An Economy is Not a Society (10 page)

The thing we are transitioning from tends to be represented in the same way. Economically, it was corporatist, protected, insular, overregulated, heavily unionised, militant, seemingly always on strike and therefore criminally unproductive. Culturally, it was embarrassingly unsophisticated in the way all life seemingly was before the espresso machine: the men had large sideburns and wore wide-lapelled suits, big-collared shirts and fat ties; the women had beehive hair-dos and skimpy bikinis and drooled at surfing hunks; everyone drank generic-tasting tap beer and instant coffee, drove Toranas, Geminis and (of course) Leyland P-76s, and endlessly sought the approval of boorish, bored celebrities visiting from overseas. All up, these books tell us, the old times were misogynist, racist, lazy and – and here's the real message – complacent, complacency being the most wicked of our modern sins.

It's interesting to watch the former politicians, economists and public policymakers who gave us The Transition talking about the past in the numerous documentaries made on the subject. When they reach the 1970s they tend to slip into comedy; with broad smiles breaking out on their faces, they say things like: ‘Just as they thought it was acceptable to listen to glam rock (ha, ha), they thought governments should control foreign investment,' or ‘They thought they could determine the exchange rate of the dollar,' or ‘They seriously reckoned they had the right to go on strike.' ‘Can you believe it?' their sneers imply, as the camera holds them in focus for a few seconds longer. You see, when it comes down to it, to the creative destroyers the past was simply corrupt, one great self-indulgent orgy like a Sodom and Gomorrah scene in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, something that must be expunged, vaporised, paved over, replaced.

To replace this Old Testament narrative, they've given us a new one, which always seems to begin with the same words: ‘And then there was Paul …' Paul and his disciples led the way into the new future, where we dropped all that nonsense about full employment and collective bargaining, cut corporate and high marginal taxes, discovered China and the rest of Asia, created a pool of capital through compulsory superannuation and laid the foundation for three decades of economic growth that even the biggest global recession since the Great Depression couldn't stop, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. St Paul and his followers did it, St John and his crew didn't oppose it, and we all saw that it was good; so sayeth the Lord.

The sheer predictability of these narratives gives the game away. (I dare you to open the
Australian
or the
Australian Financial Review
tomorrow morning and not find an echo of them.) They comprise a hero narrative, obviously: with time fast running out (time is always running out where economic reform is concerned), a handful of heroic men and women, firm in their convictions, set out to save the nation from itself, and succeeded just before the International Monetary Fund had to step in. The narrative is not so much an economic analysis as a moral judgment handed down from the mountaintop (or, rather, the boardroom on the fiftieth floor), ordering adherence to a set of new commandments: thou shalt not restrain competition; thou shalt not go against free trade; thou shalt not deny the shareholders; thou shalt not deform the labour market by forming a union; thou shalt not redistribute wealth; and so on. You can find similar narratives in Britain and America; only the names change.

Something similar was happening in George Orwell's time. He was at once fascinated and horrified by the Marxist obsession with reinterpreting and rewriting history, especially economic history. He recognised that those seeking to overthrow the way we live tend to start by falsifying the past – because it is only by discrediting the good things about the past that such people can make the present seem better and the utopian future they are offering seem inevitable, when in fact life in many ways has become worse. This is the meaning of the famous party slogan from Orwell's dark novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' By misrepresenting and discrediting the time before the Great Australian Economic Miracle, by portraying it as complacent and corrupt and laughable and poor, our present narrators are clearing away the positive human memories that might restrain their attempts to create a future that is 100 per cent safe for productivity.

In a famous scene from the novel, the character Winston Smith goes into a proletarian pub to talk to someone old enough to remember what life was like before the revolution, but finds that, under the onslaught of propaganda and mindless popular culture, the old man's memory has turned to rubble. How long will it be, we might ask, before there is anyone who still remembers that the past was in many respects superior to the present, and who knows that the future can in fact be different from the one now being foisted upon us?

The economists' hero narrative runs into an immediate problem. It is forced to recognise that the greasy-haired, wide-lapelled, Holden-driving past was in many ways a success on its own terms – and popular. Just view the images on the TV documentaries: crowds of people surging into factory gates; newspaper headlines screaming ‘full employment achieved'; highways full of Australian-made cars that people loved to drive; Australians at play on the beach, eating steak around the barbecue in the backyards of houses that were affordable to working people, safe from worry because their children's education was free, Medibank was free, their regulated weekends were free; a political system that, by the middle of the 1970s, was modernising, optimistic, at once liberal and social-democratic, reforming and conserving. The truth is that the generations that were in charge of our nation prior to the 1980s created a society that was in many ways more successful and popular than the one the economic reformers have given us. It gave Australians a standard of living and a way of life which was the envy of the world – but which the economists, especially the creative destroyers, can only view as complacent. The economic growth of the past came with full employment. The creative destroyers' growth has not. Whose is superior?

Third, language and the meaning of words.
As well as reclaiming the past, we have to reclaim language, especially the meaning of the word ‘reform'. By giving themselves the title of ‘reformers', the people who brought us the Great Australian Economic Miracle imbue themselves with a moral authority and a democratic mandate that they don't really possess. Who could reasonably be against reform – the removal of faults or errors to promote change for the better? No one. But in the arena of political economy, ‘reform' has a meaning far deeper and richer than the one the self-styled economic reformers are offering us.

