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How the Liberal Party can rebuild itself.

Article Excerpt
The Liberal Party has never been an ideological party. The contrast with Labor could not be clearer. And yet it was only by presenting himself as leading a party little different from the Liberals that Kevin Rudd was able to win the November 2007 election.

Government in Australia is in a mediocre state. The delivery of core services by the states--for example, public hospitals, water and transport--is too often appalling and rarely of a standard that was the norm four decades ago. In too many areas, little has been added to the stock of infrastructure built up by past generations. The solution is not in the management of these services being based in Canberra, nor in the federal government moving into new areas. Too often this has led to a serious deterioration in quality, as with general medical practice and the universities.

And yet we have more politicians than ever before, vast public services and high taxation. The Australian main-stream knows what is wrong. They would not run their own businesses or their own affairs so badly. The Liberal Party seeks to apply in government those mainstream values, values that are spectacularly different from the ideological theories which Labor, particularly the Labor left, embraces from time to time.

The warning long ago by the Liberal Party's great founder, Sir Robert Menzies, is as relevant today as it was in 1942. This was that the Liberals should not to be seen as just attacking the "worst mistakes of Labor", but to be offering a defined and alternative policy. That policy should be one that the mainstream will instantly recognise as a commonsense solution.

Liberals should not try to copy the Labor Party. They should not seek to become another raucous exchange in which money, power, influence and votes are traded between a gaggle of factions on the inside and a range of hungry power bases on the outside. Nor should they be mesmerised by the bewildering succession of neo-socialist postmodern ideologies so fashionable with the Labor left, and which the Labor Party must give some credence in its factional deals.

Australians should not forget that Labor's plan for the greater part of the 20th century was to seize the commanding heights of the economy. Though this was portrayed as a silver bullet that would cure the ills of society, international experience proved it to be precisely the abject economic, social and political failure conservatives had always...