An Economy is Not a Society (11 page)

The fact that older working-class suburbs don't look as nice as they once did, and sometimes look downright ugly, is something that should concern us because it affects everyone. Drive through the neighbourhoods with the highest rates of unemployment and you will likely see an unattractiveness that is unnecessary and self-perpetuating: broken or missing fences, rusting cars and unkempt lawns, and in the worst places shuttered shops, smashed windows, graffiti-scarred walls and burnt-out buildings. To put it simply, nobody wants it.

Although it was purpose-built for the families of factory workers, when my neighbourhood in Doveton was first constructed it was well planned and attractively laid out. Serious consideration was given to the look and feel of the streets, with plenty of parks with colourful children's play equipment, public gardens opposite strip shopping centres, with even the trees and hedges in front yards well-chosen by the Housing Commission that built and then helped maintain it all. The planners of these places were in touch with the mass of the people in a way that public-policy experts tend not to be today. Aside from the obvious economic consequences of letting these sorts of neighbourhoods go – falling property values compounding year on year, aspirational flight, the concentration of people living on welfare, rising crime and so forth, all producing a downward spiral that is expensive to arrest – it naturally makes people feel depressed. Imagine waking up each morning, opening your blinds and seeing a sea of rusting trucks or a vacant block with weeds six feet high, littered with discarded bedding, whitegoods and syringes, a haven for bored teenagers to vandalise or take drugs. This, now, is a reality for many people.

If a concern with beauty seems an elite obsession, and one unrelated to a social-democratic agenda, think again. In purely utilitarian terms, beautifying our working-class suburbs would bring greater benefit and pleasure to more people's lives than any number of highbrow art galleries, which of course are so generously endowed by the super-rich. Why can't we have both? Indeed, one might plausibly say that a revulsion against urban ugliness was one of the original and most important motivating elements of social-democratic politics. After all, calling a workplace a ‘dark satanic mill' is an aesthetic as well as a moral judgment. Here is Friedrich Engels – a founder of modern social democracy – describing the industrial suburbs of Manchester in the 1840s:

This idea that the lives of everyday people could be improved by beautifying their surroundings is at the heart of the work of one of the greatest nineteenth-century socialist thinkers, William Morris, who, in addition to being a political activist, was an artist, poet and close friend of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Robert Browning. Morris grasped something that has relevance today and which puts the graph-wielding managerialists in their place: that progress can be measured by more than money. People don't want to live in the most expensive neighbourhood they can afford, but the most beautiful one, and they want jobs that are not only well paid but also satisfying. Early social democracy was all about such things, not just more money, but we have forgotten this.

How can we have forgotten about the importance of the quality of the work we do and the satisfaction it brings to our lives? There's a certain nobility in making things, especially things of obvious utility or beauty, and this makes craftsmanship something we should strive to preserve. Think of our workers at Holden in Dandenong; they didn't just collect widgets as they dropped from a conveyor belt, they made highly complex and beautiful machines that required skill and effort, and this gave them an enormous sense of satisfaction – certainly greater than that gained by staring at a computer screen all day or manning a consumer help desk. If we don't value this sort of thing, what do we value?

It's true that, even in the strongest manufacturing economy, not everyone can build cars and submarines and components for airliners; for some, catching a widget or responding to a disgruntled consumer has to be enough. But we rob our society and ourselves of something important when we fail to recognise the broad value of industrial craftsmanship and the opportunity it provides for the millions of people who happen not to be ‘artists' to have such obviously meaningful occupations. Giving people the chance to lead creative lives should be an important objective of public policy.

Recently, the National Gallery of Victoria made exactly this point when it staged a major artistic exhibition of Australian-manufactured cars. It even featured the Valiant Charger muscle car owned by my next-door neighbour; how beautiful it was. Walking around the exhibition brought home to me the fact that every time we farm such meaningful work out to other countries (who unashamedly or underhandedly practise the sort of industry protection we find morally beneath us), a part of our quality of life gets exported along with it. These are the sorts of things that, in their unconsciously philistine way, the economic reformers neither measure nor value, and which they might unthinkingly dismiss as ‘rent-seeking', but which ordinary people who haven't been to university understand intuitively to be an important part of life. By creating a spreadsheet that closes a factory, even the most artistically inclined economic reformer can unconsciously condemn thousands of creative everyday people to lives of pointless boredom. Creativity should be better understood and valued more.

Morality, history, linguistic precision, sociology, aesthetics: adding these to our thinking would allow us to honour the complexity, generosity, creativity and even majesty of working-class life and work in wider and more honest ways than economics alone makes possible. Yes, economics has something to say, but on its own it tells us almost nothing.

Ordinary people do not live their lives according to the sort of narrow parameters that can be plotted on graphs. Their thinking on economic, social and political issues doesn't revolve around the concept of productivity but around whether their children have jobs to look forward to, whether they can afford to buy a home, their level of employment security, the quality of their jobs, the physical state of their neighbourhoods, and the civility or otherwise they encounter in their daily lives – and all these things at once.

