unrg:

The left should support Katter’s Australian Party. It’s got a hard-line position on coal seam gas. It’s against economic rationalism. It’s deeply concerned about the state of our hospitals. It’s opposed to further privatisation. Currently, the Australian Party is seeking to contest upcoming Australian elections. It is opposed to the Tea Party on most economic matters. It also differs from the One Nation Party in that it has an active economic agenda (conservative, anti-free market policies; and support for collective bargaining).

[KAP] is also a non-racist party, and it actively supports egalitarian policies for Indigenous Australians. The party (mostly) does not actively pursue socially conservative policies. Have a look on the website and you’ll see most of the issues aren’t social ones, they’re economic. Although social conservatism is usually associated with issues such as abortion, the party doesn’t have a position on this (or most solely social policy issues): that’s a matter of social conscience for individual party members.

I would be quite glad if the Australian left and conservatives finally made things formal and consummated their closeted relationship. It could free up the notional liberals and libertarians in the ALP and the Liberal Party to do the same. In due course—surrounded only by their ilk—they’d hopefully become more consistent in their liberalism.

I think it’d be a welcome structural realignment in Australian politics. The present division between those who support intervention in labour markets and those who do not (or profess not to) will, however, be unlikely to fade until labour markets are finally lastingly deregulated.

Yet I would still be kinda happy to see some conservatives and lefties get the ball rolling now. It mightn’t be all positive news of course. I have always uneasily imagined what the Greens and the One Nation Party could have done to suppress immigration into Australia if they had been willing to work together on the issue to influence Coalition policy in the late 1990s. But I think a realignment could favourably straighten out Australian politics somewhat, and in doing so could help loosen the shackles on liberalism and bring it closer to the fore.

I imagine most people who are foolish enough to vote don’t think of their binary political choice as a question of “Should or shouldn’t the state intervene in labour markets?” Rather, to the limited extent you might assume rational justification for votes cast, it’s more a question of “Should or shouldn’t the state intervene.”* And yet our political parties remain in a graceless maintenance of the former rather than the latter divide, uncomfortably swatting other differences aside and pretending everything makes sense and could simply not be otherwise.

(In New South Wales alone you can find Michael Costa, the Hayekian former Labor Treasurer of the state, and Tony Abbott, the crypto-protectionist Liberal Federal Opposition Leader. More broadly, you can find the Federal ALP beginning a string of national public asset privatizations in the 1980s after a Liberal PM famously refused to, as well as state Liberal Parties opposing the privatisation of electricity assets. Yet, in terms of campaigning on labour market deregulation, you almost always find politicians falling properly into party lines.)

A liberal-libertarian to left-conservative split would better reflect the present loose split in political outlooks. I say this despite my dislike of the binarity of étatisme, and as much as I think such a split would benefit the left and conservatives in both the short and medium run.

As for this author’s bunk claim that KAP won’t be conservative on social issues due to conscience votes, I think this piece says a lot. It’s Katter’s party: there ain’t nothing else about it. As you see liberal apologists for conservative policies in the Liberal Party transform like a hawke into conservatives, if the KAP has any real electoral success (which is improbable) I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same happen to its social noninterventionists. Trivial power can be a strange thing.

*This is incredibly generous. It’s more truly a question of which party is offering the “better” set of interventions. But in mythology at least, that is the publicly-presented image of the question voters are asked.

(Original article via The Blix Report).