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Neither liberal nor conservative: Australia's Postmodern Conservatism: Howard's culture wars are integral to economic liberalism, write Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher.

Article Excerpt
The year 2007, it seems, may prove to be the end of the Howard years. If it is, the government's late June intervention in the Northern Territory's remote Aboriginal communities might well be seen by future historians as Howard's peculiar swansong. After eleven years of berating the Indigenous 'guilt industry', the government that gave us 'black armband history' and shut down ATSIC, set out this June to show Australians that it alone has what is needed to address the 'Aboriginal problem'. Having ignored for years a sequence of reports on Indigenous child abuse, the Federal Government dramatically declared the situation in the Northern Territory's remote communities a state of national emergency. Echoing Minister Nelson's earlier comparison of the War on Terror to World War II, Australians were now served notice by their government that the situation in remote Indigenous communities was a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. In the wake of such a desperate and unforeseen emergency the government announced that it would take the most decisive steps. This was no time to consult with the NT communities in question ('who do you trust?'), nor to give the NT Government advance notice of the announcements. What would Australians rather have, our Prime Minister asked, 'constitutional niceties or the care and protection of little children'? This was to be welfare alright, but not as modern Australia has known it. Having divested and outsourced the direct public provision of health, welfare and education for over a decade, the Federal Government turned now to the military and police to restore 'law and order', quarantine the payments of offenders, and dam the rivers of grog.

The politics of John Howard's June intervention were masterful, not least because the declaration of a 'national emergency', in the name of innocent kids, meant that no political opposition could speak its name without being derided as 'unAustralian', 'uncompassionate' or simply 'unmugged' by the harsh realities on the ground. After months trailing Mr Rudd in the polls and ideas, Howard reduced the Opposition leader to meekly asking for a briefing from the government in Parliament, and pledging 'in-principle' support for the Prime Minister's move. In a year of growing frustration at the non-compliance of the Labor States, the NT measures allowed Howard to strike the first of several concerted blows against the Labor premiers, urging them to send police, and to do more in their own backyards. Finally, in this case, as in so many other signature Howard events, Australia's cultural Left was fatally 'wedged'; with their in-principle commitment to the marginalised 'Other' exposing them to triumphal charges from the Right of being naively self-indulgent, since some of these 'others' do abuse their kids, if they do not in fact throw them into the sea. The Murdoch media, for its part, barely changed gear in their ongoing 'culture wars' against everything economically left of Milton Freidman, culturally left of the Lyons Forum, and politically left of the Attorney-General. Within days, Glenn Milne and others were improvising on familiar riffs, appealing to the 'silent majority' of 'ordinary Australians', who speak with one voice. 'Memo to John Howard's cynical critics,' one of Milne's subheadings read in The Australian: 'Stop sniping at this noble and just cause'.

In recent years, there has been a growing literature--liberally dubbed 'psychotic' by the national daily's editorial team--aiming to come to terms with just how far to the Right Australia has travelled politically under Howard. In Arena Magazine, Geoff Sharp has contributed several essays to this literature. We agree with Sharp's diagnosis of a 'neo-authoritarian turn' that has supplanted the liberal and conservative heritages of the...

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