Kevin Donnelly: Why I left the lefties

From The Australian: Given my background and an interest in politics, the next step may have been to join the Australian Labor Party. I never did and, in fact, I turned my back on the Left and joined the Liberal Party. Why? Looking at my father I realised the socialist dream, in part, was driven by class bitterness and the politics of envy. Following Edmund Burke, I also realised that the need to conserve was equally as important as the need to change and that evolution was preferable to revolution. As Burke predicted, the French Revolution descended into terror and brutality. Since then, history is littered with tyrants such as Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who killed and enslaved billions in the name of socialism. Once society's safeguards and institutions are destroyed, there is nowhere to hide. George Orwell was another reason I became a conservative. Animal Farm not only presents an allegory of Communist Russia's descent into totalitarianism and the gulag, it also tells us the Left's romanticised view of human nature is misplaced. The rest here.

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