Conservative Heresy

What I am about to say will sound like heresy to many idealistic conservatives. 

But I feel it has to be said because truth is the first step to solving problems, no matter how inconvenient. 

But words, whether they are true or not, are just noise. The real problem solving takes action - and that’s where the conservative heresy begins. 

Last week, a well-meaning conference in London was organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

That’s a new group with “ a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.”

They are inviting people to join them

“in developing a better narrative in response to life’s most fundamental social, economic, philosophical and cultural questions. We reject the inevitability of decline and instead are seeking solutions which draw on humanity’s highest virtues and extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.”

They’ve tapped into a rich vein of concern because their first conference was sold out. 

I’m sympathetic to their cause. They support the moral, cultural, economic and spiritual foundations that built Western civilisation. 

The ARC is the brainchild of Psychologist Jordan Peterson. He’s joined by various global luminaries, including Australians like John Howard, John Anderson and Tony Abbott.

I admire them all for lending their name to supporting the goals of the Alliance.

But having followed the conference and the speeches, it became just another festival of undeserved self-congratulations from a bunch of current and former politicians. 

You could summarise the overall theme as ‘let’s try quoting Reagan or some other legendary conservative, and publicly reconstruct our respective times in office to look like we tried’.

And I suppose some of them did try, in a fashion, but their attempts left us where we are today. That’s hardly a mark of success. 

The West is now a listless ship with a sagging banner.

That ship has been controlled by politicians and thought leaders for decades now. A number of them spoke at this recent conference.

So, let’s join them in taking stock of where we are according to the criteria of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship - social, economic, philosophical and cultural.

Importantly, let's also consider how we got there under their leadership.

The West is weak in all of these areas - because of political decisions and a lack of courage from those driving them. 

Socially, we have never been more divided.

It’s black vs white, have’s vs have-nots, leaners against lifters. Our city streets are riddled with gang crime, homelessness and the drug-addled.

Looters walk into stores to take what they want without recriminations. Police are considered legitimate targets for revenge, and idiots glue themselves to the streets.

Families are falling apart, abortion rates are at the highest levels in history, and the institution of marriage has devolved from what it always was to whatever you want it to be.  

We’ve got protests celebrating the lives of black criminals and condemning every achievement of white people. The trans, rainbow and new race-based identity badges are now a talisman of protection from public criticism while our media brazenly lies to us all.

The new Marxist moralists are rewarded with taxpayer-funded festivals, and segregated health, education and job opportunities while they demand the rest of us surrender truth to fantasises of pronouns and public status. 

All this is taking place while, economically, the West is doing terribly. 

There is unsustainable debt and no government appetite to reduce it. We’ve got inflation and national economic growth that is making us individually worse off. 

That’s because it’s being propped up by low-skilled immigration. The teeming hordes of new arrivals make the headline economic figures look good, but the per capita figures show we are individually worse off. 

In Australia, we’ve got some of the most unaffordable housing in the world - thanks to government policies of subsidising on the one hand and profiteering on the other. 

There are five million people on income support in our nation, and it seems like everyone wins some sort of hand-out prize whether they need it or not. Tax rates are too high, and business red, green and black tape is out of control. 

We can’t even generate our power needs in this country - mostly because the politicians have signed us up to globalist net-zero commitments.

That’s an indulgence exclusive to the West.

Our foreign competitors don’t give a hoot about the Green zealots or the lunatic fringe calling themselves Extinction Rebellion.

The non-West is mocking us as our political (and community) leaders cheer on our very own economic suicide note. 

But philosophically, the West is on the right side of history - aren’t they?

Well, that depends. If you think abandoning a commitment to freedom of speech, movement and thought is good, then the West is doing us proud. 

It's only in the West that you can be arrested for using the wrong pronouns or standing silently in the street. Yes, that really happened to one Christian woman in the UK who the police thought was 'praying' while she stood.

Sorry, I need to correct that, not everyone can be arrested for silent prayer.

It’s only white and Christian people who are subject to such limitations. A Muslim proselytiser can pretty much do whatever they want in the West, even chanting 'gas the Jews' or holding 'behead those who insult the prophet' signs. 

The West fully supports the right to protest unless it’s against Western government policy of lockdowns and forced vaccinations. Then, the Western leaders will have you attacked with rubber bullets, suspend your bank account, arrest you in your home for a Facebook post or make sure you are excluded from work. 

All those things, and more, happened in the West in recent years.

But don't worry, if you’re marching for diversity or inclusion, in support of black lives or against Israel and whiteness - it’s all good. You can do whatever you like. In fact, you'll likely be rewarded for it.  

That’s philosophical purity in the West. 

And then there’s culture. 

I have said many times that repairing a fiscal balance sheet is much easier than a cultural one. 

Most Western leaders wouldn't know what culture is any more than they know what a woman is. Little wonder they can't or won't defend it.

In years past, for daring to raise the importance of preserving the tenets of Western Culture in the West, I (and others) have been called terrible names, including by some of those who attended this conference. 

These are the same people who embraced the concept of ‘multiculturalism’ and immigration with no concern for the long-term cultural impact on Western nations. 

These are the same people who want to export Western culture and values to other nations via contrived wars and propaganda campaigns while ignoring the domestic cultural decline in their own countries.

They’ll send our men and women to fight for foreign cultures and causes while failing to engage in a battle for our own. 

There’s more, so much more, that has led us to this moment, but I needn’t go on. I’m sure you get the picture.

I can even imagine some of you saying, “It’s the Left who did all that”.

Sure, the Left did do it, but so did the so-called ‘conservative’ side of politics.

In Australia, the ‘conservatives’ have ruled the political roost for 20 of the past  28 years in this country. 

It's not hard to see the results.

They fostered the unsustainable welfare state, failed to cut the ABC propaganda, launched the rotten safe schools program, failed to lift the moratorium on the nuclear industry, wanted to push an extradition agreement with China, ran up hundreds of billions in national debt, gave priority to low-skilled immigration, dumbed down the education system, created the housing bubble, increased taxes and government tape, signed up to net zero, fostered the renewable energy boondoggle and failed to reign in government excess after excess.

There's so much more, but do I really need to go on?

Incredibly, many of our political leaders (and their un-elected lieutenants) actively tried to stop those who sought to correct or even raise these problems. 

I can tell you firsthand that politics is where cancel culture originated. 

As an MP, when you say some inconvenient truth or step out of line, you’re told to be quiet, and if you do, you're promised another notch up the greasy political pole. 

That’s why so many will ‘only say what they really think’ after they’ve left office and no longer have the capacity to implement change directly.

Those who do agitate for change or for enduring principles while in office are ostracised and marginalised by their own.

Just ask the recent crop of political outsiders. Politicians like Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic, Craig Kelly and Pauline Hanson.

Where were their principled conservative colleagues or thought-leaders outside of parliament, cheering on their brave stance for freedom and government overreach?

They were nowhere to be seen or heard until it was safe to emerge with some 'I knew it all along' 20-20 hindsight vision.

There are many more over the decades who have been frozen out of the political process for challenging why ‘conservatives’ want to raise taxes, import incompatible cultures or impose draconian restrictions that limit freedoms.

The ‘conservatives’ had to be dragged kicking and screaming to defend free speech. It resulted in a half-hearted support to repeal section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Conservatives wanted to help Kevin Rudd introduce local government to the constitution and would have signed off on the ETS if not for the efforts of a handful of agitators.  They even wanted to back Rudd for Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I know this because I was there, right in the thick of it and experienced first-hand exactly how weak many of the now wise conservative thought leaders were

How is it that a conservative Australian government wanted to ratify an extradition agreement with China or decided to allow a CCP front company to lease the port of Darwin? 

How did a conservative government introduce the perverted safe schools program or pledge no cuts to the out-of-control ABC? 

How did a conservative party appoint so many non-conservative people to its ranks - including leaders who are more Green than green and gold?

Successive conservative governments have upped housing subsidies even though they know it only pushes the price of housing higher. They didn’t redress falling education standards or the cultural Marxism in our schools. 

They presided over billions in bad debts for students to get a useless university education that doesn’t equip them with meaningful skills to get a job, and conservatives sat on their hands while our defence forces became weaker while introducing free gender transitions, halal meals and sending them off to march in the Mardi-Gras.

Now, in speech after speech, all the answers to what the West's conservative leaders didn’t do are produced at a conference. 

They didn't stop the cultural, economic, social or philosophical decline of the West. More often, they actually initiated or facilitated it.

Apparently, conservatives now believe there should be no more race or identity politics, multiculturalism is a failure, and there’s a need to restore trust in government and democracy. 

Give me a break. How can you restore trust when your political leaders, including the conservative ones, seem so happy to lie and mislead the voters?

They'll even deceive themselves by reinventing their own political history on the public stage.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with so much of the sentiments behind what each of the speakers said.

I tried to apply those principles consistently throughout my own time in the political realm, and that's how I know that what they now say and what they did then are poles apart.

It’s frighteningly obvious what’s leading the decline of the West, and it isn’t the lack of intellectual rigour or well-crafted speeches about enduring ideas. 

No, the problem in the West is a lack of will, courage and commitment by our conservative politicians to actually do what needs to be done. 

History shows many of them consistently and deliberately refuse to see the problem when they are in power while attacking those who have the courage to raise the really important matters. 

Our conservative politician's courage only seems to emerge when they are in the safe confines of a conference, surrounded by a crowd of like-minded people cheering them on. 

If the West’s problems could be solved by reinventing personal political history in a safe space, then we’ve clearly got nothing to worry about. 

Unfortunately, we all know, through lived experience, that words are the cheapest of commodities, and real political action is a price that too few on the conservative side are prepared to pay