Politicians nowadays try automatically to reduce these concrete concerns to supposedly measurable concepts such as ‘cost of living', and they roll everyone together under the nonsensical imported American term ‘working families'. Why is this? Is it cynicism? Is it because they haven't the capacity to stand up to the pollsters who bribe them with promises of easy victory, or the tabloid editors and shock jocks who bully them with simplistic and anti-intellectual explanations of what ordinary people really care about? Or is it because politicians and their advisers today lack the wider education, the imagination or the verbal capacity necessary to articulate something broader, deeper and more meaningful, something that can move people in genuine and even profound ways?

The management consultants and the pollsters don't have the answers, and it's time we tell them: ‘Enough!'

We need to connect, now more than ever. This is becoming increasingly urgent. Some would say it is
the
urgent issue of the day. But how are we to do it?

It is a common complaint of the creative destroyers that our political system is broken – broken because economic reform is no longer possible. At election after election, governments that advocate privatisation and cut thousands of public-sector jobs are being tossed out or having their majorities slashed. The economic reformers and their boosters in the press tell us that we, the people, led by populists the way a beef farmer leads a bull by its nose ring, are the problem, and that we must be ignored for the good of the country. What politicians must do, they say, is prepare the electorate for uncomfortable truths by providing them with a new narrative, and ideally one which involves multiplying the current rate of productivity by two or three. The debate about this narrative and the policies that flow from it, they argue, must be taken out of the public arena and discussed in forums insulated from the special pleading of vested interests and the emotion of the electorate.

For some, this means a new economic forum of wise economists, led by the old advisers from the glory days of the 1980s and '90s. For others, it means a national summit of businessmen and sensible welfare leaders, led by the productivity commissioners and the men who brought us the Great Australian Economic Miracle: Hawke, Keating, Howard, Costello and their former advisers. With the exceptions of the prime minister, the treasurer and a few other office-holders who can be relied upon to support the Productivity Commission's line, all current members of parliament must be excluded. Only in this way – by locking out the people and their democratically elected representatives, and thus by engineering an appointed Parliament of Creative Destruction – can economic reform be certain of coming out on top.

In other words, democracy can't be trusted to get things done, and economics must be made safe from it, safe from the potential losers from change, safe from the human yearning for equality and creativity, safe from moral reasoning, safe from the memory of something better. This is essentially the same lament about people power first mouthed by the elites in fifth-century Athens, but whereas the Athenians said, ‘Leave the decisions to the philosopher kings,' we say, ‘Leave them to the economists.' Like the Eastern European communists before them, the creative destroyers have finally found the root of their problem: to succeed in their plans, they first need to elect a new people.

They know that, out in the open, their philosophy of creative destruction is doomed because the people are wary of it. You can't smash what's left of the car industry, put the remaining canneries out of production and replace their produce with contaminated food from China, get rid of penalty rates and the minimum wage, privatise what's left of electricity and rail and ports, make people pay to visit bulk-billing doctors when their children are sick, price university degrees at $100,000, break what remains of union power, shift an even greater share of GDP from labour to capital, make more people redundant at the age of fifty, murder more neighbourhoods and destroy more lives without expecting a democratic fight. The Australian people do not want these things, and never will.

This has enormous significance for our democracy. If our political system is really broken, as the common slogan today says, it is because while the reformers want creative destruction, the people do not. The popular will is being subverted. The people may be willing to accept change, but they are unwilling to accept change for change's sake, or for the sole sake of the people at the top. Bringing these two sides of our democracy back together requires our politicians to listen to the people.

It comes down to this: change can't be avoided. Everyone knows that. But just because change can't be avoided, it doesn't mean that everything has to change at once, or that it has to change in the way decreed from on high. This is not an argument for replacing hard reckoning about the present with some naive form of nostalgia. We can't create a time machine and we shouldn't try. But perhaps nostalgia can sometimes have a point, because when we look back we can attempt to understand what the past got right, and we can see that sometimes our parents' generation got it more right than we have. The idea that life in the future will always be better than it is now is just as naive as the idea that the past was always better.

There is an alternative. There are many imaginable futures, and it seems to me that the future the people
will
accept is the one that adequately respects important elements of the past, not one that tries to wipe the past out and simply start again. This requires an effort: we must think for ourselves as a people, and not accept the tired, imported, out-of-date, out-of-time, off-the-shelf theory of creative destruction that is being offered as our only option.

We need instead to choose a future that – like the past – is designed to benefit all the Australian people, not just some. It's the future we were heading towards before the unfortunate revolutionary changes of the past thirty years derailed it. Back before that time – an era still within the span of middle-aged memory – we believed our economic future lay in making things, and we believed our social future lay in supporting communities. We saw ourselves as more than just an agglomeration of individual consumers left to fend for themselves. For the people of Doveton, this meant making cars, trucks, trains and processed food, and it meant supporting neighbourhoods that were built around job creation and the provision of real opportunities for ordinary people. It meant nation-building for every member of the nation.

Thanks to sometimes unstoppable change, but also to stupid, shortsighted and overly theoretical policy – the too hasty closing down of car manufacturing in the face of a temporarily overvalued dollar being but the worst example – we can't any longer make all the sorts of things we once did. But we can aspire to make things, to create skilled jobs, to value creativity, to replace urban blight with urban regeneration, not in the bits-and-pieces way we currently do, as a sort of penance for smashing things up in the first place, but with real purpose and real investment. The way our parents lived, and the sort of egalitarian nation they worked and fought for, provides us not so much with a model but with the moral inspiration we need to get started.