Dr Gary Johns served as former Assistant Minister for Industrial Relations, Special Minister of State & Vice-President of the Executive Council in the Keating Labor Government. A philosophical rethink saw him accept a series of appointments in the service of economic rationalism, including Senior Fellow at the IPA and Assoc. Commissioner at the Productivity Commission. He recently served as Commissioner of
the Australian Charities and Not-For-Profits Commission.
She was a young tall Indian beauty, perhaps a model, but maybe an engineering student. She passed me as I handed out No how-to-vote cards to prospective voters at the pre-poll in Brisbane. She called to the exuberant Yes booth worker beside me, “I’m not a citizen, I can’t’ vote, but I am with you, why wouldn’t I, just look at me!”
Colour solidarity seems alive and well in this referendum. Prime Minister Albanese has stood shoulder-to-shoulder with leaders of various ethnic associations, feeding the shallow thoughts of our Indian non-citizen: that colour should define us, and divide us, forever. What a poor leader is the Prime Minister, and what a despicable proposition is the Voice.
The referendum was an act of ego by elites who have rarely acted in the common interest.
Others were not so shallow as our young visitor. A PNG native took my No card, and several Malay women, along with lots of white Aussies who just winked, and took the card. I have travelled the country speaking to forums, and while most No voters that I spoke to are quiet Australians, they can spot a crude grab for power that is the Voice. Emotions are running high, mostly on the Yes side, such is their moral hubris. Because of them, the narrative will be that there will be a fair bit of putting Humpty Dumpty together again after Saturday.
Prime Minister Albanese will have to wear his constant castigation of Australians for not accepting the “gracious gift” of the Trojan Horse. Many Yes supporters, smug in the certainty they were right, will think of their fellow citizens as ill-informed or hard-hearted.
Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese
For the majority, the best way to put the Humpty Dumpty narrative to bed is to realise it doesn’t exist. The referendum was an act of ego by elites who have rarely acted in the common interest. Mining company leaders donated millions of corporate dollars to the Yes cause at the same time environmentalists were making mincemeat of legal procedures over ‘inadequate’ consultation with indigenous peoples on new mines.
Charities poured millions into Yes coffers, undercutting their donor’s intentions to help the poor and instead helping middle class Aboriginal leaders to the spoils of office. Celebrities can return to their magazines and make-up mirrors assured of their dinner party invitations. Academics can write deep analyses of the faults in the minds of lesser beings outside of the walls of the academy, or more accurately, outside of their control.
Australians are not broken. They will have served democracy well. They can return to their day jobs on Monday, while those who have an enduring interest will be left to pick over the entrails of Aboriginal politics. In this task I want your help: Aboriginal leaders in the Yes camp may have declared that they will “fall silent” or never again “perform a welcome to country” should the referendum crash and burn, but they will not give up their jobs in the industry.
Shallow thoughts … that colour should define us, and divide us, forever. What a poor leader is the Prime Minister, and what a despicable proposition is the Voice.
With your help, we must overturn the separatist ideology that drives this industry. If you want to stop the next generation of failed programs and destroyed lives you should join with those who want to reclaim a sensible path to a decent life for Aborigines.
Ethno-separatist ideology at odds with liberal democracy
Race-based policies must be phased out. Need, not race, is the new mantra. We at Close the Gap Research will resume work on Sunday. It will be a long haul, winning one battle is but a step in winning the war. Please join us.
Gary Johns is Principal of CloseTheGapResearch.org.au
Dr Gary Johns served as former Assistant Minister for Industrial Relations, Special Minister of State & Vice-President of the Executive Council in the Keating Labor Government. A philosophical rethink saw him accept a series of appointments in the service of economic rationalism, including Senior Fellow at the IPA and Assoc. Commissioner at the Productivity Commission. He recently served as Commissioner of
the Australian Charities and Not-For-Profits Commission.
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that if a republic is to live long, it is necessary to draw it back often toward its beginning.
“For all the beginning of sects, republics, and kingdoms must have some goodness in them, by means of which they may regain their first reputation and their first increase. Because in the process of time, that goodness is corrupted, unless something intervenes to lead it back to the mark, it of necessity kills the body.”
It is now time for Australia, and all modern western democracies, to be led back to the starting point, less necessity kills our body politic.
No political system has ever been immune to corruptible processes.
Now, the concept of going “back” will raise the ire of progressives. It could even unnerve libertarians, the thinking being that any hint of the status quo or traditionalism is the sole purview of conservatives. But I would remind them of what Thomas Paine said, that when government “operates to create an increased wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary.”
Thomas Paine
We could argue over the difference between Paine’s reform and Machiavelli’s drawing back to the beginning, but as a historian, I stand by the view that unless one contemplates how a thing starts, the solution to improving it can be neither understood nor solved.
A searing reminder of how far Australia has fallen from political grace can be seen in the erosion of habeus corpus, articulated brilliantly by Jaimie Stevenson in her article, Imprisoned with Zero Charges, noting that this “unchecked authority fundamentally challenges the principles upon which our democratic society is based.”
Surely, this one issue alone requires us to be drawn back to our beginning. But if we need more reminders of the importance to look in the rear-view mirror, it can be found in Kenelm Tonkin’s explanation of the Tocqueville Matrix.
When government operates to create an increased wretchedness in any of the parts of society, it is on a wrong system, and reformation is necessary.
It is not new, this thing known as recovery of freedom. In 509 BC, Lucius Junius Brutus rescued Rome from the corruption and pride of kings gone bad. After two hundred years the monarchy had degenerated into vileness at the hands of one man vested with too much power.
It is not a stretch to draw parallels with life in Australia from 2020 – 2022 under the direction of Scott Morrison as Prime Minister, who set up an unconstitutional National Cabinet, continued to this day by current leader, Anthony Albanese; and who allowed unrestricted power to state premiers for carte blanche hard-line rule over their populations. Daniel Andrews’ iron fist in Victoria demonstrates that it is all too easy for one man to think himself a god. Though he was not alone in his authoritarian bent, he was by far the most brutal of all the state’s leaders.
We can ruminate on our demise, or we can each do something to regain the goodness which has been corrupted by time. This is a process in itself; documenting what is wrong by looking back to what provided the foundation upon which democracy was built. And it does not require the commanding presence of public figures.
It is now time for Australia, and all modern western democracies, to be led back to the starting point, less necessity kills our body politic.
In Cicero’s dialogues between past heroes of the Roman Republic, Scipio Africanus said of Lucius Brutus:
“No one is a mere private citizen when the liberty of his fellows needs protection.”
For those who question the relevance of being drawn back to beginnings, I urge you to consider the increase in dystopian and futuristic writing and ask yourself why it is occurring.
John Goddard writes fast fiction; dystopian ponderings, often with a question as to what went before. In a recent article entitled Mephistopheles, his dystopian character questions the relevance of old-world heroes, that they have “no place in our modern mythology.” It is a hellscape scenario in which to question anything significant from the old world would be to bring down the wrath of the state upon oneself.
That people lament the absence of old heroes; or sound the alarm about the deterioration of valued democratic safeguards like habeus corpus; or feel compelled to encourage us moderns to look back to invigorating figures like Alexis de Tocqueville, surely tells us that the past does hold significance in the quest to understand ourselves and our societies.
No political system has ever been immune to corruptible processes. And now it is our time to act. It may even require a “going to the mattresses” approach, not as a physical war, but as an intellectual war between the people and those we put in office to represent us.
Gerardine is a Roman historian, with specific interest in Rome’s foundation up to the end of the Republic. She advocates that history gifts us with wisdom for the mind and nourishment for the soul, and keenly defends the ancients’ legacy of civic society, law, and government.
Earlier this year, I described how the modern political left has largely been annexed by authoritarians, with those who would have been considered left wing not that long ago exiled from their political home and outcast as “extremists”.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that authoritarians constantly rely on a logical fallacy known as the appeal to authority.
THE APPEAL TO AUTHORITY
According to this fallacy, relevance relies on qualifications and standing within certain entities; the merits of their argument be damned! Its reliance on authority saw a particular renaissance during the depths of the Covid tyranny.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a fallible human, was deified – considered incapable of wrong. The mere fact that Fauci made a pronouncement was sufficient reason to strip millions of their autonomy and liberty. No need to get caught up in the triviality of whether that claim was factual. Many other politicians and bureaucrats around the world were similarly granted God-like status.
Meaningful public discourse is reserved only for those properly authorised.
‘But you’re not an epidemiologist’ became the mantra of the cult of authority. The simpletons dare not question the holy doctrine of Anthony Fauci and his cadre; they are not qualified!
THE REAL EPIDEMIC
It doesn’t take much to realise this insidious logical fallacy is prevalent in nearly all areas of modern cultural and political debate.
Don’t question climate change, ‘you’re not a scientist!’
Don’t question the education system, ‘you’re not a teacher!’
Don’t question the Bible, ‘you’re not a Christian!’
The few contrarians are either excluded or have their qualifications either discounted or stripped from them.
It is so prevalent that merely being part of a certain class entitles you to greater input in debate: ‘how dare you discuss abortion, you’re not a woman!’ Indeed, the concept of the Voice to Parliament is predicated on the fallacy that only indigenous people are qualified to discuss indigenous issues.
NUANCE SHINES
Public policy development, when done properly, requires balancing various multi-disciplinary analyses based on the merit and relevance of each. We do not restrict discussions on road policy exclusively to motor mechanics. While the input of a mechanic may be useful, it would be short sighted to solely rely on it.
However, when it comes to contentious and important issues, we take a single-minded approach. For the past three years, the “success” of the Covid response was measured by one metric alone: Covid deaths. Liberty, the economy and all-cause mortality be damned: if the number of deaths in the headlines was lower than yesterday’s number, it was a win!
Politicians and bureaucrats around the world were similarly granted God-like status.
Forget about how many people died because they were turned away from routine medical appointments. ‘How dare you question the epidemiologists!’
When economists warn of the serious consequences from prolonged lockdowns, the response is: ‘They’re not epidemiologists!’
Don’t question whether subjecting free citizens to extensive home detention could possibly lead to increased mental health issues. #DonutDay!
THE FOREVER BUREAU
Every consensus opinion began as a fringe viewpoint, often propagated by a contrarian in their field – sometimes even an outsider. The insidious aspect about the appeal to authority is that it prevents this from happening, leaving us locked in perpetual status quo, much to the delight of the establishment.
The few contrarians are either excluded or have their qualifications either discounted or stripped from them. Dr. Robert Malone, often credited as being the inventor of mRNA technology, was silenced and discredited. The authoritarians said: ‘he’s not a real doctor.’ Dr. Jordan Peterson was sanctioned by the College of Psychologists for venturing outside the authorised script on gender issues.
… authoritarians constantly rely on a logical fallacy known as the appeal to authority
When you apply this logical fallacy, the merits of argument, empirical evidence and even your own personal experience becomes irrelevant. People would sooner question their own eyes than the musings of some two-bit bureaucrat. Shove someone in front of a camera and put the title ‘expert’ in the chyron and they are suddenly incapable of error.
Nothing changes. Innovation dies. Society stagnates. Dissidents are silenced. The marketplace of ideas is shut down. Meaningful public discourse is reserved only for those properly authorised. Which flavour of tyranny shall it be today? Red tyranny or blue tyranny?
Anybody is qualified to debate any topic and the value of their input must be determined by the points they raised, not the honorifics after their name.
While always avidly following politics and culture, James Hol was not politically active until the overreaction to COVID. In a matter of months, James gained invaluable insight into all levels of government, being heavily involved in Federal, state and local election campaigns.
To those who know, this question is rhetorical. It is a secret ‘handshake’ among fans of Ayn Rand and her seminal work, Atlas Shrugged.
Reading Atlas Shrugged profoundly changed the way I viewed life, society and the world. It was like a stranger had tapped me on the shoulder, pointed out that I was sitting on a pile of jigsaw pieces, and helped me put the pieces together. Afterward, instead of being confused by the variety of pains in my ass, I was contentedly gazing at a beautiful picture of the world. It changed my life.
… the Covid sham of 2020 was Atlas Shrugging
The climax of Atlas Shrugged could be summarised as: civil society devolved because the government kept ratcheting up its abuse and extortion of the most productive and competent people in society, based on the socialist argument of “needing” to “help” the ever increasing “needs” of the “needy”. So the productive people left.
This is relevant today because the Covid sham of 2020 was Atlas Shrugging. We all felt the earth move. If you have read Atlas Shrugged then you know where the story goes, and you know what the smart people do. We leave.
So I left.
The obvious question, then, was where to go? Again, Atlas Shrugged proved instructional. The protagonist and her friends did not leave one declining socialist kleptocracy to go to another declining socialist kleptocracy. They built a new society from scratch. They did not run away; they ran toward opportunity.
Galt’s Gulch. A new society for the productive and competent
Fortunately, escaping government suffocation no longer requires living on an island like Robinson Crusoe. There are numerous countries where you might be surprised to find a superior quality of life to Australia, at a lower cost, with palpably more freedom.
Consider the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as an example. The UAE is a not a liberal democracy. It is run like a business. The rulers explicitly want successful, talented and wealthy people to move all of their wealth and business there. So they built cities with everything that their target market wants: zero tax, no crime, spotlessly clean, mind-boggling architecture and world class banks, hospitals, schools, facilities, activities, food etc. They then made immigration easy: register a company and self-sponsor your residency. It costs just a few thousand dollars.
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The UAE offers a unique solution to the libertarian dilemma of how to balance individual freedom with security and societal order. Instead of a contrived internal democratic process, living in the UAE is a voluntary transaction. You do not have a right to free speech, to protest or to vote. Your money and your feet are your voice and vote. Your rights are: take it, or leave it.
One of the most freeing factors in the UAE – especially for anyone who operated a business in Australia – is the absence of fear of Government extortion. The income tax rate is zero. No tax means no criminal tax avoidance. And that eliminates government treating tax residents like criminals.
Other countries have taken notice of the success of the UAE and Dubai, and are rolling out the red carpet to entrepreneurs. For example, the small nation of Georgia in eastern Europe offers an entrepreneur’s visa, with residency and a paltry 1% tax rate on earnings up to $AU375,000/year. The capital, Tbilisi, is a beautiful, classically European city. It is objectively safer than Australia, and with a cost of living around 1/3rd, or less.
Tbilisi, Georgia
Dubai and Georgia are just two examples among numerous countries that offer extraordinary advantages, along with a quality of life that belies their reputations of 10-20 years ago. Globalisation and the commoditisation of technology means that western nations no longer have a monopoly on modern living. Friendly people, sealed roads, modern homes, fast internet, good coffee and Gucci stores are everywhere, including most “emerging” or “developing” nations.
