By Jack Waterford
That whining noise in the background this week was mostly from politicians and businessmen trying to pretend that they have "got" the message from the election of Donald Trump as US President, and about what it means for Australians whom they have pissed-off.
"Getting it" seems to involve recognition that a good many Australians feel they have missed out on years of steady growth in Australia. They have heard words about how exciting it has been to be an Australian, and about change, adaption and resilience. But they are "disenchanted" and not galvanised. They do not trust politicians. Their jobs are less secure and, often, less well paid. They believe themselves less well-off and are less confident than they used to be about the future. Many are underemployed, many more worry about whether they will have the agility or the skills or the opportunities to refashion their careers as a result of technological change or abrupt changes in the international or national economy.
Malcolm Turnbull is on your side, and feels your pain. He understands how you feel – heavens he was poor and insecure once himself. Credit: Andrew Meares
Malcolm Turnbull is on your side and feels your pain. He understands how you feel – heavens, he was poor and insecure once himself. And he knows what to do. Or he doesn't but Bill Shorten does. The mere fact that each is a FAQ sample of why voters have stopped listening and have turned off is not reason not to give them another chance, now that they have heard. Turnbull helped generate despair, after all. Just like Bill Shorten did. Both sat in cabinets who made cool calculations about how much people, including the very poor, could or should take before public anger boiled over. Neither has shown any compunction about cruelty, particularly to people on welfare. And both, with equal hypocrisy, have shed crocodile tears when out of power about fairness and unfairness, about brutal and unnecessary burdens being placed on particular vulnerable groups in the economy, and about the crushing costs of living and burdens imposed by government. Neither has ever wanted for a feed or a roof over his head.
Right now, each pretends to see the problem, and its solution, somewhat differently. But one is in government, the other in opposition. And one is a party of the slightly left, while the other is the party of the fairly right. From such perspectives and such experience their scripts are fairly predictable, if hardly inspiring in confidence. And as with Pauline Hanson, a good deal of the art lies in describing the problem rather than the solution. And if the dogs are running free who can be surprised about the need for dog whistles?
If Trumpism really does change things, a mere mantra about "growth" and "jobs" may suggest short- rather than long-term planning. Credit: Bloomberg
Here's Bill Shorten, oozing compassion, concern and fellow feeling.
"Unlike the Americans, Australia is not big enough to afford isolation.
"We can't cut ourselves off from the globe – it would choke our agricultural and mining industries. It would starve us of advanced new manufacturing opportunities, binding us tightly into global supply chains.
"But we, in the house of Labor, must understand that in mining towns, the manufacturing suburbs and regional communities of our country, our fellow Australians are hungry for recognition. Hungry for Australia's political parties and leaders to recognise that the economy is not working in the interest of ordinary Australians.
"Living standards are 2 per cent lower than they were when the Liberals were elected.
- Most jobs being lost are full-time jobs
- Most jobs being created are part-time jobs
- Productivity is at a standstill.
- Wages growth is flatlining.
- Insecure work is on the rise, and more and more Australians are worried about being off-shored and contracted-out and outsourced and downsized.
- There are almost 170,000 fewer apprentices in Australia now than five years ago.
- Income inequality is at a disturbing 70-year high.
- Childcare costs are devouring the wages of working parents.
- Our tax system continues to disproportionately favour the multinationals and the very wealthy. We have a bell-shaped tax system in the country. At one end if you earn no money you pay no tax. But at the other end if you earn a great deal of money, you also pay no tax.
- And next year, for the first time ever, homeowners will be in the minority, because a generation have been locked out of the housing market in preference of property speculators.
Shorten wants to kick out the foreign workers who have stolen Australian jobs: "It's time that our fellow Australians locked out of the dignity of work receive the opportunity to be let in and have equal citizenship. It is time to
- Build Australian first.
- Buy Australian first in our contracts
- And employ Australians first."
This does not, apparently, mean closed markets, "managed" competition, and renewed isolationism and protectionism. Just being fairer.
"This is not a time for putting more money and more power in the hands of the wealthy few to the neglect of the very many. And it is not the time and it is never the time for the low road of change.
"Where leaders, instead of dealing with the issues, simply scapegoat minorities, give into extremists, appease the powerful at the expense of our values. Labor knows that Australians are better than that."
Malcolm Turnbull, suddenly concerned about free speech for bigots, and the ABC's catering for elites, had left himself open for that last gibe, even if Pauline Hanson thought the references to foreign labour were a bow in her direction. She should be so lucky. She seems to think that Donald Trump would have voted for her were he an Australian.
Turnbull, by contrast, seems to think that the bitterness and anger of those who think themselves missing out is primarily a problem of perception, a failure of government communication and explanation. Silly folk can't have listened to his explanations.
He knows the feeling is intense. It's not his fault. It is, apparently, a combination of disappointment about the treachery of Tony Abbott's 2014 budget and public failure to appreciate the exquisite virtues of a market that can make a person like him a multi-millionaire.
