Australian progressives tend to have a love-hate relationship with Senator David Leyonhjelm, a “purist libertarian” who won his Senate race thanks to enviable luck and the psephological equivalent of a fake moustache. He strongly supports marriage equality and introduced a private members’ bill to legalise it last month.

He also opposes Medicare, the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, public schools and many other central progressive projects.

Because we don’t have a tradition of libertarianism in Australia, this can be challenging to understand. To the left, he is by turns a champion of social freedom and a villain who would destroy the social programmes we hold so dear. But his policy preferences track very closely to his fundamental world view, and once you’ve taken a good look, it’s much easier to predict his reactions to the issues of the day.



This morning Leyonhjelm came out in favour of a “send in more firearms” approach to reducing gun violence in the wake of Sydney’s tragic and deadly siege. His call for debate about “practical self-defence” packs a lot of his personal commitments into a very small space.

The stated reason for supporting gun reform was:



What happened in that cafe would have been most unlikely to have occurred in Florida, Texas, or Vermont, or Alaska in America, or perhaps even Switzerland as well.

That is: if we had more guns, the world would be a safer place. If we take Leyonhjelm at his word here, all we’d need to do to change his mind is demonstrate that his conclusion is dodgy.

Opposition leader Bill Shorten took this approach to rebutting the Senator: “Our rate of gun deaths for the same population proportionately is far less [than America] and I do not see how putting more guns into the community makes us safer,” said Shorten on ABC’s AM programme.

Case closed, right? Studies were done: gun control works. So when can we expect Leyonhjelm to retract this statement? Well, probably never, because utility isn’t really the issue. The Liberal Democratic party’s (LDP) position on firearms reads:



The LDP regards the right to own firearms for sport, hunting, collecting and self-defence as fundamental to a free society, irrespective of how many choose to do so. It does not believe governments have a general right to limit the ownership of firearms.

This is what distinguishes someone who’s mistaken on a point of fact, as Leyonhjelm appears to be, from a true gun nut. The LDP holds an American-style belief in gun rights, based on proceduralism and inalienability rather than concern with the public good. If they are properly committed to this principle, there is no massacre, no siege and no amount of gun violence capable of changing, in their estimation, the fact that people are always entitled to guns.

Public opinion in Australia has little room for this kind of fundamentalism, and rightly so. Presumably Leyonhjelm is aware of this, which may be why he chose to wrap the iron fist of his gun fanaticism in the velvet glove of an appeal to safety. But LDP policies are all built on a hardline rights-based philosophy in which material consequences – people’s actual lives – are more or less irrelevant.

For most of us, the social contract is a relational arrangement that’s supposed to benefit everyone and make sure we all live decent lives. This involves freedoms, yes, but also entitlements and responsibilities. Leyonhjelm sums up the entire concern of his libertarianism when he says, “I never liked being told what to do, and I tend to assume others feel the same.”

Take the LDP’s position on climate change:



Whether or not the world is getting warmer, and whether humans are contributing, there is no justification for government intervention in the economy.

Most of us are aware that the government “interferes” in the economy all the time, except we refer to it using the less negative-sounding term “economic management”, because we don’t think it’s bad. But that’s the LDP’s policy on climate change: do nothing, no matter how many people suffer.

According to a poll released in July, 63% of Australians believe the government should be taking an international leadership role in reducing carbon emissions, placing the LDP well outside the mainstream again. Never mind that environmental concerns in general throw up some damning obstacles to the libertarian worldview.



Of course the state, like all human institutions, isn’t perfect. Governments do abuse their powers, they do create and sustain inequality, and they do enact structural discrimination against minority groups. That creates a powerful duty for all of us to be active and engaged as citizens, to try to create a state whose policies reflect what we actually care about.

By valuing their questionable conception of freedom above things like gun control, which we know saves lives, Leyonhjelm and the LDP reveal themselves to be at odds with the common view of a moral and functioning society.