BY 2050
Planning a better future for our children
in 21st century democratic Australia
BRONWYN KELLY
By 2050: Planning a better future for our children
in 21st century democratic Australia
Copyright © Bronwyn Kelly, 2020
Bronwyn Kelly asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
consent of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design and photo by Bronwyn Kelly
Cover Photo: The Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road
Victoria Australia
i
About By 2050
Adult Australians in the 2020s are likely to be the first generation in a
century who will fail to leave a better future and quality of life to their children
and grandchildren. But it is still possible to rescue a better, even a wonderful
future, if we work together to describe it fully, plan our way towards it
inclusively and methodically, and then persistently hold our governments to
account for their part in delivering it.
By 2050 examines Australia’s current capacity, strengths and weaknesses
as a modern society, economy, environmental custodian and democracy, and
looks at our preparedness for the coming challenges. The conclusion is that
Australian governments and political leaders are currently incapacitated to
the point where they are unable to offer a compelling vision for our future,
let alone a path towards it. That path can only be found by Australians working
together, using their democracy more effectively than they are now.
By 2050 offers a practical way of organising ourselves as a nation to
imagine our preferred future and develop an Integrated Planning & Reporting
process to make it a reality. This is an efficient process in which any and all
Australians can become engaged and which can significantly increase our
chances of arriving at a better future by 2050 or sooner, via the most
acceptable routes. It allows us to shift to a space where we the people – in all
our diversity – can act together and partner with ethical governments,
businesses and institutions. This is a space of proactive participatory
democracy where power and national wealth are more fairly shared.
By 2050 demonstrates how this shift in the balance of power between us
and our governments can arise from a system which gives precedence to the
coherent plans of a diverse community over the divergent, short-sighted
platforms of political parties. Implemented well, this national community
futures planning and reporting process can make transcendence of politics
and ideology a common feature of our democracy instead of a rarity.
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About the Author
Bronwyn Kelly
Dr Bronwyn Kelly is an Australian public sector professional with thirty
years’ experience in the Senior Executive Service of state and local
government in NSW (1984-2014). Her experience traverses government
sector reform, policy development, profitable management of government
commercial trading enterprises, utilities operation, environmental and
scientific management and integrated long term community strategic
planning. She has held senior positions in Sydney Water, Australian Water
Technologies, the NSW Government Cabinet Office, and was a senior policy
advisor to a state government minister in NSW. As a Director of Corporate and
Technical Services in local government for fifteen years, she pioneered
innovative and best practice implementation of Integrated Planning &
Reporting – a legislated form of community futures planning operating in local
government in several states of Australia. In By 2050, Dr Kelly adapts that
experience so that Integrated Planning & Reporting can be used by any and
all Australians to create their own national community futures plan.
Dr Kelly’s PhD is from Sydney University, 1985, in History of Systems of
Thought. Her Doctoral thesis was The Textual Mandate: the authorisation of
the logic of deterrence in western philosophy since Decartes, an exploration of
humanity’s fear of death and extinction in the nuclear age.
Bronwyn Kelly is the founder of Australian Community Futures Planning.
She lives with her husband and two sons in Sydney.
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Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we
live and work across Australia and pays respect to Elders past and present. I
and my family recognise and celebrate the extraordinary contribution that
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have made through millennia
to all aspects of Australian life, culture and the environment.
May all their songlines endure.
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For Davey, Harry and Seanie
and in loving memory of my parents, Al and Viddy
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Contents
Foreword .................................................................................................. 1
Preface ..................................................................................................... 5
Planning for the future we want to leave our children ...........................................9
Expectations and pre-requisites for success..........................................................11
Hope in diversity ....................................................................................................12
Introduction............................................................................................ 15
Unleashing the collective national imagination ....................................................22
Enabling bottom-up leadership and avoiding undue influence ............................25
Maximising the power of the process and the plan ..............................................29
Part 1 – Reversing Disempowerment ....................................................... 36
Chapter 1 – The Question of Re-balancing Power .................................... 37
The spread of disempowerment ...........................................................................37
Reversing the trend of 21st century disempowerment in Australia ......................41
Chapter 2 – Why Plan? ............................................................................ 44
Beginnings ..............................................................................................................48
The basis of a national plan ...............................................................................48
Values or rights? ................................................................................................49
Readiness for a statement of values..................................................................62
The land of the fair go – disappearing ...............................................................66
Imagining ourselves before it’s too late ............................................................76
Chapter 3 – Bottom Driven Leadership and Planning ............................... 80
The beginnings of “bottom driven” planning in Australia .....................................82
What is Integrated Planning & Reporting? ............................................................85
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The benefits of Integrated Planning & Reporting ..................................................87
The current limits of Integrated Planning & Reporting .........................................91
Chapter 4 – How Not to Plan ................................................................... 94
The failure of planning and reporting at state government level .........................94
Problem No. 1 – A failure of integration in planning .........................................99
Problem No. 2 – A failure of reporting ............................................................120
The failure of planning – nation-wide .................................................................160
Part 2 – Building an Inclusive Democratic National Planning Process ...... 172
Chapter 5 – The Elements of a Viable National Plan & Planning Process . 173
Chapter 6 – Techniques for Recovering from the Failures of Top Driven
Planning ............................................................................................... 179
Solution No. 1 – In all quadrants – Aim high .......................................................180
Example 1 – Aim high to solve child poverty ...................................................180
Example 2 – Aim high to prevent climate change ...........................................184
Solution No. 2 – In the social quadrant – Look for more bottom driven solutions
.............................................................................................................................204
Integrating strategies and services locally for the best social outcomes ........204
Solution No. 3 – In the environmental quadrant – Look for more top driven
coordination.........................................................................................................210
Integrating economic and environmental strategies ......................................210
Chapter 7 – Techniques for Developing a National Plan for Australia’s
Economy ............................................................................................... 214
Solution No. 4 – In the economic quadrant – Interrogate the prevailing economic
narrative and then imagine a better one ............................................................217
Interrogating the prevailing economic narrative .............................................219
Assembling the data to assess performance against key socioeconomic
objectives .........................................................................................................232
Searching for a sustainable basis for future growth ........................................236
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Seeking a new preferred socioeconomic arrangement...................................245
Restoring the role and participation of government in our economy ............249
Changing attitudes about taxation ..................................................................274
Changing the place of welfare in our socioeconomic arrangements ..............313
Imagining a new and better economic narrative.............................................373
Chapter 8 – Techniques for Developing a Plan for Better Governance .... 405
Solution No. 5 – In the governance quadrant – check the threats to democracy
and then gather its strengths ..............................................................................406
Checking for threats to democracy..................................................................413
Gathering the strengths of democracy ............................................................443
Leaders learning to listen.................................................................................492
Communities learning to speak .......................................................................502
Chapter 9 – The Turning Point ............................................................... 506
Turning away from growth in inequality .............................................................507
Turning away from growth in racial and religious conflict ..................................523
Turning towards a First Peoples Heart ................................................................531
Turning away from loss of openness and transparency in governance and
democracy ...........................................................................................................535
Turning away from climate catastrophe..............................................................539
Turning away from disengagement .....................................................................555
Chapter 10 – How Can Australians Participate in Their Democracy? ....... 563
Activating the elements of community futures planning ....................................565
Activating Element 1 – Community engagement ............................................566
Activating Element 2 – A Vision of Australia by 2050 ......................................569
Activating Element 3 – An agreement on what success should look like and the
Directions from which to approach it ..............................................................575
Activating Element 4 – An agreement on Strategies .......................................577
Activating Element 5 – Regular national opinion surveys ...............................578
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Activating Element 6 – A funding plan.............................................................579
Activating Element 7 – A wellbeing index and a tracking system for monitoring
and reporting progress ....................................................................................592
Activating Element 8 – A transparent reporting system .................................596
Getting started on national community futures planning ...................................603
Institutional arrangements ..................................................................................606
Organising for speedy, quality implementation of national IP&R, unfettered by
politics ..................................................................................................................612
Part 3 – A Framework for a National Community Futures Plan, Australia
Together ............................................................................................... 624
Chapter 11 – A Prototype of Australia Together .................................... 625
Building a Vision for Australia Together ..............................................................626
Building the Directions of Australia Together .....................................................639
Building the Strategies of Australia Together ......................................................648
The benefits of locating strategies in one place ..............................................649
A framework for building Strategies for Australia Together ...........................664
Building the Targets and Indicators of Successful Performance – the QBL
Wellbeing Index ...................................................................................................668
Building End of Term Reports on Australia Together ..........................................674
Australia Together – from 2020 to the future .....................................................678
Chapter 12 – A New Balance of Power ................................................... 682
Epilogue – Australians Together ............................................................ 692
Afterword – At the Onset of Coronavirus............................................... 695
Acknowledgements .............................................................................. 700
Appendix A – Beliefs and Commitments of the Community of Iona ........ 702
Appendix B – The Vision for Waverley Together 2 ................................. 704
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A note on the text of By 2050
By 2050 was written between July 2019 and February 2020, before the arrival
of the Coronavirus pandemic in Australia. The Foreword and Afterword were
added in March and April 2020, after the arrival of the pandemic. All
references to the “present” or “the current” situation or “the here and now”
in the main text are contemporaneous with the commencement of 2020 –
pre-pandemic.
The accuracy of statistics in this book about Australia’s health and wellbeing
and the timeframes to which they apply are unaffected by the pandemic and
they remain fully instructive for purposes of planning a better future for
Australia.
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We have it in our power to create the world anew.
Thomas Paine, 1776
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Foreword
Sydney, Australia
April 2020
By 2050 is an examination of the state of Australia in the 21st century and our
preparedness for the future. In response, it provides a practical means by
which we may come together to plan a better future for ourselves as a nation
and travel safely to it over the decades to 2050.
Like many other recent works of research, By 2050 identifies
neoliberalism – those policies favouring small government, free market
ideologies, corporate greed, unregulated capitalism and environmental
exploitation – as a dangerous infection within our democracy, something
leaving us exposed to socioeconomic breakdown whenever times get really
tough, such as in a pandemic or in the face of climate change. And like many
other books, it also identifies a number of other weaknesses in our social
cohesion and governance – including inequality before the law and in relation
to social security, reduction of freedom of the press and open government,
diminished human rights, and myriad forms of exclusion for vulnerable and
minority groups – all weaknesses which have crept up on Australians over the
last two decades such that we have reached a point where our land of the
“fair go” is fast disappearing.
With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, many writers are asking
how we might seize the opportunities of the crisis to reverse the evils of
neoliberalism, corporate greed and particularly small government. But at the
start of April 2020, only a month into what promises to be a prolonged
shutdown of life and our economy as we have known them, conservative
politicians and media are already mobilising to ensure that we will not
become accustomed to measures of economic stimulation that they have
inveighed against for decades but have now been obliged to introduce,
implicitly acknowledging the inadequacy of their own policies in these areas.
1
These measures include fiscal stimulus, a doubled Newstart allowance, free
child care and the idea of a universal basic income, and their introduction
shows us things can be done differently. However, instead of opening up
minds to new possibilities about the way our economy can be run, such as via
full employment policies and expansion through a bigger publicly owned
health, welfare and education services sector, conservative ideologues are
moving quickly to bolster their preferred narrative that our economic good
fortune must be pursued, if necessary at the expense of the poorest and most
vulnerable Australians, by returning or “snapping back” to the tenets of
neoliberalism – austerity, welfare payments below the poverty line,
individualism, self-reliance, deliberately embedded inequality, monetarism,
tax cuts, lost services, dismantling of compulsory superannuation, disregard
for fairness in sharing of resources and the national wealth generated by all
Australians, uncooperative international relations, diminished access to
higher education, gross inequality in distribution of funding for school
education, and of course complete disregard for the natural environment
upon which all humans rely. All these aspects of neoliberalism are a blight on
our prospects and capability as a nation.
As it is, Australians can look around the world and see that wherever
these neoliberal policies have taken hold, especially in America and Britain,
they have not improved wellbeing for society as a whole – they have made it
much worse. Americans in particular have been left exposed to a devastating
inability to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic due to the rundown of their
health system and the nation’s long held preference for self-reliance. With
these scenes of misery abroad squarely in view, and having had a taste of a
different and apparently entirely feasible way of supporting our own national
wellbeing through large scale government provided financial support
equivalent to a universal wage, Australians are no longer as likely to be easily
swept aside if they begin to reject the preferred narrative of neoliberal
ideologues at home and call for bigger and more ethical government, fairer
distribution of wealth, and controls on corporate greed.
But the effectiveness of any calls for change by Australians depends on
how well we can organise ourselves to work together for a better future and
be persuasive within our two-party-preferred political system. We need an
organising mechanism for this purpose. By 2050 offers that mechanism. It
introduces Australians to an integrated national community futures planning
2
process in which we can increase our chances of achieving the future we want
– in all our diversity – and can do so without undue imposition on our time-
poor daily lives. In this efficient use of our democracy, we the people can take
more control of our national agenda by crafting an integrated plan which
reflects our diverse and common interests and then working to ensure that
our plan will take precedence over the divergent, short-sighted platforms of
political parties. The re-arrangement of power on offer here means we can
significantly increase our national capability and resilience. We can partner
far more effectively with our governments instead of endlessly and
ineffectually quarrelling with them. And we can partner with our employers,
business, religious groups, charities, universities, non-profit agencies, and the
public service in a well coordinated process – because we will be working
according to an integrated plan that actually aligns with what we sincerely
want to become as a nation.
The Coronavirus crisis will test our resilience as a nation for at least the
next decade as we attempt to deal with its unprecedented impacts. But the
techniques on offer in By 2050 can ensure that after this crisis passes we need
not be reduced to simply picking up the pieces of our old socioeconomic
arrangements and putting them back as they were, thereby setting ourselves
on a course to incapability in future crises, particularly crises like climate
change that cannot be solved by a bit of temporary fiscal stimulus. These
crises – imaginable and unimaginable – will still be waiting for us as we emerge
from the Coronavirus pandemic. But the planning techniques in By 2050 are
geared to assist Australians to imagine the unimaginable and to grab the
advantage that comes from that process of forethought. They will also make
it possible, as Australia emerges from the Coronavirus crisis, to make our
country and our lives entirely anew if we wish.
Instead of remaking what we had, we can make what we want, if we work
together as Australians in a more efficiently organised democratic process.
We can build national resilience, cohesion and wellbeing, but only with
inclusive integrated planning and persistent accessible reporting. And since
there are sound reasons to believe that we might only get one shot at re-
balancing our shares of power in this way – because of a probable future
prolongation of the slow and insidious shutdown of our rights as citizens over
the past twenty years – it is important to give ourselves the chance to think
through how to do it with integrity and with the quality assurance that only
3
comes from decent, evidence-based, generous planning for the common
good.
By 2050 has been written to facilitate that process of thinking and
planning our way through to the future we want. It is, as it were, something
akin to a twenty-year diary of a nation, taking us back to the start of the
century, to 2001, a year that one author has aptly described as “the year
everything changed”1, and examining what has become of us since. In doing
so it endeavours to describe the starting point of a plan we can make in 2020
for a better future by 2050. Like a diary, it is a letter to ourselves in which we
can search for and express what it is in our lives that is not making us happy
but, more than that, what we might long for instead if only we could assemble
ourselves to imagine it and then bring it about. We have this in our power. By
2050 shows how.
1 See Phillipa McGuinness, The Year Everything Changed: 2001, Vintage Books Australia, 2018.
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Preface
Sydney, Australia
July 2019
Some time around the year 2015 in the western suburbs of Sydney I found
myself at a family gathering being taken aback by a comment from a very dear
and close relative. The comment, I realise now, would by that year have been
innocuous enough for many good and decent Australians – but it came as a
bolt from the blue for me. The comment, dropped in passing but with some
emphasis as the beer, chips and nuts were being served, was “I’m glad they’ve
stopped the boats”.
Any Australian who had reached adulthood by the year 2000 would
understand this statement immediately as a reference to Australia’s near
twenty year old campaign to stop refugees from seeking asylum in Australia
by means of risking their lives in desperate attempts to cross the Indian Ocean
or the Timor or Arafura Seas in boats often unfit for the purpose.
My first instinct, given my views about the need for compassion with
refugees and our obligations to them, was to object to my family member’s
passing remark. But as I opened my mouth to speak, I picked up a silent but
unmistakable vibe that to engage on the matter would lead to distressing
tensions. So the moment passed quietly and family harmony remained
untrammelled.
But as time passed after this moment, my discomfort did not. It became
clear to me in subsequent family encounters that sentiments behind the
comment were not marked wholly by concern to prevent asylum seekers from
drowning but were the result of a more complicated set of attitudes and
anxieties about immigration, refugees and multiculturalism which had
become far more prevalent in Australia since the early 2000s.
I had not lived in so much of a bubble throughout the decade as to have
been unaware of this attitudinal shift on a nation-wide basis. Its advent had
5
been marked obviously by events now famous in Australian history as “The
Tampa” and “Children Overboard”. And of course I knew that the conservative
response to those events had been very much embedded in our institutions
through such things as:
• the establishment of the Australian Border Force;
• the introduction of mandatory offshore detention of refugees;
• generally indefinite detention and denial of human rights to refugees
who had committed no crimes but who had happened to seek
asylum by taking a boat instead of a plane to our shores;
• new policy settings which violated international law and which
arbitrarily denied asylum seekers rights we had always conferred
since World War II consistent with our commitments as a signatory
to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international
conventions; and
• adoption of legislation imposing prison terms for doctors and social
workers who disclose information about conditions in offshore
detention centres.
I knew all this, of course. I knew that 21st century Australia was a very different
place to the one I remembered from the post-war years of the 20th century.
But what I had been naively unaware of was that these attitudes and the
institutional changes they had spawned had become something of a norm to
some in my family and that, without knowing it, I had diverged from them or
they from me in a very unsettling way.
Prior to this, I had always assumed a shared set of values with my family
about a compassionate and multicultural society. I had assumed this
commonality notwithstanding my awareness that my family had, throughout
their lives, come to their convictions mainly through their religious faith and I
by contrast had come to mine on the basis of a fully atheistic humanism. It
came as a jolt that the religious faith that my family and I had all been brought
up with (but which in my case had long since been discarded in early
adulthood) had not led my family to the same views about human rights that
I held, or at least to the same degree of passion that I felt for protection of
those rights for all humans.
What did it say to me if in a multicultural, multi-faith, irretrievably
globalised world, I would not be able to rely on a notion (at least) that there
6
are principles common to different cultures and religions which will reliably
lead to shared ideas of the common good and decency? The question was on
most days too troubling to answer, particularly because the more I thought
about it, the more instances I saw of the consequences of failures to consider
the common good, including:
• near catastrophic global heating,
• increases in income and wealth inequality,
• erosion of democratic systems and institutions, including attacks on
media and free speech – and an undermining of confidence in those
institutions,
• unfair trade agreements, trade wars, proxy wars mounted for the
purpose of weakening or destroying another country’s economy,
• the insidious continuation of neoliberalism (despite a number of
commentators saying that we were finally witnessing its death),
• the weakening of properly regulated capitalism as a means of fairly
sharing increasing prosperity,
• grossly disproportionate corporate influence over governments and
law making, and
• natural ecosystem and habitat destruction and large-scale extinction
of species.
The distress I felt on this account reached its peak in the results of the
2019 Australian Federal election. Like most Australians I had been at least
half-expecting that the Australian Labor Party would win this election (as all
the polls had predicted) and that conservative dominance would take its
normal turn on the back seat for a while, while some progressive policies
picked up speed, hopefully before it was too late in the real existential crisis
of global heating.
When Labor’s progressive agenda didn’t win the day, the pain, anger,
frustration and outright loss of hope I felt, constituted a personal crisis. In part
this crisis arose from my sense of how little time we have left – probably only
10 years according to the near unanimous opinion of all experts in the field –
to prevent irreversible collapse of the ecosystems on which we depend. But
in part the crisis also arose, and was made the worse, because for the only
time in my life I felt in danger of breaking with my extended family – the small
7
but tight-knit unit into which I had been born over 60 years ago and that I had
always loved.
Why, I asked myself in near anguish, did they and the majority of the
nation not see the world the way I did? Why did they not feel the same degree
of urgency that I did for change and progressive, united effort in addressing
such critical issues as global heating, massive post-GFC dislocation of
populations, increasing inequality and attacks on democratic institutions? Did
they not share the same hopes and aspirations for the safety, security and
prosperity of their children as I did?
Luckily for me the last of these questions became the critical one. It
became the critical question because it became the only question to which I
could feasibly posit a positive answer – that answer being that the vast
majority of Australians probably did have the same hopes and aspirations for
the safety, security and prosperity of their children as I did.
This is a parent speaking, of course. But when it comes to our children
there are very few of us who are not hardwired to fight to protect them. The
image of our children, and our nieces and nephews, and our consciousness of
any threat to them are, when it all boils down, far more likely to drive the
formation of common commitments to a better future than adherence to any
creed, cultural norm, ideology or worldly political affiliation. Our children
form the ground on which we are most likely to realise the dire need to
overcome the inertia that arises from feelings of powerlessness in a globalised
world and to overcome the antagonisms that arise from cultural, religious and
ideological differences.
In the fog of my anger about the 2019 election, my belief in the power of
this hardwiring was probably the thing that pushed me through the crisis and
brought me to a point where I could stop agonising about why the majority of
the nation did not appear to see the world the way I did or did not have the
same priorities for change and for a progressive politics. Jettisoning those
rather pointless questions brought me to a different place – one where I felt I
could do something practical to restore at least some of my hopes that my
beautiful children might still be left a better world. After all, I reasoned, I have
decades of experience in how to help communities describe the better world
they want and plan their way towards it. This is the time to share that
experience.
8
This book, then, is about how we can work together – with our children
and grandchildren, with governments and with business – to describe that
better world and how we can significantly increase our chances of being able
to travel the paths we want to take towards that inevitably globalised but
hopeful future in 21st century democratic Australia.
Planning for the future we want to leave our children
There have been lots of different reasons put forward as to why Labor did not
win the 2019 election and why the progressive agenda in Australian politics
suffered such a distressing setback. Grappling as Labor had to with a
constituency divided roughly evenly between city dwellers who wanted
something done for their kids on climate change and less privileged city and
regional populations who wanted a reliable, well paid job to put a meal on the
table for their kids in the here and now – it was probably always going to be a
cliff-hanger. And it is likely that there will be several more cliff-hanger
elections in Australia as long as the progressive parties stumble in painting a
picture of what the future has to offer those who have the most immediate
needs for financial security and who are the victims of the increasing
inequality brought on by a reluctance (often their own) to change certain
conservative policies.
Progressive political parties will continue to stumble and fall on this more
optimistic picture-painting in election campaigns for as long as:
• they are drawn into negative politics – the slick, sharp, dumbed-
down and insulting one-liners of marketing and advertising experts
and tabloid editors – and as long as
• they continue to fall back on pointing out the need for change
without displaying enough about the benefits of change and the
surest, least painful, socially supported pathways towards those
benefits.
Progressive party campaign speeches which claim that “we need change”, and
then provide merely a nebulous image of misery that may arise down the
track from the conservative no-change policy case (in other words – fear
campaigns), are clearly not enough to make people in a relatively prosperous
first-world country clamour as a solid majority for progressive programs. This
9
is especially the case when the progressive programs themselves are
explained in complicated language. If such campaigns were all that is needed
to fire up a desire for progress, we would not have reached a point where a
government entirely bereft of policies and ideas for solving the big problems
we all know we are facing, is re-elected and even emboldened to continue
doling out the contorted message that things will change for the better if only
we stick with the course that has led us precisely to where we don’t want to
be.
Moving away from the tactical folly of negative politics is difficult for any
political party. But, as it happens, with thirty years’ experience as a senior
strategic planner in the public service, I know that it is not impossible. What
is needed is a process of community dialogue outside politics, where we can
imagine and articulate to each other a fuller idea of what our children’s lives
could be like in the longer term if certain changes can be made in a manner
that doesn’t consign some of us (or even more of us) to suffering and oblivion
in the shorter term.
This process must be one where communities can organise themselves to
take the lead in defining the national direction necessary for their children’s
security and championing that preferred direction to politicians. Community
groups have always done that, of course, but usually based on sectional
interest. To champion the national interest we need quite a deal more
organisation and integration in planning techniques and community
engagement, especially if we are attempting to achieve progress in several
areas at once, namely in society, the environment, the economy and
governance. In particular, we need a communication vehicle which can carry
a set of integrated messages from us to our governments.
To ensure success in delivery of the messages, this system necessarily
works by applying a new type of discourse to the processes of governance and
reform, a discourse using thoughtful, positive, emotionally intelligent and
inspiring language. This is a language with which bureaucracies and the more
shallow among our politicians have never been comfortable. Whenever it has
emerged in Australian political battles, its orators have been categorised as
“bleeding hearts” – pejoratively, not positively. Nevertheless, until we find a
way to invoke this language we will never be able to take our personal
aspirations for the world we want to leave our children into the public sphere
of possibility. We will also never be able to overcome the soporific effects of
10
the advertising slogans, outright lies and personality driven politics to which
Australians have become prey in the 21st century.
In a post-truth world so rife with distrust of governments (any
government), where participation in democracy is accordingly declining, and
where social media is amplifying rather than stemming the reach of fake
news, a shift in the language and tactics of political campaigns away from the
negative is now an imperative. Slick negative campaigns, full of promises we
all know are hollow but succumb to anyway, will continue to trump more
thoughtful progressive ethical campaigns if we do not rise to this challenge of
increasing participation in democracy by giving people more practical ways of
determining what is true and worth valuing and what they want for their own
and their children’s future. In By 2050, I will propose a package of planning
mechanisms, the purpose of which is to open up opportunities for Australians
to participate far more effectively in their democracy and to increase their
influence over their own future.
Expectations and pre-requisites for success
The package of planning mechanisms and engagement processes suggested
in this book will not deliver benefits immediately. Nor would it make current
problems instantly and magically disappear. It simply provides communities
with an organising mechanism for broadening, deepening and more fully and
lucidly articulating our understanding of the sort of society, environment,
economy and governance systems we would wish for our children by 2050. It
is geared to smooth the path to a better future over the medium to longer
term (five to thirty years). This smoothed path assumes the existence of at
least three fundamental underpinnings:
• It assumes a robust social safety net and the maintenance of reliable
rights to fair support from that safety net, especially during periods
of major industry transition. In this regard it assumes a change in
attitudes about what causes poverty and disadvantage. It assumes a
greater focus on the social determinants of disadvantage and an end
to blaming the victims of poverty. In short it assumes a change in
attitudes to social obligations and privilege, to welfare and to
taxation.
11
• It also assumes development of values about corporate citizenship
and ethics (including ethical investment) which are currently on the
wane or are even non-existent in parts of Australia’s corporate sector
(the banking and mining sectors come to mind in particular).
• And finally it assumes that leadership, which so many complain has
been absent from our governments during this century, must be and
can be driven more from the bottom up, giving communities a better
shot at increasing their power in democratic decision processes and
at the same time emboldening progressive leaders to be less fearful
of electoral punishment merely for proposing obviously necessary
change and institutional reform.
In effect it is a practical mechanism giving communities, individuals and
governments the chance to influence each other much more than they do
now, and to do so for purposes of the common good.
This book displays how this planning process and its associated
techniques can revolutionise the ways we organise our approach to change,
lessen or dissolve the fears that always come when we know change is coming
(whether we want it or not), and take more control of that change and our
future than we can with our current processes for participation in our
democracy. It is also about the challenges of articulating what we want for the
future in a country which has never actually articulated its values or checked
with us, as citizens, about which values we would all be prepared to share. If
we are to reach the more tangible and practical outcomes we might articulate
for our children, if we are to leave them with a hopeful and optimistic view of
their future security and wellbeing, there must at some time in the near future
be an agreed understanding of a preferred Australian identity and values. As
yet there is no such statement. This challenge is not insurmountable at all and
there is tangible cause for hope, if we start now. In another ten years it may
be too late.
Hope in diversity
Some time after the 2019 election result, my husband reminded me of an
afternoon in 2017 when we had found ourselves wandering the tiny island of
Iona in the Scottish Hebrides.
12
Strolling through that remote island’s 1,450 year-old abbey we came
across two placards containing simple but reasonably comprehensive
statements of beliefs and community commitments2. These statements were
marked by the sort of generosity, respect for the environment and celebration
of cultural diversity that we would have expected from progressive, outward
looking secular communities but had come not to expect from monotheistic
religions, especially religious communities steeped in more than a thousand
years of a particular way of thinking.
My husband and I stood reading these statements for some time,
recognising in them a host of values that we shared and that I had articulated
and promoted many times throughout my professional career as a public
servant. We found ourselves astonished, happily, to see that such an ancient
community – which had every excuse to remain steeped in its revered
traditions and persist in expressing all its hopes through an unchanging
biblical language and exclusivist propagation of its own particular faith – had
stepped into a very different articulation of its values and commitments than
we might have expected. It was an articulation which seemed to place
humanity at its centre, which mentioned its own god hardly at all, and which
elevated no creed above any other. We might have expected reclusive
introspection and prayers from such a remote setting. We might have
expected that tiny community to be borne down by the massive weight of its
own heritage and patterns of thinking. Instead we saw a secular, outward
looking, inclusive and progressive heart.
Those who feel a religious spirituality and are at the same time deeply
thoughtful about humanity will be entitled to suggest that our surprise about
the thoughts of the Iona Abbey community is merely condescending
ignorance on our part. And they may be right. But in a world where religious
cultures have done much in the last two millennia to discredit themselves
through intolerance, sexism, extreme violence and religiously driven
rapacious ethnic cleansing, it should not be difficult to understand our
astonishment that such an ancient religious community could behave, not just
with tolerance but with appreciation of “the other” and a recognition of the
commonality of human interests. For my husband and I, remembering this
moment from the perspective of the state of the world in 2019, Iona was a
2 Photographs of these placards can be found in Appendix A.
13
source of real hope that humanity can overcome the enormous existential
challenges we are now facing, despite religious and non-religious cultural
divides and ideologies.
But more than that, Iona showed us that – somewhere – there is a place
where the languages, values and aspirations of all these faiths, cultures,
ideologies and atheisms intersect. If that place can be found – and it is most
likely to be found in discussions about what we want for our children and
grandchildren – then a common idea of a far better future is more likely to be
determined and accepted not just despite diversity but because of it. That
future is one where the sum of the parts is much greater than the value of
individual components.
In a single afternoon, Iona revived our hopes that diversity, far from being
an ongoing oppressive and divisive liability for humanity, can instead be an
asset for our children, if the processes of democracy can be adjusted to make
that diversity work for rather than against the common good. This book is
intended to provide practical help to communities towards that adjustment
of the processes of democracy – an adjustment that will enable Australians to
define the “common good”, and to organise their diverse desires into a
coherent picture of a society and planet that will be better for us all by 2050.
It is designed to help us plan our way towards a better future for our children.
14
Introduction
This book is an aid to planning a better future for our children and
grandchildren. It is a proposal for a paradigm shift in the way Australians of
the 2020s participate in their democracy and it provides a practical means of
making that shift more easily than we might think is possible. The shift I am
speaking of is to a space where we can act in an organised manner as a nation
together to design our preferred future and lead ourselves far more efficiently
and effectively than Australians are being led now. This is a shift that will give
Australians more control over their lives today and their future.
The suggestion of the necessity for this paradigm shift has arisen from the
fact that in Australia today, two out of our three levels of government – state
and federal – are attempting to drive the nation into the future without any
agreed plan or road map. There is no statement of either our direction or
destination – nothing articulating where we are going and what we want
Australia to become as our nation’s children and grandchildren grow. And
even were we to suddenly come to an agreed understanding of what our
preferred future might be, we would nevertheless find ourselves bereft of
agreement as to how we might arrive safely in that future – what paths we
might take or avoid along the way. All nations need to know that they are safe
and secure and that they have things in hand to ensure a continuation of that
safety and security into the future. At the outset of the 2020s Australia has no
such surety.
Accordingly, this book sets out a systematic process for creative dialogue
and transparent communication that will help any and all Australians organise
themselves efficiently to develop the missing road map – a national plan for a
preferred standard of wellbeing and security achievable by 2050 or sooner.
This plan and the process which produces it will be a first. It will be a plan
which can unleash us from the glib language, shallow slogans and obvious
unashamed lies into which political debate has largely sunk in Australia and
15
which is driving us to an unspecified destination. Ominous portents about this
destination are gathering to suggest it is not likely to be a safe one. By 2050
therefore proposes a process and set of techniques designed to help
Australians replace destructive personality politics with substance and
coherence about the best set of policy directions and strategies that
communities can imagine in 2020 to achieve the fairest and most prosperous
possible Australia by 2050. “Prosperous” here means prosperity in terms of
wellbeing, i.e., in social and environmental capital, not just a prosperity where
national wealth increases without an attendant increase in overall wellbeing
for all.
The object of the planning process and techniques described in this book
is to significantly increase the influence and capacity we have as communities
and individuals to take more control of our future in a diverse, globalised and
increasingly undemocratic world. The aim is to re-vitalise the participation of
Australians in their own democracy, substantially expand the reach and
content of the community’s diverse voices, and re-balance not just the sharing
of national wealth but the sharing of power and influence over our
governments and our own lives. Currently this power balance is dominated
far too heavily by some big sectional interest groups and very large corporate
interests to the serious detriment of others, particularly the young, the
disadvantaged, women, LGBTIQ+, and First Nations populations.
In attempting to reduce and ultimately redress this imbalance, By 2050
aims to display how the use of simple strategic planning techniques and
processes can assist us to:
• project a clear and agreed idea of the type of society and planet we
want for our children by 2050,
• identify the paths we would prefer to take (and not take) towards
that future,
• periodically assess whether we are moving forward or backward
along those paths (or not at all), and
• isolate the policies and strategies we need to adjust to reach that
future.
Anyone can participate in this process or use these techniques to begin
to imagine the future society and planet they want for their children – or if
they don’t have children, for their nieces, nephews, adopted family and
16
unrelated future generations. They are simple democratic planning
instruments already used to varying degrees by community strategic planners
in some public sector organisations but mainly in local government. The
process and techniques are called “Integrated Planning & Reporting” or
“IP&R”. This may sound like the jargon of the stereotypical desiccated
bureaucrat, irrelevant to our concerns in daily life, but it is actually just an
ordered way of talking to each other about what matters, setting down our
preferred strategies for the future in one easily accessible place and
monitoring whether we are moving towards or away from that preferred
future. It is a particularly effective and practical way of organising
communities to determine and take greater control of their future and at the
same time reduce the distortions and suboptimal outcomes that are often
imposed on Australians, either by debased and poorly motivated politics or
rigid ideologies. IP&R can adjust the shares of influence in a democracy
between those who elect and those who are elected. It does this by making a
space for practical idealism within democracy to produce an authenticated
guiding hand for governance, a new social contract in which the obligations of
all – the politicians, the parliaments, the governments, the public servants,
the judges, the corporates, and we the people – are clear. And it is working
already at one level of community involvement – in local communities – to
diminish the detrimental impacts of elitism in governance.
To date the process and techniques in use already in IP&R have not been
used in state or national community planning and as far as I am aware they
have not been used anywhere with the variety of transparent detail,
accessibility and opportunity for imagination that is on offer in this book. In
order to make Integrated Planning & Reporting work for the first time at a
national level it has therefore been necessary to build up the capacity of the
techniques and build a deeper understanding of how the whole process can
work to deliver us safely into whatever our preferred future might be as a
nation together. In By 2050 I have built up that capacity by reviewing where
Australia is in terms of the challenges it is facing and the obstacles we may
have to overcome to secure our children’s future. As such, By 2050 functions
as an issues paper for Australia, marking a point in time – the beginning of the
2020s. In isolating those issues and obstacles – several of which are attitudinal
obstacles that we have put in our own way – I have been able to test how the
process and techniques of IP&R could help us cope with the task of nation-
17
wide planning and how they need to be refined or adapted to meet the
challenges involved, including the formidable one of how IP&R can help
Australians, for the first time, plan their own preferred national economy.
IP&R is a proven successful planning instrument for purposes of bringing
communities together to plan their own local social, environmental and
governance outcomes and to set up a vision of what they want their lives to
be like in ten or twenty years’ time. In several states, IP&R (or variations on it)
has been a legal requirement for more than a decade at the local government
level. Therefore, local communities in much of Australia can and already do
own their own community strategic plans and they work with their elected
councils, local businesses and non-profit organisations to monitor progress
and meet their local targets. But no community has ever attempted to plan
their own economy, let alone a national economy, and they have never
attempted to deal with the myriad issues of governance that are the province
of the Commonwealth in the Constitution. Nor have they attempted to lift
their community engagement in strategic planning to a national level.3 This
means IP&R needs to be adapted to meet national planning and community
engagement needs. This book works through the questions of how to use
IP&R at that higher level to produce what I will call a “national community
futures plan” – a long term plan that can be owned, monitored and adjusted,
as needed, by Australians so that they can re-build the nation’s confidence in
itself and its future.
As the book unfolds I will be demonstrating:
• why Australians should begin to do this – together,
• why this is the time to do it,
• how poorly we are governing ourselves now (in the 21st century),
• how to turn that poor governance around with practical ease, and
• how to take more control of our future and lead ourselves efficiently
and effectively in our democracy.
3It may be suggested that the Australia 2020 Summit organised by the Australian Government under
the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd in 2008 is proof of past community involvement in strategic
planning at a national level. However, the Summit in no way functioned as the sort of genuine
community engagement that pertains in Integrated Planning & Reporting. Notably 135 of the 138
recommendations of the Summit were rejected by the government. See “Australia 2020 Summit”,
Wikipedia and associated references, accessible at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_2020_Summit#CITEREFStuart2010
18
As will become clear, this is a book for Australians, not for governments.
Although governments and politicians should find it useful, they are the
secondary audience. It is designed primarily for communities because of a
recognition that governments and politicians in 21st century Australia have
slowly allowed, and sometimes even encouraged, a significant deterioration
in the efficiency and effectiveness of our democracy. Participation and trust
are dwindling at a time when we need to be engaged in a strong democracy
more than ever. But disturbingly, the trend within government legislation and
policy has been to shut Australians out of directing their own future and to do
so in a less than transparent and accountable manner. This is a trend towards
autocracy that has been quietly building throughout the century, so covertly
sometimes that it has been difficult to see in its entirety. Chapter 8 provides
some significant examples of how this has been happening. Unless we
suspend and reverse this trend towards autocracy – and do so by setting down
our own plans for society, the environment, our economy and our governance
– Australia will enter a period of persistent decline in living standards, social
cohesion, national wealth and self-determination. We are already some way
down these paths of decline and Chapters 7 and 8 will shed some light on just
how far we have travelled down some quite disturbing paths. As shown in
Chapter 9, a reversal of the direction of travel is urgently needed in several of
these.
However, these reversals will need to be attempted at a time when there
can be no confidence on the part of Australians that governments and
politicians (even those with genuine good will) have the capacity to lead us
safely through the challenges of the next few decades. Most simply don’t
know how and are not geared towards it, as Chapter 8 will show. Others are
geared to leading us to destruction as a society. Steeped in harmful
adversarialism, politics on all sides is geared towards division of Australians,
not towards bringing them together. This is why this book proposes new ways
to look at strengthening the capacity of politicians in ethics and leadership
itself, at the same time as we strengthen our own participation in democracy.
The challenges we are facing as a nation are unprecedented and a continued
reliance on political leadership to bring us safely home will not suffice. But if
adjustments can be made in the way Australians and governments both think
about their role in democracy, we will enhance our chances of arriving safely
home in 2030, 2040 and 2050. By “adjustments”, I mean:
19
• how Australians speak to and listen to each other,
• how they then relate to their governments, and
• how politicians then respond and relate to us.
It is a new sequence of the interchanges of communication between us and
our leaders, a sequence which changes the precedence of the instruments
and processes we use for our governance. At present, that precedence
arrangement is set such that we elect a government and then trust them to
plan and safeguard our present and future interests. With IP&R, however, that
arrangement is reversed and the coherent plans we, the people, develop for
our own future – together in all our diversity – take precedence over the
divergent, short-sighted platforms of political parties. In this re-arrangement,
politics matters less and less and a far more equitable distribution of power
in our democracy is progressively built.
To achieve this change in precedence, Australians need to shift slightly on
two fronts:
• On one front, a shift is required in implicit attitudes about where
democracy occurs, by which I mean a distinction needs to be made
between democracy and politics. Too often these are considered to
be the same thing, as though politics is where all democracy is
exercised. But they are not the same thing and in 21st century
Australia the reality is that politics is where democracy is being
undermined. Until we shake that idea that politics and political
"leadership" (however debauched) is the sole forum of democracy,
we will be selling ourselves out of a reasonable role in determining
and realising our own future. In fact we will sell ourselves into
autocracy, and because politics reduces our aspirations to mere self-
serving venality – as though all we care about is money – we will have
done this for the sake of a few pennies in tax relief, none of which
will provide us with the most affordable infrastructure and services
necessary for maintenance (let alone improvement) of our health,
wellbeing, economic growth and environmental sustainability.
• On the second front we need to shift slightly to reorganise ourselves,
by which I mean we need to work together to articulate firstly to
ourselves and then to politicians, exactly where we want to find
ourselves in 2050. In our 21st century democratic arrangement, our
20
politicians have been leading Australians down a multitude of very
risky paths, but they have been leading us there because we have not
told them where we would rather go. With IP&R we have a practical
and efficient process whereby we can articulate that destination to
politicians and set directions for the country that provide both us and
our leaders with an agreed road map to the future.
These shifts are not hard. They are entirely practicable for a wealthy,
educated nation. But they are essential. By 2050 works on the premise that
until we articulate our preferred directions – our vision for a better life – and
the strategies we are prepared to use to get there, we can’t expect to find
ourselves in a better land – ever. And we certainly can’t expect politicians to
behave better. We can only expect to be divided against ourselves until finally
it is too late.
The possibility that in some ways it might already be too late has also
provided a focus for this book. For instance, there is a major question of
whether it is too late to ameliorate the worst effects of climate change or to
prevent more global heating. But in testing whether IP&R can be lifted to
become a highly capable national community futures planning process, it has
emerged that quality Integrated Planning & Reporting is probably the only
thing that can help us make up some of the time we have lost in the 21 st
century in dealing with the imminent and immanent impacts of the existential
challenge that is climate change. A national community futures planning
process, based on implementing quality IP&R, is the only thing that can help
us assemble and activate all the strategies we need to activate in parallel if
we are to prevent the worst levels of climate change and the worst social and
economic impacts of it. IP&R works simply by making us put all our strategies
in one place, so that we can stand back and see where we are exposed and
where we need further strategic effort. This is a vital and distinguishing
feature of the benefits of IP&R, benefits which are not available in our existing
approaches to democracy and certainly not in our politics or even in our
government institutions. Climate change and its impacts will not be dealt with
simply by reducing emissions – although this is obviously vital. If we are to
mitigate climate change and cope with its effects, other strategies will also
need to be implemented simultaneously along multiple lines, as I will show.
This particularly includes strategies to:
21
• reduce inequality;
• reshape welfare and taxation and our attitudes to both these things;
• end neoliberalism and restore properly regulated capitalism;
• develop an agreed statement of national values and human rights;
and
• perhaps most importantly, establish a Voice to Parliament for First
Nations in our Constitution.
A national community futures planning process based on adapted Integrated
Planning & Reporting is the most practical means of achieving these and the
many other strategies that will need to be implemented to deliver a better life
for our children by mid century.
Unleashing the collective national imagination
The process and techniques outlined here for national Integrated Planning &
Reporting (national IP&R) assume that a certain level of idealism should be
allowed free rein in this type of strategic planning. They assume that if we are
to argue (because we are diverse and wish to maintain that diversity), then
the more productive arguments are going to be about what can be
(imaginatively and optimistically), and rather less about what is or isn’t true
and good in the here and now. If we simply focus endlessly on what is and
isn’t true in, say, global heating, we will get nowhere. We will be stuck in the
here and now. By contrast, IP&R works on the assumption that if we don’t
spend time imagining an idealised future for the common good, it simply
won’t happen inside a hundred years, let alone thirty, if only because no paths
will be established to ensure that (a) it becomes a reality and (b) it becomes a
reality with as little pain and disruption as possible.
What can be is limited only by our imagination. As such, the planning
process suggested in this book is one that will work most effectively with
multiple and diverse imaginations at play. In fact, it will only work with that
multiplicity and diversity being fully unleashed, and with the agreement that
can only come from open inclusive discussion for development of a plan and
a collegiate monitoring of progress.
In reality, these sorts of plans – which at the local level are usually called
“community strategic plans” but which at the national level can be
22
distinguished as an integrated “national community futures plan” – would be
developed by workshopping, open and transparent submission processes,
surveying, and verification that they actually express the sort of future we can
agree is for the common good. They would be developed, not from scratch,
but from a prototype or template like the one provided in Part 3, which is
flexible enough to be populated with whatever examples of our ideas for the
future we consider to be important now. The prototype is simply an
organising mechanism for our hitherto disconnected conversations about the
best directions to take towards the future. Within that, the content of an
agreed plan may end up looking nothing like the examples I have provided,
but that doesn’t matter. The point is to use the organising mechanisms to set
down the diversity of opinions and options for strategy. In turn this will
expand our ideas of what the future could or should look like by 2050.
Experience has taught me that the sum of those diverse imaginings will be
much greater than an individual person’s or an individual community’s ideals.
It has also taught me that by stretching imaginations to focus on the long
term, people begin to feel safe enough to discard short term interests in
favour of a better longer term outcome. When they think about the longer
term there is a convergence of desires about the future. Disagreement about
what we want fades. It emerges that we all want the same things for our
children, the same high quality of life, opportunity and happiness. Some want
more of a particular thing and others might want less of it, but fundamentally
there is room for diversity and what we envision for the future, what we
idealise or dream of, is the same. Working together, using IP&R, to set out
that vision and the preferred path to it is what can bring a nation together,
like no other available process within our democracy.
In displaying how the process and techniques can work, Part 3 includes a
prototype national community futures plan for Australia, underpinned by a
set of arrangements that are outlined in Chapter 10 of Part 2 for:
• community engagement,
• suggested institutional and governance arrangements for the
planning process itself,
• monitoring and reporting, and
• a consolidated wellbeing index that will need to be in place if we are
to turn the aspirations of the plan into a reality.
23
But this prototype in itself is not a plan. Even if it were, it would get us
nowhere unless it had been formulated via a genuine community engagement
process where trust and perhaps even excitement in the plan is built through
inclusive dialogue. It needs to be acknowledged that the process of
development, monitoring and revision of the plan is as important as the plan
itself. The process to create and monitor the plan must be open, accessible,
transparent and ongoing. That said, the prototype provides an insight into
what such a plan can look like if we use more of our imaginations together
than we are using now.
We have never been given an opportunity to create this type of plan
before. Therefore the prototype offered in Part 3 provides a working example
of the language and structure of discourse that we need to use to bring
together our diverse imaginings of what we value now and want for the
future. It is set up to help us find room for them all. This working example
paints one picture of the sort of place Australia can become and will become
if we organise ourselves well enough to overcome the massive challenges to
our way of life that we are facing at the outset of the 2020s. It is a good place
– this place in the imagination – a place in which I certainly would want my
children to arrive. Of course, if others have different opinions about the issues
we are facing, they may describe what they want Australia to become quite
differently. That is the beauty of Integrated Planning & Reporting – it will give
them the opportunity to do exactly that, an opportunity they have never had
before.
If, however, some Australians would genuinely prefer no change in our
society, environment, economy and governance, and would wish to rest our
chances of continuing prosperity on our current forms of leadership,
unassisted by the wider intelligence and imaginings of all Australians – in
other words if some Australians are happy that leaders continue to lead as
well or poorly as they are doing now and that we should rest easy in that –
then it probably should be said at the outset that this book is not likely to
appeal to them. Having said that, if those who are happy with the Australia of
today nevertheless harbour a niggling doubt that the current forms and
quality of our leadership may ruin what is working well for them, then this
book presents an opportunity to ensure that what is valued about the here
and now is valued into the future. No-one can be certain that what they value
now about their lives is not under threat and that the forces of change and
24
time will not sweep away their current happiness and prosperity. That is what
makes it so important for all Australians to tell our leaders both what we want
to become and what we do not want to lose. A national community futures
plan built by Integrated Planning & Reporting – not by autocrats, politicians
or corporate greed – is the only way to ensure we arrive safely in 2050 with
all that we really value still intact. This book will show that governments of
the early 21st century in Australia cannot do this for us, not the way they are
operating within democracy now. Starting in 2020, we will need to do this for
ourselves. We need to guide our leaders to the particular future we genuinely
wish to share.
Enabling bottom-up leadership and avoiding undue
influence
Integrated Planning & Reporting is actually a widened type of micro-economic
reform that is already alive and working in Australia – albeit in a largely
unacknowledged field of application. There is a statutory basis for it in several
states, meaning it has been made law in some parts of Australia due to
reforms of local government during the first decade of this century. These are
good, sensible reforms geared to an idea that modern, healthy, sustainable
economies are not just about personal or national income and wealth. They
comprehend that if we really want a society that is about the shared benefits
of wealth, and a shared responsibility for sustainable growth of our income
and capital, we need an integrated social, environmental, economic and
governance planning framework. In the local government reforms, this is
called “quadruple bottom line” or “QBL” planning – another term at risk of
being discarded as bureaucratic jargon but which is simply shorthand for
ensuring that our plans deliver a better future for society, the environment,
the economy and our governance. It is extremely useful shorthand because it
provides the simplest way to organise all the strategies we need to collect and
implement to achieve that future.
Implementation of IP&R for quadruple bottom line or QBL community
strategic planning within local governments has not been entirely uniform
across Australia. New South Wales is one of the states for which legislation
has been in place since 2009, making this sort of community strategic
25
planning, and community engagement for preparation of such plans, a
compulsory legal requirement. Other states which have legislative
requirements for development of long term community strategic plans (as
opposed to mere corporate or service plans for councils) include the Northern
Territory, Tasmania and Western Australia. New Zealand also has this sort of
legislation for local government area planning. Although the other states have
legislation which focuses more on local council corporate planning and service
delivery, the majority do undertake extensive community engagement in
preparation of those plans. In New South Wales there is, however, an
additional stimulus for development of the nation’s best practice in IP&R
because it is the only state where council rate increases are capped annually
by the state. In NSW, a demonstration of genuine best practice community
engagement in IP&R is a pre-requisite for state government approval of
applications for increases to council rates above the statutory annual rate cap.
The process and techniques of IP&R are therefore already reasonably well
embedded in NSW and this state does set the benchmark for best practice in
IP&R. But IP&R is not embedded in either of the higher levels of government
(state and federal) and, as such, things which affect our quality of life,
particularly in regard to the national economy, taxation, welfare, education,
justice, policing, democratic rights and most aspects of public health, all fall
outside the community’s current sphere of influence in long term planning. In
relation to those sorts of issues, our sphere of influence is limited to the ballot
box in state and federal elections, where the most that can happen is that
reward and punishment for political parties is meted out by an increasingly
divided, unhappy nation. No path to a better future is currently being supplied
by the ballot box process, or any other process, in state and federal
government. Long term community strategic planning has been considered to
be a good thing in local area planning for more than a decade, and councils
and local communities have been getting better and better at it over the
decade to 2020. But it seems not to have dawned on anyone in state or federal
government that it might be a good thing at these higher levels of our
governance system.
That is why this book is suggesting that the integrated strategic planning
and reporting process currently available in local government should be
established as a process for community-based development of an agreed
future for our whole nation. It should not be confined to discrete local
26
government areas. Many people will be sceptical that a process required in
local government may contain any value at all for our governance nation-
wide. But regardless of perceptions of the good and bad about local
government (its greater responsiveness and relevance to our daily lives versus
its perceived parochialism and lesser professional competence), there is
actually something going on at the local government level in Australia to help
us think about our future and become involved in designing and driving it. For
as long as this does not influence our other levels of our governance, we will
be stuck in a rut when it comes to addressing the less parochial issues of our
time.
This book makes a case for the benefits of taking this consultation and
planning process currently available in our local governance and lifting it to a
level of nation-wide operation. Effectively, IP&R may be taken as a pilot
scheme for national community futures planning that has been going on at
the local level for some years now. Although the process is only as good as its
best practitioners, it has been working well at the local community level as a
democratic planning process and there is no reason why it can’t work for
issues that are generally the responsibility of higher levels of governance. At
the local governance level it generally has a ten or twenty year horizon but at
a national level a thirty year horizon is more likely to be required. Hence the
selection of the title for this book – By 2050. This is not to say that some things
in a national community futures plan could not be achieved before 2050.
Significant benefits could accrue well before 2030 if we start early enough.
But the thirty year horizon functions well to inspire us to focus on the next
generation and how we can adopt strategies now which will bear fruit for
them, even though we may not see that benefit in our own lifetimes.
A national community futures planning process can be game-changing to
the extent that it can provide ongoing opportunity for meaningful input from
individuals and communities about their preferred future and about
acceptable ways of achieving that future. At present, unless you are a member
of a political party, you will get no opportunity at all to influence our future in
this way for policies which affect us nationally. In fact, the number of people
who have been influencing that over recent years has been progressively
declining as political party membership has declined and as disillusionment
with politics has increased. We are being controlled more and more by
extremist ideologues and outsized corporate greed. But with national
27
community futures planning we can reconnect with democratic decision
making in a far more meaningful way and we can start to shape our own
future much earlier. As an example of how things might have been different
if we had had access to a process of national IP&R in, say, the year 2000, we
might have been able to acknowledge that global heating was going to change
our world and we could have planned our way to a new set of industries, job
opportunities and markets, phasing out fossil fuels while phasing in healthier,
more sustainable jobs and a new type of economy and prosperity. These big
changes take time and they require far better planning than can be provided
by a three-year or four-year election cycle – which provides no planning at all.
Another benefit of this process is that, rather than setting the confines of
our political engagement within an often exhausting and increasingly futile
process of objection to party political platforms, it focusses instead on
possible futures – on creative ideas and imaginings of something better. In
short, it engages people to say what they want and to shape a path towards
it, rather than simply object to the policy suggestions of the political parties.
Done well, it can enable us to set our own agendas, not just respond to the
agendas of a vested interest. And perhaps best of all, it can assist Australians
to spot an agenda that is likely to work entirely against our better instincts
about the future we might prefer for our children – and to spot that unworthy
agenda well before it does damage that our children may not be able to afford
to overcome. In 2020, Australia is being driven by this sort of destructive and
unaffordable agenda, particularly with regard to the provisions our
governments are making in health and education. Chapter 4 sets out how this
particular agenda is being embedded, while we are not looking.
New institutional and/or cooperative arrangements will of course be
required to support a nation-wide IP&R process. Options for this are quite
various and they each have pros and cons. In an ideal world, such a national
community futures planning process would be established through new
statutory provisions and institutions and would probably work best with the
establishment of a new set of obligations for and between different levels of
government. Alas, we do not have an ideal world; but fortunately, it is likely
that this process can work well even in the absence of this sort of government
sponsorship or buy-in. Indeed, in this book I am suggesting that a nation-wide
framework for community futures planning may well, of necessity, commence
outside government – from the bottom up. A statutory basis is not necessary
28
for commencement of a bottom driven planning process. All that is required
is the good will and collective generosity of we the people.
Regardless of whatever statutory arrangements might be created, any
institutional arrangements enabling such a planning process would need to
ensure its independence and freedom from undue influence by governments
and those with private interests, financial or otherwise. This implies the need
for the creation of something that may be designated along the lines of an
independent centre for national community futures planning. Nothing exists
along these lines at this time, either as a government institution or as a
popular forum funded and driven directly by Australians. Chapter 10 sets out
the prospects and possible shape of such an entity. In the absence of
government sign-on to the proposal for national community futures planning,
this entity can become a vehicle enabling Australians to take much greater
control of their future from the bottom, re-balancing the power arrangement
that currently prevails. In this new arrangement – this paradigm shift in
democracy – the plan Australians can build together would become the
planning and visioning instrument by which elected representatives would
ideally be led. That is how IP&R works at the level of local governance. It
changes what leads us to the future, replacing ad hockery with purposefully
integrated strategy, and that change is driven by the interests of the
community.
Integrated Planning & Reporting is possibly the only bottom driven
planning capability ever gifted to Australians by their law makers. Its potential
to shift our democracy towards a far better power arrangement than we have
now is unprecedented. This book will explain how.
Maximising the power of the process and the plan
An open, transparent consultation process is a pre-requisite for the credibility
of any plan. But the power of the plan to influence government comes first of
all from its being written down. This might seem like a gratuitous and banal
statement but nothing spurs something as big, lumbering and encumbered as
a government (or a parliament, or a bureaucracy, or a business sector, or a
community) into action, unless it is written down and accessible.
29
A plan for a nation is necessarily detailed. It is not something that can be
effective and influential by being dumbed down to a few nebulous vision
statements or marketing one-liners. We have that sort of thing in many places
already and, clearly, it is not working – it is simply a favourite toy of short-
sighted politicians. If attempts to maintain the “accessibility” of a national
plan rely on dumbing it down, we will end up with little more than we already
have in our capacity for planning and little more chance of achieving anything
we might really want for our children. Instead of achieving a higher level of
involvement we will simply have a higher degree of insult to our collective
intelligence. However, there is a difference between being detailed and being
unnecessarily complex and, worse, obscure.
IP&R is not a process for producing complicated, obscure plans. Its beauty
is that it produces accessible, comprehensive plans. This accessibility is built
in via special reporting mechanisms. These include an open and transparent
set of performance indicators – a quadruple bottom line (QBL) Wellbeing
Index – accompanied by an open, collegiate monitoring process and a
consolidated report on progress at the end of the term of an elected federal
parliament (just before an election). A QBL Wellbeing Index is a new type of
index of health and wellbeing, not to be confused with composite wellbeing
indices being developed by economists as an alternative to measuring wealth
by growth in a nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Social scientists and
economists have been developing wellbeing indices for some years and this
has sped up in the last few years due to increasing dissatisfaction with
traditional dependence on economic growth (growth in GDP) as a measure of
a nation’s real health, wealth and wellbeing. As a result, indicators of
wellbeing now exist in fragmented and highly selective forms in many places,
ranging from some local government community strategic plans right though
to international comparative frameworks such as the OECD’s Regional
Wellbeing measurement framework. But they don’t yet exist in a format or
assembly that makes it easy to discern the truth about whether public policies
and our polity are moving us as a nation toward or away from the place we
want to be4. They show historical progress up to the here and now in some
4The Australian National Development Index, ANDI, is on its way to developing a wellbeing index
capable of shedding light on whether Australia is moving toward or away from a preferred set of
values or a picture of what we value for our future. This sort of index will be important in national
community futures planning. See http://www.andi.org.au/
30
ways, but not the potential for progress from the here and now towards a
particular destination in the future. And it is difficult to use them to distil the
policy changes that would make the most difference to our capacity to reach
that place. In other words, the indices don’t exist in a manner that is aligned
with an agreed plan for a nation. We have not yet developed a measurement
system for our particular preferred paths to the future. For all we know, we
could be monitoring things that are relevant to the past, but not the future. A
QBL Wellbeing Index aims to monitor whether the likelihood of reaching a
preferred future is genuinely increasing through time, or declining. In short it
aims to provide insight into whether our preferred future as a nation is
disappearing or becoming more of a certainty.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics provides a vital set of statistical
pictures across many important indicators of our current social and economic
health and some on environmental health and there is little doubt that these
indices would be relevant in any plan we might devise for our future. But they
are not assembled to build a clearer picture of what and how we will need to
change over the longer term (let alone what the impacts of those necessary
changes will be). As a result, they are unpersuasive for decision makers and
all too easily dismissed, ignored or sometimes even misrepresented. If we are
to ensure that we are using the right indicators of performance, these sorts
of statistics and others need to be lined up with the component parts of our
shared vision of a better future. Integrated Planning & Reporting does that. It
can create a relevant QBL Wellbeing Index with much greater capacity to be
useful in securing our future.
Experience in this century is proof that not only is it insufficient to rely on
GDP growth as proof that a nation is on the right course, it is insufficient to
assume that better data across a wider array of indicators will suffice to
inspire governments to make sensible changes to policy to prevent the
impending disaster that the data might be indicating. The fact is that after
forty years of rampant neoliberalism (poorly regulated capitalism) politics
itself in much of the developed world is broken and as such, the significance
of many wellbeing indicators is bound to be lost on governments (often
deliberately). If, however, the indicators are selected and connected so that
they monitor performance in relation to whether an agreed plan is moving us
closer to or further away from where we want to be, then their significance
should not be lost on us. Once the appropriate indicators are made to work in
31
a way that meaningfully monitors the performance of a particular national
plan, they can function as a signposting system for any changes in directions
or strategies that we might need to take to get our plan back on track.
The power of the sort of picture of our future prospects that can be made
available by this process and these techniques is impossible to calculate. But
it is bound to be much greater than the power provided by the fragmented
systems of governance available to communities and governments to date.
Politics up until the 21st century and up until globalisation had an easier task
in governance, and reliance on fragmented monitoring presented
governments with fewer risks than it does today. Until the turn of the century
we could reverse some problems as they arose more easily than we can
reverse our current problems. We could do this without the need for much
insight into a preferred future and without the need for as much in the way
of planning, because the majority of problems were confined more within
domestic borders than they are now. Problems in the 21st century, however,
are much bigger and our control over the solutions is much smaller, because
we live in an irretrievably globalised world. To keep up with our problems in
the 21st century we need not just to fix them, we need to anticipate and
prevent them. This requires more minds working together cleverly and with
good will and less dependence on political leadership. In our current
governance, however, these diverse minds have no easy or reliable way of
finding each other and organising their efforts. In fact, there is much going on
in our governance at the moment that is intended to stop collaboration. But
with Integrated Planning & Reporting, especially an enhanced form of it,
everyone will be able to assemble and organise much more effectively. We
can do this because we are a nation with access to both education and
massive wealth compared to most other countries. We also have the internet
and this makes a significant difference to our chances of success.
The internet is in its infancy as a tool of social connectivity and its teething
problems need to be ironed out. It seems to have reached a point where it is
flooding the airwaves with fake news rather than facilitating free, ethical and
intelligent communication. But at the same time, it has enormous power to
speed up decent evidence-based planning which can help us distinguish fact
from fiction. For instance, I have been able to do things like write this book
because of the internet. I have sat at my kitchen table and been able to
produce an evidence-based picture of Australia’s health and wellbeing,
32
supported by hundreds of credible, professional and scientific references. In
a mere six months, I have been able to access, compare and verify a
multiplicity of sources of knowledge that would have taken years to assemble
before the advent of the world wide web, by which time it would be largely
out of date and I would have to do it all again before I could use it to shed light
on our current position. This is not to say that I have found the truth of our
current situation as a nation. I have simply assembled evidence to suggest a
starting point for a national community futures plan that is as valid as anything
that could have been assembled before the internet. It is just that I have been
able to do it with ease and speed.
For communities wishing to take charge of their own future, this same
ease and speed is available to them because of the internet. Although
development of a national community futures plan is not something that can
be done entirely via online interaction (on the contrary, development of plans
would best be facilitated via a combination of meaningful face-to-face and
online community engagement), the capacity for people to monitor progress
of the plan is very much enhanced by its online presence. Moreover, ongoing
strategy development and assembly of the most efficient set of strategies is
made possible in the online environment in a way it could never have been
before the internet. In this sense, the web has made it possible for the first
time to create a space for ideas and optimised decision making similar to the
way in which the agora was said to function at the dawn of democracy in
Greece. The Athenian marketplace – the agora – enabled exchange between
members of the people – the demos – to produce the widest application of
democracy available at the time, alas without the participation of women or
the underprivileged (slaves). Even so, it worked well in that small world – well
enough for societies through the centuries to attempt to create democracies
that would function as effectively as that small community of Athens could in
its own local agora. Democracies, of course, struggled to organise themselves
as societies grew in size and number from the city states of the classical Greek
period. And outside local communities, the democratic dynamic of the agora
simply didn’t work: the communications task was too big and the interests of
communities were not as interdependent as they are in the modern
globalised world.
This may be one reason why we have never had a national plan before.
Until the internet, the tyranny of distance in a sprawling country like Australia
33
could not be so easily overcome. We had no way for millions of us to assemble
in a space that would allow us to converse and to collate our conversations
much as the Greeks did in the agora. All we could do was plan at the local
level, like the Athenians, and abrogate power to elected leaders for just about
everything else. But that system of abrogation, or delegation, is of late not
working. In the process we have created parliaments which are increasingly
detached from communities and we have burdened elected officials with
responsibility for far more than they can fairly and reasonably be held
accountable. In this situation those elected leaders are vulnerable to undue
influence – especially corporate greed – to an extraordinary extent.
With the rise of neoliberalism over recent decades our politicians have
increasingly been set adrift without the necessary guidance system for
leadership, without a compass of any sort – either a moral one or one which
will help them navigate to the place we agree we want to go. But in the age
of the internet, for all its faults, we have arrived at a point in time when it is
possible for millions of us to relate to each other, overcome the tyranny of
distance and find common ground – as long as we create the space to do that
in an organised way. With IP&R, and harnessing the communicative power of
the internet, we now have that way to shift democracy from being run rather
less by politics and rather more by the people. This may sound impossibly
utopian, but in reality it is not at all new. In fact it simply returns us to the
origins of democracy in that Athenian marketplace, except that our agora is
now all around us and accessible at the click of a mouse. So, as I will
demonstrate, in an educated first world country with access to some of the
highest levels of wealth in the world, this new organised approach to
democracy – to government of the people, by the people, for the people – is
entirely possible and entirely preferable to the dystopia and autocracy we are
being plunged into now. With the aid of Integrated Planning & Reporting and
a QBL Wellbeing Index – jargonistic though they may seem – we have the
opportunity to take the best aspects of democracy, inclusivity, open
discourse, and transparency to a new level – a level where we can produce
our first national community futures plan and speed our nation safely to a
preferred future.
This is a gift we can give ourselves. My hope in writing this book is that it
can offer Australians a much greater chance to take advantage of that gift –
34
an entirely inclusive, practical, organised way to maximise our chances of
leaving a better world for generations of the future.
35
Part 1 – Reversing Disempowerment
36
Chapter 1 – The Question of Re-balancing
Power
Disempowerment is at the heart of poor health – physical, mental,
emotional.
Professor Sir Michael Marmot
The spread of disempowerment
In 21st century Australia, and in several other western democracies, we are
witnessing a crisis of disempowerment, an all too familiar lament about our
growing inability to influence our own situation and to determine and control
our own future. This is matched by an increase in complaints about the
“failure” of democratic processes and institutions and the quality of 21st
century political leadership in ensuring equitable sharing of prosperity. It is
also matched by complaints about the pervasive influence of “elites” and
vested interests, not just in the political sphere and big business, but in the
media. It is difficult to tell on any day which of these groups is trusted the
least, but trust in all these groups does appear to be at an all-time low, in part
courtesy of the rise of the digital age, the pervasiveness of social media and
the ease with which fake news can be circulated online. We have entered a
“post-truth age”. On some days it can seem as though we have reached a
point where disempowerment and distrust are feeding into and on each other
in some wild whirling infestation of social regression that we are totally unable
to control. Cap all this off with the feelings of powerlessness that are bound
to overwhelm many Australians when they contemplate our inability, as just
one of 195 countries on planet Earth, to head-off something as massive as
climate change, and we have a pandemic of powerlessness, with all the
symptoms of depression, anxiety and rage that you would expect in a world
37
caught in the double-whammy of socioeconomic regression and ecological
devastation.
In the second half of the 20th century, research and discussions about the
effect of disempowerment tended in the main to occur within the fields of
epidemiology, public health and sociology, particularly with a focus on
disempowerment as a cause of mental ill-health, drug addiction, embedded
socio-economic disadvantage, and public health inequity (such as marked
differences in life expectancy within a single country or community). In
Australia, the plight of our Indigenous communities is possibly one of the
world’s most spectacular examples of how disempowerment can plunge
whole civilisations into a spiral of wretchedness that ripples through
successive generations in a manner that keeps on defying attempts to close
gaps in public health, wellbeing and social equity for the survivors.
The problem of how we might close the gaps for our Indigenes is a major
national concern for Australia now. But with the coming of the 21st century
and our worries about global heating and the existential crisis it poses for us
all, many more of us are also being drawn into another malaise of
disempowerment and, with it, we are being drawn into new inequities in
health and standards of living. This sort of disempowerment is somewhat
different in both type and scale to the sort that has so disastrously affected
First Nations in Australia. But it is not inconceivable that if it persists, it will
have a similar propensity to lead many more of us into a spiral of widening
inequality that is very difficult to reverse, if only because our response to it
has been a decision by many of us to opt willingly for more of this type of
disempowerment.
Unlike the spiral of misery for our Indigenous communities, which is much
more a function of social determinants than it is self-induced, this new spiral
may be self-generated (or self-inflicted, if you like) and self-perpetuating. It is
as though our exasperation with our inability to overcome the huge waves of
modernity’s fast-paced social re-organisation and environmental crises has
resulted in many of us throwing up our hands in despair or disgust and
retreating to the margins of society. This is probably for many people a form
of self-preservation. But it may extend to self-destruction if we take the tactic
too far.
The rise of social media has provided an easy means by which more and
more of us can make this retreat. In that online space, it is possible to feel that
38
we can safely rail at the universe and at each other from the sidelines, often
from the standpoint of political extremes. But there is really no place in that
retreat from which an agreed way forward to a better future can emerge.
Agreement or even compromise in that space is virtually impossible since we
have retreated there precisely for the purpose of continuing to grudgingly
disagree. It is a comfort zone – nothing more than an illusion of safety, and a
temporary one at that. What is far more likely to happen in this situation is
that such retreats will push more and more of us to the margins of society and
the extremities of irreconcilable opinions, or more accurately, to the exact
place we wanted to avoid or escape from by that retreat – i.e., to the bottom
social stratum, not just powerless but poor as well.
In the evolving hierarchies of power that have pertained in western
society, the vast majority of us have always lived and worked at the bottom
of that hierarchy, and more happily so as the centuries have rolled by, because
being at the bottom of the power hierarchy has not always led to being poor.
On the contrary hierarchical power systems have often resulted in general
trends of reduction in poverty and improvement in wellbeing. In fact, for
purposes of efficiency, effectiveness and indeed sanity, we have deliberately
designed our systems of power in that hierarchical way. We might not like
thinking of ourselves as “at the bottom”, but the fact is that democracies as
we know them these days all work on our willingness to abrogate (or some
say “delegate”) power in decision making processes to those at the higher
levels of society and/or institutions. Individuals who are not running for office,
or not running a middle to large sized corporation, are likely in the main to
have a basic preference for contributing to society by living their lives at the
bottom of the chain of power (although not at the bottom of the chain of
wealth). As far as our position in the power chain goes, this has seemed to be
an efficient and sound approach. We want to be able to choose that place if
it suits us. Moreover, many of us might reason that if this system of power
abrogation were not in place the alternative would be chaos, massive
inefficiency and dysfunction. (Imagine the inefficiency every one of us having
to decide everything, say, by a plebiscite, simply because we preferred a
system wherein everyone has equal power on every single decision. That way
madness lies. Nor would it increase our chances of equal wealth.)
Alternatively, we might reason that if we did not abrogate power to a
select few then the result might be mob rule. Few of us would be likely to
39
include ourselves in this “mob” – the mob that has been characterised for
centuries as unwashed, unintelligent and brutish. And indeed, our fear of “the
mob”, so characterised, is why pure democracy has never been implemented
in modern western society. It is why Plato argued against the pure democracy
of the demos and the agora and for a republic and philosopher kings – because
he feared the rule of the uneducated many. Democratic experiments such as
the United States of America, with its universal enfranchisement (for men at
least), have been established as republics with aspects of representative
democracy, not pure democracies, precisely because of that same fear of mob
rule. But this is the 21st century and we are educated. Instead of the untutored
rage of the once feared mob, we have enormous reserves of wisdom at our
disposal, if only we can organise ourselves to tap it efficiently. At present we
are not doing that. Much of this book is about what can be done with and via
democracy when instead of an unintelligent, ill-informed, unruly mob we
have an educated “many” to participate in it. That is an enormous potential
just waiting to be tapped and this is exactly the time to tap it – before
governments disable our education system and mobilise the internet fully
against us by encouraging the proliferation of fake news. If we tap this
potential of the educated many in a well organised way we can re-balance our
shares of power over our own lives.
Many Australians may persist in arguing that governments are elected to
turn our vision for a better life into a reality and that this task can and should
be left to them. After all, this is the purpose of representative democracy.
However, anyone can observe that representative democracy is not working
for the vast majority of Australians in the 21st century. Political discourse,
integrity and ethical use of our democracy by politicians have slipped into
such a state of decline that, as at 2020, trust in governments has hit what we
should hope is the rock bottom5. Nor do our state and federal governments
have either the will or the capacity to make our aspirations a reality, if only
because we are yet to tell them what those aspirations really are. So we have
nothing in place that is clear enough to pull politics back into decency. As I will
show in Chapters 2 and 8, at no stage in our history have Australians
articulated what we want for the future and what values we hold in common.
And as long as we fail to articulate the aspirations we truly share (as opposed
5 See Chapter 8 for discussion of the recent decline of trust by Australians in politicians and
institutions.
40
to the ones governments think we share – or want us to share) – we cannot
expect to see them realised. On the contrary, with the current settings of our
democracy – settings which abrogate power to the untrustworthy, to political
elites who seem to feel no obligation to be accountable for their use of that
power – we are more likely to arrive at 2050 having achieved the opposite of
what we might aspire to now.
Representative democracy has its advantages, but this system of
abrogating power moves away from being practical and efficient and towards
being dysfunctional and discriminatory when we abrogate too much power
and withdraw completely from any process that might offer an opportunity
for a better future. When we wilfully bury ourselves at the bottom of the
hierarchy, even though we don’t like it, we are reinforcing the downside of
hierarchical power, not re-balancing it. There will, of course, always be
imbalances in power in a democracy. At the moment, however, in Australia
there are signs that imbalances in power have shifted decidedly towards the
unhealthy. Unless we arrest this trend, we are very likely to find ourselves
embedding increasing inequality for future generations. We are likely to wake
up in 2050 and find ourselves living in an autocracy.
Reversing the trend of 21st century disempowerment in
Australia
At the bottom of any educated society organised in this hierarchical way,
there is a far greater volume of social capital, intelligence (scientific and
emotional), creativity and good will than there ever can be at the top. The
sheer weight of population numbers at the bottom dictates this. The difficulty
lies in accessing that vast collective social intelligence efficiently and in
building coherent knowledge from it, particularly in relation to what we might
want power to be used for – how it can serve the ideas and ideals we might
share for our future. Throughout this century we have seen a few sporadic
efforts by communities, researchers, writers and social commentators to
articulate an ideal or, at least, a better Australia. One of these was a
coordinated program of quite large scale community engagement by a project
41
group called A246, which resulted in the release in 2019 of a vision for “an
Australia of our dreams”, called “Australia reMADE”7. This vision was the
result of an inclusive exercise of imagination – the collective ideas that can
only come from the bottom, from we the people. It lines up with other
imaginings suggested by commentators such as Hugh Mackay, and insofar as
it aspires to a far better, more equal, prosperous Australia than the one we
have now it is bound to be attractive to the vast majority of Australians. Nor
is it by any means a vision that is beyond the realms of possibility. On the
contrary, it is entirely achievable.
But there is a problem. The vision for Australia reMADE is clear and
compelling but we are not organised to make it a reality. Nor is our
representative democracy arranged to make it a reality. In fact, our
democracy is moving in a direction contrary to that needed to create the sort
of future aspired to in Australia reMADE. The Australia reMADE vision would
require, as a minimum, an inclusive and liberal democracy. But as I will show
in Chapters 2 and 8, our democracy is becoming less and less inclusive and
liberal by the year. To make such a vision a reality we will need to lift our
participation in society and in our own democracy to a new level. But it will
not be enough to simply work within our own small circle or local community.
If we persist with that, laudable though it is, we will be overtaken by many
other things beyond the control of our small spheres of influence. We will
trend towards further disempowerment and this trend will accelerate
whenever we elect governments that give every regard to the interests of the
powerful, particularly large multinational corporations, and no regard to our
genuinely shared interests. Recognising this, the important question then
becomes: how do we access the vast reserve of talent, experience,
intelligence and imagination that is currently sitting in disarray at the bottom
of our socioeconomic hierarchy, and by so doing reverse the trend of
disempowerment of the many in a manner that is efficient and will not result
6 See Australia reMADE website, accessible at https://www.australiaremade.org/who-we-are: “In June
2017, the A24 Engagement Project began. The project sought to hear from ordinary Australians
about the future they want for Australia. … People were asked to dream out loud about the
Australia they want and to think with us about how such a transformation could happen. Their
ideas and dreams have come to give life to a vision for Australia, Australia reMADE, adding depth,
breadth, spirit and hope to previous draft vision statements developed in 2016 by many others
who attended a series of A24 Gatherings and considered the same questions.”
7 See Australia reMADE website, accessible at https://www.australiaremade.org/
42
in burdensome impositions on our daily lives or chaotic dysfunction in
democracy and governance?
As I have already indicated, a process has already been embedded in
Australian democracy precisely for this purpose and to some extent it is
working. This process is called “Integrated Planning & Reporting” or “IP&R”.
It is in its infancy but its feasibility has been proven. It is a form of bottom
driven planning – i.e., planning driven more by the community than by
government – which has the potential to re-balance our shares of power and
obligation within agreed social contracts for the common good and benefit of
all. It has the potential to help us take whatever vision we might decide to
share and make it a reality.
As yet, this bottom driven planning has only been working in a limited and
fragmented way in various parts of Australia. It is being facilitated (as opposed
to dictated) by what many would recognise as the least powerful level of
government – local government. If we are to improve outcomes, we will need
to expand this process and also overcome some significant barriers to its
effectiveness that have arisen within state and federal government. As
Chapter 4 shows, these barriers are considerable. But despite its present
limitations and these barriers, this bottom driven planning is in fact the only
existing legislated mechanism with some potential to correct the power
imbalances and distrust from which we are currently suffering. It is the only
process which is geared towards making governments take notice of what
communities want. Chapter 3 shows how this system is at work in Australia
already and how better and fuller use of it would give Australians a chance to
take a far more effective role in setting their own future – from the bottom.
But before we consider how to make this system work beyond the level of our
local community planning efforts, it is important to consider why we should
make this shift at this point in Australia’s history. The next chapter sets out
why we should plan together now, before it is too late.
43
Chapter 2 – Why Plan?
In Australia today, two out of our three levels of government do not steer
their way to a better future for the nation by means of any agreed plan. The
state and federal governments are running a rudderless ship without a
compass and little idea of whether they are headed for the rocks or not. You
really have to wonder sometimes how we have managed to get as far as we
have. Is it more by good luck than good management? Doubtless it has been
a bit of both. But with the way things in state and federal government and the
public sector are organised at the moment, it is probably a fair bet that in
future we will be forced to rely on more of the former than the latter.
In 1964 Donald Horne dubbed Australia “the lucky country”8. And indeed
Australia has enjoyed lots of luck, such as the luck of enormous natural
resources, of not having to share a border, and of being founded as a colony
at a time when the Westminster system was reasonably mature and could
function effectively as a model of government that people would accept. We
didn’t have to take on a bloody fight for independence as America did
(although, as with America, we did deem it necessary to suppress our
Indigenes and that certainly was not a moment of luck for them). Instead we
ended up with a Constitution in which self-rule was peacefully passed on.
My generation, the baby boomers, struck it particularly lucky. There were
two vital moments in the history of the baby boomer generation. One was
when conscription was abolished and the second was when free tertiary
education came in just in time for me to have the chance to afford to go to
8This epithet for Australia has often been used to celebrate our country but it was actually a criticism,
particularly insofar as it suggested that Australia’s luck had arisen despite its being “run mainly by
second rate people who share its luck. [Australia] lives on other people's ideas, and, although its
ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that
surround them that they are often taken by surprise.” See Donald Horne, The Lucky Country, Penguin
Books Australia, 1964, Introduction to the Sixth Edition by Hugh Mackay, Penguin Books Australia,
2005, https://www.penguin.com.au/books/lucky-country-9780143180029
44
university and there meet a man with whom I could spend the most wonderful
life because he hadn’t had to go to war and had likewise gone to university
instead. No post traumatic stress disorder ruined our lives as it had for many
in the generations before us. As a woman, I also had the added luck of coming
out of tertiary education and into a public sector workforce where a standard
of excellence and reform in public service had been embedded and anti-
discrimination laws were being enacted across the nation alongside equal pay
and equal employment opportunity policies. These gave the opportunity to
countless Australian women to make a contribution, the like of which they
had never been able to make before. So my generation sure did get lucky.
As I look at the next generation coming through to middle age now, it is
apparent they have not enjoyed the same good fortune. Many of them
coming out of tertiary education have had to start their adult lives with a
massive debt and for their pains many of them have struggled to find a job in
which they could use the expertise they took on that debt to acquire. Their
chance of finding the fulfilling work that I and many of my generation were
able to find is significantly lower than the chances I enjoyed. They are
suffering through unprecedented rates of underemployment and the gig
economy is set to prevent them from securing sufficient full time permanent
employment to plan for home ownership. They simply accept that our (largely
fulfilled) baby boomer dream of owning our own home is unlikely to ever
come to pass for them, unless they are lucky enough to have a wealthy family.
As for working women in the generation after mine, equality of income with
men still eludes them by a long way.9
Of course, some of what I have characterised as luck for baby boomers
was indeed good management. The timing of it for me was fortuitous but this
is not meant to detract from the excellence of the visionary politicians who
happened along to deliver that good fortune, such as Gough Whitlam, who
ended conscription and enacted the first anti-discrimination laws. My
generation has indeed been the beneficiary of some grand moments of good
management. Today many Australians would agree that when the Hawke-
Keating government tried to rethink the lucky country and make it into “the
9 When the Australian Bureau of Statistics last reviewed income inequality between men and women
in 2014 it reported that the median income for women was only 69% of that of men and that this ratio
had worsened since 2006 when it was 72%. See ABS
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4125.0main+features120Aug%202015
45
clever country”, they took steps that re-shaped our economy and set us up to
become the only country in the world to have achieved more than 25 years of
continuous economic growth. They also re-established the Whitlam
government’s universal health care system which had been abolished by the
Coalition government of Malcolm Fraser, and established the compulsory
superannuation scheme which means that today, working Australians hold
more than $2.9 trillion10 dollars in savings that are generating investment
growth for the nation and returns for those workers. This system is providing
workers with access to a stream of wealth previously unimaginable.
But even that good management had an element of luck. It was not the
product of a defined plan and could so easily have not happened at all. In the
main, it depended at one point in the 1980s and early 1990s on one man, Paul
Keating, who had a talented and coherent Cabinet and the skills:
• to recognise structural failure in our economy,
• to envision an entirely different and smarter way to run it and to
explain that to Australians, and
• to win government for long enough to get those changes through.
It thereafter depended on another man, Kevin Rudd, to have the courage in a
time of world economic crisis in 2008 to be bold about fiscal stimulus and to
be willing to expend his political capital on that. In between these two leaders,
we were lucky enough to have enjoyed a resources boom and to have
maintained a comparatively strong, diversified financial sector that had not
been deregulated too far at that stage (not to the same degree as the United
States of America anyway), had not invested quite so much in dodgy stocks,
unsafe mortgages and collateralised debt obligations, and was still running
under some of the more conservative prudential regulations put in place after
insurance industry failures in the early 2000s. Although during the 2008
Global Financial Crisis (GFC) the Rudd government had to step in and
guarantee personal deposits with Australian banks if one or more of them
were to fail (putting taxpayers on the hook for underwriting the profits of
privately owned banks), luck arrived again inasmuch as these guarantees have
10See Paul Keating, “This reckless government and its business and media mates are determined to
damage superannuation”, The Guardian, 24 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2019/oct/24/this-reckless-
government-and-its-business-and-media-mates-are-determined-to-damage-superannuation
46
not been drawn on (ironically as it turns out because the banks protected their
profits by other forms of gouging customers, prompting in 2017 a Royal
Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial
Services Industry). Nevertheless, the point remains that although our banks
sailed close to the winds of failure, we managed to scrape our way out of it
with some timely good management by a government.
In this same period, two governments – the same two who steered us to
25 years of growth – had the foresight to overhaul native title and begin to
right wrongs for stolen generations. All of this epitomised good management
and courage in a time of bad luck. It was imaginative, inspiring and decent
leadership.
Many Australians who feel they personally did not fare well as a result of
the above described flashes of leadership may disagree with my rendering of
these moments in our history as “good management”. They may suggest that
these leadership periods sowed the seeds of neoliberalism which eventually
ran rampant to embed the inequality we are now suffering. They may assert
entirely different instances of leadership as the cause of our achievement of
more than 25 years of economic growth and may be proud of an entirely
different set of causes of our economic good fortune. I leave them to argue
any and all such views if they feel the need, especially if it would add to our
understanding of what type of management and policy leads to a better
society and what doesn’t. Indeed, part of the point of this book is to create a
space and a logical framework in which such diverse views can not only be
expressed but can be better understood. But for purposes of demonstrating
why we should plan, it is important to single out at least some of the better
moments of our leadership history if only to help us ask a quite basic question
about the continuance of our run of luck. That question is:
What are the chances of that sort of leadership happening again?
Sadly, I suspect that without a greater convergence than we are currently
seeing between political parties about how to take us forward economically
and in terms of social equality, those chances are not high. Leaders who were
proposing progressive agendas were emerging before the 2019 Australian
election, but they did not get the luck of the draw. However, even if we
consider that the odds of good management occurring again are higher than
47
my pessimistic prediction, do we want to trust to that luck? Shouldn’t we
increase our good luck and reduce the chance of bad luck by thinking ahead,
setting out the societal, environmental, governance and economic
distributions that we want?
We might not all agree with the above description of our luck, but lucky
it was. We became one of the wealthiest societies in the world despite the
fact that we never really had an agreed plan, not because we planned it that
way. Personally, I wouldn’t be chancing our future that way again, not when
things are as grim future-wise as they are now. I would prefer to boost my and
my children’s chances of not foundering on the rocks by thinking about where
I want to sail to and having a clear map to that destination. Of course, there
will always be luck (good and bad) and there will always be blunders. But there
will be more good luck and less blunders if we think logically about what we
want and how to get there. We need something we have never had: we need
a coherent plan for our nation’s future – one that we develop ourselves,
together.
Beginnings
The basis of a national plan
Bearing in mind that we have never had a plan for the nation, thinking logically
about what we want will, ideally, require us to start at the beginning – i.e.,
from first principles about our values as a society. I say “ideally” because
Australia’s performance to date in coming to agreement on a statement of
national values is woeful, and reflection on this has led me to suspect that if
we do organise ourselves to plan our future, we will probably not, realistically,
be starting from that type of “ideal” beginning point. Be that as it may, it is
nevertheless useful to consider all the possible bases for a national plan.
By “starting at the beginning” I simply mean that at some stage in the not
too distant future, if Australians want to know where they are going, they will
need to describe to themselves the nation we want to be and what we stand
for as a society. What do we agree to value?
This is something neither we nor our leaders have ever sat down in
concert to decide before – not genuinely anyway. Some may take it for
48
granted that we all value or stand for certain things, such as certain types of
freedoms or fairness. But the reality is that there is nothing that we can take
for granted and certainly no agreement about what we mutually desire and
what we stand for. Our future – the nation we think we are and that we think
we want to be – is entirely tenuous because we do not have an agreed
statement of what we value. Without that, any and all plans we may develop
for our future will be, as it were, provisional, or potentially aimed at the wrong
outcomes.
There are also risks associated with being more than 200 years old as a
nation and still having no agreed idea of what we stand for. For example, there
is a much greater chance that current and future generations can be lulled
into entering wars which have nothing at all to do with protecting what we
genuinely value. We have, after all, been led into several wars which many of
us have looked back on with deep regret as unnecessary, wrongly conceived,
vastly destructive or even immoral. Irrespective of this type of risk, however,
we can’t go on too much longer without a statement of our values if we expect
to be able to plan a decent future and not waste money going to the wrong
place. So where might we start from and how can we describe what we want
to be as a nation?
Values or rights?
Hitherto, Australians have not been good at defining what we truly value. The
only occasion on which we ever seriously considered writing something about
Australian values was in the Constitutional Convention of 1998, which
resulted in a referendum on whether Australia should become a republic. The
Convention resolved that a preamble should be inserted into the Constitution
(in place of its existing prefatory clauses) and provided some instructions in a
Communique11 to the Parliament covering the intent of the suggested new
preamble.
11For the wording of the Communique of the 1998 Convention on the Australian Constitution see
Professor Mark McKenna, “First Words: A Brief History of Public Debate on a New Preamble to the
Australian Constitution 1991-99”, Parliament of Australia, Research Paper 16, 1999-2000 accessible at
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs
/rp/rp9900/2000RP16#The
49
Had the final draft of the preamble been developed by genuine
consultation consistent with the intentions of the Communique, this may
have resulted in our first statement of agreed national values. As it happened
though, the requested preamble was effectively hijacked in several ways. In
the end it was devised by a single person, the then Prime Minister, John
Howard, aided by Australian poet, Les Murray, with next to no consultation
(other than with one Indigenous Australian Democrat Senator, Aden
Ridgeway, whose views were rejected by the Indigenous community at large).
The Howard version discarded significant aspects of the intention of the
Convention as expressed in its Communique. Comments by parliamentarians
and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders also made no impact on the wording
as Mr Howard refused to accept any changes to his final draft or to put that
draft out for public comment. Adding further insult to Australians, the
wording of the final draft of the preamble was not included in the ballot paper
for the referendum, even though the question of whether we supported it or
not was one of the two questions on the ballot.12 Effectively, the whole
exercise was top down decision making gone mad.
With the defeat of the referendum on the republic in 1999, the possibility
of a preamble to our Constitution was lost, along with one of the most
important prerequisites for a reconciled national identity, namely
constitutional recognition of our First Nations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders. Twenty years later we are still floundering around trying to settle
something as fundamental as the question of recognising Australia’s original
inhabitants in the Constitution. This is without doubt the most shameful
aspect of our history as a nation. Our failure to deal with it is long overdue
and more than anything else in our history that failure affects our ability to
move forward as a decent people with some claim to integrity.
The fact is that as far as our Constitution goes, our Indigenes do not exist.
They rate no mention whatsoever in our nation’s “birth certificate”. This
explains why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are now asking for a Voice
in the Constitution13 and it is an indictment of Australians that in the 21st
12 Nor was it explained to Australians that the new preamble would not be justiciable and would be
additional to the old Preamble, not replace it. Had the Howard preamble been endorsed it would have
resulted in a curious set of anachronisms and would have had no substantive bearing on how we
interpret and uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.
13 “Uluru Statement From the Heart” – “We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice
enshrined in the Constitution”, accessible at
50
century we are still mired in a debate which we should have settled decades
ago. This debate continues in part because we have not articulated values that
accord equal rights to all. We may take it for granted that we all have these
rights, but in truth none of us do. Except for protection of a right to freedom
of religion, Australia’s Constitution confers no explicit human rights on either
us or our Indigenes as individuals.
One reason why we have never articulated our values or asserted our
rights before is because there was a piece of bad luck built into the good luck
of having nationhood and self-rule peacefully passed to us at Federation.
Unlike America, we did not have to declare our independence from first
principles. We didn’t have to go through intense arguments, or even any
arguments at all, about how we wanted to rule ourselves and what we wanted
to be. So we never established things like a bill of rights and we have no
document in which “we the people” have affirmed the values by which we
will govern ourselves or use as a guide in ongoing democratic decision making.
Our Constitution is singularly inadequate in this respect. Other than creating
a system of “‘representative government’ – that is government by
representatives of the people who are chosen by the people”14, our
Constitution mentions nothing in regard to what binds us together as a nation
– what we commonly stand for or agree is good. Some rights (as opposed to
values) are conferred by the Constitution such as the above mentioned right
to free exercise of religion and the right to compensation on just terms in
cases of compulsory acquisition of property. Some other rights, such as
“freedom of political communication” have been deemed to be “implied” by
the Constitution rather than expressly conferred, although recent case law
has shown these to be extremely limited in their application. They are not a
personal right15 and, in general, the Australian Constitution is silent on the
https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/sites/default/files/2017-
05/Uluru_Statement_From_The_Heart_0.PDF
14 Australian Government Solicitor, Overview Notes to “Australia’s Constitution”, October 2010, page
v, accessible at https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/7913385?q&versionId=51611380
15 Some human rights are “implied” in Australia’s Constitution, but these are subject to legal
interpretation and High Court rulings as to whether the implied right exists in particular
circumstances. For instance, the High Court declined in August 2019 to use the Constitutional implied
freedom of political communication in favour of a federal public servant who had been sacked for
anonymous social media posts criticising Australian Government immigration policy. The case has
been taken as a signal that rights to freedom of political communication may not be assumed by
public servants, although the fact is they may not be assumed by anyone else either because the High
51
sort of rights Americans and most other major Western democracies can take
for granted, such as the right to free speech and protest. There is basically
nothing in Australia’s Constitution in terms of societal values to which we
routinely refer as a definition of who we are. The good ship Australia has been
sailing along for over 200 years without any sense of a coherent national
identity based on shared values.
In the case of America, by contrast, the values and rights declared in their
Constitution and its Amendments over time have worked for almost 250 years
to establish a basis for decisions about progressive changes which have
cohered to produce a world leading nation in that period. We might not all
agree with those values but at least they have some. Obviously, America like
any nation is still (and always will be) a work in progress and at present seems
to be going backwards in terms of equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. But this doesn’t mean their Constitution with its Amendments
can no longer function as a guide to the nation they want America to be and,
perhaps even more importantly, as a guide to what it cannot become, which
in the main for an American means that one of them may not be less free and
have fewer rights than another. Because their Constitution and its
Amendments are structured to establish the rights that may not be infringed,
Americans simply need to use their Constitution, as amended, and as tested
or interpreted in their courts, as an overarching agreed statement – a
“beginning” – to remind themselves of what they stand for as a nation and
what will not stand. And use it they do to carry on with the endless work of
ensuring that the rights they regarded in 1776 as “inalienable” are indeed
granted equally so that everyone can pursue life, liberty and happiness. This
is their particular shared understanding of their nationhood. In 1776 they
Court has repeatedly ruled that the implied right of communication is not a personal right of free
speech. See High Court of Australia, Comcare vs Banerji at https://jade.io/article/657141?at.hl=Banerji
“It is a restriction on legislative power which arises as a necessary implication from ss 7, 24, 64 and
128 and related sections of the Constitution and, as such, extends only so far as is necessary to
preserve and protect the system of representative and responsible government mandated by the
Constitution[44]. Accordingly, although the effect of a law on an individual's or a group's ability to
participate in political communication is relevant to the assessment of the law's effect on the implied
freedom, the question of whether the law imposes an unjustified burden on the implied freedom of
political communication is a question of the law's effect on political communication as a
whole[45]. More specifically, even if a law significantly restricts the ability of an individual or a group of
persons to engage in political communication, the law will not infringe the implied freedom of political
communication unless it has a material unjustified effect on political communication as a whole.”
52
considered those rights worth dying for, so naturally they considered them
worth writing down.
America’s ongoing struggle “to form a more perfect Union”16 is and
always will be an enormous one and I do not wish to imply that the United
States, as a result of its Constitutional value statements, is a better place to
live than Australia. For my money, it is not. Australia for instance has less
inequality than the United States17, although the bigger inequality problems
in the US have not arisen from their Constitution. The point is that whenever
Americans come face to face with the next great step forward necessary for
their particular “more perfect union”18, they can and do ask themselves
whether that next step will really take them to the place they still agree they
want to go, with all the rights they have willingly and explicitly codified into
their lives and liberties since Independence.
We can ask ourselves no such question. We cannot ask whether the next
step we are taking will actually lead us to where we want to go – because we
haven’t said where that is and where it isn’t. And in this circumstance we can
be, and are, led down some paths that, on reflection, we sometimes find
regrettable and sometimes highly objectionable. We cannot say what our
preferred national “union” may be, or how it may become more perfect.
In contrast to America, where almost every great political battle is settled
by reference to the equal rights set down in their Constitution and its
Amendments, our Constitution makes no mention of either equal human
rights or broader societal values. Our birth certificate is simply a statement of
our arrangements for representative government and the checks and
balances built into those arrangements to help ensure that powers are fairly
spread and appropriately separated. Both America and Australia have a
16 From the “Preamble” to the “Constitution of the United States”: “We the People of the United
States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide
for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to
ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”
Accessible at https://constitutionus.com/
17 The “Gini coefficient” is a statistical measure developed in 1912 and is used internationally as a
gauge of economic inequality, measuring income distribution among a population. Lower coefficients
reflect lower income inequality. In 2019 the “World Population Review” recorded Australia’s Gini
coefficient in percentages as 34.7% and the United States’ as 41.5%. These figures were taken from
the World Bank. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/gini-coefficient-by-country/
18 Note the implication that a perfect Union was not taken for granted and that a “more perfect
Union” was to be the ongoing work of the American people.
53
system of government of the people, by the people, for the people –
nominally at least. But while America says what the people want and what
they affirm as a right, our governors are required to take no account of what
we want, either in the way of several types of rights that many other Western
powers have long since codified, or in the way of a positive social value of
equal access to such rights. Rights tend to be conferred by legislation and are
therefore ad hoc or merely state-based and can be easily overridden or
repealed. This explains how we have arrived at a situation in the early 2020s,
where some in federal parliament are attempting to legislate positive rights
of free speech and discrimination for the privilege of individuals with religious
beliefs (possibly over-riding state based anti-discrimination legislation in the
process), even though religious people are the only ones at present enjoying
some human rights for expression of their opinions in our Constitution. In the
event that this grab for unequal rights succeeds, we will have arrived at a
situation where rights for religious people are augmented to allow
discriminatory speech and behaviours on the grounds of religion, while others
will find themselves unable enjoy any protection from that discrimination. At
the same time, we are witnessing reinforcement by the High Court of the
message that implied rights to freedom of political communication do not
apply for individuals in our Constitution. After the High Court’s decision in
2019 in relation to Comcare vs Banerji19, and the recent unreasonable
tightening of Australian Public Service Guidelines restricting public comment
by public servants (even to the point of prohibiting a “Like” on a politically
charged Facebook comment), those public servants must now expect to lose
their jobs for taking a liberty that everyone else can (at least for now) take for
granted – the liberty of speaking freely about public policy. By contrast
(subject to the terms of religious discrimination legislation), another group
may end up feeling safe in keeping their jobs whenever they take the liberty
of speaking freely with bigotry, hate and vilification, or whenever they
terminate someone’s employment, by claiming religious grounds. Something
is on the verge of being seriously out of joint in terms of equal human rights
in Australia, especially when someone contemplating joining the public
service has to simultaneously contemplate giving up the right to participate in
civic debate.
19 See High Court of Australia, Comcare vs Banerji at https://jade.io/article/657141?at.hl=Banerji
54
Looking at our expression of our sovereignty in this way, it does seem that
there is a rather large hole in our ability to chart our course as a nation,
compared to other Western powers. Whether that hole should be filled with
a bill of rights or something else is a conversation worth having. But as long as
the hole remains, there should be little to wonder at such things as the fact
that we have been successfully able to ignore nation-defining issues such as
equal rights for our Indigenes for so long, and can instead prioritise debates
about the human rights of the only group that already have rights in the
Constitution.
America is living proof that articulating your rights does not guarantee a
better society. But Australia is living proof that not articulating them
guarantees that some of “the people” will be among those not lucky enough
to share in the same rights and privileges as others. This will affect
disadvantaged minorities in the most painful ways, particularly at times when
they are most in need of help and the same powers of self-determination that
others enjoy. This has been so for our Indigenes for over 220 years. But at
present it is starting to turn out that way for more of us, such as our
unemployed and the poor.
Australia has slowly turned into a more cruel country in the 21 st century.
It remains to be seen just how cruel. But cruelty does characterise more of
our behaviour in 2020 than it did in, say, 2010. Ten years have made a
palpable difference. This is observable in both the domestic and international
spheres. Our credibility as a decent nation has been significantly and
adversely affected by this.20 But domestically the effects of the gradual move
to a harder heart are multiplying. In the absence of an agreed statement of
commitment to equal rights or values about decency, we are standing by,
mutely as “quiet Australians”21, while a whole underclass is being built around
20 See Paola Totaro, “Global opinion is against Australia. Do we know how far we’ve fallen?”, The
Guardian, 19 November 2015: “Australia’s human rights policies were last week singled out for
criticism by no fewer than 100 countries, 61 of them focussing on Australia’s treatment of people
seeking asylum. Among them are key allies including the US, the UK, Germany and France.” Accessible
at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/19/global-opinion-is-against-australia-do-
we-know-how-far-weve-fallen
21 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, coined the phrase “quiet Australians” in his election
victory speech, 18 May 2019, “These are the quiet Australians who have won a great victory tonight.
Tonight is about every single Australian who depends on their government to put them first.” See
Katharine Murphy and Sarah Martin, “Scott Morrison credits ‘quiet Australians’ for ‘miracle’ election
55
us as a group deemed less worthy of privileges and a fair share in the benefits
of our prosperity. We are beginning to set values by default, but they are
values that are entirely inconsistent with the fair go most of us probably took
for granted in the 20th century. These new values are about money and a
growing economy, not people or society. They are about who is entitled and
worthy, and who is not. As devotion to accumulation of personal wealth is
taking more and more hold, to the exclusion of other human values, we, or at
least a sizeable number of our leaders, are beginning to demonise anyone
pushed into dependency on the welfare we used to regard, and even welcome
with pride, as a shared responsibility.
More than that, we are accepting wealth as a signal of personal worth
and virtue, and poverty as a signal of membership of an inherently indolent
and evil caste. More of us are accepting that those who earn more are the
ones who are working hardest and that those who are earning less (such as
our aged care and child care workers) are not worth more22, however hard
they might be working and however much they might be doing essential
undervalued work that keeps society together. Those reliant on welfare are
being asked to accept the blame for their disadvantage when in fact we as a
society have simultaneously begun to stop acknowledging any reciprocal
responsibility to them, such as by providing them with a job. As at September
2019, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported vacancy and
employment figures indicating that there was only one vacant job available
for every 2.8 unemployed and that, if the 1.14 million underemployed people
were also pursuing the available 247,100 jobs then it may be that in 2019
there was only one vacant job for every 7.5 job seekers 23. Other estimates
from October 2019 show that in the market of low skilled jobs, there were
victory”, The Guardian, 19 May 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/may/19/scott-morrison-credits-the-quiet-australians-for-miracle-election-victory
22 Consider comments by Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia: “The harder [people] work, the
more they earn.” Emma Dawson, “Scott Morrison’s ‘work harder to earn more’ nonsense shows how
out of touch with workers he is”, The Guardian, 2 August 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/02/scott-morrisons-work-harder-to-earn-
more-nonsense-shows-how-out-of-touch-with-workers-he-is
23 Source: ABS, 6150.0.55.003 Labour Account Australia, Quarterly Experimental Estimates, Table 1,
accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6150.0.55.003June%202019?OpenDocume
nt
56
“about five low-skilled job seekers competing for every low-skilled job”24.
Nevertheless, the government of the time still inveighed against a level of
welfare necessary to provide dignity and sustenance to all who need it. Those
excluded from the benefits of our wealth are growing in their numbers, and
as the 2010s drew to a close we saw a push to degrade welfare recipients even
further by proposals to drug test all recipients and restrict their right to spend
their welfare payments on legal activities, as though having lost their jobs they
had also lost equal rights to determine how they shall lawfully lead their
lives.25
This has all been happening, and happening all the more easily, in the
vacuum created by a failure to articulate the values we share about fairness
and equality. These values have been supported by both sides of politics for
the entire length of the 20th century, but that support is evaporating and the
vacuum is being filled without our consent with a whole range of attitudes
most of us would have found inconceivable twenty years ago (and many of us
find repugnant now). The longer our values and rights remain unspoken and
unwritten, the easier it will be to take them away – to alienate what we might
have assumed to be inalienable, but which has never really been clear and
present for Australians.
There are those who will say we may rely on our legislatures to safeguard
our rights by codifying them as they see fit in their laws. But that is actually
not how a Constituted representative democracy with a balance of powers is
supposed to work. In the absence of a statement in the Constitution of what
rights and values shall not be infringed or abridged, our legislators are in effect
able to exceed the delegation we gave them when we opted to be part of a
representative democratic system of government. They are simply being
given more power than is reasonably their due under a Constitution founded
on an idea that powers should be balanced and fairly shared. The Constitution
of Australia was set up largely to protect states’ rights, but in many cases it
has resulted in simply protecting their right to discriminate. And even when
24 Source: Anglicare. See Judith Ireland, “'Simple mathematical fact': Report finds lack of jobs for
unemployed”, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/simple-mathematical-fact-report-finds-lack-of-jobs-for-
unemployed-20191015-p530pt.html
25 See Rob Harris, “Scott Morrison eyes long-term cashless debit card roll out”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 8 September 2019 https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/scott-morrison-eyes-long-term-
cashless-debit-card-roll-out-20190907-p52oxb.html
57
they legislate to prevent discrimination this can still be over-ridden by the
whims of federal parliaments. These imbalances in power are allowing our
various state and federal governments to wreak havoc in our lives and this is
imposing entirely unnecessary misery on minorities who have no voice. These
prolonged miseries benefit none of us. Nor do they benefit our natural
environment. Some examples of how our assumed rights are or can be
undermined include:
• Had we had a bill of rights providing for equality of access to
institutional benefits for all, John Howard would probably not have
been able to define marriage in the discriminatory way he did in 2004
(strictly as “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all
others”) – a plainly expedient and gratuitous definition of marriage
which could have no other purpose than to deny the rights, benefits
and protections of one of our most important family institutions to a
single group. We could have avoided a dozen more extra years of
ongoing discrimination and abuse and the trauma and expense of a
plebiscite.
• Had we had a bill of rights providing for equality of protection under
the law and an expression of agreement that no person shall be
deprived of life, liberty or possession of property without due
process of law, it is likely that a few less generations of Indigenous
children would have been stolen from their parents and confined
involuntarily in appalling institutional misery and abuse.
• Had we had a bill of rights providing that “freedom of speech or of
the press”26 shall not be abridged, we would be far less likely to be
seeing the sort of assaults and threats we have witnessed,
particularly since 2019, on investigative journalists and public
servants (see Chapter 8).
• Had we had an express right to peaceful assembly and association, a
common law right which can be traced back to Magna Carta but
26Amendment 1 to the Constitution of the United States of America: “Congress shall make no
law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging
the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
58
which has not been expressly conferred in our Constitution, we
would not now be subject to quite wide variance in the way states,
on their whims, have legislated to limit the common law right of
peaceful assembly. NSW is among the lesser examples of largesse in
facilitating this right, having introduced laws in 2016 which
significantly increased fines for persons illegally entering mining and
coal seam gas projects for purposes of peaceful (non-destructive)
protest and which gave police greater powers to search, seize and
move on protesters. Tasmania has legislated to impose even larger
fines on people who peacefully enter forests for purposes of protest,
although some aspects of these laws have since effectively been
struck down by the High Court27. This, however, has not prevented
the conservative Tasmanian government from introducing legislation
providing sentences of up to 21 years for environmental protest.28
Queensland has also introduced legislation to prohibit peaceful
protest. And federally, we have most recently seen legislation which
has had the effect of re-defining entirely peaceful non-destructive
protest, even on public land, as espionage, if such protest can be
determined as an act working against “economic interests” – and this
does not mean national economic interests, it means corporate
economic interests. In that case the law now provides for corporate
dominance over civil and political rights. This infringement of our
rights has even been objected to by the conservative think tank, the
Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). You really know that human rights are
in trouble when the IPA objects.29
27 See Michael Slezak, “Bob Brown wins high court challenge to Tasmanian anti-protest laws”, The
Guardian, 19 February 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2018/feb/19/tasmanian-liberals-vow-to-restore-anti-protest-laws-struck-down-by-high-court
28 Alexandra Humphries, “Greens defiant ahead of anti-protest law reboot to quell activists tabled in
Parliament”, ABC News, 14 November 2019, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-
14/bob-brown-and-others-say-new-anti-protest-law-bid-wont-work/11705296
29 See Nicola Paris, “Suppression of the Right to Protest” in “Green Agenda”, 29 April 2019. In this
legislation the right and left ends of the Australian political spectrum are in agreement in their
concern about restrictions on the right of free speech: “25 years jail for peaceful protest. That is the
potential outcome from the Espionage and Foreign Interference Bill (EFI) that was introduced by the
Liberals and rubber stamped by Labor in 2018. It was slammed through with such speed that the
cross-benches had one hour to examine what was described as the most serious overhaul to national
security in 40 years. Introduced alongside the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform Bill (EFDR) and
59
• Had there been a “human rights charter” or something of the sort in
our Constitution it is doubtful that our federal legislators would have
been progressively able to eat away at the basis of our attitudes to
immigration and refugees to the point where we have sunk to
holding children in captivity offshore and adults, who have
committed no crime nor been charged with one, in indefinite
detention. As John von Doussa QC, President, Human Rights and
Equal Opportunity Commission stated in 2005, the absence of a
charter of human rights led the High Court to conclude in 2004 by a
4 to 3 majority that the indefinite detention of a stateless person was
lawful.30 In this case the High Court determined that amendments to
the Migration Act did lawfully allow indefinite detention, and that the
Act was not unconstitutional. This ruling pertained “even though the
detention was recognised as arbitrary, contrary to article 9 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. … The Court held
Parliament had sufficiently expressed its intention that children
could be detained, notwithstanding that their detention ran foul of
human rights principles.”31 This last example indicates how quickly a
nation can be led into base conduct. To many of us it demeans us in
our own eyes, but it also demeans us in the eyes of the developed
world, fraying our credibility when we comment on the human rights
abuses of other nations.
I could go on with numerous examples of this sort (and indeed Chapter 8 lists
over thirty similar examples), but the main thing to note here is that in a very
short period of time, this country can become unrecognisable from the
country we took for granted in the first 100 years of our Constitution. In large
part, it already has become unrecognisable. Being mainly vested in or
the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Bill (FITS) it even troubled the Institute of Public Affairs,
which called for the withdrawal of the legislation, stating ‘The IPA is inherently concerned about any
proposal that seeks to ‘manage’ political debate by limiting freedom of speech.’” Accessible at
https://greenagenda.org.au/2019/04/right-to-protest/
30 Al-Kateb v Godwin [2004] HCA 37, (2004) 219 CLR 562, High Court (Australia).
31 John von Doussa QC, President, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, “Why We Need
An Australian Bill of Rights – a joint forum”, University of South Australia, 7 December 2005 accessible
at https://www.humanrights.gov.au/about/news/speeches/why-we-need-australian-bill-rights-joint-
forum
60
“facilitated through” legislation (as opposed to being vested in the
Constitution as rights that may not be abridged), the sort of rights I have
spoken of above are, at best, only very lightly “conferred”. They are blithely
assumed but can be quite easily removed. Indeed, they are being slowly taken
away while we stay silent.
There is mounting evidence that these unsaid rights are well past the
point where they can be taken for granted, as though we are living under
some benign enlightened philosopher king. Evidence is mounting that we are
living under the opposite – under a system of autocracy which has no
intention to grant rights, let alone grant them equally, and every intention to
erode them. It is also clear that the powers that be are commending “quiet
Australians” to stay that way, injecting us with tax cuts to anesthetise us into
docility while entitlements we have thus far all enjoyed as needed are slowly
defunded. It is not only the voice of our Indigenes that is being silenced.
If all the values that we have taken for granted are being undermined and
re-written without our input, surely this more limited set of rights is not the
“beginning” we would want to use to plan for a better Australia. Is this
upended, unfair value system the Australia that past generations fought for?
The risks of running a country without any guiding agreement on what
we want to run it for are substantial. We have a Constitution which sets out
how our legislative, executive and judicial powers shall be arranged but
nothing about the common purpose for which they shall be arranged. This is
not to say that Australia should rush out tomorrow and develop a bill of rights,
although a discussion about whether we should develop one and what
function it might serve is, as I have suggested already, long overdue. A
decision to develop something as fundamental as that should be the result of
fully open consultation and at this time none of our leaders is willing to put it
on the agenda. This reluctance is the product of all sides of politics’ (except
perhaps the most conservative side) having been burned by the 1998
Constitutional Convention. After the loss of the republic referendum,
leadership on something like a preamble stating our values simply melted
away, with most politicians agreeing that until there is a renewed appetite for
a republic there will be no stimulus to develop a preamble.
However, things have changed since 1999 and another issue has grown
to such a level of significance that it may place new pressure on the need for
constitutional amendment and this may create a space for the debates we
61
need in this area, sooner than we might have otherwise expected. That issue
is, of course, the persistent and growing calls for recognition of a Voice for our
First Nations in the Constitution since the “Uluru Statement From the Heart”.
Readiness for a statement of values
With circumstances as they are in 2020, it is probably unlikely that a debate
about constitutional recognition of First Nations will be allowed to morph into
a broader debate about national values and rights. The conservative federal
government of Australia since 2019 has been active in narrowing any debate
by promoting a “co-design” process for a referendum on Indigenous
recognition. “Co-design” is code for confining the chat to a narrow set of
interest groups rather than a wider open consultation process with all
Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, who after all will be voting in any
referendum. This is more like a strategy that might increase the potential for
failure of the whole process than one intent on achieving widespread
agreement. It is reminiscent of the referendum for the republic and Mr
Howard’s hijacking of the associated preamble.
But in the unlikely event that there is a groundswell for a broader debate
on a new preamble specifying our values and/or rights, and if that debate is
not also confined to a mere “co-design” process, it should be instructive to
consider some of the thoughts and resolutions that came out of the last
process where we attempted this – the Constitutional Convention of 1998. In
that Convention there were in fact some inspiring and imaginative things
which arose in the discussion about a new preamble and which were
expressed in the Communique from the Convention to the Parliament of the
day. A lot of the content of the Communique was obscured by the lamentable
prime ministerial hijacking of the preamble (not to mention the question of
the republic itself) after the closure of the Convention; but the fact is that a
debate which started as a discussion about whether we should become a
republic or not unexpectedly turned into a quite inspirational debate about
what values we should espouse for our republic. As the University of Sydney’s
Professor Mark McKenna, a consultant to the Australian Parliament for the
Convention, documented in 2000:
62
On the first day of the Convention, ARM [Australian Republican
Movement] chairperson Malcolm Turnbull asserted:
We believe that the preamble should be amended. If it is to remain a
statement of history, then it should pay appropriate regard and
respect to Aboriginal history ... The preamble should also affirm our
commitment to those core political values which define our nation.32
Initial surprise about this turn in the direction of discussion was
apparently quickly overtaken by enthusiasm to support development of a
statement of national values. Again, Professor McKenna:
In the days that followed, this [Mr Turnbull’s] sentiment received almost
unanimous support, while debate surrounding the preamble attracted
some of the most inspiring and unusual speeches of the Convention. For
many delegates, the preamble had become an essential and defining
element of the future republic. Delegates in favour of writing a new
preamble employed language which, only a decade earlier, would have
been applied rarely to the Australian Constitution. A list of phrases used
by Convention delegates as metaphors for the preamble proves
revealing:
o 'a new beginning'
o 'a euphonic useful and uniting statement of fact'
o 'a moral imperative'
o 'a moral charter'
o 'a mission statement'
o 'a vision statement'
o something to 'tell us who we are'
o something to 'believe in'
o a document to 'reinvigorate the national narrative'
o 'the things we hold dear'
o 'a welcome mat', and
o 'the lymph gland'.
32Professor Mark McKenna, “First Words: A Brief History of Public Debate on a New Preamble to the
Australian Constitution 1991-99”, Parliament of Australia, Research Paper 16, 1999-2000 accessible at
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs
/rp/rp9900/2000RP16#The
63
This catalogue of sometimes clumsy poetic images also included words
such as 'truth', 'meaning', 'origins', 'values', 'aspirations', 'hopes',
'ownership', 'inclusion', 'heritage', 'spirituality', 'desires', 'feelings',
'justice', 'equality', 'cohesion' and 'settlement'. For the first time,
Australians were imagining their constitution as a civic creed.
Much was being asked of a preamble at the Convention. Some
wanted a creation myth, some a myth of nationhood. Others wanted a
statement of historical truths or a democratic covenant, some kind of
antidote to the breakdown of traditional systems of belief and
traditional institutions, an alternative to 'crass materialism', a document
in which the people would 'belong'. Unlike the flawed and grimy world
of day-to-day partisan politics, many delegates hoped that a new
preamble would be a means of lifting politics above cynicism and
corruption. It should be something to revere – a tablet of stone to
cherish. At times, it seemed as if the Convention was witnessing a
profound change in the republic debate – a shift from pragmatism to
poetry. Although many delegates who spoke in favour of a new
preamble believed the preamble should be justiciable, they mentioned
this rarely, preferring instead to couch their arguments in emotive
language.33
The fact that Australia didn’t in the end get a new Constitutional
preamble that “would be a means of lifting politics above cynicism and
corruption” may say a lot about why we have ended up in 2020 with a
tarnished reputation for corruption.34 But leaving that aside, a notable thing
about this discussion at the Convention is that nobody mentioned rights. It
was all about values. Perhaps at that stage people still weren’t feeling under
siege as to human rights. We had after all not yet encountered much of the
more recent negative attitudes as a nation to multiculturalism, immigration
and refugees – attitudes which began to take more hold in political discourse
after the Tampa and Children Overboard incidents in 2001. Racism had not
33Professor Mark McKenna, Ibid.
34Christopher Knaus, “Australia among 21 nations where perceived corruption has worsened”, The
Guardian, 23 January 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/jan/23/australia-among-21-nations-where-perceived-corruption-has-worsened
64
been normalised in multicultural Australia to the extent that it is now35. We
also had not experienced the introduction of large numbers of new laws
restricting our human rights, laws which have multiplied in number since
2002. (I will expand on this in Chapter 8.)
Nevertheless, based on the observations of Professor McKenna, it seems
that whether or not we enshrine rights in our Constitution, a bill of rights
might be beside the point for purposes of planning what we want to be as a
nation. A bill of rights in a new constitution may be highly desirable, given the
risks of inequality (before the law) that arise from not having a documented
expression of our rights. But for purposes of developing a plan for our nation,
we might “begin” in a place which involves discussing values while we
anticipate (hopefully in the not too distant future) further discussion on rights.
What is encouraging about the 1998 Constitutional Convention is that when
given the opportunity, the delegates to that Convention, who came from a
wide array of backgrounds and opinions, political and non-political, were
excited by the exercise of imagining what Australia can become and rallied to
the concept of expressing values for our society in evocative language. They
came together on this and in just two days. And some of them even thought
a preamble of national values should be justiciable – in other words it should
be used to determine whether laws which undermine those values are
unconstitutional.
As a community planner of many years’ experience I find this particularly
instructive and heartening. It is heartening because I have found that when it
comes to consulting with communities, participants generally find it easier to
rally against something they don’t want than to imagine something new that
they do want. Public servants obligated to undertake consultation for
community planning (which only happens now at the local council area level
of course) have all had the experience of seeing 100 people turn up to a
rowdy, indignant demonstration or community meeting to protest against a
development around the corner, but only about 10 or less turn up when 100
are invited to participate in an open-ended dialogue about their own future.
This happens because our tendency in our busy lives is to focus on the parts
rather than the whole, and to reject the unacceptable actions being proposed
rather than imagine a new direction. It also happens because, until integrated
35For instance, Pauline Hanson was ejected from the Liberal Party in 1998 for perceived racist
statements, an action that would be highly unlikely today.
65
planning techniques came along, there was no particular format in which any
new future we might imagine could be easily set down. Now there is.
The 1998 Constitutional Convention gave the lie to the idea that if people
are given an opportunity to imagine the future they would really prefer, they
will turn the opportunity down. On the contrary, in the right space and with
the right techniques they can quickly become energised and inspired to
describe that future, putting all their genuine shared aspirations for a better
world into much sharper focus. Integrated planning is particularly suited to
this purpose, and it may well have arrived just in the nick of time, because the
nebulous sense we may have had of ourselves as a fair and democratic nation,
not a cruel and autocratic one, may be under challenge. There are signs that
things we might have taken for granted about the Australian character,
especially our care for and generosity towards each other, are under assault.
In the next section I will examine how our national character – the way we
have tended to express our sense of community and what binds us together
– is being stripped back to something less than we might prefer.
The land of the fair go – disappearing
We have yet to truly imagine ourselves. We have tilted at isolated ideas of
ourselves from time to time, such as the home of “mateship”, the nation that
came of age in World War I, the “we” that are “young and free”, or, perhaps
most pervasively, the land of the fair go for all. That is no doubt our most
enduring understanding of ourselves – that a ‘fair go’ was somehow the
bedrock value of our society. But 120 years after we, or rather our distant
Victorian age sovereign, first defined how we were to govern ourselves, we
still have not defined to what end we want to govern ourselves and how we
might fairly make our nation together. Meanwhile that fair go we might have
imagined we were all entitled to is lately being made conditional on our
meeting a whole lot of prerequisites which we are not being given
opportunities to meet. For instance:
66
• We are being told we’ll get a go if we have a go36, which in a country
where there is only one job for every seven unemployed and
underemployed people37 who are seeking a job, is nothing but an
outright lie to six out of every seven job seekers.
• We are being told that “the best form of welfare is a job”38, but this
is obviously just a wilful set of contradictions designed to befuddle
and distract from the fact that one partner in our social contract has
pulled out of the deal by perversely neglecting an obvious
requirement to provide a job if access to welfare is to be dependent
on said job. It is like a sick Catch-22 where eligibility for welfare –
particularly unemployment benefits or youth allowance – requires
you to already have a job. In other words, if you are in need of
welfare you can only get it by not being in need of it. This dizzying
rhetorical trope functions merely to create an illusion that in an ideal
society there should be a need to collect less tax rather than more,
or perhaps no tax at all, so that self-reliance can take over completely
and alleviate the state of all responsibility. It effectively masks the
unspoken belief that government should work to put itself out of
business and when it does that elusive perfect society will have finally
arrived. In this arrangement there will eventually be no financial
ability within government to support us when we are most in need
of the fair go and no argument that such an obligation even still
exists. But no bother, the perfect society will have arrived by then.
Or not. In any event, self-reliance will rule and it will justify a culture
of every man for himself. America here we come – and not the good
bits of America.
• We are being told that welfare is bad (any welfare, including
pensions, family benefits, single parent benefits, and health
benefits), that the less of it we provide the better, and that assisting
36 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, 1 January 2019, SBS News, “If you have a go, you get a
go.” https://www.sbs.com.au/news/if-you-have-a-go-you-get-a-go-pm-vows-to-make-2019-a-winner-
for-all
37 See notes 23 and 24 above for the variable figures on this.
38 Scott Morrison, Treasurer of Australia, Facebook page, 20 September 2016
https://www.Facebook.com/scottmorrison4cook/photos/i-believe-that-the-best-form-of-welfare-is-a-
jobthat-is-why-when-i-was-social-se/1258085420902525/
67
some disadvantaged people and not others is fine, even “wonderful”,
as long as it is not through welfare. As the Prime Minister of Australia
has stated, “The wonderful thing about the NDIS is it’s not a welfare
program.”39 He meant that the NDIS is great because it supports
people whose disadvantage is not of their own making. All other
welfare recipients are assumed to have caused their own
disadvantage. In their case welfare itself is an undue reward. This is
a major departure from the past where, certainly, welfare cheats
were criticised as cheats and bludgers, but at least welfare itself was
not demonised.
• We are being told that “moving people from welfare to work” is not
“about money” (i.e., it is not about achieving budget surpluses), “it’s
about saving lives”.40 Presumably this means that pushing them to
destitution is the best means of saving the disadvantaged from their
own lesser natures and inspiring them to achieve prosperity through
complete self-sufficiency. But the means by which that ostensible
effort to “save lives” is being prosecuted at the moment is to
completely humiliate people, even to starve them, by trenchant
refusal to raise unemployment benefits to a level where a person
may be able to survive, may not find themselves homeless and may
not lose all sense of self-worth and all confidence to live their life to
the fullest. Within conservative policy think tanks, there are even
moves afoot to convert the welfare payments system to a loans
system for what they proudly claim would be a “far-reaching change
to the whole architecture of welfare payments [that] would increase
recipients’ incentives to become self-reliant”.41 Needless to say,
39 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, “The wonderful thing about the NDIS is it’s not a
welfare program”, quoted by Paul Bongiorno, “Going prayer-shaped” in “The Saturday Paper”, 13 July
2019.
40 Jason Falsinki, Liberal Party Member of the Australian Parliament, on ABC’s Q&A, in answer to a
question of “If you get a surplus will you raise Newstart?” – “I know people on the Left try to
characterise this as being about money. It’s not. It’s about saving lives. It’s about moving people from
welfare to work. … I am allowed to disagree with John Howard. … I think on this issue he is wrong [in
wanting to raise Newstart].” Q&A, 5 August 2019,
https://twitter.com/qanda/status/1158344666653188096?lang=en
41 Andrew Stone, “How to make the Australian economy more productive and shock-proof”, Financial
Review, 5 December 2019. Andrew Stone, who is the former chief economist advisor to former Prime
Minister Tony Abbott and must rank as one of the most thoughtless men on the planet, made these
68
replacement of welfare payments with a loans system would negate
welfare entirely and create a whole new class of debt laden
unemployed, incentivised not to seek a job but to stay out of work.
(The real idea here is nothing to do with incentivising employment
and everything to do with making welfare payments repayable with
interest. Will we see estates of pensioners being garnisheed for
repayment of their pensioner loans? This would certainly be a “far-
reaching” change – but back to a Dickensian period, inasmuch as it
evokes a return to the era of debtors’ prisons.)
• We are also being told:
o that empathy can be dispensed with, if it is “unfunded”42;
o that it is desirable to proactively de-fund “empathy” – i.e., to
cease sharing the nation’s income from taxation as a safety net
(at least as a safety net for the able bodied43) – and to do so not
just by cutting the tax base but by giving much larger tax cuts to
the rich than the poor; and
o that the government has to be cruel to be kind44, and must
accordingly “sharpen the incentives to work”45, as if a Newstart
remarks on launching his book Restoring Hope: Practical policies to revitalise the Australian economy:
“There is also scope, using contingent loans, for a far reaching change to the whole architecture of
welfare payments. This change would increase recipients’ incentives to become self-reliant, but
without cutting the near-term financial support [read indebtedness] available to them”. Accessible at
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/how-to-make-the-australian-economy-more-productive-and-
shock-proof-20191204-p53grs
42 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, as quoted by Katharine Murphy, ”'Unfunded empathy':
Scott Morrison pushes back on growing calls to lift Newstart rate”, “The Guardian”, 29 July 2019,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/29/unfunded-empathy-scott-
morrison-pushes-back-on-growing-calls-to-lift-newstart-rate
43 Scott Morrison would appear to espouse a hierarchy of the entitled. In this hierarchy the disabled
are apparently entitled because obviously they didn’t create their own disadvantage, it was god’s will.
The able bodied are not entitled because they are assumed to have created their own disadvantage.
44 Tony Abbott, Leader of the Opposition in the Australian Parliament, speech to the Queensland
Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 30 March 2011: “Allowing people to stay on welfare when there
is work they can reasonably do is the kindness that kills. It’s the misguided compassion that eventually
breaks down the social fabric.” Reported by Stephen Lunn, “Tony Abbott’s Tough Love Welfare Push”
in “The Weekend Australian” accessible at https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/tony-
abbotts-tough-love-welfare-push/news-story/a0793550a71c1014d32319490a777624
45 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, Address to the Western Australian Chamber of
Commerce and Industry, 24 June 2019, accessible at https://www.pm.gov.au/media/wa-chamber-
commerce-and-industry-address
69
benefit that is sending more people every year into hunger46
isn’t already sharp enough to get them off welfare and into jobs
(assuming enough jobs existed), and won’t be sharp enough until
it is completely removed. On this logic it is justifiable and even
righteous to let people starve. Hunger is their just deserts. The
welfare state must be completely dismantled, regardless of the
fact that our system of welfare has been a mainstay of decency
and other very successful countries such as Norway attribute
their success to their pride in being a welfare state.47
• And we are being told that dependence on welfare is in and of itself
prima facie evidence of cheating and an immoral character, and of
an offence proven before the allegedly guilty party has had any
opportunity of self-defence. I am referring here of course to the
“robo-debt” scandal that was perpetrated on welfare recipients
under the Coalition Government between 2016 and 2019. In robo-
debt cases the government used unverified analyses of potential
overpayments to assert that access to welfare had been illegal. The
onus of proof here was placed entirely on the defendant, who of
course in robo-debt cases rarely had the means to fight the
allegations. This is one of the most egregious examples of a common
law right being trashed by a government before our very eyes.48 The
46 According to an ACOSS survey of 489 people on Newstart or the Youth Allowance in July 2019, “84%
skip meals to save money, 44% skip more than 5 meals a week, 66% don’t use heating in winter, 64%
don’t use cooling in summer, 63% don’t eat meat, 54% don’t buy fresh produce, 68% only buy second-
hand clothes, and more than half have less than $100 left per week after housing costs.” Accessible at
https://www.acoss.org.au/media_release/more-food-for-my-kids-replace-worn-through-clothing-
keep-a-car-running-to-get-to-a-job-acoss-survey-shows-what-a-newstart-increase-wou/
47 See “Norway in the UN: Values and priorities”, Values of Norwegian society: “Modern Norway is
characterised by a high level of welfare, gender equality and economic stability.” Accessible at
https://www.norway.no/en/missions/UN/values-priorities/
48 See Australian Law Reform Commission, “Traditional Rights and Freedoms—Encroachments by
Commonwealth Laws (ALRC Interim Report 127)” accessible at
https://www.alrc.gov.au/publications/common-law-principle-5: “In criminal trials, the prosecution
bears the burden of proof. This has been called ‘the golden thread of English criminal law’ and, in
Australia, ‘a cardinal principle of our system of justice’. The High Court of Australia observed in 2014
that [o]ur system of criminal justice reflects a balance struck between the power of the State to
prosecute and the position of an individual who stands accused. The principle of the common law is
that the prosecution is to prove the guilt of an accused person.”. In robo-debt cases, however,
defendants in many cases were robbed of all means self-defence, particularly in cases where they had,
say, not retained their pay slips and/or had no money to take the risk in defending their case.
70
federal government eventually backed away from robo-debt on
being forced to acknowledge its illegality but it has continued to
assume that dependence on welfare is in and of itself prima facie
evidence of cheating and an immoral character, particularly with
respect to single parents who are considered guilty until they prove
themselves innocent in relation to their single status.49
All of this is so far from our original sense of “mateship”, fairness, equality
before the law and equality (or at least mobility) of classes as to be
unrecognisable as “Australian”. It is a move to a meaner Australia where the
prospect of personal wealth is being daily dangled before us all but in such a
way as to make it an absolute certainty that only some shall attain it. It is also
a move towards an equation of poverty with sinful indolence, innate
immorality and unworthiness, and towards an equation of wealth with
personal worth and virtue. Wealth for all? No, in this arrangement wealth is
only for the “worthy” who are defined as such by means of their being
employed, and only by means of their being employed. Dependency on
welfare is taken as a signal of unworthiness not just for society’s support but
even for salvation.
For those on welfare (especially the unemployed), the ignominy of
poverty is taken as a signal of their unworthiness for any share of our wealth
when they are most in need – i.e., when our imperfect society has not
provided for them (or even for their children). Even the sacrifices of those
deemed “unworthy” (in giving up expectation of welfare payment increases,
or in having a job but still being paid so poorly that they are living below the
poverty line) will not, according to the things we are being told above, admit
them to the kingdom of our wealth. Over 25% of Australians living below the
poverty line in the late 2010s actually had a full time job50 and still they could
not break into the ranks of those deemed respectable enough to have wealth
49 See Luke Henriques-Gomes, “’Demeaning’ welfare crackdown finds only 1.3% were breaking rules”,
The Guardian, 23 January 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/jan/23/coalitions-demeaning-parenting-payment-crackdown-falling-short-of-estimated-
savings?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
50 According to ACOSS 13.4% of Australians who live below the poverty line have a part time job and
25.9% of Australians who live below the poverty line have a full time job (based on the 50% of median
income poverty line). ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2018”, page 57 accessible at
https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ACOSS_Poverty-in-Australia-Report_Web-
Final.pdf
71
– fair share or otherwise. Apparently, if they were poor it was simply their
own fault: it was no longer society that had failed them, they had failed
themselves. “How good is a job!” said Australia’s Prime Minister Scott
Morrison in 201951. Not too good at all, as it turns out, since low wages,
underpaying employers and temporary or part-time employment
arrangements are consigning more and more Australians to poverty. In the
Morrison government’s worldview, welfare is merely conducive to further
sins of sloth and should rightly be reduced to zero. Pity they don’t apply the
same zealous energy and alacrity to the task of stamping out some of the
other deadly sins, like greed.
In this new ethos of taking the old protestant work ethic closer to its
extremes, those who are working are being told they can enjoy rights and
freedoms that others may not. By contrast, those on Newstart are being told
that if they want to gain access to the benefits of our society’s safety net (even
if they have worked and paid taxes all their lives), they may soon be required
to submit to the ignominies of drug testing and cashless debit cards for their
welfare payments which limit what they can buy and which make them shop
at more expensive outlets for essentials. Again it assumes welfare recipients
are all guilty drug dependent bludgers who don’t want to work and have no
rights or skills for deciding how best to manage their money and lives, when
in fact evidence from drug trials for those on welfare in New Zealand has
shown that consistently less than 1% of those tested have recorded a positive
result52. The cost of a new trial for this program in just three local government
areas in Australia is expected to be $5.6 million53 but since it makes no
51 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia quoted by Tony Wright, Sydney Morning Herald 4
August 2019 “Bludgeoning the jobless: It’s a work of decades” accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bludgeoning-the-jobless-it-s-a-work-of-decades-20190802-
p52d8r.html
52 New Zealand runs a drug testing program for job seekers who are referred to certain employers.
“Data from NZ’s Ministry of Social Development shows that of the 47,115 people who were tested in
2017-18, only 170 recorded a positive result for drugs. That equates to 0.3% of those tested. Statistics
from previous years tell a similar story: consistently less than 1% of those tested have recorded a
positive test. In 2014-15 there were 29,049 people tested for 159 failures (0.5%) while in 2013-14,
29,800 were tested. Of those people, only 121, or 0.5%, were found with drugs in their system.” See
Luke Henriques-Gomes, “The Coalition want to drug test welfare recipients. Here's why experts think
it's a bad idea”, The Guardian, 10 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/10/the-coalition-want-to-drug-test-welfare-
recipients-heres-why-experts-think-its-a-bad-idea?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
53 Luke Henriques-Gomes, Ibid.
72
contribution to alleviation of drug problems, and is coincident with continued
lack of services in regional areas for drug rehabilitation54, its sole purpose can
only be to further stigmatise the unemployed. It is being newly branded by
Scott Morrison as “compassionate conservatism”55 but there is nothing of
compassion about it. Instead it is part of a narrative that is being built
everywhere that a government has to be cruel to be kind, that in work is your
salvation, that only “work will set you free”. It sounds ominously familiar and
may well be an extremist characterisation of a merely nascent ethos, but the
seeds of that end to this new narrative are there in the “compassionate
conservatist” dogma we have been subjected to in the five years to 2020. The
fact is that we have no real protection against the development of a society
that may move closer to total loss of freedoms and support for those deemed
“unworthy”. “First they came”56 for the unemployed. Who amongst us will be
rounded up next?
It is against this background that we should interrogate the validity of
those values we are routinely told we do enjoy – such as “a fair go” – and
consider the urgency of collectively thinking through both those values and
the rights they should properly imply. Those who are out of work, who have
a go but nevertheless do not get a go, are already being cast out. Witness the
significant increases in homelessness across Australia. And if anyone wants to
avoid being cast out – and that can indeed happen to anyone – they may well
have to give up their aspirations to social justice, a compassionate society,
fairness for all, propinquity with their families and friends, love, self-respect –
in short any aspiration to happiness. They may well have to reduce their
aspirations to the merely venal and slowly hollow out all their hopes for a life
lived to the fullest. In the Morrison government’s creed – and creed it is – the
54 Toby Hall, Chief Executive of St Vincent’s Health Australia, Don’t humiliate Newstart applicants with
drug test – it’s no way to tackle addiction”, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/don-t-humiliate-newstart-applicants-with-drug-test-it-s-no-way-
to-tackle-addiction-20190906-p52osf.html?btis
55 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, “Positive welfare and compassionate conservatism –
address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne”, 22 July 2015, accessible at
https://formerministers.dss.gov.au/15775/positive-welfare-and-compassionate-conservatism-
address-to-the-institute-of-public-affairs-melbourne/
56 Martin Niemoller, 1984, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – Because I was
not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a
trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – Because I was not a Jew. Then
they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
73
“aspirations” of Australians are being reduced, bit by bit, to money. This creed
does not seem to imagine that we might value something else and that money
alone does not bring happiness.
If this offer of a life lived to the fullest were really available and really
accessible under our government’s good graces only by the reduction or
removal of welfare, particularly for the unworthy, then logically the single
best thing any government could do, if they truly believe in the power of
“compassionate conservatism”, is to actually create enough jobs for
everyone. While ever there is a refusal to do this – for instance by refusing to
undertake fiscal stimulus programs called for by all the top economists
including the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia, and/or by refusing to
expand the share of government participation in the market for provision of
services – there can be no credit given to claims that there is real economic
strength to be gained via being cruel. Only the opposite outcome can emerge
– a rise in unemployment and an attendant weakening of our economic
strength.
What we are witnessing here – in the vacuum of our valueless society –
is the establishment of a new class system, a new way of defining class, and
along with it, a new unequal distribution of access to the benefits of growth.
And if smaller economic growth is coming, as appears to be the case, then
conservative governments in particular have a very strong vested interest in
setting up distributions which will ensure that the wealthy still corral as much
as possible to themselves. To that end a new class system is a necessary item
on the conservative agenda.
Many of us probably thought that we were living, if not in a classless
society, at least one where class mattered far less than it did in the “mother
country” for purposes of being able to move up the wealth ladder. This is what
we have always meant whenever we have celebrated Australia as the land of
the fair go. But what we are witnessing is the establishment of a new class
system where not only social status but also moral status is determined
entirely by income and wealth. A new simpler two-class system is emerging –
a worthy class and an unworthy class, with the latter being set up to be quite
a deal larger than the former. More, specifically, this is a system where class
differences – and that means wealth differences – can be entrenched through
time and through generations. It is a system where far smaller shares in
national wealth and far smaller quanta of personal wealth can be acquired by
74
younger generations and the working class than the shares and quanta that
older generations were able to acquire (regardless of whether they were from
the working class, the middle class, the upper class or the poor). Certainly,
more of us are gaining access to personal wealth through superannuation, but
even that is coming under fire from certain quarters. At least a dozen federal
Coalition MPs spoke out in July 2019 “in open rebellion against the
government's planned increases to compulsory superannuation, warning
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg they are ‘frustrated’ by his position to raise the
rate from 9.5 to 12 per cent.”57 This is one of many aggressive moves over the
last two decades to slow or stop wage increases. That it should happen
simultaneously with massive reductions of total tax income is proof that
wealth is now not meant to be accessible for all.
