If it is really such a great time to be alive, one would think that Malcolm Turnbull would be more confidently spruiking his philosophy and his message. And that he would be building a path for change, rather than trying to fill in potholes on the road after events cause someone to trip.
The man who promised not to talk down to the electorate has effectively ceased to argue that the facts and anxieties that are killing him in the polls are in fact symbols of what he, and the Liberal Party, have long been claiming to be the bright and golden future that lies before us. By the looks of it, the public isn't in a listening mood.
PM should be building a path for change, rather than trying to fill in potholes on the road. Credit: Andrew Meares
Nowhere could this be more obvious than in policies affecting the labour market. Notice how abruptly Pauline Hanson, and for that matter Derryn Hinch, changed their view to echo Labor's concerns about the impact on poorly paid workers of cuts to Sunday penalty rates? Hanson, once a small business fish shop owner, instinctively felt that lower penalty rates would be good for the economy, good for jobs and good for small business. Her support base disagreed, and vehemently, and she changed sides. So did Hinch.
Note the resemblance of the ACTU ads showing suffering low-income workers to the campaign which, in 2007, destroyed WorkChoices and the Howard government. Note the echo of old campaigns suggesting a hidden agenda for a return to WorkChoices, and further swingeing cuts to health, education and social security expenditure.
Labor is successfully exploiting lines about the government's keenness to serve the big end of town by offering major business tax cuts, while simultaneously squeezing and kicking the poor. It has likewise seized on a part of a government submission to the minimum wage case in which the government commented that many of those on minimum wages belonged to high-income household, implicitly with the message that the Fair Work Commission should not be deceived into thinking that the misery of the low paid could be ameliorated by higher wages. Perish the thought!
Coalition ministers thought they could deflect the attack by pointing out that senior Labor spokesmen, including Shorten himself, had said very similar things in the past, but they have long ceased to be in a debate in which history, or logic, carries the day. It's about emotions and impressions, and, on these, Labor has the running. They have also used the opportunity to attack the character of Shorten himself, as the powerful leader of a tame union that did deals with employers in ways that sold out the workers but enhanced the fortunes of the union and the power of those in its hierarchy.
But logic and personal attacks cannot win this debate. I would prefer Shorten's hand to Turnbull's. All the more so when Turnbull has a sales staff like Michaelia Cash and Scott Morrison so consistently addressing the wrong audiences in the wrong way. More often than not they are gesturing to party zealots rather than reassuring a nervous and fractious electorate.
Those who want a logical, intellectual and forensic debate can accuse Labor of being populist, opportunistic or irresponsible, of engaging in class warfare, of being oppositionist for the sake of being oppositionist, and of frustrating worthwhile long-term reform of the economy by its refusal to look at the long-term consequences of its approach.
They may be right, at least in part. The coalition is complaining, on such matters, that Labor is copying Liberal Party bastardy of 2010-13.
But the coalition is missing the real point. Labor may be repositioning itself; it may be retreating from a 1980s-90s devotion to market theory, and it may be playing its own game against the electoral risks of a Pauline Hanson. It is not even obvious that its approach is loading up a future Labor government with much increased expenditure.
But it is being neither crass or ad hoc; it is exploiting perhaps the most potent and fundamental anxiety and insecurity in Australian politics – job insecurity. It has reason to do so.
And it is adding to that the emotive feeling that John Howard so successfully exploited in 1996 - the idea that people are sick of change, and suspicious that the government of the moment is one of insiders, by insiders, and for insiders.
This feeling intersects with the idea that the population is dividing between a privileged cosmopolitan elite, enjoying the benefits of the new economy and a more traditional workforce whose prospects, tenure and future seem far less rosy. Labor may not be playing a crude economic nationalist, or the xenophobia card with the enthusiasm of a Trump or a Hanson (though there's a good deal of dog whistling in the 457 visa campaign by building unions). But it seems finally to have got a message that doctrinaire and formulaic free market responses are neither popular with voters or obviously good economic medicine.
What's worse, at least from the coalition's point of view, is that it is playing the coalition off a break, bringing it into an argument that it simply cannot win, at least by the type of arguments it has been using.
In fact the Turnbull government, like the Abbott and Howard ones before, is remarkably pragmatic on free market economics, and more than willing to abandon principle, theory or what it announced yesterday at the slightest sign of opposition or criticism from the party's conservative wing. But it keeps proclaiming where it comes from – in deference to its close constituents. Even its concessions or total routs tend to hint at a secret agenda, if only the senate was vaporised, or opinion polls banned.
The Hanson (or the Trump) phenomenon, as has been often observed, has roots in racism, a yearning for an old (and irretrievable) monoculture, and the plight of a part of the workforce, particularly in rural areas, that is less educated than average, have fewer job skills, and have less capacity to adapt to a changing economy. These are people who have felt displaced and dissed by the new economy. Even where they have managed to keep their heads above water, they have felt less secure in their jobs, less certain about their social and economic future, and more and more worried about the future of their children and their grandchildren.
