Font Size: Decrease Increase Print Page: Print Christian Kerr, House Rules | February 02, 2009 Article from: The Australian THE culture wars are back, thanks to Kevin Rudd.
"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy," the Prime Minister declares in yet another essay in The Monthly. "Ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."
Them's fightin' words, as my granny used to say.
The culture wars have never really gone away. It's just that they haven't been front-page news. Culture warring is an elite sport, which is a polite way of saying very few people are interested in it other than the participants and a few batty bloggers who cheer from the side.
The culture wars matter only when they catch the attention of the rest of us.
It's nice to have a PM who can bash out 8000-odd words for a middlebrow mag, but we already knew our Kevin was a bright boy. The real test is how his latest effort goes down with the mums and dads.
Rudd should beware. Who does he think scares voters more: a dead Austrian economist or Robbo, Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid? If the Prime Minister wants to go on about Friedrich von Hayek, Malcolm Turnbull will find a larger audience by bagging the boot boys of the NSW Labor Right.
The leading lights of the Austrian school of economics - von Hayek, von Mises and, if you want to go back, Menger, Wieser and Bohm-Bawerk - all sound like John Buchan villains. But just as The 39 Steps is all rather quaint in these Jason Bourne days, so is nitpicking over what dead economists said. Voters want deeds.
The PM invokes Barack Obama in his culture warring. The President reminded us of what the issue really was in his inauguration speech. "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works," Obama said.
The observation is scarcely original, but it is what the electorate wants to hear. And Turnbull had a good example of government that worked in his initial response to Rudd's words.
"In Australia we didn't have a sub-prime crisis," the Opposition Leader said. "In America, they had 16 per cent of all their mortgages were sub-prime. That category of high-risk lending, less than 1 per cent in Australia. Why's that? Because the Australian financial system was well-regulated. Who regulated it? The Coalition."
And governments that don't work, or are struggling? Well, their leaders filed through Canberra in an identity parade last week: Nathan Rees and Anna Bligh, John Brumby and Mike Rann.
Voters got a very clear idea of what they look like.
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