So I left.
The factor determining the viability of leaving Australia, for most people, is money. If you have no assets, no education, and expect $200,000/yr to hold a road sign, Australia is probably the only country that will work for you. But if you, like me, are able to generate an income from anywhere – or if you have made your money already – you have an array of options to increase your freedom, improve your lifestyle, eliminate or reduce taxes and escape Marxism. Just exclude Canada, the EU, UK, US and New Zealand from your shortlist.
Australia is an extraordinary country with extraordinary potential. But it is hard to argue that it is heading in the right direction politically or economically. The natural inclination is to want to fight for the rights and freedoms that the West has always been so justifiably proud of. But there is an alternative: you can leave. It is another way to scratch your Liberty itch.
Damon is the founder of the National Recomposition Institute and creator and founder of the Recomposer software system. He was also formerly the Australian Ambassador to the International Society of Sports Nutrition, president of the World Powerlifting Congress Australia and an Australian Champion in Bodybuilding and Powerlifting.
A non-illustrated guide to where conservatives continually fall short on a key pillar of liberty…
Libertarians and conservatives might be friends on certain issues, often shoved into the same corner by the ‘progressive’ left, but it’s time we libertarians took a hard stance on free speech.
James Hol’s recent commentary regarding the proposed ‘misinformation’ bill reflected an attitude towards freedom of speech and expression that is generally shared across the entirety of the centre-right.
However, conservatives are not yet ready to defend the speech and expression of those they don’t agree with. Purporting to pick and choose who has access to free expression is a dark pathway to liberty.
Free speech is very easy to defend when you agree with the speech that is being censored – the true test of principle is to defend all speech, regardless of your personal view on what is being expressed. Yet apparently Yumi Stynes’ ‘graphic’ book titled Welcome to Sex should be ‘wrapped in black plastic’ and sold in a restricted manner akin to a pornographic magazine according to the self-confessed ‘conservative patriot’ Senator Ralph Babet.
Comments from Stynes that she would be ‘comfortable’ with an 8 year-old child reading the book, and its availability in major retailer chains, have sparked community outrage at the supposed accessibility of such material to children. Yet what does it say about the rights of parents if conservative commentators feel entitled to decide what is suitable for other people’s children? It raises questions on our perceptions of the role of parents too – is it their job to manage what their child has access to, or is that the job of government and society at large?
You have to wonder at what point any more restrictive approach by government towards curating children’s material could be weaponized against conservatives. This of course is the fundamental weakness in the conservative take on this issue: the lack of foresight as to how restricting the speech and expression of one group weakens it for us all in the end. Furthermore, all the attention and furore over the content of the book led to it becoming a bestseller.
Controversial book ‘Welcome To Sex’ attracted conservative calls for it to be banned
It’s not the first time so-called ‘freedom friendly’ MPs have actually sought to curb the rights of those they disagree with. In February, Liberal Senator Alex Antic introduced a private member’s bill that sought to impose harsh criminal penalties on ‘incitement to trespass, cause property damage or traffic disruption’ (paraphrased). This was clearly an attack on extinction rebellion type traffic protests and the activities of animal rights protesters at slaughterhouses.
Yet it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the same laws could easily have been imposed on leaders of protests against vaccine mandates. This bill was yet another reactionary, populist thought bubble that demonstrates the folly of conservatism as a philosophical vehicle to protect individual rights and reduce the size of government.
As seen by the impact of boycotts and negative PR directed at companies such as Anheuser-Busch, Gillette, Target and Big W, it is much more effective to fight bad ideas and bad speech with consumer action as opposed to legislative action. It is also fundamentally moral – the market will ultimately determine the social licence companies have to comment on social or political issues by rewarding or punishing them via consumers.
Good ideas don’t require force, and bad ideas don’t require banning. As libertarians we must fight both progressives and conservatives who seek to censor or ban speech they dislike.
They will invoke the innocence of children, the plight of minority groups or the collective ‘harm’ caused by disinformation, but history tells us that those doing the censoring are never the good guys.
The only role politicians have with regards to free speech is to protect it, and the best way to protect free speech is to amend the Australian constitution, enshrining the right to freedom of speech, religion and assembly.
Max Payne is the Australian Program Associate with Students For Liberty, a global non-profit that spreads the values of libertarianism on campus. He is also a twice former candidate with the Libertarian Party and maintains a keen interest in Austrian economics, classical music and organic gardening.
Libertarianism is all about the freedom of individuals from coercion. Libertarians believe the proper role of government is defined by JS Mill’s harm principle: ‘The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’
Within a country this is relatively straightforward – reductions in tax and increases in liberty are supported, increases in tax and reductions in liberty are opposed.
But things can get complicated when it involves matters outside the country. How is libertarianism affected by national borders? Can it apply to relationships between sovereign states?
To what extent should Australian libertarians seek to oppose coercion in other countries?
In his 1801 inaugural address, US President Thomas Jefferson declared that the US should consider its external military alliances to be temporary arrangements of convenience to be abandoned or reversed according to the national interest. Citing the Farewell Address of George Washington as his inspiration, Jefferson described the doctrine as “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”
Thomas Jefferson. 2nd President of the United States. Author of the Washington Doctrine of Unstable Alliances.
Known as the Washington Doctrine of Unstable Alliances, this thinking dominated US foreign policy right up to the Second World War. And although America now has longstanding alliances with many countries, including Australia, the doctrine remains influential in some political circles.
In particular, many libertarians support it. In their view, a country should not invest blood and treasure in squabbles beyond the country’s borders unless there is a clear threat to the country and its ability to engage in trade and commerce. It should certainly not maintain military capabilities in excess of what is needed to defend the country.
This is rationalised in terms of libertarian values. History has repeatedly shown that a standing army is a threat to liberty. Moreover, maintaining a military force capable of more than simply defending the country is expensive, necessitating higher taxes than if the Washington Doctrine applied.
They point to wars such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, where it is difficult to show any enduring benefits from military involvement by America or Australia. They also criticise current support for Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine’s ambassador to Australia, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, inspects an Australian Bushmaster armoured vehicle
There is a problem with this thinking though: nationalism and national sovereignty are actually collectivist concepts. They are not libertarian and, Jefferson’s other qualities notwithstanding, neither is the Washington doctrine.
What that means is there is no libertarian justification for doing nothing about coercion merely because it is occurring in another country.
Coercion should always be our concern, wherever it occurs.
That does not necessarily mean rushing military aid to those subject to coercion in other countries. There are many reasons why that might not be possible, practical or advisable. But it is perfectly legitimate for libertarians to consider whether there is anything they can do, militarily or otherwise.
Some interventions have made a major difference. But for America’s entry into the Second World War, for example, Germany and Japan would have imposed their dreadful dictatorships on most of the world. But for America’s intervention in Korea, the people in the south would now be suffering the same miserable fate as those in the north. And but for Australia’s intervention in East Timor, the country would be suffering under Indonesia’s heavy-handed military rule, now obvious in West Papua.
Australian Peacekeeping Handover of East Timor
There are also some current examples to consider. One of the consequences of the climate change panic, for example, is that around 40,000 children in the Democratic Republic of Congo work in appallingly inhumane, slave-like conditions in cobalt mines. The cobalt is used in lithium-ion batteries required by electric vehicles.
In China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs since 2017 and subjected those not detained to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour, and forced sterilisations. Forced labour is used to produce solar products.
It is estimated that China has 98 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity for photovoltaic ingots; 97 percent for photovoltaic wafers; 81 percent for solar cells; and 77 percent for solar modules. Many of the largest global producers of photovoltaic ingots and wafers, solar cells, and solar modules directly source polysilicon from entities believed to use forced labour in its production.
Even a boycott of products associated with such coercion would be more consistent with libertarian values than doing nothing based on the “no entangling alliances” idea.
JS Mill was also an advocate of utilitarianism in addition to classical liberalism. This philosophy, generally attributed to Jeremy Bentham, is often summarised as seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. For libertarians, it should mean the greatest liberty for the greatest number.
David Leyonhjelm was an Australian Senator from 2014 to 2019 representing New South Wales for the Liberal Democratic Party. Notable for his libertarian consistency, David’s work in Senate Estimates attracted acclaim worldwide for its forensic examination of government
waste. Professionally, he is a veterinarian and agribusiness consultant.
Should we legislate to stop a government offering indemnities to vaccine manufacturers?
This was a matter which came before the Senate last week in a private members bill.
Some of the reasons given for the Bill were:
“Companies work for shareholders first and it is profits that motivate their decision and actions. People should always be put before profits”;
“Indemnification has created an incentive for risk-taking in the pharmaceutical industry which is not aligned with the fundamental principles of medicine. Where indemnity exists, it is human nature to take larger risks, whether it be a conscious decision or subconscious, the outcomes are poor”; and
“The pharmaceutical industry has a taste for your money.”
Vivid language for the impressionable mind!
The most amicable and well-meaning of senators championed the cause with a rousing speech. A personal friend of mine adroitly negotiated it behind the scenes. It was a case study in politicking, and even attracted the support of one Libertarian state division.
Then with the support of all but Labor, it went to committee for investigation and so will become news again soon. Yes, the centre-right crossbench attracted the Greens and even Senator Thorpe for a moment.
What is not to love?
Against such a juggernaut of consensus, this simple libertarian fig farmer has his misgivings. Have sympathy for me. It’s in my DNA to search for a principle.
We libertarians are fond of paraphrasing John Stuart Mill’s 1859 Harm Principle with phrases like “live and let live, as long as you don’t harm others.”
We are not so persistent in reminding our parliamentary friends that the Harm Principle requires that we ‘weigh such harms.’
The great horror of the last 3 years was that our leaders did not do this. Ignore psychological damage to infant school children plastered with a mask. Ignore the cheap, unhealthy food on the dinner table of a family with dual incomes lost to mandates. Ignore the evaporated life savings of ‘non-essential’ small business owners. Ignore the suicides and mental health flair-ups caused by lockdowns. Ignore the business collapses.
It was one flu-like covid-19 harm, all other harms be damned!
One must weigh the harms.
The problem with the Bill is that it applies a blanket ban and fails to weigh harms.
Just say the next virus is more potent. Let’s say it’s Ebola or something with a 50% mortality rate!
In the end, we need politicians who apply John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in full. Live and let live as long as you don’t harm others. When there are competing harms, weigh them and choose the least harmful option.
I want our government to have the same commercial tool as any private sector party. Indemnification, or the transfer of risk, is used by outdoor adventure operators, mining equipment hire companies, and many others. Why ban the government?
As a libertarian, I prefer my government to be able to transact like the private sector.
As a libertarian, I prefer my government to be ready to act in the case of genuine pandemic threat. As established, I want the government to potentially offer indemnity to vaccine providers in the case of emergency.
And as a libertarian, I want politicians who’ll use skilled negotiators so offering indemnity won’t be necessary.
Further …
As a libertarian, I’m unimpressed by populist attacks on free enterprise, especially pharmaceutical companies which keep us alive. As a libertarian, I’d be more curious to know why anyone believes a vaccine company should absorb near sovereign-level risk for a government intent on releasing vaccines before they pass the government’s own safety standards. As a libertarian, my focus is on that government maladministration, not the vaccine company.
As a libertarian, I’d prefer my government weren’t both umpire, with its TGA vaccine approval processes, and player, being the acquirer and dispenser of vaccines. I’d prefer to eliminate this conflict of interest.
As a libertarian, I’d like to rollback government from healthcare delivery, replace tired old public hospitals with private hospitals, and to protect charities which run hospitals.
And as a libertarian, I’d prefer our allies in parliament did not run adrift philosophically into the dangerous and choppy waters of the anti-capitalist. I am left in little wonder why the Greens and Senator Thorpe kept the Bill alive.
I believe the correct approach for a libertarian here is to vote against the Bill. In our current system, the Government needs to make it easy for vaccine production to occur in the event of a genuine calamity.
Our government already has one hand tied behind its back running a socialised system. Let’s not tie the other one by banning the free-enterprise bargaining chip of indemnities.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
Who would have thought that quacking geese could help save the Roman Republic from a Gallic horde in 390 BC?
It prompts the question: could a stirring speech on liberty help save Australia from its government in 2023 AD?
The Roman Republic was born when a warrior gathered his family from the ashes of Troy and founded a city destined to become one of the greatest civilisations in history. But its emergence was not without repeated struggles.
Grappling with rapid growth and accumulated power, the Republic was in danger of being crushed by Gallic invaders. Rome had conquered most of her neighbouring Italian lands, but chronic infighting among the Senate and Tribunes distracted it from the rising threat outside the empire.
The ancient historian, Livy, in The Early History of Rome, wrote of a warning which was ignored because it came from a plebeian of no consequence.
“The Gauls are coming!”
And they were. Gallic armies decimated vast swathes of Roman territory.
In a final siege to sack Rome, Gallic troops climbed the Citadel wall, which was minimally defended as an exodus to neighbouring provinces had occurred. The people slept. Not even the dogs were alerted; it took the screeching of sacred geese to wake the people from their slumber and quickly act to repel the enemy.
Australia in 2023 is facing its own enemy at the gate. It goes by the name of Government.
While we don’t suffer from screeching geese in our parliaments – albeit some may like to draw a comparison – our representatives are in a prime position to sound the alarm.
The government’s surveillance tentacles are reaching so far into our lives that we soon may not be able to breathe without its consent. Citizens are facing censorship of their thoughts, speech, and actions with the impending ACMA Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, a direct threat to our democracy.
In the Parliament of New South Wales, on 28 June 2023, one newly elected MP laid down the stakes for liberty, delivering a rousing endorsement of the natural rights and abilities of the people, and a scathing assessment of government interference.
In his maiden speech, John Ruddick articulated the essence of free market capitalism:
“We believe in the inherent morality of capitalism simply because, that is what people will spontaneously do when left alone. The worst atrocities of history were not the result of drought, flood, pestilence, or plague but of big government throwing its weight around like an elephant stomping on ants.”
One would think such a passionate defence of liberty would be welcomed in a democratic nation.
Alas, YouTube swiftly took it down.
Was it the mention of “anarcho-capitalism” that offended the senses of the censorship tzars? Perhaps too radical an idea for our modern and progressive world to embrace. Sadly, this term is misunderstood. Where it is demonised as being violent in meaning and action, it is really the opposite.
As Mr Ruddick said:
“Anarcho-capitalism has a favourable view of human nature and an unlimited belief in our potential. I am increasingly attracted to the view that we will tap humanity’s highest potential via a government-free voluntary-based society.”
