Why is Don Brash so intent on a centre-right electoral strategy that failed in Britain and Canada? At the moment, the New Zealand National Party is intent on attacking New Zealand's cultural diversity and political pluralism through the vapid catchphrase "political correctness." Oh, and "tax cuts." As Ross Wilson of the Council of Trade Unions and Brian Easton have already questioned Brash and Key's sums, I thought I might devote some time to serious examination of the unhealthy condition of New Zealand's largest centre-right political party. At the moment, only the most benighted National Party apparatchik would fail to concede that under the successive regimes of Bill English and Don Brash, the largest Opposition party has swung back to the retrograde social conservatism of the Muldoon era of the mid-seventies to mid-eighties. Under Brash's leadership, National has attacked civil unions, reproductive rights for pregnant teenage incest survivors, rational and evidence-based drug policy, and appointed a series of mediocre ideologues like Judith Collins and Richard Worth to shadow cabinet positions that are clearly far beyond their competence. So, if National can't win through rational political debate, it seems to have decided to resort to vapid cliches and popilist rabble-rousing in lieu of public policy instead. Witness its Orewa blip, and the current suspicious continuing absence of detail about its alleged "tax cuts." This isn't a sustainable strategy. National may think it is, but that's because social conservative party ideologues hijacked the party after Bill English, Nick Smith and Michelle Boag led the party to a traumatic election fiasco that was the Opposition's worst election defeat since its formation in the late thirties. After July 2002, the composition of the parliamentary party was severely distorted, and a silent coup turned it into an echo chamber for social conservative ideology at the cost of rational analysis. Despite hopes held for Don Brash, he has proven even worse than English in this regard. Moreover, has the National Party cuddled up to unrepresentative social conservative fringe groups because it 'worked' in the United States and Australia? Yes, but the US Republicans and Australian Liberals are to blame for that- they used their federal partisan power to create capacity-building opportunities for US and Australian fundamentalists, so that both are beneficiaries of constituency bloc voting. And did it work in the Australian context? True, the Howard regime has occupied Canberra's Commonwealth Government for nearly a decade, but the Australian Labor Party now govern all of Australia's states and territories. In cases where there were narrow state ALP majorities, recent state and territory elections have shored up those centre-left state governments. Furthermore, what happens when Howard goes, or the Liberals (sic) eventually lose federal power? However, it did not work for the British and Canadian Conservative Parties. In Britain, the Tories have been torn apart by factionalism over the last eight years, since John Major lost to Tony Blair in a Labour landslide, and vengeful social liberals undertook tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats that accentuated the scale of Tory defeats in 1997, 2002 and 2005. While the Major administration and William Hague and Ian Duncan-Smith's tenures as Leaders of the Opposition tried to harness fundamentalist social conservatives as a Tory constituency, they found that the latter was liable to alienate younger, female, immigrant and LGBT voters. Accordingly, when Michael Howard took over after the most recent Tory leadership coup, he decided to pursue a moderate course, and accept Blair's LGBT-affirmative social reforms. During the most recent British General Election, then, the Tories avoided attacking LGBT issues, although Britain's LGBT communities still feel ambivalent about the Tories. True, Michael Howard himself voted for the UK Civil Partnership Act, and didn't flip-flop over the issue, as Don Brash did. Moreover, he even acknowledged that the Thatcher-era Clause 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 served no rational purpose in the current context. However, there are still Thatcher era dinosaurs lurking in the undergrowth, ready to make ridiculous social conservative proclamations, and there are still social conservative time-servers in the parliamentary party. Still, Michael Howard's moderation did result in some gains against the Blair administration, weakened by opposition to Blair's Iraq War advocacy. In Canada, their Conservative Opposition has been wracked over its social conservative parliamentary loudmouths and infiltration and stacking of CPC party branches. Unlike US Republican fundamentalists, Canadian social conservatives tend to be from small, homogenous rural communities, and aren't used to mainstream Canadian multiculturalism and social diversity. Moreover, the Conservative Party of Canada itself is a patchwork, created through fusion of the Reform Party/Canadian Alliance social conservatives and the broadbased Progressive Conservatives, who had a social liberal contingent. Many Progressive Conservatives didn't like the hostile takeover in question, much less the new Conservative Party embrace of social conservatism. In 2004, their fears were borne out. Alberta-born Stephen Harper did nothing at all to restrain Canadian Christian Right threats to attack women's reproductive choice and same-sex marriage. Resultantly, what had looked like a certain federal election victory turned into a narrow electoral defeat. Worse still for the Canadian Tories, Eastern Canada rejected their pandering to unrepresentative social conservative fringe groups. And the trouble didn't end after their general election loss either. As the Martin Liberal minority government debated federal same-sex marriage legislation, Eastern Canadians were frightened away from the federal Conservative Party as they realised what its activists and some parliamentary federal MPs were like. As the debate proceeded, the Liberals started electoral resurgence, as the electorate turned against Harper and Conservative Party social conservative extremists. Needless to say, the social conservatives didn't care about costing their prospective vehicle support. All they wanted was seizure of power. So, what path might the National Party go down? During the nineties, Bolger and Shipley were pragmatic enough to realise that National needed to embrace pluralism and welcome social liberals into its governing circles, and that strategy worked for most of that decade. It failed when Winston Peters wandered into and out of an MMP coalition in the late nineties, and incumbency fatigue hit. Still, Shipley's own social liberalism saved the Nats from a debacle at the polls. Unfortunately, Bill English took over as Leader of the Opposition, and nearly destroyed his hapless party. For most of the current parliamentary term, the Opposition has trailed the Clark administration, apart from blips attributable to Treaty-bashing and phantom tax cuts promises. As for social conservatism, the general public isn't buying it. If they had, then United Future wouldn't be facing oblivion at the forthcoming general election, as it has done, ever since the general public realised that it was nothing more than a stealth fundamentalist political vehicle, after all. Civil unions are not a major election issue, and any attempt to make them so risks alienating younger and social liberal voters. The Nats need to stop raving about 'political correctness' and face facts. The general public aren't hardcore 'phobes insofar as relationship equality goes. It's interesting to recall that as soon as the Nats pandered to Destiny Church and hardcore antigay social conservatives after the Enough is Enough march in August 2004, their poll lead vanished. If Brian Tamaki decides that another antigay march is in order, watch the tax cut bubble pop. Are Canada or Britain really all that dissimilar to New Zealand? Craig Young - 25th July 2005