If your citizen-strength bulldust detector isn’t pinging like blazes, you need a new one. And if Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg have a fraction of the courage of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, I’ll eat the hat I’m not yet bald enough to need.
Speaking from experience, Frydenberg is like the fat man whose eyes are bigger than his belly and orders more than he can eat. He wanted to give his hardline Liberal backbenchers a thrill by invoking the holy names, but he and his boss don’t have the appetite for tough “reforms”.
The truth is that only conservatives of a certain age (and failing memories) hanker after the glory days of Thatcher and Reagan. No one else wants to return to the halcyon era of privatisation and deregulation because by now most people realise how lacking in halcyonicity those things are.
In any case, all the obvious reforms have already been made. When you’ve privatised Telstra, Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories and much else, what’s left? Selling off Australia Post?
The further you go down that road, the more dubious and distasteful your sell-offs become. The more recent privatisation of Medibank has effectively opened private health insurance provision to profit-seeking companies, adding a further problem to all that sector’s other life-threatening ailments.
The states’ privatisation of the electricity industry has turned five state monopolies into three big money-hungry oligopolists and raised electricity prices far higher than a carbon tax ever could.
The admission of for-profit businesses to childcare and aged care has hardly been a roaring success (on the latter, just ask Victorians). Bringing private companies into vocational training has turned technical education into a disaster area that’s still to be cleaned up.
The public is strongly opposed to privatisation. When the Coalition was considering privatising Medicare’s back-office processing, Labor portrayed this as a plan to privatise Medicare proper which, apparently, cost Malcolm Turnbull a lot of votes in the 2016 election.
Speaking of which, remember that Thatcher’s initial reforms were so unpopular she needed a war with Argentina to get re-elected. John Howard’s goods and services tax was so unpopular he went perilously close to losing the 1998 election.
I was puzzled to see Frydenberg associating Thatcher and Reagan with removing red tape. They aren’t remembered for anything so minor. Then I realised removing red tape was his euphemism for “deregulation”. The word now has such negative connotations he didn’t even want to say it – much less do it.
No, I don’t think we have anything to fear from Morrison’s inner Maggie.
For another thing, she wanted to close Britain’s inefficient coal mines, not defy economic reality and keep them going at all cost. And she, being a scientist, never had any doubt about the reality of climate change and the need to stop it.
The historian Manning Clark argued that, thanks to the circumstances of white settlement, Australia’s leaders could be divided into two groups: the “enlargers” and the “punishers and straighteners”. The enlargers wanted to get on with exploiting this land’s huge opportunities, whereas the punishers and straighteners, successors to the governors and prison guards, just wanted to go on running the place and keeping the lower orders in line.
If today’s Liberals were enlargers, they’d be resisting the temptation to help our coal and gas industries postpone their inevitable demise, and embracing this great opportunity to transform Australia into a global superpower in the production and export of renewable energy.
The Libs’ continuing role as punishers and straighteners is seen in their penchant for playing friends and enemies. Honourable friends and disreputable enemies. Honourable friends get rewarded with big tax cuts, which probably need to be brought forward – in the national interest, of course.
Although the Libs have lacked the mandate to cut government spending generally, they’ve selected various enemies whose lack of public sympathy means their money can be cut with impunity. Amid the massive government spending to counteract the lockdown, they’ve still singled out the universities for exclusion from the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme or any other help of consequence.
But the people the Libs have most wanted to punish are the unemployed. When the lockdown caused unemployment to more than double, they had no choice but to increase the dole. But they kept their measures temporary, and introduced a two-class system.
Those travelling second class – who’ve lost any link to an employer – were given the JobSeeker unemployment benefit of $558 a week, about a quarter less than those in first class on JobKeeper.
We learnt last week that, after September, this will drop to $408, about a third less than the reduced JobKeeper payment. Means-testing will be resumed, as will penalties for failing to search for jobs. JobKeeper has been extended for six months, but the JobSeeker supplement only for three, with no guarantee it then won’t revert to $40 a day.
Why so tough? Because the unemployed aren’t like you and me. They’re shirkers. If you want them to work, you have to threaten punishment.
