Comments on: Whither the Australian Left?

By: Bill Muehlenberg

Bill Muehlenberg — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:21:57 +0000

Thanks Conor for sharing your thoughts and a bit of your journey. I am glad to hear you are seeking to think carefully about these important issues. Like you, I started on the left, but moved to the right over the years. No political or economic system is perfect, but some may more closely approximate some biblical ideals than others.
Thanks again for joining us here.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

By: Conor Ryan

Conor Ryan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 10:13:24 +0000

Coming in a bit late here but I just wanted to say my take on all this from a Christian young person who has tended to be left leaning for years but recently seen the immense wisdom in the conservative point of view. I am like my generation of young Christians in general and am concerned about the relevance of the gospel to social and political issues, particularly poverty and justice. For me what matters is what actually helps the poor practically, not idealistic rhetoric. A few years ago I felt God say to me that if I really care about the poor then I owe it to them to really understand what causes poverty and how to overcome it. This surprisingly led me to develop an interest in economics, which the relevance of never really crossed my mind before. But I realised that economics is the science of wealth and poverty. My knowledge is very limited and I am still an amateur, but I have come to be fairly convinced that what Bill said about left leaning ideals tending to move rightward in practical outworking is entirely accurate. Economic liberalisation seems to lead to economic growth and development for the poor not government intervention in the market. That accompanied with strong protection of private property rights. Look up the Austrian school of economics for scholarship regarding this. I challenge left leaning Christians to seriously look into these issues of what economic and political conditions really deliver countries from poverty. To maintain trendy leftwing views or remain in the domain of postmodern ambiguity out of fear of becoming a ‘right wing extremist’ does not cut it when the hopes and freedom of the poor are at stake. The labelling of ‘right-wing extremist’ or ‘far-rightist’ is not helpful in this critical debate. In fact I would argue that free market ideas are the really progressive economic ideas if we are willing to rationally understand why. But it seems that too much of my generation is more concerned with being politically correct and appearing to be socially progressive than actually taking the time to wrestle with what actually works and most fits with a biblical worldview. I knew nothing about economics when I was left-wing, but I was sure to wear my ‘make poverty history’ sticker proudly for all to see. I believe God will hold us to account for what we did personally to help the poor with our own money, our own resources, our own time. What sacrifices do we actually make. Sloganeering is not a sacrifice, it makes us feel good. The real countercultural progressives will stand against the politically correct, lef-wing establishment and live in the realm of hard practical reality, not fantasy. We need to get our own hands dirty. We need a thorough intellectual critique of marxist class conflict theory and the way it still influences us more than we realise. We need to acquaint ourselves with history and the devastating oppression that left-wing ideas have led to. Are we for the poor and against oppression? Ideas do have consequences. We need to be more careful in our thinking, and stop making excuses for sloppy thinking. I’m not a suit and tie conservative type at all. I have long hair in dreads, I am scruffy and I listen to heavy metal. But I take intellectual honesty seriously. And because I want to do good in the world. Please pray for me. Pray for a whole generation of Christian young people. Cheers.
Conor Ryan

By: Brian Wheatley

Brian Wheatley — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 05:08:49 +0000

To Barry Koh,

Capitalism was the logical outgrowth of the American dream. The basis for doing business in a free market place is goodwill.
Laws were established by the US Government to protect people from those who would coerce others either by force or other illegal means.
Today in America you have a generation who live by the philosophy of “Do unto others before they can do it to you.”
Or “It is only illegal if I get caught”

The basis for Capitalism is not at fault here, it is the people within the community who have no morals. When the majority or even a sizable minority are immoral then the society is in trouble.
Bernie Madhoff (?) was doing what he did for more than 20 years. Many of his institutional investors knew he was up to no good, but wanted a piece of the action.
Brian Wheatley

By: Michael Boswell

Michael Boswell — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 03:24:53 +0000

Bill,

I think you assume that Chifley didn’t do it deliberately. I think he did. He was enlisting the ALP’s Christian origins against a anti-Christian force – atleast that was one element. Please remember this was the ALP with the DLP attached – prior to the split.

Michael Webb

You forget the Cold War. There was a fear the common people were turn against the then current political culture infavour of a Marxian one. Some have argued that the polices prior to the 1980s were bribes to working class. Others think it was simply a shift in the intellectual climate.

Marx wrote – We make our own history but we do not choose the circumstances in which we make it. They are transmitted to us from the past.
It not the full quote and I did not read it in Marx. It heads a chapter in Power without Glory by Hardy.

Michael Boswell

By: Michael Webb

Michael Webb — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:20:17 +0000

Well said Michael Boswell. Terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are only rough guides or as you said convenient shorthand. And yes we all need to use convenient shorthand, so long as from time to time, all of us, do not fall into the trap of just using those terms, so as to deny the variations and also so as not to justify the ugly aspects which are found in the extremes on both sides.

