Tony Abbott, the British-born leader of the Australian Liberal Party, has been ridiculed as a boorish brawler, whose deep conservatism and apparent misogyny ought to make him terminally unelectable. A monarchist and a devout Catholic who once trained to be a priest, his nicknames have included “Dr No”, “The Mad Monk” and “People Skills” (because he was presumed not to have any).Read the rest here.
Sounds like my kinda guy. On a side note, why do Australians refer to their conservative party as liberal?
5 comments:
If this is "your kind of guy" why is this post entitled "Good News from DOwn Under?"
Because, as the article explains, he is likely about to become the next Prime Minister.
I like your posts. As to the Liberal question, My thought would be that fiscal conservatism and free markets were known as Liberal back at the turn of the last century. Now we refer to them as Classical Liberals. The Aussies might still see it this way?? My source is Friedrich von Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom.
The main right wing parties in Australia have tended to define themselves in opposition to socialism (i.e. the Labor Party), so they took the name "liberal" to mean the economic opposite of socialism. The same was with the original Commonwealth Liberal Party in the early 20th Century.
The real question is why American liberals call themselves conservatives. Liberal="free" comes from the French Revolution, when the liberals were for the new, rational, small government (it got out of hand) whereas the conservatives were for the old order. I believe sometime around when the Republicans started being the conservative party, and Democrats being the liberal party (Douglass was for small government, Linconl, against it) the names swapped. But I'm not entirely sure.
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