Opinion
Australia leads the world in the use of this oxymoronic term
David Astle
Crossword compiler and ABC Radio Melbourne presenterBlue, pink, black. Not a box of Derwent pencils but three different shades of economy. Feel free to add green, mixed and patchwork, too. Circular and tiger. Two-speed and drip-down. Or shadow and cash, which double for black. In fact, economy is a household word, whichever way it comes.
Fitting, really, once you delve the word’s Greek roots, economy emerging from household management. In ancient Athens the posher homes boasted stewards, or oikonomos – a compound of oikos (house) plus a variant on nemein, to organise, the stem shared by such other systems as taxonomy and agronomy.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers reading his budget speech.Credit: Getty
From house to nation, economics expanded during the 1600s to become the global science we know today, the Athenian home usurped by the House of Reps, the obol-watching steward our federal treasurer, Jim Chalmers. And, boy, does Jim ride the economy pony hard, the word cropping up 23 times amid his 4000-odd words in last week’s budget delivery.
Over 30 minutes we heard about a modern economy, an advanced or transforming economy, yet the collocation (or recurrent word association) MPs copped most was the care economy – eight times. Subtly at first, the cadence of care itself embedded repeatedly in the speech, paving the way for Chalmers’ catchcry: “In childcare, aged care and across the care economy, the majority of workers are women.� Three cares swaddled into one sentence, including the treasurer’s fond neologism.
Not that Chalmers coined the term. Rifling the trove that is the News on the Web corpus (an archive of 17 billion words cited across online papers and magazines, from 2010 to now), I found care economy in United Nations documents (from 2012), promptly adopted by The Huffington Post, and later a spate in India’s Economic Times. Thanks to Labor’s appetite for the phrase, however, Australia leads the world in this oxymoronic marriage of compassion (care) with the dismal science that is economics.
Words, of course, can translate into measurable actions – or not. So perhaps any charges of contradiction are too early in the quarter, yet the coinage is a pledge to watch, and prosecute in time, for that matter. As a linguist at Macquarie, Associate Professor Annabelle Lukin has been a long-time sifter of budget speeches, trawling the scripts since 1981. This year, in fact, marks a fulcrum between the two major parties, the 44-year stretch balanced out at 22 budgets each.
So why the annual obsession? As Lukin explains, “The budget speech is the closest thing we have to a State of the Union address in Australia. They set out a government’s priorities for the future. They give us a reading on the economy (treasurers typically cite some key indicators of the economy’s health) before then spelling out the government’s chief priorities.�
By way of linguistic reward, many curious patterns have emerged from those 200,000 words of fiscal rhetoric, much like X-ray shadows captured in our yearly check-up. If we compare keywords across the house, Labor has a soft spot for policy, accord, stimulus and we’re, while the Coalition are all about program, plan, want and their. Meanwhile, intelligence and terrorism rank 12 and 13 (in top-usage count) for the Coalition, jostling against renewable and deficit on Labor’s charts.
As for economy, that Greek idea of house-sorting, the dominant collocations for Howard onwards have been stronger and growing. For Labor, the darlings are productive and transition. Until last week, at least – before Jim Chalmers rose to the dispatch box, thanked Mr Speaker and floated the notion of care.
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