Peter Costello shows why he was never suitable to lead the conservative political parties

No dispute that Peter Costello and John Howard formed the most effective duo in Australia's political history. No dispute, either, that Peter Costello has been Australia's best Treasurer. It is equally true that as Treasurer he was in the position of his maximum effectiveness. You see, Peter Costello, like Malcolm Turnbull, does not know what philosophical conservatism is about.

Both do not understand, for example, the real issues of the debate about the 'republic'. For them it is simply reducible to Australia's shrugging off its (alleged) dependency on Great Britain and 'growing up'. The case they put up is so puerile as to make one wonder how two intelligent men who claim to belong to the party Sir Robert Menzies established could continue to propose such flimsy arguments based on false perceptions of Australia's history and its status in the world.

Australia as a unique social and moral incorporation of people, and not merely an extent of land between geographical co-ordinates was, astounding as it may seem, near enough independent after fifty years of settlement. This had a lot to do with distance, a factor in nature (as Edmund Burke pointed out) that restricts government authority no matter what governments think about it. Legislation over the next century made attempts to catch up with that fast developing reality. Unfortunately recent legislation has been dominated by the same mentality that wants to mess about with the Constitution, as if the Constitution is some dicky stand-alone machine that can be taken apart and put together again.

The real issues of the republic are the Constitution, historical continuity and culture. Australia's links with Great Britain are cultural and historical. Nothing else. Australians confident about their nation and way of life want not only to maintain those links, but enhance them. The republican movement is like the dysfunctional disconnected delinquent who wants to beat up his father to show that he is a man. That makes a very poor man, indeed.

We conservatives are proud of the house and family we have established through our own toil. It has a character all of its own. Though long outgrown the parental house we look to it with familial affection. It is the ageing house that most Australians like to make their first port of call when they first venture abroad. We cannot help a smile at the observation that many of the most committed 'republicans' are constantly on the plane to the 'mother country', and some have even established themselves there permanently. Oh, the embarrassment of feeling so at home there, if people found out!

My purpose in deploying some Burkean ideas and argument in defence of the Constitution has been to outline the crucial difference between a conservative's reasoning and that of a non-conservative. With this in mind let me now deal with the issue that Peter Costello has spoken out so boldly about recently: Tony Abbott's maternity leave policy.

To the dismay of the government and surprise of many Liberal Party members his policy on maternity leave is more generous than the Labor government's. Costello sees this as very bad development in the Liberal Party and he said so in an article in Melbourne's feminist newspaper, The Age - which is where you would expect to find heavyweight criticism of Tony Abbott. Abbott for the Age sisterhood is a nightmarish continuation of John Howard.

Costello levels essentially two arguments against Abbott. Political editor Michelle Grattan reproduces them in a comment in the Age (18 March):

Mr Costello...ridicules Mr Abbott for taking a ''Crocodile Dundee approach'' - a reference to the famous scene in the 1980s movie where the hero, confronted by a mugger with a switchblade, pulls out a big hunting knife and says: ''That's not a knife, this is a knife.''

Mr Costello writes: ''And the point of Abbott's proposal is to tell the public that Rudd does not have a maternity leave scheme: 'This is a maternity leave scheme,' he declares.

''In this kind of politics, if your opponent has a bad idea you try to outflank it,'' he writes. ''Your opponent has a mildly bad idea so you come up with a more extreme one and have a race to the bottom... I have been to a lot of Liberal Party meetings in my life and I can honestly say I have never heard a speech in favour of higher tax... The idea of increasing tax would be as foreign to the Liberal Party as voluntary unionism at the local ALP branch.''

Costello's comparing Tony Abbott to Crocodile Dundee in flashing his knife to a mugger is vintage Costello send-up. All Australians are on to the image immediately and it effectively dresses up the first argument against Abbott and his generous maternity leave policy. It is an argument from political ineptitude and cynical manipulation. There is no sound reasoning supporting Abbott's policy; he is merely trying to outbribe the Labor government for political advantage.

Apart from the truth (or otherwise) of the claim, there is importantly the political effect of this sort of gratuitous character attack. Costello could have argued against the policy without imputing disgusting motives to Abbott. What was he on about? Was this tactic, arising either from political naivety or resentful spite, really coming from a man so many Liberal supporters have admired - until now? Surely he must have been conscious of the use Labor Party heavyweights like sharp-tongued Julia Gillard would make of it.

What a gift for Gillard whose policy-evasive mockery hardly knows an equal in Australia's leftist class. Jazzing Julia's tongue would have left many of her own colleagues slashed and bleeding over the years. There she was on Nine's Today show shortly after, obviously buoyed by the Costello attack, laughingly using the argument from ridicule against Abbott in their Friday 'debate'. Costello's attack on Abbott's alleged political cynicism and political ineptitude will be a major weapon against him right up to the election. Ruud and Gillard should send Costello a magnum of Bollinger.

The second argument Costello levels at Abbott is an economic one. Abbott's maternity leave policy goes against fundamental conservative economic policy. While the character attack is nectar for the Labor Party whose weapon against Abbott is empty ridicule, the economic argument is primarily for his (former) Liberal colleagues. A Liberal Party surely does not increase taxes, an abhorrent strategy that is socialist in nature. A Liberal Government would leave the market as much as possible to regulate itself. The government takes an overseeing role and does not intervene at the detection of every perceived inequality or unfairness. In this way the economy operates at an optimum level, ensuring the smooth exchange of goods and services, the receipt of revenues, the payment of labour, a spread of wealth, and taxes for the government. It seems an empirical truth that a market economy works best.

