Aussie PM Gillard loses leadership ballot to Rudd

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was ousted as Labor Party leader Wednesday by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, in a vote of party lawmakers hoping to avoid a huge defeat in upcoming elections.

While I can see America heading further left, in all honesty, I have to say that in many ways Australia is further left. Our welfare system is a lot more prevalent than that of the US. We have universal health care (which is actually supported here by most conservatives because we actually seem to have developed a system that works quite well - as you still have the option to ‘go private’ if you wish).

In some other ways, I think our system is more conservative than Americas (for example, when it comes to education - private schools, which are mostly religious, receive some government financial support in Australia and one third of our children attend private schools, greatly reducing the control government schools have and also encouraging them to improve). We also don’t seem to have some of the race-related problems you have (we have our own issues with our indigenous population, but that’s a small proportion of the population) and that reduces some other issues as well.

I have a good friend in Australia who says the plan for conservatives is to completely purge the country of all forms of socialism, which would include welfare, socialized medicine and any form of state support to education.

If that was true, I'd have to be out of the loop on it - and I don't think I would be. I've got quite a lot of connections to a lot of things.

There is certainly a lot of room in the welfare system for major reforms and at some point we may get a conservative government that really bite the bullet on that. But our national health system (called Medicare) actually works reasonably well even from a conservative perspective, and I think there is far more focus on refining the system so it works even better, rather than dismantling it. That's certainly the approach of the two main conservative parties. On education, I would actually say the typical conservative approach in Australia is to increase state support to education by giving further support (with either no strings, or limited strings attached) to private schools - de facto voucher sytems which we really already have in place.

There may well be some conservatives who'd support the type of changes your friend is talking about, but I doubt they are within the mainstream conservative parties (the Liberals and the Nationals who generally work in coalition, and are thus often referred to as the Coalition) and unless there is a dramatic shift in Australian politics, it's the Liberals and Nationals who really define conservatism in Australian politics - like the United States, while we are not officially a two party system, we have the same type of situation where there really are only two major groups that can form governments, and other parties are more minor - not because there's any rules that say it has to work that way, but because that's how the system has evolved. Personally I am a member of the Liberal Party, and believe the best form of conservatism for Australia is that of Menzies and Howard (and hopefully Abbott as well), rather than anything more radical than that. I'd oppose the dismantling of our health care system, and I'd want welfare for those who actually genuinely need and deserve it (and that's only some of the welfare system) to stay in place. On education, I think we have it pretty much right at school level where private schools receive significant government funding which creates one of the highest levels of educational choice in the world, but I could change my views on that if it lead to dramatic enough tax cuts to ensure those choices remained intact.

But in theory wouldn’t that be possible in Australia? It’s a parliamentary system whereby the majority could rollback everything enacted in the past? A sort dictatorship of the majority that could not be overruled by the courts?

Not quite. Australia's system of government is (deliberately - it was designed this way) a hybrid of the British system, and the American. The British influence on our constitution is stronger than the American but the people who wrote our constitution in the 1890s took some ideas that they thought were good ideas from the American model, and our High Court of Australia has some broadly similar powers to the United States Supreme Court in interpreting laws in light of our Constitution. They can find laws to be unconstitutional (during the Howard era they blocked some of the laws the government tried to put in place to deal with illegal immigration for example), and more worryingly (in my view), they can also find laws violate international treaties, or increasingly vague 'human rights' principles. Personally I think the most important thing conservatives can do in this country over the next decade or so, is work towards laws (or constitutional amendments, if necessary) to limit the courts ability to be activist on these issues - I agree with their right to actually interpret the written Constitution - but not to 'discover' new rights as they seem wont to do.

@naturalman1975:

Yes, I can see now my friend, who goes by the internet handle of “Crusader Rabbit”, has some ideas out of the mainstream of conservative Australian politics....The bottom line is that at best the new Rightist PM Abbott would favor some minor modification of the Welfare State.

I think that’s the same problem with American conservatives - when in power they never rollback any welfare/statist program enacted by the Left - they simply attempt to modify it, as to made it more workable and cost effective. Ronald Reagan made a campaign promise to end the Department of Education, yet when he left office it was bigger than when he took office eight years before.

Thus by evolution the leviathan of central government gets bigger and bigger, more and more authoritarian, until finally it becomes a hideous monster like the old Soviet Union...and collapses like all attempts to build the Tower of Babel do in the end.

Unfortunately, this process of an ever more authoritarian central government has just begun in both the United States and Australia - and may take several generations of oppression and failures for the monster to finally die - and the default position return once again to free minds, free markets and limited constitutional government.

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