The bicycle is the machine that best represents conservative and libertarian worldviews, and we cannot let our bikes be co-opted by the inner city greenies, the Teals, and other assorted Lefties.
Here is the centre-right case for bicycles.
Bicycles are liberty. Once you’re on your bike, whether it’s a flashy road bike or the old mountain bike unburied from the depths of the garage, many of the daily worries and societal constraints are left behind. This is because you are exerting not only your heart and legs, but your freedom of choice. From our childhoods onward, bicycles give us the individual ability to choose, to explore, to experience, to take responsibility for our individual behaviour, and to be ourselves. Cycling carries us beyond the boundaries of the Nanny State.
As Donald Donaldson writes: ‘Your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are when you’re on the saddle. You are taken away.’
Bicycles are good for the economy. Bicycle sales in Australia have been booming for over a decade, and received a further solid boost during the Covid period. Some 1.7 million are now being sold per year in Australia which is up from 1.2 million in 2019. (One of the fastest growing categories are battery-powered e-bikes that further extend cycling’s utility and accessibility and, thereby, appeal.) That’s worth some $6.3 billion and 34,295 jobs according to the recently released Australian Cycling Economy Report.
As former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg noted in 2021: ‘Getting on the bike is good news for the economy and it’s certainly good news for people’s health.’
Bicycles reduce costs. For those who favour lower taxes, bicycles should be the go. Road infrastructure – at around $1.5 billion per kilometre for a tunnelled highway – is incredibly expensive. Public transport only exists through public subsidisation. Hence, the increased use of bicycles for more activities such as commuting, shopping, and logistical fulfillment (including the gig economy) puts downward pressure on transport costs.
The increased health of cyclists also puts downward pressure on health costs. Every avoided pre-mature heart attack or episode of mental illness is an avoided Medicare or systemic health cost. For such reasons, the Commonwealth government has now enabled FBT-exemption/salary sacrificing for individuals who purchase e-bikes for commuting. (Around 2 per cent of Australians commute by bicycle compared to the world leader, Netherlands, on some 43 per cent.) An incentive for staying healthy and keeping your car in the driveway. Who woulda thunk it?
Bicycles align with family values and consistency. Cycling is a recreational activity that is fully accessible to almost all family members regardless of fitness level, age, or ability. Bicycles exist in all shapes, sizes, and styles for different rider types. That helps make cycling something that most families can readily do together without much preparation, skill or expense, but with a common sense of purpose and journey. Those who ride together, stick together.
And, by the way, you definitely do not need a Lycra outfit that makes you look like Spiderman-who-ate-all-the-snags to get on a bike. Beyond such accoutrements, to their great credit, bicycles are simple but hugely efficient machines that have generally not departed from their very early and nearly perfect design specifications of some 125 years ago. We of the centre-right appreciate that good things should last and don’t need much revisiting.
Bicycles are fun. In a society which is increasingly glum, sanctimonious, and outraged, bicycles put a smile on the dial. They are the contemporary contrarian’s physical response to the boring and annoying limitations of identity politics, pronoun Olympics, comprehensive victimhood, and narcissistic vanity – be it in the corporate workplace or the public arena. To quote Maverick in Top Gun 2: ‘Don’t think. Just do.’
Bicycles are practical – not ideological – environmental action. So much of our contemporary debate about renewable energy, forest, and land management, water management, electrical vehicles, and the like is shrouded in religiosity and ritual rather than set in sound management and engineering. We are asked to genuflect at the altar of climate change. If we don’t appropriately cross ourselves, we are heretics of some sort. It’s repulsive to many of us, who very much value the environment and think it’s simply prudent to conserve resources, but don’t share the subtext about wealth redistribution or the increased role of the state in markets and lives. Bicycles are a non-theological alternative; they let us act with our pedals not our political correctness to reduce our environmental footprint.
But what about, I hear you say, all those cycling morons who don’t follow the road rules? Exactly. Morons. Not different from the morons who steal your carpark space, or cut you off in traffic, or otherwise disrespect their fellow road users. We good centre-right types – defenders of the rule of law – are certainly not among them, right? Whether it’s in a BMW or on a bike, right? Indeed, if we believe in personal responsibility, we behave accordingly by being excellent road sharers and citizens – regardless of our wheels – and contribute to respectfully shared roads for all.
To be a cyclist is indeed to be a good citizen and supporter of the centre-right.
