My big question at the start of 2010: when will the Victorian Liberal Party behave like a conservative political party and attack the femo-fascist underbelly of the Brumby Government?

Recent news that the Brumby government in Victoria is well ahead of the conservative parties in the polls and should be returned to government in a landslide at the state elections this year must exasperate and frustrate many Victorians. Victoria has seemingly intractable moral and social problems, the most visible of which is the culture of violence among young men, the origin of which one does not have to seek far to find.

They are the product of the dominant class's failed social agendas which no party embodies more than the Brumby Labor government. Sadly ordinary people appear blind to the bankruptcy of the class Labor Party governments around the nation represent and whose political agendas dominate policy. It's puzzling. How, for example, can people be blind to the fact that radical feminism has made the Labor Party its very own vehicle - particularly in Victoria? Radical feminism is now the spearhead of leftist political philosophy and the feverish political minorities causing enormous dislocation in society. There is a fifty-year record of the dislocation - and the misery and social decay it has unleashed.

Radio, television, newspapers and the internet are at this moment full of reports and commentary about the murder of Indian student, 21-year-old Nitin Garg, on his way to work at a suburban takeaway. An hysterical Indian media has no doubt that the murder was racially motivated. An Indian journalist in New Delhi told ABC radio this morning that Indians think Australians racist. An Indian Government minister has warned there will formal government retaliation unless action is taken to protect Indian citizens in Australia. One can only contemplate what he has in mind as a punitive response worthy of his indignation. The Indian Navy blockading the entrance to Port Philip Bay? An air strike on Melbourne's docklands? You have to shake your head in disbelief. Here we have an important Indian Government minister brazenly threatening Australia in the international media.

Those in the dominant class, those full of cultural self-loathing and making a career of slandering Australia, thus creating an easy stereotype to satisfy other nations' prejudices, should be happy with the rubbishing. The void of their culturally empty souls must now be filled to brimming with the international contempt for our country. And how will the Australian Labor Government respond to this government-to-government threat? Send another contingent to India to bow and scrape abjectly in the face of media venality because they (the government) are afraid of losing business? Perhaps the government's articulate lesbian duumvirate will depart to complete this crucial economic task.

Let me leave aside the stomach-turning hypocrisy of the Indian media who are conveniently blind to the sort of violence and ethnic prejudices within Indian society, something Australia is free of. Anyone who looks objectively at the male violence in Melbourne must know that racism is not the essence of the problem. It's not just Indian students that are being targeted, as the evidence clearly shows. As I have said before, a paradigm case of the male violence is the Werribee case. There is no racism here; it is violent and bitter contempt of anyone who for whatever reason incurs the disapproval of these young men, or who opportunistically presents an occasion to assuage their nihilistic self-hatred, or of anyone who has something they want. There is absolutely no scheme of morality in the corrupted minds of these young men who maraud in groups around the city and suburbs. If they pick on Indian students it's only because they are perceived as naive targets - easy pickings for the exercise of their cowardice. Talk of racism not only fails to grapple with this severe social problem, but enables those responsible for the causal cultural environment to evade scrutiny. Evading the reality of their ideological action is that class's exceptional talent. Conjuring a clever buzz word or phrase - like 'knife culture' - usually does the trick.

As I have written often before, Australia's former social environment of objective moral standards (supported and enhanced by the Christian religion) and pride of our European cultural heritage has been replaced by a nihilistic wasteland of moral subjectivism, cultural relativism, atheistic materialism, and a dozen other 'isms'. It was replaced after a vicious unrelenting attack in which personal abuse, calumny and sometimes violence played an important role. Ninety-nine percent of political violence in Australia has been authored by the Left. The evidence is there in the pages of newspapers and television news reports for anyone caring to investigate. I have the clearest memories of the hypocritical behaviour of the Sixties radicals.

Why should people wonder that young males fed a diet of this nihilism and contempt in Victoria's social environment should go about expressing it?

The tactic of destroying an ideological undesirable by smear, contempt and ridicule is in full use today. Melbourne's feminist Age is an outstanding example. Witness the constant ridicule and abuse of Christians and Christian belief by its writers and constituency - especially during the most sacred religious occasions of the year. The dominant class's attacks on Christians and Christianity are now so unabashed that there's no reluctance to cast Christians as stupid and irrational and thus unworthy of taking part in the nation's political life. This is the atmosphere of political disqualification and penal laws, which is presently being objectified in the Brumby government's attempt to collapse Christian organisations by amending the Equal Opportunity Act. The prejudiced and ideological nature of the Brumby government legislation was evident from the start in casting religious organisations as discriminatory in law, when in reality any club, grouping, or organisation is discriminatory in the same sense. This is the nature of the world we live in. The Equal Opportunity Act was always going to be the launching pad for the final solution to Christian belief in Victoria.