If we keep going this way, our wages, taxes and superannuation will end
up being shrunk to such a degree that just about all welfare will be unfunded
at the same time as more of it will be needed. It seems mad but that is the
way our approach to taxation and wealth sharing is now tending. Once
employers have been relieved of all responsibility for the fair sharing of
productivity and national income increases, and once as much welfare as
possible has been de-funded, we will apparently be able to dispense with
empathy and compassion entirely and yet feel we have done right. Any
obligation to fellow Australians down on their luck will no longer be part of
our social contract. This is a drastic change to our national character.
This move to meanness, and denial of obligations under human rights
conventions to which we are a signatory, has been apparent for some time in
relation to our treatment of refugees and Aborigines. But our Indigenes and
refugees are no longer the only ones in the firing line. That same meanness
and erosion of rights is now being turned on the rest of us. We are being told
we can’t afford a decent welfare safety net but as a country we are richer than
we have ever been. This simply doesn’t add up. And it is certainly no way to
deal with obviously growing poverty and the growth in the numbers of
working poor. Even if it were to be promoted by its ideologues as a grand plan
for eliminating poverty, it clearly can’t work. If this is the creed under which a
fair new Australia might be “baptised”, it stands in stark and ugly contrast to
57Eryk Bagshaw, “Coalition MPs rebel against planned increases to superannuation”, Sydney Morning
Herald 22 July 2019 accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/coalition-mps-rebel-
against-planned-increases-to-superannuation-20190722-p529j8.html
75
the sort of “creed” that was imagined in 1998 by delegates to the
Constitutional Convention on the republic.
In 2018, before his demise at the hands of his colleagues, Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull signed off on Australia’s “Voluntary National Review” on
implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals58,
adopted by Australia in 2015. In that review, Mr Turnbull noted that
At the heart of the Goals is the belief in ‘a fair go for all’ – nothing could
be more Australian.59
He also remarked that
Australia’s 26 years of consecutive economic growth is an important
part of our story. A growing economy means higher incomes and more
jobs, allowing people to better their own lives. Our growth has been
widely shared across families from different backgrounds.60
It may well be true that nothing could be more Australian than a fair go for all,
but it is not true at all to claim that our growth has been widely shared. On
the contrary, as I will show in Chapter 7, income and wealth inequality is rising
and the shares of wealth going to those at the bottom of the income ladder
are being dwarfed by the shares going to those at the top and to big business.
Additionally, as I will show in Chapter 8, our ability to get a fair go is
evaporating due to an insidious increase in our loss of rights since 2002. It is
time to stop perpetrating myths on the Australian people that we still live in
the land of the fair go. Contrary to popular belief, we are closer than we might
think to losing everything we value in fairness and equality.
Imagining ourselves before it’s too late
In comparing two possible imaginings of Australia – on the one hand as the
land of the fair go for all and on the other as the land of the fairer go for some
– and finding the former obviously more palatable than the latter, I don’t
mean that the former should automatically be taken as a prescription of how
58 Australian Government, “Report on the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals 2018”,
accessible at https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/sdg-voluntary-national-review.pdf
59 Malcolm Turnbull, Australian Government, Ibid., page 2.
60 Malcolm Turnbull, Australian Government, Ibid., page 2.
76
we should henceforth imagine ourselves. I can’t emphasise enough that for
any national planning process to work, our imagination needs to be exercised
collectively. What I might want as an individual is neither more nor less
relevant than what anyone else might want. We need to plan a new Australia
– together. But if we decide together that we want to be the land of the fair
go for all once again, we had better say so now, before it is too late. And while
we are at it, we might take the opportunity to imagine ourselves as a society
driven by more than just money. Certainly, financial security matters – a lot.
But so does our ability to gain access to a certain sort of lifestyle – one that
makes us and our families happy and secure. Our children’s education
matters. Our mental and physical health matters. Our parents’ dignity and
comfort in their old age matter. Our personal safety matters. Our national
security matters. Our integrity on the national stage matters. Our sense of
community matters. Future generations matter. The environment and
biodiversity matter. Our confidence in democracy matters. What matters
money, if not for these?
These things are all under serious threat at the moment, more so than I
can recall at any time in my life. For me this has embedded a sense of urgency
that the time has come to say what we want our society, environment and
leadership to be like, before it is gone. Hence the proposition at the start of
this chapter of the need to set out the societal, environmental, governance
and economic distributions that we want. We can “begin” from the point of
view of the new creed where aspiration equals money, or we can begin from
a more inclusive view. If we begin with the newly emergent creed of money,
we cannot make a plan for us all. We can only make a plan for the fortunate
few – a plan which by definition must consign the outcast to permanent
oblivion. On the other hand, if we begin with something of greater largesse,
we can all have a chance.
Why should we develop this plan together as a nation? Not just because
we have no plan and it is foolish and irresponsible to assume a safe arrival in
a better future without one – although it is. We need a plan at this time in
our history because our rights and the standards by which we have measured
our own decency are on the brink of disappearing. In Chapter 8, I will show
just how close we are to loss of rights we have hitherto taken for granted. We
are not in a good place in terms of the capacity of our democracy to carry us
through to any future we might prefer, unless we prefer a future where we
77
suffer from stark inequality, economic decline, environmental catastrophe
and powerlessness. The time has come for the development of a map to the
future that we can see will take us to where we want to go. We need to work
out where that place is and what it looks like if we expect our children to meet
us there.
Imagining a better world together will be nowhere near enough to make
it a reality. But the chances of making a better Australia can be vastly
improved by learning to plan in an integrated way and by making
governments more accountable to us for delivery of such plans. These plans
would work best if they were developed jointly between communities and
governments and I will talk about the potential models for joint planning in
Chapter 10. At this point, though, it is as well to note that experience has
tended to suggest that state and federal governments should not be expected
to rise to the occasion for some time, although local governments may.
Businesses may also surprise us by joining in positively in planning for a better
society. After all they can and often do see that a better and more sustainable
financial bottom line materialises when social, environmental and governance
bottom line results are thriving.
But regardless of who joins or doesn’t join in on this map making, a logical
framework is needed in which we can organise ourselves to make the map.
We have precedents for this in the Integrated Planning & Reporting (IP&R)
frameworks which have been operating, and operating well, at the level of
local community planning in many parts of Australia for more than a decade.
These can be adapted to enable any Australian to participate with others in
planning the nation’s future. It will become evident in Part 3 that Integrated
Planning & Reporting, done well, is a highly inclusive process for building
social, environmental and economic capital and it has the capacity to help us
imagine a remarkable country – a wonderful country that we have never yet
given ourselves the space to think about, let alone create. We have been so
used to letting our governments do all our imagining for us that we have given
ourselves no real capacity for insight into what they are failing to do and what
they are doing that is contrary to our interests. Regrettably, all but a tiny few
of our leaders have had enough imagination for our purpose as a nation to
date, and our current leaders have nowhere near enough to set out a vision
for a new, finer Australia. We have been a lucky country, but as Donald Horne
said when he coined that phrase, “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-
78
rate people who share its luck.” This is not very complimentary to our leaders
but it is not wide of the mark. A greater imagination can be released, however,
if we build some new techniques for taking charge of our national future
through an adapted Integrated Planning & Reporting process. The following
two chapters of Part 1 outline:
• how this sort of planning is currently working in many local
communities in Australia,
• what is not being done at higher levels of government to facilitate it,
and
• what is being done at higher levels of government that is preventing
us from benefitting from Integrated Planning & Reporting.
Part 2 sets out how to adapt IP&R for national planning purposes so that we
can maximise our chances of realising our preferred future and Part 3 provides
some insight into the power of national IP&R to help us articulate exactly what
our national ideals and aspirations are and how to make them a reality over
the coming decades together.
79
Chapter 3 – Bottom Driven Leadership and
Planning
In Chapter 1, I talked about the potential for Australians to plan their own
future “from the bottom” using Integrated Planning & Reporting (IP&R) and
how, in the process, we can re-balance our shares of power relative to the top
of the power hierarchy. In this and the next chapter I will begin to explain how
that bottom driven planning has worked in Australia to date at the local
government area level and how, by contrast, higher levels of government
have failed to facilitate it and have counteracted it, thereby significantly
reducing its potential to deliver a better quality of life and environmental
protection for Australia. In the main, I will be using the example of how
planning is done in New South Wales to compare and contrast bottom driven
planning with top driven planning. This will provide an insight into the
workings of both approaches. The intention is to provide a base of
understanding of the potential of bottom driven planning and how it can be
strengthened and taken up by more Australians and, ultimately, by their
governments. I will be suggesting that there is a model for efficiently
organising the way we can plan for the future, from the bottom, and for
gaining maximum leverage with local, state and national leaders in politics
from these plans. IP&R relies on understanding community strategic planning
and on how that type of planning can function to integrate all our plans – to
collect them in one easily accessible place for the purpose of maximising the
possibility of a better future over the longer term – in other words, the future
our children will experience. I have chosen to focus on the use of IP&R in local
government area planning in NSW because that state has achieved a level of
best practice in IP&R by local communities, a level not yet achieved by other
states. As such it provides the examples of stark contrast between IP&R in
action at the local area level and its antithesis, which is currently in action at
80
the state and federal levels. For an introduction on how IP&R is implemented
at the local community level, readers may wish to browse the “Integrated
Planning and Reporting Guidelines for local government in NSW; Planning a
sustainable future”61.
*****
Community strategic planning, or what has come to be known in Australia as
“Integrated Planning & Reporting”, is operating at present in Australia only at
one level of our three-tiered system of governance – the local level, where it
is facilitated by councils. There is some variation between states in the way it
is operating but generally the intent is the same, particularly with regard to
the primacy of the community in the planning processes. According to the
University of Technology Sydney, community strategic planning at this level
is concerned with influencing trends and issues in the locality,
irrespective of a council’s corporate responsibilities. It involves
substantial community engagement to determine residents’ aspirations
and needs.62
As such it is the one planning process which gets us talking to each other and
which thereby puts us in a stronger leadership role. Like any other
communication process, it is only as good as its last best practitioner and
relies heavily for success on the generosity of people working together and
thinking about each other’s views. But done well, it works and the amount of
disagreements it can resolve is extraordinary. Hence the importance of
learning how to do it well, and how not to do it.
Community strategic planning – IP&R – is not hard. Anyone can
participate in it and as long as there is good will and some understanding of
good practice, there is significant potential to efficiently organise ourselves
61 NSW Division of Local Government, “Integrated Planning and Reporting Guidelines for local
government in NSW; Planning a sustainable future”, March 2013, accessible at
https://www.olg.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/Intergrated-Planning-and-Reporting-Guidelines-
March-2013.pdf
62 Tan, S. F. and Artist, S. 2013, Strategic Planning in Australian Local Government: A comparative
analysis of state frameworks, Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government, University of
Technology, Sydney, page 5, accessible at
https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/38559/1/ACELG_2013_Strategic-Planning-and-
Reporting%20%282%29.pdf
81
into a process which will push our leaders to deliver us a better future than
they might otherwise.
The beginnings of “bottom driven” planning in Australia
In 2009, amendments were made to the New South Wales Local Government
Act 1993 by unanimous decision of both houses of that state’s parliament.
These amendments introduced the Integrated Planning & Reporting
framework for NSW local councils.
If we ran a poll in NSW (or anywhere in Australia for that matter) asking
who has ever heard of Integrated Planning & Reporting, we would be likely to
get a solid majority of blank looks. It has to be admitted that IP&R was one of
the quieter revolutions in Australian democracy and its arrival went
unremarked by the vast majority of Australians. Nevertheless, IP&R may, if
properly activated, have more potential to increase our influence over our
own futures than any other reform of democratic governance systems in the
last 20 years. Indeed, it may be the only reform which positively increases our
influence, standing out as it does among a large number of regressive reforms
which have positively reduced our shares of power and influence in our
democracy (see Chapter 8).
The extent to which IP&R will increase our influence will depend on how
well it is used and how well it can be spread both out into the community and
to other levels of government. But the framework has the makings of an
unprecedented opportunity to infuse our political debates with a rather more
thoughtful set of ideas and preferred directions than can ever be supplied by
the current level of debate in parliaments and the media.
It is likely that many Australians will be sceptical about the potential of a
planning framework that has its genesis in the government sector (with all its
associations of highfalutin or irrelevant bureaucracy) to actually achieve some
improvement in our quality of life and rescue us from the spiral of
disempowerment. But at this stage of the game, when we have lost trust in
politics, and our parliaments are simply not functioning as a terrain on which
policy disagreements can be sorted through and on which we can thereby find
a path to the common good, the importance of planning our own way out of
our problems and toward a shared vision can’t be understated. In the absence
82
of fine leadership from our political institutions, the option of finding a
different way to lead ourselves – to give ourselves something clear to aim for
– is well worth considering.
To do that we need a road map in which we can clearly see the pathways
out of our current disagreements and toward a future in which we can
commonly and fairly share whatever prosperity we can generate as a nation.
Governments are not providing that map now. They have no plan showing
how to get from point A to point B. They can’t even articulate what point B
should look like except in narrow, venal terms. Instead they are spending all
their time in vacuous squabbles and point scoring, embedding a continuance
of disagreement rather than a resolution of it, polarising the electorate,
hollowing out the centre ground where agreement might otherwise be
reached, governing in some places by personal fiat, and doing all this entirely
without a guiding set of articulated values about what Australians stand for.
It is as though there is a deliberate strategy at play to swell out the left and
right extremes of political opinion and pit them both against the few left
standing in the middle. This is a divide and conquer strategy in which our
leaders are urging us to “disagree better”63, but to nevertheless keep
disagreeing, as though this will lead us to a place where we are confident of a
better future, when actually it prevents us from imagining a better one.
It is probable that many of us already feel we will not arrive at a better
future under our current divide-and-conquer form of democracy. Indeed, this
is why our trust in governance and democracy has been eroded so sharply
over the last decade. According to research conducted for the Museum of
Australian Democracy (MOAD) and the University of Canberra’s “Democracy
2025” project
In 2007, 86% of voters were satisfied with Australia’s democracy, but
that figure dropped to 72% by 2010 (where it plateaued for three years)
and then went into freefall from 2013, plummeting from 72% to 41%
between 2013 and 2018.64
63 Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, quoted by Nick Bonyhady, The Guardian “Morrison calls
for more civil debate after 'nasty' campaign”, 20 May 2019 accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/federal-election-2019/morrison-calls-for-more-civil-debate-after-nasty-
campaign-20190520-p51pey.html
64 See the “Democracy 2025” program led by the Museum of Australian Democracy and the Institute
for Governance and Policy Analysis at the University of Canberra accessible at
83
MOAD has also pointed out that:
Democracy is on the retreat globally. We have now entered what the
Pew Research Centre has termed a global ‘democratic recession’ (Pew
Research Centre, 2017). Satisfaction with democracy is tipping around
the world — there are now more authoritarian regimes than full
democracies (Kellogg, Varieties of Democracy Project, 2018).65
Some communities in Australia have already tried to circumvent this by
establishing an array of mechanisms for strengthening democratic processes
at the local level. These include citizens’ juries and processes for co-design of
individual policies by citizens and politicians. These processes have excellent
potential to re-empower those Australians fortunate enough to get the
opportunity to participate. But those opportunities tend to arise ad hoc and
because there is no overarching plan in which any piecemeal local democratic
decisions can be assessed, there is only a limited potential for national benefit
overall.
However, if these sorts of localised democratic decision processes can be
conducted in less of a piecemeal fashion, and in a manner consistent with a
broader plan for national advancement that can be developed with wide
community involvement, there can be a substantial increase in the potential
for national benefit overall and a substantial increase in the efficiency of local
democratic decision processes. Such a process has the potential to connect
us back into our democracy but still leave us all with the time to live the life
we want. Moreover, to the extent that such a process can be geared to
provide guidance to our leaders about what we actually want for the future,
it can help set parliamentary debate back onto a more respectful and
therefore productive footing.
IP&R is an organising mechanism well suited for this purpose. In fact, it is
the only process of community-led direction setting that already has some
legislated stature. There is value – potentially enormous value – in bringing
these disparate local democracy efforts together in an organised planning
process. But to make that work, we have to understand what IP&R is, how it
https://www.democracy2025.gov.au/ See also Gerry Stoker, Mark Evans and Max Halupka, “Trust
and Democracy in Australia: Democratic decline and renewal, Report No. 1, 2018”, “Democracy 2025”
Project, Museum of Australian Democracy and University of Canberra, page 021
https://www.democracy2025.gov.au/documents/Democracy2025-report1.pdf
65 “Democracy 2025” webpage at https://www.democracy2025.gov.au/.
84
functions, what can ruin it and what can strengthen it. In the rest of this
chapter and Chapter 4 I will attempt to set this out.
What is Integrated Planning & Reporting?
In its simplest terms, IP&R in NSW is a statutory obligation that has been
placed upon all local governments to develop (minimum) ten-year community
strategic plans via genuine community engagement and to report to their
communities on progress against the agreed targets and directions of those
plans at the end of each elected council’s term of office (i.e., once every four
years).
For the first time in the history of our governance this reform requires
elected representatives in our democracy to work with their own
constituencies and communities to:
1. articulate community aspirations,
2. design integrated plans to make those aspirations a reality over the
longer term (usually 3 election cycles), and to
3. report back to their communities on the progress that has been
made against the targets of those plans during their particular term
of office.
No other level of government has yet imposed this sort of commitment to
engagement and transparency on itself for purposes of futures planning, or
for any other purpose.
According to the NSW Office of Local Government66, IP&R is based on a
recognition that
most communities share similar aspirations: a safe, healthy and
pleasant place to live, a sustainable environment, opportunities for
social interaction, opportunities for education and employment, and
66At the time of writing the “Office of Local Government” in NSW had just been abolished and
transferred into the Department of Planning and Environment. References to the Office of Local
Government website therefore may or may not be accessible in future at the locations I have
provided.
85
reliable infrastructure. The difference lies in how each community
responds to those needs. 67
The IP&R framework was therefore designed to be flexible enough to cater
for each community’s preferred response. In other words, it was designed to
cater for diversity.
The framework also works on the assumption that a local government
area’s plans are more likely to deliver a better level of wellbeing, locally, if
they are linked and cohere within the framework, and if they are also linked
with the plans of other levels of government. In other words, the strength of
the framework comes from the fact that it integrates plans.
This “I” of IP&R – the “Integrating” part – is crucial in understanding and
maximising the power of the framework. IP&R was introduced mainly in
response to an acute awareness of financial sustainability problems being
experienced by a significant proportion of NSW councils, particularly with
respect to management of ageing physical assets such as roads, bridges and
stormwater infrastructure. However, the framework as it finally emerged,
after about three years of consultation between state and local governments,
was not designed simply as a remedy for financial woes through better
financial and asset planning, although that was certainly part of it. Instead, a
much wider holistic approach to planning was introduced – one which
reflected the need to plan for better results on what bureaucrats often
awkwardly but aptly call the “quadruple bottom line”, i.e., in terms of the
“bottom line” results of social, environmental, economic and governance
programs, routinely called the “QBL”.
In taking this integrated quadruple bottom line approach to planning,
instead of the more traditional and much narrower financial bottom line
approach, IP&R legislation ushered in one of Australia’s earliest structural
attempts not just to establish a high standard, long term community strategic
planning process, but to significantly enhance the potential for financial and
non-financial returns from that planning for any community that takes the
opportunity to participate.
IP&R also transformed the influence communities can have over their
own lives by raising both:
67For an insight into the workings of IP&R in NSW see
https://www.olg.nsw.gov.au/councils/integrated-planning-and-reporting/framework
86
• the standard of community engagement in local democracy, and
• the standard of transparent monitoring, reporting and accountability
of elected representatives.
More than this, the “R” part of the framework – the “Reporting” part – was
developed in such a way as to significantly increase the potential for local
communities to re-shape future policies and plans, whenever reporting might
reveal that progress is off track or directions need to change because the
community’s aspirations have changed.
All in all, there is no consultative mechanism in Australian democracy at
the moment with as much potential as IP&R to change the balance of our
entire community’s influence in our systems of power.
The benefits of Integrated Planning & Reporting
IP&R is in full operation in NSW local government today and compliance with
it has materially benefitted many councils which have been better able to plan
a steady path towards local sustainability, and their own financial
sustainability, with the support of their community. Different councils have
implemented IP&R to varying degrees of excellence and continuous
improvement in IP&R is required (and always will be). But the first decade of
IP&R has materially benefitted NSW councils and communities in at least two
main ways:
1. it has helped ensure service continuity which was clearly under
threat, particularly in regional NSW, due to a terrible coincidence of
aging infrastructure and financial failures; and
2. it has helped communities to better understand the benefits of being
more involved in their own governance.
Another quite remarkable benefit of IP&R in NSW is that it has provided
an orderly and transparent process by which councils can re-structure their
revenues into a more reliable and appropriate mix of taxes and charges
capable of supporting the services people want and allowing them to
prioritise new services according to clear community preferences. IP&R has
been instrumental in this by helping a large number of councils, with the
support of their communities, to gain approvals for increasing their general
87
income from rates (i.e., through an increase in their tax). Since its
introduction, the NSW Independent Pricing & Regulatory Tribunal (IPART) has
approved almost 150 applications from councils for rate increases above an
annual rate cap or “rate peg”, as IPART calls it68. (The “peg” itself is usually set
by IPART at around CPI). Approval of these applications for rate increases
above the “peg” has generally been contingent on a council’s ability to
demonstrate that it has conducted community engagement – on both the
community’s strategic plan and the size of the rate rise – to a high standard
of openness and integrity.
Approvals for rate rises in NSW local government are not absolutely
contingent on councils’ being able to demonstrate community support, say,
through a statistical survey, for the rate rise above the IPART “peg”. IPART
tends to look more at the standard of engagement and IP&R achieved by the
councils that are applying for rate rises, alongside some other factors such as
whether a council has a track record of efficiency gains or whether the local
area is suffering a high or low degree of social disadvantage. Nevertheless, a
remarkable thing about IP&R is that it has resulted in a large number of NSW
residents voluntarily supporting increases in their tax (in this case, a tax on
their property wealth).
One of the amazing lessons of the first ten years of implementation of
IP&R is that when people feel included in decision making and are given more
power of self-determination and priority choices, they tend to shift their
attitudes on government spending and taxation quite solidly in the direction
of a greater willingness to share the cost of community benefits provided by
taxation. This is particularly the case with council rates, probably because it is
relatively easy for ratepayers to see the connection between their rates and
the local services funded directly by those rates. All the tax collected via local
council rates goes directly back to the community that paid it. It can’t be sent
to another community. This sort of direct connection between rates and local
services can’t be made between services and, say, income tax or land tax. But
with council rates, there is substantial evidence showing that communities
that are included in decision making frequently shift away from a willingness
68 NSW is the only state in Australia with a rate capping system. The system has been in place since
1974 and has resulted in markedly slower rate revenue growth than that experienced by other states
in the same period. It is widely criticised in scholarly reviews as a major contributor to the financial
woes of councils and as a threat to service continuity.
88
to pay only for what they personally and exclusively use, and toward being
more willing to pay for what they share with others, or for what they might
use less of than someone else. This prevails even when they acknowledge that
not everyone in their community will pay this particular increased tax (at least
directly). Renters, for instance, will still be allowed to share in the benefits of
municipal infrastructure and services even though they won’t be (directly)
paying rates. It is as though the dialogue necessary in IP&R weakens the
grudging response that prevails when we view taxation in terms of “burden”
or even theft, and re-establishes the connection in people’s minds between
taxation and shared benefit.
This process of connecting taxation to delivery of an agreed community
strategic plan works so well sometimes that there have been many instances
where communities have agreed to multiple proposals from councils for rate
increases above the peg, including one famous instance where a community
agreed in the majority to a doubling of their rates over a seven-year period69.
Additionally, the benefits enjoyed by ratepayers and non-ratepayers
alike, as a result of the increasing contributions of ratepayers, can be regularly
re-established in people’s minds through the “Reporting” part of the
framework. The “R” of IP&R is probably the linchpin of any success in the
process, inasmuch as it provides a community the means by which a council
can be held accountable for not living up to its commitment to delivery of the
benefits the community wished to share when it supported the rate rise. In
IP&R, the process of engaging the community to develop their own strategic
plan and to agree to increased taxation in exchange for delivery of that plan,
constitutes a social contract, the like of which Australians have yet had no
opportunity to enter into with any other level of government. It is a contract
where the power of the community to hold a council to account at an election
is in no way diminished. On the contrary, IP&R increases the power of a
69This happened in relation to Waverley Council in NSW in 2011/12. In that case, IPART did not
approve the full doubling of the rates but majority community support for the doubling influenced
IPART’s decision to approve the largest increase in rates above the statutory rate peg ever seen in
NSW, allowing the Council to raise an additional $110 million in rates over four years above the
statutory rate cap for dedicated and community agreed purposes. See Waverley Council, “Application
for a Special Variation to Rates under Section 508A of the Local Government Act, Part B”, 25 March
2011, page 61, accessible at https://www.ipart.nsw.gov.au/files/assets/website/local-govt-static-
docs/waverley_council_-_application_form_part_b_-_website.pdf
89
community to hold an elected government to account for failure to deliver
the benefits envisaged in a social contract. More than this, it increases a
community’s ability to hold a government accountable based on sound
information (rather than misinformation) about whether agreed strategies
were implemented properly and whether time has proved those strategies to
be worthwhile in achieving the outcomes for community wellbeing envisaged
in the original contract.
Experience with the IP&R reforms also strongly suggests that people are
much more likely to be willing to live up to their own obligations in a social
contract if they have a say in the aim of that contract and how that contract
should be designed and administered. This is particularly the case:
• if they can put the stamp of their own aspirations on that contract in
language that is meaningful to them, and
• if they can develop some confidence that performance by the other
main party to that contract – their council – will be openly and fully
reported.
These two ifs need to become, as it were, somewhat less ify than they are
now, before people will suspend their distrust of governments and move into
partnerships with all levels of government for delivery of a better common
future. Under IP&R, a mechanism has been made available to help local
governments reduce distrust of councillors, but their closeness to the
community is a factor that has made this somewhat easier for councils than it
would be for other levels of government. The further away a level of
government is from communities, the harder those at that level will have to
work to reduce distrust, particularly given that distrust appears now to be
approaching a fever-pitch level in Australia.
The upshot of a decade of IP&R in NSW is that a sector of the government
which, in a patchy but fairly substantial way, was on the edge of financial ruin
– or at least on the edge of leading whole communities into a loss of services
vital for health and wellbeing – has been turned around and is slowly but
steadily moving towards financial sustainability without loss of council
services – albeit that there is still a long way to go for some councils. In the
IP&R reforms, local communities throughout NSW were given the opportunity
to contribute to the rescue of a very large part of the services necessary for
their wellbeing and way of life. Many took that opportunity and continue to
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take it. But it is an opportunity that currently applies only to a certain aspect
of their lives – the part that can be provided locally.
The current limits of Integrated Planning & Reporting
In 2012 a review of the first three years of implementation of IP&R in NSW
was conducted by Martin Bass, a Senior Associate of the Centre for Local
Government at the University of Technology Sydney. That review pointed out
that:
One of the aspects of the IP&R process that was most strongly
reinforced by the DLG [NSW Division of Local Government] was that the
Community Strategic Plan (CSP) was to be developed as ‘the
community’s plan’. The CSP would be developed with extensive
community input, describing a vision, long term goals and associated
strategies with a focus well beyond the role and responsibilities of the
council. … Achievement of the goals identified by the community would
require active participation from the broadest array of government and
non-government agencies, businesses, community groups and
individuals through the life of the plan [my emphases].70
Mr Bass also found that:
In analysing a range of CSPs for council areas across NSW, it is evident
that a significant proportion of long term goals relate to local and
regional issues surrounding transport, health and medical services,
education, policing, environment and climate change and water
security. It is apparent here that achievement of many of these goals
relates to matters of state and federal responsibility. In some plans, it
would appear that councils may have a primary leadership role in as
little as thirty per cent of the goals listed in their CSPs.
… In observing the CSPs developed by rural and regional councils
throughout NSW, many communities have expressed strongly their
concerns over the erosion and loss of localised services provided by
70
Martin Bass, UTS:CLG, “Integrated Planning and Reporting: Reflections on three years of
implementation by NSW councils”, page 23
http://www.martinbassconsulting.com/Integrated_Planning_and_Reporting_Reflections.pdf
91
state agencies and departments. Many of their long term goals focus on
retention of what services they still have and, ideally, on the re-
establishment of what they have lost over past years.
[Lost] Services and facilities commonly identified include regular
public transport connecting local and regional centres, rural and
regional hospitals and medical staff, secondary education facilities,
police personnel and facilities. In relation to environment and climate
change, communities expressed their broad concerns about declining
agricultural productivity, the health of their natural environment and
waterways and the future security of local and regional water supplies
[my emphasis].71
It is apparent from this assessment that while IP&R may have been
instrumental in stemming losses of services from local government, a loss of
services from both state and federal government has nevertheless proceeded
apace. That being so, Mr Bass went on to say that:
Whilst it is unlikely that comprehensive transport, health, education and
other services will be restored to many rural and regional areas that
have lost them, some level of state initiated dialogue, partnership and
action is needed with councils and their communities if the true intent
of the Community Strategic Plan is to be upheld in the long term.72
Mr Bass then suggested that the appropriate response to these issues for the
state government is to consider how it will respond to the wealth of
information arising from the community engagement that state government
has made compulsory for local government under IP&R:
Having tasked councils, through legislation, to work with communities
to identify long term priorities and goals for every local government
area within NSW, it is now incumbent on state government to respond
appropriately to these communities on issues for which they have
primary responsibility.73
In publishing Mr Bass’s report, it is apparent that UTS thought it
appropriate to send a message to the NSW state government in 2012 that the
71 Ibid., page 23.
72 Ibid., page 24.
73 Ibid., page 23.
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benefits of IP&R are at risk of being undermined, cancelled out or lost outright
if there is a failure by state government to live up to the unanimous intentions
of the Parliament of 2009. The report stands as an open letter to the state
government and indeed the federal government on the need for “active
participation from the broadest array of government and non-government
agencies, businesses, community groups and individuals through the life of
the plan”74. Unless state and federal governments respond to that message,
the limits of IP&R may well have been set at a level well below the potential
imagined in the original legislation.
Unfortunately, that particular letter from UTS to the state government
appears to have been lost in the mail. The next chapter analyses the
consequences of that lost letter and how the state government has set back
the IP&R reforms in NSW and delayed access to the benefits that may arise
from a higher standard of community strategic planning. I will also canvass
how other states and the federal government have failed to plan for the
nation’s future. This will shed light not just on how not to plan but on what
we need to overcome together as Australians to make Integrated Planning &
Reporting a viable means of re-engaging with our democracy.
74 Ibid., page 23.
93
Chapter 4 – How Not to Plan
The failure of planning and reporting at state government
level
As I write this, it is more than seven years since Martin Bass and UTS reviewed
the first stage of implementation of IP&R and sent their message to the NSW
state government that the benefits intended under the IP&R reforms were at
risk of being withered away or undermined by the state government’s own
failure to live up to its obligations as a partner in the contracts faithfully
entered into by local NSW communities in development of their strategic
plans. No reply has been forthcoming from the NSW state government – a
particularly discouraging development since up until about 2013 that
government (the Liberal National Party Coalition government of Premier
Barry O’Farrell) had been something of a model for encouraging this kind of
inclusive administrative planning. Their subsequent failures in this respect
display a 180 degree move away from their own original high aspirations and
offer an exemplary case of what not to do for effective planning to occur. In
this chapter I will detail the nature of these failures as a cautionary tale of
what must be avoided if proper national planning is to take place.
Soon after IP&R was introduced in 2009 under a Labor Government in
NSW, the newly elected O’Farrell government commenced preparing a new
ten-year strategic plan for the state of NSW. This plan was released in 2011
under the title “NSW 2021”75. It was a comparatively comprehensive strategic
plan for all aspects of the operations of state government including:
• budget management and state economic development,
75NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
94
• urban planning reform, regional planning, and liveable cities
development,
• education, health, transport, police, justice and family and
community services,
• infrastructure provision,
• natural environment protection,
• emergency management,
• cultural, creative, sporting and recreational programs,
• community involvement and participation, and
• open and accountable governance.
This new plan was similar to plans developed by the previous government.
Consistent with the intentions of IP&R, the original idea for “NSW 2021” was
that it would be integrated with the plans prepared by local councils and their
communities. To some extent, attempts at integration did begin and by June
2014 the state government was able to report that:
As each local community in NSW has its own set of priorities, the
Government has localised “NSW 2021” through 19 Regional Action
Plans. Government Ministers and local Members of Parliament
consulted with more than 3,500 community members at over 25
meetings across NSW, and input was also gathered through online
forums and written submissions. The Regional Action Plans were
released in December 2012 and focus on the most important actions the
NSW Government will take to align resources with locally identified
priorities in each locality.76
This was a positive step forward and credit is due to the state’s Department
of Planning of the day. Another positive step taken at this time was that the
state government funded a major reform plan for local government called
“Destination 2036”. The intention of this plan was to scope out actions
necessary to achieve “strong communities through partnership”. One of those
actions was to “recognise local government as a legitimate and important
sphere of government” and specifically to “align state and local government
76NSW Government, “NSW 2021 Performance Report 2014-15”, June 2014, page 1-2 available at
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/tp/files/20373/2014-15_Performance_Report_-_2021.pdf
95
planning frameworks”77. Looking back on this from the perspective of 2019, it
is clear that not only did the intended alignment not come about, the exact
opposite happened. “Partnership” between local and state government since
2014 has not been apparent and reporting appears to have ceased sometime
around 2013 on all action plans committed to by the state government under
“Destination 2036”. Instead we have experienced what could be called a
program of disintegration of planning.
Since 2014, then, a number of significant problems have arisen with the
approach taken to the integration of state and local plans by the state
government and, even more so, with the quality of planning itself in state
government. Effectively, the state government has ceased any form of
community strategic planning. These problems go part of the way towards
explaining why, during a period when the state is significantly increasing its
investment in public infrastructure and the economy is among Australia’s
strongest, quality of life for those living on the margins is getting worse,
particularly in terms of homelessness, sexual assault, domestic violence,
emergency treatment in hospitals, poverty and hunger. It is also getting worse
in terms of school educational outcomes. These problems with planning also
provide some insight into the widening of income and wealth inequality from
2014 onwards and into the apparent continuing accumulated deterioration of
the natural environment and ecosystem health.
The problems with the approach to integration of plans by the NSW state
government since 2014 fall into two main types. They are, firstly, attitudinal
and secondly, ideological in nature.
1. The problems are attitudinal inasmuch as planning decisions at the
state level are being made in a paternalistic culture which is limiting
the scope for integration of state plans with local plans. Integration
has occurred to some extent in some types of planning – mainly in
spatial planning for urban and regional development and housing –
but not in terms of community services planning or environmental
planning. Hence the efficiencies that should arise from integration of
state and local plans for the environment and service provision are
limited and dwindling. Paternalism is also limiting the activity of
77NSW Government, Office of Local Government, “Destination 2036 Action Plan June 2012”, page 16
available at https://www.olg.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/Destination-2036-Action-Plan.pdf
96
planning itself at the state level inasmuch as major projects are being
adopted in the budget with no real idea of whether they will lead to
improved wellbeing on the ground in local communities or greater
equality on a state-wide basis78. At the state level, the budget rules –
that is to say it constrains plans (such as they are); plans don’t rule
the budget, and as such they can’t enhance the effectiveness of the
budget. In short, as far as planning goes, the culture within state
government is neither cooperative nor collegiate. Nor is it a function
of “partnership”. It is largely authoritarian and the opportunities
being missed as a result of this attitude are legion. Problems arising
from paternalism in government are also being replicated across the
nation. With the re-election of the Liberal National Party Coalition
government in May 2019, the federal government seems to have
taken the NSW government’s way of doing things as a model, scoping
down the public service, subsuming important departments
(particularly environmental agencies) into bigger ones where they
lose influence and can be silenced more easily. In this arrangement
of government, the objective is to silence everyone by paternalistic
governance. As Richard Flanagan wrote in late 2019:
In Australia we are now all being treated as children, quietened
Australians.79
78 The NSW state government of 2019 and 2020 would object to this description of its budget planning
process and would insist that its budget is focussed on “outcomes”. In releasing the NSW budget in
2019, the state Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet, stated that “We have shifted over the last three budgets
to more of an outcomes focussed approach in that there are clear outcomes that should guide
departments in the allocation of their spending. … [The head of the Education Department has been
working closely with the heads of Treasury and the Department of Premier & Cabinet] to focus on
going through their budget line by line and making sure that every investment we make in education
is focussed on achieving better educational outcomes. We are certainly going to make sure that every
dollar there will improve our kids’ education.” Budget wide, however, there is poor specificity in
“outcomes” (many of which are really just government activities, not community outcomes or
benefits) and no way of knowing whether new expenditures in education would be better spent
elsewhere.
79 Richard Flanagan, “Scott Morrison and the big lie about climate change: does he think we’re that
stupid?”, The Guardian, 25 November 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/nov/25/scott-morrison-and-the-big-lie-about-climate-change-does-he-think-were-that-
stupid?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
97
2. The problems are ideological inasmuch as the scope of any
community strategic planning that might go on at the state level is
being circumscribed almost exclusively by a fixation with neoliberal
policy. This is a fixation that we are beleaguered with every day. It
tells us that our wellbeing arises exclusively from economic growth
and that this growth can only arise from less government, not more.
This is promoting a withdrawal from planning by governments for
just about everything except spatial planning for economic
development and the infrastructure projects that can be launched
through such plans, funded by more and more sales of publicly
owned assets and services. There is very little focus now on effective
community service planning, except perhaps at the local government
level. A typical spatial plan makes little or sometimes no mention of
community services. And planning for sustainability of the natural
environment, to the extent that it ever occurred at state level, has
been disconnected almost entirely from planning for spatial and
economic development.
It is as though the state government has withdrawn into a narrow closed off
shell where it has full control of decisions and no commitment to consultation
beyond certain limits – usually on isolated issues, not on strategic long term
directions for the state. It has made available no avenue via which the
community or local government may break back into processes for discussion
of their preferred futures, let alone for the future of the natural environment.
Unless these problems of attitude and blinkered ideology are fixed, we
are more likely than not to experience further decline in living standards and
a widening of inequality, no matter how much is spent on infrastructure
programs. Indeed, some infrastructure programs may accelerate a decline in
living standards.80 If this pattern is replicated across every state in Australia,
we are facing the demise of the government services most critical to social
wellbeing and environmental health, and a potentially massive reduction in
the contribution that could otherwise be made by the government sector to
the economic growth we are ostensibly trying to stimulate.
80This is a view popularly held by some councils and many affected communities about major road
projects, such as WestConnex, being given priority over public transport projects. Being given more
opportunity to sit in a car is not considered an enhancement of quality of life by many modern city
dwellers. Nor is it considered a front runner as an economic enabler.
98
The following sections analyse in detail examples of how these problems
are manifest at the state level in NSW. As mentioned earlier, the objective in
working through these problems here, using NSW as a case study, is to shed
light on how not to plan for a better future for our children and how
disintegration of planning will cause Australia to miss vast opportunities for
sustainable growth of our social and environmental capital and our economy.
However, the focus on NSW is not meant to imply that other states and the
federal government do not exhibit the same failures in planning. The last
section of this chapter shows that they do and that the consequences at the
federal level are approaching disaster levels.
Problem No. 1 – A failure of integration in planning
The first problem with the approach taken by NSW to integration of state and
local plans is simply that it is not integrating them. The original idea under
IP&R was that not only would integration be vital but that it would be bottom
driven, or at least the product of real partnerships with local communities. In
other words, local and state plans were both meant to be driven by the
community’s aspirations.
Unfortunately, whenever planning does occur these days at the state
level, it tends to be driven in a non-consultative, top down and increasingly
arrogant and ignorant fashion, with little assessment of changes in
community needs and desires in health and wellbeing. Information about
these community needs and desires can be found in many of the local
community strategic plans developed under IP&R but they are rarely, if ever,
considered by the state government. That information would also be readily
apparent if there was a decent measurement system and monitoring process
in place for comprehensive (as opposed to selective) indicators of wellbeing.
But this does not exist at the state level. Instead what little monitoring does
go on – and is publicly reported – is for a small selection of isolated indicators
of performance. These indicators are more often than not cherry-picked on
the basis that they will paint positive pictures of progress in fragmentary but
digestible portions. In short, they are chosen for political and marketing
purposes. They are not chosen for their ability to shed light on holistic trends
for planning purposes. Nor are they chosen to shed light on whether
99
government programs are succeeding or failing in terms of meeting
objectives.
There is clear evidence that in this top down state-knows-best style of
mindset that now characterises state planning in NSW, more and more of us
are being consigned to the forgotten part of society with demonstrably
reduced wellbeing. This evidence is not assembled in a central, easily
accessible place, but it does exist. And what it points to is that on the
internationally accepted measures of inequality, New South Wales, and
Australia as a whole, are moving backwards. Chapters 9 and 11 provide detail
about income and wealth inequality in Australia and a picture of the related
social impacts – the impacts in health, wellbeing and social security. The
picture is not a positive one.
This backward movement for social equity and wellbeing is bad enough,
but the wellbeing of the natural environment and ecosystems is moving
backward even faster. To the extent that this decline is being hastened by
poor state planning processes it is important to provide an overview here of
how this is all going wrong and how it is turning our impending environmental
decline into a catastrophe that with better planning could be avoided.
Failures in integration of spatial, economic and environmental planning
The environmental decline we can all easily observe in 21st century NSW, in
areas like the water quality and quantity in our inland rivers and wetlands, our
riverine ecosystems, our forestry cover, our native species habitats, our soil
quality, and our air pollution, is a function of decades of economic growth –
i.e., excessive consumption and pollution of natural resources. This excess has
only been partially kept in check by the stronger environmental regulations
brought into law in the 1990s under the NSW Protection of the Environment
Operations Act. But now this decline is being hastened not just by the failure
of the state government to integrate with the plans of local government for
the environment, but by the state’s failure to integrate its own spatial and
economic development planning with its plans for sustaining the natural
environment.
Plans for sustaining the natural environment are developed mostly within
the fine print of some of the plans about spatial and economic development
100
and, to give credit where it is due, there are some good attempts at sound
forward-thinking environmental planning buried deep in the state’s regional
development plans. These do exist, to a degree, thanks to the efforts of some
fine public servants working within the various iterations of planning
departments, industry departments and environmental departments over the
last two decades. But because of the vicissitudes of departmental re-
organisations, which in the main have tended to subjugate the natural
environment to spatial and economic development, these environmental
plans have gradually been reduced in their influence. What we have now is a
range of dispersed or disconnected environmental plans, very few of which
are strategic or focussed on the longer term.
What remains accessible is an array of rather high level plans, or more
accurately “goals” (without accompanying action plans), for management of
environmental issues. These goals tend to be overwhelmed by the distinctly
heavier economic focus of the spatial plans. In some of these plans, the
environment isn’t integrated at all. A good example of this is the NSW
government’s “20-Year Economic Vision for Regional NSW 2018” which is an
attempt at long term strategic planning for regional economic development
in NSW but which fails entirely to mention the need for environmental
sustainability as an enabler of (and potential contributor to) that economic
development. That plan goes so far as to identify the “global forces shaping
our regional economies” as “megatrends” which “represent major shifts in
environmental, social and economic conditions that change the way people
live”. However, the “megatrends” identified make no mention of any
environmental trends. Instead the focus on trends that must be addressed,
according to this “Vision”, is entirely on “the rise of Asia, rapid urbanisation,
demographic social change, and digital disruption”.81
There is a fundamental failure in this plan for regional NSW and in some
other planning projects, such as the NSW Centre for Economic and Regional
Development’s report on “Regional Economic Growth Enablers”82. These
plans exemplify a failure to understand that if we are going to save our
81 NSW Government, “A 20-Year Economic Vision for Regional NSW, 2018”, page 14, available at
https://static.nsw.gov.au/nsw-gov-au/nsw-gov-au/Regional-vision/1532654855/20-Year-Vision-for-
RNSW-accessible.pdf
82 NSW Government, Centre for Regional and Economic Development, “Regional Economic Growth
Enablers 2017” is available at https://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/assets/dpc-nsw-gov-au/files/Programs-
and-Services/CERD/54f3d914e1/Regional-Growth-Enablers-Report.pdf
101
economies, we need to save the planet. And to save both the economy and
the planet, we need to look not just at the climate problems that arise from
greenhouse gas emissions but the sustainability problems that arise from
over-consumption of natural resources through economic development itself.
Probably some of the state’s better, more outcomes focussed, strategic
planning work lies in the policies prepared by the Office of Environment &
Heritage prior to 2016, such as the “NSW Climate Change Policy
Framework”83. These contain aspirational targets for greenhouse gas
reduction which reflect aspirations similar to those in several local
government area community strategic plans. But the effectiveness of these
more “outcome driven” policies and plans has been dissipated by their not
being integrated with other plans for economic development, except as an
afterthought or footnote. When these environmentally focussed plans are
mentioned, this functions more to distract us into thinking that climate
change is being addressed and that this will be enough to create a basis on
which consumption can continue at the rates of recent decades (or perhaps
even faster if we reduce environmental regulation). It does nothing to draw
attention to the need to establish a more sustainable pattern of natural
resource consumption.
If we look at the way spatial and economic planning has been run by the
state of NSW between 2014 and 2019, what we can see is a much higher
priority being given to the economy than to the environment which sustains
that economy. Except at the local government level in NSW, it is difficult to
find evidence of comprehensive environmental sustainability planning at all.
And nowhere is environmental accounting melded into plans for spatial or
economic development. Instead, spatial and economic planners seem to
consider it sufficient to foster environmental “protection” via the narrower
device of regulation. However, due to the primacy given to the economy over
the environment in spatial planning, even the effectiveness of environmental
regulation is under threat.
The regulatory rigour provided under the Protection of the Environment
Operations Act in the 1990s is giving way to a new attitude in the state
government’s approach to long term planning. An attitude has emerged that
83 NSW Government, Office of Environment and Heritage, “NSW Climate Change Policy Framework”,
2016, last viewed at https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/climate-change/policy-framework
in January 2020.
102
regulation to protect the environment is working against economic
development and needs to be “streamlined” (read “wound back”) to “enable”
development. Witness the first preferred strategy identified in the Centre for
Regional and Economic Development’s report on “Regional Economic Growth
Enablers 2017” after consultation with key stakeholders (identified in the
report as “business managers in key sectors” and local chambers of
commerce):
Regulation pertaining to the environment was identified as an
impediment to growth by many firms in workshops with regional
stakeholders undertaken as part of this report. This is not to suggest the
regulation is overly burdensome, any assessment of the
appropriateness of regulation is out of scope in this paper and would be
an area of future work. [But] To assess the industries most likely to
benefit from a reduction, or streamlining of environmental regulation
that is found to be unnecessary (if any) a brief review of the main pieces
of regulation was undertaken. This revealed 12 separate pieces of
environmental legislation for businesses to comply with. The industry
sectors that are impacted by each piece of legislation were identified,
with the impact assessed as being either ‘low’, ‘medium’ or ‘high’.
Industry sectors that are impacted heavily (‘medium’ or ‘high’ impact)
by four or more pieces of this legislation were identified as being most
likely to benefit from any reduction in, or streamlining of environmental
regulation.84
Regardless of the extent to which any environmental regulation may or may
not be relaxed to cater to the preferences of the stakeholders in the above
exercise, it is clear that relaxation of environmental protection has been
getting closer to the top of the list of “enablers” of economic development
and is being actively explored. In 2019, Australia’s newly elected Prime
Minister, Scott Morrison, added his weight to this idea that environmental
regulation needs to be relaxed to stimulate business by calling on business
leaders to “provoke the ‘animal spirits’ in our economy” by identifying the
“regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to businesses investing and creating
84NSW Government Centre for Regional and Economic Development, “Regional Economic Growth
Enablers 2017”, page 260 available at https://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/assets/dpc-nsw-gov-
au/files/Programs-and-Services/CERD/54f3d914e1/Regional-Growth-Enablers-Report.pdf
103
more jobs”.85 This call was delivered in the context of a speech lamenting how
mining approval processes have lengthened over the last 40 years.
This sort of call to eviscerate environmental regulation is not likely to be
“enabling” of our future economy. Instead it is a kind of self-defeating modern
economic madness. At a time when the vital environmental underpinnings of
our economy and wellbeing are collapsing under the weight of climate change
and unchecked exploitation, the “strategies” being considered by the state
and federal governments, their consultants, and business owners are,
paradoxically, about eroding regulation when, if we are to maintain a strong
economy, they should obviously be strengthening or at least maintaining
environmental regulation. If this attitude to regulation shifts even slightly
more than it already has towards relaxation in a new decade then, so far from
strengthening our national and regional economies, we stand to spiral them
into a quicker decline. The evidence for this is strong. Talk of relaxing
environmental regulation at this time in the nation’s development is merely
code for reducing the entry costs for businesses that cannot be expected to
have a long life cycle in the 21st century anyway, and which therefore must be
written off over the short term. The most obvious of these is coal mining. It is
common knowledge that these sorts of business will play little or no role in
growth of GDP by mid century (notwithstanding protestations by some that
coal will play a part in our economy for decades to come86). So reducing
regulation merely increases the cost to the Australian public in environmental
losses and remediation for very short lived gains for a few wealthy
corporations. Hence my characterisation of Mr Morrison’s calls for regulatory
relaxation as economic madness.
Returning to the level of state government, the potential for a downward
economic spiral is being increased by the fact that nothing is being done to
stop or even slow the unsustainable exploitation of environmental resources
and loss of biodiversity that has brought ecosystems, and the economic
development they support, to the brink of destruction. On the contrary, in
2016 the NSW Government undertook major biodiversity conservation and
85 Scott Morrison, Address to the West Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 24 June 2019,
available at https://www.pm.gov.au/media/wa-chamber-commerce-and-industry-address
86 See Richard Marles quoted by Amy Remeikis, “Labor's Richard Marles won't rule out supporting new
coal developments”, The Guardian, 9 February 2020: “Coal will play a part in our economy for decades
to come.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/09/labors-richard-
marles-wont-rule-out-supporting-new-coal-developments?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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land management reforms which saw the introduction of the Biodiversity
Conservation Act 2016 (NSW) and the Local Land Services (LLS) Amendment
Act 2016 (NSW). The reforms commenced in August 2017. 87 The overall
objectives of these reforms were:
• to arrest and ultimately reverse the current decline in the state’s
biodiversity while facilitating ecologically sustainable development,
in particular efficient and sustainable agricultural development [and
to]
• enable landholders to improve the efficiency of their agricultural
systems and take a more active role in providing incentive and
supporting landholders to improve the condition and function of
their ecological systems.88
These are noble aims. However, based on a report of the NSW Audit Office in
June 2019 it is apparent that implementation of the new legislation is
occurring in a manner that is roundly defeating these ostensible objectives.
The idea of the new legislation was to control ecosystem loss from land
clearing by making landowners “set aside” land for conservation. Any
common sense interpretation of the objectives would lead a lay person to
think that the area of land set aside for conservation would roughly equal the
land being cleared. But that’s not how it turned out. Contrary to the objectives
of the new legislation, the Audit Office found that:
Over 200,000 hectares [about the size of the entire Australian Capital
Territory or about 700 times the size of Sydney's CBD] of native
vegetation has been approved for thinning or clearing under certificates
since the Code commenced in August 2017 to February 2019. Of this
around 170,000 hectares authorises the thinning of Invasive Native
Species (INS) and over 30,000 hectares covers thinning or clearing under
other parts of the Code. Around 20,000 hectares has been approved for
inclusion in set asides associated with some of these clearing approvals.
87 In this process, the Native Vegetation Act 2003, the Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995, the
Nature Conservation Trust Act 2001, and parts of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 were
repealed.
88 Audit Office of NSW, “Managing Native Vegetation – Performance Audit, 27 June 2019”, page 1,
available at https://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/pdf-
downloads/Final%20report_Managing%20native%20vegetation_WEB%20version.pdf
105
During the same period, notifications were made to LLS for a further
43,000 hectares of clearing, of which around 39,000 hectares related to
thinning of INS.89
To sum up, this particular regulatory reform has, in only two years, chalked
up an achievement of clearing ten times the land area it has set aside for
conservation. This has occurred at the same time as key business leaders and
the CSIRO are pointing out that there is potential for significant improvements
in GDP to arise from increasing native forestry cover and restoring degraded
ecosystems.90 Compared to the way key business leaders are beginning to
value the environment and biodiversity, the NSW government has become
embarrassingly out of date.
By late 2019, the NSW state government’s top down attitudes to planning
for our environment stood in stark contrast to attitudes that are more
commonly observable in local government. In local government there have
been multiple calls for and practical actions taken towards environmental
management and planning over the last decade. But at the state government
level, environmental planning and action has gradually been wound back,
reaching its apogee (or nadir, more like) in the abolition of the Office of
Environment and Heritage in 2019. This office used to report to the Premier
but has since been subsumed into the depths of the Department of Planning
and Environment, from which position it can (and probably will) be more
easily ignored as a state priority. The future of the Office of Environment and
Heritage is uncertain, but there is little doubt that even if its existence is
maintained nominally, its reach and effectiveness have been truncated
through weakened funding and progressively weakened environmental
regulatory instruments – and this at a time when much more power should
be given to environmental planners and regulators.
89 Audit Office of NSW, “Managing Native Vegetation – Performance Audit, 27 June 2019”, page 4.
Note also that the Audit Office found that native species listed as invasive in the administrative code
supporting the new legislation were not always invasive. “The Code allows some native species to be
treated as ‘invasive’ when they may not be invading an area, provides little protection for
groundcover and limited management requirements for set asides. There is also limited ability under
the Code to reject applications for higher risk clearing proposals.”, Ibid., page 2.
90 See CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, page 61. This report gives
significant weight to the improved economic outcomes (GDP) that can arise from restoration of
ecosystem health and investment in carbon forestry. Interestingly, it gives no weight at all to any
improvements in GDP as a result of mining. Download the full report at
https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/ANO
106
As at late 2019, we can contrast the attitudes and actions of such local
government leaders as Clover Moore, the Mayor of Australia’s largest capital
city, Sydney, with the actions of the NSW state premier, Gladys Berejiklian.
Taking office in 2017, Ms Berejiklian proceeded to shelve the “NSW Climate
Change Policy Framework” spearheaded by the Office of Environment and
Heritage only a year earlier91. This framework was the only existing whole-of-
government policy for the environment and the only one focussing on
emissions reduction. It was also the only policy attempting to give primacy of
place to climate change in all government decision-making on economic
development. The “NSW Climate Change Policy Framework” was
complemented by a draft strategic plan for a Climate Change Fund, built by
donations from the people of NSW through their electricity bills. However,
since 2017 the Climate Change Fund has been underspent and in 2019, almost
$300 million of the $1.4 billion fund was directed in the main to activities for
adaptation to climate change rather than to prevention of climate change.
Adaptation is important, and the longer we ignore preventative measures for
climate change, the more we will need to focus on adaptation. But doubtless,
adaptation is not what the people of NSW thought they would be paying for.
Originally the fund was set up specifically to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, not to help us simply learn to suffer a little less with ever rising
emissions.
There would be more confidence that the state might use the Climate
Change Fund well if there was an identifiable action plan with quantifiable
steps for reaching the key objective of the shelved “NSW Climate Change
Policy Framework”. This was first published in 2016 and at the time the stated
objective on page 5 was “to achieve net zero emissions by 2050”92. However,
the Policy Framework itself undermined this objective only one page later by
stating that the state government’s role in emissions saving would be to:
91 See Peter Hannam, “Government climate plan stalled after Berejiklian took over, documents show”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-
change/government-climate-plan-stalled-after-berejiklian-took-over-documents-show-20190314-
p5145l.html
92 NSW Government, Office of Environment and Heritage, “NSW Climate Change Policy Framework”,
page 5, available at https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/climate-change/policy-framework
107
Implement emission savings policies that are consistent with achieving
the Commonwealth Government’s interim and long-term emissions
savings objectives and are fair, efficient and in the public interest.93
In other words, the state adopted a movable target for emissions reduction,
linked to nothing more than whatever Australia’s commitment to the Paris
Agreement94 on climate change might be in the future. As the years passed
after 2016, nothing changed in the detail of the “NSW Climate Change Policy
Framework”. In late 2019, after unprecedented bushfires for months from
August 2019, the state government quietly resurrected its shelved climate
change policy (without updating any wording in it) and stated on its website
that:
The NSW Climate Change Policy Framework outlines long-term
objectives to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 and to make New
South Wales more resilient to a changing climate. This policy framework
builds on our strong track record of expanding clean energy, helping
households and businesses reduce their bills by saving energy and
preparing for the impacts of climate change.95
But in reality, the target for implementation of “emissions saving policies” was
still no more than necessary to achieve a 26% reduction on 2005 levels by
93 NSW Government, Office of Environment and Heritage, “NSW Climate Change Policy Framework”,
page 6, available at https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/climate-change/policy-framework
94 The Paris Agreement: In 2015, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(established in 1992) held its 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP21). At this conference more
than 170 nations made commitments to reduce carbon emissions in order to keep global heating to
less than 2o Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 and preferably to keep global heating to 1.5o
Celsius, recognising that if the earth is heated beyond 1.5o Celsius there will be irreversible damage to
the planet. As at 2020 temperature increases were already at least 1o Celsius higher than pre-
industrial levels. Australia’s commitment under the Paris Agreement was to reduce carbon emissions
by 26%-28% of 2005 levels by 2030, a target widely considered inadequate for meeting the goal of
keeping the average temperature increase to 1.5o Celsius, let alone 2o Celsius. This inadequacy was
not limited to Australia. As such, the Paris Agreement included a ratchet clause, requiring countries in
subsequent COP meetings to submit plans to increase their emissions reduction targets and provide
tangible evidence of strategies for achievement of the revised targets. Australia has stubbornly
refused to participate positively at COPs held since 2015 in accordance with its commitments under
the Paris Agreement and has on one occasion derailed cooperation (such as the COP25 conference in
Madrid in December 2019). Australia has not complied with its commitment to ratchet up emissions
reduction targets.
95 NSW Government, NSW Climate Change Policy Framework website, last viewed in January 2020 at
https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/climate-change/policy-framework
108
2030, nowhere near enough to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, and truly
effective strategies to achieve the meagre 26% target were nowhere in sight.
Strategies in NSW focussed merely on measures described elsewhere by the
Business Council of Australia as “small”96, including “the creation of a state
energy security target to ensure adequate supply, case management for
critical infrastructure, creation of renewable energy zones in regional NSW,
schemes for energy efficiency and demand reduction, grants for emerging
technologies, trialling solar PV for low income households and subsidies for
solar-battery systems in households”97. But with the possible exception of the
creation of renewable energy zones in regional Australia, none of these
measures will significantly reduce the impacts of continued fossil fuel
extraction and generation. On the contrary, federal funding for some of them
has been made dependent on expansion of gas extraction, as the Federal
Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, made clear when
he said in February 2020, “no gas, no cash”98.
In December 2019, the state’s Environment Minister, Matt Kean,
announced that NSW would begin preparing
a new ambitious emissions reduction target to address climate change
and will commit to lowering greenhouse gases by 35 per cent by 2030.99
However, this announcement lacked credibility, not just because other Liberal
and National Party members at the state and federal level still tried to reject
a connection between the fires and climate change but because the state
96 Business Council of Australia, “2020 Energy and Climate Change Project Scoping Paper”, January
2020, page 5, accessible at
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/bca/pages/5085/attachments/original/1581309292/BCA_Cli
mate_and_Energy_Policy_-_Scoping_paper_-_January_2020.pdf?1581309292
97 Ibid., page 5.
98 See Katharine Murphy, “New resources minister Keith Pitt rejects calls for higher taxes on gas
industry”, The Guardian, 12 February 2020: “In parliament, Taylor said the government was
committed to rolling out bilateral agreements with the states to guide the energy transition, like the
$2bn deal unveiled recently with New South Wales that Canberra says will boost gas supply. But he
said for that deal to be replicated, the states ‘must do the right thing. When it comes to those deals,
whether it’s NSW or Victoria, the principle is very simple,’ Taylor said. ‘No gas, no cash.’”. Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/12/new-resources-minister-keith-pitt-
rejects-calls-for-higher-taxes-on-gas-industry?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
99 Alexandra Smith and Mike Foley, “NSW to commit to new emission reduction targets for 2030”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-
to-commit-to-new-emission-reduction-targets-for-2030-20191211-p53izc.html
109
itself was still offering an array of subsidies to coal miners to build new mines
and indeed was in the process of approving new coal mines underneath
Sydney’s main water storage and catchment100. As Richard Denniss, Chief
Economist at the Australia Institute pointed out at the time:
The NSW government’s policy for setting royalties states: “Royalty rates
are set to encourage present and future exploration and development
of mineral resources”.101
In other words, both the strategy on royalties and the planning approval
process were set in opposition to, not support of the target for emissions
reduction by 2030.102
If the last few years of federal policy and inaction on emissions is anything
to go by (and failing a change of federal government), this moveable target
for emissions is more likely than not to be kept at a level substantially lower
than what is necessary to achieve net zero emissions by 2050103. But even if
the ostensible state objective is maintained, it can’t be achieved by focussing
on adaptation. It can only be achieved by strategies which replace the use of
fossil fuels with renewables and/or with other sorts of offsets such as carbon
sequestration via, say, re-forestation. However, there is little, if any, evidence
of a focus on the latter sorts of strategies. Carbon sequestration and the like
are not high on the state agenda (or the mining industry’s agenda) and, in the
absence of an emissions trading scheme or carbon price, carbon farming is
not high on the federal agenda. So a target of net zero emissions by 2050 in
100 These mines were approved quietly in December 2019 and March 2020, despite serious concerns
by catchment management authorities. See Peter Hannam, “Coal Mining allowed under Sydney Water
Reservoir for first time in 20 years”, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 March 2020, accessible at
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/sustainability/strict-rules-for-new-coal-mining-
under-sydney-reservoir-20200329-p54eyd.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed
101 Richard Denniss, “New coalmines in Queensland don’t help existing communities, they hurt them”,
The Guardian, 11 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/11/new-coalmines-in-queensland-dont-
help-existing-communities-they-hurt-them
102 See Chapter 9 for information on how federal policy on emissions reduction has likewise been set
in a direction opposite to that necessary to achieve actual emissions reduction – the Emission
Reduction Fund (ERF).
103 As at June 2019, under the “Paris Agreement” within the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change, Australia had committed to no more than a reduction of 26%-28% on 2005 carbon
emission levels by 2030. See Chapter 6 for a full run-down on the quantum and pace of emissions
reductions necessary to achieve net zero emissions by Australia by 2050.
110
NSW is likely to require a move to 100% renewables within NSW by (or before)
2050 – no thermal coal, next to no gas (except perhaps what might be
necessary to produce hydrogen), and no petrol driven cars. I will explain why
this is the highly likely reality not just for NSW but for the whole of Australia
by 2050 (or much sooner) in later chapters, but continuing with the story in
NSW, as at 2020 there is no action plan for NSW to achieve 100% renewables
by 2050, let alone sooner. Indeed there is no renewable energy target at all in
NSW104. Little wonder then that the state is falling well short of where it needs
to be with renewables in 2019/2020 to meet the target of net zero emissions
by 2050. In July 2019, journalists at The Guardian Australia provided the
simple mathematical facts on this:
To steadily get from where [NSW was in 2018] at 14.4% renewables to
100% by 2050, they need to increase the share of renewable energy
meeting their electricity demand by close to 2.7 percentage points each
year. So, if the NSW government was genuinely serious about its target,
then by 2030, renewable energy should make up close to 46% of their
electricity demand. But present project commitments plus rooftop solar
only deliver 28% renewables, and the state needs to stimulate another
5,000 megawatts of projects to get back on track.105
Sadly, in its 2019/2020 budget NSW missed the opportunity to do this. They
could easily have re-invested some of the cash raised through their recent
sell-offs of energy infrastructure by creating new, highly profitable renewable
energy generation with all the profits coming back to the people who built the
Climate Change Fund in the first place – the people of NSW. Instead the
government delivered no new funding to large scale renewable energy
generation and chose to spruik about reallocating funds from a cancelled
virtual powerplant program106 to provide no interest loans to households to
104 See the Climate Council’s webpage, “States and Territories Leading the Charge on Renewable
Energy”. NSW is the third worst performing state in programs and achievements in renewable energy.
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/states-territories-leading-the-charge-on-renewable-
energy/
105 Tristan Edis, “While the government is in denial, the states are making staggering progress on
renewable energy”, The Guardian Australia, 2 July 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/02/while-the-federal-government-is-in-
denial-the-states-are-making-staggering-progress-on-renewable-energy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
106 Michael Mazengarb, “NSW Budget: Coalition misses opportunity to invest in state’s energy sector”,
Renew Economy: Clean Energy News and Analysis, 18 June 2019
111
install rooftop solar and battery storage. The residents of NSW (those who can
afford it) are expected to do the heavy lifting on reducing emissions and to
the extent that they fall short of supplying the extra renewable power
necessary to reach net zero emissions by 2050, it looks as if they will simply
have to make up the rest by paying even higher bills for non-renewable power
than they have already been stuck with.107 In the meantime, mere adaptation
to climate change and a few grants for emerging technologies for emissions
capture (grants which, when they have been given in the past, have resulted
in no such technology development108) are consuming the majority of funding
from the state government. Diversion of the majority of climate change
funding to adaptation at this time – when we should be focussing on
prevention of climate change – is merely increasing the inevitability of even
worse global heating and the economic misery that will arise from it.
There is really no excuse for the financial losses that NSW will suffer as a
result of this myopic focus on adaptation in the 2019/2020 budget, rather
than investment in new large scale sources of renewable energy. The
investment planning is simply wrong-headed. For every dollar we invest on
renewables now we can probably save much more on adaptation costs later.
And the one gesture the state has made to renewables (i.e., no-interest loans
to those wealthy enough to pay out many thousands of dollars for roof solar
and batteries) is nothing more than a recipe for making the poor a lot poorer
due to rising energy costs (even though it might be packaged as helping some
low income households). That is both wrong-headed and inequitable.
This problem is also being made worse by the fact that all mention of
climate change, and indeed almost all mention of the environment, has been
cleansed from the state’s highest level plan. This “plan” is known as the
“Premier’s Priorities” and the “State Priorities”. Between 2014 and 2019 the
https://reneweconomy.com.au/nsw-quietly-cancels-200mw-virtual-power-plant-redirects-funds-to-
solar-loans-54811/
107 In contrast to, say, the South Australian government which is installing large scale renewable
power, NSW appears to prefer to stick with ageing coal fired electricity. For analysis of NSW’s poor
record in transfer to renewables and the risk to NSW energy customers see the Climate Council,
“Ageing and Unprepared: Energy in NSW”, available at https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2019/02/climate-council-nsw-report-2019.pdf
108 See Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, La Trobe University Press &
Black Inc., 2019, Kindle edition, Loc 1060: “Despite the commitment of large financial support from
the Australian government, the Australian coalmining industry hardly invested at all in the research,
development and commercialisation of CCS.”
112
only aspect of our environment which was given any priority at all in this
overarching “plan” was litter reduction. Yes, litter reduction was the entire
environmental focus of the state’s overarching plan. Perhaps the government
thought this looked all too obviously like the state was fiddling while the
country burned, because in July 2019 (after a state election) this lonely goal
of reducing litter was deleted from the “Premier’s Priorities” and replaced
with two priorities for planting one million trees and increasing open space in
urban areas109.
Neither of these new “priorities” were about the real challenge of
addressing environmental degradation and vital ecosystem loss in the vastly
larger area of regional NSW. Nor were they about doing anything that would
reliably lead to a reduction in greenhouse gases. This is because they were
introduced without any mention of:
a) the need to establish a renewable energy target and a plan for
reaching it;
b) the need to correct the deficiencies of the Biodiversity Conservation
Act 2016 and the Local Land Services Amendment Act 2016 – in other
words, the need to stop clearing far more land than they re-plant;
and
c) the need to prevent further erosion of other environmental
regulations.
To make matters worse, announcement of the two new “priorities” for urban
trees and open space coincided with a bullish announcement by the Deputy
Premier of NSW, John Barilaro, vowing to open up the Murray Valley national
park to logging110. If such a vow is fulfilled, then we can plant all the trees we
like in the cities but if we keep ripping more out in the rest of NSW then there
can be nothing but net loss for our environment and climate.
In 2018, when litter reduction was the sole priority for the environment,
the Premier boasted in a video on the webpage for her “Priorities” that
109 NSW Government, “Premier’s Priorities” webpage, https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-
nsw/premiers-priorities/greening-our-city/ and https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-
priorities/greener-public-spaces/, as viewed in July 2019.
110 Lisa Cox, “NSW deputy premier vows to open up Murray Valley National Park to logging”, “The
Guardian”, 11 July 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/11/nsw-deputy-
premier-vows-to-open-up-murray-valley-national-park-to-logging?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
113
“ambitious targets were deliberately set”111. Alas, not for the environment. In
fact, outside the one mention of litter reduction between 2014 and 2019, and
the subsequent mention of urban trees and open space, as at July 2019, the
“Premier’s Priorities” and the “State Priorities” have not made mention of the
environment at all, either as a priority or as a category for which targets (other
than litter and urban trees) should be set. The environment is simply not a
priority in NSW. More is being done to destroy it than enhance it.112 NSW was
once able to boast that it introduced the world’s first emissions trading
scheme in 2003. This scheme was operative until 2012, when it was
unceremoniously closed down. From that point on, nothing effective has been
done by the state government to reduce net emissions. The result of this is
that in 2019 “New South Wales is responsible for more greenhouse gas
pollution than any other state or territory.”113 The Berejiklian government
may attempt to dress up its environmental commitments as much as it may
please with gestures toward planting one million trees in urban areas and
even by reinstating an ostensible target of net zero emissions by 2050. But
these gestures will be nothing more than tokenism while the state continues
to strip the land of more and more vegetation and plans little more than a few
small adaptation and resilience programs. Indeed the gestures toward tree
planting are puny and therefore entirely insincere: compare the proposal to
plant one million trees in NSW to the actual achievement by Ethiopians in
2019 of planting more than 200 million trees in one day114. If Ms Berejiklian
111 Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, “Premier’s Priorities – Progress on delivering for citizens 2018”,
Video viewed on 23 June 2019 available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C3Bv4BCXZo&t=25s
112 This applies despite reports from the NSW EPA which in the headlines of their “State of the
Environment Report 2018” state that greenhouse gas emissions are “now” 18.7% lower than they
were in 2005, when in fact this is a report about the emissions in 2016 and emissions have been
steadily rising since 2014. The true impact of the state’s failure to control emissions, say by a
renewable energy target (which NSW does not have), is buried in the lower pages of the report. This
shows that actual annual mean temperatures and sea level rise are both getting worse and that the
projected outcomes for both temperature and sea level rise by 2070 are poor and progressively
getting worse. https://www.soe.epa.nsw.gov.au/all-themes/climate-and-air/climate-change
113 Climate Council, “Ageing and Unprepared: Energy in NSW”, page 7, available at
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/climate-council-nsw-report-
2019.pdf
114 Associated Press, “Ethiopia plants more than 200 million trees in 1 day”, news.com.au, 31 July
2019, accessible at https://nypost.com/2019/07/31/ethiopia-plants-more-than-200-million-trees-in-1-
day/
114
were to attempt even half of that, then she might at a pinch be able to boast
about the environmental credentials of her government, but not before.
True, the state government in June 2019 did attempt to improve its
environmental credentials by making provision in the budget for creation of a
new Energy, Climate Change and Sustainability Division in the Department of
Planning and Environment and it charged this new division with responsibility
for “developing policy on energy and climate change”. But such a policy had
already been developed three years earlier with the assistance of a
government-appointed expert panel, the Climate Change Council. The policy
that emerged from this process was the “NSW Climate Change Policy
Framework”, mentioned above (the one quietly shelved by the Berejiklian
government in 2017), and was based on a principle of “embedding climate
change consideration into government decision making”. The Climate Change
Council has not been contacted by the government since the development of
the framework and it is not known whether their expertise will be sought in
future. If the state’s behaviour on climate change between 2014 and 2019 is
anything to go by, the best we can probably hope for is that this new Climate
Change and Sustainability Division will occasionally comment from the
sidelines, when permitted. The probability of their introducing a renewable
energy target is low.
Contrast this with the rather more visionary approach of some local
councils. For instance, more than twenty local councils in NSW are supporting
new solar farms to help reduce their power bills.115 They have miniscule
resources compared to the state, but they are displaying a far higher degree
of creativity, community leadership and management skill.
Several councils have also set ambitious targets for greenhouse gas
reductions in their areas and in their own operations. Action plans to achieve
this are in place and progress is being made towards targets. The council for
the City of Sydney is one with a strategy and action plan to achieve reduction
in greenhouse gas concentrations consistent with the reductions deemed
necessary by world scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change to avoid a >1.5oCelsius temperature rise. As at 2019, the City was on
track to meet its targets and reduce emissions in its own operations by 44%
115Climate Council, “Ageing and Unprepared: Energy in NSW”, pages 2 & 23, available at
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/climate-council-nsw-report-
2019.pdf
115
on 2006 levels and move to 50% renewable energy by 2021. More broadly,
the City has set targets for the entire City of Sydney local government area.
These include a target for 50% of electricity to be renewable by 2030, a 70%
reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and net zero emissions by
2040116.
But more than this, local councils are thinking about the impacts of
climate change on the poorest and most vulnerable in our community and
calling for action from higher levels of government. In June 2019 the council
of the City of Sydney unanimously passed a motion calling on the federal
government to respond urgently to the climate emergency by reintroducing a
carbon price and establishing a “Just Transition Authority” whose role would
be to ensure that Australians working in fossil fuel industries can find suitable
alternative employment. In the words of the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore:
This emergency is not just about the numbers, it is about our
communities, and its impacts are felt by us all, particularly the poorest
amongst us – the vulnerable, the marginalised and those that live in
remote communities.117
Ms Moore is championing the cause of all Australians, not just those in her
own local government area. If she can do it, surely the state’s Premier could
think on a state-wide basis. But apparently not. As shown above, Ms
Berejiklian’s priorities are more likely to embed inequality than reduce
impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable.
Ms Moore is also on record saying that the city “cannot reach its targets
for greenhouse gas reduction alone. Everyone in our community has a role to
play.” Unfortunately, this is a message to which the state government is likely
to be deaf, just as it was deaf to the message from Mr Bass and UTS. By its
inaction on the environment, the state government in effect has marginalised
itself and reduced its potential contribution to environmental sustainability
so drastically that it has made itself almost an irrelevant player in a sustainable
116 Office of the Lord Mayor Clover Moore, “City of Sydney to bring net zero emissions target forward
to 2040”, Mirage News, 6 February 2020, accessible at https://www.miragenews.com/city-of-sydney-
to-bring-net-zero-emissions-target-forward-to-2040/
117 Clover Moore quoted by Lisa Cox, “City of Sydney councillors to vote on declaring climate crisis a
national emergency”, The Guardian, 21 June 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/jun/21/city-of-sydney-councillors-to-vote-on-declaring-climate-crisis-a-national-
emergency?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
116
future not just for NSW but for Australia. This is truly regrettable since it is
obvious that saving our environment would be so much easier with state
government involvement than without it. There are so many things the state
government could do in environmental protections and in economic
development via improved environmental resource management, but they
are simply not planning to do them. So we may need to face the prospect of
working towards environmental sustainability without much assistance from
the government of NSW.
For its part the state government of NSW might argue that it is not the
state but the federal government’s role to deal with big environmental issues
like climate change, as though they have no capacity to influence the federal
government to provide policy settings, such as a price on carbon, which will
incentivise new industry developments like carbon farming, and which could
thereby bring massive benefits to the state’s economy. If the state abrogates
responsibility for all action on prevention of climate change to the federal
government, and confines itself in the main to adaptation responses, then
NSW is simply behaving thoughtlessly, even childishly, the more so because
the federal government is not accepting the abrogated responsibility. They
have done nothing as leaders in climate change other than to frustrate or
negate everyone else’s efforts. Abrogation of responsibility by the state is out
of step with the approaches of other major state based economies, such as
California and over 600 local governments across the world, who are taking
on the role of leadership in preventing climate change, even though some of
their national governments may have deserted the stage on prevention of
global heating. States like NSW can do much more than they are on the
environment and global heating, all of which would be of significant economic
benefit to NSW and Australia as a whole. There is no excuse for leaving
councils in NSW to go it almost entirely alone in the challenge of climate
change. There is especially no economic excuse.
The aggregated result of the NSW government’s antipathy to integration
of plans and their approach to planning overall would appear to be that NSW
is making some progress only in the area of its economy, not in the areas of
the environment or wellbeing (as the next section shows). NSW has been
improving its economy by spending on infrastructure through its “mega
building program”, which in 2019 passed the $90 billion mark for the first
time. Much of this is in roads, which will just result in more car trips and drive
117
up fossil fuel emissions.118 The improvement to the economy from this extra
infrastructure expenditure is, for reasons I will explain later, likely to be
relatively short-lived. But, for the present, the state government’s interests
comfortably consist in their being measured on very little other than the
economy (and reporting on that is slim and dwindling too119). Meanwhile,
however, environmental degradation is obviously and rapidly increasing.
Witness river systems in crisis such as the Darling river, failing water supplies
and wetland degradation such as Menindee Lakes, and massive fish kills in
inland river systems. This can only bode ill for the economy and jobs down the
track – and sooner rather than later.
This degradation is a direct function of the current culture of the state
government in which the environment has come to be viewed not as a
mainstay of the economy but as a barrier to economic growth and
development. And the Berejiklian government continued to reinforce this
mind-set in 2020 (even as it was resurrecting its old commitment to net zero
emissions by 2050) by introducing new legislation to stop the NSW
Independent Planning Commission from taking “scope 3” greenhouse gas
emissions into account when considering approvals of new coal and gas
extraction proposals120. Suppression of all mention of the environment as a
priority in any state-based plan is now almost complete, despite attempted
appearances to the contrary. If this disintegration in planning persists – where
one policy for environmental protection or climate change mitigation is
negated by another – we are likely to experience significant economic
downturn, especially if it is reinforced federally by attacks on environmental
approval processes.
This is all the more disappointing because at the same time that the state
government is completing its systematic disintegration of environmental,
spatial and economic planning and reducing environmental regulation, it is
becoming quite apparent that scientists, economists and business leaders in
118 This is in contrast to, say, the country of Luxembourg, that in 2020 made all public transport free.
119 Between 2014 and 2019, reporting on the strength of the NSW economy was confined in the
“Premier’s Priorities” web page to reporting on creation of jobs. After June 2019 reporting on this
indicator as a headline on government webpages ceased. Reporting on the NSW economy still occurs
through budget reviews.
120 See Felicity Rourke, et. al., “NSW Government to prohibit scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions
conditions”, Allens Lawyers, 25 October 2019, accessible at https://www.allens.com.au/insights-
news/insights/2019/10/nsw-government-to-prohibit-scope-3-greenhouse-gas-emissions-conditions/
118
Australia are gathering around a view that environmental and ecosystem
protection and prevention of further global heating are vital for growth of
GDP. The “Australian National Outlook 2019” 121 released in June 2019 by the
CSIRO, National Australia Bank and twenty other participating agencies
(including three universities, peak not-for-profit NGOs, a range of major
corporations, funds managers and the Australian Stock Exchange) indicates
that environmental protection and social inclusion are distinctly more likely
to lead to higher GDP by 2060 than policies which exclude the environment
and society. Chapter 7 includes a discussion of the opportunities for economic
growth that are being missed by Australia as a result of government’s failure
to integrate social and environmental planning with economic planning.
Disintegration of planning combined with ill-considered deregulation, not
just of the environment but in other areas such as the financial sector and
labour markets, will substantially reduce the economic strength of Australia
unless there is a reversal of the culture within state and federal governments
which is systematically collapsing mainstays of growth such as our natural
environment. But more than this, additional economic loss will arise from
policies and planning styles which are set to embed rather than reduce social
exclusion. At the state level, much is being done to conceal this sort of
exclusion by changing the way in which progress on plans for social health and
wellbeing is being reported. Not only is social planning being disintegrated
from spatial planning but reporting is being reduced to the point where we
can learn next to nothing about which policies are working, what mistakes are
being made, and what changes should be made to policies. If the state were
suddenly of a mind to revive integrated planning, it is arguable that they
wouldn’t know where to start because they are simply not doing enough
monitoring of meaningful indicators to figure out what is and is not working
in their (ideologically driven) policy approaches and plans. The next section
outlines how this problem is playing out and provides some insight into what
needs to be fixed if state governments are to play a more effective role in
planning.
121See CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, available at
https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/ANO
119
Problem No. 2 – A failure of reporting
In its spatial and economic planning, driven from the top, the state of NSW
has become deaf to the needs of the environment. But it is also becoming
wilfully deaf to indicators of social health and wellbeing, which for several
years now have been deteriorating sharply and, in some cases, considerably
more steeply than in the rest of Australia.
Planning in NSW is clearly not working in terms of delivering improved
social outcomes. For example:
• The rate of homeless persons per 10,000 head of population
increased in NSW by 38% between the 2001 census and the 2016
census – by far the highest increase out of all states and territories,
most of which have been decreasing their rates of homelessness in
that period.122 The rate increased by 27% in the five years to 2016,
indicating a much steeper rise from 2011 onward compared to the
rise in the ten years between 2001 and 2011.
• The rate of sexual assault per 100,000 head of population in NSW is
35% higher than the average across all states and the second highest
in Australia (exceeded only by the Northern Territory). Additionally,
the rate of increase in sexual assault in NSW since 2011 is the second
highest in Australia.123
• The rate of domestic violence assaults (excluding domestic related
sexual assaults) in NSW increased by 6% (or 1,704 more assaults)
over the two years to March 2019, bringing the total domestic
assaults to over 30,000. Breaches of apprehended violence orders (in
domestic violence related incidents) increased by 11.5% in the same
period. The rate of sexual assault in domestic violence related
incidents also increased by 6.3% over the five years to March 2019.124
122 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Catalogue No. 2049.0 - Census of Population and Housing:
Estimating homelessness, 2016
123 Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Victims of Crime, Selected Offences, States and Territories (Tables
6 to 10)” accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/4510.02017?OpenDocument
124 Source: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research,
https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_pages/Domestic-Violence.aspx
120
• NSW has the third highest rate of poverty in Australia with 13.3%
(over one million people) living below the poverty line (i.e., they are
living – if it can be called that – on less than 50% of the median
household income across the state).125
• And astounding as it should be in one of the wealthiest countries in
the world, hunger in Australia is becoming a massive problem. In
NSW there has been a 10% increase in the proportion of people
seeking food relief since 2016.126 Foodbank has reached a point
where it provides food assistance to people living in NSW more than
1.4 million times a year.
We might have built a stronger economy in NSW – temporarily – but our
wellbeing is getting worse. We certainly do not have safer communities, and
the figures above clearly indicate that the proceeds of whatever economic
prosperity there might be are not being delivered to all and this is producing
stark divisions of inequality across the state.
The problem here is not just that “planning” by the state government has
been confined in the main to spatial planning and that there is no longer much
idea, if any, of integrating those spatial plans with those of any other level of
government, or the community, or the environment for that matter. When it
comes to social planning, the problem of lack of integration is exacerbated by
two other factors, both of which arise from an acute fear by politicians in
government of being held accountable and a desire to narrow down to almost
zero the number of things the government might be held accountable for.
1. One of these factors is that when it comes to its own planning and
priority setting, the state government has become very reluctant to
be held to account for anything more than it is prepared to “deliver”.
This might seem reasonable if it weren’t for the fact that what the
state government is prepared to deliver has been narrowed down
sharply since 2014. I will talk about this later in this chapter.
125 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2018”, page 64 accessible at
https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ACOSS_Poverty-in-Australia-Report_Web-
Final.pdf
126 McCrindle, “Foodbank Hunger Report 2017”, page 17 accessible at
https://2qean3b1jjd1s87812ool5ji-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/04/Foodbank_HungerReport_McCrindle_Oct2017_Digital.pdf
121
2. The second factor is that the state has eschewed almost all reporting
on indicators of social health and wellbeing and where reporting still
does occur it is engaging in “indicator shopping”, which is to say it
has fallen into a habit of selecting the most favourable performance
measure and target and then reporting on those (and only those) in
such a way as to mask the truth about loss of wellbeing, rising
inequality, increased exposure to violent crime, and the pain of
human exclusion. The habit now is that whenever actions arising
from their better intentions for social health don’t work (and they
often don’t), the state government simply changes the indicator or
the measure or target it would prefer to report on, or deletes
reporting entirely.
The harm arising from this cannot be understated. In some areas, it is the type
of harm that makes the difference between life and death. Sound
measurement and reporting systems are vital for continuous improvements
in quality of life. As such it is worth looking at how reporting is being stripped
out of planning at the state level, if only to shed light on why and how it should
be structured back into long term planning processes. Without integrity of
reporting, we cannot know whether reforms have been successful or not and
where we should head next.
The narrowing of social accounting
In spruiking its 2019/2020 budget for NSW, the state’s Treasurer, Dominic
Perrottet, stated that:
We have shifted over the last three budgets to more of an outcomes
focussed approach in that there are clear outcomes that should guide
departments in the allocation of their spending. … [The head of the
Education Department has been working closely with the heads of
Treasury and the Department of Premier & Cabinet] to focus on going
through their budget line by line and making sure that every investment
we make in education is focussed on achieving better educational
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outcomes. We are certainly going to make sure that every dollar there
will improve our kids’ education.127
In this speech the state’s Treasurer was working overtime to promote the
state government as having our children’s interests uppermost in mind. The
focus on “outcomes”, however, was free of detail about which outcomes,
except where he implied that the outcomes would not be those promoted by
the Teachers’ Federation, an organisation of experienced educators with
views at odds with Mr Perrottet’s about what sort of teaching and monitoring
(and the level of funding necessary for that teaching) works best to improve
educational “outcomes”128. Mr Perrottet’s focus on outcomes was also free
of information about which children would benefit. It remains to be seen
whether benefits will be realised for the most disadvantaged, but for reasons
set out below, substantial benefits to the most disadvantaged may be quite
unlikely.
If, however, disadvantaged groups do benefit from a focus on “outcomes”
(specified or unspecified), we will probably never know. And we will certainly
never know if they suffer from this outcomes-focused process. This is because
the state government has devised a summary reporting system that has
reduced reporting to the narrowest of indicators and is also inclined to
manipulate reporting on those indicators when things don’t go according to
plan or targets are not met. This is not just happening in education. It is
127 Dominic Perrottet, Treasurer of NSW, Media conference after delivery of the 2019/2020 state
budget for NSW, 18 June 2019 https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/perrottet-wants-bang-for-
buck-on-education-funding/vi-AAD1YKp
128 The desired outcomes generally advocated by the Teachers’ Federation are for improved results as
displayed by comparing improvements within schools as opposed to across schools. There is an
ideological divide in education where high level comparisons such as those provided by NAPLAN
(National Assessment Program – Literacy & Numeracy) are perceived by progressive teaching
organisations to provide less assistance to teachers in determining the best ways of improving
educational outcomes within a given school. After a decade of NAPLAN results which have shown no
statistical improvement in the literacy and numeracy of NSW children, these progressive teaching
organisations are agitating for the addition of new tools (beyond but not necessarily excluding
NAPLAN) to assist teachers to design learning programs which will improve results. In the 2019/2020
budget the NSW Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet took a more adversarial approach to the education
sector than the collegiate approach of previous state education ministers. With the NSW Treasury
driving education, as opposed to education ministers, the stage has been set for more top-down
intervention and less consultation with teaching professionals.
123
happening in almost all areas of social health and wellbeing. Here are just
three examples:
Example No. 1 – In education: In 2015 the NSW state government
chose annual NAPLAN (National Assessment Plan Literacy & Numeracy)
results for schoolchildren in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 as the indicator of
success in achieving its desired educational outcomes. The target for
this indicator was to “increase the proportion of NSW students in the
top two NAPLAN bands by eight per cent by 2019”129. This is a deeply
offensive target because it focuses on helping only those already at the
top, and completely ignores those at the bottom. But for the moment
let us simply concentrate on the facts of achievement against the target
and what was and wasn’t reported. The baseline selected for the target
was the average achieved in 2014 of 32.7%. With an 8% increase, this
means the target set for 2019 was that 35.3% of all NSW students would
be in the top two NAPLAN bands.
However, before much in the way of reporting on success or failure
could occur, somewhere between 2015 and 2018, the government
amended this target to confine it to the NAPLAN results for reading and
numeracy. This excluded the NAPLAN results for spelling, grammar,
punctuation and writing from the target. In regard to reading and
numeracy, the Premier reported in late 2018 that:
Preliminary data indicates that in 2018, 34.4 per cent of students
achieved results in the top two NAPLAN bands in reading and/or
numeracy. There are now an additional 20,000 more students
achieving results in the top two NAPLAN bands. We remain on track
to achieve the Premier's Priority target in 2019.130
In effect this indicates that in the year between 2018 and 2019, the
government expected an extra 10,000 students would move into the
top two NAPLAN bands, and the original target of 35.3% of students in
the top two NAPLAN bands would thereby be met, at least for reading
and numeracy. Readers may surmise what they like about the
129 NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf
130 NSW Government, “Improving Education Results” webpage, https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-
nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/improving-education-results/ Last viewed on 1 July 2017.
124
probability of moving 10,000 extra students into the top two NAPLAN
bands in one year, when it had taken three years to move 20,000 into
those bands and there were no plans to do anything different to achieve
the expected boost in results. But in reality, we are never likely to be
told – at least we are never likely to be told by the Premier – whether
this rather narrower target was met because no reporting on actual
results seems to have been made available by the re-elected Coalition
state government in the aftermath of the March 2019 election. Indeed,
the webpage of late 2018 cited above, with its “preliminary data”, was
taken down in late June 2019 without further updates on whether the
preliminary results came true.
Regardless of whether the desired results were achieved, it should
be noted that in none of its amended forms does the measure provide
an indication of whether there has been an increase in the number of
students falling into the bottom two or three NAPLAN bands. The effect
of this choice of measure and target – focussing on those who are
already at or near the top rather than those who are left at the bottom
– is to distract attention from any growing inequality and from the more
general picture of progress that can be provided by a fuller assessment
of the NAPLAN results.
The fuller assessment tells a very different story to the one the
government is struggling to tell by its selection of ever-narrowing
indicators and diminishing (easier) targets. It shows that over the ten
years of NAPLAN results, no statistically observable improvement has
occurred in the educational results of NSW schoolchildren (at least
those measured by NAPLAN), except to a very slight degree in reading
and numeracy for year 5 students and to a slight degree in reading for
year 3 students. In the areas of spelling, grammar and punctuation there
were no statistically observable improvements for NSW schoolchildren
in the 10 years between 2008 and 2018. And in the area of writing skills
there was a statistically observable worsening of results between 2008
and 2018 for NSW school children in years 3, 5 and 7.131
131Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA), “NAPLAN Time Series Results”
for NSW schoolchildren in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, 2008 to 2018, available at
https://reports.acara.edu.au/Home/TimeSeries
125
These poor results in writing, spelling, grammar and punctuation
shed light on why the government decided to exclude them from future
reporting on NAPLAN results. In the face of the results the government
appears to have preferred a strategy of narrowing the accounting and
reporting less. This tactic might make sense in a political context but it
can’t turn a failure into an achievement. Based on the broader
accounting of NAPLAN results over the last ten years, it is plain that the
government’s target of 2015 to “increase the proportion of NSW
students in the top two NAPLAN bands by eight per cent by 2019”
wasn’t met. In some ways, things got worse. Stolidly sticking to this
offensive target stopped the NSW government from devising strategies
that may achieve improvements where it really matters. Instead of
learning about what was and wasn’t working and sincerely working with
teachers to fix the problem, they simply changed the targets. In the
process, they widened the inequality between students.
Example No. 2 – In health: In 2015 the NSW state government chose
hospital emergency department performance as the indicator of
success in achieving its desired service levels in hospitals. The target for
this indicator chosen by the state was to achieve “81 per cent of patients
through emergency departments within four hours by 2019”132. The
baseline selected was the percentage achieved in 2015 of 74.3%. By
2018, actual performance on this average had decreased to 73%,
moving NSW emergency patients further away from the 81% target, not
towards it.133
In contrast to its tactic in the education example, the government did
not attempt to make a prediction about the potential to achieve its
target for hospital care by 2019. Instead it attempted to promote the
poor result as an “achievement”, by saying that, “Of the 2.88 million
patients presenting to NSW's emergency departments in 2017-18, over
2.1 million moved through in four hours – 36,000 more than last year
132 NSW Government, “Improving Service Levels in Hospitals” webpage, 10 September 2018
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/improving-service-levels-
hospitals/ Last viewed on 1 July 2017.
133 NSW Government, “Improving Service Levels in Hospitals” webpage, 10 September 2018
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/improving-service-levels-
hospitals/
126
and almost 105,000 more over the life of the priority. Over the same
period, an additional 224,000 patients have presented to emergency
departments across NSW.”134 The Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian,
then appeared to quote a different set of figures to promote this
“achievement” by stating in a video in late 2018 that “68,000 more
patients [are] going through hospital emergency departments within
four hours”135, although she did not supply a time period or source to
enable assessment of the accuracy of that statement. In her video, she
made no mention of the recorded failure against the original target and
indicator. She simply picked a different indicator (a numeric, not a
percentage) and promoted it exclusively as an achievement, implying
her government’s policies and funding arrangements had been working.
This might have been understandable, given how hard it would be
for any government to face up to the fact that they had spent many
millions more on the hospital system only to find it unable to keep up
with increasing demand. But rather than coming clean or attempting to
learn from the facts, the government, in a pre-election period, simply
obfuscated those facts. In April 2019, after the state election,
independent information was released by the Bureau of Health
Information (BHI) which painted a poorer picture of performance for the
period being claimed by Ms Berejiklian as her period of “achievement”.
The BHI surveyed almost 16,000 patients in 82 NSW hospitals about
their care during hospital visits in 2017-18. The raw data from that
survey revealed waiting times in emergency departments had
deteriorated across New South Wales. In reporting on these results in
April 2019, ABC News stated that BHI’s raw data showed:
Just 65 per cent of the state's patients with potentially life-
threatening conditions were treated within 30 minutes — falling
from 70 per cent the previous year, the findings show. Less serious
134 NSW Government, “Improving Service Levels in Hospitals” webpage, 10 September 2018
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/improving-service-levels-
hospitals/
135 Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, “Premier’s Priorities – Progress on delivering for citizens 2018”,
Video viewed on 23 June 2019 available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C3Bv4BCXZo&t=25s
127
patients also faced long waits — 16 per cent said they waited more
than two hours for treatment last year.136
When Ms Berejiklian’s obfuscations are put into this context, it
becomes apparent that they are not benign errors. They are quite
systematic and wilful distortions or omissions of the truth about serious
increases in risk in hospitals. If we have a system intended to monitor
whether patient risk is being reduced in emergencies, it makes no sense
to pick a measure that maximises the amount of time all patients,
regardless of whether they have “life threatening conditions” can wait
in emergency and ignore the measure necessary to determine whether
emergency departments are dealing in time with the highest risk cases.
Focussing on the wrong indicator in this case is actually increasing the
potential for preventable trauma and death. It’s like saying “the
operation was a success but the patient died”. Here we could easily end
up with a case of “the target was met but more patients – unnecessarily
– died”. The honest reporting on this indicator should have said
something along the lines of: “We got more people through the system
in four hours, but more of the serious cases suffered longer waits and
therefore preventable trauma (or maybe even died) along the way,
especially in Western Sydney, where the BHI survey results showed the
greatest stresses and longest waiting times were being experienced in
emergency departments.”
To be fair, it should be acknowledged that, after the release of the
BHI data in April 2019, the state government did move away from its
pre-election target of “81 per cent of patients through emergency
departments within four hours by 2019”. This was replaced in July 2019
with a new target of:
100 per cent of all triage category 1, 95 per cent of triage category
2 and 85 per cent of triage category 3 patients commencing
treatment on time by 2023. … ‘On time’ is defined as Triage
category 1 (T1) seen immediately, Triage category 2 (T2) seen
136Greg Miskelly, ABC News online, “Sydney hospital patients reveal long wait-times, safety concerns at emergency
departments”, 26 April 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-26/nsw-hospital-emergency-
patient-survey-results/11047102
128
within 10 minutes and Triage category 3 (T3) seen within 30
minutes.137
This is a more sensible target likely to reduce risk for patients in
emergencies, if it is met. It remains to be seen whether there will be a
repeat of the evasive reporting of the truth seen in 2018 if actual results
in 2022 are poor or whether another pre-election period will lead them
yet again to be selective in their reporting.
The state government’s response in both these cases was to allocate
more money for the problems in the 2019/2020 budget announcement by
making provision (over four years or more) for 4,600 extra teachers, 40 new
and upgraded schools, 29 new hospitals and 8,300 new nurses, doctors, and
other health professionals. This is entirely desirable (although it is difficult to
tell if these increased state allocations will be counteracted by the federal
government’s plans to reduce funding for education and provide insufficient
funding for health as per the “2015 Intergenerational Report”138 (see the
section below on “The failure of planning – nation-wide” and Chapter 7). But
if reporting by the state government is conducted in the way it was between
2015 and 2019, we are never likely to be told whether these new expenditures
led to real improvements or not and we will gain no insight into better ways
of spending funds in the future. In this regard, Example No. 3 is perhaps the
most cautionary tale.
Example No. 3 – In domestic violence: In this example, the way funds
are spent and allocated by the state government could be said to have
led indirectly at the very least to the state’s tragic increase in domestic
violence in the five years to 2019.
The NSW government started out in 2013 with ambitious intentions
in the area of domestic violence by setting a target to “reduce the
proportion of domestic violence perpetrators re-offending within 12
months by 5%”. At the time it appears this target was taken to mean a
reduction in re-offending from 14.2% to 9.2% by 2017.139 No discernible
137 NSW Government, “Improving Service Levels in Hospitals” webpage, 28 June 2019,
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities/improving-service-levels-in-hospitals/
138 Australian Government, The Treasury, “2015 Intergenerational Report”
https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/2015_IGR.pdf
139 NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf
129
improvement occurred between 2013 and 2015. In fact, the proportion
of re-offenders rose to 15.7% in 2014 and then fell back once again to
14.2% in 2015. Some time after 2015 – possibly in late 2018 in the pre-
election period – the target was then adjusted to “reduce the
proportion of domestic violence perpetrators reoffending by 25 per
cent by 2021 (based on the 2019 cohort of perpetrators)”.140 Although
the wording change in the way the target was promoted – from a 5%
reduction to a 25% reduction – looks like a serious increase in ambition,
it actually represented a reduction in ambition. In reality, the new target
was for a reduction in domestic violence re-offending from the 14.3%
that was still manifest in re-offending by 2019 to a target of 10.7% by
2021.141 This target of 10.7% by 2021 is obviously less ambitious than
the original target of 9.2% by 2017.
Given how incredibly difficult it is to achieve reductions in domestic
violence there are few who would begrudge a government’s desire to
think more cautiously about what it should promise and by when. But
rather than resorting to making the target smaller (by a sleight of hand
that attempted to make it look bigger), what the government should
have been looking at when failure seemed to be constant over six years
was the way in which it was approaching the task.
In determining the way funding would be allocated to support this
target, the state failed from the very beginning to take (or perhaps even
seek) advice from expert practitioners in the field and in their usual top
down way assumed that efficiencies could be brought to the sector by
reorganising contracts for domestic violence refuges and homelessness
services. At the same time, they also “shook up” the social housing
sector by developing targets to “increase the number of households
successfully transitioning out of social housing by 5% over three years”
and to “increase the proportion of young people who successfully move
140 NSW Government, “Premier’s Priorities” webpage published 10 September 2018,
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/reducing-domestic-violence-
reoffending/
141 NSW Government, “Premier’s Priorities” webpage published 10 September 2018, “Our goal is to
reduce the proportion of 2019 offenders that reoffend within 12 months to 10.7 per cent, a 25 per
cent reduction from the 2013 baseline.” Last viewed in July 2019 at
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities-2015-2019/reducing-domestic-violence-
reoffending/
130
from specialist homelessness services to long term accommodation by
10%.142
Measuring the success of the social housing sector by measuring how
many don’t use it says a lot more about the state government’s
arrogance, ideological predisposition towards “self-reliance”, and
preferred use of public funds (socialism for the rich, rugged
individualism for the poor, as the neoliberal project has been described)
than it does about their commitment to really help people who are
caught in entrenched disadvantage. It is tantamount to saying this
service, into which we pummel many millions of dollars each year, is
only successful if it is not used.
For its part, the state government defended this sort of measure and
target by saying that:
Working with households to successfully and safely transition them
out of social housing [and homelessness shelters] increases the
ability of those households to participate in the economy and exit
the cycle of entrenched disadvantage.143
That is one way to look at it. But selection of such measures, to the
exclusion of all other measures that would be relevant to measuring
whether the security of accommodation and refuge for disadvantaged
households is improving, indicates nothing more than that the
government is seeking to reduce or eliminate a vital part of the social
safety net for those who need it most and has no commitment to
reducing social disadvantage and inequality at all. But let’s leave that
aside and concentrate on how this extremely narrow, perverse and even
callous attitude to social housing objectives was combined with equally
insensitive efficiency programs in domestic violence services to produce
precisely the opposite outcome the government was ostensibly aiming
for in the service level for women fleeing domestic violence in NSW.
Between 2012 and 2014 the NSW Government developed a reform
agenda, known as “Going Home Staying Home” (GHSH) for
142 NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf
143 NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf.
131
the Specialist Homelessness Services (SHS) Program. GHSH formed the
framework for the development of new contracts for SHS services. This
resulted in a reduction in the number of SHS contracts from 394 to
149 across NSW, the vast majority of which went to religious based
providers (in the main, the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul Society,
Mission Australia and Wesley Mission). Prior to the new contracts these
organisations had not been known as specialist providers in domestic
violence support services (i.e., advice, counselling, employment
assistance, and assistance with financial and legal arrangements, etc. –
things you need to know and be able to access to help you safely escape
physical and emotional violence). The changes in the structure of the
contracts for service delivery resulted in closure of some specialist
women’s refuges and conversion of many others to mixed refuges and
support programs for all types of homeless people, not just domestic
violence sufferers who, prior to the change, had been able to access not
just crisis accommodation but life-saving specialist advice and support
through the dedicated women’s refuges. There is disagreement within
the sector as to whether homelessness and domestic violence require a
separation of service delivery. At the time of writing this disagreement
is unresolved but service providers have done their best to adapt. Even
so, the Women’s Community Shelters organisation (the peak
community agency in the field in NSW) has reported that the GHSH
program has resulted in a 9.4% decrease in services specific to female
domestic violence sufferers in NSW.144
The “outcome” of this change in contract arrangements under the
GHSH reform was reported on the “Premier’s Priorities” webpage in late
2018 by the Premier herself in a video as an outstanding achievement
144 Women’s Community Shelters homepage accessible at
https://www.womenscommunityshelters.org.au/. Last viewed in July 2019. This page also reports
that, across Australia in 2019, “more than 1 in 2 women are turned away from crisis accommodation
every night.” On their FAQ page they also report that, contrary to NSW figures showing ‘turnaways’ from
services are going down, turnaways are actually going up because: “A change in the way these numbers are
measured under the Going Home, Staying Home reforms is the cause of the change [in reporting on the number
of turnaways]. The ‘No Wrong Door’ approach to measurement pushes the responsibility on to services to find
another service for a client if they can’t provide one. If they make a referral of any sort, this translates in the
[GHSH reporting] system as a ‘service provided’ when there is insufficient quality assurance that there is actually
an outcome for a client. A ‘service provided’ does not equate to obtaining a crisis bed when you need one.”
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of a “reduction in domestic violence for nine consecutive months”145.
But this claim did not paint the same picture that emerges from the
figures supplied by the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research
which plainly showed that domestic violence assaults increased by 6%
and breaches of domestic related apprehended violence orders
increased by 11.5% in the two years to March 2019.146
If we simply consider the narrower indicator of domestic violence re-
offending, preferred by the government, as the sole indicator of
performance in reducing domestic violence, the state government has
certainly disclosed that in the three years after 2015 the proportion of
domestic violence perpetrators re-offending within 12 months rose
from 14.2% to 15.7% and then fell back in 2019 to 14.3%, indicating that
no improvement had occurred in re-offending. But it would appear that
in order to turn the situation into an achievement in the pre-election
period, Ms Berejiklian chose to concentrate on the last few months of
performance in that period for the narrower indicator and probably
hoped that no-one would notice that six years of effort had led to no
actual improvement. Putting it politely, this is obviously disingenuous,
but more than that it is a thoughtless and unnecessary prolongation of
the failure.
Between April 2014 – when the state government should have
started to notice that its approach to contracts in homelessness and
domestic violence support might not be working – and March 2019, 164
people were murdered, 145,811 were assaulted, and 8,786 were
sexually or indecently assaulted in domestic violence related incidents
in NSW.147 And yet the state government took no hint from the
persistent failures that perhaps it was their methods and planning that
should be adjusted rather than the target itself.
The causes of this failure are complex and it would be unfair to lay it
all at the feet of the state government. But their strategy, being non-
145 See promotional video of Gladys Berejiklian, Premier of NSW, “Premier’s Update on the Premier’s
Priorities”, last viewed on Youtube on 28 June 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C3Bv4BCXZo
146 Source: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research,
https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_pages/Domestic-Violence.aspx
147 Source: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research,
https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_pages/Domestic-Violence.aspx
133
consultative, dismissive of specialist advice and focussed on efficiency
of inputs instead of effectiveness of outputs, could not have helped and
there is much evidence suggesting they made it worse for longer than it
should have been. Precisely at the time when the government was
ostensibly trying to reduce domestic violence re-offending, they were
reducing the specialist services which had been helping victims to avoid
repeats of the violence. The failure of the whole thing is apparent in the
tragedy of the increase in domestic violence in NSW between 2014 and
2019.
The NSW state government appears to have learned little or nothing from
the failures of its policies in each of these three areas. One conclusion that
they should have been able to consider, based on the statistics about the real
outcomes in education, health, and domestic violence between 2013 and
2019, is that difficult social issues don’t readily respond to efficiency drives,
bundling of contracts, shedding (and shunning) of expertise, smaller
government involvement and other vapid dehumanising economic
rationalisms. They don’t, and can’t, respond to programs doing it the way the
private sector would do it. Governments need to be there to deal with these
things in a way that contractors, driven by a bottom line, will never be
motivated or geared to achieve. But instead of considering the evidence
strongly suggesting that years of the so-called “outcomes focussed approach”
to budgeting had not led to the expected outcomes, and instead of rethinking
its approach, the NSW government instead doubled down on its top down
approach, asserting that it knows best and its rationalisation of the services
of education, health and domestic violence can be run effectively with
business-like efficiency. And this was despite years of data showing the
ineffectiveness of their approach.
The language of the budget speech in 2019/2020, promoting, as it did, a
line-by-line analysis of departmental budgets by Treasury officials and
gauntlets thrown down to senior professionals, especially educators148, was
148Witness the NSW Treasurer, Dominic Perrottet’s gratuitous goading of the Teacher’s Federation
after he made decisions to do some things differently in education entirely without consultation with
professionals. See Jordan Baker, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 June 2019, “Mr Perrottet is unapologetic.
‘Why should state governments not look at better ways of doing things? We are not here for the
Teachers' Federation,’ he said.” https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/perrottet-unapologetic-we-
are-not-here-for-the-teachers-federation-20190618-p51yto.html
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antagonistic code in an ongoing and escalating war between the government
of the day and public servants. It was code for, “we’ll give you more money
but you had better get some results, or else! (meaning your future funding or
your job is on the line)”. This is to convey the impression that experienced
public servants, NGOs and unions of teachers, social workers and health
professionals are the problem, not the government itself for not consulting,
not tapping into the diverse experience of the public service and specialised
NGOs, not listening to anything but its own neoliberal echo chamber, and for
having imposed ideologically driven service delivery changes like GHSH that
simply didn’t work. Gestures of cooperation or partnership were thin on the
ground in the state sector in 2019 (in fact this got worse in education in
2020149), which should leave the people of NSW with no comfort that there
will be any learning arising from future results. An atmosphere of fear will
also pervade the public sector which will stifle input from the many creative
people still left there who know from experience what works and what
doesn’t. No-one should expect that things will get better in education, health,
homelessness and domestic violence while the government keeps persisting
in doing things that they know – or certainly should know – don’t work.
It seems there are only two things the NSW state government has learned
from these failures: one is cheap tricks in changing indicators, measures and
149For instance, in February 2020 the Berejiklian government further aggravated the education
sector’s problems of poor outcomes by insisting on a top down determination process of how children
in NSW state schools are henceforth to be taught. See Jordan Baker, “Premier says status quo 'no
longer tenable' in schools, flags reforms”, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/premier-says-status-quo-no-longer-tenable-in-schools-flags-
reforms-20200219-p542fz.html: “In an interview on the eve of her address to the SMH Schools
Summit, Ms Berejiklian outlined a plan to use the department's data to find schools that were
excelling in different areas, then identify why they were doing so well. Those methods would be
exported to other schools. ‘We need to provide greater certainty around what we regard as best
practice, rather than saying, you've got a suite of things you can consider when teaching children …
‘We know what success looks like because the results tell us,’ said Premier Berejiklian”. Doubtless
what Ms Berejiklian will find is that schools with more money in more privileged areas are the ones
that are succeeding. But it is doubtful if this will translate to a better distribution of needs based
funding for state schools. In fact state schools across Australia are suffering a serious disparity in their
share of funding compared to private schools. As federal MP Adam Bandt noted in February 2020:
“The federal government … currently spends $12.6bn on private schools and just $8.3bn on public
schools that teach two out of every three students.” See Paul Karp, “Tanya Plibersek cites 'visible
inequality' at schools in call for fair education funding”, The Guardian, 21 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/21/tanya-plibersek-cites-visible-inequality-
at-schools-in-call-for-fair-education-funding?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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targets when all else fails, and the other is to skip the process of setting decent
indicators and reporting processes entirely. Social accounting has been
narrowed so tightly in NSW that it is now unable to function as it should in a
decent strategic planning system. The adverse impact of this on the state’s
ability to plan a better future for all is considerable. The next section discusses
how the narrowing of social accounting is part of a more general process of
reducing the strategic capacity of planning by the state government to help
determine the best way to achieve desired outcomes. The social,
environmental and economic value that may be delivered by the sort of
planning now being undertaken at the state level in NSW is a lot lower than
the value that would be delivered by a more genuine strategic approach. By
looking at the lesser approach we should gain some insight in how not to plan
for a better future for our children.
The demise of a strategic focus in state planning
Since 2014 the NSW state government has moved dramatically backwards in
terms of reporting on outcomes and, in the process, our ability to track
government performance in relation to societal and environmental targets
has been progressively reduced – in some areas to zero.
What has happened is that the original state strategic plan developed by
the Coalition government when it took office in 2011, “NSW 2021”, has been
markedly narrowed down so that reporting, whatever is left of it, is
henceforth likely to be focussed mostly on performance in delivery of certain
programs, and much less on whether those programs have led to better social
outcomes. It should not be surprising to find that the programs the
government has been most prepared to report on are the ones that they
might expect to be successfully completed in one or two electoral terms and
that are tangible to the majority of us. These are the mega infrastructure
programs that aspirational voters can see themselves benefitting from,
without having to consider who is being left behind in the process (such as
their children or their aged parents). This narrower type of reporting cannot
be and will not be about whether life has really got better or worse as a result
of those programs, let alone whether it would have got better still if we had
built something else (eg., a public transport system rather than a road).
136
Unless this problem is acknowledged and reversed, the disconnect
between plans from the top and plans from the bottom, such as those in local
government, will widen in a parallel fashion to the widening of inequality that
we have been experiencing since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In fact, as I
will show in Chapter 7, the disconnect will exacerbate our problems of growth
in inequality. The former is a contributory factor to the latter. Widening
inequality is not good for an economy, because by definition it means that
over time more and more of us have less and less to spend. So any
government that wants to stay in power for more than a couple of terms
would be wise to take stock of the problem of rising inequality and its
causes.150
As outlined above, the problem of the narrowing of social and
environmental accountability arose from a loss of appreciation of the central
importance of community strategic planning (particularly grassroots
community planning) and a fear of accountability. It has left us in a situation,
in NSW at least, where there is less and less genuine integrated planning and
comprehensive reporting and more and more selective “prioritisation”
(determined solely from the top) and narrowed reporting. When this
happens, we can be certain that social equity and the environment will be
near or at the bottom of the priority list, if they hang on at all. Here it is worth
exploring the descent into this problem in further detail, taking NSW again as
a case study, to describe exactly what needs to be reversed and the mistakes
that should be avoided in planning for a better future over the longer term.
*****
When the newly elected Coalition state government released “NSW 2021” in
2011, that plan contained “32 goals and 180 targets to drive action, based
around five strategies” of:
• rebuilding the economy,
150Failure to take account of widening inequality generally causes voters to start careening from one
government to another in fairly quick succession, as recent experience in the USA proves. Rising
inequality in America resulted in the election of Republican president, Donald Trump, in 2016 but in
the mid-term elections, only two years later, with inequality still steeply on the rise, the pendulum
swung back sharply to the Democrats. The same thing happened to the Obama government. Rising
inequality leads to government instability.
137
• returning quality services,
• renovating infrastructure,
• strengthening our local environment and communities, and
• restoring accountability to government.151
A sizeable proportion – about 45% – of the 180 targets of “NSW 2021” were
aimed at achieving improved social outcomes. At this point the government’s
intentions seemed fairly decent and “NSW 2021” looked like something that
could be integrated with community strategic plans in local government
areas, consistent with the unanimous intention of the state’s parliament in
2009 when it introduced IP&R.
However, these days, reporting on “NSW 2021” is no longer being
conducted. The last (only) available report on progress of “NSW 2021” is from
2014. This is available on the NSW Parliament’s website within a document
called “NSW 2021 Performance Report 2014-15”.152 As such, it is impossible
to see what progress may have been made after 2014 towards the 32 goals of
“NSW 2021” and whether any of the 180 targets were ever reached.
In 2014, barely three years into the life of “NSW 2021”, the state
government under a new Premier, Mike Baird, replaced it with a much
reduced new plan headlined as the “Premier’s Priorities”153. This new plan (I
use the term “plan” advisedly here) contained:
• 12 “Premier’s Priorities”, and
• 18 “State Priorities”.
The “Premier’s Priorities” and the “State Priorities” taken together replaced:
• the 32 goals of “NSW 2021” with 30 priorities (12 for the Premier and
18 for the state), and
151 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, page 5, Op
Cit.
152 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 Performance Report 2014-15” is accessible at
https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/tp/files/20373/2014-15_Performance_Report_-_2021.pdf
153 NSW Government, “Premier’s Priorities” and “State Priorities” have been accessible at
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities/ but have been amended or removed
from time to time by the state government. PDF versions as they have changed through time are not
always readily available. The latest PDF version still available in June 2019 may be found at
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf but
this contains no reporting on achievement of targets since 2014.
138
• the 180 targets of “NSW 2021” with 30 targets.
Until mid 2019, these new “priorities” of the NSW Premier remained in place
with some minor wording changes. After mid 2019 they were updated by the
Berejiklian government and reduced to a total of 14 “Premier’s Priorities” with
the “state priorities” somehow dropping off the radar, being expunged from
the webpage for the NSW government. At the time of writing it is unknown
whether the “state priorities” will be revised and/or reinstated.154 Be that as
it may, for purposes of this discussion we can assume that while public
reporting on the full 30 priorities of the Premier and the state set up in 2014
may have been substantially narrowed (temporarily or permanently), there
has nevertheless been no fundamental change to the preferred approach of
running the state by a tactic of autocratic “prioritisation” of a few selected
items, and no change to the narrowing of the strategic focus of planning in
NSW that was more evident in “NSW 2021”. Reduction of the 30 priorities of
2014 to 14 priorities in 2019 is simply a manifestation of the continuing
descent into the problem that I am suggesting needs to be reversed.
On the good side of the descent (if it has a good side), it can be observed
that the 30 new priorities set up in 2014 were not too widely divergent from
the original “goals” of “NSW 2021” and they fell roughly within the same
strategy areas identified in “NSW 2021”, with one notable exception, that
being that “accountability of government” is no longer to be found as a
strategic priority. In the new priorities the original strategies of “NSW 2021”
were re-designated as follows:
Strategies of “NSW “Premier’s Priorities” &
2021” “State Priorities”
Strong budget and economy – 7
Rebuilding the economy … became …
targets
Returning quality services … became … Better services – 12 targets
Renovating infrastructure … became … Building infrastructure – 3 targets
Strengthening our local Protecting the vulnerable – 3 targets &
environment and … became … Safer communities – 4 targets &
communities Clean environment – 1 target
Restoring accountability to This strategy is nowhere to be found in
… was deleted.
government the new priorities.
154As at February 2020, the NSW “state priorities” had still not been reinstated by the Berejiklian
government.
139
Looking at the downside of the change, we can start by observing that
the word “strategy” does not appear in the “Premier’s Priorities” or the “State
Priorities”. There is little left in the new top driven selection of “priorities”
deserving of the name “strategic”. And when the term “outcomes” is used, it
tends more to be used to describe activities of government (i.e., inputs),
rather than outcomes for the community. This is a basic mistake that no
experienced community strategic planner would make but that politicians
frequently do.
Of course, it should not be surprising that when politics takes over,
consideration of longer term strategy falls by the wayside. ‘Twas ever thus.
But this short-sightedness of politicians needs to change if we are to deal with
issues of the magnitude of, say, climate change, or closing the gap for
indigenous peoples, or addressing inequality state-wide. Prioritising
something like litter reduction while ignoring climate change is a folly of short-
sightedness unbecoming of any decent decision maker. And writing the word
“environment” out of the priorities (and regional development plans such as
the “20-Year Economic Vision for Regional NSW”) also suggests an antipathy
to matters “green” bordering on the myopic (or the stupid). But the deeper
problem in the battle to reverse or even just reduce short-sightedness in
politics is the evisceration of systems of accountability and transparency,
particularly accountability for widening inequality.
It is no accident that alongside expunging the word and activity of
“strategy” from state planning, the NSW government also deleted all mention
of “accountability” when it replaced “NSW 2021” with the “Premier’s
Priorities” and “State Priorities”. As stated above, the NSW government has
displayed a deep reluctance to be held to account for anything more than the
bare minimum of what it is prepared to deliver and what it is prepared to
deliver is getting smaller by the year. In fact, the process of strategic planning
at the state level has shifted so far away from being strategic, holistic and
integrated, that “delivery” (particularly of infrastructure) has risen up to
become an end in itself, supplanting any possible focus on the longer term
social outcomes and removing (or covering up) any sense of accountability for
failure to achieve social outcomes.
At the state government level, indeed at any level of government, long
term strategic direction should be established by openly consulting on desired
140
outcomes for society and the environment and this in turn should dictate the
selection of policies, spending priorities and approaches to contract
management. This is basic stuff in a modern, open democracy. But in NSW,
long term strategic direction has disappeared and has been replaced by
paternalistically selected priorities and a culture celebrating something which,
however much the state’s Treasurer Perrottet might object, is not about
educational, health, or environmental “outcomes”. It is about maximising the
political credit while being accountable for delivery of as little as possible. A
“delivery” is not an “outcome”. And when it is represented as such it is
nothing more than an accounting trick.
Strategic direction setting for a better society, environment, economy
and healthy governance system has been replaced in NSW by something
invented and marketed by consultants under the embarrassingly ungainly title
of “deliverology”. Now there is a piece of awkward public sector jargon if
there ever was one, and I regret to report that the reality of deliverology is as
embarrassing as the term itself. This is a public sector performance
enhancement approach piloted by the Blair government in the United
Kingdom and adopted uncritically by the Baird government in 2014. Put
simply deliverology sets aside the more complex activity of strategic planning
and integration of plans in favour of a slimmed down “prioritisation”
approach. The theory is that this enhances a government’s ability “to find
ways to define and execute their highest-priority objectives so that they have
the greatest possible impact”. According to consultants McKinsey &
Company, there are three critical components to the deliverology approach:
“the formation of a delivery unit, data collection for setting targets and
trajectories, and the establishment of routines [to review progress,
performance and decisions]”155.
The NSW government has taken to deliverology with zeal. The “Premier’s
Priorities” webpage, which is the peak site hosting the overarching plan (if
“plan” it can be called) for the state of NSW, actually sported a video in 2018
and 2019 of senior public servants from the “Premier’s Implementation Unit”
spruiking deliverology as a “disciplined approach to delivery like [we’ve] never
155McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-
insights/deliverology-from-idea-to-implementation
141
seen before”156. That it may be, but in the absence of a state strategic plan it
is difficult if not impossible to figure out whether what is being “delivered” is
more worthwhile than something else that we might have decided to
prioritise if we had the chance to participate in more strategic, truly
outcomes-driven, integrated planning.
Deliverology is the apogee of the top down approach to government.
Does it work? Well, not if experience in NSW is anything to go by.
The delusions of deliverology and prioritisation
Elected members of the state government of 2019 would be likely to argue
that in switching from the more strategic focus of “NSW 2021” to the
paternalistically selected “prioritisation” approach, they were attempting to
maximise the possibility of achieving more in terms of the things that are most
important to the people of NSW. And indeed it might seem sensible to
characterise the more strategic approach taken in “NSW 2021” as a mere
“scattergun” approach where the probability of hitting widely dispersed
targets is more random than planned, and therefore lower (especially if the
guns aren’t loaded with enough bullets because of resource cutbacks). By the
same token it would seem sensible to argue that the probability of hitting
those targets that are most important (at least notionally) will be higher if the
government focuses its limited resources on a smaller number of selected
priorities and single targets that will ostensibly benefit everyone more (at
least in the government’s view). And indeed, this is what is espoused by the
consultants who peddle deliverology. But in practice the consultants’ logic
hasn’t held up in NSW.
While the government has been busy narrowing its focus onto ever
smaller numbers of targets, a la deliverology, and has simultaneously reduced
the number and/or capacity of limited public sector resources charged with
hitting those targets, the number of NSW residents living on the margins of
society has grown – a lot. And it has grown in precisely in those areas the state
had “prioritised” as being among the most important things it wanted to
156This video was last available for viewing on 23 June 2019. It was removed by the state government
on or around this date.
142
achieve. It has probably grown in some non-priority areas as well, but we can
hardly know because reporting has ceased.
“Prioritisation” and deliverology might work, for some people, some of
the time, in those places where a government focusses more resources on
fewer targets. But it is bound to fail for others, more of the time, when a
government focuses fewer resources on fewer targets. It is especially bound
to fail where contracting out begins to dominate the delivery of those
particular services that do not respond well to profit driven frameworks, such
as homelessness and domestic violence support services.
In reality, government for all – decent, economically fair government – is
so much harder than the deliverology consultants would have politicians
believe. To the extent that it requires a focus on a premier’s personal set of
priorities that are selected without community consultation, deliverology is
just an up-front admission of defeat in the face of the really hard things we
elect governments to do. It really only works for the relatively easy stuff, like
infrastructure programs, and even then, not all the time. Witness the disaster
of the CBD to South East Sydney Light Rail, a project which ended up years
overdue and massively overbudget, despite the ostensible focus of
deliverology. Projects like these are proof that one of the basic premises of
deliverology – i,e., “what gets measured gets done” – is an illusion. Quite a lot
of governments have paid quite a few consultants quite a lot of money over
the last two decades to feed them this specious simplification of the job of
government. And consultants have been successful in the sales pitches
because deliverology can indeed help to get a government re-elected – at
least once – if economic headwinds are favourable. But deliverology often
verges towards failure particularly in the most difficult challenges for
government, namely in achieving sustainable, improved social outcomes. This
failure occurs because ultimately the practice of deliverology always ends up
being more about getting re-elected than it is about genuine “outcomes” of
social progress and equality. It fails because it discards the value of integration
of planning and reporting and thereby cuts off the creative input that comes
from the people suffering those social problems. I’ll explain how this happens.
Under deliverology, governments very quickly succumb to its implicit
encouragement to promise less so that, come election time, it looks like they
have achieved more. Of course, they have to be careful how they do it. To use
deliverology to its best advantage as a re-election tactic, you need to master
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the art of promising less while looking like you are promising more. To lay
claim to the title of being better at government than the opposition, a
government needs to lay claim to having “deliberately set ambitious targets”,
to quote Premier Berejiklian, while artfully concealing where it has been
easing the targets. The sleight of hand I spoke of above, when I outlined how
domestic violence targets were made less ambitious (even as they were being
made to look more ambitious), was not an isolated incident of target fiddling
by the NSW government, purely for purposes of re-election. Indeed, in the
area of creating jobs, the highest priority of all for both Premiers Baird and
Berejiklian between 2014 and 2019, the premiers deftly fiddled the target for
creating jobs, making it significantly less ambitious than the target set by
Premier O’Farrell in 2011 in “NSW 2021”.
Under “NSW 2021” the target for creation of jobs was to “grow
employment by an average of 1.25% per year to 2020”157. This was probably
not a very ambitious target anyway but it was a reasonable expectation and
would have equated to something in the order of an average of 100,000 new
jobs in NSW per annum between 2011 and 2020. In a state as populous as
NSW (and in a country with a strong growing economy nationally) this should
have been an achievable expectation. However, under the “Premier’s
Priorities”, this target was reset by Premier Baird in 2014 to express it as a flat
number over four years rather than a per annum percentage increase. The
target thereby was converted to a mere 150,000 extra jobs in total over the
four years between 2015 and 2019158. In other words, the target dropped
from around 100,000 to 50,000 extra jobs per year. The government would
have reasoned that it could hardly fail on this much lower target and indeed
it did not. Instead, it exceeded the target set by Premier O’Farrell, achieving
an average of about 117,000 new jobs per annum. This enabled Premier
Berejiklian, come election time, to claim that “We’ve more than doubled our
target for creating new jobs.”159 She meant they had achieved more than
157 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, page 7,
available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
158 NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf
159 Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian, “Premier’s Priorities – Progress on delivering for citizens 2018”,
Video viewed on 23 June 2019 available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C3Bv4BCXZo&t=25s
144
double the target, but they did that simply by halving the target, not by being
brilliant economic managers.
So deliverology isn’t this thing that makes politicians set ambitious
targets for a smaller number of priorities for purposes of increasing their
chances of achieving targets. In the hands of politicians, it has the opposite
effect, reducing both the number and the ambition of their targets and
making them focus only on achieving less, not more. Ostensibly in
deliverology, all the metrics and performance reviews are supposed to be set
up to hit more ambitious targets, albeit fewer of them. But the NSW
government has figured out that the smarter thing politically is to do the
opposite and set the metrics to achieve less, annulling all the extra value that
might have been expected if deliverology had been utilised with genuinely
ambitious targets or a greater number of targets. In the theory of deliverology
and in all practical reality this political reductionism can only gear a
government to achieve less. In that light, we have to conclude that an extra
117,000 jobs in NSW a year did not arise from anything the government
deliberately did in its prioritisation or in delivery. It was a fluke achieved
despite the government’s tactic of aiming for only 50,000 new jobs.
An added beauty of this tactic within the deliverology ethos of deleting
targets and then fiddling with the rest, is that it allowed the government to
ignore the need to report any potentially poor performance on other targets
for the economy that had been set by Premier O’Farrell in “NSW 2021”. One
of Premier O’Farrell’s targets, deleted in the “Premier’s Priorities” was to
“grow Gross State Product (GSP) per capita by an average 1.5% per year to
2020”.160 As it turned out this target was not achieved between 2011 and
2014 when the GSP per capita grew by an average of only 0.8% per annum.
When Mr Baird took over as premier in 2014, he seems to have taken fright
and deleted this target entirely when framing his “Premier’s Priorities”.
Thereafter, per capita GSP exceeded the old 1.5% target only once, in
2015/16. Consistent with the theory of deliverology we would have to
conclude that the single year in which the target was exceeded (2015/16) was
also a fluke because the government wasn’t doing anything deliberate to
achieve it. The average annual growth in per capita GSP in NSW between 2011
160NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, page 6,
available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
145
and 2018 was 1.2%, basically the same as the average for Australia in that
period161. There is no saying whether that growth would have been higher if
the government had kept the 1.5% per annum target and the strategies
Premier O’Farrell had developed to achieve it. All that can be said is that if the
higher target had been achieved it wouldn’t have been because of any
deliberate strategy by Premiers Baird or Berejiklian. They simply didn’t lay
down a strategy.
This is not to downplay the achievements of the state of NSW in growth
of the economy. NSW is still, alongside Victoria, the leading economy in
Australia.162 But this is not because “what gets measured gets done”. And it’s
not because of deliverology. The NSW economy simply grew in nearly direct
relationship to its population growth, and per capita GSP grew due to the hard
work of that population. The economic stimulus provided by the
government’s mega building program certainly played a role in growth of GSP
and credit should be given to the government for this. But beyond that,
growth in Gross State Product was not the result of a broad-based deliberate
economic strategy by the Coalition government.
In a growing economy, it is possible to derive some passing wry
amusement from the shenanigans of politicians’ warping the better precepts
of deliverology (eg., setting ambitious targets) to meet their more pressing
need to keep their jobs for long enough to get a better parliamentary pension.
But amusement wanes when we look at the impact of the zeal for deliverology
on the government’s ability to achieve its own desired social outcomes. Under
the deliverology illusion governments will instinctively and immediately resort
to creating a list of priorities dominated by small targets for things they
perceive will get them re-elected, rather than the priorities with ambitious
targets that will make a real difference to the growing number of people on
the margins of society or will help non-voting entities like the environment.
Consequently, they lose the plot on the things that they themselves profess
to be vitally important. This applies no matter how well intentioned they
might be. And this is what happened in NSW between 2011 and 2019.
161 NSW GSP per capita figures are sourced from ABS 5220.0, Table 1, Column AC.
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5220.02017-18?OpenDocument
162 See CommSec, “State of the States: January 2019 State & territory economic performance report”,
Executive Summary, accessible at
https://www.commsec.com.au/content/dam/EN/Campaigns_Native/stateofstates/april2019/CommS
ec_State_of_the_States_April2019.pdf
146
The Coalition government was re-elected in 2019 despite some fairly
drastic failures in social and environmental issues. But there is a real question
as to how long its tactics can be effective for re-election purposes, especially
if more people are getting poorer. Sooner or later these people are bound to
notice that life is just getting worse for even more of them. Once a
government starts to shy away from the complexities of delivery and focuses
only on politically selected priorities and disingenuous, unambitious targets,
what really happens is that gaps in the social safety net simply get wider and
more people, not less, fall through. The gaps widen even further when
performance measures are selected which merely measure whether inputs
have been delivered, rather than whether outcomes are being achieved. This
happens in these narrowed down prioritisation approaches because they are
not actually a plan at all. They are just a marketing tool for creating an illusion
of progress and distracting from failures.
*****
“NSW 2021” had its faults as a plan. But when the NSW state government
gutted it to produce the “Premier’s Priorities” and the “State Priorities”, they
left the state without a strong strategy to achieve the goals they actually had
carried over from “NSW 2021” to the new “Priorities”. Any decency exhibited
in “NSW 2021” was doomed from this point onwards.
It is a mistake to view big plans like “NSW 2021” as scatterguns likely to
miss distant or seemingly dispersed targets. Their complexity and
thoughtfulness in making connections between activities and goals actually
increases the chances of hitting some of the desired goals, although it is not
easy to market politically. A tightly knit web of different activities honed in on
a particular goal increases the chances of success. And because many goals
are related and inter-dependent, a tightly knit web of activities in relation to
one goal also increases the chance of achieving more of other goals. To extend
the metaphor: in any strategy, the more detailed and multi-faceted the
activities, and the tighter the connections between them, the less chance
there is of people falling through the net, and the more chance a state has of
unleashing the otherwise untapped capacity of those on the margins to
contribute to economic growth for all.
147
If a government wants to deliver improved social outcomes and thereby
a stronger economy fully utilising the potential of the population, the last
thing they should be advised to do is to delete activities aimed at realising
those desired social outcomes from a well-considered strategic plan. But this
is what the NSW state government did in 2014. And they did this despite the
fact that in forming the new “State Priorities” the Premier himself, Mike Baird,
chose to elevate eight of the social goals of “NSW 2021” into his top twelve
“Premier’s Priorities”. He chose to nominate the following twelve priorities as
his personal priorities:
1. Creating jobs
2. Building infrastructure
3. Reducing domestic violence
4. Improving service levels in hospitals
5. Tackling childhood obesity
6. Improving education results
7. Protecting our kids
8. Reducing youth homelessness
9. Driving Public Sector diversity
10. Keeping our environment clean
11. Faster housing approvals
12. Improving Government services
At least eight of these are about improving social outcomes, so clearly Mr
Baird favoured an agenda of social inclusion, but unfortunately he decided to
delete all further mention of several of the activities originally included in
“NSW 2021” that would have helped him reach the targets for his own new
personal priorities. To assess the impact of this – which I may as well say in
advance is not at all good – we can revert to our three examples of education,
health and domestic violence.
Example No. 1 – In education: In choosing the priority of “improving
educational results”, the Premier chose to aim solely for a target of
“increasing the proportion of NSW students in the top two NAPLAN
bands by eight per cent by 2019”. But he discarded five activities and
aims from “NSW 2021” that would have helped support achievement of
that priority of improving educational results including:
148
• Under “Goal 15 – Improve education and learning outcomes for
all students”, the Premier discarded activities and aims such as:
o All children have access to quality early childhood education
o More students finish high school or equivalent
o Schools have high expectations for all their students
o Improve the quality of all teaching
o Public schools have more options for local decision making163
Each of these activities had a rationale and when taken together they
could have added up to quite an impressive improvement in educational
standards in NSW from pre-school right through to tertiary level
graduation. Their presence in the top level state plan would also have
assisted the public servants involved in those activities to appreciate the
value of their own small contributions and inspire them to use their
expertise to best advantage. Their removal would have dispirited them
and undoubtedly diminished their contributions.
It might be argued that these activities were absorbed into lower
level plans within the education sector but the fact is that if they
survived at all (and it is not apparent that they did) they lost priority and
some were even reversed164. The efforts of educators shifted strongly
towards meeting the much narrower target for improved NAPLAN
results for a minority of students – which, as we now know, wasn’t met.
At least something might have been achieved if the broader base of
activities thought appropriate in “NSW 2021” had been given time to
work. Eight years after being elected, the government of NSW had not
delivered better results in education. All it had done was remove the
possibility of its having to account for any potential failure in early
childhood education, HSC attainment, and expertise in teaching.
163 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, pages 31-33,
available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
164 For example, the Berejiklian government’s February 2020 announcement of an intention to impose
particular teaching methods on teachers, rather than rely on the judgement and experience of
teachers in each school, indicates a full reversal of the “NSW 2021” goal that “Public schools have
more options for local decision making”. See Jordan Baker, “Premier says status quo 'no longer
tenable' in schools, flags reforms”, Op. Cit.
149
Example No. 2 – In health: In choosing the priority of “improving
service levels in hospitals”, the Premier chose in 2014 to aim solely for
a target of “81 per cent of patients through emergency departments
within four hours by 2019”. But in this case, he discarded ten activities
and aims from “NSW 2021” that would have helped support the priority
of improving service levels in hospitals including:
• Under “Goal 11 – Keep people healthy and out of hospital”, he
discarded:
o Reduce smoking rates
o Reduce overweight and obesity rates (although this was
retained for schoolchildren)
o Reduce risk drinking
o Close the gap in aboriginal infant mortality
o Improve outcomes in mental health
o Reduce potentially preventable hospitalisations
• Under “Goal 12 – Provide effective world class clinical services
with timely access and effective infrastructure”, he discarded:
o Improve transfer of patients from emergency departments to
wards
o Reduce unplanned readmissions
o Decrease healthcare associated bloodstream infections165
o Ensure all publicly provided health services meet national
patient safety and quality standards166
As with education, it might be argued that these activities were
absorbed into lower level plans within the health sector, and some of
165 I should disclose a conflict of interest here. My own mother died in a major NSW hospital in 2009
from a “healthcare associated bloodstream infection” in a post-operative ward. Her death was directly
related to a failure of successive state governments to “provide effective world class clinical services
with timely access and effective infrastructure” as per goal 12 of “NSW 2021”. There were no available
MRI machines to locate her infection and the staff therefore could not pinpoint the infection for
effective treatment before it took irreversible hold. The O’Farrell government’s inclusion of the goal in
“NSW 2021” two years after her death recognised the issue of underfunding for effective
infrastructure for detection of infections in hospitals. It goes without saying that deletion of the goal in
2015 from the state’s highest level plans is more than regrettable.
166 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, pages 23 to
26, available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
150
them were. Most activities under “Goal 11 – keep people healthy and
out of hospital” found their way into the Department of Health’s
strategic plan, “NSW Health Strategic Priorities 2019-20” 167. But they
still lost priority. Nor did they feature as a nominated priority by the
Secretary of that Department. The efforts of health professionals and
administrators shifted towards meeting the much narrower target for
improved emergency waiting times – which, as we now know, wasn’t
met. The increase in productive output that could have arisen from the
relegated or excluded activities was largely lost. It certainly wasn’t
reflected in the results. Indeed, how could it be? How could a
government ever hold a reasonable expectation that reduced waiting
times in emergency units, especially in areas of growing population such
as Western Sydney, would reliably materialise while they are
simultaneously diminishing their efforts in “keeping people healthy and
out of hospital”?
The government itself, it seems, finally got smart enough to figure
this one out – at least partly – because it decided in July 2019 to put
back at least one activity into the newly revised “Premier’s Priorities”
aimed, albeit indirectly, at keeping some people healthier and therefore
out of hospital.168 This new activity aimed to “reduce potentially
preventable visits to hospital by five per cent through to 2023 for people
who can safely receive their care in the community”. No substance was
provided as to how they intended to do this and who was going to take
up the burden in “the community”, but there was at least some small
recognition of the connection between meeting the targets for treating
patient waiting times in hospitals and the need to “keep people
healthier in the long term”. Some greater credit might be given to the
Berejiklian government for this revised approach were it not for the fact
that the new activity was couched in terms that seemed, again, to
equate success with reducing visits of sick people to hospitals and
increasing the proportion of their treatment that is provided elsewhere.
167 NSW Government, “NSW Health Strategic Priorities 2019-20” available at
https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/priorities/Documents/strategic-priorities.pdf
168 See NSW Government, “Premier’s Priorities” webpage published 28 June 2019,
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities/improving-outpatient-and-community-
care/
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It was aimed more at keeping sick people out of hospitals. So instead of
being a deliberate strategy to improve programs for prevention of ill-
health, the new activity simply fell back into the old habit of attempting
to make a virtue of not providing a service at all in the government
sector, shifting the burden to “the community”.
Unfortunately, some other activities thought important in 2011
under “Goal 12 – provide effective world class clinical services with
timely access and effective infrastructure” also don’t appear to have
rated much of a mention in “NSW Health Strategic Priorities 2019-20”.