Great speeches won’t save a nation from ruin, but they can affect how people begin to consider the world around them.
Livy tells us that “Destiny had decreed that the Gaul’s were still to feel the true meaning of Roman valour.”
Let our citizens record that the enemy of liberty is still to feel the true meaning of Australian spirit and enterprise.
Sacred geese did not prevent Rome from being invaded by the Gauls, but their screeching put Romans on notice.
Perhaps Mr Ruddick’s speech will serve as a warning for Australians in the face of monumental government overreach, reminding them of the value of our inalienable individual rights and freedoms, and how voluntary associations and agreements are by far the preferred mode of human interaction.
Gerardine is a Roman historian, with specific interest in Rome’s foundation up to the end of the Republic. She advocates that history gifts us with wisdom for the mind and nourishment for the soul, and keenly defends the ancients’ legacy of civic society, law, and government.
“Perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them”.
Hannah Arendt.
The Royal Commission report into the Robodebt scandal has shone a spotlight on the leviathan that is now the Australian government. Not surprisingly, the Albanese government has distanced itself from the findings, portraying the ill-conceived scheme as a failure of their political opponents. Most of the media frame it as a failure of the Coalition government.
In neither case is the integrity and generosity of government as an institution ever questioned, nor its proper role in society. Bill Shorten made this clear when he said: “There is an ethos in Australia that the Government always has its people’s best interests at heart and, in legal matters, is a model litigant.”[1] From his perspective the Coalition betrayed this ethos.
It is a belief in which the Australian government represents the pinnacle of virtue. Not mere mortals pursuing their own self-interests, but a congregation of the anointed ones.
This ethos of government as inherently good is pervasive and has allowed it to become impervious to failure.
Yet we don’t have to look back too far to find a pattern of systemic government blunders, with substantial human and financial costs. Let us remember just a few within recent memory:
Green Loans Program (2009-2010). Thousands of assessors who invested their time and money were left with unfulfilled work promises.
Home Insulation Program (2009-2019). The death of 4 young installers sparked a Royal Commission which concluded it was a “serious failure of public administration”.
Building the Education Revolution (2009-2011). A $16.2 billion ‘stimulus package’ resulting in hugely inflated construction costs and waste.
Vocational Education and Training FEE-HELP Loans (2012-2016). Hundreds of vulnerable Australians were left with large debts for courses they never completed or started.
Jobactive Employment Services (2015-2022). Delivered high profits for job agencies and a bureaucratic nightmare for job seekers.
Much can also be said about the NBN rollout, the NDIS, Snowy 2.0 and the ongoing PwC tax leaks scandal. Time after time a series of scathing, damning, blistering reports, inquiries, audits, and Royal Commissions have analysed the reasons for each successive failure, the lessons learned, and the specific details that need to be corrected to ensure the good intentions of central planners are not botched by implementation mistakes.
In the wake of the Robodebt report there are calls for a change in the culture of the Australian Public Service: a renewed Code of Conduct and Values with an emphasis on stewardship and a primary focus on the people the APS is meant to serve.
Kathryn Campbell. The senior bureaucrat who implemented Robodebt, an algorithmic system which issued illegal social security debt notices.
Missing from the report and the discussion is the one recommendation that would ensure that Services Australia cannot continue to harm vulnerable Australians (especially in the age of AI): dismantle it.
Human tragedies, large and small, have been enabled by bloated centralised bureaucracies throughout history. The more concentrated the power structure, the bigger the tragedy. Hannah Arendt, reporting in 1961 on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major Holocaust perpetrator, observed: “the court naturally conceded that such a crime could be committed only by a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government.”
In the context of a more dispersed power structure, a giant Australian bureaucracy is still capable of causing severe harm as we have seen with Robodebt and numerous other cases. The response should be to reduce the source of this harm to its minimum expression, not to defend it or reform it.
The fundamental mistake is to endow government with high moral values, higher than those of private citizens. A fair and just society is not built by abdicating social responsibilities and delegating them to an external agent, one with coercive powers and a perverse incentive structure.
Governments are not benign. In reality, “the individual bureaucrat is not attempting to maximize the public interest very vigorously but is attempting to maximize his or her own utility just as vigorously as you and I.”[2]
Acknowledging the primacy of self-interest is not incompatible with a natural tendency to help others and engage in charitable activities or mutual aid.
Australia has a proud history of friendly societies that provided vital financial and social support to many communities before they were crowded out by government welfare[3].
At the beginning of the twentieth century nearly half Australia’s population was connected to a friendly society[4]. How much good could civil society do today with a fraction of the resources removed by a confused bureaucracy mostly concerned with finding its own soul?
Despite being pushed aside and distorted by the expansion of government, Australia’s strong volunteer tradition never disappeared. We see it all around us, in the selfless actions of millions of people, each with their own unique talents, experiences, and circumstances.
Lionel is an IT engineer with more than 20 years’ experience developing enterprise applications in the private and public sectors. He completed his computer science degree in Venezuela in 2001. Then in 2002, Lionel moved to Australia after obtaining an international internship in Canberra. He became an Australian citizen in 2008.
In his famous three-volume masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the frozen wastelands of Siberia where political prisoners and dissidents the Soviet state considered dangerous were held (for their speech, not their actions). A gulag was a Soviet prison; an archipelago is a string of islands; hence the term ‘gulag archipelago’ – a string of camps, prisons, transit centres, secret police, informers, spies and interrogators across Siberia.
Today, people are frozen out of society in more subtle ways. The authorities no longer bash down your door and haul you off to a gulag for espousing the ‘wrong views’; instead, they silence and freeze you out of existence in other ways.
No-one describes the current situation better than Scottish commentator Neil Oliver in his Essentials of Life video clip here. More about that shortly.
Divide and conquer
As we know, the Left’s chief weapon is division. Unite the disaffected groups and those with grievances, and then ‘divide and conquer’ the rest of us. Divide along racial, generational, sexual, religious or economic lines. Any line will do.
What may have started as ‘the workers vs the bosses’ – ‘the proletariat vs the bourgeoisie’ – and ‘supporting the poor’, became just a ruse to gain power. Workers and the poor have long since been abandoned by the Left who now find other ways to divide and conquer.
In his excellent book, Democracy in a Divided Australia, Matthew Lesh writes:
“Australia has a new political, cultural, and economic elite. The class divides of yesteryear have been replaced by new divisions between Inners and Outers. This divide is ripping apart our political parties, national debate, and social fabric.
Inners are highly educated inner-city progressive cosmopolitans who value change, diversity, and self-actualisation. Inners, despite being a minority, dominate politics on both sides, the bureaucracy, universities, civil society, corporates, and the media. They have created a society ruled by educated elites – that is, ruled by themselves.
Outers are the instinctive traditionalists who value stability, safety, and unity. Outers are politically, culturally, and economically marginalised in today’s graduate-dominated knowledge society era. Their voice is muzzled in public debate, driving disillusionment with the major parties, and record levels of frustration, disengagement, and pessimism.“
For over a hundred years, Australia fought to remove race from civic considerations. Yet now we are being asked to permanently divide the nation by entrenching an Indigenous Voice into our Constitution. By the ‘Inners’, of course.
In the workplace, politicians are still treating workplace behaviour like a game of football. Australia’s employers (‘the bosses’) are on one team, and Australia’s employees (‘the workers’) are on the other. The game is then overseen by a so-called ‘independent umpire’ called the Fair Work Commission. But of course, this is not how workplaces operate at all. The ‘game’, if you even want to call it that, is played not by two teams of employers and employees, but by hundreds, even thousands of different teams, competing against hundreds and thousands of other teams of employers and employees.
Mark Twain observed, “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example”.
Here’s one – the infamous Dollar Sweets dispute where unions were picketing Fred Stauder’s confectionery business. Other confectionery businesses were approached to support Fred but were rebuffed saying, “Why should we care if Dollar Sweets goes down? It will mean more business for us.” So much for ‘bosses vs workers’.
While paying lip service to free markets, property rights, personal responsibility, self-reliance, free speech, lower taxes, the rule of law and smaller government, the Liberal Party in Australia has all but abandoned these ideals in practice. As has big business, which, truth be known, was never on the side of free markets. Corporations have always wanted markets they can dominate, and to eliminate the competition. If that means aligning with the Left or doing the government’s bidding, so be it.
Which includes – and here we return to our ‘new gulags’ theme – closing a person’s bank account, destroying them on social media, or excluding them from employment. Business is right on board with this.
The Left will keep pushing its woke agenda until it is stopped. And it will not be stopped with facts, figures, logic, evidence or reason. It doesn’t care about any of that. It will only be stopped with political power.
Holding conferences, writing opinion pieces, producing podcasts and YouTube interviews in the hope of persuading people have, I’m afraid, had their day. The ‘Inners’ now rule.
Stopping the relentless march of the Left will require political power. Seats in parliament. Which means like-minded people and parties forming alliances and working strategically and tactically together to win seats.
In Neil Oliver’s video clip, he says, “When it comes to the state, that which it can do, it certainly will do” and “What can happen to anyone, will soon happen to everyone”.
So, if you belong to a think-tank, lobby group or centre-right political party, and want to stop the woke Left further ruining our country, then please encourage your organisation to place less emphasis on winning arguments and more emphasis on winning seats – as previously outlined here and here.
Bob’s contribution to the Australian community has been reflected in a wide range of appointments including National President of the Housing Industry Association, Co-Founder and Inaugural President of Independent Contractors of Australia, Director of The Centre for Independent Studies, and Senator for South Australia.
Although commonly attributed to Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the expression “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” long predated him.
In fact, it described the practice of saloons (bars) offering a “free” lunch to patrons who purchased at least one drink. The luncheon was generally high in salt (cheese, salted crackers, nuts), enticing patrons to purchase generous volumes of high-priced beer. If you weren’t paying attention, and fell for the trap, you wound up paying much more for the “free lunch”. The exploitation of a cognitive bias leads to over consumption (eg cheap and poor quality food) and over payment (eg through purchase of excess beer).
Which brings us to Australia – the land of the free and home of the expensive. Not free as in freedom, but free as in government delivered services including healthcare and education that are perceived to be free. And as with the salty food, there is over consumption and excessive cost. Like the free lunch, Australians do not get free healthcare or education. Every single one of us pays; just in a different way.
Healthcare is funded through the Medicare levy and general taxes at the State and Commonwealth level, including income tax and GST. So, whether you are a billionaire or on welfare, you are paying taxes that fund healthcare. And because healthcare is presented as “free”, there is inevitable overconsumption and waste.
Prof. Milton Friedman
Referencing Milton Friedman again, he observed that there are essentially four ways to spend money:
You can spend your own money on yourself.
You can spend your own money on someone else.
You can spend somebody else’s money on yourself.
You can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else.
When you spend your own money on yourself, you are very careful because you are looking for value. You won’t be as careful when you spend your own money on someone else, but you will look for value.
When you spend somebody else’s money on yourself, you are more interested in making your life comfortable than achieving value, but you will at least expect to gain a benefit.
Healthcare falls into the fourth category, of spending other people’s money on somebody else. There is no incentive to pursue value at all.
While we pretend healthcare is free, in reality it is bureaucrats in offices spending other people’s money on others. That includes finding new ways to expand their domain.
Consider the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care. According to its 2021-22 annual report, at 30 June 2022
It employed 5,154 persons – up from 4,450 the year prior,
These staff cost $697 million – up from $559 million the year prior, and
Its operating expenses were $1.3 billion – up from $1.1 billion the year prior.
All this and yet the department did not operate a single hospital or aged care facility.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (a government body), in 2020-21, total health spending in Australia was over $220 billion of which over 70% was government (Commonwealth, State, and Territory). That does not sound very free.
A government commissioned review also found that perhaps 10% of the Medicare program was subject to waste and fraud. Why? Perhaps because governments are spending somebody else’s money on somebody else.
This is not to suggest that there would be no government health expenditure if this charade of free healthcare was ended. It might however lead to a much more responsive and cost-efficient system. Consider how much lower taxes could be, or how much higher pensions might be, but for the inefficiency and waste of Australia’s “free” healthcare system.
We are told by Professor Duncan Maskell, the Vice-Chancellor (CEO) of the University of Melbourne, that “one of the most important radical changes that could be made to facilitate this would be once more to make education free to the Australian domestic student”. Australia already has an over-production problem of university graduates, and Maskell’s proposal would make it even worse. Why? Because universities would be spending somebody else’s money on somebody else.
To make university education “free to the Australian domestic student” would require someone else to pay for it, including those who do not and will never attend university. It wouldn’t be free; it would just be paid for by someone else.
If Professor Maskell, who is reported to be on an annual salary package of $1.5 million, really wants to make university cheaper and/or free for students, he should first look in his back yard. According to the Melbourne University annual report, in 2022 it had approximately 53,000 students and employee related expenses of $1.6 billion. That’s approximately $31,000 per student. It would certainly make the cost of education much lower if Professor Maskell and all his staff worked for free.
Dimitri Burshtein is a Principal at Eminency Advisory and a former government policy analyst. He is a contributor to The Australian newspaper, Spectator Australia magazine and various libertarian blogs. Dimitri has also appeared on SkyNews and 2GB radio.
When consuming the day’s news, I bet you first respond by gut feel.
Everyone does. Human are instinctive beings. Shoot first, ask questions later.
The problem with that was illustrated by the Great Pandemic Overreach of 2020-2022. Fear was weaponised and the world community fell for it.
Some people try to think. As a subscriber of Liberty Itch, you are most likely a disciplined, libertarian thinker. We fight against our natural urges to ‘let rip’ in our political response. We are principled. This sets us apart.
For libertarians to believe in a life free from coercion; to live and let live, and to respond with our minds rather than a gut-based thought-bubble, we need a tool that:
identifies all the sources of power operating in our society;
clarifies the methods they use to erode our liberties;
shows how our freedoms can be protected when a power centre is neutralised by another centre; and
exposes how our liberties are lost when the power centres collude or are weakened.
I have that tool. It’s an infographic. I call it The Coercion Wheels.
Wheel 1 identifies the culprits: the power centres which will coerce you if given half a chance. There are ten culprits operating under two categories.
The first category is government, under which there are five sub-categories:
International;
Legislature;
Executive;
Judiciary; and
Forces.
The second category is non-government, also with five sub-categories:
Business;
Media;
Community;
Crime; and
Individuals.
You will see that the ten sub-categories are further divided into forty coercion culprits. These are the people or groups of people who seek to impose their will on our life and limit our freedoms. They range from the United Nations to our siblings.
