Dr Waleed Aly of Monash University impressively argues in his current Australian Quarterly Essay that conservative parties have backed themselves into a corner by embracing free-market extremism, and that an illiberal social policy, combined with a free-market economics, offers little hope for Australia.
This is precisely the policy territory inhabited by the Australian Coalition Parties, and begs the question, given the preponderance of Catholics in their senior ranks, as to whether the philosophy of the Coalition can accommodate a Catholic emphasis on social justice.
In general Aly's argument, that a reactionary brand of politics is unlikely to work because a better educated public opinion is swiftly leaving it behind, particularly on questions of global warming and the GFC, is to be welcomed. Aly's may be a clear — even a necessary — argument, but it is not an original one.
Political scientists have long been acquainted with Lipset's typology of the Radical Right, in which he and his confreres, Daniel Bell and Theodore Adorno, make crystalline the proposition that a Catholic politics is a politics of the centre, opposed to both collectivism and capitalism.
Does Aly's contribution to a much-needed new conservative policy discourse offer hope for those wedded to the resuscitation of an Australian political Catholicism, or does his analysis mark a radical incompatibility between the positions of a Liberal leader and the fundamental claims of the Catholic social justice tradition?
To answer this question is not only to depart from the depictions and continua of the right and left but also to engage in a kind of Socratic critique of Catholic Social Teaching to establish where it sits on some of the abiding socio-economic questions of the 21st century, such as women's and homosexual rights, global warming, the ubiquitous intrusion of the free-market into everyday life, the predicament of refugees and Indigenous people and a host of other complex imponderables manifestly unaddressed by Catholic Social Teaching alongside its standard contributions to the discourse of justice and peace.
Thus, the problem with conservative politics may not simply be semantic, reflecting an inability to comprehend Aly's distinction between 'conservative' and 'neoliberal', 'right' and 'left'; it may simply be that a familiarity with Catholic Social Teaching is inadequate on its own to inform a contemporary Catholic political consciousness, thus accounting for a disparity of policy positions between the likes of an Abbott and a Blair.
Indeed, with so many of Labor's policies being unashamedly neo-liberal, it makes sense for the Coalition to advance a case for an alternative conservative social and economic program for Australia. How this is done is as important as what it is, as its family-friendly Paid Parental Leave policy demonstrates.
To move in such a direction, at considerable expense to the business sector, is to justify statist intervention to serve the common good. Rudd's failure to do this has exposed Labor hype on 'working families' at the cost of family-friendly policy. It also offers the kind of policy leeway to expose Rudd's now empty assurances on refugees and climate change.
Such a reconfiguration would restore some semblance of the politics of Menzies, who championed a role for the state in a corporatist-centrist Australian politics that has too easily been abandoned. Remember too that the first changes to White Australia were made by the Coalition Parties against the objections of Calwellian Labor.
Indigenous intervention was a form of protectionism long overdue, rather than a bland reliance on socially liberal policy. Indeed, there is much to salvage from Howard's policies, misconstrued as universally liberal and bereft of state intervention in the interests of the underprivileged that could be reworked into a new policy front on this score. More could be done to link such a policy frame with several aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, especially on industrial relations.
The Coalition could heal a suppurating sore in the Australian body politic by integrating low-fee private schools into a localised, varied and choice-driven public education system, through school-funding arrangements similar to those obtaining in other countries, giving parents valuable school choice without making it dependent on the payment of fees. This is a matter currently vexing Catholic education authorities, conscious that their demographic is steadily becoming wealthier, privatised and less Catholic.
In general then, such a shift is better countenanced in terms of issues that politicise Catholics and their allies, such as school funding, the treatment of refugees and bioethical questions, than a vague desire to conform to a Catholic Social Teaching that is manifestly silent on major questions of culture and society.
In fact religious politics have been successfully employed whenever Catholic principles have come under threat. What better time to resurrect a new kind of conservative Catholic politics than now, as much on bioethical questions as on parental choice of schooling, the human rights of refugees and the unborn, as on Indigenous policy and industrial relations!
Dr Michael Furtado of The University of Queensland is a Graduate of Plater Catholic Social Justice College, Oxford. His research field is the funding of Catholic schools.