Australians of the Year utterly out of step with the rest of us

How moving it was to watch Malcolm Turnbull presenting the Australian of the Year awards last week. What impressive people they were. Made me proud to be an Aussie.

I can't help liking Turnbull. At a show like that he's all we could hope for in a Prime Minister. He looked the part and spoke it well. He was completely at ease, someone we can be proud to have represent us to the world.

In his introduction he said all the right things. The "extraordinary finalists" for the various awards – Young Australian, Senior Australian, Local Hero and Australian of the Year – "light the way for us – shining examples of our best selves".

"Generous and compassionate, selfless, never daunted by seemingly impossible odds, brilliant, curious, entrepreneurial, innovative, building bridges to reinforce the mutual respect which secures our harmony and diversity.

"They include First Australians and those who have dedicated their lives to working with them" – such as the wonderful Sister Anne Gardiner, who's spent her life serving the Tiwi people on Bathurst Island.

"They include migrants and refugees who have fled horrors barely imaginable ...

"Yet, however much we celebrate the remarkable, peaceful and diverse nation that we have built together, we always strive to be better. Our Australians of the Year have always shown us how ...

"Respect for women, respect for each other, in all our magnificent diversity, is the foundation on which our harmonious society depends, is the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential."

And yet I confess that in the days since that proud night I've suffered a bad hangover. It seems our One Day of the Year has moved from April 25 to January 26.

We celebrate these "shining examples of our best selves" for one night and day before we revert to being far from our best selves for the rest of the year. We hunt up a handful of people who remain "selfless" so we don't feel so bad about the self-seeking lives the rest of us lead?

Far from retaining a strong sense of community, of helping each other and working for the greater good, we live in an era of every person for themselves, where the material almost always gets priority over the social, where our ambitions centre on personal advancement rather than making the world a better place.

If our politicians – of both stripes – are so keen for us to be "generous and compassionate" as well as "respectful" and part of a "harmonious society" why aren't they setting a better example?

What's generous and compassionate about sending social security recipients bills for "debts" owed to Centrelink that you haven't checked properly, then making them prove they don't owe that much with payslips and other documents from past years that you hadn't warned them to retain?

What's "respectful" about treating invalids, the aged, and young workers down on their luck in such a way? What's Australian about denying point blank there's any problem with what you're doing?

Why when you've gone out of your way to honour the place of First Australians do you, the very next day, curtly brush aside their request that the white majority run to the huge inconvenience and expense of changing the date of Australia Day? Respect, eh?

Do we honour the work of the Sister Annes because they salve our consciences? Thank God they're willing to put themselves out, because the rest of us ain't.

Some of us – including many in Turnbull's own electorate – are the children or grandchildren of "refugees who have fled horrors barely imaginable".

Much worse, apparently, than the way we've been treating refugees on Nauru and Manus Island.

Turnbull is right to say we've built a highly successful multicultural society.

Lately it's been fraying at the edges, however, with intolerance of people with unfamiliar religious practices – women's head coverings; halal – fears that all Muslims are terrorists, fears we're being overrun by Asians, and downward envy of government help for disadvantaged Indigenous people.

But it's not just that our political leaders fail to set an example, it's that too often they seek partisan advantage from our moral weaknesses. Rather than seeking to calm our fears of foreigners they compete to pander to them. Let's protect ourselves from the resurgent One Nation by aping its rhetoric, even its policies.

As for respect being "the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential" it's sentimental claptrap – especially coming from a government that seems to have set its face against funding the nation's schools on the basis of student need rather than established privilege.

It's schools and pre-schools that should be "the platform which enables every Australian to realise their full potential".

The most worrying message we got from the latest bad news on NAPLAN and PISA testing of students is the wide gap between our best and worst students and the large minority of kids the system is failing.

As Peter Goss, of the Grattan Institute, has demonstrated, we can go most of the way to needs-based funding quickly and without extra spending, provided we're prepared to shift funding from the less-needy to the more-needy.

But that would require Turnbull to exhibit the undaunted, entrepreneurial and bridge-building character traits he so admires in others.

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Lord save us from being governed by bankers

With Our Glad Berejiklian – the archetypal girl who works harder than the boys – replacing pin-up boy Mike Baird as Premier of NSW, should the citizens of other states be envious? Don't be too sure.

True, Berejiklian, like Baird before her, came to public office from a job in banking, rather than a post-uni career as a political apparatchik, though she did spend time as a ministerial staffer. Baird didn't even have that.

Politics is becoming a priesthood – a lifetime calling, culminating in elected office – with ever fewer politicians having spent most of their lives working in a normal job with normal people.

I doubt we're better governed under this development.

One thing making NSW different from other states is that, until Baird's resignation, it was a state governed by former bankers: premier, treasurer and Treasury secretary Rob Whitfield, shipped in after a 29-year career as a deal maker at Westpac.

With Baird gone, NSW may seem one banker down. Except that Berejiklian's successor as Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, was a solicitor specialising in "banking restructuring".

I suppose one good thing about having a government dominated by bankers is they can be relied on to keep the budget shipshape. They'd be the last pollies to send us bankrupt.

Indeed, Berejiklian's proudest boast is that the NSW government (narrowly defined) is now debt free.

But is that the highest achievement of a government? You'd expect bankers to know better than to regard an institution like NSW without any debt as a joy to behold.

What about all the infrastructure the state still needs? Why boast about having no debt at time when debt is exceptionally cheap and governments' size and taxing powers make them ideally placed to borrow?

Though the fashionable fatwa against debt is atypical of bankers, what it does reveal is a weak grasp on the tenets of economics.

It's a mistake to imagine bankers and economists think alike. That's been my greatest reservation about the financially virtuous Baird government and my greatest fear about its Berejiklian successor.

Its only leading light who can be counted on to have a better grasp on the ways the powers and obligations of governments differ from those of a business is the secretary of the Premier's Department, Blair Comley, a former top federal Treasury officer.

Historically, state governments have had responsibility for owning a lot of profitable businesses, which have been government-owned only because they're natural monopoly networks – electricity, gas and water – as well as managing huge service-delivery organisations: public transport, roads, hospitals, schools and prisons.

This has led to the common notion that running a state government is pretty much about running a collection of businesses. The main thing you need is efficiency.

Sorry, wrong.

First, where governments deliver services with "public good" characteristics – services whose supply would be insufficient if customers had to pay market prices – the quality of the service, reflecting the multiple objectives in supplying it, is just as important as the cost of supplying it.

Second, when you're owning – or selling – a profitable business, profit should never be maximised at the expense of the wider community. You have to take an "economy-wide" perspective.

I fear a banker-dominated government is too likely to adopt a simple, business approach towards an endeavour that that has much wider objectives and obligations; to see the state budget as akin to a business's profit and loss account – as an end in itself rather than just a means to an end; to imagine that maximum benefit to the state's finances equals maximum benefit to people of the state and their economy.

Every instinct of a deal-making banker tells them the object of the exercise is to privatise a business for the highest price possible, this being in the best interests of taxpayers.

You do this by packaging the business up with government-conferred competitive advantages.

But this comes at the disadvantage of taxpayers-as-customers of the business, any present or potential private competitors, and business customers of the privatised business.

Rod Sims, boss of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, has been highly critical of the NSW government's privatisation of its ports which, of course, enjoy a degree of geographic monopoly.

I supported privatisation of NSW's electricity "poles and wires" mainly because ownership of a key natural monopoly presented the government with too much temptation to look the other way while its trading enterprises fattened their profits by gouging their customers.

Damaging the state's economy in the interests of improving the state government's finances is something only an ill-educated banker could think was a good idea.

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