PM's culture wars a fraud: Rudd

Peter Hartcher
Political Editor
October 28, 2006
SMH

THE Prime Minister, John Howard, is guilty of perpetrating "a fraud" in his so-called culture wars, according to the prominent Labor frontbencher Kevin Rudd.

In the first substantial Labor response to a notably ideological speech by Mr Howard almost a month ago, Mr Rudd stakes out a philosophical alternative for the Opposition.

Mr Rudd argues in a forthcoming essay that the Government's ideological excesses give Labor a chance to "reclaim the centre of Australian politics".

He told the Herald yesterday that Labor needed to engage in the battle of ideas and should not sit idle. His combativeness contrasts with the silence of his leader, Kim Beazley, who has made no substantive response to Mr Howard.

Mr Rudd's essay, his second on political philosophy in a month, seems designed to establish him as something of a philosopher king in Labor and an equal to the Prime Minister.

Labor's response to the Howard Government should be "anchored in Adam Smith and the market with social responsibility, rather than in Karl Marx and madness", he said.

The "culture wars" - whose battlefields include the teaching of history, school standards, migrants' rights, alleged bias at the ABC and homosexual marriage - were a fraud because they are designed not to make real change but to mask the damage inflicted by the Government's economic policies, Mr Rudd claims.

In an address on October 3 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the conservative journal Quadrant, Mr Howard made a speech advancing the culture wars. He rejoiced in the death of "philo-communism" in Australia and the struggle against "political correctness."
The Prime Minister railed against the "fangs of the left" in the debate over teaching Australian history. And he warned of the ideological fights to come.

He likened the war on terrorism to the struggle against communism - "a generational struggle for ideals of democratic freedom and liberty under the law".

He also warned his audience "we should not underestimate the degree to which the soft-left still holds sway, even dominance, especially in Australia's universities".

Mr Rudd, Labor's spokesman on foreign affairs, has hit back in an essay to be published in the magazine The Monthly next week, a sequel to an earlier essay urging the churches to take a more active role in politics.

Mr Rudd writes in the essay titled Howard's Brutopia that the Prime Minister's speech was a "diversion" from "the debate that Howard is desperate not to have".

That, according to Mr Rudd, is "the values debate in Australia between market fundamentalism and fairness".

In the US, critics of the Republican Party of George Bush make a similar claim. Thomas Frank, for instance, in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? argues that the Republicans' values agenda is a vast "bait-and-switch" manoeuvre so that middle-class voters will not notice that Bush Administration policies are actually damaging their economic interests.

Mr Howard has previously argued that market economics complements social conservatism and his Government pursues both in tandem, but Mr Rudd argues that the two are irreconcilable.

"'Traditional conservative values' are being demolished by an unrestrained market capitalism that sweeps all before it," writes Mr Rudd. "This is the disconcerting reality that the right itself must acknowledge."

According to Mr Rudd: "There are no more corrosive agents at work today on the so-called conservative institutions of family, community, church and country than the unforgiving forces of neo-liberalism, materialism and consumerism, which lay waste to anything in their path."