In terms of increasing protection for patients undergoing clinical
treatment in hospitals, the focus appears to have shifted partly to
preventing assaults in hospitals, which is understandable. But at the
same time it has shifted somewhat further away from controlling the
spread of infection and more towards another British invention from a
period of economic rationalisation. This is called “value based health
care”. According to the Secretary of NSW Health, this is “not about
saving money”, although she states it did have its “genesis in health
systems where cost cutting was being driven”. Instead, the Secretary
says that value based health care “is about getting the best outcomes
for the most efficient and effective price. … It’s about not doing
unnecessary procedures.”169 All well and good and no-one should argue
that efficiency and effectiveness should not be an important
consideration in health. But in the absence of reporting on whether
“outcomes” for patient safety and mortality in NSW hospitals have
improved as a result of value based health care, it is hard to tell whether
value based deletion of “unnecessary procedures” has produced a
better set of outcomes than might have come to pass if an equivalent
focus had also been maintained on identifying funding gaps for
necessary procedures, such as equipment to detect life threatening
infections in hospital patients.
Bearing in mind that reports from the Bureau of Health Information
indicated in April 2017 that a number of NSW hospitals had shown
higher than expected mortality rates from an array of causes (the
169 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=115&v=uC5hqj9C0Ys
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highest being from pneumonia after infection)170, there were no solid
grounds to assume that a value based approach would deliver better
outcomes. Better outcomes are unlikely to arise from an approach that
tells you where you might be able to remove funding rather than where
you should be increasing funding.
This is not to criticise the performance of public servants who are,
overall, delivering one of the best health services in the world. But
initiatives which are politically driven, such as efficiency programs and
“prioritisation”, should be treated with caution. Far from increasing the
focus on “outcomes”, they actually just create a hierarchy of outcomes
some of which end up being quite arbitrarily accorded more worth than
others. Worse, they take the focus off certain outcomes that should not
be ignored.
Example No. 3 – In domestic violence: When it came to reducing
domestic violence, the story was not dissimilar to the story for
education and health, although “NSW 2021” didn’t have a huge amount
to offer in the way of activities to reduce domestic violence. Even so,
they too were discarded. “NSW 2021” included initiatives to:
• Under “Goal 16 – Prevent and reduce the level of crime”
o significantly reduce domestic and sexual violence against
women and their children,
o provide long–term accommodation and support,
o expand the availability of legal advice and support,
o deliver a more coordinated police and service response, and
o ensure appropriate court support is available to victims.171
170 Bureau of Health Information, “Exploring clinical variation in mortality: Mortality following
hospitalisation, seven clinical conditions, NSW July 2012 – June 2015”, page 15, “Across seven
conditions [Acute myocardial infarction (AMI), Ischaemic stroke, Haemorrhagic stroke, Congestive
(chronic) heart failure (CHF), Pneumonia, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) & Hip
fracture surgery] in 2012–15, the number of hospitals with lower than expected mortality ranged from
none to six hospitals; and the number with higher than expected mortality ranged from one to 11
hospitals.” http://www.bhi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/356529/report-
insights_exploring-clinical-variation-in-mortality-2017.pdf
171 NSW Government, “NSW 2021 – A plan to make NSW number one, September 2011”, page 34,
available at
https://www.ipc.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/file_manager/NSW2021_WEBVERSION.pdf
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But after the prioritisation approach took over, the goal of reducing
domestic violence was cut down to a single target of reducing domestic
violence re-offending. The web of interconnected activities that might
have helped to build a more reliable social safety net for domestic
violence victims was broken. And indeed the web of strategies supplied
under Goal 16 of “NSW 2021” were not just deleted, they were
reversed. The rest is history. As we know, the target of the Premier’s
priority for domestic violence was not met. Domestic violence
increased.
Matters were also made worse for several other targets and activities
originally thought worthy of inclusion in “NSW 2021”. The following activities
were dropped entirely when the prioritisation approach took over:
“NSW 2021” Activities in “NSW 2021” deleted
Strategy area in “Premier’s Priorities” & “State Priorities” 2014-2019
In Justice Improve community confidence in the justice system
Build liveable centres
In Infrastructure
Secure potable water supplies
Grow patronage on public transport by making it a more attractive
In Transport choice
Improve customer experiences with transport services
Fostering opportunity and partnership with Aboriginal people
Enhance cultural, creative, sporting and recreational opportunities
In Environment & Make it easier for people to be involved in their communities
Communities Increase opportunities for seniors in NSW to fully participate in
community life
Ensure NSW is ready to deal with major emergencies and natural
disasters
Restore confidence and integrity in the planning system
Restore trust in state and local government as a service provider
Improve government transparency by increasing access to
In Accountability
government information
Involve the community in decision making on government policy
services and projects
It is difficult to fathom how the state government could have ever
thought this subtraction of activities might add up to a greater chance of
delivering the things it still considered to be worthwhile goals under the
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prioritisation approach. But it is unlikely that they were thinking about this at
all. What is more likely is that they were thinking about getting re-elected.
Persuaded as they were by the deliverology consultants into thinking that
they could rely on being able to report glowing outcomes on a few priorities,
it would probably not have occurred to them that the absence of a more
thoughtful approach to complex problems would be noticed by anyone. At
least it wouldn’t be noticed by the majority of voters by 2019. Clearly they
were correct in that assumption because they were re-elected. But they had
to fudge the figures and shut down the reporting quite a deal more than they
might have imagined would be necessary in 2014. In doing this the Premier
herself had to stoop to reports which were so selective in their truth telling as
to be nothing more than falsifications.
Priorities versus plans, spin versus results
The Coalition government of NSW elected in 2011 didn’t start out this way.
They started with a reasonably broad social agenda, at least for a government
on the conservative side. Somewhere along the line, however, they lost their
way. They lost it when paternalistic arrogance and top down priority setting
eclipsed strategic planning and community involvement in 2014.
By 2019 the government of NSW had settled into a habit of expressing its
preparedness to “deliver” in terms that were far more limited than they were
when it took office in 2011. Its commitment to delivery had been reduced to
mega building programs which are meant to underpin a stronger economy, as
though a strong economy is the only thing we need for survival. But based on
current trends in social decline and inequality, it would seem that no matter
how faithfully the state government sticks to delivery of its mega building
program, the worth of that program is unlikely to be manifest in improved
social outcomes. It is certainly not working so far and can only get worse if the
government continues to tout “delivery” as if it is an end in itself, rather than
as a means of achieving specific social outcomes.
We might expect that if wellbeing and social equity don’t improve in the
next decade in NSW, then the response that the state government would
prefer to be able to supply is likely to run along the lines of, “Well don’t blame
us, we did what we told you we’d do. It’s got to be the fault of some other
level of government (or the fault of the people we were trying to help).” But
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this is little more than a whole level of government opting out of its
obligations for society in the same way as it has for the environment. It is as
though an attitude of fear and rejection of any accountability at all has grown
up since the introduction of IP&R in 2009.
This is a fear of overpromising and underdelivering, a fear often exhibited
by governments since the mid 1990s. Many have now deeply internalised a
view that they must not fall into a trap of overpromising and underdelivering
lest the inevitability of disappointed expectations leads to too much electoral
backlash. But in the case of NSW, it appears that old habits of overpromising
and underdelivering have been replaced by a new set of extreme tactics of
underpromising and overdelivering – i.e., underpromising on outcomes,
particularly social outcomes, and overdelivering on inputs, particularly on
infrastructure at the expense of services (and accessibility to services) vital for
health and wellbeing. There is no doubt that much of this new infrastructure
(though not all of it) is necessary and long overdue. But as strategic planning
at the state government level has been wound back, and as integration of
community strategic planning has been abandoned in its infancy, we have
reached a situation where the balance between focussing on infrastructure
delivery and focussing on equitable access to services for community
wellbeing has tipped too far in the wrong direction, with the latter being
sacrificed to the former.
The NSW state government has fallen into a pattern of promising less and
less when it comes to community health, wellbeing and resilience, and less
and less when it comes to ensuring accessibility of services. The focus is
almost all on service quality, not on accessibility. This is not to say that a
certain type of service quality isn’t improving. It is. Anyone who has dealt with
Service NSW for something like a driver’s licence or a vehicle registration is
likely to attest that Service NSW is providing more efficient quality service
than in the past. But this is in traditional service areas for administration. The
improvement in quality is not occurring for groups that have less access to
that sort of service and entirely different needs. In short, there is an inordinate
focus on customers and not enough on community.
The state has arrived at this juncture in the main by jettisoning strategic
planning and chopping off integration between its own plans and with those
of other levels of government. The strategic plans that were announced at the
outset of the NSW Coalition government’s election to office in 2011 have all
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been progressively wound back, especially since 2014, to the point where, as
plans, they exist no more. All that’s left of the original agenda is a few
“priorities” in ad hoc areas selected autocratically by the Premier. And this is
simply not enough to effectively drive something as complex as our social
services. And yet, ironically, improved social services has been at the heart of
the Coalition government’s espoused intentions through all its terms of office.
It should be observed that although successive Coalition governments in NSW
have asserted that their main priority is the economy, none of the 14
remaining priorities of the Premier elected in 2019 are about a strong
economy, although the marketing seems to frame them, at least superficially,
in that context. In the main they are social, with a couple of late inclusions for
the environment (a million urban trees and open space – nothing about
climate or investment in large scale energy generation with renewables). This
is still a socially inclusive agenda, at least on the face of it. But the problem is
that it is not an effective one.
With the exception of a new priority for reducing suicide, the social items
in the new priorities are all carry-overs of previous priorities that have not
been met in education, health, domestic violence, homelessness, re-
offending and recidivism, and child protection. In posting her 14 new priorities
after the 2019 election, the Premier stated:
These priorities represent our commitment to making a significant
difference to enhance the quality of life of the people of NSW. They aim
to tackle many of the issues that have been put in the too hard basket
for too long. Each priority has an ambitious target. They have been set
with the purpose of delivering on my government’s key policy priorities
being:
o a strong economy
o highest quality education
o well connected communities with quality local environments
o putting customers at the centre of everything we do
o breaking the cycle of disadvantage172
This is all very nice but it is not very practical. Nor is it honest. The remaining
14 priorities do not have ambitious targets. Nor do they “tackle things that
172NSW Government, Premier’s Priorities webpage posted, undated,
https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-nsw/premiers-priorities/ Last viewed 14 July 2019.
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have been left in the too hard basket for too long”. They haven’t been left in
a too hard basket because they’ve been on the agenda as “priorities” for all
three Coalition premiers since 2011. They’ve just been poorly managed
because of poor planning. Premier Berejiklian has no greater chance of
“tackling” these priorities than she had before the election simply because
she will go about it in the same old way of deliverology, which hasn’t worked.
Now she stands to repeat the mistakes of her first term as premier by
assuming if she cuts her focus down even further she will achieve more.
By way of example, in relation to education, Premier Berejiklian adopted
a new target for NAPLAN results in June 2019 in which she excluded private
school students from future reporting on performance against NAPLAN
targets and confined the focus to public school students. It seems this came
about because the final NAPLAN results for 2018 were analysed and it
emerged that public schoolchildren scored poorly in 2018 compared to
private schoolchildren. Hence the Premier set a new target to “increase the
proportion of public school students in the top two NAPLAN bands (or
equivalent) for literacy and numeracy by 15 per cent by 2023.”173 A baseline
of 31.6% of public school students in the top two NAPLAN bands was selected
based on what apparently was actually achieved by public school students in
2018 in reading and numeracy NAPLAN assessments – an achievement
considerably lower than the 34.4% that was reported as a preliminary result
for all students in the pre-election period of late 2018. Presumably the
Premier concluded it was smarter to keep the truth from everyone before the
election and then bury it in the detail after the election. Nevertheless, we can
observe that from the new lower baseline of 31.6%, the target of achieving a
15% improvement by 2023 is a somewhat more ambitious target than the
2015 target to “increase the proportion of [all] NSW students in the top two
NAPLAN bands by eight per cent by 2019”. So at least the government appears
to have chosen to hone in on where it was failing. But it is still an unambitious
target overall. It is a predictable response by a government that still can’t see
that it might be necessary to focus government resources on children in the
bottom bands instead of those in the top who are more likely to be able to
climb the ladder with less assistance. It is as though the government would
173
NSW Government, Premier’s Priorities webpage, https://www.nsw.gov.au/improving-
nsw/premiers-priorities/bumping-up-education-results-for-children/
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prefer to write the students at the bottom out of any potential participation
in a growing economy and a better Australia. It is an erasure.
Moreover, achievement of this relatively feeble new target concentrating
on the top public school students seems to rely still on a program (the “Bump
It Up” program) that was in place before 2019 and which hasn’t yet led to
improvement in NAPLAN results. Additionally, the Premier is still operating
under the assumption that measuring it will get it done. Unfortunately,
measurement isn’t what gets something done, especially if it involves
measuring a path to a belittled target. To get something done we need a well
thought out integrated plan, not targets-sans-strategies. (And we don’t need
a premier or treasurer telling experienced teachers how to teach. Truth be
known, we simply need them to provide enough money to the disadvantaged
schools and let the teachers get on with it.)
We also need to recognise that well thought out plans don’t emerge from
a culture where monitoring and reporting are cheated on, narrowed, falsified,
misused, not published, not read at all or simply not done. They don’t emerge
from cultures where accountability is suppressed, where terms like
“outcomes” are (mis)used for political purposes, or where indicators,
measures and targets are poorly selected and then trashed when they
become inconvenient in their truth telling. If we are to move our society,
environment and economy forward from where it is now then we need a well
integrated set of plans and these have to be based on the full truth about the
size of the challenge and the failures of past strategies. That truth can only
come from comprehensive, honest monitoring and reporting. Until we turn
the failures of reporting around in Australia and re-gear reporting to serve
strong strategic planning it is a dead certainty that any successes in social,
environmental and economic progress will be flukes – and therefore fewer in
number than we would care for.
This sort of approach to planning – top down prioritisation with a cynical
application of deliverology – is just too disingenuous ever to succeed. And it
is a matter of public record that it doesn’t. When governments aim for less,
they are simply reducing their professed priorities to little more than window
dressing. The priorities and the targets function merely as a marketing tool for
re-election. They cannot be effective as plans because they are not genuine
plans at all. This should affect the credibility of the government and its
motives, but some governments don’t particularly care about that. The NSW
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government from 2015 onward is a good example of one that has been quite
insincere in its professed “commitment to making a significant difference to
enhance the quality of life of the people of NSW”. The truth is that the Baird
and Berejiklian governments chose to rely on the tactics of deliverology, with
its reductionist approach to prioritisation and target setting, even though they
would have been fully aware that deliverology had in fact failed in the UK to
achieve any of the really decent outcomes intended by the Blair government.
Deliverology had already been discounted as an effective management tool
by 2010 when details emerged about how politicians and public servants had
both figured out how to game the system in order to make it look like they
were reaching the targets. Some of these games resulted in deaths.174
Nevertheless, deliverology was adopted by the NSW government, knowing
full well that it doesn’t work, except as an aid to re-election. In such cases, the
dishonesty of deliverology doubles the insult to voters. It doesn’t get voters
where they want to go and the real agenda is almost always very different to
the one being touted. It is an agenda to ignore the need to distribute benefits
to those most in need and instead to pre-distribute those benefits to the
already privileged, all the while looking as if it is a socially inclusive agenda.
The failure of planning – nation-wide
I started this chapter by suggesting that planning at the state government
level in NSW had failed for reasons of attitude and ideology within the
government. I have discussed the problems of attitude in depth and will
discuss the problems of ideology in Chapter 7. But both these problems need
to be addressed before we can recover from the damage they are doing.
Planning at the state level in NSW is leading us to a deterioration in our quality
of life and the environment. Ultimately this will culminate in a weaker
economy.
There is no evidence that decent leadership and socio-economic
improvement can emerge from any of the direction setting processes in place
174For a professional assessment of the actual results of three years of deliverology in the UK, see
videos by British occupational psychologist, John Seddon in 2010 on “Why deliverology made things
worse in the UK”, accessible on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9TH5ktKFE&t=16s
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sIFvpRilSc
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in NSW. The better society and economy we are being promised cannot
emerge from:
• top down prioritisation and exclusion of community involvement in
priority setting,
• narrowed social and environmental accounting and reduced or
dishonest reporting,
• shirking or abnegation of accountability,
• elimination of strategy,
• exclusion of environmental and social considerations in planning,
• deliverology, including politically driven meagre target setting, or
• disintegration of planning.
I have used NSW as a case study because in so many ways it epitomises how
not to plan and it shows how much we are losing by such poor planning and
custodianship. As time passes, more people are losing their prospects, their
livelihoods and in some cases their lives. And we are losing our ecological
diversity through devastatingly bad natural resource management. In a
wealthy country this simply needn’t happen. If aspects of NSW’s top down
disintegrated approach to planning are replicated across other states – and to
varying extents they are – then Australia as a whole is being set up for a more
uncertain future with greater inequality and slower economic growth than
would otherwise be attainable under a more inclusive bottom up planning
system.
To date it would appear that, mercifully, no state other than NSW has
taken up full-blown deliverology, although some approach prioritisation in the
same way as NSW and simply refrain from calling it deliverology. The standard
of practice of strategic planning varies across state governments in Australia
but generally it is weak across the board. Queensland is the only state with a
strategic plan to achieve a long term vision defined though consultation with
its community – “The Queensland Plan: Queenslanders’ 30 Year Vision”175,
which dates from 2014. Targets in this plan lack deadlines and although there
has been annual reporting on progress in the plan, it has only taken the form
of listing the government’s activities. Like NSW, the Queensland government
175Queensland Government, “The Queensland Plan: Queenslanders’ 30 Year Vision”, 2014, accessible
at https://www.queenslandplan.qld.gov.au/assets/images/qld-plan.pdf
161
has developed its own “Priorities”176 but these make no reference to “The
Queensland Plan”, possibly because it was an initiative of a previous Liberal
National Party government and a Labor government may prefer not to be too
supportive of it. Annual reports on “The Queensland Plan” are delivered by
the Labor government but they include nothing about whether, for all the
state government’s expenditures and activities, life in Queensland actually
moved closer to or further away from the goals of “The Queensland Plan”. As
far as the Queensland government’s “Priorities” go, it is as if “The Queensland
Plan” does not exist. Indeed, the Queensland state “Priorities” look
remarkably similar to the NSW Premier’s Priorities. They are the sort of thing
that any government can come up with when wanting to be accountable for
as little as possible and when focussing on getting elected in the short term
rather than on making a real difference in the things Australians have said
they really want in the longer term. Additionally, the Queensland
government’s attitude to “The Queensland Plan” is more about top down
impositions than bottom up influence. For instance, the Premier of
Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk, stated in her government’s 2018 review
of “The Queensland Plan” that:
The Plan should inform local government corporate plans. The Plan
should guide the development of the strategic direction for local
governments and the performance indicators used for measuring
progress towards achieving their vision for the future. In reviewing the
Plan, the Queensland Government is interested to learn how local
governments have incorporated the goals and progress measures of the
Plan in their own corporate plans.177
This is a top down arrangement rather than a bottom up view of the world. In
that regard, Queensland is repeating the mistakes of NSW in paternalism. In
implementing “The Queensland Plan”, it is apparent that the state
government has little if any intention of putting more power into the hands
of Queenslanders or of being driven by their longer term outlook.
Nevertheless, compared to other states “The Queensland Plan” has some of
176 See Queensland Government, “Our Future State: Advancing Queensland’s Priorities”, April 2018,
accessible at https://www.ourfuture.qld.gov.au/assets/custom/docs/gov-objectives.pdf?c
177 Queensland Government, “The Queensland Plan Queenslanders’ 30-year vision: Review”, October
2018, page 8, accessible at https://www.queenslandplan.qld.gov.au/assets/images/qld-plan-
review.pdf
162
the makings of a more decent framework for planning and its targets are
aimed towards the expressed goals of the community (although curiously
tourism hardly rates a mention as a mainstay of the Queensland economy).
Aside from Queensland, most other states are simply confining their
planning to traditional spatial planning for land and urban development and
are otherwise flying blind (or close to it) about what their populations really
want in their future wellbeing, quality of life and their environment. In these
cases, “planning” is simply what is done at state budget time and is the
product of decisions by treasuries and mandarins about what can be achieved
(or, more accurately, de-funded) before the next election. In other words, it
is not planning; it is just unaccountable rule from the top, for the short term,
with no obligation to report on either progress or failure. It is certainly not a
system in which the real “outcomes” of these arbitrary budget re-
distributions will ever be accounted for.
Over the past decade we have seen community strategic planning and
reporting stripped back at the state level, in contrast to the way in which it
has been embedded at the local government level. South Australia used to
have a state strategic plan, although community involvement in its
development was minimal. But this plan, the “SA Strategic Plan” was binned
in the change of that state’s government in 2018, although remnants of it can
still be found on the web178. The “SA Strategic Plan” seems to have been
similar to “NSW 2021”, which is no surprise since the same chief executive
officer of the Departments of Premier and Cabinet in both states produced
both plans. That CEO, Chris Eccles, has since turned up as the CEO of the
Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. In Victoria, though, he appears
to have not yet (by 2020) been permitted to develop a state plan. Instead he
has presided over the development of a guide for public sector planners about
how to develop “outcome based plans”.179 This guideline provides no
indication of any resultant plans or the location of any such plans. The
community is left to scramble around for themselves in search of these
disintegrated plans and reporting on progress is difficult if not impossible to
178 Government of South Australia, “South Australia’s Strategic Plan 2011: Summary of Targets”
accessible at http://www.barossa.org.au/assets/Uploads/Grants/Opportunities/Attachment-A-SA-
Strategic-Plan-Targets.pdf
179 Victoria State Government, “Outcomes Reform in Victoria”, accessible at
https://www.vic.gov.au/outcomes-reform-victoria
163
find. There is no centralised place where the Victorian government can be
seen to be accounting to its community about its progress in relation to the
outcomes it is apparently developing, somewhere. Western Australia and
Tasmania appear to have no state plans, although their capital cities have
good community strategic plans at the local government level.
Curiously, all this stripping back of community strategic planning at the
state level stands in contra-distinction to what the states have imposed on
local government. Local governments in Australia are controlled by state
governments. Councils have a wide array of statutory powers under various
acts of parliaments but are not a level of government in their own right under
the Constitution. In this arrangement, most of the states have compelled their
local governments either by law or policy to establish community strategic
planning frameworks of sorts, and to make a series of plans within those
frameworks for their desired social, environmental, local economic and
governance outcomes. The frameworks can include the overarching long term
community strategic plans that I have spoken of above but also delivery
programs, asset management plans, long term financial plans and workforce
plans. There are also legislated requirements to report on all those plans in
either annual reports and/or “end of term” reports. Best practice approaches
also encourage, or in some states require, councils to publish these plans
within a prominently displayed linked guide on their websites so people don’t
have to guess whether a plan might exist and shuffle around looking for it by
key words.
Obviously, in the first twenty years of this century, all state governments
and the Northern Territory thought it was good governance to impose
something of this sort of planning framework on local governments. Alas, they
did not see fit to impose these same standards on themselves. These days we
can find out something at least about whether we are moving closer to the
life we wanted at the local level, but we can’t find it at the state or national
level. We simply have to read about what’s gone wrong with our lives, day
after day in the media. We are not given a forum from which we can work out
how to fix it, let alone prevent it in future. And as parliaments are no longer
working well for this purpose that puts us in a pretty dire mess.
On top of that, disintegration of whatever plans do exist is rife. The
benefits that could be accessed from integration are simply being foregone as
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state governments have settled back into top driven governance. As UTS
pointed out in 2013:
State and local government integration poses its own set of challenges,
and the creation of local level plans offers an untapped resource to
inform state level strategic planning. To date no jurisdiction has fully
seized the opportunity to incorporate the outcomes of community level
planning into state level planning systems. Similarly community plans
developed under the various Local Government Acts are often higher in
the council planning hierarchies than the land use plans, but state
legislation generally does not recognise the precedence of these plans.
There are weak legislative links between local government and [spatial]
planning Acts. Future reforms could examine the ideal integration
arrangements between strategic, corporate and land-use planning
provisions to resolve any conflict, duplication or lack of integration. 180
Suffice to say, those suggested “future reforms” haven’t happened yet. Nor
are they expected.
The combination of the top down approach to planning at the state level
(or the lack of planning at this level) and recent changes in the federal
government’s disposition towards the disadvantaged, which I will discuss in
Chapter 7, is bound to compound the problems of poor planning for the
nation. However, the planning systems in state and local government at least
can be re-set to help us recover from the setbacks of the past decade in
inequality and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in environmental loss. This will
involve a change in the paternalistic attitudes of governments that I spoke of
at the start of the chapter and a move away from all the dishonesty currently
being exhibited in the approach to reporting at state level.
At the federal level there is a need for planning per se. The federal
government would protest that it does plan. They would hold up the federal
government budget as their plan and some might cite the “Intergenerational
Report” prepared every five years by the federal Treasury as a “plan”.
Unfortunately, this report is not produced with an eye to delivering what
180Tan, S. F. and Artist, S. 2013, Strategic Planning in Australian Local Government: A comparative
analysis of state frameworks, Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government, University of
Technology, Sydney, page 7, accessible at
https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/38559/1/ACELG_2013_Strategic-Planning-and-
Reporting%20%282%29.pdf
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Australians might actually want to secure for the next generation. Indeed the
“2015 Intergenerational Report – Australia in 2055”181, produced by the then
Treasurer Joe Hockey is designed to produce nothing like the benefits
Australia might be expecting for the future. For instance:
• Australians are very likely to be expecting that their children will be
able to afford an education in 2055. But alas, in the fine print of the
“2015 Intergenerational Report” the Treasurer made it clear that
while the Australian Government in 2015 was spending 1.7% of the
nation’s GDP on education, by 2055 its proposed spending on
education would be reduced to 1.0% of GDP182 (a 40% drop); and
• Australians are also very likely to be expecting that their children will
be able to afford health care when they are sick in 2055. But again,
in the fine print Mr Hockey made it clear that while the Australian
Government in 2015 was spending 4.2% of the nation’s GDP on
health and would expect that to rise to 5.5% in 2055, the real
expected spending level that will be a necessity by 2055 on our
health is 7.1% of GDP183.
In short, if the “2015 Intergenerational Report” is a “plan”, it is a plan to
ensure that our Gross National Product – the product we generate by our hard
work – should not fund our entirety of our expected health needs in 2055 and
it shouldn’t fund even our existing education expenses as at 2014. The wealth
we generate and the taxes we pay should apparently be devoted instead to
paying down national debt, which in our case is lower than most other
nations’ as a proportion of GDP, but which is apparently still a bad thing, even
though debt has been extremely cheap in five years to 2020. Having said that
debt is a bad thing, the Treasurer was nevertheless not shy about proclaiming
that young Australian students themselves must take on much more debt to
make up for the government’s expected reductions in allocation of our own
taxation revenues for our education. It is probable that he also preferred that
181 Australian Government, The Treasury, “2015 Intergenerational Report”
https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-03/2015_IGR.pdf
182 Ibid., pages 76 and 77. Note that, oddly enough, by 2018/19 Mr Hockey’s plan to cut education
spending as a proportion of GDP had not succeeded, inasmuch as federal spending on education that
year was 1.84% of GDP. However, this was more the result of slower growth in GDP than Mr Hockey’s
rosier expectation in 2015.
183 Ibid., page xvi.
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we should take on debt to fund our own health care in 2055, although he
appears to have retained the good sense not to mention that in 2015. The
brazenness of such callow treatment of Australians – the flat-out insult to the
trust we place in leaders – is rendered no less insulting by the fact that it is
buried deep in a report Mr Hockey might have hoped that nobody in the
general public would ever read. The short story on this is that when the
federal government plans – what Australians might want for their future
doesn’t even make it into the fine print.
I do not suggest that in the 2020s state and federal governments will
accept that there is a need for Integrated Planning & Reporting, but they
should. There is some evidence that at the federal level of government,
independent advice has been provided on the need for integrated planning
and reporting and that failure to heed this advice is costing Australia dearly.
A stark instance of this has been provided by the independent authors of the
most recent report to the Commonwealth government on the State of the
Environment in Australia. Those authors noted in 2016 that:
For some parts of the Australian environment, at least, effective policy
and management have contributed to improved outcomes for the
environment and for people. For example, early indications are that
environmental watering in the Murray-Darling Basin driven by the 2012
Murray-Darling Basin Plan, along with the effects of natural floods, have
contributed to ecological benefits for stream functioning and
biodiversity. … However, a number of key challenges to the effective
management of the Australian environment remain:
• An overarching national policy that establishes a clear vision for
the protection and sustainable management of Australia’s
environment to the year 2050 is lacking. Such a program needs to
be supported by
- specific action programs and policy to preserve and, where
necessary, restore natural capital and our unique
environments, taking into account the need to adapt to climate
change
- complementary policy and strengthened legislative
frameworks at the national, state and territory levels
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- efficient, collaborative and complementary planning and
decision-making processes across all levels of government,
with clear lines of accountability.
• Poor collaboration and coordination of policies, decisions and
management arrangements exists across sectors and between
different managers (public and private).
• Follow-through from policy to action is lacking.
• Data and long-term monitoring are inadequate.
• Resources for environmental management and restoration are
insufficient.
• The understanding of, and capacity to identify and measure,
cumulative impacts is inadequate, which reduces the potential for
coordinated approaches to their management.
Meeting these challenges requires:
• integrated policies and adaptive management actions that
address drivers of environmental change and the associated
pressures
• national leadership
• improved support for decision-making
• a more strategic focus on planning for a sustainable future
• new, reliable sources of financing.184
As such, the federal government has been advised they need IP&R. But this
advice has fallen obviously on deaf ears and four years later the results are
that the Murray-Darling basin, a system vital to the economy of four states, is
a disaster with near complete ecosystem breakdown and water supply failure
in substantial parts of the system. Unless it was their plan to kill millions of
fish and make towns run out of water, I don’t think any government in
Australia could claim that the Murray-Darling Basin plan was a success. Nor is
it going to be. Framed, as we now know it was, on historical estimates of
184Jackson WJ, Argent RM, Bax NJ, Clark GF, Coleman S, Cresswell ID, Emmerson KM, Evans K, Hibberd
MF, Johnston EL, Keywood MD, Klekociuk A, Mackay R, Metcalfe D, Murphy H, Rankin A, Smith DC &
Wienecke B (2017). “Australia state of the environment 2016: overview, independent report to the
Australian Government Minister for the Environment and Energy, Australian Government Department
of the Environment and Energy, Canberra.”, accessible at
https://soe.environment.gov.au/sites/default/files/soe2016-overview-launch-
version328feb17.pdf?v=1488792535
168
inflows rather than measured inflows under global heating185 – in other words
the plan was not built on evidence – it was doomed to failure from the start.
Effectively it shared out 25% more water than was likely to flow into the
system with climate change. Given that we are talking about the most
important agricultural and environmental asset of Australia – a singular giant
breadbasket and biosphere – what has been done to our future as a result of
the ineptitude of planning at the state and federal level should be beyond
forgiveness.
Federal and state governments both know that their failure to plan – and
their failure to stick to plans on the few occasions when they are forced to
formulate them – has been grossly irresponsible. NSW went so far as to
actively undermine regional water resource planning throughout 2019 by
effectively refusing to comply with its commitments under the Murray-Darling
Basin Plan for the supply of water resource management plans by mid 2019.
Its recalcitrance resulted in early 2020 in a threat from the federal Minister
for Water Resources, David Littleproud, that funding would be withheld from
NSW for desperately needed water resource management projects and that
the federal government would begin the process of taking “control of river
management planning parts of the Murray-Darling basin”186. But such
assertiveness by the federal Minister should not fill Australians with
confidence. The federal government has behaved no better than the NSW
government, particularly in relation to management of irrigators licences,
having presided over water “buy-backs” from irrigators which provide the
irrigators with significant boosts to their income in exchange for very little if
185 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit., Loc 130: “Average
temperatures across Australia so far this century are over a degree higher than in the first half of the
twentieth century. We have reliable records of inflows into the Murray since 1892. After taking out
the Snowy and inter-valley transfers, and the highly variable (currently absent) flows from the Darling,
the average inflow in the past seven years has been a quarter below the first century of observation.
The controversial Murray–Darling Basin Plan does not take into account declining inflows as a result of
climate change. It is unsettling now to read a CSIRO panel’s description from 2011 of how the original
Basin Plan dealt with climate change: MDBA [Murray–Darling Basin Authority] has modelled the likely
impacts of climate change to 2030 on water availability and this modelling is robust. MDBA has not
used this information in the determination of SDLs [sustainable diversion limits] for the proposed
Basin Plan but rather has determined SDLs using only the historical climate and inflow sequences. The
panel understands that this reflects a policy decision by MDBA.”
186 See Kylar Loussikian, “Federal takeover looms as NSW fails to complete river plans”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 26 January 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/federal-
takeover-looms-as-nsw-fails-to-complete-river-plans-20200126-p53ut6.html
169
any water being returned to the river for environmental flows.187 Neither the
state nor the federal government can claim ethical credentials in
management of the vital and scarce resource of the biggest inland river
system on the earth’s driest continent.
The challenges listed above by the authors of the 2016 State of the
Environment Report read like an indictment of all that is wrong with our
planning and the standard of care taken by Australia’s governments to secure
our future. None of their advice has been taken, especially in terms of the
need for visionary long term planning, integration of plans, collaboration, and
honest reporting. If we want to achieve results from any planning that our
governments undertake, we could insist that the above advice is taken
seriously. But it is likely that this too would fall on deaf ears. Governments in
the Australia of 2020, except at the local level, are not geared to listening.
Their focus is entirely on the next election, not on our future. Australians have
an opportunity to reverse this, as I will discuss in Chapter 9 onwards.
As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, we will also have to deal with
the problems arising in Australian policy settings from our current fixation
with neoliberalism and our current attitudes to taxation. Unless neoliberal
ideological blinkers can be overcome and new attitudes to taxation can be
instilled into our social orientations, no amount of planning will change the
trajectories we are currently on in relation to rising inequality, environmental
and climate disaster and eroded democracy.
The possibility of achieving a change in attitudes to planning by state and
federal governments within the 2020s is not high. But if we can re-activate a
bottom up approach there is a possibility that the influence of community
groups can be progressively increased and that we can reverse at least some
of the disempowerment that has set in over the last decade in Australia. The
rest of this book is about practical things that can be done to re-activate that
bottom up approach, to re-engage the community in setting its own future. It
is about how to put some power back into the hands of the growing number
of Australians who have either been excluded already from a fair share in
prosperity, or who fear their future is becoming less secure by the day.
187See Jackson Gothe-Snape, “Everything we know about water buybacks, Barnaby Joyce and Angus
Taylor – and the things we still don’t”, ABC News, 23 April 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-23/water-buybacks-everything-we-know/11037798
170
Regardless of whether we, as a community, build a national plan or
whether one or more of our levels of government join in as partners, there
are things we need to learn about how to structure a national plan if we want
it to work. This is because some types of plans work better than others. I have
already shown how top down plans are an abject failure. But bottom up ones
can fail too if they make the sort of mistakes state governments have been
making whenever they have attempted to plan in the 21st century. Hence, Part
2 is about how not to make those mistakes. It is about how communities can
set a standard in Integrated Planning & Reporting if their governments will
not. This will turn local area community strategic planning into a powerful
new process for the production, by Australians, of Australia’s first national
community futures plan.
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Part 2 – Building an Inclusive Democratic
National Planning Process
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Chapter 5 – The Elements of a Viable National
Plan & Planning Process
Chapter 4 set out how not to plan and why planning should not be driven from
the top. But it didn’t set out anything in detail about how we might overcome
the problems that have become endemic in planning and that are causing
nothing but failure in achievement of the priorities that governments select.
Those problems included:
• disintegration of social, environmental and economic planning,
• disintegration of the plans and priorities of different levels of
government,
• autocratic, politically driven and even arbitrary selection of priorities,
• narrowed social accounting,
• dishonest reporting,
• elimination of strategic focus,
• deliverology, and
• politically driven meagre target setting.
In Chapters 6, 7 and 8 I will set out solutions to those problems and
ground rules of good practice necessary to ensure that in planning our own
future we don’t fall into replicating the bad habits that state governments
have settled into and which have had the effect of edging communities out of
any say in their future. (I would lump federal governments in with this, but
they never undertook community planning and so never really edged us out
of anything. They never offered it to us in the first place. This is not to say that
federal governments are not afflicted with the above problems.)
However, before we can solve the problems of the way we are planning
for our future, it is necessary to describe what an Integrated Planning &
Reporting framework actually comprises. If IP&R is the solution – if it is the
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best way to build and deliver a plan for the nation – what is it and how does
it work? This chapter therefore sets out the elements of a viable national
community futures plan and planning process.
*****
In Chapter 2 I discussed why we should plan at this time in our history and
the importance of establishing an agreed set of national values that we wish
to protect in our legislative and policy decisions. At present we have neither
stated our values nor set down a plan for a preferred future. But it is clear that
a national community futures plan would have a far greater chance of viability
– of being successful in delivering the life we really want – if it were to include
a statement of our preferred national character, identity, values or rights.
Having said that, I have also foreshadowed that we may not have the luxury
of reaching agreement on such a statement for some time. In its absence,
however, we can still develop a strong plan with considerable value for our
future and the process of developing that plan may well provide an
opportunity to have a coherent discussion about our preferred national
character, values and rights. Alternatively, it may help us schedule such a
discussion for a specified time in the future. Regardless of whether we get
such an opportunity, there are things we need to do to ensure we are not
wasting our time in developing a national community futures plan. The
following table sets out the essential elements of best practice in Integrated
Planning & Reporting at a national level. If we follow this process, the risks
associated with developing an Australian Community Futures Plan, before we
have a statement of national values and rights, can be minimised, and we can
remove obstacles that will slow us down unnecessarily.
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Elements of a viable national community futures planning and reporting
process
1 The most important prerequisite for a viable national plan is open
genuine community engagement.
2 The second element is an overarching Vision of what we want Australia
to be – socially, environmentally, economically, and in its approach to
governance. This is something different to a statement of values or
rights for our preferred national character, but in best-practice
Integrated Planning & Reporting a good comprehensive Vision
statement is essential. In developing a Vision, it is important to make it
a Vision for the long term. When we think ahead, especially when we
think ahead together, we tend to unleash imagination about what the
future could be that is quite different to what we might imagine for
next year. Community futures planning works only over long periods.
For that reason, a thirty-year time frame is a reasonable idea. Hence
the title of this book: By 2050.
3&4 The third essential thing is to be able to translate that Vision into
practical reality. This means we need to create a space where people
can discuss what success would look like for each aspect of the Vision.
Here we describe in more detail what Australia would become if the
Vision is realised. We describe the “Directions” we are prepared to take
(and the routes we do not prefer) in order to reach the Vision. That in
itself helps us tease out a fourth essential – the “Strategies” which are
most likely to lead to the identified “successes”.
5 A fifth element is regular national opinion surveys to check whether the
Vision, Directions and any Strategies included in the plan are supported
by those Australians who have not participated in developing any of
these. This polling process provides a significant feedback loop for
adjustment of the plan.
6 The sixth element is a plan to ensure adequate funding for the
government sector’s contribution to realisation of the overall
community futures plan. Initially this will isolate areas where public
funding needs to be increased and decreased to ensure delivery of the
priorities of the plan. As time passes, results from monitoring of the
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Elements of a viable national community futures planning and reporting
process
plan will provide information about fine tuning necessary in funding.
This is a holistic approach to financial planning that works extremely
well at the local government area level for purposes of achieving
sustainable service delivery at the lowest cost. It will be quite a bit
harder to make it work at the national level but not impossible and the
benefit in terms of prevention of wasted money would be enormous.
7 The seventh element is a tracking system to tell us if the Strategies (if
implemented) are working or not and whether changes to preferred
Strategies might be required. The tracking system needs to include
meaningful indicators of success, and clear measures and targets, with
baseline information about where we are starting from and how far we
want to go. This is similar to what some have called a “wellbeing index”
but it is one tailored to help us track our path to the particular
successes we have said we want, not one that simply assumes what
might constitute our “wellbeing” without asking us. Such a wellbeing
index monitors quadruple bottom line performance, not mere financial
or economic performance. This is why I will call it a QBL Wellbeing
Index.
8 The eighth element is an open transparent reporting and review system
which examines how we are going according to the targets, based on
the results of monitoring the indicators in the tailored QBL Wellbeing
Index. The report is called an “End of Term Report” and it is designed to
be produced prior to federal election campaigns. It provides evidence
of whether the nation has moved towards or away from its Vision
during the elected government’s term and whether the government
acted consistent with or contrary to the community’s interests in the
plan. It also provides suggestions for discussion about where any
failures of strategy may have arisen. That helps start the community’s
next conversation about how the plan should be revised after each
federal election. In that discussion it is completely open to the
community to change its idea about its preferred Vision for Australia or
simply to fine-tune the Strategies.
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Chapter 10 provides detail about how each of these elements can be
activated to ensure best practice IP&R at the national level.
Community strategic planning is not difficult. But as Chapters 3 and 4
have shown it is only as good as its last best practitioners and if the will isn’t
there to be totally open with the community and respectful of their
considered preferences, then any plans that are developed simply deliver less
and less relevant value for the community. They also tend to leave the
environment decidedly in the lurch. To get the maximum value from a
community strategic plan we need genuine good will between all the parties
to the plan, integration of plans, and a best practice approach to the
mechanics of the planning process. Otherwise we will end up back with the
problems outlined in Chapters 3 and 4 – lip service to the community and top
down governance.
A plan that delivers full value will depend on an attitudinal change in state
and federal government. Those levels of government will need to become
partners with local governments, local communities and the business
community if full value is to be captured. They will need to drop all
paternalism, although it should be expected that this will only happen very
slowly and may never happen fully. I’ll talk about this in more detail from
Chapter 10 onwards. It is a risk inherent in any system – that one or more
parties may not live up to their obligations or play a fair part in the agreement.
Nevertheless, this risk can be managed and continuously reduced over time.
In the following three chapters, however, I want to concentrate on another
far more critical success factor for a viable national plan. This is about getting
the techniques of planning right. It is about skilling Australians in what to do
instead of the bad planning and policy development habits of state and
federal government. It is about how to avoid lapsing into the problems of top
driven planning, which is then more easily captured by vested and sectional
interest groups. If that happens, we will end up back where we started.
Effectively this means we need to do this well, or not at all. And we need to
do it ourselves, whether or not governments and businesses come on board.
In setting all this out here I hope to shed some light on:
• the extraordinary value that can be obtained from applying quality
Integrated Planning & Reporting in development of a national
community futures plan, and on
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• the opportunity to turn Australia’s democracy into an inclusive value
adding project towards the creation of what other democracies
might call “a more perfect union” but what we might simply call
“Australia Together”.
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Chapter 6 – Techniques for Recovering from
the Failures of Top Driven Planning
Experienced community strategic planners all follow the quadruple bottom
line approach. Until the early 2000s some planners followed a “triple bottom
line” approach, incorporating just society, the environment and the economy.
But then it dawned on everyone that these three areas of focus had no
stability at all if nobody was planning for a stable, fair and ethical system of
governance. Hence the emergence of the quadruple bottom line.
The community planners of today, in local government at least, all know
they have to chase ideas and seek consensus in the four quadrants of society,
the environment, the economy and our system of governance – and they
divide their plans into those quadrants for this purpose. But while I said
anyone could use this framework to design a plan, and they can, there are
always going to be some techniques and approaches that work better than
others to produce a better plan. The more careful thought we put into a plan,
together, the more we can expect to get out of it. And indeed, if we are not
prepared to put that care into it, we may as well stick with the facile level of
political debate we have now.
Some of the techniques and approaches for quality community futures
planning differ depending on which quadrant you are working in, or which
level of planning you are working at. If a community futures planning process
is being undertaken simply for a local plan, then some of the techniques and
approaches suggested here aren’t necessary. But if a community futures
planning process is being undertaken for a national plan, that’s an entirely
different story. Suddenly you are involving the community in planning for the
type of national economy they want, or the type of national social services
sector that they want, or the type of Murray Darling Basin they want. This is
new territory. It is exciting new territory but facilitators and participants alike
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need to understand the practices that produce the most effective plans, the
plans that will give us and our children a better life.
In this and the next two chapters I will be setting out a best practice
approach to national community futures planning in Australia’s 21 st century
democracy, including techniques and approaches to help Australians work
together in planning each quadrant of the QBL. These are the minimum that
would be required for a national community futures plan driven from the
bottom, and all are offered as solutions to the problems of top down planning
set out in Chapters 3 and 4.
Solution No. 1 – In all quadrants – Aim high
In taking issue with the way the government of NSW approached its design of
and reporting on priorities and targets under deliverology, I did not mean to
imply that measurement and targets are not important. Nor did I mean to
imply that targets should not be ambitiously set when the issue being dealt
with is a critical one. On the contrary, targets are vital. And when it comes to
issues that we all know are important – but which we might tend to think are
too difficult to solve or intractable – setting ambitious targets is not only vital
to solving the problem, it is the cheapest thing to do over the longer term.
Aiming high – aiming to fully fix the problem, not just fiddle at the edges – is
the key to success, and to efficiency in success. Here are two examples.
Example 1 – Aim high to solve child poverty
When Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke famously promised in 1987 that
“by 1990 no Australian child will live in poverty” he showed a genuine
ambitious intent to fix a big national problem of which any first world country
should be abjectly ashamed. In attempting to deliver on the commitment, the
government took the advice of the Australian Council of Social Service
(ACOSS) and undertook a program of significantly expanding tax free family
allowance supplements for low income families. They also introduced
indexation for these payments and committed other funds for related
programs including $100 million for homelessness assistance and $400 million
over six years for extra child care places and fee relief. These seem like small
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budget increases by today’s standards, when it has become customary for us
to talk of just about every dollar cost in terms of billions, not millions. But they
were very large budget increases for the time.
Statistically, the problem of child poverty was not fixed. But the failure
was not because of the target. In this case the ambition of the target – to fix
a huge problem completely – drove the government to do more than had ever
been done before. And to an unprecedented extent it worked, as has been
shown by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling (NATSEM)
at the University of Canberra. NATSEM conducted research in 1999 about
child poverty rates in Australia between 1982 and 1996 (the Hawke-Keating
government period) and concluded that:
The results suggest a dramatic one-third drop in before-housing child
poverty during this period, largely as a result of the very substantial
increases in government cash payments to low income families with
children.188
Nothing like a one third drop in this sort of social problem had been seen
before, or since, in Australia.
Had the Hawke-Keating government (1983 to 1996) aimed lower and
injected lower funds, they would not have achieved as much as they did.
Indeed, subsequent governments that have aimed lower (or not at all), in both
their targets and their funding injections, have delivered a serious increase in
child poverty.
Estimates vary depending on how poverty is measured, but when Bob
Hawke, after three years of implementing increased funding, was first
challenged about failures to fully solve child poverty in 1990, just over 500,000
children were living in poverty in Australia. By 2018, a total of 1.15 million
children and young people were living in poverty, including 739,000 children
under the age of 15 (17.3% of all children - more than one in six) and 410,000
youth between the ages of 15 and 24 (13.9%)189. In ACOSS’s reviews of
“Poverty in Australia” in 2016 and 2018, it is observed that between 2003 and
188 NATSEM, University of Canberra, Anne Harding and Aggie Szukalska, “Trends in Child
Poverty in Australia: 1982 to 1995-96”, page 3, accessible
at http://www.airc.gov.au/snr2005/acci/Att5_4.pdf
189 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2018”, page 15 accessible at
https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ACOSS_Poverty-in-Australia-Report_Web-
Final.pdf
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2013, based on ABS data, the overall picture for adults and children in poverty
is “one of a persistent and entrenched poverty rate around 12%”190. By 2018
this had risen to 12.8%191 and by 2020 it had risen again to 13.6%192. But when
it came to children, ACOSS was regretfully compelled to report in 2016 that:
The most concerning population group over the period were children
for whom the rate increased by over 2 percentage points from 14.8% in
2003-04 to 17% in 2013-14 on a comparable basis (17.4% using the
updated ABS measure).193
By 2020 this had risen to 17.7% of children under the age of 15 and was
unchanged for young people aged 15 to 24 years (stable at 13.9%)194. Overall,
life has been getting markedly worse over the last two decades for children
who are not born into the wealthier classes in Australia.
Taking on a target that no child will live in poverty would be regarded by
most politicians these days as political suicide. Inside the party rooms it would
be furtively but routinely characterised as a quixotic folly rather than as the
genuine intent that it was to actually achieve something in reduction of child
poverty. Our culture should have no room for that sort of mockery. But among
some politicians it is actually fashionable today to scoff at this famous
commitment and characterise it as the classic case of overpromising and
underdelivering.
Oddly, there is no evidence that the target resulted in a loss of
government by the party that made the commitment, the Australian Labor
Party. Nor is there evidence that the sort of cynicism we are subtly fed by
politicians these days ever achieves anything. To aim for less in the vital areas
of social progress – to deliberately underpromise – is to give up on the really
hard and worthwhile things we want governments to do. It is to give up before
they even start. Worse than that, it allows a government to cover up or
190 ACOSS & SPRC, “Poverty in Australia 2016”, page 17, https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2016/10/Poverty-in-Australia-2016.pdf
191 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2018”, page 13 accessible at
https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ACOSS_Poverty-in-Australia-Report_Web-
Final.pdf
192 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2020, Part 1: Overview”, page 9, accessible at
http://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Poverty-in-Australia-
2020_Part-1_Overview.pdf
193 ACOSS & SPRC, “Poverty in Australia 2016”, page 18, Op. Cit.
194 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2020, Part 1: Overview”, page 13, Op. Cit.
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distract us from things it is purposefully doing in budget reductions that
everyone would know could only result in entrenched poverty. The increase
in poverty in Australia between 2003 and 2014 outlined above is in large part
a direct result of budget cuts by the federal government, as ACOSS has stated
in its 2018 report on poverty:
Trends in child poverty were … influenced by economic conditions, but
social security changes since the GFC increased child poverty instead of
reducing it, especially in sole parent families. Parenting Payment was
excluded from the 2009 pension increase, Family Tax Benefits (FTB)
were frozen (after accounting for inflation) and in 2013, 80,000 sole
parents were transferred from Parenting Payment to the lower
Newstart Allowance.195
The lesson to be learned here is that you might not always fix something you
are aiming to fix; but you are certainly not going to fix something that you are
decidedly not aiming to fix. To put that point positively, if there is a genuine
commitment to an ambitious target and sufficient resolve in the form of
funding, then success is more likely. These very ambitious targets should be
achievable in a wealthy country. After all, if a poor country like China can lift
800 million people out of poverty in less than forty years, surely a wealthy,
smart country like Australia should be able to manage the same for half a
million children.
All this means that it is indeed essential for governments to set genuinely
ambitious targets, especially when the most important areas of social policy,
such as child welfare, happen also to be the most difficult areas of social
policy. Thereafter, the important thing is to avoid cynically warping the valid
intention behind the targets. That intention should be to achieve more, not
less. In short – aim high. Don’t aim not to fix something that in a less cynical
world would be considered worthy of a complete fix. If we aim not to fix
something that is as important as child welfare, then the only thing we can be
certain of is that we won’t fix it and we can be reasonably certain we will just
make it worse.
195 ACOSS and UNSW Sydney, “Poverty in Australia 2018”, page 13 Op. Cit.
183
Example 2 – Aim high to prevent climate change
A second example of where we need to aim high is, of course, on climate
change prevention. A note about choice of words here. There are those who
will assert that climate change cannot be “prevented” because it is already
happening. Strictly speaking they are correct and the practical reality is that
we can only “mitigate” climate change. However, in early 2020 unscrupulous
politicians in the Morrison government staged a quiet coup on the word
“mitigation”, twisting it in their strange lexicon to mean climate change
adaptation by mitigation of its effects rather than mitigation of climate change
itself by emissions reduction. This has allowed them to appear as if they are
addressing concerns about emissions when in fact they are simply switching
“mitigation” efforts towards adaptation and resilience. This is a sop to climate
change deniers in the Liberal and National parties, appeasing their concerns
about any effort that the government might make to control emissions, while
simultaneously deluding Australians that they have some policy commitment
to emissions reduction. “Mitigation” has become a word that the Morrison
government uses with a forked tongue. For this reason I have chosen to use
the word “prevention” when speaking of climate change action by means of
emissions reduction.
Australia has displayed an erratic performance in reducing carbon
emissions in the 21st century and we are paying dearly for our inaction. Since
1990 we have swung back and forth between policies which have resulted in
reduced emissions and policies which have increased emissions, with the
trend of results as follows:
184
Total annual
Year Emissions trends emissions
Mt CO2-e196
1990 Carbon emissions recorded at 604.9 in 1990
Trended down to reach Australia’s lowest
1991 to 1995
annual emissions ✓ 482.6 in 1995
Trended back up to Australia’s highest annual
1996 to 2007
emissions 627.0 in 2007
2008 to 2014 Trended back down again with a carbon price ✓ 533.9 in 2014
Trended to increases and then roughly
flatlined after the repeal of the carbon price
2015 to 2019
and the failure to develop any policy for 532.0 in 2019
sustainable energy and a low carbon economy
There is a direct relationship here between the trends and the policies of
the governments at the time. Conservative government performance has
been extremely expensive for the taxpayer in the form of massive subsidies
to the fossil fuel industry197 and increased energy costs198, and deeply
destructive of the environment and hence the economy. The flatlining
performance between 2014 and 2019199 – the years of the Abbott-Turnbull-
Morrison government – covers a period when that government had
committed Australia to reducing emissions in 2030 by 26%-28% below 2005
196 Source: Australian Government, Department of the Environment & Energy, “Australia’s Emissions
Projections 2019”, accessible at https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4aa038fc-
b9ee-4694-99d0-c5346afb5bfb/files/australias-emissions-projections-2019-report.pdf
197 See Chapter 11 for more information on the expense of fossil fuel subsidies for Australian
taxpayers.
198 See Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, La Trobe University Press &
Black Inc., 2019, Kindle edition, Loc 530: “Uncertainty in energy policy [between 2014 and 2020] has
contributed to electricity prices being much higher than when the [Gillard government’s] carbon price
was operating – with no government revenue to compensate low-and middle-income households.”
199 This “flatlining performance” is in part the result of changes in 2019 by the Department of
Environment to emissions data for the Rudd-Gillard period of government. It is an accounting
adjustment which masks the fact that real emissions trends have risen during the Abbott-Turnbull-
Morrison period. See Adam Morton, “Australia changed its historical carbon emissions data: what
happened?”, The Guardian, 23 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/23/australia-has-changed-its-historic-data-on-
carbon-emissions-what-happened?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
185
levels200. But no progress has been made, despite the fact that this should be
an easy target because the baseline year of 2005 was a very high emissions
year of 610.6 Mt CO2-e.
The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government’s adopted target for
greenhouse gas reduction means that, on the face of it, in tonnage terms, our
total emissions in the 2030 year should be no higher than 451.8 Mt CO2-e201.
However, that is only on the face of it. In reality, there is a limit to the total
amount of CO2-e that can be emitted to the atmosphere up until 2030 and
allowed to accumulate in it before Earth’s average temperatures rise to 1.5o
Celsius above pre-industrial revolution levels. 1.5o Celsius is the cap on the
temperature increase that signatories to the Paris Agreement, including
Australia, have agreed is preferable if we are to prevent irreversible damage
from climate change. Anything higher than 1.5o Celsius is far more likely to
lead to runaway climate change and humanitarian and environmental
catastrophe. But because CO2-e doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere at
the end of each calendar year (in fact in the main it stays there for hundreds
of years202), the truth is that the cumulative emissions tonnage is the real
target that we need to focus on, not a distant target for a single year. It will
not be sufficient to keep the temperature rise at 1.5o Celsius if we simply emit
any amount of carbon we like each year until 2029 and then suddenly drop in
2030 to an annual emissions load that is 26% below the total emissions in
2005. Nor will it be sufficient to stave off doing anything to reduce emissions
and then suddenly in 2040 or 2050 decide to drop to net zero. To limit the
temperature rise to 1.5o Celsius we need to achieve “rapid reduction” early in
the thirty year period between 2020 and 2050, as Macquarie University
Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lesley Hughes has stated:
200 See Australian Government, Department of the Environment & Energy, “Australia’s 2030 Climate
Change Target” website, last accessed in January 2020 at https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-
change/publications/factsheet-australias-2030-climate-change-target
201 In 2005, Australia’s carbon emissions for the year were 610.6 Mt CO -e. A 26% reduction would
2
therefore equate to total emissions in 2030 of 451.8 Mt CO2-e. Data source: Australian Government,
Department of Environment, accessible at
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4aa038fc-b9ee-4694-99d0-
c5346afb5bfb/files/aust-emissions-projects-chart-data-2019.xlsx
202 See Carbon Brief and Duncan Clark, “How long do greenhouse gases stay in the air?”, The Guardian,
16 January 2012, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-
gases-remain-air
186
Net zero is absolutely necessary, but the bigger question is how quickly
we get there, and what are the interim targets? If we are emitting like
we are now and then suddenly hit net zero in 2050, we would overshoot
the target by two degrees. The emissions plan and trajectory of
emissions reduction over the next decade will count more to global
warming than what happens in 2040 to 2050.203
What this means is that we need to take a prudential approach to the
allowances of total emissions that we grant ourselves each year until 2050.
This prudential approach needs to be worked out as the one that is the fairest
spread of burden between our generation and the next. It is like buying
insurance for our children to ensure their future. And if we think of ourselves
as insurers would, then an emissions reduction target of 26%-28% on 2005
levels by 2030 is precisely the opposite of the bet an insurer would take on in
2020. It is shifting too much risk to the generation we are trying to insure and
will definitely result in such a massive liability for the insurer that it would put
them out of business if they were foolish enough to take it on.
Under a prudential approach, if we wish to emit no more CO2-e than is
necessary on a cumulative basis to meet the broader part of our commitment
under the Paris Agreement – i.e., to keep global heating to less than 2o Celsius
203 Professor Lesley Hughes, Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie Uni, quoted by Mike Foley,
“Australia must hit net zero by 2050 to meet Paris: scientists” Sydney Morning Herald, 24 February
2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-must-hit-net-zero-by-2050-to-
meet-paris-scientists-20200224-p543ss.html. See also Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor Australian
National University, “Labor’s climate policy is too little, too late. We must run faster to win the race,”
The Conversation, 24 February 2020: “Opposition leader Anthony Albanese’s announcement on Friday
that a Labor government would adopt a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 was a big step in the
right direction. But a bit of simple maths reveals the policy is too little, too late. Perhaps the most
robust way to assess whether a proposed climate action is strong enough to meet a temperature
target is to apply the “carbon budget” approach. A carbon budget is the cumulative amount of carbon
dioxide the world can emit to stay within a desired temperature target.
Once the budget is spent (in other words, the carbon dioxide is emitted), the world must have
achieved net-zero emissions if the temperature target is to be met. … The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that from 2020, the remaining 1.5℃ carbon budget is about 130 GtC
(billion tonnes of carbon dioxide). This is based on a 66% probability that limiting further emissions to
this level will keep warming below the 1.5℃ threshold. Current global emissions are about 11.5GtC
per year. So at this rate, the budget would be blown in just 11 years. This is where the “net-zero
emissions by 2050” target fails. Even if the world met this target, and reduced emissions evenly over
30 years, cumulative global emissions would be about 170 GtC by 2050. That is well over the 130 GtC
budget needed to limit warming to 1.5℃.” Accessible at https://theconversation.com/labors-climate-
policy-is-too-little-too-late-we-must-run-faster-to-win-the-race
187
and preferably 1.5o Celsius – then the prudential target for our generation in
tonnage terms (the carbon “budget” as it is generally expressed) is that
between the beginning of 2020 and the end of 2030 we should allow
ourselves to emit no more than a total of 3,756.8 Mt of CO2-e – or, on average,
341.5 Mt per annum. This average is obviously a lot less than we emitted in
2019 (533.8 Mt) and a lot less than Australia’s target emission load for the
year of 2030 of 451.8 Mt CO2-e. And as a cumulative load, 3,756.8 Mt of CO2-
e is obviously a lot less than the full load of emissions the government has
luxuriously allowed itself of 5,286 Mt of CO2-e between 2019 and 2030204.
How have I determined that the total prudential cumulative load or
“budget” of carbon emissions for the eleven years to 2030 for Australia should
be 3,756.8 tonnes of CO2-e instead of the notional load budgeted by the
Morrison government of 5,286 Mt of CO2-e? I have calculated it, as anyone
can, in fact as a child can205, on the basis of what the United Nations’ Annual
“Emissions Gap Report 2019” said is necessary in emissions on a global basis
if we are to keep global heating to 1.5o Celsius. That report stated:
Unless global greenhouse gas emissions fall by 7.6 per cent each year
between 2020 and 2030, the world will miss the opportunity to get on
track towards the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement [and]
even if all current unconditional commitments under the Paris
Agreement are implemented, temperatures are expected to rise by
3.2°C, bringing even wider-ranging and more destructive climate
impacts. Collective ambition must increase more than fivefold over
current levels to deliver the cuts needed over the next decade for the
1.5°C goal.206
204 See Greg Jericho, “Scott Morrison’s stance on climate change makes it harder for future
governments to undo his damage”, The Guardian, 23 January 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2020/jan/22/scott-morrisons-stance-on-
climate-change-makes-it-harder-for-future-governments-to-undo-his-damage
205 See Greta Thunberg’s speech to the United Nations 2019 Climate Action Summit, accessible on
YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMrtLsQbaok. Greta clearly comprehends and easily
explains the facts and figures about carbon budgets, something world leaders are preferring to ignore.
See Chapter 9 for more discussion.
206 United Nations Climate Change website, External Press Release, “Cut Global Emissions by 7.6
Percent Every Year for Next Decade to Meet 1.5°C Paris Target - UN Report”, 26 November 2019,
accessible at https://unfccc.int/news/cut-global-emissions-by-76-percent-every-year-for-next-decade-
to-meet-15degc-paris-target-un-report
188
That being so, if we apply the need for a 7.6% reduction year-on-year in
the eleven years to 2030 we come up with a cap on total emissions for that
period of 3,756.8 Mt of CO2-e. In total percentage reduction terms, this
translates not to a 26%-28% reduction on 2005 level emissions of 610.6 Mt
CO2-e, but to a 58% reduction on 2019 level emissions of 533.8 Mt CO2-e by
the end of 2030. Instead of being able to emit CO2-e per annum in the eleven
years to 2030 at the average rate of 480.5 Mt, we can only prudently emit an
average of 341.5 Mt, 35% less on average than we actually emitted in 2019.
And we will need to do that every year for eleven years or we will play a major
role in heating Earth by more than 1.5o Celsius. The following table provides
a comparison of Australia’s current commitment and the minimum prudential
commitment necessary to play a fair, reasonable and prudential role in
preventing global temperature rise above 1.5o Celsius:
Comparison of Australia’s commitments as at February 2020 under the Paris
Agreement and the commitment necessary to help keep global temperatures
from rising above 1.5o Celsius
Total
Average Total
emissions
Base year / assumed to assumed to
assumed to
Base be permitted be permitted
be permitted
emissions per year to in the year
over 11 years
2030 2030
to 2030
Australian
Government
commitment as at
2005 /
February 2020: 5,286 Mt CO2-e 480.5 Mt CO2-e 451.8 Mt CO2-e
610.6 Mt CO2-e
26%-28% reduction
on 2005 levels by
2030
Minimum prudent
Australian 223 Mt CO2-e
(assumes 7.6%
commitment
2019 / year-on-year
required for 1.5o 3,756 Mt CO2-e 341.5 Mt CO2-e
532 Mt CO2-e reduction in
Celsius heating: tonnage from
58% reduction on 2020)
2019 levels by 2030
And lest people suggest that it is not fair to Australia to impose a uniform
reduction of 7.6% per annum, it should be pointed out that such a target
189
would actually be going easy on Australia, relative to the rest of the world and
relative to Australia’s own future generations. If we were playing fairly and
delivering according to our significantly greater wealth and capacity, then a
country like Australia would be required to take on more than the same share
as every much poorer country. Taking on the same proportional share is the
least we can do if we accept that those less well-off countries should not have
to take on more than a fair share. Moreover, there can be no argument that
Australia should be permitted to adopt less than a uniform percentage
responsibility of 7.6% emissions reductions per annum, when it is the
emissions of developed countries like Australia that have created the vast
majority of the accumulated problem in the first place. Nor should we give
any credence to the entirely misleading but repeated claims that Australia
emits only 1.3% of the world’s greenhouse gases and therefore should not be
put upon to solve any more than 1.3% of climate change207. We have caused
and we continue to cause much more than 1.3% of the climate change
problem. Historically, Australia has benefitted massively from fossil fuel use
and exports (which are not counted in the fictitious 1.3% figure). We are the
world’s biggest exporter of coal, and we have sought to continue those
benefits for far longer than is fair when the cost to other nations of our
industrialisation has become so grossly disproportional to their capacity to
absorb such costs. As Matt McDonald, Associate Professor of International
Relations at the University of Queensland, has observed:
In 2012, the campaign group Beyond Zero Emissions estimated that if
Australian coal was factored into Australia’s emissions, our contribution
to global emissions would be 4% rather than 1.3%. This would make
Australia the world’s sixth-largest contributor to climate change.208
It is untenable for the sixth largest contributor to climate change to argue that
it should bear less than an even share of responsibility for the emissions
207 Scott Morrison, quoted in Sarah Martin, “Australia already ‘carrying its load’ on emissions and must
adapt to warmer climate, PM says”: “We know that Australia on its own cannot control the world’s
climate as Australia accounts for just 1.3% of global emissions”, The Guardian, 29 January 2020,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/29/australia-already-carrying-its-
load-on-emissions-and-must-adapt-to-warmer-climate-pm-says
208 Matt McDonald, “How to answer the argument that Australia’s emissions are too small to make
a difference”, The Conversation, 18 June 2019, accessible at https://theconversation.com/how-to-
answer-the-argument-that-australias-emissions-are-too-small-to-make-a-difference-118825
190
reductions necessary to stop the planet from heating by more than 1.5 o
Celsius. If we think it is worth signing onto an agreement to limit global
heating as closely as possible to 1.5o Celsius – and even our most conservative
governments have not cavilled with that – then it must be worth doing
everything we can to meet it.
Australia’s Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has been fond of suggesting
that Australia has done its fair share in emissions reduction and that we
should not have to take on more than a fair share in future. Mr Morrison has
also been adamant that Australia is on track to meet its emissions reduction
target by 2030. But nothing could be further from the truth. The federal
Department of Environment and Energy’s webpage for “Government and
International Initiatives” on climate change stated in 2020 that the
government’s climate change “plan” includes “Reducing emissions by 5 per
cent below 2000 levels by 2020.”209 Total emissions in 2000 were 536.2 Mt
and at the end of 2019 were recorded as 532 Mt. So clearly, that initiative is
not on track. Moreover, not only is Australia not on track to reach its
inadequate 26%-28% reduction target (as I will show in Chapter 7), it has
stubbornly failed to develop plans to meet its part of the commitment it has
made to keep Earth’s average temperature increase as close as possible to
1.5o Celsius. Every country that has signed the Paris Agreement, including
Australia, has thereby also signed an agreement that states that initial pledges
will need to be ratcheted up commencing in 2021 to keep the temperature
rise to 1.5o Celsius. As one of Australia’s finest economists, Professor Ross
Garnaut – author of the “Garnaut Climate Change Review” for the Rudd
Government, and Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity – has
noted:
While embodying a marked strengthening of earlier commitments, the
Paris pledges did not add up to achievement of anything like the 2°C, let
alone the 1.5°C, objective. That was to be corrected over time. The
temperature commitments were the primary ones, and numerical
emissions-reduction targets would be adjusted over time to be
consistent with them. Numerical targets would be strengthened
209Australian Government, Department of the Environment and Energy, “Government and
international initiatives” webpage, last accessed in January 2020 at
https://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/government
191
periodically in subsequent ‘pledge and review’ meetings of the
UNFCCC.210 [My emphasis]
As such, the Australian government knows full well that it will need to pledge
more than a 26%-28% reduction on 2005 emission levels. They also know that
the longer they delay ratcheting up their commitment, the harder it will
become to meet the target of 1.5o Celsius. But Australia is not just destroying
other economies and nations by its refusal to participate fairly in preventing
climate change. We are destroying our own economy. As the United Nations
“Emissions Gap Report 2019” said:
Had serious climate action begun in 2010, the cuts required per year to
meet the projected emissions levels for 2°C and 1.5°C would only have
been 0.7 per cent and 3.3 per cent per year on average. However, since
this did not happen, the required cuts in emissions are now 2.7 per cent
per year from 2020 for the 2°C goal and 7.6 per cent per year on average
for the 1.5°C goal. Evidently, greater cuts will be required the longer that
action is delayed.211
And as those required cuts grow in volume, they will grow in cost. Had we not
persistently stalled emissions reduction during the years of conservative
federal governments in Australia since the mid 1990s, the cost of reducing
emissions would have been far lower than it will be now. As Ross Garnaut has
pointed out:
If we had moved with resolve from 2008, we could have reduced to zero
over about fifty years. Of course, if we continue to move slowly – as we
have so far – we will have to achieve zero emissions earlier than 2050,
as it is the accumulated total of emissions that determines the warming
effect.212
For every year we delay, the cost and effort associated with emissions
reductions is higher than it ever needed to be. Still, emissions reduction, even
at this late stage is cheaper – far cheaper – than climate change adaptation
210 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 447, Op. Cit.
211 United Nations Environment Program, “Emissions Gap Report 2019”, page XX, accessible at
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/30797/EGR2019.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowe
d=y
212 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 356, Op. Cit.
192
(see Chapter 9 for University of Melbourne economic projections213). Scott
Morrison would have Australians believe that climate change prevention (i.e.,
mitigation by emissions reduction) is more expensive than “adaptation and
resilience”214, that we are already pulling our weight internationally on
emissions reduction, and that we can’t afford to do more on genuine climate
change mitigation because this will risk jobs (by which he means high paying
jobs in marginal seats where coal mining is fighting to hang on, rather than
jobs in, say, tourism in regional areas215). According to Mr Morrison, we can
only afford mitigation of the effects of climate change, not of climate change
itself. But the fact is that we are not pulling our weight on emissions reduction
because, as Ross Garnaut has noted, “Australia’s pledge [in the Paris
Agreement] was among the weakest of those offered by developed countries
–26 to 28 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels”216. And regardless of views on
whether we are playing fair and doing enough, the fact remains that it is more
affordable to pull our weight than not. Because we are a nation with massive
resources suitable for creation of a 100% renewable energy economy, what
we stand to gain from getting the jump in the race to a decarbonised economy
will far outweigh the cost of climate change prevention (i,e., mitigation via
emissions reduction). And if we take that route of prevention, by
reintroducing a carbon price and participating in domestic and international
213 University of Melbourne, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, “Australia’s Clean Economy
Future: Costs and Benefits”, June 2019, accessible at
https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/issues-papers/australias-clean-economy
214 Sarah Martin, “Scott Morrison to focus on 'resilience and adaptation' to address climate change”,
The Guardian, 14 January 2020: “The Prime Minister says he will work on ‘practical measures rather
than bolstering emission targets… Scott Morrison said Australia was already ‘carrying its weight’ in
terms of its global emission reduction efforts and transition to renewables but more needed to be
done on ‘resilience and adaptation’” Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/14/scott-morrison-to-focus-on-resilience-and-
adaption-to-address-climate-change?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
215 See Ross Gittins, “What pollies really mean when they say they are protecting jobs”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 5 February 2020: “On the question of jobs, don’t assume it’s your job he [Scott
Morrison] is promising to save. What we know is that jobs in the coal industry are sacred, but what
happens to other jobs isn’t the focus of his concern. Don’t forget, this is the same government which,
as one of its first acts, decided we no longer needed a motor vehicle industry.” Accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/what-pollies-really-mean-when-they-say-they-are-
protecting-jobs-20200204-p53xj9.html
216 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Op. Cit., Loc 444.
193
emissions trading schemes, we can make emissions reduction even cheaper
and our financial returns far bigger. As Ross Gittins has pointed out:
Economists advocate ‘putting a price on carbon’ because they believe
it’s the best way to minimise the ultimate cost to the economy (and the
punters who make it up) of moving to a low-carbon economy. But if
Australian voters are stupid enough to allow some on-the-make
politicians to persuade them to reject the economists’ advice, then so
be it. You prefer to do it the expensive way? Okay, have it your way.
There’s no shortage of more costly alternatives.217
As I will show in Chapter 7, all we are doing by not putting a price on
carbon is stopping our agricultural, minerals and industrial sectors from
turning decarbonisation – such as carbon farming and sequestration, and
energy efficient minerals processing and manufacturing – into wonderful
money making opportunities. All we are doing is putting the brakes on our
entire economic transition to a more stable and prosperous future.
Contrary to Scott Morrison’s bluster, a swift movement to a decarbonised
economy is not the thing that will cost us our jobs and make our power bills
unaffordable. What is unaffordable for Australians – those who will lose their
livelihoods, businesses and homes as climate change builds up to its full force
– is the cost of adaptation itself. Australians have seen the cost of climate
change first hand in the bushfires of the Spring and Summer of 2019/2020 and
they know that it will not matter how much the government releases in
funding for “adaptation and resilience”, it will not suffice to restore the lost
prosperity and value of life, let alone future losses that have been built in as
a result of our recalcitrance on prevention of climate change through
emissions reduction. What Australia can’t afford is the havoc that will arise
from our persistence with an allowance of 5,286 Mt of CO2-e emissions over
the eleven years to 2030 and an emissions reduction target of 26%-28% on
2005 levels by 2030. The far more prudent target – financially – for everyone
is to set a minimum target of a 58% reduction on 2019 emission levels by 2030
with a cap on total permissible emissions at 3,756.8 Mt CO2-e. I stress this is a
minimum. We must expect that even this high target will need to be
intensified as the 2020s decade passes if we are to keep other bills for
adaptation, resilience and mitigation from rising to insurmountable levels.
217 Ross Gittins, “What pollies really mean when they say they are protecting jobs”, Op. Cit.
194
And for every year we delay, it will need to be intensified again. Although as
at early 2020, the federal government was refusing to commit to net zero
emissions by 2050 – even though that is the minimum commitment necessary
to avoid heating above 1.5o Celsius by 2100 – it is inevitable that such a
commitment will be dragged out of the Australian government well before
2030, if only by the force of our own business sector (outside the minerals
sector) and economic experts. But regardless of the “if or when” of such a
commitment, all decent planning should work on the assumption that:
• we will need to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 at the absolute
latest; and that
• this will be need to be done in the context of:
o an entirely new understanding of the total carbon emissions we
might responsibly release to the atmosphere between now and
2050 (the total responsible “budget” of emissions), and
o the pace at which we may reduce emissions annually.
The total responsible budget of emissions for approaching net zero by
2050 should be determined as a matter of intergenerational equity, meaning
we should determine it as a matter of what is fair between us and our
children, bearing in mind our starting position of 532 Mt of CO 2-e emitted in
2019. We need not distract ourselves quibbling about whether the emissions
budget or target reductions are fair vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Once we
legislate a target of net zero by 2050, the only thing that matters is our
measurement of our performance in doing what we need to do to reach that.
We need no longer be distracted by arguments about whether some other
country is pulling its weight. We are switching to a new system where we are
assuming everyone is fairly pulling their weight because they are all aiming to
reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050 at the latest. The international
fairness argument is thereby solved and the only question is how do we solve
the issue of intergenerational fairness.
One option, of course, is to apply the UN’s model of an annual 7.6%
reduction in emissions from current volumes for the whole world and
continue to tell ourselves that this is fair compared with other nations. But
then by 2050 we would not have reached net zero. We would still be emitting
at least 45 Mt of CO2-e in 2050. To approach net zero by 2050 via an even
annual percentage reduction (rather than via some bumpier reduction
195
pattern) we would need to reduce emissions not by 7.6% per annum but by
at least 12% year-on-year for thirty years. This would be a comparatively
orderly approach to net zero (at least in percentage terms if not tonnage
terms, which I will speak of below), although strictly speaking according to the
maths it would still mean we will be emitting just over 10 Mt CO2-e in 2050.
Nevertheless, in this logic the emissions budget that we might assume to be
responsible is therefore the sum of the reducing yearly volumes we might
allow ourselves each year after applying our 12% reduction. Applying a 12%
reduction per annum in this fashion gives us a total responsible budget of
emissions over thirty years of 3,827 Mt CO2-e or an average of 123.5 Mt CO2-
e per annum. In 2019 we emitted 532 Mt CO2-e. So this gives us an idea of the
size of the challenge. We can of course go easier on ourselves and stall in the
early years. But that will only mean that we are pushing the cost of more
emissions reduction onto our children, expecting them to achieve massive
drops in each year when the fairer thing to them would be to just
proportionally share it out and aim to reduce by a minimum of 12% per
annum. The true reduction to achieve net zero would be 16% per annum year-
on-year (which would bring us virtually to zero) but if we assume a minimum
12% and simultaneously assume that our children will be smarter than us and
come up with more efficient emissions reduction solutions, then 12% per
annum at the start may (I emphasise may) be a justifiable split of cost between
us and them for, say, the first decade but no longer.
In Australia’s case this means that instead of allowing ourselves an
emissions budget of 3,756.8 Mt CO2-e by 2030 (which equates to the above
mentioned 58% reduction on 2019 emission levels by 2030), the responsible
thing to do would be to allow ourselves an emissions budget of 2,945 Mt CO2-
e by 2030 – which will equate to a necessary 75% reduction on 2019 emission
levels by 2030 (equivalent to 12% reduction year-on-year over the ten years
to 2030). To do less is likely to push too much onto our children. After 2030,
if we are to reach net zero (or get close) by 2050 the responsible course will
be to allow ourselves a budget of another 882 Mt CO2-e between 2030 and
2050 bringing the total implied budget for the thirty years to 2050 to 3,827
Mt CO2-e. That should bring Australia’s emissions down in an orderly fashion
to about 10 Mt CO2-e in 2050, still not net zero but it is a reasonable guide.
Working on this logic, it is not fair to either our children or the rest of the
world to reduce emissions by less than 12% per annum. That should be
196
considered the least our particular nation should do to keep temperature rises
to 1.5o Celsius and it is prudentially the least we might do for our children. If
we had started sooner we could have done less, but we didn’t, so that horse
has bolted. To put this into perspective we can summarise it in a re-work of
the previous table:
Comparison of the effect of different levels of emissions reduction necessary to
meet net zero by 2050, consistent with Australia’s commitments under the Paris
Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising above 1.5o Celsius
Total
emissions Average Total Total
Base year /
budget per year permitted permitted in
Base
over 30 – 2020 to in the year the year
emissions
years to 2050 2030 2050
2050
Effect of a
notional 223 Mt CO2- 45.9 Mt CO2-e
prudential e (assumes (assumes
Australian 7.6% year- 7.6% year-on-
2019 / 5,910 Mt 190.6 Mt
commitment of a on-year year
532 Mt CO2-e CO2-e CO2-e
7.6% year-on- reduction in reduction in
year reduction on tonnage tonnage from
2019 levels to from 2020) 2020)
2050
Effect of
commitment 130 Mt CO2-
necessary for net 10.1 Mt CO2-e
e (assumes
(assumes 12%
zero emissions by 12% year-
2019 / 3,827 Mt 123.5 Mt year-on-year
2050 – modelling on-year
532 Mt CO2-e CO2-e CO2-e reduction in
a 12% year-on- reduction in
tonnage from
year reduction on tonnage
2020)
2019 levels to from 2020)
2050
In this model it is obvious that we do not have the slightest chance of
reaching net zero emissions by 2050 if we maintain our stance that a 26%-
28% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030 is responsible. If we persist with that
target, we will actually end up emitting in the decade to 2030 almost 40%
more than we should responsibly allow ourselves to emit over the full thirty
years to 2050. That makes prevarication on ratcheting up emissions reduction
197
targets from our current offering of a mere 26%-28% a crime against our own
children. It is a substantial theft from them.
Decent planning authorities, those that have the interests of Australia
and Australians at heart, know that the federal emissions reduction targets
are entirely destructive. They have known it for more than a decade which is
why capital cities such as the City of Sydney have adopted much higher
emissions reduction targets and are ratcheting them up as time passes. In
February 2020, for instance, the City of Sydney brought forward its target of
achieving net zero emissions from 2050 to 2040218, a target they are likely to
achieve because they started more than a decade ago. It is a tragedy that
Australia did not do the same. The City of Sydney has also had targets in place
over that decade for a 70% reduction on 2005 levels for the whole city (not
just their own operations) by 2030. They have understood what is necessary
and have set themselves up so that they are achieving what seems to be an
impossible target. But 70% reductions of current emissions by 2030 is clearly
not an impossible target and for Australia to do less is the opposite of a
prudential and economically sensible approach.
I said above that emissions reduction, even at this late stage, is cheaper
– far cheaper – than climate change adaptation. Why? Because costs of
adaptation in the absence of mitigation can only grow as temperatures rise.
But climate change mitigation (emissions efficiency) costs are falling, fast, and
in this decade are likely to fall further. Not only has the cost of renewable
energy technology and production dropped faster than anyone thought it
would over the 2010s decade (to the point where solar and wind power are
now the cheapest forms of energy in Australia219), interest rates have also
218 Office of the Lord Mayor Clover Moore, “City of Sydney to bring net zero emissions target forward
to 2040”, Mirage News, 6 February 2020, accessible at https://www.miragenews.com/city-of-sydney-
to-bring-net-zero-emissions-target-forward-to-2040/
219 See Matt Edwards, University of NSW, “Coalition wilfully blind to economics of renewables”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 2020: “With all subsidies taken out, solar PV and wind wipe the
floor with gas, coal and nuclear. Levelised cost of solar and wind is about $50 per megawatt hour, half
that of gas and coal’s $100 per megawatt hour even without a carbon price. Nuclear is way off the
money, priced anywhere between $250 and $330 per megawatt hour. Solar plus storage is now also
cheaper than coal, and getting cheaper. The cost of batteries is falling rapidly and it will drop by as
much as 50 per cent over the next 10 years. A recent study by the Australian National University
shows the potential of low-cost pumped hydro storage in Australia: it says there are 300 times more
good-quality sites than required for 100 per cent renewables. The Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme
alone will allow vast quantities of renewables to be added to the grid.” Accessible at
198
dropped to far lower levels than they were in 2008. This means we have better
economic and financial opportunities if we run hard in the 2020s to keep
temperature rises to 1.5o Celsius. Our net result is better with higher
emissions reduction programs designed to achieve more in keeping
temperatures low. Ross Garnaut has stated that when he was writing in 2008
he was unable to make as strong a case – on economic grounds at least – for
emissions reduction sufficient to achieve the lowest possible increases in
temperatures. But things are very different in 2020:
The fall in global interest rates and the structural changes in the
economy that … lie behind them … [now] support the case for a 1.5°C
objective, and for making an early start on the move to zero net
emissions.220
He means that aiming in 2020 for lower temperatures in 2030 is cheaper now
than it has ever been before.
Australians tend to think it is Pacific nations that will suffer more from
climate change than we might, and that as we live in big prosperous cities with
diverse jobs we will be cushioned from many effects. But because we have an
economy deeply connected to reaping value from the land and natural
resources, the decimation of those lands and resources that will be wrought
by climate change exposes our economy to risk of collapse. The fact is we are
not acting in our own interests, let alone our children’s, by taking as little
action as possible on climate change. As Ross Gittins observed after the
bushfires of 2019/2020:
Although Australia is a big emitter relative to our small population, in
absolute volume we’re not in the same league as America, China or
Europe. But the rest of the world’s horrified reaction to our fire season
has helped us see we’re in the vanguard, that the Wide Brown Land is
going to cop it a lot harder than the green and pleasant lands. So our
self-interest lies not just in doing our fair share, but in doing more than
our share, so we’re well placed to press the big boys to try harder. 221
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/coalition-wilfully-blind-to-economics-of-renewables-
20200209-p53z4m.html
220 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Op. Cit., Loc 685.
221 Ross Gittins, “What pollies really mean when they say they are protecting jobs”, Op. Cit.
199
To sum up, when it comes to climate change it is cheaper to aim high and
definitely cheaper to start early. The prudential and most economically
advantageous approach is to aim for a minimum 70% reduction on 2019 levels
of CO2-e by 2030.
When thinking long term - think like an insurer
Readers will observe that the above suggestion of a minimum 70% reduction
on 2019 emission levels by 2030 is more ambitious than the target suggested
by the Labor party in the run up to the 2019 federal election in Australia. That
target was for a 45% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030. The Labor Party has
since backed away from that target although in February 2020 it announced
a commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050, remaining silent on
any interim target. We might expect that Labor, if pressed for an interim
target, will choose to approach the target not by uniform 7.6% or 12%
reductions per annum but by even tonnage reductions per annum. This would
allow them to plot a course of even tonnage reductions of about 17.2 Mt per
annum for the thirty years to 2050. That tonnage reduction (an arithmetical
progression) is a lot less than the tonnage reductions required up to 2030
under the annual 7.6% drops (a geometrical progression) that the UN suggests
will be necessary to stay within the tonnage necessary to cap temperature
increases to 1.5o Celsius (although after 2030 an annual 7.6% reduction
equates to a lot less than a 17.2 Mt uniform tonnage reduction). If we apply a
7.6% reduction to Australia’s 2019 emissions then the tonnage reduction
required in the first year of our thirty year trek to net zero would be
approximately 40 Mt and thereafter decrease each year until by 2030 the
necessary tonnage reductions would be about 18.3 Mt. The first year
reduction of 40 Mt is obviously a lot more than the 17.2 Mt that might be
expected under a uniform tonnage reduction program and accordingly it
should be expected that no political party will sign onto uniform annual
percentage reductions of 7.6%, let alone 12% (which would result in a first
year reduction of 64 Mt – a tonnage reduction likely to make even the most
optimistic and ethical politician blanch). Having said that, Australia has
managed a couple of times to drop emissions in a single year by just over 20
Mt without even really trying. One of those years was during the carbon
pricing scheme of the Rudd-Gillard government. So we can clearly organise to
200
reduce emissions by more than a mere 17.2 Mt if we try. Indeed in the 2020s
we are likely to easily achieve between 30 Mt and 40 Mt reductions, simply
by accelerating augmentation of our now very cheap renewable power
capacity. If we aimed to achieve 100% renewables by 2030 and introduced an
electric vehicles policy (opposed by the Morrison government at the 2019
election), our current tonnages would fall like a cascade. If we also
commenced large scale re-forestation in the early 2020s, then by 2035 those
trees would be doing a large part of the rest of the work for us in pulling CO 2-
e down.
In fact, when it comes to climate change there is no point in being
unambitious and the later we start (as indeed we have) the more ambitious
we will need to be. Because this is all about the total extra tonnes that can be
emitted to the atmosphere by 2050, every year we delay ambitious action
simply increases the necessary work and cost later on – it increases it to the
point where annual reductions in tonnage terms will conceivably need to be
more than the 40 Mt or the 64 Mt per annum that I have considered for the
single year of 2020 above. It could conceivably mean our children will need to
reduce tonnages by more than 100Mt in a single year, for several years.
Moreover, if Australia adopts an even tonnage reduction approach of 17
Mt of CO2-e per annum all the way to 2050, it will end up emitting a total
tonnage of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in that thirty year period that
is about 35% higher than the amount the UN suggests is permissible in its
proclamation of the need for a 7.6% per annum reduction world-wide. And
because a 17 Mt reduction per annum allocates to ourselves a total emissions
budget of 7,980 Mt over the thirty years to 2050, it adds up to more than
double the emissions budget we might allow ourselves in the 12% per annum
reduction scenario. In that arrangement, net zero will not equate to a 1.5 o
Celsius temperature increase. It is likely to heat the Earth by well over 2.5o
Celsius, and possibly by as much as 4o Celsius. The plain fact is the big
reductions need to occur in the 2020s decade. The bigger reductions are now
necessary because we didn’t attend to the issue a decade ago. We will now
inevitably experience something of what it will be like for our children when
they have to address the effect of our inaction – except for them of course
the effect will be much worse. In this context, an ambitious effort in the 2020s
is the best insurance policy for us and our children. This is the way an insurer
or a bank would look at it. As I have indicated above, they would not take on
201
a bet that a uniform tonnage reduction will deliver them a reasonable risk on
any policy they might be willing to offer us as insurance for our children. And
banks will not lend for technology projects that in the absence of strong
legislated emissions reduction targets (targets that do the lion’s share of the
work before 2030) will not definitely eliminate exposure to global heating.
This is why the Morrison government is on a loser with its insistence that
technology will save us and an emissions reduction target is not needed.222
The uniform percentage reduction approach is also likely to make more
money for Australians on any investment they put into it. It does so by
reducing future expenses and also by stimulating entry to the international
market of tradeable emissions permits earlier than we could enter it if we
persist in using fossil fuels. Early entry would mean entry when that market is
likely to be at its most lucrative. As the world winds down its emissions, that
market will become smaller and we will be able to sell less credits. Something
of the carbon credit market will be operative for probably the next century
but there is big money to be made now (not by coal mining companies of
course but certainly by other industries). Because of this, our economy is best
re-set if we move swiftly (within ten years from 2020) towards 100%
renewable power, implement large scale re-forestation (carbon farming) to
give ourselves a yield of available carbon permits for sale internationally, and
compensate coal miners and those in unsustainable agriculture (and any
other similarly affected group but not the mining corporations) over the
coming decade as their jobs disappear. This would be a very good deal for
workers in these industries – a deal which has not been offered to workers in
other sectors such as the car industry and manufacturing that have been
abandoned in the past in economic restructuring. But it is a smart, modern
way of humanely and affordably transitioning between economies. Those
industries dependent on coal mining (suppliers and regional commercial
businesses) may also benefit from this but all beneficiaries should also be
222Scott Morrison considers that a target of net zero emissions by 2050 is pointless – “just … some
sort of vague commitment to something 30 years from now.” But then Scott Morrison is not the long
term planning type. He is desperate to keep us stuck in the short term because if we focus on the long
term necessity we will want to do something entirely different right now to what Mr Morrison wants
to do. See Katharine Murphy and Sarah Martin, “Scott Morrison praises Gladys Berejiklian's plan for
zero net emissions”, The Guardian, 25 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/25/scott-morrison-praises-gladys-
berejiklians-plan-for-zero-net-emissions?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
202
planning their own way to new industries now. From an emissions point of
view we might risk a slower path to 100% renewables, reaching that in 15
years from 2020223 instead of the 10 years I have suggested above, if we do
other things to reduce the risk such as transition to electric vehicles. But from
the economy’s point of view it is far more advantageous to aim for 100%
renewables by 2030. This will produce the strongest growth trajectory and a
far more sustainable consumption pattern for the next generation. Aim high.
It should be acknowledged that coal mining corporations have been
pushing up their emissions sharply in the last three years of the 2010s. Instead
of capping their production, they have been increasing it and have
successfully applied for increases to their permissible emissions above those
allowed for under a safeguard mechanism originally built into the Abbott-
Turnbull-Morrison government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (see Chapter 9).
This is in order to get as much out of their sunk capital as possible before the
end of the coal era. Consequently, they are emitting more and more carbon
each year and when this is combined with the extra emissions from the
bushfires we must expect over the next decade, our total prudent emissions
budget will be exhausted before we know it. This just gives us one more
reason to set ourselves a 70% reduction target for 2030. Otherwise our
children will need to achieve net negative emissions – not just net zero – by
2050 if we are to keep temperature rises to below 2o Celsius. That is extremely
unlikely to be affordable for them, even if it is technically feasible, especially
if they have to carry the skyrocketing costs of adaptation at the same time.
No matter which way we look at this, aiming high in emissions reduction is the
best insurance policy.
It should be expected that all the above calculations, such as they are, will
be called into question by economists and politicians. But even if they are half-
way off the mark and I have overstated the case, it is still a very big problem
that we must solve for our children. The beauty of IP&R though is that it can
make us think about the size of the biggest challenges well before they
become as big as climate change has now become. Until we get into the habit
of looking at things for the long term, acting like a clever insurer, and planning
223See Katharine Murphy, “Australia’s electricity market must be 100% renewables by 2035 to achieve
net zero by 2050 – study”, The Guardian, 27 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/27/net-zero-emissions-by-2050-possible-in-
australia-if-low-emissions-options-accelerated?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
203
holistically, we won’t see our way clear to the full advantage of living up to
the truly necessary targets. Fear will get in the way. IP&R can be used to create
the assurance that an ambitious target is indeed the prudent thing – the
fairest thing between the generations – and it is the surest way of helping us
find the least cost path to meet the necessary ambition.
Solution No. 2 – In the social quadrant – Look for more
bottom driven solutions
If we are going to recover from the failures of the states in planning and
reporting, then certain lessons about delivery need to be learned. One of
those is that in managing social issues we probably need less of a hands-on
approach by government and more funding for and trust in the experienced
service providers in local communities and schools. By contrast, the approach
that may yield the best results in managing the environment would be more
likely to accrue from increasing the hands-on approach and the direct
involvement of and investment by government. I’ll deal with the social
quadrant first and then move on to the environment quadrant.
Integrating strategies and services locally for the best social
outcomes
As I have already indicated, in something as appalling as, say, our nation’s
problems with domestic violence, or in child protection, if we really want to
achieve more we need to lift our sights towards a genuine target of fully fixing
these things, instead of just selectively fiddling at the edges. Aiming to shave
off bits of domestic violence re-offending (as they attempted in NSW) simply
won’t cut it as far the whole challenge of domestic violence goes, especially if
we fail to acknowledge or we discard community led strategies which, when
knitted together, have been proven to make a difference at the coalface.
These strategies often pop up in local communities or in local council plans
and they deserve much more attention – that is to say, funding – from the
top.
204
A powerful example of the effectiveness of a multi-faceted integrated
strategic approach with deep community involvement was experienced
recently in the western NSW town of Bourke. In 2013 Bourke had the highest
rate of domestic violence, assaults and break-ins in the state but after a
concerted community led strategy, the incidence of domestic violence related
assaults dropped by 39% in four years. That is a result that Australian
governments could only dream of. Gay Alcorn of Guardian Australia reported
in July 2019 that according to domestic violence researcher, Jess Hill, author
of See What you Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, this
remarkable result in Bourke began by introducing alcohol restrictions but the
real difference was made when
a group of locals looked for circuit breakers to prevent men becoming
perpetrators, concentrating on young children, those aged up to 18 and
the role of men. A community hub called Maranguka brought all the
services and factions together. The high rate of youth charged for
driving while unlicensed was easily fixed – Maranguka raised money for
a car and young people were taught to drive. The local police
revolutionised their approach to domestic violence from responding to
it to preventing it. Officers made house calls to perpetrators and victims
to check that court orders were being adhered to, but ‘more radically,
assess what could be done to improve their lives’. Did they need help
with job training, treatment for substance abuse or mental health
treatment? They put them in touch with these services or encouraged
them to attend a Maranguka men’s group, to talk about trauma and
loss. By 2017, domestic violence-related assault had dropped by 39%.
Other crimes, such as drug offences, driving offences and non-domestic
violence-related assaults also fell. And more students are completing
year 12.224
This case supports the strength of the argument I made earlier that a tightly
knit web of different activities honed in on a particular genuinely ambitious
target increases the chances of success, not just in the primary target area, in
224Gay Alcorn, The Guardian, “There are ways to reduce domestic violence that have nothing to do
with patriarchy”, 10 July 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/society/commentisfree/2019/jul/10/there-are-ways-to-reduce-
domestic-violence-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-the-patriarchy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
205
this case domestic violence, but in related target areas such as drug and
alcohol and non-domestic assaults. It supports the point that if a government
of good intentions genuinely wants to achieve something in social wellbeing,
they need to drop paternalistic attitudes, particularly those attitudes that
assert that deeply embedded intergenerational social problems will respond
to the economic rationalisms and efficiency programs favoured by the officials
of their state treasuries. As Gay Alcorn reported, “Solutions have to be local,
community-led and require enormous cooperation between various service
providers.” Bottom up planning and integration is the key. A genuinely decent
state government would go out and call for proposals for more networks like
Maranguka and fund them, without, by the way, dictating a la Treasurer
Perrottet, how the objectives of such networks should be met. A less
interventionist approach which grants autonomy to those who know what
they are talking about and backs that approach with increased funding should
be attempted. Such an approach couldn’t do any worse than the deliverology
approach.
Of course, this will require state governments to change their deeply
ingrained, autocratic or arrogant spots. It is a big call to expect old state
governments and the senior ranks of their public services to learn new habits
of relating more openly and closely with local communities, accustomed as
the bigger states are to the upper echelons of their capital city towers. But
every state has local councils which have significant experience in local
community services. This can open doors for the state and there is no reason
why more proposals for community safety and capacity building projects
cannot be solicited and coordinated through councils. Instead of letting state
treasuries decide the value of budget proposals for things like family and
community services, why not integrate with the efforts of councils and tap
into the understanding they have built of their communities’ diverse needs
through Integrated Planning & Reporting or through their local service
provision? The value of the connection that can be created between
communities and their distant state governments via this means cannot be
understated.
Proof of the value of a bottom up approach was brought home by the
NSW Ombudsman in 2019 when he reported to NSW Parliament that
community led strategies in Aboriginal affairs and self-determination, inspired
by the Maranguka example, had developed into “a ground-breaking practice
206
and ... model directed at changing how the NSW Government works with
Aboriginal leaders and communities”225. Additionally, major consulting firm
KPMG reviewed the Maranguka project in 2018 and estimated that
the economic impact of the project was $3.1 million in 2017 (with
operational costs of $600,000). KPMG says that, if Bourke can sustain
just half of these results, an additional gross impact of $7 million over
the next 5 years is achievable.226
This has obviously become an area where New South Wales has learnt that
more can often be achieved – and much more money can be saved in terms
of burden on the economy and on the health and welfare system – by giving
greater autonomy in solutions design and funding decisions to local
communities so that they can solve their own problems. If they can extend
this to other disadvantaged groups we will be on the road to a vastly more
efficient and effective system of enhancement of social capital than the top
down, treasury driven approach we have been subjected to for far too long.
The federal government may have lately made the same discovery as the
state, insofar as Prime Minister Scott Morrison was reported to have said in
early 2020, after yet another horrendous year of poor performance in the
“Closing the Gap” report on Indigenous disadvantage, that:
Until recently Closing the Gap was never a partnership with Indigenous
people: we believed we knew better. We don't. … We must see the gap
from the viewpoint of Indigenous Australians before we can hope to
225 Natassia Crysanthos, “’Ground-breaking reform’: Ombudsman lauds NSW's Aboriginal affairs
strategy”, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/ground-breaking-reform-ombudsman-lauds-nsw-s-aboriginal-
affairs-strategy-20191028-p5350d.html
226 Australian Government, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “Family, domestic and sexual
violence in Australia: continuing the national story 2019”, page 107: “In November 2018, KPMG’s
impact assessment of the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project between 2015 and 2017 reported
that there had been improvements in: *family strength: a 23% reduction in the number of family
violence incidents and a 19% reduction in family violence reoffending incidents reported to police;
*youth development: a 31% increase in Year 12 student retention rates and a 38% reduction in
charges across the top 5 juvenile offence categories; *adult empowerment: a 14% reduction in bail
breaches and a 42% reduction in days spent in custody. Accessible at
https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/b0037b2d-a651-4abf-9f7b-00a85e3de528/aihw-fdv3-FDSV-in-
Australia-2019.pdf.aspx?inline=true. See also KPMG Australia & Just Reinvest NSW Inc. 2018.
Maranguka Justice Reinvestment Project: impact assessment. NSW: Just Reinvest NSW.
207
close it and make a real difference. That is the change we are now
making together with Indigenous Australians through this process.227
However, we should be wary of any conservative federal government’s
supposed enlightenment in this regard, at least until they have earned some
credibility from a better track record. It was reported that in accepting the
poor results, Mr Morrison (ever the advertising man) nevertheless went on to
warn that “the targets [for Closing the Gap] did not celebrate the strengths,
achievements and aspirations of Indigenous people” and that:
They don't tell you what's happening on the ground or stirring under it.
They don't tell you how realistic or achievable these targets were in the
first place. They reinforce the language of failing and falling short and
they mask the real progress that has been made.228
In other words, let’s not make the mistake of aiming high again – let’s not
make the mistake of aiming to actually close the gap. Let’s be realistic and
settle for a lesser outcome. Real progress on the ground is good enough
(contrary to the evidence of failure on the targets and that progress has not
been made) without aiming unrealistically to fix the entire problem, implies
Mr Morrison. This, of course, is just sophistry designed to set Indigenous
communities adrift to fix themselves but without enough funding. It is a ruse
on which the government can back out of its disastrous intervention approach
but also back out of funding a bottom driven approach - because the message
is that our Indigenes are making great strides on their own and will need
funding only for lesser ambitions than a full closure of the gap.
The concept that local communities are better than state and federal
governments at solving their own problems has application right across the
spectrum of social issues, particularly issues like homelessness, child support,
and family and Indigenous intervention. It even has application in public
health, as the Productivity Commission recommended in its 2017 report
“Shifting the Dial”229. But the concept doesn’t work unless enough funding is
227 Scott Morrison quoted by Rob Harris, “Bid to Close The Gap on Indigenous benchmarks has
'failed'”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bid-to-close-the-gap-on-indigenous-benchmarks-has-failed-
20200211-p53zug.html
228 Scott Morrison quoted by Rob Harris, Ibid.
229 See Australian Government, Productivity Commission, “Inquiry Report No. 84, Shifting the Dial”, 3
August 2017, pages 50-51: “Devolution [of health care decision making and management] to the
208
provided for a full solution. That will simply threaten all the advantage that
can be gained by giving communities back their autonomy. When it comes to
these issues, state and federal governments in a country like Australia
certainly are too big, far too remote and, at the political level at least, plainly
too incompetent to comprehend the problems, let alone fix them. The most
useful role they can play, particularly outside major capital cities, is to provide
the money. Beyond that they have no purpose. And when they seek to
intervene, their lack of expertise often just makes things worse. They spend
on the wrong things such as building completely inappropriate housing in
regional Australia230. Solutions are more affordable when organised locally
and if there are larger scale local issues such as homelessness in capital cities,
even these are best organised by local councils if they can be funded to ensure
that everyone in their area has a home. If the state and federal governments
took this approach of simply ensuring sufficient funding for housing (instead
of trying to measure their success by the number of people they exclude from
homeless shelters and the number of houses they build that are too hot for
any human to live in) and assisted councils to approve and build social and
affordable housing, they would make substantial savings in mental health
services, hospitalisation, policing and the justice system. When a person has
regional level can also partly address the perpetual contest between Australian, State and Territory
Governments about the role of the central government in orchestrating the system. A regional
approach would be a more tractable way of bringing the disparate sources of government funding
(and their assorted baggage of rules and demands) into a coherent package aimed at health outcomes
— an issue discussed further below. PHNs [Primary Health Networks] and LHNs [Local Hospital
Networks] would reach agreements that would offer greater certainty over periods that could span
several different governments at the Australian and State and Territory level. This is important
because the transition to an integrated system of patient care is an ongoing, long-term endeavour
that must continuously respond to changes in patient needs and technologies. Some PHNs and LHNs
have worked together to deliver integrated health — and where they do they have proved effective
for improving the coordination of care. For example, the Hunter Diabetes Alliance brought together a
multidisciplinary team of health professionals to manage patients’ type 2 diabetes. After being in the
program, there were large improvements in exercise rates, better medication management, weight
loss, improved self-management and lower glycated haemoglobin levels (the key measure of longer-
run adverse outcomes like coronary heart disease). And it cost less. However, such partnerships are
rare in Australia, a consequence of relatively weak financial incentives, underdeveloped governance
arrangements for their universal adoption and (based on feedback from stakeholders) insufficient
funding of PHNs for them to achieve their goals.”
230 See Laura Murphy-Oates and Lorena Allam, “Is central Australia becoming too hot for humans?”,
The Guardian, 18 December 2019, podcast accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/audio/2019/dec/18/is-central-australia-becoming-too-hot-for-humans
209
a home and the dignity of independence that comes with that, they are often
able to solve health and social problems for themselves. And as communities
link up to deliver the benefits of housing in their own areas (private
developers often help with this too), the social cohesion that can be built in
this process functions as a further saving for the state and the nation.
Solution No. 3 – In the environmental quadrant – Look for
more top driven coordination
When it comes to the environment, the top down approach of fiddling at the
edges of the problem, for instance by suddenly and selectively deciding to
prioritise the planting of a million trees (as the Berejiklian government did in
NSW), simply won’t cut it either. Here though, there is more ground for large
scale involvement by governments of all levels and more scope to realise
benefits that can arise from integrated planning for the quadruple bottom
line. In particular, integration between economic strategies and
environmental programs has enormous scope to deliver enhanced outcomes.
Given the extent to which global heating is impacting our economy, and vice
versa, the economic and environmental quadrants have reached a point
where they will overlap almost entirely in a sound national community futures
plan. The next few sections discuss ways of maximising the benefits of that
integration.
Integrating economic and environmental strategies
In state planning – I will briefly revert to the example of NSW again – the
problem has been that the government no longer thinks about integrating its
dispersed plans (where they still exist) for the economy, society, the
environment and for governance. In other words, they don’t think about the
quadruple bottom line. They think almost exclusively about two bits of two
parts of the quadruple bottom line, namely spatial development (for urban
populations) and finance (by which I mean the state or national budget
bottom line). In this arrangement of disrespect for inter- and intra-
governmental planning, there is almost nothing to guide selection of
worthwhile projects for better community or environmental outcomes. The
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Council of Australian Governments (COAG) does provide some selective
opportunities for cooperation between states and the Commonwealth, but
they have no overarching agenda, are tending to meet on an ad hoc basis, and
in 2017 transferred reporting on progress in their initiatives to the
Productivity Commission231 – which means they can basically ignore the
reporting. The Productivity Commission’s Dashboard Reports on the COAG’s
agenda items for Australia is a litany of failure. Across eight reporting areas at
the national level, the most recent reporting, which in many cases is not up to
date, shows that the COAG is failing in twice as many areas as it might be
succeeding. The following table is a summary of reported results for the COAG
as at 2020:
Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Dashboard Performance Report232
Performance – No. of Indicators
Unlikely Likely to
to have Negative have
Reporting area Not Mixed Improving
been met change been met
met results / On track
/ Not on (failure) /
track Achieved
Housing 2 1 1 1 2 1
Education 1 1 2 1 1
Skills 2 1 1
Health care 3 3 1 3 1
Disability 2 1
Indigenous 2 4 2
Infrastructure 1
Legal assistance 1
Total 8 12 5 3 10 4
The glaring gap here about the focus of COAG is that there is no focus
whatsoever on what they can do together about the environment. But even
if they might look sometimes at environmental matters, it would appear that
COAG pays no heed to the performance results anyway. This is an indictment
of the cooperation that goes on between governments in Australia. There is
231 See website for “Council of Australian Governments: COAG Performance reporting”, last accessed
in January 2020 at https://www.coag.gov.au/performance-reporting
232 Source: Australian Government Productivity Commission, COAG “Performance Reporting
Dashboard for Australia” website, last accessed January 2020 at
https://performancedashboard.d61.io/aus
211
no integration and little if any care for the country. Instead there are just
knee-jerk reactions by disassociated governments whenever information
emerges which suggests things are not getting better in terms of the
environment or wellbeing.
A good example of this is that when it became apparent in June 2019 that
the NSW Audit Office would release a scathing report about environmental
destruction caused by poor administration of the NSW Biodiversity
Conservation Act 2016, that state’s response was to make a quick
announcement of the program to fund planting a million new trees in the
cities and regional centres, using the help of school kids and local councils.
Good, but unnecessarily belated compared to what they might have thought
of doing if “environment” had been a word mentioned in the “Premer’s
Priorities” with reference to more than “litter reduction”. Nor is the planting
of a million urban trees a solution to the problem of massive loss of forest and
groundcover vital for conservation of water resources and biodiversity
experienced under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016. And nor is it a
solution to the problem of transitioning regional mining and agrarian
industries into new sustainable, diversified economic arrangements.
The fact is that if the NSW government thought more strategically about
environmental sustainability, they would write, and fund, far more effective
plans than their “20-Year Economic Vision for Regional NSW, 2018”. NSW –
the nation’s biggest economy – is being held back in economic development
because the state government simply doesn’t see the huge positive impact
that its own participation in environmental services and industries would have
on employment, regional development, Gross State Product and social
cohesion. Nor does COAG see it. Australia is a federated nation of states. It is
therefore absolutely vital for state governments to learn this lesson of the
need to think and behave more strategically and cooperatively for quadruple
bottom line sustainability. Their potential contribution to the overall economy
of the nation is in several ways greater than other levels of government. They
control more of the levers and enablers and their impact on the economy
through greater spending on these levers and enablers is substantial. When
they pull back, or fail to collaborate, they can have far greater potential to
slow the nation’s economy than the other levels of government.
The sustainability of Australia’s diverse but fragile environment depends
heavily on sound integrated planning – planning which fully integrates
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strategies for the economy and the environment. Governments, however, are
not set up to achieve this integration. They have no framework to do this and
COAG is not working as an integrating mechanism. Nor do they have an
appetite for working together in anything more than an ad hoc way, as and
when they are prompted by political crises. This means that communities right
across the nation need to become adept at integrating plans for the economy
and the environment. Based on current performance, governments are not
going to do this for us. That being so, communities need to skill up in planning
their own economy. This may sound unachievable. But we have it in our
power to do it if we choose. Chapter 7 is about how to build this power.
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Chapter 7 – Techniques for Developing a
National Plan for Australia’s Economy
In Australia, neither we nor our governments have ever developed a plan for
our national economy. At least, we have not developed a clear and
transparent one – one that gives us confidence in the future.
From time to time, political parties will tell us they have a plan, but rarely
are they specific about what it is. Sometimes political plans for our economy
will focus on one reform, such as the introduction of the GST. At other times
the purported plan is simply a pledge, such as former Prime Minister Tony
Abbott’s pledges in the 2013 federal election campaign to “fix Labor’s debt
and deficit disaster”, or repeal “Labor’s carbon tax”. Or it is Scott Morrison’s
promise in the 2019 election that his government’s budget surplus will save
us. But it could be argued that none of these things, even the singular
substantial reforms, are worthy of the name “plan”. Probably in Australia, the
example of a reform that comes closest to deserving the name of a “plan” is
the Prices and Incomes Accord struck between the Hawke government and
trade unions in the 1980s. Some insightful planning was evident between
government, business and unions in that period and the benefit to Australia
was quite extraordinary. But when the Accord was developed, things were
simpler. The world was not so globalised. The challenges were more local than
the massive challenges we are facing in the 21st century and could therefore
be a little more easily controlled by local action. In the 1980s in Australia we
had leaders who could pull levers within the economy and expect that it
would respond, albeit more slowly than we would prefer. The recession of
1991 is evidence that economies are stubborn and benefits can be slow in
coming. Economies are tough nuts to crack. But in the 21st century everything
is even tougher. It is more complicated and our national economy is so much
214
more exposed to international issues. We are in a very different century, not
just in time, but in circumstance and epoch.
In economic reform we know that conferencing and partnership works
best – as it did in the Accord, where the brains and better instincts of workers,
business and governments were all used. But the space for such partnering is
not being offered to us in the 21st century. In fact we have a government
actively working – via incessant attempts at legislation to close down trade
unionism – to ensure that the space for partnering is smaller than ever. In
2020 we are at the wrong end of a long period of top-down governance and
exclusion of workers in particular, but citizens in general, from planning. And
from that we have arrived at a point of higher inequality, which is negatively
affecting economic growth. At the same time – when our fortunes are
inextricably linked to the fortunes of other countries – we are not stepping up
to work with other nations as well as we might to participate in development
of a sustainable global future. This places us in a far more vulnerable position
than we might have expected at the turn of the century and we have arrived
there at a time when leadership is wanting.
In the 21st century we seem to have reverted to mini “plans”, if they can
be called that – a bit of GST reform here, a bit of surplus budgeting there, a
bit of income tax regression to satisfy business and the rich, and other
piecemeal policies (such as a carbon price) that we overturn with a new
government. Some of these mini plans are better than others, but even the
good ones are not linked in a manner that can boost their potential. These
mini plans are announced often without reference to a larger strategy that
they might be part of. They are provided without the benefit of a bigger
picture and are time limited to the here and now – the more so because we
often wreck them quickly after adopting them. They are also reactive rather
than proactive – designed to fix a failing economy (usually when problems are
already entrenched) rather than prevent the impacts that come from failing
to imagine a different way of organising the economy early enough. At their
worst, they are short-sighted political pitches, disconnected entirely from any
idea we might have of the real purpose of a strong economy. And they give us
absolutely no space to organise a just transition from a failing economy or
industry to a new economy and industrial opportunity.
We are sold these mini plans in bite-size pieces on the assumption that a
bite-size plan is more easily digestible by the untutored populace who in their
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“un-learned” state would not be capable of understanding much more. But
what this misses is the fact that we are quite capable of understanding what
sort of life we want for ourselves and our children and quite capable of
considering the pros and cons of options for the best way to set up or re-set
an economy according to our purpose. We are quite capable of connecting
the dots if we are given the space and information we need. Our politics is not
set up to provide either that space or information and in fact politicians often
have a vested interest in preventing such involvement in planning. But even
in the absence of inspiration and encouragement – indeed in the presence of
discouragement – we can organise this for ourselves without too much effort.
If we can succeed, we have a lot to gain.
Why might we choose to plan our own economy? I would suggest that
one substantial reason is because Australia’s economy in 2020 is on a knife
edge and we have no decent leadership in place that can be trusted to imagine
a way through a future that seems beset with more intractable challenges
than we have faced before – challenges of runaway global heating, pitched
battles in United Nations climate summits, unstable international trade
agreements, rampant exploitation of public assets and resources by
insufficiently regulated private sector greed and crime, and growing
inequality. Our economy could go either way in the next decade – towards an
entirely new basis for our prosperity; or it could suffer “a slow decline”233. But
we cannot trust that governments will set us on the path to sustainable
growth. Older generations are considering the very real prospect that we may
be the first generation since the Great Depression of 1929 who cannot be
confident that younger generations will be better off than their parents.
Piecemeal reform and political boast and bluster will not help us avoid the
worst of global heating, economic contraction and inequality. What is
required is an integrated plan to steer Australia towards a new, more
sustainable economy, one which supports the quality of life, health and
wellbeing we want for our children and the children of others. We are more
likely, at this time, to achieve this by bottom-up planning than by top-down
politics.
233 See CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”: “The latest ANO research
tells us Australia is at a crossroads – stride towards a more positive future outlook filled with growth,
or face a slow decline.”, page iv, Op.Cit.
216
Integrated Planning & Reporting provides a framework in which a plan for
a national economy can be efficiently developed by any Australian wishing to
participate. However, IP&R has never been used for this purpose before, so
there are some things we will need to teach ourselves about how to develop
a plan for an economy – one which sets out what we want to achieve via that
economy in our society, our environment and our governance. The following
Chapter discusses why and how we might develop this plan together, what
we might gain, and what we and our children are losing by not planning.
Solution No. 4 – In the economic quadrant – Interrogate
the prevailing economic narrative and then imagine a
better one
Guidelines for best practice Integrated Planning & Reporting have been
developed for local government to a standard that has made it possible in
local communities to achieve meaningful planning for better social,
environmental and governance futures. Many community planners in local
government now have excellent skills in facilitating development of these
plans, and they have considerable skills in developing guidelines and plans for
ethical governance.
No-one in local government, however, could lay claim to experience in
developing policies and strategies to deliver a better economic future for the
nation. Local council planners do influence local economic development. But
in IP&R there are no guidelines about how to work with communities to
develop a plan for the things that need to be done across the wider economy
to support those local efforts and community involvement in macro or
microeconomic planning basically stands at zero in Australia.
We have seen one leader who has re-shaped an entire economy and has
taught us all a fair bit about understanding the fundamentals and imagining
new approaches to our own economy. That leader was Paul Keating, a guy
who left school at fifteen and led the remaking of the Australian economy
from 1983 to 1996. That seminal transformation can be understood by
reading Mr Keating’s own writings about it, written after the full positive
217
effects of the changes had been brought home for us234. Regardless of
whether we all agree with Mr Keating’s version of history on this, the point is
that he did think about long waves and trends in our economy. Recognising
that the structure of the Australian economy had reached the end of its useful
life by the 1970s, he then worked with others to imagine a way to reset it and
achieved a massive change by explaining economics to Australians in layman’s
terms. The Hawke-Keating government took us through to extended
prosperity by keeping us in the loop on why and how restructuring was
necessary. In these explanations of economics, they were ably assisted by
great journalists of the time, particularly Ross Gittins and Max Walsh.
Paul Keating didn’t assume we needed to be talked down to. He assumed
he should be honest and direct with us. Often we didn’t like hearing what he
had to say and arguments about whether we were on the right track were
fierce. But debate was healthy and timely. It was even entertaining.
Australians are in a better position to engage with the dynamics of their
economy these days because Mr Keating credited us with intelligence,
eschewed paternalism, and refused to baffle us by leaving obscurantist jargon
unexplained. None of our leaders has been as open with us or as imaginative
since. And one result of this period of feisty debate is that we now know that
any of us can understand and actively engage with macro or microeconomic
issues, and that it doesn’t take a university education to do it.
What this means is that we do have the capacity to imagine the sort of
economic future we might want. We might not all have the answers on the
mechanics of achieving that economy, but:
• we can set objectives for it,
• we can determine which strategies we prefer, which ones we want
to avoid, and which ones will defeat our diverse aspirations,
• we can develop performance measures for it,
• we can check if it is delivering us a better lifestyle or not,
• we can develop our understanding of why and where it might not be
working according to our objectives and what we might adjust to fix
it as the need arises, and
234See PJ Keating, After Words: The Post Prime Ministerial Speeches, Allen & Unwin, 2011, especially
the speech titled “Australia: The New Economic Template”, pp. 491-501.
218
• we can hold our leaders to account for any problems of inequality or
environmental degradation aggravated by their failure to implement
our preferred economic approach.
Of course, if we do this here it will be a first. And because we haven’t
done it for ourselves before, our first steps in organising ourselves to be able
to do it will be something of an experiment. Community planning skills will
have to be adapted to a new purpose. The following section is therefore a lot
longer than sections about “Solutions” in other quadrants. It is longer because
the skills we need haven’t been nailed down before. But if we approach the
task by following a few logical steps for ethical planning we should be able to
generate an integrated planning framework and a skill set for developing the
type of economic future we want. In the economic quadrant that means
sharpening our skills in understanding where our economy is now and in
enlivening our dialogues on preferred economic directions. The logical steps
in this process are:
Step 1: Interrogate the prevailing economic narrative
Step 2: Assemble data to assess performance of the prevailing
narrative against key socioeconomic objectives
Step 3: Search for a sustainable basis for future growth
Step 4: Seek a new preferred socioeconomic arrangement
This chapter sets out what is involved in each of these steps. It is offered to
create a basis for best practice in community engagement for the economic
quadrant of an integrated national community futures plan for Australia.
Interrogating the prevailing economic narrative
Any plan for a nation’s economic future needs to take stock from time to time.
It needs to assess, at least at an overarching level, whether or not the
prevailing economic ideology – the narrative of what will deliver economic
success – is working according to its objectives. In modern developed
countries, no matter what their prevailing economic narrative might be at any
one point in time, these objectives usually roll up to being about:
a) economic growth (GDP),
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b) whether the benefits of that growth are being fairly shared by those
who have produced it (i.e., all of us, including those on welfare),
c) whether it is delivering and will continue to deliver the type of society
and wellbeing we want and the environment we need, and
d) whether the economic growth itself is sustainable.
Accordingly, if we want to plan for our socioeconomic future – i.e., an
economy that will deliver both wellbeing and a sustainable environment – we
need to start by assessing whether and how the prevailing economic narrative
is performing in relation to at least these four objectives.
In several developed countries in 2020, but most notably in the USA and
the UK since the 1980s and more lately in Australia, the prevailing economic
narrative is neoliberalism. As I said in Chapter 4, this narrative tells us that our
wellbeing arises exclusively from economic growth and that this growth can
only arise from:
• less government,
• less taxation (especially for the rich and for corporations),
• less public ownership or operation of assets and services,
• less welfare, and
• less regulation of markets and the natural environment.
Neoliberalism at its theoretical extreme is basically unregulated capitalism,
where government must get out of the way of corporations, where the
emphasis is on working to ensure few or no controls are imposed (even on
monopolies or oligopolies), and where no curbs exist on cheating or skewing
of the rules for property ownership (particularly patents or intellectual
property), contracts, bankruptcy, and market regulations.235 When standing
naked, neoliberalism gives capitalism a really bad name. It is about less
competition, not more. It is about more state subsidy to business, not
partnership. It is about less equality, not more. It is about corralling scarce
resources for the few, not the many. It is about concentration of market
power. And it is about concentration of wealth in the hands of corporations,
leaving everyone else to fend for themselves, unassisted. Neoliberals are all
staunch believers in and promoters of the notion that if business is doing well,
235
For an insight into capitalism and how it can be affected by removal of regulation and the
departure of government from regulation, see Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the
Few, Icon Books and Penguin Random House, 2016.
220
and only if business is doing well, we will all do well – eventually. In Australia,
the Business Council of Australia epitomises this neoliberal mindset by
insisting, among other things, that the “the actions that will improve our lives
… require … creating the environment where Australians can succeed because
employers are doing well.”236
However, at this time in our history, anyone who reads the daily news,
from the conservative tabloids and talk-backs to the progressive media, can
detect that the argument for neoliberalism is under siege. And they can detect
that it is under siege from critics because it is failing to work well for more and
more of us as the decades pass. The rampant laissez faire approach of
neoliberalism over almost forty years has done nothing but give us the Global
Financial Crisis of 2008, from which the world is yet to recover, and inequality
is rising continuously. In Australia:
• Wages have stagnated. During the GFC years from 2008 and up until
June 2014, annual growth in wages (hourly rates of pay excluding
bonuses) averaged 3.3%. Since 2015, annual growth in wages has
averaged only 2.1%237.
• At the time of writing, Australia for the first time in over 25 years had
entered a period of successive quarters of per capita recession.
Growth of GDP per capita averaged -0.2% in the four quarters to June
2019238.
• Growth in GDP in Australia has also been slowing. It was slower in
the last five years of the decade to 2020 than at any time since 1960:
o Average annual growth in GDP between 1961 and 2007 (just
before the GFC) was 3.8%. During the GFC average annual growth
dropped to 2.6%.
236 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 8,
accessible at
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/bca/pages/4678/attachments/original/1555035404/Volume
_One_Singles.pdf?1555035404
237 Source: ABS, 6345.0, Table 1 Column S, derived, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6345.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
238 Source: ABS, 5206.0 - Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, Jun
2019, Table 1, Column AM, derived, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
221
o From 2015, growth in Australia’s GDP slowed further to an
average of 2.4% per annum239.
o In June 2019 we hit what we might hope turns out to be rock
bottom with an annual growth in GDP of 1.4%240. Although this
was later revised upwards to 1.6%, it was still lower than during
the worst year of the GFC (1.7% in 2009)241.
This stagnation and the suboptimal distribution of the benefits of capitalism
is a world-wide problem and although Australia came later than other nations
to the reversal of national fortunes, it is now no exception.
In the decade to 2020 fewer and fewer Australians have gained access to
the wealth that we were promised would “trickle down” to us if only we let
business owners have their head to set markets up the way they prefer (i.e.,
entirely unregulated) rather than in a manner that ensures a level playing field
for competition. After forty years of neoliberalism’s having eaten away at our
best protection mechanisms against anti-competitive behaviour, more and
more of us are actually going backwards in terms of shares of national wealth
and productivity. In the five years to 2020 we entered a period where growth
in wages fell below growth in GDP, something that had not occurred since the
ABS established its records of a Wage Price Index in 1997, collecting figures
on changes in hourly rates of pay242. Prior to 2014 annual wage growth
averaged 3.5% while annual growth in GDP averaged 3.1% – meaning that the
benefits of growth were being shared between employers and employees
who had worked together to create that growth. After 2014 annual wage
growth averaged only 2.1% while annual growth in GDP averaged 2.4%243 –
indicating a significant reduction in workers’ share of GDP growth. The
consequences of this change are bigger than what may appear from the
statistics. Each time less of the growth in GDP is distributed back to workers it
239 Source: ABS, 5206.0, Table 1 Column B, derived, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Mar%202018?OpenDocument
240 Source: ABS, 5206.0, Table 1, Column B, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
241 Source: ABS, 5206.0, Table 1, Column B, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
242 See Australian Bureau of Statistics: 6345.0 - Wage Price Index, Australia, June 2019, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6345.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
243 Source: ABS 5206.0 Table 1 Column B, Op. Cit., and ABS 6345.0 Table 1 Column S, Op. Cit.
222
has flow on effects to future GDP results. It tends to lock in reductions in
economic growth because it flattens demand.
At this point it is time to acknowledge that neoliberalism is not
performing in terms of either equality or growth and is due (if not well
overdue) for a review. But to build a decent plan for an economy that will
work for more of us, it is necessary to start with decent data about the things
we know we need to fix, namely:
• the inequality that is growing under neoliberalism, and
• the theory of economic growth itself, or at least our ideas about what
might generate sustainable growth.
A national community futures planning process can give us the opportunity to
fix these things before it is too late. That is one of the advantages of planning
over politics. Planning can reduce many of the shocks that come from not
looking at a problem soon enough. Politics will almost always look at a
problem too late, which makes solutions cost much more than they otherwise
would. If we simply rely on politics, we end up missing opportunities, such as
the opportunities we have missed in the last ten years to expand rare earth
mining244 or to switch to more sustainable and profitable agriculture and
water management or to capitalise on our capacity to establish exportable
renewable energy. At this time, it is even more important to grab
opportunities to fix problems arising from neoliberalism, because if they are
not fixed our entire system of capitalism is headed for the rocks, at least
according to our more forward thinking academics and researchers.
Australia is now awash with writers and think tanks that have conflicting
views on neoliberalism. On the critical side we have the Australia Institute,
Per Capita, the Grattan Institute (on some days), the entire progressive press,
and all their progressive international colleagues such as Robert Reich and
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. On the other side we have proponents for
neoliberalism including the mining industry funded Institute of Public Affairs,
the Business Council of Australia, the Grattan Institute (on some days), and
the entire conservative press. Australia’s Prime Minister in 2020, Scott
Morrison, clearly falls into the latter camp, having delivered his calls to
244See Peter Hartcher, “Morrison government’s big stick should be pointing at itself”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 17 September 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-
government-s-big-stick-should-be-pointing-at-itself-20190916-p52rp9.html
223
business leaders for some years to identify where regulations can be loosened
to unleash what he calls the “animal spirits”245 of our economy. We have even
seen a Member of Parliament in 2019246 affirming his allegiance to the Queen
while gripping with a flourish (presumably as an alternative to the more
frequently favoured Bible) a copy of Capitalism and Freedom by Dr Milton
Friedman, credited as the father of neoliberal style market freedoms and flat
taxation. Heady stuff, on all sides!
The lines are clearly drawn between the adversaries on this. Our own
Prime Minister in 2020 probably enunciates the views of the pro-neoliberals
more clearly than most. Against the great freedoms and “undenied human
spirit”247 of neoliberalism trumpeted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan, Mr Morrison has posed the great evils of what he calls
“Drachmanomics”, a name he has used to characterise Greece and its
economy as a “socialist inspired edifice”248. In a speech on this to the Institute
of Public Affairs in 2015, Mr Morrison’s point was that Greece’s economy,
which had then collapsed to the point of needing a bail-out by the EU and
others, came undone “amongst other contributing [but unspecified] factors”
due to “the election of the Socialist PASOK Government under Andreas
Papandreou in 1981. PASOK ruled Greece for 19 of the next 22 years,
enshrining the modern Greek age of welfare entitlement.”249 Mr Morrison
extended his point by saying that this socialist government spiraled Greece
into penury by significantly increasing the ratio of debt to GDP while
expanding welfare entitlements to unaffordable levels.
Looking at Greece’s fate from this angle, it is undeniable that Greece’s
policies of borrowing to support unaffordable recurrent expenditure (in their
245 Scott Morrison, Address to the West Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 24 June 2019,
available at https://www.pm.gov.au/media/wa-chamber-commerce-and-industry-address
246 See Van Badham, “Labor’s support for tax cuts is an unfathomable betrayal of principle”, The
Guardian, 5 July 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/05/labors-support-for-tax-cuts-is-an-
unfathomable-betrayal-of-principle?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other The MP who gripped his Friedman
was Liberal Tim Wilson.
247 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, “Positive welfare and compassionate conservatism –
address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Melbourne”, 22 July 2015, accessible at
https://formerministers.dss.gov.au/15775/positive-welfare-and-compassionate-conservatism-
address-to-the-institute-of-public-affairs-melbourne/
248 Scott Morrison, Ibid.
249 Scott Morrison, Ibid.
224
case, welfare) is not an economic strategy likely to be sustainable for long. But
these policies are not peculiar to socialist countries and to imply that they are
is to do nothing more than reduce the debate about the comparative benefits
of different approaches to economic management for purely ideological
purposes and political gain. Broader facts that Mr Morrison could have
mentioned (but did not) are that the US, Singapore and Japan all have debt to
GDP ratios that exceed 100%. At 234%, Japan’s is even higher than Greece’s
(181%)250. Nor is it the case that any miserable consequences that might (or
might not) arise from those policies are peculiar to socialism and not
neoliberalism. Mr Morrison lamented the effect of “Drachmanomics” by
reporting that:
Today, those who the Greek Socialists claimed would be the
beneficiaries of their welfare reforms, have become their victims.
Drachmanomics has shut the ATMs, forced pensioners into the streets
in tears and economically cursed at least one Greek generation and
perhaps more.251
Oddly enough, aside from the point about shutting the ATMs, this would stand
as a valid description of the fate of many under neoliberalism and the policies
of austerity252 that have been imposed on so many across previously wealthy
countries as a result of the GFC. This austerity was not caused by socialism, or
by any other “ism”, other than neoliberalism – that is to say, it was caused by
grossly unregulated capitalism and corporate greed. The effects of that have
been so profound as to cast many more in the USA, the UK and Australia onto
the streets in homelessness and increase our poverty rates substantially. The
2016 Census of Australia shows that since 2006, just before the GFC, almost
27,000 extra people in Australia have been thrown onto the streets as
homeless253. We could half fill the seats of one of Sydney’s unnecessary new
250 World Population Review, ”Debt to GDP Ratio by Country 2019”, accessible at
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-national-debt/
251 Scott Morrison, “Positive welfare and compassionate conservatism – address to the Institute of
Public Affairs, Melbourne”, Op. Cit.
252 Austerity policies aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases,
or a combination of both. They generally increase unemployment as government spending falls.
253 Census figures show that between 2006 and 2011 an extra 12,700 people had been made homeless
in Australia and between 2011 and 2016 another 14,000 were made homeless, bringing the total
homeless on census night 2016 to 116,427, a 29.8% increase since 2006. Source ABS 2049.0 - Census
225
football stadiums254 just with those extra people, every night. We could fill
more than two of those stadiums every night with the total number who were
homeless on the 2016 census night. Indeed, it is not only in countries with
socialist governments or “Drachmanomics” that the “economically cursed”
are being cast out in tears. It is happening in Australia. And yet our
conservative neoliberal government is not of a mind to accept any
responsibility. Instead the preferred current government narrative is to insist
that Australians should put a “positive spin on homelessness”255. A bit of
poverty and homelessness won’t harm you; it’s good for you. It will re-ignite
your “undenied human spirit”. Let’s look on the bright side of homelessness,
said our federal Minister for Homelessness and Community Housing in 2019.
For Seinfeld fans, this is equivalent to George Costanza’s attempt to put a
“positive spin on manure”. Pretty soon we’ll be saying, “How good is
homelessness!”
Obviously this narrative needs interrogation, and quick. Or what have we
come to? Is this really the attitude we want our elected leaders to proudly
espouse? Friedman fans may, with good reason, be intensely opposed to
“Drachmanomics”, but socialism doesn’t have a monopoly on economic
misery. The “human spirit” is flagging for many Australians and many
developed countries despite their not having socialist governments. There is
no evidence that the “human spirit” (whatever that may be) has been
released at all by the tightening of welfare and the “cruel to be kind”
economic stick. To be fair, there is no disputing Mr Morrison’s view that:
Social justice … must be funded, it must be measured, it must be
targeted, it must be delivered by a competent government. It must be
sustainable and affordable and have the integrity necessary to sustain
taxpayer confidence. Above all, there must be a strong economy to
support it.256
of Population and Housing: Estimating homelessness, 2016,
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/2049.02016?OpenDocument
254 See the section below on “What really happens when governments vacate markets?”
255 Luke Howarth, Minister for Homelessness and Community Housing, July 2019,
https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2019/07/i-want-to-put-a-positive-spin-on-it-homelessness-
ministers-comments-cause-outrage/
256 Scott Morrison, Op. Cit.
226
But there are several countries that we could look to that are achieving strong
economies with the best standards of living in the world while increasing their
spending on welfare, providing free education and, incidentally, having higher
taxes and, if they deem it necessary, higher debt. Scandinavian countries
come to mind. Unless our leaders want to sell us short, they can all look at
these other economies and compare them with “Drachmanomics” or with
socialism or with neoliberalism. They can all ask: which economies are
delivering what their populations want in quality of life? How are they doing
it? Would it produce better results for us?
A failure to ask this sort of question narrows our chances of diversifying
and strengthening our economy. Economic hubris of this kind – crowing over
another economy’s demise for mere political and ideological point scoring –
is not the mark of an open and thoughtful custodian, as the passage of time
since Mr Morrison’s speech on “Drachmanomics” has proved. Had Mr
Morrison been able to foresee that after five continuous years of his economic
stewardship in Australia, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would report
that Australia’s GDP growth for the calendar year of 2019 would not just hit
an alarming low but would be lower than Greece’s257, he might not have
crowed with such alacrity.
Our leaders are regrettably not of a mind to plunder the better
performing economies of the world for their smarter ideas on achieving
prosperity for all. They are steeped in ideological wars. Nevertheless, we are
perfectly free to look around the world and consider what has worked and
what hasn’t.
Australia is in a uniquely fortunate position, among developed
economies, about the timing of the deterioration of its economic strength.
We have had the luxury of being able to sit back and watch what severe
austerity policies have done to other nations and we can compare that to
what’s happened here under different policies. The nation that we can most
easily relate to for this purpose is the United Kingdom.
The call for Brexit in the UK is a direct result of the GFC and the policies
of austerity imposed by the British government in their attempts to deal with
257Shane Wright and Dominic Powell, “Australian economy tipped to grow slower than Greece as
signs show tax cuts haven't worked”, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australian-economy-tipped-to-grow-slower-than-greece-
as-signs-show-tax-cuts-haven-t-worked-20191015-p530uv.html
227
the Crisis. But the austerity did not soften the effects of the GFC for the British
people. It deepened and extended the effects, demanding that the poor and
the welfare dependent (dependent because of the GFC) bear the full and
painful burden of restoring the economy. The corporations, stock traders and
banks, which caused the welfare dependency, were not required to make any
restitution. Ten years after the GFC, the upshot of this failure to properly
share the task of restoring the economy is a hopelessly divided nation. Blame
has been shifted anywhere but towards those who caused the disaster and
Britons have not been given a chance to address their real economic
problems. Attention has been diverted from the real internal problems by
blaming Europe, immigrants and workers themselves. Growth has slowed and
persists at the lowest levels seen since the 1950s258. Britain’s GDP growth has
weakened every ten years since neoliberalism was introduced in the 1980s,
reaching its lowest rates in the ten years to 2019. No recovery is in sight. This
low level of growth is not enough to deliver prosperity for all, and Britons now
find themselves squabbling for shares of what little growth comes along. A
massive fight is underway between those who believe all growth gains should
be distributed to shareholders and those who believe the gains should be
ploughed back into investments and better wages for all (i.e., for the promised
“trickle down”). There is no plan to stimulate growth itself and no idea of
where new opportunities might come from. Instead there is avoidance of the
issues, an aversion of the eyes from the unprecedented challenge of being a
small country in a globalised world with no trade agreements in place and no
bargaining power. On the horizon is an imaginable break-up of a once united
kingdom and a possible subjection of much of their national health system to
predatory takeover by a rapacious American private sector.
By contrast, Australia avoided the worst impacts of the GFC in large part
by not imposing austerity. We avoided it by using fiscal stimulus, the polar
opposite to austerity. At a time when the USA and UK, in the grip of the
neoliberal ethos, were ripping public investment out of their economies, we
were injecting public money into ours. At the same time as the UK was
258See Trading Economics, “GDP Annual Growth Rate in the United Kingdom averaged 2.44 percent
from 1956 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 9.70 percent in the first quarter of 1973 and a
record low of -6.10 percent in the first quarter of 2009. … Britain's gross domestic product expanded
1.2 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2019, slowing from 1.8 percent in the previous
period and missing market consensus of 1.4 percent.”
228
slashing its community support and welfare programs in order to prioritise
the repayment of national debt, we were taking on debt and issuing
government bonds to invest in local infrastructure. This debt was taken on by
both the progressive government in power in Australia when the GFC hit and
extended further by the subsequent conservative government. For all Scott
Morrison’s avowed disapproval of “Drachmanomics” and the evils of debt and
enormous debt to GDP ratios, it is apparent that he too saw the virtue of using
debt to stimulate our economy, especially when the debt is cheap. We now
have both sides of politics to thank for their use of debt over the last decade,
with:
• the Labor government cushioning us against economic crisis and
austerity by tripling our very low levels of debt in 2008 from $60
billion to $257 billion in 2012; and
• the Liberal National Party government further doubling our national
debt from $257 billion to $541 billion in by June 2019259.
We also have both sides of politics to thank for managing our debt to GDP
ratio well, compared to countries such as the US, Japan, Singapore and
Greece. While their debt to GDP ratios are all well over 100%, Australia’s was
kept to 30% by the Labor government after the GFC and rose only to 40%
under the Liberal Government after 2013260. Compared to these other
countries, Australia can easily afford more debt and it is irresponsible to be
forcing those on welfare to bear the burden of paying down our comparatively
low debt, when debt and a reasonable progressive taxation system could be
used to create the jobs that those on welfare need and that will revitalise the
economy itself, paying us all back for our collective investment.
Australians can now judge for themselves which of all these diverse
strategies worked better to provide a growing economy and to cushion us in
global crises: the strategies variously applied in Australia since the mid 1980s,
or the neoliberal strategies imposed on Britons. But even so, Australia is now
259 Source: Australian Government, Australian Office of Financial Management,
https://www.aofm.gov.au/data-hub via Wikipedia, source quoted as “Commonwealth of Australia.
Retrieved 7 August 2019”, last viewed September 2019 at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_government_debt
260 Source: Australian Office of Financial Management, via “Trading Economics”, “Australian
Government Debt to GDP, last viewed September 2019 at
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/government-debt-to-gdp
229
at risk of slipping into recession in part because austerity has actually come to
us slowly and insidiously by the back door. It has been slipped in under the
cover of shibboleths like “the best form of welfare is a job” or “the age of
entitlement is over”261, and under crass and callous assertions that welfare
needs to be austere enough to push the purported “leaners”262 out of their
supposed laziness and leeching complacency, no matter how much poverty
that causes. Those who we are told want to spend their whole lives on
welfare, and those who ostensibly want to stay working in low paid jobs
(when, according to one of our latest prime ministers, they could just go out
and “get a better job”263) must, apparently, be sacrificed and sold into poverty
for their own sakes and for the sake of our economic growth, regardless of
whether mass desertion of low paid work would deprive us of nurses,
teachers, aged care and child care workers, manufactures, public transport,
public spaces cleansing, sanitary services, and hundreds of other lowly paid
but essential services. But this perversely justified austerity doesn’t result in
growth of the economy. On the contrary, it has significant contractionary
effects. While those on welfare and those on low wages have next to nothing
left to spend after they have paid their housing costs, the economy necessarily
shrinks, especially if governments are simultaneously stifling or pulling out of
fiscal stimulus programs, infrastructure developments and services.
