whatever the current Overton Window might command is acceptable to say. And boy oh boy do we all need that bravery.
So all in all I think the answer that the great Tom Stoppard gave to that surprisingly insightful question was an excellent one. In both Britain and Australia the politicians of the two established, once great right-of-centre parties have patently failed to conserve what needed to be conserved. And so today we need rear-guard actions and bravery, not vacillating invertebrates. (And when it comes to Victoria, vacillating invertebrates is clearly far too kind a description of the Liberal Party.)
Seize the day or get out of the way for One Nation.
This article was originally published in Spectator Australia and republished by the Daily Sceptic.
