Conservatism in Australia isn’t AWOL, but instead flourishing quietly

In a recent Flat White item, Where is Australia’s conservative intellectual movement?, Jonathan Cole and Simon Kennedy argued that Australia, in contrast to both Britain and United States, does not have (and indeed has ‘never seen’) ‘a robust and energetic’ community of conservative thinkers. Instead, we have ‘eccentric and maverick right-wing commentators’ who tend to ‘carp and pillory from the sidelines’. This, the authors suggested, is a recipe for continued irrelevance. If conservatives are to shape our future, if they are to build both influence and supporters, they must, we were told, ‘win the hearts and minds’ of the next generation ‘reared in the world of ideas.’