Australians are now suffering what Britons have gone through. The poor are
being targeted and expected to sacrifice everything to pay down national debt
all in the name of a strong economy, even though that debt is quite
sustainable, even advisable. When the burden of producing a strong economy
becomes as unfair as this, it is time to ask questions like: “Strong for whom?”
261 Joe Hockey, Treasurer of Australia in 2014: “The age of entitlement is over, and the age of personal
responsibility has begun'', quoted in Mark Kenny, “Hockey calls end to ‘age of entitlement’”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 4 February 2014, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/hockey-
calls-end-to-age-of-entitlement-20140203-31xgl.html
262 Joe Hockey, Treasurer of Australia in 2014 divided Australia into “lifters” and “leaners”. He stated
that “we are a nation of lifters not leaners” but the distinction stuck as a detrimental slur on the
unemployed. See Peter Martin, “Hockey's dangerous legacy: We're neither lifters nor leaners”, The
Age, 18 September 2015, accessible at https://www.theage.com.au/opinion/hockeys-dangerous-
legacy-were-neither-lifters-nor-leaners-20150918-gjpeh6.html
263 Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australia, in Parliament 19 June 2018, reported in “‘Entitled to
get a better job’: Turnbull on hypothetical aged care worker”, Aged Care Insite, 20 June 2018
accessible at https://www.agedcareinsite.com.au/2018/06/entitled-to-get-a-better-job-turnbull-on-
hypothetical-aged-care-worker/
230
and “Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by strangling and underpaying our
social services sector?”
In Australia we have arrived at a point where economic growth benefits
the few, not the many. It is the same as Britain. Growth is slowing and we are
squabbling over who gets the shares of what little growth there is to share.
The poor are not winning anything at all in this fight even though they
contribute to economic growth, both when they are dependent on welfare
and/or when they have a career in low-paid work providing welfare and social
services.
Australia’s 2020 Prime Minister said in 2016, when he was still the
Treasurer, that:
I do not want my kids to know what a recession is like [Mr Morrison’s
emphasis].264
He’s not alone there. I don’t know of anyone who would say they want their
kids to suffer a recession. But the likelihood is that they will know a recession
as long as governments persist with neoliberal strategies that put too much
money into the pockets of too few and far too little into the pockets of the
rest of us. And some of us will “know what a recession is like” much more than
others. Mr Morrison’s children are among the more privileged by birth and
wealth and would be significantly less likely than others to feel the full brunt
of a recession, especially one generated by means of austerity combined with
a narrow focus on debt repayment. Some “isms” visit the misery of recessions
on less of us; some on more. Neoliberalism, by definition, visits misery on
more, but it is designed to quarantine a privileged few from the misery. And
in that regard it is working, the world over.
Unfortunately, as I have already indicated, Australia’s government of
2020 is quite averse to interrogating the prevailing economic narrative. We
have a federal government that is fully convinced of the wisdom of neoliberal
ideology, presumably because it works for them. Moreover, they have
successfully spooked the Labor opposition into giving up much of the fight
against key tenets of neoliberalism including those that:
• erode the tax base,
264Seven National News, “Joe Hockey's 'lifters & leaners' becomes Scott Morrison's 'taxed & taxed-
nots'”, 25 August 2016, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDKMmJ_jdM
231
• prevent progressive tax reform,
• introduce more regressive taxation, and
• support enormous taxpayer subsidisation of industries which are not
commercially viable and which undermine our economic strength
and longer term sustainability (such as coal mines).
The prevailing style of politics in Australia for the last twenty years – wedge
politics – has really worked well to deaden discussion among our leaders of
the performance of neoliberalism and any alternatives.
But at the beginning of any national planning process it really shouldn’t
matter what economic narrative is in play. Even a successful one should be
interrogated. Neoliberalism is not a success, but even if it were producing
better results than it is, it would still be time to demand that it be
interrogated. There is really no argument that neoliberalism hasn’t been given
a fair go. Forty years of it in the UK and the USA should have ironed out the
bugs about which the progressives have complained. But it hasn’t. That being
so the relevant question is: how do we, ourselves, go about interrogating it to
generate a better approach to our economic future? It can be hard to figure
out where to begin but no matter where we start, we need good data about
our economy’s performance in relation to the four objectives I set out at the
start of this section, particularly the objectives of fair sharing of benefits and
the sustainability of growth. The next two sections are about those data.
Assembling the data to assess performance against key
socioeconomic objectives
Any economic plan or ideological system is meant to improve life for us all and
should be measured honestly on the basis of whether it is doing that.
Essentially, community futures planning in the economic quadrant is about
looking for a system to ensure a better economic future for more of us, for
the group that are missing out under the current ideology. However,
Australians have run into a few troubles getting a decent handle on the right
data, especially about inequality.
You know we are really in trouble with inequality when even the
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) takes fright at its own figures and tries to
put a positive spin on, indeed even gratuitously distorts the meaning of, its
232
own statistical evidence about inequality. In July 2019, the ABS put out two
media releases accompanying its publication of data from the “2017–18
Survey of Income and Housing” – Australia’s largest survey of income and
wealth265. The media releases were headlined:
• “Inequality stable since 2013-14” (meaning both income inequality
and wealth inequality); and
• “Average household wealth tops $1 million”.
In the body of the releases the ABS stated that “income and wealth inequality
had remained relatively stable since 2013–14.”
Lovely! Excellent news. Except that the actual data presented by the ABS
showed that income inequality was not exactly stable; it had increased, albeit
slightly. And that while the average wealth (as opposed to income) per
household might now be over $1 million – a fact which when highlighted by
the ABS caused some of the less analytical economic journalists to run
headlines like “Australia a nation of millionaires for the first time in history”266
– the truth is that only 30% of households have wealth over $1 million. That’s
quite a long way from a whole nation.
Now, in a report that is about income and wealth inequality, it is
important to avoid putting spins on data that make it look as if things are
stable or getting more equal, when they are not, or we are getting wealthier,
when most of us are not and many of us are actually going backwards. The
slight deterioration on income inequality between 2015 and 2018 may not be
statistically significant, but the longer term trend is continuing in the wrong
direction and the continued deterioration of income inequality since 2003 is
significant enough to give us pause.267 (See the table on the next page for a
265 ABS, Media Release, 12 July 2019, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/6523.0~2017-
18~Media%20Release~Inequality%20stable%20since%202013–14%20(Media%20Release)~20
266 See “Australian now a nation of millionaires”, The Australian, 12 July 2019. Accessible only if you
subscribe to this newspaper.
267 Planners and economists may differ as to what is significant in statistics. An economist will consider
what is statistically significant in a trend in the same way as a statistician would, but a long term
planner will necessarily prefer to attend to whatever the statistics might be saying as to the early
stages of a trend, hoping to catch the problem before it gets any worse. As an example of an
economist’s approach to statistics on inequality there is Ross Gittins’ view in early 2020: “Contrary to
any impression you may have gained our inequality in income hasn’t worsened a lot over the past 30
years. And, although our household wealth (assets minus debts) is a lot more unequal than our
incomes, it’s low by rich-world standards.” This is a necessary “glass half full” approach for an
233
bit more context than the ABS chose to provide.) It is this longer term trend
that we need to look at if we are to assess the performance of neoliberalism
in delivering better socioeconomic conditions and wealth sufficient for all our
aspirations. The truly relevant fact here is not that things have been “stable”
over the short term but that more of us have been getting poorer in a long
term trend in relation to both income and wealth (although on income we are
losing out more slowly). So far from enjoying a stable or more equal society,
the facts of this decline, as reported by the more fastidious economic
journalists, are that:
• At The Guardian – “The wealthiest 25% of Australians have increased
their income by nearly double that of median household incomes,
while the wealth holdings of the poorest 20% of households has
actually declined.”268
• At the ABC – “The average net worth of the top 20 per cent of
households is more than 93 times that of the lowest 20 per cent –
some $3.2 million compared to just $35,200.”269
• At the Sydney Morning Herald – “The wealth of the Average
Australian household has surged past $1 million but low-income
families have not seen any increase in their net worth for more than
a decade … wealth inequality increased over the past two years and
is now at its highest level since the survey began in 1993-94.”270
economist who is attempting for good reason to assist Australians to appreciate their wealth. See
“The magic of capitalism: you’re working less time to buy your daily bread”, Sydney Morning Herald,
26 February 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-magic-of-
capitalism-you-re-working-less-time-to-buy-your-daily-bread-20200225-p5440y.html. However, long
term community strategic planners have a different purpose and will necessarily look at a 30 year
trend of worsening inequality as a useful warning and as a prompt to strategy development, hoping to
arrest the trend before it gets any worse and becomes significant in the statistical sense.
268 Greg Jericho, “Saying $200,000 isn’t rich is stupid – and Labor should know better”, The Guardian,
12 July 2019 accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/jul/12/saying-
200000-isnt-rich-is-stupid-that-labor-says-it-is-extraordinary and “ABS’s shameful distortion of the
truth shows why good journalists see beyond the spin”, The Guardian, 1 September 2019, accessible
at https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/sep/01/abss-shameful-distortion-of-
the-truth-shows-why-good-journalists-see-beyond-the-spin
269 Stephen Long and Michael Janda, “Rich are getting richer, but stagnating wages mean income
inequality is steady, ABC News, 12 July 2019, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-
12/household-income-and-wealth-abs-data-shows-rich-are-richer/11302696
270 Shane Wright and Eryk Bagshaw, “Revealed: the households with surging wealth and the
households standing still”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 July 2019, accessible at
234
In the ABS’s own words in the fine print of their media release:
• In 2017–18, the wealthiest 20 per cent of households still held over
60 per cent of all household wealth … the lowest 20 per cent
controlled less than 1 per cent of all household wealth.271
Mean income per week actually fell for those in the lowest quintile in ABS’s
2017-18 Survey – not just relative to other quintiles but in raw and real terms
– and as far as shares of income go, the only quintile that increased its share
was the top quintile. The other four all stayed the same or fell.272 None of the
actual figures justifies a rosy spin in a headline.
I will leave aside any speculation as to why the ABS, in its “aim to show
key findings”, felt it necessary to spin those findings in such a way as to divert
attention from the key facts.273 Suffice to say that they must have had fairly
deep concerns about the effect of their data on Australia’s mood (I won’t say
the government’s image) to go to the trouble of trying to distract us from the
fact that the richest 20% have got substantially richer over time, while the
poor have got substantially poorer.
The following table provides the ABS data for the actual changes in
income and wealth inequality over the past 15 years274. Income inequality is
generally measured by an internationally recognised indicator called the “Gini
coefficient”. The closer the coefficient is to zero, the less inequality.
Movement toward a value of “1” means inequality is increasing within that
population. Draw your own conclusions about our path to economic equality.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-households-with-surging-wealth-and-the-
households-standing-still-20190712-p526js.html
271 ABS, Media Release, 12 July 2019, Op. Cit.
272 ABS, 6523.0 - Household Income and Wealth, Australia, 2017-18, Data Cube 1 – Household income
and distribution – Australia, comparing Columns P and Q, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6523.02017-18?OpenDocument
273 The necessity for positive spin was the subject of candid internal deliberations within the ABS,
details of which emerged after release of internal emails under a Freedom of Information application.
See Paul Karp, “ABS drops reference to worsening wealth inequality to craft a 'good story'”, The
Guardian, 28 August 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/28/abs-drops-
reference-to-worsening-wealth-inequality-to-craft-a-good-story
274 Source, ABS, 6523.0 - Household Income and Wealth, Australia, 2017-18,
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6523.02017-18?OpenDocument
235
Inequality in 2003/04 2015/16 2017/18
Australia
Income inequality 0.306 0.323 0.328
Wealth inequality 0.573 0.605 0.621
If our task is to plan for a better future, we need to attend to the key
indicators of performance of the prevailing economic narrative. One key
indicator is inequality and on this, neoliberalism in Australia is obviously
performing poorly. Rosy spins on data have no place in planning. They do
nothing but stop us from planning soon enough for a better, cheaper way
through to ongoing prosperity. Hence, rule number one – get the data right
on whatever it is you think we should be measuring and face up squarely to
what it is telling you, without the political blinkers.
As I said above, one of the other key indicators of an economy’s
performance and capacity is whether it is delivering growth or not. Here too,
we need good data, which we have and which any of us can access. But
figuring out what it means, particularly whether it means growth is
sustainable, is a challenge. Still, if you look at figures about growth in the
context of a broader based plan, we can all easily sense which way the wind
is blowing. In the next section I want to show how national community futures
planning is our best tool in the never-ending search for sustainable economic
growth.
Searching for a sustainable basis for future growth
As I have already said, this whole integrated planning process is about
grabbing the advantage that comes from thinking ahead – well ahead. That
really comes into play when it comes to thinking about where economic
growth may come from in future. We can’t expect that growth will land in our
laps, particularly when our prevailing economic theory is itself under stress.
The prevailing theory is that economic growth is all, that if GDP isn’t
growing then we cannot sustain our populations, and that growth must
therefore be pursued indefinitely. But you don’t have to be an economist to
have developed a dim fear that our ability to keep growing may be reaching
its limit as we continue to populate the planet and outstrip the capacity of the
natural environment to sustain us. Extinction rebellions are not just about
236
fears for flora and fauna, they are about a sense of our own extinction. We
can sense that, in our attachment to ever-increasing consumption patterns as
our sole means of achieving economic growth, we might be consuming, not
just the Earth, but ourselves. These rebellions are the crystallisation of a sense
that economic growth won’t prevent our death, it may cause it. “We are living
in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and
fairy tales of eternal economic growth” said Greta Thunberg in 2019275. And
more of us each day are sensing that she might be right.
This sense of apprehension, of what we hope is a distant and still
avoidable catastrophe, may well grow into an unmanageable panic unless we
think about it now. It is becoming more unsettling for many of us, in part,
because economists have struggled to find an alternative to the growth model
of economics (although alternatives are emerging)276 and in the main we are
still being forced to assume that economic growth is the only way of achieving
prosperity. This places us uncomfortably in a situation where on one hand we
have politicians who promise us that growth is vital and that it will continue
under their management, but on the other we can see the consequences of
excessive consumption and must at least occasionally wonder how long the
planet can support us all if we keep managing it the way we are. What
happens if economic growth ceases or is no longer possible due to resource
exhaustion? It is one of those questions that sometimes is too difficult to
contemplate. But failure to engage with this will kill any plan (and possibly the
planet, for that matter) stone dead. It will make planning worthless.
That being so, it is important at this point in the economic narrative to
figure out where the environment and economic quadrants intersect. Today
this isn’t hard, because given the state of play with the planet and the
imminent exhaustion of many of our natural resources, these two quadrants
are now overlapping almost entirely. Integrated planning for both the
economy and the environment has never been more vital than it is now. The
former cannot be saved without saving the latter. Unfortunately, we have a
federal government in Australia and some state governments that are
275 Greta Thunberg, Address to the United Nations, “Nature Now”, 20 September 2019, Youtube,
accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S14SjemfAg
276 See George Monbiot, “Finally a breakthrough alternative to growth economics – the doughnut”.
The Guardian, 12 April 2017, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/12/doughnut-growth-economics-book-
economic-model
237
shunting the environmental quadrant aside in favour of the economy, as
though they can be managed independently. They are not interrogating
consumption patterns or looking for new ways to manage consumption. On
the contrary they are speeding up consumption. Land clearing laws which I
discussed in Chapter 4 are a good example.
Fortunately, there are some in Australia’s business and scientific sectors
who have figured out that new kinds of environmental management have
more potential than our current environmental approaches to provide us with
more sustainable economic growth. These new approaches have been
modelled by the CSIRO in the “Australian National Outlook 2019”, to
determine the level of economic growth that may arise by 2060 while
reversing – in fact, by reversing – current over-consumption of natural
resources. It seems paradoxical because it implies slowing consumption to
increase economic growth. But it is really about re-distribution of
consumption for efficiency and for the re-distribution of wealth itself. In this
regard it is a practical response to the myth to which we have become hostage
– the myth that economic growth is the sole means of achieving prosperity for
all and therefore the sole means of fulfilling our aspirations and making us
happy.
The fact is the growth model of economics is only a way of achieving
prosperity for some, and indeed for fewer and fewer as the decades pass. The
growth theory of economics – which actually I should call the growth theory
of politics, since in the 21st century it really suits no-one but lazy politicians
and large corporations – has a strong inbuilt tendency to embed inequality.
Because it encourages unsustainable inefficiency in resource consumption,
the growth model of economics has over-stretched itself and is therefore well
past its usefulness for both the environment and for all but the top 1% of
income earners. However, according to some economists, such as Ross
Gittins:
It’s wrong … to conclude that continuing growth in GDP is incompatible
with ecological sustainability. People say that because they don’t
understand what drives the "growth" that GDP measures (hint:
improved productivity). We can have unending growth in
GDP and sustainable use of natural resources (which is what the
environmentalists care about) by changing the way economic activity is
238
organised – including by getting all our energy from renewable
sources.277
If that is so, it follows that Australia, because of its resources base, has a very
strong chance of resetting its economy along new lines – lines that are quite
likely to deliver economic growth but with far more equitable distributions of
returns for effort, ingenuity and investment and at lower and more
sustainable rates of consumption. The preferred strategy for our economy
need not be focussed entirely, nor even mainly, on growth. Instead we need
to look for a new way of sharing the benefits of more efficient and sustainable
growth. The “Australian National Outlook 2019” shows how new markets and
competitive industries can be established, particularly in re-forestation for
carbon sequestration and biodiversity, and put our consumption patterns
back onto a more sustainable footing in the process. It assumes and concludes
that economic growth will still occur but not by means of the same industry
structure and resource consumption patterns. It is an economic model so it is
only as good as its assumptions, of course, but it does look out towards the
results that may pertain in different approaches – so its comparative outlooks
are instructive. The “Australian National Outlook 2019” considers two
possible futures for Australia’s economic growth:
• a “slow decline” vision, in which “Australia fails to adequately
address the challenges identified, leading to poorer outcomes in
multiple dimensions”; and
• an “outlook vision” which “represents what could be possible if
Australia can achieve its full potential”.278
According to the CSIRO’s modelling of the outcomes of two different
approaches to our economic future, the “slow decline” and “outlook” visions
result in the following different outcomes279:
277 Ross Gittins, “How we caught the economic growth bug, but may shake it off”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 4 January 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/how-we-
caught-the-economic-growth-bug-but-may-shake-it-off-20200103-p53ojx.html
278 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, page 3, available at
https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/ANO
279 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, Ibid., pp. 16-17.
239
Australian National Outlook 2019
Slow Decline vision Outlook vision
GDP grows at 2.1% annually GDP grows at 2.75-2.8% annually
Real wages are 40% higher in 2060 than Real wages are 90% higher in 2060 than
today today
Average density of major cities increases
Cities sprawl with little change in density
60-88%
Average urban vehicle kilometres travelled
Average urban vehicle kilometres travelled
per capita reduced by 33-45% with greater
per capita falls by less than 25%
uptake of mass transit
Australia reaches net zero emissions by
Net emissions decrease by 476 MtCO2e by 2050 under a cooperative global context,
2060 (11% on 2016 levels) with potential for net negative emissions
by 2060
61% increase in total energy use by 2060 6-28% increase in total energy use by 2060
(on 2016 levels) with only a modest (on 2016 levels) with more than a doubling
improvement in energy productivity of energy productivity per unit of GDP
Returns to landholders increase by around Returns to landholders increase by $42-84
$18 billion between 2016 and 2060 billion between 2016 and 2060
Households spend 38% less on electricity Households spend up to 64% less on
as a percentage of income electricity as a percentage of income
11-20 Mha of environmental plantings in
Minimal environmental plantings in 2060 2060 under a cooperative global context
(12-24% of intensive agricultural land)
In the “outlook vision” Australia’s landscapes “are filled with a profitable
and sustainable mosaic of food, fibre production, carbon sequestration and
biodiversity”280. (Notably they are not filled with coal mines or gas fracking.)
They are also filled with the effects of more equitable social distributions and
transfers (social services, health, education and welfare) and more ethical
governance. But for purposes of the present point, adjustment of our
approach to environmental consumption is the critical success factor.
The catch is that these new environmentally sustainable markets and
agribusiness industries suggested in the “outlook vision” require governments
to develop regulations, particularly to establish markets for carbon trading.
These markets need to be established to give a value to carbon so that it can
be sold as credits domestically and to nations who have less capacity to
efficiently reduce their own carbon emissions than we do. To achieve carbon
280 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, Ibid., page 60.
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neutrality – net zero emissions – across the country and the globe, market
rules for carbon trading and prices for carbon itself need to be set to allow
emitters of carbon to offset all their emissions but by the cheapest means. In
this equation, any tree we plant and the carbon we lock away in that tree
allows another farmer to grow crops and livestock and emit that same volume
of carbon without increasing net carbon pollution. Australian farmers who are
currently (although not for much longer) making money by over-exploiting
our water and soils can make money – more money probably – by switching
to this new industry, turning their land over to forestry and ecosystem
protection. And miners who are currently earning salaries by denuding vast
lands and degrading water supplies, can shift to new, safer and healthier
careers by remediating those lands and waters and converting their energy
generation industries to renewables and forests. CSIRO’s financial modelling
of this suggestion for the “Australian National Outlook 2019” indicates that:
Returns to landholders could increase to as much as $114 billion (more
than doubling relative to [the] Slow Decline [scenario]).281
Of course, what we have to do to make this higher growth scenario a reality
is a lot more complicated and requires integrated planning across all four
quadrants of the QBL. According to “Australian National Outlook 2019” we
need as a minimum to:
• stimulate opportunities for increased labour productivity;
• build human capital by strengthening our education system and its
capacity to produce graduates with more cognitive and collaborative
skills;
• increase urban densities but in such a way as to substantially reduce
travel times for work and provide attractive social cohesion
opportunities – in other words, multi-centre cities and regional hubs;
and perhaps most importantly
• re-vitalise our civic and political institutions to ensure that they
“foster greater engagement and curiosity to engage with new ideas
and find solutions to national challenges”282.
281 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, Ibid., page 60.
282 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, Ibid., page 70.
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So if we want the bigger growth in the “outlook vision”, it is more complicated
than just planting trees. But this is where our integrated community futures
planning comes to the fore. It can set us on the fuller variety of paths we need
to be on to achieve growth and keep us together and on track, without
running strategies that counteract each other. We need one place to register
all those strategies so that we don’t negate each other’s work. That place is a
national community futures plan. But I will discuss this in detail later.
The economic results of CSIRO’s models for “Australian National Outlook
2019” vary depending on whether there is a cooperative global context or a
fractious global context. In 2019 we experienced a more fractious global
context than a cooperative one. So that isn’t a good start. But going into the
2020s there is something else we don’t have that, if we had it, could make a
vast difference to our future. Not only do we not have a government
committed to long term planning, we have one that is doing nothing in the
way of proper market regulation. This is the area where any government can
make the most difference to our lives. And yet neoliberal persuasions are set
precisely to remove regulation rather than take on one of the main obligations
of a government to a community – that being to set market rules to direct
investment into industries which have a viable future and will not result in
unsustainable resource consumption patterns, and which protect fair shares
of wealth for everyone.
In the “Australian National Outlook 2019”, some of Australia’s business
leaders, scientists, universities and community organisations could very well
have found a sustainable basis for our future growth. But government isn’t
listening, and nor are we. Instead we are leaving ourselves unnecessarily
exposed and ignoring the expert advice that we all need to plot the best paths
to the future. As one journalist put it in 2019, “Australia had led the world in
policy development, especially in its response to the global financial crisis, but
was now a laggard.”283 And as one of the Chairmen of the “Australian National
Outlook 2019”, Dr Ken Henry, observed in reply, populist disregard of or
disrespect for expert advice is tantamount to shooting ourselves in the foot:
We used to be capable of identifying emerging policy issues and dealing
with them before becoming traumatic. We are no longer capable of
283Shane Wright, “Populism over good policy is risking the nation's future, Ken Henry says”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 10 September 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-case-study-in-
government-failure-ken-henry-excoriates-politicians-warns-future-jobs-at-risk-20190910-p52pri.html
242
doing that. … Ironically, populism undermines trust in the institutions of
government. The reason is obvious enough. Populism might entertain
briefly but it doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t fix any of the things that
matter to our citizens.284
Dr Henry is right. Populism is not an organised policy capable of acting as a
cure. It is a symptom of an ailing society. Fixing things will require us to decide
which popular views hold water and which don’t. Fixing things requires an
honest use of our intelligence. And of course, fixing things is certainly easier if
we deal with issues before they become traumatic. But in this situation things
have already become traumatic and that is why populism is gaining a foothold
in Australia285. That being so, we will need to be safely assured that if we let
go of what we probably know are bad ideas in the long run, such as starting
new coal mines and permitting more gas fracking, we will not fall off a cliff
into immediate desolation. This is where having an integrated plan comes to
the fore. Plans can test and pose the best alternatives to the bad ideas, giving
all of us some greater assurance that we can safely let go of those ideas that
will cause our extinction in the long run, because there is a fair and feasible
way of letting go. In short, there is a just transition that can be both planned
and managed.
It is difficult to know at this point if something like the “outlook vision” in
“Australian National Outlook 2019” could succeed and that a just transition
could occur before it is too late for our climate. It may well be true that we
have reached a tipping point and will soon have outstripped the capacity of
the planet to sustain us. If so, a century of economic decline is in the offing
and along with it a century of population decline – painful decline (through
hunger, disease and death) instead of an alternative of planned, orderly and
gentle transition to a sustainable world population. There are some scientists,
not many yet, but some, who are of the view that by 2100 the planet will only
be able to sustain 1 or 1.5 billion people286, not the 7.6 billion we have at the
284 Ken Henry, quoted by Shane Wright, Ibid.
285 See Warren Hogan, Industry Professor University of Technology Sydney, “Australia’s populist
moment has arrived”, The Conversation, 25 February 2019, accessible at
https://theconversation.com/australias-populist-moment-has-arrived-111491
286 Dr David Karoly, International Climate Expert, University of Melbourne, speaking on the ABC’s Q&A,
Science Special, 18 June 2019: “There’s at least one – probably more – climate scientists in Europe
that have said that the long-term sustainable population of people on the Earth is about 1 billion
people in 2100 – not the foreshadowed United Nations population estimates of about 10 to 12 billion
243
moment. Others think that it is a matter of how we regulate consumption and
that the planet can sustain all of us if we learn how to moderate and distribute
consumption. None of us can know if the more dire prediction is true but few
if any of us would want it to be. Again, though, the integrated planning is the
key. If such a dire prediction is even partly feasible, we need to start now to
head it off. We are late off the mark, but what is the alternative?
If the “outlook vision” described by CSIRO’s models is to succeed,
Australian governments of all political persuasions must do something
different. And so must we. Success can’t be expected if governments
continue, in their best neoliberal fashion, to get out and stay out of the way
of those business leaders who they believe should be left alone to unleash the
“animal spirits” of our economy287. This sort of discourse is inhuman. And we
really have to ask: What is it that can lead a government to think that such a
choice of language and strategy is going to give us anything other than a brutal
socioeconomic future? It is dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest stuff;
unchecked greed that can lead only to one outcome.
To avert that brutality, governments will instead need to buy back into
playing a decent role in the social contract. And expert advice will need to be
heeded by all of us. The time has come to take the blinkers off about
neoliberalism, to interrogate this ideology for what it is – a mere ideology, an
anaesthetising fantasy, a failed promise, not a panacea. We need to be able
to pick out and jettison the bits of neoliberalism that will disable any plan for
our future. Otherwise we will simply miss all the opportunities for sustainable
growth that are available to Australians.
For millions of Australians today the prospect of a brutal, dog-eat-dog
future is profoundly dispiriting. On any one day there are millions of us who
are confronted with bad news that suggests this is a frightening and dispiriting
time to be alive. But the “Australian National Outlook 2019” is one of the more
people. That’s not good news.” Also Dr Tim Flannery, University of Melbourne, “I now look back on my
20 years of climate activism as a colossal failure”, The Guardian, 17 September 2019: “That future
Earth may have enough resources to support far fewer people than the 7.6 billion it supports today.
British scientist James Lovelock has predicted a future human population of just a billion people. Mass
deaths are predicted to result from, among other causes, disease outbreaks, air pollution,
malnutrition and starvation, heatwaves and suicide”. Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/17/i-now-look-back-on-my-20-years-of-
climate-activism-as-a-colossal-failure
287 Scott Morrison, Address to the West Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 24 June 2019,
available at https://www.pm.gov.au/media/wa-chamber-commerce-and-industry-address
244
recent examples of considered collaborative planning that opens up tangible
prospects for hope. The prospect of working together in the practical and
clever ways that are suggested by the authors of “Australian National Outlook
2019” opens up the possibility that it may well yet be a very exciting time to
be alive, a visionary time where creative imagination can be exercised as
never before and with real practicable prospects of success. We simply have
to organise ourselves to unleash that imagination and to skill up to convert
our preferred vision for the future into viable plans. There are some incredibly
clever Australians who can inspire us here. They are living among us. We just
have to find them and listen to them and this will help us move past the
neoliberal ideological paradigm. It should help us move past it quite quickly,
if we let it.
Of course, moving past the paradigm is one thing, deciding what to move
to is another. The next section is offered as an example of how we can think
our way through to a new preferred socioeconomic arrangement. It is only
one example and we might approach the task quite differently from time to
time. But it should help illustrate the process of economic futures planning
and provide confidence that communities can become involved in this with
considerable impact on their future.
Seeking a new preferred socioeconomic arrangement
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gave the USA and the UK
neoliberalism, passionately advocating that prosperity is up to the individual,
not the state288. In their case, their “ism” eventually visited misery on millions
in the GFC. But neoliberalism didn’t really arrive in Australia, in full blown form
at least, until well after the GFC. While neoliberalism was playing out overseas
from the early 1980s, we in Australia were being treated to a quite different
approach to economic growth and this approach meant that when the GFC
hit, we were in far better shape structurally as an economy to deal with the
288Margaret Thatcher: “I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people
have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have
a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’
and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are
individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through
people and people look to themselves first.” https://www.keepinspiring.me/margaret-thatcher-
quotes/
245
Crisis. This alternative approach started with the Hawke-Keating government
in the 1980s, and since we have no other example that was as successful as
this in Australia (or perhaps anywhere in the world) in the last century289, it’s
a good place to start looking for ideas for a socioeconomic arrangement that
will address the failures of neoliberalism. This doesn’t mean the Hawke-
Keating approach should be preferred without the same degree of
interrogation we might give to the neoliberal narrative. On the contrary, as I
will show later, the Hawke-Keating strategy sits a little less well in the 21st
century than it did in the 20th century, mainly because of globalisation and the
arrival of artificial intelligence and robotisation of industry. This will make a
massive difference to the role of labour in Australia’s economy in the 21 st
century. Nevertheless, it is worth analysing the contrast between the two
arrangements of neoliberalism overseas and the Hawke-Keating approach to
the economy here in Australia. In most but not all aspects, they are polar
opposites. And the latter worked, the former didn’t.
The Hawke-Keating approach was built on the following elements:
• union involvement with a focus on an “Accord” wherein unions
slowed down wage claims in exchange for a government pledge to
minimise inflation, act on a social wage and increase spending on
education and welfare;
• introduction of “decentralised” enterprise bargaining wherein wage
increases could be linked to and dependent on labour productivity
gains instead of having wages determined in a centralised system in
line with inflation by a “national wage case” process;
• expansion of the welfare sector, including reinstatement of the
universal health care system, Medicare, which had been dismantled
by the conservative Fraser government of the late 1970s;
• maintenance of a reasonable progressive taxation system;
• corporatisation of some government trading enterprises; and
289See Ric Battellino, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, “Twenty Years of Economic
Growth, Address to Moreton Bay Regional Council”, 20 August 2010: “The Australian economy has
started what will be its twentieth year of economic growth. This has been a remarkable performance –
one that is unprecedented both in Australia's economic history and among other developed
economies over this period.”, accessible at https://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2010/sp-dg-
200810.html
246
• expansion of the capacity of individuals to participate in and benefit
from economic growth through the compulsory building of
superannuation balances.
These approaches all run counter to neoliberalism to varying degrees. Indeed,
some of them, particularly union involvement, would be considered
anathema to a neoliberal. Expanding on this a little:
• No neoliberal agenda ever included the unions as part of a
partnership for economic development. On the contrary the
neoliberal agenda is to break the unions and crush worker bargaining
power as far possible.
• Similarly, corporatisation of government trading enterprises (GTEs)
did not fit the neoliberal approach because it strengthened the
competitive capacity of government businesses and increased
market competition for private sector players. Several GTEs in
Australia became commercially quite successful in the late 1990s as
a result of a policy of corporatising GTEs alongside the introduction
of competition policy. “Corporatisation” simply means making
government enterprises work as commercially competitive
enterprises while retaining them in full public ownership. A good
example was the corporatised subsidiary of Sydney Water, Australian
Water Technologies. This GTE moved some of the loss making,
subsidised non-monopoly services in water and environmental
science into profitable operation290, at least until the whole of
Sydney Water was disaggregated in the early 2000s291. As GTEs like
this were reformed and protection/subsidies were removed, they
were encouraged to bid alongside the private sector for substantial
290 Australian Water Technologies included an environmental science commercial consulting service
which competed successfully for some years with other public and private sector scientific
organisations. At one time AWT Environment and Science was the biggest commercial environmental
science consulting service in Australia. It traded profitably during the late 1990s on a level playing field
against such companies as Sinclair Knight, GHD, SMEC and the like.
291 Sydney Water was, until the early 2000s a vertically integrated monopoly supplier of water,
controlling the entire supply train from the catchments, through distribution, to retail and to disposal
or reuse of water as treated sewage. This integrated system was disintegrated in the early 2000s in a
process which hived off the catchments to separate authorities and contracted out large scale
operation of water treatment. The disaggregation was a backward step in efficient management of
water, stopping water reuse schemes, for instance, when it should have been increasing them.
247
government contracts and non-government business with some
considerable success. But corporatisation experiments like this
posed a threat to private sector market dominance and the appetite
and capacity for managing the corporatised GTEs dwindled as the
public service was outsourced gradually from the late 1990s
onwards. Accordingly, corporatisation of GTEs was quietly
abandoned as policy in the early 2000s in favour of privatisation.
• Progressive tax systems also had to be dismantled under
neoliberalism (via company tax cuts, the introduction of a goods and
services tax (GST), flatter income tax systems, and in 2019,
extraordinary tax relief for high income earners), simply because
they reduced the profits of the corporations and the incomes of
corporate shareholders and, in theory, would discourage private
sector innovation and “brilliance”292.
• And of course, once progressive tax systems were withered away,
the welfare sector would become “unfunded” (another favourite
agenda item of neoliberalism), leaving no room for empathy in our
social arrangements. To this end, according to arch neoliberals,
society itself had to be extinguished and all responsibility for
“unfortunates” transferred to any individuals who might be prepared
to help them. Mrs Thatcher promoted this using the following logic:
There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men
and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the
quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is
prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us is
prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are
unfortunate.293
This Thatcherism lets government off the hook entirely for anything in the
way of a contribution to society. Of course, it is a risky strategy for career
politicians. I mean, if it really worked, all the politicians would be out of a job.
292 The typical neoliberal narrative celebrates the “brilliance of individuals”. See Tom Switzer, Centre
for Independent Studies Mission Statement: “Governments can’t create optimism, wealth and jobs;
only the private sector can do it. Innovation and progress spring not from bureaucracy but from the
brilliance of individuals.” Accessible at https://www.cis.org.au/about/mission/
293 Margaret Thatcher, Op Cit.
248
Instead of the death of society we would have the death of government
(which the most extreme neoliberal ideologues would probably quietly agree
to be the intent). But obviously there is not a snowflake’s chance on a burning
planet that Mrs Thatcher’s self-reliance could be relied upon, particularly by
the unfortunates, and so we will be stuck with governments for quite some
time yet.
That being so, can we give our governments some guidance on how to
weave a “more beautiful tapestry”, as it were? Of course, it would be
preferable to weave one rather more beautiful than Mrs Thatcher’s, where it
clearly doesn’t matter how many unfortunates get left behind. To that end
the only really relevant question is: What value might there be in the
alternatives to neoliberalism? It is essential to identify these alternatives
because in their absence the more optimistic scenarios – like the ones painted
in the “Australian National Outlook 2019” and the ones which create a just
transition to a sustainable world – won’t get off the starting block.
Based on comparisons of the different approaches, there are at least
three things that might be reintroduced to our socioeconomic arrangements
that may strengthen our economy, reduce inequality and provide for more
sustainable growth:
• One of these is to restore the role and participation of government
in our economy.
• A second is to change our attitudes about taxation.
• A third is to change our attitude to welfare and its place in our
socioeconomic arrangements.
The next sections show why these three things are critical at this time when
neoliberalism has failed us, and why, if we are not prepared to change, we will
be unable to build a national community futures plan.
Restoring the role and participation of government in our
economy
For more than two decades now Australian governments have progressively
moved out of active involvement in services and industries that are vital to
any nation’s future, including energy generation and distribution, water
supply (rural and urban), land and property information, telecommunications,
249
banking, transport, health, disability services, education and even social
services. They have done this to vacate the market for private providers based
on a notion that the government sector is inherently and inescapably
inefficient and can’t manage things – even traditional services such as
corrective services or immigration detention – as well as the private sector.
At the same time, governments have been vacating their regulatory roles
and either reducing regulation or allowing private sector self-regulation. As a
result, we have seen disasters like those emerging from the Banking Royal
Commission, from the NSW Audit Office’s recent findings on land clearing
under the Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016, and most recently from self-
regulation of the building industry in NSW (to name just a few). From this last
disaster we now have a situation where many thousands of people’s lives
have been severely impacted financially, if not ruined, and where the
insufficiently regulated, “privately certified” building and development
industry has quite negatively impacted its own future returns. Additionally,
the insurance industry is withdrawing from the market for indemnity for
building professionals, meaning that the state is highly likely to have to fund
compensation and/or other financial solutions to this problem. Taxpayers will
foot the bill for this to the extent that the government might agree. Indeed,
taxpayers were hit with over $600 million in bills for building defects between
2010 and 2019, due to the NSW state government’s deregulation of building
certification294. These bills will continue to rise. And those left uninsured, such
as people who bought into new buildings higher than three stories, will suffer
severely. So much for the efficacy of the government’s deregulatory strategies
in achieving the state priority of “putting downward pressure on housing
prices”295. Prices are likely to drop for properties built during this period of
294 See Nigel Gladstone and Carrie Fellner, “Taxpayers paid $200m last year to prop up government
fund against dodgy builders”, Sydney Morning Herald, 18 December 2019: “Taxpayers forked out
more than $200 million last year propping up a NSW government insurance fund that offers
consumers protection against dodgy builders in an industry so broken that private insurers have fled
the market. And in an effort to bring taxpayer liabilities that have topped $600 million under control,
the Government has proposed that compulsory insurance premiums on some new homes and
renovations will almost double within 18 months.” Accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/taxpayers-paid-200m-last-year-to-prop-up-government-fund-
against-dodgy-builders-20191205-p53h6n.html
295 See NSW Government, “NSW Making it Happen – State Priorities” 2015,
https://rdacentralwest.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NSW-State-Priorities-brochure.pdf
“Priority – Increasing housing supply: Increase housing supply across NSW. Target – Deliver more than
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poor regulation, and drop to a point where unit owners will be stuck with
properties worth less than their mortgage. Somehow I don’t think that was
the intention of that particular state priority. It seems in their haste to speed
up approvals for housing commencements and reduce developers’ costs, the
self-regulators skipped a few important requirements, eg., that compliance
with structural and fire regulations should be properly certified. All up, this
building industry disaster will have contractionary effects on the NSW
economy.
This is life with neoliberalism. It is the sort of life we get when, consistent
with the neoliberal agenda, public assets are divested, usually for less than
they are worth, and usually for far less than the benefit that would accrue to
us all if we retained them in public ownership and reformed them to operate
efficiently on a level playing field with private sector competitors. And it is
what we get when we also establish sub-optimal markets in which regulation
(of the environment, of business, of urban development, and of the labour
market) is reduced as far as is politically possible. The neoliberal agenda has
been to arrive at a complete deregulation of markets and a complete
divestment of public services and assets by a creep slow enough to make it
less noticeable while what is actually underway is a grand theft. It began with
what is known as the Ridley Plan, a plan presented to Margaret Thatcher in
1977 under the title “Final Report of the Nationalised Industries Policy
Group”. Its author, Nicholas Ridley, “was the son of a wealthy family whose
coal and steel interests had been nationalised under the Attlee government
[and who] was implacably opposed to public ownership”296. As UK researcher
Christine Berry has observed, Ridley’s plan
prefigures almost all of the key moments in the long neoliberal assault
on public ownership, from the open war against the miners to the
50,000 approvals every year. A Plan for Growing Sydney estimates that Sydney will need 664,000 new
homes over the next 20 years. Increasing the supply of housing will put downward pressure on prices.
In the 12 months to July 2015, there were 61,057 building approvals in NSW, the highest result in
more than 41 years and 64.5 per cent above the decade average. The Government is supporting
future growth by establishing housing targets across NSW, and providing record allocations to the
Housing Acceleration Fund to build the infrastructure to support this growth.
296 Christine Berry, “Thatcher had a battle plan for her economic revolution – now the left needs one
too”, Open Democracy, 28 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/thatcher-had-a-battle-plan-for-her-economic-
revolution-now-the-left-needs-one-too/
251
privatisation “by stealth” (Ridley’s own words) of the NHS. It suggests
that Thatcher pick her battles, provoking confrontations in “non-
vulnerable industry, where we can win” such as the railways and the
civil service, while taking steps to create the conditions for eventual
victory against the more powerful trade unions. It outlines a plan to
prepare the ground for privatisation by introducing market measures in
the running of nationalised industries (such as changes of leadership,
targets for return on capital, and new incentives for managers), and
fragmenting the public sector into independent units that could later be
sold off. Ridley explicitly describes this as a “long term strategy of
fragmentation”, “a cautious ‘salami’ approach - one thin slice at a time,
but by the end the whole lot has still gone”.297
In a sceptic’s view this strategy by stealth might once have been rejected
as conspiracy theory – except that is has now turned out to be true, and in
Australia no less than in the United Kingdom. In NSW in particular, the salami
slice approach to divestment of assets and services owned by the public has
been subtly but determinedly pushed by successive conservative
governments to the point where NSW is probably on the brink of having its
full range of vital state controlled public services sold off to the private sector
including the remaining state bus services and TAFE298. We might expect that,
in full Ridley plan style, the “whole lot will be gone” by the time the Berejiklian
government is finally ejected from office or that this particular government
will have done its level best by then to have sold NSW residents out of all their
interests in their own assets and services and sold them out at a fraction of
their worth.299
These simultaneous withdrawals by the government sector – from
competition in operation of profitable trading enterprises and from
regulatory roles – have had significant and entirely unnecessary
contractionary effects on our economy and on fair distribution of the benefits
of the growth we generate by our labour. We didn’t interrogate the
infiltration of neoliberalism into Australia and the results have been entirely
297 Ibid.
298 See Premier Berejiklian refusing to rule out privatisation of NSW TAFE in February 2020. Accessible
on Youtube at https://www.facebook.com/JodiMcKayMP/videos/525483331684435/
299 See the following section for further discussion about the severe detriment arising from what is
effectively a raid on or legal theft of public assets in NSW by its conservative governments since 2012.
252
disadvantageous to everyone but big businesses. The probable motive for not
bothering to interrogate neoliberalism, until now, has been that many
Australians have implicitly supported breaking the power of trade unions.
Union membership has declined significantly since the Hawke-Keating period,
in part because some Australians have developed a suspicion about ceding
their individual control over their workplace bargaining arrangements, but in
larger part because of incessant demonisation of unionism by right wing
media and politicians. Many have come to consider that in a dog-eat-dog
world, every man for himself might be a better option. Regardless of whether
this is persuasive, the fact is that as neoliberalism has crept forward – and
control of so much of the public assets we used to own has been signed away
to a tiny few who can operate without the constraint of competition – we
have simply replaced the power of the unions with the power of the banks
and those corporations that have inveigled the banks into lending on
extremely unsafe investments, such as fossil fuels. Banks will not desert those
corporations in a hurry because they will lose everything (although they are
less likely to enter into new fossil fuel risks). They will only shift very slowly.
And while they are shifting, they will continue to put pressure on those of us
who have no power, and do so in ways that have been unmasked during the
Banking Royal Commission. Banks and major corporations will exert power on
a scale that could never have been contemplated by a trade union. The power
of capital can be a frightful force, and one seemingly defiant of control by
workers – until of course, those workers themselves begin to own vast
portions of available capital via superannuation. Compulsory superannuation
is probably the only area in our economic history since the 1980s where
Australians got one up on neoliberalism. Growth of superannuation is
something neoliberals fear. The prospect of millions of wage earners and
superannuants having more control of large industries and corporations than
a tiny few of their board members is a power transfer that they will fight hard
to prevent. Accordingly, Australians would be wise to be vigilant in the 2020s
as conservative governments will attempt to wind back employee
entitlements to the already legislated increases in the superannuation
guarantee.300
300
See Paul Keating, “This reckless government and its business and media mates are determined to
damage superannuation”, Op. Cit.
253
But we need to do more than be vigilant about protecting our
superannuation if we are to set Australians on a path of achieving greater
control over their future. We will also need to reverse the neoliberal
withdrawals from public ownership and from regulation of the private sector.
If we can achieve this, we will have significant potential to stem or reverse the
problem of low growth in our GDP, strengthen our economy overall, and
increase the shares of our future prosperity for ordinary Australians. To
achieve this we need to work and plan together. We need an entirely new
type of union. This is not a workplace union operating on a fragmented basis,
bargaining with bosses and losing, although there is a place of course for well
organised workplace bargaining. This is a new union of thoughtful planners
who integrate strategies for the whole economy. And they achieve this not by
bargaining but by influencing those in power according to an agreed national
integrated plan. As far as the economic quadrant of that plans goes, we need
to start this thoughtful process by understanding how neoliberalism is
militating against government sector participation (that means taxpayer
participation) in competitive markets, and why extreme neoliberals will
oppose any attempt to reverse the withdrawals.
What really happens when governments vacate markets?
One part of the theory of neoliberalism is that if a government natural
monopoly is broken down and more players enter a market for service
provision, the ensuing competition will result in greater cost-efficiency and
the same services will be delivered for lower prices. In practice, what
frequently happens is that regulations have to be, and are, progressively
loosened to allow the new private sector providers to cut their costs in order
simply to sell us the same service (or less) and still generate a profit. In other
words when a government sells off a service/asset or tenders out contracts
for operation of services/assets, we all now no longer just pay for the costs of
the service, we have to pay for a profit margin for the private provider too,
and none of that profit comes back to us. Very often, we also have to accept
a higher price for the subsequent delivery of that service or a service level cut,
and sometimes both, to pay for the private provider’s profit. To rub salt into
the wound, the deregulation of the labour market that has to be brought in
to help maximise the profit of the private provider entrenches wage
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stagnation, job insecurity, casualisation, fewer full time and more part time
jobs, and underemployment. So now we all have even less money than we
had before to pay the higher cost (not lower) of the frequently inferior service.
The road to smaller government over the first two decades of the 21st century
has been littered with this sort of folly.
The myth here is that even if we as taxpayers now have to pay for a
private profit that we didn’t have to pay for before, we will still be better off
because the private sector is so much more efficient and honourable that they
will be able to absorb the extra cost of their profits without cutting service
levels and still offer the services for a lower price than government ever could.
Yes, the sector that out of sheer unconstrained greed gave us the Global
Financial Crisis in 2008 is so much more efficient than government and so
much more capable of altruism and social responsibility, that they need no
regulation or supervision to prevent market failure, price gouging, anti-
competitive behaviour or fraud. It is bizarre, but it is what neoliberals hope
we will continue to believe.
In reality, the maths of the sell-offs never add up in the way implied by
neoliberals. On the contrary, we really do have to acknowledge the failure of
this experiment when we look at our power bills. And if that isn’t convincing,
it should be abundantly clear that twenty years of this improbable maths
hasn’t worked when the Chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission, Rod Sims, comes out and says he has lost faith in privatisation
and deregulation, a program for which he was once a keen supporter. In 2016,
Mr Sims reported to the Melbourne Economic Forum that:
I’m now almost to the point of opposing privatisation because it’s been
done to boost proceeds, it’s been done to boost asset sales and I think
it’s severely damaging to our economy.301
Under neoliberalism, privatisation has simply replaced public sector
monopolies with private sector monopolies. It has replaced publicly owned
natural monopolies with all their inherent capacity for efficiency, with a
system where there is no compensating benefit from increased competition.
301Editor, “The Pen” http://the-pen.co/aligning-private-interest-with-societys-need/ and David
Donaldson, “Bad privatisation ‘severely damaging’ the economy: ACCC chair” in “The Mandarin”, 27
July 2016, accessible at https://www.themandarin.com.au/68147-bad-privatisations-severely-
damaging-economy-rod-sims/
255
Because we have been “unleashing onto the economy unregulated
monopolies”302, no pressure has arisen from competition to deliver the price
drops we were promised. “We deregulated poles and wires [in electricity
transmission] in 2006-07, and almost automatically in Queensland and NSW
over five years power prices doubled”, said Mr Sims303.
With almost twenty years of excessive sell-offs, which are really
facilitated raids on public assets, we have weakened our economy, not
strengthened it. We have also trashed our ability as taxpayers and owners of
these assets to share in the profits of that economy, not just by bashing unions
who campaign for better wages and help us retain a fairer share of
productivity gains made by workers (although that is a severe loss), but by
selling off even our most profitable government trading enterprises. In these
cases, such as the recent sale by the NSW government of the Land & Property
Information service and data base, we have sold away all the profits we used
to share in as owners of that service to a privileged few in the private sector.
Government trading enterprises can and do make excellent profits, all of
which come back to taxpayers. It is simply not true that the private sector is
bound to run better businesses and public sector managers will never be as
clever. Contrary to the myth of government sector ineptitude, public sector
managers have proved themselves to be just as capable as the private sector
of running trading enterprises to profit and of doing so on a fair, competitively
neutral playing field. They have been used to doing that since the rules for
competitive neutrality were introduced in the 1990s to remove any
advantages enjoyed by government providers (although frankly, there were
very few) and enable other players to enter the market for provision of
government service in fair competition.
This skilling up of government trading enterprise managers and
sharpening of the rules for competitive neutrality has led us to a point where,
in the case of the NSW Land & Property Information service, that business was
generating $130 million in profits per annum before being sold off for 35 years
to a private consortium for a mere $2.6 billion (ostensibly because there was
no other source of funds to re-build a couple of relatively new and perfectly
302 Dr Craig Emerson, Economist and former Minister for Trade and Competitiveness, in David
Donaldson, Ibid.
303 Rod Sims in David Donaldson, Ibid.
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serviceable football stadiums in Sydney). As the Sydney Morning Herald
reported in 2017, before the sale:
A leaked Treasury document reveals NSW's land titles registry is earning
$130 million in profit for the taxpayer each year as the government
comes under growing pressure to ditch its privatisation plans. Fairfax
Media has seen the "strictly private and confidential" sales pitch to
potential private operators of Land and Property Information (LPI), …
co-authored by investment bank JP Morgan, [that] reveals for the first
time that LPI, with 3.9 million titles, made $190 million in revenue and
$130 million in profit in 2015-16.304
Let’s have a look at that again. We taxpayers owned a service in NSW that
earned $190 million a year of which $130 million – 68% – was sheer profit for
us. On top of that we were paying next to nothing for transactions on titles
and next to nothing on title insurance. And yet the Berejiklian government’s
line was that this should be sold off because public sector workers are
incapable of taking the service through its next efficiency phase via
digitisation. No argument was put forward to prove that any new digitisation
phase could be done more cheaply and with less risk than the phases already
completed by the public custodians – business improvements so successful
that they had taken the business to the point of being able to generate 68%
profits for taxpayers. Nor was any argument put forward that increased
competition would result in efficiency or lower prices. On the contrary, the
Berejiklian government advocated that the LPI had to be sold as a monopoly.
No downward pressure on prices would be achieved in this case through the
introduction of competition. Indeed, in its confidential sales pitch document
the government promoted the sale to prospective buyers by saying that:
the winning bidder would gain the ‘first mover advantage’ if it wants to
capture and consolidate registries across Australia.305
In other words, the LPI was sold in a manner that was meant to encourage the
creation of a monopoly over all of Australia’s land title businesses. It was an
304 Esther Han, “Leaked NSW Treasury document reveals billions to be made by land title registry
operators” Sydney Morning Herald, 1 February 2017, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/leaked-nsw-treasury-document-reveals-billions-to-be-made-
by-land-title-registry-operators-20170201-gu2wed.html
305 Esther Han, Ibid.
257
anti-competitive strategy that could do nothing other than concentrate
massive profits in the private sector – in a single provider in NSW and possibly
in a single provider across Australia. Indeed, potential buyers were given to
understand that the prospects for profit growth in this business were
extraordinary due to an expectation that:
‘long-term growth dynamics of the NSW real estate market’, … will be
driven by a 50 per cent population boom and the construction of 43,500
dwellings each year over the next 40 years. ‘This is forecast to result in
the addition of approximately 1.8 million titles over the next 40
years’.306
In short, all the future growth in worth and profit of the service was sold as
well. This is growth in value that would have come entirely back to the
taxpayer, as no brilliant efficiency skills whatsoever would be required to
generate that growth. We taxpayers will be gifting that additional value to the
private owner every time we – or more accurately our kids – buy a new
property in the next 35 years. On top of all that, the risks of fraud in relation
to our property titles, or their outright theft, or of administrative failure, are
likely to increase significantly. Problems with property title were extremely
rare before 2017. But almost as soon as 70 LPI staff were made redundant and
the LPI was split up in 2016, a massive administrative error occurred that saw
over 200 families unknowingly buy properties in the path of a future
freeway.307 For the moment, title risk is still insured, but by the government,
not by the winning bidder. We didn’t even get to offload the cost of increased
insurance premiums and payouts for the title frauds, thefts and
administrative bungles we are more likely to suffer. Overseas experience
suggests that additional insurance may be required for this. All of this suggests
that every home owner would be wise to keep a good grip on their property
titles in NSW and they should be very careful about what they buy.
There isn’t a single stakeholder to be found that had a good word to say
about the sale of NSW LPI. Stakeholders as diverse as the Real Estate Institute
of NSW, the Law Society and the Public Service Association all roundly
306Esther Han, Ibid.
307Matt O’Sullivan “Bungle exposes 205 properties to planned roads projects in Sydney”, Illawarra
Mercury 2 November 2016, accessible at
https://www.illawarramercury.com.au/story/4268900/bungle-exposes-205-properties-to-planned-
roads-projects-in-sydney/?cs=7
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condemned it. Even the real estate agents don’t have confidence now that
they are selling properties with valid titles and correct land title information.
But perhaps the Public Service Association should be left with the last word
on the sale. They called it "the most appalling fire sale decision".308 And yet it
went ahead. Hence my characterisation of such neoliberal divestments as
facilitated raids on public assets. They are a form of organised legal theft of
public assets. The sale of the LPI was in fact a gross example of malfeasance
in public office. However, it is unlikely the NSW government will ever be
brought to account for this technically legal wrongdoing.
It is evident that if the LPI service had been retained in public ownership
it would have generated the funds for the stadium overhauls in less than half
of the 35 year contract timeframe. They could have easily been financed by
the extremely cheap loans available at the time and paid back at a fraction of
the cost of the loss made by the sale. According to the Berejiklian government,
prices will not increase for processing of property title transactions because
the contract does not allow price increases to exceed the CPI and there are
minimum service levels imposed by the contract. However, this simply means
that in order to maximise profits while prices are capped, the new provider
will be reduced to cutting costs wherever they can, which will simply expose
us to more risk of fraud and inaccuracy on our property titles. The cap on price
increases also means that the buyers all submitted bids that were lower than
they might otherwise have been for purchase of the operation. The idea that
the maths always works for the benefit of the service owners (us) and end
users (us) in this case is clearly false. The only thing the government gains in
these cases is the one-off budget boon that comes in the year of the sale.
Thereafter it is usually all money down the drain for the taxpayer.
Of course, sometimes these government services are sold off to non-
profit private sector providers, although this really only happens in
community services that are unlikely ever to make a profit. In the main these
services tend to be sold to consortia such as church groups. In those cases, we
at least don’t have to pay for the private providers’ profits; but we do have to
pay for their service inexperience, as we have seen in the case of contracting
308Esther Han, “NSW land titles registry leased for $2.6 billion to Hastings Funds Management, First
State Super”, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 2017, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/nsw-land-titles-registry-leased-for-26-billion-to-hastings-
funds-management-first-state-super-20170412-gvjcfw.html
259
out domestic violence and homelessness services. This price could be even
higher than the cost of providing profits for a private provider. We might pay
that price with our lives.
But perhaps the most dangerous program of privatisation and illusory
cost saving is the sell-off of government consulting and management advisory
services themselves. I mean that this is the most dangerous sell-off because it
allows governments to privatise anything and everything without impartial
advice. Divestment of public policy advisory services is thereby a vital
underpinning of continuance of the neoliberal agenda and it is essential to
consolidation of profits in private hands. In this area of the sell-offs, we have
progressively taken our in-house government advisory and operational
management expertise, built – at our expense – and developed over decades
to a remarkable standard of professionalism and unique knowledge (including
unique knowledge about how to run a government trading enterprise to profit
at commercial rates of return on a competitively neutral playing field), and
replaced it with private sector consulting services for which we pay up to
three times the amount we had to pay before, because of the way private
consulting and management services businesses structure their charging
systems.
Take the example of a top level lawyer in the public sector compared to
the top level private sector lawyer in a field of expertise relevant to
government needs. A lawyer in the private sector in professional services
typically required by the government will charge anywhere between $400 and
$650 or more an hour, working on the usual model that consulting companies
use of multiplying the base cost of the lawyer’s salary by 3, or if they are
feeling bullish, 3.5. What does it cost the taxpayer if the same lawyer works
as a government employee? The answer is it is about 1.3 times the base salary
(and that base salary is likely to be lower than that of the comparable private
lawyer). Of course, the private sector charges factor in the need for the private
sector to cover costs of office accommodation and all other business costs.
But the public sector still has to cover most of these costs for its own
accommodation and business costs and cannot save much if any of that by
using a contract lawyer. So we all end up paying for both the private sector
and the public sector accommodation and business costs. To cap it all off, the
taxpayer pays the costs of redundancy of those expert advisors who have
been let go in the contracting out process. These expert advisors are then
260
often hired by the new private firms and are sold back to the government for
almost three times the price it used to cost us. Some of them even get desks
inside their old building.
The real advantage to government in this, however, is not cost cutting
(since no costs are cut). In contracting out consulting and management
advisory services, governments are setting a system in place where instead of
having the opportunity to listen to considered advice provided fearlessly and
freely by experienced public servants who can be impartial because they do
not have to work in an atmosphere of fear about their job, the government
can create a climate of fear in private consulting firms that the next consulting
job will not come their way if they do not advise as desired. Several state and
federal governments since 2000 have embarked on a program of matching
this sort of fear inside whatever remains of the public service – so public
servants now also fear for their jobs. Gone are the days when any decent
policy advisor – public or private – could advise without fear or favour.
Consultants and public servants alike learn very quickly about what sort of
advice will be acceptable and resort to dishing up only what the government
has told them they want to hear, regardless of whether evidence is telling
them it is a good idea. The damage that can be done by disabling the public
service in this way is enormous.309
The more usual result of all these sell-offs and all the deregulation that
goes with it is that a market arises in which a small number of players end up
not creating competition but eliminating as much competition as they can. To
add insult to injury, the new private providers often have to be subsidised on
an ongoing basis by taxpayers to stay in the market and maximise their profits.
A good example of how this has happened in Australia is in the private health
insurance industry. In that case, conservative governments have introduced:
309The hollowing out of the public service is a retrograde step observed by independent analysts such
as the Grattan Institute. See John Daley, “Good policy making is a game of inches, not kneejerk
reactions”, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 January 2020: “Meanwhile, the public service's ability to provide
strategic policy advice is being hollowed out, as documented by the recent Thodey Review of the
Australian Public Service. ‘Efficiency dividends’ have tended to cut strategic policy areas. More of the
public service's time is being spent responding to short-term issues, so the policy muscles waste away.
We're falling into a vicious cycle: when governments do want policy work, they often commission
external consultants to do it – and so the best and brightest are increasingly attracted to work outside
the public service.” Accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/good-policy-making-is-a-game-
of-inches-not-kneejerk-reactions-20200107-p53ph5.html
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a) a range of penalties to taxpayers to force them towards private
health cover when most were quite satisfied with the public system
that they had, and
b) subsidies from taxpayers to prop up these supposedly efficient
providers of health cover whenever people desert them in droves
because they have obviously not provided value for money.
In the case of our medical insurance, all these penalties and subsidies simply
functioned in the first instance as a way of creating a space for private profit
from public funding and in the second instance as a way of re-organising
taxpayer funds so that the rich get subsidised to queue-jump in accessing
hospital services.
There are numerous other instances of how neoliberalism has blighted
our lives over the past two decades (and even more so over the last five years
of the decade to 2020). But perhaps the greatest problem with it is that it
doesn’t strengthen our economy. It actually restricts both the size and the
strength of our economy and the potential for all Australians rather than a
few to benefit from growth. It propounds the idea that publicly funded
community service provision is a financial burden on taxpayers, the
implication being that such burden will disappear when the service is
divested. But as shown above, the burdens on taxpayers tend more often to
be increased because private sector players incessantly lobby politicians for
more and more deregulation and subsidy to maximise their profits.
This is not to say that in a globalised world, governments shouldn’t seek
to meet our needs by contracting with the most efficient and effective
providers. In theory, and sometimes in practice, there is nothing wrong with
the improved competition that should come from letting the private sector in
on some parts of some of the services, industries and markets in which
governments have traditionally played a part role or acted as a natural
monopoly. But complete vacation of traditional markets and services by the
government sector and simultaneous deregulation in Australia is a perfect
storm for the total size of our national economy and for distribution of the
profits and prosperity of that economy. It is clear from a number of bitter
experiences over the last couple of decades that:
a) if a traditional market is vacated largely or entirely by a government,
then privatisation is more likely to result in no improvement in
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competition, no greater efficiency in service delivery, no cheaper
prices for that service, and no improved productivity on which
economic growth can be built; and
b) if market rules are also then loosened by the government to the point
where the new, supposedly more efficient market imposes further
costs on consumers – and/or fails to distribute benefits
proportionally back to the public who originally owned those
services, industries and infrastructure – then there is an issue, not
just for society, inequality and the environment, but for the size,
efficiency and benefit-sharing of the state and national economies.
Fair sharing of economic growth cannot and does not arise from reducing
competition. And a strong economy cannot arise from reduction of
competition. If markets are vacated by government in such a way as to reduce
competition, this can only shrink the growth of GDP and the economy overall.
This whole problem can, however, be reversed. It will take time, of
course, since so much of our assets and expertise has now been sold off for
decades. But since our government sector is such a substantial player in GDP,
it is important to look at how to correct the situation. The next section deals
with options for that correction.
What can be done by government to expand the economy?
In modern economies, continued growth and fair sharing of returns requires
a government, as a minimum, to set policies which will:
• unleash the full capacity of the labour market;
• stimulate growth in productivity;
• minimise the consumption of non-renewable natural resources and
maximise access to renewable resources;
• establish new, well regulated markets in lucrative areas to maximise
national income and returns on investment;
• set market rules which ensure fair sharing of increased GDP and
increased labour productivity – in other words prevent excessive
inequality and allow everyone to share fairly and proportionally in
the wealth they create;
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• devise and enforce regulations for prevention of anti-competitive
behaviour and market failure, particularly the failure that arises from
the creation of monopolies or oligopolies;
• retain sufficient capacity within government to supervise contracts
when private sector involvement (or non-government not-for-profit
involvement) is deemed advisable for delivery of government
services;
• retain sufficient capacity within government to regulate future prices
charged by corporations to whom public assets have been divested;
• prevent the use of structures within contracts which establish
incentives to maintain or maximise profits by cost cutting (as
opposed to genuine efficiency) and prevent the increased risks that
such cost cutting will entail (eg., data insecurity or workplace safety
risks); and
• strategically and cost-effectively finance investment in public
infrastructure and services (including educational, health and social
services infrastructure, not just hard engineered assets), recognising
that such infrastructure is a pre-condition of an expanding economy,
a sustainable environment and improved wellbeing – in other words,
develop a debt policy which sets a rational framework for when and
where debt should be invoked.
At the time of writing, Australia does not have state or federal governments
that are sufficiently observing the above listed minimum duties for policy
setting for economic growth. Here are some examples of how policy setting is
falling short or running in an opposite direction:
Our minimum policy
Our actual policy settings are:
settings should:
• Unleash the full • Policies about welfare and education are
capacity of the labour actively working against our ability to
market. release the spare capacity in the labour
• Stimulate growth in market – and if that is not released it
productivity. means the economy will contract.
Newstart is now so low that it is reducing
the capacity of the unemployed to
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Our minimum policy
Our actual policy settings are:
settings should:
compete for jobs. Tertiary and vocational
education fees are too high. And the
vocational education and training sector
has been progressively de-funded for
more than a decade, as has the research
sector. This, combined with diminishing
investment in new capital by both the
public and private sectors has led to a
decline in productivity. A lack of policies
to positively encourage industry
transitioning is also embedding long term
problems for releasing the capacity of the
labour market.
• Minimise the • Policies for the environment are set to
consumption of non- consume our natural resources at a faster
renewable natural rate than they can be renewed. And
resources and there is too little government owned
maximise access to investment in large scale renewable
renewable resources. power. Instead, a large part of the
burden of investment in renewables has
been foisted onto individuals.
• Establish new, well • No markets for carbon trading are being
regulated markets in established to enable the generation of
lucrative areas to profits from sale of carbon credits. This is
maximise national stymying transition from one economy to
income and returns on another and it does nothing to create
investment. greater economic growth and returns to
the taxpayer.
• Set market rules which • Gross State Product in Australia’s biggest
ensure fair sharing of state economy, NSW, has been increasing
increased GDP and but gross hourly rates of pay have not
increased labour increased at the same rate. Hourly rates
productivity – in other of pay in NSW, for instance, in the four
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Our minimum policy
Our actual policy settings are:
settings should:
words prevent years between 2014 and 2018 increased
excessive inequality by an average of 2.2% per annum, 30%
and allow everyone to lower than the average annual increase
share fairly and in total NSW GSP for that same period310.
proportionally in the Nationally, the situation is similar.
wealth they create. Between March 2014 and March 2019,
Gross Domestic Product grew by an
average of 0.6% per quarter but hourly
rates of pay grew by only 0.5% per
quarter, almost 20% lower than the
average quarterly increase for GDP311. In
June 2019 this situation worsened with
the share of total national income going
to employees reaching its lowest level
since 1965.312 In other words, the settings
in wages policy and control are
suppressing wages and workers are
suffering a significantly lower share of the
growth in economic output and national
income. Too much of the growth is going
to business owners, shareholders and the
wealthy. If this inequality continues to
grow then the economy will eventually
310 Sources: For the % change in NSW GSP between 2014 and 2018 see ABS 5220.0, Table 1 Column K.
For the % change in hourly rates of pay in NSW between 2014 and 2018 see ABS 6345.0, Table 2a
Column K.
311 Sources: For the % change in GDP between 2014 and 2019 see ABS 5206.0, Table 1 Column B. For
the % change in hourly rates of pay in NSW between 2014 and 2018 see ABS 6345.0, Table 1 Column
S.
312 Sources: See Greg Jericho, “No Surprise, but shocking: there’s no other way to spin Australia’s
GDP”, The Guardian, 4 September 2019: “Because profits in the mining sector have grown so strongly
and compensation to employees is growing so weakly, the share of national income going to workers
has plunged. The last time the share of national income going to workers was this low, the Beatles had
just toured Australia.” Statement based on ABS 5206.0, Table 7, Columns D/N.
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Our minimum policy
Our actual policy settings are:
settings should:
contract because too many people simply
do not have enough money to spend.
• Devise and enforce • Policies for regulation, particularly of
regulations for prudential requirements, building
prevention of anti- standards and the financial services
competitive behaviour industry are being eroded in favour of
and market failure, business and at the serious expense of
particularly the failure the consumer. Where the erosion has
that arises from the been uncovered, it is not being fixed (eg.,
creation of monopolies the federal government has been slow to
or oligopolies. implement the recommendations of the
Banking Royal Commission).
• Retain sufficient • Contracts are being let for operation of
capacity to supervise government services or assets/services
contracts when private are being sold outright (eg., for 30, 50 or
sector involvement (or 99 years) without proper and transparent
non-government not- business cases comparing the benefits
for-profit involvement) that would accrue if the services were
is deemed advisable retained and/or reformed, and with little
for delivery of or no assurance to the public that the
government services. assets or services will be operated more
• Retain sufficient efficiently than in the past or, for
capacity to regulate instance, not sub-leased or sold on to
future prices charged third parties who may have even less
by corporations to accountability than the original
whom public assets contractors. In many cases these
have been divested. contracts give consumers reduced
• Prevent the use of control over price increases, thereby
structures within achieving precisely the opposite of the
contracts which intention when they were divested. In
establish incentives to some cases where future price increases
maintain or maximise for the leased service have been
profits by cost cutting, contractually capped, there are even
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Our minimum policy
Our actual policy settings are:
settings should:
as opposed to genuine greater risks arising from the cost cutting
efficiency. that is likely to be resorted to by the
contractor in order to maximise profits.
Risks arising from cost cutting can include
data insecurity and declines in workplace
safety.
• Strategically and cost- • Sound practices for financing services and
effectively finance investing in infrastructure are not being
investment in public followed. Debt is not being invoked
infrastructure and when it is cheap for purposes of financing
services (including major infrastructure and creation or
educational, health enhancement of capital assets (including
and social services data assets). Options are being chosen
infrastructure, not just for infrastructure delivery financed
hard engineered instead by the private sector which are
assets), recognising often likely to deliver poorer returns on
that such investment to the taxpayer over the
infrastructure is a pre- longer term. Where the public sector is
condition of an continuing to finance infrastructure, such
expanding economy, a as the National Broadband Network
sustainable (NBN), the finance is being reduced to
environment and deliver the cheapest possible outcome,
improved wellbeing – rather than one that will deliver desired
in other words, service levels and better rates of return.
develop a debt policy Taxation is also being reduced to a point
which sets a rational where it will not cover increasing costs of
framework for when service delivery in the future. Social
and where debt should service and education sector losses will
be invoked. harm the economy.
Clearly Australians are not being offered policy settings that will enable
us to enjoy the benefits of the smartest national investments, either by the
private or the government sector. And as I have already noted, the economic
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contraction arising from these poor policy settings is also being made worse
by the government’s own vacation of markets. If governments can reverse
this, we will be better able to maintain the potential for continued economic
growth overall. They need to get back into these markets and take on the
challenge of running government trading enterprises alongside the private
sector, the challenge they suspended back in the early 2000s in favour of
neoliberalism. Of course, because many of these GTEs and services have now
been sold off for periods of over thirty years, it will be a long time before
government can return to the competitive capacity it had prior to the sell-offs.
But new infrastructure programs and service opportunities are coming along
all the time and as they do, our governments, state and federal, should be
looking to be an active player in those markets, especially in energy
generation. Big or bigger government, run well, will increase both the size and
pace of growth of our economy and distribute shares of wealth more fairly.
Experience with neoliberalism in the UK, the USA and now Australia shows
that small government will trend inevitably toward the opposite result313.
Government policy in Australia is currently set to reduce the size of the
government sector relative to the overall economy. It should be reset to
increase it, if only for the simple reason that there is simply no sense in
reducing the contribution of something as large as Australia’s government
sector to the nation’s overall economy. The importance of an energetic,
strong, big or at least bigger government sector cannot be understated,
especially at times when other big sectors in our economy are not doing well
or are so grossly corralling profits to their shareholders that wages are
unreasonably suppressed, investment runs down, and consumer confidence
and spending is strangled. An efficient government sector bustling
competitively at scale alongside an efficient private sector can smooth out the
peaks and troughs of private sector market performance. Something of that
effect can be observed recently in Australia’s economy. For instance in June
2019, the economy would have gone into negative growth without
government sector spending.314 A little over half of the total growth in the
313 See Will Hutton, “America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory that they
imperil the nation”, The Guardian, 1 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/01/america-is-not-the-land-of-the-free-but-
one-of-monopolies-so-predatory-they-imperil-the-nation
314 ABS data indicate that expenditure by government contributed 0.5% points to growth in the June
quarter of 2019 whereas GDP only grew by 0.48%. Source: ABS, Table 5206.0, Column HF.
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national economy in the June quarter of 2019 came from the activity and
services of the government sector (and since the government sector accounts
for only about 25% of GDP, but is producing over 50% of the growth – this is
quite a testimony to the efficiency of the government sector and the
inefficiency of the private sector).
As prices for coal drop – and they will – the trough in GDP growth which
has seemed to open up recently is likely to deepen to a chasm, unless we
replace that industry with new ones for which there is demand. There are
many who would argue that the government sector’s role should be confined
to providing fiscal stimulus only occasionally, as necessary, rather than being
an active competitor on an ongoing basis. In reality though, that approach
simply takes us through to a point where taxpayers end up subsidising the sort
of investments in private industry and agriculture that are non-competitive,
which in turn reduces the size of the economy and increases inequality. It is
not a sustainable way to manage national growth. Catering to demand,
however, does bring growth – so the economists say. And demand for
traditional government sector services such as health and welfare is currently
a key opportunity for growth. If government takes a competitive role in direct
delivery of those services, alongside a competitive private sector, rather than
simply selling off everything to non-competitive monopolies or oligarchs (and
then just skipping provision of services the oligarchs don’t want), then
economic theory would suggest that we can embed a bigger services sector
into our economy and successfully achieve increases in GDP. And there is no
reason why we shouldn’t have a go. Indeed, if Scott Morrison is insistent that
Australians should “have a go to get a go”315, then this is how they can do it –
expand the public sector’s participation in our economy.
Of course, to have a go we need to have a decent plan. This isn’t
something we can plot out on the back of an envelope. Approaches to the
required sort of planning are discussed in the next two sections. But there is
something that our governments can do immediately to set the scene for a
competitive, strong economy. They can stop reducing regulation and
reintroduce regulations that prevent anti-competitive behaviour. For
instance, governments can reintroduce regulations to prevent the sort of
315Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, 1 January 2019, SBS News, “If you have a go, you get a
go.” https://www.sbs.com.au/news/if-you-have-a-go-you-get-a-go-pm-vows-to-make-2019-a-winner-
for-all
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conflicts of interest which have given rise to the building and banking industry
debacles. Unfortunately, nothing much is happening here. On the contrary,
there is evidence of a desire to newly afflict other key decision makers in
regulation of our economy with conflicts of interest, which will undermine the
rational and independent decision making that is vital for the national
interest. For example, in late 2019 we witnessed attempts by conservative
think tanks and some parliamentarians to fetter the independence of the
Reserve Bank of Australia by suggesting that the board of the Bank should lose
performance pay if Australia doesn’t reach, say, preferred target inflation
rates316. This will introduce a conflict of interest for the RBA board and will
affect its ability to act impartially in the national interest. It might be
reasonable if the board could actually be held fully accountable for inflation.
But of course it cannot. Inflation is an outcome of the interplay between
multiple levers in the economy, only one or two of which can be pushed or
pulled by the Reserve Bank. For as long as there is inconsistency between
operation of the levers by the various players who can have an impact on the
economy, and for as long as we have a government that undertakes no
investment planning and refuses to set rules for fair and efficient markets, we
will be at the mercy not just of global trends and opportunists but those who
would persist in fettering the independence of regulators for their own
undisclosed reasons. That way misery lies.
What might prevent governments from expanding our economy?
The short answer to this is that, depending on our attitudes and our
willingness to participate in planning our own future, we might inadvertently
prevent our own government from expanding our economy. Australia is
316See comments by Dr Stephen Kirchner, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, in The
Guardian, 21 September 2019: “The [Reserve Bank] governor’s performance-based remuneration
should also be tied to inflation outcomes by the board.” Comments accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/21/australias-slowing-economy-how-should-the-
government-and-reserve-bank-respond It is worth noting that other expert commentators quoted in
this article disagreed with Dr Kirchner. Brendan Coates from The Grattan Institute remarked that “I
don’t agree with Stephen that remuneration should be tied to inflation outcomes set by the board.”
And Emma Dawson from Per Capita said “We should be wary of introducing more prescriptive
measures that may undermine the perceived or actual independence of the RBA, which remains one
of our most trusted public bodies at a time of declining confidence in the institutions of democracy
both here and internationally.”
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entering the 2020s within a decision making vacuum. There is no reference
resource providing community guidance to our parliaments on how they
might achieve a consensus across an ideological divide and we are now
entirely hostage to just one of those ideologies – neoliberalism – which clearly
isn’t working. Little wonder that increasing numbers of Australians believe
neither side of politics is up to the job. But we can re-set these policies. To do
so we need to begin to describe what a truly decent economy should look like
– according to our ideas of the purpose of that economy. We don’t have a
strong economy in Australia in 2020. But even if we did, having a “strong”
economy just for the sake of it isn’t, or at least in a decent society oughtn’t to
be, enough. The objectives of the economy need to be articulated:
For whom and to what ends should our economy be working?
We need to figure that out and tell our leaders. Only then will we have a
strengthened capacity as a nation to manage the economy we want and know
that we are on the right track.
Some economists and the more paternalistic among our political leaders
are, however, likely to scoff at the concept of a community becoming involved
in planning for its own economic future. They will portray that community as
non-economists, amateurs who should leave everything to professional
lobbyists. These lobbyists will generally do nothing more than urge
governments to push and pull the levers that will produce the preferred
outcomes of their paying clients. Such outcomes are likely to align with the
national interest only by chance, if at all, especially in the age of transnational
corporations. These vested interests will have particular trouble giving credit
to an idea that big or bigger government has merit over small government.
They will continue to campaign hard to diminish government as a competitor
in the market place, in the manner that conservatives and the right-wing
media are campaigning, for example, to sell off the Australian Broadcasting
Commission. That particular government competitor, the ABC, is seen by right
wing media as a threat to both their market and political dominance and, for
their part, the sooner it is taken over by those private interests the better.
When neoliberals talk about the evils of big or bigger government, what
they really mean is the evils of big competition from government. Much of the
neoliberal narrative is all about displacing the public as a competitor. It is
about embedding an idea that market power, when exercised through
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government, is somehow illegitimate. It is about muscling us out and
maximising profitable opportunities for the already privileged. We need to be
able to recognise this sort of cheating in the stories we are being told about
government participation – that is to say, our participation – in our economy.
Failure to recognise this will prevent our governments from expanding the
economy on our behalf.
To obfuscate the matter further for us, these conservatives will also
inevitably steer the broader public debate about how best to manage our
economy back to arcane arguments in which participation by communities is
discouraged. They will attempt to fence off community participation by
confining the terms of discussions about the economy to whether monetary
policy or fiscal policy is the better way to go, working on the entirely
unimaginative premise that these two things are the only real levers we have
to manage an economy. The premise, however, simply isn’t true. Nor does a
debate focused myopically on those two levers produce anything but answers
driven from the particular ideological perspectives that each proponent
started with. If we ask to what end and for whom an economy should be
working, we can break out of this circular rut. Breaking open the shell of those
perspectives is amongst the most important things that communities can do
to convey to governments:
• a preferred set of objectives for a strong economy, with more decent
prospects and better wellbeing for us all,
• the minimum policy settings that stand the best chance of supporting
that preferred economy, and
• the government’s role in maximising growth through competition.
I will consider this issue of the techniques that are and will be used to exclude
Australians from participating in planning for their own economy later in this
chapter. At this point, however, it is time to look at one of the other major
inhibitors to our capacity to reset our own economy back onto a footing of
higher and more equitably shared growth. That inhibitor is our attitude to
taxation.
With neoliberalism we have been subjected to repeated pejorative
epithets for policies or politicians that seek to increase the size of
government. They are called “tax and spend” policies and they are
characterised as inherently bad, a kind of theft, a profligate misuse of our
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money, and even a reduction of our freedom of choice over our own
spending. However, whenever we succumb to notions of taxation as a
villainous character in our social story, we sell ourselves short of the
ownership and shares of benefit we could be enjoying from public assets. We
diminish both our wealth, our share of returns and our influence as a
shareholder of public assets and services. There is value for us all in changing
our attitudes about taxation, in looking at it far more broadly in terms of:
• the efficiencies it brings to the way we organise our money,
• the purchasing power and discretion it gives to us, and
• the strength it can inject into our budgets and our economy.
If we want to build a plan for the future and be able to fund it efficiently,
we will need to rethink our attitudes to our biggest source of funds – taxation.
Unless we rethink this, there may be little point to our planning. There will
certainly be lower returns. A brief look at the issue is worth the time here
because our recent decisions about tax cuts are going to have a much bigger
detrimental impact on our quality of life than we have been led to believe.
Changing attitudes about taxation
Moving back into bigger government is one thing, but any realist would accept
that changing our attitudes to big taxation is entirely another. Few if any
political pragmatists would have the courage to suggest increases in individual
or total taxation – at least they wouldn’t have the courage to support it
openly. But the reality is that national income from taxation is almost always
creeping up, even when we think it is going down. I say “almost” always,
because contrary to popular belief that taxation was not high under the
conservative Howard and Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments and was
high under the Labor Rudd-Gillard governments of 2007 to 2013, the facts
show the opposite to be the case. Total taxation went down under the Rudd
government for two successive years in 2008 and 2009317 and remained lower
317Source: ABS 5506.0 - Taxation Revenue, Australia, 2017-18 & 5506.0 - Taxation Revenue, Australia,
2009-10 accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/allprimarymainfeatures/9321627294FABECFCA2583E80
013F54C?opendocument
274
as a proportion of GDP than under any of the Coalition governments this
century318.
Notwithstanding occasional aberrations like the drop in total taxation
under the Rudd government, governments almost always find a way to ensure
they will be able to collect more tax. Sometimes they do this by shifting the
burden around, hoping that those to whom the burden shifts will not notice
too much. This is reason enough to keep our eye on how and to what extent
we are being taxed. But there are always other reasons to look around for
new approaches to taxation and these reasons change from time to time.
Lower taxation is not always the best thing for an economy. For example,
taxation that is too low can sometimes cause excessive inflation. Inflation is
not a problem in 2020, and in theory we could therefore tolerate lower taxes
for short time, at least until we need higher ones to either finance our
investment – as opposed to private investment – in publicly owned services
or dampen excessive demand within the entire economy. But as we go into a
new decade in a comparatively shaky financial position as a nation it is
particularly timely to have a look at this major item in the structure of our
economy and consider how our attitudes to it are adversely affecting our
capacity to secure our future.
Why rethink our attitudes to taxation now?
In the 2020s decade, two pressing reasons for rethinking our approach to
taxation include the fact that in 2018 and 2019 our Parliament legislated:
• to make our systems of taxation more unfair, and
• to reduce the amount of our total national income that will come
from taxation over the decade to 2029 by $302 billion.
One credible economist has called this $302 billion cost to Australia’s budget
“an incredible sum in several senses”319. In a colloquial mood I might call it
318 Alan Austin, “True Lies: Mathias Cormann caught by his own department for economic fairy tales”,
MW, 14 October 2019, accessible at https://www.michaelwest.com.au/net-debt-tops-400-billion-and-
humiliates-mathias-cormann/
319 Ross Gittins, “Morrison’s seven year plan shows who it thinks more deserves a tax cut”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 13 April 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-
economy/morrison-s-seven-year-plan-shows-who-it-thinks-more-deserves-a-tax-cut-20190412-
p51djj.html
275
“gobsmacking”, but to put it in measured perspective: it means we have
legislated to delete from the next ten years of the nation’s previously
budgeted revenue an amount that is almost the equivalent of the full year’s
worth of income tax received by the government in 2017/18 ($312.4
billion320). It is the equivalent of deleting funding for the entirety of what the
Commonwealth Government expects to spend in 2019/2020 on social
security, welfare, health and education ($298.3 billion321). The implicit
assumption here is that somewhere between 2019 and 2029 we could, in
theory, live for a year (at least in 2017/18 dollars) without having to pay for
things like pensions, Medicare, family tax benefit, disability support pension,
pharmaceutical benefits, carer income support and the federal government’s
contribution to schools and higher education. It seems unimaginable but we
are, nevertheless, imagining that somewhere, somehow, in the next decade
we can give ourselves a year-long holiday from paying income tax and that
there will be no unwished for effect on our economy or service levels. We are
relying on some idea that if those services are needed they will be provided
nonetheless from some other source – although if we look around there is
actually no commitment of that sort, and the track record of conservative
governments in particular is that the government’s budget must be balanced
at all costs and this must be achieved by reduced government spending and
service cuts – i.e., by austerity.
Of course, government services will continue to be provided; but some
will be provided to a greater extent and others to a much lesser extent,
because the fact is that growth in total government sector spending overall is
projected in the federal government budget to slow significantly over the
2020 decade. In its report, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections”322, the
320 Source: ABS, 5506.0 - Taxation Revenue, Australia, 2017-18 (released 29 April 2019), Table 1,
Column K, https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5506.02017-
18?OpenDocument
321 Source: Estimates of budgeted costs of social security, welfare, health and education, totalling
$298.3 billion, are derived from Commonwealth of Australia, “Budget 2019/2020: Overview – Our Plan
for a Stronger Economy”, 2 April 2019, page 32, accessible at https://www.budget.gov.au/2019-
20/content/download/overview.pdf
322 Source: Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No.
03/2019”, September 2019, accessible at
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Budget_Offi
ce/Publications/Research_reports/Medium-term_budget_projections
276
Parliamentary Budget Office projected that, taking into account the budget
assumptions and assuming no change to policy settings in the decade:
• total government spending as a proportion of GDP is set to decline
over the next decade by 1.0%, from 24.9% in 2018/19 to 23.9% in
2029/30323; and
• total government spending per capita is set to increase over the next
decade but only at about one third of the rate in which per capita
spending has increased on average since 1990 – per capita spending
is set to increase by 0.6% per annum but the long run average since
1990 is 1.8%324.
These drops in spending don’t sound like a lot when expressed as percentages
but they roughly equate to the full amount of money we have taken out of
the budget revenue by the 2018 and 2019 tax cuts.
Based on the 2019/20 federal budget and its assumptions, spending on
Medicare, the NDIS, defence and aged care is expected to increase. But based
on the Parliamentary Budget Office review of the budget and its policy
settings and assumptions, these increases in costs are to be funded, not by
restoring the capacity of our taxation system to produce the yield it did in
2017/18 (relative to GDP), but by large decreases in spending (relative to GDP
but in some cases in real terms) on Commonwealth grants, the disability
support pension, veterans’ support, the family tax benefit, pharmaceutical
benefits, government administration, the ABC, corruption monitoring, debt
servicing and all other federally funded items and services including the
sciences, research and the ABS325. The expected decreases in spending are
larger than the expected increases in spending on Medicare, the NDIS,
defence and aged care. It is as though the government has concluded that we
no longer want to be able to rely on all those things it has cut. The tax
reductions were sold to us without the necessary fine print about what the
government was assuming we would henceforth do without – and this at a
323 Source: Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No.
03/2019”, Ibid., page 16, Table 3.1.
324 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
pages 13-14, Figure 3.2.
325 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
page 15, Figure 3.3.
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time when, due to an ageing population and increasing inequality, we are
likely to increase our demand for the things being cut.
The decline in projected federal government spending of 1% of GDP over
the decade from 2020 is in addition to significant continuous reductions in
federal government spending since 2013326. Little wonder that the
Parliamentary Budget Office sounded a dimly ominous warning in September
2019 that:
The spending restraint seen over the past few years may be increasingly
difficult to maintain over coming years given the length of time over
which restraint has been applied, the pressures emerging in some
spending areas [such as Newstart and aged care], and the potential
need for fiscal stimulus, noting that the projected improvement in the
budget balance is mildly contractionary.327
Current policy settings for Australia’s federal budget are indeed
contractionary. They are promoted as a plan for “a stronger economy” but
they are set to slow growth – or at least slow the public sector’s contribution
to growth. Growth in GDP is instead expected – in theory – to be driven by the
private sector. However, there are some significant risks in the private sector
side of the economy, not the least being the likelihood of falling commodity
prices. Any trade wars between the USA and China (or the USA and any
country) will also have contractionary effects. For as long as trade wars go on,
investors will be unable to plan (and commence) long term investments
because they will be unable to make reasonable assumptions about the
probable costs of a large proportion of their inputs. Nevertheless, in the face
of this sort of uncertainty Australia has, with the 2018 and 2019 tax cuts,
removed almost all our spare cash in the budget which could otherwise have
acted as a buffer against these contractionary impacts. It is a double whammy.
We can no longer fund the services we want and we have no protection
against downturns. We are not building a stronger economy, we are setting it
up to be weaker. The tax cuts we have given ourselves may be our undoing.
326 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
page 13: “Total spending has reduced considerably since 2013–14 and, under current policy settings,
is projected to continue to decline over the medium term, reaching 23.9 per cent of GDP by 2029–30.”
327 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
page 1.
278
A stronger economy with higher growth is, as we have seen from the
“Australian National Outlook 2019”, entirely feasible but the settings are not
in place to make that a reality. Economic shocks that we are more likely than
not to suffer from unstable international situations will require us to maintain
some capacity for fiscal stimulus. However, the decrease in taxation that has
been legislated significantly diminishes or even cancels out our ability to
choose stimulus approaches possibly for the whole decade. We could use
debt for stimulus where returns on national capital investment are likely,
particularly if we lend the money to ourselves and minimise foreign debt. But
with the loss of such a large amount of income from taxation we have
diminished our ability to make the repayments to ourselves and to then set
ourselves up for the next round our preferred investments – those where we
can share the returns.
There is an illusion working in the advertising about the 2019/20 budget
that projections of a return to consecutive budget surpluses will give us the
wherewithal for stimulus should we need it. But these projected surpluses are
dependent on projections of growth in GDP and wages that are very much
above-trend in both cases. Thus the projected surpluses are not reliable as a
source of stimulus. They are unlikely to materialise. On top of that, the budget
is set to decrease our spending on debt, but as I have just intimated this is
something we should be increasing. The government in its 2019/20 budget
assumed that it would be taking on less debt over the decade from 2020 and
with expected low interest rates our loan repayment expenditures were
projected to decline. This was necessary because we have cut out the funding
for loan repayments by giving ourselves tax reductions. But in refusing to take
on more debt (especially the cheap debt we have access to in 2020) and
financing less infrastructure creation and renewal, we will build up a backlog
of infrastructure works for our children and a much higher bill for them in
asset management. We are repeating at a national level the failures for which
we heavily and rightly criticised local government in asset management in the
early 2000s. These mistakes nearly sent many local governments broke. In the
national budget’s settings for debt, we are also creating significant
intergenerational inequity, pushing our financial worries down the track. At
the risk of being repetitive, this is not an approach that strengthens an
economy. Moreover, when it is combined with what might be expected in a
continuation of recent trends in very low investment in new capital by the
279
private sector, the outlook becomes even more grim. Private sector new
capital investment has declined recently: since 2014, growth has been
negative, averaging -1.6% per quarter.328
The economy that is being built via the approach taken in the 2019/20
budget estimates not only contains some inbuilt contractionary effects, it
contains inbuilt growth in inequality. The 2018 and 2019 legislated tax cuts
have been sold to Australians on the basis that they will put more money in
our pockets. In reality, the tax cuts will put much more money in some pockets
than others. The tax cuts have also been promoted on the basis that they will
prevent taxpayers’ losing their hard earned wages through bracket creep. But
the new brackets have been set up in a way that reduces bracket creep
problems for high income earners (the top 20%), but increases them for low
income earners (the bottom 80%). As the Parliamentary Budget Office has
observed:
Even with the tax cuts, average tax rates are projected to continue to
increase with growth in incomes, particularly for low- to middle-income
groups (those with a taxable income in the range of $20,000 to
$58,000). In contrast, the average tax rate for the top 20 per cent of
income earners (those with a taxable income above $90,000) is
projected to be little changed.329
In summary, people earning less than $58,000 will see a significant rise in their
average tax over the next decade. People earning above $90,000 will actually
see a drop in their average tax. The Parliamentary Budget Office’s analysis
shows that:
individuals in the second and third quintiles (together spanning the
taxable income range $20,001 to $58,000) [meaning the poorer
quintiles], are expected to face the largest effects of bracket creep,
while the benefits of the tax cuts are greater at higher quintiles. Overall,
average tax rates for individuals in the second and third quintiles are
projected to increase by 4.5 percentage points and 3.9 percentage
328 Source: ABS, 5625.0 - Private New Capital Expenditure and Expected Expenditure, Australia, Jun
2019, Table 3B Actual Expenditure by Type of Industry, Column M (converted to annual percentage
change), accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5625.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
329 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Op.
Cit., page 1.
280
points respectively over the period to 2028–29, while average tax rates
for individuals in the top quintile (with taxable incomes above $90,000)
are projected to fall marginally.330
This increase in inequity would on its own be reason enough to rethink how
we arrange our own taxation. But, distressingly, it is not the only reason for a
rethink. The 2018 and 2019 legislated tax cuts were sold to us on the basis of
a number of falsehoods but a key one was that the government would not be
asking for the money back. In the government’s advertising sell, we would all
get to keep our tax cuts. But the budget papers show the government expects
that total revenue from personal income tax will begin to grow again by the
mid 2020s and will grow to a point where it constitutes a higher percentage
of GDP than it does now. Again, the Parliamentary Budget Office has noted
that: “This increase occurs even after factoring in all stages of the
Government’s personal income tax cuts, as announced in the 2018–19 and
2019–20 Budgets.”331
The problem here is that the tax cuts have been brought in very early in
the decade, before we know whether we can actually afford them. But the
government is unworried, because contrary to the impression created in the
pre-election period of 2019 that the strong economic managers in the
government wouldn’t need our taxes, they have structured the tax cuts to
ensure they won’t have to do without our taxes. In structuring the tax cuts
the way we have, we have taken over $300 billion out of the public sector
economic contribution; but from about the mid 2020s the poorest of us will
be required to put it all back, and more. Economic circumstances being
favourable, we will probably be able to cope with this (although that does not
excuse the inequity). Economic circumstances being unfavourable, we will
suffer more than we can understand, more than will ever be explained, and
more than the government of 2019 will ever be held accountable for.
This arrangement has not just been embedded by lies. It has been
embedded by policies that look benign but are dangerous if misused. The
policy fitting this description most closely is the government’s commitment to
a “tax-to-GDP cap”. This cap is set so that revenue from total taxation does
330 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
page 9.
331 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Ibid.,
page 6.
281
not exceed 23.9% of GDP. It is an artificial and arbitrarily imposed limit, for
which there is no good reason in economics. It is simply a signal of someone’s
(mainly the business sector’s) idea of where the taxpayer’s and the public
sector’s participation in and share of the economy should cease and where
the private sector should be allowed to take over. It is a policy favoured by
those neoliberals who don’t want the government sector to become a bigger
competitor and as such, it is a particular favourite of the Business Council of
Australia, alongside their other favourite of “a real spending cap” on taxpayer
spending332 (although it is quite a presumption for the Business Council of
Australia to consider itself a rightful and disinterested policy setter on how
Australians should collect and spend their own taxes).
The tax-to-GDP cap works insidiously by playing on our prejudices about
tax and by following neat steps. The first step is to cut taxes for everyone and
then let bracket creep do the work to get the total receipts back up again,
except that the brackets must be set to ensure that those in the poorest
brackets will do all the heavy lifting. Voila! The poor have filled the coffers
again. Then, usually just in time for another election, the process can be
started all over again, each time entrenching growth in the numbers of
working poor.
The tax-to-GDP cap and other complementary neoliberal policy settings
work together neatly to achieve both objectives of inequality (the rich getting
richer) and objectives of smaller government. In some circumstances we
might be prepared to put up with this. But in doing so we achieve a much
smaller economy than we might otherwise build by fairer means. It is a
beautiful political strategy, but all it means is that we are docking ourselves.
Tax cuts bribe us with our own money.
Proponents of neoliberalism like the Business Council of Australia (BCA)
have a lot at stake when they impose on the credulity of Australians about
taxation, painting it as an unreasonable and even unjust impost on
hardworking individuals. Full of guile when imposing as much on any relatively
guileless and generally unsuspecting taxpayer, they can argue in favour of
smaller taxation for us knowing full well this makes it easier to argue for much
smaller taxation for themselves. It also reduces pressure on them to fund
wage rises sufficient to stimulate the economy. Their preference is that we
332 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia”, April 2019, page 30, Op. Cit.
282
fund wages rises ourselves. All of this is done for the purpose of shifting the
burden for delivering growth. The BCA claims business does all the heavy
lifting in delivering economic growth, but all their efforts in fact go towards
shifting the heavy lifting to individuals. Their members get a double benefit
from this inasmuch as they can avoid wage increases and can shunt much
more of the burden for infrastructure support for their investments, and other
subsidies for their profit maximisation, back to individuals. In this regard they
have little if any scruple about making highly improbable claims about how
lower taxation will not result in a loss of services. For instance, they can and
do unaccountably claim that:
To get Australia’s budget in order, a series of fiscal rules to hold the
government to account and deliver programs and services more
efficiently is needed. These rules include a tax to gross domestic product
(GDP) cap, and a real spending cap. Following these rules will not reduce
services for Australians, but will provide for an increase in spending per
person after inflation.333
We are apparently obliged to conclude here that if we follow the BCA’s
preferred self-styled “rules” of cutting spending, we will end up with an
increase in spending. Will we? Well, bearing in mind that revenue from
taxation usually makes up over 90% of what the federal government spends
in any year334, it is unlikely that a cut to taxation revenues would of itself
automatically make way for an increase in spending or even a maintenance of
spending, especially if the government has a mindset not to take on debt or
issue bonds for fiscal stimulus projects. Nor can a self-imposed tax-to-GDP cap
and a cap on total spending itself function as an inspiration to efficiency
sufficient to result in “an increase in spending per person after [or before]
inflation”, as the Business Council persists in claiming here:
They [the Business Council’s preferred “rules” of a tax-to-GDP cap and a
tax cap] are designed to ensure the federal government does not tax
and spend first, but instead focuses on achieving value for taxpayers’
333Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia”, April 2019, page 30, Ibid.
334Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 4: Revenue,
page 4-5 lists total taxation receipts as $466.4 billion and total receipts of $505.5 billion. Hence
taxation makes up 92% of total federal government revenue. Accessible at
https://budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs4.pdf
283
money. These targets also work to limit the risk of an ever expanding
and bloated government, which can lead to less effective spending. We
support a responsible tax to GDP cap. We also support a real spending
growth cap of two per cent.335
This sort of linkage of the phrase “tax and spend” with phrases like “bloated
government”, or a linkage of the phrase “responsible tax” with phrases like
“achieving value for taxpayers’ money” – all of this is the foundation of a
mirage that is meant to convince us that if we pay less tax we will still get the
services we need. It is a mirage suggesting that public service efficiency gains
– that can apparently only be inspired by funding cuts (and no other means)
– will enhance our services to the point where they can keep up with growing
demand. Efficiency gains may, from time to time, help meet some of our
existing demand for services but any such gains will almost certainly never
cover the cost of growing demand. The truth is, this whole mirage is designed
simply to bedazzle us into letting business off the hook for sharing any of the
benefits and profits from our work. The Business Council has stated that:
The Business Council has a stake and investment in the success of
Australians. We believe we have a responsibility to outline the actions
that will improve their lives. This requires creating the environment
where Australians can succeed because employers are doing well,
delivering more and higher paying jobs while offering attractive returns
to almost six million Australians who own shares directly in Australian
companies.336
The trouble with this is that the actions the Business Council of Australia
prefers to outline, all of which are straight down the line neoliberalism, do not
improve the lives of Australians. For a start, this statement is a clear admission
that business prefers only to share profits (maybe) with Australians if first we
buy their shares, even though they may not be ethically or profitably run. This
might have some small integrity if the “more and higher paying jobs” they
claim to provide were actually being provided. But business can’t claim the
credit for delivering more jobs, any more than governments, or immigrants
might claim it (because they increase demand). And in Australia, business has
335 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia”, April 2019, page 30, Op. Cit.
336 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 8, Op.
Cit.
284
not been delivering higher paying jobs since 2014. Over the five years to 2020
we have seen slower growth in wages than at any time since the Australian
Bureau of Statistics started keeping records on the Wage Price Index in
1997337. And as I have already pointed out, wage growth has been lower than
GDP growth for some years. We are generating more “product” but getting
less back. Worse, we are seeing repeated instances of businesses deliberately
underpaying staff at record levels. And now the Business Council expects
Australians to fund their own wage rises by accepting tax cuts in lieu of wage
rises. This is not a wage rise at all. Moreover, it is built on a lie that we won’t
need the services that are being funded by those taxes as we descend into
further unemployment and underemployment problems and the standard of
living declines for the rest of us. In the meantime, profits of corporations are
rising as all the statistics on inequality have shown. In Australia, since 2016,
corporate profits have risen to unprecedented levels.338 To add the final insult
to a long line of injuries, the Business Council of Australia has continued to
campaign for a drop of 5% in the company tax rate, meaning it wishes to keep
billions more of the profits it gained through taxpayer subsidisation and
workers’ productivity, but has also happily continued to campaign for a 2%
cap on government spending of Australians’ money, meaning it wishes
Australians to cut their spending to ensure there will still be enough funding
available for their company tax cut. Clearly the business sector in Australia
thinks the age of entitlement is over for taxpayers, but not for business.
The Business Council of Australia calls all this “A Plan for a Stronger
Australia”339. But it is not a plan; it is merely a failed ideology – a failure which
even the godfather of neoliberal deregulation, disgraced ex-chairman of the
US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, freely acknowledged in 2008.340 If we
337 ABS, 6345.0, Table 1 Column S, shows that hourly rates of pay increased on average by 3.5%
annually between 1997 and 2014. From 2015 to 2019 hourly rates increased by only 2.1% per annum.
Accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6345.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
338 See Source: Trading Economics, “Australia Corporate Profits”, reported that annual corporate
profits rose 22% in the two years to June 2019. “Corporate Profits in Australia averaged 45921.12 AUD
Million from 1994 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 98026 AUD Million in the second quarter of
2019 and a record low of 12032 AUD Million in the first quarter of 1995.” Accessible at
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/corporate-profits
339 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, Op. Cit.
340 See Andrew Clark and Jill Treanor, “Greenspan - I was wrong about the economy. Sort of”, The
Guardian, 24 October 2008: “The former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, has conceded
285
really want to know what the business sector can do to develop a much more
effective approach to a better economy, we only have to compare the
Business Council’s “Plan for a Stronger Australia” with the “Australian
National Outlook 2019” by NAB and CSIRO, et al. These two plans are chalk
and cheese in terms of their focus, with the latter focussing on social inclusion,
environmental conservation, and innovation and on absolutely nothing about
cutting tax or spending by government. By contrast, everything in the BCA’s
“plan” has been tried in Western economies for the last forty years and none
of it has worked to deliver a stronger economy in Australia or any other
country. The sort of neoliberalism preferred by the BCA cannot and does not
work to grow an economy. If it did, we wouldn’t have had a GFC and we
wouldn’t be experiencing the slower growth of the last decade. Growth in
GDP since 2008 is almost half what it was between 1961 to 1975 (when,
notably, tax rates were higher than they are now) and 35% below what it was
between 1961 and 2007341. But still the BCA keeps trotting out the shallow
and thoughtless ideas about lower taxation, smaller government, and less
regulation, and it still persists in peddling myths rather than facts to support
its view.
In our busy lives it is inordinately difficult to navigate our way through
this miasma of lies about the best way to fund our preferred lifestyle, not to
mention a secure future for our children. But all indications are that we have
nothing to lose, and perhaps quite a lot to gain, in rethinking the role of
taxation in strengthening our economy. If we want to fund a stronger
economy and a better lifestyle, we need to skill up a bit on being able to spot
lies about tax and re-arrange things our way as collaborative communities.
The next sections are provided to assist in building those skills and to help us
navigate our way through the fog of lies about tax to a fairly and adequately
funded future.
that the global financial crisis has exposed a ’mistake’ in the free market ideology which guided his 18-
year stewardship of US monetary policy. ’I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of
organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their
own shareholders and their equity in the firms,’ said Greenspan.” Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-
greenspan
341 ABS, 5206.0, Table 1 Column B, shows that GDP increased on average by 4.3% annually between
1961 and 1975 and by 3.6% on average annually between 1961 and 2007. Between 2008 and 2019 the
average annual increase in GDP was 2.5%. Accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Mar%202018?OpenDocument
286
How are our taxation arrangements set in 2020?
Australia’s current income tax system is progressive, meaning it is a system
which takes a progressively higher proportion of people’s income in taxation
as incomes rise. But the idea of a progressive taxation system is not just that
marginal tax rates should increase as incomes rise. It is also that higher income
earners will bear a bigger proportion of a nation’s total income taxation
revenues than lower income earners. Australia’s income tax system fits this
particular description of “progressive”. Currently the top 20% of income
earners pay almost 60% of the total annual income tax raised by the
government from individuals. But because almost all other taxes are actually
regressive (such as the GST which takes an identical percentage of 10% of the
cost of a good or service from each of us, regardless of our income, or the
Medicare levy which taxes us all at an identical 2%), our taxation system
overall is significantly less progressive than it might otherwise appear. It
burdens individuals and the poorer among them somewhat more than it
appears, compared to businesses and the richer among them. In 2016/17,
about half our total national revenue from taxation came from taxes levied
regressively. And only about 70% of what individuals contributed – income
tax, GST and Medicare – was levied on a progressive basis.
Australians are moving towards more regressive taxation and in the
process our standards of living are likely to decline. As indicated above, the
legislation passed in 2018 and 2019 in Australia will result in a small drop in
the average income tax for those on incomes above $90,000 (the top 20% of
earners)342. But it will result in a rise in average taxes for those on incomes
below $90,000 with the greatest burden falling on those earning below
$58,000. By 2024, those earning $45,000 will pay the same marginal tax rate
of 30% as those on $200,000. This is quite strongly regressive. It embeds a
notion that someone on $45,000 can afford to pay the same rate as someone
who earns four times as much as they do. In other words, it embeds
inequality. According to the Grattan Institute, this means that:
342 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Op.
Cit., page 9, Box 3.
287
• the top 20 per cent of tax-filers will receive an average tax cut of
$3,170 in 2024-25 in addition to the 2018 tax cut of $3,780 on
average;
• the middle 20 per cent of tax-filers would receive an additional tax
cut of $740 on average in addition to the 2018 tax cut of $540; and
• the average tax cut for the top 1 per cent of tax-filers is $11,640 each
year from 2024-25.343
In the opinion of the Grattan Institute, the passage of these tax cuts will
mean that:
• the top 15 per cent of income earners would pay a lower share of
their income in tax, but middle-income earners would pay a higher
share. The income tax system in 2024-25 would be less progressive
than it has been at any point since the 1950s.344
This opinion has since been broadly substantiated by the figures from the
Parliamentary Budget Office.
We are trending towards regressive taxation and the inequality it
embeds, because of the pervasiveness of the neoliberal narrative about
taxation. But to trend back to a fairer and smarter system we need to
understand and break down that narrative. The next sections look at that
narrative and seek opportunities to re-set it. In these sections I will engage
with an underlying philosophy that has become deeply embedded within, and
ideologically weaponised as, conventional social and political discourse,
because of neoliberalism. This will necessarily involve an extensive critical
analysis of the reach and modalities of the neoliberal discourse, particularly
with regard to the rejection of taxation and welfare as a basic underpinning
of Australian society. The idea is to eradicate the false narrative that has taken
hold in order to clear the stage for the more rational and community planning
task that needs to take place. Consequently, discussion here will be both
wider and more extensive than heretofore.
343 Danielle Wood, Kate Griffiths and Matt Cowgill, The Grattan Institute, “Budget blues: why the Stage
3 income tax cuts should wait”, July 2019, page 14, accessible at https://grattan.edu.au/wp-
content/uploads/2019/06/917-Budget-blues.pdf
344 Danielle Wood, Kate Griffiths and Matt Cowgill, The Grattan Institute, Ibid., page 3.
288
Interrogating the neoliberal narrative on taxation
For many years now under neoliberalism, debates about income tax have
been dominated by the Thatcherite myth of self-reliance and its attendant
repudiation of the social contract. In these debates, supporters of
neoliberalism subordinate the societal need to pool our funds for services and
infrastructure provision to an ostensibly more important individual need to
reduce those funds (tax) so that we may at last be entirely self-reliant. They
gloss over the loss of services and the absence of new infrastructure that
logically must arise from this construction of how society should be ordered,
then create a comforting illusion:
• that taxation works against self-interest, not for it,
• that there is no such thing as shared interest,
• that if we pay less tax (or none) we will be able to afford to support
ourselves (when in fact with no taxation our lifestyle will be entirely
unsupportable), and
• that we do not need to cooperate in order to build a better life for
ourselves.
Because debate about tax is now organised in this way, almost totally eclipsing
discussions about services (except maybe at election time when some service
expansions tend to be trundled out and offered in a piecemeal fashion from
the proverbial pork barrel), we seem to have become transfixed by ideas of
taxation as theft by the government of money that is rightly our own personal
money, because, after all, it is we who have earned it through our own hard
work – haven’t we? Nobody else’s hard work has helped each of us earn our
wages – has it?
Of course, it is obvious that everybody else’s hard work has helped us
earn our wages. Nevertheless, in this anti-tax mindset, we have been
persuaded that taxation is a burden, a “dead weight loss”345, rather than a
345Economists refer to the theory of “deadweight loss of taxation” which refers to a notional harm
caused to economic efficiency and production by a tax. In other words, the deadweight loss of
taxation is a measurement of how far taxes reduce the standard of living among the taxed population.
An example is a tax on tobacco, intended to dampen demand. However, not all taxes can be described
as “deadweight”. Depending on how income taxes are spent, for instance, they have as much chance
of being stimulatory as they do of reducing standards of living.
289
way of organising our money efficiently to do and build the things we couldn’t
do and build at all if we did not pool our money.
The narrative that persuades us down this path of folly or denial about
neoliberalism goes something like this:
• I work hard.
• Government doesn’t spend my hard-earned money so well that I
should want to give them more of it.
• Indeed, shouldn’t I be giving them much less of it? After all, the
private sector is far more efficient than the public sector and will
always deliver services to me more cheaply.
• All services run by government which can be or are in fact profitable
should therefore be transferred to the private sector and in that
process a few big business owners can keep all the profits that I used
to share in, in exchange for charging me a lower price for the same
service.
• All the other services run by government which are unlikely ever to
be profitable should also be transferred to the private sector who will
certainly run them more cheaply for me if they no longer have to
observe certain inconvenient service standards, such as humane
treatment of a convicted felon or a refugee, or my aged aunt.
• The whole economy will run more efficiently and grow faster if we
cut government red tape and prudential regulations. I can rely on the
integrity of the private sector to put by enough assets to cover their
liabilities; and so if I need to make an insurance claim when I have
sustained some sort of loss through their actions, I know the
company will still be there, ready, willing and able to pay my claim.
• Taxes on big business and big business owners should be reduced to
enable them to divert their wealth into purchasing public assets and
businesses (profitable and not profitable). Thereby I will be released
from my burdens. If we run it this way, maybe eventually I won’t have
to pay the government at all. I’ll only have to pay for what I use.
• That might be impractical of course. But even if it isn’t, it will take
some decades to reach that point. In the meantime, all will be well
because the increasing wealth of the big business owners (that I have
helped finance by giving them big tax cuts and providing them with
290
taxpayer subsidies) will not be hoarded by them but will trickle back
down to me in the form of more job opportunities and higher wages.
• To make all this work, and to cushion any hardship while I am waiting
for wealth to trickle down, taxes on me should be reduced to
incentivise me to work even harder than I already do, regardless of
the impact on my quality of life.
• Any loss arising from reductions in my tax for those government
revenues that will still be necessary to support the few services and
assets that might remain in public ownership will be offset by
increased tax revenue obtainable from the higher wages trickled
down to me by the wealthy.
Phew! If I wasn’t tired at the start of this narrative, from all my hard work, I
certainly was at the end. Instead of being released from my hard work, I seem
to be strapped on a wheel where I can only attain a liveable wage (or barely
liveable) by even harder work. I am required to sacrifice what little quality of
life I might have left in order to get the money that I wanted to rescue that
very quality of life. I am required to sit patiently in traffic or in telephone
queues for longer every day because infrastructure is not being built to meet
the pace of our expansion as a rich country. More than that, the lower prices
I expected never seem to eventuate and the higher wages I am promised
never seem to trickle down to me, at least not fast enough to keep up with
the rising cost of living. No matter how much extra I contribute to my
employer (public or private) I am not to be recompensed by them
proportionally for those extra efforts. Instead I am required to supply the
necessary increases to my take home income from my own gross pay, which
itself is not increasing. Every time I see a drop in my taxes, that is exactly what
I am doing: funding my own income increase and letting my employer off the
hook, even though it is my extra efforts and increased productivity that has
enhanced the company profits. I’m also docking myself a second time,
because I won’t get the infrastructure that helps me get out of the traffic jam
and home to my family. Every time I’m given a tax cut, I achieve nothing more
than theft from myself – twice. Eventually I will need a second job.
It may be argued that my rendering of the neoliberal narrative on taxation
has been taken to the level of the absurd and that in reality things would never
approach a point where we pay no tax at all. But there is little if any doubt
that the leaders of neoliberalism would push the narrative that far. A world
291
where we are so perfect as to have no need of taxation (except perhaps for
whatever subsidies businesses might still crave) is the logical corollary of the
sort of stories woven by Mrs Thatcher into those “beauteous tapestries” when
she says things like:
And who is society? There is no such thing. … There are individual men
and women and there are families and no government can do anything
except through people and people look to themselves first.346
We don’t need to look too closely to see that history is not bearing out the
truth of the story that neoliberalism tells us about the evils of taxation and
the efficacy of total self-reliance. In reality, except perhaps for the first
sentence – “I work hard” – none of it is entirely true and much of it is entirely
false. The reality is:
• The private sector is neither more nor less inherently efficient than
the government sector. They both struggle with the same challenges
and if anything in 2020 the private sector is less efficient than the
public sector.
• Strong economies need participation by all of us, not less of us.
• Prices don’t go down when we privatise services, they often go up –
a lot.
• It is not true that we can’t afford these social obligations such as
aged, child and disability care services. On the contrary, we can’t not
afford them.
• Lower tax rates for the rich do not translate to higher income for the
poor.
• And as it turns out, it is not true that the economy grows faster when
taxation shrinks or the public sector reduces its participation.
What the neoliberal narrative encourages us to forget is the fact that we have
only been able to earn money, as individuals, because of the services and
infrastructure made available to us in the main through government revenues
from taxation. We can only earn money because of our education, which in
the vast majority is not funded by parents’ fees or private institutions such as
346 Margaret Thatcher, Op. Cit.
292
churches, but by taxation347. We can only turn up to work if public health is
maintained, not just in hospitals but in clean water, sewerage and waste
management systems. Again, this rests almost entirely on public funding
(even if it appears to be provided privately). We can only aspire to earn money
by partaking of these services and accessing infrastructure built through
taxation.
But perhaps the most dangerous part of the narrative is that it drives
divisions into communities and pits current generations against those of the
future. Instead of reinforcing an understanding and appreciation of
collaboration, it reinforces estrangement and debt shifting. Behind it all, there
is an insidious and destructive train of thought that implies each of us can live,
as though on an island, without participating fairly in a social contract and
taking on the obligations that attend every type of contract where shared
benefit is involved. This narrative has lately been so persuasive that it is
pushing us to entirely unnecessary peril.
The best example of the sort of peril we can walk into, when we underrate
the benefits of taxation, can probably be seen in the reversal of the Gillard
government’s price on carbon. This was introduced in 2012 under the Clean
Energy Act, 2011. The price on carbon was dubbed “a great big tax” on us all
by the then federal Opposition, under Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott became Prime
Minister in 2014 on the strength of an election campaign “pledge” to
“immediately scrap the carbon tax”. His Chief of Staff, Ms Peta Credlin, some
years later in 2017, admitted that:
347 Parents who pay exorbitant fees for the private school education of their children (fees which in
two NSW schools, SCEGGS and Kings, reached $40,000 per annum in 2020) are not taking the burden
off the taxpayer or funding their children’s education on their own. They are simply paying for a luxury
level of education which others cannot afford and which in fact others are missing out on because
they are subsidising private school education. The extent of the taxpayer subsidy to private schools
has reached the point of gross inequity in 2020. See Tanya Plibersek quoted by Paul Karp, “Tanya
Plibersek cites 'visible inequality' at schools in call for fair education funding”, The Guardian, 21
February 2020: “The government likes to say that it’s now committed to sector-blind, needs-based
funding, or that its policies are neutral, or that it’s drained disagreement from the sector. It’s just not
true. None of it is. By 2023, under Coalition policy, almost all private schools will be funded at or
above their full schooling resource standard – while almost all public schools will remain below it.”
And Adam Bandt is quoted in the same article: “The federal government … currently spends $12.6bn
on private schools and just $8.3bn on public schools that teach two out of every three students.”
Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/21/tanya-plibersek-cites-
visible-inequality-at-schools-in-call-for-fair-education-funding?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
293
It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in
nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax. We made it a fight
about the hip pocket and not the environment. That was brutal retail
politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and when
he cut through Gillard was gone.348
And so was all our potential competitive advantage as a nation in carbon
trading – gone. By the time Ms Credlin admitted that it was merely a political
ploy to persuade us that the carbon price was an evil tax, the damage to our
economic competitiveness and to our environment had been done, several
times over. This lie has been rightly described as an “opportunity crime”349
against Australians. The cost of it is so large as to be incalculable. And we have
still not recovered from it. For as long as we let ourselves believe lies like this
which play on our fears or prejudices about taxation we will continue to
imperil our own future.
Ms Credlin’s belated candour in 2017 is indicative of a complete lack of
conscience about telling lies to Australians. And she knew which lies would
work on us, given that antipathy to taxation had been stoked for some time
by some previous governments. Only when she felt there would be no
consequences for her, was Ms Credlin happy to share the truth. The truth,
now universally agreed, is that the Gillard government’s price on carbon was
not a tax at all. In fact, the scheme of the Act reduced our income tax and only
260 corporate entities were ever subject to the carbon price – the price they
were required to pay to continue to pollute, i.e., to continue to consume our
resources of clean air with the right balance of carbon dioxide in it. To the
extent that the price on pollution by those 260 entities might have increased
our energy bills, we were compensated by reduced tax funded by the charge
on those big polluters.
The carbon pricing system resulted in immediate drops in carbon
emissions from electricity in Australia, although some think tanks dispute that
the evident drops in emissions were caused by the scheme. Suffice to say
348 Peta Credlin, Ex-Chief of Staff to Tony Abbott, speaking on Sky News’ “Sunday Agenda”, February
2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/whats-the-point-of-australian-
politics?utm_term=.dwgLMAdMQ#.or8lJ0aJQ
349 Katharine Murphy, “Australia’s energy policy is a world-class failure and Abbott wears the gold
medal of blame”, The Guardian, 9 March 2017, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/mar/09/australias-energy-policy-is-a-world-class-
failure-and-abbott-wears-the-gold-medal-of-blame?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
294
while the scheme was in place, Australia's carbon dioxide emissions from
electricity generation fell to a 10-year low, with coal generation down 11%
compared to 2009350. But when the scheme was repealed by the Abbott
government after only two years in operation, emissions from electricity rose
again and for another three years were higher on average than they had been
during the carbon price scheme.351 Between 2017 and 2019 electricity
emissions dropped back to a little below their annual average during the
carbon price period, but these gains were overwhelmed by increases in most
other sources of greenhouse gas.
At the end of 2019, an attempt was made by the federal government to
make total annual carbon emissions during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison
Coalition’s period of government appear lower than total emissions under the
Rudd-Gillard Labor years by adjusting upward the figures for emissions from
land use changes during the Rudd-Gillard period352. This, however, was
nothing more than a fiddle with the figures for political purposes, similar to
the Berejiklian government’s attempt to convince NSW voters in 2018 that it
beat its jobs growth target by double when all it had done was halve the
target. The whole exercise of changing the figures for total emissions
(including land use) for the Rudd-Gillard period succeeded in nothing more
than making it appear that total emissions during the Coalition’s period of
government from 2013 had flatlined instead of risen noticeably compared to
the Rudd-Gillard years, during which they had actually dropped sharply,
350 Source: “Australian CO2 emissions hit 10 year low”, Business Spectator Australia, 4 December 2013
(no longer accessible), and Peter Hannam, “Big fall in electricity sector emissions since carbon tax”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 5 February 2014, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/big-fall-in-electricity-sector-emissions-since-
carbon-tax-20140205-320a6.html
351 Emissions from electricity averaged 46.3 Mt CO -e per quarter between June 2012 and June 2014
2
under the Gillard government’s Carbon Price Scheme. Between September 2014 and September 2016,
after the repeal of the Scheme, emissions from electricity grew again and averaged 48.1 Mt CO2-e per
quarter. From December 2016 electricity emissions have settled back to average 45.6 Mt CO 2-e per
quarter. Source: Australian Department of Environment and Energy, “National Greenhouse Gas
Inventory for March 2019”
http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/6686d48f-3f9c-448d-a1b7-
7e410fe4f376/files/nggi-quarterly-update-mar-2019-data-sources.xlsx
352 Adam Morton, “Australia changed its historical carbon emissions data: what happened?”, The
Guardian, 23 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/23/australia-has-changed-its-historic-data-on-
carbon-emissions-what-happened?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
295
regardless of which data set we might choose to believe353. Revision of the
historical data on carbon emissions is nothing new for the federal Department
of the Environment. It goes on all the time, due to the complexity of the data
and difficulty of collecting it, particularly for land use. It makes you wonder
how governments could ever be confident that they are accounting properly
to the United Nations for their compliance with any international agreement
on emissions reduction. But regardless of the variability of sets of statistics,
the point is that when it comes to actually reducing emissions, nothing is in
place to turn either a flatlining or rising trend around, due to the conservative
federal government’s inability since 2014 to establish any policy for energy
efficiency or for an economy based on renewables – a decarbonised economy.
Although our per capita carbon emissions dropped a little in 2019, we
remained the highest emitters of greenhouses gases per capita in the world
and total emissions excluding land use have either been steady (if we believe
the new accounting raising emissions for the Rudd-Gillard period) or they
increased for five years in a row to 2019354. They have certainly not been
falling. Moreover, we are nowhere near on track to fulfil the commitments we
have made under the Paris Agreement to reduce carbon emissions by 26%-
28% of 2005 levels by 2030. As journalists were able to observe readily at the
end of 2019, by checking the government’s own data:
The line from [Scott] Morrison is that we will “meet and beat” our Paris
emissions reduction targets [but] the current figures from his own
government show that rather than reduce emissions in 2030 by 26%
below 2005 levels, we are on track to cut them by just 16%.355
353 Adam Morton, “Australia changed its historical carbon emissions data: what happened?”, Ibid.
354 Source: The Climate Council: “Australia is not on track to meet its Paris target. The government’s
own published data shows our greenhouse gas emissions have been rising consistently for five years.
To be on track to meet our target, our emissions would need to be falling – not rising. … Australia has
the highest emissions per capita in the developed world. It is true that Australia’s emissions per capita
have fallen more than most countries, but this is from an extraordinarily high baseline, and has largely
been driven by rapid population growth. Even with this drop, we still have the highest per capita
emissions in the developed world. Our emissions per capita are higher than Saudi Arabia, a country
not known for its action on climate change.” Busting Six Emissions Myths, Posted 30 August 2019,
accessible at https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/busting-six-emissions-myths/
355 Greg Jericho, “The government has been forced to talk about climate change, so it’s taking a subtle
– and sinister – approach”, The Guardian, 14 January 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/commentisfree/2020/jan/14/the-government-has-been-
forced-to-talk-about-climate-change-so-its-taking-a-subtle-and-sinister-approach
296
From 2020 onward every Australian can likewise readily observe that from
our current starting position and with our current policies we are unlikely to
meet this wholly inadequate target for emissions reduction, if only because of
the fact that bushfires – which have unmercifully beset our country and will
undoubtedly worsen over the coming decade before we can mitigate the
increase in their scale – release massive amounts of carbon into our
atmosphere. The bushfires between August and December 2019, alone,
emitted 250 million tonnes of CO2 to our atmosphere, almost half our usual
annual emissions.356 And that was before the bushfires of 2020, which
brought the destruction wrought by the Spring and Summer fires to a total of
more than 2,000 homes, the death toll to more than 30 people and the death
toll for animals to more than one billion, not to mention the economic and
habitat loss from the fires which ravaged more than 10 million hectares of
regional Australia357. Short of a major economic downturn resulting in
prolonged industrial shutdowns, we are nowhere near “meeting and beating”
our 2020 Paris emissions reduction target for 2030. Our economy simply isn’t
yet structured to allow it.
Australia is not doing anything to reset its economy to fix this 358, even
though there are substantial opportunities to reap economic gains from a
carbon price. We are carbon price averse because we have been led to believe
it is a tax and tax is bad. Hence my remarks above about the unnecessary peril
that has arisen from stoking a fear, indeed a lie, about increased taxation.
Emissions reduction is one of those things that we can’t not afford to deal
with. And to characterise a scheme that facilitates efficient investment by
private industry in pollution reduction as a tax is twisting the truth 180o in the
356 Graham Readfearn, “Australia's bushfires have emitted 250m tonnes of CO2, almost half of
country's annual emissions”, The Guardian, 13 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/13/australias-bushfires-have-emitted-250m-
tonnes-of-co2-almost-half-of-countrys-annual-emissions
357 See Naaman Zhou, “Australian bushfires from the air: before and after images show scale of
devastation”, The Guardian, 17 January 2020: “More than 10.7m hectares of land have burnt so far in
Australia’s bushfires – larger than the total area of South Korea, or Portugal, and 1.3 times the size of
Scotland.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/17/before-and-after-
images-show-scale-of-bushfire-devastation
358 For a fact check on the history of Australia’s emissions reduction targets see Adam Morton, “Scott
Morrison says the government is acting on emissions. Is it true?”, The Guardian, 21 January 2020,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/21/scott-morrison-says-the-
government-is-acting-on-emissions-is-it-true?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
297
wrong direction. The repeal of the carbon price did not actually save us money
in our taxes. On the contrary, it shifted the cost of pollution reduction away
from the businesses who were benefitting from polluting the atmosphere and
back to us. Instead of removing a tax, Mr Abbott introduced a new one for us.
The “tax” on 260 pollution generators was simply converted back to a subsidy
to those polluters to be provided by us all, via the creation of Prime Minister
Abbott’s “Emission Reduction Fund”. In the carbon pricing scheme, we as
taxpayers weren’t paying for industry to reduce its emissions; but we are now.
Additionally, in the absence of that price, a real tax impost will now fall on our
children and they will pay for maintenance of today’s ongoing subsidies to
polluting industries. And to rub some final salt into our wounds, “wholesale
electricity prices have almost doubled compared to what they were under the
carbon price”359.
Despite this debacle, there is still an opportunity for us as a nation to
generate income by pricing carbon. One of the real losses associated with the
demise of the carbon price was that the scheme was scheduled to be
transitioned into a carbon trading scheme in 2014/15. Had that occurred we
would have already had the financial and market structures in place to
commence domestic and international trading of carbon permits. This would
have allowed polluting industries to select the cheapest way of reducing
emissions, either by investing directly in pollution reduction or buying permits
(up to a ceiling) if that was cheaper, or by choosing the lowest cost
combination of both. On top of that Australian agribusiness could also have
been making a fortune out of a market for carbon trading. As the “Australian
National Outlook 2019” has shown:
Carbon sequestered in forests could be produced profitably on over 30
million hectares, equivalent to half of the more marginal agricultural
land in Australia’s intensive use zone. Supported by higher carbon price
assumptions, planting on this scale means that returns to landowners
could more than double to as much as $114 billion per annum, growing
land use industries as a share of national GDP from 2.1% to 5.2% by
2060. … This has the added benefit of directly supporting jobs and
359Michael Mazengarb, “Five years after carbon price repeal, Australia remains in policy abyss”,
Renew Economy: Clean Energy News and Analysis, 17 July 2019, accessible at
https://reneweconomy.com.au/five-years-after-carbon-price-repeal-australia-remains-in-policy-abyss-
43066/
298
incomes in regional Australia. … Carbon and environmental plantings on
this scale are a significant land use shift, and so require careful planning,
consultation and engagement with the community, particularly regional
communities. Such considerations will include protecting prime
agricultural land for food and fibre production and avoiding adverse
effects on water supplies. However, the assumed rate of change is
consistent with historic innovations in the land sector, and includes time
to gain community support, as well as build expertise and investment in
infrastructure and logistics. The key driver is effective global action to
limit warming to below 2°C, which translates to a global carbon price
rising to $153/tCO2e in 2050 and $274/tCO2e in 2060. 360
There is a huge emerging market here that we could be capitalising on. But
we can’t, because we no longer place a price on carbon. And to make matters
worse, courtesy of Liberal National Party policy on carbon trading, Australian
businesses are unable to buy international carbon credits as a cheap way of
reducing global emissions while undertaking long term changes to make their
operations less polluting361. So we can’t save money and reduce emissions by
buying credits from overseas. And we can’t make money either by selling the
credits overseas. It is hard to see how we could short-change ourselves more.
It is as though we have said to ourselves:
Let’s not set up an economy where we can all make money out of being
green; let’s continue with the one we have set up where a tiny few make
money out of being brown and the rest of us can pay for it.
360 See CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, page 65, accessible at
https://www.csiro.au/en/Showcase/ANO
361 Nicole Hasham, “How do Labor and the Coalition plan to cut carbon emissions?”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 13 May 2019: “The Liberal-Nationals have ruled out allowing businesses to buy international
carbon credits, or permits, to meet their obligations to cut carbon pollution. International credits
mean emission reduction has taken place overseas instead of Australia but they contribute to lowering
emissions globally. These credits, endorsed by the UN and other experts, can be cheaper or more
convenient for business than taking the action themselves. While the Coalition say the credits equate
to sending money offshore to foreign carbon traders, experts such as former Reserve Bank governor
Bernie Fraser say international permits are a sensible option because they allow emissions to be offset
immediately while businesses undertake longer-term changes such as making their operations less
polluting.” Accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/federal-election-2019/how-do-labor-and-the-
coalition-plan-to-cut-carbon-emissions-20190429-p51ic8.html
299
It is entirely self-defeating for well over 90% of Australians. Even peak
bodies in industry can see this makes no sense. As Innes Willox, the chief
executive of the Australian Industry Group said in early 2020:
The aversion to a carbon price should be rethought. What justifies it
today beyond the inertia of past politics? Carbon prices are key policies
for major economies on every continent except Antarctica – and
Australia. An emissions trading scheme for China’s huge power sector
starts this year.362
Mr Willox is a Liberal Party loyalist and ex-Liberal staffer. So if he is saying a
carbon price is a good idea, we can be fairly certain that at last the business
sector has figured out that it would be financially beneficial. (Even the
appallingly self-serving Business Council of Australia finally figured it out and
switched in late 2019 to supporting a carbon price that it had spent a decade
demonising.363) And Mr Willox is not alone. Ross Garnaut has also pointed out
that:
The Australian emissions trading scheme was due to be integrated into
the European one from 1 July 2014. Those arrangements went into
hibernation with Australian carbon pricing. If something like them were
brought back to life, we could now expect Australia to be a rapidly
expanding exporter of goods embodying renewable energy, and to be
engaged in close discussion of adjustments in rules to allow large-scale
trade in legitimate carbon credits from the land sector. We can make a
significant start on developing an important carbon farming industry
through domestic markets, and go further when policy change allows
large-scale international trade in carbon credits.364
362 Innes Willox, “Getting down to the business of evolving Australia’s climate policy”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 31 January 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-
change/getting-down-to-the-business-of-evolving-australia-s-climate-policy-20200130-
p53w34.html?btis
363 In late 2019 after a decade of retrograde undermining of a carbon price the Business Council of
Australia joined other business groups in the Australian Climate Roundtable and called for – no less – a
reintroduction of the carbon price. Presumably by the end of 2019, the BCA thought it might lose too
many members if it didn’t change its tune. See Lisa Cox and Adam Morton, “Q&A recap: business
council calls for legislated target of net zero emissions by 2050” The Guardian, 11 February 2020,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/11/qa-recap-business-council-
calls-for-legislated-target-of-net-zero-emissions-by-2050?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
364 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit., Kindle edition, Loc 242.
300
Given all this, it is clear that if we want to stop global heating and reap all the
financial benefits that can arise from emissions reduction, one of the big
things standing in our way is our attitude that a price on carbon is a tax on us.
This is false. A carbon price is simply a way of establishing a value for a new
type of commodity that we can sell and that we have a competitive advantage
in producing (because we have a huge amount of open land and others don’t).
That commodity is cheap pollution reduction, in the form of carbon credits.
We can be making money and saving the planet at the same time. Instead of
filling our land with new coal mines which will make us less money as time
passes (if the coal is to be sold for burning as a fossil fuel)365, we can fill it with
forests and make more money. And the really neat thing is that if we look at
this as the opportunity that it is, we can also avoid contraction of our
economy, as the “Australian National Outlook 2019” points out:
It is also clear that unmitigated global heating will cause economic loss
both globally and in Australia. … the most reliable estimates aligned to
the scenarios indicate that 4°C global heating without adaptation could
lead to a global per annum GDP loss of 7.2% and an Australian per
annum GDP loss of 1.6% by 2100. If mitigation can limit the global
heating to 2°C by 2100, the global per annum GDP loss would be
reduced to 0.5–1.6% by 2050 and to 1.8% by 2100, and the Australian
per annum GDP loss would be reduced to 0.6% by 2100. The GDP loss
would be further reduced by adaptation.366
Looking at this example of the opportunities that are missed when taxation is
demonised (or when a perfectly sound market price is demonised as a tax), it
is clear that succumbing to ideas of taxation as an evil is a path to self-defeat,
not self-reliance. It is a path to social breakdown and lower GDP and
unsupportable burdens for our children. Today in Australia we have reached
a point where services that we refuse to fund as a collaborative society
(particularly services in the regions) simply get taken away, and infrastructure
that we refuse to fund simply gets built badly (like our NBN) or not at all. This
365 There are some arguments for continuation of coal mining for metallurgical coking coal suitable for
use in manufacture of wind turbines. See Sarah Martin “Anthony Albanese recasts Labor's climate
policy to make it ‘all about jobs’”, The Guardian, 29 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/29/anthony-albanese-recasts-labors-climate-
policy-to-make-it-all-about-jobs?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
366 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, Ibid, page 64.
301
is obvious but we are acting like it is not. We are acting as if only lower income
tax will strengthen our economy and all tax is therefore bad. In doing so we
are reinforcing the very narrative that is set to defeat our aspirations. This
reinforcement is set in play because the idea that all tax is bad and lower taxes
are always better than higher taxes strongly supports other parts of the
neoliberal vision of how the world should be run. It convinces us that we can
pay for our own future without cooperation with others, withdrawing from
our own savings of the nation’s taxation revenues – money that we have
worked hard to set aside to fund a better tomorrow – to pay for our own wage
rises today. It is simply stealing from our own future. This in turn means that
businesses can increase their profits now by avoiding wage increases. This has
become painfully obvious since 2014 with the flattened wages that we have
been experiencing. Here are the facts on our wage rises:
Australia
Period
Average Annual Growth in Hourly Rates
(ending June)
of Pay367
1999 to 2007 3.5%
2008 to 2014 3.4%
2015 to 2019 2.1%
That is a big noticeable drop in wages growth, almost 40%. But again, we are
acting as if it is not obvious, preferring instead to dip into our own funds and
savings rather than complaining about flattened wage rises, a growing class
of working poor and a smaller middle class.
But stepping back from the neoliberal story on taxation, it is easy to see
that it is indeed all set up to distract us from the folly of funding our own wage
rises – by accepting tax reductions in lieu of an actual wage rise. It is also a
very convenient distraction from the fact that governments are not doing
their job of creating the markets which will enhance GDP, our wellbeing, and
the more equitable distribution of benefits from our economy. In a capitalist
society it is government’s core role to establish market rules and set
367Source: ABS, 6345.0, Table 1 Column S, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6345.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
302
incentives to create an economy capable of expanding the number of us who
can live in the middle class. This is because, as Robert Reich has pointed out:
No economy can maintain positive momentum without the purchasing
power of a large and growing middle class.368
We can all sense this is true. Even the neoliberals know it, which is, in
part, why its advocates work so hard to play upon our natural aspirational
tendencies. They recognise, as we all do, that there is a need to ensure enough
of us can afford to buy whatever they want to sell. But the modus operandi of
our governments in 2020 is to set up the market rules, and restrict
government’s own market participation, in such a way that they can only
achieve the opposite. The settings at the moment – particularly historically
low top marginal tax rates, refusals to make corporations pay proper tax and
resources rents, and smaller government participation – are all acting
together to hollow out the middle class. And because the direction in which
we are being pushed out of that class is down, not up, we are experiencing
slower growth in GDP, per capita recession, and verging toward economy
wide recession. Growing inequality inevitably contracts an economy. It can
have no other outcome. And we are setting ourselves on course for that
outcome while ever we persist in views that taxation and government
spending are nothing but a dead hand. Of course the government should be
spending. Intuitively we all know that – and given that, it would therefore be
far more useful if we focussed less on the fact we are taxed and more on what
we should spend our tax on.
What we should be spending it on is – to put it simply – us. We and our
governments really can afford to do this and do more of it because, in reality,
money is not the limitation. We have multiple ways of financing our future
and tax is only one of these, but it is a crucial one. Consequently, the trick with
taxation is not to resist it as a theft from ourselves but to inject ourselves into
the process of deciding how to use it well – to spend it on ourselves and not
on, say, poorly structured subsidies to prop up businesses that are consuming
resources beyond safe levels (such as the fossil fuel industry). Because
taxation performs a dual role of:
368 Robert Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, Op, Cit. Preface to the British Edition.
303
• expanding our ownership of common assets and services (and the
returns to us from that), and
• moderating inflation if need be (if politicians have the courage to
raise it before inflation takes off),
it functions as a versatile tiller that steers the ship through storms to the
nearest available calm waters.
Not every government can run their economy to full advantage with this
same versatility and variety of money sources, but Australia can and does.