Government intervention in the form of high taxes and ideologically driven restrictions on the free workings of business shunts the economy to a dawdle with the result of less revenues, a shrinking of the spread of wealth, and less money for the government to do those things that are the real responsibility of governments. It is an empirical truth that socialist governments have failed to varying degrees or work inefficiently at a deadening pace.

In conservative thought, however, there are not just these straightforward economic factors, the discoveries of economics seen purely as a social science. For the conservative there is also a moral and social dimension to economic policy. Conservatives claim that a free market economy encourages initiative and responsibility. It gives purpose to the individual, a sense of achievable destiny for oneself and one's family. In brief, the market economy provides the scope and opportunity to perfect our nature, that is, perfect ourselves as moral and social beings in community. Although perfection cannot be attained, the freedom of the market economy raises perfection before the eyes as a guiding ideal. I am sure Peter Costello, though considering himself too sober to subscribe to such a high-minded description, would nevertheless be in basic agreement that the market economy enhances individual autonomy, initiative and responsibility, all for the benefit of the community. It is here that we reach a fork in the political road and I have the impression that Costello takes the road out of a conservative view of life.

There is a simple economic response to Costello's charge about increasing taxes. Taxes are needed regardless of Liberal Party policy of doing away with taxes wherever possible. A conservative government would maintain or introduce a tax where in the circumstances it is required. It is the circumstances that dictate particular policy development - and not only in economic terms. This is a conservative principle that Burke asserted many times in different ways. Its clearest expression came in the Reflections:

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentlemen of that society [The Revolution Society]... But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which some gentlemen pass for nothing) give to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, Penguin Edition, pp.89/90

Costello has no sound argument against Abbott simply on the basis that Abbott is talking about a new tax. In Menzies' Liberal Party taxes come and taxes go, depending on the circumstances. But he would have an argument if in the circumstances Abbott's 'new tax' is not warranted. Failing that, Costello's economic argument is reduced to meaningless ridicule. That's the way the Labor Party does politics. So the question is whether circumstances support Abbott's new policy on maternity leave. In this we dealing more with social and moral considerations than with economic policy. In fact, the primary concern of policy for a conservative political party should be what is morally and socially desirable. The moral and the social dictate economic policy. In the Letter to Dr. William Markham in 1772 Burke wrote: 'The principles of true politicks are those of morality enlarged. . . .' What then are the social and moral considerations that justify Abbott's generous new maternity leave policy?

Like most conservatives forty-odd years ago I was deeply concerned about the Left's blatant campaign to destroy the nuclear family which was and still is seen by feminists as one of the great obstacles to the full realisation of the feminist agenda. There would be no equality for women unless the woman's role dictated by the structure of the family could be eliminated. That meant smashing the traditional family.

The conservative response was not to stand in the way of a woman who wanted to pursue a career, but to support government policy that concerned itself primarily with those women who wanted to be full-time mothers. The traditional role of the mother was indispensable for the healthy functioning of the family. Without that role, we conservatives warned, there would be a breakdown in the family which would cause serious repercussions in society. I will not linger on the fact that we were right. The important point is that maternity leave was not of primary importance then. Protection of the mother in the family was, and that meant creating circumstances in which the family of a stay-at-home mother would not be penalised economically.

What happened in the course of forty years is a long story, but to keep it brief the Leftist campaign succeeded economically in separating mothers from their children with disastrous consequences for many families - and for society. News bulletins are full of stories of those consequences. That's not to speak of the collapse of traditional morality which was also the aim of the fascist Left. In 2010 we are confronted with an entirely different set of circumstances from forty years ago. The conservative's task is to reflect on those changed circumstances and to develop social policy that will achieve the same aims of forty years ago: the protection of the traditional family in which mother and father can carry out their respective roles, ensuring the healthy development of their children.

A fact that cannot be ignored, at least in the foreseeable future, is that few women can afford to stay at home to be full-time mothers. The modern family is dependent on two incomes. But it is not only the economic demands that force mothers out of the house whether they like it or not. Those mothers that are prepared to make the sacrifices are subject to the cruel and unmerciful scorn of feminists for whom ideology goes before everything else, especially before the real living person. Another development which one must take into account is that for many women the social contact and consolation once provided by neighbourhood mothers is now to be found in the work environment. There are few mothers during the day in the neighbourhood. In summary, most ordinary women for social and economic reasons must go out to work.

It is not difficult to see that if a conservative political party wants to achieve its most important moral and social aims for families and society, it must develop policy for working mothers. So it is reasonable that a generous maternity leave policy be an important consideration. Tony Abbott's maternity leave policy seems entirely reconcilable with conservative principles and the Liberal Party philosophical outlook. It was revealing that Peter Costello did not understand this.

For the conservative the main issues that Australia confronts are moral and social. The truth is that in economic terms the Australian Labor Party differs only in detail and emphases from the Liberal Party. And who could deny that the Australian economy is sound shape? Where both parties differ is in moral and social outlook. The fascist Left with their socially corrosive ideology is deeply embedded in the Labor Party on all levels of government. It is right for Tony Abbott to make the maternity leave a priority policy. It is equally right - in fact, necessary - for him to make the political field of combat the moral and the social. The mass of Australians want political leadership on this ground.

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com