It's no secret that, as Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party were looking around for ways to organize themselves in opposiiton in order to become the government they are today, they went to Australia and John Howard's Liberal Party. (Despite its name, Australia's Liberal Party is, essentially, a conservative party.) Howard had found long electoral success in Australia and Harper advisor Patrick Muttart drew on Howard's example as he and others crafted the strategic and policy ideas that would help Harper win in 2006 and govern beyond that.
In 2003, University of Sydney anthropologist Ghassan Hage published a critique of Howard's Australia, arguing, as one reviewer noted:
“The radical neo-liberal Howard Government engages in a highly unethical practice of social and ideological exclusionism. This socio-economic, cultural and ethnic 'othering' increases the membership of marginalised people in our community, while further disempowering and delimiting the opportunities of hope for those traditionally marginalised by society. Hage's paranoid nationalists are the chronically underemployed or unemployed, the poor, the 'no-hopers produced by transcendental capitalism and the policies of neo-liberal government' “
Hage, in the foreword to Against paranoid nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society (2003), then suggests that the opposite of Howard's approach is something he calls “The Caring Society”. Here's a snapshot of the section (Google Books doesn't let you copy so I've taken a screen grab of what Google Books displays.)
Now: Why is all this important?
This weekend, the Liberal Party of Canada is hosting a three-day 'thinkers conference“. Experts from a variety of political and professional backgrounds are addressing delegates — including leader Michael Ignatieff — as it tries to come upon some ideas which it might use in a future election platform.
This morning, the conference heard from David Dodge, the former governor of the Bank of Canada and a former deputy minister at the Department of Finance. Dodge's speech was notable for several reasons but I noticed that he used the phrase “the caring society” more than once. In his view, a broad range of policy initiatives — employment insurance reform, fiscal measures, pension reform and so on — ought to be brought to bear to improve the country's productivity becuase, in doing that, the Canada of the next two decades will be able to afford to pay for the care of an increasing number of retired persons, the sick and so on.
“However politically difficult to put in place, these and other structural policies will be key to raising productivity and enhance incomes and government revenues to cover the increased costs of a caring society. The question of how do we care becomes moot if we do not have the income and wealth that allows us to collectively care at all,” Dodge said.
So if the Canadian Liberal Party is casting about for some idea it can take into battle against a Conservative Party inspired by Australia's Liberal Party, perhaps it could look to the concept, defined by Hage and others here in Canada, and articulated today by Dodge of “The Caring Society”. If the Liberals of the 1960s championed Pierre Trudeau's vision of “The Just Society”, perhaps Liberals may consider linking their policy ideas around the theme of “The Caring Society.”