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TOM'S
TAKE...
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What is the ideal political party a Catholic ought vote for?  What is the ideal political system? What is the one that a Catholic should back or vote for? Is there such a thing as an ideal political system? Does God have a favoured political party? I appreciate this is a theme I've explored before in Tom's Take and not too long ago either. I only return to it today because I still don't know the answers and I'm continuing to explore the issues in a very real way in my life.
My family background in Western Australia was very different to Cliff's. On my father's, Irish-Catholic, side I suspect that they were vaguely Labor Party supporters until the 1950s. My grandfather though was an entrepreneur in his own small way — full of Irish charm and I suspect he could have sold fridges to eskimoes using that charm were he to have lived where eskimoes live. At one stage he is reputed to have owned half the front street of the gold-mining town of Agnew, or was it Lawlers, in the Murchison of W.A.. Most of his 10 sons and daughters inherited a fair wack of the Irish charm themselves — and some in my generation as well. Most of the boys ended up in their own small businesses and for a long period my own father, who had been the eldest was looked up to as the leader partly because he was the one who became a publican and he ended up owning the two-storey building and a quite substantial business in the wheatbelt of Western Australia. My father at one stage stood for the DLP and he was a great fan of B.A. Santamaria. I can still vividly remember as a fairly young lad being encouraged to come in and watch Bob's "Point of View" telecasts on a Sunday morning. At least one of his other brothers also stood for the DLP and my late mother-in-law was a stalwart of the DLP in Western Australia. Interestingly enough the most successful person politically in our family was an uncle who ended up representing the Liberal Party in the seat of Murchison-Eyre in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. At the time Murchison-Eyre was reputed to be the largest single electorate in the world in terms of surface area. It's population though was sparsely scattered and relatively small compared to other electorates. On my mother's side both of my grandparents, who were of English and Scottish Protestant background, were also very successful small business people and Liberal Party supporters. It is perhaps understandable then that my attraction has always been towards the conservative or liberal side of politics although for a very, very long period my political philosophy was very much derived from Bob Santamaria's outlook on life. I in fact interviewed him once for a television documentary I put together exploring the rise of what was then called the "New Right" in Australia in the early 1980s.
As I mentioned in the earlier Take where I commented on these matters, for a decade of my life I gave a commitment to the Liberal Party of Australia that was about as passionate and intensive as the commitment I've given to my Church over the two and a half decades since. I resigned from the Liberal Party though in a fairly public way when that party kicked Doug Jennings and Charles Francis out of their parliamentary ranks in Victoria at the end of the 1970s. Apart from the brief resurgence of the Liberal Party in Victoria under the maverick, Jeff Kennett, I still think the explusion of Jennings and Francis was the beginning of the end of the Liberal Party as a political force in Victoria. That's the point at which the Liberal Party had "pragmatised itself into paralysis" and so began the long, slow downhill slide until it has become virtually irrelevant as a political force in every State of Australia and only survives at the Federal level today because of the almost Machiavellian personal pragmatism of John Howard. Paul Keating's cutting comment in relation to Andrew Peacock that a "soufflé never rises twice" ought better be applied to the Liberal Party overall. It's little wonder that the backbenchers want to keep John Howard on as leader until he slides into his grave. Once he's gone the "soufflé will never rise twice" and I'll bet everything I own that the Liberal Party nationally will end up like the Liberal Party in every State of this nation — irrelevant! I suppose at the moment I must have half a dozen phone conversations a day with Cliff. I have to say that I do love the man's gravelly socialism, sense of mateship and genuinely caring about ya mates. At the same time I continue to believe that socialism is deluded. It offers only half a solution to the social challenges society faces. The trouble with all socialists is, it seems to me at least, that they're always bitching about those who've got up off their backsides and created the businesses and enterprises that actually employ people and generate wealth and rising standards of living. Socialists are great, it seems to me, at knowing how to carve up the cake equally but they are bloody hopeless at cooking a cake to carve up in the first place. The trouble with capitalists is that while they might be great at creating cakes they're pretty hopeless at distributing it equitably.
