Shifting debate on personal freedom spells trouble for Liberals

While the rhetoric of efficiency, competitiveness and individual freedom helped the Liberals achieve state and federal political success in the 1990s, this language is becoming increasingly outmoded.

The best example is the recent debate about laser pointers. Two months ago, calls for a ban on laser pointers were described with the well-worn response of "red-tape nanny-statism". The last thing we needed, it seemed, was more government intervention and bureaucrats telling us what we can and cannot buy.

But then the debate shifted. Calls for regulation of laser pointers should not, it was argued, be considered in terms of economic efficiency but in terms of our ongoing war on terror. In that case, because terrorists might buy laser pointers and aim them at planes, the responsible thing for governments to do was to classify the laser pointers as weapons and ban them at once. And so it came to pass.

It wasn't the laser pointer, or even the risk assessment, that changed. All that happened was that the debate was reframed away from "Are markets better than governments?" towards "What is the most responsible decision for society?"

And that is the big problem for the Liberal Party and - while it is in government at least - for the ALP: the debate is shifting.

Airline passengers have been told they can't carry deodorant and must take their shoes off, but at the same time we are told it would be wrong to make people buy fuel-efficient cars. Citizens have been told that in a war on terror we all have to accept a reduced right to privacy, but it would be wrong to make all companies report regularly on their executive salaries and pollution output.

The debate about whether markets are better than government was always phoney, but it used to be effective. It is running out of steam. Issues such as terrorism forced governments to reconsider their role, and issues such as climate change are hastening the shift in thinking.

The real issues, though, such as whether people should be able to sell their kidneys and whether we should tax alcohol or ban poker machines, will never go away. They are moral issues that might have been concealed by a fake debate about governments versus markets, but they have never been resolved.

Sooner or later the Liberal Party will have to answer these hard questions and - whoever the opposition leader is - they will always find it harder than the prime minister of the day.