… and no, I won’t be posting a photo of Tony Abbott in any form of swimwear to answer that question. But it’s interesting to observe the blue thread that runs through all of Abbott’s pronouncements – a mindset that Father Knows Best. The answer to the question posed by Ben Eltham in New Matilda, writing on the Coalition’s climate change policy [see this post for LP discussion] – “have the Libs lost faith in the market?” – is surely that conservatives don’t necessarily have faith in it. The Howard government’s practice, in many respects, was as much conservative as neo-liberal, if not more – an increasingly large state, a dirigiste approach to doling out public money to corporations, all manner of attempted pro-family social engineering, and so forth. To some degree, the era of 80s bipartisanship on ‘economic reform’ left an institutional and legal bias towards economic liberalism in state institutions; Treasury, the Productivity Commission, competition law, and so on. But with a lazy Treasurer, for most of the time, Howardism only used economic liberalism as a fig leaf.

I think what we’re seeing now, with Tony Abbott, is that fig leaf being discarded.

We’re back to old fashioned paternalism – faith, country, and trust in your betters. And in the economic sphere, Abbott, who knows nothing much of economics, is happy for the state to sit down and carve up the pie in consultation with his preferred interest groups. All this is really classic National Party stuff.

What’s perhaps astonishing on the surface, at least, is how little we’re hearing from the so-called libertarians and classic liberals about Abbott’s lack of faith in the market. Could it be that they’re mostly more interested in anti-Labor partisanship than their own ostensible creed?