Australia is a stable, well-governed country, but if Kevin Rudd
becomes Prime Minister it may not be possible to go taking this for
granted.
In the 11 years since it was elected, the right-of-centre
government of John Howard has proved itself Australia’s best
government ever. That is not to say it has been perfect, just very
good indeed. The economy has boomed and gone on booming. Per capita
income has soared, inflation, unemployment and interest rates have
all been low. More Australians are wealthy and enjoy a higher
living-standard than ever before. A number of potentially serious
regional foreign crises have been handled effectively. Australia in
general is one of the most respected countries in its region and a
leading player in south-east Asian international co-operation and
diplomacy. It has taken a strong position in the war on terror and
supported the U.S. internationally both diplomatically and
militarily.
Australia has been well-governed and prosperous for so long that
there is a feeling that such is the natural and unchangeable order
of things. This could be a dangerous delusion. Kipling once warned
of:
Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget.
It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with the
Deep.
Men, not gods, devised it; men, not gods, must keep …
Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote recently of the “Return of the Idiot”
— of economically illiterate populists like Hugo Chavez fired by
anti-Americanism and the ghost of communism: “Today, the species is
back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are
reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from
around the world who are lending new credence to them, and
supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct.”
There are signs of this attitude re-surfacing on the Left in
mainstream Australian politics.
That the opposition Australian Labor Party is now ahead in the
opinion polls, with an election a maximum of about seven months
away, is ominous, given what it has become. Bob Hawke, Labor prime
minister for much of the 1980s, proved a sound, responsible and
beneficial economic reformer. But it seems times have changed, and
not for the better. The present leader, Kevin Rudd, despite wearing
nice suits (he is an ex-diplomat) and projecting innocuousness,
seems to have a grasp of economics comparable to that of Hugo
Chavez. Indeed a group of Rudd’s supporters — including the
national president of the Labor Party and a host of
Labor-affiliated union leaders — signed a letter inviting Chavez
to Australia to advise on the governance of the country,
claiming:
We have watched developments in Venezuela with great
interest. We have been impressed by the great effort that your
government has taken to improve the living standards of the
majority of Venezuelans. Although we are on the opposite side of
the globe, we feel that our shared ideals of social justice and
democracy bring us close together … what Venezuela has been able
to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and
ideas for many in Australia.
Rudd has condoned this poisonous nonsense and refused to discipline
or rebuke those responsible, despite or perhaps because of the fact
that apart from anything else it is an obvious insult to
Australia’s closest ally, the U.S.
Rudd himself spouts simplistic anti-market extremism:
Our common enemy is the political project of John
Howard which seeks to reconstruct Australian society … Howard’s
vision for Australia is Friedrich Hayek’s rampant individualism
where unfettered free markets determine the value of not only every
commodity but of every person and institution.
Rudd bolsters his self-righteousness and economic ratbaggery by
invoking religion. In the U.S. this might be normal for a
politician. In Australia, where politicians don’t wear their
religion on their sleeves (Howard is a Christian but doesn’t invoke
the fact to justify his actions), it is a disquieting departure.
This is particularly so when it is bracketed with anti-capitalism
and eco-extremism, with implied or explicit claims to superior
moral worth over the so-called “common enemy” and of a general
monopoly of moral rectitude. Rudd has claimed:
What, for example, is a Christian view on the impact of
the Americanization of our industrial relations system on family
living standards and family life? What is a Christian view of
global climate change, given Christian teachings on the proper
stewardship of creation?
In a recent article titled “Child of Hayek,” Rudd demonstrated a
truly scary, Chavez-like blend of moral self-righteousness and
ignorance of economic thought, theory and history. He claimed:
“Friedrich Hayek…argued that the only determinant of human
freedom was the market.”
Actually, Professor Friedrich von Hayek said centrally planned
economies are incompatible with liberty. In free societies he
should be regarded as a hero. Rudd also claimed absurdly that:
“Hayek argued that any form of altruism was dangerous because it
distorted the market.” Nothing like this is to be found in Hayek’s
writing. Is Rudd confusing Hayek with Ayn Rand? Or trusting no-one
in his audience knows the difference? Hayek’s commitment to
humanity, compassion and charity was abundant and has never been
questioned by competent scholars. That Rudd is capable of such
perversion of history and economic ideas, whether through ignorance
or irresponsibility, might seem a small thing for a private
individual — but not one who may well be Australia’s next prime
minister.
