Yesterday at the National Press Club, Guardian Australia political editor Lenore Taylor asked Tony Abbott a question about the widely-perceived unfairness of his budget measures, and how he planned to get them through the Senate. In answering it, Abbott gave an important insight into the conservative mind.

He said that if the Senate refused to pass his planned cuts to social security, education, health, the public service, and public broadcasters, it would constitute “intergenerational theft”. Moreover, Australia has been “self-indulgent as a nation”, and “it’s the mission of this government to address that”.



While elsewhere in his remarks he claimed the legitimacy of popular election in the face of those colleagues who would replace him, we can see from his response that for Abbott government is not strictly carried out by or for the people. Its most important task is holding the undisciplined appetites of the people in check.



If there is theft occurring, Abbott’s policy proposals show that he believes the culprits are the poor, the sick, and the old. “Price signals” in healthcare, arbitrary cut-offs for the withdrawal of benefits, and increasing student debt are a means of restoring popular discipline and guiding erratic or irrational citizens towards wise choices. Governing on this view is tantamount to ruling. Above all it must inculcate responsibility in those whose misfortune only demonstrates the extent to which they lack it.



This is an article of faith for contemporary conservative leaders around the world, though they have to try to avoid spelling it out. When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was caught on tape in 2012 railing against those “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”, he became a living demonstration of the danger of making these beliefs too explicit.

This didn’t stop Joe Hockey, a slow learner, from dividing us into “lifters and leaners” as he prepared for the 2014 budget. The idea that the poor are parasitic on the rich is integral to the morality of the contemporary right, and the source of all its antidemocratic indignation.



Ideological warriors in the media and conservative intellectuals can afford to be more candid than politicians. After the weekend, in response to Queensland tossing a first-term austerity government, the right’s hatred of democracy revealed itself in a kind of generalised panic about the future prospects of what the political establishment euphemises as “reform”. A chorus of pundits sought to indict the voters for their selfishness, cowardice and stupidity.



Business Council of Australia chairman Tony Shepherd told the Australian Financial Review that “the philosophy of tax, spend and borrow is being rewarded”, because “Australians only let governments respond when we are close to catastrophe”. The Fin’s editorial writer lamented the “complacency” of an electorate that treated “politics as infotainment” in sending the country down a “Greece-lite path”. Melbourne talkback titan Neil Mitchell tweeted that the election rendered Australia “ungovernable. Nobody will be willing to make tough decisions”. CQU vice-chancellor Scott Bowman wrote that the succession of short-lived governments in recent years meant voters were “sabotaging the integrity of our political system”. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Sheehan claimed that the high turnover of governments and leaders showed that social media was “ giving society a collective attention deficit disorder”.



The mood was even darker at The Australian. Political editor Dennis Shanahan said that voters have rejected “governments attempting austerity and debt reduction” because they are “in denial”. Greg Sheridan wondered if “any kind of sensible fiscal reform is for the moment beyond the Australian electorate”, and brooded over the “decline of our political culture into an abyss of disastrous populism”. Paul Kelly claimed that the Labor victory revealed the “dysfunctional crisis plaguing Australia’s political system is deepening with the potential cost to the nation only becoming more severe”. The paper’s snarky “Cut and Paste” column was uncharacteristically bleak, reacting to an orderly transition in representative government with the headline: “Nihilism becomes the new normal in politics, and voters get pleasure from inflicting pain”. Nick Cater suggested on Tuesday that a sheeplike electorate had been misled by the “insidious” influence of psychologically damaged Abbott critics who “run in a pack and tweet in flocks”.

This apocalyptic, antidemocratic mood swept up many who would otherwise be at pains to distance themselves from capital-C conservatism. Arch-neoliberal Adam Creighton, who has made a habit of calling time on democracy opined that the voters’ stupidity had led them to give the wrong answer:

Adam Creighton (@Adam_Creighton) Whatever outcome in #qldvotes, scary harbinger of Australia's decline. Economic literacy dwindling at the time we need it most #ignorance.

Troy Bramston, ostensibly a Labor voice in the Australian’s editorial pages, wrote that the victory of his own party demonstrated that “oppositions and minor parties are being rewarded for running populist campaigns and promulgating policies with little credibility”. Even Laura Tingle, who some would like to claim for the liberal left, worried that “voters have had enough of political rhetoric about reform and change, and … both sides of politics back away from ambitious reform as a result”.



This extraordinary outpouring of contempt for the voting public is not simply a fit of rightwing pique. Rather, we can see that conservatives and a broader swathe of the political elite revealing some of their basic assumptions when put under pressure. To argue that democracy fails when it resists the imposition of fiscal austerity is simply to argue for our permanent subjection to the rule of property.

To equate the repeated rejection of ideological policy prescriptions with nihilism, populist insurrection, sadism and stupidity, or to say, as Tony Abbott did yesterday, that voters have elected new governments in a state of “absent-mindedness” strongly suggests a view that popular election is illegitimate when it returns the wrong result. In short, it shows how they think that we, individually and collectively, are not competent do determine our own interests, or the kind of community we want to live in. And this necessarily calls into question our right to make these decisions.



The howl of pundits and politicians who equate democracy with disorder reveals how deeply estranged they are from the rest of us. The indicator of crisis is not voters sacking first-term governments who lied about their true intentions, but that these decisions are received with incomprehension and contempt by those who are supposed to represent us and safeguard our interests. In Queensland, Labor’s return indicates that the public wants an economy that is fair, and for the government to preserve the public things they have repeatedly said they want retained. But to understand that would require a level of commitment to democracy that many of our would-be rulers seem unable to make.