Thank you to Kevin Rudd, and The Monthly, for restoring integrity into the realm of public policy discourse in Australia.
It’s time for a renewal of the Australian social democratic tradition. Whilst I would prefer to talk of a progressive liberal tradition, as per American liberalism, the social democrat epithet will have to suffice.
“There’s no such thing as society”, Margaret Thatcher once famously remarked.
Well, of course, a million people demonstrating against the Poll Tax put an end to that erroneous perception. It’s therefore timely for Rudd to remind us that the market is there to serve society, not the other way around.
I do not shy away from my own personal Judaeo-Christian heritage. There is no shame in championing a cheer squad for altruism or deeply-held theological views in a culture where, as Barry Jones points out, “the cult of managerialism” has prevailed.
The brutopia of Hayek permeates economic life throughout Australia, beyond even the corporations and the “rump” of employer peak body groups (as the Age’s Ken Davidson recently described VECCI). Bureaucracies run by supposedly progressive State Labor governments are also guilty of peddling corporatist, utilitarian nonsense.
As a whole, none of us should shy away from our own socio-political gods.
One notes that the passing of Milton Friedman was treated with respect in the Murdoch and Fairfax press, as was entirely appropriate. Write-ups on Friedman consistently noted his essential humility and decency as a human being, and his obvious rigor as a free-market theoretician (whether or not one agreed with his views).
Civility in public discourse is to be admired, and Rudd is a fine exponent and example of a graceful public policy intellectual.
Milton Friedman, as has been noted in Richard Parker’s recent biography of John Kenneth Galbraith, used to vacation with John and Catherine Galbraith in Vermont. Friedman and Galbraith, intellectual sparring partners, were civilized people.
Yet, when J K Galbraith passed away in April this year, the ungracious and venomous P P McGuinness pulled out the blow torch, inferring that JKG was an economic illiterate, his works a province of “sociology” or “political economy”.
Well, the battle for the politics of ideas has once again been re-joined.
McGuinness mischaracterized Galbraith as only backing “losers”, Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and Eugene McCarthy, a liberal-left Catholic Senator from Oregon, in 1968.
Rubbish.
JKG worked on freezing prices for the great Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tutored and befriended John F Kennedy, and unlike Kennedy, also shared a deep friendship with Lyndon Johnson, whose economic stewardship (through the implementation of Keynesian policies) was only unraveled by the Vietnam War.
Kennedy, for all his faults, reclaimed the centre after the vacuous Eisenhower years.
Rudd has paved the way for a reinvigoration, not just of the Christian liberal-left, but of a genuine alternative to neo-liberalism.
The deceitful, spin-heavy rhetoric of Blair’s “Third Way” is a hollow failure; Rudd’s substantive, centrist vision is based on a love and respect of “moral sentiments” that is well worth fighting for.