Rudd’s green extremism crosses the borders of the irrational,
with a bizarre promise to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by
60% by 2050. Terry McCrann, one of Australia’s most respected and
politically impartial economics journalists, summed the matter up
starkly:
Kevin Rudd has recommitted a Labor government to
damaging the economy in the short-term and destroying it in the
longer-term.
What he proposes would do far more economic damage, sow far
worse social chaos, and specifically and directly hurt individual
Australians more than the damage we are still suffering from the
disastrous Whitlam period in the 1970s.
Michael Chaney, president of the Business Council of Australia, has
said: “You run the real risk that you’ll destroy the economy
without any benefit to the world’s climate.” This is
extraordinarily strong language from the council, a normally
cautiously-spoken body that works hard to cultivate good relations
with all political parties.
Rudd’s deputy, Julia Gillard, is a far-leftist who claimed in
the national daily the Australian that a “strong economy
should not be at the cost of fairness” — and it is hardly
rocket-science to work out what that means. Rudd’s environment
spokesman, Peter Garrett, is a lawyer but best known as a
rock-singer and anti-development, anti-capitalist, anti-U.S.
activist and general subscriber to the package-deal of modern
far-leftism. He has said that economic growth “almost always” leads
to a worse environment. Shadow Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner is a
member of the Party’s “socialist left,” the most left-wing faction
in the Labor Party spectrum. He is a former student radical and
strong advocate of compulsory student unions (abolished by the
Howard government, to the great benefit of most of the country’s
university students).
Senior journalist Paul Kelly, who is anything but an uncritical
supporter of the present government, has written in words of
astonishment about Rudd’s economic primitivism: “Rudd has seized a
bizarre fate — a resurrection of trade union power, collective
bargaining rights and a far stronger industrial umpire as the keys
to [the prime ministership]. Rudd’s new industrial policy is a
giant step into the past. Indeed, so sweeping is Labor’s embrace of
the principles of collective power and re-regulation that it must
be wondered whether Rudd fully comprehends what he has done.”
Even the Labor Party premier of Western Australia, Alan
Carpenter, heading a state whose mineral exports make it one of
Australia’s principal economic power-houses, seems unnerved at what
is being proposed.
In 1972, Australia elected a Labor government led by Gough
Whitlam, a smooth, pragmatic-seeming lawyer, who came to office
with an image of suave modernity not dissimilar to that of Rudd
today. It took Whitlam and his cabinet, enthralled by economically
illiterate populism, only a few months to reduce Australia to
economic chaos. Inflation went from 4.5% to 16.9%, devastating the
lives of pensioners and others on fixed incomes (Mrs. Whitlam
dismissed it as “a lot of hoo-hah”). A later Labor finance
minister, Peter Walsh, said: “Most of the time Whitlam behaved as
if the economy didn’t matter. Most of the 10 or 12 dominant
ministers were economic cranks.”
When Whitlam came to power, Australia had an unemployment rate
of 2.4% and falling. It went into double-digits. Economic growth
rate went from 4.9% in 1972 into minus figures. In September, 1974,
with the country ravaged by inflation and unemployment, the Whitlam
government approved a 32.5% increase in government spending. By the
end of 1974 this had risen by 45%, the budget deficit had gone from
0.6% to 4.2% of GDP, and unemployment had more than doubled over
the year.
The crackpot Jim Cairns, sometime deputy prime minister and
treasurer, was probably a Soviet agent of influence (Whitlam
himself tacitly admitted to the U.S. ambassador that Cairns was a
security risk and would not share U.S. intelligence briefings with
him). Cairns as treasurer printed money ever faster in an attempt
to destroy capitalism. A multifaceted attack was made on the
federal system, with the intention of destroying the states lest
they obstructed grandiose plans of social engineering. It
culminated in a bizarre attempt by the federal government to borrow
money from Iraq for an undisclosed quid pro quo. Finally, with the
government in complete dysfunction, the governor-general intervened
to call a general election. Australia has strong democratic
institutions and traditions and it survived. Nonetheless it took
many years to recover from the economic damage. Though the Whitlam
government’s wrecking activities were limited by its relatively
short term in office, the lesson is chilling: Australia elected a
government of Llosa’s idiots once and it could do so again.
