Paul Thomas: Conservatives speak but say very little

The conservatives had their say this week but how many people were listening?

Don Brash's speech to the Orewa Rotarians needn't detain us. The economy is on the brink of turning to custard, he said, and it's all the Government's fault.

That's what leaders of the opposition do; it's their job.

The other thing they do is try to avoid getting stabbed in the back by their loyal lieutenants. This is a little trickier and few manage to pull it off.

The declaration that you intend to lead your party into the next election hasn't worked thus far and there's no reason to believe the laws of politics (and the jungle) will be suspended solely for Dr Brash's benefit.

In Washington President Bush gave his State of the Union address. There are various rituals associated with this occasion. For instance, when the President makes his entrance, members of Congress invariably carry on like tipsy grandmothers at a Neil Diamond concert.

The bipartisan goodwill lasts for as long as it takes the President to say something political, at which point one side of the chamber springs to its feet in frenzied applause while the other remains grimly grounded.

Bush devoted most of his speech to telling us that Iraq and the United States economy are in tip-top shape, which must have come as a surprise to many, not least the 65 per cent of the American public who think both are in a shambles.

He laid out the big-picture strategic case for being in Iraq, the one they dusted off when they couldn't find any weapons of mass destruction. In a nutshell, this is that Middle Easterners are angry and turning to terrorism because they don't have the vote.

It works like this: a democratic Iraq will become a shining example for the rest of the region. Dictatorships will collapse, the people will be set free, terrorism will be renounced and America and the world will be safer places because the Bush Administration had the courage to act, and the steadfastness to ignore the defeatists and see the mission through.

It's a seductive theory and it's certainly true that the status quo ante didn't have much to recommend it, characterised as it was by assassination, displacement, terrorism, war, genocide and perpetual crisis.

However, the cynical, or perhaps realistic, counter-argument would be that it requires optimism on an irrational scale to believe everything will fall into its allotted place.

It's a little like thinking you can kick over a house of cards and they'll fall into a neat stack, arranged by suit and in descending order.

Take the central component, democracy. In their recent election the Palestinians voted resoundingly for Hamas, an outfit that makes no bones about its use of terror. Bush's response was to insist that Hamas must disarm, recognise Israel and commit to a lasting peace.

The problem is that's not what Hamas stands for, and if Palestinians had wanted that policy package they presumably would have voted for Fatah.

The Palestinians, of course, are newcomers to democracy and probably assume that what a political party says during an election campaign is some sort of guide to what it will do if it gains office.

Being more experienced and therefore sophisticated in these matters, New Zealanders don't pay attention to anything but the bribes.

Dictators have always justified their tyranny by claiming that the people can't be trusted with democracy. Indeed: they might vote for the other mob.

After the Islamic Salvation Front gained a majority of seats in the 1992 Algerian election, the military seized power, supposedly to save the country from fundamentalism, setting off a spiral of terror and counter-terror that resulted in 100,000 deaths. For the most part the West looked the other way.

As American Presidents tend to do, Bush portrayed America's role in the world and its use of force in unashamedly idealistic terms. Much of the world sees it very differently, and this suspicion will hardly be alleviated by a doctrine which equates democracy with outcomes that suit American interests.

The most dubious assumption of all is that America has the will to stay the course in Iraq. The insurgents certainly don't believe that. They think they just have to keep killing US soldiers and their public opinion and election cycle will do the rest. History and the polls are on their side.

Bush didn't directly mention the deficit, the 800kg gorilla he's pretending not to notice but which scares the hell out of many economists.

Back in the rip-roaring 1980s Ronald Reagan said: "I don't worry about the deficit - it's big enough to look after itself." That, apparently, is still what passes for economic policy in Washington.

The third and most intriguing conservative utterance of the week came from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who promised to give up sex until the April 9 election.

Coming from a 69-year-old, this might seem a rather empty promise.

Coming from a 69-year-old multi-millionaire who's had a facelift and a hair transplant, it could well amount to a major sacrifice and a valuable example of the self-denial we'll all need to practise if Brash is right and Bush is wrong.