"Countries that have embraced open trade and investment policies have experienced significant gains in income, employment and living standards," he told the Business Council on Thursday. (It seemed to understand.)
"They have lifted billions out of poverty. But people are seeing things change around them; they are concerned that they could be left behind.
"…Retreating from policies that have delivered us prosperity and opportunity is the wrong call. We would ignore the gains from openness at our peril.
"Instead of looking backwards, we must make the case to increase global economic integration ... to overcome the rising disquiet, we must ensure that the benefits of open markets deliver for the many and not just a few. If the results of the recent US presidential election have taught us anything, it is that policy changes must be fair in a very broad sense."
"Fairness does not mean examining each decision in isolation, looking at a narrow set of winners and losers," one of Australia's biggest lifetime winners said on Thursday.
"It means making sure our overall system is fair, examining the transfers of goods and services over a person's lifetime and asking ourselves, does this reflect the benchmarks we set ourselves of an open, fair and just society."
"… Our policies must not ignore the fact that the impacts of change can be borne unevenly across the community. To overcome the rising disquiet we must ensure that the benefits of open markets deliver for the many and not just the few".
Turnbull is off, this weekend, to an APEC meeting at which Pacific nations can be expected to be expressing their anxieties about the US economy and its defence and foreign policies under Trump, and wondering how to respond. Right at the moment, it seems, no one has much of a clue which slogans and policies used by Trump are core promises, which were merely vague statements of inclination, and which mere exuberance or bombast, able to be ignored. Informal indications are seeming to suggest more moderation (if with characteristic eccentricity) than he had pledged.
Australian politicians and their colleagues around the world were creating disengaged, angry and resentful citizens, and hollowing out their middle classes long before the phenomenon of Trump. Trump, indeed, is (like people such as Clyde Palmer and Pauline Hanson) a response to the problem.
Yet the sense that his election means that the current 70-year economic cycle of progressively more open markets and more free trade is coming to an end is strong.
Here in Australia, or in a Britain, a France, a Germany, a Greece or a Canada, politicians may seek to address the alienation and change some of the levers and some of the balances.
But their moves may be mere gestures compared with the economic impact of contracting world markets, a shift back to protectionism, and hostile and unfriendly borders. These after all inevitably lead to weaker economies, weaker growth in incomes, even more uncertainty and insecurity and, most likely, economic stagnation. But they do not restore power to politicians to actually achieve much.
One reason for a nostalgia for a monocultural past, with protected and cocooned jobs, is a feeling that, once, a Mr Menzies or a Mr Holt could pull economic levers and, more or less, produce an economic result. We have become increasingly exasperated that modern fiscal and monetary mechanisms do not deliver what is promised or expected. This is not merely a function of open markets, or of operating in an international economy; it is also a problem of modern complexity.
The point is that most of the simplistic solutions (and one can hardly get more simplistic than Shorten's Australia First policy) will actually make things worse. That's regardless of what happens with our critically important markets abroad as a result of decisions made by politicians such as Trump.
It is all very well, and, probably right, to ask and insist on a higher level of attention to inclusion, sectoral and regional inequalities. Likewise with an end to the war against an imagined peril of welfarism. But looking after all Australians, properly distributing the wealth, and bringing them all along together involves something more than blaming foreigners, or paying twice as much as we need for submarines.
How the pain, and the benefits, are shared are important, but they are more matters of nuance and balance than basic. And Labor, even Shorten over single-mothers payments, has erred as grievously in the past as any Tony Abbott or Scott Morrison.
The fundamental job remains questions of enabling a strong private economy, stimulating growth, investment, and delivering health, education, welfare and national security to the community. With boring but critical bits involving fiscal rectitude, a stable currency and current account, high employment and high levels of business and consumer security and personal safety.
If Trumpism really does change things, a mere mantra about "growth" and "jobs" may suggest short- rather than long-term planning. Likewise obsession about deficits and debt. These matter, but the long-term survival and development of the economy depends rather more on getting the fundamentals right – not least during a period when at least some things can be under control. Investing in our future is not intergenerational theft.
One of the biggest puzzles, for example, is the resolute manner in which the government rejects plain advice from the Reserve Bank, and any number of sensible sources, about the desirability of a major capital investment in physical and social infrastructure. When Australia laid down much of its basic infrastructure – its roads, its bridges, railways, its electricity networks, its urban public transport systems, its water and sewerage schemes – money was more expensive than now. But never did the nation make better investments, and for the benefit of future generations as much as the present ones.
Heavens, Turnbull could even imagine a First-World broadband network. On such things as much as improved educational outcomes does long-term productivity growth depend.
It seems plain that Trump's planned economic revival will focus on major infrastructure spending, financed by debt and quantitative easing (printing money). A post-Brexit Britain seems to have something similar in mind, if only as a way of reducing its overdependence on a financial and service economy. But here in Australia politicians remain obsessed with budgeting as if for a household, are timorous and shy, and remain convinced that spending money on keeping Australians healthy and well-educated only encourages long-term dependency
The moon has been very close this week, producing more moonshine than the root vegetables should be allowed to bear.