Yes - the giant move to the right. The Liberals are really partly clothed Republicans while Labor is a clouded Liberal Party.

So, I'm a radical which now must mean I'm anti-establishment and hopless out of touch with reality in need of re-education run by the thought-control police.

Perhaps one might ask - How did this all come about - was it all those middle class welfare recipients who now think they are well on their way to becoming millionaires not realising how they have imprisoned themselves in cloaks of respectibility but terrified of the next interest rate rise.

Yep, fundamentalism in politics is really taking over. The truth is that fundamentalism in history usually means a step backwards because people are gutless to take a true democratic step forward, these days frighteningly moving towards Heil - Heil - Heil.

It is interesting that today's right-wing politics still are again using 19th century terms like the freemarket economy, as well as economic rationalism, both terms as Adam Smith gave warning, only meaning freedom for the business entrepreneurs to break way for the growing acme of global trade, the ancient term Promised Land and the newer term neo-colonialism, only giving more freedom to our modern business and corporate racketeers.

And so we are getting an increasing record number of multi-billionaires, many of them joining the formerly evil gambling den mobsters, our dumb public still believing that with a system operating with fair-minded terms like freedom and rationalism under go, everything must be not too much a big con, but very hunky dory.

It is indeed interesting to observe that to be a social democrat is to be increasingly a radical. Andrew Scott, a brilliant writer on labour politics, pointed out that even the labor left now is just basically calling for a return to Keynesian macro-economic policy not much extra. What is even more interesting though is that the broader populations views remain largely social democratic in character (even in the US). This suggests that the main function of politics in Australia is to serve corporate power and any pragmatic appartchicks in the ALP know who they have to appease to win elections. The preferences of the population are not reflected in elections. That's what we call democracy.

Oh, by the way that's a great blog.

Very interesting article - however I believe that in common with political scientists in general the writer allows the main participants in our political sector the benefit of too much introspection. Our political leaders are poll driven, and in my view most moves in the political chess game derive from attempts to second guess the next poll rather than adhere to a considered political philosophy. Few political leaders today have a genuine commitment to a political philosophy - they simply join a party at a young age and stick with it through the laborious selective processes. The writer seems to discount the most significant factor in our political process - ie personal ambition and the desire to obtain a very good job.

Gets the thinking juices flowing!

I often wonder if we need to shift our focus to talking about economic democracy and improving peoples economic rights ?

The left emphasis has historically been on centralised State control which has been problematic as there have been major failures of State provision, not least of which has been the lack of flexibility or diversity.

Maybe we should shift the left focus to a more distributed democratic power, more power for shareholders, workers, consumers and the lik