Dr Waleed Aly of Monash University impressively argues in his current Australian Quarterly Essay that conservative parties have backed themselves into a corner by embracing free-market extremism, and that an illiberal social policy, combined with a free-market economics, offers little hope for Australia.
This is precisely the policy territory inhabited by the Australian Coalition Parties, and begs the question, given the preponderance of Catholics in their senior ranks, as to whether the philosophy of the Coalition can accommodate a Catholic emphasis on social justice.
In general Aly's argument, that a reactionary brand of politics is unlikely to work because a better educated public opinion is swiftly leaving it behind, particularly on questions of global warming and the GFC, is to be welcomed. Aly's may be a clear — even a necessary — argument, but it is not an original one.
Political scientists have long been acquainted with Lipset's typology of the Radical Right, in which he and his confreres, Daniel Bell and Theodore Adorno, make crystalline the proposition that a Catholic politics is a politics of the centre, opposed to both collectivism and capitalism.
Does Aly's contribution to a much-needed new conservative policy discourse offer hope for those wedded to the resuscitation of an Australian political Catholicism, or does his analysis mark a radical incompatibility between the positions of a Liberal leader and the fundamental claims of the Catholic social justice tradition?
To answer this question is not only to depart from the depictions and continua of the right and left but also to engage in a kind of Socratic critique of Catholic Social Teaching to establish where it sits on some of the abiding socio-economic questions of the 21st century, such as women's and homosexual rights, global warming, the ubiquitous intrusion of the free-market into everyday life, the predicament of refugees and Indigenous people and a host of other complex imponderables manifestly unaddressed by Catholic Social Teaching alongside its standard contributions to the discourse of justice and peace.
Thus, the problem with conservative politics may not simply be semantic, reflecting an inability to comprehend Aly's distinction between 'conservative' and 'neoliberal', 'right' and 'left'; it may simply be that a familiarity with Catholic Social Teaching is inadequate on its own to inform a contemporary Catholic political consciousness, thus accounting for a disparity of policy positions between the likes of an Abbott and a Blair.
Indeed, with so many of Labor's policies being unashamedly neo-liberal,