G’day. Artist Robert Bosler was the first Webdiarist to pick the zeitgeist switch – just before Latham’s election – in some great pieces: Time for Labor to play to win, not just play safe, An artist’s blueprint for a Latham win, A Webdiarist’s speech for a Mark Latham address to the nation.
Today, Robert’s questions the relevance of the liberal philosophy in today’s world. I’ve been thinking about that a fair bit myself while writing my book. Before Robert, some Webdiary titbits.
TITBITS
Liberal leadership: Sensational interview with John Hewson on Lateline last night. But Tony Jones, you should have asked Hewie whether he’d stand as an independent Liberal against Malcolm Turnbull. Go for it, John! True Liberals unite!
Football sex scandals: Brian McKinlay recommends Football and Sex at Colorado: The Real Scandal, which has lots of insight into the whys and wherefores of the Bulldogs rugby league abomination.
Colin Rubenstein: The following email completes my email correspondence with Mr Rubenstein (see Mel, Colin, George and Miranda).
Margo to Colin
OK, one last attempt. Was George Brandis correct in his statement that after his Greens and Nazis speech Mr Rubenstein contacted him to say “he supported it and he was pleased it had been given”.
Colin to Margo, March 04, 2004
One more time. Your failure to want to comprehend my previous email leaves me with my initial impression that you are out to create mischief and misrepresent the truth. I reserve my rights.
Colin Rubenstein
*
March 26: Email from Dr Doron Samuell removed after he stated it was not for publication.
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Death of the Liberal’s liberalism?
by Robert Bosler
What do people really know and understand of the Liberal Philosophy that has been governing us?
For instance, we hear from the Liberal Party a description of their philosophy as one structured on a belief in the individual. Clearly it is important for one to have a belief in oneself, and that we each find the way to doing that individually. However, isn’t it equally important that this belief in the individual be found through means provided in only a small measure by the state, and that we find instead this belief in the rich areas of life as provided through offerings from spiritual, sporting, cultural and parenting guidance?
Isn’t it more propitious for a political party to accept the belief in the individual as a matter for that individual and to provide, instead, the secure framework by which each and every individual can prosper?
It’s a subtle point, but one which bears serious scrutiny in the modern age.
It’s a matter of focus. The Liberal Party as it currently stands has a philosophy that is based on a focus, and that focus is proclaimed and in effect ‘the individual’. It may well be that the Australian society has outgrown a philosophy with that focus.
Originally, the focus on ‘the individual’ in the Liberal Party philosophy was born of a need to provide the individual with more freedom and choice during the political climate of 1944. There is a serious argument to be made that a philosophical focus on ‘the individual’ by a modern political party could possibly be very dangerous and detrimental.
We have to remember that the Australian Liberal Party is not that old. We have to remember that its philosophy was one that was created to solve a social and political problem of the time. What has changed?
We have changed, enormously. The whole social fabric and thrust has changed. The changes since the birth of the Liberal Party in 1944 have placed us in a different social planet entirely.
One example that bears scrutiny is our understanding of the human relationship. Were there books and tv programs and school programs discussing the human relationship during the 1940s and 1950s? Was there an abundance of social discussion and awareness on the workings and the importance of human relationships in that time?
No. Wasn’t it so that during those times the man had set roles and the woman had set roles and those roles formed the measure of the relationship? Isn’t it because of the lack of understanding of the workings of the human relationship that relationships bound by those times ended so much in disaster?
But the human spirit cannot be bound up in set roles. It wants to be free; it wants to express and create. No wonder the world of Australia was bursting for individuality and personal and social freedom during the forties and fifties. Bring on the sixties! Bring on the forces that threw the human spirit free. Bring on free love, bring on pot, bring on Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, bring on the pill. Let’s be free, they said, that is our individual right.
And so the bursted embers came settling back to earth in the seventies. But what could sustain itself during those times? As the embers settled, ideas that looked brilliant as people ran with them fizzled and died in their hands. People looked at each other in askance.
But free we were. Now settled in the eighties we had true individualism. The human spirit was free beyond its wildest dreams, in the social fabric of the western world. A man could now happily have a beer in the pub with his bricklayer mates and be taken by them to have had just a hard day’s work being a house husband looking after the kids. A woman could choose and relish in a career instead of a family. We had, for the first and utterly significant time in western history: a black woman judge.
The individual had arrived.
What then? Is not the sky the limit for the individual? The western human being had achieved its spiritual exultation, by fully realising The Individual. Or had it?
What good is the fully realised individual if it cannot be sustained by its natural environment. What good is a fully realised individual of the future, dead, extinct?
Is there anything, anything, on the planet that does not rely on something else for its existence?
And so again we come to relationship.
In this short but seemingly long road since the fifties, haven’t we learned that the human being is most comfortable and happy and, indeed, feels loved and fulfilled when addressing and satisfying his or her inclusion in some form of group?
Is it possible that the human condition has evolved, that is, that our understanding of the human condition has evolved, to a point where the need for the focus on the individual has been superceded by the knowledge of the need for quality relationships.. knowledgeable quality relationships…. not only with each other closely at hand, but outwards through community, state and nation, on to quality relationships eventually and happily with all other countries – and all of us with the environment ??
If so, does that not place the individual within a framework of other individuals and environment such that it’s that framework that is the thing of importance??
Therefore, isn’t the framework the thing our political parties should be philosophically focused on?
Have we grown up from that individual focus, and moved on??
Where not so long ago we relished the focus on our individuality, do we now find a blind and dangerous sense of “If I am ok, the world is ok” in the Liberal belief ??
Is John Howard the embodiment of that strident me-please individual from yesteryear, thrown up by its party’s 1944 philosophy, so that, if his Prime Ministership is ok, the world is ok?
And as we’ve moved on, and he hasn’t, is Howard blindly taking the Liberal movement down with him?
Is that much change afoot, that the arc of the Liberal Party philosophy has come, peaked and is going ??
Do we need this perspective to see more clearly what Howard has done to Australia’s development?
Surely, to look at humanity in these times of massive change since the fifties and hold the individual as the central core of communal prosperity is as ridiculous as thinking the world is the centre of the universe.
Surely we have come to understand that the philosophical focus must be on relationship.
Surely we have come to understand that there is ultimately pain and destruction in the focus on self?
Has Howard, with his full intensity of commitment sunk his own party ship through his self determined efforts, where such clinging and urgent intensity, like rigid unforgiving steel in fast-motion rusted disintegration, self destructs?
Is Howard captain of his beloved Liberal Titanic?
Is Malcolm Turnbull to bring a new Liberal philosophy, to modernise it? Or is he the embodiment of individualism personified as a mirror catalyst to set off towards the party’s swift decline – with every man for himself – should it be that, yes, we have moved on from the investment of focus in the individual as the philosophical core of humanity’s prosperity?
And while we’re at it, what can the Labor Party do to throw off ideals of yesteryear now become shackles holding it back? Mark Latham is leading now, and there is a very real feeling this can happen.
We are hungry as a society. We are not complacent, though it sometimes appears so. We want relevance and we want results and when we want them we want them now. The parties must listen. Are we talking loudly enough just yet, or has the modern request just begun? I’m excited.