To examine the detail, I recommend you print the infographic. It is written from an Australian perspective but subscribers from other countries can substitute their local equivalent for what is represented.
Forty power centres in a liberal democracy like Australia! Forty coercion culprits, each pressuring you with differing amounts of control over your life. Any one or combination of them can curtail your freedoms.
Wheel 2 shows the same sub-categories but with the coercion method used against you and your family. There are a surprising number of them, from Appropriation Increases to Denial of Child Custody, from Wire Taps to Asset Seizure, from Ostracism to Trolling. I’ve listed 103 methods used to impinge upon our rights and freedoms.
Liberal democracies like Australia work best when each power centre is subject to checks and balances by others. This neutralising effect leaves you and me less likely to be subject to coercion.
Here are examples of the checks and balances working:
Various churches were plagued by reports of child sexual abuse but could not reform themselves. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the investigations and final report resulted in criminal proceedings and conviction of priests, and led to structural changes in the Church. On Wheel 1, this is shown as Old Media (24), Federal Ministers (6) and State Judges (14) checking the abuse of power by the Church & Religious Organisations (26).
When former CEO of James Hardie Limited was banned from acting as a director for 15 years for failing to provide a duty of care with respect to asbestos diseases, this is State Judges (14) holding Large Corporations (22) accountable on Wheel 1. Another check and balance success.
When Political Parties (28) vie for election to the legislature as Federal MHRs and Senators (3) or State MLAs and MLCs (4), each party acts as a check on the others and helps ensure there is a balance of opinion. There are no one party states in a liberal democracy.
Sometimes though, a segment of society may be weak or unwilling to act as a check and balance. At times, a number of power centres collude. This was evident during the Great Pandemic Overreach of 2020-2022:
When State Agency Officers (11) and State Police (18) forced the Church and Religious Organisation (26) to shut. Australian churches simply rolled over, such was the force against them. No check or balance, with freedom to worship crushed;
When Old Media (24) acted as propagandist for Federal MHRs and Senators (3), State MLAs and MLCs (4), Federal Bureaucrats (8), Federal Agency Officers (9), State Bureaucrats (10), State Agency Officers (11) and State Police (18), and with no power centres in support of our rights, we lost the right to assemble, protest and earn a living. Checks and balances failed.
These are just some examples.
If liberal democracy feels like it’s on the slide, it is because there is a blurring of interests and collusion between these traditionally separate power centres.
But there is hope.
What is Liberty Itch if not New Media (25) holding the other 39 power centres to account in a freedom-oriented, intelligent way?
Next time you consume the news, rather than rely on gut feel, use The Coercion Wheels to think and analyse. Which power centre is doing the coercing? On whom? How are they doing this? Which power centre needs to balance the coercion so you and your family are not vulnerable?
If libertarians are about freedom from coercion, The Coercion Wheels are a great tool for identifying the power centres which can act against us, the tactics they use, and why we must have them focus on each other and not us.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
In Australia, conservatives and libertarians tend to get along. Neither has sympathy for the woke, neither declares their pronouns, chooses their gender, or seeks to cancel those with whom they disagree. They both believe in things such as equality before the law, the presumption of innocence, parental responsibility, religious freedom and democracy. Indeed, some conservatives tend to think that libertarianism is merely conservatism under another name.
That is not the case though; libertarianism and conservatism originate from quite different places. It is worth understanding those places so that when they do diverge, it is not unexpected. It also helps those who are unsure of their own position.
Libertarianism is a political philosophy based on individual freedom. Before the Americans corrupted the word it was once synonymous with liberalism, but now it’s also known as classical liberalism. Some people prefer to call themselves classical liberals to avoid being mistaken for members of the US Libertarian Party, but there is no difference.
John Locke. Early Enlightenment philosopher who advocated for the right to “Life, Liberty and Estate”
The origins of libertarianism can be traced to the Enlightenment philosophers, particularly John Locke, and to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, which says that people should be free to act however they wish unless their actions cause harm to somebody else.
Conservatism is not a political philosophy but a preference for the status quo. Edmund Burke described it as an “approach to human affairs which mistrusts both a priori reasoning and revolution, preferring to put its trust in experience and in the gradual improvement of tried and tested arrangements.”
That it is not a philosophy can be seen from the fact that in the former Soviet Union, those who lamented the fall of communism (the status quo at the time) were also conservatives. Obviously, in that case they had nothing in common with libertarians.
John Stuart Mill. Philosopher who conceived The Harm Principle
Libertarians tend to have a view of what an ideal society should be: one in which the government is kept small and limited to a narrow range of functions, such as national defence, criminal justice and the protection of private property, with everything else subject to free markets. Conservatives might acknowledge some change is justified at the margins, but they generally regard current institutions as worth preserving. Libertarians advocate low taxes; conservatives oppose increased taxes. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, is a conservative sentiment.
“Taxation Is Theft”, a libertarian idea. “No Tax Increases”, a conservative idea.
Where coercion is involved, the two can part company. This was illustrated by the debate over same sex marriage. Libertarians supported the change because it removed state intrusion from the choice of a spouse. Conservatives resisted the change on the grounds that marriage is a longstanding and revered institution.
It is similar with illicit drugs. Conservatives tend to disapprove of them and are happy they are prohibited. Libertarians argue that, although they might disapprove of them, it is a matter of personal choice unless others are being harmed (and concede that can occur in some circumstances).
Libertarianism and conservatism originate from quite different places.
Conservatives and libertarians generally agree that personal choice can be important. Libertarians support it in principle (the nanny state is anathema to them) while conservatives support it because it is the status quo. But this disguises a significant difference: libertarians believe personal choice is never the government’s business unless others are harmed, except for those unable to take responsibility for their choices (eg children). Conservatives believe some people make poor choices and may need saving from themselves, or that certain choices lead to additional cost to our socialised medical system (which is the status quo). This can lead to different positions on issues like drinking, smoking, gambling, sugar and bicycle helmets.
Things get interesting with firearms. Obviously, these have the potential to harm others if misused, but that is true of other things. For libertarians, the problem is that gun control invariably only applies to civilians, not the police or military. Laws are ultimately enforced by people with guns. As the saying goes, when government fears the people there is liberty, but when the people fear the government there is tyranny.
Conservatives tend to have a more benign view of government and are reluctant to concede that it might ever be necessary to fight against or overthrow it by means other than elections.
Of course, there are libertarians who take a conservative approach on some issues as well as conservatives who have libertarian tendencies. Upholding principles can be challenging. It is easy to rationalise spending other people’s money on something close to your heart.
Conservatives tend to have a more benign view of government.
It is nonetheless a good idea for both libertarians and conservatives to periodically consider the reason for their views. Are they based on principles, or do they reflect a preference for the status quo? Are they consistent or hypocritical?
Libertarianism and conservatism are different, though they have much in common. But libertarians and conservatives also need each other, so understanding each other is important.
David Leyonhjelm was an Australian Senator from 2014 to 2019 representing New South Wales for the Liberal Democratic Party. Notable for his libertarian consistency, David’s work in Senate Estimates attracted acclaim worldwide for its forensic examination of government
waste. Professionally, he is a veterinarian and agribusiness consultant.
Whether to oppose or support the Voice referendum is an easy decision for me. The proposal is fundamentally racist, and I’m a libertarian. Racism is a collective concept and simply incompatible with libertarianism.
Libertarians see people as individuals, not as members of a group.
The proposal is for people of the Aboriginal race to elect members of the Voice, which will have the right to give advice to the government and executive. Non-Aborigines will not have a vote for the Voice, and will have no comparable means of giving advice. Australians will thus be divided into two groups – Aborigines and non-Aborigines, with Aborigines having rights that non-Aborigines do not have. Moreover, by being in the Constitution, the Voice will have a status not held by any other advisory body.
Dividing people into groups, whether it is race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual preference, is collectivism. It might be appropriate on occasions for statistical purposes, but it is not acceptable as a basis for government policy. The only legitimate approach, to libertarians like me, is to treat people as individuals.
That does not mean we lack concern for the welfare of Aborigines. Like Australians generally, we are distressed at the pathetic improvements revealed by the Closing the Gap surveys. Indeed, the third world conditions of Aborigines in remote regions is a national disgrace that I railed about regularly when in the Senate.
And yet, there are plenty of Aborigines who participate in Australian society on the same terms as other Australians. They have jobs, are not poor, their children attend school, and they are not involved in substance abuse. Moreover, there are plenty of non-Aborigines who do not have jobs, are poor, abuse drugs, and neglect their children.
Treating all Aborigines differently because some are poor and disadvantaged makes no more sense than treating non-Aborigines differently because some of them are poor and disadvantaged. The problem is that these issues exist, not the race of those who suffer them.
Libertarians see people as individuals, not as members of a group.
We share Martin Luther King’s dream, in which he hoped that one day his four little children would be judged on the basis of their character, not the colour of their skin.
Racism is a collective concept and simply incompatible with libertarianism.
Collectivism, which includes defining people by their race, is rejected. If someone is poor and disadvantaged, the appropriate response is to overcome the disadvantage that keeps them poor. This is true irrespective of the race of those concerned, or indeed any other collective characteristics with which they might be defined.
Voting no to the voice referendum can be justified on several grounds, including the fact that it will seriously compromise the role of parliament once the High Court gets its hands on it. But for libertarians, the simple fact that it is based on racism is sufficient.
David Leyonhjelm was an Australian Senator from 2014 to 2019 representing New South Wales for the Liberal Democratic Party. Notable for his libertarian consistency, David’s work in Senate Estimates attracted acclaim worldwide for its forensic examination of government
waste. Professionally, he is a veterinarian and agribusiness consultant.
He believes we are creatures playing out compulsive, repetitious behavioural cycles like any other animal and, like them, we just don’t realise it.
Except for him.
He knows what none of us can see, apparently.
He has elevated himself above the primal, it is suggested we acccept.
Forgive my skepticism.
On the contrary, I see ‘free will’ exercised daily, at life’s inflection points and in our beliefs.
We are free agents, individuals making an individual’s decision, not some kind of habitual, near-clone automatons.
‘Free Will’: individuals’ ability to decide independently of evolutionary reflex
Daily ‘Free Will’
We exercise ‘free will’ daily in the decisions we make: walk across the road now or when the cars come, read a chapter of a book now or later or not at all, compliment a person or not. This is obvious.
‘Free Will’ At Life’s Inflection Points
We exercise ‘free will’ at great inflection points in our lives when long-lasting, significant decisions are made: a marriage, a move overseas, a decision to start volunteering for a charity for the next ten years, the ascent of a rugged mountain.
When a child is born, is it preordained that this individual would go on to a life of crime or become a Rhodes Scholar? No. A million choices are made along life’s path to reach that point.
Daily and at life’s inflection points, ‘free will’ is exercised.
So too with our belief systems.
‘Free Will’ In Our Beliefs
The more counter-intuitive our belief systems, the more likely we are to be free agents and individuals making an individual’s decision.
It’s easy to follow the herd. Not much ‘free will’ in that.
The more unusual or challenging the ideas we embrace, the less likely we are some kind of habitual, near-clone automaton and the more evidence there is that we are NOT creatures playing out compulsive, repetitious behavioural cycles like any other animal.
The harder to understand or more complicated our beliefs, the less likely our adherence to them is an evolutionary reflex. Unusual or radical ideas have to be formed, absorbed and finally proactively accepted. This all takes prodigious helpings of ‘free will’.
Let me give two examples of counter-intuitive belief systems which prove ‘free will’ is in play.
First, in the political realm, classical liberal and libertarian principles.
Adam Smith. Classical Liberal.
In a world of predictable, herd-following progressive versus conservative debates, our views are counter-intuitive and don’t fit their narrative. Our ideas take discipline to apply. We have to constantly think to hold true to them. We are exercising ‘free will’ just to maintain philosophical consistency. In a Left-Right world, we are thinking outside the box and reshaping the political landscape as an Authoritarian-Libertarian world.
Does this sound like the product of an automaton in a matrix, or thinking individuals weighing a fresh and exciting political philosophy?
It smacks of individual thinking and ‘free will’ to me.
Second, in the religious world, Christian faith.
Do you want an example of a mind-bender of a belief, a counter-intuitive thought which takes all of our ‘free will’ – all of us – to absorb and embrace?
OK. I’ll give you one, timely since today is Good Friday:
“For God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son, that whoever shall believe in him, shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Tell me that doesn’t take a large dose of ‘free will’ to accept! Let’s call this idea what it is: über radical! There’s nothing automatic or mundane about this concept. To truly accept the idea, there can be no coercion, only free-thinking and a big leap of faith, individuals making an individual’s decision on a concept well outside the norm.
As I meet more and more classical liberals and libertarians, I become less and less surprised that so many happen to be Christians in their private lives. Of course, you don’t have to be a Christian to be libertarian. The former is a personal moral code, the latter a political one. But, wow, there are a lot of Christian libertarians. Start with the most famous: Ron Paul.
Ron Paul. Christian Libertarian.
None of us should be shocked by this.
Libertarian and Christian ideas are for the free-thinker. Both are challenging to apply. Both respect the dignity of the individual. Both call for personal responsibility. Both respect those who’s lives we touch. Both require the exercise of ‘free will’ and both will be judged on the decisions made with the ‘free will’.
This is a very different person from a conservative who trades on Christianity with words like “I am a cultural Christian. I believe in Judeo-Christian values” but doesn’t even believe let alone go to church on Easter, the singular most important day on the Christian calendar.
No, in my experience, libertarian Christians not only have a parish church and attend on Easter Day, but are actually in the leadership groups of their local church. No virtue signalling over it. Just belief and quiet action. They work hard in their local communities and volunteer because, as one of many reasons, the act of charity is authentic not the act of being charitable with other people’s money.
The inherent tension built into the idea that you should live freely as long as you don’t harm another, John Stuart Mill’s Harm Principle, mirrors the ‘free will’ Biblical narrative from the consequences of free choice in Eden to the consequences of choosing to submit in Gethsemane.
These are not ideas for mere creatures playing out compulsive, repetitious behavioural cycles like any other animal.
Rather, these are daring, challenging ideas for the enlightened free-thinker.
Sam Harris is wrong. ‘Free will’ is everywhere and Easter service awaits you this Sunday.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
In my last piece, Remembering Frederick Douglass, I discussed the evils and folly of centralised wage-fixing which, amongst other things, prevented people – young people in particular – from getting a start in the workforce; a foot on that first rung of the employment ladder.
Today, we look at centralized wage-fixing’s partner-in-crime – tariff protection. The other side of the micro-economic coin, if you like.