My own politics today is somewhere in the middle of all this. I honestly do not think there is "an ideal political party, or system". To function effectively we need both capitalists and we need socialists. The "ideal" society — or should that be "the least unideal society"? — comes from neither of the major political parties within themselves but rather it comes from "the tension" that exists in society between the two ideological mainstreams. This is not an argument that somehow fence-sitting is somehow the "ideal" political philosophy to have. I think a pox should be declared on all fencesitters. No, the ideal society comes about when one has a strong collectivist political philosophy that is held in tension by, or with, a strong individualist political philosophy. And it's not just the philosophies that are important. The ideal society requires strong party machines tha articulate the collectivist and individualist philosophies and give voice to them in passionately held policy positions. In this country I think our Church gets it about right. It does not have a political position. As Catholics we are encouraged to support either of the main political parties, or any of the smaller parties. Gone are the days when we had bishops and priests telling our parents from their pulpits that they had to vote DLP almost on pain of mortal sin if they didn't. I am coming to the view that what underpins Catholic social teaching is something similar to what I've tried to articulate in this post. There is no one "ideal" political party or political philosophy. The ideal actually does come from the "tension" that exists between two strong parties or philosophies one of which broadly represents the collectivist outlook and the other broadly represents the individualist outlook. It is the tension which allows a community to grow economically and in generating the prosperity that enables us to offer better educational opportunties, better health care, better social and physical infrastructure. Yet, at the same time, it is also the tension that forces constraint on the uninhibited ambitions of the entrepreneur and individualist and feeds into the social mix the voice of "the common good" and "the common man and woman", and which forces on society social justice and that philosophy of social equality, mateship, brotherhood and sisterhood that, more than the inputs of the entrepreneurs, define who we are as a community and as a nation. Blessings, Tom
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At
the personal level I continue to be intrigued by the incongruities inherent
in my new-found friendship with Cliff Baxter. Cliff is a died-in-the-wool
Labor man. He was describing to me on the phone his experience mixing
with all the Labor luminaries in NSW at his friend Kevin Stewart's funeral
on Monday. I could visualise the scene and I have long been attracted
to the sense of mateship and camaraderie that comes out on occasions like
a wake although I am also well aware that when socialists decide they
don't like someone the hatred and bitterness can burn human flesh like
a blowtorch can burn paint. Cliff's Dad wasn't just a socialist he was
actually a paid up member of the Communist Party so it's been a particularly
long road for Cliff's eventual conversion to Catholicism.
I
actually think I still like Santamaria's economic outlook and his broad
political philosophy which was, very much and very genuinely, formed from
Catholic social teaching. I got to know him fairly well personally during
my years living in Melbourne and he supported me personally in a number
of projects I became involved in. I continue to have enormous respect
for him as a person of enormous personal integrity. I also found him a
very humble man. I still have a number of very long handwritten letters
where he put in what must have been hours writing to address some question
I had raised with him. My personal view is that where Bob ended up failing
is that he somehow seemed to attract around him as well as some really
good people a heck of a lot of no-hopers. People who thought the sun shone
out of Bob's you know what but who themselves could not have put two and
two together and come up with the correct answer if their lives depended
on it. There was this adulation around Santamaria as though anything that
Santa said was almost as though God himself had been the one making the
pronouncement. Some of them I am sure engaged in behaviours — particularly
trying to "stack" various kinds of public debates and organisations
— where the tactics employed were every bit as Tammany Hall, even
immoral, as what was endeavouring to be encountered in their proclaimed
enemies in the ALP or the Communist Party. For these people, like our
modern day terrorists, the ends always justifies the means. These people
honestly did believe civilisation as we knew it was under diabolical threat
from Communism and there were no moral boundaries almost in what tactics
might be allowable in not just countering, but conquering, that threat.
People
who believe John Howard has some brilliant political mind and ideology
delude only themselves. Howard's great skill is that like the late Kerry
Packer, or like Rupert Murdoch, he has a "sixth sense" at reading
the mind of the average yobbo out in suburbia. He operates from the politics
of populism and pragmatism with skills we've never seen the likes of before.
The trouble is though that yobbos never built a civilisation. There is
going to be an enormous price paid for the economic prosperity of the
Howard era. Our children and grandchildren's generations are gunna be
a cursing us for a long time into the future when the price eventually
starts to be extracted for the unsustainability of our present Western
lifestyles. Last Monday's 