Because it is what is called a “monetary sovereign government”369 Australia
has extra flexibility in structuring and diversifying our supplies of money. Our
federal government can issue its own money – or we might say create new
money in the economy – if it wants to and it does so frequently, although in a
controlled and sensible way by issuing bonds to those willing to lend to it. It
can then use that to create employment opportunities for people who then
pay tax. And so the supply of funds for us all grows and circulates faster
producing faster growth in the entire economy. It can also combine this with
another advantage that is peculiar to government in stimulating employment.
This advantage arises from the fact that a government does not have to
balance its budget every single year, let alone bring in surpluses, to generate
employment and economic growth. For the majority of years in my lifetime,
the government has not brought in surpluses and yet we have enjoyed
amazing economic growth. This is because government sector surpluses
generated by reduced government spending are not a key to growth. Indeed,
such surpluses remove money from an economy. Deficits in the government
sector are more to the purpose when it comes to stimulating economies.
Government budget surpluses are really only useful for dampening demand,
not simulating it.
So instead of needing to ensure we “live within our means” by always
tightening the belt and shrinking public sector spending, and instead of
369See Steven Hail, “Explainer, what is modern monetary theory?”, The Conversation, 31 January
2017: “A monetary sovereign government is one with its own currency and central bank, a floating
exchange rate, and no significant foreign currency debt. Australia has a monetary sovereign
government. So does the UK, the US and Japan. The Eurozone countries are not monetary sovereigns,
as they do not have their own currencies.” Accessible at https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-
is-modern-monetary-theory-
72095?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIpPqOpKj96AIVRRSPCh3dxQH9EAAYASAAEgLJQPD_BwE
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thinking we can’t afford to employ ourselves, government in our case is very
well placed to use its powers to issue bonds (money), take on debt
(judiciously), and spend on public services (either directly or through
contracts with the private sector) for the purposes of balancing the entire
nation’s economy and getting it operating at full, or close to full, capacity.
Our governments can therefore run deficits and strongly progressive tax
systems with no adverse impact on Australians. In fact this is the key means
by which they can promote full employment, giving us all a go. But for some
reason they are trying really hard not to do this. They are afflicting us with a
chronic underutilisation of our own labour and are refusing to use all our
capacity, even though we are keen to offer our spare labour.
Why do governments – of both persuasions – do this? There are at least
two reasons:
1. Because they can’t (or won’t) sell the message about the real benefits
of taxation as simply an investment in ourselves and as a
fundamentally good thing – a thing that, if set up properly and fairly,
keeps our economy chugging along nicely, moderating it within a
tolerable inflation range, balanced and benefitting people equitably
if the tax system is properly progressive.
2. And because – in the case of conservative governments in particular
– they prefer an underutilised labour force because this serves the
purpose of keeping labour costs down and profits up for the private
sector.
To further this purpose, needless cruelty is imposed on millions of Australians
who want to work and could be employed if the government chose. The
government could structure it that way simply by issuing and accessing its own
sovereign funds and directly employing people who will then spend money
into the economy and pay tax which in turn would cover – more than cover –
any costs of the funds they had injected. If they did this, running money in this
sort of circle around the economy, in theory they could drop taxes for all,
perhaps even more than they have done in the massive cuts of the 2019
legislation (although it would be smarter to stage tax cuts and time them
depending on what’s going on with inflation and tax cuts should never be
legislated so far in advance – it just buys elections, nothing more). However,
full employment would raise wages for the private sector, so the political
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preference instead, particularly for conservatives, is to win elections by
offering tax cuts up front, withholding opportunities for employment in the
government sector, and covering the sin of this needless exclusion and cruelty
by propagating a myth that the unemployed and underutilised are
unemployed and underutilised by choice – through their own fault of
indolence. It is truly and needlessly nasty, not to mention simply self-
defeating from an economic growth point of view.
Tax should be understood as a clever regulating lever and one that, if set
properly, makes participation possible for more of us, not less of us – through
time. For a start, it helps fund recurrent public expenditure (without
increasing debt costs) – being effectively something that means we are
borrowing from ourselves this year to invest in ourselves next year and not
borrowing from overseas. By taxing ourselves we are not losing. We are
simply making it possible to invest what we borrow from ourselves into our
public services, utilities and GTEs, which make money for us and increase the
stock of our capital – particularly human capital if the tax is invested in
education. When we set up a taxation system we are not being diddled of our
own money, we are simply deciding to put our weekly earnings in two
different accounts:
1. one account for take-home pay that we can use for consumption and
immediate needs, and
2. another account that we can use to put the rest where it has even
more value because, by being combined with the taxes of others, it
will create the possibility of ongoing consumption and improved
living standards into the future.
Of course, if too much of the money we earn in wages is put into the wrong
one of these two accounts it can create lots of problems. But that is the job of
governments and economists – to figure out how to balance our accounts
through time so that disruption (firstly to consumption and then to steady
growth) is minimal and the economy grows at a rate that benefits more of us
and doesn’t result in scarcities of resources and attendant inflation. It is not
the job of governments to demonise taxation to the point where it can no
longer serve this useful function of organising our accounts for continued
prosperity through time with the least debt burden.
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To sum up, none of this neoliberal narrative about taxation being a dead
weight holds water if looked at through time. The more productive argument
– the one that doesn’t always rise clearly to the surface of debates about
taxation (at least in the right wing media) – is about who gets to use taxpayer
funds and injections from governments through transfer payments or fiscal
stimulus, and who doesn’t get to use those funds. We can be reasonably
certain that when governments inveigh against increased taxes and spending,
they are not altruistically thinking of keeping our national accounts or even
our household accounts in the black and protecting us from dreaded debts
and deficits. Conservative governments will readily run into debt and deficits
if it suits their spending agendas, and then bellow about fiscal irresponsibility
when the other side does it for whatever they want. (Notice how the Abbott-
Turnbull-Morrison government berated the Rudd-Gillard government for
increasing debt while more than doubling debt levels during their own period
of office.) But if we can get past those neoliberal myths about deficits, debt
and particularly tax as a theft, and visualise it all simply as the fairest way of
financing our future, we can release ourselves from this and start setting the
spending agenda according to a better thought out and fairer plan.
Instead of running down rabbit holes which suggest that the smartest
thing to do is to introduce more regressive taxes such as a GST, or an increased
GST, and compensate those dependent on fixed welfare incomes (eg.,
pensioners, the disabled and the unemployed) by increased transfer
payments (which are then not supplied by the untrustworthy governments
we elect or are cut at the first opportunity), we can do things the other way
around. We can maintain a progressive tax system which, while it may not be
as “efficient” from the collection point of view as, say, a GST, nevertheless
keeps the pressure on those earning more to pay more – which is as it should
be. Higher income tax collections only reduce economic growth if those who
should be paying more of it pay much less than they should (or none) while
those who should be paying less of it pay much more than they should. It is
not really the total that is collected that matters so much. What matters more
often is how it is collected and from whom and what is done with it. Getting
that balance right – making sure the many at the bottom have as much to
spend as possible rather than just a few at the top – is a more reliable key to
growth. And it is a far fairer set-up than a GST system that relies on making
those at the bottom pay more today for the same volume of consumables
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they could only just afford to buy yesterday and then beg to be compensated
so that they don’t have to buy less food just to pay their rent. Prosperity arises
from equality. By contrast, a set-up which embeds inequality undoes
economic growth.
Economies will tend steadily towards contraction in neoliberalism –
especially after forty years of it – because neoliberals allow themselves to get
stuck in a conflict of their own making: proponents can acknowledge that a
large, prosperous middle class is good for demand but it is not so good for
their share of profits. They therefore reason that if they have a choice
between smaller slices of a larger GDP pie and larger slices of a smaller GDP
pie, then the smart money is on the latter (especially if they are going to be
inept at growing the economy or reluctant to take the risk necessary to grow
it). Never mind that this leaves the rest of us with much smaller slices of an
ever smaller pie. They genuinely don’t care – just as Peta Credlin did not care
how much damage demonisation of the carbon price would do to our
economy. And just as Scott Morrison has not cared what damage he does to
our prosperity by continuing to frustrate the establishment of a decarbonised
economy in Australia. Scott Morrison’s persistent favouring of fossil fuels –
even to the point of bullying the NSW government into accepting more gas
fracking in state forests (which will push up emissions) in exchange for federal
funding for transmission upgrades to connect regional renewable energy
supplies into the national grid – denotes a complete lack of care for
Australians. His insistence in January 2020 that, “There is no credible plan to
lower emissions and keep electricity prices down that does not involve the
greater use of gas as an important transition fuel”370, was nothing but
misrepresentation for purposes of bullying. More gas fracking is the least
credible way to keep power prices down because:
a) gas has become expensive due to a move to export parity pricing over
the 2010 decade371, and
370 Scott Morrison quoted by Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison strikes $2B deal with NSW to boost gas
supply”, The Guardian, 31 January 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/jan/31/australian-prime-minister-scott-morrison-strikes-2bn-deal-with-gladys-berejiklian-
nsw-to-boost-gas-supply?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
371 See Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit., Kindle edition, Loc
1352: “With gas priced out of long-term balancing of intermittent renewables by the move to export
parity pricing in eastern Australia, it is become clear that storage [pumped hydro and battery] will play
the major role in providing reliability in the National Electricity Market(NEM).”
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b) solar and wind are cheaper and battery storage can – and will –
negate the need for baseload (“firm”) power via gas, particularly if
they are combined with pumped hydro storage (PHS) for supply
continuity in times of peak demand372.
Gas also has no credentials in terms of keeping emissions down. All the Prime
Minister was doing in this “initiative” was making Australians use their
taxation income to subsidise more fossil fuel use when we should have been
using it to fund far cheaper extra renewable energy generation.
This sort of dishonesty has become persuasive for Australians because it
feeds off another lie that we have come to believe – a neoliberal lie that
taxation is bad for us. A discourse which tells us that:
• “higher taxes will kill aspiration in this country”373;
• “quiet Australians”374 simply want to be in control of their own lives
and tax cuts are essential for this; and
• “tax cuts represent the best chance ‘to get ahead’ in a strengthening
economy”375
372 See Ross Garnaut, Ibid., Loc 1336: “The Snowy system [for pumped hydro power storage] has 175
hours of storage. That makes it possible to greatly expand the power capacity ten-fold or more if there
were value in doing so, while providing abundant hours of storage. An expanded Snowy PHS could
meet most of the balancing of solar and wind with close to 100 per cent renewables in the National
Electricity Market. It would, however, be expensive. The 27-kilometre horizontal distance between the
two storage dams is much greater than is usual in PHS. This raises capital costs and loss of power
through friction in operations. Similar potential for balancing mainland renewables at lower cost has
been identified in Tasmania. Both the Tasmanian ‘Battery of the Nation’ and the Snowy 2.0 project
would require large investments in transmission to contribute substantial value –the latter through
new submarine cables. Other, smaller PHS sites could provide storage at substantially lower total costs
per unit of electricity.” Regardless of the capital expense of PHS, operating costs are next to zero – a
virtue that cannot be claimed for gas extraction.
373 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, on the passage of tax cuts in the Australian Parliament,
2019, in Brett Worthington and Stephanie Dalzell, “Government’s $158b tax cuts pass Parliament,
giving coalition first win since election”, ABC News, 4 July 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-04/full-federal-government-tax-cut-passes-the-
senate/11277002
374 Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, election victory speech, 18 May 2019, “These are the
quiet Australians who have won a great victory tonight. Tonight is about every single Australian who
depends on their government to put them first.” See Katharine Murphy and Sarah Martin, “Scott
Morrison credits ‘quiet Australians’ for ‘miracle’ election victory”, The Guardian, 19 May 2018,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/19/scott-morrison-credits-the-
quiet-australians-for-miracle-election-victory
375 Senator Matthias Cormann, Finance Minister, in Brett Worthington and Stephanie Dalzell, Op. Cit.
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has all been geared one way and it is slowly and subtly settling us into a spiral
of economic decline.
But not only are we passively opting for tax arrangements which will
reduce both services and total GDP, we are opting for tax arrangements in
which the very wealthy will proportionally contribute much less, or bear no
burden at all, and the rest of us will proportionally contribute more. When
faced by political candidates who proposed maintaining our 2018 higher
marginal tax rates for the rich and lower marginal tax rates and thresholds for
the poor, the majority of us instead favoured those political candidates who
proposed lower taxes for the rich and a greater share of the total tax
obligation to be borne by individual members of the middle and poorer
classes. We are led to this sort of perverse position quite effectively by
statements like this one from Scott Morrison in the 2019 federal election
campaign:
We want to see people know that by earning more, they will do better
and not be taxed more.376
Or this one from the Budget Papers for 2019-20:
The Government is building a tax system that rewards effort and
underpins a strong economy.377
But these and similar statements are disingenuous and if we deconstruct
them their insincerity emerges quite easily. We can consider the possibility
that although the government, in full election mode in April 2019, went on
record stating they did not want “anyone saying that [the 2019 income tax
cuts] will stop income tax being progressive”378, the tax cuts themselves
eroded the progression in the system. Taking them at their word, the first of
376 Scott Morrison, speaking with Katharine Murphy, “Scott Morrison on wage growth, tax cuts and
playing politics – the full interview”, The Guardian, 8 February 2018, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/08/scott-morrison-on-wage-growth-tax-cuts-
and-playing-politics-the-full-interview
377 Commonwealth of Australia, Pamphlet accompanying Budget 2019-20, “Lower Taxes: Tax relief to
encourage and reward hard‑working Australians”, accessible at https://budget.gov.au/2019-
20/content/download/taxes.pdf
378 Australian Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, quoted by Ross Gittins, “Morrison’s seven year plan shows
who it thinks more deserves a tax cut”, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/morrison-s-seven-year-plan-shows-who-it-thinks-
more-deserves-a-tax-cut-20190412-p51djj.html
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the above two statements can be seen as the unashamed attempt that it is to
reset tax thresholds so that those who earn the most do not pay more tax, or
will at least keep much more of their future wage rises, proportionally, than
those who earn less. The second statement suggests that those who are
rewarded with the highest pay rises are intrinsically worth more than those
who are rewarded with lower pay rises, and accordingly should take home
proportionally more of their pay rise relative to the proportion that can be
taken home by someone on a lower wage. The attempt to embed inequality
trudges on. It is actually a deliberate choice within the ranks of neoliberal
advocates. Inequality is not just an unwanted or unintended side effect of
neoliberalism. It is the objective. (A higher unemployment rate is the
associated objective of neoliberalism too, but I will deal more with that later.)
In Australia’s case in 2020, this embedding of inequality may not be
uniformly deliberate (not every neoliberal has a conscience like Ms Credlin’s),
but it is nevertheless playing out as a covert attempt to embed a regressive
tax system for an entire decade. To achieve that, the federal government has
invoked an idea that those whose wages creep over time into a higher tax
bracket somehow end up going backwards, in their take-home pay, when of
course we still go forward and are always net better off when we cross a tax
bracket. It is meant to create an impression that there will be a disincentive
to work more, and/or earn more, if that bracket line is crossed and all the
wage gains are lost through tax. If this were the case it certainly would be a
disincentive to earning more. But we would need a progressive taxation
system where the higher marginal rate was 100% for that to happen. Clearly
our highest marginal rate, at 45%, is nowhere near that. It then comes down
to an argument about whether the structure is too progressive and is placing
too much burden or pressure on the rich. Conservative thinkers tend to try to
settle this argument by claiming (correctly as at 2015) that:
50% of all income tax in Australia is paid by 10% of the working
population.379
The implication is that this is far too progressive, imposes far too much on the
rich who can’t afford it, and should be adjusted by the only means available –
379Australian Treasurer, Joe Hockey, in interview with Fran Kelly on ABC Radio National, 27 July 2015,
fact checked by The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/factcheck-is-50-of-all-income-tax-in-
australia-paid-by-10-of-the-working-population-45229
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namely, by imposing more on the poor. Even if this were defensible in equity
(which of course it is not) it would still be an unsound way to go about
strengthening an economy. It obscures the fact that filling the pockets of a
small number of wealthy people cannot grow an economy.
In the 2019 federal election in Australia, the Morrison government asked
us: “Where do Labor’s high taxing policies stop?”. On the face of it this is a
reasonable question that should be asked in any election, although it is not
really a question; it is a statement in the form of a question that contains its
own pre-determined answer. (Has Labor stopped beating its wife?) But in the
case of the question as it was put in the 2019 election, the inbuilt answer was
quite misleading because:
a) as noted above, the fact is that Labor isn’t actually the higher taxing
government of the 21st century, the Coalition is; and
b) Labor wasn’t actually proposing to increase taxes; it was proposing:
o some income tax reductions for low income earners,
o no change to tax for higher income earners,
o removal of some tax concession arrangements that were
favouring some self-funded retirees who had held shares – in
other words it was proposing to remove tax “rebates” (gifts of
other taxpayers’ funds) to people who hadn’t actually paid tax,
and
o removal of some other concessional arrangements for negative
gearing and capital gains tax for future property investors (not
existing ones) – arrangements that, if not removed, would
continue to unfairly favour future property investors and inflate
house prices.
That said, the Morrison government’s question should have been answered.
Not answering it in straightforward terms (or not ensuring the answer was
published in the conservative press) simply left Labor without the trust of the
electorate. But if we were going to ask that question, there was a twin
question that also needed an answer: “Where do the Coalition’s regressive
taxing policies stop?” or “Where does inequality stop under the Coalition?” I
feel no compulsion whatsoever to do either political party’s advertising for
them, but as an elector I would have liked each party to address these
questions. Alas, they didn’t and as a result Australians were left without the
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fuller story, at least on the challenge we are facing in inequality and the threat
it poses to our economy.
Getting the balance right on progressive and regressive taxation isn’t
easy. But as a rule of thumb the system should never be set up to result in a
smaller middle class. And yet Australia’s new tax system is now set in that
direction. Being built on our ambivalence or our outright antipathy towards
taxation it is set to weaken our economy, not strengthen it. When this is
combined with a withdrawal by the government sector from participation in
competitive markets and services, it becomes a recipe for disaster. The
neoliberal narrative about taxation and small government is failing us and will
continue to fail us.
This needless disaster can be avoided. But we will need to achieve a shift
in our attitudes to at least four important things:
1. our attitudes to tax,
2. our attitudes to public sector participation in, and regulation of,
competitive markets,
3. our attitudes to the place of welfare in our society and our economy,
and
4. our attitudes to our own role in planning for a better future.
I have discussed the first two of these attitudinal changes already. These are
really important shifts in thinking because if we can change our attitudes to
tax and public sector participation in our economy we will be better able to
amass the funds necessary to set our economy back on course for strong
growth, and we will be able to amass these funds fairly. Likewise, the third
change will enable us to strengthen our economy. The fourth attitudinal
change will enable us to determine what and who economic growth is for.
This will require us to imagine a new and better economic narrative.
The following two sections deal with the issue of how we might achieve
the last two of these four changes. I’ll start with the third challenge first.
Changing the place of welfare in our socioeconomic arrangements
Throughout the 20th century Australians supported and maintained a strong
social safety net. Ever since the Great Depression we have taken it for granted
that we have a right to dignity in misfortune and this right is met by the mutual
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cooperative that is our welfare system. This welfare system is not just about
welfare payments for the unemployed, pensioners, carers, single parents,
youth allowances, student allowances, child care fee assistance, parental
leave, disability support, farmers’ allowances, Indigenous support, veterans,
self-funded retirees, and the like. It is also about social services including
taxpayer funded health, hospital and disability services, employment services,
emergency relief services, along with services for the homeless, domestic
violence victims, the aged, children, families, our Indigenes, and other
disadvantaged groups such as children living in poverty. So when I speak of
welfare here, I mean all these things – welfare payments and welfare services.
They are all part of the social safety net.
Our confidence that we will be able to rely on our welfare system is a
fundamental underpinning of our confidence that we will be able to maintain
personal and public safety, free from the destitution, violence and
degradation that was the fate of those in the 19 th and early 20th centuries
during depressions.
In the 1970s Medicare emerged as the pinnacle of our egalitarianism and
our desire for decency for all. It is a universal health care system that we have
been proud of ever since. Any attempt or even potential attempt to dismantle
it has, at least since 1983, been viewed with deep suspicion at the ballot box.
In the 1980s we used our welfare system as a reliable safety net during a
period of massive transition from one type of economy to another. The Prices
and Incomes Accord between the Hawke government and trade unions in the
1980s was developed contingent on a government commitment to respond
to the sacrifices being made by workers in lower wage claims with a quid pro
quo of expansion of the welfare safety net. This enabled us to support the
most vulnerable in our society while we moved from a closed economy reliant
on strong demand for our commodities, tariff protection and an
administratively set exchange rate (which culminated in high inflation and low
productivity) to an open economy based on promoting our natural
competitive advantages and a floating exchange rate (which culminated in an
extended period of low inflation, high productivity, strong wage growth and
strong growth in GDP for more than twenty years).
Then in the 1990s, thinking way ahead, we formed another type of
mutual cooperative by introducing compulsory superannuation, enabling
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more of us – and one day, hopefully, all of us – to maintain dignity in
retirement, when we can no longer work or no-one will take us on.
Working together to build a reliable social safety net and a strong
economy at the same time has always been one of Australia’s most positive
attributes, a defining strength in our society. Universality of health care,
retirement funding and welfare is a vital entitlement that not every nation can
take for granted. Our great good luck in having it – in granting it to ourselves
through cooperation and genuine commitment to each other – is a significant
part of what has made our country a far better place to live than most other
countries in the world.
But in the 21st century things have changed. We are being besieged by a
discourse which is far less generous to those in need of welfare. And this at a
time when our need for social security will rise due to the likelihood that:
a) technology will replace more and more of our jobs,
b) more of us will live longer and face more health challenges, and
c) the global economy will weaken (probably through trade wars, global
heating and/or unsustainable investments and exhaustion of natural
resources) to such an extent that our export earnings may plummet
and/or our import costs may rise. (In other words, the global
economy may significantly worsen our terms of trade position.)
We can hope for a change of course on the global economy. We might hope
that international relations will become less fractious and international
cooperation, particularly on global heating, will materialise. In 2020, however,
we are not seeing much if any tendency towards cooperation coming out of
Australia. Quite the opposite. Our relations with Pacific nations, China and the
United Nations are on balance more antagonistic than demonstrably
cooperative. Nevertheless, a new cooperation may emerge. There is far less
hope, however, that our jobs will not evaporate in the wake of technology
development and Artificial Intelligence. All up, the size of the coming storm is
bound to be like nothing we have ever gone through before. As such, the
prospect of weathering it with a smaller and less equitable welfare system
should give us pause.
In 2008 Paul Keating delivered a speech to a conference on “Asian
Leadership” in Seoul, organised by Chosun Ilbo, one of South Korea’s leading
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newspapers. The speech was entitled “Financial Innovation and Labour
Reform in the Post-Industrial Age”. In it he said:
There will always be groups in the labour market whose positions are so
weak that they are unable to bargain their way into higher wages, to
garner a share of the productivity. This is invariably true for women and
young people and the broadly unskilled. Policy has to work at protecting
these vulnerable people from exploitation while the better off are able
to reasonably enjoy their economic rewards. There is a real challenge
here: we want flexible and mobile labour markets with earnings related
to productivity but decency demands that we should have this only in
the context of safety nets for the disadvantaged.380
Mr Keating was talking about smaller challenges than those we are facing now
– possibly far smaller. He was speaking of problems that could be managed
with clever solutions at a domestic level, not global problems on a far larger
scale and over which we can have far less control. But still he did not expect
that those smaller challenges could or should be weathered without a
comprehensive welfare safety net. In 2020, however, the parameters are
being set to decrease that safety net. Not only are we being set up to drag
ourselves through to a new future and transition ourselves into jobs in
industries which in fact are not yet being established (because investors are
simply too hesitant and there is insufficient political leadership to lift
confidence), we are being set up to manage this transition with a smaller
safety net and we are making our economy smaller in the process.
Welfare is under assault in Australia. This makes no sense at all since a
well run welfare service sector, including social services like the public health
system, contributes massively and, in the absence of a mining boom, possibly
more than any other single sector to growth of our GDP. Government output
is equivalent to just under 25% of our GDP. Within that government output,
our health and welfare sectors contribute more than half of total annual
expenditures by the Commonwealth (over $260 billion in 2019/2020381) and
380 PJ Keating, After Words: The Post Prime Ministerial Speeches, Allen & Unwin, 2011, Op. Cit., page
547.
381 Source: Estimates of budgeted costs of social security & welfare ($180.1 billion) and health ($81.8
billion), totalling $261.9 billion, are derived from Commonwealth of Australia, “Budget 2019/2020:
Overview – Our Plan for a Stronger Economy”, 2 April 2019, page 22, accessible at
https://www.budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/download/overview.pdf
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this doesn’t count expenditure by the states and local government. That’s big.
The biggest employment sector in our economy by far is health and social
care. It has been called “the colossus of Australian employment”382 and
approximately 13% of Australians work in this sector. Welfare, including
health, is therefore a significant essential engine room of our economy. It is a
service, not a burden. It underpins our economy in at least two massive ways:
• It funds jobs for those who deliver the services. We have been
transitioning away from a commodities based economy to a services
economy for decades now and as our dependence on commodities
wanes (particularly non-renewable commodities), and as technology
replaces more and more jobs, and as we all live longer, welfare
services will continue to be the great jobs growth pillar of our
economy383.
• It is also a great demand growth area of our economy. The taxpayer
dollars used to provide welfare circulate throughout the community
increasing the demand for everything other businesses want to sell.
The Multiplier Effect384 of the injection of welfare increases all our
final incomes. It does not diminish them. Absent the purchasing
power provided by that injection, and commercial businesses
particularly in the retail sector would suffer and possibly collapse.
Accordingly, the neoliberal concept of making the health and welfare sector
smaller rather than bigger and more exclusive rather than less exclusive is
economically suicidal.
Presuming to paraphrase Mr Keating, I would venture to suggest that it is
not only decency that demands a safety net for the disadvantaged. Common
sense demands it. Common sense, however, it not very common in 2020 in
382 Bernard Keane in interview with Katharine Murphy, Australian Politics Live Podcast, “Why
neoliberalism is its own worst enemy”, The Guardian, 9 March 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2019/mar/09/why-neoliberalism-is-its-own-
worst-enemy-australian-politics-live-podcast?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
383 Bernard Keane, Ibid., “We’re not an economy of rugged individualists, we’re not an economy based
on riding the sheep’s back or ripping stuff out of the Pilbara, we’re an economy of people using the
health system and the aged care system and child care to look after ourselves – there’s the transition
to a services economy, writ large.”
384 The Multiplier Effect in economics refers to the increase in final income arising from any new
injections of funds from exports, investments or government spending.
317
relation to the attitude of our leaders to welfare. Our whole attitude to
welfare and who should and shouldn’t be entitled to it is undergoing a
fundamental change. This section analyses that change, assesses the threat it
poses to our society and economy and suggests how we might approach the
issue of the place of welfare in any plan for our socioeconomic future.
This will necessarily involve introducing significant discussion about the
influence of religion in our attitudes to welfare. Religion – or rather
fundamentalist Christianity – has played a major role in shaping our attitudes
to who deserves and who doesn’t deserve welfare and to the place and proper
use of welfare itself in capitalist societies. It is not possible to work through
the issue of attitudes to welfare and its proper place in our economy without
understanding the historical effect of religion in this regard. Effectively this is
because neoliberalism is itself a kind of fervour or faith that shares – and has
taken advantage of – perspectives identified with right wing Christian
evangelicalism. Confected in the early stages of the Cold War and responding
to the adversarial threat of communism, neoliberalism is an anti-egalitarianist
economic doctrine that has come to inspire faith-like adherence from its
proponents (there was really no irony in Tim Wilson’s use of Milton
Friedman’s work on monetarism when taking his ministerial oath of office). In
the face of facts to the contrary – such as the catastrophic historical fact of
the GFC – neoliberalism nevertheless persists perversely on the basis of a
belief in the rightness of the market and trickle-down economics. In this
persistence, its socioeconomic perspectives tend to mirror (and are
reinforced by) moral perspectives arising from Christian evangelical doctrine,
such as an abiding distrust of welfare and an overwhelming emphasis on
individual self-reliance (discounting the role of circumstance in social destiny).
That is why neoliberalism has found itself in comfortable ideological
agreement with the Christian right in America – the Christian fear of godless
leftism merges with the neoliberal paranoia over planned economies under
communism, helping to breed a complex web of beliefs, ideas, perspectives
and indeed superstitions that have come to underwrite prevailing attitudes in
the conservative-dominated Anglosphere (Britain, the United States and
Australia). It is this web that one economic historian has called the “neoliberal
318
thought collective”385 which has been used to influence (among other things)
our ideas on a hierarchy of entitlement, thereby slowly embedding inequality.
For as long as we fail to interrogate and dismantle this frame of religious
prejudice about welfare, inequality will continue to grow and our economy
will slowly decline.
Accordingly, I have structured this analysis to examine attitudinal
problems in relation to welfare and the structural undermining of welfare. I
will then follow on with a discussion of how we can plan our way out of the
problem.
What is happening to our attitude to welfare?
I have asserted in the previous section that inequality is the objective of
neoliberalism. This is not to suggest that an objective of inequality in the
hands of neoliberals is some sort of Machiavellian plot to which all of its
advocates have knowingly or wilfully subscribed with malevolent and
misanthropic intent. Rather, neoliberalism must be understood as
fundamentally antipathetic to radically egalitarianist ideologies such as
communism. Moreover, to the extent that the objective of inequality has
been clothed in a garb of respectability – as though inequality is the natural
outcome of a moral order where only those deemed “worthy” can and should
attain wealth – it can make sense to see an objective of inequality as a
reasonable and morally consistent way to pursue a just distribution of
rewards for effort in society. This view has dominated American society since
its inception and particularly since religious fundamentalism became popular
and established in the US, soon after World War I386. It is a view that makes
total sense to the majority of Americans.
385 Philip Mirowski, “Hell is Truth Seen Too Late”, boundary 2 – an international journal of literature
and culture, 1 February 2019, accessible at https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-
2/article/46/1/1/137342/Hell-Is-Truth-Seen-Too-Late
386 For an insight into the rise of religious fundamentalism and its antipathy to welfare, state control
and internationalism see Matthew Avery Sutton Professor of History, Washington State University,
Carnegie Council Audio Podcast, “The Crack-Up: 1919 & the Birth of Fundamentalism”, accessible on
Spotify.
319
Today, it is likely that about 25% of Americans (just over 80 million of
them387) identify as subscribers to fundamentalist evangelical religions which
are Christian, or more specifically, Protestant in their origins. In that episteme,
those who earn their own place in society, by not depending on welfare, are
welcomed to the fold. Those who don’t are likely to be cast out – spiritually
and financially – because their financial failure is considered, in
evangelicalism, to be of their own making. They are poor because they don’t
work hard enough. This moral order has shaped the American view of the
nature of welfare, and how it should be organised in modern society, more
than any other school of thought. In America, religious fundamentalism and
neoliberalism go hand in hand. They are both antipathetic to the welfare state
and welfare per se.
In Australia, evangelical fundamentalism has generally been confined to
the fringes of religious practice and has had little impact on our attitudes to
welfare. But in the same way that neoliberalism arrived comparatively late in
Australia as a dominant political discourse, evangelical fundamentalism –
especially in its “prosperity religion” formats – has come later to our shores,
and with it we have begun to experience a noticeable shift in our attitudes to
welfare. This shift is being embedded by a new discourse that in 2020 is being
led, loudly and whenever possible, by none less than our nation’s Prime
Minister.
Scott Morrison is the world’s first elected national leader who is steeped
in fundamentalist evangelical beliefs (in his case, Pentecostal beliefs388) and
his persistent explicit criticism of welfare, as though it is somehow pernicious
in our lives, is an attempt consistent entirely with that fundamentalist faith to
387 Statistics on this vary quite widely between surveys. The latest research from Pew Research in
America in 2019 suggests that the figure is more like 16%, while a Gallup Poll in 2018 cited a figure of
41%. Either way, it’s a lot of people, in each case more than the entire population of Australia,
although younger generations would appear to be deserting religion. See Harriet Sherwood,
“Americans becoming less Christian as over a quarter follow no religion”, The Guardian, 18 October
2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/17/americans-less-christian-
religion-survey-pew?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. For the Gallup poll, see
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/235208/things-know-evangelicals-america.aspx
388 See Pentecostalism at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentecostalism Key Pentecostal
beliefs include that the Bible is literally the unerring word of god, that the Bible is prophetic, that
these prophecies include that Jesus Christ will come back to Earth, that we are living in or at the
beginning of the “end times”, that the end times will be characterised by the rise of the anti Christ and
a battle of Armageddon, but that those who have been baptized in Christ will be spared and instead
“raptured” “into the clouds to meet the lord of the air”.
320
unleash a new and larger antipathy to welfare here in Australia. For Mr
Morrison, this is a mission in the religious sense, but the timing of it for
Australians is quite inconvenient, to say the least, given the challenges ahead.
It is difficult to know how successful this mission may have been to date.
Where it has traded mainly on resentment of welfare for migrants it has
probably been quite successful over the last twenty years, since the Tampa
crisis. On the other hand, in late 2019 there were calls from diverse
community advocates for an increase to welfare for the unemployed, and a
nation-wide poll of attitudes to welfare provided some indication of growing
support in the wider population for an increase to unemployment benefits
(Newstart) and a shut-down of the government’s heavily criticised (and as it
turned out, unlawful) robo-debt program.389
This return to a more compassionate approach among Australians to
welfare and social security may be temporary, however. According to Peter
Lewis, the Executive Director of Essential, the research firm that conducted
the above mentioned poll, the more usual exhibited “strain in Australian
consciousness” over the last decade or so, when it comes to “redistributive
policies”, is something he calls “downwards envy”:
Downwards envy is a powerful force that entrenches power and
privilege, channelling the anxieties of those who are struggling to resent
any support for those who are actually going under. I’ve witnessed the
phenomenon in countless focus groups: talk about high level tax
evasion, family trust rorts and executive salary and the conversation
inevitably leads to hand-wringing about dole bludgers and single
mothers who apparently breed to maximise their welfare cheque. It was
a subtle force in the May [2019] election, where lower-income voters
turned against a party that was vowing to close income tax loopholes
for the wealthy to fund things like free dental for pensioners.390
Regardless of whether a more compassionate attitude than this is temporary
or not for Australians, the fact is that the Prime Minister was emboldened
enough by his unexpected election win in 2019 to double down on the anti
389 See Peter Lewis, “There is a growing empathy for those on Newstart. The dynamics of welfare
politics are changing”, The Guardian, 14 August 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/there-is-growing-
empathy-for-those-on-newstart-the-dynamics-of-welfare-politics-are-changing
390 Peter Lewis, Ibid.
321
welfare messages in the post election period, “dismissing growing calls to
raise Newstart as ‘unfunded empathy’ while asserting a tax cut for the very
rich is justified as a higher income is a sign someone is working harder” 391.
This hard line rhetoric may well cut through again and if it does, it has the
potential to undermine the systems which provide equitable access to the
social safety net that all Australians have been able to rely on for almost a
century. More, and maybe many more of us, will be locked out. I have said
the federal government doesn’t have a plan; but if it does have one for our
economy, then this is it. The tightening of the welfare budget, alongside the
tightening of criteria for who may and may not have access to it, is a core
component of the Coalition government (and any neoliberal government)
program, regardless of the fact that it will have contractionary effects on our
economy.
The rise of prosperity religions in the 21st century in Australia, or rather
their sudden increase in and access to power, is reinforcing the neoliberal
view that inequality is the natural, inevitable and rightful order of things –
spiritually and economically. According to prosperity religion, it is god’s plan
that we are all to be born in sin and the expectation of the ultimate outcome
of that divine plan is that not all of us can or will be saved. By definition, in
prosperity religions, salvation is impossible for those who refuse to seek it
through Jesus Christ. This of course rules out salvation for any non-Christian
(for starters). It also implicitly de-legitimises any prosperity that may be
enjoyed by non-Christians (reinforcing resentment of immigrants from non-
Christian backgrounds). And it especially de-legitimises any income or wealth
that may be enjoyed by means other than work. Only work will save you,
handouts will damn you.
Despite this, Australia’s Prime Minister has proudly, faithfully and maybe
even ingenuously positioned himself as a lead crusader in this cause – the
cause of prosperity achieved through adherence to and open avowal of a
particular moral code derived from the beliefs of a minority sect within a
rather more diverse Christian code (not all Christians think like Pentecostals,
obviously). As Mr Morrison stated in his maiden speech to Parliament in 2008,
alongside his family, his faith is “the most significant influence in his life”. His
faith was mentioned no less than 13 times in this short speech, although in a
391 Peter Lewis, Ibid.
322
somewhat contradictory and muddled way. On one hand he stated that: “My
personal faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda.” But not two lines later
he proclaimed what can only be the opposite, by stating that:
In recent times it has become fashionable to negatively stereotype
those who profess their Christian faith in public life as ‘extreme’ and to
suggest that such faith has no place in the political debate of this
country. This presents a significant challenge for those of us, like my
colleague, who seek to follow the example of William Wilberforce or
Desmond Tutu, to name just two. These leaders stood for the
immutable truths and principles of the Christian faith. They transformed
their nations and, indeed, the world in the process. More importantly,
by following the convictions of their faith, they established [my
emphasis] and reinforced the principles of our liberal democracy upon
which our own nation is built. 392
Many non-Christians and even some Christians might quibble about the
extent to which the “immutable truths of the Christian faith” are indeed
immutable and true. For our purposes here we can leave that sort of quibble
aside. The more relevant quibble, one well worth looking into, is about the
contention that the Christian faith should be credited with having
“established” liberal democracy. Liberal democracy was born not in any
religious movement but in the Enlightenment of the 18 th century, a secular
and rationalist movement for the development of human rights, human
values, and an ethics of human governance – the emphasis being on
humanity, not god. There is no doubt that Christianity has helped inform the
values of many liberal democratic countries and leaders, but so have other
religions. Gandhi’s India comes to mind, being a liberal democracy very similar
to our own but founded consistent with what Gandhi characterised as “a
federation of different religious faiths”393 – in that case, Hinduism, Islam,
Sikhism and Christianity. Christianity does not have a monopoly on liberal
democracy and never has had. Just ask 264 million Indonesians. Still, the
392 Scott Morrison, maiden speech to the Parliament of Australia, Hansard, 14 February 2008,
accessible at
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%22chamber/hansardr/200
8-02-14/0045%22
393 Manisha Barua, “Ghandi and Comparative Religion” Gauhati University, accessible at
https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompBaru.htm
323
quibbles of non-Christians in relation to Mr Morrison’s claims about the
foundations of liberal democracy might have been easily set aside had the
narrowness of the views not been reinforced by these immediate next
sentences in his maiden speech:
Australia is not a secular country—it is a free country. This is a nation
where you have the freedom to follow any belief system you choose.
Secularism is just one. It has no greater claim than any other on our
society. As US Senator Joe Lieberman said, the Constitution guarantees
freedom of religion, not from religion. I believe the same is true in this
country.394
Actually, the same is not true of this country. Under the Australian
Constitution we are indeed guaranteed both freedom of religion and freedom
from religion. Indeed, as I have already pointed out, these are the only human
rights we are guaranteed under our Constitution, which plainly states at
Clause 116:
The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion,
or for imposing any religious observance [my emphasis], or for
prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall
be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the
Commonwealth.395
The fact that our Prime Minister entered Parliament thinking that we don’t
have both these rights – to practice and not practice religion – and wishing in
particular to assert that the latter right is not guaranteed to us – that we may
not be free from religion – is quite a worrying departure from “liberal
democracy”. It is not liberal democracy at all. It is simply an attempt to encode
religious intolerance into our democratic foundations – to make them less
liberal than they have been since 1901. When read in the context of the
immediately preceding sentences in the speech, it is a thinly veiled attempt
to proffer Christianity as the established religion of all liberal democracies,
including Australia’s, and this despite the fact that Australia under its
constitution cannot have an established religion.
394Scott Morrison, maiden speech to the Parliament of Australia, Op. Cit.
395“Australia’s Constitution”, accessible at
https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/7913385?q&versionId=51611380
324
Mr Morrison is also incorrect in his claim that “Australia is not a secular
country – it is a free country.” We are obviously both a secular country and a
free country, at least for the present. And the idea that secularism is not
consonant with freedom is a preposterous misconception, because as far as
our governance goes, our country is entirely secular. I do not make this
response to the Prime Minister on the basis of, say, census statistics which
show that Australians claiming to have “no religion” (30%) make up the single
largest group responding to questions about their faith in the 2016 Census396.
Nor do I make it on the basis of results of the 2009 WIN/Gallup International
poll which suggested that Australia was the 12th “least religious” country in
the world (with 32% of respondents saying that religion was important in their
daily lives and 68% saying it was not important in their daily lives)397. Nor do I
make it on the basis of the fact that between the 2006 and 2016 census
periods, the proportion of Australians identifying as having a religious
affiliation increased by only 3.2% (from 13.8 million to 14.2 million – or
438,000 people), whereas the proportion of Australians identifying as having
no religion almost doubled (from 3.71 million to 7.04 million – a 90% increase
or 3.3 million people – seven times the rate of increase in those identifying
with religious beliefs)398. None of these statistics has much bearing on
whether we are a secular country or not, quibble over them though we may.
I make the response on the basis of the fact that liberal democracies are
essentially secular. In Australia, god does not rule state. This is not to say that
religion cannot play a role in a liberal democracy. But if the Prime Minister of
Australia is seeking to suborn the secular to the religious in our governance,
this would necessitate the removal of the word “liberal” from our particular
form of democracy.
Scott Morrison’s maiden speech to Parliament signals something new
about the leadership of Australia in 2020. These are not the words of a leader
396 Source: ABS, 2071.0 - Census of Population and Housing: Reflecting Australia - Stories from the
Census, 2016, Accessible at
https://web.archive.org/web/20170919010053/http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/b
y%20Subject/2071.0~2016~Main%20Features~Religion%20Data%20Summary~25
397 Source: World Population Review, Least Religious Countries 2019, Retrieved 2019-10-3 from
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/least-religious-countries/
398 Source: ABS Census statistics for 2006 and 2016, collated in Professor Andrew Markus, “Mapping
Social Cohesion 2019, The Scanlon Foundation Surveys”, page 18, accessible at
https://scanloninstitute.org.au/sites/default/files/2019-
11/Mapping%20Social%20Cohesion%202019.pdf
325
who leaves his personal faith in the car park before entering the office or who
is necessarily able, in detachment, to give his personal values neither more
nor less weight than those of others. These are the words of an evangelising
politician who intends that in order for nations to qualify as liberal
democracies they must be “transformed” according to the so-called
“immutable truths” of his faith and his faith alone. It does not admit of an
ability to see the potential for conflict between his personal beliefs and the
fair, equitable and democratic administration of the national interest.
Doubtless Mr Morrison is fully persuaded that his strictness and
narrowness is the right thing for our nation. It is not premeditated evil intent.
For him it is simply the truth – the truth that will set us free if only, and only
if, we take Jesus into our hearts. As believers at his Horizon Church in Sydney’s
Sutherland Shire have espoused:
God wants to heal and transform us so that we can live healthy and
prosperous lives in order to help others more effectively. We believe
that our eternal destination of either Heaven or hell is determined by
our response to the Lord Jesus Christ.399
Superficially, this sounds benign, if a little patronising, and as I have said, it is
unlikely that those who attend Pentecostal churches every week do so with
wilful malevolent intent towards those who don’t attend. But there is a
disturbing underside to these beliefs so expressed. The underside is that any
of us who do not attend will not be saved unless we believe what these
particular Christians believe. These beliefs are hard and fast within
fundamentalist evangelicalism, i.e., within the largely Pentecostal prosperity
religions in Australia who group themselves under the title “Australian
Christian Churches”. This group does not admit Christian churches outside
Pentecostalism. They passionately believe they are correct and that the rest
of humanity will and should be damned to poverty in this life and hell in the
next if their message is not heeded.400 In that regard, this sort of
fundamentalism is manifest intolerance of diversity. It is the height of
399 See the Horizon Church website, webpage titled “What We Believe”, accessible at
https://horizonchurchsydney.com/what-we-believe/. This page is linked to the website of the
Australian Christian Churches at https://www.acc.org.au/about-us/.
400 Catholics, for example, are “idolaters” destined for hellfire, as footballer Israel Folau notoriously
warned. It was in response to widespread criticism of Folau that Scott Morrison felt the need to
concoct a “religious freedom” bill as a matter of urgency.
326
exclusion and it is rationalised inhumanity. It stands in stark contrast to the
sort of multifaith openness, generosity and appreciation of difference that my
husband and I saw in the religious community of Iona, mentioned in the
Preface to this book.
When we can compare the sort of beliefs we see on the website for the
combined Pentecostal churches of Australia401 with the beliefs set out by
Iona’s community (see Appendix A), we can see that on Iona, inequality has
been deemed highly undesirable. But in Pentecostal communities in Australia
today, inequality is both the natural order and the means by which decency is
measured and entitlement is judged. In Pentecostalism, the further down the
poverty chain you slip, the less entitled you probably are to any benefits and
felicity at all, in both this life and the next.
Normally this sort of belief system wouldn’t matter. The majority of
Australians would do what they have done since colonisation. They would
tolerate it as a fringe view (which indeed it is because only about 1.5% of
Australians are “constituents” of Pentecostal prosperity churches402) or not
bother to think about it at all. But public policy is now being shaped quite
strictly within the parameters of one set of private beliefs of a minority. Again,
Mr Morrison’s maiden speech provided some specific insight into how welfare
policy might be shaped consistent with his personal beliefs when he said:
From my faith I derive the values of loving-kindness, justice and
righteousness, to act with compassion and kindness, acknowledging our
common humanity and to consider the welfare of others; to fight for a
fair go for everyone to fulfil their human potential and to remove
whatever unjust obstacles stand in their way, including diminishing their
personal responsibility for their own wellbeing; and to do what is right,
to respect the rule of law, the sanctity of human life and the moral
integrity of marriage and the family. We must recognise an unchanging
and absolute standard of what is good and what is evil.403
Again, the speech seems benign, albeit a little preachy for a parliament and
more suited to a church. But the underlying message is that welfare is an
401 Australian Christian Churches, accessible at https://www.acc.org.au/about-us/
402 Australian Christian Churches claims to be a movement of more than 1000 Australian Pentecostal
churches in voluntary cooperation with over 375,000 “constituents”. Ibid.
403 Scott Morrison, maiden speech to the Parliament of Australia, Op. Cit.
327
obstacle to the fulfilment of human potential: the way one must “consider the
welfare of others” is to ensure the removal of those “obstacles” that “diminish
their personal responsibility for their own wellbeing”. Welfare diminishes that
personal responsibility, so it must be removed. In this way of thinking, a
person’s welfare can only consist in their not having access to welfare. Put
another way, their spiritual welfare can only consist in their not having access
to social welfare. The implication of the whole paragraph is that there is “an
unchanging and absolute standard of what is good and what is evil” and
welfare (as in state welfare payments) is certainly not listed on the “good”
side of the ledger. At the very least it is an aid to evil, if not evil in and of itself.
Obviously, this is not just a casually held view. It is deeply rooted in a belief
system about how the country should be run. And it makes sense of all that
canting about a job being the best form of welfare, higher pay being a sign of
harder work, and lower pay being proof of indolence.
Making sense of this new strain in the thinking of a national leader is
difficult. It swims into focus only slowly. For example, Ross Gittins, the
Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, who looks closely at this sort
of thing for a job, comes up stumped about it. In late 2019, in an article about
the failures of politicians to fix poverty, Mr Gittins remarked:
It never ceases to surprise me that a Prime Minister so ready to proclaim
his Christian faith is so hard of heart when it comes to people on benefits
(age pensioners excepted). Presumably, he’s not prepared to “give
them a go” because he’s not convinced that they “have a go”. As the
Australian Council of Social Service has said, increasing Newstart would
be “the single most effective step to reduce poverty” – not to mention
giving a much-needed boost to the nation’s retailers. But Scott
Morrison, so generous in his promises of big tax cuts to high-income
earners like me, has steadfastly refused to oblige. Rather, he’s working
on an unending list of torments for people on welfare. It’s as if he’s
seeking applause from all those who think anyone on welfare must be a
lazy loafer. If that’s how you imitate Christ, things have changed a lot
since I grew up in the Salvos.404
404Ross Gittins, “Politicians too poor at their jobs to fix poverty”, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October
2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/politicians-too-poor-at-their-
jobs-to-fix-poverty-20191015-p530rq.html
328
While Mr Gittins’ surprise may never cease, he has actually provided us with
some insight into the working of our national leader’s thinking and at the
same time given us an insight into the potential for this to change us all. As
Paul Keating once said, “When you change the government you change the
country.”405 The phrase holds true for a change in a leader of a government.
With Scott Morrison we are looking at a fundamental change – this time in
the sense of religious fundamentalism – and that change has quite significant
potential to change us, particularly if we do nothing to interrogate the change
and discuss whether we want it.
With the appointment of the world’s first Pentecostalist prosperity
religion ambassador as a leader of a national government, religion in Australia
has crossed over into our affairs of state and into management of our nation’s
wealth to an extent not experienced before. The neoliberal objective of
inequality is being underscored by a religious philosophy that has hitherto not
been all that influential in affairs of state, but is now. There is every prospect
that this will propel us to even quicker growth in inequality, especially if it is
accompanied by ineptitude in macroeconomic management and trade
relations. This is not to say that churches have not always sought to influence
our politics. They have. And there is no reason why they shouldn’t. But there
is a difference between (a) churches acting as community advocates to
transparently lobby parliamentarians, and (b) a single church not just having
the ear of government, but perhaps having a mission to suborn some parts of
government policy to a particular religious view – and a highly exclusive one
at that.
Perhaps there is no issue here; no conflict between religious interests and
the national interest. Perhaps too, there would be no problem even if there
were a conflict. After all, parliament is structured to balance out our interests.
It is a democracy designed to overcome the problem of the personal interests
that any human being inevitably brings to the job of government.
Nevertheless, in the case of Australia’s election of a devout sectarian acolyte
as the nation’s leader, we should ask ourselves at least once: what are the
implications of this? It is certainly new, so the jury is still out on whether the
impacts are positive or negative. But we might consider the matter if only
from the point of view of whether an increase in fundamentalist evangelical
405 Paul Keating quoted on Wikiquote: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Paul_Keating
329
power in our society and governance may result in a fundamental change in
national attitude and consciousness. The main issue is cultural. These
fundamentalist perspectives represent hard line views (Pentecostalism is at
the extreme of the extremes in religion) and those who hold them dear do
not necessarily consider that they can cross lines in their public life that
compromise their personal beliefs. In America, evangelicals consider it their
duty to propagate their faith. Therefore, would an expansion of the power of
evangelicalism here make us more like America, with a welfare system more
like theirs? Would we want that?
Regardless of the answer to this question, it is clear that as the neoliberal
and fundamentalist views of the world coalesce inside our government,
blurring the boundary between church and state in a way we have not
experienced before, our society will definitely be changed. To the extent that
a neoliberal/fundamentalist objective of inequality declares some of us more
deserving than others, regardless of things beyond our control, regardless of
differences in our opportunities and regardless of our luck, then that objective
– either avowed or unrecognised, explicit or implicit, deliberate or not – is
plainly prejudicial, indecent and elitist. It invokes an underclass and consigns
the poorest of us to it – irretrievably. People become victims of this intended
inequality and are then blamed for the poverty or wretchedness caused by
that very objective. The prosperous, however, can escape all blame and can
enjoy more and more wealth apparently untroubled by qualms of conscience
about certain deadly sins such as hoarding and greed. In their reasoning, they
have not caused or contributed to someone else’s pain. Pain is the result of a
failure to take personal responsibility for one’s own wellbeing. It is self-
inflicted every time, unless it arises from physical or mental disability, and
even then proof is required that it is not self-inflicted before social security
can be considered an entitlement. By this proliferation of fictions that there
are no social determinants of poverty, and that poverty is all self-inflicted, the
implication arises, and is embedded, that the victims of inequality are
inherently unworthy and their poverty is proof of that. If you are poor, this is
prima facie evidence of unworthiness. If you are rich this is prima facie
evidence of god’s favour. Therefore, only if you are already rich will you be
entitled to privilege. So runs the logic of prosperity religion.
To those of us who are not steeped in religious fundamentalism of this
kind, the perversity of this can be baffling. Because there is a dizzying
330
circularity to it, it tends to test skills in comprehension. It simply “does not
compute”. No wonder Ross Gittins never ceases to be surprised. But from the
fundamentalist’s point of view there is a coherence to their value system
which stems from the protestant work ethic and from strict ideas about how
salvation and eternal life can, and must, be attained. In an older version of
that ethic’s most extreme form, that eternal life can only be attained by some:
by an “elect” who are predestined, before birth, to go to heaven rather than
hell406. Those who are not part of the elect are predestined to go to hell and
there is nothing they can do about it. In some forms of this extremism, no
amount of good works by someone who is not a member of the elect will
allow them to enter the kingdom of god’s favour in this life, or heaven in the
next life. This extreme view was abandoned as redemptive theologies
developed in the 18th century, but it nevertheless continued to permeate into
the thinking of some modern forms of Protestantism, especially
fundamentalist forms. From there it permeates into policy decision making:
in the value system of the protestant work ethic – moderate or extreme – it
can be considered immoral to give someone assistance to escape their
victimhood. According to researchers in this area, such as Dr Lydia Bean of
Harvard and Baylor Universities, prosperity religions, such as evangelical
churches in America, tend to subscribe to what some scholars have called
“accountable individualism”. In this reasoning:
individuals are accountable to God for their self-sufficiency and cannot
sidestep this responsibility by shifting the blame to others, including to
systemic causes. For some evangelicals, redistributive social policies
such as the ACA [the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare] not only
406The doctrine of pre-destination is a feature of one of Protestantism’s most extreme sects:
Calvinism. According to Wikipedia: “Predestination is a doctrine in Calvinism dealing with the question
of the control that God exercises over the world. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith,
God ‘freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass.’ The second use of the word
‘predestination’ applies this to the salvation, and refers to the belief that God appointed the eternal
destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all
their sins, even their original sin. The former is called ‘unconditional election’, and the latter
‘reprobation’. In Calvinism, some people are predestined and effectually called in due time
(regenerated/born again) to faith by God. Calvinism places more emphasis on election than do other
branches of Christianity.” Accessible at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_in_Calvinism
331
undermine self-reliance and independence, they are morally
corrupting.407
In this context it is a reasonable likelihood that neoliberal
fundamentalists would consider Medicare, and certainly welfare, morally
corrupting. Welfare in that frame of reference is the anti-Christ. Hence the
increase in the demonisation of welfare that we have witnessed since the
election of the Abbott government in 2013 and the introduction of the 2014
budget which was famously heralded by the then Treasurer as the end to “the
age of entitlement”.
Australians kicked back against the austerity of that budget. But the
crusade has been renewed since the 2019 election – with vigour.I am
reasonably certain that I am only one of many people who would have
wondered why Scott Morrison carries on so much about the evils of welfare.
It seems completely gratuitous to the likes of me. Whence comes his need to
promote and defend any government handout as though it is “not welfare”?
For instance, when handing out $100 million to drought stricken farmers and
their communities in 2019, Mr Morrison felt compelled to headline the whole
announcement with a statement that the relief was “not welfare”, but
"helping people make sure that they can maintain viability"408. The subtlety
of the difference between a welfare handout and helping people maintain
viability is lost on me, but obviously Mr Morrison felt it important to make the
distinction. If it were an isolated remark it would just be a curiosity. But it is
not isolated. It infuses multiple speeches and all budgets since Mr Morrison
became the nation’s Treasurer. In that regard it is obviously central to
attempts to bolster the neoliberal narrative. But it is also central to the need
to distinguish government handouts based on who they may and may not be
given to. Perhaps the obsession with diverting the positives of an
announcement of a handout to an announcement about the negatives of
welfare was some kind of contorted attempt to distract from the fact that the
407 Miriam Reynaud, “Three Reasons Why White Evangelicals Hate Obamacare”, University of Chicago
Divinity School, 12 April 2018, accessible at https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/three-reasons-
white-evangelicals-hate-obamacare. See also Dr Lydia Bean, “The Politics of Evangelical Identity: Local
Churches and Partisan Divides in the United States and Canada”, Princeton University Press, 2014.
408 Rob Harris & Lydia Lynch, “’This isn't welfare': PM pledges another $100m for drought-ravaged
farmers”, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-s-a-bleak-picture-drought-ravaged-farmers-welcome-
pm-s-100m-pledge-20190927-p52vdx.html
332
handout was $100 million worth of fiscal stimulus (in the form of grants for
regional employment projects). Or it was an attempt to distract from the fact
that it is an extension of the agrarian socialism, long advocated by the
National Party, which has always subsidised the farming community in
Australia. Or perhaps it was an attempt to divert attention from an associated
drought relief announcement a fortnight later of an extension of the Farm
Household Allowance, which added another $13,000 per farming family to the
Allowance and which certainly is welfare409. Who knows? Who even cares?
Australians, after all, have never begrudged farmers support in times of
drought, flood or otherwise. But whatever else the “not welfare” headline of
the announcement might be, it was certainly yet another gratuitous attempt
to promote the rightness of a handout to regional communities and the
wrongness of a handout to the urban unemployed. It was a statement
reinforcing previous pronouncements about who may be entitled and who
may not, a distinction which runs suspiciously along partisan lines.
To be fair to any and all prime ministers, they are entitled to champion
any dearly held beliefs. But if so, then we must be entitled to engage with
those views if we are attempting to plan a sustainable future. Mr Morrison is
not enamoured of people who engage with his views. He even slaps big
businesses for openly disagreeing.410 Nevertheless, engagement is essential
to survival. It is evident that the social transitions we may be facing cannot be
weathered with dignity without welfare; but we have a government that is
409 The Farm Household Allowance is promoted on the Australian Government Department of Human
Affairs website as “a payment for farming families in financial hardship.”. It’s the welfare you get
when you already have a job or a business as a farmer. Drought is not required to trigger the
application of the Allowance. The allowance is generally ceased after four years. See
https://www.humanservices.gov.au/individuals/services/centrelink/farm-household-allowance. An
extension to the Farm Household Allowance was announced by Scott Morrison in October 2019,
adding another $13,000 to the payment per family if they have reached the four year cut off. See Rob
Harris, “Lump-sum farmer payments sparks Coalition conflict over who gains credit”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 17 October 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/lump-sum-farmer-
payments-sparks-coalition-conflict-over-who-gains-credit-20191017-p531nl.html
410 Multiple print media articles appeared about the Morrison government’s objections to big business
speaking out against government policy in September 2019. Many of these can be accessed through
The Guardian which provides links to stories in the conservative print media. For a good place to start
pulling the thread, see Richard Denniss, “When Scott Morrison lectured CEOs about speaking out on
climate change, it was quite a fight to pick”, The Guardian, 18 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/18/when-scott-morrison-lectured-ceos-
about-speaking-out-on-climate-change-it-was-quite-a-fight-to-pick
333
showing all the signs of wishing to implode our welfare system while
preserving parts of it (under some other as yet unspecified name but certainly
not the “stimulus” that it is and certainly not the “socialism” that it is) for a
select few. Sometimes the select few is the disabled. Sometimes it is farmers.
In the 20th century Australians didn’t begrudge these or any other
disadvantaged groups a handout when they needed the support of the social
safety net. But they are being encouraged to begrudge it now every time the
Prime Minister “seeks applause [i.e., votes] from all those who think anyone
on welfare must be a lazy loafer”411. If this ethos of “begrudgery”, or what
Peter Lewis called “downwards envy”, takes too much more hold of us, we
will be severely diminished not just in our national character but in our
capacity to plan for a just transition to a new future. We may even be
diminished in whatever values we may hold that are akin to traditional
Christianity.
It is difficult to tell just how far the view that welfare is a bad thing may
have penetrated the collective consciousness of Australians. Given our
resounding rejection of the 2014 “end of entitlement” budget, it might be that
our consciousness has not been affected and that we have not become
smaller in our empathy and our commitment to equity, sharing and
cooperation. It would be a massive cultural shift for Australians if we changed
our views about welfare and the need for a social safety net, so it might be
expected that a change of that magnitude would take some time. We certainly
are not America yet.
However, any increase in the prevalence of begrudging attitudes to the
unemployed (or to any other group that might fall into the unentitled
category) would threaten to place significant limitations on our ability to plan
for a just transition to a new economy and to smooth the inevitable bumpy
ride for the disadvantaged. No-one is so good at managing the economy that
the bumps will not occur, especially since, if we leave it to politicians, it is likely
to be “managed” in knee-jerking and ad hoc style – i.e., without a plan. The
transition from a carbon economy to a post carbon economy is probably more
challenging than any other transition we have attempted in Australia. We
really are up against it here, given the fractious global situation. But if we wish
to attempt minimisation of poverty and inequality during the transition it
411 Ross Gittins, “Politicians too poor at their jobs to fix poverty”, Op. Cit.
334
would be as well to be mindful of begrudging attitudes and minimise that sort
of judgementalism in planning for a new economy.
Beyond that, there is another reason why we should interrogate the
effect of an objective of inequality in our approach to economic management
and resist the calls to “begrudgery” wherever we can: that reason being that
these miserly attitudes are being deployed by conservatives to minimise any
backlash that may arise as they continue to downsize the welfare sector. The
objective of inequality is already having a significant effect on the volume of
services we may expect from our social safety net in future and on the way
we are re-structuring delivery of those services. The federal government is
intent that the volume of services should be set to decrease. They have
planned it so in the 2019/20 budget outlook to 2029/30. And they are keen to
privatise delivery of whatever remains, particularly to religious organisations
wherever those organisations express an interest. Taken together this will
have significant negative impacts on the size of our economy and the
accessibility of the services. In particular, it will have the effect of increasing
unemployment and underemployment – keeping the spare labour capacity in
our economy at a level that is much higher than is necessary or even beneficial
for growth, and keeping our prospects of a fulfilling job down, along with our
productivity and, of course, our wages.
This is, as I have already described, another objective of neoliberalism,
alongside its objective of inequality. Neoliberals crave a cheap supply of
labour, so they intrinsically prefer higher unemployment and growth in
underemployment. They especially do not want spare capacity in the labour
market to be sopped up by the public sector – although, as I have also said
above, any government could easily do this – because a bigger public sector
may create a labour scarcity that will drive up unit labour costs for their own
private ventures. Labour scarcity can have the downside effect, of course, of
driving up inflation but this can be managed by governments through a range
of techniques, none of which need include increases in unemployment.
However, conservative or lazy governments do find it easier to increase
growth – or more accurately the shares of economic growth that go to
business and corporations – by artificially restricting public sector
employment opportunities and then convincing everyone that the
unemployed are jobless through their own fault, and further, that they should
therefore not be encouraged in their indolence by increases in welfare.
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This covers for the myth that it is not the job of government to provide
enough jobs, when in fact that is one of the prime reasons why we create
governments – to organise that for us, so that we can participate. Most
aspiring politicians will chant “jobs and growth” as an election promise and
will be elected on the strength of our belief that they are committed to
creating those jobs. But neoliberal governments double deal us on this one –
offering the prospect of enough jobs with one hand but taking it back with the
other by insisting that it is entirely up to us to get a job, regardless of the fact
that they haven’t created the ones they promised, even though they could
have all along. They imply that only a strong economy can create jobs, when
in fact it is full employment that creates the strongest economy, not the other
way around. Moreover, the idea that it is feasible for all of us to find a job –
without socially cohesive organisation of a labour market by a government
governing for all – is as wrongheaded as can be. It is an infectious disease that
depletes our resilience as a nation and our preparedness for economic shocks
– a mind-forged manacle that we must break free of if we are to set our
economy back onto a footing not just towards overall economic growth but
to fairly shared prosperity.
This implies the need to expand all sectors of our economy but
particularly the welfare sector. That sector is the colossus of our employment
market. Therefore, unless we look to strengthen and expand the welfare
sector we will be unable to ensure a just transition to a new and stronger
economy. The next two sections consider some of the things we might take
into account when planning for a stronger welfare system and services, with
the objective of maximising our chances of achieving a just transition to a new
economy for our children.
How is our welfare sector being weakened?
The answer to this question is straightforward. Our welfare sector is being
weakened by neoliberalism, particularly by poorly administered privatisation.
Australia has been experiencing the privatisation of welfare services for a
couple of decades now. The contracting out of employment services under
the Howard government and the reorganisation of contracting of
homelessness and domestic violence services (predominantly to religious
peak organisations) under the NSW state government are good examples of
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this. The NDIS is another good example of privatisation of welfare services
that used to be delivered more directly from within the public sector. And of
course, aged care has in the main been delivered mainly on a “contracted out”
basis412 by non-profit and for-profit private providers for decades. Welfare is
one of Australia’s largest industries in the services sector of our economy and
we have been experiencing a major transformation in the way its services are
being delivered (or stopped entirely). The process of privatisation of welfare
has gathered steam under neoliberalism, with the ostensible objective of
strengthening the sector. But the result on the ground has been to weaken it
substantially. This weakening is occurring in terms of both the size of the
sector and its effectiveness, by which I mean its capacity to properly serve all
those who need the service and serve them on a non-exclusive basis.
It is important to realise here that what I have called “privatisation of
welfare” comes in several forms. It can be mere outsourcing of service
delivery, where what used to be delivered by the public sector gets delivered
by the private sector but with no particular guarantee of a client base. This
tends typically to apply to services which are more professional such as health
services. Alternatively, services can be completely divested – not in the sense
that they are sold to private entities but in the sense that they are simply
handed to these entities for free with few if any strings attached. The new
private entities simply pick up the client base, or whatever they want of it, and
carry on from there. In many cases they maintain a local monopoly over the
service, particularly if it is delivered in a country town. This tends typically to
apply in the case of social services, such as domestic violence support or
homelessness.
In either of these privatisation arrangements though, the taxpayer keeps
paying for the services. Clients of the services also continue to contribute fees
but, in effect, we as taxpayers pay these organisations to take these services
412In the case of aged care, the term “contracted out” is possibly a misnomer. Privatisation of aged
care tends to take the form of private sector start-ups which then qualify by a points system for
subsidies from the taxpayer. These subsidies cover more than two thirds of the costs of aged care
homes, the remainder being covered by fees from clients. In many senses a “contract” is absent.
Taxpayer subsidies are supplied with little or no accountability to a contract manager within
government and supervision of whether services are being delivered is minimal to non-existent.
Abuses of this system led to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and
Safety in 2018. For the terms of reference of the Royal Commission see
https://agedcare.royalcommission.gov.au/Pages/Terms-of-reference.aspx
337
on. We don’t get a cost saving by transferring welfare into private hands –
although if the volume, quality or accessibility of services is truncated in the
process, we may (or may not) cut our costs. In the case of any church based
charities that might win any of these contracts, it often turns out that the
services they used to fund, in part at least from church funds (such as
homeless shelters, soup kitchens or clothing shops), become services they are
now able to fund with little or no impost on their church funds.413 In the vast
majority this outsourcing or privatisation, services are still taxpayer funded
and the only real difference in the new arrangement (apart from changes in
service quality and accessibility) is that the private providers are able to insert
themselves further into the money chain. Welfare services are attractive and
lucrative businesses, even when profit is not involved.
What I have called privatisation, others have called “quasi-
privatisation”414. In The Guardian, for instance, Greg Jericho, who has deep
experience of interacting with our public health system under Medicare for
disability and medical services, noted in 2019 that:
There actually has already been a recent quasi-privatising of the health
system. The NDIS saw the end of the very good care people received
from public health groups such as TherapyACT and a switch to having to
find private therapists (often those who had worked for organisations
like TherapyACT) who are then paid through the NDIS. I am sure many
413 Churches have also been honing their skills in dipping into taxpayer funds, even though they don’t
pay tax themselves, and have become adept at this while simultaneously ensuring they have no
accountability for expenditure of such funds or for provision of service to Australian taxpayers. Under
the Morrison government they have been encouraged to think of themselves as the entitled and they
don’t confine their tapping into taxpayer funds to the competitive bidding processes for contracts to
supply government services. They now receive grants on a non-competitive basis and the grants are
untied to services. The Morrison government’s “invitation only” $2.3 million “Stronger Communities
Program” is a good example where local MPs invite grant applications from entities they consider to
be “delivering social benefits”. These applications are considered on a closed, non-competitive basis
and have been given to prosperous church groups for facilities upgrades for their exclusive use (eg.,
upgrading auditoriums with sound proof panels). See Christopher Knaus, “Liberal MP Lucy Wicks
denies conflict of interest over grant to church that called her a 'dear friend'”, The Guardian, 20
February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/20/liberal-mp-
lucy-wicks-denies-conflict-of-interest-over-grant-to-church-that-called-her-a-dear-
friend?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
414 See Greg Jericho, “The proposal to privatise Medicare is bizarre. We should treasure our public
health system.” The Guardian, 28 July 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/jul/27/the-proposal-to-privatise-
medicare-is-bizarre-we-should-treasure-our-public-health-system
338
have benefited from the NDIS, but I have not found too many benefits
that I would not have been as efficiently delivered by just providing the
public health sector with the extra money that now goes into the NDIS.
But this is the heart of the argument – the belief that the private sector
delivers things better. And yet we know this is a belief better observed
in economic textbooks from the 1980s than from reality.415
These comments were penned in response to a call from the CEO of the
private health insurer NIB, Mark Fitzgibbon, that the government should scrap
Medicare and “make private health insurance compulsory for all Australians
with taxation devoted to subsidising the premiums for those who would
otherwise be left behind.”416 This is a direct bid from the private sector to
have all tax collected under the Medicare levy (and maybe more) handed
straight to the private insurers who will then decide who gets a rebate and for
what. The venality of it is staggering. It is brazenly asserting that taxpayers
should hand over about $20 billion a year417 (not to mention all authority over
the use of that money) to private sector players whose financial credentials
are obviously poor and whose fiduciary credentials aren’t much better (since
every time they come up against a financial failure they simply burn trust by
cutting the medical conditions they will cover under their insurance policies).
They have been so inept, inefficient and unattractive to customers as to be
unable to demonstrate their competitiveness and sustainability as
commercially viable providers of quality service and assurance. In this case,
the private sector so obviously does not do things better. They are clearly
failing, both in their own financial outcomes (they are not happy with the level
of profit they can make from the taxpayer subsidies they already receive) and
in their service quality and reliability. But their only answer in their
complacent and unimaginative entitlement is to suggest taxpayers should
give up the entirety of the Medicare levy to bail them out. Moreover, there is
not even a hint of potential acceptance of increased accountability for service
415 Greg Jericho, “The proposal to privatise Medicare is bizarre. We should treasure our public health
system.”, Op. Cit.
416 Mark Fitzgibbon, “Universal health care needs private insurance for survival”, The Financial Review,
23 July 2019, https://www.afr.com/politics/universal-healthcare-need-private-insurance-for-survival-
20190722-p529i9
417 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 4: Revenue,
page 4-17 lists expected revenue from the Medicare levy in 2019/2020 as $18.1 billion rising to $21.0
billion by 2022/23. Accessible at https://budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs4.pdf
339
delivery that would be offered in return for this new $20 billion subsidy from
taxpayers. Should these private insurers still end up failing, we can be certain
that they would either come back to taxpayers, cap in hand for more, or
simply “uninsure” us and throw policy holders back out on the street, in the
same way private aged care providers began throwing residents out of their
retirement homes, literally onto the streets, in 2019 when their financial
results did not stack up to their liking (prompting the expansion of enquiries
conducted under the Aged Care Royal Commission established in 2018)418.
This proposal from the private insurance industry is entirely foreign to the
average Australian’s sense of and pride in the universality of its health care
system. It is more outlandish and offensive than most of the bids for
subsidisation of the private sector’s involvement in health care that we have
suffered along with since the late 1990s; but it is not atypical and if
neoliberalism retains its sway in public policy we can be certain it will not be
the last attempt.
Whatever we might agree to call this process of outsourcing or
divestment of public welfare services, the pace of it is increasing and calls for
more of it keep coming as private providers realise how much money can be
made by plundering this part of the public purse. In the health and disability
sector, impacts of the more recent privatisations are adding to the impacts
we have already suffered under the past quasi-privatisation of our health care
system. In the transition of disability clients from the publicly funded
Medicare system to the publicly funded NDIS, the federal government
appeared in 2019 to deliberately slow the process in order to approach a
418See Sky News interview with National Seniors Chief Advocate Ian Henschke regarding the
unexpected closure of Earle Haven Retirement Village in July 2019. Interview dated 5 August 2019,
“Residents at the Earle Haven Retirement Village were forced out of the facility after it unexpectedly
closed in July over a financial dispute.” Mr Henschke stated that the contractor running the centre
“put in a letter of demand [to the government] for $3 million and they said that if they didn’t get that
they couldn’t continue to operate.” On not receiving the funds, Earle Haven evicted the residents. Mr
Henschke further remarked “Providers say this is all about money … but at the end of the day this is
taxpayers’ money. It’s being provided by the federal government and we need to have better control
over how it’s being spent … It’s vast amounts of money – predicted to be above $20 billion … The
latest figures show there are dozens of providers who are in trouble in NSW.” Effectively the private
providers are all calling for more money without offering more accountability. Interview accessible at
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6068078251001
340
budget surplus in 2018/19419, although the expectation was still that demand
would eventually be met as originally planned. Having said that, not everyone
in the early days of the NDIS was so confident, and some maintained a
wickedly sardonic sense of scepticism about the government’s intentions in
this regard. Cartoons of a mourner standing over the grave of a loved one,
chatting to the interred, flowers in hand, saying “… oh and your tilt bed finally
arrived last week”, typified the scepticism of the time420. Nor did any evidence
emerge of the government picking up the pace of implementation as the final
months of 2019 elapsed. On the contrary, the prophecy of the cartoon
seemed more likely. In January 2020 the Minister responsible for the NDIS,
Stuart Robert, felt compelled to respond to complaints about deaths of wait-
listed NDIS applicants by claiming that “no one has died waiting for the
scheme”, despite the fact that the NDIS Agency, in answer to a parliamentary
question on notice, revealed that “between 2016 and 2019, 1,279 people died
between submitting an access request and receiving supports under the
National Disability Insurance Scheme”.421 Clearly the course of privatisation
did not run smoothly with the NDIS.
However, in the wider social services sector, including services for
homelessness, domestic violence and aged care (as opposed to services in
health and disability), the impacts of privatisation are even more worrying, in
part because they are far less noticeable when they are underway than the
naked greed and entitlement of the private health insurance industry, in part
because they will therefore be harder to object to, and in part because they
are very hard to reverse. While it might not be readily apparent, we are
experiencing the creation of an oligopoly in delivery of some social welfare
services and that oligopoly is being increasingly dominated by religious
groups. This is an oligopoly from which governments wish to exclude
419 See Luke Michael, “NDIS underspend helps return budget to the brink of surplus”, Probono
Australia, 20 September 2019, accessible at https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2019/09/ndis-
underspend-helps-return-budget-to-the-brink-of-surplus/
420 See First Dog on the Moon, “The NDIS has ‘saved’ the budget, how good is trampling the poor and
powerless?”, The Guardian, 24 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/24/the-ndis-has-saved-the-budget-how-
good-is-trampling-the-poor-and-powerless
421 Luke Henriques-Gomes, “NDIS minister claims no one has died waiting for the scheme, despite
agency revealing 1,279 deaths”, The Guardian, 15 January 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/15/ndis-minister-claims-no-one-has-died-
waiting-for-the-scheme-despite-agency-revealing-1279-deaths?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Othe
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themselves (or conservative governments at least). The partial shut-down
and/or slow divestment and/or re-consolidation of public welfare services
over the last couple of decades is an anti-competitive move similar to the
divestment of profitable commercial state enterprises discussed earlier in this
chapter. It is also a move towards a less inclusive society with lower levels of
service for the growing numbers of disadvantaged.
The services being outsourced are generally non-profit services but this
does not mean that they are not lucrative and highly attractive to private
providers, particularly churches. In fact there is a double benefit in taking on
these not-for-profit services if you are a church. What better and cheaper way
to attract people back to churches than with handouts paid for by the
taxpayer? Of course, some of this welfare work has been core business for
religious charities in Australia for a long time and there is no doubt that their
participation in the market has been and will continue to be vital to our social
safety net. It is not the continuing participation of churches per se in this
market that is the problem. The problem is potential excessive consolidation
in one type of provider. When that is aligned with a clamp on, or reduction in,
total funding, and when it is also coincident with the sort of increases in
demand for welfare services that we have seen in the years leading up to 2020
(particularly due to unaffordability of housing), it has all the makings of a new
social disaster. Effectively it makes for exclusion of more and more vulnerable
people. In the domestic violence refuge sector it is particularly disturbing. It is
also becoming more disturbing in the aged care sector. I will talk later about
how this exclusion is a significant threat to our economy but for the moment
it is important to consider what is driving the problem, and that is that we are
allowing ourselves to look at welfare as though it is a cost, not a benefit – as
though it is a burden, not a service.
Since the budget of 2014 and particularly since Scott Morrison rose to
become Treasurer of Australia, the prevailing monologue delivered by our
government about welfare is that it is going to get too expensive or is already
economically unaffordable. The message is that if we do nothing to contain
this increasing expenditure we will be supporting “Drachmanomics”, and we
will all end up like the poor people in Greece, “cast out in tears”. To get this
message across to those who won’t bother to read his full speech about what
342
he sees as the evils of socialism in Greece422, Scott Morrison’s Facebook page
has carried, for more than three years from 2016 (and still counting), a post
which has sported a bunch of unexplained big numbers about how our
welfare costs will grow in the future, although the period over which the
growth is expected to occur is not indicated. The Facebook post states:
• “$4.8 trillion – our future welfare bill if nothing changes”;
• “More than one third of Australia’s population is currently receiving
welfare payments”; and
• “88% of people not in the welfare system are expected to receive
some type of welfare payment in their life time”423.
Other statements in the finer print above the post include:
• “… it takes eight out of ten income taxpayers to go to work every day
to pay for our annual welfare bill”;
• “if nothing changes, young students aged 17-19 who transition to
unemployment payments are, on average, expected to be on income
support for 37 years”; and
• “if nothing changes, current young parenting payment recipients
aged under 18 are, on average, expected to be on income support
for 45 years.”424
These are all rather ham-fisted advertising slogans or claims with next to no
context and no identified source. There is no attempt to verify the claims or
provide references that will enable an independent assessment of their
veracity. There is even no embarrassment about distortions of the truth
through misuse of statistics. The claim that it takes eight out of ten
taxpayers to go to work every day to pay for the nation’s “welfare bill” is
grossly misleading:
• Firstly, it creates the impression that the whole welfare bill is caused
by those who don’t go to work – the overriding implication being that
422 Scott Morrison, “Positive welfare and compassionate conservatism – address to the Institute of
Public Affairs, Melbourne”, Op. Cit.
423 Scott Morrison Facebook page, last accessed in October 2019 at
https://www.Facebook.com/scottmorrison4cook/photos/a.103972859647126/1258085420902525/?t
ype=3&comment_id=1258212504223150
424 Scott Morrison Facebook page, Ibid.
343
it is caused by those on unemployment benefits. This is untrue. For
instance, in 2019/2020 unemployment benefits made up only about
6%425 of the nation’s budgeted full year welfare expenses. So in that
year it took about 5%, not 80% of us to go to work each day and pay
tax to pay for the unemployment benefits426 that any decent society
would provide when they cannot provide everyone with a job (which
we clearly can’t and/or don’t). The proportions were similar in
2016/17 when the post was first published.
• Secondly, it implies that those who don’t go to work every day are
“leaners” who have never gone to work in their lives and who never
will, which is also obviously untrue. Aged pensioners, for instance,
whose pensions and other costs make up almost 40% of our total
welfare expenses427, don’t go to work every day but they have
worked all their lives and can’t be categorised as leaners simply
because they have finally reached the age when our society had
planned (and budgeted) that they should retire, because (a) they
have already paid their share during their working lives and have
earned their retirement and (b) their retirement will free up a job for
someone in the next generation.
425 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-22, accessible at https://budget.gov.au/2019-
20/content/bp1/index.htm. The total budget estimate for expenses in social security and welfare is
listed as $180.1 billion, including the estimate for Unemployment and Sickness Benefits of $10.8
billion. Hence the calculation that unemployment benefits represents 6% of the total Social Security
and Welfare Expenses Budget.
426 In 2019/2020 the budgeted expenditure on Unemployment and Sickness Benefits was $10.8 billion
– just under 5% of the $229 billion estimated of revenue to be raised in that year from our personal
income tax. Hence the calculation that 5% of tax paid by those who go to work is spent on
unemployment benefits. It should be noted that in reality we pay a lot more taxes than our personal
income taxes. Total receipts from tax in 2019/2020 were expected to be $343 billion, indicating that
3% of the taxes we pay is spent on unemployment benefits. Source: Commonwealth of Australia,
Budget 2016-17, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 4: Revenue, page 4-16, accessible at
https://budget.gov.au/2019-20/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs4.pdf
427 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-22, Op. Cit., The total budget estimate for expenses in social
security and welfare is listed as $180.1 billion, including the estimate for Assistance to the Aged of
$70.1 billion. Hence the calculation that benefits for the aged represents almost 40% of the total
Social Security and Welfare Expenses Budget.
344
• Thirdly, while it is true that our social security and welfare budget at
the time of the Facebook post was $158 billion428 and receipts from
income tax were $196 billion429 – making the “eight out of ten” claim
appear to be technically correct – the more pervasive appearance
created by the post is that 80% of us are lifting (permanently) so that
20% of us can lean (permanently), which is certainly not true. It
ignores the fact that many Australians in receipt of benefits of this
kind have already contributed tax for decades, have gone to war or
carried out peace keeping duties for us, or in fact are still employed
and paying tax, for instance:
o families with children,
o veterans not yet retired,
o the working disabled, or
o people in work but being paid so little that they are entitled to
other supplements.
In Australia, politicians run the full gamut of the different types of professional
integrity that prevail in a capitalist society. They cover the full spectrum – from
the statesmen to the ad men. Here we have the integrity of the ad man,
touting a facile Facebook approach to economic management, using ad man’s
shorthand, as though neither honesty nor credibility are required. Rigour and
a sense of accountability for the truth or the full story are entirely absent in
these slogans. They can have no other function than as a shallow slur designed
to divide us against each other, to instil prejudices about welfare dependency
and to panic people into thinking it is unaffordable. The sole point of these
numbers is to imply that the sector is too big and needs to be shrunk. The
purpose of shrinking the sector is not explained. Nor is any defensible reason
provided as to why it should be necessary; nor is any estimate of the benefits
we will reap or forego by having a smaller welfare sector. Nor is any
opportunity being granted to us to intervene.
From time to time this scary and entirely unsubstantiated message is
reinforced. Repeatedly since 2013 we have been told to look upon our welfare
428 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2016-17, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-25, accessible at https://archive.budget.gov.au/2016-
17/bp1/bp1.pdf
429 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2016-17, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 4: Revenue,
page 4-15, accessible at https://archive.budget.gov.au/2016-17/bp1/bp1.pdf
345
system (and our tax system for that matter) as though it is theft and an assault
on our wealth. We have been told by Scott Morrison to look down on welfare
recipients as “taxed nots”430 rather than “taxed”. This litany has been driving
a wedge between Australians, implying that all social inter-dependency and
mutual benefit ceases when someone goes on welfare, and that welfare
drains the life out of both those who are on it and those who are not. Scott
Morrison persisted in driving this wedge further into our minds in 2016 with
statements like:
More Australians are also likely today to be net beneficiaries of the
government than contributors, never paying more tax than they
receive in government payments.431
Again, no verification is provided. Like the lingering three-year-old Facebook
post, it is just a speculation intended to scare and divide. It has no credentials
to truth or fact. Doubtless there are people who for one reason or another
end up in permanent welfare. At the end of their lives the little balance sheet
of their tax versus their welfare payments might show they earned more in
welfare than they paid in tax. But, by contrast, the national balance sheet
benefits from the circulation of taxation wealth back into our economy, via
welfare, for all to spend. At the level of the national accounts, welfare gives
us much more than it takes from us. It is a significant pillar of our economy.
All we have to do to verify this is to think about how the economy would suffer
if the spending power of pensioners, veterans, the disabled, single parents,
and those for whom there are no jobs, were pulled out of the economy. That
would add up to millions of people who will no longer be able to buy what the
rest of us want to sell. As long as we keep thinking of this as a lot of people
who cost us money, rather than a lot of people who give us money back, we
will always sell ourselves short on the nation’s bank balance and indeed on
our own weekly pay packets. The number of us who would be out of a job
without the welfare sector is incalculable but directly it is millions; indirectly
it is much more.
430 Scott Morrison on Seven National News, “Joe Hockey's 'lifters & leaners' becomes Scott Morrison's
'taxed & taxed-nots'”, 25 August 2016, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDKMmJ_jdM
431 Scott Morrison on Seven National News, “Joe Hockey's 'lifters & leaners' becomes Scott Morrison's
'taxed & taxed-nots'”, Ibid.
346
Of course, the main thrust of the fundamentalist neoliberal campaign
against welfare since 2016 has been against the unemployed, not against
pensioners, the disabled, veterans or young families. But as noted above, the
unemployed represent only a small fraction of the cost of our welfare system.
Lean heavily, they do not. Out of the $260 billion or so we are spending on
welfare annually, if we include public health services, only 4% of this outlay is
for the unemployed, or 6%432 if we exclude health. Far bigger costs arise in
welfare for the aged, the disabled, families with children and veterans. These
groups make up 62% of the annual cost, or 90% if you exclude health433.
Bearing in mind that pursuing and excluding the unemployed from access to
welfare is therefore not actually going to make for much improvement in the
budget bottom line (a mere $10 billion out of a $500 billion annual federal
expenditure budget434), the campaign against welfare for the unemployed can
really only be ideological – pursued for political advantage rather than
economic improvement. The unemployed are easy targets – low fruit. Yet
picking them can’t save much and it is more likely to create other costs.
But bearing in mind the fact that Scott Morrison’s Facebook post casts
the net much wider, scaring us about all welfare recipients, the thought arises
that once the political and budget advantage from targeting the unemployed
has been squeezed dry, who’s next? My money is on the young students and
young parents he targeted in the Facebook post. Alternatively, the target
could be even more of the thousands (reportedly around 280,000) of sick or
disabled people classified by the government as having a “partial capacity to
work”, who have, without adequate justification, been excluded from a
disability pension and forced to languish in poverty on Newstart for years435.
432 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-22, Op. Cit.
433 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-22, Ibid., shows that estimates of Assistance to the Aged = $70.1
billion or 39% of the total Social Security and Welfare Expenses Budget of $180 billion (excluding
health); Veterans and dependants = $6.7 billion or 4%; People with disabilities = $47 billion or 26%;
Families with children = $37.4 billion or 21%. Total = $161 billion or 90%.
434 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-6, Ibid.
435 See Luke Henriques-Gomes, “Government underreported sick and disabled people on Newstart by
80,000”, The Guardian, 24 October 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/oct/24/government-underreported-sick-and-disabled-people-on-newstart-by-
80000?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other See also Luke Henriques-Gomes, “Record number of sick or
disabled Newstart recipients as Coalition seeks savings”: “Over the same period, the number of
347
Alternatively, it could be pensioners, although they may be lower down the
current list since Scott Morrison already wiped $2.4 billion off the pensions
budget in 2015436. In that particular budget Mr Morrison made 175,000
pensioners (those with less assets) better off with a $15 per week increase in
their pensions but he made 235,000 pensioners (those with more assets)
worse off in the size of the part pension they had been entitled to and 90,000
pensioners lost their part pension entirely. Mr Morrison had the option to
make all pensioners better off but he chose to make more pensioners worse
off than better off for the sake of a $2.4 billion budget saving. Pensioners were
asked to bear the burden of the biggest single budget saving in the 2015/16
budget.
Who knows who will be next in this drive for austerity? And who knows
where it will end? But if the point of a clamp down on welfare is to get the
budget back into surplus, then not only will the government have to start
coming after more and more welfare recipients, such as pensioners, it will
have to start doing it soon, before the 2022 election. Austerity must be
widened. Indeed this is what has been budgeted for. As the Parliamentary
Budget Office has already disclosed, the 2019/20 budget is based on an
outlook of significant decreases in spending in the decade to 2029/30 (as a
proportion of GDP, and in some cases in real terms) on Commonwealth
grants, the disability support pension, veterans’ support, the family tax
benefit, pharmaceutical benefits, government administration and debt
servicing.437
The Morrison government, as elected in 2019, valued budget surpluses
like a sacred idol, despite the fact that they bear no more relationship to the
health of an economy than do deficits. For instance, in 2019 the government
disability pensioners fell from 832,024 to 750,045, and the rate of successful disability support pension
claims also declined markedly – from 69% in 2010-11 and 40.6% in 2013-14 to 29.8% in 2017-18. It
comes after last week’s federal budget forecast a 2.3% saving on income support to people with a
disability over the next four years.”, The Guardian, 10 April 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/apr/10/record-number-of-sick-or-disabled-
newstart-recipients-as-coalition-seeks-savings
436 Eric Tlozek and Matthew Doran, “Budget 2015: Greens will support $2.4 billion pension savings
measure, Scott Morrison says”, ABC News, 16 June 2015, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-16/scott-morrison-greens-will-support-$2.4-billion-pension-
changes/6551044
437 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019–20 Medium-Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Op.
Cit., page 15, Figure 3.3.
348
effectively achieved the first surplus since 2007, or near enough. But the
economy – as measured by growth in GDP, growth in unemployment, growth
in wages, growth in productivity and growth in consumer confidence – sank
into its poorest state since the 1991 recession438. On none of these indicators
was the economy performing well. Not even at the height of the GFC did the
economy sink as low as it did in 2019. Nor did the repeated deficits incurred
by both progressive and conservative governments since the GFC cause the
poor economic results of 2019. On the contrary, those deficits softened the
impacts of the slower growth we have experienced continuously since the
GFC, none of which were caused by surpluses or deficits and all of which were
caused by poorly regulated capitalism – neoliberalism. The only real purpose
of a surplus in a government budget is to slow down an economy when
inflation is too high and needs to be slowed. Conversely the only real purpose
of a deficit is to stimulate an economy when it needs stimulating. Neither is
causative of a strong or weak economy439 and the notion that we need to
stack up government budget surpluses against a rainy day is an entirely self-
defeating economic nonsense. Stacking surpluses up at the wrong time is
downright dangerous and can unnecessarily aggravate the impacts of a
recession. Notwithstanding this, the government elected in 2019 persisted in
valuing budget surpluses, relying totally on them as the only (ostensible)
indicator of good economic management that they could muster. And it
budgeted those surpluses in for another decade440. If, and/or as, our
economic situation worsens, their reliance on surpluses in their political
advertising will deepen and further austerity will be unleashed on more of us.
Should it be necessary to start openly sacrificing people other than the
unemployed, there will be no hesitation.
This introduces us to a very real scenario that by the time some of our
younger generations – both those who are taking on mortgages for home
438 GDP growth in the year to September 2019 was 1.4% (later revised to 1.6%). The last time GDP
growth went below that was 1991 when it hit -1.1%. Source: ABS 5206.0 Table 1, yearly figures
extrapolated from quarterly figures in Column B, Op. Cit.
439 See Greg Jericho, “This government has abandoned economic logic – and no one seems willing to
call them on it”, The Guardian, 20 October 2019,
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/oct/20/this-government-has-abandoned-
economic-logic-and-no-one-seems-willing-to-call-them-on-it
440 See Commonwealth of Australia, “Budget 2019/2020: Overview – Our Plan for a Stronger
Economy”, 2 April 2019, page 5, Op. Cit.
349
ownership and those who are unable to afford a mortgage – reach retirement
age, the pension may well not be there for them or may be so far reduced
that it is no longer a liveable wage. By 2050, or even by 2030, this will
constitute a huge drop in standard of living for retirees, even if they have
some decent savings in superannuation. Unlike the majority of baby boomers,
all of whom had access to a far more affordable housing market and were able
to rely on retiring without a mortgage (or with a very small one), younger
home buyers can entertain far fewer expectations that they will retire without
a big mortgage still hanging over their heads (thanks to policies which have
grossly inflated the price of housing since 2000 such as discounted capital
gains tax and negative gearing). As a result, younger generations than mine
will need to plan retirement incomes sufficient to cover rental housing or, if
they have a mortgage, they will have to resort to the sort of strategy adopted
by prominent economics journalist, Jessica Irvine, when she finally broke into
the home ownership market in 2019:
My plan now is to live there for decades, use my super to pay off any
outstanding debt in retirement and live on the age pension.441
One can only hope that by the time Jessica retires the pension system is still
available and at a rate sufficient to maintain some dignity after housing costs
are paid. With the budget settings the way they are – building in surpluses at
the expense of welfare – and with nothing being done to increase housing
affordability, and with attitudes to welfare being hardened in the minds of
government and Australians, there are few grounds for optimism that
Australia’s pension system will be in a shape healthy enough to support
Jessica’s modest housing arrangements in her retirement. Nor might her
superannuation be sufficient to help her if the Morrison government follows
through on suggestions from the right-wings of some think tanks that
legislated increases to the superannuation guarantee should not go ahead.442
441 Jessica Irvine, “I’m a home owner at last, but hold the bubbly. Too many are left behind”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 31 October 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-
finance/i-m-a-home-owner-at-last-but-hold-the-bubbly-too-many-are-left-behind-20191030-
p535ru.html?btis
442 See Ben Butler, “80% of superannuation increase would come from pay packets, Grattan report
says” The Guardian, 3 February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/feb/03/80-of-superannuation-increase-would-come-from-pay-packets-grattan-report-
says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
350
Naturally, a contraction of the size of the welfare sector that will arise
from obsessions with budget surpluses will just exacerbate the problem for
the economy as a whole. The plain fact is that those on welfare contribute to
economic growth: welfare grows the economy by growing demand and
reducing inequality443. A massive downsizing of the sector would hurt growth
– a lot. This is not to suggest that we should aspire to life on welfare. On the
contrary, most people can and do figure out that it is far preferable to aspire
to earn enough money to pay tax than to aspire to a life on welfare. We don’t
line up to be leaners on the dole queue. The vast majority of us who end up
on welfare do so after a lifetime of work, not before. It is not like we start out
in life saying: “When I grow up I want a career in poverty and dependency”.
Generally, we start out wanting the things that others have – independence,
wealth, self-determination, individual achievement. And most of us sustain
that desire throughout our lives. Indeed, this is the aspiration that all the
conservative prime ministers of the 21st century have played on for their
political gain. But there is a limit to the lifespan of political and economic
success built this way.
That limit is reached when too many of us are prohibited from aspiration
and when the economy tanks so badly and for so many that if a change
doesn’t occur via the more polite means of the polling both, things start to
turn ugly. History tends to suggest that this ugliness can rise quite quickly,
taking the rest of us by surprise. As the American theorist and author, John
Taylor, put it in 1814:
There are two modes of invading private property; the first, by which
the poor plunder the rich, is sudden and violent; the second, by which
the rich plunder the poor, is slow and legal. One begets ferocity and
443 See for example, Pasquale Tridico and Walter Paternesi Meloni, “Economic growth, welfare models
and inequality in the context of globalisation”, Sage Journals, The economic and labour relations
review, UNSW/AGSM Business School, 22 February 2018: “By means of some descriptive evidence
with respect to different welfare models, we provide evidence that higher welfare provision is
associated with a lower level of income inequality. Moreover, public social spending growth is
positively related to real per capita GDP growth. These preliminary analyses indicate that the
‘efficiency thesis’ can be criticised, as countries with low social public spending (Anglo-Saxon and
Mediterranean) suffered the most during the recent crisis in terms of economic growth and income
distribution, while countries that implemented the ‘compensation thesis’ (Continental and
Scandinavian) exhibited lower inequality and higher income growth.” Accessible at
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1035304618758941
351
barbarism, the other vice and penury, and both impair the national
prosperity and happiness.444
Are we on the cusp of such ugliness? To the extent that John Taylor has
implied it is something we don’t necessarily see coming, it is very hard to
know, although the rise of populism probably gives us hints of the imminence
of ugly violence. Where populism has sprung up in other countries, it has the
character of early stage violent upheaval, particularly at its more egregious
extremes such as white supremacism. But populism is also a choice that many
people make to avoid or delay violence. It is as though instead of choosing
violence some people prefer to show their resentment of elites, the
establishment and inequality, by trashing their democracy rather than their
home.
In the Australia of 2020, we don’t seem to have embraced extreme
versions of populism such as white supremacism yet, although there are those
who say our populist moment has arrived445. We are simply dealing with our
resentments, particularly about inequality, in a somewhat more orderly
fashion than the populist movements in other countries. For instance, we are
certainly starting to rail against what John Taylor called “vice and penury”,
although we would probably update these 19 th century expressions to
“corruption and poverty”. As we have witnessed wider and wider inequality
being imposed on our society, there has been a parallel clamour for inquiries
into corruption, abuse of political power, electoral system distortion, financial
sector crime, tax evasion in big business, suppression of media freedom, and
domination of markets by monopolies, oligopolies and large media and
internet manipulators. So we are not necessarily sleep-walking into a doom
that we can’t see coming. But it may be closer than we think. As Richard
Flanagan has put it:
A corrupted, sclerotic system incapable of the change needed, surviving
only through a dull repression of dissent and dissenters can,
nevertheless, seem eternal – until the hour it crumbles. At some point
444 John Taylor, “An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States,
1814”, accessible at https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/taylor-an-inquiry-into-the-principles-and-policy-
of-the-government-of-the-united-states
445 See Warren Hogan, Industry Professor University of Technology Sydney, “Australia’s populist
moment has arrived”, The Conversation, 25 February 2019, accessible at
https://theconversation.com/australias-populist-moment-has-arrived-111491
352
something gives. Something always gives. The longer the impasse, the
more denied the common voice, the greater and more terrible that
future moment.446
Whether we are unwittingly walking into doom, and whether we are on the
brink of violent upheaval or not, is always a matter for debate. And the
winners in any such debate can’t be identified until after the doom arrives.
That being so, it is undeniably important to keep a close watch on what
governments and corporations are doing if we are to guard against the “more
terrible future moment”. But keeping a close watch is incredibly difficult in
the 21st century, especially when we are flooded with fake news and
governments are actively working for the disproportional benefit of
corporations through legislation, subsidy and criminalisation of protesters
and opponents. The things governments tend to do in this vein start long
before we can see them. They start deep inside the machinery of government.
Changes in the structure of the way government does business and provides
essential services (or seeks to stop providing them) are often difficult to
distinguish until it is too late. The creation of a concentrated, limited market
of providers of social support services is one of the more significant instances
of this problem. Learning to spot it is essential to the development of plans to
prevent long term harm not just to the most vulnerable in society but to the
economy as a whole.
All of the shallowness, unaccountability and dishonesty of Scott
Morrison’s Facebook approach to economic management is underpinned by
the fundamentalist neoliberal narrative. That is to be expected. But when it
spruiks a message that welfare is a drain on us all, the potential impact of the
narrative is much bigger than it might seem. Slogans like these Facebook page
quips are inserted to smooth the way for a continuing transfer of valuable
welfare services into the hands of private providers and to divert it as covertly
as possible before we have a chance to realise what is going on. To the extent
that this may result in too much market share going to one type of private
provider – such as churches – there is the same cause for concern that would
arise if we were witnessing the creation of an oligopoly in big commercial
446Richard Flanagan, “Scott Morrison and the big lie about climate change: does he think we’re that
stupid?”, The Guardian, 25 November 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/nov/25/scott-morrison-and-the-big-lie-about-climate-change-does-he-think-were-that-
stupid?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
353
businesses. The evangelical fundamentalist neoliberal nexus is an intensely
powerful force in unregulated capitalism for establishment of a social services
sector that is exclusive and weakened compared to what we have been used
to. This makes it important to skill up on interrogating the evangelical
fundamentalist and/or neoliberal narratives about welfare before planning
what place welfare should have in our future. Here is a story to shed light on
how these takeovers are made and how they weaken our social safety net.
An example of weakened service delivery through structural change
in domestic abuse refuge services: A distinctive feature of the
evangelical fundamentalist narrative is that it is highly suspicious of
state sponsored welfare but not suspicious of philanthropy provided by
voluntary private contributions. Fundamentalists have several reasons
for this, and these reasons can constitute a big incentive for these sorts
of religious groups to bid for contracts in welfare service delivery. The
reasons are about their ability to increase their own credentials for
salvation and to increase their congregations at the same time.
Ministering to the poor is central to salvation; it is akin to buying
indulgences. If they can be bought with taxpayer money, so much the
better. This is not to say that there is no impulse for good at work in
religious charity. There is some genuine benevolence, at least until it
becomes exclusive.
In some fields of missionary endeavour this exclusivity can have, and
has had, significant negative social impacts. The sector that has suffered
quite noticeably from this is domestic violence refuge services. Jess Hill,
author of a seminal history of domestic abuse in Australia, See What you
Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, has pointed out that
the women’s refuge movement in this country worked tirelessly during
the 1970s to “wrest [domestic abuse] shelters away from faith based
charities”447. One of the reasons for this was that faith based charities
generally placed a higher value on things like the sanctity of marriage
and a women’s obedience to a man, than they did on the safety of
women. Being against divorce, they would tend to send women back
447Jess Hill and Hagar Cohen, “How funding changes in NSW locked women out of domestic violence
refuges”, The Guardian, 9 March 2015, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/09/no-place-to-hide-how-women-are-being-locked-
out-of-domestic-violence-refuges
354
into violent situations rather than offer ways out of the abuse. Bearing
in mind the fact that several of those faith based charities that have
recently commenced moving back into this service area still reject or
stigmatise divorce (or remarriage after divorce)448, it is not difficult to
understand the anguished reaction of the secular women’s refuge
network to the decimation of their network in the case of the NSW
government’s Going Home Staying Home (GHSH) program discussed in
Chapter 4. The very name of that program says it all, the patriarchal
implication being that the best place for abused women is in the home
and that subjugation is the rightful order of things regardless of the
increased exposure to abuse for women and children449.
Experience with the implementation phase of GHSH in 2014 did not
provide encouragement that the faith based contractors had changed
much in judgemental and exclusive attitudes since the 1970s. For
instance, a Salvation Army contractor awarded the GHSH contract to
operate the only refuge in Broken Hill introduced a strict payment
regime and refused to allow women back in who couldn’t pay, enthusing
to the ABC’s Background Briefing program about this new arrangement,
saying it teaches domestic violence victims to be responsible. “It’s not
simply a service that they can use and abuse,” he told Background
Briefing. “There’s actually responsibilities about them coming here now.
We follow up on them, making sure they are making the payments for
448 See Julia Baird and Haylee Gleeson, “No-brainer, Sydney Anglicans vote in support of allowing
domestic violence survivors to remarry”, ABC News, 26 October 2018: “In a historic moment for the
Sydney Anglican Church, and the latest in a series of small victories for Christian survivors of domestic
violence, the synod has for the first time voted in favour of allowing divorced survivors of abuse to
remarry. … The carried motion will not necessarily change much in practice because bishops will still,
in accordance with church law, be able to deny a divorcee’s application for remarriage”. Accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-24/sydney-anglicans-support-allowing-dv-survivors-divorce-
remarry/10425230
449 For more information on the effects of faith, particularly the Christian faith, on perpetuation of
domestic violence, see Julia Baird, “What we learnt during a year reporting on domestic violence in
the church: Women told to endure domestic violence in the name of god”, ABC News, 23 May 2018:
“Overall we heard repeatedly from counsellors and psychologists that Christian women are less likely
to leave abusive marriages, more likely to blame themselves for the abuse, more prone to believe the
abuse will change, and unlikely to be protected by their pastors.” Accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/julia-baird/4512348
355
their accommodation.”450 The fee itself wasn’t necessarily new as the
previous contractor had charged a $20 fee per night but it had always
been forgiven or foregone when someone couldn’t pay. By contrast, the
new fee arrangement allowed for no forgiveness and applied despite
the fact that the centre was taxpayer funded. In other words, the faith
based operator was seeking to be paid twice and covering this up with
a convenient and entirely gratuitous sermon on personal responsibility.
It was as though he thought the clients were responsible to him as the
contract manager, instead of him being responsible to them as clients.
He inverted the power arrangement that should have put the client first
in the contract. Advocates from the peak body for domestic violence
victims, WESNET, claimed the fee would act as a disincentive for women
to attend the centre. And indeed it did, because “when Background
Briefing visited Catherine Haven in February [2015], the refuge looked
deserted, and most of its rooms were empty, despite the town having
one of the highest domestic violence rates in the state.”451
The multiple attractions of the social services area of the welfare
sector makes some religious charities bargain hard in tender processes.
They form powerful consortia and end up dominating the market of
private sector providers, edging smaller specialist and more
experienced providers out. This is what happened in the Going Home
Staying Home outsourcing program. In that case about 75% of the
business for specialist homelessness and domestic violence refuge
services went to four religious consortia, all of which were Christian452.
450 Jess Hill and Hagar Cohen, Ibid. See also ABC Background Briefing “A Cycle of Violence”, 3 May
2015, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/2015-05-
03/6428882#transcript
451 Jess Hill and Hagar Cohen, Ibid.
452 Jess Hill and Hagar Cohen, “How funding changes in NSW locked women out of domestic violence
refuges”, Ibid., In late 2014 “the state government had just completed a radical reform of its
homelessness sector, putting all its services out to tender for the first time in 25 years. Women’s
refuges were told they couldn’t just reapply for their own service – if they wanted to retain their
refuges they would have to show they could provide multiple services to all homeless people in their
area. Services would no longer be exclusively for victims of domestic violence – they’d now have to
cater to all types of homelessness. The women’s refuge movement, which had wrested shelters away
from faith-based charities in the 1970s, was decimated. According to the advocacy group, SOS
Women’s Services, 75% of women’s shelters were transferred to faith-based charities.” Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/09/no-place-to-hide-how-women-are-being-locked-
out-of-domestic-violence-refuges
356
The lesson is that when this sector is contracted out, it is highly
vulnerable to market domination by one type of provider and the
greater the consolidation of market dominance, the greater the
potential for social exclusion of the most vulnerable in our society.
Problems of exclusion are further exacerbated in privatisation of
social services by poor contract management. Private philanthropy
contracts are generally both poorly specified and supervised. Indeed,
the Going Home Staying Home Program was the subject of substantial
criticism by the NSW Audit Office in 2019 for poor contract design and
supervision. The findings are an indictment of contract management:
o Family and Community Services (FACS) cannot demonstrate it
is effectively and efficiently contracting NGOs to deliver
community services because it does not always use open
tenders to test the market when contracting NGOs, and does
not collect adequate performance data to ensure safe and
quality services are being provided.
o New service providers are excluded from consideration –
limiting contestability.
o In the service delivery areas we assessed, FACS does not
measure client outcomes as it has not yet moved to outcomes
based contracts.
o FACS does not effectively use client data to monitor the
performance of NGOs funded under the Permanency Support
Program and Specialist Homelessness Services.
o FACS does not yet track outcomes for clients of NGOs.
o Incomplete data limits FACS’ effectiveness in continuous
improvement for the Permanency Support Program and
Specialist Homelessness Services.453
Based on these findings about one of the nation’s foremost
experiments in privatising delivery of essential social services, the real
outcome of the above audited programs is none other than a waste of
taxpayer funds in creation of unsupervised oligopolies. Who benefits
here? Not the homeless or other vulnerable people. And not the
453See Audit Office of NSW, “Contracting of Non-Government Organisations”, 29 June 2019,
https://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/our-work/reports/contracting-non-government-organisations
357
economy, much less our social cohesion. We are not saving a bean. How
are we better off as a nation?
Admittedly this audited program is a state program, not a federal
one. But neither the state nor the federal public services are retaining
contract supervision capacity in welfare services and they are certainly
not focussed on ensuring non-discriminatory access. Nor are they
keeping up with demand for the service. Contracting out of welfare was,
in theory, meant to create an efficiency gain so that the welfare dollar
would work harder and we would be able to keep up with expected
increased demand for social services welfare without unsustainable
impact on the public purse. What has happened in the case of Going
Home Staying Home is that the initiative has not freed up extra capacity
to deal with increased demand. Spending has simply been kept at the
same levels or less in real terms and more and more people have been
turned away. According to Homelessness NSW, since 2014 client
numbers for these services have increased by 30% and yet no extra
funding has been pumped into contracts. Nor have any efficiencies
emerged due to the fact that the contracts are awash with meaningless
requirements. As a result, Homelessness NSW reported in 2019 that:
2 in 5 clients who contact homelessness services are unable to
access crisis accommodation due to lack of availability and 2 in 3
clients who need long term accommodation are unable to secure
this even with the support of a homelessness service because of a
lack of available social housing and unaffordable private rental
market.454
There is no end in sight for this situation due to the fact that the federal
government in 2019/2020 budgeted an 8.2 % decrease in real terms
over the three years to 2023 in its contribution to the National Housing
and Homelessness Agreement455.
454 Homelessness NSW, Domestic Violence NSW & YFoundations, “Contracting non-government
organisations – Audit Office Report”, summary response, accessible at
https://www.homelessnessnsw.org.au/sites/homelessnessnsw/files/2019-
07/Position%20statement%20on%20Audit%20Office%20Report.pdf
455 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-27, Op. Cit.
358
Of course, social service delivery isn’t always weakened by pursuit of
religious fundamentalism. Sometimes it is weakened simply by privatisation
gone wrong. There are certain groups of the vulnerable in society that faith
based charities have become less interested in over the last decade and they
have vacated the market in these cases. One of these groups is children,
particularly Indigenous children. This is an area that has become just too hard
for the churches since the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission
released its report in 1997 on the stolen generations of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Children, “Bringing Them Home”456 and since the Gillard
government established the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to
Child Sexual Abuse457. This sector of the welfare services market has been
quasi-privatised over the last couple of decades too, but without the same
features of a religious oligopoly as the Going Home Staying Home program.
Despite the less discernible market domination problems, the privatisation
process has resulted in significant inefficiency and entirely unnecessary cost
to the taxpayer. Here is a story to shed light on how privatisation has
weakened child protection services for our Indigenes:
An example of weakened service delivery through structural change
in Indigenous child protection services: These days welfare services for
child protection are structured and delivered in a manner that is having
particularly detrimental effects on Indigenous children compared to
non-Indigenous children. This has resulted in a situation where:
o In 2017–18, the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children receiving child protection services was 163.8 per 1,000
Indigenous children, 8 times the rate for non-Indigenous
children (19.7 per 1,000); and
456 See Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, “Bringing them Home” – a report of the
National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their
Families, 1997, accessible at https://bth.humanrights.gov.au/
457 See Wikipedia, Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Commission_into_Institutional_Responses_to_Child_Sexual_Abu
se#Outcomes
359
o At 30 June 2018, the rate of Indigenous children in out-of-home
care was 59.4 per 1,000 children, 11 times the rate for non-
Indigenous children (5.2 per 1,000).458
The significant over-representation of Indigenous children in care has
been getting worse since 2014:
o At 30 June 2014, there were 14,991 Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander children in out-of-home care, a rate of 51.4 per 1,000
children. These rates ranged from 21.8 per 1,000 in Tasmania
to 71.3 per 1,000 in New South Wales.459
As at June 2018, however, the number of Indigenous children in out-of-
home care had risen by almost 2,800 children to 17,787460, almost a 20%
increase in four years. The above statistics are from the government run
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. However, the national,
Indigenous-led and controlled Family Matters campaign estimates that
“currently, there are 20,421 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children in out-of-home care, making them 37.3% of the total out-of-
home care population”461. Regardless of which figures are correct, it is
an appalling situation.
Professionals working in this area acknowledge that this is a function
of two trends: one is the quasi-privatisation of service delivery itself, and
the other is that the method of service delivery is entirely lopsided,
placing far too much emphasis on removal of Indigenous children from
their families and far too little on early intervention support that assists
children to stay in their homes. Government investment in out-of-home
care supports – like foster care and kinship care – has far exceeded the
support provided to Indigenous families before child removal occurs. In
458 Source: Australian Government: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “Child Protection
Australia 2017-18”, page 53, accessible at https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/e551a2bc-9149-4625-
83c0-7bf1523c3793/aihw-cws-65.pdf.aspx?inline=true
459 Source: Australian Government: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “Child Protection
Australia 2013-14”, page 50, accessible at https://www.aihw.gov.au/getmedia/50220a9f-c5e1-415f-
a88c-d01218b79037/18756.pdf.aspx?inline=true
460 Source: Australian Government: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, “Child Protection
Australia 2017-18”, page 53, referencing “Table S43” accessible at
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/child-protection/child-protection-australia-2017-18/data
461 Source: Family Matters, “The Family Matters Report 2019”, page 5, accessible at
https://www.familymatters.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1097_F.M-2019_LR.ƒ.pdf
360
other words, there is not enough early intervention supporting families
and too much “late action”, where professionals resort straight to
removal. This impacts Indigenous children disproportionately because
of their pre-existing over-representation in the proportion of our
population that lives in poverty. Indigenous children start from so far
back in the field that removal is imposed far earlier than it generally is
for children who do not live in remote areas and have greater access to
welfare support that prevents the need for removal.
One Indigenous professional working in this field has put forward the
idea that we are experiencing a second “stolen generation” because if
the figures of 20,000+ Indigenous children in care are correct, then “the
numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-
home care now exceed the numbers removed through the stolen
generations”.462 Instead of strengthening the families with earlier
intervention in things like in-home maternal child health visits, culturally
appropriate counselling, and financial support for things like electricity
bills, we have weakened their capacity for self-reliance and created a far
more expensive institutional approach. The institutions don’t look like
those that created the victims of the stolen generation because they are
in the main placing children in other families rather than in faith based
institutions. But the paternalism is the same, the removal from family is
the same, and the institutions of the state apparatus are as overweening
and dispossessing as they have ever been, albeit more deftly
camouflaged. We have replaced the obvious edifice of the church with
the far less obvious apparatus of the legal system, ill-qualified
bureaucracy and culturally distant professionals.
This problem could be quite easily resolved with a less paternalistic
approach and by changing the balance of how funding is organised,
giving more funds directly to families in financial stress, more to local
support groups (like the community hub of Maranguka mentioned in
Chapter 6) and less to institutional solutions. Unfortunately the industry
has been quasi-privatised in a dispersed manner that is the opposite of
462Jacynta Krakouer, Indigenous X, “The stolen generations never ended – they just morphed into
child protection”, The Guardian, 17 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/17/the-stolen-generations-never-ended-
they-just-morphed-into-child-protection?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
361
oligopoly but no less problematic and entrenched as it now supports
thousands of professionals – “lawyers, social workers, education
specialists, medical professionals, and psychologists – all of whom
benefit financially from indigenous disadvantage and
overrepresentation in care”463. These well meaning professionals
remove Indigenous children from their families at a far higher rate than
non-Indigenous children and do so ostensibly in the “best interests” of
the child. These “best interests” are judged from the point of view of
western society, without regard to the values of Indigenous society and
without regard to the fact that our failure to support Indigenous led
approaches to child and family protection has resulted in massive
increases in family break ups and significant increases in the cost of
welfare. A report released in 2019 by a research partnership of
specialists and foundations in early intervention for child protection,
“How Australia Can Invest in Children and Return More: A new look at
the $15 billion cost of late action”, has found that:
The cost to government of late intervention in Australia is $15.2
billion each year. This equates to $607 for every Australian or
$1,912 per child and young person. The greatest costs are services
for children in out-of-home care (39%).464
And of course, the majority of those costs for services for children in
out-of-home care is for Indigenous children.
Wherever the old top down approach to welfare services for
Indigenes intrudes yet again into our approaches to welfare service
delivery, the targeted “outcomes” that governments flatter themselves
they will achieve simply evaporate. Clients do not get a better standard
of living and inequality widens. Both the service and the society are
weakened, and that is putting it mildly. If we simply prioritised early
intervention and skipped the removal of Indigenous children until it was
463Jacynta Krakouer, Indigenous X, “The stolen generations never ended – they just morphed into
child protection”, Op. Cit.
464 William Teager, Stacey Fox and Neil Stafford, “How Australia can invest early and return more: A
new look at the $15b cost and opportunity”, Early Intervention Foundation, The Front Project and
CoLab at the Telethon Kids Institute, Australia, 2019, page 35, accessible at
https://colab.telethonkids.org.au/siteassets/media-docs---colab/coli/finalhow-australia-can-invest-in-
children-and-return-more---final.pdf
362
absolutely necessary, the national budget and the strength of our
society would both be markedly improved. As it is, we are simply paying
parts of the welfare bill that we shouldn’t be paying at all. If we switched
to alleviating the poverty and the impacts of remoteness, we would save
on the far larger costs we are incurring on institutionalised forms of care
and the life long troubles they cause. It is far cheaper to assist people
out of poverty than support them in out-of-home care.
I could go on with other examples of privatisation gone wrong, the best
example probably being the privatisation of employment services, now called
the Jobactive program. In this case a tripartite Senate Committee in 2019
found that privatisation of job placement services was “failing those it was
intended to serve”. The Committee comprised of Labor, Liberal and Green
party members unanimously recommended:
Throughout the inquiry, the committee has received substantial
evidence about the failings of the privatised Jobactive model,
particularly in regard to meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged
in our community. A return to some public service delivery of
employment services could have a number of benefits for job seekers
and improve the professionalisation of the industry. The committee
considers that the government must seriously consider the restoration
of some public service delivery of employment services for certain
cohorts of unemployed people.465
This response should be applied to just about every sector of our welfare
services that has been privatised in the last two decades. The fact is,
contracting out delivery of welfare services to the private sector has not been
successful in Australia. If it had been, we would have seen the evidence in
reductions in homelessness, domestic violence, abuses in aged care,
Indigenous disadvantage and joblessness. But everything is getting worse in
these areas. It is not just in the for-profit sector that we are blundering into
the need for royal commissions to fix the abuses of unrestrained
neoliberalism (eg., the banking royal commission). Royal commissions have
465 Parliament of Australia, Senate Education and Employment References Committee, “Jobactive:
failing those it is intended to serve”, February 2019, Paragraph 5.154, accessible at
https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/committees/reportsen/024217/toc_pdf/Jobactivefaili
ngthoseitisintendedtoserve.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf
363
been necessitated in the not-for-profit sector too – in aged care, in
institutional responses to child sexual abuse, and in Aboriginal children in
detention in the Northern Territory. Additionally, the rate of exclusion from
our welfare services has been increasing and is set to increase further. In
contracting out service delivery heavily to the private sector, the only thing
we seem to have “achieved” is to vest private providers with greater powers
to decide who may be entitled and who may not. This is obviously not an
achievement: it is a problem. And when the private provider is a church group,
this adds another dimension to the problem – another layer of risk of
exclusion.
Welfare doled out by the state in Australia today is generally delivered
without discrimination and without obligation on the recipient to improve –
morally or spiritually. Welfare payments and services are certainly delivered
by the state with other conditions (such as an obligation to attend training
courses and meetings with Jobactive contractors), but not moral ones. A
recipient of state welfare is not imposed upon to seek redemption or to even
listen to any script about his or her soul before or during service delivery. For
example, they are not put upon to undergo conversion therapies such as gay
conversion therapy, or to convert to any particular religion. Not yet anyway.
But whenever a welfare service is contracted out to a church, we may expect
that there will be some increased pressure on recipients to convert,
depending on how fundamentalist or rigid the church is. This may be applied
even if contracts stipulate that such pressure shall not be applied. It will be
very difficult to police. Some churches consider that their mission is to convert
souls and that if they do not pursue this mission they will be imperilling their
own immortal souls. Other churches have a non-prejudicial idea of welfare
and long may it stay so, because the role of churches in delivery of private
social support is in fact a vital part of our economy. The prospect of trying to
deliver welfare over the next thirty years without the involvement of religious
groups is almost as daunting as the prospect of delivering it without
government involvement. The point is that if welfare service delivery is to be
contracted out, it should be done with very careful contract conditions and
supervision to ensure that any taxpayer funded services are delivered without
exclusion and without compulsion to satisfy irrelevant pre-conditions. In
other words, welfare services, being taxpayer funded, should be delivered
entirely without discrimination.
364
However, since 2018 Australians have been witnessing a new crusade by
some peak Christian associations to claim greater powers of discrimination in
their welfare service delivery. For instance, in 2019 the Australian Christian
Lobby (ACL) started positively bellowing for rights to discriminate in delivery
of its welfare services. In October 2019, amid public debate on the federal
government’s proposed draft Religious Discrimination Bill, the ACL took this
to a new high by calling for a positive right for “religious businesses such as
aged care providers to gain more powers of hiring and firing employees who
do not conform to religious teachings”. In a speech to the National Press Club,
the ACL director, Martyn Iles, “backed calls from the Australian Catholic
Bishops Conference for greater powers to fire employees who don’t conform
to a ‘Christian sexual ethic’”466. It was also reported that:
At the debate, ambassador of the National Secular Lobby, Fiona Patten,
warned the ACL and Catholic church want to “extend the ability to hire
and fire” to their commercial businesses which would be “very
dangerous” and “extremely exclusive” to staff and patients of aged
care.467
Prior to this, all the publicised calls from religious groups for positive rights of
discrimination had been about the right to hire and fire in religious schools. In
this new call, the ante was upped into the welfare services sector, particularly
aged care, for which these groups, of course, receive massive taxpayer
subsidies. This sort of call about firing employees in aged care was alarming
enough; but even more alarming was the commentary in response from the
federal Attorney General, Christian Porter, the Minister responsible for the
Religious Discrimination Bill. He disclosed that the calls from certain religious
groups for discriminatory rights were even more widely framed:
In a statement Porter acknowledged business and LGBTIQ groups’
concerns and noted that some – but not all – religious groups had called
for “even more minimal limits on what religious Australians can say” and
466 Paul Karp, “Australian Christian Lobby backs sacking of employees with no ‘Christian sexual ethic’”,
The Guardian, 9 October 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/oct/09/australian-christian-lobby-backs-sacking-of-employees-with-no-christian-sexual-
ethic
467 Paul Karp, “Australian Christian Lobby backs sacking of employees with no ‘Christian sexual ethic’”,
Ibid.
365
expanding the definition of religious organisation to grant “the broad
discretion to deal with staff and customers on a faith basis”.468
It might be expected that the ACL (and the Prime Minister) would have
preferred that Christian Porter hadn’t blabbed the bit about wanting
discretion to “deal with customers on a faith basis”, or that he hadn’t blabbed
it quite so soon in the debate. But blab he did. And we were thereby able to
witness how a major private player in the welfare sector was fighting hard for
the right to become more intolerant at a time when they were expecting to
be bidding for contracts or subsidies to take over more and more of any
welfare business that the government may still be willing to fund with
taxpayers’ money. At the same time, we were able to witness a government
aiding and abetting more of this sort of exclusion from our social safety net,
for example by showing every intention to introduce discrimination against:
• drug dependent recipients of welfare,469
• the growing numbers of people who are being subjected to the
ignominy and outright punishment of a cashless welfare card,470 and
• even welfare recipients who exercise a lawful right to protest.471
All these welfare recipients, and more, are experiencing an increasing number
of conditions being placed on their access to welfare. This has been
recognised by scholars recently as a global phenomenon called “welfare
conditionality” – a trend where access to welfare is granted conditional on a
468 Paul Karp, “Australian Christian Lobby backs sacking of employees with no ‘Christian sexual ethic’”,
Ibid.
469 See Alison Ritter, “Drug testing welfare recipients is about morality not policy”, The Conversation,
ABC News, 12 September 2019, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-12/drug-testing-
welfare-recipients-is-about-morality-not-policy/11504532: “The proposal to drug test welfare
recipients keeps bouncing back. The most recent attempt announced last week is not the third
proposal since 2017. … These proposals are examples of welfare conditionality. In other words welfare
participants need to meet certain conditions or behave in certain ways to receive their payments.”
470 See Max Koslowski, “’The card declined and I broke down’: Life on the cashless welfare card”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 14 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-card-declined-and-i-broke-down-life-on-the-cashless-
welfare-card-20190913-p52r02.html
471 See news.com.au, “Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton suggests protesters should lose welfare”, 4
October 2019, accessible at https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/home-affairs-minister-peter-
dutton-suggests-protesters-should-lose-welfare/news-story/0743cc5b4420bc9558601c2dcae7381f
366
recipient’s perceived “morality” or conformance to certain behaviours.
According to researchers:
The essence of welfare conditionality lies in requirements for people to
behave in prescribed ways in order to access cash benefits or other
welfare support. These conditions are typically enforced through
benefit ‘sanctions’ of various kinds, reflecting a new vision of ‘welfare’,
focused more on promoting ‘pro-social’ behaviour than on protecting
people against classic ‘social risks’ like unemployment.472
This is shaping up as a fully orchestrated campaign to impose a restrictive
moral order on us as a pre-condition for access to something we have
probably all hitherto assumed as an equal right – as something that would be
there for us, if or when we ever needed it, regardless of our faith, sexual
preference, or race. A program of privatisation is being implemented in direct
coordination with a revision of discriminatory laws and policies. This
integrated program kills a number of birds with one stone. For instance:
• it gets the government out of having to deliver a service directly and
out of responsibility for any failure in service delivery;
• it cuts down the demand for the service as more and more people
can be shut out if they don’t conform to any new pre-conditions for
benefits (such as conversion to a faith or behaviour change);
• any recipient that does conform grows the congregation of the
provider (if delivered by a church group rather than a secular charity);
• the providers are enriched by growth of their congregation without
having to fund any of that because it is all still funded by the taxpayer;
and
• depending on how legislation on religious discrimination is finally
passed or amended, faith-based groups may even be able to use
taxpayer funds on a discriminatory basis.
This last effect is particularly egregious. If taxpayers are going to fund services,
they should be delivered entirely without discrimination, equitably to the
public. Tax should not be used to peddle a particular religion, any religion. If
472 Reference: Beth Watts and Suzanne Fitzpatrick, “Welfare Conditioning”, Routledge Publishing,
2018, accessible at https://www.crcpress.com/Welfare-Conditionality/Watts-
Fitzpatrick/p/book/9781138119918
367
faith-based service providers wish to deliver service for faith purposes rather
than public purposes, then they should not be able to use public funds and/or
should give up their tax exempt status and start paying tax. Nevertheless,
religious groups seem to have few qualms about pushing for more and more
taxpayer support for their businesses while arguing that they should have the
right to discriminate in service provision. To cap it all off, because there is no
incentive within these taxpayer funded arrangements to deliver the services
more efficiently, there is the very real prospect that taxpayers will end up
paying more for less service. All this adds up to wins for the government and
wins for the private providers, but losses for the clients and losses for the
taxpayer.
The conversion of our welfare system from a social safety net open to all
in equity to a system of welfare conditionality is an evisceration not just of
welfare but of our society itself. It is a campaign of social restructuring that, if
successful, is likely to make Australia into a very different place – an
unrecognisable community where social mobility is much harder than it has
been since World War II, where only some of us can be permitted to aspire,
and where the rest of us must reside as a permanent underclass. All the force
of the neoliberal/fundamentalist narrative about the age of entitlement being
over, and a division of labour into lifters and leaners, is the establishment of
a new class system, legitimising the obliteration of any and all obligation that
the employed have accepted in the past towards the unemployed and that
the taxed have accepted in relation to those who may not be paying tax. By
making access to welfare contingent on passing more and more eligibility
tests and thresholds, including prequalification tests about inherent
worthiness – i.e., providing constant proofs that you are not a “leaner” – this
new class system stops the possibility of social mobility for anyone but the
already employed. It stops equal opportunity for all. We are witnessing the
structural establishment of a system in which only some of us (including some
races, some religions, some genders, some sexual orientations, some
immigrants and some refugees – or possibly no refugees) may be permitted
to aspire to a share of prosperity.
Without recognising just how indecent that is – how fundamentally
exclusive – we can slip more easily into demonisation of welfare and even
come to believe that all those who are on it, by definition – by the very fact of
their being on welfare – do not deserve it. Their dependency on welfare or
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other social favour (such as tolerance) constitutes proof of their sinfulness.
From there it is a short step to believing that all those who wash up on our
shores, invited or uninvited, do not deserve to be here. And all those who do
not subscribe to our particular beliefs (as defined by whoever is in power at
the time) deserve neither heaven nor a handout.
This is a narrative from which the poor cannot escape. Suddenly it is the
poor and the wretched who appear to have repudiated their obligation in the
social contract, not the rich and the privileged. It is the poor and dispossessed
who have lost all claim to virtue, have thereby forfeited all claim to aspiration
and wealth, are not worthy of saving, are a drag on the whole economy and
should be cast out. Once that point of reasoning is reached, our discourse can
only slip further into consigning all those on welfare to a hell – the underclass
must be tipped into the underworld – along with any other person who
doesn’t fit our idea of the worthy or the elect.473 To those at the extremes of
fundamentalism it is taken as a given that this is a natural world order: a
prophesied return to Eden and a deity’s favour for the righteous, and a
justifiable consignment to hell for those not deemed righteous. But this
doesn’t look like Australia. At least it doesn’t look like post WWII or even post
WWI Australia. The multiculturalism that we embraced after the war is one of
the few things that Australia has excelled in during its brief post-colonial life
(our treatment of Indigenes and refugees being exceptions). Multiculturalism
and all the egalitarianism that goes along with it was an implicit recognition
that we would survive and thrive as a nation only by inclusion, by openness to
difference, by immigration and by fairness. But we seem to be reversing our
record in that area of strength. If we continue down that path there will be
substantial implications for our economic growth and our social cohesion.
However, against this, planning for a new economy can help us reverse the
weakening of our social links and improve our economic resilience.
473 In this scenario, people on welfare are seen as different in kind from those employed, as reflected
in ex-PM Tony Abbott's extraordinary call for middle class women to lie back and think of Australia.
See Nick Bonyhady, “Abbott calls for middle class women to have more children”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 28 January 2020: "’That is a real problem in every western country: middle class women do
not have enough kids. Women in the welfare system have lots of kids,’ Mr Abbott said.” Accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/abbott-calls-for-middle-class-women-to-have-more-
children-20200128-p53vkx.html
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Planning for a strengthened social safety net
I wrote in the previous section of the economic narrative that the poor cannot
escape. Stepping back and looking at how subtle but persuasive this
inescapable narrative is, questions emerge about the size of the impacts of
the nexus between evangelical fundamentalism and neoliberalism in
Australia. Which is worse: the mess the nexus makes of our economy, or the
mess it makes of us? The one is the other or course: the societal breakdown
and the destruction of cohesion feed the economic breakdown, and vice
versa. It is a self-reinforcing spiral of socioeconomic decline. This is something
that has garnered the attention of some of our more thoughtful business
leaders who have acknowledged the interdependency of better economic
outcomes and social cohesion. The “Australian National Outlook 2019” has
isolated social inclusion and cohesion as critical success factors in Australia’s
ability to achieve economic growth. Unfortunately, social cohesion has been
declining in Australia in the 21st century. As the authors of “Australian
National Outlook 2019” have noted, the Scanlon Foundation in Australia is “an
organisation that measures social cohesion annually using an index that takes
into consideration respondents’ sense of belonging and worth, social justice
and equity, political participation and attitudes towards minorities and
newcomers”. In its annual surveys, the Foundation has found that Australia’s
index of social cohesion
has decreased over the life of the survey, falling from a baseline of 100
in 2007 to 88.5 in 2017.474
The causes of the deterioration are “not fully understood” but several
factors are thought to play a role. Some social scientists suggest that the chief
culprits are “financial stress, slow wage growth and poor housing
affordability”475. Others cite the cause simply as “inequality” (which I will deal
with in depth in Chapter 9). Australia has exhibited all these symptoms of
social ill-health over the last decade. Wage growth in particular has hit
historical lows and “sits near the bottom of the OECD range”476. The
“Australian National Outlook 2019” also goes on to mention that:
474 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Op. Cit., page 13.
475 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Ibid., page 13.
476 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Ibid., page 13.
370
In 2018, the Productivity Commission concluded that over the last three
decades, although sustained growth has significantly improved living
standards in every income decile, inequality has risen slightly.
Importantly, there is more to inequality than variation in material living
standards, particularly through its impact on the multiple dimensions of
human capital and economic participation.477
In other words, according to the Productivity Commission, the higher the
inequality, the poorer the potential for economic growth and the greater the
potential for loss of social cohesion through diminishing human capital.
What we have here is a range of leaders from big business and
government economists forming an elementary conclusion based on the
obvious: a decline in social cohesion diminishes human capital, which
diminishes participation in employment (paid and unpaid), which diminishes
the whole economy, which then further diminishes social cohesion. While the
CSIRO did not model the impacts of decline in social cohesion in their
projections about whether we can achieve higher or lower levels of GDP
growth in future, the authors of “Australian National Outlook 2019” rated the
impact as substantial. Accepting that, it can be observed that while the
breakdown in our welfare safety net that we are witnessing now may not be
a direct cause of the deterioration in our social cohesion, it is a critical factor
that is locking us into a continuation of the loss. A weakened welfare system
constrains our ability to break the cycle of decline in social cohesion.
Alongside restricting access to education, a restriction of access to welfare
strips us of growth in the human capital necessary to achieve economic
growth.
However, this needn’t happen. There is much that we can prevent in
terms of the further depletion of our human capital that has occurred and will
continue to occur under neoliberalism and its objective of inequality. We can
prevent that depletion by strengthening our welfare system and changing our
attitudes to sharing of national wealth. One way of doing this is to come
together to develop an accord on wealth, welfare and wellbeing that deepens
and clarifies our understanding of our obligations to each other in our 21 st
century economy. Such an accord between government, workers, business,
unions and NGOs – for social safety net commitments and policy on mutual
477 CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Ibid., page 13.
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obligations in benefit/burden sharing in both prosperous and hard times
within a globalised economy – can form a solid basis for:
• the generation and use of maximum human capital,
• lifelong dignity for all,
• ongoing economic growth, and
• preparedness for economic shocks.
In some ways such an accord might be similar to the Prices and Incomes
Accord struck between the Hawke-Keating government and the ACTU in the
1980s – at least in the sense that it is based on parties working together to
create a new basis for benefit and burden sharing and being explicit about the
terms of each party’s obligations. The Prices and Incomes Accord was a major
plank in Australia’s successful transition from a commodities-based economy
to a diversified, open economy. An accord on wealth, welfare and wellbeing
would not be about prices and incomes and it would require more partners
than a willing government and trade unions. But it would be vital to orderly
transition from our current economy (which in the mining and agriculture
sectors is under threat) to an economy based on renewables, carbon trading
and a broader health, education and welfare services sector.478
Australians are being put upon by proponents of neoliberalism in
government and in big business to swing into a view that only the business
sector can deliver economic growth. But economic growth doesn’t arise so
much from big investors as it does from us. An economy grows when investors
have enough confidence to invest capital but growth depends just as much, if
not more, on human capital, on those intangible assets to which a value is not
assigned in a balance sheet but which make the investment of capital possible
and which can mean the difference between high profits and low profits or
losses479. As long as we sell ourselves short on all the things we need to enable
us to contribute, no amount of financial capital from big business will set the
economy up for growth. Alongside education, a strong, efficient and growing
478 See Chapter 10, “Organising for speedy, quality implementation of national IP&R, unfettered by
politics” for further discussion of opportunities in economic transition.
479 See Investopedia: “Human capital is an intangible asset or quality not listed on a company's
balance sheet. It can be classified as the economic value of a worker's experience and skills. This
includes assets like education, training, intelligence, skills, health, and other things employers value
such as loyalty and punctuality.” Accessible at
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/humancapital.asp
372
welfare sector is one of those things we need to sell to ourselves if we want
to strengthen the economy. This is why in planning a new and better
economic future for our children we need to structure our welfare services in
such a way as to minimise the intrusion of weaknesses into the system.
Imagining a new and better economic narrative requires us as a minimum to
imagine ways to achieve inclusion rather than exclusion in our society. This
applies when thinking about education, health and welfare. All three are vital.
Australians are likely to have little if any problem with the concept of needing
to strengthen our education and health systems if we want to build a strong
economy. But they are being taught to suffer the weakening of the other
major plank in the foundations of a strong economy. Reversing that sort of
learning isn’t hard. The next section considers how we might achieve that
within a broader process for imagining a new and better economic narrative.
Imagining a new and better economic narrative
Interrogating the prevailing economic narrative is one thing, but imagining a
better one might be something of a challenge. A logical place to start is to set
an overall objective for our economy. In this regard we can start by asking
ourselves what we want our economy to be for, and who do we want it to be
for? This seems like a simple question and in some senses it is. An obvious
answer is that we would want an economy to work for all of us, not just the
top 20% or the top 1%. We would want our economy to result in fair sharing
of the profits generated by our efforts. In other words, we would want it to
be set up to ensure maintenance of a reasonable relativity between the value
of our output and our pay. If we generate more growth and our productivity
rises, we want a fair slice of the benefits. We don’t want a narrative for
management of the economy that leads to a situation that makes 1% of us
much wealthier and 80% noticeably poorer. We know that when that sort of
neoliberal narrative becomes the dominant one, our economy cannot grow
at a pace sufficient to sustain us all.
But what type of narrative for management of our economy would work?
What type of economic settings would reverse our national fortunes and
spread the benefits more equitably? This is a little more difficult to describe.
It will be particularly difficult if we assume that we will all have to become
conversant with a whole lot of technical jargon and theories that are usually
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the preserve of trained economists. But imagining a new economic narrative
– one that will lead us to the fulfilment of our objectives – need not require
as much of that jargon as we might think. It is more likely to require a
combination of common sense about the agreed objective of our economy
matched with a bit of know-how in spotting fictions that will defeat our
achievement of that objective. It is also likely to require a debate conducted
in broader policy terms and on broader policy grounds than we have been
used to.
To illustrate how we can arrive at those broader terms and develop skills
in designing our own economy together I am going to set out a story about
how we are used to thinking about the economy in Australia and how we can
change, or more accurately, widen the terms in which the narrative is
currently being conducted. The point of this story is to untangle and simplify
the way we explain our economy to ourselves now and how we might explain
it to ourselves in the future. Once we have mastered that we can more easily
imagine a new economy and set up a plan to meet that economy’s objectives.
We can give ourselves some signposts to what needs to be included in the
economic quadrant of a national community futures plan.
How do we talk about the economy now?
In 2019, elected members of the Australian Parliament spent quite some time
arguing, as they always have, about the best way to manage the economy. In
the melee, members from both sides of politics alternated between
lambasting the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) for not lowering the cash
rate480 (the interest rate for cash in the overnight money market), and then
for lowering it481. These alternations were typical of the ongoing fight driven
by neoliberals and indeed economists of all persuasions and the restrictive
480 Shane Wright and Eryk Bagshaw, “RBA has 'got it wrong', says key Labor MP ahead of bank grilling”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/rba-
has-got-it-wrong-says-key-labor-mp-ahead-of-bank-grilling-20190808-p52f60.html: “The Reserve Bank
of Australia faces its toughest parliamentary interrogation yet as both Labor and the Coalition prepare
to attack its handling of the economy amid accusations it has failed hundreds of thousands of job
seekers.”
481 Paul Karp, “Tim Wilson challenges Reserve Bank to prove effectiveness of interest rate cuts”, The
Guardian, 23 August 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/23/tim-
wilson-challenges-reserve-bank-to-pr-effectiveness-of-interest-rate-cuts
374
way they tend to arrange the terms of that argument, shackling debate about
how to manage Australia’s economy. Typically, the neoliberals champion the
Friedman school of economics, which favours the use of “monetary policy”,
over the Keynesian school of “fiscal policy” in managing an economy.