In its original political and economic usage, ‘reform' was a nineteenth-century movement that set out to build a sounder moral basis for the new economy being created so rapidly by the Industrial Revolution, the faults of which were highlighted (either directly or by implication) by the great thinkers and writers of the day, most notably Charles Dickens, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte and many others no longer commonly read today. The Reform Acts to democratise the House of Commons were joined by Factory Acts, Mines Acts and other pieces of social legislation that limited the length of the working day, prevented the economic exploitation of children, gave people the right to join trade unionists, and improved public education and public health through, among other things, improved sanitation. (The eight-hour day movement here in Australia was part of this great reform era.) Reformers did more than remove outdated controls on the market; they also stopped the gerrymandering of parliament, ended the slave trade, prevented children as young as five years old from going down mines, and created the moral basis for the great improvements in life that were continued by social democracy into the twentieth century.

To place the freeing of the dollar, the introduction of the GST and the attempt to replace collective bargaining with individual contracts on the same moral plane as the great reforms of the past 200 years is a faux hero narrative indeed, absurd and delusional in equal parts, the sort of egotistical tribute that vice pays to virtue. The true reforming efforts of the nineteenth century were motivated in large part by moral concerns, whereas the faux reforming efforts of our time are usually motivated by a desire to remove moral concerns from economic policy almost completely, taking us back to the era of Gradgrind and his world, in which the reason of the market was completely unrestrained.

Fourth, sociology.
Here's another fact we need to grasp if we want to create a better future: the Australian working class is not the reactionary mass that many – including many on the Left – sometimes take it to be. These days, in certain circles, when the subject of working-class Australia comes up, the response is often negative. Recently, at a dinner for the visiting English intellectual Maurice Glasman, I heard the following response from someone at my table: ‘I agree with everything he said about the economy, except of course for all that praise of the working class and its values.' These days, when educated people of the Right and Left think about the old Anglo-Saxon and European working class, they conjure up a mass of negative adjectives: xenophobia is usually the first, followed perhaps by sexism and homophobia, then anti-intellectualism, and finally (usually without irony) avarice. This view leads to policies of the worst sort as the political parties attempt to appeal to these negative stereotypes: the demonising of refugees, opposition to same-sex marriage, the creation of dumbed-down subjects at poorer public schools, the rubbishing of universities and the life of the mind, and a simplistic, populist approach to holding down the rising cost of living (which no one ever actually manages to do, despite all the hand-on-heart promises they make). It ends up with all parties, including Labor, pursuing a sterile, transactional form of politics that offers a combination of financial bribes and punitive social policy instead of a vision of a better society. It's a formula that never delivers Labor victory, and simply robs it of its sense of purpose.

Such nonsense about working-class attitudes is easily debunked; all it requires is a few conversations. On one of my visits to the Holden plant at Dandenong, I got talking to one of the now retired chief engineers. He'd come to Australia from India in March 1974 and had got a job at the plant virtually the next day, working on the truck assembly line. He freely admits it was another world in which you sometimes needed a thick skin to survive. The foreman, for example, had names for everyone in his section of the line, most of which consisted of four letters. (This foreman was obviously not my father, who never swore and would cuff me if I ever did.) On hearing this, I asked the man whether he ever experienced racism while working at Holden. ‘No,' he said. ‘Never.' In fact, with the help of Holden he went on to become one of the plant's leading engineering managers, and he later used this experience to take a sabbatical of sorts, when he worked for one of the world's premier motor-racing teams. Working-class racism obviously never held him back.

One of the managers of the current spare parts operation also told me that racism had never been an issue at the plant; in fact, he said, the only ethnic tension he had ever had to deal with since he started at the plant back in 1979 involved tensions between workers from different sides of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and even then it was mild stuff.

Why is this important? Why does it matter so much that Australians, but especially Labor and the Left, should drop the misconception that the working class are beyond the pale in their beliefs? Because without the working class, social democracy loses most of its purpose. When you think about it, social democracy was founded on the very idea that the people with the least wealth, privilege and power can and should be a force for social change – because they have a direct and obvious interest in creating a more equal society. Once you regard the working class as reactionary, vulgar and stupid – even vaguely sinister and to be feared, as my friend at the Glasman lecture implied – the game is up. But this has been mostly forgotten.

As the educated middle class has grown, many on the Left have come to see it – supposedly more rational and amenable to progressive causes – as their new agent of change. But no matter what their progressive beliefs, the middle class, especially many highly educated middle-class people who form a progressive elite, will never be a sufficient force for greater economic and social equality, and can never be fully relied upon to worry about the fate of places like Doveton. This is not because they are intrinsically uncaring people, but because when it comes down to it, they benefit from such inequality and tend to be ignorant about its true nature and extent, no matter how hard they try to understand. Unless we truly care about the working class and the communities in which its members live, and unless we take their economic and social interests seriously, there will be no advances in economic and social equality. This is why the Labor Party and the Left cannot afford to cut itself off from the union movement, and it is why both must clean up their internal affairs and get their acts together as a matter of extreme seriousness and urgency.

Fifth, aesthetics, particularly creativity.
Another important way of thinking about what's going on concerns aesthetics, particularly urban aesthetics and the creation of beautiful objects. This is an area of crucial importance, although it isn't often in the forefront of our minds – until, that is, we see it with our own eyes. Urban beauty is typically something we associate with the wealthy and highly educated. We expect their inner-suburban streets to be neat and leafy, their apartments to be old and art-deco or new and sharp-edged, and their holiday homes to look like spaceships that have parked themselves on ocean cliff-tops. We value this sort of beauty and prefer it to ugly squalor every time – and we do so for innate reasons that can't be quantified on a spreadsheet. We tend to put this down to the superior taste of the people who live in such desirable places, but in reality it's down to their superior bank balances. They may have a monopoly on expensive real estate and A-list architects, but can they possibly have a monopoly on finer human feelings? Show a working person a gracious mansion or an art-filled penthouse and he or she will choose it over a crumbling former public housing estate every time.