In 1983 there were many changes in Australia - but interestingly, there were rumblings in its so-called right-wing political party, about the need to put people first.
It was quite unexpected from Australia's right-wing party, but it showed that more than 40 years ago, the high-up elite still some heart left for the people.
What on earth am I talking about?
The Valder Enquiry of 1983, was from a time when Andrew Peacock was in charge of Australia’s conservative opposition. Bob Hawke’s Labor government had formed a government, approximately six months earlier.
One of the big parts of the enquiry was to decide whether the Liberal Party policy should have used conservatism or Liberalism. So the Liberal Party really did consider liberalism in the old days. This means they would have wanted individualism, freedom of expression and action, freedom from ideological and religious constraint and they wanted equality of respect. That's if you rely on the definition of Liberalism. Yes, there was still some chance for one of the major Australian political parties to show some heart. Here was a conservative party, which argued that it did not have to be conservative! In other words, it did not have to preserve what was established. It did not need to prefer gradual development to abrupt change and it did not have to stress established institutions and base itself on social stability and tradition.
If it was to embrace Liberalism and not conservatism, it could have potentially ignored other conservative values, such as individual financial responsibility for personal needs, strong national defense, limited government regulation of investing and business. It could have ignored lower taxes.
The general public wanted the Liberal Party to balance the middle ground, even though many right-wingers wanted ideological purity.
By the time the Valder Enquiry began, Mr Hawke's Labor government had already started the Prices and Wages Accord. His accords did many things. Notably they forced the unions to make friends with the corporations. Mr Hawke's Labor Party had really found the middle ground - appealing to swinging voters. Next, it was Andrew Peacock's turn to do the same, in what had become an era of Australian centrist parties.
In the end, Mr Peacock decided to include the middle-ground cornerstone of more freedom of choice and less bureaucratic interference, with his doctrine of lower tax and free market economies. He never became Prime Minister, but by his second attempt to become Prime Minister, the Labor Party was about to commence the neo-liberal privatisation of public utilities. It had already floated the Australian dollar in December 1983. It had done the opposite of what one expected from a Labor Party
All of these things suggest that there is middle ground for governments to meet the general public in the middle and fix all our problems. Here we see evidence of a Labor Party which is capable of going right-wing and a conservative Party, which is capable of embracing some of the ideals of liberalism. What is left does not have to be left and what is right does not have to be right.
It tells us that there is room for any government to fix everything that is wrong about our society - but will they? ― Joseph Walz
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