This argument has been going on since I was a child, which is to say for
quite a few decades. I remember my father, an amateur economist (in the
true sense of the word “amateur”, meaning “lover of”, since he never had
schooling beyond primary school), on many occasions talking of the pros and
cons of this argument until he died in 1983. Because of our conversations
around our kitchen table and on our pebble-crete back porch, I grew up with
a rudimentary awareness that the economy was managed by tweaking
monetary and fiscal levers and that “monetarists” favoured adjusting interest
rates to stimulate and/or dampen an economy as necessary and did not
favour the “fiscal” approach of stimulating an economy by direct injection of
government funds.
I never heard my father come down on the side of the monetarists. But
then he was a worker, not a boss, and the lines between the advocates of
monetarism and the working class were more clearly drawn then. Today the
lines are blurred, in part because many more of Australia’s working class
“aspirationals” have reasoned that if the bosses are making money, then their
preferred approach must be the right one. Go the monetarists!
With those lines blurred we find ourselves in 2020 hearing politicians
arguing across the divide, and in doing this they often argue against
themselves. Politicians like the conservative federal MP, Tim Wilson, for
instance (the one who pledged his allegiance to the Queen in Parliament by
grasping Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom in place of the Bible)
argued on one day in early August 2019 that the RBA was abrogating its
responsibility by not lowering interest rates482 and then argued on another
day in late August 2019 that lowering interest rates was not the way to go
because it would affect the returns of people whose retirement depends on
interest on their bank deposits or shares483. Hence in the Australian
482 Eryk Bagshaw, “Tim Wilson accuses RBA of giving up on stimulating the economy”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 7 August 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/tim-wilson-accuses-
rba-of-giving-up-on-stimulating-the-economy-20190807-p52esf.html
483 Paul Karp, “Tim Wilson challenges Reserve Bank to prove effectiveness of interest rate cuts”, Op.
Cit.
375
Parliament in 2019 we heard both sides of politics going through the same
arguments that fascinated my Dad, trying to reason it out as much as my Dad
did, looking intently at the whole cause and effect chain, and trying then to
convince us they were each on the right path.
Those parliamentarians (from the Coalition and Labor) who favoured
lowering interest rates in 2019 reasoned that if cash rate cuts had been made
earlier by the RBA, this would have resulted in:
→ banks lowering their interest rates,
→ which would have resulted in increased investment by businesses,
→ who would then have hired more workers,
→ who would then have spent more money,
→ which would have resulted in inflation reaching a target range
sufficient to increase overall economic growth.
That reasoning sounds entirely plausible, except when you reach a point
where interest rates are so low that they have nearly reached zero. Then each
cut in the cash rate becomes far less effective in stimulating economic activity.
At this point the story doesn’t work so well anymore and conducting the
debate in terms of monetarism versus fiscal stimulus doesn’t produce an
answer about the best option, particularly for the longer term.
History has shown us that lowering interest rates can work at certain
times and has worked to stimulate our economy when it has been done as a
series of relatively bigger cuts starting from a high interest rate point. It
worked in the GFC when the RBA took the cash rate from 7.25% in 2008 down
to 3% in 2009484 (then the lowest rate since 1964). But the cuts only worked
so well because they were implemented in tandem with two consecutive
fiscal stimulus packages:
1. An initial economic stimulus package worth $10.4 billion in late 2008;
and
2. A second economic stimulus package worth $42 billion in February
2009 consisting of:
a. an infrastructure program worth $26 billion,
b. $2.7 billion in small business tax breaks, and
484For a history of cash rate changes by the Reserve Bank of Australia see
https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/cash-rate/
376
c. $12.7 billion for cash bonuses, including $950 for every Australian
taxpayer who earned less than $80,000 during the 2007-8
financial year.485
In this arrangement, when monetary and fiscal policy were used in tandem,
private sector new capital investment picked up and, despite the terrible
global conditions of the GFC, grew at an average of 1.3% per quarter486 in the
years of the Rudd-Gillard government, not too far below the historical average
growth of 1.8% per quarter between 1987 and June 2008487. Within the period
of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, however, cash interest rates
set by the RBA have never been above 2.5% and since 2016 have never been
above 1.5%. In that period industry has not taken advantage of the
abnormally low interest rates and private investment in new capital has not
grown. On the contrary, private sector new capital investment has declined:
over the five years between 2014 and 2019 growth in new private capital has
been negative, averaging -1.6% per quarter488. This has occurred at a time
when corporate profits in Australia have skyrocketed to unprecedented
heights. In the two years between the financial year 2017 and the financial
year 2019, corporate profits in Australia rose by 22%489. Obviously this profit
was not redistributed to workers in above average wage rises because wages
only grew about 4% over that same period. Nor was it reinvested in new
capital. The vast majority of this corporate profit growth went to corporate
bosses and shareholders. Unfortunately, with this drop in investment, our
productivity (on which the best chance of a growing economy rests) has
dropped. This is only to be expected. After all, how can workers be expected
485 Source: Wikipedia, “Rudd Government, 2007 to 2010” accessible at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudd_Government_(2007–2010)
486 Source: ABS, 5625.0 - Private New Capital Expenditure and Expected Expenditure, Australia, Jun
2019, Table 3B Actual Expenditure by Type of Industry, Column M (converted to annual percentage
change), accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5625.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
487 Source: ABS, 5625.0, Ibid.
488 Source: ABS, 5625.0, Ibid.
489 Source: Trading Economics, “Australia Corporate Profits”, reported that annual corporate profits
for 2016/17 added to $30.5 billion and annual corporate profits for 2018/19 added to $37.2 billion.
“Corporate Profits in Australia averaged 45921.12 AUD Million from 1994 until 2019, reaching an all
time high of 98026 AUD Million in the second quarter of 2019 and a record low of 12032 AUD Million
in the first quarter of 1995.” Accessible at https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/corporate-profits
377
to make more efficient use of ageing assets or those that are well past their
useful life?
The negative growth in private sector new capital investment since 2014
is not a ringing endorsement of the theory that loosening monetary policy will
always stimulate more investment, more employment and higher wages. At
very low cash rates it clearly does not, especially if there is nothing much going
on in fiscal policy to help. Once the cash rate drops to, say, 2%, every extra cut
is going to be proportionally less powerful in stimulating an economy than
cuts made to much higher interest rates. The maths alone dictates this and
indeed this is something conservative politicians (at least those who are no
longer in Parliament and no longer have an overriding political interest) have
agreed with. Peter Costello, Treasurer in the Howard Government, warned in
2019 that cash rate cuts “won’t do much” for the economy, despite what avid
neoliberals would have us believe:
We’ve already got a cash rate of 1 per cent, suppose it goes to 0.75 per
cent, suppose it goes to 0.5 per cent. All these people who are holding
off spending or borrowing or investing are going to say ‘I wouldn’t have
done it at 1 per cent, but I’m going out there now that it’s 0.75 per cent?’
I don’t think that’s going to happen.490
The RBA did end up dropping the cash rate to 0.75% in September 2019 but
this was probably not representative of a rejection by the RBA of Mr Costello’s
view that the drop would not do much for the economy. By September 2019
it had become necessary to drop the cash rate further for at least one other
reason, that being that so many other countries’ cash rates were approaching
zero that, should Australia’s remain higher, it would place upward pressure
on the Australian dollar. This would make our exports more expensive and
less attractive, which no-one would want when the global economy is moving
into trouble.
Regardless of what the cash rate cuts were really for, the succession of
rate cuts in the last couple of years of the decade to 2020 and the arguments
about them were, nevertheless, grist to the mill of the neoliberal narrative.
The clamour for the use and predominance of monetary policy, along with a
490Clancy Yeates, “Cash rate cuts ‘won’t do much’ for the economy”, Sydney Morning Herald, 26
September 2019 accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/peter-
costello-warns-rate-cuts-won-t-do-much-for-economy-20190926-p52v5k.html
378
story that cash rate cuts would return us to higher inflation, lower
unemployment and blissful prosperity, took the pressure off calls on the
government for more fiscal stimulus. This was entirely convenient since by
that time the Morrison government was leveraging its entire reputation on
the achievement of the first surplus since the GFC in the 2019/2020 budget
and was in no way willing to risk that by being dragged into spending
government money, especially on those like Newstart recipients, who in the
government’s view should simply get a job and support themselves. As I have
already noted, they weren’t even too keen on spending it on the disabled, a
group that Mr Morrison had previously proudly stated were entitled to
support, because, after all, the NDIS was “not welfare”, like Newstart. The
government’s largesse went out the window though, for both Newstart and
NDIS recipients, in favour of achieving a near balanced budget in 2018/19
precisely by means of spending significantly less than had been previously
budgeted on the NDIS, and of course by flatly refusing to raise Newstart.
The need for an increase in Newstart was identified by several prominent
politicians and agencies from both sides of the political spectrum during 2019.
Support for an increase in Newstart was championed by interests as diverse
as the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), the Business Council of
Australia491 and former conservative Prime Minister John Howard492. There
was general agreement that Newstart was way too low and that an increase
would have positive effects on the economy. The Morrison government of
2019 argued, however, that appropriate fiscal stimulus was being provided by
some federal funding of state infrastructure projects and by the 2018 and
2019 tax cuts. These are the legislated cuts that are meant to release over
$300 billion into the hands of wage earners over the ten years to 2030.
Unfortunately, past experience suggests strongly that these tax cuts are
unlikely to be sufficient in stimulating the economy in 2020, especially if it is
implemented with only the tiny assistance that monetary policy has left to
offer, and without further infrastructure spending by the government.
The chance that the 2018 and 2019 tax cuts will work as an effective
stimulus in 2020 is small to nil, because they are too small for the vast majority
491
See Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia”, April 2019, page 33, Op.Cit.
492
See Eryk Bagshaw, “'Freeze has gone on too long': John Howard calls for dole increase”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 9 May 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/freeze-has-
gone-on-too-long-john-howard-calls-for-a-dole-increase-20180509-p4ze83.html
379
of us and will be too slow in coming through to us. When most of us get the
small increase that we can expect in our tax returns each year it is unlikely to
result in more than a payment of an overdue or ever increasing power bill.
Moreover, the cash rate cuts, if they are ever passed through in full to people
with mortgages (which is extremely unlikely) will not result in a flurry of new
consumer spending as people will, in the majority, simply set that aside to pay
down their abnormally high mortgages a little faster. Pensioners and retirees
will also have less money to spend because they will be earning less on their
deposits in interest. The net effect of the tax cuts and the interest rate cuts,
domestically, is more likely than not to be a dampening of consumer spending
overall.
There are also no grounds for suggesting that the private sector, as a
result of interest rate cuts, will take up the cudgels and save the economy by
investing more because:
• even with low interest rates since 2014 they have not taken up the
opportunity,
• there are no decent policy settings being provided by government
which will allow them to structure new investments at minimum risk
(especially about the cost of imports for use as inputs in their
businesses and the cost of energy), and
• global uncertainty has been exacerbated by the trade war between
the USA and China, our biggest buyer.
My Dad would have said that those progressive Labor party people who
crossed the ideological divide in 2019 to argue in favour of monetary policy,
tax cuts, low government spending and surpluses-at-all-costs, really hadn’t
figured the economy out. Or he would have said they hadn’t figured out how
to sell the benefits of fiscal policy. My view, as his amateur economist
daughter, is that he would have been right on both counts, but especially on
the second. Whenever both sides of politics argued for tax cuts and interest
rates cuts in 2018 and 2019, they did so not because they believed they would
stimulate the economy (although some may have believed it); they argued for
the tax and interest rate cuts because they thought this would be more likely
to get them elected. They didn’t believe arguing for fiscal stimulus would be
an electoral winner, just as former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd didn’t
believe that arguing for more public spending would have got him elected in
380
2007. He was right; it wouldn’t have. He won in 2007 by a strategy of
promising to clamp government sector spending. And in 2019 the winning
strategy once again was for tax cuts and against government spending. The
winning party divined – correctly – that campaigning against cuts to tax and
interest rates, and for fiscal stimulus, would not have got them elected, not
with the way Australians have been told to think about tax as an evil
imposition, government debt and spending as a waste of taxpayers’ money,
and government intervention as an unwarranted, unnecessary and
counterproductive restriction of market freedom and the “brilliance of
individuals”493.
While antipathy to welfare may or may not have cut through the
Australian collective psyche yet, a distaste for taxation and government
spending certainly has been etched deeply on our preferred understanding of
how an economy can be strengthened. Nothing in the neoliberal narrative has
cut through more than the sentiment behind the iconic line offered by Kerry
Packer, Chairman of Australian Consolidated Press, justifying his admitted tax
minimisation in the 1991 House of Representatives Select Committee on Print
Media when he said:
As a government you’re not spending [our tax] that well that we should
be donating extra.494
But unfortunately, the way we have become accustomed to defining good and
poor economic management – where “tax and spend” equals poor
management – has reached a point where we are now strangling our own
economy. By taxing ourselves less and ditching government spending, we
have reached a point where instead of increasing our power as individuals
over our own spending we are simply writing ourselves out of a share of any
prosperity that comes from owning and operating major public infrastructure.
We have written ourselves out of airports, ports, toll roads, a big bank, an
airline, electricity, buses, vital data bases (such as those holding our property
titles), and too many other vital assets to mention. And all because we have
493 Tom Switzer, Centre for Independent Studies Mission Statement: “Governments can’t create
optimism, wealth and jobs; only the private sector can do it. Innovation and progress spring not from
bureaucracy but from the brilliance of individuals.” Accessible at
https://www.cis.org.au/about/mission/
494 Testimony of Kerry Packer to the 1991 House of Representatives Select Committee on Print Media,
available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnwYoOeWZGA
381
succumbed to a myth that the public sector is less efficient than the private,
when in fact both sectors face the same challenges and should be given the
same opportunities to grow their contribution to a modern economy. We may
think we have bought back into a share of the profits by becoming
shareholders. But the operative word here is “bought”. We have to buy in to
get the profit. This makes us no better off than when we had to pay taxes in
order to own and receive profits from major infrastructure assets (such as
airports and electricity) – profits that we used to use to fund new assets and
ongoing services. That is what paying tax is – buying shares in your own
nation. Are we better off by backing out of just about every one of our own
assets and buying in only to private corporations? Are we worse off? If
inequality is a measure, we would have to say more of us are worse off than
better off. And if increased corporate profits but reduced growth in GDP is a
measure, then we would have to say we are worse off. And if price increases
are the result of sell-offs of assets like electricity generation, then we would
have to say we are worse off. But still we hear the clamour from some in the
business lobby for more investment from us and less investment in us,
without anything being offered to those who work for these companies but
can’t afford shares.
And from time to time, usually near an election, the clamour is bolstered
by the “tax and spend” scare story, which in turn bolsters other myths
generated by some in big business – myths about what constitutes good and
poor economic management of the nation itself. Over the last couple of
decades, more of us have come to accept that the better governments are
those that manage our economy in the same way as we might (notionally at
least) manage our household budget, even though a household budget bears
little if any resemblance to a national budget (particularly in terms of capacity
to pool funds and manage debt), and a national budget for a Commonwealth
government bears no resemblance at all to a national economy. The Business
Council of Australia (BCA) has channelled this myth for the Coalition
governments of the 21st century as follows:
As every family and household knows, if you spend more than you have,
you end up with a credit card debt you may struggle to pay off. You have
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fewer choices, and face hard decisions to bring your finances under
control. 495
The Business Council duly goes on to recommend that a responsible
government will therefore:
Get the budget back into surplus and keep the budget in surplus … and
introduce fiscal rules that would help keep federal government
spending within Australia’s capacity to pay.496
It is quite difficult to overstate the number of problems with this whole silly
myth of an equation between a household budget and the national economy
but one of the problems is that it implies the federal government budget
bottom line result equates to some sort of bottom line result for the economy
of Australia. Bearing in mind that all government output – federal, state and
local – represents just below 25% of total GDP for the nation497, no such
equation can be made. But the myth that the federal budget result is the
nation’s budget result serves several useful purposes for neoliberals in big
business. To begin with it allows peak industry conservative lobby groups like
the BCA to indulge themselves in claiming credit for keeping the nation afloat
– because it is their private endeavours in employing 85% of workers in
Australia498 that delivers 75% of our GDP. But, conveniently, it also allows
them to fictitiously blame the government whenever the private sector
doesn’t perform well in growing our economy through productivity gains –
which if we look squarely at the BCA’s own figures appears to have been the
case for some time. Indeed, isn’t it rather flimsy for the Business Council to
boast of using 85% of the nation’s labour only to produce 75% of the GDP?
Does it not suggest a rather inefficient use of our labour resources and human
capital by the private sector, compared to the public sector which uses 15%
495 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 30,
Op. Cit.
496 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 30,
Ibid.
497 Federal, state and local government GDP combined in 2018/19 was $446.8 billion and Australia’s
total GDP for the same period was $1,851.5 billion, making the government sector’s contribution
equivalent to 24.4% to Australia’s total GDP. Source: ABS 5206.0 Table 2, Column F + Column AH / ABS
5206.0 Table 1 Column R, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Jun%202019?OpenDocument
498 According to the Business Council of Australia: “Business employs 11 million [85%] of the 13 million
working Australians.” See “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 4, Ibid.
383
of the nation’s labour but generates 25% of GDP? This is a question worth
pondering. On these figures, the public sector’s productivity embarrasses the
private sector substantially.
Despite the private sector’s poor performance – which arises in large part
from their anti-competitive clamps on government participation – the
government sector is expected to pick up the slack by endless efficiency drives
which then cut services to taxpayers. And taxpayers are simultaneously
expected to subsidise the inefficiencies and losses of the private sector. In
these situations, it is not the private sector that is doing the heavy lifting at
all.
The private sector’s need and desire to be able to delve deeper and
deeper into taxpayers’ pockets is the real reason that the BCA is so insistent
that the government should keep its budget in surplus. This is why they insist
that we should impose an abstemious rule on ourselves of the
aforementioned tax-to-GDP cap. They tell us how we should bank less of our
own taxation and pay for our own wage rises from our tax revenues. And they
tell us that we should not lend ourselves any of the tax we do bank but give it
to them instead by means of subsidies and bail-outs for their failing
businesses. And they tell us they should have first right of refusal on public
infrastructure projects before we can enter the market as providers of our
own infrastructure.499 They demand this even while clamouring for
“investment allowances” for those projects, so that we end up paying for
much of the construction anyway but get nothing back from a future income
stream. (Westconnex in Sydney is a fine example of this problem.) The BCA’s
clamour for investment allowances is nothing more than a refusal to invest in
new capital until Australian taxpayers give them enough money to minimise
any risk for them while maximising it for us. We are told that if we run the
economy this way, and at the same time give them more of our after tax
income by buying their shares (especially if they are not doing well), then and
only then will wealth trickle down to us. But in the last forty years of
neoliberalism there has been no evidence of the truth of the trickle down
narrative.
499
Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 15,
“Opportunities for private investment in public infrastructure should be exhausted before committing
public funding.” Ibid.
384
Nevertheless neoliberals persist with the story and the electorate is
repeatedly regaled with baseless ideas that a government in a capitalist
society should not take on debt and we should not spend to stimulate our
own economy, no matter how wealthy the nation might be, how good our
credit rating is and how capable we are in servicing debt. These ideas probably
run counter to our intuition about how budgets might best be managed over
a lifetime, but over the last couple of decades more Australians have been
persuaded to them: to ideas that if we abstain from spending the economy
will grow to support more of us, and that if we are debt free or pay close to
zero in interest rates, we will increase our national and personal wealth.
Of course, not only do we not manage our household budgets that way,
capitalism itself doesn’t work that way. At some time or other in our lives,
almost all of us borrow. We seek credit, precisely for the purpose of “spending
more than we have”. And if we didn’t, capitalism itself would fail. Lending
capital is what capitalism is built on, and in that system we do not grow our
wealth without debt at some point. If we have no debt, we might maintain
more of our income for the weekly food bill and rent. And obviously, having
no debt is a good thing if you are not getting a wage. But with a lifetime of no
debt we do not acquire asset wealth, unless we win the lottery, or we win the
lottery of birth and inherit property. The whole idea of capitalism is that to
increase wealth we need to take on debt. That is why most of us aspire to take
on a mortgage. Too much debt is obviously a bad thing, but none is just
pointless, and indeed would mean we would be totally reliant on the state for
housing – which of course would equate to communism.
Notwithstanding our intuition about all this, come election time
neoliberals still attempt to play on our desire to be abstemious and debt free,
ignoring the consequence of freedom from debt – the consequence being that
property ownership would only be for the very rich. It works only in part, as
the statistics show. Only about half of Australians believe that conservative
neoliberal governments manage the economy better than progressive
governments.500 But its main beauty is that it helps neoliberals swing the
500See Katharine Murphy, “Essential poll: most think economic stimulus more important than
surplus”, The Guardian, 29 October 2019: “Asked which party they trusted more to handle economic
management, 49% of the sample said the Coalition and 34% said Labor, with 17% unsure – the same
result as in March, when the question was last asked.” Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/oct/29/essential-poll-most-think-economic-
stimulus-more-important-than-surplus
385
debate about economic management back onto the narrower terms they
prefer (monetarism) and away from any of the more thoughtful reforms we
might begin to clamour for if leaders took a more genuine forward-looking
interest in the wellbeing of the many rather than the few. For as long as we
cling to ideas that a budget surplus and no debt are proofs of the best
economic management, we will be locking ourselves unnecessarily into
economic decline.
I have been able to put forward a view that my Dad would have been
right, particularly about the failure of monetary policy (whenever it is
implemented without complementary fiscal policy) because I have lived
beyond his time. I have been able to watch how things have played out, as he
would have, had he lived to see the day that Australian politicians took up a
broader forward-looking set of strategies for economic management in the
1980s and early 1990s. My Dad didn’t get to see the implementation of all
those approaches that ran counter to neoliberalism that were put in place by
the Hawke-Keating government.
But Australians in 2020 are in a fortunate enough position to be able to
stand back and compare and contrast the successes and failures of two
entirely different approaches to economic management:
• Approach No. 1 – the neoliberal fixation – including:
o reduced government participation (in welfare, government
trading enterprises and even in large scale infrastructure
provision),
o withdrawal from efficient market regulation and policy setting,
o increased reliance on monetary policy and rejection of fiscal
policy,
o distribution of profits to shareholders rather than reinvestment in
new capital,
o private sector resistance to investment in new capital unless they
are given “investment allowances”, company tax cuts,501 or other
taxpayer subsidies, and
501Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 13,
Op. Cit.: “To encourage investment, lower the rate of company tax (in stages) from 30 per cent to 25
per cent for all companies. Robust integrity measures are a key complement to more competitive
company tax arrangements. … Introduce a broad-based investment allowance that would stay in place
until Australia tackles its uncompetitive tax rate for larger companies. The allowance would apply to
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o wage increases provided by tax reductions rather than by fairer
benefit sharing between corporations, shareholders and workers.
• Approach No. 2 – the obverse of neoliberalism – including:
o expansive government participation – in both profit making an
non-profit enterprises and services,
o collaboration between workers and business,
o collaboration between governments and the RBA,
o a flexible mix of reliance on monetary and fiscal policy,
o all operating within an open and inclusive economy where
protection (meaning tariff protection) is minimised, anti-
competitive behaviour is minimised, inefficient taxpayer funded
subsidies are eliminated, and where there is fairer sharing of
benefit from productivity gains.
We don’t seem to have started seriously comparing these two approaches
yet. Nevertheless, the opportunity is there to ask ourselves about which of
these two approaches may have worked better over the last forty years.
But more than that, we can also observe that every government since the
Hawke Labor government – including the Keating, Howard, Rudd and Gillard
governments – has been able to master the task of growing our economy and
growing private sector participation in it. So why not the Abbott-Turnbull-
Morrison government of 2014 to 2020? Even in the worst of times during the
Global Financial Crisis, the Rudd-Gillard government could manage average
annual growth in GDP of 2.6%502, substantially better than the world average
annual growth of 2.18% at the time. The Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison
government, operating in much more favourable circumstances, has only
been able to manage average annual GDP growth of 2.4%.503 And new private
sector investment, as I have shown above, has been at historical lows since
2014. This is not a strong economy, however much the Morrison government
might wish to claim otherwise. Compared to the average annual GDP growth
all investments that are depreciable under current tax law, such as machinery, equipment, intangible
assets and buildings.” In other words, allow business the depreciation but give them another
allowance on top – a double dip into taxpayers’ pockets.
502 Source: ABS 5206.0 Table 1 Column B derived, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/5206.0Mar%202018?OpenDocument and
The World Bank https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG
503 Source: ABS, Ibid., derived.
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we have experienced since the post-war boom, we have now almost halved
the pace of our growth and the trend is worsening, as the table here shows:
Average
Period Annual GDP
growth504
Post war to close of Whitlam government 1961 to 1975 4.3%
Fraser government 1976 to 1883 3.7%
Hawke government to 1991 recession 1984 to 1991 3.6%
Post 1991 recession to pre-GFC –
1992 to 2007 3.6%
Keating to Howard
GFC – Rudd-Gillard government 2008 to 2014 2.6%
Post GFC – Abbott Turnbull Morrison government 2015 to 2019 2.4%
What has gone wrong?
Those of us who, like my Dad and me, are not economists, would expect
that economists will argue endlessly about why this lower growth is occurring.
And we should encourage them to keep looking for the reasons for the
turnaround in our fortunes. However, the history of the past forty years
suggests they will tend to keep arguing in terms of whether monetary or fiscal
policy is the answer. Confining the argument to these terms is the preference
of neoliberalism – with a strong predisposition towards monetarism. But what
seems obvious from the experience of the last forty years is that once we start
arguing – yet again – in those terms, it is already too late. The economy is
already heading into trouble or it has fully arrived, and we are resorting to the
remedies that we and the professional economists have always narrowly
relied on but which obviously have not worked. We tend to focus on monetary
and fiscal policy as alternative (and mutually exclusive) “plans” but they are
mainly effective only as reactive measures of last resort. They can help
forestall a looming crisis or partially remedy a present one, but they are not a
“plan”. While we are all busy wrangling over whether monetary or fiscal
policy is better – whether Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes got it
right – we are simply continuing to distract ourselves from the much wider
policy options which, if deployed properly and early enough, would have a
preventative effect on future recessions, in the main because they would be
stimulatory in a smoothed, more manageable and affordable process for use
504 Source: ABS, Ibid., derived.
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of national revenue from taxation and for repayment of any debt. Such a
strategy would give more control in advance and less reliance on the need for
excessive reaction via massive stimulus whenever a severe and/or sudden
downturn hits.
Every government wants to prevent recessions. Some insist we should do
it by building up a long string of budget surpluses, setting them aside for a
rainy day. When things go wrong in the economy these can be used for fiscal
stimulus, so the theory goes. But in Australia’s full blown neoliberalism period,
from 2014 onwards, the smoothed and managed stimulus that the economy
needed was withheld for over five years. The budget was instead set up to
produce a string of surpluses from 2020 onwards at the expense of the
necessary stimulus and Australia was not given the benefit of a balanced
execution of monetary and fiscal policy. One of the levers (the fiscal lever)
that we are supposed to be able to use in an emergency and in anticipation of
a recession (something Australia was obviously in or on the brink of by mid
2019) was not made available to the extent it should have been. Instead, the
poorest among us were asked to make up the shortfalls by suffering service
and safety net cuts. The poorest were expected to bear the full weight of the
process of producing a budget surplus. The effect will be contractionary, not
stimulatory.
Political parties of all persuasions today are in the habit of brandishing
their credentials in economic management in very narrow terms of whether
they can give tax cuts while achieving budget surpluses, as though surpluses
are an end in themselves and proof positive that the government that
achieves them is better at managing the economy and will be able to give
even more tax cuts down the track. But surpluses are, at best, merely one
means to an end, that end being some spare capacity to stimulate a flagging
economy at the right time. Economies often stubbornly tend not to wait
around for said surpluses to appear before they go off the rails due to the fact
that a whole lot of other policy levers have not been pulled at the right time.
In certain circumstances, a string of surpluses, and the pain that the poorest
must go through to produce them, is as bad as, or even worse than a string of
deficits. And when a country is as wealthy as Australia, there is no reason why
the poor must pay the price of government miscalculations in economic
management and corporate opportunism.
389
It is a reasonable certainty that should we achieve a reversal of our
fortunes and witness an acceleration of economic growth in Australia, the
sacrifices of the poorest will not be acknowledged in the form of a restoration
of their fortunes down the track (once the theoretically projected but
improbable budget surpluses arrive and are accumulated to levels sufficient
to increase welfare payments). It is likewise a reasonable certainty that should
our fortunes not be reversed, any benefit arising from a build up of budget
surpluses will not be transferred to the growing numbers of those living in
poverty but will be used to bail out or subsidise private sector failures. In
neoliberalism, this is the intent; the transfer of public monies to fund private
failure is the proved practice, behind accumulation of government surpluses.
It is precisely what the Business Council of Australia is angling for.
It is not the job of government to build surpluses, especially surpluses
that will then be handed to a privileged few. It is the job of governments (or
at least one of their jobs) to build balanced budgets, usually over ten year
periods, some with deficits, some with surpluses, ploughing the net positive
back into the economy as hard as they can, building growth steadily, not
holding it back to be used when it is already too late and leaning on the most
vulnerable to shore up the economy and shield the governments from the real
cause of the failure. And their purpose in this budget management role is not
to balance the family accounts. It is to balance the whole economy overall and
make it grow steadily, without leaving anyone behind and using our full
capacity wisely.
What has gone wrong with our economy isn’t about the mistakes we have
made in monetary or fiscal policy. Those mistakes are only the effects of panic
when things are not going well and there is an election coming up. What has
gone wrong is something deeper. It stems from a lack of planning, from failing
to ask ourselves where we want to be at the end of any forthcoming decade
and how we can get there reliably and fairly. Be assured, conservative
governments, although they do not have a plan for us and our economic
security, have a plan for themselves, and they form that plan by asking
themselves where they want to be in a decade’s time. If we read Joe Hockey’s
“2015 Intergenerational Report” or the Morrison Government’s 2019/2020
budget we can see precisely where they want to be – they want to have less
need to fund our health and education and more stacked up for big business.
We need to match this with a plan of our own. We need to ask ourselves how
390
we might avoid being backed into recessions and how we might avoid being
forced into arguing our way out of a downturn in terms of Friedmanesque or
Keynesian theories or any other belated band-aid approach. We need to swap
the ineffectual band-aids for a proactive plan.
The unfortunate fact is that politicians often get this whole debate all
painfully mixed up, because they are not asking these sorts of questions –
questions about what our economy is for and where it should be in a decade’s
time. They are looking instead for the line that will get them re-elected, not
for the line that meets a commonly agreed objective about the economy and
society. To be fair, we are not telling them what that objective is. We are
telling them our short term aspirations, which are restricted merely to money,
not our longer term ideal outcomes which, in our more thoughtful moments,
we express in a completely different language about quality of life,
connection, love, liberty, creativity, physical exhilaration, peace, joy, security,
and balanced co-existence with our magnificent planet. We are not telling our
leaders what we want for our children. For as long as we fail to explain that to
our leaders, we will be holding ourselves hostage to the neoliberal narrative,
a narrative which on the balance of all probabilities is destined to exclude us
and our children from the middle class, and spiral our economy and
environment into extended decline.
That branch of the neoliberal family which exclusively favours
monetarism beleaguers and sullies our debates about our economy. Those
debates – the sort I used to have with my Dad when life was simpler and the
economy wasn’t so “globalised” – have lost all their charm. Governments
have been reduced to playing to our lesser inward looking selves rather than
our better and outward looking selves and the debates have been reduced to
a rhetoric whose underlying message has somehow become vicious: “Trust
me, I can manage the economy better because I know how to be more cruel
and my cruelty is the best form of kindness.” This is not just a reduction of our
political discourse, it is a reduction of us.
But what if the debate can be conducted on different terms – terms
entirely different to those usually relied upon for election purposes? If
politicians weren’t just consumed by getting re-elected, what might they think
of doing about the economy? If they were not entirely in thrall to the
dominant corporate ethos of greed and could muster the courage to step
away from the electoral donations, lobbying and media of the biggest
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corporations, what policy menus might they choose from? They actually have
quite an array of policies to choose from to strengthen the economy and make
it work to everyone’s benefit. These can be imagined simply by comparing
what has worked and what hasn’t in various circumstances. Neoliberalism can
claim no positive track record. The Business Council of Australia’s approach
simply hasn’t worked and never will. The opposing policies have worked well
by comparison. So they are a good place to start (I emphasise start), even if
there is scepticism about whether those opposing policies were really the
cause of our 25+ years of growth since 1991. That said, it would not be realistic
to expect that politicians in Australia in 2020 would have the courage to go
back and re-frame the debate about our economy. Maturity and cooperation
are not predominant in their value systems.
Nevertheless, in the absence of courage and maturity in our national
leaders, there is nothing to stop us stepping up to the plate and writing a new
story of the economy for ourselves in terms that are meaningful to us and are
consistent with objectives we can share. This is entirely possible and there is
a language available for it – one of mutual respect, where our children take
the dominant position in our thinking, instead of corporations and their
biggest shareholders. This can be an enjoyable and exciting process, if we can
master this sort of dialogue and keep our kids front and centre.
I like to think my lovely Dad would have enjoyed opening up the debate
about how best to manage an economy for the grandkids and great grandkids
he never got to see. Had he had the opportunity to open it up, here are some
of the ideas we could have pondered on the pebble-crete back porch.
Imagining our next economy
Throughout this discussion of Solution No. 4, I have come back repeatedly to
just one question:
For whom and to what ends should our economy be working?
This is a question that we should consider by spending time together as
communities and the point of this book is to help us organise ourselves,
efficiently and effectively, for that purpose. Planning in the economic
quadrant presents by far the greater number of challenges compared to
planning in all the other quadrants.
392
That said, the choices about who and what we would want an economy
to be for are very likely to be not all that numerous. Experience in facilitating
community engagement for community futures planning has taught me that
the answers that tend to emerge are simple and self-evident. We have an
instinct about sensible objectives for an economy. We simply haven’t written
them down in one place – yet.
If I sit down on my modern equivalent of the pebble-crete back porch (it’s
some kind of composite stone these days – don’t ask me what kind) and shoot
the breeze on these questions with my own children, we can come up with
answers that we readily agree on. And once we have articulated the answers,
in however faltering a fashion, we end up recognising they were obvious all
along. Basically, we all come up with something approximating the four
objectives I spoke of at the start of this whole section on Solution No. 4, when
I said that modern developed countries, no matter what their prevailing
economic narrative might be at any one point in time, these objectives usually
roll up to being about:
a) economic growth (GDP),
b) whether the benefits of that growth are being fairly shared by those
who have produced it (i.e., all of us, including those on welfare),
c) whether it is delivering and will continue to deliver the type of society
and wellbeing we want and the environment we need, and
d) whether the economic growth itself is sustainable.
In short:
• We know we want the economy to grow otherwise more of us just
get poorer instead of wealthier.
• But beyond that, and perhaps more importantly, we want an equal
chance to be healthy, happy, productive, creative, safe, secure,
connected, included, at peace with the world and with our own social
consciences, and anything else that we might identify as essential to
wellbeing or quality of life.
• Ultimately, it is all about fairness and harmony. It is about preventing
rises in inequality, falls in social cohesion, and falls in environmental
sustainability.
393
By means of this fairly simple conversation we are able to identify who our
economy is for and what it is for, and we can be reasonably confident that as
we consult on wider territory than our own back porches, we will find that
others and their children will come up with similar intergenerational
aspirations. After all, it would be a big surprise if other families came back and
said they didn’t want an economy to grow, they didn’t want the same chances
as someone else for a decent quality of life and they didn’t want a sustainable
planet. It would also be a surprise if large numbers of other families came back
and said that inequality is a good thing (in fact studies show a majority of
Australians don’t think current inequality is a good thing505) and big business
should retain an unfair share of profits. Therefore for purposes of discussing
how we can imagine a new economy it is reasonable to assume agreement on
the above objectives, at least for the present.
But although we might have crystallised some objectives, experience has
also taught me that it is harder to reach agreement on the strategies for
achieving those objectives. Here we need to skill up, as I have said, on
interrogating the prevailing economic narrative and search through other
narratives to build a picture of what has worked in the past and what hasn’t.
Then we can check what might work in the future and what might need to be
done differently.
At this point in our economy’s history, however, we need to recognise
that we are not developing a plan on a blank slate. We will never be able to
do that. There will be limits to what we can achieve in reality, even if we find
that there are no limits to what we can imagine about a new economy. Two
things will circumscribe any plan for a national economy:
1. Changed circumstances since the end of the 20th century – meaning
the things that have changed since our last successes in economic
growth, such as globalisation; and
505See Fiona Collis, for Ipsos, ACOSS, Reichstein Foundation and Australian Communities Foundation,
“Community Perspectives on Social Inequality, 2005-2015”, page 24: “In an Ipsos Iview omnibus
survey conducted in May 2015, 73% of respondents felt that the gap between rich and poor was
getting wider and 58% felt that having large differences in income and wealth is bad for society.”
Accessible at https://www.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Ipsos-ACOSS-Report_Final.pdf
Refer also to Chapter 9 for results of the ABC’s Australia Talks National Survey, 2019 where 76% of
Australians reported that they think inequality is too wide.
394
2. History – meaning our historical establishment as a capitalist country
and a dependence on economic growth as the main means of
broadening access to prosperity.
Therefore, being practical, and wanting to achieve something rather than
nothing within a ten to thirty year timeframe, it would be smart to set some
limits about what can reasonably be achieved. It would be smart, for instance,
to assume that throwing out capitalism and starting all over again is not a
practical option at this point in our history. Nor is throwing out the entire
theory of economic growth itself. We know that the theory of economic
growth is dicey, that the sustainability of our growth-dependent economy is
on a knife-edge because of globalisation challenges, excessive resource
consumption, too much dependency on fossil fuels, and growing inequality.
We know that “eternal economic growth” may well be an unreal and
unrealisable “fairy tale”. And we know that capitalism has been reduced to all
its worst attributes by neoliberalism. These reduced circumstances of our
economy are all constraints on our planning. At some time in the future we
may be able to get past them and reverse our descent into unregulated
capitalism (neoliberalism). Indeed, as far as excessive natural resource
consumption goes, we must get past that. But this is early 21st century
democratic Australia and it would be foolish to assume there is an appetite
for something other than capitalism. Nor can the biggest threat to our
economy, climate change, be stopped by jettisoning capitalism. As Ross
Garnaut has pointed out:
Climate change will not be stopped by ending development. The
challenge is to change the relationship between economic growth and
emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. 506
In other words, achieving a sustainable economy in the face of climate change
is all about where we get future growth from and how, not that we should
abandon growth. If we did that in this period of our history, it would only
result in a widening of inequality. The smarter thing would be to try to repair
and revitalise our capitalist economy so that it contributes to our objectives,
including the growth objective, and simultaneously moves us towards a
sustainable economy – perhaps one where quality of life and wellbeing don’t
506 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit., Kindle edition, Loc 282.
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depend so much on total economic growth but more on fairer sharing of
sustainable growth. Robert Reich has tried to suggest ways of repairing and
revitalising capitalism in Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few. We
can take a cue from that and see where his suggestions lead us. We can take
inspiration wherever we may find evidence that certain incarnations of
capitalism have led to achievement of the objectives similar to those we might
espouse in community engagement such as objectives of health, wellbeing
and social cohesion.
Once we set some realistic baselines and acknowledge constraints, it is
likely that from there on, the answers on strategy will begin to tumble out of
our collective head. We can follow through on some inspirational thinking
that hasn’t been tried before and at the same time plunder the past for the
options which have worked to deliver better results in our economy. One
option here is to use a simple question and answer framework. I have set out
something of what this might look like in the following table. The questions
are framed on the basis of the above objectives. They would of course be
different if communities chose different objectives. But the discipline applies,
regardless. The answers, of course, are indicative only. Communities working
together will do a much better job of putting the answers together. But the
process should be reasonably illustrative of how we can strategise our way
towards a better economy, even if we don’t choose these particular strategies
in the end.
Questions Possible answers
(Indicative only and not comprehensive)
Do we want growth in • Yes
GDP?
How might we achieve • One method that has worked is to pick a
that growth reliably? structure that encourages growth in wages
for all, creating a growing middle class.
• Another method is to ensure that income
and wealth are spread as evenly as possible
because that is what produces the biggest
economy. The neoliberal objective of
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Questions Possible answers
(Indicative only and not comprehensive)
inequality will produce the smallest
economy.
How might we achieve • We can pick economic settings which
continuous growth in encourage growth in productivity. For
wages? example, we can pick settings which
encourage new investment in industries
where Australia has a natural competitive
advantage (rather than where we don’t).
• We can change other settings, particularly in
taxation, to discourage businesses from
distributing too much of annual profits to
shareholders and to encourage companies
to reinvest more of their profits in new
assets, research and development.
• We can also decide to remove subsidies
from non-competitive industries or from
industries which are unlikely to have a
future because of falling demand or prices.
How might we achieve • We can expand our education system and
ongoing growth in make it more accessible and diverse. We can
productivity and remake tertiary education and give more
economic efficiency? weight to vocational education and training.
And we can reverse the trend of growth
inequality which is blocking access to
education.
• We can reintroduce free tertiary education,
including vocational training.
• We can implement a plan to dismantle
neoliberalism and increase public sector
participation in our economy by competitive
government trading enterprises driving
efficiency gains through competition.
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Questions Possible answers
(Indicative only and not comprehensive)
• We can switch to a decarbonised economy
for maximum efficiency in industrial
production.
How might we achieve • Again we can set policies to encourage
more sustainable reinvestment in new industries and assets,
resource consumption? which because they increase productivity
can also reduce excessive consumption of
non-renewable resources and embed more
sustainable consumption.
• We can set environmental regulations to
discourage overconsumption of non-
renewable resources.
• We can set market rules and prices for
scarce resources to provide incentives
toward sustainable consumption and
reliance on renewable resources.
• We can reintroduce a carbon price and
commence trading carbon credits
internationally.
How might we achieve • We can expand the community services
greater equality, sector and welfare services.
inclusion, social • We can reimagine our cities and the ways in
cohesion and quality of which we can improve connection, including
life, and accordingly, through:
maximise the o world class transport systems within
generation and use of and between geographically
human capital? dispersed socioeconomic hubs,
comprising education and health
services, creative spaces, and
greenspace amenity,
o a greater variety of housing types
located closer to our jobs.
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Questions Possible answers
(Indicative only and not comprehensive)
• We can come together to develop an accord
on wealth, welfare and wellbeing that
deepens and clarifies our understanding of
our obligations to each other in our 21st
century economy. Such an accord between
government, workers, business, unions and
NGOs – for social safety net commitments
and policy on mutual obligations in
benefit/burden sharing in both prosperous
and hard times within a globalised economy
– can form a solid basis for generation and
use of maximum human capital, lifelong
dignity for all, ongoing economic growth,
and preparedness for economic shocks.
How might we bolster • We can maintain an open economy, where
our economy against our exchange rate is not centrally controlled
shocks? and can float up and down as international
conditions necessitate.
• We can look to maintain our
competitiveness in industries where we
have natural advantages and resist resorting
to protectionism through tariffs. Instead we
can protect our industries by use of strong
competition policy and prevention of anti-
competitive behaviour, monopolisation, and
domination by oligopolies.
• We can stimulate competition by
maintaining a bigger presence by
government in the services economy –
namely health, education, community
services and welfare, utilities and major
infrastructure.
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Questions Possible answers
(Indicative only and not comprehensive)
• We can consider developing the above-
mentioned accord on wealth, welfare and
wellbeing.
… and so on …
… and so on …
for as many questions as we need to ask to help us imagine our preferred
ways to achieve our objectives
Effectively, there is no limit to the questions we might realise we need to ask
to achieve our objectives. It just depends on what we want and how far
ahead we can make ourselves think. In that vein we can find ourselves in the
enviable position of having asked the right questions at the right time,
before it is too late. Questions like:
• Do we want an affordable retirement?
o Yes? Then let’s ensure our compulsory superannuation is
available to everyone and housing is affordable.
• Do we want a fairer tax system?
o Yes? Then maybe we should consider taxes on inherited wealth
from estates valued at, say, over $50 million. Or maybe we
should consider land taxes. Or maybe we should consider lots of
suggestions made by thoughtful public servants over recent
decades on tax reform which governments have not had the
courage to take up, regardless of how much better off we might
have been. Or maybe we want to consider lower or higher
company taxes, depending on whatever meets our objectives of
fairness.
• Do we want to ensure a just transition for workers as we move to a
post carbon economy?
o Yes? Then let’s ask ourselves now what just transition looks like
and where the opportunities are. Do we want to support
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workers affected by industry transition with direct assistance?
How will we finance that?
• Would we like to be able to turn carbon pollution from an economic
weakness to an economic strength?
o Yes? Then set ourselves up to be a market leader in pollution
reduction technologies and industries, including sustainable
agribusiness. And buy back in, as a government player, to the
wholesale energy generation market by building new renewable
power. And upgrade the electricity distribution network so that
all of us can sell the power we generate into the grid. And wind
back fossil fuel subsidies to zero.
• Do we want to be sure of a job or a decent income when the robots
take over?
o Yes? Then maybe we should identify industries where
technology will replace labour and think about new ways to
either provide jobs or new ways to ensure fair access to income
and wealth if jobs dry up.
• Do we want a decent lifestyle where all of us are able to contribute
for the full span of our productive lives?
o Yes? Then maybe think about the place of welfare services,
lifelong training and retraining, and a universal wage in our
future. And maybe shift our attitude that we cannot afford things
like full employment and give our governments explicit
responsibility for guaranteeing employment and education.
• Would we like to ensure equitable access to opportunity, regardless
of wealth?
o Yes? Then we could consider reintroducing free tertiary
education (vocational and university) for everyone, funded by
the hypothecation of a percentage of our existing tax, converted
to a medicare style levy.
Any one of these questions can unleash a creative capacity within our
community to get ahead of the game, creating a bright, secure future through
401
a flexible economic policy, untrapped by blinkered ideologies and vested
interests who operate without conscience. We might get it wrong from time
to time. But the odds of that are much higher if we don’t engage in the
discussion. As long as we organise our discussions to cover the objectives we
are very likely to be able to devise a national plan for the economy we want.
We are at least as capable as our current politicians – more capable, because
we are working together in the national interest. The fact is that if the
Business Council of Australia can write “A Plan for a Stronger Australia”, then
so can we. And we can doubtless do a far better job of it because we will
escape the self-serving focus of the BCA. Australians should come to
understand that the level of insight that comes from business about how to
run a strong economy is not great, and certainly nowhere near as great as we
have been led to believe. The neoliberal “brilliance of individuals” and the free
unregulated market has obviously been vastly overrated. A few self-serving
individuals huddling together to perpetrate a myth of their brilliance can be
no match for an organised sharing of national wisdom.
“Organised” is the operative word here. We have the wisdom, but we
need to assemble it in one spot that we can all see. Only then will we be able
to step back and compare something like a BCA plan for a stronger Australia
and spot all its shortcomings before it is too late. Organising a national plan
for our economy will require us to ensure that the questions we ask will
enable us to develop answers covering each of the following components or
areas of the plan:
• economic planning, growth and transition,
• employment planning and industry transition,
• income and wealth inequality,
• national wealth generation and sharing,
• market regulation and competition policy,
• government competitive business participation,
• science, research, innovation and collaboration,
• technology development and digitisation, and
• international economic engagement and trade.
As I will show in Chapter 11, it will be necessary to develop objectives – or
“Directions” – for each of these components and the questions we ask
ourselves about how best to move in our preferred Directions will then help
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us establish an optimised mix of strategies that will help us achieve the four
objectives of growth, fair sharing, wellbeing and sustainability that I described
above. This is a process that will help us get past the disagreement that we
often fall into when trapped in ideology and in attitudes that are self-
defeating instead of enabling.
Imagine if we had asked ourselves these and similar questions twenty
years ago and reorganised our whole approach to the economy based on our
preferred answers. We might well have avoided the years of slow economic
growth, low wage growth and inequality that was pushed onto us from 2014
onwards, when it needn’t and shouldn’t have been. We might have avoided
the ignominy of international condemnation for our poor performance in
transitioning to carbon neutrality. We might have been well on the way to
new jobs in sustainable industries for coal miners. We might have been less
susceptible to blaming the poor, the welfare dependent, and migrants for our
miseries, when in fact it is the dominance of neoliberal ideology among
conservative leaders that has set us on the wrong course to greater inequality,
financial insecurity and an increase in poverty, hunger and domestic violence.
We might have used our inordinate wealth as a nation to invest more in our
own country and share the profits from our ownership instead of giving all the
profits away to a tiny few via privatisation and creation of monopolies and
oligopolies. We might have re-charged our economy for another 28 years of
growth, but this time it might have been sustainable growth based on
renewable energy and resources and a diversified services economy that isn’t
just about the financial services sector but is about delivery of valued
community services and welfare, all of which would grow GDP and reduce
inequality at the same time.
Looking back on our 28 years of continuous economic growth from the
perspective of what might have been, had we been organised enough twenty
years ago to imagine a better future and agree on our own preferred
strategies, it seems now as if the easy ride and continuous privilege we
enjoyed, compared to the rest of the world, has spoiled us. Cosseted in our
privilege, we have become complacent and listless, and we have settled into
victim blaming (or victim ignoring). This has stopped us from seeing that
things were getting worse in our economy, that we did not have the strong
economy we boasted of. We have slipped into tolerating inequality and
(passively or actively) rewarding cruelty and exclusion when in fact these
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things have a contractionary effect on our economy. If they go on too long,
any brighter future that we might imagine in 2020 will not eventuate.
What we missed by not imagining a better, more decent, sustainable
economy is incalculable. I think we missed a lot and that our children will pay
for that mistake. But there is no need to repeat it. With a bit of organisation
and imagination, we can plan our way to a better future. But as I have said,
this will require us to organise ourselves. We can come up with all the
economic plans we like, but if we can’t establish that plan as a respected
governing instrument in our political system all our thinking will be for nought.
As at 2020 there is a big stumbling block in the way of any plan we might come
up with for a better future. That stumbling block is the way our democracy is
being used by our leaders and by Australians themselves. Politicians are a
dead hand on any approach we might take towards a better future in the
2020s. We are at a crossroads where our 28 years of economic growth could
run into downturn or continuing slow growth. Alternatively, it could run
towards strong sustainable growth through resource conservation and fairer
sharing of wealth. But no political party has a handle on the situation and trust
in politics is, not unreasonably, at an all time low.
What this means is that not only do we need to plan our own economy,
we need to plan a new mode of operation in our governance. Chapter 8 shows
how.
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Chapter 8 – Techniques for Developing a Plan
for Better Governance
Thus far I have argued that, given a quality integrated planning framework,
Australians are entirely capable of working together to plan their way to a
better future for their children in our 21st century democracy. But none of that
can really work if Australia’s democracy itself is in tatters. As I will show in this
Chapter, the reality is that our democratic freedoms and systems are being
withered away and this could extinguish the possibility of community re-
engagement with our democracy precisely at the time when we need it most.
State and federal governments are becoming so hostile to community
involvement in governance that the disempowerment that I spoke of in
Chapter 1 could become a permanent feature of our governance system if we
do not arrest this trend. Australia’s democracy in 2020 could be aptly
described as “frayed” – largely because of our disengagement combined with
debased political behaviour. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on
national community futures planning before we even start. On the contrary,
a well organised Australian community futures planning and reporting
process may well be the only option left in strengthening our system of
governance so that it can once again work in our favour.
In this chapter I will show how our democracy is not working for us
because politics is not working for us as well as it used to. This will require a
distinction to be made between democracy and politics. Too often these are
considered to be the same thing, as though politics is where democracy is
exercised. But they are not the same thing and in Australia our democracy is
being beggared to almost complete dissipation by our politics. More than
that, if we allow it to continue to run on the way it is, politics is not going to
deliver a better life for us. But our best chance to restore politics to a more
positive role is to use IP&R to set out a plan for strengthening our democracy
405
over the next decade. Some politicians are trying to strengthen Australia’s
democracy, but others are not. Others still are actively wreaking havoc in it.
Those that are trying to fix it could use a helping hand from us. In this and the
following two chapters I hope to show how we can pitch in and help out.
Solution No. 5 – In the governance quadrant – check the
threats to democracy and then gather its strengths
If asked, it might reliably be imagined that the vast majority of Australians
would say we live in a democracy, although they might argue about how open
or liberal it is. Of course, there are degrees of democracy and the extent to
which we live in any one of these can vary through time. There is pure
democracy, where citizens participate directly in decision making – every
decision. Most of us don’t want to live like that. Accordingly, we opt for the
alternative of representative democracy, where citizens elect people to
represent their interests so they can turn their attention to running their own
lives. These democracies are built on a presumption that those who are
elected will abide by the same ethical codes as those who elected them. In
other words, they presume the elected representatives are trustworthy and
will behave in accordance with their espoused values.
Somewhere in between these two approaches to governance, there is
participatory democracy – where citizen participation is thought to be more
of a necessity as trust decreases and less of a necessity as trust rises. In other
words, whenever we feel our value system is under threat from our
governments, many of us tend to increase our participation. We start
protesting or joining together as groups or online, to campaign for a particular
program that we believe will improve our quality of life. This is reactive
participatory democracy. When we do this, there is sometimes a backlash
from government itself. Instead of responding positively to our log of claims
(if the claims don’t suit them), they can respond by ratcheting up
authoritarianism, or telling noisy dissidents to shut up and be “quiet
Australians”507, or singling out groups that we can blame and be afraid of. This
507See Mark McKenna, “Scott Morrison’s quiet Australians”, The Monthly, July 2019, accessible at
https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/july/1561989600/mark-mckenna/scott-morrison-s-
quiet-australians
406
can and has weakened democracies the world over and it has weakened
Australia’s noticeably since about the year 2002 in the aftermath of the
September 11 attacks on America in 2001.
In the five years or so leading up to the 2020s, Australia experienced an
even sharper increase in authoritarianism, as I will show below, and we
suffered a concomitant sharper loss of confidence in our democracy as well
as an increase in both our feelings of disempowerment and our actual
disempowerment. According to surveys conducted by Ipsos in 2018 for the
“Democracy 2025” project by the Museum of Australian Democracy and the
University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance Policy and Analysis:
Satisfaction with how democracy works has been in decline since the
end of the Howard era in 2007 [when it was at 86%] but has been in
freefall since 2013 (when it was at 71 per cent) standing at 41 per cent
in 2018. In comparative terms this finding puts Australia below the
median satisfaction rating in comparison with other advanced industrial
democracies508
The drop in confidence in our democracy was paralleled by a drop in
confidence in our economic future and a drop in our trust of all our institutions
of government, the media, business and NGOs to deliver that future. Between
2016 and 2018 the “Edelman Trust Barometer” (a global survey of trust in the
institutions of business, government media and NGOs) reported that trust in
these institutions had declined progressively in Western democracies and
that Australia was no exception with annual drops in trust of all four
institutions509, culminating in results which placed Australia as one of the
distrusting countries in the survey. We are not proud of our institutions of
democracy.
In the “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer”, there was a slight rebound of
trust among Australians (note: the 2019 survey was taken in late 2018, not
2019). However, out of a total sample of 26 countries, Australia still showed
up as:
508 Gerry Stoker, Mark Evans and Max Halupka, “Trust and Democracy in Australia: Democratic decline
and renewal, Report No. 1, 2018”, “Democracy 2025” Project, Museum of Australian Democracy and
University of Canberra, page 021 https://www.democracy2025.gov.au/documents/Democracy2025-
report1.pdf
509 See results collated in CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Op.
Cit., page 12.
407
• one of 15 markets in which the general population exhibits distrust
of its institutions510;
• one of 14 markets “in which the majority of mass the population do
not believe that they will be better off in five years”511;
• one of 18 markets with “double-digit trust gaps” between the views
of the general population and those of an “informed population” –
with trust being 13 points lower among the general population512;
• one of 26 markets giving the lowest trust ratings to government and
the media, slightly better trust ratings to business and NGOs, but
comparatively good trust ratings to a direct employer513; and
• one of 8 markets which neither trusts nor distrusts the United
Nations514. (Note that in this survey the United Nations showed up as
the most trusted institution by the 26 participating countries.515)
Sadly, when a society reaches this level of distrust, it can take on the
dimensions of a national dose of depression, the symptoms of which include
a withdrawal from healthy reactive participation in democracy and even a
withdrawal from exercising a vote. Voter turnout by the young in Australia in
the 2019 election reached an unprecedented low level, when up to 1.5 million
enrolled voters failed to vote, with the biggest falls in turnout occurring in
seats with a high proportion of young voters.516 In Australia’s case, withdrawal
for many of us has been into the dark recesses of social media, from whence
many of us can and do anonymously snipe at each other, disconnected from
510 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, page 6, accessible at
https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss191/files/2019-
03/2019_Edelman_Trust_Barometer_Global_Report.pdf?utm_source=website&utm_medium=global_
report&utm_campaign=downloads
511 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Ibid., page 14.
512 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Ibid., page 9. An “informed population” was
defined as “college educated, between the ages of 25-64, in the top 25% of household income, and
reporting significant media consumption and engagement in public policy and business news”.
513 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Ibid., pages 39-42.
514 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Ibid., page 44.
515 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Ibid., page 44. Only 5 markets distrusted the
United Nations whereas 13 markets trusted the UN. The next best performer was NGOs: 6 markets
distrusted and 11 markets trusted NGOS.
516 Shane Wright and Max Koslowski, “Voter turnout at record low after young people disengage”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/federal-election-
2019/voter-turnout-at-record-low-after-young-people-disengage-20190530-p51sol.html
408
the organised protests of groups with whom we have a common interest. For
others, the withdrawal has simply been into apathy and/or cynicism.
Of course, withdrawal from democratic participation, no matter what
form it takes, is far more likely to make things worse in our lives than it is to
make them better. And adding to the problems caused by withdrawal of so
many of us from democracy, reactive participatory democracy itself starts to
lose its effectiveness. It doesn’t work as well as it otherwise might, particularly
if it is choked off by repeated authoritarian crackdowns on civil liberties and
dissent.
The participation of Australians in their democracy has been choked off
repeatedly by several means over the five years to 2020 as the installation of
a more authoritarian system of governance has coincided with the rise of
unregulated, irresponsible and unethical social media. In response to this,
many more of us have backed out of our democratic processes in frustration;
and although many of us have remained engaged, the struggle to achieve
what we want via our democracy has become much harder. The growth of
movements like GetUp and smaller local agitation groups or those who run
petitions online is evidence that we have not all disengaged from our
democracy. But those who have persisted with participation have
experienced what it is like to agitate within a weakened democracy – it is
intensely frustrating. Agitation and protest in a weakened democracy has
tended to produce policy outcomes which divide nations even further, not
policy outcomes around which we can find common agreement, let alone an
enduring one. The centre ground is often not found.
This fracture in our national polity reflects an alarming shift in the
disposition of power that has been growing over recent decades as
disproportionate shares of power have been slowly transferred from the
many to the few – a trickle up, if you like. In Australia’s case, very clear
disproportionate power has been trickled upwards this century to the very
wealthy, to large corporations and to one excessively powerful media
company – Murdoch. A tiny few have influenced authoritarian governments
to corral profits to the top and to create a significantly higher incidence of
inequality in our society than we have seen since the mid 1990s517, when the
517
Inequality has trended up in Australia since the ABS began measuring income inequality in the mid-
1990s and wealth inequality in 2004. See ABS 6523.0 - Household Income and Wealth, Australia, 2017-
409
ABS first began measuring inequality. This is a kind of madness that has been
building in western societies since capitalism began. What has happened is
that in order to encourage corporations to take the risks on private
investments – i.e., to free up capital necessary for economic growth –
corporations have been given rights to limit their liability to the amount of
their investment and nothing more. In other words, they have been released
from liability for the funds of any other investor (such as a taxpayer) and for
the risks and injuries associated with the activities of their corporations. They
can shunt all risk away from themselves and keep all profits to themselves.
This limitation of liability has been slowly and legally extended by
unscrupulous corporations who have played with rules designed to constrain
them appropriately, with varying degrees of success through history. For
instance, corporations gained so much influence during the American Civil
War that, shortly before his death, Abraham Lincoln lamented what he saw
happening with the following “resounding prophecy”:
Corporations have been enthroned …. An era of corruption in high
places will follow and the money power will endeavor to prolong its
reign by working on the prejudices of the people … until wealth is
aggregated in a few hands … and the Republic is destroyed.518
And of course, with neoliberalism – i.e., unregulated capitalism – corporations
have come to rival governments in strength. We tend to think of corporations
as being comprised of human beings, who by extension must be capable of
ethics, empathy and care for others. But they are actually inhuman, abstract,
almost untraceable entities with a single focus of maximising financial returns.
Moreover, large multinational corporations are:
theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison … and are not
constrained by the laws of any individual country. … With equivalent
rights to human beings but with the incalculable advantage of their
superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world.
They have grown so massive that fifty-three of the largest hundred
economies in the world are corporations. Along with their vast power,
18, Tables 1.1, 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/6523.02017-18?OpenDocument
518 Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s
Search for Meaning, Prometheus Books, New York, 2017, Kindle edition, Loc 383.
410
corporations have imposed on the world a set of values, arising from
their overriding objective to maximize financial returns, at odds with
many intrinsic human values. Even those in a position of power within a
corporation only maintain that power as long as they follow the
corporate mandate of maximizing shareholder value above all other
considerations.519
Corporations are the equivalent of countries we can’t find. There are
people behind them, of course, but not people we can get hold of easily. They
also very successfully throw us off their scent by lulling us into blaming the
poor, the disadvantaged, the unemployed and the otherwise powerless for
being a drain on national wealth, even though their individual portions of the
nation’s wealth through their entire lives are dwarfed by the subsidies
enjoyed in a single year – or even in a single day – by some large corporations.
Australia’s fossil fuel subsidy at AU$42 billion a year520 is a classic example of
corporate plunder of taxpayers’ money, being four times the total cost to the
taxpayer of unemployment and sickness benefits in 2019/20 – a mere $10.8
billion. So much for business being our saviour and the creator of our jobs. It
is taxpayers who are funding much of the job creation for large corporations,
especially in the fossil fuel industry. Demonisation of the poor is a blind for
the truly obscene hand in the taxpayers’ pocket that is the large
corporation.521
In this arrangement, politicians are the human face of inhuman corporate
power, although the vast majority of politicians would not accept this to be
the case. Nevertheless, politicians are what the corporations hope we will find
when we go looking for what is causing our problems of inequality. They are
what corporations hope we will fight with and protest against – in a proxy war
519 Jeremy Lent, Ibid., Loc 384.
520 Source: International Monetary Fund, David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, and Baoping Shang,
“IMF Working Paper: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level
Estimates, WP/19/89”, 2019, page 35. This report cites Australia’s subsidies for fossil fuel in US$ for
2015 as US$29 billion (AU$42 billion approximately or 2.3% of GDP) and US$1,198 per capita
(AU$1,700 per capita approximately) Accessible at
https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx
521 Source: Commonwealth of Australia, Budget 2019-20, Budget Paper No. 1, Statement 5: Expenses
and Net Capital Investment, page 5-22, accessible at https://budget.gov.au/2019-
20/content/bp1/index.htm. The total budget estimate for expenses in social security and welfare is
listed as $180.1 billion, including the estimate for Unemployment and Sickness Benefits of $10.8
billion.
411
– until we realise the futility of protest and give up. Whether politicians like it
or not, they are set up by corporations whenever possible to take the full
brunt of accountability for the corporations’ gross and ongoing abuses of the
public’s interests in the natural resources and human capital of a country.
Demagogues like Donald Trump spend a lot of time on Twitter promoting the
image of the public service and their political opponents as the “deep state”,
when in fact it is large corporations that are the deep state.
Because corporate power is so deeply buried and so fully entrenched,
Australians will not be able to take the corporations on in a head-on fight.
There is no “body” of the corporation that we can get hold of and nothing in
politics will hold them to account. Witness the fact that the corporations and
financiers that caused the GFC were bailed out (except for Lehman Brothers)
by taxpayers and not a single one was ever held to account for their
destruction. As such, we will be restricted to using what we can in our
democracy to extricate ourselves from the dominance of corporate power,
proxy war though it may be. If we wish to escape from the gross power
imbalance and the proxy war too, we will need to re-vitalise our democracy
and learn to use it so that it works for all of us, not just the top 20% or 1%.
And we will need to plan for that, using the fullest possible weight of our
numbers. We will need a plan for a truly robust liberal democracy. If we can
liven that up, this is our best and our only available weapon against corporate
greed and all the misery it brings.
Democracy has always held promise for those nations who have taken it,
in varying degrees, as their system of governance. However, the promise of
democracy is failing Australians in 2020, just as it seems to have failed for the
United Kingdom and the United States. It is failing the poor, the
disadvantaged, the alienated, the next generation and the one after that, the
jobless, and those in the middle class who have a job but worry that they
might soon be unemployed. But to restore the promise of democracy, we
need to understand what is actually threatening it. Many will posit that
democracy is failing because of abuse of the internet and the misinformation
that is being peddled on the net by the Machiavellis of the world. Others will
suggest that the failure has arisen because the promise of “one vote, one
value” has evaporated under the weight of electoral funding laws which are
long overdue for reform. There is a certain truth to this, but it is failing due to
a number of other threats too. There are threats to our democracy that are
412
closer to home and which are likely to pose a bigger threat to our ability to
use our democracy for all it is worth. Those threats are likely to be two-fold:
• One threat has arisen from the progressive removal of our rights – a
slow and insidious attenuation that started after the September 11
attacks on America in 2001 and which was made all the easier by the
fact that we do not have a statement of national values or a charter
of rights in our Constitution.
• The other threat is arising from our own withdrawal from democratic
participation.
Unless we analyse these threats, and step back and look at them squarely, we
won’t be able to develop a coherent plan to reverse the problems and
strengthen our democracy to the level where it will serve us better.
Accordingly, the following section provides a scan of the threats posed to our
democracy by the erosion of our rights in the 21st century. Beyond that, the
rest of this chapter and Chapter 9 consider the techniques and key focus areas
for strengthening not just our democracy but our society, environment and
economy in an efficiently integrated planning and reporting process.
Checking for threats to democracy
Isolating the threats to democracy – seeing them for what they are – is a
challenge, one made much more difficult by substandard journalism and an
unethical online environment. But unless we isolate the threats, we can’t plan
to fix them. At the beginning of any planning process it is vital to review not
just our confidence in our democracy but what might have contributed to any
drop in confidence. In the same way that we should interrogate the prevailing
economic narrative if we want to plan a new and better economy, we likewise
need to examine how democracy might have been weakened, if we want to
plan a stronger democracy. The following section provides a scan of some of
the things that have weakened our democracy in the 21 st century.
413
How has Australia’s democracy been weakened?
In the first 20 years of the 21st century, chokes on our democracy in Australia
were boldly exhibited by conservative governments522 in so many successive
abuses of power that by 2020, independents and academic and media
commentators had started characterising Australia as “arguably the most
secretive democracy in the Western world”523 or as “Orwellian”524. There is
little to wonder at in this characterisation, given the number of abuses or
attempted abuses we saw, including, but not limited to:
• reductions of freedom of the press, alongside a failure to protect
democratic discourse from misinformation, “doublespeak”, fake
news, hate speech and cyber attacks;
• reduction of transparency in government and access to public
information;
• inequitable application of electoral funding rules and a lack of
transparency in lobbying;
• suppression of free speech, protest and the right to organise; and
• significant reduction of human rights for Australians (not simply for
refugees).
522 Since 2002 more than 70 pieces of national security legislation have been introduced in Australia
which have the effect of limiting the civil liberties and democratic rights of Australians. Over 95% of
these have been introduced by Coalition governments. The Labor governments during this period
watered down some draconian powers introduced by the Coalition and introduced an independent
national security monitor, a role which the Coalition attempted to abolish in 2014 but eventually
supported. They also attempted to include safeguards for journalists in some cases (eg., requiring a
warrant for access to journalists’ metadata). By and large, Labor governments have kept democracy
open, not choked it, although their track record on human rights is unfortunately a faltering one in the
case of treatment of refugees and they have succumbed to wedge politics when in opposition, which
led to their supporting legislation in late 2018 that significantly restricted rights of protest,
criminalising peaceful protesters who affect business operations of corporations.
523 Tony Walker, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University, “Press freedom must be enshrined in
a charter of rights”, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/press-freedom-must-be-enshrined-in-a-charter-of-rights-
20191031-p5368c.html?btis
524 Zali Steggall, Australian Parliament, Independent Member for Warringah, quoted in Giovanni Torre,
“Scott Morrison accused of attacking democracy over vow to outlaw environmental boycott
campaigns”, The Telegraph UK, 3 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/11/03/scott-morrison-accused-attacking-democracy-vow-
outlaw-environmental/
414
Here are some concrete examples of these abuses, all of which deplete
the strength of our democracy:
Reductions of freedom of the press
1) Limitations on freedom of the press – taking multiple forms
including:
o police raids on journalists homes, files and workplaces with
dubious warrants525,
o pressure on journalists to disclose sources, and
o extended intimidation by refusing to rule out prosecution of
journalists who publish information which is strongly in the
public interest, is not contrary to the public interest, is not a
security threat, and is merely embarrassing to the
government526.
2) Criminalisation of public interest journalism527: for instance,
when such journalism exposes government or private sector
conduct which is unethical or unlawful528 or airs stories which
are in the public interest529. This criminalisation became so bad
525 Katharine Murphy, “AFP to examine its handling of sensitive investigations after media raids”, The
Guardian, 21 October 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/oct/21/afp-to-
examine-its-handling-of-sensitive-investigations-after-media-raids
526 Amy Remeikis, “Christian Porter says he can't guarantee he wouldn't prosecute journalists”, The
Guardian, 20 October 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/oct/20/christian-porter-says-he-cant-guarantee-he-wouldnt-prosecute-journalists
527 See Johan Lidberg, “New bill would make Australia worst in the free world for criminalising
journalism”, The Conversation, 1 February 2018: “Australia is a world leader in passing the most
amendments to existing and new anti-terror and security laws in the liberal democratic world. Since
September 11, 2001, it has passed 54 laws”, accessible at https://theconversation.com/new-bill-
would-make-australia-worst-in-the-free-world-for-criminalising-journalism-90840 More laws have
been passed since this article.
528 For example, the Australian government raised criminal charges against “Witness K” and his lawyer
Bernard Collaery for revealing unethical conduct by the Australian government in East Timor in
bugging their cabinet room to obtain information during the negotiation of oil sharing rights and for
revealing this more than a decade after the bugging. See Andrew Greene and Lucy Sweeney, “’Witness
K’ and lawyer Bernard Collaery charged with breaching intelligence act over East Timor spying
revelations”, ABC News, 29 June 2018, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-
28/witness-k-and-bernard-collaery-charged-intelligence-act-breach/9919268
529 For example, the Australian Federal Police raided the offices of the ABC in June 2019 confiscating
files associated with an old story about a coverup by the government in relation to alleged killings of
civilians by Australian special forces in Afghanistan. See Michael Koziol, Fergus Hunter and Lucy
415
in 2019 that news organisations from the most conservative to
the most progressive combined to launch a coordinated
campaign of resistance and protest against secrecy laws (the
“Right to Know Campaign”)530.
3) Prohibition of public interest journalism and professional
disclosure of public interest matters: for example, prohibition of
reporting – by doctors (since overturned), by immigration and
refugee detention staff (not overturned) 531 and by journalists532
– of abuses of human rights of refugees held by Australia in off-
shore detention centres.
4) Refusal by elected government politicians to protect or respect
the independence of federal police and other public prosecution
agencies: for instance, in decisions about prosecution of
journalists by refusing to step away from a sign-off role on
commencement of prosecutions of journalists. In this regard the
Attorney General, Christian Porter, and the Prime Minister, Scott
Morrison, attempted in 2019 to promote the Attorney General’s
role – in determining whether a journalist will be prosecuted for
Cormack, “Police raid on ABC offices sparks firestorm over press freedom and national security”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 5 June 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/police-
raid-on-abc-offices-sparks-firestorm-over-press-freedom-and-national-security-20190605-
p51utw.html
530 Lenore Taylor, “Concrete action rather than nice words are needed on press freedom”, The
Guardian, 21 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/oct/21/concrete-action-rather-than-nice-words-are-
needed-on-press-freedom. See also David Crowe and Jenny Noyes, “Campaign for the right to know
fights the darkness”, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 October 2019: “Seeking change after police raids on
journalists and whistleblowers this year, the media industry is widening the argument over the "right
to know" by focusing on the harm to Australians if abuse and corruption are never exposed. With a
media blitz running for weeks, the campaign is unusual in its scale as well as its broad support across
the industry from Nine, the ABC, The Guardian, News Corp Australia, Prime Media, Seven West Media,
Sky News, SBS, Ten, the WIN Network and others. (Nine owns this masthead.)”, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/campaign-for-the-right-to-know-fights-the-darkness-
20191020-p532gq.html
531 Ben Doherty, “Doctors freed to speak about Australia’s detention regime after U-turn”, The
Guardian, 20 October 2016, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2016/oct/20/doctors-freed-to-speak-about-australias-detention-regime-after-u-turn
532 Helen Davidson, “Australia jointly responsible for Nauru's draconian media policy, documents
reveal”, The Guardian, 4 October 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2018/oct/04/australia-jointly-responsible-for-naurus-draconian-media-policy-documents-reveal
416
actions taken within the course of their profession – as “a
safeguard” for the journalist533, presumably from faulty
investigations by police. Scott Morrison stated in Parliament
that:
I do not believe that those decisions about who should be
prosecuted at the end of the day should be made on the whim
of politicians. I think they should be made based on the rule
of law and the proper assessment of appropriately
constituted law enforcement agencies.534
However, Mr Morrison made no attempt to distance politicians
from the process of sign-off on commencement of prosecutions
against journalists. Retention by politicians of this sort of sign-
off role can only negate the arm’s length nature of the police
investigation and convert decisions on prosecution into purely
political ones. Instead of de-politicising decisions, it cements a
politician and a government into the role of determining
whether a piece of journalism was in the public interest, even
when, or especially when, the subject of the article was the
contravention of the public interest by the government itself.
Effectively it removes any safeguard for a journalist and reduces
it to a safeguard for politicians.
5) Severe reductions of funding for the nation’s independent
broadcaster – the ABC535 (despite election promises that no such
533 Attorney General Christian Porter quoted by Amy Remeikis, “Christian Porter says he can't
guarantee he wouldn't prosecute journalists”, The Guardian, 20 October 2019: “But the fundamental
point is that investigations, whether they be of any Australian, are conducted by the AFP, completely
arm’s length from government, as it should be, but these are extra safeguards put in place in that
process.” Accessible at Christian Porter says he can't guarantee he wouldn't prosecute journalists
534 Scott Morrison quoted by Katie Burgess, “Your right to know: Media bosses want politicians' power
to sign off on prosecutions removed”, Southern Highlands News, 22 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.southernhighlandnews.com.au/story/6452206/media-bosses-urge-removal-of-
politicians-power-to-sign-off-on-prosecution-of-journalists/?cs=2658
535 ABC News, “Budget 2018: ABC funding frozen in $84 million hit to the bottom line”, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-08/budget-2018-abc-funding-frozen-in-$84-million-hit-
bottom-line/9740690 and Alexandra Wake & Michael Ward, “The ABC didn’t receive a reprieve in the
budget. It’s still facing staggering cuts”, The Conversation, 9 April 2019, accessible at
https://theconversation.com/the-abc-didnt-receive-a-reprieve-in-the-budget-its-still-facing-
staggering-cuts-114922
417
funding cuts would be made536), and threats to divest the ABC or
close it to reduce competition for the conservative Murdoch
press537.
Failure to protect democratic discourse from misinformation, hate
speech and cyber attacks
6) Failure to regulate online publishers such as Facebook in any
ethical obligations for truth in advertising (and disclosure of
authorisations for advertising) and in protection of personal
data, and failure to impose regulations which will curtail the
spread of misinformation on these platforms.
Reduction of transparency in government and access to public
information
7) Increased limitations on access to public information – access
that used to be protected under freedom of information laws
and standards but is no longer538.
8) Increased limitations on access to official public records of
federal government ministers539 – with the FOI rules being newly
536 Lenore Taylor, “Tony Abbott admits he broke ABC cuts promise and says ‘buck stops with me’”, The
Guardian, 1 December 2014, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2014/dec/01/tony-abbott-admits-he-broke-abc-cuts-promise-and-says-buck-stops-with-me
537 See Amanda Meade, “’Unprecedented hostility’: Murdoch, the government, and an ABC under
attack”, The Guardian, 25 July 2018: “Today, government support for the national broadcaster – the
most trusted and loved media organisation in the country – seems missing in action. The threat to
Aunty’s remit is, according to some, existential. The official line from the ABC is that it’s business as
usual. That global media disruption has compounded the pressure the ABC is under from the usual
political and commercial forces. But with ongoing funding cuts, complaints of bias, government
reviews, Murdoch media antagonism, internal instability, and a communications minister who is a
member of a rightwing think tank that advocates the end of public broadcasting, the forces against
the ABC loom large.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jul/25/unprecedented-
hostility-murdoch-the-government-and-an-abc-under-attack
538 Christopher Knaus, “How a flawed freedom-of-information regime keeps Australians in the dark”,
The Guardian, 2 January 2019: “The Australian government is refusing access to documents at record
rates, aided by a flawed freedom of information regime beset by delays, understaffing and
unnecessary obfuscation.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/jan/02/how-a-flawed-freedom-of-information-regime-keeps-australians-in-the-dark
539 See Anne Davies, “Don’t hold your breath waiting for the truth on Bridget McKenzie’s sports rort”,
The Guardian, 2 February 2020: In relation to an FOI request made for official ministerial documents
of the former Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg, the office of the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg,
refused the application thus: “A request for documents relating to a minister’s previous portfolio
418
interpreted to mean that once a minister has changed portfolio,
FOI requests for documents pertaining to his or her previous
portfolio/s are no longer valid requests and cannot be approved
for access. Hence ministers of the crown can elude scrutiny
simply by changing portfolio and some delay access for the
duration of their portfolio540.
9) Brazenly insincere claims of support for transparency in matters
of unethical and illegal conduct by politicians – when such
conduct is criticised by independent reviewers such as the
Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) – but equally brazen
commissioning of alternative reviews from senior public
servants and refusals to release the reports from those
alternative reviews conducted behind closed doors541.
10) Reduction of funding for the Office of the Australian Information
Commissioner542.
responsibilities is not a request for an ‘official document of a minister’. … As this request seeks
documents that relate to previous portfolio responsibilities, not to the treasurer’s portfolio
responsibilities or the business or activities of his portfolio agencies, it is not a valid request under the
FOI Act.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/01/dont-hold-your-
breath-waiting-for-the-truth-on-bridget-mckenzies-sports-rort?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
540 See Christopher Knaus, “Canavan delayed releasing documents about coal lobby interactions
before resigning”, the Guardian, 11 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/11/canavan-delayed-releasing-documents-
about-coal-lobby-interactions-before-resigning?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
541 See Katharine Murphy, “Scott Morrison wants the sports rorts mess to be over with McKenzie’s
exit. It won’t be”, The Guardian, 2 February 2020. In reference to an alternative report commissioned
by Scott Morrison from his former Chief of Staff, Phillip Gaetjens, when Mr Morrison didn’t like a
report released by the ANAO which found that Deputy National Party Leader Bridget McKenzie had
breached rules in relation to $100 million in sports grants during the 2019 election: “When people are
looking at the whole institution of government and wondering if the whole thing is entirely off the
rails – the antidote to this corrosive distrust is sending McKenzie out the door with a tight smile and a
light shove, and declining to be transparent about how a program can be a debacle according to the
auditor general and just a flesh would according to the head of the Department of Prime Minister and
Cabinet”. Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/02/scott-morrison-
wants-the-sports-rorts-mess-to-be-over-with-mckenzies-exit-it-wont-be
542 Richard Mulgan, “Freedom of information: Australians are losing the battle against government
secrecy” Sydney Morning Herald, 3 December 2017, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/public-
service/freedom-of-information-australians-are-losing-the-battle-against-government-secrecy-
20171203-gzxokd.html
419
11) Intimidation of whistleblowers – including prosecution when
their actions have been both responsible and in the public
interest543.
12) Introduction of imprisonment penalties for whistleblowers who
make public interest disclosures of classified information on
immigration or border enforcement matters – legislation which
deems any and all such disclosures “reckless”, before the fact,
merely because the information being disclosed has a security
classification544. In these disclosures, no onus exists on the
government to prove that the disclosure was reckless and
contrary to the public interest, and a defendant cannot plead
public interest as a defence. This legislation effectively makes it
impossible for any public interest disclosure at all in the area of
immigration and the operation of the Australian Border Force
established in 2015 and there is now no mechanism by which
Australians can be advised when the government is secretly
acting contrary to the public interest in these areas.
Reduction of capacity to report and investigate corruption in
government
13) Serious funding threats for corruption watchdogs and consumer
protection agencies545.
543 Christopher Knaus, “‘Too many loopholes’: Christian Porter urged to go further on whistleblower
protections”, The Guardian, 21 June 2019: “… a series of government whistleblowers face jail time for
exposing government wrongdoing, including tax office employee Richard Boyle, defence lawyer David
McBride, and former ACT attorney general Bernard Collaery and his intelligence officer client, Witness
K.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/21/too-many-loopholes-
christian-porter-urged-to-go-further-on-whistleblower-protections
544 See Section 42 of the Australian Border Force Act 2015: “(1A) If the information is Immigration and
Border Protection Information because of the operation of subsection 4(5) or (6), the fault element of
recklessness for paragraph (1)(c) of this section is taken to be satisfied if the person is reckless as to
whether or not whichever of the following applies: (a) the information has a security classification; …”
Accessible at http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/abfa2015225/s42.html
545 See Farrah Tomazin, “Anti-corruption chiefs warn of political interference, call for independent
funding”, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/anti-corruption-chiefs-warn-of-political-interference-call-for-
independent-funding-20191101-p536i1.html
420
14) Tenacious and continuing resistance to establishment of a
national corruption watchdog, especially with regard to the
actions of politicians and their staff546.
15) Failure when finally developing proposals for a “federal integrity
commission” to develop a model for a commission with teeth –
for example, the proposed commissions in 2019, if established,
won’t have the powers to make corruption findings against
members of Parliament or their staff and “investigations in the
proposed public sector division would remain secret until the
end of any resulting court case.”547.
16) Brazen interference in police investigations when matters of
potential breaches of the law by politicians have been referred
to the police548.
Reduction in accountability of government for security and use of
personal information
17) Introduction of laws requiring phone and internet providers to
store metadata of all subscribers549: These laws are not of
themselves a reduction of accountability but they provide a
platform on which abuses of power can be more easily mounted,
including selective (mis)use of metadata to form a “reasonable
suspicion” that a person has committed an offence (even though
the content of calls and internet browsing are not being stored).
Based on said reasonable suspicion (formed with no evidence
other than a log of a call or email) a person can be raided,
546 Christopher Knaus, “Coalition's plan for anti-corruption body a ‘sham’ set up to protect MPs,
former judge says”, The Guardian, 24 January 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/24/coalitions-plan-for-anti-corruption-body-
a-sham-set-up-to-protect-mps-former-judge-says
547 Paul Karp, Amy Remekis and Ben Butler, “What happened? The policies Scott Morrison's
government appears to have abandoned”, The Guardian, 28 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/28/what-happened-the-policies-scott-
morrisons-government-appears-to-have-abandoned?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
548 See Michelle Grattan, “Scott Morrison under fire for calling NSW police commissioner over Angus
Taylor investigation”, The Conversation, 27 November 2019, accessible at
https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-under-fire-for-calling-nsw-police-commissioner-over-
angus-taylor-investigation-127922
549 Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015
421
detained without charge, provided with no information of the
nature of any offence, and is unable to complain because it is a
criminal offence to disclose information relating to a “special
intelligence operation” (see points 29 and 30 below for examples
of abuse of power that can arise).
Inequitable application of electoral funding rules and a lack of
transparency in lobbying
18) Electoral funding distortion: whereby lobby groups and rich
individuals are allowed to buy elections (such as Clive Palmer
who paid $83 million in 2019550 to sway preferences towards the
Coalition and Malcolm Turnbull who paid almost $2 million in
person551 to boost the Coalition’s electoral campaign in 2016)
and yet the Coalition government attempted to introduce
legislation in 2018 which would restrict small donations by
householders to activist groups like GetUp552 and charities like
the Climate Council553 – in other words, all the legislative actions
of Coalition governments in the decade to 2020 were aimed at
capping the small donations of the many, not the massive
donations of the few.
19) Excessive concentration of the powerful influence of certain
lobby groups – particularly those employing recently retired
government ministers554.
550 Tom McIlroy and Edmund Tadros, “Clive Palmer spent $83 million on failed election bid”, Financial
Review, 3 February 2020, accessible at https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/clive-palmer-spent-83-
million-on-failed-election-bid-20200203-p53x4j
551 Alexandra Beech, “Malcolm Turnbull admits donating $1.75 million to election campaign”, ABC
News, 1 February 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-01/turnbull-admits-donating-1.75-
million-to-election-campaign/8233244
552 Gareth Hutchens, “Crackdown on donations would destroy activist groups, GetUp says”, The
Guardian, 29 January 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2018/jan/29/crackdown-on-donations-would-destroy-activist-groups-getup-says
553 Michael Slezak, “Charities fight Coalition's attempt to limit advocacy”, The Guardian, 1 November
2017, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/01/charities-fight-
coalitions-attempt-to-limit-advocacy
554 Multiple conflicts and potential corruption issues have arisen from post-separation appointments
of ex-government ministers from the Coalition to consulting firms lobbying for government contracts
for companies with whom they dealt as ministers. See Katharine Murphy, “Christopher Pyne and Julie
Bishop to be grilled over private-sector jobs”, The Guardian, 5 September 2019, accessible at
422
20) Misuse of Commonwealth powers under the Constitution by
providing grants direct to local communities instead of via the
states – for example, grants provided by the Morrison
government direct to sporting clubs in the 2019 federal election
campaign555. This amounted to an unashamed misuse of powers
under the Constitution for nothing more than purposes of
electoral funding distortion.
Suppression of free speech, protest and the right to organise
21) Repeated campaigns targeting grass roots community groups
such as GetUp556 – campaigns which reject the right of
individuals to organise themselves in groups to seek progress on
issues of common importance to them (in the case of GetUp this
represents an effort to silence over one million engaged
citizens).
22) Repeated campaigns targeting trade unions557 – campaigns such
as the (failed) WorkChoices legislation and the Ensuring Integrity
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/05/christopher-pyne-and-julie-bishop-to-be-
grilled-over-private-sector-jobs
555 See Paul Karp, “Bridget McKenzie's sports grants program may be unconstitutional, expert warns”,
The Guardian, 21 January 2020: “Bridget McKenzie’s controversial $100m sports grants program may
be unconstitutional because the federal government lacks power to hand out money to sports clubs, a
leading constitutional academic has warned. Anne Twomey, a professor at the University of Sydney,
issued the warning … after Scott Morrison asked the attorney general to ‘clarify’ and ‘address’ legal
issues with the program which the auditor general found was skewed towards marginal seats.”
Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/21/bridget-mckenzies-sports-
grants-program-may-be-unconstitutional-expert-warns
556 Andrew Tillett & Tom McIlroy, “Scott Morrison tells GetUp to get lost”, Financial Review, 16 August
2019, accessible at https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/scott-morrison-tells-getup-to-get-lost-
20190816-p52hxb and Dana McCauley, “GetUp hits back at 'extraordinary attack' by the PM”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 17 August 2019, quoting Paul Oosting, National Director of GetUp: “Afraid of being
challenged or held to account on having no policy on climate change and the lack of support for
raising Newstart, [Mr Morrison] is trying to shut down democratic participation, slurring the name of
everyday people participating in our politics. This would be the fourth attempt by the hard right to
shut down independent grassroots campaigning." Accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/getup-hits-back-at-extraordinary-attack-by-the-pm-
20190817-p52i2x.html
557 Rob Harris, “Prime Minister Scott Morrison ups pressure on Labor over union reforms”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 28 July 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/prime-minister-
scott-morrison-ups-pressure-on-labor-over-union-reforms-20190727-p52bbs.html and Australian
423
Bill 2019, which seek to deregister unions for tiny infractions
such as failing to lodge an annual report on time, and which in
essence reject the right of individuals to organise themselves in
groups to seek progress on issues of common importance to
them and collectively bargain for improvements in wages,
conditions, workplace safety and productivity.
23) Increased prohibitions on and penalties for peaceful civil protest:
laws in NSW, Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia were
tightened over the decade to 2020 to stop protests and increase
fines for protesters, and federal legislation in 2018 had the effect
of re-defining entirely peaceful non-destructive protest, even on
public land, as espionage, in certain circumstances, with
penalties of up to 25 years’ imprisonment558.
24) Threats and active efforts to prohibit any rights of unions,
individuals, protest groups and even businesses themselves to
suggest boycotts of businesses on environmental and ethical
grounds (eg., where businesses like banks and insurers and
suppliers are encouraged by Australians not to work with coal
mining giants) – Prime Minister, Scott Morrison announced in
November 2019 that: “Together with the Attorney General,
Christian Porter, we are working to identify serious mechanisms
that can successfully outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices
that threaten the livelihoods of fellow Australians”559 (meaning
protests where someone merely encourages someone else not
to invest in or supply to industries that pose unacceptable
environmental threats and losses).
Unions, “Stop Morrison's Attack on Working People and Our Unions”, accessible at
https://www.australianunions.org.au/stop_ei
558 See Nicola Paris, “Suppression of the Right to Protest” in “Green Agenda”, 29 April 2019, Op. Cit
559 Scott Morrison, quoted on video in Nour Haydar, “Scott Morrison slams environmental groups
‘targeting’ businesses with selfish secondary boycotts”, ABC News, 1 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-01/scott-morrison-environmental-groups-targeting-
businesses-boycott/11660698
424
Reduction of human rights
25) Threats and active efforts to override state legislation protecting
human rights and pass new laws permitting discrimination on
the grounds of religion560 – the “Religious Discrimination Bill
2019” was marketed as legislation to “outlaw religious
discrimination” whereas in reality it was legislation to legalise
discrimination by religious groups, granting them rights no other
group has in Australia. This legislation represents one of the
most socially divisive breaches of human rights we have seen in
our country, a statute which if passed will take us back to the
dark ages in terms of tribalism.
26) Legislative attempts (which nevertheless failed) to
amend/repeal Sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination
Act in order to erode legal protections of racially diverse groups
from hate speech – attempts made despite the fact that a
Parliamentary Joint Inquiry into Freedom of Speech “found no
consensus for making any changes to the wording of either
clauses 18C or 18D which have worked effectively for more than
20 years”561.
27) Extra legislative attempts, via the introduction in 2019 of the
Religious Discrimination Bill, to override protections for all
Australians from racial hatred that are currently provided under
Sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act. Drafts of
the Religious Discrimination Bill released in 2019 attempt to
make legal what is illegal under Section 18C of the Racial
Discrimination Act if statements that offend, insult or humiliate
560 Sarah Martin and Paul Karp, “Religious discrimination bill: Coalition accused of creating a ‘Trojan
horse for hate’”, The Guardian, 29 August 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/aug/29/religious-discrimination-bill-coalition-accused-of-weakening-state-human-rights-
law
561 Colin Rubenstein, “The fight over section 18C and 18D should be put to bed”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 5 March 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-fight-over-section-18c-and-18d-should-
be-put-to-bed-20170305-guqxoh.html
425
people based on their race are made as expressions of religious
belief562.
28) Removal of the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven
for recipients of welfare and foisting of the onus of proof onto
those recipients in cases where Centrelink, without evidence,
has served them with notice of a debt for overpayments they
may or may not have received563 – all accompanied by a
stubborn refusal by Centrelink to account for its supposed legal
argument in favour of its ability to reverse the onus of
establishing a debt. The federal government eventually admitted
Robo-debt was unlawful after the Federal Court ruled in a test
case in late 2019 that a robot debt raised against welfare
recipient, Deanna Amato, had not been validly made and that
her tax returns had been illegally garnisheed by Centrelink564.
29) Removal of rights to a trial in open court and more, removal of
the right of the public to know that someone is being charged,
tried and convicted under national security laws – as occurred in
the case of a person dubbed “Witness J”, a defendant who was
tried, convicted, and sentenced to more than two years
562 Paul Karp, “Religious discrimination bill could legalise race hate speech, Law Council warns”: “The
expression of religious beliefs that offend, insult or humiliate people based on their race could be
effectively legalised by the Coalition’s religious discrimination bill, the Law Council of Australia has
warned. On Wednesday the Law Council president Arthur Moses noted that the bill, released last
week by attorney general Christian Porter, contains a “narrower” protection for racial discrimination
than exists under current commonwealth law in the notorious section 18C of the Racial Discrimination
Act.”, The Guardian, 4 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/sep/04/religious-discrimination-bill-could-legalise-race-
hate-speech-law-council-warns
563 Australian Public Law, “Robo-Debt Illegality: A Failure of Rule of Law Protections”, 30 April 2018:
“Despite bald ‘claims’ of some basis, Centrelink has neither exposed its reasoning publicly (such as to
the Ombudsman and Parliamentary Committees), nor mounted contradictory argument before the
Administrative Appeals Tribunal (‘AAT’), nor appealed against the (many) legal invalidations of debts
by the first tier of the AAT when it has an absolute right to go straight to the second tier if it believes
the reasoning is incorrect. Because first tier AAT (‘AAT1’) decisions are not made public (unlike AAT2),
might it be that the emperor fears being seen in public?” Accessible at
https://auspublaw.org/2018/04/robo-debt-illegality/
564 Paul Karp, “Government admits robodebt was unlawful as it settles legal challenge”, The Guardian,
27 November 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/nov/27/government-admits-robodebt-was-unlawful-as-it-settles-legal-challenge
426
imprisonment on the basis of charges which “are not allowed to
be disclosed”. Witness J’s trial and imprisonment only became
known by accident565. A trial being conducted in a closed court
is not entirely disturbing if national security is involved, but
secrecy that a trial is being conducted is a serious concern, laying
open the possibility that any of us could be abducted or
“disappeared” and imprisoned without anyone knowing what
happened to us and that this could happen without the
government ever having to account for its actions or our
whereabouts.
30) Anti-terrorism laws which significantly erode the rights of
Australians without sufficient accountability and safeguards566
being in place to prevent abuse of the extra powers granted
under these laws – including over 70 pieces of legislation567 since
2002, several of which introduce or increase:
o powers of police to hold people in police custody without
charge,
o powers of surveillance and interrogation of non-suspects,
o powers of monitoring non-suspects’ computers,
o powers of coercion in testimony,
o secret warrants and secret evidence,
o warrantless search powers for persons and homes,
565 Andrew Probyn, “’The quiet person you pass on the street’: Secret prisoner Witness J revealed”:
“What can be gleaned publicly about Witness J came almost by accident, when he took action in the
ACT courts to complain about his treatment and what he claimed was a breach of his human rights.
The action failed, at his own considerable cost, but it did at least drag Witness J's fate from the darkest
shadows into the half-light.”, ABC News, 5 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-05/witness-j-revealed-secret-trial/11764676
566 See Commonwealth of Australia, “Council of Australian Governments Review of Counter-Terrorism
Legislation”, 2013, pages xiii, 45 and 54: This review recommended the need for additional safeguards
against abuse by government. Recommendations were also made by a Senate committee in 2005 to
increase safeguards but not all of these were accepted by the government. Accessible at
https://www.ag.gov.au/Consultations/Documents/COAGCTReview/Final%20Report.PDF
567 Tony Walker, Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University, “Press freedom must be enshrined in
a charter of rights”, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 2019, Op. Cit. See also Nick Evershed and
Michael Safi, “All of Australia's national security changes since 9/11 in a timeline”, The Guardian, 19
October 2015, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-
interactive/2015/oct/19/all-of-australias-national-security-changes-since-911-in-a-timeline
427
o immunity from civil and criminal prosecution for ASIO
officers in covert “special intelligence operations” (except in
cases of torture, murder, and rape), and
o powers to jail journalists who inadvertently reveal ASIO
“special intelligence operations”.
The fate of Witness J proves these repressive laws are in full play
in Australia today.
31) Attempts to use the Australian Signals Directorate to spy on
Australians without a warrant and attempts to cover up such a
program and punish those who brought it to Australia’s
attention568.
32) The formation of a home affairs super ministry which, while it
may have achieved some efficiencies, has also “militarised” a
range of civil functions such as immigration, emergency
management, transport security, multicultural affairs, and
refugee detention and processing by incorporating these with
security agencies including ASIO, the Australian Federal Police,
the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, AUSTRAC, a
Border Force, and various counter-terrorism and intelligence
functions. One result of this is to remove checks and balances in
approvals for who is allowed to come to Australia and who is not,
all of which powers are now vested in the one minister, and one
who by 2020 had a very dubious track record of inconsistency in
approvals for certain people while deporting and detaining
others569.
33) Effective withdrawal from, or active violation of human rights
conventions, to which we have been a signatory for decades570
568 Amy Remeikis, “Police raid on Annika Smethurst shows surveillance exposé hit a nerve”. The
Guardian, 5 June 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/jun/05/police-raid-on-annika-smethurst-shows-surveillance-expose-hit-a-nerve
569 The Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton has a record of intervening to allow two au pairs who
were employees of his friends to stay in Australia contrary to a deportation order, but refusing to
overturn deportation orders for many children of refugees and other people born in Australia.
570 Ben Doherty, “Report on Australia's human rights record to be scrutinised by UN committee”, The
Guardian, 16 October 2017, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2017/oct/16/report-on-australias-human-rights-record-to-be-scrutinised-by-un-committee
428
(including violation of the rights of refugees, children and
Indigenous Australians in being locked up without charge),
abuses of international law571, and a diminution of commitment
to collaboration with other nations and the United Nations on
global issues such as climate change572.
34) Repeal of the only decent laws made by Australia in relation to
refugee rights in the 21st century – namely the Medevac
legislation which was passed by the federal Parliament in late
2018 and repealed in late 2019 by the Morrison government for
absolutely no purpose and benefit other than to impose further
pain on refugees we have illegally detained for years.
35) Attempted subversion of the nation’s human rights agencies –
particularly Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs in
retaliation by the Liberal National Party government for her
decision to conduct an inquiry into children in immigration
detention573.
36) Last but not least, deportation of Indigenous Australians, and
others who are not indigenous but who have been living in
Australia since childhood and may even have served in our
armed forces, if they have committed an offence punishable by
two or more years’ imprisonment but for one reason or another
cannot prove their citizenship574. Offences for which these
571 Ben Doherty, “UN body condemns Australia for illegal detention of asylum seekers and refugees”,
The Guardian, 8 July 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/08/un-body-
condemns-australia-for-illegal-detention-of-asylum-seekers-and-refugees
572 Katharine Murphy and Sarah Martin, “Scott Morrison points finger at UN for pursuing ‘negative
globalism’”, The Guardian, 14 October 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/oct/14/scott-morrison-points-finger-at-un-for-pursuing-negative-globalism
573 Michael Gordon, “Lauded and vilified: Gillian Triggs, Australian Human Rights Commission
president” Sydney Morning Herald, 17 June 2017, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/lauded-and-vilified-gillian-triggs-australian-human-rights-
commission-president-20170616-gwsk3b.html
574 Helen Davidson, “Government attempting to deport Indigenous man to New Zealand”, The
Guardian, 17 February 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/feb/17/government-attempting-to-deport-indigenous-man-to-new-zealand and Helen
Davidson, “High court to rule on whether Indigenous people can be deported from Australia”, The
Guardian. 8 May 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/may/08/high-court-to-
rule-on-whether-indigenous-people-can-be-deported-from-australia
429
people are being deported are not national security offences.
Sometimes those threatened with detention and deportation
have not been charged with a crime575. Rendering any of these
people stateless must be the most unnecessary of the crimes
against humanity committed by Australia in the 21st century.
Regrettably, this is not an exhaustive list; it is just some of the most
obvious parts of a big authoritarian crack-down. And over twenty years the
list just kept getting longer – so much so that by 2020 some Australians
(mainly lawyers) started questioning whether we are still living in a
democracy, let alone a liberal one576. By 2020 we had reached what we can
only hope turns out to be the low point – a point where we had a national
leader willing to remove the rights to free speech of anyone who was even
vaguely progressive. We had a leader who would characterise progressivism
as an Orwellian “newspeak type term”577 masking oppression. In Mr
Morrison’s new lexicon, progressivism was defined as oppression of
otherwise free-thinking “quiet Australians” who by definition would have
absolutely nothing in common with more outspoken progressives either in
their concern for the planet, their family security, their general wellbeing or
their children: “Progressivism … at its heart would deny the liberties of
Australians”578 said Scott Morrison in November 2019. “Progressives … want
to tell Australians what you can say, what you can think and tax you more for
the privilege of all of those instructions”. Progressivism is “… apocalyptic in
tone, it brooks no compromise, it’s all or nothing. Alternative views are not
permitted.” In context, what Mr Morrison really meant was that progressives
575 Nick O’Malley, “'No intention of deporting them': Nancy Bird-Walton's niece still in hiding, despite
MP's reassurance”, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 2018, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/no-intention-of-deporting-them-nancy-bird-walton-s-niece-still-in-
hiding-despite-mp-s-reassurance-20181102-p50dmp.html
576 Sydney Criminal Lawyers, “Nothing to Hide but Everything to Fear – Part 2 of our special series on
the new metadata laws”, 22 March 2015, accessible at
https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/nothing-to-hide-but-everything-to-fear-part-2-of-
our-special-series-on-the-new-metadata-laws/ and at “The Death of Australia’s Liberal Democracy”, 9
April 2016, accessible at https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/the-death-of-australias-
liberal-democracy/
577 Scott Morrison, quoted by Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison threatens crackdown on protesters who
would ‘deny liberty’”, The Guardian, 1 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/01/scott-morrison-threatens-crackdown-on-
secondary-boycotts-of-mining-companies
578 Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison threatens crackdown on protesters who would ‘deny liberty’”, Ibid.
430
want to oppress banks and big business. Given all that, we might have to
conclude that those infernal progressives are pretty nasty people, and we
should be afraid.
Of course, in Orwell’s novel the oppression Mr Morrison fears so much
was perpetrated not by those who might have dared to protest that they
wanted a better world but by those who would stop change. In Nineteen
Eighty-Four, extreme invisible authoritarians were the oppressors – not those
who were out in public being clear about their fairly simple requests for a
better life – like a tolerable climate, a better and more affordable education
system, a fully accessible public health system, or better transport. The
“progressives” of 2020 who are out campaigning for a better quality of life in
every western democracy are not way-out radical extremists making way-out
radical unreasonable requests. However, in Scott Morrison’s own attempted
(albeit not very convincing) newspeak (which is really double-speak579), they
are the height of an extremism that “quiet Australians” ostensibly don’t want
and that should be suppressed at every turn. Clearly rattled, the Prime
Minister’s attack was an unsuccessful effort to redefine terms such as
“progressivism”, and dispense with annoying protesters in the process.
Contrary to the purpose of protecting the liberty of all Australians, it could
only have the function of setting the scene for further suppression of the free
speech that is central to the effective operation of any democracy (liberal or
illiberal).
In 2019, Australia found itself with an autocratic national leader who saw
neither problem nor contradiction in suggesting that protesters who, in his
view, seek to “deny liberty”580 should have their liberty denied, even though
they may merely be exercising their own liberty to choose where they prefer
to invest their own money or where they prefer to shop581. He also saw no
departure from the neoliberal worship of free markets in his own calls to
squash the exercise of customer power in free markets. And he saw no
problem or contradiction in promoting himself as the staunch defender of
rights of free speech by means of threatening to remove those rights for those
579 See Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublespeak
580 Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison threatens crackdown on protesters who would ‘deny liberty’”, Ibid.
581 This particular outburst of anger at progressives who ostensibly “deny liberty” arose in relation to
the activities of a group called Market Forces (and similar) who according to the government are in
the habit of pressuring people to boycott companies that behave unethically or in an environmentally
damaging way.
431
who simply do not see things his way. At the start of his elected term of office
in May 2019, Scott Morrison called on all Australians to “disagree better”. But
in only months he had morphed into heavy handed bullying to stop
Australians disagreeing with him. “Be quiet”, he told both business leaders
and Australians in general. And if you won’t be quiet, it may well be jail for
you. Overreach was unrestrained.
All of this probably came to a head by late 2019 because over 300,000
normally quiet, ordinary Australians (one of the highest per capita turnouts in
the world) had the temerity to come out in support of the school children’s
climate strikes in September 2019 (while Scott Morrison was refusing to
attend United Nations climate forums), and because normally quiet ordinary
Australians also had the temerity to prefer putting their money and
superannuation into ethical and environmentally sound investments instead
of financially and environmentally unsustainable investments like the Adani
coal mine. Of course, Scott Morrison’s idea of what is permissible in our liberal
democracy and what is not has never been very “liberal” (in the small “L”
sense of the word). And tolerance is not something he has ever called for – at
least not for very long582. Even so, the descent from tolerant statesman on
election night in May 2019 to “sinister” and “threatening”583 abuser of rights
by Christmas was swift and by Advent there was no “smoulder” about his
anger; there was a newly unguarded venom584. The move from democracy to
582 See David Crowe, “Liberties for the chosen ones: what and who do Morrison’s Liberals stand for?”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 8 November 2019: “Scott Morrison spoke as a champion of liberty nine days
ago when he likened personal freedom to a lighthouse that would guide his government in rough seas.
Morrison used a lecture in honour of Tom Hughes, a Liberal who fought for freedom in the air over
Normandy, to talk of the rule of law, democratic principles, tolerance, respect and the sovereignty of
the people. …Two days later, Morrison made a very different speech. This time he spoke about
freedoms run wild – about protesters who tried to stop coal mines and about his plan for new laws to
stop boycotts. … The freedoms lauded one day were forgotten the next. There was no place for liberty
if it meant free speech and the right to galvanise consumer power against the government’s favoured
industry.” Accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/liberties-for-the-chosen-ones-what-
and-who-do-morrison-s-liberals-stand-for-20191107-p5389j.html
583 Katharine Murphy, “As he rails against activism, Scott Morrison is turning a bit sinister, a bit
threatening”, The Guardian, 1 November 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/nov/01/as-he-rails-against-activism-morrison-turns-a-bit-sinister-a-little-bit-
threatening?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
584 See footage of Mr Morrison delivering a speech to the Queensland Minerals Council, Nour Haydar,
“Scott Morrison slams environmental groups ‘targeting’ businesses with ‘selfish’ secondary boycotts”,
ABC News, 1 November 2019, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-01/scott-
morrison-environmental-groups-targeting-businesses-boycott/11660698
432
autocracy, which had been quietly building up in the background, was finally
openly underway. It was slow in coming, and in coming out. But after twenty
years of quiet changes to the law, which gradually changed Australia from a
free, open society to a much more restricted democracy, it seemed as if the
conservative government in place at the end of 2019 was not about to take a
backward step on the road to a society where everything but big business and
the banks and parliamentarians themselves would henceforth be subject to
oppression for dissent, where free speech would be the preserve of the
approved religious, and where scrutiny of the government itself would be
close to impossible. Compared to what Australia’s democracy must have
looked like to, say, those who had attended the Constitutional Convention
just before the turn of the century, our democracy in 2019 must be classed as
remarkably weakened. The consequences of that weakening – for our future
– are the subject of the next section.
What happens in a weakened democracy?
When a nation tries to use its democracy to fight back against the above sort
of authoritarianism and finds that democracy already too weakened for the
purpose, people naturally lose trust in democracy itself, which sets in place a
spiral of decline towards autocracy. At least that is what seems to be
happening in Australia. A loss of trust in democracy doesn’t just happen
because things go badly in an economy and because inequality rises. We have
had things go badly in our economy before and it hasn’t led to this sort of
collapse of confidence in democracy itself. Although economic misery and
inequality certainly feed the problem of declining trust, they are not so much
causal as they are symptomatic of at least two prior breakdowns:
1. a prior failure to appreciate the value of participation in democracy,
and
2. a failure to check and rebuff attacks on democracy and freedoms
much sooner than we have been doing since the turn of the century.
Although it might not always happen this way, a loss of trust in our democratic
institutions does happen when we lose appreciation of them and we take
action too late to protect them. Then we are likely to find that just when we
need them – to help us navigate our way out of big socioeconomic and
433
environmental problems – they are too weak to be useful to those who still
have enough energy to campaign for reform. “One vote, one value” is no
more. Imbalances in power have weakened democracy to breaking point.
In 2019, the Edelman Trust Barometer showed that in this state of
weakened democracy many of us had turned to our own individual employers
(note: this means “my employer”, as opposed to “business” or “NGOs”) as the
only remaining identifiable entity outside the home that might be worthy of
trust. We had started trying to form relationships to get things done despite
government, not with it (and some community spirited businesses started
doing the same). Along with at least 25 other countries we were so
disillusioned with our institutions that many of us went out scouting for any
relationship that might be vaguely reliable. As Richard Edelman observed, by
2019 trust had “gone local” – meaning there was almost no trust left in
traditional institutions at all. By then, 77% of Australians585 were apparently
only prepared to trust people who were near to them, who they could eyeball.
As Richard Edelman put it:
The story of trust in 2019 is a very important change in the landscape
of trust. Trust used to be conveyed from top down, vertically. Then
about 10 years ago it started to move from peer to peer, horizontally
through social platforms. Now people only trust that which is very close
to them, very local. This year trust has moved to the employer. My
employer is actually at 75% trust globally, a phenomenon born of lack
of belief in other institutions at a time when there is deep dissatisfaction
with the system and there are deep fears about loss of jobs to
automation or to globalisation. A cry for help in a way, because I can
actually trust that which is close to me, where I can look in the eyes of
my employer. And at the same time, we see an incredible rise in interest
in news and engagement with mainstream media. People actually
deeply want to be informed – a 22-point jump, we’ve never seen
something like that.
585 Source: “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer”, Australian results, 7 February 2019: “Despite a lack of
faith in the system, there is one relationship that remains strong: “my employer”. In 16-markets, trust
in my employer has increased from last year. In Australia, 77% of respondents trust “my employer”,
significantly more than NGOs (56%), business (52%) and government (42%). Employers that work to
build trust will be rewarded; Australian employees who have trust in their employer demonstrate
greater advocacy (80%), loyalty (71%), engagement (69%) and commitment (87%). Accessible at
https://www.edelman.com.au/research/trust-barometer-2019
434
There is a new contract between employer and employee. I want to
work for a company with values, that has a purpose, that is answering
societal needs. Second, I want to be informed, I want to be empowered.
I want to be able to speak up, I want to feel as if I’m heard. Third, I want
my CEO to speak up for me, to actually get into the fray and speak up
about diversity or sustainability. And lastly, I want my company to do
something in my headquarters city. I want better education, better
roads. It’s no longer just that I have a job, but I am part of a movement,
part of a mission to improve the world.586
There is something pivotal that may be observed here, which from the
planner’s perspective is quite convenient if we are sitting at the start of a
thirty year planning period where we might hope to see confidence restored
in our democratic institutions by 2050 (or sooner, for those of us who are ever
the optimists). This is our situation in 2020:
a) After 20 years of attenuation of our rights and freedoms, Australians
seem to be placing any modicum that is left of their trust in the only
entity they suspect they might still be able to influence – their direct
employer.
and
b) Some employers seem to be starting to respond positively to that by
championing the social and environmental values of their employees
(for instance in the way we saw employers such as QANTAS advocate
for gay marriage in 2017 and the CEO of Atlassian advocate at the
United Nations for action to tackle climate change in 2019).
but
c) Australia has found itself with a hard-line authoritarian prime
minister and government with a preference for the exact opposite
approach from that preferred by the workers and employers cited in
the Edelman survey.
Having presided with his colleagues and party predecessors over a continuous
erosion of our democratic rights and freedoms, the like of which we have
586Richard Edelman, “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer: Trust at Work”, 21 January 2019, Video
accessible on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=0e3dCn8JSkw
435
never seen in Australia (excepting, respectfully, the near total destruction of
rights suffered by our Indigenes since colonisation), Scott Morrison
approached the role of Prime Minister in 2019 by exclusively praising those
Australians who remain quiet and docile in the face of their loss of freedoms
and in the face of their near total loss of influence in their democracy. At the
same time, he was vilifying those who are still active in asserting rights and
freedoms – vilifying them as “anarchists”, “radicals”, “indulgent and selfish”
fringe dwelling extremists587. He was also autocratically ruling out enshrining
an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the Constitution.
Scott Morrison prefers quiet over voices. In his preferred power
arrangement, the voices of those who, as Richard Edelman observed, newly
want their CEOs “to actually get into the fray and speak up about diversity or
sustainability, … better education [and] better roads”, must be silenced. The
CEOs themselves must be silenced. Suddenly mainstream workers and
professionals and their bosses have no credibility, no right to voice
professional views (regardless of how mainstream their concerns might be)
and especially no right to join together to bring about a better Australia. In
this power arrangement, it seems it is critical to maintain divisions between
Australians.
On election night 2019, Scott Morrison vowed to work “every day” on the
policies that:
most importantly, most importantly, will keep Australians together.588
But Australians were not together on election night; they were split hard into
camps that could not see things from each other’s point of view, in the main
because the type of leadership and election campaigns they had been
subjected to had not led them to think about any common interest; they had
been driven instead to think only about their individual prosperity and
security and to be suspicious of anyone with different views. For almost 20
years, they had been subjected to divisive strategies designed specifically to
make them afraid of each other, the most recent instance being the marriage
equality plebiscite in 2017. So by election night 2019, the idea of “keeping”
Australians “together” was a moot point – a blind to cover the fact that we
587Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison threatens crackdown on protesters who would ‘deny liberty’”, Op. Cit.
588Scott Morrison, election victory speech, 18 May 2019, YouTube, accessible at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=GoNgXtvkUtk&feature=emb_logo
436
had been finally and successfully riven by a shallow and insincere “jobs and
growth” campaign in which city dwelling progressives – workers themselves –
were made to face off with (not identify with) their country counterparts
working in more threatened industries. It was ordinary Australian against
ordinary Australian – vaguely (or perhaps not so vaguely) evocative of “The
Hunger Games”. Keeping us together was never the objective.
But even if we had been a nation acting together on election night 2019,
not a word about togetherness escaped Mr Morrison’s lips for the rest of the
year. On the contrary, having vanquished Labor, he set about dividing the
country yet again and focussing not on governing for all, as any elected
government should, but on vanquishing the real enemy – the progressive
voter. He intensified the targeting of progressives, merely for their
progressiveness. He resumed the process of stripping liberalism from our
democracy. At no time did the importance of “keeping Australians together”
creep back into Mr Morrison’s statements until the south-east of Australia
ignited in flames in unprecedented devastating bushfires for months in the
Summer of 2019/2020. Then, and only then, in January 2020, when he needed
to hastily deflect blame for the fires away from himself – his one-man
government – did Scott Morrison resume his speech on togetherness or, as
he put it, “a need for the community to want to come together”589. There was
a subtle shift here, as though leadership no longer had a role in policies that
“will keep Australians together”, as he preferred to celebrate on election
night. If in January 2020, Australians were not together, it certainly wasn’t
Scott Morrison’s fault, apparently.
Back in 2019 though, the war against progressives trailed on – in both
sides of politics. In their bewilderment about why Australians had rejected
589 See Alexandra Smith, David Crowe and Chris Barrett, “State Liberals vent anger at 'disconnected'
Morrison over bushfires”. Video within this article records Scott Morrison saying: “Look, there’s been
a lot of blame being thrown around. And now is the time to focus on the response that is being made.
Plenty of people have blamed me. People have blamed the Greens. People have blamed – who
knows? Honestly blame doesn’t help anybody at this time. And over-analysis of those things I think is
not a productive exercise. The appropriate exercise at the moment is coming together. … That’s the
other piece of feedback that I get in response to a lot of the noise and blame and commentary and
analysis on particular issues that are a long way from the main issue which we need to focus on.
There’s a frustration in elements of the community that too much attention is being placed on that at
the moment and there is a need for the community to want to come together.”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 5 January 2020, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/scott-morrison-starts-bushfire-
repair-with-states-after-weekend-of-confusion-20200105-p53p0s.html
437
what was probably the most progressive agenda on offer from the Labor Party
in 25 years, even some Labor Party members started blaming progressives;
the subtle suggestion being that unless the Labor Party folds on some
progressive policy lines such as “tax and spend” and emissions reduction
targets, they will not win in future elections590:
• Progressives – get back in your box please, said Labor, while we listen
to swinging blue collar voters who hate being talked down to by
politically correct progressives and who refused to vote Labor as a
result!
• Progressives – go easy on the climate change stuff and stop shutting
down people who want high paying jobs in coal mining!
• Progressives – hang back on multiculturalism, immigration and
decency for refugees and stop shutting down people who feel their
job is threatened by immigration!
Both sides of politics took aim (albeit in quite different ways and to differing
degrees) at progressives or progressive policies for getting in the way of their
coming to power or maintaining power. The weight of all those “inconvenient
truths” coming out of the mouths of progressives just got too heavy for quite
a few politicians. All of this made progressives into the enemy. The
progressives became the outcasts, although the truth is that progressives
were just as much the victims of the whole debacle as everyone else. Nobody,
except the Morrison government itself, got anything they wanted out of the
2019 election. Those who wanted jobs and growth didn’t get either. Those
who wanted climate change addressed got even less. And those who didn’t
want “tax and spend” had occasion to regret what they had wished for when
the government subsequently refused to spend to save the economy.
Of course, the Labor Party’s election loss in 2019 made it a matter of life
and death for them to ask themselves:
590For example, Joel Fitzgibbon of the ALP called for the ALP to settle on a less ambitious climate plan
and more support for coal mining. Jade Macmillan, “Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon wants his
party to adopt Coalition’s climate policies”, ABC News, 9 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-09/joel-fitzgibbons-a-less-ambitious-labor-climate-
plan/11585176
438
If politics is changing, who do we seek to represent in Parliament? What
are we fighting for on their behalf? And how should we talk with them
about their lives in this new era?591
This question was asked by Labor front bencher, Claire O’Neill, some six
months after the election defeat, in the context of a speech about how
progressive parties had been suffering defeats world-wide. Certainly, after
what has been called Labor’s “Hindenburg”, the party needed some time to
decide what it is they stood for and who they wanted to represent. After all,
they had woken up on the morning after the election not to a nation acting
together but to an awareness of a whole new set of “fault lines” between
Australians, fault lines they had no idea how to traverse. As Claire O’Neill
observed:
When I look at our community, I do not see Right and Left as the defining
political division. I see a bunch of new fault lines emerging which are
increasingly important at the ballot box. I see a fault line between the
winners and losers in a digital economy which provides vastly more
economic rewards to people who live in our cities. I see a fault line
dividing Australians who want the community to look more like it did in
the past, and those who love and value change. A fault line dividing
people who are worried about global interdependence, and those who
see opportunity for global influence. A fault line between those who
relish economic change and those who resist it. Between young people
who feel locked out of a life enjoyed by older generations, and those
who think that kids have never had it better. Between open and closed,
authoritarian and decentralised, the elites and the masses.592
This is what a weakened democracy looks like – a fractured community, or
what in our case might be more accurately described as an atomised one,
since there are so many new divisions between us, divisions that the powers
that be probably hope will keep us apart and enable them to control the
agenda more easily. And for some time in 2019 the nation staggered on,
591 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government Series, 31 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.clareoneil.com/media/speeches/john-curtin-research-centre-pathways-to-government/
592
Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government Series, Ibid.
439
seemingly unsure about whether it had any appetite for change left. In the
process of attempting to regroup, the Labor Party faithful actually asked
themselves “if we share the fight for social progress”593. They asked
themselves whether they still wanted to be the party of progress. This is
something that the Labor Party had never been seen to ask itself before, but
in 2019 they did not take it as a given that they would continue to be the party
of progress. In the blinding flash of their loss, they blinked – for quite a few
months, although with the passage of time for recovery of their eyesight it
might be expected that the Australian Labor Party will present a newly
branded, simpler, progressive policy platform for the federal election in 2022.
After all, how else might they be able to differentiate themselves?
The question of whether Labor wanted to carry on with the fight for social
progress might be deemed a healthy one after what they characterised as
“gut wrenching defeat”; but it is also an indication of how much of a challenge
progressivism had become to those seeking power in Australia’s democracy.
Progressivism was being viewed as a threat not just to conservatives in power
but to the attainment of power by the political Left. It was not being looked
at simply as one expression of the opportunities that aspirational voters might
be seeking – aspirations for which there should be room in any healthy
democracy. It was viewed more as a barrier to power, as though to attain
power at all any political party must submit to or at least feign conservatism
and aversion to change. In their “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election
Campaign”, released in November 2019, authors Jay Weatherill and Dr Craig
Emerson stated that:
Labor should not abandon its progressive values and principles.594
The fact that they had to say this at all is indication enough of the unhealthy
place we had arrived at in Australia’s democracy. Democracies are supposed
to be used to facilitate change that is in the national interest in a manner
which balances the diverse interests of all parties. But by 2019 Australia had
managed somehow to develop a democratic arrangement geared towards
593 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government Series, Ibid.
594 Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, November
2019, page 17, accessible at https://alp.org.au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review-2019.pdf
440
rejecting any change at all. Little wonder many young people simply didn’t
bother to vote.
*****
When I first started writing this book, I did not foresee that I would be painting
this rather depressing picture of our democracy. The research just led me
there. As the research piled up, I began to feel I had woken up in a country I
didn’t recognise, like some kind of latter day Rip Van Winkle. Whether the
same research would lead someone else to an opposite view – that all our
post war liberties and freedoms could still be taken for granted – well, I think
that would be unlikely. They would have to find evidence of a liberating
program of reforms offsetting the overwhelmingly oppressive legislative
program that has been imposed. And that evidence simply isn’t there. Outside
the eventual overwhelming success of the marriage equality plebiscite in 2017
– a progressive and hugely popular measure obstructed for years by the
conservative right – I can’t think of another enduring liberating reform to
offset the cavalcade of diminished human rights for Australians since 2000. I
acknowledge though that, trust barometers and survey results
notwithstanding, we are in the realm of speculation here about a nation’s
psyche and mood at a point in time; and that even if my description of that
disposition resonates with other Australians, the mood can change quickly. If
my description of the condition of our democracy as at the end of 2019, and
our relationship with it, is accurate, then as I have already remarked, we can
only hope it is the low point.
Having said that, there is something really interesting going on here as a
starting point for a thirty year plan for governance in Australia – one in which
democracy can function more effectively and less divisively. In what I have
called a pivotal moment, it seems to me there is a glimmer of hope – hope
that we can reconvene as a nation and will not always be marked by division.
I have derived this glimmer, oddly enough, because of the way we have been
able to watch how the Australian Labor Party – a party which has always
identified itself as progressive – has chosen to drag itself through a bruising
process of reviewing the defeat of its most progressive offering in more than
twenty years, and to make the results of that review transparent. This is new.
The value that may be derived for our democracy from the review is not yet
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fully understood; but as a minimum there is a major benefit on offer for
Australia, if only because in mounting the review the Labor Party has begun
to interrogate the effect of politically motivated divisiveness on our capacity
to act together as a nation.
This is not to say that any particular political party in Australia has a
greater insight than another into how to bring a nation together. Frankly, after
long years of working closely with politicians of all persuasions, I would
confidently assert that none of them have that insight – none. They are simply
not made that way. They seek power by adversarial disciplines and the whole
idea of keeping a nation together is simply anathema to that adversarial
system. But this can change if politicians of good will want to recognise that it
is a problem and change it. It can also change because, fortunately, there is
still some energy in our democracy – it is not totally dead yet. It has lost a lot
of its “liberal” characteristics but there is a way to revive it, and to a point
where it may be stronger than ever. This may sound quixotic but in fact there
are some very practical things that can be done to strengthen the institutions
we seem to have lost faith in. They can be strengthened, no matter who is in
government, and strengthened to ensure that we can decide and navigate any
changes we want in our society and environment in a safe, secure, fair and
just process.
Watching the Labor Party’s post mortem on its 2019 election campaign is
highly instructive in this regard. They have found themselves in the same
dilemma as many progressive movements in western capitalist countries: a
dilemma which made them go so far as to ask if they still wish to be the party
of progress and change. This prompts questions for us all, questions such as:
Are we near the death of both progressivism and liberalism in our democracy?
Are we on the brink of waking up in an autocracy that neither progressive nor
conservative voters would support? As at the end of 2019, the Labor Party
was yet to agree on an answer to its part of the dilemma, the part about its
own continued existence as a progressive political party. The Labor Party can
be left to that. But the rest of us can engage with the bigger question of how
to strengthen our democracy to the point where it can unite the nation rather
than divide it – to a point where we can find the centre, together. The
following section travels through this question, hopefully, towards a practical
and positive answer.
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Gathering the strengths of democracy
The way we carry on with and watch politics in Australia today is weakening
our democracy. Our detachment, scepticism, disengagement and cynicism is
pulling social capital and collective intelligence out of our democratic system,
when we should be building and strengthening it. Disengagement is depleting
the system of all the inspiration that should be available from what is after all
a highly educated and comparatively wealthy society. There are amazing ideas
out there that are not being shared and included in plans for our future, and
while we continue to sit back and do little or nothing to organise this collective
intelligence, our democracy will not deliver for us.
As things stand in 2020, the community’s detachment, silence and
disengagement from politics suits conservative parties quite well. But it
frustrates progressive politicians quite a lot. Labor Party frontbencher, Tanya
Plibersek, has expressed this frustration on more than one occasion. In
December 2019 she stated:
The public arena we enter every day, so quick to descend into insult and
vitriol, compounds the feeling among ordinary citizens that getting
involved in politics is pointless – that the public sphere is a nasty place,
best avoided. Populists exploit this feeling, filling the vacuum with
simplistic solutions to complex problems. When these inevitably don’t
work, it only frustrates people more. It’s a vicious circle, reinforcing the
conviction that democracy is broken and that genuine improvement is
impossible. Everyone involved in Labor politics understands our urgent
mission to restore confidence in our party and in our movement. But
even more importantly, we need to dedicate ourselves to rebuilding
trust in democracy itself.595
In Ms Plibersek’s rendition of our current state everyone is frustrated, not
just politicians, and people are taking their frustration out on the system itself,
assuming that democracy no longer works for them and that it is not possible
to fix it. But Ms Plibersek went on to pose a solution:
595Tanya Plibersek, Shadow Minister for Education and Training, Australian Labor Party, “Closing
Address to the Chifley Research Centre Conference”, 8 December 2019, accessible at
http://www.tanyaplibersek.com/speech_closing_address_to_the_chifley_research_centre_conferenc
e_sydney_sunday_8_december_2019
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It’s not just participating that matters – it is how we participate. With
generosity, sincerity, kindness, determination and thoughtfulness –
matched by hard, methodical, practical work. We should aspire for
something better for ourselves and our children, but this doesn’t
require a dog-eat-dog mentality. Our aspiration can be for a better,
fairer country, where everyone does well. And we can find a way to get
there courteously and cooperatively. … As citizens, we need to teach
ourselves again how to talk, listen, and argue courteously. … We need
to take our democratic responsibilities seriously. And if you really
believe no one represents you, you should consider joining a party or
standing for office.
I don’t think I could have put all this better myself – except perhaps for the bit
about joining a political party. Not that there is anything at all wrong in
encouraging people who might want to do more for us and our children to
join a political party. But it isn’t quite the full solution to the problem of
disengagement. Politics is part of the problem with democracy, so fixing some
things that are wrong with the way politics itself is conducted will help us
improve the strength of our democracy. But something new and additional to
politics is necessary to really build the musculature back into our democratic
system. Not everyone is comfortable in mixing it with politicians, let alone
joining a party; but the involvement of a lot more of us in our democracy is
required if we are to strengthen it. This means we need forums additional to
politics where any of us can play a role. We will expect our democracy to do
some very heavy lifting for us in the next few decades if we are to deal with
the challenges we are currently facing. That strength can’t be based entirely
on improving the standard of politics and/or political candidates. Being blunt
– politicians do not constitute the entirety of the problem with democracy,
incredible though that may seem to those who look on every day with horror
at the shameless corruption, self-interest, ineffectiveness and inefficiency of
the whole parliamentary drama. We ourselves are part of the problem.
Two big changes are required in our democracy:
• one is about the way politicians behave and interact with us and
particularly the way they listen to us; and
• the other is about the way we speak to them.
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To understand this, we need to look in some depth at the way politicians are
trying to grapple with their part of the problem – because some progressive
politicians at least are trying quite hard to fix their part in the slow weakening
of our democracy. There is no evidence that conservative parties are making
any effort at all in this regard, but progressive parties are trying to step up,
albeit that they are faltering. One of the things that is hamstringing them is
their ingrained idea that democracy and politics are almost interchangeable
terms and that if someone who is talented and generous joins a political party
then this will mean disengagement is being overcome and democracy will be
strengthened. But mistaking politics and government for democracy is to cut
the strength of a democracy in half. More specifically, it is to reinforce top
down governance, which in turn will risk reinstating all the problems of
paternalism that we saw in Chapter 4. It will also act as a turn off to the many
among us who would prefer to participate in another way and whose
contribution can be far more effective if we work in ways that fit best with our
personal and professional capacities and preferences. Politics provides a
space for the exercise of a certain type of personal strength but there are
other types of social and professional strengths that we need to provide a
space for.
A democracy’s strength does not and cannot consist merely in ethical and
fair governance and the cleverness of a few political leaders. A democracy’s
strength and the strength of governance itself consists in participation. This
participation cannot be merely in politics. A democracy must run itself in a far
bigger forum than in a parliament or even in a public service bureaucracy if it
is to thrive. A democracy run only in the political sphere will provide a space
only for reactive participatory democracy and sectional interest (or at worst,
self-interest). For it to be capable of the heavy lifting we need in the 21st
century, our governance system will need to be capable of what I will call
proactive participatory democracy and an intense focus on the national
interest. This will require us to establish both a better space of dialogue in our
parliaments and a space for dialogue for the rest of us – an agora as it were,
with a conduit for clear communication of well-considered ideas between
parliaments, governments and public advisers on one hand and us on the
other hand. This is a completely different way of doing things in our
democracy. It does not mean a complete reversal of power, with bottom up
ruling top down for a change. This isn’t likely anyway. But what it does mean
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is a shift towards partnership with power more intelligently spread and
tapped. To establish this sort of partnership change is needed in the behaviour
of both politicians and people and the way they relate to and respect each
other.
In the next two sections I will look at some of the things politicians might
change in the way they relate to us. These sections are about the first of the
two big changes I have just listed above – i.e., they are about the way
politicians behave and interact with us and particularly the way they listen to
us. What we might do to reciprocate – the second change – is the subject of
the last section of this chapter, which I have called “Communities leaning to
speak”. Chapters 9 and 10 and Part 3 will provide a framework in which
politicians (who might learn to listen better) and people (who might learn to
speak more clearly about what we want in our lives) can communicate more
effectively with each other, with the ultimate aim of forming the above
mentioned partnership within a proactive participatory democracy.
Wherever the following discussion focusses on what politicians might
change, I will be discussing how progressive politicians (rather than
conservative politicians) are trying to grapple with their part in the decline of
democracy and how they are trying to figure out what to do about it. I would
focus on what conservative politicians are doing if they were actually doing
anything. But they are not. As I have said, the current melee suits them just
fine. We can’t learn anything about strengthening our democracy from
today’s conservatives because all the examples of their engagement with our
democracy are only about weakening it. That leaves us with the progressives,
mainly in the Labor Party, because as I said above, they are going through this
trial in open view of the public. There is much to be learned from their
candour and generosity in this regard – much to be learned about how
adjustments can be made to their participation in the democratic process that
will make any other adjustments we might also make in our own participation
far more effective in strengthening our democracy.
Although it is probably a spoiler, I am inclined to provide a heads-up
about the next section – which is that if you are not inspired by politics or you
are bored outright by it, you might not find this next section interesting and
may wish to skip to the section on “Leaders learning to listen”. Aggravation
with politics and politicians is easily understood because politics in Australia
is not working well, so it will be understandable if readers would prefer to
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move on to later sections that are more focussed on what communities might
do to improve our democracy. Having said that, politics is not going to go away
and it will remain a pervasive influence. That being so, fixing the damaging
things politicians are doing is important and worthy of some detailed
attention. This will not be confined to getting politicians to behave better. It
will involve fixing or at least improving some things about the relationship
between politicians and voters. If you are interested in the way ordinary
Australians relate to politicians and how politicians relate to voters, and what
effect that might be having on our democracy, then the next section might
provide some insight into:
• how 21st century Australian politicians think,
• how they struggle to understand us,
• how they are used to framing the messages that they assume will win
us over and vanquish the opposition,
• how they have neither an aptitude for nor appreciation of planning,
• what isn’t working for them or us, and most importantly
• what could be adjusted in the way they relate to us.
The insight provided here is derived from my thirty years of experience as a
senior public servant, working with politicians of all persuasions in delivery of
public benefit and policy. The point is to shed light on what needs to be
changed in the way politicians and voters relate to each other to bring us
together rather than split us up. This is and will always be very hard work for
politicians. It will be a very difficult shift for them, particularly the best of
them. But if we understand a little better how politics has worked for them
during the 20th century and how it works for them now, we will be able to help
them lead the nation in the 21st century, far better than they are leading it
now.
How are politicians participating in our democracy and how might this
be improved?
When, after the 2019 election loss, the Australian Labor Party attempted to
deal with the question of whether they should continue to “share the fight for
social progress”, they answered in the affirmative, albeit tentatively. While
the sting of defeat was still raw, they hovered cautiously around the task of
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how to manage the burgeoning multiplicity of conflicting constituencies. But
even as Labor hesitated about exactly what they might be “fighting for on
[our] behalf”596, they nevertheless, by instinct, took the question straight to
the next step by stating:
If we share the fight for social progress, we need to take people with
us.597
This need to take Australians with them was immediately obvious but it
has to be observed that they were confused or even clueless as to how, and
they floundered around quite a bit looking for an answer to the question of
how to use democracy to “take a nation with you” if you are a progressive
political party grappling with an atomised community in 2019. As an elector,
there is an equally important question of how democracy can be used to bring
a divided nation back together if you are not a politician. But let’s look at it
from the political party’s perspective first, to see what pointers that might
provide for those of us wishing to deal with the bigger question of regrouping
as a united nation.
In Australia today politicians of all persuasions use adversarial techniques
to win power in our two-party-preferred system. This hasn’t changed since
the 20th century. On the face of it, both sides of politics claim in their
campaigning that their objective is to lead Australia as a unified nation, and
to lead us to a place to which they presume we all aspire. In any election, that
place always ends up being loosely imagined as prosperity. Apparently, this is
typically Australian. According to the Scanlon Foundation’s annual Index of
Social Cohesion, we have always put the economy at the top of our list of the
most important problems facing our country598 and we take this concern to
every election as the top of mind matter. Recognising that, one side of politics
habitually uses conservative policies to promise prosperity, and the other side
claims that same outcome can only come from progressive policies.
596 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government Series, Op. Cit.
597 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government, Ibid.
598 Source: Professor Andrew Markus, “Mapping Social Cohesion 2019, The Scanlon Foundation
Surveys”, page 32, Figure 15, Op. Cit. These survey results since 2012 show that Australians have
consistently ranked the economy as “the most important issue facing Australia today”, although the
percentage of Australians ranking economic issues as the most important concern has declined
noticeably while the percentage concerned about the environment has risen sharply since 2017.
448
Campaigns are really not much more sophisticated than that sort of
headbutting over a narrowly defined expression of our aspirations.
Sometimes an overlay of “a fair go for all” is added. But no matter how often
journalists may identify a new theme for an election – for instance, by stating
that “this election will be fought on climate and the environment”, or “this
election will be fought on the issue of getting a better go for the forgotten or
the socially disadvantaged”, or “this election will be a referendum on
Medicare”, or “this election is about WorkChoices” – the campaign themes
still seem to revert to the economy and to play on some poorly specified idea
of working class and middle class financial aspiration.
For progressive parties – those that want to broaden the agenda beyond
the economy – it has become apparent that their traditional approaches to
electioneering are not working to tip the scale in their favour. In 21st century
Australia, conservative Coalition federal governments have been elected to
power for periods almost three times the length of time afforded to
progressive Labor governments. The extended period in the wilderness for
Labor has prompted them to search for new ways to bring people together
and to rally them around a new narrative. But the means by which they are
attempting to craft that narrative are no different to the adversarial politics
that has not worked well for progressive parties since the mid 1990s. Nor is
Australia itself any closer to a higher level of wellbeing and equality; in fact,
we are going backwards in both wellbeing and equality.
These are facts. The adversarial arrangement of our democracy in the last
twenty years has not taken us forward to a better life. A democracy ought to
work to make us happier. But we are not. In the annual “World Happiness
Report” published by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions
Network, Australia has slipped from being ranked as the 9 th happiest country
in 2017, to the 10th happiest country in 2018, and then to the 11 th happiest
country in 2019599. Say what some might about the appositeness of the Gallup
Survey used to collate the “World Happiness Report” (there is an argument
that the scale and questions used are more likely to reflect scores for
599Source: United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, “World Happiness Report”
2017, 2018 and 2019 collated on Wikipedia, accessible at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2017_report
449
“wellbeing” rather than “happiness”600), the trendline of decline in happiness
for Australians is consistent within the uniformly applied methodology. In
regard to our wellbeing or happiness (call it what you will), we are not just
slipping in ranking relative to other countries. We are slipping in actual scores
provided by Australian respondents on “average life evaluations”601.
No doubt there are many factors contributing to this decline in our sense
of our wellbeing or happiness. But if we want to use our democracy to get
ourselves out of this rut, it stands to reason that using it in the way we have
been is unlikely to work. If politics is to constitute the dominant means by
which we run our democracy, and if the objective is to change our lives for
the better, we need to do something different in the way we allow politics to
operate within it.
I am not alone in suggesting that the “different something” we need has
everything to do with how we are able to imagine the better world we want
to find ourselves and our children living in. Many people invoke the need for
imagination in our polity. The trouble with adversarial politics though, is that
it neither invokes an imaginative, inspirational language nor creates a space
where we can forget about our present troubles for a bit and imagine that
“different something”.
If Australians are bored by politics this is why. It is a litany of the same old
boring, point-scoring stuff. It doesn’t unleash our imagination. If we have
become cynical about it, it is because politics itself is overwhelmingly cynical.
We can see straight through it because it is hollow – hollow in its promises,
hollow in its consistency, hollow in its ethics, hollow in its commitment to us
and even more hollow in any commitments to our children (genuine
intentions of the Tanya Pliberseks of the world notwithstanding). Progressive
politicians have picked up on this accumulated hollowness (without
describing it as such), and they have felt the effect of the ennui it has instilled
600 Reviewers have suggested that the 0-10 scale used in the Gallup poll for the “World Happiness
Report” may be more appropriately used to measure wellbeing rather than happiness. See David
Roos, “Colombia, not Finland, may be the happiest country in the world”, How Stuff Works, Science,
26 March 2018, accessible at https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-
mind/emotions/colombia-not-finland-may-be-happiest-country-in-world.htm
601 Results of three consecutive “World Happiness Report” surveys indicate that Australia hasn’t just
slipped in ranking against other countries, it has slipped in terms of actual scores for “average life
evaluations” provided by respondents on a 0-10 scale. The slips were by 0.026 points in 2017, another
0.079 points in 2019, and another 0.065 points in 2019. Source: World Happiness Reports 2017, 2018
and 2019 collated on Wikipedia, Ibid.