It was Bert Kelly (1912–1997) who once said, ‘The really bad ideas never go away’.
Bert Kelly. Member for Wakefield (Lib, SA). Leading advocate for free markets.
Along with centralised wage-fixing, protectionism is another of those really bad ideas.
The Australian settlement of 1900 was based on five key principles – two were economic, two were social and one was the imperial benevolence of the mother country.
The two social principles were the White Australia Policy and State Paternalism.
The two economic principles were regulated labour markets and tariff protection. These two went hand in hand. As centralised wage-fixing delivered arbitrary pay increases, thus increasing the cost of production, the price of the goods rose commensurately. As a result, imported goods became more competitive. In response, an import tax – a tariff – was placed on these imported goods to ‘protect’ Australian jobs from competition.
By the late 19th century, NSW had prospered under its free trade regime and had overtaken protectionist Victoria, becoming the continent’s leading colony. Following the collapse of the gold-rush, and to sustain its economy, Victoria borrowed heavily in the British capital markets but soon found itself impoverished and losing population – the consequences of 30 years of protectionism. NSW political leaders such as George Reid speculated that Victoria was desperate for federation so that its economic problems could be shared with the other colonies!
By the early 1920s, the newly-formed Country Party under Earle Page – influenced by the rural export industries of wool, meat and wheat – was officially opposed to protection, yet supported the Scullin Government’s belief that tariffs on imports would help restore employment during the Great Depression (1929–1932) by handing out tariffs virtually on demand. It didn’t work.
In 1930, Australian historian Keith Hancock had published his book Australia which contains this memorable reference to protectionism in Australia:
‘Protection in Australia is more than a policy: it is a faith and a dogma. Its critics, during the second decade of the twentieth century, dwindled into a despised and detected sect suspected of nursing an anti-national heresy. Protection is interwoven with almost every strand of Australia’s democratic nationalism. It professes to be a policy of plenty, but it is a policy of power.’
Bert Kelly arrived in Federal Parliament in 1958 as the Member for the South Australian seat of Wakefield and from then until he left the Parliament in 1977 fought a long and often bitter campaign against protectionism – first against a very powerful Deputy Prime Minister and Country Party Leader in John ‘Black Jack’ McEwen, and then against the strongly-defended populism of ‘protecting Australian jobs’.
Bert Kelly was opposed to protectionism because, like centralised wage-fixing, it was not only economically foolish, it was also morally wrong. It was wrong, he said, because it created a situation in which governments granted favours to some, who became greatly enriched, at the expense of others, who were at best impoverished and at worst, ruined.
On a parliamentary delegation to India, Bert visited a factory making bed sheets which wanted to sell in Australia but was unable to do so due to the high tariff (import tax) placed on imported bed linen. It was the same at an Indian shirt factory.
For example, a shirt made in Australia cost $50 to buy. An imported shirt $20. By imposing a $30 tariff on the imported shirt, consumers were told they had to pay $50 for a shirt to ‘protect Australian jobs’. If there were no tariff, however, and consumers were able to buy a shirt for $20 instead of $50, that would give them Bert argued, $30 to spend on something else. And it is that something else that is the catalyst for emerging industries.
Tariffs support declining industries, free trade supports emerging industries.
Bert also learned that Indians were desperate to buy Australian milk powder for their children but did not have the foreign exchange – Australian or US dollars – due to the insurmountable tariff on their textile goods entering Australia.
Thus, both India and Australia suffered. To quote Bert Kelly:
‘Australian dairy farmers can’t sell their skim milk powder, Australian families have to buy expensive ‘Australian-made’ sheets and shirts, Indian children don’t get milk and Indian factories can’t make textiles. A lose-lose situation if ever there was one. All this brought to you by our good and wise government’.
At the same time, Australia was giving aid money to India.
Bert spoke frequently in favour of Community Aid Abroad but against aid being given with no strings attached. ‘Trading with poor countries is a far better way to help them than giving them aid,” he argued.
With the union movement’s new friends in Canberra, expect to see more on the wages/tariff front.
Bob’s contribution to the Australian community has been reflected in a wide range of appointments including National President of the Housing Industry Association, Co-Founder and Inaugural President of Independent Contractors of Australia, Director of The Centre for Independent Studies, and Senator for South Australia.
Some thirty plus years ago, a fellow by the name of Kerry Packer appeared before a House of Representatives Inquiry into Print Media.
Kerry Packer. Appeared in the House of Reps Inquiry into Print Media in 1991.
The context of the inquiry was that the owner of the main metropolitan newspapers and classifieds, Fairfax, had gone broke. And with Fairfax having gone broke, Packer was trying to buy into the re-floated business.
This was a time before the Internet, when newspapers actually made money and lots if it from their classifieds business. Fairfax’s classifieds business was referred to as the ‘rivers of gold’.
There is a tale to tell here around Malcolm Turnbull who was previously Packer’s in-house lawyer and who, by this stage, had moved on and was representing the junk bond holders of the broke Fairfax. But that is for another time.
Businessman Kerry Packer with future Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.
For his masterclass in its entirety, see the video at the end of this article.
There are some much younger looking folk in it, including one Peter Costello. However, this is not to delve into the issues of media, but rather the diversion that took place late in the piece when Packer spoke about the risk to Australia from the constant meddling of Australian parliaments and the risk to investments into Australia. It was a Packer masterclass and should be shown in every school and every parliamentarian induction session.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Highlight 1 – when Packer says to ALP curmudgeon John Langmore:
“You seem to be completely unaware of the Constitution of Australia.”
Highlight 2 – when Packer points out that in his lifetime, tens of thousands of laws had been passed but that Australia was not a better place for all those new laws. He also suggested that for every law passed, another law be repealed. Packer said:
Every time you pass a law, you take someone’s privileges away from them.
Highlight 3 – again when Langmore accuses Packer of minimising his tax. To which Packer replied:
I don’t know anyone who does not minimise their tax. If anyone in this country doesn’t minimise their tax, they want their heads read, because as a government, I can tell you that you’re not spending it that well that we should be donating extra!
Which brings me to superannuation wars 2023 when Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones flagged yet more changes to superannuation taxes.
The proposal is couched in fairness, but the truth is that like drug addicts, the government is in desperate need of more money.
A retiree earning $100,000 a year in super fund investment returns typically pays no income tax, whereas a wage earner receiving the same amount pays $23,000 tax
This is neither fair nor just. But the Government’s problem, as with the same problem for the Coalition, is that they have no credibility when it comes to tax changes and tax reforms. This because they won’t do the work of demonstrating that what is currently being spent is being spent efficiently and effectively.
Instead, piles of money and political capital are being expended to generate what will likely be less than $1 billion per annum of additional taxes.
Talk about perverted priorities.
There is much wrong and distortionary with the Australian tax system. It is a train crash. But until government does the fundamental and hard work of spending reform, tax reform will be seen for what it is. Just an attempt to pump more water into a leaky bucket.
According to the ABS, for the 12 months to June 2021, the 3 tiers of Australian government managed to generate $810 billion of revenue. But they spent $970 billion or near half of GDP generating a combined deficit of $160 billion.
Our governments don’t have revenue problem. They have a spending problem. Message to Labor, Liberal, National and Greens governments, as Kerry Packer said quite well and clearly:
“you’re not spending it that well that we should be donating extra!”
Dimitri Burshtein is a Principal at Eminency Advisory and a former government policy analyst. He is a contributor to The Australian newspaper, Spectator Australia magazine and various libertarian blogs. Dimitri has also appeared on SkyNews and 2GB radio.
Well, it was mischief-making in the sense that I like to sharply define the line between liberal and conservative and then, with all the goodwill in the world, provoke people to think and explore these differences.
There is a difference, you see.
So I posted a video clip between American commentators Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. They had opposing views of how to handle inevitable job losses caused by driverless trucks. It illustrated the difference eloquently.
Then I challenged you to vote whether you agreed with Tucker Carlson or, by inference from his question, Ben Shapiro.
The results are in:
37% Tucker Carlson; and
63% Ben Shapiro.
If you agreed with Tucker Carlson, you are a conservative.
If you agreed with Ben Shapiro, you are a liberal.
As I repeat ad nauseum, conservatives wish to conserve. Here, Mr. Carlson would be happy to conserve current industry development rather than advance it. He’d be happy to keep truck drivers in jobs for which technology has a more efficient solution, the driverless truck.
By inference from his question, Mr Shapiro would prefer to let the free market take its course, permit the technology and have truck drivers migrate into related freight work or even redeploy into other industries.
There’s a big difference in approach.
Liberals and conservatives are not the same.
You’re an optimist if you’re a liberal (or if you must, a classical liberal or libertarian, they all mean the same thing!) You believe in people, in their ability to innovate and in their ability to adapt to change. In the case of driverless trucks, you fully embrace this new technology and you want to encourage the creators of that innovation by allowing it to be unleashed on the market. No restrictions. And you have faith truck drivers, given appropriate notice, are more than capable of finding new work. You are confident they aren’t simply going to sit and bemoan the loss of one type of occupation. Rather, you know they’ll have to find other work to feed their families, as we all do.
You’re a pessimist if you’re a conservative. You believe, as Mr Carlson even said, that you don’t want high school educated men let loose on society without a job. He assumes that high school educated men would suddenly become helpless and even dangerous. That’s the inference.
Blimey!
Talk about loss of faith in our fellow citizens. It’s a nanny state attitude. What evidence is there for this? None that I can find. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence high school educated men are adaptable.
Take 1980s Newcastle. A city bustling with blue collar men busily working the steelworks. Now look at 2020s Newcastle, a lifestyle, health and university town. What happened to these steelworkers? Was Newcastle ravaged by idle high school educated men wreaking havoc across the city? No. Some of these men were due to retire, some moved to the Wollongong works, some stayed in Newcastle moving into value-add niche industrial enterprises, some stayed in the large industrial companies but worked from home as the companies left, some started their own businesses using their skills in new ways, some simply moved into new industries altogether, some retrained, some took early retirement to enjoy life.
Take my grandfather. He grew up and apprenticed as a wheelwright at the tale-end of the old wooden spoke and hub horse-drawn carts. Then as his career developed, wood gave way to steel spoke and hub wheels. Then steel plates came in. What a transition!
Further, when a conservative says ‘let’s restrict technology’, what does that signal? It’s the same as saying to every inventor and innovator, every scientist and engineer, to every entrepreneur and free thinker that their fresh, new ways of solving old problems are unwelcome.
As I say, conservatism’s tendency to oppose change can be helpful. However, if that’s all we on the Right do is oppose and conserve, we end up sliding to the Left. Opposition and conservation are insufficient to fight the Left.
We must treat our innovators with respect and let them advance society. We must not be conservative and stand in the way.
We must treat our fellow citizens with respect, have confidence in them that they can cope with change. We should not mollycoddle them.
Don’t be a conservative like Mr. Carlson.
Be a classical liberal like Mr. Shapiro in this debate.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
Word on the street is that the Liberal Democrats are searching for a new name.
Malcolm Turnbull and the Greens forced it upon them. It was his parting gift.
It is now the Eleventh Commandment.
“Thou shalt not use any English word of an older party’s name in your own.”
So, despite being named the Liberal Democrats for 21 years, the Liberal Party government took the Liberal Democrats to court and won. The Liberal Democrats challenged the decision in the High Court and lost.
And just like that, the Liberal Party owns a monopoly right to the word ‘liberal’ despite being one of the most illiberal governments in existence today.
The amazing development is that Friedrich Hayek himself has come back from the grave and offered a suggestion for a new name!
Hard to believe, right?
And yet, here he is in black and white pondering the very same question about an appropriate party name for classical liberals.
In his famous 1960 essay Why I Am Not A Conservative in which he affirms the clear differences between socialists, conservatives and liberals, he wrote:
“In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use ‘liberal’ in the sense in which I have used it, the term ‘libertarian’ has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive. For my taste it carries too much the flavour of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favours free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”
Having eschewed the word ‘libertarian’, he then strikes upon an idea.
“We should remember, however, that when the ideals which I have been trying to restate first began to spread through the Western world, the party which represented them had a generally recognized name.
It was the ideals of the English Whigs that inspired what later came to be known as the liberal movement in the whole of Europe and that provided the conceptions that the American colonists carried with them and which guided them in their struggle for independence and in the establishment of their constitution.
Indeed, until the character of this tradition was altered by the accretions due to the French Revolution, with its totalitarian democracy and socialist leanings, “Whig” was the name by which the party of liberty was generally known.
The name died in the country of its birth partly because for a time the principles for which it stood were no longer distinctive of a particular party, and partly because the men who bore the name did not remain true to those principles. The Whig parties of the nineteenth century, in both Britain and the United States, finally brought discredit to the name among the radicals.
But it is still true that, since liberalism took the place of Whiggism only after the movement for liberty had absorbed the crude and militant rationalism of the French Revolution, and since our task must largely be to free that tradition from the over-rationalistic, nationalistic, and socialistic influences which have intruded into it, Whiggism is historically the correct name for the ideas in which I believe.
The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig – with the stress on the ‘old.’ ”
The long history of the Whigs is rich and worth exploring. The ‘Old Whig’ phrase was coined by Edmund Burke who best reflected its views. Famous Whigs have included or been influenced by John Locke, Adam Smith, former British Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, after whom the grand city of Melbourne is named, and most of the pre-revolutionary American patriots.
You adhere to the principles of Whiggism. You are Whiggish in your philosophical leanings.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
This open letter assumes the reader has also read the Australian Financial Review column by Alexander Downer dated 4 Dec 2022 found here . Start there and follow with this Open Letter.
As a former State and Federal Executive member of the Liberal Party, as a former Young Liberal of the Year and participant in 72 pre-selections, I agree with much of what you wrote.
The fact that the Liberal Party has lost its philosophical mooring and is now drifting wherever the political currents take it was the very reason I left and joined the Liberal Democrats in South Australia.
They stand for fiscal restraint, individual freedom, rule of law, freedom of speech, entrepreneurialism, freedom of worship, free trade, equality before the law, innovation and science, the very things the Liberal Party have abandoned and seem unable to clearly articulate.
As an example of just how unable even Liberal Party senators have become to hold true and firm to these beliefs, see here Senator Andrew Bragg from NSW on ABC’s Q&A:
It’s not only the Liberal Democrats who provide fresh competition. There are good people in other parties who share these values but do not see the Liberal Party as their natural home any longer.
Nowhere was the Liberal Party’s drift more evident than during covid overreach. And it’s with that in mind that I turn to your column.
