There has been a fair amount of picking over the entrails of the Liberal Party after the election, including a lot of gazing at the navel.

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It has been localised and introspective. A broader historical view might be more instructive for the Liberal Party and, indeed, for Labor and the Greens.

From the end of World War II until about 1980, a consensus had built up. Business liked stability and certainty and were willing to trade that for increasing regulation over how it dealt with labour, wages, the environment, safety, and competition. For steady, stable profits it was a price worth paying.

Then along came Thatcher and Reagan to introduce neo-liberalism and economic rationalism. It meant deregulation, self-regulation, user pays, privatisation, out-sourcing, and tax cuts for the wealthy.

The left-right politics bumbled along for a while, but basically across the democratic world the neo-liberal, economic rationalist view of the world won. Anything collective was denigrated, emasculated, and defunded - particularly unions; public education, housing and health; and utilities.

Thatcher famously said that there was no such thing as "society", just individuals and the family. In short: atomise, depower, and control.

Even under Clinton, Blair, Hawke, and Keating, neo-liberalism and economic rationalism still won. They just called it the third way and were not as extreme as Thatcher and Reagan, but the result was the same.

The result, of course, was the replacement of what was branded inefficient, bloated, unresponsive public monopolies with even more unresponsive private monopolies which were also rapacious. And the tax cuts for the wealthy did not result in the promised bigger cake with trickle down to the poor, or for the poor to somehow rise with all boats in the neo-liberal nirvana.

The neo-cons and economic rationalists........

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