(Check against delivery)
Thank you for that kind introduction and for the invitation to speak here this afternoon.
Firstly, congratulations to Rachel, Michael and the Federal Young Liberal Executive for all their efforts this year.
In Opposition new ideas are as important as activism, and you have ensured the YLM has delivered on both of these.
I note that your theme for this convention is “The Culture Wars and Political Correctness: How to win the hearts and minds of Australians”.
I thought I today I would focus on part of the political battle in Australia that I fear, we sometimes ignore – and I believe we do so at our peril.
It is about the power and importance of language. In this case, how it is being used by the left and how our language is being appropriated by the left for illiberal policies and objectives.
Last year we saw the twentieth anniversary of the final collapse of Marxism and its various offshoots.
And for a little while people were writing about the complete victory of liberal democracy, the so-called end of history.
But this was not the case.
While the left lost the ideological war and their economic and social model was proven a failure, the social democratic left of the west sought new tools to achieve their social and economic objectives.
In this case I am not referring to the socialisation of industry – as that was a tool to many, although an objective to some.
I am referring to the incessant desire of the left, whether they describe themselves as communitarians, social democrats or democratic socialists, to limit and constrain the choices, with their associated responsibilities, that we rightly believe belong to the individual. To somehow ‘manage’ our society to achieve a predetermined outcome that they have decided is in our collective interest.
So social democrats started using the language and tools of the victors, of liberals. Hence we had Blairism, the Third Way and ‘triangulation’.
All claimed to want the best of both worlds, the market and the state. But this was simply rhetoric.
Since then, and particularly over the last decade in Australia, the left have started to use the language of liberalism, particularly classical economics, to justify and underpin a greater role for government and the state in all our lives, greater levels of taxation and limits on the choices of individuals.
Most notably in my view, the language of the market has been adopted as a key weapon in the armoury of the left.
Over the past two years, this has been compounded by the vilification of liberalism by the Prime Minister, the very market liberalism that has provided unprecedented prosperity over the last decade.
In essence, the language of markets, a language used by liberals over the past three decades to drive the liberalisation of our economy, is increasingly used to provide a basis for some quite illiberal measures.
The left now use terms like price signals, demand management, productivity and opportunity cost to justify their programs, in an attempt to cloak the constraint of choice in the very language that has traditionally protected it.
Often it involves use of so-called economic models. These might outline the jobs allegedly ‘created’ or ‘saved’ by protectionist measures or subsidies; or the ‘future health costs’ avoided by taxes that are aimed at changing dictating individual behaviour.
Usually these models are complete rubbish in an economic sense, speculative at best, downright misleading at their worst – and often the product of rent-seeking by vested interests, whether they be an industry, an interest group or self proclaimed ‘experts’.
But such terms and claims dominate the political dialogue and debate. We read about them in newspapers and hear about them in the electronic media. From a political point of view, therefore, they achieve their purpose. In a media and political sense, they are a success.
Examples of economic language being used abound:
With respect to climate change the UK Government as well as the Australian Government undertook an extraordinary effort to construct a case focused solely on the premise that ‘not acting’ on climate change would be more expensive than, coincidentally, adopting the exact policy prescriptions those governments desired. Alternatives were not fully considered.
The whole political case for Labor’s ETS was based on the reports of Stern and Garnaut, using economic arguments to justify the need for this massive new tax. The alleged ‘opportunity cost’ of not acting.
And this economic modelling was somehow sacrosanct, we were unable to challenge its assumptions or outputs lest we be labelled ‘sceptics’.
Last year the massive ad hoc alcopops tax hike was partly justified on the basis of the ‘health costs’ of alcohol abuse. Apparently increasing the price of a can of Bundy and Coke was part of Labor’s plan to reduce pressure on the health system.
Proponents for a junk food tax hope to achieve similar ends – using projected ‘costs’ of obesity to the health system in coming years. In this case increasing the cost of a Big Mac will reduce pressure on the health system – but not, interestingly, the price of fois gras.
It never fails to fascinate me how it is usually people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale need extra taxes to know what is in their own interests.
Health is a particularly fertile field for such proposals.
But no less so than education.
So far Labor has linked every spending initiative in education to productivity.
School halls, wanted or not, laptops (only for every second child now) – billions of dollars of debt-financed spending have all been justified on the basis of increasing future productivity without any evidence of this being the case.
It appears that productivity is now the catch-all phrase used to justify any education spending initiative.
We are now awaiting the Henry Review and in this we expect to see proposals for another new tax – a so-called congestion levy.
A tax that will penalise you for driving on roads for which you have already paid.
Again, this is justified in the language of the liberal market – the price signal of this new tax will allegedly encourage more ‘efficient’ behaviour and use of our roads.
The left call these ‘nudge taxes’ – as if this friendly terminology hides their insidious nature.
Lindsay Tanner has referred to such ideas as “nudge regulation, where people retain choices but are gently pushed in a particular direction”.