450
in the electorate – that effect being a perverse rejection by the electorate of
policy offerings that are in the best interests of those rejecting them.
Accordingly, some progressive parties have come to feel that if they even so
much as try to offer a genuine progressive agenda they will get slapped for it
at the polls. But they have also sensed the counter-issue: that they are not
inspiring us and that their electoral prospects in the future will hinge on their
ability to tell us what Claire O’Neill called a “compelling story”. They are in a
cleft stick, where they feel they are not going to win with a progressive agenda
but they are not going to be “compelling” without one either. So the question
has become: how can they jazz up the progressive agenda to make it
compelling and how can they tone it down so it doesn’t scare people off? Very
tricky. How can they be exciting and dull at the same time?
To answer the tricky question in 2019, the Labor Party did what it always
does. It began trawling anew though its market research to find out what
might inspire us without threatening us. But regardless of the trickiness of the
question, and whether it is the right question to be asking, I would venture to
suggest that Labor is looking for an answer in the wrong place and at the
wrong time. Listen hard they may to all their research sources, but this is
unlikely to produce the compelling story they think they need.
To explain this, I’m going to talk about how the Labor Party of the late
2019s and early 2020s has struggled with the challenge of developing a
compelling story that will bring our nation together. Bringing the nation
together – or rather, unsplitting two halves of their currently split
constituency – is probably the only way Labor can win power. At least, that is
what Labor leaders like Tanya Plibersek and Claire O’Neill might suggest.
Conservatives are likely to seek power by splitting the nation for as long as
possible, whereas these sorts of progressives, thankfully, are attempting to
take on a challenge for their own survival by working on an assumption they
are more likely to win power, and we are more likely to prosper as a nation, if
we act together as a cohesive society, not as a broken one. There are some
schools of thought that are suggesting Labor can only regain power by
forsaking parts of these split constituencies602. There are still other schools of
602 See Daniel McNamara, “Labor should stop chasing the blue-collar regional mirage, your future is in
the cities”, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/national/labor-stop-chasing-the-blue-collar-regional-mirage-your-future-is-
in-the-cities-20191216-p53kde.html?btis
451
thought that suggest trying to keep both parts by selling different and
contradictory messages to each part. So, as at the start of 2020, the jury is still
out on this and there is still some confusion. But the general sense is that a
split nation is not a good thing and that the “compelling story”, however it
emerges, cannot be reliably built around division. Division is neither sellable
nor healthy, for us or for politicians. So we are back with the issue of how
progressive policy adherents might inspire the majority of a nation with a
compelling story.
The following section is a tour through Labor’s struggle to find a vision
that will compel a majority. I hope it will provide some clues on how not to
devise and tell a compelling story to a wealthy, modern educated population
in a developed country. My apologies for the negativity at the outset but the
tour is important because it sheds light on how telling a story of a nation in
the shallow, adversarial way that politicians are used to rips us and our
democracy apart. We will need to tell our own story in an entirely new and
substantial way if we wish to draw our nation back together.
The limitations of adversarial politics in strengthening democracy
In her very important speech to Labor Party faithful about the “need to take
people with [them]”, Claire O’Neill’s political instincts told her that:
We stand for society, for community. Better together, no matter what,
and that:
there is [a] way to bring people together: by defining and nourishing not
who we are against, but what we have in common.603
We can reasonably take it from this that in renewing itself after its electoral
defeat the preferred strategy of the Labor Party would be to bring the nation
together. So far so good. Ms O’Neill also went on in her speech to say –
perhaps most importantly – that “talking down to people”604 was no longer
going to be effective in the primary task of bringing disparate groups together.
603 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government, Ibid.
604 Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government, Ibid.: “The impression of many was that progressives were talking down to them. I know
this is not what was intended. But if our voters hear sanctimony, that is what matters.”
452
But thereafter, she looked straight back to leadership within the political
sphere to bring people together, citing Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and
Anthony Albanese in Australia as “compelling examples of hope and
competence”. This made the speech seem a little more like an advertisement
for the new party leader, Mr Albanese, than a real attempt to “talk about how
… Labor can use this defeat to build a better and stronger movement for
change”. But it is to be expected that politicians will always view politics as
the only way to get things done in a democracy. Generally, they operate under
an assumption that inspiration can come only from the top, from great leaders
and leadership in which imagination and courage are combined. As Paul
Keating has stated on more than one occasion:
Leadership, after all, is as I have so often remarked, about two things:
imagination and courage. The imagination to see the bigger picture, to
make sense of it and to imagine something better; and having the
courage to see the changes through.605
Steeped in 2019 in the perspective that leadership from the top is the
only way for a country to achieve something better, Claire O’Neill put the view
that:
Politics is about offering a compelling story about our country: who we
are, where we are going. Then we talk about how we are going to get
there.606
So now the nuance is that Labor wants to bring the country together, and to
do so with a compelling vision, but that we can bother with the detail of how
we will get there later. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really help a
political party – any party – to “take the people with them” for any more than
a fleeting moment. It is actually still talking down to people. It is still about
using a bunch of fragmented conversations in focus groups, robo-polling, the
occasional conference of members and supporters, electoral encounters and
doorknocking to tease out the supposedly compelling story from a jangled
diversity. These groups and encounters are structured in such a way as to
make people more jaded than inspired. They have an important place in a
605
PJ Keating, After Words: The Post Prime Ministerial Speeches, Op. Cit., page 74.
606
Claire O’Neill, Australian Labor Party, Address at John Curtin Research Centre: Pathways to
Government, Op. Cit.
453
reactive participatory democracy, but they provide little or no opportunity for
the exercise of imagination about the future. Visionary, they are not.
If a political party wants to isolate a compelling story – a vision of a better
Australia – they are quite unlikely to find it in the information collated from
their market research, conferences and electoral encounters. This is what I
meant when I said above that Labor is looking in the wrong place for the
answers. As long as a political party confines itself to those fragmented
conversations and polls, it will almost always end up doing little more than
responding to grievances and grumbles. They will find out what people want
to fix but this is not the same thing as where they want to go. This is not to
say that grievances and grumbles shouldn’t be responded to. On the contrary,
these responses of elected parliamentarians amount to one of representative
democracy’s best attributes. They are helping people where it counts – today.
But they have very little to offer in terms of imagining where we might want
to be as a society in ten or twenty years’ time. They just solve some of the
myriad problems of the fragmented populace, without bringing them
together. They are fragments of cures, rather than preventions brought about
by early detection of incipient problems and visionary thinking on how those
problems might be avoided.
If at the same time a political party also separates the overarching
“compelling story” from the “talk about how we are going to get there”, as
Claire O’Neill seemed to think necessary, they risk fragmenting not just the
audience but the conversation itself, making any information that might
emerge about agreement on a compelling vision instantly unreliable. The fact
is that the means by which we approach an ideal is as important as the ideal
itself and the two things can’t be separated.607 Experienced community
strategic planners will vouch for this whereas politicians generally do not
understand it. People don’t sign on to a vision about a better quality of life
(not for long anyway) without considering whether they will have to pay more
than they are prepared to pay in terms of lost quality of life.608 There is always
a trade-off and they absolutely want to know what the trade-off is going to be
607 Brexit is an example of the truth of this. Separating the notional ideal of Brexit from the question of
how the UK would achieve it was what brought the UK to vote for Brexit. The ideal of leaving Europe
was separated from the issue of how to get there – an issue the British parliament then failed to
resolve over three painful years.
608 In the case of Brexit, Britons did sign on to the vision of a new life outside the EU, but only because
they were told (erroneously) that they would save money.
454
– both sides of the trade-off. Moreover, talking about how we are going to get
to an agreed destination is what keeps community commitment to a vision
going for more than the proverbial fleeting moment. There is no point in
developing a vision about a preferred destination unless you are prepared to
do what is necessary to “bring people with you”, not just for a six or eight
week election period but for the length of time necessary to reach the
destination. Claire O’Neill was obviously correct when she said “we need to
take the people with us”, but she was talking rather more about the tactics of
attaining office, and rather less about what needs to be done to keep office
long enough to actually achieve some progress in the story.
An additional problem in the political approach to developing “a
compelling story about our country” arises when the feedback comes in from
the fragments of market research, conferences and electoral or focus group
encounters. If anyone in the upper echelons of politics manages to conjure a
“vision” out of those fragments, the assumption still prevails in the world of
politics that for this new vision to be “compelling” it must then be simplified.
But once it is simplified – especially if it is simplified too far (and in politics it
almost always is) – a whole new world of trouble starts. If the compelling
vision is simplified to the level of the ad man’s blather, everything compelling
about it fades away like ice in water. It no longer inspires, it just divides. It
creates yet another new fault line in the community. None of this describes
the complexity of our diverse aspirations, or enables us to find our particular
place in that vision, or uncovers a new way to bring us together. We all end
up back where we started. Politicians think they need to be compelling if they
are to succeed. Well, yes. But they want to keep it simple too, like a tabloid
headline or a one-liner under a recognisable logo (perhaps like “City of Sydney
– Green Global Connected” or “Oxfam – A just world without poverty”). The
bad news on this for progressives is that while simple one-liners might or
might not win elections, they can’t be compelling as such. They never were –
not in the shallow adversarial discourse which afflicts politics. Grand speeches
like Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, or Churchillian speeches exhorting Britons
to “fight them on the beaches”, or Paul Keating’s Redfern speech are
compelling. “Jobs and growth” is not. It is just a cheap slogan. But because
progressive politicians are rather stuck on the idea that to be compelling they
must be simple – largely because it seems to work for conservatives – it is
worth a look at the equation.
455
Can the simple be compelling?
After the rise of populism, progressive parties have all fallen under the spell
of an idea that “simple” equals “compelling”. As Ben LaBolt, the National Press
Secretary for President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012 (notably
before populism really took deep hold in the USA and the UK), wrote in The
Guardian in December 2019:
For the left to win again it must:
1. Distil its message into one that is simple, compelling and
repeatable;
2. Provide a vision for how it will address the challenges of
globalisation and automation in a way that supports the average
family;
3. Run modern, integrated campaigns that reach voters where they
consume information.
… Labor must be crisp and motivational and use sophisticated social
media tools to catch the onslaught of misinformation.609
Perhaps. But unfortunately, there is an equally plausible possibility that the
rise of populism and social media are precisely why this election tactic might
not work for progressives as well as it apparently does for conservatives.
Apart from simply proposing to do what conservatives do to win elections,
but be better at it, Mr LaBolt’s proposal doesn’t really add much detail about
exactly how progressives would take this “crisp” messaging approach to
winning elections, and be better at it than the conservatives. There is no
doubt that progressive parties need a better social media capability, presence
and strategy. But otherwise, Mr LaBolt’s advice is doing little more than
suggesting that an election winning tactic that insults rather than engages
with our intelligence is the only way to win. It is “talking down to us” and is
patronising, and this may run the risk not just of capitulating to a thoughtless
populism but stoking the resentment of those who have turned towards it
609 Ben La Bolt, “The political right wins by striking fear into its citizens’ hearts. The left must raise their
hopes”, The Guardian, 4 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/04/the-political-right-wins-by-striking-fear-into-its-
citizens-hearts-the-left-must-raise-their-hopes?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
456
precisely because they feel they are being “talked down to” by elites who
think themselves superior. If this is truly the only way for politicians in the 21 st
century to win elections then, OK (maybe), but let’s not mistake it for
something that is genuinely “compelling”.
Clearly, it is not easy to marry the simple and the compelling as Ben LaBolt
goes on, accidentally, to prove later in his article by saying:
Simultaneously the left needs a clear and consistent message outlining
how it will help families thrive despite global economic headwinds. It
needs to not just make higher education affordable but make clear what
types of training are most likely to help students succeed once they
graduate. When the core industry of a region is on its way out, it should
help secure a new one rather than repeat the same wishful thinking
about it coming back. It should make sure that all children have access
to learning and support at younger ages. It can help workers continue
to pursue their education in search of higher skills and income. That’s
the path to prosperity, not a backwards-looking vision that closes
borders to immigrants, rejects cooperation on pressing international
issues and assumes that the profits of a handful of corporations will
trickle down.610
This is, of course, getting less “crisp” by the minute – laudable though every
policy suggestion might be. It is a vast deal less crisp than, say, “Make America
great again” – and that is before it even starts down the road of, say,
explaining “how it will help families thrive despite global economic
headwinds”. For progressives, simplicity is an illusion, as a means of winning
elections. It is as likely as not that it will make a difference to an election
outcome. And the fact is, even the conservatives don’t really win by the
simplicity of a compelling message. Scott Morrison did not win the 2019
election because he inspired us with a compelling vision. He won because he
divided the nation with a couple of simple messages about the hip pocket.
If progressives want a simple, compelling vision to work as a means of
election, they probably do have to start with a smaller agenda than Labor took
to the 2019 federal election, as several advisers have suggested. But if this is
the preferred tactic, then they need to start very early with it – like about a
610
Ben LaBolt, “The political right wins by striking fear into its citizens’ hearts. The left must raise their
hopes”, Ibid.
457
decade earlier than they normally start. For instance, they need to start much
earlier with a commitment to just transition for threatened communities,
such as coal miners, and stick with it. And above all, don’t dilute that message
with other contradictory ones – something I will talk about later. Otherwise,
“simple and compelling” is not going to be the holy grail of election or re-
election, and the sad news for progressives in the 21st century is that the road
to power in a post-truth, populist, online world is going to be a much harder
slog for them than it is for conservatives. Simplicity is an effective option for
parties that want to win by dividing the community. But it is less effective for
parties that would prefer not to have to stoop to dividing a country in order
to win power. It is less effective for the more altruistic parties and quite a deal
less effective when it is seen through by constituencies as simultaneously
insincere and risky.
Some political parties (usually conservatives) prefer to pursue power by
widening the fault lines and wedging division into the community. That is the
surer path to victory for them. A nation acting together is not the stuff of
victory for conservative parties because it is far too likely to unite the
numerous have-nots against the tiny number of haves. The most successful
strategy for conservatives consists in “divide and conquer” among the have-
nots. It consists precisely in preventing diverse groups from finding that they
have common interests and especially from finding out that their diversity
itself can be a very good and exciting thing. To that end they are prepared to
take a punt on whatever crisp slogan they hope will draw the final line in a
place where they will grab just enough of a majority. The slimmer the slogan,
the better for purposes of “cutting through”, a la Tony Abbott’s and Peta
Credlin’s “cut through” on the carbon tax611. As the Labor Party election
reviewers in 2019 stated:
While the Liberal campaign was overwhelmingly negative, its positives
of tax cuts and a return to surplus were simple and cut through.612
611 Peta Credlin Ex-Chief of Staff to Tony Abbott, speaking on Sky News’ “Sunday Agenda”, February
2017, Op. Cit.: “It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms
but we made it a carbon tax. We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not the environment. That
was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and when he cut through
Gillard was gone.”
612 Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, page 24,
Op. Cit.
458
The recommendation derived from this observation was that Labor likewise
needed to keep it simple if it wanted to “cut through” in the future. But using
simple messages to cut through leaves us all stuck with what Peta Credlin
accurately and honestly called “brutal retail politics”. It is as if the electorate
is a piece of dumb meat to be carved up for political convenience. Not every
politician holds this dehumanising attitude, but they adopt tactics
(consciously or unconsciously) which reduce us to that meat nonetheless. If
Labor were to reduce its politics to the brutal retail level, the insult would not
go unnoticed by certain constituencies they need to retain.
Labor’s election reviewers concluded that Labor lost the election because
they “did not craft a simple narrative that unified its many policies”613. But the
idea that we can be drawn together by simplicity is neither a sound political
tactic nor a respectful way to relate to people. And if that is going to be what
is dished up to us in elections in the 2020s, we are going to be stuck in our
current divided ruts for the whole decade. In the realm of brutal retail politics,
it stands to reason that a party running with a simple message will trump a
party with a complicated one. But it also stands to reason that if two parties
run with a simple message this may be unlikely to change the odds much,
especially if they each run with the same simple message. The Labor Party
came to assume after the 2019 election that if they had just convinced voters
that they, and not the Coalition, are and always have been the true party of
“jobs and growth”, this would have made up for the unpopularity of their
leader, Bill Shorten, and they would have been more likely to win. Maybe,
maybe not. But the most likely outcome of an election fought on simple
messages is not a Labor win, any more than it is a Coalition win, especially if
the simple choices are presented as binaries about the here and now, such as:
• Jobs and growth versus tax and spend,
• Progressive versus conservative,
• Change versus safety,
• Panic versus calm steadiness,
• Environment versus economy,
• Bill Shorten versus Scott Morrison,
• The “bill” you can’t afford versus the “coal” in Coalition.
613Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, pages 68-
69, Ibid.
459
Instead, the most likely outcome from an election fought on these sorts of
binaries is a divided country – polarisation. In 21st century democratic
Australia, that outcome can almost be guaranteed in adversarial politics. And
division of a country is not a path to a happier future for us or to electoral
success for progressives.
None of these banal binary choices unifies a majority behind a
“compelling story”, let alone a vision for the future replete with an agreement
about how we want to get there. Our future is always sacrificed in this sort of
divisive simplicity. And if a political party goes for the simpler message and at
the same time avoids the detail on the how, it is as likely as not that election
results will be kept on a knife edge and all Australians will miss out on the
stability and continuity necessary to deliver on a vision that makes sense to
us. Neither side’s chances of attaining office change all that much. They might
change for other reasons, but not because a party has found the magical
simple story that will “cut through”. Moreover, a progressive party’s chances
of greater longevity in office might not improve all that much with this
simplicity in story telling. This is particularly regrettable because reduction of
longevity in office for progressive parties confines us to the present – to the
very grievances, grumbles and miseries we are trying to escape.
Can narrow agendas be compelling?
The 2019 Labor Party election reviewers emerged from their review with a
recommendation that Labor should narrow its agenda and “avoid becoming a
grievance-focussed organisation” [my emphasis]. This is a bit odd. Haven’t
they always been that – at least in large part? It has been one of their
strengths. But clearly, the reviewers felt that new and perhaps unsupportable
burdens were arising from being a grievance-based organisation when those
grievances were multiplying to plague proportions amid a “vast and disparate
constituency”:
The mobilisation of the Labor Party to address the political grievances
of this vast and disparate constituency has accelerated at the same time
as many people who would have been regarded as traditional Labor
voters have looked to Labor for answers to their problems. Working
people experiencing the dislocation caused by new technologies and
globalisation could lose faith in Labor if they do not believe Labor is
460
responding to their issues but is focusing on issues not of concern to
them, or in some cases, are actively against their interests. Care needs
to be taken to avoid Labor becoming a grievance-focused organisation.
This approach leads to a culture of moving from one issue to the next,
leading to the formulation of myriad policies that respond to a broad
range of grievances.614
This is code. It is code for advice that says, “give up trying to solve everyone’s
grievances and pick one constituency that you must win at all costs, even if
you dash the aspirations of all the others”. It is to play to populism and/or to
marginal electorates, regardless of the expense to any other constituency.
Accordingly, the response of the Labor Party to the pressure of an atomised
constituency tended to express itself, in late 2019, as a decision to respond
rather more to the grievances of some than others. They opted to narrow the
agenda to suit the constituency of workers in regional Queensland and
probably Christians in Queensland and western Sydney over the constituency
of inner city people who wanted something done on climate change. This was
pragmatic, not visionary. It certainly wasn’t imaginative or compelling. It
didn’t make Labor any less a grievance-based organisation and it didn’t bring
people together. In the post traumatic stress disorder of their defeat the shift
was entirely understandable, but it didn’t solve anything.
The shift was understandable because the party had been slapped hard
by a section of the electorate that had felt neglected – those with a grievance
about their personal interests, namely their jobs in regional areas and in some
cases their Christian religious beliefs about gay rights and to a lesser extent,
women’s rights and abortion. But the Party itself then fell into punishing those
who had wanted to make personal sacrifices to support the national interest
on climate change and inequity. Labor appeared to decide it was worth
alienating their progressive supporters in the inner cities, by supporting more
coal mining if that was necessary to grab back the waverers in the regions,
particularly Queensland and the Hunter Valley in NSW. Presumably, Labor’s
examination of the numbers led them to think they couldn’t win without the
extra seats in Queensland and that the best course was to risk alienating city
voters who, even if they deserted Labor would still direct their preferences
614Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, page 38,
Ibid.
461
back to them. Accordingly, to reach the constituency in Queensland, mention
of climate change was flattened wherever possible, as shown by the fact that
amid the height of catastrophic bushfires all over eastern Australia in late
2019, both major parties spent considerable energy telling us not to discuss
climate change615. And while the Labor Party still professed to support climate
change action on the basis of science, language used in any mention of policy
on climate change (mentions which became less frequent) was designed not
to offend sectional interests in coal. Facing the prospect that there may not
be enough votes distributed across enough seats in the cities for Labor to win
power on the issue of climate change, and despite the fact climate change
was by far the most pressing issue for our nation’s future, Labor election
reviewers advised that:
Labor cannot and should not abandon principled positions on issues
such as climate change and non-discrimination on the basis of race,
religion and sexuality, although it might find language that is not
capable of being characterised by its opponents as a threat to other
voters.616
There it is: advice that Labor should be inspirational, progressive, dull and
non-threatening, all at the same time. Tricky question answered. But
inevitably, nothing compelling can arise. Nor can we see a viable, inspiring,
competitive opposition party of government.
Labor took their reviewers’ advice to heart. They truncated the
environmental agenda to saying little more than: “Labor is on the side of
acting on the science when it comes to addressing climate change”617. And
they reverted to supporting continuation of coal mining and climate change
615 See Waleed Aly, “We say we want climate action, but we still won’t vote for it”: “At least
something is up when politicians – from both major parties – spend considerable energy telling you
not to discuss something, and the public debate carries on anyway. … Labor has been so scarred by its
adventures in pricing carbon that it has now resorted to spruiking, say, renewable energy targets
rather than offering a detailed policy on how exactly reduced emissions are to be achieved.” Sydney
Morning Herald, 21 November 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-say-we-
want-climate-action-but-we-still-won-t-vote-for-it-20191121-p53coj.html
616 Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, Op. Cit.,
page 63.
617 Anthony Albanese, “Address to the Queensland ALP Conference”, 24 August 2019, accessible at
https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/speech-address-to-queensland-alp-conference-brisbane-
convention-and-exhibition-centre-thursday-24-august-2019
462
adaptation. Almost all ambition about climate change mitigation was
expunged at least until Labor thought it safe in February 2020 to introduce a
target of net zero emissions by 2050, albeit while still supporting coal mining.
In this way Labor attempted to walk a tightrope with a slim agenda that would
offend as few as possible. Effectively it signalled an intention to walk a path
to the 2022 election with the same split messages – one for the cities which
supported climate change action and another for the regions which supported
coal. This had not worked well for Labor in the 2019 election. Nevertheless, it
may have been the only pragmatic political option. By February 2020,
Anthony Albanese stepped out on what may be a long path to convince coal
mining communities that a target of net zero emissions by 2050 can mean
opportunity for blue collar workers, farmers and regional towns and cities.618
He began expanding the story, perhaps recognising (but not openly
acknowledging) the truth that climate change is the harbinger of the end of
coal mining, at least to the extent that coal is mined for fuel. Coal mining for
fossil fuel should in all prudent planning be considered to be dead inside a
decade as an industry. But because these communities sit at the junction of
our economic future – either blocking the way or opening it up, depending on
how we approach it – the direction we take at that junction deserves all the
attention to detail that we can give it. This cannot come from the narrow facile
agendas which in the hands of hard conservatives seek to demonise climate
change advocates and in the hands of hard progressives may extend to
demonising coal communities. But nor does it consist in deluding coal
communities. To compel those communities who happen to be sitting at this
junction, the story of their future needs to be told in full. It needs to be
planned so that they can see themselves arriving at a happy ending.
Stories matter. In fact, stories are what help us make all our choices in
our lives. But the story has to be one that resonates. We must be able to find
our own personal place in that story. To that end, the story has to be
completely sincere and big enough to ensure as many of us as possible can
see our future in it, not narrow enough to appeal to just one community of
marginal electorates. We need the truth.
618See Katharine Murphy, “Anthony Albanese denounces 'lazy cynicism' of Nationals in appeal to NSW
coal country”, The Guardian, 29 February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/feb/29/anthony-albanese-denounces-lazy-cynicism-of-nationals-in-appeal-to-nsw-coal-
country?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
463
Can the truth be compelling?
The short answer to this is that the truth can be compelling if it is told
completely and early enough. If it is told piecemeal and too late, it just makes
people panic, which might be helpful in one way perhaps, but not helpful
otherwise and definitely not helpful in terms of saving money. And the longer
we put off telling the truth, the worse things will get. However, this is more a
criticism of the way we have run our politics, and participated in it, than it is
a criticism of politicians.
In 2019, Labor found itself in what it felt was a no-win position about the
truth on climate change. That is everyone’s fault – voters and all politicians
alike (even Greens) – not just Labor’s. After all, if we want action on climate
change, but won’t vote for it, or tax the rich a little more to achieve it, or help
those hardest hit by transition with a decent and respectful welfare safety net
and transition plan, we really only have ourselves to blame when progressive
politicians falter. What we all have to bear responsibility for now is the loss of
time for doing something about climate change when we know we only have
about a decade left (if that) to reduce emissions to levels low enough to
prevent global heating above 1.5o Celsius. In reality, we probably have to
accept that the world may not succeed in limiting temperature increases to
1.5o. Carbon budgets calculated by the United Nations have been revised
annually and as at 2020 are known to be capable merely of capping global
heating at 1.75o Celsius. As Ross Garnaut has noted:
The emissions reductions [carbon budgets] that were associated with a
1.5oC outcome in earlier IPCC reports will probably only hold warming
to 1.75oC. … But temperatures over land will increase by more than the
average over land and sea. An increase of 1.75oC for the whole world
would mean more than 2oC for Australia – twice the increase that this
year [2019] helped to bring bushfires in August to New South Wales and
Queensland.619
619
Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 313 & Loc 146,
Op. Cit.
464
And of course – twice the increase that throughout the Spring and Summer of
2019/2020 brought bushfires that devastated eastern Australia to
unprecedented levels.
Australia has left its transition run to a decarbonised economy so late that
by 2100 or much sooner we are likely to be living in a climate that is at least
2o Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times, with all the extra trillions of dollars
of economic cost and lost benefit that higher temperature will entail for us.
All Australians have to bear responsibility for that loss and cost. And if we keep
doing what we are doing – refusing to tell ourselves the truth or let ethical
progressive politicians tell it to us – the fact is our country is likely to be at
least 4o Celsius hotter. United Nations scientists have reported that to keep
global heating below 2o Celsius by 2100, all countries will need to at least triple
their Paris Agreement commitments, otherwise temperatures will rise by
between 2.9o and 3.4o Celsius by 2100620.
If the bushfires in Australia in the Spring and Summer of 2019/2020 seem
catastrophic, when temperatures have only risen about 1o Celsius compared
to pre-industrial levels, imagine a planet heated by more than three or even
four times that level. If ever there was a time that Australia needed
imaginative, courageous leadership it was on this issue at that moment in our
history – January 2020; but what we got was more hesitation and obfuscation
– fear on the part of the best politicians and malignant intent on the part of
the worst. Neither the Liberal National Party nor Labor faced up to the
challenge of telling the hard truth that needed to be told, preferring instead
to tote almost identical messages that Australia will rely on “resilience and
620Adam Morton, “Countries must triple climate emission cut targets to limit global heating to 2C”,
The Guardian, 23 September 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/23/countries-must-triple-climate-emissions-
targets-to-limit-global-heating-to-2c?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other See also World Meteorological
Organization, “Landmark United in Science report informs Climate Action Summit” website at
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/landmark-united-science-report-informs-climate-
action-summit and associated United Nations’ “Emissions Gap Report 2019”, Op. Cit.
465
adaptation”621 or “mitigation”622 of the effects of climate change – not
prevention of further global heating itself. It is our lack of preventative action
that is obviously causing the need for massive time and money to be spent on
adaptation, resilience and mitigation of effects – on cleaning up the problem
we have made. We should have been able to spend this money on the
establishment of a new decarbonised economy but, instead, we have left
ourselves and our children with a huge bill for recovery from tragedy.
At the risk of proselytising, there is a lesson to be learned here about
human relationships. It may be too late in the day to learn this from the
climate point of view, but if we take this lesson from our history now, it may
help us in the future on other crucial matters – such as on mopping up the
mess we are making of our planet and reducing the harm we are causing to
those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. That lesson is that If
we don’t let political parties tell us the truth we are simply asking for more
trouble in our lives, not avoiding it. We need to understand that we can’t keep
on bellowing for leadership and then bashing up politicians when they
attempt to meet that demand. We need to recognise that politicians are not
saviours, they are neither more nor less human than the rest of us. They are
just as vulnerable to rejection and as easily crushed by it. Therefore, if we
want them to lead us with a better measure of courage, we need to treat them
a bit better. We certainly need to acknowledge that we can’t punish them for
their progressive views and then expect them to lead us courageously through
621 Sarah Martin, “Scott Morrison to focus on 'resilience and adaptation' to address climate change”,
The Guardian, 14 January 2020: “The Prime Minister says he will work on ‘practical measures rather
than bolstering emission targets… Scott Morrison said Australia was already ‘carrying its weight’ in
terms of its global emission reduction efforts and transition to renewables but more needed to be
done on ‘resilience and adaptation’” Accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/14/scott-morrison-to-focus-on-resilience-and-
adaption-to-address-climate-change?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
622 Mike Foley, “Science Minister says climate denial a waste of time in wake of fires” Sydney Morning
Herald, 14 January 2020: Science Minister Karen Andrews, “warned unnecessary debate could distract
from the urgent need to develop new bushfire adaptation and mitigation techniques. Her intervention
is another step in the Coalition's recent shift in rhetoric over climate change, after a decade of
divisions over the issue dominating the party room.” Accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/science-minister-says-climate-denial-a-waste-of-time-in-
wake-of-fires-20200114-p53rev.html
466
the progress we have just told them we don’t want. In May 2019, 51.5%623 of
Australian voters told the Labor Party we didn’t want their climate change
policy, despite the fact that only a month or two earlier, well over 60% of us
had declared in a nation-wide poll that climate change was a critical threat624.
Contrary behaviour like this is hardly likely to instil courage in progressive
politicians. Little wonder they are all too scared to tell us the truth before it is
too late. And if we keep punishing politicians whenever they display
imagination, why would we expect them to use imagination at all? If we
expect to have a polity we can be proud of and that will lead us in the
strongest of liberal egalitarian democracies through necessary change, then
something needs to be understood about those few politicians who will step
up to all the hard work and hard knocks of leading us, honestly, through
change. Something needs to be understood, particularly about progressive
politicians, that isn’t commonly understood. It is a lesson that can probably
best be learned by watching them all closely in their daily struggles –
something I had the privilege of doing through thirty years of public service.
Dr Martin Parkinson, former Secretary of the federal Department of Treasury
and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, remarked in interview on
his retirement in December 2019 that:
Almost everybody who enters politics is actually well motivated. We
should never lose sight of that.625
It was a sentiment with which his interlocutor, Katharine Murphy of The
Guardian, readily agreed. For what it is worth, so do I. Politicians of all
persuasions generally enter politics with good intentions and public servants
and politicians usually find ways to work well with each other in a manner that
623 See Wikipedia, “2019 Australian federal election”, which registers the two-party-preferred vote for
the Liberal National Party (against Labor) at 51.53% of total votes cast. Labor’s two-party- preferred
result was 48.47%. Accessible at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Australian_federal_election
624 See the Lowy Institute: “2019 Lowy Institute Poll – Australian Attitudes to Climate Change”: “A
majority of Australian adults (64%) see climate change as ‘a critical threat’, an increase of six points
from 2018 and 18 points since 2014”. Accessible at
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/media-release-2019-lowy-institute-poll-australian-
attitudes-climate-change
625 Martin Parkinson in interview with Katharine Murphy, “Martin Parkinson on Australia’s decade of
climate inaction – Australian Politics Live Podcast”, The Guardian, 19 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2019/dec/19/martin-parkinson-on-australias-
decade-of-climate-inaction-australian-politics-live-podcast?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
467
often transcends ideology and politics. With each change of government,
politicians and public servants slowly find what they respect in each other and
where they can work together. They find ways to compromise and collaborate
ethically to advance whatever they believe is in the best interests of
Australians at the time. In that way they can survive a thirty- or forty-year
career, sleeping at least on the majority of nights reasonably well with their
diverse consciences generally untroubled. But while I would affirm that there
is an essential truth in Dr Parkinson’s statement that “almost everybody who
enters politics is actually well motivated”, it is at least equally true in my
experience that not everyone leaves politics with their original good motives
still intact. Good intentions are easily and frequently lost sight of in the face
of electoral punishment. And there are differences in the “good motivations”
with which each politician enters politics.
Denizens of progressive parties, particularly the Labor Party, almost
always start their careers at the altruistic end of the political spectrum. They
genuinely want to achieve change for the common good. This sets them apart
from denizens of the Liberal or National Parties that I have worked with.
Fewer of them start at the altruistic end. The vast majority of Liberal and
National Party members start at the entitled end – an entitlement they have
no capacity to question or sometimes even any awareness that it is present.
And throughout their careers they seek (consciously and unconsciously) to
reinforce that entitlement as a natural right and inheritance. Unquestioningly,
these conservatives take it for granted that that they are born to rule. These
differences in character – altruism versus entitlement – predispose politicians
to choose progressive and conservative parties respectively, although cross-
over confusion, where altruism and entitlement are mixed (such as in
Malcolm Turnbull), can and does occasionally occur. Distinctions like these
may seem like gratuitous and flimsy generalisations but they are a reflection
of long experience of the observed character of both types of politicians and
their susceptibility to their own groupthink, herd mentality, and egotisms. All
are highly egotistical. They wouldn’t survive five minutes in the game if they
weren’t. But the tragedy for Labor’s denizens is that as elections come and go
and they don’t win power, they always start to preach to each other that their
altruistic agendas for change cannot come about unless they are elected. As
Anthony Albanese says:
468
To get things done, you need to be in power.626
True and correct. However, this is where the rot begins to set in for
progressives and their agenda begins to be eaten away. When they lose
elections, and sometimes even when they win, they tend to end up spending
so much time trying to keep their jobs, they forget to do their jobs. They forget
what they wanted to get elected for. Very few get through an entire career
without falling into this trap. They start to dilute their own agenda or even
desert parts of it, or whittle it down to inoffensive shadows. (Here they differ
from Greens Party politicians, who never water anything down and therein
lies a completely different problem.) With Labor though, the assertiveness
and energy that should be used to inspire us is slowly abandoned. And the
longer they stay in politics, the worse this gets. This is not a new pattern of
behaviour brought on by a newly atomised unmanageable electorate.
Politicians, including progressive Labor politicians, have always been prone to
it. They start obsessing with the numbers, in detail, right down to the level of
looking at which booths in each electorate returned Labor and which booths
didn’t. From here they focus on which sectional interests need to be catered
to without recognising that this will pull us apart rather than draw us together.
This is what happened as a result of the 2019 election. In their PTSD afflicted
state, Labor decided to focus on sections, rather than all Australians. They fell
into doing what conservative parties do – divide and conquer among the have-
nots, which in our increasingly unequal society now covers about 60% of us.
They failed to realise that for progressives to win they must unite as much of
that 60% as possible, not split it with conflicting messages. And they fell back
onto the idea that they could be inspiring and compelling enough to bring us
all together – in all our perversity and dispersion – by means of the old
adversarial divide and conquer strategy of simpler messages. It might work,
for a temporary period, or as a fluke – but let’s not mistake it for imagination,
let alone a compelling truth.
The fact that we habitually scare politicians off from telling us the truth is
a suicidal approach to our own future. The longer we put off telling the truth
to ourselves, the more we have to lie to ourselves and the more we force our
626Anthony Albanese, Parliament of Australia, Leader of Federal Labor and Leader of the Federal
Opposition, Speech to the Business Council of Australia, “Partnerships in the National Interest”, 18
September 2019, accessible at https://anthonyalbanese.com.au/speech-partnerships-in-the-national-
interest-the-business-council-of-australia-wednesday-18-september-2019
469
politicians into thinking they have to lie to us too. It is difficult to figure why
we might expect that, if we keep punishing politicians for the truths they
muster the courage to tell us, they won’t respond by lying. But we seem to
lock ourselves into unnecessary and avoidable fates by avoiding the truth for
as long as possible – by denial. The truth can be compelling, but not if we
won’t let our leaders tell it. And what we lose by not letting them tell it is a
timely imagination of tolerable ways out of our problems.
The decent leadership Australians clamour for from time to time (usually
when the crisis that might have been avoided is already upon us) is not
possible when those willing to be decent in leadership are continually
punished for it and those who are plainly indecent are allowed to get away
with it. Punishment of the decent saps courage and this locks us into
unnecessary delays in implementation of the tolerable solutions. An example
of this – another delay in the making, and at a time when delays will be
disastrous – can be seen in the way that Labor’s leader Anthony Albanese
capitulated to the dilution of Labor’s stance on a strong environmental policy
after the 2019 election and (although he didn’t lie) obscured the full truth
about the future of coal exports past 2030. In order to heal a rift in his party
between supporters of coal mining and supporters of action on climate
change – and basically to win Queensland and the Hunter Valley in 2022 – Mr
Albanese announced in an interview in December 2019, at the height of
destructive bushfires, that coal exports should continue (a view extended
some two months later by Labor’s deputy leader Richard Marles who stated
that “Coal will play a part in our economy for decades to come”627 and that
new coal developments should not be ruled out). In the process of his
interview Mr Albanese – in a mindboggling twist of logic, incorrect
understanding of economic theory and apparent climate crisis denial –
actually used the need for a strong climate change mitigation policy as a
justification for continued exports of coal. He saw no contradiction here. As
David Crowe reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Mr Albanese said Australia’s priority should be to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions under strong global agreements but that this would not
627Richard Marles quoted by Amy Remeikis, “Labor's Richard Marles won't rule out supporting new
coal developments”, The Guardian, 9 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/09/labors-richard-marles-wont-rule-out-
supporting-new-coal-developments?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
470
be achieved by stopping coal exports. … “If Australia stopped exporting
today there would not be less demand for coal – the coal would come
from a different place,” Mr Albanese said in an interview. “So it would
not reduce emissions – which has to be the objective. I don’t see a
contradiction between that and having a strong climate change policy.”
628
But the obvious fact is that there is every contradiction between continued
coal mining and exports and a strong climate change policy. While Mr
Albanese was indulging in these sophistries the nation’s most credible
economists were pointing out the truth:
Fugitive emissions (emissions released from coal, gas or oil mining and
processing separately from the use of the energy) – in the absence of
policy constraints since 2014 – have grown explosively with the
expansion of coalmining and liquefied natural gas. The increase in
fugitive emissions is the main reason why Australia has failed to make
any overall progress towards emissions reduction over recent years,
despite falls from electricity generation and changes in land use.629
So, far from introducing thoughtful honest policy, Mr Albanese was just
finding a new way to “do denialism” and at the expense of all Australians,
including the coal miners who really should be honestly assisted out of these
industries before 2030 when the world energy economy will have killed their
future anyway. Coal mining produces too much in emissions and with the
competitive cost of renewables it is now entirely uneconomic to net these
emissions off at the mines by carbon capture and storage. The far more cost-
effective emissions reduction course is simply to not use fossil fuels.
The uncomfortable marriage Mr Albanese created between these two
completely opposed approaches to our future – climate crisis action and
continued coal mining and exports – surely will end in divorce sooner rather
than later, and sooner than thermal coal mining can be saved as a way of life.
The two things don’t hang together at all for obvious reasons and particularly
because of the time at which Mr Albanese is attempting to force them into
628 David Crowe, “Albanese says Australia should continue to export coal”, Sydney Morning Herald, 9
December 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/albanese-says-australia-
should-continue-to-export-coal-20191208-p53hyp.html
629 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 1451, Op. Cit.
471
marriage – a time when the climate crisis and its effect on our economy are
about to dwarf the effect of the loss of a thermal coal mining industry. The
uncomfortable forced marriage may not be too late to try for short term
political purposes for the Labor Party, but it is too late for our economy. As
David Crowe went on to report:
Mr Albanese said the demand for coal around the world would not
change if Australia stopped its exports, which meant the ban would
have no impact on emissions. “What happens with our exports depends
on demand – and our exports do not create demand,” [Mr Albanese]
said.630
Apologies to Mr Albanese for the coming bluntness – but in economic theory
and at this particular time in the rise of renewables as the most competitive
source of energy, that representation of the law of demand and supply is
ridiculously wrong, as is his representation of the effect of exporting coal on
emissions. Our exports of coal added to everyone else’s obviously suppress
prices for coal which creates demand and even increases total demand. If we
removed our exports from the market, coal prices would rise. They would rise
a lot because, as Richard Denniss has pointed out:
Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal. When it comes to
exportable coal, Australia has a bigger share of the traded coal market
than Saudi Arabia has of the world oil market. Our supply decisions
matter. A lot.631
A price rise brought on by removal of our coal from the international market
means demand for coal would drop because renewables would quickly
become cheaper than coal (they are already) and countries currently using
coal fired power would switch away from coal more quickly. It actually would
reduce global emissions more quickly if we removed our coal from the
international market. If there is an argument that new coal mines would open
up outside Australia to drop prices again – making Mr Albanese’s view
economically correct and mine incorrect – well, the best that can be said for
that is that they wouldn’t open up for long, if at all, partly because investors
630
David Crowe, “Albanese says Australia should continue to export coal”, Op. Cit.
631
Richard Denniss, “New coalmines in Queensland don’t help existing communities, they hurt them”,
Op. Cit.
472
would realise the risk of ending up with stranded assets on their hands in less
than a decade and losing more than they would gain financially – even with
the subsidies they might be able to garner from injudicious, imprudent or
unethical governments. Mr Albanese might have had an outside chance of
being correct if it weren’t for the fact that renewables are now cheaper than
fossil fuels. But given that fact he is almost entirely likely to be wrong.
Regrettably, all that may be achieved by his politically motivated policy
contortion act is to put off for yet another decade what Labor (and the
Coalition) should have started to address well more than a decade ago – a just
transition for coal mining communities to a new economy and a sustainable
lifestyle. Worse than that: in countenancing new mines, such as the Adani
Mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, Labor will be prolonging and deepening
the hardship for those communities (and others) that will come before
transition can be achieved.
All this would be different if we weren’t in what is realistically the last
decade of our chance of heading off unsupportable global heating and the last
decade of our chance of switching to exports of renewables and industries
that rely on the efficiency of inputs that only a decarbonised economy can
supply. It is Mr Albanese’s timing (more than his contortionist act) that is the
real mistake and the real disservice to both the climate and coal mining
communities. While coal mining communities might newly relish a feeling that
there is no contradiction between climate change mitigation and the
continuation of the world’s largest coal export volumes, from the point of
view of extra carbon that we can still afford to discharge to the atmosphere
world-wide, there is unfortunately a giant sized contradiction. These
communities are not just sitting at an economic junction for a single country,
they are sitting at the junction of a vast environmental and therefore moral
problem. It is a problem that if we move swiftly, can be solved for them and
us. But what Mr Albanese or any leader will do if they persist with a dream of
massive thermal coal exports is take those communities and the rest of
Australia in an unaffordable direction. If we give ourselves the luxury in 2020
of thinking purely for the short term – i.e., to the 2022 election (and assuming
a win for Labor at that time – a risky assumption) – perhaps the loss of three
years out of the last decade we have left for prevention of intolerable climate
change may not turn out to be too much of an issue. But the damage that can
be done in that period in making things so much worse is enormous. In this
473
sense, the sooner the communities at the junction of this unprecedented
dilemma realise that they can make or break all our futures, depending on
their choices, the sooner we will all be able to work together on the most
tolerable exit from thermal coal without specious arguments that distort the
economics of the whole thing.
One of the silliest parts about all this is that it is not even very difficult to
use a bit of imagination to inspire coal communities to shift sooner rather than
later from their coal mining jobs (although getting them to shift from jobs in
coal which pay more than $200,000 a year is a challenge). As Richard Denniss
wrote, when he heard Mr Albanese’s statements on the economic wisdom of
continuing to rely on exporting coal:
Imagine if Australia had a national plan to manage the decline in coal, a
decline that even the coal industry accepts will come “in the decades to
come”. Imagine if instead of subsidising new mines to come and
compete with existing coal mines, we tried to protect existing coal
communities and the environment at the same time. If such a plan was
based on economics, not spin, it could be simple and cheap:
Step 1 Stop building new coal mines – you can’t transition out of
coal while you are still building new coal mines.
Step 2 Admit the obvious: new coal mines push down prices and
threaten jobs in existing coal mines.
Step 3 Keep existing mines open for longer by preventing new
ones from opening. That’s the fairest way to help existing
coal miners in existing mines and an easy way to help the
climate.
Step 4 Increase the very low coal royalties and raise a lot more
revenue from existing mines.
Step 5 Fund regional development from the increase in revenue
that will accompany higher royalties and company tax
revenues. We just need NSW, Queensland and the
Commonwealth cooperating to help existing communities
instead of competing to help foreign coal companies
establish new ones.
474
Step 6 Ban robot trucks and robot trains. What’s the point of
causing climate change from mines that don’t even employ
anyone in regional areas?632
Or here’s another imagining, this time at the urging of the rather more
conservative Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher:
Imagine how Australia's economy could be energised, in every sense of
the word, by a nationally coordinated drive to be the world leader in
this enormous growth industry [renewable energy]. Australia has the
opportunity to be the lowest-cost electricity supplier on the planet. This
is exactly the scenario explained in Ross Garnaut's new book
Superpower. This would be a competitive advantage for Australian
industry and the entire economy.633
This is not difficult to figure out. Both of these imaginings are good examples
of why I carried on so long in Chapter 7 insisting that developing a national
plan for an economy was not beyond the capacity of communities, and that
we might very well do a better job of it than governments. Once you take
politics out of the equation – once we unleash our collective imagination from
politics – planning for a sustainable economy is not hard. We can free up the
space to tell ourselves the truth and stop the time-wasting and cost that come
from beating politicians up for telling us the truth.
The truth of our current predicament is that our next economic transition
will come at the inevitable expense of coal mining communities just as other
economic transition and growth has come at the expense of manufacturing
communities. But it need not come at the complete and unfair expense of
those communities. It will, if governments don’t think ahead and tell the truth.
When it comes to the crunch, leadership is about reacting with integrity
in crises and doing the hard things we all know need to be done, despite the
expected backlash. If politicians don’t want to exemplify courage or accept
responsibility in the face of the inevitable backlashes when crises arise, then
they can have no genuine justification in seeking election in the first place.
632 Richard Denniss, “New coalmines in Queensland don’t help existing communities, they hurt them”,
Op. Cit.
633 Peter Hartcher, “A nation crying out for leadership from Scott Morrison got excuses”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 14 December 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-nation-crying-
out-for-leadership-from-scott-morrison-got-excuses-20191213-p53jtn.html?btis
475
Better leadership is about anticipating the challenges well ahead of time and
inspiring people to do something to avert the looming problems before we
get to crisis points. Proactive leadership before it is too late works far more
effectively than reactive leadership when it is already too late. This is what I
meant when I said above that Labor is looking in the wrong place at the wrong
time for the answers. Anticipatory leadership would have helped Mr Albanese
avoid a quite preposterous, albeit temporary, abandonment of the vital and
honourable role of opposition in our two-party-preferred democratic system.
By the end of 2019 it could have been said that Australia had no opposition
party at all. As Greg Jericho of The Guardian succinctly observed:
The ALP remains far more worried about looking like it is attacking
people who work in coalmines than getting on the front foot on climate
change. It is 2019 and the leader of the ALP is now repeating lines about
our exports of coals that Tony Abbott used.634
When my younger son heard about this abandonment of courage in
leadership by the leader of the progressive party of government in Australia,
his simple response was:
I don’t think we need two Liberal parties.
Mr Albanese is surely correct that: “To get things done you need to be in
power.” But from the point of view of progressive voters this is just an
unfinished and unsatisfactory sentence. It should say: “To get things done you
need to be in power, but when you are not, leadership in opposition –
championing the interests of those who might be left behind – still needs to
be exercised for the interests of all.” Oppositions can get things done by the
way they lead with integrity and forethought. But progressive oppositions
can’t get anything done simply by becoming a paler version of the
conservatives. That is not rising above the limitations of adversarialism, it is
simply succumbing to it.
By early 2020, Labor modified its position somewhat back to a more
progressive stance of supporting a target of net zero emissions by 2050,
rescuing some chance of acting as effective leaders in opposition. But Labor’s
634Greg Jericho, “The Coalition isn’t being honest about the climate crisis. But neither is Labor”, The
Guardian, 10 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2019/dec/10/the-coalition-isnt-being-honest-
about-the-climate-crisis-but-neither-is-labor
476
policy reaction to the loss of Queensland in the 2019 federal election –
temporary wobble though it may be – makes it clear that short term political
thinking is never going to do the best by Australia, not with the quality of
leadership we have on both sides now. Little wonder populism is on the rise
and that those voters who desert Labor for the minor parties prefer to blow
up the system, even to the extent of voting against their own interests. Those
Queenslanders who are deserting Labor may well believe that regardless of
which party is in power, they might not exist as communities in a decade
anyway, with the way things are going with our climate. If that turns out to be
true, then Labor is speaking to an electorate that will not exist at all in the
near term, instead of creating a new one that people will flock to. Still, the
option is there to be honest with coal miners and provide hope, instead of a
delusion that their jobs will be safe for decades (a delusion those miners will
see through soon, if they haven’t already). The hard thing is that the message
that thermal coal mining is doomed has to be heard loud and clear and heard
before it gets any later in the day to create a new economy and life for
Queenslanders. It is too late for this forced marriage between environmental
sustainability and coal mining to work.
The Australian Labor Party has demonstrated that it is capable of
imaginative, proactive leadership before. Indeed, it has been responsible for
the two most amazing economic reforms in Australia’s history – two reforms
which give us the capacity to boost not just Australia’s terms of trade but the
shares of Australians in the profits from that. One, of course, was the Hawke-
Keating government’s superannuation guarantee which made all Australians
shareholders in national wealth and enriched us to the point where we are
now a net exporter of capital. We lend more to the rest of world than we
borrow from them.635 The other reform was the Gillard government’s carbon
price. Had it not been repealed by the Abbott government, just when Australia
was poised to convert it to an emissions trading scheme, Australia would now
be a net exporter of carbon credits in trade with the European Union. As Ross
Garnaut pointed out in 2019:
Reductions in the cost of reducing emissions in Australia, in excess of
reductions in other countries, now make it likely that Australia would be
635
See Paul Keating, “This reckless government and its business and media mates are determined to
damage superannuation”, Op. Cit.
477
a net exporter of entitlements if it entered trade with the European
Union. Free trade in permits with the EU would have begun from July
2014 if the carbon price had been retained.636
But Australia’s conservative Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government has acted
to reverse these successes and is continuing to do so, attacking the legislated
superannuation guarantee increases and persistently acting contrary to our
interests in carbon trading markets, including by derailing international
negotiations on carbon trading at the Conference of the Parties to the Paris
Agreement (COP25) in Madrid in 2019637. This makes it vitally important for a
progressive party of government, especially if it is to be confined to long
periods in opposition, to find ways to maximise its leverage regardless of
whether it is taking a turn in the government seats or not. If the Labor Party
does not fight hard to keep telling Australians the truth about their future – if
they opt for policy messages which do nothing more than make Australian
taxpayers heavily subsidise carbon pollution and simultaneously pay the full
cost of any reduction in and/or adaptation to such pollution – then so far from
telling us a truth that is indeed compelling, they will be telling us a lie. It is a
lie to imply, as the Morrison government does, that reducing emissions by a
bit of fiscal intervention (often poorly targeted and timed) and a weak
regulatory goal is cheaper than carbon pricing.638 It is not leadership. It is not
even reasonable political compromise – the sort of compromise decent
politicians make when necessary and when they are confident that it will lay
the ground for progress. In the case of a compromise that costs Australians
far more than it saves – a compromise where progressives capitulate to a lie
that we can’t afford a carbon price – it is simply very expensive cowardice.
A note of caution: I have spoken here about thermal coal mining
approaching its end. But from a climate point of view, metallurgical coal
mining is also under threat if Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) or other
technologies for managing fugitive emissions from coal mining are not
636 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 757, Op. Cit:
“Where broad-based carbon pricing is not possible, emissions can be reduced by regulatory and fiscal
intervention sector by sector. This will inevitably cost more.”
637 COP25 – the 25th “Conference of the Parties” to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change. The COP in Paris in 2016, which produced the Paris Agreement, was the 21st COP.
638 See Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 761, Op.
Cit: “Where broad-based carbon pricing is not possible, emissions can be reduced by regulatory and
fiscal intervention, sector by sector. This will inevitably cost more.”
478
seriously pursued or are not feasible. In 2020, CCS in this application doesn’t
seem to be considered feasible. If so, the communities at the centre of this
problem in Australia should be clamouring for development of anything that
will offset their emissions, including a carbon price and carbon farming, if they
want to continue exporting metallurgical coal into the future, particularly with
a clear conscience. While progressive politicians pull back on this message
about the need for more responsible and fair behaviour by these
communities, they will do them no favours. As the messaging is going in early
2020, it is simply encouraging coal communities to think that they will be able
to continue exporting metallurgical coal without any reciprocal obligation to
net off their own emissions. Some enlightenment is required here about the
unfairness of being subsidised by Australians to continue to pollute while
simultaneously expecting others to do the heavy lifting on emissions
reduction. These communities can sustain their own industry for longer if they
plan now to take on a fairer share of the burden for emissions offsets and stop
expecting that others will continue to subsidise pollution many times over.
*****
Summarising the above tour through the descent of Australian politics into
hollowness, it is reasonable to say that progressive parties and political
pundits alike have come to a conclusion that for any party to win power in a
period of rising populism then “this requires a honing down of messages and
polices”639. But politicians shouldn’t delude themselves that honing down
their policies will turn them into the great inspirational, visionary leaders of
our time, famed for their insight and their courage. If the democratic process
is used merely to give people choices as glib as the adversarial binarisms I have
described above, such as “jobs and growth”, then people will certainly make
a simple choice. What else are they going to do? But they are not compelled
by the simple choice. They are compelled by the fact that they are in a
compulsory voting system. So they make a simple choice from the dull and
boring options they are given. Australians like a good story. But “jobs and
639Laura Tingle, “’Labor’s heartland’ is a mirage not a destination – so it’s probably time for the party
to find a new roadmap”, ABC News, 9 November 2019, accessible at
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-09/labor-heartland-mirage-not-destination-political-post-
mortem/11687718
479
growth” is not a good story; it is not a story at all. They just choose it because
there is nothing better on offer.
There is no argument that if those favouring change and progress want
to win an election and stay in office for a decent enough interval to effect
change, they are going to have to tell a compelling story and keep people
interested in it. This is what George Monbiot tried to get across at a 2019 TED
Summit when he said:
Political failure is at heart a failure of imagination. Without a restoration
story that can tell us where we need to go, nothing is going to
change, but with such a restoration story, almost everything can
change. The story we need to tell is a story which will appeal to as wide
a range of people as possible, crossing political fault lines. It should
resonate with deep needs and desires. It should be simple and
intelligible, and it should be grounded in reality.640
Exactly. But care is needed to avoid confusing the “simple and intelligible”
political messages with something that is genuinely redolent of our “deep
needs and desires”. Rarely are our individual deep needs and desires
amenable of reduction to the simple, and our collective needs and desires in
their myriad forms are never so amenable. The “wide range of people” Mr
Monbiot says we should appeal to is just too diverse to be so honed down. A
compelling restoration story – a story of the benefits of change, a story which
must be told over the long periods required for societal transformation – can’t
be told in the ad man’s simplicities. Mistaking simplistic election slogans for
compelling visions won’t work anymore (if it ever did). This is very
inconvenient for politicians that want to win office and actually achieve
change – but that’s the bad luck of it for them.
By contrast, conservative parties who do not want change are luckier.
They have an easier time of it in terms of crafting simple messages. And if they
can combine disengagement, divisiveness and simplicity, they are home and
hosed. Conservatives don’t and won’t go for the whole “restoration story”
thing because it is too complicated and cuts across their preferred messages
640George Monbiot, “The new political story that could change everything”, TEDSummit 2019,
accessible on YouTube at
https://www.ted.com/talks/george_monbiot_the_new_political_story_that_could_change_everythin
g?language=en
480
– those that are designed specifically to imply that there is a quick fix available,
that no work needs to be put in over an extended period to make life better,
and that they have the answers (and the other side has none). Simplicity, and
the division it causes, are therefore the preferred stock in trade of
conservatives and they will grab whatever simple shallow message serves the
purpose, even if they don’t believe it and have no intention of honouring it
once elected. The last thing they want is to tell a truly compelling story
because that would imply that the story ends with life being different to what
it is now – which is precisely what they don’t want to convey as the dominant
message. Life suits them just fine as it is now – especially now that
neoliberalism has taken such a hold on our economies. Heaven forbid they
might have to promise a better life than this one. They might be held to
account for not delivering it and that is more trouble than they need or desire.
So in choosing their messages, their best bet is an each way one – one that
implies that aspirations can be fulfilled by a contradictory mix of “no change”
with “change” – very much like the tag line of “continuity with change”
developed by the political satirists of the American TV comedy, “Veep”, who
came up with what they thought was “the most meaningless election slogan
we could think of” for their fictional presidential candidate, Selina Meyer. It
should not be surprising that in 2016, the then conservative Prime Minister
Malcolm Turnbull and his branding boffins came up with the vacuous phrase
“continuity and change”, and actually ran with it as a real political slogan until
the embarrassment of its satirical origins became evident641.
Those of us who want to be led safely through the changes we know we
need can only sit and wait for the day when the game is up for politicians who
do not want to offer us a genuine compelling story of who we are and what
we can be as a country. But the game will not be up while ever both sides
assume it is a game they have to play by means of disingenuous and
disrespectful underestimation of the true values, needs and desires of
Australians. Leadership may well consist in imagination and courage, but it
doesn’t consist in risible simplicity. The sort of simplicity that we are treated
to by our politicians in their ad men’s binarisms is worse than unimaginative
and timorous leadership; it is a reduction of our dreams to absurdity. While
641ABC News, “VEEP creators poke fun at Malcolm Turnbull over ‘meaningless’ continuity and change
slogan”, 23 March 2016, accessible at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-23/continuity-with-
change-veep-creators-poke-fun-at-turnbull/7269810
481
appearing to pitch to our “aspirations”, it reduces them to mere venality in
the here and now. There is nothing aspirational about that. And there is
nothing safe and secure either. Furthermore, it requires us to discard all other
types of aspiration – such as aspiration to social cohesion and belonging. In
particular, it requires us to discard our aspirations for our children. If both
parties succumb to such adversarial banality, we are all lost.
If truly progressive leaders genuinely want to tell a compelling story of
who we are and where we are going, and if they want to tell a story in which
we are, as Claire O’Neill might say, “better together, no matter what”, they
won’t have the luxury of this sort of simplicity. Stripping things back to imply
that aspiration is simply about jobs and growth may suffice from time to time,
but mistaking it for the compelling is to be taken in by their own advertising.
The market research and focus groups that supply the data on the slogan most
likely to captivate voters will probably spit out one of the above binaries in
most election campaigns. But this spitting should not be taken for anything
other than the unimaginative stuff that it is. A compelling vision will come not
from the way a political party might do its research; it will not come from the
way we might respond to questions about our latest concerns or injustices. It
will come from the way a political party looks at what we say when we talk
with each other, when we connect with each other, when we inspire each
other on the rare occasions we are given a chance. This is a form of dialogue
with which political parties are wholly unfamiliar and a form of listening in
which they are unschooled. The circumstances in which that dialogue can
occur need to be created. I do not mean a dialogue between us and
politicians. The needed dialogue is one that must occur amongst ourselves –
our non-partisan selves. And that dialogue needs to be clear and well
organised into an agreed plan for our future, before it can be expected that
politicians can be schooled in listening to what it is all about. I will talk more
about this in the next sections to shed some light on how the listening skills
of politicians need to be improved before it will be possible for them to
discover the vision that will truly compel us. They cannot produce that vision
themselves. Only Australians working together in a non-political space can do
that. And unless the listening skills of politicians are improved, they will not
be able to hear what that vision is and we will be consigned forever to the
limitations of their adversarial politics – the result of which is that we will
move no closer to a better life.
482
Where can politicians look for the truths we all need to hear?
If we accept the suggestion that the truth, even when we don’t want to hear
it, is the only story we are likely to find compelling, because it resonates with
most of us, then where might progressive politicians look for that truthful
story? The answer I have already posited above, in the negative, is that they
shouldn’t be looking where they are looking now. Currently they are looking
inward, into their own research and feedback. I will suggest soon that
progressive politicians should look well beyond that; but it is worth reviewing
what isn’t working in their current methods of searching for a compelling
story.
In the Australian Labor Party’s 2019 election review, Jay Weatherill and
Craig Emerson opined that their failure was not just due to the lack of a simple
message. It was also partly caused by Labor’s not having listened to the people
on the ground and what local members were telling them about their
constituents’ concerns. As the reviewers said:
Numerous local campaigns had been picking up anti-Labor sentiment
while door knocking, phone banking and holding street stalls. State and
territory branches, shadow ministers and others across the Party raised
concerns too. Candidates and local campaign teams felt they were not
taken seriously when they raised their concerns and the campaign was
unable to adjust in response to the feedback it was receiving. All of this
was made more difficult by high expectations of a Labor victory.
Finding 4: Labor’s campaign lacked a culture and structure that
encouraged dialogue and challenge, which led to the dismissal of
warnings from within the Party about the campaign’s direction.642
But even if Labor had listened to their local candidates and sitting members,
it would have been impossible for them to collate messages gathered from
the ground up to produce a story that we might find compelling. It would have
been impossible because they had organised no space where a forward
thinking conversation could occur in communities about what Claire O’Neill
642
Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, Op Cit.,
page 23.
483
called “who we are and where we are going”. Had they listened, they would
have been listening too late to turn around their failing election campaign.
But even if they had listened earlier to their focus groups and doorknocked
constituents, they would have heard a cacophony that would have left them
not all that much wiser about what might compel us all and bring our now
atomised community together. They would have found it very difficult to
assemble all the pieces into a coherent story that would resonate with a
majority. In that situation, their chances of boiling the cacophony down to a
simple election winning slogan would have been little different to the chances
they had during the actual election – around 50/50. And their chances of
boiling the cacophony down to a slogan that could have brought people
together and inspired them to travel in the same direction would have been
close to zero.
I have suggested these odds because after the election, several Labor
Party members who ventured a view about how a more successful campaign
might have been run, all hovered around an idea that they should begin to
look more like the winners than the winners. Chris Bowen, Labor frontbencher
and key proponent of the progressive policies in the failed campaign, put the
view that:
If we are going to win the next election, we will need to unequivocally
establish our credentials as the superior party of economic growth. … If
commitment to jobs and growth isn’t front and centre in our retail
offering, people will draw their own conclusions about what we
prioritise, and they will think that their jobs and economic security
aren’t foremost among our priorities. Clearly, we need a bigger
emphasis on our pro-growth policies in our economic narrative. … But
we have to also accept that the Liberal scare campaign about tax did
worry voters who depend on a strong economy for their job. And
despite the modest increase in the tax to GDP ratio under Labor, and
the fact that Labor would have remained a low taxing country by
international standards, the scare campaign by the Liberals worked.643
643
Chris Bowen, “A New Compact with the Australian People – Inaugural Paul Keating Lecture”, 7
November 2019, accessible at https://www.chrisbowen.net/transcriptsspeeches/a-new-compact-
with-the-australian-people-inaugural-paul-keating-lecture/
484
Had this view been put before the election it is at least arguable that the
result wouldn’t have been any better for Labor, if only because this course
offers Australians less choice, not more. Presumably, Mr Bowen looked into
Labor Party feedback sources and that suggested to him that the path to
victory for Labor will consist in both major parties giving headline support to
“jobs and growth”, “low taxes” and “spending restraint”. This might or might
not increase Labor’s future chances of winning power, although as I have
already said, it stands to reason that it is just as likely to keep the results on a
knife edge because it obliterates all differentiation between the major parties.
This knife edge would continue to apply, particularly in the absence of any
other differentiating feature between the major parties in environmental or
social policy. Alternatively, the potential for electoral loss may increase for
progressive parties that seek to introduce some differentiation in the form of
environmental or social offerings. After all, it would be all too easy for a
conservative party to undermine the credibility of a progressive party that is
offering fiscal restraint alongside social or environmental spending. It would
be all too easy for a conservative party to assert that a promise of low
spending is a Labor Party lie because the real agenda – hidden or not – is
unaffordable spending in social and environmental areas. Some of the
plausibility of this “don’t trust the Labor Party with your money” message
might be shaved off if the proposed spending by Labor were to be targeted to
infrastructure rather than welfare (indeed that’s exactly what Labor decided
to do), but this would do little to make life better for the sections of the
population that progressive parties usually want to help.
What it would all boil down to in the end is that both major parties would
have simply alighted on the same agenda – a narrow agenda in which
Australians are pushed further and further away from the targeted spending
they need to commit to in order to transition from an old economy to a new
one at least cost and with a welfare safety net. Both parties would have
settled on a story that can only delude us – a story that says we will get a
better quality of life if we don’t spend money on ourselves, and a worse
quality of life if we do. This delusion is really dangerous if we stick with it for
too long. But we seem to keep falling for it – or maybe we fall for it because it
is all we are being offered. We are not, for instance, being offered stories
about how re-targeting our existing spending can help us – such as stopping
fossil fuel subsidies and diverting them to just transition projects.
485
The narrow campaign messages of “jobs and growth”, anomalously
combined with a pledge of adherence to “fiscal restraint”, certainly worked
for the election of Labor’s Rudd government in 2007. But that was against a
Coalition campaign in which their WorkChoices policy had become a liability.
Instead of promising jobs, WorkChoices threatened jobs and working class
aspiration – an unusual example of the overreach of the conservative entitled,
who had until that point kept their entitlement better hidden under a blanket
of messages appearing to support the aspirations of “Howard’s battlers”. So
in the case of the 2007 election, there was a significant differentiation
between the main policy platforms of the major parties. What this indicates
is that in cases of federal elections in Australia since 2000, when one major
party has pushed “jobs and growth” combined with “spending restraint”, that
has been a winning policy combination. I don’t suggest it is a good
combination for Australia. But the combination is a winning one in a two-
party-preferred electoral system where one party supports it. It is a winner
because the phobia of “tax and spend” has cut through with enough
Australians. However, there is no indication that the combination of “jobs and
growth” with “fiscal restraint” works to elect progressive parties if both major
parties are making indistinguishable promises along the lines of this policy
combination. Try it again and Labor might win, although Australia would
continue to lose.
A lot of this is speculation about potential electoral outcomes by
someone who is neither a specialist in psephology nor political science. I am
just an interested amateur onlooker (albeit one with a lot of close-up
experience about how politicians think). But specialisation in such fields isn’t
necessary to observe that if in 2020 both major parties are chasing the same
2% of Australian swinging voters644 with the same message, then the odds
that one party will gather a solid majority among that 350,000 voters are poor.
Nor is specialisation in psephology necessary to observe that an indulgence
by any party in this sort of narrow political sophistry is highly unlikely to
inspire a nation. What this sort of banality definitely doesn’t do is exercise the
political imagination. It doesn’t exercise anyone’s imagination. A solid political
win requires differentiation and differentiation requires a clear enough
exercise of imagination – by at least one party – to lift a party platform above
644That is all they are chasing – about 350,000 votes, which prove decisive in elections that invariably
split somewhere around 49-51% in two-party-preferred terms.
486
the level of the banal. It is apparent that Chris Bowen at least intuitively
understood this. He harked back to the examples of progressiveness from the
Hawke-Keating era to provide pointers about imagining a new economy and
society:
We draw on Paul Keating and Bob Hawke. They didn’t choose between
saving the Franklin River and creating thirty years of economic growth:
they did both. … Going forward, a commitment to social justice can and
must partner with a fiscally rigorous, prudent approach. New spending
commitments aren’t the only way to improve social outcomes.
Institutional reforms, incentives and rigorous insistence on high
standards are sometimes better and at the very least, must accompany
spending decisions.645
These pointers could certainly provide some differentiation between the
major parties (although not as far as the “fiscally rigorous, prudent approach”
goes); but it is doubtful they constitute a compelling vision – compelling
enough to grab more than 50% of that tiny 2% both major parties are chasing.
Put the way Chris Bowen did – mixing “social justice” with “fiscal prudence” –
it is a little boring. It says nothing really about what a strong economy might
be for, which is the inspiring bit. “Spend less to get social justice?” It just
doesn’t hang together as a convincing platform. And of course, the mixture in
the message undercuts the message itself before it starts, because it
reintroduces all those annoying progressive social and environmental issues
that conservatives have so successfully demonised in the minds of the
swinging voters disillusioned with their job security. When the blame for job
insecurity is foisted onto environmental and social activists, as it has been by
conservatives for the last forty years, pursuit of a social agenda by progressive
parties is likely to undermine their economic security message. People are
likely to revert to the temporarily safer hands of the conservatives who they
know will not risk their jobs in order to save the environment. The mixture
basically amounts to a capitulation to the idea that progressive parties can
only be elected by promising not to spend. Politics might work that way,
sometimes. But life doesn’t. It may be a winning formula for some elections,
but it is not a winning formula for a better future for our children. So when
the Labor Party looks inside its research and feedback, and comes out at the
645 Chris Bowen, “A New Compact with the Australian People – Inaugural Paul Keating Lecture”, Ibid.
487
other end with this distillation of contradictory messages – this should provide
some indication that they might need to approach development of their
messaging differently.
It is very inconvenient for progressive parties, or the Labor Party at least,
that in 2020 the things they feel they must say to get themselves elected run
counter to what they know they have to do to make a difference to our lives.
To be elected they seem to feel they have to promise not to spend to achieve
the thing they want to be elected for, that being to improve our quality of life.
The illusion created here is that there are ways, other than by government
spending, to achieve that difference, for example: public sector reforms, re-
structures (usually thoughtless outsourcing) and efficiencies (usually
thoughtless cost-cutting), or more private sector involvement. (Note: genuine
collaborative planning never seems to get thrown into that list). Doubtless,
reforms, efficiencies, or more (properly regulated) private sector involvement
can play a part in improving our lives; but, as we have seen in so many cases
– like those cited in education, health and domestic violence in Chapter 4 –
these reforms, efficiencies and private sector deals are fraught with
complications. They look like they make sense on the surface, but then they
are far too often badly executed. To rub salt into the wounds, failures, which
are frequent, often require us either to spend public monies that we had been
promised we would not need to spend, or to simply cut victims adrift, adding
to the growth of inequality. This illusion that we can get better social and
environmental outcomes by spending less and/or selling services off to an
unaccountable private sector is one of the most self-defeating illusions we
have ever perpetrated on ourselves. It suits politicians – but only politicians.
In the 21st century, politicians from both sides have spent time
demonising government spending and deifying government thrift – thrift to
the level of zero spending if possible. Admittedly, there was a reasonable
argument to reduce some areas of government spending in the 1980s and to
implement public sector efficiencies, in order to make way for increased
spending on health and education. Hence the Expenditure Review Committee
of the Hawke-Keating years, otherwise known as the Razor Gang646, although
646See Gabrielle Chan, “Hawke-era cabinet papers reveal nation-defining social change at a time of
economic reform”, The Guardian, 1 January 2015: “With typical chutzpah, Keating wanted to deliver a
higher-than-expected budget surplus, while at the same time cutting public-sector spending, global
borrowing and payments to the states. Keating felt the states should share the commonwealth’s
488
to put that in perspective, the main point of those cuts was to reduce demand
and inflation – clearly not a problem Australia was still suffering from in 2020.
By 2020, neoliberalism had taken reduced public spending, efficiency and
sales of public assets well past the point where such strategies might improve
returns or achieve sustainable savings and well past the point where surpluses
needed to be stacked up to dampen demand. By 2020, government sector
spending had been cut to the bone; and in order to support necessary new
expenditures in Medicare, the NDIS, defence and aged care our government
had started developing budgets to strip mine every other area of federal
funding, including education, Commonwealth grants, the disability support
pension, veterans’ support, the family tax benefit, pharmaceutical benefits,
government administration, the ABC, corruption monitoring, debt servicing
and all other federally funded items and services647. By 2020 Australia’s
economy was like one of those athletes who, having run a marathon, find their
body starts breaking down its own muscle tissue and poisoning itself in an
onset of Rhabdomyolysis. It had no energy left. State governments had also
ripped so much out of the public service’s capacity that it was causing massive
overruns on the budgets of some of their major infrastructure projects. The
case of the Sydney to Randwick light rail is the classic example of the hidden
cost of depleting public sector spending and contract management capacity.
That project went overbudget by almost 100% (from an initial estimate of $1.6
billion to a final cost of almost $3 billion648) and was years overdue, sending a
whole raft of private sector businesses along the light rail route to the wall.
And what did it deliver? A trip from Circular Quay to Randwick that ended up
taking 50 minutes instead of the 25 minute trip on the old buses.649 More
budgetary pain. It was the first cut by a federal government to the states since the early 1960s.” And
quoting Paul Keating in 1988 Cabinet Papers: “In a nutshell we have to hold down the growth in
domestic demand and keep our new-found competitiveness to go on reducing the current account
deficit.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/01/-sp-hawke-cabinet-
papers-social-change-economic-reform
647 See Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”,
Op. Cit., page 15, Figure 3.3.
648 Megan Gorrey and Matt O’Sullivan, “Sydney's light rail bill soars to at least $2.9 billion”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 22 November 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-s-
light-rail-bill-soars-to-at-least-2-9-billion-20191122-p53d88.html
649 Another example of the cost of depleting the capacity of the public service in delivery of major
projects is the $4.5 billion cost overrun on the Sydney Harbour underground metro rail project. See
Matt O’Sullivan, “$4.3 billion cost blowout in Sydney's metro rail project”, Sydney Morning Herald, 4
489
often than not, in this 21st century idolatry of non-spending, if a progressive
party is elected, they are defeated before they even start in terms of delivery
of their actual agenda. Fear sets in about being seen to spend on anything in
a progressive agenda. In either victory or defeat progressive governments can
end up wedged. And who loses the most? Obviously, we do.
We can assume that the Labor Party, as our only possible progressive
party of government, would like to be able to escape this wedging but they
seem not to know how. They have explored the option of looking into the
past, as they should, for inspiration – just as I suggested we should do in the
previous section about building a plan for a new economy. But to date, they
haven’t alighted upon a new way out of the dilemma, let alone a compelling
imagining of a better future and a just path to that future. They may resurrect
some Hawke-Keating successes on the economy – such as an intense focus on
productivity – and they can even add some new ideas into the mix, such as
“predistribution instead of redistribution” or a “Green New Deal”. But on
society and the environment they, and we, remain wedged. They are looking
for the answers in their own research and in the past but it isn’t helping them
imagine a way forward.
The Australian Labor Party is the only progressive party in Australia that
we might expect to be able to form a government and lead us through
necessary change to a better quality of life for more of us. (The Australian
Greens are progressive, of course, but there is no possibility they will become
a party of government inside a decade, especially in a two-party-preferred
system.) But if Labor really believes that imagination is the only thing that will
make a difference to our futures, then it can’t seriously expect that, in a non-
spending agenda (the agenda its own research has suggested is a winner), it
will find an imaginative vision for Australia that will captivate us, expand our
horizons, and make us see value in that agenda. Expansive imagination is very
unlikely to be delivered via parsimony. The story Labor seems to want to tell
us in 2020 is one that is in danger of being narrowed down to be about a
strong economy as an end itself rather than what a strong economy is for.
There is no value to be seen in that narrower story and it assumes we don’t
want to invest in ourselves, when in fact there is evidence to the contrary on
that. The story they want to tell us is also about where they want us to go, not
February 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/4-3-billion-cost-blowout-in-
sydney-s-metro-rail-project-20200203-p53x7n.html
490
about where we might want to go – i.e., where we might be willing to invest.
Of course, Australians want to invest in their own future but the story Labor
is telling is that, if this might be done at all, it has to be done by building a
strong economy first. The reality is of course that economic growth works the
other way around. Investment first, then growth will come.
Another story that Labor wants to tell us is about how they can be taken
on trust to be better economic managers than the conservatives. But they are
not willing to trust us and honour our intelligence or generosity with detail
about how we might get there together. “Better together, no matter what,”
says Labor. Well, yes. But that requires political parties to stop driving us
apart, to stop insisting that we must be talked down to and pacified into
quietude with stupefyingly dull stories that harangue us about strong
economies, all the while ignoring the inequality being embedded by the
means they have chosen of building that economy – an economy that will be
prone to contraction, not growth, precisely because of that refusal to spend.
Until Labor’s commitment to “better together, no matter what” becomes
more than tokenism borne of inward intuition – until it becomes more than a
blind for political disrespect about our capacity to swallow anything more
than the dumbed down stories that politicians assume will hold our interest –
then Labor’s idea that winning consists in telling us a compelling story is going
to fall flat. Mistaking the dull and totally compromised language of politics,
and the dull non-spending agenda, for a compelling story is Labor’s part in the
delusion.
Much of this idea that stories need to be simple – to the point where a
glimpse is all we would need to be inspired – arises from a misconception
about our attention span and our desire for detail. In our busy lives, we might
not display a long attention span on politics. But perhaps that is because
politicians are not feeding us anything worth attending to or they are feeding
us with lies too easily seen through. There is after all little if any evidence that
they are doing anything other than impoverishing the whole debate with their
glib banalities. Good story tellers they certainly are not. That being so, it might
be said, frankly, that instead of lulling us into dumbness (in both brains and
speech) in the hope we might just shut up and listen, it might be time for
politicians to shut up and listen.
The listening thing is a huge challenge for politicians. They have never
been good at it. They listen in all the wrong places and at all the wrong times.
491
If they listen at all it is usually about ten or twenty years too late – like on
climate change. So even learning where to start listening is a problem for
them. It is a problem for two reasons. The first is because we ourselves are
not organised to deliver coherent messages and until we are, we can’t expect
too much from governments in return. I will talk more about this later. The
second reason is because there is an in-built deafness in politics to the
sections of the community where something good can be tapped into. These
sections of the community constitute a good place for politicians to start
developing more inspiring stories of hope for the future. Listening skills need
to be developed and used in the forums where people are willing to
contribute ideas towards an imagination of a new Australia. These forums will
not be found inside the party rooms. But they are beginning to be set up
outside the political sphere. While they are being set up, politicians could do
worse than spend some time on learning how to listen. This could stand them
in good stead if the power of politics to change our lives completely crashes
in the future and if bottom driven planning takes off in Australia, shifting
power away from political leaders and towards all Australians.
Leaders learning to listen
The non-spending agenda – the one where politicians promise to achieve
more while ostensibly taxing us less (I say “ostensibly” because as the
Parliamentary Budget Office has shown, it is only the rich that are being taxed
less650) – that non-spending agenda has been developed by politicians, with
the help of corporations, on an assumption that 21st century Australians are
predominantly parsimonious, greedy, selfish, insatiable and fickle. Do
politicians really think we are like that? My experience is yes they do actually,
although our disdain for politicians is probably about equal to theirs for us.
But even if I am being mean about politicians on this point (and they have, on
average at least, a better view of us than we do of them), it is fairly clear that
we can’t have brushed up too well in the estimation of any party that feels
that policies of parsimony are more likely to win our support. These policies
pre-judge Australians in quite a demeaning way as an ungenerous, spoilt and
650 Parliamentary Budget Office, “2019-20 Medium Term Fiscal Projections, Report No. 03/2019”, Op.
Cit., pages 1 and 9. See Solution No. 4 above, “Changing attitudes about taxation”.
492
puling electorate. It could be argued they actually try to turn as many of us as
possible into that.
But what if we are not so much miserly as merely discerning about what
we want to do with our money and to be more involved in decision making
about that? What if the whole problem of relating to Australians about jobs,
growth and taxes were less about the amount that governments should spend
and more about our trust that our taxes will be spent well and spent where
they really will do more good? What if development of the spending agenda
occurred on ground where we could work together to define priorities instead
of splitting us up into camps: one camp full of marginal electorates, that can
then be won by pork barreling, and another camp of non marginal electorates,
where those most in need simply get left behind? What if we weren’t forced
at every election into the indignity of squabbling over an ever smaller cake?
What if the debate were conducted on terms completely different to the ones
that make it seem like all we ever think about is ourselves and our individual
financial prosperity? What if we were drawn more into questions about “the
how” – how we spend our money rather than whether we spend it. This would
require governments to focus on something in the electorate that they are
simply not focusing on and may not even want to, because it would take
decision making away from them on where our money should be spent. The
something that they are not focusing on is our generosity, our spirit of
cooperation, our willingness to share, and our willingness to pay a fair share
of our intergenerational debts.
Labor missed something critical in the 2019 election results which, were
it painted differently, could have potential to heal the multiple rifts between
Australians about who gets money and who doesn’t and to lift debate from a
suffocating and self-defeating focus on cost and budgetary constraint. It was
evident in the election results that there is an abiding generosity in many
Australians – a generosity that, if tapped into, could change everything. As
Chris Bowen observed:
On economic policy, we know from close analysis of the election results
that many people who were actually being asked by Labor to make a
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greater contribution through the closing down of tax loopholes and
other measures actually swung to Labor.651
Yes. But instead of looking into what this might mean about large numbers of
Australians willing to share more of the burden of cost for a better life for
everyone, the prevailing interpretations fell back on painting a picture of an
uppity disregard by city elites for their regional counterparts. The image
painted was that inner city voters and regional workers were now at each
other’s throats whereas the picture was actually laden with examples of far
less miserly electors (albeit that they weren’t distributed evenly across
enough seats for their generosity to be acknowledged). The image that might
have been painted was one of an abiding groundswell of commitment from
the more well off Australians to the less well off. And yet those on the Labor
side seemed not to credit it, preferring instead to throw the offertory of the
decent rich back in their faces, to forego taxing them (even though they had
said they wouldn’t mind paying the same or even more), and to cave in to the
low spending scrimp-and-save agenda of conservatism. What emerged was a
poverty stricken mantra, newly hummed by both sides instead of just one,
that electoral success will consist in spending less on health and welfare, even
though that is the opposite of what Hawke and Keating made into a massive
success – politically and economically. After the 2019 election, everyone fell
back on a notion that a winning strategy must consist in playing to Australians
as entirely motivated by venality, dressed up as “thrift”, to make the policy
and us look a little smarter and little less cruel. Aspiration was defined first
and foremost as financial aspiration, not as aspiration for a better society,
environment or decency in governance. Growth in inequality was rejected
superficially but reinforced in practicality by Labor. If the Labor Party were to
continue on this policy course, it is hard to imagine that anything might
emerge in policy which could be called compelling. The most likely outcome
is a continued wedging of more cruelty into our national character.
By contrast, were we to start from a premise that Australians are more
generous than mean, and that there is enough national wealth to share as
long as we share it wisely, we are likely to come up with quite a different
picture than the parsimonious cost cutting and welfare bashing that can only
651 Chris Bowen, “A New Compact with the Australian People – Inaugural Paul Keating Lecture”, Op.
Cit.
494
punish society’s victims all the more. Evidence that Australians are more
generous than politicians make them out to be is fairly clear in research.
Evidence supplied, for instance, by the University of Sydney’s United States
Studies Centre in late 2019, showed that Australians have a commitment to
generosity through higher taxes and redistributive welfare that is in sharp
contrast to the national character of the USA. In its study of “Public Opinion
in the Age of Trump: The United States and Australia Compared”, the United
States Studies Centre surveyed over 1800 Australians and 1800 Americans
and found that there is much we admire in American society but not so much
when it comes to wealth and sharing via government support and taxation.
Here is what Australians and Americans provided in answers to questions
about sharing of wealth and public funds:
United States Studies Centre
Public Opinion in the Age of Trump: The United States and Australia
Compared652
% of
% of Americans
Statement Australians
agreeing
agreeing
The minimum wage should be high enough so that
no family with a full-time worker falls below the 84% 57%
official poverty line
The government should provide a decent standard
61% 40%
of living for the unemployed
The government should provide funding for hospital
visits for emergencies and operations to lower the 82% 52%
cost for patients
The government should increase taxes on the
52% 48%
income and wealth of the rich
The government should provide a free university
50% 38%
education for anyone who wants to attend
I would support a plan to reduce fossil fuel usage
that would be paid for by raising taxes, including a 64% 54%
tax on carbon emissions
652 Simon Jackman, Shaun Ratcliff, Zoe Meers, Jared Mondschein and Elliott Brennan, “Public Opinion
in the Age of Trump: The United States and Australia Compared”, University of Sydney, United States
Studies Centre, December 2019, pages 13 and 53, accessible at
https://www.ussc.edu.au/analysis/public-opinion-in-the-united-states-and-australia-compared
495
Other evidence of the generosity of Australians and their preparedness
to share with others is provided in research by Essential and the Centre for
Policy Development in their 2017 paper, “What Do Australians Want? Active
and Effective Government Fit for the Ages”, which found, for instance that:
On average, 61% of respondents in the Essential Study were prepared
to pay some level of increased tax for more service spending.653
This implies that if, as the Labor Party seems to have concluded, the hip
pocket concerns of individual Australians must always be addressed before
their social and environmental concerns, this might be a misreading of
Australians and a massive missed opportunity. The underestimation of
community willingness to share benefits and costs may lead politicians to walk
away from any and all opportunities to harness that commitment. It may also
walk away from the opportunities that can arise for our hip pockets when
social and environmental issues are addressed first (before our hip pocket
concerns), instead of doing it the other way around. There is ample evidence
that addressing social and environmental concerns can immediately stimulate
the jobs market, whereas a focus on jobs in limited or failing markets, like coal
mining, will slow jobs growth in other areas because it saps investment. This
opportunity to use social and environmental initiatives to create jobs in the
human services and renewables sectors was sitting right under the Labor
Party’s nose in the lead up to the 2019 election but they missed it and they
misread Australians’ attitudes to it. Reading the differing expressions of
Australians about their aspirations as though it is some sort of irreconcilable
divide between the north and the south and between the two halves of its
constituency – “tertiary educated progressives” and the “traditional working
class” – they decided to craft two contradictory messages: one for the people
of the south appearing to reject further investment in coal, and one
supporting new coal and fracking in the north. Everyone saw through it of
course, and Labor succeeded only in looking duplicitous and untrustworthy.
Despite the ninety odd pages of Labor’s 2019 election review and the
suggestion therefrom that Labor lost because of a combination of factors, the
probability is that they really lost because of the way they treated all
653Centre for Policy Development, “What Do Australians Want? Active and Effective Government Fit
for the Ages”, December 2017, accessible at https://cpd.org.au/wp-
content/uploads/2017/12/Discussion-Paper-Final-December.pdf
496
Australians over the issue of Queensland and coal mining. They lost because
they should have been bringing the two agendas together in an exciting way
years earlier. As a result, when it came to the crunch, they hadn’t built the
confidence in Queenslanders that Labor could lead them through a just
transition away from coal towards a better life in the regions. Bill Shorten
mentioned just transition maybe once or twice during the campaign and then
dropped the ball, probably because by then it was too late for the message to
have any traction in Queensland anyway, and with Labor obviously touting
two different messages instead of an integrated plan, they didn’t have any
credibility. A political party can’t get away with that in a post-truth post-trust
age.
After the election, Labor still didn’t get it. Knowing that their future
consists in their ability to bring these two constituencies together, they still
opted for a message which kept them apart – a message which tried to
reinstate coal and miners at the expense of the deep and legitimate concerns
of other constituents over climate change. But when you are steeped in
adversarial politics it is perhaps difficult to see where the opportunities to
bring constituencies together more effectively might arise.
Walking away from any of the sort of opportunity that generous
Australians offered in the 2019 election would be highly regrettable in the
2020s. That commitment of generosity from the better off Australians may
not last much longer if those people keep getting criticism for it from both
Left and Right. Despite the persuasiveness of the view that progressive parties
must convince people that their jobs and the economy are safe first (before
they turn to issues of social progress and environmental protection),
dependence on that unnuanced view about Australians will do little to deliver
office reliably to progressive parties and nothing to bring Australians together
for any purpose they may have in common. We can only be drawn together
by a common purpose – and that “purpose” is not a strong economy. It is
about the purposes to which a strong economy is put and how we share
whatever wealth we might have the good fortune to amass in a globalised,
highly competitive world. It is about how we share it with each other, with
our children and with the creatures and flora of our natural world.
The likelihood is that Australians are not solely “compelled” by their own
hip pockets. Many of them are compelled by something greater – a purpose
for the survival of their line and for membership of a decent society where
497
they can feel safe and valued. While they can ask “what’s the point of saving
the environment if I don’t have a job today?”, they can and do equally ask
“what’s the point of my job today if my children won’t have one tomorrow?”
Many of them can and do ask “What is the worth of my life if I am not leaving
my kids or someone else’s a better world?” The political party that can
acknowledge the presence of this second or third sort of question in the minds
of Australians, subtle and repressed though it may be, and tap into a vision of
the future that recognises the vital interdependency between what we do
today and what we might have tomorrow – that is the party most likely not
just to achieve office, but to achieve longevity in office in an irretrievably
diversified community. They are also likely to give a gift to Australia far more
valuable than the splintered society that they must assume, and indeed
create, in their non-spending policy platforms.
Politicians have to overcome lots of ingrained problems in leading a
nation. This is a trite statement, or a wry understatement, if you will. But that
doesn’t make it any less worth considering at this time in our history. Over
decades of working closely with politicians of all persuasions I have observed
that one key problem is that they never seem to seek election to do what
Australians want to do. They seek election to do what they want to do. This is
in their DNA. They all think they have the answer. For some the answers are
altruistic. For others they are mostly or sometimes entirely selfish. But for all
of them, the reward for their exhausting climb to the top is to implement the
vision that compels them – their ideology, not the one that might compel the
rest of us, if we were asked to work together to design that vision. On the
occasions that they do listen, it is to a homogenous construct of
Australianness that doesn’t exist but that will come to exist if we let it. This
construct equates Australianness to avarice.
It doesn’t fit of course. Nothing about Australianness is so static,
unchanging, thoughtless and mean as the construct politicians are reducing
us to. But the construct does seem to govern policy choices made by
governments and oppositions, reducing our options so that they are more and
more unlikely to be compelling – even while politicians themselves might
profess that a compelling vision is essential for progress.
Generally, it does not occur to politicians to ask what might really inspire
us. They have to reach a crisis like Labor did in 2019. And even then they fall
straight back onto their market research and hardly bother to ask what we
498
might find genuinely compelling, in common. It may well be that some
actually don’t want us to find out what might really matter to us, because it
might not be what they want to sell us. Still, they always think the answer
must be somewhere in their market research and their conferencing (which
usually occurs based on short term horizons and what they can do in the here
and now to get elected next time654). In this regard it is absolutely no surprise
that one of the key reasons put forward by Labor for their defeat in the 2019
election was that they didn’t pay attention to their own research:
Labor did not use its research program to develop a set of strategic
principles … The research program focussed more on the tactical
implementation of decisions already taken, rather than building a
strategy that could inform campaign planning and tactical decisions. …
The [qualitative market research approach] seems to have been driven
by … a growing separation of policy development from the research
program.655
But even if they had used their research to develop policy, research is not
engagement. And it is genuine engagement that is necessary for imagination
in policy development. Research, including focus groups, will not isolate the
things that might inspire us. It will drive us to express only our grumbles and
indulge in the handwringing, blame and “downwards envy” that Peter Lewis
observed over decades in his focus groups656 (see Chapter 7). Nor will short
term, party political conferencing about which policies will lead to a successful
election equate to the conversations that are necessary to isolate the things
that may inspire us. These forums will not sit us down in a conversation about
genuine aspirations, free of political dross. For as long as we are not given
opportunities in our polity to have those unfettered conversations, political
parties will cheapen our democratic mechanisms to sell us what they want us
to want, not what we may really want.
This is the great failure of the simplistic “narratives” that are trumped up
by politicians as election winners and the great failure of their deafness. They
654 An example of the short term horizon for conferencing within the Labor Party is the Chifley
Research Centre’s “Towards 2022” conference held in December 2019.
655 Jay Weatherill and Craig Emerson, “Review of Labor’s 2019 Federal Election Campaign”, pages 68-
69, Ibid.
656 Peter Lewis, “There is a growing empathy for those on Newstart. The dynamics of welfare politics
are changing”, Op. Cit.
499
inveigh against the echo chambers we are stuck in because of the algorithms
of social media, but they then recreate their own echo chambers by a
different process. Starting from their own incessant ideological
predispositions, they then seek to reinforce them by scouring their market
research for the messages and tactics that will get us to accept those
ideologies. If at the ballot box we don’t accept them (for example, we don’t
vote for action on climate change despite appearing to want it all the way
through a campaign), they then narrow the messages down until they find the
one that appeals to the marginal electorates, not the national or common
interest.
If Labor doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of not listening to the
electorate – mistakes Labor itself has concluded were one of the main reasons
for its loss in 2019 – then Labor’s listeners need to start from a presumption
of generosity in the electorate. If Labor is to pre-judge Australians as narrow
and mean before it has even offered us something to inspire us to invest in,
then this will merely repeat the mistake of not listening.
There are ways to listen and ways not to listen. The way not to listen is to
trawl views from research and party encounters. This will simply provide more
feedback about grievances than it does about genuine imaginative aspiration.
It will confine imagination to the sort of things that governments can do, more
than to things we must decide to do together – ideally outside party political
confines and in partnership with our employers, business, religious groups,
charities, universities, non-profit agencies, and the public service. It will risk
slipping into thinking that imagination still consists solely in a great
imagination about managing the economy, the type of imagination that
Hawke and Keating displayed when they transitioned Australia from one
economy to another. I do not mean to imply that the Hawke-Keating
government’s imagination was confined to the economy. It wasn’t. But
Australia’s leaders seem to think of little else these days. If I am correct in
that, and they are combining that narrow imagination with a presumption of
our miserliness, then the odds are that our economy is soon to be ruined, not
expanded. Listening to views of Australians that reduce them to mere avarice
isn’t listening at all. It is no place to start a conversation that might turn
Australia’s fortunes around.
But if that is the way not to listen, what is the way to listen? I would start
(and it is only a start) by suggesting that they listen to the better angels of our
500
nature – as a profoundly imaginative politician once advised. Hard-headed
modern-day politicians would probably dismiss that suggestion as idealistic
tripe, but only because the suggestion doesn’t suit them and may even
threaten the way they prefer to run things. Hard-headed modern-day
politicians are distinctly uncomfortable with idealism. Some are outright
afraid of it when it is manifest in public life (although they are not afraid of
idealism in a religious setting). There is in many politicians an ingrained fear
of visionary imagination, even as they profess that imagination is the secret
to great leadership. It is a little fear, but it is a real stumbling block. If this little
fear can be overcome, then something new is likely to open up.
A good place to start for progressives would be to stop discarding the
offers of the generous section of the population. A next step would be to
make that section of the population think bigger – by opening up or switching
the terms on which we relate to each other. At present, we tend to keep the
terms of our visioning confined to ideological expressions. For instance, Labor
and the Greens might pose the option of a green new deal as a visionary plan.
But they would then wonder why many people might not feel inspired to sign
on and may look back blankly at them. However, if the terms of a new deal
were slightly reoriented to be about who the deal is between, then the deal
becomes humanised and the role we can see ourselves playing in it suddenly
has significance, dignity, even nobility. If a deal is first and foremost about
relationships and connecting with each other, it becomes possible for us to
see where we fit and that the benefits of the deal, whatever they may be, will
come back to us and our children. This is not the sort of deal Donald Trump
prides himself on being master of – a deal where someone must lose in order
for someone to win. It is a deal of fair benefit sharing, of mutual recognition
and respect for each other’s interests because each party knows what they
are getting. In such a deal, the generosity of those who have more can be seen
for what it is – straightforward generosity, not disrespect or uppity disregard
for others.
In this approach to the deal, it is entirely possible for, say, a Labor Party
to forget about listening to its market research, and our grumbles, and our
north-versus-south antagonism for a little while, and focus instead on
developing a deal with each other for benefit sharing, one where we support
each other through each other’s bad times. Instead of, say, a deal expressed
as a “green new deal”, we could think about an interstate and
501
intergenerational new deal – a social contract in which we put our hip pocket
second and our fair social sharing first. We do this already, every single day of
our lives. There is nothing new in it. We take money out of our pockets to put
it in someone else’s, knowing that that is how we will get benefits back. That
is how the tax system works as an investment in a better society. It is how
capitalism works. Capitalism is, in a way, the story of billions of Henry Fords.
Ford had his awful shortcomings, but he treated his workers remarkably well.
While he figured out that if he organised labour in an assembly, he could
reduce the cost of production of cars, he also realised there was no point in
shuffling us into producing the cars if we still couldn’t afford to buy them. So
out of his own pocket he paid his people more – a lot more – enough to get
them to the point where they could buy his cars. Capitalism doesn’t work
without this sort of common sense – this sort of deal where the difference
between what is in the pockets of the rich and poor is small enough to allow
the whole market to become bigger. Capitalism doesn’t work with the
inequality that arises from unfair deals. I will talk more about the impact of
inequality and the need to reverse its growth in Chapter 9. But central to the
idea of a fair deal, not a Trump style deal, is the idea of mutual recognition
and respect. Such a deal isn’t likely to happen in public life if leaders keep
listening to our meaner rather than our better selves. They need to credit that,
within each of us, there is a generosity to be tapped and that if it is honoured
it will underpin our social cohesion in a manner that will strengthen both our
politics and our democracy.
Communities learning to speak
Having said that leaders need to develop new ways of listening, there is
nevertheless a practical reality that must be acknowledged. If we want
politicians to listen, and for that to lead to something effective, we need to be
saying something worth hearing. My theory that politicians need to listen
better presupposes that we are in a position to provide a coherent picture of
who we are and what we want to be as a country and a nation. This is
something we haven’t yet done, but we can organise it. Indeed, only we can
organise it. Our leaders can’t or aren’t willing.
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Australia’s representative democracy is not working well. But this is not
just because politicians are not behaving as well as they used to. It is failing
for additional reasons – because we are disengaging, disempowering
ourselves, and abrogating far too much power precisely when we should be
taking it back from those who quite apparently cannot be trusted with it. In
the past, we have been more comfortable in abrogating decision making
upward because we felt our leaders could be trusted to get it right more often,
and when they weren’t getting it right we were able to protest. Now that right
to protest is being squashed at precisely the time when we need it most –
when politicians are descending into much more untrustworthy behaviour
and setting in place myriad ways of avoiding scrutiny and accountability.
Protest might have been the most time efficient way in the post-war period
to achieve progress and get the national agenda back on track, but it is
becoming less efficient. When it does occur, protest has the double
disadvantage of coming back to politicians more as a babble than a reasonable
and orderly refrain (or that at least is how it can be misrepresented by them).
And it takes too long to cohere into a generational shift. This enables
politicians to divide and conquer for longer than they should. However, well
researched, agreed and documented plans can come back into the hearing of
politicians as a reference point for the things we will be prepared to strive for
in common – a reference point for where constituencies will join up.
Moreover, if we switch our behaviour to collaborative planning and spend
some time on that, we are likely to be able to save ourselves quite a lot of
time and pain.
Strengthening democracy in this way will require a slight shift in the
mindset of Australians because in our preference for representative
democracy we are accustomed to abrogating decision-making upward, so it
hasn’t yet become apparent that there might be a far more efficient way to
get somewhere. But there is something more efficient and effective than
protest, reaction and abrogation. Instead of spending quite so much time
protesting against the decisions and decision makers, there is an option to
become the decision makers. That does not mean joining a political party
which is simply the entry point to the adversarial system. Rather there is the
option to join together in a different forum, and set the framework within
which orderly decisions can be made in a much less fractious, less costly and
less time consuming way. In this shift, our plans can drive our spending
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decisions instead of the other way around. More of our mistakes can be
avoided instead of mopped up at inordinate cost.
For their part, our leaders could give us space to make this shift. They
could start by stepping away from the practice of reducing us to a lesser
version of ourselves and then playing insidiously to that divided and beggared
community. They could recognise that there is an option to seek out who and
what we might want to be, and perhaps begin soon to enjoy a conversation
with us as to how we might become that – without being domineering, as is
their habit. There is an option that they could work with us as partners. This
option has been proved to be an effective and viable option at the level of
local governance. It is the option provided in the framework I described in
Chapter 5. It is the option of establishing a national community futures plan
via a genuine community engagement and an ongoing open monitoring
system based on the system of Integrated Planning & Reporting already
legislated in some states of Australia. It is the option of letting a community
own a long term plan, rather than a party owning a short term platform. It is
the option of a truce in what has been a lot of pointless, self-defeating
mudslinging between politicians and voters.
This system of Integrated Planning & Reporting, done well, has the
capacity to shift us from mere reactive participatory democracy to proactive
participatory democracy. It has the capacity to turn our babble into coherent
collective wisdom. In practice, were a national community futures planning
and reporting system to be driven from the bottom up in an open,
transparent, cooperative, enjoyable, ongoing conversation, then there would
be something coherent to which politicians could listen. We would be saying
something really worth hearing. It would take some skill development in
participating communities, but it is not rocket science. It merely requires open
conversations in a non-intimidating setting, without the intrusion of fear
mongering that many politicians stoop to in policy development. As I showed
in Chapter 7, literate and thoughtful communities can work together to devise
plans even for something as daunting as a national economy. Indeed, from
the way the economy is shaping up in Australia today, communities could
hardly do a worse job than governments, especially governments operating
with a neoliberal fixation. If communities can master the art of developing a
plan for a national economy, then a national plan for the other three
quadrants – of society, the environment and governance – is sure to be
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achievable because it is a significantly easier task that many local communities
have already mastered. It is time to give an integrated national community
futures plan a try.
At the beginning of this section on gathering the strengths of democracy,
I quoted Labor’s Claire O’Neill saying: “Politics is about offering a compelling
story about our country: who we are, where we are going”. But if politics is to
be reinstated as more of a positive force in our democracy I think we should
reverse this. It isn’t politicians who should offer the compelling story to us.
We should offer it to them. We should offer them unprecedented insight into
what really does inspire and compel us, instead of letting them guess and
punishing them when they guess wrongly (and even when they guess
correctly). Integrated Planning & Reporting lifted to a national community
futures planning effort is a means of putting us in charge of our own story and
leading politicians to the place we want to go.
In the next two chapters I will attempt to set out how we can activate a
process of national community futures planning in an orderly and efficient
manner. I will also suggest some things that we might concentrate on in the
early stages of the next decade to ensure that any plans we decide on will
have the greatest chance of success. If there is a key weakness in this whole
idea of lifting community futures planning to a national level, it is probably
that we are starting a bit late. But if we recognise the urgent things we need
to fix and trends we need to remedy then it will not be too late. We can catch
up. Australia is at a critical turning point in its history as a nation and as a land
– a point from which we could go either way into ruin or success. The activity
of identifying the key things that are going wrong in our nation at the moment
– and using IP&R together to develop strategies that will head off failure in
these areas before it overtakes us – this is an essential part of imagining our
better future. A focus on this will help us shape the way we speak to our
leaders with a clarity and coherence that will enable them to listen.
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Chapter 9 – The Turning Point
Integrated community futures planning is entirely new at the national level.
For that reason, start up may be slow. And thinking about the effort that might
be required to start all this up, and do it well, occasionally makes me feel a
little more tired than energised. But it is the right time to start. There are
things we must turn around soon, if we can. In this section I will list the key
things we must turn around sooner rather than later, with or without the help
of politicians. They set a context for our starting position at 2020 and will
provide some focus on the areas where we must succeed in the 2020s if we
are to maximise our chances of leaving a better world by 2050. Unless we
succeed in these critical actions, we are very unlikely to succeed in other
expectations for social mobility, environmental recovery and economic
ascendancy that we might envision as desirable by 2050. These key turning
points are:
• Turning away from growth in inequality,
• Turning away from growth in racial and religious conflict,
• Turning towards a First Peoples Heart,
• Turning away from loss of openness and transparency in governance
and democracy,
• Turning away from climate catastrophe, and
• Turning away from disengagement.
Notably, this list doesn’t contain anything about the economy – not directly
anyway. And but for one obvious exception, it doesn’t specifically cover what
we should turn towards. However, in other studies657 there is much to suggest
that if these things are turned around then a strong economy will follow.
There is also much to suggest that if we don’t turn inequality, social exclusion,
657See The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (which I will talk about next), Saving
Capitalism For the Many Not the Few and the “Australian National Outlook 2019” (which I have
already discussed).
506
repressive and secretive governance and climate change from their current
trajectories, a weaker economy will arise.
Insofar as we might identify what we want to turn towards, other than a
stronger economy (which is a given), I have always found it useful in
community engagement to encourage people to imagine the opposite of the
current situation. If we apply that technique in the case of the five things in
the above list that I have suggested we turn away from, then we would be
able to begin imagining what it might be like to live in a society that has less
inequality, more harmony, more freedom, a tolerable climate and a sense of
connection. And then when we have arrived at the next step and are at the
stage of having chosen a vision for our future that we find compelling, we can
double-check the sanity of that vision by imagining its opposite. If anyone still
has any doubts about the vision of what we should turn towards at that point,
my experience is that they will tend very quickly away from scepticism and
towards optimism and confidence that the vision can become a reality.
Turning away from growth in inequality
In 2020 Australia has reached what we should hope is the nadir of its
experience with growing inequality. This trend of growth in inequality must
be arrested and reversed if we are to stabilise or reverse the growth our social,
economic and environmental problems. Economists know that widening
inequality leads to a depletion of and degradation of the middle class which
in turn leads to contraction of the economy. What might not be so obvious to
Australians, though, is how badly we are doing already in terms of our social
and physical wellbeing as a result of growing inequality. As I showed in
Chapters 4 and 7, Australia’s growth in income and wealth inequality since
2003 has been marked and has trended consistently in the wrong direction.
The damage we have already done in just a few years of growth in inequality
isn’t widely apparent yet, except perhaps in stand-out cases such as the health
and wellbeing of Indigenous populations and youth suicide. But Australia is
faring quite badly among developed world countries in terms of health and
wellbeing.
A major study released in 2009 by British epidemiologists and social
scientists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, provides access to an
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assemblage of data from hundreds of studies compiled over decades which
demonstrates a strong correlation between income inequality within any
given country and poor health and wellbeing. The study, The Spirit Level: Why
Equality is Better for Everyone658, shows that developed countries with higher
income inequality suffer with poorer health, wellbeing and social cohesion,
despite their significantly greater wealth per capita and total national
prosperity relative to developing countries. Misery in developed countries
may not be as widespread as it is in developing countries, but where it occurs
in a developing country it is no less miserable and its consequences are just
as devastating, or in some cases even more devastating than in some
developing countries.
The authors of The Spirit Level paint a picture that suggests developed
countries are close to, or past the point of, what economic growth can do for
their populations in terms of improving health, wellbeing and social cohesion.
Instead the authors posit that reducing inequality within a given developed
country has far more potential than economic growth itself to deliver better
health, wellbeing and happiness:
Economic growth, for so long the great engine of progress, has, in the
rich countries, largely finished its work. Not only have measures of
wellbeing and happiness ceased to rise with economic growth but, as
affluent societies have grown richer, there have been long‐term rises in
rates of anxiety, depression and numerous other social problems. The
populations of rich countries have got to the end of a long historical
journey.659
… Health and social problems are indeed more common in countries
with bigger income inequalities. The two are extraordinarily closely
related – chance alone would almost never produce a scatter in which
countries lined up like this [i.e., the index of increases in health and
social problems is very tightly aligned to increases in income inequality
in rich countries].660
658 Emeritus Professor Richard Wilkinson and Professor Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is
Better for Everyone, Penguin Books, 2009.
659 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Ibid.,
Kindle edition, page 5.
660 Ibid., page 20.
508
In short, richer countries do not deliver a better quality of life overall once
they reach a certain point of wealth. We don’t live longer. We don’t get
happier and we don’t get more healthy. And if in those wealthy countries a
problem of growing inequality arises, we are likely to become less healthy,
more depressed or more anxious on average. We certainly become more
homicidal, more violent in the home, more class driven and more intolerant
of what we see as our own limitations. We appreciate ourselves less and
suffer disproportionately with shame661. It is as though our health and
wellbeing is directly threatened by the image of someone next door or in the
next suburb who appears to be wealthier than us, regardless of the fact that
we have personal and shared wealth that is far greater than the wealth that
can be enjoyed by just about everyone in a developing country. The
comparisons we can make between us and our peers can cause us inordinate
anxiety and shame. And shame has been identified by leading social scientists
as “the social emotion”662. It has been shown in a range of studies to be a
major likely contributor to increases in mental illness, homicide and domestic
violence663. This applies in Australia. Shame brought on by the conspicuous
success and wealth of those around us, compared to our personal views of
661 Ibid., Chapter 3. See also Chapter 10, on “Violence: gaining respect: If you ain’t got pride, you ain’t
got nothing”: “James Gilligan [Director of the Harvard Centre for the Study of Violence] … argues that
acts of violence are ‘attempts to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation – a feeling
that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming – and replace it with its opposite, the
feeling of pride’. …Gilligan goes so far as to say that he has ‘yet to see a serious act of violence that
was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed and humiliated’.”, pages 132-133.
662 Ibid., pages 39-41: “It was Thomas Scheff, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, who said that shame was the social emotion. … By ‘shame’ he meant the
range of emotions to do with feeling foolish, stupid, ridiculous, inadequate, defective, incompetent,
awkward, exposed, vulnerable and insecure. Shame and its opposite, pride, are rooted in the
processes through which we internalize how we imagine others see us. Scheff called shame the social
emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves
as if through others’ eyes. Pride is the pleasure and shame the pain through which we are socialized,
so that we learn, from early childhood onwards, to behave in socially acceptable ways. Nor of course
does it stop in childhood: our sensitivity to shame continues to provide the basis for conformity
throughout adult life. People often find even the smallest infringement of social norms in the
presence of others causes so much embarrassment that they are left wishing they could just
disappear, or that the ground would swallow them up.”
663 For example, see Jess Hill, See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, Black
Inc., 2019, Chapter 4, for a dissertation on the contribution of shame to increases in domestic abuse
by men.
509
our own situation or success, is a major negative influence on our health and
wellbeing, our home life and our community spirit.
Furthermore, the authors of The Spirit Level provide strong evidence to
suggest that declining health and happiness, in increasingly unequal countries
like Australia, applies not just at the bottom of societies like ours but
throughout our social spectrum. Money doesn’t buy happiness. Such a
description of the difficulty of living in a wealthy but inequitable Australia may
seem incredible to those who are doing well in their comparative wealth and
who have a higher degree of self-confidence arising from the reinforcement
of a sense of superiority that they have either enjoyed from birth or have built
up during their lives. Indeed, if the results of the ABC’s Australia Talks National
Survey in 2019 are anything to go by, almost 75% of Australians would still
assert in 2020 that, regardless of any faults of inequality, Australia is still the
best place to live in the developed world664. Having said that, the same survey
returned a finding that “76% of Australians agree that the gap between rich
and poor is too large”. So we obviously sense that something in our economic
distributions isn’t quite as we would like it. Bearing in mind that the Australia
Talks National Survey – which was an enormous survey of over 54,000
Australians – found that “55% of Australians feel they are not struggling
financially”, it is obvious that there are a lot of well-off people who could be
counted within the 76% of Australians who think income inequality is too
wide. That 76% is not just made up of the aggrieved and aspiring poor. There
is a considerable proportion of Australians who detect that quality of life isn’t
good for many others and they want it to be better.
Regardless of our individual views of our quality of life, the authors of The
Spirit Level have not been able to paint a pretty picture of the health and
wellbeing of Australians compared to other developed countries. The authors
present quite confronting data which shows a strong correlation between
income inequality and poor health, wellbeing and social failure. The higher
the income inequality, the higher the failure of a wealthy country in terms of:
• level of trust,
• mental illness (including drug and alcohol addiction),
• life expectancy and infant mortality,
664Results of the ABC’s Australia Talks survey can be accessed by completing the survey on line at
https://australiatalks.abc.net.au/
510
• obesity,
• children’s educational performance,
• teenage births,
• homicides,
• imprisonment rates, and
• social mobility.
The developed countries whose performance was recorded in these
correlations included (and here they are listed in order of income inequality
from the lowest inequality to the highest):
• Japan
• Finland
• Norway
• Sweden
• Denmark
• Belgium
• Austria
• Germany
• Netherlands
• Spain
• Canada
• Switzerland
• Ireland
• Greece
• Italy
• Israel
• New Zealand
• Australia
• UK
• Portugal
• USA
• Singapore
Sometimes studies were not available for some aspects of the health and
wellbeing of all countries on this list, but Australia was in no way an outlier in
the theory that health and wellbeing stagnate or deteriorate as income
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inequality increases. Scandinavian countries and Japan – having the lowest
income inequality – displayed consistently better outcomes in health,
wellbeing and social problems. By contrast, Australia, having one of the
highest levels of income inequality, sat right where we should expect it to be
if the thesis of the authors of The Spirit Level is correct – namely at the less
enviable end of the line. Out of the 22 developed countries studied, Australia
was:
• the 7th worst performer on an overall index of health and social
problems665;
• the 5th worst performer on child wellbeing666;
• the 14th worst performer on trust in the community (not too bad until
you consider that in the 14 worst performers the percent of people
agreeing that “most people can be trusted” was less than 40%)667;
• the 4th worst performer in terms of spending on foreign aid (spending
on foreign aid was used as an indicator of a nation’s trust and
generosity beyond its borders)668;
• the 2nd worst performer in terms of mental illness (equal with the
UK)669;
• the outright worst performer on illegal drug use670;
• the 7th best performer on life expectancy671 but only the 11th best on
infant deaths per 100 live births672;
• the 7th worst performer on obesity673;
• the 3rd best on the average of maths and literacy scores for 15-year-
olds674 (however, these results are based on PISA scores collected by
the OECD before 2009 and Australia has since fallen sharply in this
665 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Op. Cit.,
Kindle edition, page 19
666 Ibid., page 24
667 Ibid., page 53
668 Ibid., page 61
669 Ibid., page 67
670 Ibid., page 71
671 Ibid., page 84
672 Ibid., page 5
673 Ibid., page 92
674 Ibid., page 106
512
ranking, coincident with its growth in inequality over that same
period675);
• the 7th worst performer in teenage births676;
• the 9th worst performer in homicides per million677; and
• the 9th worst score on prisoners per 100,000678.
The best that can be said about this is that we should be glad we don’t
live in the USA which has the dubious distinction of the second highest
inequality and the worst or near worst results on every measure of health and
wellbeing. Some results for the USA were so bad that the authors had to use
a log scale in some graphical representations of the data, just to fit the USA
onto the graph. So while we are doing better than the USA, Australia, for all
its riches, nevertheless displayed some of the poorest health and social
outcomes among the developed countries on the list. In all but about three of
the measures we performed in the bottom third or half of the scale. And we
have to remember that this study was published in 2009, before we had
undergone another decade of growth in inequality and had the shine quite
taken off our economic credentials.
What this implies is that a great place to start in terms of planning for a
better future is to focus in hard on reducing income and wealth inequality,
before it gets any worse. Take the money we have got, ensure it is raised fairly
via progressive taxation, and then work together to spin it round faster in our
economy, particularly by shifting our attitude to:
• welfare,
• jobs expansion in the services sector,
675 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores are collected by the OECD and
compare the performance of 15-yearolds in reading science and maths. Australia has been falling
steadily in performance in all three fields since 2000. See Paul Karp, “Pisa results: Australian students'
science, maths and reading in long-term decline”, The Guardian, 6 December 2016, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/dec/06/pisa-results-australian-students-science-
maths-and-reading-in-long-term-declin and “Australian students' maths performance falls to OECD
average in worst result since 2000”, The Guardian, 3 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/03/australian-students-maths-performance-
falls-to-oecd-average-in-worst-result-since-2000?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
676 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Op. Cit.,
Kindle edition, page 122
677 Ibid., page 136
678 Ibid., page 148
513
• jobs expansion in renewables and agricultural/ecosystem
management and energy efficient industrial processes,
• cessation of subsidisation for industries going into decline such as
fossil fuel industries, and
• increased government sector participation and competition via
government trading enterprises.
In short, capitalise on our generosity and energise our economy by investing
our tax revenues in ourselves. After all, the private sector is not investing in
us and it is time to stop waiting around for them to discover a greater sense
of civic reciprocal responsibility. If we can reverse the inequality that
corporations have been slowly embedding under neoliberalism, we stand a
far greater chance of achieving a happier and healthier lifestyle.
At the same time, if we can stop deluding ourselves that everything is
fine, as leaders of both major federal parliamentary parties in Australia did in
their Christmas messages in 2019, we will give ourselves a better chance to
solve our problems. While Australia was suffering through unprecedented
bushfires for more than four straight months – fires made even more
agonising than usual because of climate change – Scott Morrison and Anthony
Albanese both stated in their 2019 Christmas messages, in full Trumpian style,
that Australia was “the best country”679. Mr Albanese went so far as to say
Australia is “the greatest country on earth”680. But it is apparent that on all
the above measures – health, education, murder and imprisonment rates,
child wellbeing, mental illness, illegal drug use, obesity, and inequality itself,
(not to mention the strength of our economy, the health of our natural
environment and our treatment of our Indigenes) – we are far from being “the
greatest country on earth”. These figures make such statements little more
than boasts by little boys, and leaders do us no favours in their attempts to
lull us into a sense of superiority and security when in fact we are closer to
the brink of breakdown than numerous other developed countries on
multiple indicators of quality of life.
679 Nick Bonyhady, “Firefighters front and centre in leaders’ Christmas messages”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 24 December 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/firefighters-front-
and-centre-in-leaders-christmas-messages-20191224-p53mq0.html
680 Anthony Albanese quoted by Nick Bonyhady, “Firefighters front and centre in leaders’ Christmas
messages”, Ibid.
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Scott Morrison expanded his hollow boast when – because by New Year
2020 the fires had got much worse, not better – he attempted to assert that:
There is no better place to raise kids anywhere on the planet.681
The truth is there are many better places on the planet to raise our kids and
this statement has no proper or responsible purpose. It is intended entirely to
distract and mislead. In Mr Morrison’s “bubble” – not Canberra (which he
ritually derides in this manner) but the Sutherland Shire of Sydney (where he
resides and where unemployment is only about 1.5%) – it might seem like
Australia is the best place to raise a child, especially on a Prime Ministerial
salary. But the broader reality is that insofar as child wellbeing goes, our rank
on the world scale for developed countries is pathetic. It has been for more
than a decade and it is getting worse as UNICEF’s 2007 study of “Child poverty
in perspective: An overview of wellbeing in rich countries” makes
embarrassingly obvious. That study stated that:
The true measure of a nation’s standing is how well it attends to its
children – their health and safety, their material security, their
education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and
included in the families and societies into which they are born.682
But Australia failed to measure up in just about every way in this study (when
it bothered to provide the requested data). For instance:
• In terms of the material wellbeing of children, Australia scored below
the average of 24 OECD countries providing data683;
• Australia had the second highest percentage of households with
children without an employed parent684; and
• In terms of the health and safety of children, Australia scored below
the average of 25 OECD countries providing data685.
681 Scott Morrison quoted in Amy Remeikis, “’No better place to raise kids’: Scott Morrison’s new year
message to a burning Australia”, The Guardian, 1 January 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/01/no-better-place-to-raise-kids-scott-
morrison-new-year-message-burning-australia?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
682 UNICEF, “Child poverty in perspective: An overview of wellbeing in rich countries”, 2007, accessible
at https://www.unicef.org/media/files/ChildPovertyReport.pdf
683 Ibid., page 4.
684 Ibid., page 6.
685 Ibid., page 12.
515
Updates from UNICEF over the decade since 2007 haven’t shown any
improvement. In fact, educational data which looked not too bad at all for
Australia in the 2007 UNICEF study, had by 2018 deteriorated sharply to the
point where Australia scored in the bottom third of developed countries for
equality of educational attainment in preschool, primary school and
secondary school. We were ranked 30th out of 38 countries686, indicating that
the disparity of educational attainment across all three levels of pre-school
enrolment, primary school reading scores and secondary school reading
scores was comparatively wide – meaning we have a far greater proportion of
our children left at the bottom of the literacy scale than 29 other developed
countries.
No amount of cherry-picking, misinterpretation and misrepresentation of
international surveys will turn the propaganda that Australia is the “best place
to raise a child” from a fantasy into a reality. Conservatives such as Tony
Abbott’s former press secretary, Claire Kimball, can and have duped
themselves and others with misrepresentations of international survey data
to support this assertion while all genuine evidence is to the contrary. In
January 2020 Ms Kimball painted misleading impressions of how much better
it is to raise kids in Australia because it is a country where average wealth per
adult is the ninth highest in the world687. But she has ignored the fact that
average wealth provides no insight into the inequality that we are suffering
and which is ensuring that for more and more of us, as each year passes,
Australia is not the best place to raise a child. She has ignored what the
surveys she is relying on are actually saying about Australia’s wealth – namely
that while we might have the ninth highest average wealth per adult, that
wealth dropped in 2019 by far more than any other developed country. It
dropped a staggering US$28,670 or AU$41,765 per adult688 to US$384,640 or
686 UNICEF, “Innocenti Report Card 15, An Unfair Start, Inequality in Children’s Education in Rich
Countries”, 2018, page 8, accessible at https://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/an-unfair-start-
inequality-children-education_37049-RC15-EN-WEB.pdf
687 See Claire Kimball, “Why it’s shocking to feel ‘embarrassed to be Australian’”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 19 January 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-it-s-shocking-to-feel-
embarrassed-to-be-australian-20200117-p53sen.html?btis
688 Credit Suisse Research Institute, “Global Wealth Report 2019”, page 7, accessible at
https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html See also
David Scutt, “Australia slides in global wealth rankings as 124,000 millionaires disappear” Sydney
Morning Herald 21 October 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/australia-
slides-in-global-wealth-rankings-as-124-000-millionaires-disappear-20191021-p532ov.html?btis
516
AU$559,581689. This implies an explosive combination of declining average
wealth and simultaneous increased inequality. Ms Kimball can attempt to
distract us with boasts about Australia’s unparalleled 28 years of continuous
economic growth while ignoring the consistent declines in that growth since
2014. And she can misrepresent any number of other statistics to distract
adults from the truth of the decline in wellbeing for our children. Yes, Australia
is one of the wealthiest countries in the world but unless that wealth is shared
better than it is being shared now, Australia will continue to slip down on
international rankings for education and access to opportunity. This is doing
Australians no favours because it is distracting us into thinking that nothing
needs to be done at a time when much more needs to be done in child
wellbeing.
In making these false and misleading statements about how Australia is
the best place in the world to raise a child, leaders such as Scott Morrison are
rightly keen to ensure we don’t panic, although his motivation is merely that
we might continue to trust, unthinkingly, to his calm and steady hand. His
enjoinder not to panic would be credible or more laudable if he had a plan.
But of course, he does not, not one that actually helps our children anyway.
On the contrary, the plan he is following, as set out in the “2015
Intergenerational Report” is to decrease funding for education by 40% as a
proportion of GDP by 2055 (see Chapter 4). If there is a shred of truth that this
is the best country to raise a child, by 2055 that will have evaporated if we
keep following Mr Morrison’s “plan”.
I should say here that the suggestion that we turn away from growing
inequality is not a plea that we should all be equal – financially. It is not a
trojan horse for communism (as it would be quickly labelled by panicked right-
wing critics). The data in The Spirit Level make it clear that to achieve a highly
desirable lifestyle in terms of health and wellbeing, we don’t need perfect
equality at all. Even if we did, we are never likely to reach that point anyway.
But we could reach a point where we have far more equal opportunity, where
the circumstances of our birth, our genetic or financial inheritance and any
689This looks like an impressive figure until we realise that most of it is locked up in over-inflated
property prices. Those left out of the property market are worth considerably less. Also note: These
figures may look inconsistent with the ABS figures quoted in Chapter 7 for average wealth in 2017/18
(>$1 million). The ABS figures are per household and the Credit Suisse figures are per adult. As such
they are not inconsistent.
517
other personal bad luck, count for less of our society’s miseries than they do
now. That prospect is easily achievable. And we could reach a point, if
business leaders change their attitudes, where business becomes a more
equal partner in social, environmental and economic development, rather
than an exploitative and destructive force. That prospect is achievable too.
Furthermore, if we reach that point of more equal opportunity, then the
very good news is that everyone benefits from that, not just the poor. If all
this focus I am putting on the need to overcome inequality gives rise to any
impression that it is all about taking from the rich to give to the underserving
poor, think again. There is considerable evidence that “rather than being
confined to the poor, the benefits of greater equality are widely spread
[throughout all social strata]”:
What the studies do make clear … is that greater equality brings
substantial gains even in the top occupational class and among the
richest or best‐educated quarter or third of the population, which
includes the small minority of the seriously rich. In short, … the benefits
of greater equality seem to be shared across the vast majority of the
population. … Everyone receives roughly proportional benefits from
greater equality.690
If central governments in Australia at state and federal levels want to do
something about rising crime and recidivism, domestic violence, poor
educational results for school children, overrun hospital systems, and a wide
range of other economically disadvantageous social ills, they could do nothing
better than aim to reduce inequality. There is a plethora of research available
today that shows that inequality is a significant contributor to social
breakdown in developed countries. It is piling unnecessary cost onto
unnecessary cost. The breakdown is linked in this research to the prevalence
of shame for individuals that arises when they can see close up that they are
not as successful as others in their community. The breakdown is aggravated
even further when a society starts to define itself and its success in terms of
wealth and affluence. As the authors of The Spirit Level point out, when it
comes to explaining why more people tend to have mental health problems
in more unequal places:
690Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Op. Cit.,
Kindle edition, page 181.
518
Psychologist and journalist Oliver James uses an analogy with infectious
disease to explain the link [between mental ill health and inequality].
The ‘affluenza’ virus, according to James, is a ‘set of values which
increase our vulnerability to emotional distress’, which he believes is
more common in affluent societies. It entails placing a high value on
acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others
and wanting to be famous. These kinds of values place us at greater risk
of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder. … In
another recent book on the same subject, philosopher Alain de Botton
describes ‘status anxiety’ as ‘a worry so pernicious as to be capable of
ruining extended stretches of our lives’. When we fail to maintain our
position in the social hierarchy we are ‘condemned to consider the
successful with bitterness and ourselves with shame’. … Economist
Robert Frank observes the same phenomenon and calls it ‘luxury fever’.
As inequality grows and the super‐rich at the top spend more and more
on luxury goods, the desire for such things cascades down the income
scale and the rest of us struggle to compete and keep up. Advertisers
play on this, making us dissatisfied with what we have, and encouraging
invidious social comparisons. Another economist, Richard Layard,
describes our ‘addiction to income’ – the more we have, the more we
feel we need and the more time we spend on striving for material
wealth and possessions, at the expense of our family life, relationships,
and quality of life.691
All this implies that if governments really want to improve our lives, they
should stop defining aspiration, social success and even personal virtue in
terms of income and wealth. If governments really want to address the cause
of social breakdown, particularly in areas such as Indigenous disadvantage,
domestic violence and school education, then the best thing they can do is to:
a) get out of the way of local communities and empower and fund them
to solve the problems themselves, and
b) do everything else they possibly can in macro and microeconomic
policy to reduce the inequality that confronts far too many people
691 Ibid., pages 68-69.
519
with a sense of their own failure, their lack of worth and virtue as
human beings, and their consequent shame.
A great place to start would be to cut out the shaming of people on
welfare. The government should especially discard policies such as the
cashless welfare card which simply heaps stigma on top of pain and removes
basic rights for welfare recipients to decide how they may lead their lives.692
The money they would save in the budget – by preventing inequality and
avoiding the need for cures to the socioeconomic ills arising from shame – is
bound to be greater than the cost of the cures. It is fully obvious that if
governments focussed on reducing inequality and poverty, that would make
health services cheaper, not to mention police and justice services. If they
focussed on expanding welfare to ensure a liveable wage for the employed
and unemployed and homes for the homeless, those people when once
provided with the basics would more often than not solve their life issues
without the need to resort to more expensive health and shelter
interventions. And if governments also simultaneously focussed on expanding
education funding, the savings from the health system could be used to build
a truly creative economy. As at the start of 2020, governments have it all the
wrong way around. We are seeing governments like NSW’s Berejiklian
government developing priorities for reducing problems of obesity, child
literacy and mental health, and spending massive amounts of money in the
process, only to find that the problems are getting worse. Common sense
should tell them that if they spent more on reducing inequality and poverty
they wouldn’t need to spend so much on health and social problems. As
Rickard Wilkinson and Kate Picket have pointed out:
On the occasions when government agencies do announce policies
ostensibly aimed at prevention – at decreasing obesity, reducing health
inequalities, or trying to cut rates of drug abuse – it usually looks more
like a form of political window‐dressing, a display of good intentions,
intended to give the impression of a government actively getting to
692See Nijole Naujokas, “I feel sick thinking about being forced onto cashless welfare. It’s so insulting”,
The Guardian, 6 February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/feb/06/i-feel-sick-thinking-about-being-forced-onto-cashless-welfare-its-so-insulting and
Melissa Davey, “’Ration days again’: cashless welfare card ignites shame”, The Guardian, 9 January
2017, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jan/09/ration-days-again-
cashless-welfare-card-ignites-shame
520
grips with problems. Sometimes, when policies will obviously fall very
far short of their targets, you wonder whether even those who
formulated them, or who write the official documents, ever really
believed their proposals would have any measurable impact. … Rather
than reducing inequality itself, the initiatives aimed at tackling health or
social problems are nearly always attempts to break the links between
socio‐economic disadvantage and the problems it produces [when in
fact the link cannot be broken because the disadvantage is the cause of
the problems]. The unstated hope is that people – particularly the poor
– can carry on in the same circumstances, but will somehow no longer
succumb to mental illness, teenage pregnancy, educational failure,
obesity or drugs.693
Of course, it is every busy bureaucrat’s and every politician’s addicted
illusion that if they treat the symptoms of social ill health, then that will suffice
for a cure, when all the while the cause is still pervasive. But if governments
switch their focus to the cause they can do much more good than they can by
trying to gain political kudos from attempted cures. This is why have I
concentrated so much in this book on changing our attitude to welfare and
tax. If we do that, we can unleash our governments from foisting political
delusions on themselves and us and design a far more effective expenditure
plan. Australians can’t expect that our expenditures on health, justice and
wellbeing will be affordable and sustainable if we keep tipping people back
into the economic inequality and poverty growth that is causing the problem
in the first place. It is simple. We can pay now, or we can pay much, much
more later. Governments can have all the budgets for health that they like,
but it won’t be worth the price of a band-aid if they don’t fix the cause of
social ill health – inequality, and the poverty, disadvantage and discrimination
it entrenches in our lives.
In concentrating on the need to change attitudes to welfare and tax, if we
are to address inequality, I have also suggested that Australians should change
attitudes about big government, or rather, bigger government. After forty
years of neoliberal thinking has permeated Australian culture with a suspicion
of bigger government involvement, it might be expected that many
693Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Op. Cit.,
Kindle edition, page 239.
521
Australians will instinctively resist expanding the government sector’s part in
our economy, despite the probability that this, more than anything, would
assist us to reduce inequality and save us from some of the more egregious
disasters perpetrated by the private sector when they came to take over areas
such as banking, child care, aged care and tertiary education. Even though we
know from the ABC’s Australia Talks National Survey in 2019 that “76% of
Australians agree that the gap between rich and poor is too large”, we might
still expect that many Australians will instinctively want to look for an
alternative to bigger government. Ironically though, as they say in The Spirit
Level:
Greater inequality actually increases the need for big government – for
more police, more prisons, more health and social services of every
kind. Most of these services are expensive and only partially effective,
but we shall need them forever if we continue to have the high levels of
inequality that create the problems they are designed to deal with.
Several states of the USA now spend more on prisons than on higher
education. In fact, one of the best and most humane ways of achieving
small government is by reducing inequality.694
In other words, even though we might not see bigger government as an
acceptable means of reducing inequality, we might end up with bigger
government anyway if we artificially suppress the necessary levels of
government involvement in services. In that event, it will be the sort of big
government that doesn’t help us much and costs more – the sort that is forced
to focus endlessly on cures rather than prevention. Somehow this cycle – of
inequality leading to the wrong type of bigger government and leading then
again to more inequality – needs to be broken. The solution is to seek out the
most effective type of government participation – the right bigger
government at the right time instead of the wrong bigger government we
want to avoid. Part of the right type of bigger government consists in more
(not less) Government Trading Enterprises (GTEs) to provide competition for
the private sector in open markets and to increase returns to the public. These
increased returns will fund our growing demand for health services, aged care
and welfare (including benefits for the employed and unemployed alike and
for the homeless), which in turn has the effect of reducing inequality and all
694 Ibid., page 272.
522
the expense arising from it – such as the expense of mental health, prisons,
homelessness, suicide prevention, domestic violence protection, and other
cures. If we can develop a staged plan to break this cycle and set it going in
the right direction, we will increase our chance of driving efficiency and
productivity into the government sector. We might still end up with bigger
government or we might end up with smaller. But we will have more
confidence that it is the right size for government and the right mix. There
should be improved confidence that government funds are being earned and
spent where they should be earned and spent. This might take ten years but
if in 2020 we have sunk as low as we want to go in terms of our income and
wealth inequality, and if as I have said above, we have reached what we might
hope is the bottom of a curve – a pivotal point in relation to the erosion of our
human rights and freedoms, our trust in each other, our happiness, and our
democracy – this would suggest there is no time like the present to start the
process of turning things around using every means at our disposal, including
increasing the right type of government sector participation. Australia needs
to make 2020 a turning point if we can, tiring though that may be. If we don’t
wish to wake up one day in the land of our nightmares rather than our dreams,
it is time to look around for a different way of doing things. Turning away from
inequality by reversing neoliberalism is the most cost-effective place to start.
Turning away from growth in racial and religious conflict
In addition to the fact that we have hit a low point in social cohesion due to
growth in inequality, there are at least five other particular reasons why 2020
is a good time to start developing a national community futures plan together.
One of these is that we have reached a point where racial and religious
intolerance is becoming a problem and many influential politicians are
inflaming that problem.
On the face of it, Australia is a highly tolerant society when it comes to
race and religion. In the vast majority, we still hold a view that there are
benefits to living in a multicultural society and support for a return to the
White Australia Policy is not at all widespread. In 2020, 85% of Australians
agree or strongly agree with the statement that “multiculturalism has been
523
good for Australia”695. And we strongly favour non-discriminatory policies in
relation to future immigration. As the results of the 2019 Scanlon Foundation
National Survey show:
Since 2015, Scanlon Foundation surveys have tested the extent of
support [in Australia] for immigration restriction, advocated by minor
right-wing and populist parties and some independent candidates.
Respondents are asked if they agree that in selection of immigrants it
should be possible to discriminate on the grounds of race, ethnicity or
religion. There has been a large measure of consistency in majority
rejection of this form of discrimination: in 2017, 80% disagreed with
discrimination based on race or ethnicity, 81% in 2019; in 2017, 74%
disagreed with discrimination based on religion, 79% in 2019.696
Our views about multiculturalism and tolerance of religious beliefs are
therefore still quite supportive of diversity. Diversity is one of our biggest, if
not the biggest, of our national strengths. It is not unreasonable to state that
our diversity has been the source of our success as a nation. But something is
on the turn when it comes to attitudes about religion, religious freedom and
freedom of speech. Religion is fast becoming the main arena where our
culture wars are being fought.
Religion is becoming less influential in Australia and less relevant in our
daily lives. According to the ABC’s Australia Talks National Survey in 2019, only
13% of Australians say that religion is “very important in their lives” and
another 16% say it is “somewhat important in their lives”. The remaining 70%
say that religion is “not very important” or “not important at all”. Full 50% say
religion is “not important at all in their daily lives”. This lines up with other
surveys such as the WIN/Gallup International poll to which I have already
referred. That poll reported in 2009 that Australia was the 12th “least
religious” country in the world (with 32% of respondents saying that religion
was important in their daily lives and 68% saying it was not important in their
daily lives)697. From the ABC’s Australia Talks National Survey a decade later,
695 Professor Andrew Markus, “Mapping Social Cohesion 2019, The Scanlon Foundation Surveys”, page
68, Op. Cit.
696 Professor Andrew Markus, “Mapping Social Cohesion 2019, The Scanlon Foundation Surveys”, page
3, Ibid.
697 Source: World Population Review, Least Religious Countries 2019, Retrieved 2019-10-3 from
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/least-religious-countries/
524
it would appear we are getting less and less religious as time passes, a fact
reflected in the ABS census statistics (see Chapter 7).
To those of us, like me, who are comfortable in their atheistic humanism,
or to those who are equally comfortable in their agnosticism and/or their
private or godless spirituality, the decline in religious commitment by
Australians is of little or no concern. But if we put ourselves in the place of
those people for whom religion, particularly organised religion, is still vital, it
could be seen that this apparently inexorable trend towards secularity in our
society might be quite frightening for them. They might be living in fear of
becoming outsiders in their own land. Of course they are not the first, and
they won’t be the last to experience that fear. Just ask Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders what it is like to be excluded from your own land. If faith
groups are indeed frightened about being excluded, overwhelmed or
overpowered by a secular culture that they sincerely reject, then a
consideration of what has happened to First Nations people, and the dignity
with which they have faced that tragedy, might be instructive. In their
struggles for recognition and their struggles for a place in Australian society,
our excluded Indigenes and those religious groups who currently feel
excluded or fear an impending decline of their power, may have something in
common – a need to find a way to work with other Australians to survive as a
defined but respected minority. At the moment, religious groups are not
finding their way through their fear and their perception of threat. They are
coming out fighting hard to retain a dominant position in our legislature, our
economy and our polity. This behaviour is in contrast to the approach of our
Indigenes.
I marvel at the dignity, generosity, thoughtfulness and cooperative
behaviour continually displayed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who,
as I write this, are organising themselves in a nation-wide co-design process
for recognition in their own land. In Victoria, Indigenes are also participating
in a process legislated in that state for establishment of an Indigenous
representative body for negotiation of a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders.698 Although the terms of the national co-design process have
been whittled away by the Turnbull and Morrison governments – from a Voice
698“Victoria introduces to parliament 'history-making' Indigenous voice legislation”, The Guardian, 28
March 2018, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/28/victoria-
introduces-to-parliament-history-making-indigenous-voice-legislation
525
enshrined in the Constitution requested in the “Uluru Statement From the
Heart”, down to a merely legislated “Voice to Government” (not even to the
Parliament699) – Indigenous negotiators have still maintained an amazing
dignity and patience, despite the rudeness of the government’s rejections of
their requests for recognition. Of course, our Aborigines don’t have a choice.
They are so utterly powerless that cooperation is the only way they will get
somewhere. Nevertheless, the grace and graciousness of Indigenous
participation, in the face of imposed degradation over more than two
centuries, is beyond anything we have ever seen in terms of cooperative
engagement for justice and social equality. In designing a cooperative process
for development of a national community futures plan, it would be hard to go
past our Indigenes’ approach to development of a Voice as a model for some
of the behaviours that might lift community engagement to a new standard.
