What's in a name? Brand confusion muddles writing on think-tanks

Similarly, the Prime Minister has accepted the changed role of women, trying to help mothers who stay at home, but also those going to work to manage their dual responsibilities. Even his recent stance against gay marriage was prefaced with a disavowal of discrimination against homosexuals. In all cases, Howard has adapted to community practice and expectations.

If there is anything novel in the Prime Minister's political stance, it is his combination of market economics and mild social conservatism. Historically, conservatives have often been skeptical of the market, fearing that its dynamism would create too rapid change and disrupt the social order.

True to form, in the early 1990s there was a conservative backlash against "economic rationalism". Robert Manne, then the conservative editor of Quadrant, published in its pages many articles against market reforms, along with a book and his own newspaper commentary.

Is this combination of market economics and social conservatism a new form of conservatism? Or is it a new form of liberalism, since Howard's social conservatism is so muted compared to Australia's past or conservative parties in other Western countries? Given Howard's own insistence that his thought includes conservative and liberal elements, we are probably best off describing it as not one or the other, but as conservative liberalism.

In the Australian context, the "neo" labels don't add much. Neoconservatism is positively confusing, and "neoliberalism" implies the ideas are more "neo" than is the case. Many of the people described by others as neoliberals - most of the people who write for the CIS fall into this group - prefer "classical liberalism", highlighting our intellectual heritage, not our novelty.

Even if we date classical liberalism from its 20th century revival, major writers like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, all Nobel Prize winners, had written significant books well before Irving Kristol decided that he was a neoconservative.

Calling Friedrich Hayek the "global godfather" of the neoconservative movement, as Wilson da Silva did in The Sydney Morning Herald, is particularly wide of the mark. More than 40 years ago Hayek wrote an essay called "Why I am not a conservative". Ironically, this essay appeared originally in a book that da Silva once called "a bible of the new social conservatism". Social conservatism owes nothing to Hayek.

So I suggest we stop calling anything new unless it really is, and adds a meaning that we might otherwise miss. Neoconservatism in the US qualifies, but nothing in the contemporary Australian scene. Conservative or social conservative will do, as will liberalism or classical liberalism to describe the free marketeers who, in the old line, want to keep the government out of the bedroom as well as the boardroom.

For those who mix liberalism and conservatism, conservative liberal or liberal conservative should suffice. Which word is the adjective and which the noun will depend on which philosophy is emphasised.

Libertarian should be kept for describing those who want to radically shrink the state, not those in the think-tanks with more modest agendas. The most far-reaching reform proposal I've found from the think-tanks would have taken Australia back to the size of government it had when the Whitlam government came to power in 1972. A genuine libertarian would condemn such statism.

Economic rationalist is a term we can keep, but to describe an issue movement rather than a distinct philosophy. The economic rationalists were a pro-market policy alliance that included a social democratic Labor federal government, the Liberal opposition and then government, export-oriented businesses, economists in the bureaucracy and academia, and the think-tanks. They agreed on a reform agenda more than an underlying philosophy.

Using these labels would avoid the kind of brand confusion that engulfed The Sydney Morning Herald's recent think-tank stories. They are generally accepted by the people they describe. And they will keep the controversy about ideas, not name calling.