Julie Bishop on loyalty

A better understanding of the logic of principles, and how they differ from both rules and policies, has in recent years seen major advances in legal philosophy. There is now a wider understanding by lawyers and judges that legal principles have dimensions of both weight and point, which courts are duty-bound to take seriously; abstract legal principles are not (as held by a conventional and still popular theory) smokescreens for law-making judges. That idea has exercised a stranglehold on jurisprudence for decades and is still taken for granted by politicians, journalists, social theorists and others in public life. It is largely responsible for the failure of attempts to introduce a constitutional bill of rights, because no one has been able to meet the objection that it must be a licence for unelected judges to legislate social policy.

However that may be, the distinction between issues of principle and matters of party policy makes it possible to reconcile Burke’s views on the priority of conscience with the need for unity on policies which further the interests of the community; this is both possible and necessary because acting on conscience is, as has been argued in earlier papers, the only way to respect community values.

To return to Bishop’s theory; while the habit of appealing to conscience is crucial in the public life of a nation, the ideal is dishonoured when members vote on a matter of principle as instructed by the party, and when leaders refuse a ‘conscience’ vote on the same matters. It is ignored when members defer to a party for the sake of unity, or to party leaders for the sake of loyalty. Unity is expedient for parties but the cost to the nation - seen in the apology and the Iraq War - is too high; if politicians want to take seriously the values they profess they must, like Burke, act on their own judgment and conscience.

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