A New Conservative Party? Step forward ALP...

Interesting piece over at the Sydney Morning Herald website from the excellently named Steve BiddulPH. The Liberal Party set to tank as a result of a combination of peak oil, environmental catastrophe and the US economy disappearing off the radar - with the ALP replacing them as the party of conservatism and the Greens the official opposition. Sounds like a fantasy from Friends of the Earth, but there are some constraints on this outcome. The Libs will quickly attract support from those affected by what is obviously a looming economic crisis ("Whaddya mean I can't afford to drive my HSV Commodore!"). The Libs will be shamelessly populist from here on in. The ALP is very much a party of big business, but it is also an industrial party through it's trade union affiliations, as well as being a party of smooth operators, time serving logs, branch stackers and stackees and wild eyed idealists - more like a Peronist party than one with anything approaching an ideology (I mean, a party that can contain Bob Gould, Virginia Judge and Greg Combet is little more than a convenient electoral machine to start with). Could such a party morph into the party of a 'one-party state'? Possibly, but unlikely considering that Ivan Milat would stand a reasonable chance against Morris Iemma at the next state elections that are in...oh, 2010! Locally the Greens have been a very conservative influence on politics - hardly the radical leftists portrayed as the 'Watermelon' party by the Brethren. They are still not taken seriously by the mainstream despite being the only party that has consistently got it right on the issue that Biddulph points out will be THE issue over the next three years, the environment. These will be interesting times indeed. Biddulph ponders what happened to the 'economic miracle' touted by those two hucksters Howard and Costello. For my money he's pretty much nailed it:

We pissed it all away on tax giveaways and consumer goods. On bloated homes that we will not be able to cool or heat, or sell, and cars we won't be able to afford to drive. A party based on self interest may evaporate along with our rivers and lakes, and have no role to play in a world where we co-operate or die.

Given the track record of the Australian media in conveying important messages to an increasingly jaded and cynical populace - and from my experience of Australian supermarket queues - If Biddulph is right then I think our society is probably going to die. "This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper" - T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland