Twelve reasons why Australia needs a Conservative Party

Australian society needs a party that can uphold the natural authority of families in the face of powerful provider and corporate interests.

Sustaining parents and carers

Parents caring for young children, parents and carers of people with a disability or a mental or chronic illness, and carers of frail elderly family members, know that their role in society is not valued as much as that of people in the paid workforce. To both Right and Left, parents and carers who are not in paid employment are simply invisible, and do not warrant the financial and social entitlements that flow to participants in the market economy, such as superannuation, professional development, sickness and long service leave. Both Left and Right are ideologically blind to the financial hardship and social costs incurred in voluntarily caring for another, and are incapable of addressing the unsustainable stresses incurred by growing numbers of households in juggling work and family commitments.

Australian society needs a party that can value the unpaid contributions of parents and carers and support a living allowance to sustain their roles.

Realism and transformation in industrial relations

The ritualised century-old stand-off between Left and Right in industrial relations has benefited only labour lawyers, union officials and neo-liberal think tanks. Together Left and Right have a common stake in antagonistic industrial relations: the Right's WorkChoices option serves a useful purpose in uniting organised labour against a common threat; while the fear of centralised wage-fixing systems unites employer bodies.

Neither position has an interest in the development of workers as owners of capital and participants in the development of industry. Neither position acknowledges that the interests and needs of high-wage workers can be vastly different from those of low-wage workers with little bargaining power. The latter require social protection, the former value autonomy more than rigidity.

Australian society needs a party that can break the ritualised practice of belligerent mutual dependence in industrial relations that stymies co-operation in the workplace and shuns the development of capital ownership by workers.

Reclaiming the health system for consumers

Both Left and Right are ignorant of Australian innovation in the 19th century in developing consumer-driven health plans for the protection and service of consumers. Not-for-profit consumer-driven entities known as “friendly societies” developed universal capitation-based health care plans with mechanisms of local control in every town and suburb in the country. They were assaulted, however, and eventually destroyed, by the British (then Australian) Medical Association on the Right, and advocates of state-run health insurance systems on the Left.

For the past 30 years, the stand-off between practitioner lobbies on the Right and public sector lobbies on the Left has choked debate about health reform and rendered our fragmented system unable to deliver preventative care, effective management of chronic illness, or acceptable continuity of care for people with complex and chronic conditions.

Australian society needs a party that can cut through the stalemate in health reform and build on our history in developing a consumer-centred health system.

Devolution of power

The old politics of Left and Right have presided over the steady growth of bureaucracy for more than a century. Neither has sought to devolve power and authority to local communities, non-government associations, families or consumers. The result has been a major centralisation of power in bureaucracy across three overlapping tiers of government.

The managerial experiments in the 1980s and 1990s in “contracting out” service delivery in health, welfare, employment and community services resulted only in a transfer of bureaucratic functions from government to contracted non-government agencies. The raft of failed “community building” programs in the last 20 years demonstrated only that bureaucracies cannot create communities.

Australian society needs a party that can focus policy and service delivery on civil society and its relationships, and devolve power accordingly.