ABSTRACT
New Labour seemed directly to borrow specific ALP policies, such as its cultural policy. New Labour’s cultural policy was said by some to be taken from the Keating government’s Creative Nation policy paper. A more rigorous search for Australian model and policy borrowing by New Labour soon runs up against insurmountable problems. One major difficulty with the notion of New Labour borrowing Australian Labor’s model is empirical: it lacks evidence for its position and ignores abundant evidence for the contrary view. New Labour is necessarily pitted against several types of connections. British citizens might make between their values and political institutions, policies, and experiences - those between fair play, social justice, decency and the like, and old Labour and those between fair play, patriotism, adventure and the like and the Conservative regime. T. Blair’s much vaunted communitarianism rests on a very thin conception of communities: the values they embody are those of every community but no specific community in Britain.
