opinios

Doubletriplespeak

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that politically I am most definitely firmly southpaw. It's not that I am hell bent on one particular party or ideal, just that when you sum up everything that I hold to be important, apparently it turns out that I come out a leftie.

Personally I believe that there are so many issues in politics that it is unfair to classify someone as being a "leftie" or a "rightie", but surveys like this confirm that indeed that is where I seem to lie (right next to Ghandi!) Apparently because I believe that the following are things that are important - health care, education, environment, community support, compassion for one's fellow human beings - then that is where I sit on the spectrum. So be it.

For some reason there is sometimes a stigma associated with holding beliefs like this. I have been labelled "communist" during conversations held in the office of a previous employer (the last time I bring up politics around the water cooler!) Naturally this I took offence to. I have also been labelled "unpatriotic" for suggesting ideas such as Australia's immigration policy is messed up. But that is another story.

My point, even though I do not in principle support conservative governments, is that it is time for conservatives around the world to take back the word "conservative".

Before I ever started educating myself about even the basics of politics, I could never understand why essentially right-wing parties who place the health of a nation's economy above everything else, were labelled as being "conservative". I stupidly took this word for its more regular meaning of "moderate" or "cautious". It seemed to me that these parties' viewpoints were far from the middle-road.

Silly me!

My well-read friend Andrew explained to me how the word relates to those who favour traditional views and values. That is, those who tend to oppose change.

If that is the case, then the conservative governments of today are letting their teams down. President Bush and his trigger happy policies towards foreign affairs is causing more change than any progressive Democrat government could ever dream of. The long-serving Howard government of Australia is a party to this in providing the assistance it does. The world is indeed changing, but it aint for the better.

Saddam is gone, and on the surface Iraq may seem to be on track to stability. But one gets the feeling that things haven't finished in the region. Attitudes towards the West certainly haven't improved as a result. There are probably 10 times more 9/11 plots being formulated than there would have been if we hadn't had the Iraq war.

And these problems overseas are convenient distractions for the problems back home. The divide between rich and poor is growing and everyone seems to be pretending otherwise.

To me a conservative approach to investigating whether a country possesses weapons of mass distraction is to wait. Wait until someone finds something. The decision to go to war should be one that is a huge deviation from the general consensus, not the conservative opinion.

So, where do we start with the word "Liberal" then...?