Conservatives are no longer losing the culture wars.(Politics)

A conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"

--William F. Buckley Jr, 1955

THANKS FOR YOUR warm welcome. And thank you Frank Devine for your wonderful introduction. Frank, like so many people in this room tonight, plays an important role in my story of the cultural sea change in Australia during the past decade. As a former editor and as a long-time columnist for the Australian, Frank has fought the good fights and helped dramatically improve the public culture in this country. More power to you, Frank.

It's great to be here in front of so many conservatives. Some might think it quite a contrast to my day job. To be a conservative in the journalism profession is a bit like how US presidential candidate Mitt Romney describes what it's like to be a Republican in the liberal state of Massachusetts: you're a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention. At least until recent times (say, the last five or so years), you were isolated in the newsroom; you were condemned for not conforming to the smelly orthodoxies of political correctness; and your political insights were treated not as a contentious contribution to the editorial conference, but as a flat earther's fit of extremist nonsense. There wasn't their opinion and your opinion; there was their opinion ... and you're insane!

I'll never forget my first week of work in Australian journalism nearly a decade ago. I started work at the Australian Financial Review at the height of the waterfront dispute in March-April 1998. My editor called me into his office on the morning that Chris Corrigan and Patrick Stevedores sacked the Maritime Union workers, and instructed me what our editorial line would be, which was along the following lines: "This is a great day for Australian capitalism; at long last, Australia is reaching a big bang end-game in its decades-long quest to remove the shame on its waterfront."

After writing my first draft of the next day's editorial for the editor, I then walked around the floor to meet my new colleagues. They were clearly concerned about the docks dispute unfolding outside our Darling Park office windows. One disturbed journalist asked me: "Comrade, how do you think we are going in the war out there on the waterfront?"

Now, the "comrade" talk naturally astonished me; I had, after all, just returned from Washington, where I had spent three years working at the American Enterprise Institute, and I could never imagine calling my colleagues John Bolton or Jeane Kirkpatrick "comrade", lest they confuse me with some Sandinista! Leaving that aside, I still assumed that my new work friends meant we in the sense that we were on message with the company line. So keen to assimilate into my new workplace, I thus plagiarised the editor's refrain: "This is a great day for Australian capitalism!"