I Stopped Being Afraid of the Word 'Conservative'

How a FIFO miner from Perth went from "anything but conservative" to "I think I've been one all along."

The Word You're Not Supposed to Say

Growing up in Australia, "conservative" was a dirty word. It meant backward, fearful, uneducated. It meant your grandfather, your uncool uncle, the people in the bush who didn't understand how the world was changing. In Perth's coastal suburbs, being conservative was not just a political position — it was a social liability. You didn't admit it, even if you suspected it might be true.

I spent most of my adult life not knowing what I believed, which meant I defaulted to whatever the people around me believed. And in the Australian mining industry, that meant a sort of casual, unexamined progressivism. You supported the right causes, used the right language, voted the right way. Not because you'd thought about it — because it was easier than being the one who questioned it.

What I Actually Believed

Here's the thing I discovered when I finally stopped performing and started thinking: I had believed conservative things my whole life. I just didn't have the courage to name them.

• I thought family mattered. Not as a lifestyle choice, but as the fundamental unit of society. I thought children needed mothers and fathers. I thought marriage was a commitment, not a contract.
• I thought work was supposed to mean something. Not "follow your passion" — that's a luxury for the wealthy. But work as vocation. The thing you do that provides, that builds, that serves. The dignity of labour.
• I thought loyalty was a virtue. To your family, your community, your country. Not blind loyalty — but the kind that doesn't abandon people when they become unfashionable.
• I thought freedom meant the ability to live as you chose. Not the freedom to be compelled to affirm everyone else's choices.

I didn't know these were conservative positions, because I'd been told that conservatism was about tax rates and climate denial. But the more I read — history, philosophy, Catholic social teaching — the more I realised that conservatism, real conservatism, is about something much deeper. It's about the recognition that human nature doesn't change, that some traditions encode wisdom, and that the latest thing is not always the truest thing.

The Moment It Shifted

I was sitting in a hotel room in the Pilbara, two weeks into a FIFO swing, reading a book by Roger Scruton that someone had recommended. I'd expected dense philosophy. What I found was someone describing my own intuitions with a clarity I'd never managed. The passage that broke me open was about the difference between freedom and liberation.

"The politics of liberation is about freedom from constraints. The politics of conservation is about freedom within constraints — the constraints that make a meaningful life possible."

I read that sentence four times. It described something I'd felt for years but couldn't articulate. My three marriages had failed not because I was constrained by tradition, but because I was liberated from it. No one expected me to stay. No one expected me to sacrifice. I was free to leave, and so I did. And I was lonelier for it.

The Backlash (or Lack Thereof)

When I started saying some of this out loud, I expected pushback. What I got was something stranger: other men nodding. Other men saying "me too." Other men who had been quietly believing conservative things for years but were afraid to say so.

The silence around traditional values is not a silence of absence — it's a silence of fear. Millions of people believe what I believe. They just don't say it at work, at dinner parties, on social media. They say it to their partners late at night. They say it to themselves in the car.

Conservatism is not extinct. It's just underground.

What I'm Not Saying

Let me be clear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying the past was perfect — it wasn't. I'm not saying women belong in the home and men belong in the workplace — I've seen what that rigidity does to people. I'm not saying every tradition is worth preserving — some deserve to die.

I'm saying: we threw out too much, too fast, without asking what we were losing. We told people they could be anything, and in doing so we took away the structures that helped them know who they were. We liberated everyone into loneliness and called it progress.

I'm conservative now. Not because I'm afraid of change. Because I've seen what change without wisdom looks like. It looks like my three marriages. It looks like the 3 AM kitchen with no one to call. It looks like a country full of beautiful beaches and broken men.

And I'm done being afraid of the word that describes what I actually believe.