Before culture wars since the 1960s in the West, there were more people whose culture was imbued with respect and support for govt conroland regulation of public utilities. Today the ALP is similar to teh Liberal Party ( and simialr story in the USAand Europe) in which small groups of Party admin & officials ignore the rank and file and are constantly introducing polciies of full-on privatisations and selling off of srategic public assets so as to deny the common good ( a Christian concept) and instead to serve monopolies in the private sector.

Michael Webb

By: Bill Muehlenberg

Bill Muehlenberg — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:09:52 +0000

Thanks Michael

The lefties I have been specifically referring to in my article were of course the six leaders of the Australian left who wrote the Australian articles, the links of which I feature at the end of my article.

And thanks for the reminder about Chifley. Yes, as someone originally from the US, I do have a rather incomplete understanding of Australian history, but now that you mention it, I do recall reading about his speech.

But Chifley did the very same thing I chewed out Soutphommasane for: he used the phrase totally stripped of its original spiritual and biblical context. For him it appears to be a totally secular concept, devoid of its original religious connotations.

Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch

By: Michael Boswell

Michael Boswell — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:08:29 +0000

Bill,

You need a history lesson in the Australian Labor Party. The Light on the Hill reference refers back to a speech given by Ben Chifley (Labor PM 1945-1949). The speech was delivered on 12 June 1949 just as Chifley was about to send the troops in against a communist lead coal miners strike. The speech was a vieled attack on the Communist Party.

It well covered in wikipedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Chifley
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_light_on_the_hill

Michael Boswell

By: Michael Boswell

Michael Boswell — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:43:55 +0000

I suppose most who would use the term would call me a lefty. I was a member of the Communist Party, the ALP’s Left faction and other so called institutions of the so called ‘left’. Twenty years plus has taught me one thing, we are all lefties. The terms come on which side would you sit in the Estates General in the then royal French parliament. Even given the excesses of the French revolution, nearly all of us would sit on the left. Capitalism progressively emerged from the excesses of business by royal privilege.
I have two disagreements with your essay. The first is that there is no such thing ‘the left’ with one set of recognised policies. Indeed, I have only seen the left united in their hatred of the ‘enemy’. No, these are not conservatives but heretics on the left. Several times I have been told I am not left enough. Prior to 1975, many on the left thought the same about Gough Whitlam, supposedly Australian most left wing Prime.
(Yes, I too fall into the trap of using the inexact terms left and right. They are a convenient short hand when one wishes to make broad unsubstantiated statements).
The other thing is the anti-religious basis of the so called left. I have been reading a John Clifford, who was both a Baptist church minister and a Christian Socialist. He wrote two pamphlets for the Fabian Society, a non-Marxist socialist organisation that flourished from the 1890s onwards in Britain. In one he argue that the role of a Christian in social policy is to attempt to bring out the best human characteristics, which occur in within collectives dedicated to non-profit activities. This is not a denial of the effects of sin on human character but a belief that if one lives within community such evils can be corrected. To support this, Clifford pointed to the first Christians who had organised themselves into communes with a common purse, according to Acts. (I have no record of Clifford joining some Anabaptist ‘brotherhood’). For Clifford, a social policy based on guarding against the effects of sin is not only surrendering to evil but a denial of the God’s grace in Christ.
Bill, I really don’t know which left wing commentators you have been reading or talking to but they cannot be very wide. The socialist George Orwell is the best know critic of Soviet state capitalism. Why do you think that euro-communism emerged? Or why the Australian Communist Party never returned to the Soviet Union after 1969?
But the one thing that grated on me was claiming the equality of opportunity for the right. It was one of the criticisms of the Whitlam government. So much so that Freundenberg tell the story of the frustrated ad agency trying to grapple with the concept. They asked Whitlam for a concrete example and he instantly replied that every student should have a room of their own, a desk and a lamp to study by. And that what Whitlam’s opponents did not like about that equality – the requirement of economic resources.
Michael Boswell

By: Michael Webb

Michael Webb — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 10:09:40 +0000

Barry is right. Whilst poor/bad government decisions concerning handing out loans to those who could not afford to repay was part of the Democrat regime from Clinton’s time, the overall system suffered also from lack of proper regulations. It is not socialist to have proper regulations.

It seems that some on the far Right want to throw away prudential regulation. Remember that the Coalition Govt here in Australia did one good thing and that was to establish proper regulations via APRA.
I and the DLP would actually build upon APRA and give it more teeth. Once again, this is not socialism.
Michael Webb

By: Ewan

Ewan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:46:13 +0000

I think the title of Ann Coulter’s book Godless: The church of liberalism pretty well sums up where the left is coming from. The secular left especially, operate out of an anti-biblical / anti-Christian worldview, and as far as I can tell, the so-called ‘religious left’ hold to most of the same policies whilst claiming to be following Jesus’ example.

Ewan McDonald.