I could go on nominating similar issues and government action that should have every philosophical conservative in a constant state of outrage. What is going on in the social and political life of Victoria is the sort of happening that roused the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, to an intellectual fury, a fury that produced the most cogent expression yet of conservative thought. But what are we getting from the Victorian Liberal Party and other conservative groups? Not much on the face of it. Ted Baillieu, the leader of the State Liberal Party, appears to be preoccupied with a transport ticketing system. Big deal. The same system is running in the UK and Holland. After teething problems it will come good. This is not the issue to make the running for government over. A far more important issue is that he and cabinet ministers Daniel Andrews, Bronwyn Pike, Jacinta Allan and Tim Pallas voted in favour of the darkest and most evil piece of legislation enacted in any state legislature. It was the legislation declaring open season on society's most vulnerable: the child in the mother's womb. How on earth could they have so acted?

It was the legislation 76 percent of women in the Victorian lower house voted for. It was this victory over the unborn child that had Joan Kirner, Emily's List supreme heavy, parading obscenely in front of her cheering feminist colleagues. What a triumph - the sacrifice of children to feminist ideas of equality and population control. We truly have reverted to pagan times with pagan ideas of sacrifice. The stone altar and gutter for the blood sacrifice in front of the parliament building at the top of Collins St presided over by Kirner in Celtic goddess garb is all that's missing.

How could Baillieu and his ministers fall in meekly behind the feminist agenda? They lost all credibility with the people who are the Liberal Party's natural constituency, and they would not have roused one jot of sympathy from the class they evidently did not want to offend. (See Campaigner Kirner hails abortion law victory)

Whether you are a conservative in the style of Edmund Burke (natural law) or David Hume (scepticism) there is one shared principle that radiates many key ideas about policy and political action ( e.g. tradition and custom as prescriptive, and tradition and custom having epistemological content). It is the claim that man and human society are not perfectible, that human reason and human will are not capable forming and reforming society to taste. Man's nature and human society are far too complex for individual reason to encompass, and that any attempt to reorganise society on the basis on any given a priori theory will produce more pain than benefit and is likely to end in disaster. Perhaps worse, such an attempt breaks the boundary between the state and the private life of its citizens, allowing the state to reach its tentacles deep into their lives.

The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution are all the empirical evidence that anyone could need to demonstrate the total failure of plans to perfect society. You would think. But the ideas that motivated the revolutionaries and motivate our 'progressives' are like intellectual heroin. The psychedelic fantasies their ingestion produces have built and continue to build magnificent universities and fiery political groups, some of which ascend to untouchable power. No matter how great the failures, no matter how extensive the human misery and dislocation, the devotees and neophytes of rationalist politics will never give up the ideal of paradise on earth. Each thinks they just have to get their particular theory operating to realise the ideal. Feminists are presently at the forefront of the campaign to perfect society, with their male colleagues coming behind in bleating solidarity

There are two common avenues the fantasisers take in their efforts to rid society of its perceived imperfections. Burke saw this at his first meeting with the overweening confidence of those who raised reason and will to illimitable heights. They are the concepts of equality and human rights - but very particular concepts. Burke did not deny (nor do I) that there is an essential (metaphysical) equality human beings share and that people have rights. His analysis was different. He had a commonsense idea of the nature of reason; reason was not the linear mathematical process the political rationalists claimed it to be. I give a sketch of the way I think Burke understood the human reasoning process in my section on natural law conservatism (see the section though it is not yet complete).

Thus, though nobody could be considered inherently inferior to another, it was commonsense and ordinary sober observation that people were not the same, and that any attempt to level or equalise natural differences or to compensate for different circumstances would result in injustice. Laws prescribing quotas because of some perceived gender inequity are obvious cases of unjust laws and unjustified state interference in the citizen's life. This is not to mention the contentious nature of gender theory, a theory aimed at ridding us of the gross imperfection of maleness. Legislation that needlessly interferes in parental authority because of some jumped-up childless academic's favourite theory is equally unjust and an unjustified invasion by the state into the private lives of its citizens. These are the burning issues for a conservative political party. These are the points at which to attack the Brumby government. These are the political issues conservatives want to see their politicians take on.

Coming now to human rights, I don't think there is a more abused and manipulated idea in political philosophy and political discourse. The fascist-left are never finished mouthing the phrase. Many of the Left's most intrusive political programs are based on their conception and analysis of human rights. And this is the crucial point about human rights: the Left assume their analysis of human rights is correct. Indeed, most of the leftist class cannot imagine that there exists a competing analysis. The tragedy is that many conservatives - and I include the Victorian Liberal Party - appear also not to realise that the Left's materialist analysis of human rights can be challenged philosophically. This entails a long discussion which I will postpone until the near the Victorian state elections in November 2010.

31 July 2010
I say a little more about the different analyses of rights (materialist vs.realist) in my comment on Julian Burnside. I will post a fuller comment before Victorian election in November 2010.

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com