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Kasz216 on 08 September 2010
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FaRmLaNd said:
Kasz216 said:
FaRmLaNd said:

To be fair, Australia didn't go into recession and our banking system didn't go kaput during the gfc. Furthermore our government had no debt before the recessions and will be out of it within a few years thanks to the huge revenues that our mining industry is generating (we're going through a mining boom atm).

Hey i'm not judging Australia.  Well outside the ridiciulious overcensorship.

A lot of what it actually does may be beneficial and partly why.  Though a lot of people just do see conservative = bad.

A government not having debt is also a Conservative position though.  One that American conservatives had forgotten in the past... oh 2 decades.

Oh I know you're not, criticism when valid is a good thing and in many areas you're criticisms are valid. The Australian government has moved more to the right in recent decades and it was a trend that was started by the traditionally left leaning Labor governments during the 80's and 90's. Where they began privatising many industries, they floated the dollar, lots of things really.

The thing is, in practice Australia is a very open society,thats democratic, seperates the powers of goverments and is secular. You can look at specific issues of legislation and say thats bad, and I'll probably agree with you and many of the issues you've raised I agree with. But that doesn't change the fact that we certainly aren't an authoratarian country. In fact we rate very well in almost all the scales that judges democracy, ecenomic freedom, quality of living, life expectancy etc.

BTW consertavism doesn't make sense to me. But this is more an issue of semantics on my behalf. What does conservative really mean? Does it mean resistence to change? Or right wing government? or a mix of both? I don't think a call to tradition is an adequate reason to keep anything to way it is. If something is worthy of staying the way it is, you should be able to make the case without such a call to traditon.

 

As for me... I consider conservative, right wing policies, laws and instutionalized attitude.   Because it's not like rightwingers don't want to change anything, they want to change alot... and not all of it is stuff that used to exist.  Like people in the US who are for a straight flat tax.  Not sure that ever existed.

 

Also, might I add... Rupert Murdoch came from Australia.  Which means Fox News is really all Australia's fault!