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.
Of course, if the right wing wins the next election.
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?
I think like drug addiction, the only way to end socialism is by going “cold turkey” all at once.
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.