Common sense, Everald. Yes, and it starts and ends with cooperative capitalism, i.e., co-ops that ensure all the profits and tax liabilities remain here whereby the usual flow on economic factors allow one dollar to do the work of seven.

Being conservative does not mean we need to sell the country to foreigners but privatize via cooperative capitalism and the most efficient and productive private enterprise, free market, business model the world is yet to find or better/may never will.

Foreign investors yes, but that doesn't also mean foreign ownership and control. Let them come and compete with all the local banks and money lenders.

In a co-op the owners are the self-employed workforce, and set their own affordable wage outcomes, and never need or want union involvement.

For all the above outlined reasons, co-ops were the only private enterprise business model to survive the Great Depression, largely intact.

True conservatives are fiscally conservative and socially progressive as evoked by the Master himself in the good Samaritan parable/the, do unto others, golden rule.

A man may own all the gold in the world but leaves with only that he came with. Hording wealth is a zero-sum game.

Money needs to be regarded as a tool to get desirable outcomes/get things done.
Alan B.

I cannot say that I have ever come into contact with this 'Christian right' that people talk about. Nor do I agree that there are any 'independents' occupying a conservative centre (what conservative centre?). And, Everald's "valued friend, Tony Windsor" is not a person who covered himself in glory, by any means. Very much despised, I would have thought.

I did like Everald's list of values, but then he shot himself in the foot by using the word 'fascist'.

What to do - I do not count myself as a traditional conservative and no political party represents my views either.

At least the author feels represented by some independent member - myself and most Australians, so I believe, do not have even that!

Everald has a feel good list of Conservative values, straight out of the 19th century Protestant handbook. Of course those who believed in those "values", were the very ones who unfairly subjugated and exploited the mass of poor for their own benefit, with the promise that; "You will receive your reward in the next life". You cannot be a conservative and a progressive at the same time, they are diametrically opposed concepts, they cannot coexist within one, when I am progressive, I am progressive, when I am conservative I am conservative, I'm never "progconsive" it don't exist. No one is completely one or the other.

I'm never "progconsive"
Paul1405,
The hypocrisy in your posts suggests you are exactly that !

Dear Paul,

It makes no sense to speak of "conservative" or "progressive" values because it all depends on what exactly you like to conserve, from which age and what location, then on where exactly you like to go from here and now.

To further complicate the situation, one may like to conserve certain aspects and simultaneously change other aspects of life.