Their concerns are not new. Indeed they were not new even in the mid to late 1990s, during the first flowering of the One Nation revolt. The modern manifestation may owe something to the success of similar movements overseas, or to the ability of skillful politicians to excite fears about strange cultures, foreign workers stealing Australian jobs, terrorism, and the loss of manufacturing industry. But there is nothing more sophisticated about the mark two of the One Nation movement, other than that its leaders have slightly more coherent discipline and determination to use their power before they collapse from their own contradictions.
Politicians of all stripes, including some of the evangelists of the opening of the Australian economy, such as Paul Keating, like to think that they have permanently changed the "national conversation". Keating once famously declared that, under him, every parrot in every pet-shop was talking about micro-economic reform. During the Hawke and Keating years, Labor moved considerably to the economic right, believing, as Keating said, that the nation was doomed otherwise to become a banana republic.
But Labor success in doing so – if it was success - did not necessarily mean that either its key constituencies or the electorate at large had adopted or agreed with all of the new economic dogma, least of all obsessions with balancing budgets, reducing and rationing services, or the privatisation of once public goods. Labor was less radical and scary than the alternative, but that didn't mean that the electorate "took ownership" of its ideas.
Indeed there is very little evidence that the general economic temper of the population has changed much at all, or that there has been much change since, say 1947, in the general basket of goods, services and leadership that citizens expect government to provide.
Seventy years has seen three generations of Australians, growth, and considerable social, technological and economic change, not least in the way that goods and services are delivered. Real wages and the standard of living has increased enormously, and the quality and quantity of government provided goods – in health, education and social security – has considerably increased. But the general types of services provided have not changed much. The general sense and expectation of what government should do has not shifted in the way that the free market think-tanks seem to suggest.
That 70 years was during the post war settlement in which Depression-era Australians, many of whom had known unemployment and deep poverty, committed themselves to a new style of government, of which the centrepiece involved fiscal and monetary policies focused at maintaining full employment. My father's generation, in particular, placed a very high premium on job security, on settling down, on economic caution, application and steadiness. For a developing middle class the ideal job might be in the public service or a bank, both effectively jobs until retirement. One might change jobs; one did not do so capriciously.
A good deal of the social settlement about penalty rates was with the enthusiastic support of moral conservatives, who did not want seven-day trading, lest the Sabbath be profaned, or the mob get too excited. It was also thought disruptive of family life. The public has now enthusiastically adopted seven-day trading but still recognises that the nature of many occupations – nursing for example – causes serious hardship and inconvenience to families.
Small business operators have long complained of penalty rates, and of their comparative disadvantage to big shop operators, and the idea that something must be done about them is an article of faith in party circles. But that cutting back, or confining rates, is difficult in practice is demonstrated by the way that Turnbull and his ministers have tied themselves in knots over the fair work commission decision on reduced Sunday rates for people in hospitality, fast food and retail operations. While defending the decision, they have distanced themselves from it. They have not been particularly successful in persuading voters that there will not now be a wider agenda to extend abolition into other areas, such as nursing, policing (even, horrors, journalism).
Ideally, government, and probably the fair work commission, would like to see the decision largely confined to a youth job sector said to be keen on the flexibility of casual part-time work, and keen to organise arrangements that suit other needs, such as study. But the problem of this is that this crosses over another key part of widespread public anxiety and insecurity - the increasing shift into the casualisation of the workforce, the tendency for newly created jobs to be part-time, and their want of skill development or career potential.
Such jobs rarely have the security that can encourage a loan from the bank, commitment into a long-term relationship or building a family, or the assurance or wherewithal for saving and investment. As in America, many of those in the "new" exciting jobs in the sorts of areas where penalty rates are to be trimmed will never be able to shift into skilled jobs. Unless, that is, they are working only to support themselves during training.
It may be young people who are particularly thrust into low-skill low-pay jobs in fast food or retail, but it is also increasingly a terror of middle-aged women and older men that this is where the "exciting" vision of a 21st century workforce is taking us. Add to that the confident assumption of so many proponents of the modern flexible systems that almost all workers can capably negotiate their own individualised arrangements in some revised personal employment contract.
The case is not helped much by confident assertions that company tax cuts create jobs and jobs growth, as if the Treasury's belief that this is so resolves all doubt, or by refined and dubious assertions of trickle-down effects. Nor by conscious policies of punishing the poor, the indigent and the suspected scroungers, while terrifying aged and invalid pensioners, and recipients of family benefits, with arbitrary robo-debt and obtuse administration.
Those who usually work may have a leery eye on those who entirely subsist on welfare, but they are still fond of the idea of social security as a safety net. With nylon ropes, not razor wire. They want to be reassured that their own jobs are secure, not told that they will feel liberated if they let go.
Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor.