No Country for Tired Ideas

An excerpt from an upcoming article for ETC. on "Working Families: Who Are You? The General Semantics of the Rudd Labor Government."
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When Mr. Rudd mentions his commitment to "fiscal conservatism", we find ourselves drowning in a semantic ocean, with the droplets that fall into it represented by two undercurrents of mainstream political economic thought. During the previous election campaign, the estimates of the Labor Party's proposed spending was a number significantly less than the Liberal Party. A cleverly (if not deliberate) tactic to confuse the referential index of voters, which equate "fiscal conservatism" with free-market oriented policies, a balanced budget and tax cuts, etc. By the same virtue, "fiscal conservatism" could also mark back to a time when of Social Democratic-Liberal consensus that allowed for broad, interventionist economic strategies; a policy enacted during the tenure of our longest serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies. This economic policy let him and his successors from the Liberal Party to rule continuously from 1949 to 1972 (Splits in the Labor Party and the tarring of the ALP with the "communist" stick by opponents notwithstanding).

The point that Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan attempt to convey is that "fiscal conservatism" "is" responsible, job-friendly, growth-oriented, etc. while distancing the term from being identified as or associated with "economic rationalism" (a term equivalent to "Reaganomics" or "monetarism", used heavily in the 1980s) which can be viewed as "radical" or "unsafe", etc. or, if one was to see it through a two-valued orientation, "not conservative."