Peace and Prosperity

Congratulations to John Madigan, the newly elected DLP Senator from Victoria. His party is not exactly the DLP of old, but it is the nearest and the most successful attempt to keep the flame burning. Now burning in the Federal Parliament, in fact. Roll on electoral reform in Britain.

I have been asked why I am so keen on the old DLP, considering that it supported the Vietnam War. My answer to that one is that, while there might not have been any existential threat to Australia from a Communist takeover of Indo-China, there might have been such a threat, whereas there was certainly none to America, just as there would have been none to Britain. Faced with that possibility alongside the huge power of Communists and fellow-travellers in and around Australia's unions and universities, the DLP's attitude becomes at least understandable and even excusable.

Leaving aside Andrew Wilkie, who for all his other faults at least had the wit and the courage to resign as an intelligence officer in protest at the lying of his country into war in Iraq, there are three Independents to whom attention now turns. All are former National Party members. Bob Katter is a pro-life and pro-family Catholic (of Lebanese extraction, in fact), whose father, predecessor and namesake was part of the ALP secession to the DLP before joining the Nationals, which his son has since left in order to pursue with dazzling electoral success his combination of protectionist agrarian socialism, moral and social conservatism, and climate change scepticism.

Tony Windsor is in similar vein, although with less economic leftishness, and in 2004 he alleged that he had been offered a diplomatic post by the Nationals in order to remove him from what was formerly one of their safe seat; there is no love lost between him and his former party. Rob Oakeshott is a social liberal and an anti-monarchist, so that one does have to ask why he was ever a National, and a very active one at that, in the first place.

All three therefore have at least as much Labor as Liberal-National potential. But how open is the ALP to a pro-life and pro-family Catholic, a morally and socially conservative agrarian socialist who is sceptical at least about the sorts of measures advocated by climate change hysterics? How open is the ALP to Bob Santamaria's Five Primacies: the integrity of human life, support for the family unit, decentralism, economic and wider patriotism, and Christian values? At least two seats in the House of Representatives, and at least one seat in the Senate, may now be available. Depending on the ALP's answers to those questions. If it had had better answers to them, then there might not have been a hung Parliament to begin with.