It is obviously just a coincidence that the government rakes in millions of dollars in extra revenue every time it decides we need a nudge.
But how much of a choice is driving to work?
And should it be the role of government to use the power of taxation to even ‘nudge’ us about what we eat, what we drink and when we travel?
For the obvious truth is that, when it comes to such personal choices, the great majority of people do not over-indulge, or impose greater costs on the community or others.
Furthermore, we have to ask ourselves whether the government should be trying to influence such decisions. It is not as if government has such a fabulous track record in looking after its own backyard.
It is not as if the public hospital system is run so efficiently so as to give us faith that the advice or decisions of some faceless bureaucrat, sorry they are now referred to as ‘experts’, will be so successful at improving the behaviour of millions of Australians and making us all better off. Similarly with the management of our public education systems or national parks.
But more importantly, the use of liberal language to achieve this increased role for the state ignores one of the reasons we believe in the market.
We believe in it for two reasons – yes, it is overwhelmingly more efficient than a command model of economics. Outside the arts faculties at our universities no-one, not even old leftists like Lindsay Tanner or Julia Gillard, mount that case these days.
We also believe in the market because it underpins the type of society we want to live in. The market empowers individuals, it allows people to choose their own path, to maximise their own opportunities and take responsibility for their choices.
But the old left didn’t die, it simply changed clothes. It does not accept this second premise.
Those who want to ‘nudge’ you in the right direction have one thing in common with the old left – they see society as a single organism, almost absent of individuals, and something that requires management.
To the ‘nudgists’, it is irrelevant that most people do not over-indulge in Big Macs or alcopops, or who use our roads because they need to get to work or pick up the kids from school. Individuals still do not matter as much as the collective.
If it is necessary to tax every Big Mac to stop a few extra being eaten, to tax every Jim Beam and Coke, to ensure a minority do not over-indulge, that is a price we apparently all must pay.
Well that is not the way liberals see our society. We see society as important, but we value the individuals who comprise it and their freedom to choose.
We do not see society as requiring management, we do not believe that there is some nirvana that this monolithic ‘society’ must reach.
Finally, we must ask ourselves, how many of these so-called nudge taxes are being introduced to cover up the failures of our Labor Governments to build new roads, to manage our public health system effectively or to guarantee safety on our streets. But that is a whole other speech.
Briefly moving to the last element of your topic for this convention, how do we win the hearts and minds of the Australians? How do we take advantage of this new trend of the left?
Well this nudge tax philosophy will result in a massive increase in the size and scope of government. It can underpin virtually anything a government or it ‘experts’ can decide is in society’s interest.
I am not talking here about abstract debates about industry or competition policy.
This philosophy means the government is at the supermarket and bottle shop with you and in your fridge, taxing you more on some foods than on others.
Almost any of the personal choices we make can be linked back to a cost that might someday be borne by the health system.
It will lead to you having to take into account a new congestion tax when you want to travel, even go out on a Saturday night.
To take advantage of this we need to go back to our core principles – which involve rights and responsibilities.
We need to draw a line in the sand about the legitimate role of government.
If the government starts to use the power of taxation to increasingly govern very personal and individual choices, then it becomes much more difficult for us to mount our case that individuals must also take responsibility for their choices and behaviour.
Australians do not have the inherent distrust of government that we see in the United States – it was not part of the founding ethos of our nation.
But Australians do have a healthy cynicism, and it is this healthy cynicism that we must tap into when we highlight the impact of such proposals on the daily lives of Australians.
No-one will believe that a Big Mac tax will reduce obesity, just as the alcopop tax has not stopped a minority of young people drinking too much.
And we see now exactly that reaction regarding the ETS – Australians know Labor’s new tax will not change the climate in any way.
We must ensure Australians see such proposals for exactly what they are – a tax grab by a government desperate to increase revenue and meddling by self-declared experts who want greater influence over the lives of people they will probably never meet.
But this will also require us to restrain our own instincts. It is not as if the occasional impulse to nudge people in the right direction does not come from our own ranks. To have credibility on this issue we must not be tempted to use similar tools for our own purposes.
With the Henry Review coming out shortly and myriad government inquiries and working parties into issues like preventative health, I am sure we will have plenty of opportunities to make our case and opposition to such measures known over the coming year.
We should continually point out that all we seem to hear about are these new taxes – this is the common thread that runs through all these proposals. We never hear of offsets cutting other taxes, nor do we hear real proposals about government needing a nudge in the right direction itself.
A final word, addressing the point that I began with.
We cannot let the left adopt our language uncontested. If we do that, then we are disarming ourselves of a potent weapon in debate, and granting them one.
If the government increases spending and claims it will increase productivity with, for example, the uncosted, sans-business plan broadband network, we cannot let that claim go unanswered.
When they talk of charges, levies and price signals, we should simply refer to them as taxes – for that is what they are.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you this afternoon, and good luck for the remainder of your convention.