In this article, John Roskam contextualises and disseminates the IPA’s polling on the criminalisation of the burning of the Australian flag.
Lewis Mumford, the American historian and critic, remarked, “Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”
Mumford’s insight provides a direction for the Liberal Party different from the one urged by commentators and former ministers in the Turnbull government.
For them, the future of the Liberals is to the left of where the party is currently perceived to be. They recommend, for example, that Liberals avoid discussion about contentious topics such as the condition of the nation’s culture, or the levels and consequences of immigration. Instead, so the argument goes, the Liberals should focus entirely on economics and, in an effort to appeal to young people, the party should consider higher taxes on ‘Boomers’.
Such assaults could take the form of a capital gains tax on family homes, death duties, or both. Leaving aside the politics of such measures, there’s the matter of principle. Political warfare of any kind; whether intergenerational as is being urged on the Liberals, or against big business as Labor once used to wage, ultimately, produces few winners.
There’s a contradiction in the demand that the Liberal Party steer clear of ‘culture’, yet, at the same time, it must do more to appeal to the 31 per cent of the population who are migrants. In the Voice referendum, overseas-born Australians were more likely to vote ‘no’ than those born locally. And not many parents would come to this country seeking to have their children told there are 33 different genders, as claimed by academics at The Queensland University of Technology.
The idea that the Liberal Party must veer to ‘the centre’ to attract the growing cohort of young people is challenged by evidence that increasingly the youth of today is indeed making friends with its grandparents. Two recent polls commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs reveal what’s happening.
When asked whether sportspeople who refuse to sing the national anthem should be prevented from playing for the Australian national team, 81 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 agreed; only 60 per cent of 45 to 54-year-olds had the same view. When asked if it should be against the law to burn the Australian flag, 75 per cent of those under 24 agreed, a result in line with that across all age groups. These polls are not anomalies. More than 40 per cent of young people voted no at the Voice referendum. What’s an anomaly is that the Liberals make so little attempt to get the youth vote.
Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie is unashamedly rebelling against the last decade or so of Liberal Party orthodoxy. But to regard his critique of neoliberalism as only about economics is to miss the point he’s making. Hastie wants an argument about the big issues, such as: Is Australia a nation, or a nation of tribes? What’s the role of the family in the modern world? Is the cultural decline of the West, of which Australia is a part, inevitable? These aren’t questions that can be answered by the pollsters and technical experts that both sides of politics have come to rely on. Too many politicians are afraid to venture beyond the narrow confines of their narrow portfolio area.
Hastie’s critics, both inside and outside the Liberal Party, have been quick to label his references back to a time when cars were made in Australia as outdated ‘nostalgia’. Maybe. But the post-war generation, whether born in Australia or as migrants, had the sort of confidence in themselves, and in their country, that if it still exists today, is far less apparent than it once was.
In the 1970s the average price of a house was three times the average annual income and the fertility rate was nearly three children per woman. Half a century later, house prices are ten times average income, and the fertility rate is 1.5 children per woman – less than the replacement rate.
Liberal leader Sussan Ley is right to put the party’s election policies up for review. However, policies are only means to ends. The Liberal Party has yet to decide what those ends look like, partly because MPs can’t agree among themselves as to their party’s purpose.
