Source : Toronto Star

As an Australian, I watch with deep alarm the prospect of Canadians electing a Conservative majority government.

Most commentators point out that a tired, complacent and corrupt Liberal party is losing government, rather than the Conservatives coming to power with a declared agenda Canadians will be voting for. But they are not assisting Canadians in understanding what is at stake.

I propose that what is at stake is the entire value orientation and tonality of Canadian political and institutional life. It is no accident that the Conservative party is being advised by the conservative Australian Liberal party machine that has honed a winning electoral strategy.

The Australian Liberal party came to power federally in 1996, after 13 years of Labour party rule, and are still in power.

The Liberal national government has profoundly changed not just the political culture of Australia but its entire institutional order. The change has been revolutionary in relation to established traditions of Australian politics and state action.

The Whitlam government came to power in Australia in 1971 and undertook a nation-building exercise that was oriented in democratic constitutionalism.

The Hawke-Keating Labour government (1983-1996) built on this legacy. John Howard led the Liberal party to victory in 1996 - another occasion when an old, tired government lost power, rather than its antagonist winning power with a declared agenda.

Howard's quiet agenda was shaped by a deep antagonism to the new person-centred democratic constitutionalism, as well as by an old anti-union and pro-employer disposition. Howard has proved to be an experienced and effective politician, who consolidated his hold on power and then proceeded to peel off layer after layer of policies dedicated to the undoing of the Australia that Labour had built.

Let me provide some detail here. The Howard administration has declared on a number of occasions that it does not have to subscribe to human rights because "Australian values" are adequate to the task.

Apparently, Australian character is inherently oriented to "a fair go" and to the sense of (male) community that the tradition of "mateship" stands for.

So the government has opposed the idea that it should be held accountable to the United Nations agencies responsible for the articulation of the international law of human rights for its treatment of asylum seekers in detention camps run by private, American-owned prisons.

The Howard government also undid all that had been achieved on behalf of "reconciliation" between settlers and aboriginal Australia.

The Liberal administration has used the power of the public purse to erode the capacity of intellectuals in all the institutions of public culture (the Australian Broadcasting Commission; the universities; publicly subsidized arts; the range of peak bodies responsible for advocacy on behalf of people with disability, immigrants, etc.) to contribute to an open public debate about Australian society and where it is going.

Publicly funded, community-based organizations such as immigrant and refugee rights groups have been told that they will not get funding if they criticize government policy, at the very time when such policy is reducing state action on behalf of human rights and social justice.

The Howard government has championed the idea of parliamentary sovereignty against the notion of so-called judicial activism and thereby contributed to the idea that the judiciary should be political, rather than independent.

By doing so, the government has eroded the idea of the rule of law (where Parliament is subject to the law).

More recently, after being elected for a fourth term, and controlling for the first time the upper house of the Australian parliament, Howard proceeded to undo the presence of trade unions in Australian institutional life and to reinstate a relatively unqualified employer prerogative within the workplace; this is the nature of the new Industrial Relations Law passed in December 2005.

The Howard government has spawned an Australia that is inward-looking rather than internationalist, paranoid rather than confident, complacently parochial rather than oriented to openness and learning.

It has corrupted public institutions - the bureaucracy, publicly funded agencies responsible for service delivery, and the public bodies charged with oversight of research and development - by demanding that they serve a radical ideological agenda of the government of the day rather than sustain their traditions of independent public service professionalism.

It has centralized power in a secretive and unaccountable style of executive government that is used to reward its followers and to make policies that favour big business.

It has done this by playing an electoral game of wedge politics and clever responsiveness to the hip pocket and "we are pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps" anxieties of the outer suburbs.

It has also known how to subtly and sometimes not so subtly tap the "dark side" of Australian nationalism.

It has produced an Australia that I no longer recognize as mine. I wonder whether many Canadians will feel about their country as I do about mine in a relatively short while.

Anna Yeatman is an Australian who teaches political science at the University of Alberta and is a tier one Canada Research Chair-Social Theory and Policy.

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