View From The Couch - 19/Apr/2015

The Grown Ups Are Gone

I don't really know what politics became so daft as it has this decade. When I was growing up, politics seemed a distant rarefied thing that happened elsewhere from one's sphere of existence; and if you are a pre-teen or a teenager, you are mostly right.  It is with gaining the right to vote that suddenly it becomes our intellectual burden to consider things we would rather not. After all, who in their right mind wants to think about the GST when they can think about - oh I don't know - whether England will recall KP to the test side. One has very little control over either those things, but at least with cricket you get some entertainment value. Nobody is entertained by the GST or the very topic of tax policy, let alone taxation itself.

Yet, it used to be that our political leaders were genuine leaders. Whether that was Gough and Malcolm or Bob Hawke with Paul Keating, or even John Hewson for that matter, politicians could be seen to be men trying to do better by the common man and trying to improve the country. They were so clearly adults, and we as citizens would be guided by their wise counsel. Somewhere along the way we got a different measure of politicians. Perhaps it was the internet that made the world go much faster than the dignity of politicians could cope. The first decade of this century really eroded the gravitas and dignity of politicians.

And so we now live in a time when politicians are much less adult-like. It doesn't offer much confidence. Worse still, they are making a hash of it and nobody seems to be able to bring them to account properly. I know I sound whinge-y when I write this, but the political class has long ago decided to cynically exploit the trust of the electorate; the downside of this decision is that it leads to truly stupid policy positions - Like Wasteconnex.

The current Federal government finds itself in a time of dwindling resource income and so must make cuts and consider raising taxes. Instead of coming out and saying "we need raise taxes", this government is hoping to let everybody bracket creep into higher tax brackets. This is partly because they have no political courage (and worse still, have all the reasons in the world not to have political courage) it's in their political credo that the only good thing to do with taxes is cut them.

Things get little weird when the people who are espousing "an end to entitlements" doggedly refuse to surrender entitlements for the rich like negative gearing and cuts to Capital Gains on residential properties or for that matter monies going to private schools. What they should be saying is "an end to poor people's entitlements" and be more honest about it, but of course that doesn't win you votes, so it's the rather confusing "an end to entitlements" as if it is some kind of universal position. They strike this posture because the universal makes them look more statesman-like but also the confusion sewn by this posturing is exactly the space into which they insert their nasty little class-politics, thereby doing the exact opposite implied by the universal posture - at the same time accusing us of misunderstanding their universal posture. As you can see, it's a complicated shuffle step of lying and dissembling - and we in the electorate have to wear this enforced double-think gobbledygook as if it is actually intelligent.

Yet this is the kind political discourse we're left with, and it just seems to get worse each week. By rights, the conservatives should be having a field day in setting the agenda but the way it is playing out suggests that none of them have coherent train of thought as to what to do about the future. Because they cannot fathom the future they sub-contract out the thinking to advisory bodies that come back with things like the Inter-Generation Report that prognosticates a certain kind of economic future but without climate change incorporated into its calculations. These are clearly not the most mature or smartest people in the room; they're the people who have convinced themselves that they are the smartest and most mature people without any supporting evidence. And again, we as the electorate have to bear with this kind of haphazard pseudo-think as the basis for policy conceited on the wishful notion that somehow global warming isn't happening.

And so as we approach the Budget in a few weeks, I can't help but wonder where all the adults have gone. It's been 20 months since the Coalition won office and it can't be coincide that both Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser shuffled off their mortal coil in this time frame. As Paul Keating once warned us, "God help us all, God help us all."

More On That Point About The Unemployed

I'm not unemployed, but it's not like I don't live with the fear that one day I might have to join the unemployed throng. At a certain age, it's just going to be dismal an experience as you can have. It's not like you can inductively reason your way to never falling out of the employment loop.

It's an odd phenomenon but nobody gets less respect than the able bodied unemployed. It's just the way it goes. Being a dole bludger isn't really a lifestyle choice any more than remote communities of Indigenous people living where they do. Centrelink hound people harder than the old DSS and CES, and there are plenty of conditions whereby the government cuts payments to people and then they're not even classified as unemployed. They're something else, but they no longer show up as unemployed in the ABS stats. The Centrelink people are given the incentive to kick as many people off, because this suits the government agenda of "lowering unemployment". That was a Howard government thing.

In the last years of the Howard government, unemployment figures fell. They fell because many people got hounded off unemployment benefits and then glommed on to disability pensions. When you have no work prospects, any excuse to get government money helps, and so Australia found itself with a growing epidemic of disable-bodied people that weren't there a decade before. In the last year of the Howard government, they decided the thing to do was to make the disabled work a few hours a week, depending on the (un)severity of their disability.

Should you find yourself on the wrong side of say, 50, or end up as the long term unemployed who got placed on the dole queue thanks to a shift in the industry they were in, then the stigmatism attached to being unemployed can be unwarranted aggravation. The strange thing is that more and more industries are closing down without necessarily giving rise to new industries to absorb them. Specifically, in the case South Australia where the car manufacturing business is going to stop operating, there are going to be a lot of people with non-transferrable skills. What industries are they supposed to head towards? It's a mystery because not even the Federal Government that precipitated the big end to car manufacturing in Australia knows where the next growth industry is going to be, or if it can absorb these workers.

I mention all this because where the next growth is going to emerge, has been a bit of a mystery for a good decade. The Dutch Disease as the downturn was known in the wake of the Dutch petrochemical boom, has settled down on to Australia leaving a property bubble and record private debt. The Gillard government decidedly took the tack that it was going to be housing, based on the fact that construction constituted 25% of our GDP, and that there is a lot of union membership in the sector. The folly of trusting in such a recovery in the face of the property bubble and high private sector debt seemed worse than foolhardy, more like bind to reality.

The Abbott Government that followed has been worse as it has set out to dismantle the renewable energy sector, pushed out the automotive manufacturing; hobbled the NBN and cut science spending (bye-bye High Tech) and generally laid waste to the non-mining sector while repealing the ming tax. All of this goes to show the considerable confusion in the political leadership operating down in Canberra - but you expect that with the sort of rampant crony-capitalism that this government has adopted as its main agenda. What is good for their mates is all that counts, may the rest be buggered by the next GFC.

Realistically speaking, there is going to have to be a pretty big effort in re-training people and placing them into growth industries. The government is trying to dis-incentivise people getting re-trained by slapping a price tag on the education and refusing to foot the bill itself. Worse still, it seems to have no vision of from where the new growth is going to come. If indeed re-training is what is going to be needed for the ageing long-term unemployed, the government is doing a terrible job of letting people know where the new employment is going to be.
But then lack of vision is nothing new with this government.