You wrote, “In South Australia, the public was on the whole supportive of the state government’s termination of traditional civil liberties.”
As you know, public opinion can be manufactured. When you say leadership was required rather than managerialism, nowhere was that needed more than during covid.
You wrote further, “The values of selfless individualism and individual freedom and responsibility are timeless. The Liberal Party shouldn’t allow them to be cast as anachronistic.”
You can see my emphasis in both these quotes.
I’d therefore like to ask you a simple question in an effort to reconcile those two quotes from your column:
Do you agree it was a mistake for the recent SA Liberal Government to have terminated traditional civil liberties at the expense of our timeless value of individual freedom?
This open letter is published on Liberty Itch, which boasts current and past MPs as well as current party leaders and activists as subscribers.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
In my last two articles, I showed how George Orwell’s 1984 seems to be coming true, how the size of government grows ever larger and how rent-seekers are not only doing what they’ve always done but are getting much better at it. How this happens without sparking a popular uprising, I invoke the fable of ‘the shrinking forest’. I also explained why our fellow citizens are so disengaged from politics and what they can do to start the fightback.
I’d now like to discuss how we’ve reached this position – specifically how our opponents have attacked classical liberalism and libertarianism by first undermining Christianity. You may be sceptical of this. You make not even see a link. But history reveals all and lessons from the past illuminate what our opponents are doing today.
Modern Western democracy was founded in Christianity and in the family. It’s why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the co-authors of The Communist Manifesto, were determined to undermine both. Marx and Engels knew faith and family were the enemy. They did not like what families and people of faith talked about around the dinner table.
In his brilliant book, The Subversive Family, British writer Ferdinand Mount argued that marriage and the family, far from being oppressed by the ruling class, were in fact the chief bulwarks against authoritarianism. Family, faith and freedom are without doubt the best bulwarks against division and authoritarianism.
As for faith, removing Christians from the public square seems to be the unstated aim. ‘Net zero Christians by 2050’, quipped by Rebecca Weisser.
“Every citizen is equal before the law.”
I would argue that the Christian is the model libertarian.
Knowing that one day they will stand before their Creator and give an account of themselves, Christians aim to be the personification of personal responsibility. Endowed with a free will to choose right or wrong, Christians cannot blame anyone else for their actions. It follows therefore, that if God is going to hold people responsible for their actions, then God would give them the right to decide how they conduct their lives.
For example, taking away from someone the right to decide for themselves how much they are willing to work for, is to deny them a God-given right to work. People do things for their reasons, not yours, and people constantly make trade-offs depending on a range of factors known best only to themselves and their families.
It is also why the Bible tells us not once, but twice, “Do not favour the poor in court”. This is real justice, not ‘social justice’.
Favouring one group of citizens over another based on socio-economic or racial grounds is not only immoral, it also foolish. It always ends badly – especially for the favoured group.
Note, this is not to be confused with obligations we have towards each other in a personal capacity. ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Jesus was asked, in the famous ‘good Samaritan’ parable.
In this, the Christian has no difficulty with public policy, that is ‘what is sinful vs what should be unlawful’. Sin is personal, the law for everyone.
And then there’s family. There has been a relentless push to replace father and mother, male and female, with something else. A village perhaps? There was that leftist trope – ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ As one wag responded, ‘Yes, and it takes a village idiot to believe that.’
More troubling is the breadth of the battleground.
Just look at the global coordination achieved by the Left with respect to Black Lives Matter, Roe v Wade, transgenderism, climate and Covid. Notice the activists all seem to read from the same script. It’s formulaic for sure and almost robotically applied globally regardless of where the original issue occurred.
The Covid response was near uniform globally and we are only now seeing the effects with little to no accountability. There were protests in Adelaide with pictures of George Floyd – a police excessive-use-of-force issue in faraway Minneapolis USA. The US Supreme Court then ruled that abortion should be a state matter and, out of nowhere, the rapid response pro-abortion rallies were rolled-out city by city in Australia, each jurisdiction of which had abortion laws already in place. Go figure.
Whatever you think of these issues, my point is that the global coordination is chilling.
There is no doubt Australia has economic and social problems that it is going to have to solve – inflation, rising interest rates, high mortgages (forcing both parents out to work), high cost of living (educating and raising children, power prices, water prices) – and social ills caused by the rupturing of family relationships due to mental health and addictions of various kinds.
Our nation also has economic and social goals it wants to achieve – increased productivity, affordable housing, lower crime rates. However, looking to politicians, bureaucrats and regulators to solve these problems and achieve these goals seems to be a lost cause.
As for free markets, property rights, personal responsibility, self-reliance, free speech, lower taxes, the rule of law, and smaller government, these have all but been abandoned.
Major party MPs seem more interested in making friends across the aisle than looking for ways ‘to improve the life of the ordinary citizen’ as described by Charles Taylor in his book, The Affirmation of the Ordinary Life.
Once elected, MPs are easily captured. They like being Members of Parliament and they like being liked – including by members of other parties. They also love socialising; they don’t want to be ostracised or booed on the ABC for making a stand or championing a cause. On issue after issue, they seem weak. They have lost both their philosophical bearings and religious convictions.
Take away religious conviction and classical liberalism becomes less grounded.
One flows from the other.
I would argue it is not possible to ‘break through’ all this. We have to ‘break with’. We have to force the major parties’ hands through the brutal reality of balance-of-power politics.
Next week I would like to flag a ground-breaking idea for change. Something practical. An innovation which I trust will bring hope and optimism.
Bob’s contribution to the Australian community has been reflected in a wide range of appointments including National President of the Housing Industry Association, Co-Founder and Inaugural President of Independent Contractors of Australia, Director of The Centre for Independent Studies, and Senator for South Australia.
If you look at the evolution of the political landscape over the last few decades, you’ll notice some things just don’t seem to add up.
Not that long ago, populism was at the heartland of left-wing ideology. Occupy Wall Street, fighting ‘big pharma’ and ending the military-industrial complex were the biggest political and social movements of the 2010s – all of them were considered left-wing.
Now even the slightest criticism of Pfizer will have you labelled a ‘RWNJ’ and shadow banned on most social media networks.
But something changed, or has it?
The reality is that nothing has changed, you have just been viewing the political landscape from the wrong direction. Left versus right; conservative versus progressive; Labor versus Liberal. These are meaningless terms and wasted battles. What exactly does it mean to be left-wing in modern society? What exactly are conservatives conserving? And what values do either the Labor or Liberal parties stand for, exactly?
We have been programed to view politics through a false dichotomy of ‘left’ and ‘right’, yet very few can accurately define those terms. Fascism is often considered as the extremity of the right-wing, yet many right-wingers would consider small governments and free markets integral to right-wing ideology. This plainly cannot gel with fascism.
SHIFT YOUR PERSPECTIVE
Instead of viewing politics through a left-right dichotomy, let’s add another axis: libertarian versus authoritarian. While some may be familiar with the political compass consisting of authoritarian-left, authoritarian-right, libertarian-left and libertarian-right, this too does not quite cut it.
The extremities of each quadrant are simply not possible. How could you sit in the extreme bottom right-hand corner? Drug-law reform and extreme right-wing ideology is a circle that cannot be squared. The same applies to all corners. Instead, let us rotate the compass 45 degrees and change some titles.
NOT ANOTHER LIBERTARIAN PURITY TEST
Now this makes sense: to fully pursue liberty, you must trade your conservative or liberal tenets. This does not mean you cannot sit somewhere between conservative and libertarian. However, it does mean you cannot simultaneously be a radical libertarian and an extreme conservative.
I am not saying all of this to prove just how libertarian I am and prohibit libertarian-leaning people from unifying under the banner of liberty, precisely the opposite. We must know the true battleplanes in order to know where our friends and enemies are coming from.
WE HAVE FRIENDS ON THE LEFT
There seems to be a growing narrative that libertarianism is a right-wing ideology. I detest this narrative. It is plainly untrue. I, myself, came to libertarianism from the left. Growing up, the concept of criminalising victimless crimes never made sense to me. So, naturally, I considered myself to be left-wing.
When I was old enough to realise the importance of the economy, I applied the same philosophy: people should be free to direct their capital however they see fit, so long as they are not hurting anyone else, with minimal government interference. If we should not govern people based on subjective morals, then we should not be looting and pillaging people’s resources via taxation.
As it turns out, I was not left-wing.
So where have all the left-libertarians been hiding for the past three years?
During the height of COVID restrictions, governments heavily interfered with markets: shuttering businesses, slashing interest rates, employing quantitative easing and deploying abundant welfare. Yet we did not see a more egalitarian outcome, as many on the (authoritarian) left so often claim.
In fact, instead of wealth inequality easing, we saw the largest redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest people. Rich, laptop-elites with large property and share portfolios saw their net worth skyrocket, while middle- and working-class people were given scraps and are currently seeing their purchasing power plummet.
So where were all the socialists decrying this?
‘The left’ was long ago infiltrated and annexed by authoritarians. Socialists are not true socialists; progressives are not truly progressive; and liberals are far from liberal. ‘The left’ wants nothing more than government to grow and dissidents to be quashed – a far cry from the socialism of decades gone. There are countless examples of left-wing castaways who are now often called ‘right-wing’ or even ‘far-right.’
Joe Rogan is a man who campaigned with a self-described democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders. He is now considered far-right. Russell Brand, who publicly advocated for socialism, has been exiled from his left-wing home since he started criticising the COVID response. Even self-avowed British socialist Jeremy Corbyn expressed some criticism of vaccine mandates. Somehow, he managed to escape much of the backlash.
The libertarian-left hasn’t been hiding for the past three years, they have been un-personed. Castaway from their ideological home and called ‘far-right extremists’ – just like the rest of us.
They are not our enemies; they are our friends.
It is incumbent upon us to welcome them under the tree of liberty.
WE HAVE ENEMIES ON THE RIGHT
We are nearing the peak of woke leftism’s cultural hegemony. But as all pendulums swing, it will come back the other way – and hard. Despite my veneer of youth, I am old enough to remember the days of conservatives demanding an end to Marilyn Manson and ‘violent’ videogames. It may seem foreign to some, but the right-wing can just as easily prosecute free speech and advocate censorship.
The trappings of a return to morality-based governance are already there. It is not a stretch to see how the pendulum returns to hard-line drug laws and a ‘war against degeneracy.’ It is imperative we do not allow this to happen.
While the political right does seem to be largely on the correct side of the culture war (for now), it is important we do not simply add to the choir of conservative voices.
Provide nuance and always advocate the values of liberty.
While always avidly following politics and culture, James Hol was not politically active until the overreaction to COVID. In a matter of months, James gained invaluable insight into all levels of government, being heavily involved in Federal, state and local election campaigns.
I’ve said it before a hundred times. I’ll say it again.
Political philosophy matters.
There’s no point telling me that philosophy is for intellectuals only.
No!
Philosophy is the bedrock on which policies are created.
Everyday, regular Australians instinctively know this even if they’re not philosophy wonks.
Here’s the proof.
When the Liberal Party of Australia publishes Our Beliefs, it just doesn’t sound right. It feels like a part time-capsule of classical liberal aspiration, part welfare state socialism, part nod to the Greens, and actually quite a lot of word salad.
It’s certainly not consistent philosophy.
And this probably explains their disastrous election results of late.
Politicians, made timid from the comforts of entrenchment, have wobbled on philosophy and been weak-kneed on policy. The Party of entrepreneurship is now devoid of a policy innovation of its own.
Without the firm foundation of philosophy, the Liberal Party edifice is collapsing.
There are many fine members within the Liberal Party working towards an undiluted classical liberal reset. If the Party is to survive, it’s these people who’ll do it.
Others are turning to conservatism but simultaneously bemoan the loss of culture, institutions and once-safe seats. These people aren’t thinking clearly. Conservatism is nothing more than maintaining the status quo. Today, the status quo is with the social democrats, the welfare state advocates and the Marxists.
Conservatives are really classical liberals who don’t know they’re not in control anymore. You end this foggy thinking by sharply critiquing your belief system, your philosophy.
So, let’s do that together now.
I’ve reproduced Our Beliefs of the Liberal Party and added footnotes to show just how far they have strayed from their classical liberal foundation.
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We Believe:
In the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples (1); and we work towards a lean government (2) that minimises interference in our daily lives (3); and maximises individual (4) and private sector (5) initiative (6)
In government that nurtures (7) and encourages its citizens through incentive (8), rather than putting limits on people through the punishing disincentives of burdensome taxes (9) and the stifling structures of Labor’s corporate state (10) and bureaucratic red tape (11).
In those most basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy (12) – the freedom of thought (13), worship (14), speech (15) and association (16).
In a just and humane society (17) in which the importance of the family (18) and the role of law and justice is maintained (19).
In equal opportunity for all Australians; and the encouragement and facilitation of wealth (20) so that all may enjoy the highest possible standards of living, health, education (21) and social justice (22).
That, wherever possible (23), government should not compete with an efficient private sector (5); and that businesses and individuals – not government (24).- are the true creators of wealth and employment.
In preserving Australia’s natural beauty and the environment for future generations (25).
That our nation (26) has a constructive role to play in maintaining world peace and democracy (27) through alliance with other free nations.
In short, we simply believe in individual freedom (28) and free enterprise (29); and if you share this belief, then ours is the Party for you (30).
***
FOOTNOTES
(1) “freedoms of all people”, unless you were covid unvaccinated;
In short, when Alfred Deakin was PM, government expenditure as a percentage of GDP was 5%. When PM Scott Morrison left office, it was 45%. Not lean!
(3) “minimises interference in our daily lives”, except that it steals your wage earned on Monday and Tuesday each week, 10% of everything you buy to survive, plus 24 other taxes,
plus stops you leaving your house during covid, crossing state borders, leaving Australia, returning to Australia, forces you to apply for permission to protest, spies on you during those protests, collects your mobile phone texts, records your conversations, arrests you for social media posts et al;
(4) “maximises individual initiative”, how? Many OECD countries are more entrepreneurial;
(5) “private sector”, a term used primarily by people from the public sector to contrast themselves with the other side, a dead giveaway that this screed has been written by a career bureaucrat. The millions who work in small business don’t talk like this;
(6) “initiative”, the Liberal Party of Australia is responsible for more laws than any other party. Each time legislation is passed, either widespread initiative is crushed or monopolies are created or both;
(7) “government that nurtures”, no classical liberal government would ever think it could nurture free people. The government is not your mother. Nurturing happens within the sanctity of the family unit not a bureaucratic department;
(8) “encourage its citizens through incentive”, no. Any philosophical liberal knows you don’t manipulate the market. Citizens are most encouraged when the market is free;
(9) “burdensome taxes”, good grief. See The Long, Long, Long, Long List of Taxes here
(10) “Labor’s corporate state”, you want to see the corporate state grow over 120 years? See footnote (2);
(11) “Bureaucratic red tape”, it was the Liberal Party that forced every business owner in the country to double its role as a tax collector when the GST was introduced;
(12) “Basic freedoms of parliamentary democracy”, except when it joined Victorian Labor in blocking three MPs from taking their rightful place in parliament because they demanded to know the MPs’ private health details. Shame Liberal, shame;
(13) “Freedom of thought”, except that its government departments regularly force job applicants into group-think over Acknowledgement of Country and the efficacy of vaccines;
(14) “freedom of worship”, except that it shut churches during covid and regulates their charitable status;
(15) “freedom of speech”, except if you are a member of the Liberal Party of Australia, in which case you are prohibited from talking to the public;
(16) “freedom of association”, but not with your dying grandmother during covid;
(17) “just and humane society”, well, well, well. This is a new inclusion since I was a member in the 1990s. This doesn’t sound like freedom-loving liberalism to me! This sounds like the Labor Party, the Australian Greens or the Animal Justice Party;
(18) “importance of the family”, except of course that under successive Liberal Party government policies family break-up and depression have increased, schools can undermine parental authority and courts stack custody against fathers;
(19) “law and justice maintained”, well yes. Police powers have increased dramatically;
(20) “facilitation of wealth”, what? There is no classically liberal government which would ever think it is in the business of facilitating citizens’ wealth. No. Not a government role. Off track;
(21) “highest possible standard of education”, the Liberal Party endorsed Labor’s National Curriculum. Far from being the Party of the individual, the Liberal Party has adopted a collective, one-size-fits-all approach. Stifling;
(22) “highest possible standards of social justice”, well, well, well! The Liberal Party aren’t liberals but social democrats now! This was not a belief of the Liberal Party in the 1990s. No. Off track. Menzies would turn in his grave. Centre-right parties should have individualism and freedom as their philosophy;
(23) “wherever possible”, but Liberals often endorse government agencies doing what privately-owned companies could do. NBN is a good example. Many other examples;
(24) “businesses and individuals, not government”, if they believed this, they wouldn’t allow the trend described in Footnote (2). Why is the Government’s ABC competing with Fairfax and News et al?;
(25) “environment”, well, well, well, a new inclusion. Straight from the Australian Greens playbook. This was never a core Liberal tenant in the 1990s;
(26) “nation”, capitalise it to Nation! Have some pride;
(27) “world peace and democracy”, perhaps. Alliances are important for a country the size of Australia. But the Liberal Party has neither been stellar building our deterrent defence forces nor limiting our economic concentration on China, a glaring geopolitical risk. These failures damage our capability to remain free;
(28) “individual freedom”, a joke. They slowly crush individual freedom from tax file numbers to police security cameras. The Liberal Party are actively installing police state surveillance cameras and tracking software in the City of Adelaide, as one of many examples;
(29) “free enterprise”, a joke. Very few Liberal politicians have owned an employing business. Name ten in the Federal Parliament;
(30) “Party is for you”, well no. Rather, the Liberal Party is a net minus for civil liberties and economic freedom.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
These five quotes are from a speech delivered on 13 October 2022 in Australia by The Right Honourable Lord Jonathan Sumption, former senior judge of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
They go to explaining how our citizens invite authoritarianism, the cost of this, and what has held back despotism to date …
“In modern conditions, risk-aversion and the fear that goes with it are a standing invitation to authoritarian government”
“If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong.”
“If we demand from the state protection from risks which are inherent in life itself, then the state’s measures will necessarily involve the suppression of some part of life itself.”
“The quest for security at the price of coercion and state intervention is a feature of democratic politics”
“It has only ever been culture and convention which prevented governments from adopting a totalitarian model. But culture and convention are fragile. They take years to form but can be destroyed very quickly. Once you discard them, there is no barrier left, the spell is broken. If something is unthinkable until somebody in authority thinks of it, then the psycological barriers which have always been our main protection against despotism have vanished.”
Our culture is becoming more risk-averse. Fear of risk grows. We’re apparently losing our grit, tenacity and adventurous spirit to manage our own risk. This manifests as a culture going soft with high-expectations that government will molly-coddle.
What then for us? How do we push back?
One fresh idea will be revealed on Liberty Itch this Thursday.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
You could be forgiven for feeling despair at the state of Australian politics right now.
Ditto for the West as a whole.
Unfortunately, despair doesn’t take us where we need to go.
There are four forces pulling us in the wrong direction at the moment. The quick summary is that the Liberty-Authority war is raging but Liberty is losing too many battles, our politicians don’t know how ‘mixed’ our mixed-economy should be and so are preferencing Authority in that war, there’s a kind of matrix hanging over us which makes things hard to change, and we aren’t giving our parliamentarians the right incentives to stop.
What we urgently need is clear-thinking on these four forces, an action plan to counter them and a lot of good people like you to follow the plan.
This article will give you the clear-thinking and the action plan.
Read what follows then decide whether you’ll join the fight.
LIBERTY-AUTHORITY WAR
First, the Liberty-Authority war is raging but Liberty is losing too many battles.
There are two extremes in government: 100% Liberty and 100% Authority.
Total Liberty is a utopia, which can only fleetingly exist before Authority is needed to stabilise it. At 95% Liberty and 5% Authority, stability is possible. Imagine 1880s London or 1980s Hong Kong. In this light-touch government, the enterprising individual flourishes to produce a dynamic, Liberty-loving productive society. Individual independence, live and let live lifestyle, free-trade, creativity, flair, ambition, initiative, vision, self-reliance, energy, innovation and self-actualisation abound. The society throbs with entrepreneurial instinct.
Total Authority is a dystopia, which inevitably collapses from the murder, starvation or flight of millions. It is frequently reformed out of necessity. At 95% Authority and 5% Liberty, the Liberty manifests as a barely-tolerated, hardscrabble barter just to ward-off widespread starvation. Imagine 2020s North Korea or 2020s Eritrea. The economy is small and centrally controlled. Basic needs are unmet. In this despotic, heavy-handed government, enterprise is crushed, initiative regarded with suspicion and people cower in fear and repression, forced into a life of misery. There is no spark in its people, no verve, no passion, no striving, no vivacity.
Australia sits nowhere near these two ends of the spectrum, of course. It would be feeble-thinking however to surmise that we are exempt from the Liberty-Authority war. All societies are subject to it, Australia included, and Liberty is losing.
Consider Authority’s recent wins:
Border closures
Vaccine mandates
Emergency power legislation enshrined and ready for reactivation
Job terminations over mandates
QR codes to track your movements and bar entry
Elected politicians denied entry into parliament
Peaceful citizens shot in the back with rubber bullets
Home detention of the population
Laws requiring employers to gather private medical data
Secrecy over vaccine purchase terms
Door-to-door visits for covid vaccine rollout
Opaque health information about vaccine injuries
Construction of covid detention camps.
Think that’s the end of it?
First, none of these powers has been removed as covid wanes.
Second, at the time of writing, there were 122 bills before Capital Hill, Canberra. This figure obviously changes but you can review the list at anytime yourself here.
I want you to think of the Commonwealth Parliament as a school of ravenous piranha. Every time a new law is passed, your personal and financial Liberty is being thrown in the legislative pond for thirty seconds. You scramble out with razor cuts all over your bloodied body. Then you’re pushed back in by errant leaders and the populist mob for another gasping swim. Again and again, the body politic is attacked, your Liberty weakened with every new law passed.
During my frantic attempts to call MPs during the covid overreach, part of my epiphany that the Liberal Party – far from being an agent for small government – is complicit in this process was a question I posed to an MP. I asked this person to find out from the Parliamentary Library how many Commonwealth statutes are active. The experts couldn’t come up with a number. We are suffocated with so many laws, we don’t know how many there are!
We’ve fought 121 years in Australia over whether we need more economic and personal Liberty on the one side, and whether we need more Authority and protection on the other.
Authority is winning.
One of the issues is that our fellow citizens are increasingly expecting government to be an end-to-end solution to every risk we face in life. What we demand of our governments is that they increasingly manage the risks of life which we have handled privately in the past. Fear is a powerful motivator.
We have to make our politicians understand that we don’t expect them to carry all the risks in our lives.
As Lord Jonathan Sumption said in a recent trip to Australia:
“If we hold governments responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our autonomy so that nothing can go wrong.”
I think he’s being optimistic about ‘nothing can go wrong’ but you see his point.
MIXED ECONOMY
Second, our politicians don’t know how ‘mixed’ our mixed-economy should be and so are preferencing Authority in that war.
Throughout time immemorial, we have sought to balance these competing but innate needs. On one side, creative, independent, self-actualising Liberty and, on the other side, risk-avoiding, dependent, protective Authority.
Democracy, coupled with its ‘mixed-economy’, tries to navigate between the two. That is, there is constant tension within a mixed-economy democracy to balance Liberty and Authority.
How are each enabled?
The general rule of thumb is that the bigger a government’s budget, the greater the means by which our leaders can impose Authority.
Big government budget means more Authority and less Liberty.
Small government budget means more Liberty and less Authority.
So, what’s the trendline in Australia.
If we use government expenditure as a percentage of GDP as the litmus test since Federation in 1901, we see an obvious trend. I’m going to use cut-offs at the end of each Liberal government (or its predecessor equivalents) since centre-right Liberals are reputationally supposed to be the small government, pro Liberty advocates.
Here’s what we discover:
Deakin (third government): 5%
Menzies (second government): 17%
Fraser: 26%
Howard: 37%
Morrison: 45%.
The trend is clearly from Liberty to Authority.
We need to jettison this old Keynesian term ‘mixed economy’. It’s an umbrella phrase which masks intent. An economy set at 90% Liberty and 10% Authority is a mixed-economy of a sort. So is 10% Liberty and 90% Authority. Even comparing Alfred Deakin’s 5% government economy versus Scott Morrison’s 45% government economy, the two look nothing like each other.
Using the term ‘mixed-economy’ gives licence to the Authority-lovers to execute socialism-creep.
During our lives, government is becoming ever larger and the piranha are being fed. Government has the growing means to intervene, coerce and limit our Liberty by a thousand imperceptible cuts over time.
And the truth is that the Liberal Party has been completely unsuccessful over 121 years in reversing the trend.
Why?
TOCQUEVILLE’S MATRIX
Well, third, there’s a kind of matrix hanging over us which makes things hard to change. I call it the Tocqueville Matrix.
The answer is that we’re in a system bigger than ourselves. We can laugh at analogies with the film The Matrix all we like. However, the reality of our predicament today was well uncovered, not by the hacker Neo in that movie but, 187 years ago by the classical liberal philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in his celebrated essay “Democracy In America”, the result of a fact-finding mission for France.
Alexis de Tocqueville. 1805-1859. Classical liberal.
Though published in 1835 on the other side of the planet, it was highly relevant to Australia at the time. The free-settled Province of South Australia was just one year from proclamation. A mere fifty-four years later, Sir Henry Parkes delivered his famous Federation-rallying Tenterfield Oration in which he said “Surely what the Americans have done by war, Australians can bring about in peace.”
Here’s what Tocqueville witnessed of the new American republic, at this point only two generations old. As you read his words, pay attention to the creaking tension between Liberty and Authority, and the ongoing, overall impact of democracy on its people:
“The protecting power of the state extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of Man is not shattered but it is softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced to act but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates and extinguishes. It stupefies a people until each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals to which the government is the shepherd.”
Dare tell me this is not Australia in 2022.
I’ve shown you our legislative losses. I’ve revealed the legislative agenda in progress. I’ve shared that we don’t even know how many laws are on the books. This is Tocqueville’s ‘complicated rules, minute and uniform.’
Further, who are our ‘most original minds and the most energetic characters’? We may not be shattered as a people. But who will deny we are ‘softened, bent and guided’?
The word ‘enervates’ means ‘to make a person drained of energy or vitality.’ If this is how you feel right now about politics, it’s the Tocqueville Matrix of democracy working you over! Resist it. Let your innate self-reliance and self-actualisation radiate.
I could have sworn Tocqueville was in Australia from 2020-2022 when writing that last sentence.
If you feel that your fellow citizens exhibit foggy thinking, if you believe they make terrible electoral choices, then take heart. We know why …
Australia, like all Western liberal democracies, has placed an apparatus over its citizens. This apparatus of uncountable statutes and a million regulatory miscellany soften, bend and guide us. Initiative, vigour and swashbuckling verve are all discouraged as is self-reliance. Our innate creativity, independence and self-actualising Liberty has been dampened. We are less Errol Flynn, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Sir Douglas Mawson, and now more a half-thwarted version of our true selves.
Sir Douglas Mawson OBE FRS. 1882-1958. First to climb Mount Erebus and reach South Magnetic Pole.
Authority has taken over Liberty as the primary force in Australia. We accommodate too much. We fund too much. We have power-hungry, entrenched legislators. Our fellow Australians are too prone to expect government to manage all the risks of the world.
PARLIAMENTARY INCENTIVES
Fourth, we aren’t giving our parliamentarians the right incentives to stop.
Our politicians, specifically the ones housed in the seat-holding incumbency parties of Labour, Greens, Liberals and Nationals, often spend ten to twenty years working towards preselection. They aren’t going to rock-the-boat once in power after that investment of time.
We need term limits. We also need the hard work within party preselection processes to turnover long-time incumbents.
Another issue is that we, as a people, are simply unpractised to tell a politician ‘no’! We advocate for spending on our pet projects and our politicians say ‘yes’ to everyone. It’s unsustainable. And when we argue for cuts, we are vulnerable to the ‘what government program are you going to end?’ We need a coherent, well-practised push-back to this. Citizens can’t keep acting like toddlers asking for more and politicians need to be disciplined in saying ‘no’.
We are terrible at applying constant pressure on our representatives between elections. They rarely hear from us after a poll. We need to visit them, form relationships with them, lobby them, guide them and, yes if necessary, threaten them with electoral backlash.
In fifty-four years, I’ve not seen one protest outside an electorate office by citizens angry about the MPs big spending tendencies. Not one.
We aren’t giving them the right incentives to correct.
AN URGENT ACTION PLAN
So, here’s what you need to do.
For Liberal and National members:
Action 1: Gather fellow members and advocate for a three-term limit. Make clear to an MP in his or her third term that this is it. Say it’s not personal, it’s a systemic position about renewal. Encourage challenges if the MP won’t budge.
