Requisite variety

Wednesday, 31st March 2010

Quarterly Essay 37: What’s Right? The Future Of Conservatism In Australia
by Waleed Aly
Black Inc, $19.95,
pp. 144, ISBN 9781863954662

On social issues, if anyone can show how he gets from Hayek to ‘G-strings for five-year-olds’, please send a note. He completely ignores relatively conservative voices, including Australia’s Melinda Tankard-Reist, on the sexualisation of children, and the sections on multiculturalism, which looked to be promising given that Aly is an advocate for Muslim affairs, read instead as ‘spin’. I switched off and you can too.

Further, like most voters, I know little about climate science. I do not like the idea of a ‘great big tax on everything’ but I also wrote for this magazine on how winning, conservative approaches to the natural world can attenuate enthusiasm for Green policies. Compared with Aly, however, I am a model of agnosticism. Certainly, he is content to paper over damaging errors in the fourth IPCC Report. He does not mention the Climategate emails. It is as though these sections were written months ago and never updated.

So too, his analysis of the current state of the conservative parties in Australia and the US. Those already dated sections add little value.

Finally, Aly deploys a familiar progressive paradigm, a ‘world radically and irreversibly changed’, to close off any future victory for conservative forces.

To predict the future of conservatism, however, we might look instead to cybernetics. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety, in a common sense paraphrase, tells us more than Aly’s entire essay: ‘The most flexible element in a system will control that system.’ Conservatism is sound.

John Heard is a Melbourne writer.