For a bloke who has been quick to criticise Donald Trump, Bill Shorten seems to like a lot of his ideas. The "Australia First" posture of the Opposition Leader's agenda-setting speech for the year was basically a Down Under version of Trumpery – but with no tax cuts and less political incorrectness. Many of the same themes were there: no foreign worker schemes, which are rorted by employers and taking Australian workers' jobs. The middle class is falling behind. In areas that Mr Trump thinks American workers have been dudded, so it seems, does Mr Shorten, who railed about Australians "having to compete with Third World labour costs and conditions". He said that the very word "efficiency" scared Australian workers in their 50s and 60s. We should be "winning in Asia on our terms," he said.
Mr Shorten thinks that Malcolm Turnbull is pursuing a "vanity project" now that Mr Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal. The nine other nations trying to salvage the deal clearly do not agree. Instead, the Labor leader will pursue policies that provide "real" jobs, not those created by "fantasy trade deals". Labor is going to double down on skills and training as the path to growth, but without the "many dodgy traineeships and certificates out there". Mr Shorten, of course is no doubt speaking from experience – he would know a thing or two about training programs, a significant source of slush funds for union officials while he was active in the trade union movement. But under Mr Shorten's government, presumably unlike Gillard Labor's disastrous changes to vocational training, TAFE training and apprenticeships are going to be fair dinkum, because they shouldn't be second rate qualifications. It's amazing how some things change. A decade ago, Labor pilloried John Howard for suggesting that not everyone should go to university.
As a result, Mr Shorten's economic plan says nothing about lowering taxes so businesses can employ more people – Labor no longer believes in investment-attracting and job-creating company tax cuts. Instead, government will mandate the hiring of apprentices as 10 per cent of the workforce in government-funded priority infrastructure projects. Under Shorten Labor's conceit, more government regulation supposedly would fix what a less-taxed and more competitive economy couldn't.
In fact, Mr Shorten's pitch provided no economic growth plan at all, although he did concede that "sometimes government for all its reach and resources might not have the answers". Instead, he borrowed from a Donald Trump/Bernie Sanders narrative that is either largely or totally incorrect in Australia: that inequality is on the rise and that children are in risk of having lower living standards than their parents. Australia's economy is growing more slowly than it should, but that is far from the dark Trumpian picture that Mr Shorten paints for middle Australia. As we have stated before, the reforms that opened up the Australian economy have been spread throughout Australian society, ensuring high living standards for working people and a high degree of social mobility. Mr Shorten imagines a dystopia that doesn't exist, while at the same time ignoring very real economic problems that do. He did not even mention the clear and present risk to Australia's AAA credit rating nor the politically-embedded budget deficit that Labor bequeathed taxpayers.
But while real budget problems didn't make Mr Shorten's pitch, non-existent threats to Medicare did, confirming that health scaremongering will be at the top of Labor's 2017 agenda. Mr Shorten slammed the Coalition's modest company tax cut package – which would reduce Australia's international tax disadvantage and so generate more investment and jobs – as a "$50billion giveaway for multinationals". Rather than genuine reformers, Labor has become a populist, empty vessel. It is morphing into an anti-free trade, anti-economic reform party that abandons the Hawke-Keating legacy in favour of importing Trumpian rhetoric to fight imaginary American-style problems.
