Road to Utopia

My apologies for the third Julia Gillard-related post in a row, but, hey, you go with what's happening. Julia's call for structural reform in the ALP might be enough to divert the attention of jaded hacks for a day or two, but just how much real change could one effect in the ALP with this kind of tinkering? Surely, at the end of the day, you will still have the large ideological blocs which make up the membership: you might as well try to stop continental drift by concreting over the fault lines. The ALP has often reminded me of the kind of governments that prevailed during the Interregnum in England (1649-1660), the so-called "government of saints". After an initially successful burst of reforming zeal, the various religious parties of government split and fractured because, when it came to building Heaven on Earth, everyone had their own, differing blueprint. The ALP is, in effect, a kind of secular religious party: everyone has a different road map to Utopia. Conservative parties, which tend to shun ideology, and to accept human nature and society pretty much as they are, find it easier to broadly agree within themselves.