Action 2: Make clear at State Council that you demand budget reductions in government. Educate MPs on the importance of reducing budgets. Ask for their game plan to achieve this. Embarrass elected officials who lack the courage to reduce the size of government. Normalise talk of smaller government. As a group or faction, make clear you will be targeting MPs who don’t work towards this.
Action 3: Gather fellow members and internally advocate for policy not tactical preferencing. Discourage tricky tactics which ultimately splinter the centre-right. Shame and seek the removal of any state director or parliamentary leader who supports tactical preferencing to Labor or the Greens ahead of the more Liberty-friendly emerging parties.
For members of the Liberal Democrats, the United Australia Party, One Nation, the Nationals outside coalition, the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers and the Democratic Labor Party:
Action 4: Write to the local MP. Meet and lobby the MP. Educate the MP. Make clear that you want the next budget to be less than the current one. Make clear you want government expenditure as a percentage of GDP to be 40%, then 35%, then 30% and so forth year by year
Action 5: Advocate for a formal coalition and joint tickets. Joint tickets are important. They plug the preference leaking so prevalent on the centre-right. Work towards agreement that each emerging party gets to lead one upper house race. This is a near-guaranteed strategy for a bloc of six senators.
Action 6: Organise in vulnerable Labor lower-house seats to perform what I call the Purple Flip. This is Teal but in reverse. Identify and draft well-known local leaders to run as independents, perhaps tradies or sports figures, who project their working-class background but, due to their success, lean centre-right for its aspirational, social mobility message. Publicly appeal to aspirational voters in these Labor electorates, say they’ve been forgotten by Labor, and privately convince the die-hard but never electorally successful Liberals and Nationals in the seat to vote tactically for the independent.
The simple truth is that, if you don’t take these actions in concert with like-minded centre-right people, that big government trendline will continue to 50%, 57%, 63% and so on.
In democracy, you have to fight for the right balance between Liberty and Authority. Liberty is losing the battle for dominance. We are fast heading to an Authoritarian Australia. Covid overreach surely taught us that. Looming issues of digital passports, facial recognition systems and digital currency are facing Liberty-lovers right now.
You must act. The alternative is that you live, as Tocqueville pointedly wrote, as a ‘timid and industrious animal’ or we just continue to scratch-around in the political wilderness.
We can do better. Let’s steel ourselves now for the battle ahead.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
On Saturday, before the polls closed, I correctly predicted the Victorian election result.
My forecast wasn’t genius.
I’ve just been around politics a long, long time and see the perennial rules of the game.
Knowing the result is the easy part.
Discerning ‘why’, well, that’s another level of understanding again.
TV, newspaper and social media pundits are already misconstruing the ‘why’. Even the Victorian Liberal Deputy Leader, David Southwick MP, continues to misunderstand. “Labor dirty tricks”, he blurted wide-eyed on Sky Saturday night.
It was like looking into the eyes of a shocked and hapless kangaroo being ploughed dead in a political road-kill.
I’m going to say it until I’m blue in the face.
Parties lose elections when they have no philosophical framework. From the philosophy come the policies. The policies then improve people’s lives.
To put it another way, philosophy is the rationale. Policies are practical applications of that rationale.
The Liberal Party of Australia has lost its philosophical bearings. It is adrift in the political sea, allowing itself to be washed aimlessly by the currents and tides of its enemies. It’s tried to mollify the Extinction Rebellion. It’s preferenced the socialist Greens #2 on how-to-votes. It’s participated in wokery. It’s succumbed to populist fiscal ill-discipline. It’s appealed to proto-fascist Australia One.
Who is the Liberal Party anymore?
Philosophy matters.
So, let’s do a short, sharp review of basic philosophy regularly. We’ll call it Philosophy Monday and we’ll know why it’s vital to have a weekly dose.
We can start with my favourite guy, John Stuart Mill.
In the wake of Saturday’s disastrous result when it seems Victorians are turning their back on freedom, here’s what JSM (personal aside: he only allows friends to call him JSM *smile*) says in his famous hundred-page essay, On Liberty:
Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities.
Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.
Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by OTHER MEANS than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them.
There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.
But though this proposition is not likely to be contested in general terms, the practical question, where to place the limit – how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control – is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done.
As a movement of good people, we need to define the limit and enforce it.
First, we need to be crystal clear on our philosophical base.
It’s liberalism. You were born and live in liberal democracy. You’re a liberal, even if you don’t release it. Declare it. Proclaim it with muscular vigour. You’re a modern-day Whig, free-spirited independent or sleeper agent amidst Tories who can be convinced. Own your philosophy, now in it’s fourth century of application. It transformed the world. And if, like me, you’re a Christian too, rejoice! Our 2,022 year old Faith best flourishes in the freedom liberalism provides. They are a hand-in-glove as far as I’m concerned. Our free will is God’s gift to us. What we do with it is our gift to God.
Don’t retreat coddled and forlorn into that thumb-sucking emotional safe-space called ‘conservatism’. Do you honestly want to ‘conserve’ the vast apparatus of government long now installed by Labor, Liberal, National and Greens, marshalled to impinge your life, take your hard-earned money and close your churches? It needs an overhaul, a stripping back.
You need to be radical now, a buster of the collectivist status-quo, an agent provocateur: a forceful Thatcher, an illuminated Wilberforce.
No more tired Tories endlessly pessimistic about today and the future. We are in the fight of our lives and we need change!
Second, we need to work hard now on bold, innovative policies which give life to our philosophy. Where there is a friendly MP or two, we need to work together to organise.
Third, since we liberals control not one parliament currently, we must use “other means than civil penalties”. We need social tactics of our own to move the cultural needle.
To which “other means”, to what social tactics is Mill hinting?
Subscribe now and share Liberty Itch to discover what that means shortly and join the call-to-arms. Tell your friends. Spread the word. There is no time to lose.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
First, free enterprise in a competitive market does 95% better in servicing the needs and desires of citizens than government. Better efficiency, better service delivery, better products, better time-frames, more innovation and less waste.
Second, the free markets aren’t perfect. Businesses with whom you trade may become insolvent. Sometimes fraud occurs. At the very least, customers can sometimes be dissatisfied. It can take time, often not long, for the markets to self-correct. More efficient companies replace the defunct, reputation self-check fraud, and word-of-mouth handles companies with bad service or defective products.
Third, the remaining 5% for government – and in my view its only role – is to adjudicate and protect fair dealings in the market. Government should be an umpire to maintain the free-wheeling clearing-house that is the aggregation of buyers and sellers. That’s it. Not a participant. An umpire.
Fourth, the more of your hard-earned money the government taxes, the bigger government becomes by definition and the more it encroaches beyond the role of umpire. With ever larger budgets, government starts to become a player, even a team of players, as well as the referee! Your money, or more accurately your acquiescence to government taking it, provides the means for that encroachment, the loss of our original concept of government in a liberal democracy and, ultimately, the loss of liberal democracy itself.
And fifth, there is a kind of sliding scale between 100% free market, laissez faire and, its opposite, 100% socialism. That large undefined region between these two poles has been called a ‘mixed economy’ in the West, starting with the introduction of ‘Keynesian economics’, the ‘welfare state’ and, later, the ‘central banking system’ which untethered our money from assets backing it.
With me so far?
Now the term ‘mixed economy’ gives our leaders a wide berth. An economy comprised of 95% private buyers and sellers with 5% government money to act as a referee to maintain the market is mixed of a sort. It’s like a drop of salt water in a fresh-water lake. But what happens if our leaders use your money to put their thumb of the scale? Let’s say, 90% private and 10% government. What about 75% private and 25% government? Take it further. What does an economy start to feel like at 51% private and 49% government? This is a mixed economy too. Now what was a pristine fresh-water lake is now brackish. Every second transaction has all the inefficiency of a government department. Now imagine 25% private and 75% government. Three out of four transactions in the economy start to look and feel like you’re in a call-centre queue with the Australian Taxation Office or, in America, the IRS. Then they really stand on the scales: 5% private, just enough to sell a tentative surplus from your backyard vegetable garden, if lawlessness hasn’t destroyed it because those without a garden are starving.
We cede far too much ground accepting a Keynesian ‘mixed economy’.
The territory is too vast, ranging from one notch past efficient laissez faire to one notch short of Yugoslavia in 1981.
You and I need a scorecard, in business-speak a key performance indicator, to judge where we are on this vast sliding-scale.
And I have it.
It’s called Government Expenditure as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product.
To put it another way, it’s that part of the entire economy which is not sourced from free enterprise, the percent not generated by the efficient free-exchange of private buyers and sellers satisfying their own needs and desires. It’s the proportion of the economy in which government intrudes, displacing private transactions which would naturally and otherwise occur between you and me.
It’s the economic cancer which ultimately kills a lively, flourishing society!
So, let’s have a look at the statistic.
And to make things interesting, let’s look at it over a long period, say since Australian Federation in 1901, and to really spice things up, let’s take the measurement at the end of each of the major ‘liberal’ governments. Once you see the figures, you’ll understand why I query their ‘liberal’ credentials.
(Before I share this with you, understand it took 5 hours of research. These figures aren’t handed to you by government on a platter!)
· Alfred Deakin (end of his third government): 5%
· Robert Menzies (end of his second government): 17%
· Malcolm Fraser: 26%
· John Howard: 37%
· Scott Morrison: 45%.
You read that correctly.
We’re all sitting in a saucepan of the slow-boil, simmering-ever-closer-to-socialism kind.
A couple of thoughts. Alfred Deakin’s 5% was sufficient to build Australia’s navy, from nothing to formidable middle-power in two years. That’s Deakin doing the work of the umpire, protecting a free society from external threat. All good! Contrast that with today’s procurement bungles.
Alfred Deakin. 2nd, 5th and 7th Prime Minister of Australia
Further, the Whitlam, Hawke and Gillard governments must certainly have contributed a lot to this creep with general expansionism, Medicare and NDIS respectively.
Liberty Itch will find out with year-on-year figures, so hold on to your subscription!
In a sense though, it doesn’t matter.
Had the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments wanted to reverse Labor overreach and get back to the Howard days of 37%, they could have. Had team Howard-Costello wanted to reverse possible Hawke-Keating expansion to return to 26% Fraser days, they could have. So on and so forth.
The timeline is too long and the trend all in one direction to excuse any of them.
All governments have been complicit.
I’ll therefore make this bold and daring prediction. You can hold me accountable for it.
By the time this Labor administration concludes, private will be less than government in our ‘mixed economy.’ We’ll be over the tipping point. Unless you and I pressure MPs, we’ll have 49% private and 51% government, or 45% private and 55% government.
Should this trend continue, Australia will look like a 1970s dank Wilson-Callaghan economy which Thatcher had to revitalise. We’ll have more in common with a 1970s centralised State Dockyard economy of NSW Wran which Greiner had to unchain. We’ll feel more like 2020 than 1950 Detroit.
There’s Australia’s KPI. We’re 45% socialist.
You and I can at least agree that this is a worrying prospect deserving action.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
I’m a liberal in the 18th and 19th Century British sense of the word.
I believe in free enterprise, laissez-faire economics, democracy, free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, free movement, the individual, human rights and freedom to live life as the individual sees fits as long as another individual isn’t harmed in the process.
As with people like Ron Paul, my mind cannot fathom a universe without God. I’m hard-wired that way. And I believe God gave Man free will to act and be judged when God so chooses. See, freedom at every turn, as God intended.
I believe there is a role for government insofar as it protects – as Locke put it – the right to life, liberty and property. That it should be strictly confined to the bare essentials of parliament, a small executive, the judiciary, the police and a strong military to protect it all. Beyond that, you’d have to make a compelling case for more government as far as I’m concerned.
This is what a liberal believes.
In the 1980s, that’s what we called someone with this outlook in life. In the 1960s too. And the 1940s, 1920s, turn of the 20th Century and … back through the Enlightenment … and, because historians can see a clear movement in the West of unleashing human flourishing as we emerged from the Middle Ages, we’ve come to identify the birth of liberalism as 1689 with John Locke.
As a Western philosophy, its inextricably linked to our Christian roots. Liberalism thrives best when Christianity is in its full flourish, when citizens are practicing Christians AND liberals, side by side, the first informing the second.
Not conservatism. I’ve never described myself as a conservative.
Why?
Conservatives seek to conserve. At the same time, if you listen carefully to conservatives, there’s a tendency towards pessimism, a kind of bemoaning at things lost. Well, to this I say, if we have lost the schools, lost the universities, lost the boardrooms, lost the public service, lost the media, lost the churches, lost the very institutions of society and even the culture, what’s left to conserve? You can’t conserve something that’s lost!
So, as far as politics goes, I’m an unabashed ‘liberal’ and I claim the word because it describes my politics. Freedom. For me, it’s personal. It’s mine. I’m not giving it up.
I’m not budging even though American social democrats at the time of the New Deal skewed its meaning, twisting it into the opposite, something more like big government, centralised control and social welfare. In my weak moments, I’ll helpfully say ‘classical liberal’ for an American but I see the word classical as redundant.
Liberal. That’s it.
I’m not shifting from this policy even though Australia’s very own Liberal Party of Australia has long ago ceased to embody the philosophy. Despite it’s name, the Liberal Party of Australia is now illiberal in their actions and policies. I concede, at the present time, they’ve tainted the word.
I ran a Twitter poll recently, asking people what words they use for the beliefs of a liberal. The results were:
Liberal – 10% Classical Liberal – 17% Libertarian – 73%
Liberal Party of Australia, a pox be on you!
Still I persist. Liberal, with a small l.
I’m not relinquishing the word because young Australians watch too much US television and YouTube clips, thinking that ‘liberal’ means what Americans say it means.
No.
And I’m definitely not giving-up the word in favour of an alternative. Sure, I relent sometimes – like here in Liberty Itch – and call myself a ‘libertarian’ to avert misunderstandings by Americans, young Australians and those quick to judge me a member of the Liberal Party.
So, yes, I sometimes allow myself to be described ‘classical liberal’ and ‘libertarian’ unchallenged.
Before either of those two terms came about, a person with my beliefs was called a ‘liberal.’
So that’s what I am and perhaps you are too.
A liberal.
Own it. Say it aloud unashamedly. Reclaim our language. Use the word without qualification.
An entrepreneur who has employed 1,470+ people, Kenelm was admitted to the BRW Fast 100 three times with businesses in Australia, NZ, Singapore and New York, where he lived for 12 years. Kenelm’s investment firm performs mid-market leveraged roll-ups. He was a regular columnist for the Australian Financial Review. Kenelm is the Founder of Liberty Itch.