Religious groups, however, are probably less likely to be motivated or
ready to recognise the things they might have in common with other excluded
groups. And being so used to holding positions of privilege and power within
society, they might not readily resort to the more cooperative suite of
negotiation techniques. Still, their fear of exclusion is real and perhaps
justified. They are becoming outnumbered. And this would explain why those
groups are emerging from their hitherto comfortable communities and are
becoming more outspoken against the rise of secularity. They are organising
to increase their influence over the nation’s legislative agenda, and they are
succeeding.
Debates about the need for religious freedom in Australia have upended
our legislative and policy priorities. When our legislators in government
should be looking at major issues like global heating and just transition for
workers to new sustainable industries, they are instead pushing legislation for
religious freedom up the priority line, even though there is no argument to
support this prioritisation since religious freedom is the only human right for
which individuals currently enjoy protection under our Constitution and there
is absolutely no evidence of a threat to their right to freely practise their
religions howsoever they might wish. So many other rights are in peril, as I set
699See Michelle Grattan, “Proposed Indigenous ‘voice’ will be to government rather than
to parliament”, The Conversation, 30 October 2019, accessible at
https://theconversation.com/proposed-indigenous-voice-will-be-to-government-rather-than-to-
parliament-126031
526
out in Chapters 2 and 8, but they are not receiving any priority at all. In that
sense, people who are worried about their religious freedom are jumping the
queue. This does not mean that we shouldn’t be dealing respectfully with
their concerns about religious freedom, if they are legitimate, but the priority
of those concerns could be determined in a national community futures
planning process so that it need not be resolved at the expense of other more
pressing issues. Who knows: if a national community futures planning process
were effectively organised, that in itself may remove many of the fears of
religious people about the loss of control over their future. Much of their fear
might be reduced simply by the social cohesion that can be developed in such
a process, obviating the need for the ill-drafted attempts at religious freedom
legislation that have been put forward. These drafts have purported to
protect religious freedom but on balance simply legalise discrimination on the
grounds of religion.
Depending on how the Religious Discrimination Bill is passed into law (or
amended in future), there is a very real prospect that, in the kick-back against
the rise of Australian secularity, religious groups and religious commercial
businesses will be able to discriminate against non-believers on religious
grounds, overriding other human rights, but non-believers will have no equal
rights and no right to object to the discrimination of faith based employers. In
that regard, the Religious Discrimination Bill is part of a larger conservative
effort to unpick progressive legislation like our anti-discrimination laws. It is
part of a serious attempt to crack down, not just on rights, but on social
mobility. It is geared to maintaining elites and licensing hate. As outspoken
Gosford Anglican parish rector, the Venerable Rod Bower, said at Christmas
2019, the federal government’s religious freedom inquiry is an “endorsement
of vilification” to “seduce a small political base”700. He particularly lamented
the upending of our most important national agenda items as a result of a
disproportionate focus on protection of religious rights by asking:
700Dana McCauley, Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Melissa Cunningham, “Church leaders use Christmas
message to call for climate action”, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/church-leaders-use-christmas-message-to-call-for-climate-
action-20191222-p53mau.html
527
What good is it that the son of God was born 2000 years ago … when for
our own short term financial gain we sell off our children’s future and
smugly watch our planet burn?701
The whole Religious Discrimination Bill is a nonsense, of course, and
shouldn’t have been prioritised as urgent legislation. Little wonder that in late
2019, the Religious Discrimination Bill was characterised as “friendless”702 and
rejected by every diverse interested party, except the Attorney General who
drafted it, and then redrafted it to make it even more discriminatory and to
satisfy only the most extreme elements of the Australian Christian
community703. The re-draft did not add too many more friends to the bill. For
instance, Bilal Rauf, spokesman for the Australian National Imams Council,
said the revised bill was “commendable” and an improvement on the first
draft but did not provide Muslims with sufficient protection from vilification
based on their faith704. He asked:
Is there anything there that helps us? I think the short answer is no.705
The re-draft simply made the bill more dangerous, prompting the Australian
Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to praise the bill’s core aspect – to prohibit
discrimination on the grounds of religion – but at the same time to warn that
other provisions “provide protection to religious belief or activity at the
expense of other rights”. The AHRC called for:
701 Ibid.
702 Sarah Martin, “Religious discrimination bill: faith-based groups and equality advocates welcome
delay”, The Guardian, 1 December 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/dec/01/scott-morrison-puts-off-religious-discrimination-bill-until-2020
703 The Religious Discrimination Bill 2019 was re-drafted in late 2019 to appease hard-line religious
groups wanting to discriminate against their staff. See Paul Karp, “Coalition's revamped bill allows
religious organisations to discriminate against staff”, The Guardian, 10 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/10/coalitions-revamped-bill-allows-religious-
organisations-to-discriminate-against-staff?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
704 See Michael Koziol, “The second coming of religious freedom: churches back 'significantly
improved' bill”, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 December 2019,
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-second-coming-of-religious-freedom-churches-back-
significantly-improved-bill-20191221-p53m2s.html
705 Ibid.
528
wholesale changes of provisions which limit other human rights in a way
that is “unnecessary and disproportionate or otherwise inconsistent
with international law”.706
All that time and all those resources – and for what? The whole point of that
bill should have been to protect religious people from discrimination, not
allow them to discriminate and diminish the rights of others. If it is ever
passed into law, the Bill has as much potential to embed inequality deeply
into our society as neoliberalism does in our economy.
All this goes to the importance of getting started on developing a
coherent and meaningful plan for our future where we might rescue some
chance to reverse growing inequality. The results of the 2019 Scanlon
Foundation Survey imply that we are at a sensitive point in our cultural
cohesion from which we could emerge as a stronger nation, if we properly
organise ourselves, or a weaker one if we don’t. Some of those results show
us headed towards breakdown or, if we put all the results together, on the
brink of it. We have certainly skated as close to it as we could wish to go, if we
want to be able to afford to restore the situation. For instance, in the decade
between 2007 and 2017:
• Australians indicating a sense of rejection and reporting experience
of discrimination “because of [their] skin colour, ethnic origin or
religion” more than doubled, from 9% to 20%;
• Australians disagreeing with the proposition that Australia is a land
of economic opportunity where hard work is rewarded, increased
from 16% to 21%;
• Australians expecting that their lives in three or four years would be
worse, almost doubled from 11% to 19%;
• Australians worried about becoming a victim of crime in their local
area increased from 25% (in 2009) to 35%;
• Australians reporting that they have a sense of belonging in Australia
“to a great extent” dropped from 77% to 67% in 2017, and then to
63% in 2019;
706Paul Karp, “Religious freedom bill's latest draft 'unacceptable and does not protect human rights'”,
The Guardian, 1 February 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/01/religious-freedom-bills-latest-draft-unacceptable-
and-does-not-protect-human-rights
529
• Australians reporting that they take pride in the Australian way of life
and culture “to a great extent” dropped from 58% to 54% in 2017,
and then to 50% in 2019;
• Australians reporting that they have been very happy in the last year
dropped from 34% to 26% in 2017, and then to 23% in 2019;
• Australians reporting that they think their lives will be “much
improved in three or four years” dropped from 24% to 18% in 2017,
and then to 17% in 2019; and
• Australians strongly disagreeing with the statement that “accepting
immigrants from many different countries makes Australia stronger”
rose from 8% to 13% in 2017 and then dropped again, but only to
12% in 2019.707
This is a picture of a loss of cohesion in Australian society. If we are to
reverse it, then as a minimum our politicians will need to behave differently,
and less divisively. However, “trust in the federal government to do the right
thing for the Australian people” dropped from 39% in 2007 to 28% in 2017. It
rose to 30% in 2019.708 This might suggest Australians do not have as much
confidence as they had a decade ago that politicians will rise above the
divisiveness inhering in their adversarial approach to our future. That is
another reason to organise ourselves to plan for that future, starting from
2020. At this particular point in time, this turning point, we cannot rely on
political leadership; and this unfortunately applies to leadership on both the
progressive and the conservative sides.
Unless we draw a line in the sand about growth in rights to discriminate
on the grounds of religion – rights that legislators are attempting to entrench
when they should be ensuring we are protected from such discrimination –
we will suffer a growth in religious intolerance instead of a growth in
appreciation of diversity. At the start of this book I spoke about having been
inspired by the religious community of Iona in the Scottish Hebrides about the
need to find a place where the languages, values and aspirations of different
faiths, cultures, ideologies and atheisms intersect. I suggested that if that
place can be found, then a common idea of a far better future is more likely
707 Source: Professor Andrew Markus, “Mapping Social Cohesion 2019, The Scanlon Foundation
Surveys”, page 5, Op. Cit.
708 Ibid., pages 3 and 5.
530
to be determined and accepted not just despite diversity but because of it.
What I meant was that our best chance of realising the best possible future
for our children lies not in cultural narrowness but in an inclusive society
which maximises the distinctly diverse contributions of every community of
interest. This is more likely to arise from a society which has moved beyond
mere tolerance and has matured to a point where differences are actively
appreciated and enjoyed. Much of our society has reached this point, but it
has to be said that the most conservative adherents of some religious groups
don’t yet see diversity as a source of national strength.
But diversity is here to stay. Like it or not, every single one of us is affected
by it far more than we are affected by a monoculture of any particular religion
or any form of atheism. So pragmatically, if we really want a better future for
our children the best option by far is to make the best of our diversity.
Capitalise on it. Make it work for us, just as it always has. There are brilliant
things in it which we all benefit from, and we don’t have to sacrifice anything
of our personal safety and security in the process. The research for this book
has not changed my mind about this. But if Australia ever countenances
legislation that entrenches religious intolerance and allows people to feel
justified in building walls of hate around their communities, we will not find
the space where our differences can productively coexist and our personal
safety and distinct preferences can simultaneously be honoured. Intolerance
cannot work for the common good. Diversity and tolerance can. But diversity
and appreciation together add up to more than diversity and mere tolerance.
The success we can make of Australia with just a slight shift in emphasis and
understanding about the value of diversity – a slight shift like that seen in the
Iona religious community – is likely to see us all safe home, sooner. The space
in which we can find that appreciation of diversity is a national community
futures planning process.
Turning towards a First Peoples Heart
At the outset of 2020 Australia had been colonised by Europeans for over 230
years but had still not defined itself. No national identity had been articulated
and nothing had been agreed about what we value in common. Nor is it likely
that something along these lines will be agreed in the near future because
531
there is no prospect that we will be offered the opportunity of a constitutional
convention or even of a conference on a national charter of rights and values.
Without that sort of statement, we are bereft of a common sense of what
makes us decent.
In the absence of this common sense of decency, people turn to local
communities, to their religion, to greed, to ideology, to philosophy, or to
anything that will give them a frame of reference for self-definition and
meaning in their lives. This is absolutely essential to health. But because these
stratagems hone our world down to a very small circle in which we feel we
have at least some measure of control over our lives, they engender exclusion.
At a personal level all these things help us keep our head above water and
give us a sense of dignity and a place in the world, however small. But at a
national level they break us up, and that comes back to hit us from behind
with a weaker economy, racial tension, a busted natural environment, and a
democracy on the brink. The big bad world always intrudes again, globalised
as it is, and turning inward or to enclaves is not enough of a shield against the
real insecurity we are facing. Australia has arrived in the 2020s as a nation full
of stress, anxiety and fear. I trust this book has provided enough evidence to
support these particular contentions.
However, there is a way out of this. While we are building our local
communities and turning to our own belief systems for guidance about how
to live life faithfully and to the fullest, we might at the same time, and at last,
turn to the question of our origins as a nation. This is likely to be traumatic
because Australia’s origins are bloody and shameful. Non-indigenous
Australians in 2020 don’t necessarily feel responsible and often bristle when
they feel put upon to accept a guilt for something they genuinely had no part
in and would not condone today. But unfortunately, they are still benefitting
from it and the share of benefit accruing to non-indigenous Australians from
our origins is so grossly disproportional to the share of benefit that has been
enjoyed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders that it amounts to a
continuation of the crimes of our origins. Until we fix this, we will be unable
to go forward and develop an identity that specifies the way in which we can
respect ourselves in humanity, the behaviours that should command respect
and the behaviours that should be rejected. If we tried to develop a statement
of national values and rights without settling this matter of our past first, the
statement would end up simply looking hollow and hypocritical. If we want a
532
new slate, we will need to wipe the old one clean, not by ignoring it but by
confronting it. And there is a matter of national conscience in the way.
As I said in the previous section, Australia’s national government of 2020,
the Liberal National Party, has begun an attempt to steer a co-design process
for an Indigenous Voice to Government. In setting this up they rejected, from
the outset, the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the
Constitution requested in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. At this point
in history, this is about as rude as bad behaviour can get. After 230 years of
appalling treatment, this is what we dish back to the oldest continuous
civilisation on the planet, the nations that acted as custodians of Australia for
60,000 years before Europeans washed up here with so much social
dysfunction and stole it. We have acknowledged the stolen generations, and
to some extent the stolen lands (in Native Title legislation). We have even
begun to acknowledge almost 150 years of massacres in the frontier wars. But
the stolen future of First Nations has not been acknowledged yet.
Logically, it should not cost us a great deal to acknowledge this last theft
before we make it any worse. And it also stands to reason that what we might
receive in return for such an acknowledgment will be a far greater national
benefit. That benefit is twofold. It consists in a recovery of our sense of
decency, which we can’t truly get back unless we acknowledge our role in
crimes from which we continue to benefit. And it consists in the fact that it is
a prerequisite to our forming a new nation together. We can’t faithfully do
that unless we restore First Nations to equality first, unless we give them the
same rights of self-definition and self-determination that we would expect for
ourselves. This is why a First Nations Voice in the Constitution is vital to all
Australians. We have it in our power to make Australia anew if we start from
this particular issue. If we fail to deal with this, respectfully, sincerely and
wholly, we will not be able to rescue our own decency and settle the question
of our identity. As I have mentioned in Chapter 2, this lack of agreed identity
and values diminishes us in so many ways and indeed even makes us
vulnerable to involvement in wars. For that reason alone, it is worth turning
towards acceptance of a First Peoples Heart.
Despite the fact that we have everything to gain from such a
rapprochement, it should be expected that many conservative politicians will
fight this. The fact that the Indigenous Voice codesign process has been
quarantined from the Constitution and shifted down into legislation instead
533
is an indication that Australia’s conservatives have little or no interest in
opening up the Constitution to a remake. They don’t want Australians to get
anywhere near the Constitution because this is like pulling a thread and they
fear their preferred narrative about what Australia is may fray or even
unravel. If a First Nations Voice in the Constitution is put to a referendum then
obviously all Australians will have to vote, which means all Australians will
start asking themselves about the rights of First Nations, and will then be
automatically prompted to ask themselves about their own rights and equal
rights, which in turn will ignite a debate about the Constitution and the rights
we don’t have in it. This is the last thing any conservative government will
want. It was the last thing John Howard wanted when he wrested control of
the last Constitutional Convention in 1998 (see Chapter 2). And it is the last
thing the Morrison government will want709, especially when they have just
spent two decades quietly legislating to extinguish the little bits of rights we
might have been able to assume and especially when they are about to hurl
themselves towards the finishing line with a bill that legalises discrimination
on the grounds of religion. With the silence of the Constitution on our human
rights – except our rights to religious freedom – legislators are free to
extinguish any other assumed right because the Constitution does not
explicitly say what can’t be extinguished. Australia’s Constitution is not fit to
protect either us or our democracy. It is the basis of our growing insecurity.
This is fully comprehended by conservatives, who prefer that sense of
insecurity – a sense they play on to increase fear and divisions. And this is why
they will not run the Indigenous Voice codesign as a process of constitutional
reform if they can at all avoid it.
But one day, Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians must join
together and call on the government to enshrine a First Nations Voice to
709 See Greg Brown and Paige Taylor, “Morrison to veto ‘voice’ as part of constitution”, The Weekend
Australian, 12 July 2019, accessible at https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/morrison-to-
veto-voice-as-part-of-constitution/news-story/c9753bbe3595470032ac7fa95636931e The Minister for
Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt is on record as saying the Scott Morrison has given him a “charter
letter” and that “constitutional recognition, the voice and truth telling are in that charter letter.” The
letter seems not to have been made publicly available but all other known actions of Scott Morrison
bespeak no such intention to grant a referendum on Constitutional recognition. See also Katharine
Murphy, “Ken Wyatt expects Coalition colleagues to campaign against constitutional recognition”, The
Guardian, 13 February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2020/feb/13/ken-wyatt-expects-coalition-colleagues-to-campaign-against-constitutional-
recognition
534
Parliament in the Constitution. Once we do that we can secure all our rights
and the values that will enable us to protect our children’s futures and
security. If we succeed in this it may be seen as the finest gift that one group
within a diverse nation has ever given to others – the gift of a definition of
ourselves and our particular decency. All it will take is a respectful, honest
acceptance on the part of non-indigenes of the selfless offerings of peace
from First Nations in the Uluru Statement of the Heart. A space can be made
for that in a national community futures plan.
Turning away from loss of openness and transparency in
governance and democracy
At the end of 2019 Guardian journalist Ben Doherty wrote an article beginning
with this statement:
The world is becoming less free and, in Asia, almost nobody lives in a
country where civil rights are not being eroded or repressed, a new civil
rights report has found.710
Australians are also becoming less free. We cannot claim to be living “in a
country where civil rights are not being eroded or repressed” and there is little
doubt that we are moving towards a more repressive and more authoritarian
state. In reporting on the results of the 2019 CIVICUS Monitor, a global
research collaboration that tracks fundamental freedoms in 196 countries, Mr
Doherty highlighted the truth of our fall from grace in freedoms and
liberalism. The CIVICUS Monitor assesses freedoms such as association,
peaceful assembly, and expression, and categorises countries as either
“closed”, “repressed”, “obstructed”, “narrowed” or “open”, “based on a
methodology which combines several sources of data on the freedoms of
association, peaceful assembly and expression”711. The 2019 CIVICUS monitor
710 Ben Doherty, “Australia’s civil rights rating downgraded as report finds world becoming less free”,
The Guardian, 8 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/07/australias-civil-rights-rating-downgraded-as-
report-finds-world-becoming-less-free?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
711 CIVICUS, 2019 CIVICUS Monitor, Press Release, “Australia’s civic space rating downgraded as
freedom of speech threatened”, 4 December 2019, accessible at
https://monitor.civicus.org/Australia.PeoplePowerUnderAttack/
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downgraded Australia’s rating from “open” to “narrowed”. In explaining the
downgraded rating CIVICUS stated that:
The downgrade to narrowed means that while the state allows
individuals and civil society organisations to exercise their rights to
freedom of association, peaceful assembly and expression, violations of
these rights also take place. The rating changed after a thorough
assessment of the state of civic freedoms in the country and comes after
a year of regular monitoring. CIVICUS is extremely concerned about
incursions on free speech, the increasing use of surveillance and
crackdown on protesters [in Australia].712
CIVICUS went on to say that:
There are serious concerns that the [Australian] government is trying to
muzzle criticism. … CIVICUS is also worried about attempts to silence
whistleblowers who reveal government wrongdoing.713
There is no doubt that these allegations of increasing abuse of power by
our government are true. And the effect of these repressions of our open
discourse is very serious. If we wish to ensure that we will not find ourselves
living in a repressive regime, and if we wish to ensure that our ideas and vision
of a free Australian life and livelihood will be taken seriously by our
governments, then the sort of things that have happened to our democracy
in the last decade – things like the list of thirty-six serious incursions on our
freedoms that I listed in Chapter 8 – must be reversed or at least amended
after open debate. Some attempts have been made through Senate
committees to review the appropriateness of these repressions but more
needs to be done to stem the abuse that is now rampant in our government’s
daily behaviour, of silencing all dissent, licensing gross imbalances in rights
that different communities may enjoy, and killing provision of decent,
disinterested, thoughtful advice provided by public servants and other
professionals for the national interest. As Lyndal Rowlands, CIVICUS Advocacy
Officer, pointed out in the press release announcing Australia’s downgrading
to a “narrowed” country:
712 Ibid.
713 Ibid.
536
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly used his speeches in
recent months to chip away at the rights of environmental movements
rather than engaging with their concerns. He has criticised students for
skipping school to join the climate strikes while downplaying their fears
that bushfires and other climate impacts are already disrupting their
education. Australians have a right to peaceful assembly, association
and expression in our democracy – rights that our leaders have a duty
to uphold, even if they disagree with the message. Australians are not
used to being told to keep quiet when it comes to talking about the
issues that matter to us – and we shouldn't have to be afraid of the
consequences of speaking out.714
The prospect of starting and sustaining greater involvement by
Australians in a national community futures planning process, in an
environment where free speech is being squashed instead of encouraged, is
a daunting one. Depending on the level of repression we may be facing,
anything that we might decide is a priority might be squashed before we even
start. If we wish to reverse the disempowerment that many Australians have
been feeling and have become anxious about, we will need to give priority in
any planning to reversing this repression. That will involve some creative
thinking.
One of the things that has given me some cause for concern in proposing
that Australians start to take much more organised control of their lives – by
deciding what we want together, writing down and integrating our plans and
monitoring our progress – is our ability to make politicians and governments
sit up and take notice and give the plans the respect they deserve. It is
obviously a challenging time to suggest we embark on a process of community
driven bottom up planning – all the more challenging because governments
at the state and federal levels are moving the other way. They are moving
towards even stronger paternalism and top down governance and away from
wanting to be held accountable for anything at all. As such, the prospect of
being held accountable for our agenda rather than theirs would be the last
thing they will want to open up. Conservatives, in particular, would see no
opportunity for them in the introduction of national community futures
714CIVICUS, 2019 CIVICUS Monitor, Press Release, “Australia’s civic space rating downgraded as
freedom of speech threatened”, Ibid.
537
planning, if only because it would whittle their power down and threaten to
reduce the inequality and the division they thrive on for election purposes.
Conservatives will try to nip national IP&R in the bud if they can.
Having said that, there is a path to making politicians and governments
respect and even commit to partnership in, and support of, plans that have
been made by communities in open consultation and reporting processes. It
will take time – possibly a decade – to swing politicians in behind these plans,
assuming they are well made by communities in the first place. But it is
possible to attract the interest of politicians in the process. It will be harder in
a society of repression and authoritarianism – but not impossible. There is a
prospect that progressive political parties might swing in behind a good,
evidenced based independently developed community futures plan if they
perceive that it could actually take several types of pressure off them –
pressures they don’t handle well at all today. For instance, it could relieve
them of the need to do a whole lot of pointless divisive things they spend
money on now, just to convince us that they have the answers to all our
problems. If we present them with the things that we believe to be the
answers, then they can shift their efforts to proving their credentials in
delivering what we have already agreed is the best plan in the national
interest. That sort of process, where we lead them with a long term view
instead of them leading us with a short term view, can actually cut the need
for a whole lot of social antagonism that politicians feed on now. It could shift
electioneering into a new art – where political parties work to convince us
about their commitment to and skills in delivering on our plan and meeting
our targets. We in turn could weed out candidates who show no willingness
to commit to the plan; or we could switch our votes when a government
demonstrates some sort of incapacity in performance. In a national
community futures plan we would have a reporting framework at our disposal
where, at a glance, we could assess whether a government had led us closer
to our vision or further away from it. This would give us an ease of control and
continuous social progress that we currently don’t have.
In Chapter 3 I spoke of how, in Integrated Planning & Reporting, the
process of engaging the community to develop their own strategic plan and
to agree to taxation and budgeting arrangements in exchange for delivery of
that plan constitutes a social contract, the like of which Australians have yet
had no opportunity to enter into with any level of government other than
538
local government. A national community futures planning and monitoring
process would allow politicians and governments to recommit to their part in
the social contract. This could relieve pressure and stress for everyone –
communities and politicians alike, since they would understand their role and
place in the deal and share responsibility instead of shirking it or lying about
it. None of this would be easy if our governments continue to close down
transparency in governance and accountability for their performance and
integrity. We probably couldn’t even get a decent plan off the ground if the
government continues to restrict what journalists and whistleblowers can
disclose and what journalists can report on as the weaknesses of our society
and governance. We wouldn’t know the half of what we were trying to fix.
The scale and pace of erosion of our rights that we have seen in the last
decade really threatens our ability to take control of our lives in the coming
decades. We need to build a plan where we turn this repression around
sooner rather than later.
Turning away from climate catastrophe
Of course, the most evident point in need of turning is the climate catastrophe
we are walking into – or that we are already in, over our heads. Reversing all
the other things I have said we need to reverse in this book – inequality,
neoliberalism, rising religious prejudice, Indigenous disadvantage, our
attitudes to tax and welfare, repressive authoritarianism, and the way we
engage in our democracy – none of this is worth much if we do not have a
planet capable of sustaining our children. On the other hand, if these reversals
will help us through the impending environmental catastrophe, perhaps they
should take priority at this point.
Either way, as I wrote this part of this book in Sydney, it was near
Christmas 2019 and bushfires were burning all over New South Wales. We
struggled through weeks of air filled with smoke and ash, a blood coloured
sun in the late afternoons, blood moons at night, a dull dusty pall over
everything and nothing of the sparkling crystalline light that artists used to
relish in painting and beachgoers used to bask in. Weeks of headlines about
unseasonal fires, attendant deaths and property loss, and massive destruction
of biodiversity had topped almost all other news. But climate experts looked
on bewildered as the national parliament carried on in its final sitting weeks
539
of the year as though climate change was no issue at all and certainly not
worth mentioning or doing something about. As Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick,
a climate scientist with the University of NSW’s Climate Change Research
Centre, remarked in response to the federal parliament’s silence on climate
while Australia burned:
Here we are in the worst bushfire season we’ve ever seen, the biggest
drought we’ve ever had, Sydney surrounded by smoke, and we’ve not
heard boo out of a politician addressing climate change. … They
dismissed it from the outset and haven’t come back to it since. … They’re
burying their heads in the sand while the world is literally burning
around them and that’s the scary thing. It’s only going to get worse.715
She wasn’t alone in expressing such bewilderment. At the end of the decade
to 2019, Australia’s parliament seemed caught in some kind of strange Greek
tragedy, where, as in Oedipus Rex, the plagues had been visited upon the
king’s city and messages from the Delphic oracle had come back to Thebes,
identifying the king as the cause. In our case, it was as though every character
on the main stage, the leaders along with the king, had set about coping with
the oracular truth that their actions (or inaction) had brought disaster on
Australia, by either denying the truth or simply staying silent. Amid it all, a
child who told the truth about the audacity of world leaders talking only of
money while the world is at the beginning of a mass extinction was either
ridiculed or ignored for saying, “This is all wrong,”716 while Australian leaders
spent the last fortnight of parliament before entering a new decade
concentrating on:
715 Lisa Cox, “Leading scientists condemn political inaction on climate change as Australia ‘literally
burns’”, The Guardian, 7 December 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/2019/dec/07/leading-scientists-condemn-political-inaction-on-climate-change-as-australia-
literally-burns?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
716 Greta Thunberg, aged 16, Speech to the United Nations Climate Summit, 23 September 2019: “This
is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you
all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood,
with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying.
Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk
about is money, and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” Accessible at
https://www.designboom.com/design/un-youth-climate-summit-global-strike-greta-thunberg-
circular-economy-09-23-2019/
540
• continued bashing of unionism and collective enterprise
bargaining717, incessantly pursing legislation to deregister entire
unions for minor breaches of administrative requirements (such as
failing to file annual reports on time) while proposing nothing in
taking proportional action against banks and their massive breaches
of laws prohibiting money laundering718;
• needlessly diminishing refugees’ rights to medical care719;
• restructuring the public service to reduce the effectiveness and
influence of environmental experts or any public servant capable of
providing informed and detached advice720;
• misleading parliament and interfering with police investigations of a
government minister’s alleged attempt to use fraudulent
documentation for purposes of influencing a government official in
the course of her duties721, and refusing to account or apologise for
such behaviour; and
• generally obsessing about anything but the climate disaster we had
arrived at.
Of course, the “king”, the lead character on the stage in our modern
Greek drama in 2019, had no need of pagan oracles or any desire to heed the
truths that children might utter. Scott Morrison had access to a different truth
that he deemed in parliamentary testimony to be “immutable”722. And that
717 William Olson, “Coalition persists with ‘dead, buried and exhumed’ union-busting bill”,
Independent Australia, 10 December 2019, accessible at
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/coalition-persists-with-dead-buried-and-
exhumed-union-busting-bill,13396
718 Charlotte Grieve, “The Westpac scandal: how did it happen?”, 9 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/the-westpac-scandal-how-did-it-happen-
20191206-p53ho2.html
719 Nick Martin, “Those who helped the medevac repeal bill to pass should hang their heads in
shame”, The Guardian, 4 December 2019, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-
news/commentisfree/2019/dec/04/those-who-helped-the-medevac-repeal-bill-to-pass-should-hang-
their-heads-in-shame
720 Ross Gittins, “Morrison is perfecting the seal on his own Canberra bubble”, Sydney Morning Herald,
11 December 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/morrison-is-
perfecting-the-seal-on-his-own-personal-canberra-bubble-20191210-p53ig5.html
721 David Crowe, “A shocking week of unforced errors from Morrison and his government”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 29 November 2019, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-
shocking-week-of-unforced-errors-from-morrison-and-his-government-20191128-p53f55.html
722 Scott Morrison, maiden speech to the Parliament of Australia, Hansard, 14 February 2008, Op. Cit.
541
“truth” had comforted and assured him that he and his family will be fine in
any future catastrophe. As Richard Flanagan put it:
[Scott] Morrison’s Pentecostal religion places great emphasis on the
idea of the Rapture. When the Rapture arrives, the Chosen – that is,
those Pentecostalists with whom the Prime Minister worships and their
controversial pastor – will ascend to Heaven while the rest of us are
condemned to the Tribulation – a world of fires, famine and floods in
which we are all to suffer and the majority of us to die wretchedly, while
waiting for the Second Coming and Scott and co wait it out in the
Chairman’s lounge above. Could it be that the Prime Minister in his
heart is – unlike the overwhelming majority of Australians – not
concerned with the prospect of a coming catastrophe when his own
salvation is assured?723
Pictures of Mr Morrison relaxing in a Hawaiian paradise as Australia and
Australians burned in the bushfires of 2019/20 seemed to confirm Richard
Flanagan’s analysis and it is feasible that his question can be answered in the
affirmative – meaning Scott Morrison is not concerned about impending
catastrophe. More than that, it can be observed that in Scott Morrison’s
religion there is a place for a belief that a catastrophe that engulfs the earth
should be welcomed and embraced. It is “a consummation devoutly to be
wished”724 – one that is eagerly awaited by those Pentecostalists who regard
themselves as entirely virtuous (whose virtue and worthiness are proven by
their prosperity) and who on that basis will be the only ones who survive the
tragedy of Armageddon proportions that is coming our way. If indeed this is
what our Prime Minister truly believes, then by spiritual persuasion, at least,
he can have had no genuine interest in reversing climate change. To do so
would have sat outside his belief system. It would have been sacrilegious. And
we can be fairly certain he will not be revising the beliefs that, on the
parliamentary record, he has declared to be “immutable”.
Scott Morrison is entitled to his belief system and to apply it in his
personal life. It is what motivates him to say things like: “I do not want my kids
723 Richard Flanagan, “Scott Morrison and the big lie about climate change: does he think we’re that
stupid?”, Op. Cit.
724 William Shakespeare, “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”, Act 3, Scene 1: “’Tis a consummation devoutly
to be wished. To die.”
542
to know what a recession is like”725. But as a parent I feel equally entitled to
be sure that my kids will be able to take a deep breath when they are fifty,
and will be able to afford food, and continue living in Sydney without feeling
as though they have moved to the Equator one year and the Sahara the next.
As such, parents like me might feel that while an autocrat is definitely entitled
to Pentecostal beliefs in private life, he or she is not entitled to impose a fate
of destruction on the rest of us because of that particular belief system.
Australians are entitled to religion, but religion is not entitled to run the
country, especially a religion based on a belief that the world must be
destroyed in order for it to be saved – or more, that the entire world must be
destroyed in order for a few elites to be saved. If political conservatism has
come to a point where it consists in this particular fundamentalism, then a
turning point on managing our climate cannot be trusted to fundamentalist
evangelical conservative leaders. Even if at some point conservatives of the
evangelical persuasion switch sides and take up preventative climate change
initiatives, it is very unlikely that their motives and intentions could be trusted.
The fact is our children are not safe in the hands of conservative evangelical
pentecostalists if they bring their faith into parliament as though it is a law to
surpass all others.
Progressive politics, on the other hand, may have some potential to help
us survive the catastrophe we have come to, if a few adjustments can be made
to the way progressive politics and politicians operate within our society. The
business sector can help too – a lot – if a few adjustments to their value
systems and ethics are made by many more corporations than have been
making those adjustments to date. Progressive politics, well executed by
insightful, unconflicted government and business leaders committed to an
egalitarian society and a sustainable environment, can and should play a vital
role in making our dreams a reality. This is a role that cannot be played by
conservatives, especially neoliberal or fundamentalist evangelical
conservatives, if our dreams actually do consist in more than money (and
perhaps even if they consist only in money). Unfortunately, progressive
politics has been stalled, and right at a critical financial and environmental
moment. Its usual language, discourse, and the relationship of progressive
politicians to people, are inadequate to the task of framing a vision of our
725Seven National News, “Joe Hockey's 'lifters & leaners' becomes Scott Morrison's 'taxed & taxed-
nots'”, 25 August 2016, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsDKMmJ_jdM
543
future that we might find compelling and agreeable. More than that, it is
inadequate to the task of framing a coherent vision for basic survival and
agreement on a path to that. Although by February 2020 the progressive party
of government, the Labor Party, began re-building its policies on climate
change (policies it had diluted in 2019 compared to those it took to the federal
election) by finally announcing a commitment to net zero emissions by 2050,
it still did not have the courage to tell anywhere near the full truth to
Australians about the need for genuine action towards that target. In
September 2019:
Labor’s shadow climate change minister, Mark Butler, told Guardian
Australia … that Labor would implement the Paris agreement, look for
policies that will keep warming below 2C, move to net zero emissions
by 2050 and set medium-term emissions reduction targets ‘that are
consistent with these principles and guided by the best available
scientific and economic advice’.726
But no medium term emissions reductions were brought forward by Labor
before all its policy was steered instead towards continued exports of coal,
policies which can only counteract a net zero by 2050 target for the world and
which were in direct contradiction of scientific evidence any child could
understand. Indeed, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg had already easily
gasped the truth when she spoke at the United Nations Climate Action
Summit in September 2019:
The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives
us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5° and the risk of setting off
irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. 50% may be
acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points,
most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air-pollution,
or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my
generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the
air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not
acceptable to us, we who have to live with the consequences.
726Katharine Murphy, “UK election shows centre-left can't win by 'preaching' to base, Labor's Jim
Chalmers says”, The Guardian, 15 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/15/uk-election-shows-centre-left-cant-win-
by-preaching-to-base-labors-jim-chalmers-says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
544
To have a 67% chance of staying below 1.5° global temperature rise,
the best odds given by the IPCC, the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left
to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to
less than 350 gigatons. How dare you pretend that this can be solved
with business as usual and some technical solutions. With today’s
emissions levels that remaining budget will be entirely gone within less
than eight and a half years.727
These are basic facts showing the vital importance of focussing on carbon
budgets and intense reductions of emissions in the 2020s decade (see the
discussion in Chapter 6 on the need to aim high to prevent climate change).
They augur very poorly for nations that still wish to luxuriate in emissions
reduction trajectories which only increase the risks associated with emitting
more carbon than the budget they have left.
Despite this, as at the start of the 2020s no political party in Australia,
except the Greens Party, was willing to be honest with Australians about what
needed to be done on climate change. Neither of the major parties had either
a vision or a single concrete workable idea of how to prevent an aggravation
of the mess developed countries like ours have made of the global climate.
The government had a pamphlet on its “Climate Solutions Package” but half
of it was replete with lies about our emissions performance and the other half
was about strategies which either hadn’t worked or hadn’t been developed
yet.728 It conveniently ignored all the things the government is doing in
subsidising fossil fuels which will counteract the emissions reduction effects
of the “Climate Solutions Package”. And the opposition, the Labor Party,
having abandoned its pre-election commitment to emissions reduction fell
back into a mixture of ostensible commitments to emissions reduction and
denial or lies. In the new year, Labor stalwarts including Richard Marles and
Joel Fitzgibbon filled their party’s policy vacuum with falsities about how “Coal
will play a part in our economy for decades to come” 729 and that coal is a
727 Greta Thunberg, Address to the United Nations, “Nature Now”, 20 September 2019, Youtube,
accessible at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S14SjemfAg
728 Australian Government, “Climate Solutions Package”, 2019, accessible at
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/bb29bc9f-8b96-4b10-84a0-
46b7d36d5b8e/files/climate-solutions-package.pdf
729 Richard Marles quoted by Amy Remeikis, “Labor's Richard Marles won't rule out supporting new
coal developments”, The Guardian, 9 February 2020, accessible at
545
“relatively efficient and modernising product”730 and that with continued coal
mining we can have “both a cleaner Oz economy & a strong coal export
industry”731. That is a policy for increasing emissions, not reducing them. Coal
does not “modernise” for emissions efficiency; nor will technology net off its
emissions either in practicality or with comparative affordability. Nor could
such contradictory policies be relied on to last for a full electoral term, let
alone for the decade to 2030. If the Independent Member for Warringah Zali
Steggall is ever successful in passage of her well-wrought private member’s
“Climate Change Bill 2020”732, policy delusions – such as the idea that coal can
be a part of our economy for decades to come – are unlikely to pass even the
first hurdle of satisfying the principles for decision making and policy setting
listed in that Bill733. The impact of fossil fuel exports on the nation’s ability to
meet the objective of net zero emissions by 2050 is also to be taken into
account under the Bill. This will seriously prescribe a minister’s powers in
relation to fossil fuel exports, the implication being that such delusions of
continued large scale coal exports would be nothing more than cruel delays
of transition away from significant dependence by communities and the
economy itself on fossil fuel exports.
On top of this, people are simply likely to find out well before 2022 how
it is so much cheaper – so much cheaper – to pursue climate change
prevention by emissions reduction than deal with the cost of damages arising
from unabated emissions. As the University of Melbourne has reported:
The potential damages from climate change to Australia at current
global emissions patterns are conservatively quantified as:
o $584.5 billion in 2030
o $762 billion in 2050
o more than $5 trillion in cumulative damages from now until 2100.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/feb/09/labors-richard-marles-wont-rule-out-
supporting-new-coal-developments?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
730 Joel Fitzgibbon quoted by Amy Remeikis, Ibid.
731 Joel Fitzgibbon quoted by Amy Remeikis, Ibid.
732 Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, private member’s bill by
Zali Steggall, MP, Member for Warringah, “Climate Change (National Framework for Adaptation and
Mitigation) Bill 2020”, accessible at https://climate-act-images.s3-ap-southeast-
2.amazonaws.com/Main_Bill.pdf
733 Ibid.., Part 1, Division 2, Clauses 9-16. Large scale continuation of fossil fuel use and exports is
unlikely to satisfy principles at clauses 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 and 16, as drafted (i.e., unless they are
substantially amended).
546
Conversely, the national costs of effective emissions reduction – based
on a carbon price or renewables target – are estimated at $35.5 billion
from 2019 to 2030, or 0.14% of cumulative GDP; a negligible impact.734
Despite these stark financial alternative outcomes, as at the end of 2019
Australia was still at the back of the line in terms of leadership in meeting vital
emissions reduction targets. We had been rated in the lowest rank of
performers on dealing with climate change in the Climate Change
Performance Index (CCPI)735. This Index has been produced annually since
2005 by Germanwatch, the NewClimate Institute and the Climate Action
Network and is supported by contributions from around 350 climate experts.
The CCPI is an independent monitoring tool for tracking countries’ climate
protection performance. It aims to enhance transparency in international
climate politics and enables comparison of climate protection efforts and
progress made by individual countries. On climate policy, Australia was
ignominiously rated dead last out of 61 countries in the 2019 Index736, even
below the United States which at the time of the assessment was trashing
world progress on climate action by pledging to pull out of the Paris
Agreement it had signed on to in 2016. Being rated below the United States is
an indication that Australia was not just being intransigent or tardy, it was
being an active wrecker. Scott Morrison rejected the findings of the Index as
“not credible”737, although when challenged he made no effort to offer any
substantiation for his claim. But the Index uses standardised scientific criteria
and draws on Australia’s own official statistics for 12 of its 14 indicators. So it
is likely that the Prime Minister is the one who is not credible – unless he
734 University of Melbourne, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, “Australia’s Clean Economy
Future: Costs and Benefits”, June 2019, page 3, accessible at
https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/publications/issues-papers/australias-clean-economy or at
https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0012/3087786/Australias_Clean_Economy
_MSSI_Issues_Paper12.pdf
735 Jan Burck, Ursula Hagen, Niklas Höhne, Leonardo Nascimento, Christoph Bals, “CCPI Climate
Change Performance Index: Results 2020” accessible at https://newclimate.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/12/CCPI-2020-Results_Web_Version.pdf
736 Jan Burck, Ursula Hagen, Niklas Höhne, Leonardo Nascimento, Christoph Bals, “CCPI Climate
Change Performance Index: Results 2020”, Ibid, page 17.
737 Adam Morton, “Author of report ranking Australia worst on climate policy hits back at PM's claim
it's not ‘credible’”, The Guardian, 13 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/13/author-of-report-ranking-australia-worst-
on-climate-policy-hits-back-at-pms-claim-its-not-credible?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
547
wants to reject the credibility of his own data. In our official stance, Australia
had therefore sunk just about as low as we could go on inaction on climate
change. We had become an international pariah. In the United Nations COP25
Climate Change Conference in Madrid in December 2019, Australia behaved
so badly that it is likely our reputation will not recover. At that time, when it
was so important for our children’s future that Australia take cooperative if
not decisive action to comply with the Paris Agreement and ratchet up what
all nations had agreed were inadequate targets and measures in the original
Paris Agreement, our executive delegation roamed the halls of the conference
hand in hand with mining executives, vandalising the entire planet simply to
fatten their profits. As one attendee at the conference reported:
And yet [while Australia literally burned under massive unprecedented
bushfires] the Australian government acted like business as usual in
Madrid. Focused on watering down Australia’s ambition. Pushing for
dodgy accounting tricks that would halve Australia’s (already
completely inadequate) climate effort, with flow-on effects to weaken
ambition of other countries. Analysis released during the summit
showed that if Australia, China and Brazil used their hollow Kyoto units
to meet Paris Agreement targets, global ambition would decrease by
25%, delaying the transition to new energy systems and resulting in
more global heating. Despite a coalition of countries coming out to
oppose this weakening, the issue remains unresolved.
… The gleeful [Australian] coal lobby stalked the Madrid COP25
meeting halls as the Morrison government threw out compassion and
international citizenship.
… This is the first annual climate summit where the general mood
was panic and climate grief. It’s the first COP where I’ve seen tears in
meetings and the corridors at the terrible impotence of not knowing
how to grasp the power back from big polluters.738
This collusive behaviour between the Australian government and mining
executives is so appalling it needs to be called out for what it is – corruption.
738Julie-Anne Richards, “Australia took a match to UN climate talks while back home the country
burned”, The Guardian, 17 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/australia-took-a-match-to-un-climate-
talks-as-back-home-the-country-burned?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
548
It is legal, but it is still corruption. It is the grandest of grand theft of profits
and resources that has characterised neoliberalism for the past forty years. It
is utterly amoral and murderous. And that these people think this can go on
openly in public, “gleefully”, without any demonstration of conscience, shows
just how far power and wealth has corrupted our nation’s negotiators and our
governments, and how little thought they will give to us or other countries in
the next decade. This is not just a case of a government working against the
common good. It is a crime against humanity.
Australians and their children are entirely exposed here, as is the rest of
the world. Contrary to Scott Morrison’s contentions that Australia’s
contribution to global emissions is negligible in the scheme of things739 and
that our refusal to cooperate with other nations is therefore not universally
harmful, the fact is our emissions, and the way we are colluding to keep them
as high as possible, has a very significant impact globally. Nations the world
over cannot feel safe in such a situation. To make matters worse, Australia
has no effective opposition working within our democracy on climate change.
Australia’s Labor party has capitulated to the mining corporations too. Labor
may see the light and turn to a better approach that is in the national interest.
But having been beaten by the mining lobby for the last twenty years, that is
unlikely. What is more likely is that Labor will succumb to the sectional
interest of mining executives and miners who do not wish to transition from
their high paid jobs into lower paid but sustainable industries. Just transition
would be seen by them as not very just. They are not ready to take a pay cut
for the nation.
We are being told by Labor to see it from the mining communities’ point
of view and that they will be out of a job if coal mining shuts down. But that
is not true. They will be out of a very high paid job but there is ample
opportunity in other industries and a transition could be managed which
provides them with some protection in lost benefits or a slower loss of benefit
739See Paul Karp, “Scott Morrison says no evidence links Australia's carbon emissions to bushfires”,
The Guardian, 21 November 2019: “Morrison then said ‘the suggestion that any way shape or form
that Australia, accountable for 1.3% of the world’s emissions, that the individual actions of Australia
are impacting directly on specific fire events, whether it’s here or anywhere else in the world, that
doesn’t bear up to credible scientific evidence either. Climate change is a global phenomenon and
we’re doing our bit as part of the response to climate change – we’re taking action on climate change,’
he said.” Accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/21/scott-morrison-
says-no-evidence-links-australias-carbon-emissions-to-bushfires
549
(as Richard Denniss has shown – see Chapter 8). In any case, they are going to
be out of a job because of mechanisation in the mining industry before they
are put out of a job because of coal prices and falling demand. But sadly, since
these voters seem to have a grip on the seats that must be won for Labor to
form government, they are not likely to see a need in the early 2020s to give
up and fight for the national interest against their own. So it is difficult to see
enough politicians in the major parties acting in our national interest to turn
our climate catastrophe around. The only thing that can be known is – turn it
must. That now Herculean task will be left to the last lot standing who seem
ready to do it: those Australians who still have it in their make-up to put the
shared interest ahead of sectional interest. In the absence of a reliable
parliament, these people must organise themselves to turn the nation back
towards decency and cooperation on climate change.
At the outset of 2020 Australia had NO plan for climate change. We had
a humiliating two-page document promoting a wholly inadequate climate
change target, which we said we would meet by an undefined “direct action”
program740 and a one-page document denoting an intention to develop a
national strategy for electric vehicles741. Compare that to Norway, which had
detailed plans and measures to meet its targets under the Paris agreement
and to work with Iceland and the rest of the EU to deliver on those targets as
set out in “Norway's National Plan related to the Decision of the EEA Joint
Committee”742. This is what the government of Norway turned up with when
attending the United Nations COP25 conference in Madrid in December 2019.
Australia turned up with a wrecking ball. No wonder people overseas started
sneering at Australians when we travelled.
Still, it is not too late to build a good plan – one that can help us recover
our integrity and work with the world to keep global temperature rises to 1.5o
740 See Australian Government, “Australia’s 2030 Climate Change Target”, 2015, accessible at
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/c42c11a8-4df7-4d4f-bf92-
4f14735c9baa/files/factsheet-australias-2030-climate-change-target.pdf
741 See Australian Government, “A National Strategy for Electric Vehicles”, 2019, accessible at
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/4476cfd6-330a-4e6f-b0c8-
985a4a8985af/files/national-strategy-electric-vehicles.pdf
742 Norwegian Ministry of Climate & Environment, “Norway's National Plan related to the Decision of
the EEA Joint Committee, No. 269/2019 of 25 October 2019”, accessible at
https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/31a96bc774284014b1e8e47886b3fa57/norways-
national-plan-related-to-the-decision-of-the-eea-joint-committee-no.-269-2019-of-25-october-
2019.pdf
550
Celsius. This cannot be a plan based on an ostensible target of net zero
emissions by 2050, which the Morrison government might adopt before
COP26 in Glasgow in late 2020, but which is at the same time likely to be
hollowed out by a politically acceptable focus on strategy through technology
development, instead of through actual emissions reduction743, and certainly
not through emissions reduction via the cheapest means available to
taxpayers – namely, a carbon price. A plan relying on technology development
will simply mean that at taxpayers’ expense, Australia’s emissions will still be
way too high in 2030. Indeed, by 2030 we may well have already exceeded
the total thirty-year budget of emissions necessary for purposes of playing a
decent and effective role in keeping the temperature rise to 1.5 o Celsius (see
Chapter 6). In the first ten years we will probably have exceeded that thirty-
year budget by double. No state or federal government seems willing to tell
Australians this. They are more than willing to continue devoting taxpayers’
money to subsidisation of coal mining and to development of emissions
reduction technology on coal mining, such as carbon capture and storage
(CCS). But the coal industry has been accepting that money for more than a
decade and hasn’t bothered to develop CCS technology or projects. Ross
Garnaut has demonstrated that past experience with this is a bitter one for
Australian taxpayers:
So how has the outlook changed since 2011? One big shift is reduced
expectation that CCS for coal and gas can play a large role in the
Australian electricity transition. It was clear in 2011 that the future of
coalmining in Australia depended on successful development of low-
cost CCS. Australian coalminers attached much more importance to
blocking action to reduce global warming than to building a long-term
future for their industry. Despite the commitment of large financial
support from the Australian government, the Australian coalmining
industry hardly invested at all in the research, development and
commercialisation of CCS. It now seems that CCS will still have a role,
743See Rob Harris, “Australia will take new emissions reduction target to Glasgow climate summit”,
Sydney Morning Herald, 10 February 2020, quoting Angus Taylor, Federal Energy and Emissions
Reduction Minister, “Mr Taylor said on Sunday the government believed the answer was not a new
tax or more bureaucracy but ‘practical change’ driven by science and technology. ’The pathway to
meaningful impacts on global emissions is through development and deployment of new
technologies,’ Mr Taylor said”. Accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/australia-will-
take-new-emissions-reduction-target-to-glasgow-climate-summit-20200209-p53z4b.html
551
but not in capturing and storing emissions from coal-fired power
generation. It is likely to be important in securing negative emissions
where carbon dioxide is captured from bioenergy combustion –known
as bioenergy carbon capture and storage (BECCS).744
The federal government is also willing to countenance emissions
reduction plans only via taxpayer subsidisation of emissions abatement
efforts by users of power, not generators of power. This is what its Emissions
Reduction Fund (ERF) is all about. This fund (also named the Climate Solutions
Fund) is structured to encourage emissions abatement at the point of energy
use by industry (including transport), agriculture, and by commercial
operations (such as retail centres). It is structured to fund the continued
purchase of fossil fuels by industry and to use taxpayer funds to pay industry
for abatement projects after consumption of the fossil fuel. Uptake on the
fund has, however, been very low, except in land recovery and re-forestation
projects where capital costs are cheap, so there has been very little
“abatement” of emissions (probably none because of maladministration of a
“safeguard” in the fund – see below). The low uptake by industry and
commerce of free taxpayer funds is because it is simply cheaper for industry
to purchase renewable power and thereby reduce emissions to zero, without
the need to install expensive capital to abate the emissions from fossil fuel
use.
The ERF has been undercut by extremely competitive prices for
renewables and the government now can’t even give the money away. The
Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, became alarmed
that the ERF – which is designed to prop up fossil fuel use while (optimistically)
achieving emissions reduction in another way and another place (any place
other than a coal mine, a gas field or a coal and gas generation facility) – was
obviously unattractive to industry in the circumstances. Accordingly, in
October 2019 he commissioned the outgoing Chair of the Business Council of
Australia, Grant King, to run a quick review, giving him a deadline of a
month745. Mr King wrote to industry players with questions about what it
744Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit. Loc 1060.
745Adam Morton and Katharine Murphy, “Coalition quietly appoints expert panel to salvage emissions
policy”, The Guardian, 29 October 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/29/coalition-scrambles-for-carbon-cutting-
solutions-as-paris-targets-move-further-out-of-reach?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
552
would take to get them to invest in abatement at point of use746. By February
2020 no report had been forthcoming from the government which may mean
that Mr King did not receive a flood of applications for the funds. If so, Mr
Taylor is likely to be shifting around for some time looking for another way to
dress up the ERF as a fund capable of actually reducing emissions. But if he
finds a way to market it as such it is likely to be nothing more than a blind for
a carve up of the remaining funds by inefficient businesses. If the government
puts the Business Council of Australia in charge of such a review, we can
expect no less. It is equivalent to putting the fox in charge of the hens. Clearly
by late 2019 the BCA could see the writing on the wall for the ERF and the
likelihood of a legislated net zero emissions target. As such, they would be
motivated to provide recommendations about their preferred carve up of the
remaining funds, but we can be fairly certain that the carve up will not be
done in a manner to harm the fossil fuel industry. It is likely to be structured
to effectively increase the subsidy to that industry. Put this together with the
fact that the federal government is also not enforcing the so-called “safeguard
mechanism” it adopted when it established the ERF and we have a clear
picture of the real intent behind the ERF. The “safeguard mechanism” was
meant to “limit emissions from big polluters to ensure they do not just cancel
out cuts paid for by taxpayers through the Coalition’s main climate policy, the
emissions reduction fund.”747 But instead, the government approved more
than 7 million tonnes of extra emissions for the polluters that were meant to
be constrained by the safeguard mechanism in the two years to 2020.
Australians should watch this space of activity and policy misuse by the
government and we should move ourselves into a position where they spend
our funds on what we want, not what the fossil fuel industry wants. We can’t
do that without a plan.
A viable and reliable plan to reduce emissions must be based on precisely
the opposite of what we are likely to be offered by the Morrison government.
That government cannot be trusted that it will do everything necessary to
reach net zero emissions by 2050, even if it makes the commitment. To the
746 See “Expert Panel Examining Opportunities for Further Abatement, Discussion Paper, October
2019”, accessible at https://www.scribd.com/document/432470725/Expert-Panel-examining-
opportunities-for-further-abatement#fullscreen&from_embed
747 See Adam Morton, “Big polluters again allowed to lift emissions without penalty”, The Guardian, 8
February 2020, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/08/big-polluters-
again-allowed-to-lift-emissions-without-penalty?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
553
extent that it maintains a role for coal and gas, by subsidies overt and hidden,
and refuses to make a competitive market for carbon by carbon pricing, a plan
based on technology development will not add up to net zero emissions and
it will not add up to the most prosperous economy possible either. A
government some time between 2020 and 2030 will swing to an outward
policy of net zero emissions by 2050 if only by the force of the electorate but
any such commitment is likely to be a qualified one. And that qualification will
threaten it. The qualification will probably be “net zero emissions achieved
through technology”, meaning continued fossil fuel use (coal and gas “for
decades to come”) netted off by emissions reduction/capture technology of
some sort. But it does not – it will not – add up. It will simply mean we waste
another decade of time and taxpayers’ money that could be used to create an
energy superpower with 100% renewables. The total permissible budget of
emissions necessary for net zero emissions by 2050 is too small to support a
place for fossil fuels. So even if some of their emissions can be netted off by
technology, it will not be enough. This needs to be faced up to now, before
we waste another decade and our own money propping up businesses that
will kill our children’s future.
Fortunately, a much better plan is still possible, although the fact is it
cannot involve decades of fossil fuel dependency. Someone needs to tell
Australia the truth about this (note that in early 2020 Zali Steggall was doing
her level best in this regard). As I have shown in Chapter 6 we have caused
ourselves some significant economic damage and some massive costs that we
could have avoided had we been told the truth by politicians and developed
a plan sooner. We have seriously harmed our biodiversity, the Great Barrier
Reef, the financial futures of thousands of burnt out homeowners and the
entirety of our nation’s breadbasket – the mighty Murray Darling Basin. But
we can stem future damage. As Ross Garnaut has stated:
Alas, the low-carbon opportunity cannot restore the life of the Murray
cod on the dry bed of the Darling below Menindee. The unavoidable
increases in carbon dioxide before we achieve zero emissions will keep
on doing what carbon dioxide does. We will still leave for our
grandchildren an awful job of cleaning up our mess. Awful, but maybe
not impossible. The low-carbon opportunity can make life better for the
Australians who come after us. There is a better chance of leaving a
manageable mess if we can build a bridge to a low-carbon economy,
554
over which Australians can now walk to join the global effort on climate
change.748
Ross Garnaut’s bridge does not involve a carbon price, if only because he
has resigned himself to a probable political reality that a carbon price is
perceived as sudden death to a politician. He knows that they prefer other
deaths. But Australians at large don’t need to play that game. We can “walk
over the bridge” with the carbon price or without it. With it we will walk over
it much more affordably and more quickly. A “manageable mess”? Perhaps
we can do better than that if we work together in a planning process to
address social, environmental, economic and governance issues in an
integrated manner – and with the blinkers taken off about tax and who is
really paying for climate change mitigation. At the moment, we are paying.
But Chapter 10 and Part 3 provide the means of organising ourselves to adjust
all this and to leave less of a mess than we might otherwise expect.
Turning away from disengagement
There are visions and visions. There are visions that have substance and there
are visions that are illusions. To get a vision right – to get it to the point where
it is truly compelling because it contains a practicable way forward – the
political language of adversarial simplicity has to be abandoned, not just by
politicians, but by us. In an online world, flooded with fake news and
algorithms designed to shunt us into illusions, visions developed by
politicians, particularly the simple ones, will be illusory. It doesn’t matter
whether they are developed by progressives or conservatives; the outcome is
still the same in regard to whether a vision will be compelling and ultimately
achievable. In the absence of a capacity among politicians to abandon their
ingrained disingenuousness – the art they feel they need to practise to get
elected – communities themselves are the only ones who can develop a vision
for the future that will have substance and credibility. If they can be organised
to do this, from the bottom, it is possible that great leadership in our country
can emerge from a much broader base within our democracy. It will not
emerge from 21st century politicians. They are not going to do it for us and we
748 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Op. Cit., Loc 263.
555
need to stop confusing politics in Australia with our democracy. They are not
the same. Even our parliament is not democracy, representative though it
may be.
Representative democracy works well or poorly, depending on how
involved we are. It works best with broader involvement and very badly when
there is exclusion. This is just a simple fact. But Australians are past the point
where our usual reactive participatory democracy will help us at our particular
turning point. A shift to more meaningful involvement in proactive
participatory democracy, and a shift earlier rather than later, is required. That
turn – the turn in the way we engage and cooperate with each other – is
fundamental to all the other turns we need to make. High quality, thoughtful,
generous, open, transparent and ethical participation in planning our own
future, thinking ahead, monitoring success and failure and adjusting when we
can anticipate trouble – this is the surest and most affordable road to
reversing inequality, intolerance, poverty, authoritarianism, and
environmental degradation.
Such a turning point – a turning point in the way we participate in
democracy (rather than just hoping our luck will change) – must be found if
we are to reverse the trend of growing inequality that is sending Australia into
decline on every socioeconomic and environmental indicator. If we have
caught the problems early enough, earlier than our counterparts in the UK
and USA, the road to a better future for our children is going to be easier than
it will be if we miss the turn. Activism in Australia has to date been confined
to reactive participation, but we can avoid missing the turn if we switch to
proactive participatory democracy. To avoid missing the turn it is plain that
we need to we need to decide our destination together and develop our
preferred route towards it. No modern Australian would think about driving
to a destination they had never been to before, say to visit the distant home
of a new friend, without a map. These days we’d even use Google to check
the best traffic plan. But for some reason we seem to think nothing of driving
to an unknown future – to a stranger we have never met before and a place
we have never even imagined, much less defined – and doing so blindly,
without a map. This is not the mark of either efficiency or sanity. However,
we can develop a common idea of the destination and the map. Chapter 10
sets out how make the best map to the future by activating this new form of
organised engagement in our democracy – national IP&R – where more
556
effective power is transferred to Australians and a plan for safe travel to a
preferred destination in the future is the result. Part 3 starts the process of
activation.
*****
At the very beginning of this book I quoted one of the founding thinkers
behind American independence, Thomas Paine, in 1776 saying:
We have it in our power to make the world anew.
This is possibly a misquote since most modern sources will today repeat the
quote as: “We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” To the
extent that this more frequently quoted second version implies we might
have to junk the whole planet and its inhabitants and start again, it imposes a
truly horrible, exclusive, and destructive precondition on social renewal,
something like the Armageddon that fundamentalist evangelicals think is
necessary to cleanse the earth and make it safe for “the elect” or the elites
that I spoke of in Chapter 7. In that sense it is no surprise that US President
Ronald Reagan once used this second version of Paine’s quote to inspire the
American National Association of Evangelicals in a speech in which he lauded
a young father’s preference that his small children should die, rather than
have them grow up no longer believing in god. In that speech President
Reagan stated that:
A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young
man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in
California. It was during the time of the cold war, and communism and
our own way of life were very much on people's minds. And he was
speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, “I
love my little girls more than anything.” And I said to myself, “Oh, no,
don't. You can't -- don't say that.” But I had underestimated him. He
went on: “I would rather see my little girls die now; still believing in God,
than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer
believing in God.” There were thousands of young people in that
audience. They came to their feet with shouts of joy. They had instantly
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recognized the profound truth in what he had said, with regard to the
physical and the soul and what was truly important. 749
President Reagan was inveighing against communism and what he called
the crisis of the Western world [that] exists to the degree in which the
West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in
communism's attempt to make man stand alone without God.750
In this rendition of righteous parenthood, our relationship with our
children, and our sense of the world we might be prepared to leave them, is
indeed a cruel one, a world in which our gods smite our enemies (at home
and abroad) and do not “forgive those who trespass against us”. It is a world
reinforcing all our prejudices and differences instead of all our common
humanity. It is a world in which we must, if commanded, sacrifice our children
on the altar of our gods, not theirs. It is a world we create at the expense of
our children, not for their benefit, and in which we justify this cruel
destruction by the utterly inhuman riposte that “it is God’s will”. This is the
emphasis of the driven paternalistic politician who seeks office only to do
what he wants to do, not what his children may want. It is the world that
Leonard Cohen spoke out against in “The Story of Isaac”:
You who build these altars now
To sacrifice these children,
You must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god. 751
This is a world that needn’t be. We needn’t be tempted to self-
destruction and thence to self-exoneration by profession of the cruellest of
faiths. To say that we have been commanded by a demon or a god and that
the death of our children is for their own good is an outrage. In this regard,
749 Ronald Reagan, President of the United States, “Address to the Annual Convention of the National
Association of Evangelicals”, 8 March 1983, accessible at
https://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganevilempire.htm
750 Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals”,
Ibid.
751 Leonard Cohen, “The Story of Isaac”, accessible on YouTube at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtdYnhnoGI0
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the closest leader we have ever had to a Ronald Reagan, Scott Morrison,
might take note. For all the faults of progressives and progressivism in
Australia, the fact is our children are safer with them than with conservatives
who take a fundamentalist evangelical and neoliberal line. By all means,
Australians should – must – be able to continue to enjoy the right and privilege
of joining a church if they wish. But the rest of us would prefer that our kids
should not be sacrificed on its altar.
The less vengeful version of Paine’s quote, the one I seem to have
become attached to even though it might not be what Paine actually said,
shifts the power more to us and requires no horrendous sacrifice of the very
thing we are trying to save. Cruelty doesn’t feature or creep in sideways. It
doesn’t emerge from the depths of the fundamentalists’ fears as a zealous
form of righteousness, as the one true way to treat those who are different,
and to justify that wilful cruelty by invoking a vengeful god. Instead, there is
free and open space for cooperation and even appreciation across our vast
differences – our cultural differences, our physical differences, and our
political or ideological differences. In this space inequality between us and the
next generation is dissolved and generosity between us and the next
generation comes to the fore. In a generous frame of mind we are likely to
come up with a far more inspiring vision than the schemes that can emerge
from adversarial politics, top down paternalistic governance, authoritarianism
and prejudice.
However, as I have said above, if there is any will amongst us to do this at
all, timing is important. The 2020s may be our last chance to use our power
to make the world anew. Because of where we are in the life of our current
economy, we have limited time left not just to save our environment but to
establish a new viable economic future. This will require us to learn to see
things differently, to re-assess our values especially about sharing wealth, and
to seek a different kind of polity – a new way of relating to and respecting
each other. That polity cannot be adversarial. Adversarial politics worked
quite well for Australia at least in the 20th century because as a resource rich
country we were still riding the wave of wealth that could be derived from
mining and agricultural commodities and we were sharing it so much more
equitably than we are now. There was still a capacity for strong growth in that
economy and we could learn more about how to tap that growth through
creative oppositional debate. But that capacity for economic growth is now
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much more constrained and will remain so until we swing our economy into
new commodities (such as green power) and – even more importantly – reset
that economy so that it may provide more equitable distributions of returns
for effort, ingenuity and investment but at lower and more sustainable rates
of consumption.
There is a massive opportunity for Australia here, but we are yet to grab
it. I will discuss how we can grab it in Chapter 10 and Part 3. But here it is
important to observe that while our politics may have worked well in the 20 th
century to exercise the muscles of our democracy and our lucky country’s
economy, so that more and more of us could move up the social ladder, that
sort of politics is not helping more of us move up the social ladder now. Our
economy and environment are no longer stretching to lift as many of us up as
they used to. Inequality is rising. Conservatives don’t mind that of course;
inequality is their objective, short-sighted though it may be. And inequality is
working for them just fine for the moment. But as progressive politics
operates within our democracy, its more frequent failures seem to be
producing a populism in which we are wilfully opting to sacrifice our futures,
sacrificing the very thing we might have in common – our desire that our
children will live full and happy lives. It is time we stopped this. We need a
different type of inspiration, a different type of story telling.
This will of course require work. It will require collaboration. But there is
no sense in sitting back and continuing to delude ourselves that governments
will do this for us. In any case, democracy simply doesn’t work when it is left
entirely to politicians, especially when their motivations tend towards
autocracy. Our governments will not do this for us – they will not lead us to a
promised land. They simply do not have the orientation to do what we want
rather than what they want. There is not much time left to get started on this
if we expect it to work well and cost-effectively. Getting started early in the
2020s is crucial, or the things we might hope to see by 2050 simply won’t
happen.
I imagine myself sometimes in thirty years’ time looking back on my life.
I will be 93 in 2050, if I’m still here, and I don’t want to have regrets that I
didn’t do something that I could have to make my children’s lives safer and
more secure. To spur myself on, I occasionally like to imagine some of the
things that I personally would love to know had actually come to pass by 2050.
I like to imagine that we arrived at 2050 with our planet not as scarred as it is
560
now – and even regenerated; that we had atoned for something of our
attempted genocide of a magnificent Indigenous nation; that we had turned
at a point in the 2020s away from inequality and had lifted the poorest into
dignity and wellbeing; that a surge of creative and artistic brilliance had placed
Australia in the top rank of creative countries; that we had restored our pride
in ourselves and could hold our heads up internationally, without shame, as a
human rights and environmental custodian; that we were still proud of our
multiculturalism and ready to enjoy all the benefits of diversity; and that if I
had grandkids, they might never have been sent to war and might have reason
for optimism. Whenever I think this way, I seem to overcome the sort of
tiredness I spoke of at the start of this Chapter and I wonder whether such a
process would help the nation overcome its national case of depression and
anxiety. Maybe not, but there is nothing wrong with giving it a try.
Throughout the last two chapters I have spent a lot of words on
suggesting that we should move past adversarialism in our politics and the
cynicism it is embedding in our attitude to our democracy. There is no value
for us in that cynicism. Indeed, in my whole professional life I don’t think I
ever saw cynicism achieve anything. However, by suggesting that we jettison
adversarialism from the process of vision making, I am not suggesting we
make debate bland or less feisty. There is still much to be gained from a
spirited exchange of ideas. There is much to be gained from our differences.
But these exchanges are not working as well as they used to or as they might,
because too much deep thinking, too much humanity and too much
generosity is being evacuated from them and way too much dishonesty has
also taken the place of decency in our debates. So in suggesting that we all –
politicians and communities alike – park adversarialism for a while, I wouldn’t
wish to suggest it be replaced with boredom. But I am going to suggest that:
• we bring something to the fore that has never been foregrounded (I
will explain what I mean by that in the next Chapter);
• we think better of ourselves and each other and treat ourselves and
each other much better than we do now;
• we shift from demonising “the other” to capitalising on our diversity
and recognising that we can and must move to create something
better in our lives because of diversity, not despite it; and that
561
• we work together to build a vision of our future in which each of us
can see a place of safety and joy for ourselves, our preferred cultures,
and our values in common.
If we can do that, we can’t possibly be any worse off than we are now. Chances
are we can make the world anew without destroying it first. The following
chapters set out how we have it in our power – and only in our power – to do
this.
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Chapter 10 – How Can Australians Participate
in Their Democracy?
Australians are skilled, but not happy, in acting within a reactive participatory
democracy. The switch we need to make is to skill ourselves to act well within
a proactive participatory democracy. The necessary skill, of course, is in
Integrated Planning & Reporting (IP&R) or what I have called national
community futures planning. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 on solutions to the problems
of top down planning in the government sector have been about this skill and
how it can be applied by Australians in developing their own plans for a better
society, environment and national economy. In this section I’ll offer a sixth
solution – a process of ongoing community engagement to produce an
Australian Community Futures Plan and keep tabs of real progress towards
the preferred future set out in that plan. Chapters 2 and 8 provide significant
detail on why we should build such a plan, but this chapter organises how we
might do it. National community futures planning is a process in which we can
all become skilled to reverse the problem of modern disempowerment and
the growing socioeconomic breakdown that has arisen from our withdrawal
from participation in our own democracy. Taking an active part in planning
our own future – working together to create not just the plan but a monitoring
and reporting capacity that can make the plan a reality – can revitalise our
entire democracy.
In this proactive participatory democracy, we need to move community
futures planning to the foreground and from this position it should drive all
our decisions about how much we want to spend on ourselves and where. At
present, at the state and federal government levels, budgets occupy the
foreground. That needs to be reversed so that the plan we can develop
together in a well organised community futures planning process should drive
our national budgets. A national community futures plan should drive both
563
the government spending program and the wider economy over a minimum
20-year period. This is a departure from the past where budgets have sufficed
for, or rather masqueraded as, the nation’s plan – even though they are
merely short term poor one-year things that are out of date before they are
off the starting block, are never fit for purpose and are never monitored for
their effectiveness. Four-year budgets and longer term ten-year projections
are developed federally, but they are so abstract and disconnected from any
plan for a better Australia as to be little more than pointless. Indeed, because
of the way they are constructed it is impossible to hold anyone accountable
for them. With an integrated community futures plan, however, it is entirely
possible to monitor the effectiveness of selected strategies through time in
relation to the original objectives and to build an early warning system for
trouble that can then be headed off by adequate and far more effective
budgeting. Once this community futures plan is in place, it is entirely possible
to hold a government to account for both the budget and the state of the
nation.
Naturally politicians won’t like this. And that means politicians of all
persuasions. After all, it will mean that we will increase our say on spending,
and swing our democratic power around a little to elect governments to do
what we want them to do, not what they might want to do. But I would
suggest we are justified in being past the point of caring about governments
being miffed or derisive of communities wishing to take more control in their
lives. And we should be past being daunted by any authoritarianism and
sneering cynicism that will doubtless rise up in opposition to the whole notion
of lifting IP&R up to the level of a national community planning process. It
should be remembered that this sort of thing has been tried at the local
government area level and within its limits it has been working well. Some ten
years ago, a large number of experienced public servants and elected
politicians (state and local) came to agreement in more than one state, after
years of consultation and deliberation, that this was a good idea – good
enough for it to be tried at the local government area level, especially because
it would not be imposing any extra accountability on state or federal
governments. They wouldn’t need to sharpen up their own act in terms of
planning and accountability for their outcomes if IP&R turned out to be
successful, and they couldn’t be blamed if it failed. (No wonder in the NSW
Parliament the vote for IP&R was unanimous). But IP&R – or what I’m now
564
calling community futures planning – was successful whenever it was done
well. It was particularly successful in restoring accountability for sustainable
financial and asset management and particularly successful in making councils
engage with communities to plan their own long term future. In that regard
the states variously bequeathed to Australia a legacy they could not have
foreseen (and probably still don’t see). The legacy should be grabbed and
activated. The following section shows where we can start to develop an
Australian Community Futures Plan and the steps that must be taken in a well
organised, quality community futures planning process.
Activating the elements of community futures planning
Chapter 5 outlined eight elements of a viable national community futures plan
and planning process. They can be summarised as:
1. open, genuine community engagement;
2. an overarching Vision of what we want Australia to be by 2050;
3. an agreement on what success should look like in relation to each
element of the Vision, what “Directions” we are prepared to take en
route to the Vision, and what directions we are not prepared to take;
4. development of “Targets”, “Indicators” and “Strategies” which are
most likely to lead to the identified “successes” in the Vision;
5. regular national opinion surveys to check support for the Plan in the
wider community;
6. a funding plan;
7. a tracking system, based on a “QBL Wellbeing Index”, to tell us if the
Strategies (if implemented) are working according to the original
elements of the Vision and whether changes to Strategies might be
required; and
8. an open transparent reporting and review system which:
a. provides results on progress about whether we have moved
closer to the Vision or further away from it,
b. isolates areas of failure and suggests areas where policy
adjustment may help get the plan back on track,
c. provides an opportunity to consider changes to the plan itself
if the community thinks that is advisable.
565
The following sections provide a summary of how each of these elements
can be activated. If we get this off the ground, then over the years we might
expect to see continuous improvement in the planning process itself and a
healthy recovery of our democracy. It might be a slow start, but it is worth a
go.
Activating Element 1 – Community engagement
When Integrated Planning & Reporting is undertaken at the local government
area level genuine, open community engagement is a feature of best practice.
It should be noted that I don’t use the phrase “community consultation” here.
Community consultation is what governments do when they feel obliged to
pay lip service to community desires but wish to avoid active involvement of
the community and any obligation to demonstrate that they took the
community’s opinions on board. “Community engagement” by contrast is a
much less passive and a much more inclusive process. It places the community
at the beginning and end of the process as an active, informed and respected
contributor to the plan and it gives them an ongoing role in oversight of
performance. Community consultation is generally what pertains in a mere
representative democracy. Participatory democracy requires ongoing
community engagement.
In NSW, community engagement for long term community strategic
planning is compulsory under the IP&R legislated framework. It is actually law.
Not all states undertake community engagement to the same level in their
local government area planning, but even where it is not compulsory various
councils choose to do it anyway in their long term planning. As I explained in
Chapter 2, in NSW there are best practice guidelines and performance against
these guidelines is taken into account when rate variation applications are
assessed by the Independent Pricing & Regulatory Tribunal (IPART). Other
states do not have rate capping so they are not always so motivated to
develop best practice in community engagement. Despite that, genuine high
quality community engagement is considered fundamental to achieving
community ownership of community strategic plans and the experience of
improving the standard of community engagement across Australia at the
local government level has supplied us with a whole set of techniques for
engagement that can be chosen by long term planners.
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In NSW, councils are required to develop a plan about how the
community engagement itself will be done for each planning cycle. This
means that the first thing any organisers of an Australian community futures
planning process should do is develop a draft engagement program. The
program can include any transparent engagement technique, but at an early
stage it should preferably involve face-to-face human interaction in well
facilitated groups. Building a national community futures plan – at least the
first plan – cannot be done quite as well if it is done solely via the web or
online interaction. Comment on drafts can be sought via online
communications, but ideally there should be quality human interaction at
some point if we are to find common interests, build confidence that
Australians have not been excluded, and open our diverse imaginations to
think about what could be, rather than just what we prefer to reject.
A vital part of community futures planning is that diverse people and
communities should be able to find a place for themselves in the Australia
that is envisaged in it. They should be able to see their future reflected in the
plan but – and this is fundamental – not to the exclusion of someone else’s.
They should be able to see what they have in common with others but also
that their diversity will not be suppressed or their particular cultural interest
or social standing relegated or excluded. In short, the community engagement
must be inclusive.
There are community engagement specialists in both local government
and private sector consulting firms. But the leaders in the field – at least for
the purposes of community strategic planning and IP&R – are most often
found in local government. The Council of the City of Sydney is a good example
of a city currently preparing a long term plan to achieve a vision for Sydney by
2050. They have undertaken significant community engagement including
thousands of surveys, pop-up consultation events, workshops with school and
university students, postcard feedback, community forums which take
suggestions, facebook comments, likes and shares, stories shared by
community members and a citizens jury that undertook an extensive process
of boiling all the input down to a draft vision for the future of Sydney, its
community, businesses and visitors752. This is fairly typical of the sort of
752
See Council of the City of Sydney webpage for “Planning for Sydney 2050”, last accessed December
2019 at https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/vision/planning-for-2050/planning-for-sydney-2050-
what-we-heard
567
engagement used in community futures planning at the local area level. It is
rarely offered at state level, and never at the federal level.
However, what this sort of engagement tends to produce is a place-based
vision of what communities want their local area and lifestyle possibilities to
be like in a given decade. It doesn’t cover matters and policies over which local
councils have no control, such as a national economy, education, the public
health system, justice, policing, emergency services and other matters
normally dealt with at state or federal level. Nor can it. But the engagement
techniques used in local government area Integrated Planning & Reporting
would still work well for broader national plans, as long as they are well
organised.
To activate quality community engagement for a national community
futures planning and reporting process, one option is to run some pilot
consultation processes at one or two capital city levels and perhaps a regional
centre, such as Geelong, Townsville or Fremantle, or something a little more
remote, such as Dubbo or Broken Hill. So as well as asking communities what
they want in their quality of life in their local area by 2050, they can be asked
about a whole range of other preferences for society, the environment, the
economy and governance. The facilitation skills required for this are obviously
something new for local council facilitators but these local government
people are better placed and already better skilled than those public servants
who facilitate consultation (as opposed to engagement) in state and (on rare
occasions) federal government matters. State and federal public servants and
policy analysts are quite a deal more distanced from communities, particularly
in those areas where they are not delivering services. When they are
responsible for direct service delivery, eg., in family support, hospitals or, say,
water, they can be quite good at feeding community opinion back into service
and policy development. But beyond that, they are not up to best practice
community consultation and certainly not for integrated planning purposes.
They tend as far as possible to break consultation down into small chunks, if
they do it at all, rather than seek connections between planning processes.
This integration is the key ingredient required in national community futures
planning.
An alternative, or addition to, the geographically organised planning
forums suggested above might be to seek registrations of expressions of
interest for individuals to participate in one aspect of a QBL plan, an aspect
568
which could then be linked back to the rest of the integrated plan and tested
as to whether it fits well or not. This could be useful in developing ideas for
inclusion in a plan for a new national economy, inasmuch as it might help
break the process down into easier pieces which could then be reintegrated
to strengthen the overarching plan. Because this sort of planning has never
been done in Australia, a bit of trial and error may occur here in the logistics
of how the discussions are set up to produce the first draft of a plan and how
much detail people might need to be able to work it out together. But the
basic engagement principles will still apply. Some techniques such as citizens
juries, which are a well-established and successful practice in community
planning and problem solving, are particularly suited to this sort of issues
based planning.
Activating Element 2 – A Vision of Australia by 2050
Ideally, we would start a national community futures plan by developing a
common set of values and/or a bill of rights. But as I have shown in Chapter
2, the nation isn’t quite ready to sponsor this from the top and in this new
authoritarian age we probably shouldn’t expect that the federal government
will want to open up a space for a conversation on values or rights. Probably
the best place to start in the absence of a statement of national values or
rights is to form a Vision of where we want to arrive as a nation in say twenty
or thirty years’ time. Some of the destinations we might want to arrive at
could take more than thirty years but a thirty year planning timeframe is
probably expansive enough to exercise the imagination and long enough to
chart an affordable path to what might turn out to be some of the more
difficult parts of the Vision.
If there is still significant concern about the lack of a statement of national
values or a charter of our rights, then one of the first programs that can be
built into the plan is a process to establish a statement of national values
and/or a charter of rights in a new constitution. That program can set its own
outcomes and timeframes, depending on whatever priority Australians wish
to assign to this activity. And regardless of whether a statement of values or
rights is available when developing a plan, there is nothing to stop the
569
communities involved in planning in developing their own working draft of
values and rights, if they feel the need.
When it comes to developing a Vision, however, we probably don’t need
to start from scratch. As it happens, we have at least a couple of examples of
some decent long range visioning going on right now in Australia. One of these
is the “Australian National Outlook 2019” from which I have already quoted
at length – although that is actually more like a detailed set of strategies that
would help make a broader Vision of an inclusive and economically viable
Australia into a reality. It holds quite a bit of inspiration on how we might
achieve a sustainable Australia by 2060. But there is another process of
bottom up visioning already established in Australia for identifying what we
want as our national community future. This is going on under the auspices of
the Australia reMADE project.
Australia reMADE is “an alliance of over 200 civil society and activist
organisations, community leaders, intellectuals, creatives, workers, and
citizens”. It is a project supported (but not run) by a range of activist groups
including the Australian Conservation Foundation, Action Aid, the Community
and Public Sector Union, GetUp, Greenpeace, the National Union of Workers,
and Oxfam, all of whom have come together to add something new to their
activism. Their project is to work out what Australians are for, rather than
what they are against. It is a project to escape adversarialism and to think for
the longer term. In that regard it is a project using deep community
engagement to create a vision for the best quality of life for future
generations.
Effectively Australia reMADE is several groups of ordinary Australians
who have “sought to hear from [other] ordinary Australians about the
future they want for Australia” 753. Its emphasis is on finding out what we can
agree on as a preferred shared future and, to date, what they have found is
that when people are given a non-threatening space to discuss the future they
would prefer, they agree on quite a lot. In 2017 Australia reMADE – by its own
words, having “nothing to sell, no politician to elect and no agenda other than
753 See Australia ReMADE website, accessible at https://www.australiaremade.org/
570
to listen deeply”754 – asked hundreds of people in communities all over
Australia this question:
Imagine you have woken up in the Australia of your dreams. What is it
like?755
The group stated in its publication of the assembled answers people gave to
that question that they
started these conversations because if we are going to grab hold of our
country and move things closer to the way we would like them to be,
we need to know what we want. We need a new, compelling story of
transformation and restoration; one that ignites our hope and moves us
into action. Listening to hundreds of people, from many walks of life, we
came away understanding that the hopes and dreams we share for our
future are staggeringly similar.756
Australia ReMADE is attempting to “create the best version of us” and the
Vision that has been put together by the participants is an entirely inclusive
one. In this visioning process, Australians have been searching for their better
self – and they are finding it. They have also found a high level of agreement
on what community strategic planners would call the four parts of the
quadruple bottom line. The “similarity” of our hopes and dreams that
Australia reMADE found staggering, would not be surprising to those
community strategic planners who have been working during the decade
from 2009 to design visions for local community strategic plans. Everyone is
familiar with how we diverge into multiple ideological arguments and
bickering when it comes to policies for how to reach a vision. But those
involved in community engagement for IP&R have long since ceased to be
surprised about the extent to which Australians always find themselves in
strong agreement on what we want our life to be like.
In 2010, I had the privilege of discovering this when as a senior public
servant at Waverley Council in NSW, I found myself facilitating a community
engagement process for development of a Vision for the community’s
754 Australia ReMADE, “Creating the Best Version of Us”, page 1, accessible at
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ae6de517c932736b15f2cc7/t/5d19820030892a00018fc9c3/1
561952803851/FINAL+VISION+-+A5+-+28_6_2019+-+web.pdf
755 Ibid., page 1.
756 Ibid., page 1.
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strategic plan, “Waverley Together 2”. The “Vision for Waverley Together 2”
was developed not as an ad man’s one liner but as a fourteen-part vision of
the Waverley community’s commitment to itself. What the community came
up with was not so much a vision for a geographical area, written in detached
third person grammar, as it was a vision for their own life quality, written in
the first person plural – “We”. When “we” start talking about what “we”
want, what emerges – invariably – is that almost all of us want the same
things, especially for children, and not just our own but everyone’s. In any
engagement process for development of a Vision we seem to find it easy to
agree on what we want and, surprisingly, what we want to do together to get
it. Instead of being stuck in merely “disagreeing better”757 – something Scott
Morrison would prefer we do ad infinitum – common ground is very quickly
found. In Waverley’s case, the community worked with the council to develop
a draft “Vision for Waverley Together 2”758. Appendix B provides the full text
of the Vision. When this draft was put to the test in a statistically valid survey
of Waverley residents, conducted independently by the Hunter Valley
Research Foundation, almost 90% of those surveyed reported agreement or
strong agreement with the draft. Only 5% disagreed or strongly disagreed.759
The critical thing to recognise here is that the “Vision for Waverley
Together 2” was not a vision for the Council’s commitment to the local
community; it was a Vision of the community’s commitment to itself. When
politics is taken out of community planning, we come to a peaceful coherence
very quickly. We have a common intuition for the common good.
Furthermore, when some detail is put back into the Vision (it doesn’t have to
be a lot of detail, but it has to be more than the politicians’ binaries) we can
get a sense of priorities, and we certainly get a sense of what we commonly
don’t want alongside what we commonly do want. This sharpens not just the
Vision – whatever it is – but our sense of what we are willing to do together
to get it. A clear idea of the “what” sharpens our appetite for “hows” that
previously we might have found unpalatable. We increase our preparedness
to do things we think are too hard because we can see a benefit at the end of
757 Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, quoted by Nick Bonyhady, The Guardian “Morrison
calls for more civil debate after 'nasty' campaign”, Op. Cit.
758 See Waverley Council, “Waverley Together 2: Our community’s strategic plan for 2010-2022”, page
4, accessible at https://haveyoursay.waverley.nsw.gov.au/waverley-together-3/documents
759 See Waverley Council, “Funding the Future: Report on Funding for Waverley Council’s Services
2010 to 2022”, December 2010, page 12, accessible at http://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/?a=20358
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the effort. That is the power of Visions. They are more than just idealising.
They are energising. But only if they are our Visions, not politicians’ visions. If
politicians’ visions predominate, we just slip back into arguing again.
In the case of the “Vision for Waverley Together 2”, the community had
easy access to enough information to guide the council and itself about
priorities. To check support for the Vision, those surveyed were asked about
the importance of each of its fourteen elements. They were asked to rate each
element on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most important. They responded
by rating all the elements with importance scores of between 3.4 and 4.7 out
of 5. In other words, all fourteen elements had the support of more than 70%
of the Waverley community760. These are levels of policy support that
politicians would kill for. And the overall score of almost 90% (87.8%) support
that was achieved for the “Vision of Waverley Together 2” as a whole is a
stratospheric score that politicians could only dream of.
What this reinforces is that politics today is not capable of describing
where we want to go, let alone taking us there. It is almost as if politics itself
has passed its use-by date, although democracy has not. Politics and
politicians seem to have reduced themselves to operating on the margins of
our thought processes and value decisions. They hardly touch what is really
meaningful for us in decision making and prefer to distract us onto other
territory.
By contrast, processes like Australia reMADE are working well to define
what we dream of for Australia. Their vision has nine pillars and extensive
work has gone into describing what these nine pillars mean to those who have
contributed. They have not tried to reduce these pillars to the politicians’
simplicities or ad man’s blather. They have not reduced the vision to the more
usual one-liners we see in many vision statements, such as the City of Sydney’s
“Green – Global – Connected” vision statement. On the contrary, the detail
provided about the pillars of the Vision for Australia reMADE does justice to
the complexity of our lives and nation and does so in an inspiring way. I
hesitate to reduce the pillars to a superficial level but for purposes of shedding
light on the structure of the Vision for “the best version of ourselves”, they
have been organised by Australia reMADE as follows:
760
Waverley Council, “Funding the Future: Report on Funding for Waverley Council’s Services 2010 to
2022”, Ibid., page 12.
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1. a first people’s heart
2. a natural world for now and the future
3. an economy for the people
4. a society where all contributions count and every job has dignity
5. a diversity of people living side by side
6. a country of flourishing communities
7. a new dawn for women
8. a thriving democracy
9. a proud contributor to a just world
Detail provided by Australia reMADE, which fleshes out what is meant by each
of these nine pillars, is extremely useful in building a quadruple bottom line
national community futures plan for Australia. It is useful in a way standard
vision statements will never be. When a Vision is supplied in this detail it
becomes so much easier to do at least three very important things in IP&R:
• It allows meaningful nation-wide surveys to be conducted on levels
of support for each aspect of the Vision. This helps us confirm that it
really is where the majority of Australians want to be in twenty or
thirty years’ time and it helps us confirm the highest priorities –
where our money might best be spent and when.
• It helps us develop affordable and effective strategies for
achievement of the Vision.
• It helps us design a reporting framework that we can use to tell
people whether we are moving towards or away from the Vision and
to figure out what might not be working as well as we would like and
change it before we do too much more damage to ourselves.
The “Vision for Waverley Together 2” and the “Vision for Australia
reMADE” are the sorts of vision statements that make it possible to plan, and
to plan with a far greater certainty, that we are going in the direction we really
want to go – together. In fact, both statements largely cover the same things,
which reinforces the truth of the Australia reMADE’s observation that
the hopes and dreams we share for our future are staggeringly
similar.761
761 Australia ReMADE, “Creating the Best Version of Us”, page 1, Op. Cit.
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When we are able to think imaginatively and expansively, we emerge quickly
into a space of agreement. But more than this, if we can connect the “whats”
in these more imaginative Visions together with the “hows” in plans like the
“Australian National Outlook 2019” and others like Ross Garnaut’s Super-
power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity762 released in late 2019, and others
like the hundreds of local community strategic plans already in place in council
areas all across Australia, we will really power up our capacity to realise our
agreed Vision by 2050. This is what integrated community futures planning
brings to something like the “Vision for Australia reMADE” at a national level
and the “Vision of Waverley Together 2” at a local level. It brings the prospect
of achievement in reality.
Activating Element 3 – An agreement on what success should look
like and the Directions from which to approach it
Expressions of aspirational aims in a Vision like Australia reMADE can help us
describe what success might look like at a more detailed level. But it is
necessary to develop a framework for the plan so that we agree up front what
the most meaningful indicators of success are and exactly where we are at the
start of the planning period in relation to those indicators of success.
For example, we might assume that in relation to an element of a Vision
that says we want “a country of flourishing communities”, success will not
have been achieved if by the end of a planning period we have a whole lot
more people reporting that they do not feel a sense of community than we
had at the start of the planning period. So, hypothetically, if in 2021 60% of
Australians surveyed said they felt a sense of community in their local area
and by 2025 only 58% felt a sense of community, then we might know we are
doing something wrong. If, on the other hand, every other indicator chosen
as a measure of our having succeeded in realising our vision of “a country of
flourishing communities” indicated a movement towards that aspect of our
vision, we might accept that the strategies were working well overall and then
shift our efforts and investment to an area where evidence was suggesting a
higher degree of failure.
762 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Black Inc. August 2019.
575
Adding up all these little indicators of success is what helps us form the
wellbeing index that I will talk more about in Element 7 below. To activate this
part of the framework, we have to marry a reasonable selection of indicators
of success with baseline data and, in some cases, targets for where we might
want to be at a certain point in time. Targets are not necessary for every
indicator, although baseline data are. Sometimes it is simply enough to know
whether things are getting worse or better in relation to a particular indicator
of success.
Having said that, it is not possible to pick meaningful indicators of success
if we haven’t first agreed on the Directions we prefer to take to arrive at the
Vision. Some routes are preferable to others and some routes might look good
but, when married up with the overarching Vision, clearly won’t take us to
that place. A good example of this is that we might decide, as Australia
reMADE has suggested, that Australia’s economy should “serve the people
and the planet”. Obviously that can be approached by several routes. One
route is via a market free of regulation and another is via a strong regulator
of fairness in markets creating confidence for investors. The second of these
would create an economy that “serves” more people, while the first has a
reputation for embedding inequality. Selecting the first would therefore be
likely to lead to poor performance on an indicator such as the Gini coefficient,
which is an indicator that the majority of Australians would include in their
program of measuring success in wellbeing. By sorting through options to
derive our preferred Directions, we can provide ourselves with sign-posts
about which routes are preferable and which are not. This is probably the
linchpin of efficiency in an integrated planning process. Agreeing on the
preferable Directions saves time both in the planning process itself and in
making sure we don’t find ourselves in a place we really didn’t want to go.
Ideally the process of selecting the preferred Directions will involve some
face-to-face quality community engagement, based on good information
about the potential effect of different options. But because Directions need
to be selected for all four aspects of the QBL – for society, the environment,
the economy and governance – there is a ready-made framework for working
it out together and coming up with a selection of routes that will complement,
not contradict or counteract each other. I will provide that framework in
Chapter 11. It consists simply in setting out all the topic or
policy/administrative areas for which we will need to develop Directions and
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Strategies. I have adapted that framework from the best of IP&R as it has been
put into practice in local community planning. It can be added to as necessary
and is not restrictive. On the contrary, because it approaches the Vision via
the QBL, it is an inclusive framework that will optimise our capacity to develop
Strategies that, when added together, will propel us faster towards the Vision.
Activating Element 4 – An agreement on Strategies
How we realise a Vision is as important as a Vision itself. As I said in Chapter
8, people don’t sign on to a vision about a better quality of life without
considering whether they will have to pay more than they are prepared to pay
in terms of lost quality of life. There is always a trade-off and they absolutely
want to know what the trade-off is going to be – both sides of the trade-off.
Strategies that exclude groups of people (such as minorities in a race or a
gender) and/or whole communities (such as a mining community) won’t
work. People will walk away from the Vision en masse at the start or engage
in such active revolt as to undermine it completely.
That said, if people can see the ultimate aim of a Vision they will very
often decide to sacrifice more than they otherwise might to attain that Vision.
Visions and Strategies work together to inspire and regulate each other. What
emerges from this is fairness – a sense that the social contract being signed
on to is fair and will equitably distribute benefit between the generations,
even if there is some perceptibly disproportional sacrifice being made by the
current generations.
It might be anticipated that strongly fundamentalist communities, such
as evangelicals, or corporate oligopolies, might have difficulty
accommodating some inclusive Strategies. But as far as strict religious
communities or, say, racial enclaves go, troubles with this can be minimised if
those groups can see a place for their own aspirations, freedoms and security
in the plan – that they and their rights will be protected equally with others
and their rights.
It is quite a bit harder to imagine that anything in IP&R would appeal to
oligopolies, unless there are some enlightened ones out there that can
recognise that the profits of corporations won’t grow as much in future
without the human cleverness that can be vested and organised in an
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integrated plan. Associations for the protection of big business, such as the
Minerals Council, or the Business Council of Australia do not, however, display
such an enlightened or community minded attitude. My experience, though,
is that activating this part of the planning framework – by seeking agreement
on the Strategies we want – does part of the work in bringing communities
and local businesses together. And clearly, the sort of business leaders and
professionals who participated in development of the “Australian National
Outlook 2019” – several of which were big businesses and big church
corporations – understood that sustainable benefits only accrue to businesses
if there is inclusive collaboration. While it might be expected that big
corporations will be the last to sign on to an Australian community futures
plan, smaller businesses may find it a very attractive way of registering their
commitment to communities and this goodwill may trickle upwards over time.
In terms of efficiency in planning itself, the good news is that we do not
have to start from scratch at all when it comes to Strategies. If the framework
is well built and has a space for the diverse Strategies we will select, then it
will cater for the ones we already have and this will show up those that are
missing. We can pick up speed because we will see the gaps that need to be
filled and the strategies that are unhelpful. In Chapter 11, I will set out a
framework that can facilitate selection of the most productive combinations
of Strategies.
Activating Element 5 – Regular national opinion surveys
No community strategic plan can be developed without human interaction.
People have to face each other in respectful and open engagement processes
to achieve consensus on a plan. But in that part of the process they are
participating in developing a draft. It will be a good draft, but still a draft.
Drafts need to be sanity-checked and this can be done by survey. These
surveys need to be statistically valid, nation-wide and the results need to be
fully disclosed. Otherwise we can’t confirm whether the plan is supported by
the majority of Australians.
A plan will never achieve 100% support at the level of Strategies. Humans
simply aren’t made that way. We are diverse and that diversity is not going to
go away – ever. This is why the surveys are so important (as long as they are
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done with validity – i.e., they are not rigged either in statistical design or in
the questions). The surveys can help grow support for the plan because they
provide feedback on what the drafters have missed. There may be good
reasons for whatever the drafters have left out, but in listening to the results
of the surveys we can shift a plan from exclusivity to inclusivity, from narrower
use of intelligence to use of diverse intelligence. In the same way that
integration of plans is bound to produce much more efficient and effective
outcomes, a plan adjusted to accommodate and reflect our wider diversity is
going to be a much stronger plan.
Activating Element 6 – A funding plan
In Chapter 8, I posed a series of questions about whether Australians could be
fairly characterised as either miserly or generous. Some of these questions
were:
• What if Australians are not so much miserly as merely discerning
about what we want to do with our money and to be more involved
in decision making about that?
• What if the whole problem of relating to Australians about jobs,
growth and taxes were less about the amount that governments
should spend and more about our trust that our taxes will be spent
well and spent where it really will do more good?
• What if development of the spending agenda occurred on ground
where we could work together to define priorities instead of splitting
us up into camps: one camp full of marginal electorates, that can
then be won by pork barreling, and another camp of non marginal
electorates, where those most in need simply get left behind?
• What if we weren’t forced at every election into the indignity of
squabbling over an ever smaller cake?
• What if the debate were conducted on terms completely different to
the ones that make it seem like all we ever think about is ourselves
and our individual financial prosperity?
• What if we were drawn more into questions about “the how” – how
we spend our money rather than whether we spend it.
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Personally, I don’t favour or agree with the miserly characterisation of the
majority of Australians. But it doesn’t matter what I believe in this regard –
the fact remains that it simply isn’t useful to assume that miserliness – and
particularly aversion to taxation per se – can take a nation forward either to
greater prosperity or greater equality of opportunity. If we want a stronger
nation we have to be prepared to spend what is necessary to get it. There is
enough national wealth to go around, and as I suggested in Chapter 7 finance
is not really the main constraint in a country like Australia. The problem comes
if our funds aren’t well organised so that they benefit all of us. That leads to a
smaller economy. In reality, since we live with a monetary sovereign
government, and we have to pay tax anyway, the most productive thing to do
is to focus on how we spend it. Our trouble at the moment, at a national level,
is that we have no process in place to drive decisions about either the quality
of life we want in future or what we are prepared to spend to get it.
At present, our habit is that we go into elections being told what we can’t
afford. We need to switch this around both in order and time. We need to
switch from being told by governments that we can’t afford something – and
from passively accepting whatever they say – and move instead to dominate
the agenda and tell governments what we want to afford, as a minimum, and
what we will pay extra for. We also need to tell our governments what we
insist on, as a minimum quality of life, well ahead of an election (in fact
immediately after the previous election). That means telling them what our
Vision is and our preferred Strategies for realising that Vision. Then we need
to ask them to come back with a plan on how what we want can be funded
over a sustainable timeframe (or necessary timeframe if matters are urgent)
and what extra help (which may not always be money) will be required from
us if – after seeing the bill – we decide we still want what we had insisted was
necessary in our Vision of a better life.
If I look at the questions I repeated at the start of this chapter, I can see
that we are not set up at the moment to make more of our future. We are not
set up to make as much of that Vision a reality as we otherwise might. I can
see that our current position and our way of engaging with government leaves
us exposed to significantly poorer outcomes than we should be able to expect,
given our national wealth. I can summarise those questions and our current
position as follows:
580
Question Current position
• What if Australians are not so much • Currently there is no place in our
miserly as merely discerning about polity for the discernment we should
what we want to do with our money be able to exercise about what we do
and to be more involved in decision with our money.
making about that?
• What if the whole problem of • Currently there is no place where we
relating to Australians about jobs, can talk together about reasonable
growth and taxes were less about taxation levels and burden-sharing
the amount that governments and no idea of what we might get for
should spend and more about our our tax.
trust that our taxes will be spent
well and spent where it really will
do more good?
• What if development of the • Currently there is no space for us to
spending agenda occurred on decide priorities for spending,
ground where we could work including the priority communities
together to define priorities instead (be they regions, or Indigenes, or the
of splitting us up into camps? unemployed, or the aged, or youth,
or very young children, or
communities undergoing industry
transition).
• What if we weren’t forced at every • Currently we can’t work together to
election into the indignity of stretch the capacity of the cake or
squabbling over an ever smaller even choose to make it a bigger cake.
cake? We can’t make our money work
harder for us.
In summary, we currently have no space either in time or venue to talk
about how we want to fund our future. But if IP&R can be lifted to operate at
a national level, we can begin to occupy this space and occupy it early enough
for it to lead to optimal and affordable budget expenditure patterns. In other
words, we need to set up a place in which we can design a plan which drives
a budget, not a budget which drives a politician’s short term agenda and cuts
off our future prospects.
Of course, a prosperous nation in a capitalist society can’t just depend on
a government budget to deliver a better life for all of us. In theory we could
depend on doing it that way, but we prefer not to live like that. We like our
capitalist freedoms. Obviously, therefore, we need partnerships between the
government and non-government sectors. Currently we are not working in
581
coordinated partnerships. In the neoliberal ethos, governments are not
meant to take a major role in delivering the quality of life we want. Neoliberals
tend to assume that governments are the problem and simply get in the way
of our better wellbeing. But instinctively, and in evidence, we know this isn’t
true. Governments can, and do, and must play an enormous role in delivering
the quality of life we all aspire to. Many of us have been reduced in the last
five years or so into thinking that the only way we can achieve something of
what we want in life is to work with our nearest neighbours and employers
and councils to achieve a better quality of life in our tiny neck of the woods.
But we know that isn’t going to suffice and that in a globalised world we are
bound to be overtaken by competition, by change, by runaway heating of the
planet, by technology and technology abuse, by corporate greed and
unregulated business, by corruption, by stupid self-serving economics, or by
a whole bunch of things that simply cannot be solved locally and cannot be
afforded without national cooperation, strong ethical governance, and
increased public funding.
Community strategic plans are a way of embedding the partnerships we
need in order to fund our future. But they are unlikely to work well if those
partnerships do not have the fullest involvement possible – and that means
monetary involvement – from both the government and non-government
sectors, and indeed from us, from we the workers, we the potential workers,
we the producers and we the consumers. Community strategic plans are just
as much about what we spend on ourselves as they are about what
corporations spend in their contribution to the economy. All players must pull
their weight if we want the economy to grow as much as it might. The
“Australian National Outlook 2019” has already shown how economic growth
will slow substantially between now and 2060 if we don’t work together with
business, government, the universities and vocational educators, industry and
professional associations, trade unions, the non-profit sector, local
government planners, ethical and diverse policy advisers (government and
non-government), superannuation funds, and the nation’s financiers and
insurers. At the moment neither sector – public or private – is pulling its
weight:
• The corporate sector is afflicted with neoliberalism which is
embedding inequality.
582
• The government sector is not only pulling out of investment in us, it
is not planning for the long term sustainability of the services it is
staying in.
• And to top it all off, we the people are being lulled into pulling out of
our investment in ourselves.
That all needs to be pulled back into a more productive and balanced
arrangement, with government especially committing more than it does now
but committing it to the things we want. IP&R can help drive that. And with a
bit of help from the Parliamentary Budget Office, IP&R can help us make sure
that public expenditure is committed to the items that are most beneficial for
Australians, rather than to inequitable subsidies for private profit from
otherwise unviable or environmentally destructive ventures.
Although I have only referred to this lightly thus far, Integrated Planning
& Reporting includes a requirement for long term financial planning of
government budgets. The potential of this aspect of IP&R to optimise budgets
and save communities a fortune in sub-optimal public expenditures is one of
the great unsung microeconomic reforms of Australia. Long term financial
planning is essential to the success of any community futures plan. Indeed,
there is no point in building a community futures plan at all if we are not
prepared to fund the government sector part of it. A plan we are not prepared
to fund is disabled before it starts. So it is worth spending time here on setting
out how long term financial planning works and how it can work to deliver the
quality of life we want in the fairest manner – at least for the government
sector’s and taxpayers’ contributions. I will use the example of long term
financial planning in NSW here because it is the easiest way to see how
community preferences can be built into a financial plan and sustainably
funded over time.
The way long term financial planning works at the local level is that a local
government – a council – lays out everything it needs to spend, as a minimum,
over a decade, or sometimes for twelve years (three election cycles) or
sometimes for twenty years. But the minimum legal requirement is ten years.
This is meant to cover expected costs of:
• essential maintenance and renewal of existing assets (such as for
roads, footpaths, drains, bridges, buildings, parks, pools, beaches,
street lighting, retaining infrastructure, cemeteries, etc.); and
583
• service operation (such as child care, seniors services, cultural
services, recreation services, development and building approval
services, local and state emergency management, environmental
planning and conservation services, regulatory services, libraries,
parking services, transport planning, place management and
cleaning, waste services, and governance services including
community consultation) at existing levels of service.
The process means that asset maintenance renewal can be scheduled so
that it is not done too late. This is essential to avoid cost escalations and
transfers of unaffordable burdens to future generations. All of the expected
asset and service costs are then loaded into a financial model alongside
expected income over the same period. If there is a shortfall, then strategies
for resolving the problem are discussed with the community, at the same time
as the community is participating in developing their own long term
community strategic plan. In the engagement process for the plan, the
community can workshop preferred solutions for funding any shortfall and
they can also provide feedback about whether they are prepared to pay for
new services or higher service levels from existing services or assets. The
process allows the council to come back with options for funding the essential
minimum asset and service level maintenance and a broken down cost for any
extras called for by the community. Optional sources of funding and savings
can be offered to the community at this time to enable them to choose
whether they still want the extras. These sources include fees, loans and rates
(tax). For its part, the community, having already engaged in developing its
Vision for the quality of life it wants to achieve in the long term (at least
locally), has a reference point that helps with its own decisions on whether
the additional service levels are really essential for achievement of the Vision
and whether they are willing to pay more for that quality of life. This tends to
result in large numbers of ratepayers opting to pay more in rates, especially if
they are convinced that the council has also done as much as it can in
achieving efficiencies.
Not every state runs long term financial planning in local government in
quite this interactive way, but where they do there is significant mutual
benefit and increased community and customer satisfaction. There have been
584
cases where community opinion about their council has improved even as
they have agreed to significant increases in their rates.763
This process works well at the local government area level because
councils are of course much smaller than state or federal governments and
can far more easily strike up an engagement process with their communities
that builds trust. For state and federal government, both these tasks are more
difficult, and the will isn’t there to do it. This is why we end up with federal
and state budgets that people like me can only describe as “poor one-year
things that are out of date before they are off the starting block”. Even though
they contain four- and ten-year projections, federal and state budgets are
highly unreliable, compared to local council budgets, in terms of their
projections. This isn’t to say that local councils get it right all the time. They
don’t. But they have a far more effective process in place for long term
financial planning and the security of their local assets and services and that
process is helping them to slowly overcome asset maintenance backlogs and
to avoid service losses due to funding problems. By contrast, Australians can
have little if any faith that state and federal government budgets are being set
in a manner that secures assets and services for the longer term.
Having said that, our federal government has powers which can make the
funding task easier than it is for a local council. Councils can’t create funding
in the same way that the federal government in Australia can. If councils want
to do more, they must raise rates and charges. But their pot of potential funds
is still limited by Australia’s Constitution, various arrangements under the
differing state laws, and politics. So they must figure out how to live within
available limits and cannot harbour expectations that they will be bailed out
of financial difficulties. They will be amalgamated before that happens, so if
they want to stay separate they have to stay afloat financially. Running a long
string of deficits doesn’t work well for councils, although in the major cities
763 Waverley Council is the classic example of this. In 2010, a majority of Waverley ratepayers agreed
in consultation to double their council rates over 7 years, in exchange for things they had said they
wanted in service delivery from the council over the following decade. A statistically valid survey of
the Waverley community showed that, depending on what aspect of Waverley Council’s image they
were asked about, the proportion of respondents who thought the better of the council immediately
after they’d agreed to double their rates ranged between 45% and 55%. Only 10% of respondents
thought the worse of the council in this survey. The opinions of the remaining 40% remained
unchanged as a result of the agreement to double rates. See Waverley Council, “Application for a
Special Variation to Rates under Section 508A of the Local Government Act, Part B”, 25 March 2011,
page 19, Op. Cit.
585
they are usually big enough to try it for a while if necessary. Our federal
government, however, can bring something more to its own budget if it
chooses. It can create funds and is not limited in doing that by anything other
than a real fear that inflation is about to take off or there is some other
impending genuine risk. As long as it is careful not to create actual labour or
natural resource scarcity, it can spend more without raising its main source of
recurrent income – tax. Economists will argue whether a monetary sovereign
government can really do that without stoking inflation but the fact is they
can and do. But regardless of arguments about that, both a council and a
federal government still need to concentrate on the main question:
What do we want to spend the money on?
This needs to be the starting point for both and for state government for that
matter. Only with national IP&R can we properly decide what we want to
spend our money on. The plan that comes from national IP&R, and nothing
else, should be the starting point.
State and federal treasuries probably do run budgets that cover their
asset planning needs to some extent, although it is very hard to be sure. We
have to rely on faith that there are asset planners inside dispersed agencies
such as utilities, education or public works departments, who are both skilled
enough and connected to the financial controllers. But what state and federal
treasuries do not do is connect their budgets either for services or assets or
revenue to a strategic plan. This makes the asset and services and the
revenues vulnerable (particularly services), when this needn’t happen at all.
Basically, service operators, especially in, say, family and community services
or even some hospital services, have come to expect that they might not exist
in the near future – that they can be established one year and shut down the
next. There is no accountability by state or federal government for service
rationalisation. They cut services at will, whenever they need money, and
even when they don’t. This leads to ridiculous situations such as the proposal
by the Berejiklian government in late 2019 to close the cardiac unit in Prince
of Wales Children’s Hospital at Randwick – a major level one hospital – and
transfer it to western Sydney. The prospect of unnecessary deaths from this
idea obviously did not appeal to any Sydneysiders (west or east) and given the
choice they would probably have chosen to cut something else, or indeed
build the extra unit without closing the first one (which after many months of
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community activism and almost 70,000 petition signatures and submissions is
exactly what the Berejiklian government ended up conceding). But
communities are rarely consulted, let alone given a viable choice. The
example crystallises the lack of accountability and respect for the general
public exhibited by both state and federal governments. It is not an isolated
foible, but it is one that needs to be reversed. And it can be reversed by
imposing the entire Integrated Planning & Reporting framework, including the
long term financial planning and compulsory community engagement
components, on state and federal government. Such an imposition is unlikely
to be permitted by these governments, but a national community futures plan
can certainly schedule the initiative. If it was good for local government it will
be just as good for the states and the Commonwealth.
As we build a national community futures plan it will be unrealistic to
expect that much will improve within state and federal government in the
standard of asset, service and financial planning at a national level inside a
decade. Nor is government consultation with the community likely to improve
much in that period. However, the very process of creating a national
community futures plan from the bottom up, instead of from the top down,
can set the nation on a more efficient track towards being able to fund its
preferred future. As I said in Chapter 5, it is essential to ensure adequate
funding for the government sector’s contribution to realisation of the overall
community futures plan. Initially this will isolate areas where public funding
needs to be increased to ensure delivery of the priorities of the plan and
where it needs to be decreased (the classic example being fossil fuel
subsidies). This is where the Parliamentary Budget Office can help out. As an
independent centre of excellent expertise in budgeting, it can shed light on
which of those invidious subsidies that we are currently forced to suffer for
unsustainable industries and private profit could be abandoned, freeing up
new lines of finance for preferable, sustainable public investments. By this
means we can figure out how best to invest our money in ourselves – for the
many, not the few.
As time passes, results from monitoring of the national community
futures plan will provide information about fine tuning necessary in funding.
While a Liberal National Party federal government in particular is unlikely to
listen to suggestions of budget fine-tuning, it may be that within the coming
decade a more progressive and inclusive government will opt for
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implementation of something like the “wellbeing budget” process adopted in
New Zealand in 2019 by the progressive Ardern Government764. While this
process simply makes Ministers bid for budget shares based on demonstrable
wellbeing benefits and is limited to a small part of New Zealand’s total
national budget, it is nevertheless somewhat similar to aspects of financial
planning used by local councils when they are engaged in community futures
planning under IP&R. It could function as an introductory phase of holistic
integrated long term financial planning for a federal budget, and if guided by
a decent national community futures plan could kick start a revolution in
federal government financial planning. Come the day.
Having said that, it is useful to note that when politicians talk about
wellbeing, they don’t talk about it in a sense big enough to spearhead a
paradigm shift in our thinking about mutual responsibility and fair sharing of
the national wealth – wealth we work hard to generate presumably so that it
can deliver wellbeing for all. If governments talk about wellbeing by speaking
only of budgets, they are likely to stunt the growth of the good idea behind
wellbeing budgets. These sorts of budgets are good things inasmuch as they
might result in a little bit more money going to us and a little bit less money
going to big, otherwise unsustainable business in the form of subsidies, tax
reductions or straight hand-outs. But they will only have that result for as long
as the flippant largesse of a political party might last. Fundamentally they still
leave the budget entirely in the control of governments. In the hands of most
politicians, wellbeing budgets are quite likely to be just a fiddle around the
edges of our wellbeing – using it as a marketing tool so that nothing really
changes much, except our superficial perception of whether a government
cares for us or not. Our ability to direct where money should and shouldn’t be
spent overall doesn’t change. If we want to increase that capacity for directing
where our money should be spent, we need a national community futures
plan and that plan would probably need to be underpinned by a far more
broad ranging memorandum of understanding between us, our governments,
our employers, unions, NGOs and our institutions as equal partners in wealth
sharing. We are mature enough as a society to make such an agreement, in
partnership, but we need the mechanism to do it. That mechanism is not a
764See New Zealand Government, “The Wellbeing Budget”, 30 May 2019, accessible at
https://treasury.govt.nz/sites/default/files/2019-05/b19-wellbeing-budget.pdf
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wellbeing budget, it is something akin to the accord I spoke of in Chapter 7 –
an accord on wealth, welfare and wellbeing.
As to the private sector’s part in our future – their contribution will
obviously continue to be greater than the government sector’s. But if we are
to reap any benefit from the private sector’s continuing participation in our
economy (participation which is really only made possible with our
assistance), their behaviour will need to change – a lot. A national community
futures plan can set a Vision which might help achieve this behaviour change.
If that Vision emphasises partnership between the public and private sectors
– as opposed to the private sector ripping off the public – that would be a
start, although obviously this part of a Vision statement might have to be
worded a little more positively than that if we expect to lure corporates into
better behaviour. But the thinking of the private sector business leaders –
their habitual mindset – also needs to change. Currently there is a stark split
in the business community about what corporate responsibility and
partnership consists in. This split can be observed by comparing the approach
of the Business Council of Australia in its “Plan for a Stronger Australia”,
already discussed in Chapter 7, to the approach of the businesses like those
who worked together to produce the “Australian National Outlook 2019”. The
business leaders who worked on the latter plan obviously support a view that
things like
• social inclusion,
• environmental protection,
• adoption of world leading technology,
• building human capital through education and collaboration,
• transition to low emissions energy and development of new energy
exports,
• transformation of our agriculture sector and land productivity
programs,
• better connectivity in cities, and
• accountable and trustworthy governance
are all vital to strong growth and stability. The Business Council of Australia’s
plan, however, could hardly be more opposite to the “Australian National
Outlook 2019”. Aside from a bit of support for connectivity within cities, the
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BCA’s approach in its plan for our future is nothing more than a complete drag
on the community’s largesse, with no reciprocity. In the BCA’s mindset:
the actions that will improve our lives … require … creating the
environment where Australians can succeed because employers are
doing well.765
But the BCA should really be saying the opposite - that:
the actions that will improve our lives require creating the environment
where businesses can do well because all Australians have an equal
opportunity to succeed.
However, there is no such open mind from the BCA. Theirs is a plan for
business, not Australians. More accurately, it is a plan for business at the
expense of Australians. The BCA’s “Plan for a Stronger Australia” consists
entirely in calling for:
• handouts and subsidies from Australians,
• reductions in tax, particularly company tax,
• government support for cheap buyouts of lucrative government
services (support which helps business buy our assets with our
money),
• labour market deregulation and the inequality of opportunity and
lower wages that attend on that deregulation,
• a reduction in government spending (obviously on welfare) so that
there is more left for subsidies to business (with Newstart to be
raised only for those permanently unable to work),
• a reduction to zero of the already legislated requirement to increase
the superannuation guarantee,
• easing Sydney Airport noise regulations and expanding its hours of
operation (presumably in preference to building a second Sydney
airport, competition from which would not be appreciated by Sydney
Airport Corporation),
765 Business Council of Australia, “A Plan for a Stronger Australia, Volume One”, April 2019, page 8, Op.
Cit.
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• easing environmental approval processes for developments (and
making no provision for costs to the community in environmental
and development damage), and
• elimination of bans on gas exploration.
This is not an exhaustive list but it is evident that the focus is all on resource
exploitation.766 There is no mention of such things as transformation of land
uses from unsustainable to sustainable uses. Nor is there mention of the need
for higher emissions reduction targets than our commitments under the Paris
Agreement767. Nor is there a skerrick of evidence in the BCA’s plan that it is
willing to work in partnership with Australians for a better future. The words
“partnership”, “joint”, and “cooperation”, feature not at all. And words such
as “social”, “society”, “carbon”, “emissions”, “climate” and “environment”
hardly rate a mention, the implication being that the BCA simply isn’t focussed
on the things concerning large numbers of Australians and has no sense of
Australians other than as a resource to be exploited. A scan of the frequency
of certain key words in the BCA’s “Plan for a Stronger Australia” compared to
the frequency of these words in the “Australian National Outlook 2019” is
instructive here:
Frequency of Frequency of
appearance in BCA’s appearance in
Key word
“Plan for a Stronger “Australian National
Australia” Outlook 2019”
Social 2 91
Society 3 13
Carbon 5 58
Emissions 14 101
766 Note also the Business Council of Australia’s “Vision for Australia” and “Goals for Australia” on its
website in 2020 did not feature any mention at all of our natural environment. Nor did it make any
reference to a goal of net zero emissions. Decarbonisation is not a BCA goal. Last accessed in mid
February 2020 at https://www.bca.com.au/
767 The Business Council of Australia changed its tune on this late in 2019, suddenly calling for a net
zero emissions reduction target by 2050, after having lambasted the Labor Party’s target of a 45%
reduction on emissions by 2030, calling it “an economy wrecking target” in mid 2018. Presumably by
the end of 2019, the BCA thought it might lose too many members if it didn’t change its tune. See
Adam Morton and Katharine Murphy, “Australian businesses, unions and farmers say Paris agreement
requires zero emissions plan”, The Guardian, 5 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/05/business-unions-and-farmers-urge-
australia-to-cut-net-greenhouse-gas-emissions-to-zero?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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Frequency of Frequency of
appearance in BCA’s appearance in
Key word
“Plan for a Stronger “Australian National
Australia” Outlook 2019”
Climate 9 86
Environment (meaning natural
environment, not business 3 108
environment)
I should allow for the fact that the “Australian National Outlook 2019”
(Volume 1) is twice as long as the BCA’s “Plan for a Stronger Australia”
(Volume 1). But even so, the difference in focus is clear. In the case of the BCA,
we are talking about the peak body representing business in Australia. If they
can’t do a better job of thinking about the things everyone else is thinking
about as critical to Australia’s future – at least to the same extent that other
decent business leaders clearly can – then we might not be able to expect
much by way of participation from our business leaders in realising a Vision of
a better Australia. I include this here to display the attitudinal problem of
business leaders in Australia today. It is an attitude that requires a major shift
if we are to finance our future as fairly and efficiently as we might. Business
needs to do the heavy lifting that the Business Council of Australia brags about
but in reality does not bother with. It needs to stop expecting Australians to
take on all the burden while business takes on all the benefit.
Activating Element 7 – A wellbeing index and a tracking system for
monitoring and reporting progress
One of the biggest benefits of Integrated Planning & Reporting is that, done
well, it enables us to figure out objectively whether our quality of life – our
health and wellbeing – is getting better or worse. We can figure it out because
under IP&R, pictures of our progress towards or away from our ideal life can
all be put in one place. No longer do we need to weary ourselves sifting
through impossibly dispersed reports from journalists, or facebook posts, or
fake news, or late night TV, or obscure government websites, or the family
BBQ for news of our progress or failure. If we have a good idea of what we
want to achieve – a Vision on which we agree – and we know where we are
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at the start of our plan in relation to that Vision, and all this is written in one
place using IP&R, then suddenly we can get a snapshot of our progress on the
things that really matter to us. If we are time-poor and can’t concentrate on
politics until the last week of the election cycle, then suddenly that doesn’t
matter so much. We can check out the picture as it really is and make our
choice about who we should trust to take us through the next phase.
To do this though, we need to know that a system has been set up
activating all the above described elements of a community futures planning
process, that this process has resulted in a plan that does reflect our
aspirations as a national community and that a transparent system has been
put in place which allows us to monitor progress in our wellbeing as described
in the Vision of our plan. This is what is meant by a wellbeing index – or at
least it is what ought to be meant. Certain economists will describe a
wellbeing index as being something quite different. They mean that instead
of simply measuring GDP as an indicator of the wealth and wellbeing of a
nation, other factors such as environmental amenity and mental health
should be measured, assigned a dollar value somehow, and added into the
GDP calculation to produce a more broadly based calculation of changes in
national wealth. However, this still produces a single GDP-like figure – often
called a “GPI” or “Genuine Progress Indicator”768 – without actually providing
insight into exactly where life is getting better or worse, let alone closer to or
further away from a particular Vision. A wellbeing index which describes
progress towards a Vision in meaningful qualitative and quantitative (rather
than just quantitative) terms is better characterised as a QBL Wellbeing Index,
and that is what we get if we use IP&R at a national level to build our own
community futures plan.
To establish a useful QBL Wellbeing Index at a national level, we need to
break our Vision for our future (whatever it is) down into smaller pieces. This
768See David Pilling, The Growth Delusion: The Wealth and Well-Being of Nations, Bloomsbury
Publishing, London, page 237: The GPI is “a measurement with a forty-year track record, which had
been tried out in various forms in countries from Japan to Finland. The GPI … is really a refined version
of GDP. Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, which compiles the index, says the GPI is drawn
up according to three basic principles. It adjusts for income inequality, which is regarded as bad. It
includes non-market benefits from the environment (such as wetlands) and from society (such as
volunteer work), and it deducts such things as the costs of environmental degradation, spending on
things like crime prevention or health insurance, and loss of leisure time. Altogether, it uses twenty-six
indicators, each expressed in dollars, to produce a single number akin to GDP. The indicators are
divided into economic, environmental and social categories”.
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isn’t hard and we needn’t flood ourselves with detail. In fact, the exercise
equates to selecting the preferred Directions that I mentioned in Activating
Element 3 above. We only need enough detail in those Directions to paint a
picture that shows where we might be succeeding and failing – where we are
tracking in the wrong direction. Once we have broken this down to the right
level of detail we can then select how we might track progress. This requires
us to:
• pick meaningful indictors of progress, and
• collect baseline data for those indicators (to indicate where we are
at the start of the planning period, or where we otherwise want to
start from).
Once we have the baseline data and we are comfortable that what we are
monitoring is actually meaningful – that it is capable of indicating where and
when we are on the wrong track – then we can select our targets for
maintaining or achieving the level and type of wellbeing we want. This will not
just be about human wellbeing. It will be about QBL wellbeing – i.e.,
improvement in environmental wellbeing, and the wellbeing that comes from
a strong economy, social cohesion and good governance.
Sometimes we will want these targets to be set at a point where they
maintain the status quo because we are happy with that or prepared to
compromise on it in order to achieve some other higher priority. Other targets
may be set ambitiously because they are game changers for us or are
perceived as make-or-break indicators. Good examples of some of these
include carbon emissions reduction targets, or industry transition targets, or
corruption prevention targets, or targets for reduction in inequality. Some of
these may have timeframes applied, some may not.
Once the targets are set, monitoring needs to be transparent but there
should be two types of monitoring. Because “wellbeing” is as much about our
perception of it as it is about our actual wellbeing, data for reporting on
progress must be assembled from both points of view. Our perception and the
physical facts of our situation need to be combined. Perception needs to be
determined of course by surveys. Actual physical progress needs to be
determined by collecting data on pre-agreed physically measurable
indicators. There is no limit to the pieces of information that can be put
together to report on progress in relation to this sort of wellbeing index. Once
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assembled, the findings can be rolled up to a simpler picture of progress or
failure and people can choose which level of detail they might want to peruse.
A significant benefit of the process of a QBL Wellbeing Index is that it
allows communities to assess where their preferred Strategies are failing to
deliver their preferred Vision (or where the government is not delivering – but
I will get to that in the next section about Activating Element 8).
One limitation of a QBL Wellbeing Index is availability of data. An Index
should be set up using data sets that we might reasonably rely on and that are
likely to continue as standard public data sets for the foreseeable future. If a
government or other selected research agency starts to reduce data
collection, or distorts it somehow, or changes the basis of the collection, then
it can disable the Index. As a minimum, governments should be reminded of
the need to maintain an ethical and adequately funded data collection system
and to ensure these data are always made public. Funding cuts and political
pressure on agencies like the Australian Bureau of Statistics (which was forced
by the Abbott Government to close down its Measures of Australia’s Progress
(MAP) wellbeing index program in 2014), the Universities, or the Bureau of
Crime Statistics, should be viewed with deep suspicion and discouraged.
Failure by governments to participate in data collection exercises to meet
requests from the United Nations, the OECD or other cooperative
international research bodies should also be seriously discouraged. In
Australia there is a national project seeking security of funding for a QBL
wellbeing index that would be of significant assistance in national community
futures planning. The Australian National Development Index (ANDI) is an
excellent research project working with communities via surveys and via
collection of other data to develop an idea of the values of the nation and
ultimately to measure whether we are moving towards that valued life or
away from it. By contrast, projects like Australia reMADE just get out there
and ask people to imagine (expansively) the life they would value. Experience
says that both projects will come up with “staggeringly similar” ideas about
what we value, except that ANDI will take a much more detailed approach to
measuring progress towards or away from it. ANDI has created a framework
for its wellbeing index769 that has a QBL-like structure and appears to have an
amazing network of support, although as at early 2020 it does not appear to
769Australian National Development Index, ANDI, The Index in a Nutshell, accessible at
http://www.andi.org.au/the-index-in-a-nutshell.html
595
have released any data or trend reports. From its website it would appear that
ANDI will be a “combined ‘index and dashboard system’”, possibly with red,
orange and green traffic light symbols indicating where progress toward or
away from an inferred and yet to be specified set of values and goals 770 has
occurred:
ANDI will produce an overall progress index, and also progress indexes
in each of 12 progress domains (such as health, education, justice etc)
and reports which reach clear conclusions about whether we are
making progress and why, and what needs to be done. ANDI will be
measuring Australia's progress against Australia's key goals and values,
as determined by its citizens.771
As such, ANDI also has expectations of influencing government policy based
on whatever findings may arise in future in its QBL wellbeing index. What it is
missing is the organising policy framework that can be provided by a QBL
national community futures plan. Put these two things together and suddenly
there will be a very efficient way not just of providing feedback to government
and Australians on genuine national progress and public/private sector
performance in relation to that progress, but on the nature and priority of the
preferred adjustments to Direction and Strategy necessary to get the nation
back on track and keep it there.
Part 3 of this book provides an insight into how a QBL Wellbeing Index
can be connected to a national community futures plan for Australia to step
up our influence in both the public and private sectors on our future.
Activating Element 8 – A transparent reporting system
If we have a good plan for our future to which the majority of us can subscribe,
and if we have a transparent system for independently monitoring the truth
770 Australian National Development Index, ANDI, Frequently Asked Questions: “With ANDI, progress
will primarily be measured according to a set of benchmarks which define our ‘goals’ in each of the
key areas. In this way, we will be measuring progress against ‘where we want to go’ rather than just
‘where we have been’ (as in MAP, the CIW and a number of other systems, which measure progress
historically through a set of statistical snapshots over time). This means that ANDI will be a measure of
our progress towards the future we want, and a way of describing that future.” Accessible at
http://www.andi.org.au/frequently-asked-questions.html
771 Australian National Development Index, ANDI, Frequently Asked Questions, Op. Cit.
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about progress through a well thought out QBL Wellbeing Index, then we can
hold that up as the standard against which governments should perform. But
it can also be held up as the standard against which the business sector, non-
profit organisations and communities themselves should perform. We can see
which sector is not pulling their weight or how we might all shift our role in
the social contract to achieve more of what we want in the most effective
arrangements. We can also edge towards a balance where the best of
corporate responsibility is at play in our economy more than the worst of
corporate irresponsibility. “Edge” might be the operative word there –
meaning “slowly”. Still, we will create a clearer picture of what corporate
responsibility looks like in an inclusive society.
In IP&R at the local government level, the standard of performance of
each partner in the process can be seen through performance reporting that
occurs annually but which is most useful when it occurs once in a four-year
cycle. One state, NSW, has what they call an “End of Term Report” in which
performance against the pre-agreed community futures plan is published just
before each local government election (which in NSW occurs every four
years). This performance report is not about bashing governments up for their
failures – although it is a report from a council to a community just prior to an
election, so it can be vulnerable to politicisation and isn’t truly independent.
But when an End of Term Report is done properly and honestly (independent
or not), it focuses not on a council’s performance but on whether the whole
community of the local area moved towards or away from their vision for a
better quality of life during the period of office of the elected council. There
is always some focus in End of Term Reports on whether the council lived up
to its commitments in the plan over the full period of office; but this is most
useful when it is done not for purposes of political point scoring or cover-up
but for purposes of gaining insight into where council policies, services,
commitments or activities might be adjusted to help the community move
closer to its vision in the next four-year period of office for the council. In this
sequence of reporting, elections can become more about progress than
recriminations, and more about what can be than what can’t be.
In these End of Term Reports the outgoing and incoming elected officials
have the chance to look at progress in a meaningful way – for the community,
not for politics – by asking themselves and reporting squarely on answers to
three main types of questions:
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1. Did life get better while the council was in office?
2. As a community, are we moving towards or away from having the
type of society, environment, economy, and governance that we
agreed we wanted four years ago?
3. Did our programs and partnerships help our community to make
positive progress towards achieving its vision and targets?
In a good End of Term Report, full detail on progress towards all targets
is provided and then rolled up into a picture of the percentage of targets being
met and identification of the targets not being met. This is then translated
into thoughts about where policy needs to be adjusted to get the community
back on track towards its Vision. This is a way for one set of councillors to pass
wisdom to the next set about what worked and what didn’t during their term
of office. It helps the next set of councillors hit the ground faster. In that
regard it has the advantage of helping us to overcome (partly) one of the most
enfeebling attributes of democracy – that being the inexperience of incoming
elected members of a government. It provides the possibility of continuity of
effective policy and expenditure and quicker identification of failing policy and
expenditure. It also helps stop the problem of the disabling of bureaucracies
that occurs all too frequently after elections and allows public service
departments to retain their skills and competence. Too often, this
competence is lost whenever governments change or even whenever there is
an election without a change of government. Neoliberal governments in
particular have almost decimated the public service on some occasions when
they have fallen over the line into power, and not because those governments
are competent. Politics is not a process of selection on merit. But public
service is – or should be. In the absence of clear evidence of whether public
service has been delivered well by governments and the public service
operating in respectful partnership – i.e., in the absence of a good and
meaningful End of Term Report – incoming governments have found it all too
easy to rip through the intelligence and capacity of our federal, state and local
public services, and even to hold up that destruction of public service capacity
as some sort of achievement. It is not an achievement or a saving. It is a cost
and a loss.
Another big advantage of an End of Term Report is that it can give us a
chance to stop blaming governments for everything. When bad things happen
in our lives, it is often the fault of governments in part; but it is rarely their
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fault entirely. This habit of bashing up politicians – a much loved Australian
blood sport – is healthy in one way but very unhealthy in another. As I have
already said, politicians are human. If we keep punishing them when they
have the courage to do the hard things we elect leaders to do, they will stop
doing the hard things and will sink to selling us just about everything we don’t
need in decent policy if that is what they think we might perversely reward
them for. If we expect them to behave better, we shouldn’t punish them when
they do and reward them when they don’t. Rewarding them at the ballot box,
whenever it is obvious they are trying to lead bravely is, in the long run, a
strategy likely to encourage them to be brave in leadership for much longer
than the average politician seems to manage today.
Of course, it is often hard to know what to reward politicians for since
they have developed an abiding aversion to being accountable in the 21 st
century. Each election should be a ground on which politicians can strut their
achievements. But it is hard to remember the last time a government won or
was returned to office based on the strength of its proven performance in
leadership on hard things. Elections in the 21 st century in our two-party-
preferred system are more about which party or leader we trust most to do
the least worst job, regardless of past performance. Such is the cynicism we
are forced into because politicians are too scared to trust us with the truth
about their failures as humans. If we can remove some of this fear of failure
by treating them less perversely, we might slowly break the cycle that
reinforces duplicity in politicians. In the 21st century post-truth age, most
politicians would, at least once in a term, think to themselves: “What have I
got to lose by lying? They think I lie anyway. They expect it.” That expectation
should stop. We should make it clear that we expect them to be honest but
help them out with a framework that enables and encourages – and rewards
– honesty in reporting. An independent End of Term Report, properly
constructed, can help with this.
Australians expect governments to lead us so that we can get on with our
lives. On the face of it, this seems reasonable. After all, we pay their wages,
don’t we? And not all of us can be leaders, can we? And surely our
contribution to progress and better living standards can best be delivered by
focussing on using our particular strengths in our day-to-day working life and
in care for our families, can’t it? But this ignores something vital about our
need to play the best part we can as parties to a social contract – a contract
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that each of us is born into by virtue of having been born into humanity. So
many of us, bowed down by the exhaustion that comes from everyday life and
working hard, combined with the fact that we have not been given a more
efficient means of organising ourselves to produce a better society (other
than a ballot box once every three or four years), simply opt out. We have
developed a habit of blaming politicians for not leading us to the place we
want to go – even though we haven’t told them where that place is. We have
spent our time arguing about measly interpretations of different versions of
how a political party should save us the trouble of leading ourselves to a
better place, and none of our time pointing them in the direction of that place.
Then we are surprised when we find that inequality, global heating, and a
massive community and even familial disconnectedness have crept up on us.
Blame the politicians we cry. They are all corrupt, they are all out for
themselves, they are all out for power. You can’t trust any of them. Let’s show
them what we think of them by voting for anyone but them, even if we know
that option will take us and our children precisely to where we don’t want to
go.
We and our leaders are both stuck in a rut of reinforcing each other’s less
than useful behaviours because we have no central reference point for where
we want to be in ten, twenty and thirty years’ time and no idea of what the
next best step might be to get there. An End of Term Report on performance
in a parliamentary term can provide all that. Producing such a report does
require forethought – i.e., an agreed plan – and some dedicated data
collection. But it is achievable.
One example of a detailed End of Term Report – one designed to help a
government pass information to the community about its own progress
towards or away from a vision, and to help a future government with wisdom
already gathered – is the end of Term Report for “Waverley Together 2”,
mentioned above772. That report provided a detailed analysis of a
community’s progress over a four-year period towards and away from its own
Vision. The report was built on a QBL Wellbeing Index connected directly to
the Vision for Waverley Together 2. It was tailored to help Waverley residents
772Waverley Council, “Waverley Together 2 – Our community’s strategic plan for 2010-2022: End of
Term Report, Elected Council 2008-2012, accessible at
https://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/15536/WT2_Communications_Endof
TermReport.pdf
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to see what progress they were making towards their own preferred quality
of life and it specifically helped isolate the most effective directions for future
policy for both the councillors and community of Waverley. A summary of the
report was provided in the 2012 Spring edition of the Waverley community’s
local newsletter, “Waverley in Focus”773. This went to every household in
Waverley before the election. There is no reason why this sort of reporting
could not be done at the national level, either by an ethical government or an
independent agency. Much of the information necessary to make such a
report meaningful is freely available in online sources. That is one great
advantage of the internet. Not everything can easily be kept secret as it used
to be. There is always something being provided by good journalism and the
internet to enable us to see through to the truth of how well we are doing as
a society. It just needs to be assembled in one place. That is what a well
constructed End of Term Report does, although if we tried it at a national level
it would be somewhat more useful if we had four-year election terms instead
of three-year terms as it is easier to discern changes in progress over a four-
year term.
A transparent End of Term Report about our movement towards or away
from a national Vision would simplify the whole decision making process for
us in elections. Three big benefits would arise:
1. Instead of being distracted or driven mad by arguments about “the
what and the how”, we could stand back and look at the real
credentials and performance of the leaders we are being asked to
trust. The “what and the how” would already be agreed. That means
that, once elected, politicians wouldn’t need to haggle on
interminably about which party’s approach is better (or waste time
making out like they had an approach) but could get straight down
to the task of what we have pre-agreed is in the national interest. It
is a totally different way of doing things and of course I’m making it
sound that life would be easier for governments than it probably
would be. But it could be easier if they let it. And it could be easier
for us too. If I could put it this way: instead of electing parliaments to
773Waverley Council, “Moving Towards Your Vision for the Future”, Special 12-page supplement to
“Waverley in Focus – Community Newsletter #55”, Spring 2012, accessible at
https://www.waverley.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/24609/WIF_Spring_2012_WEB.pdf
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do whatever they might choose, and ceding far too much power to
them in the process, we could, as it were, elect a plan. Obviously this
would not be on offer at the polling booth itself; nevertheless, by
writing down our plan and setting ourselves to watch how well a
government delivers it, or shreds it, we do swing a little more power
our way, without too much trouble and with potential financial
benefits for everyone.
2. This system would also mean that politicians who are keen to push
favours for vested interests would not have the sway they can
currently achieve by running our parliaments like bear pits for the
amusement of content hungry tabloid media, who look to expand
readership and advertising income via mere negativity and
sensationalism instead of encouraging clever, solid, creative policy
and strategy from our leaders. The theatre of politics might shift,
from our parliaments – where, let’s face it, our politicians no longer
do justice to their finer selves anyway – to a stage where what used
to be called “statesmanship” can be demonstrated, if only because
the incentives to lie and dissemble and cheat have been reduced.
That stage can be set up outside parliament (if community futures
planning comes to the fore) or it can lift the standard of behaviour
inside the current houses of parliament in Canberra and the state
capitals. Or the stage can be set in both places.
3. An independent, verifiable and transparent End of Term Report could
mean that we need no longer be living so vulnerably at the mercy of
brutal retail politics, or the Murdoch press, or Facebook, for our
judgements about whether a government is worthy or not. We
would have an accessible, independent source of verified facts about
how well the government had done in delivering what we want, not
what they want. And we would have a yardstick for checking that
whatever they might be promising actually accords with what we
want and what we know we need – well before we get into a mess
because we voted for something that we knew wouldn’t help us in
the long run. Many more of us would be able to see all this – at a
glance. We would be able to see whether the incumbent government
had governed for all, rather than for just their preferred
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constituency, and determine on the basis of evidence whether we
should trust them with another term.
All this might be a paradigm shift that for some could be a shift too far.
But the successes of local IP&R indicate that it is entirely feasible. In any case,
there is no benefit in sticking with the mess we have now – the mess of
deliberate confusion that we are subjected to in social media and the mess of
a world that we don’t want. IP&R can give us all an opportunity to behave
better and do justice to our finer selves. It has been proven that it can work
at a local level, if it is done well and done honestly. Its potential should be
tapped at a national level.
Getting started on national community futures planning
Establishing an inclusive national community futures planning process will be
a first for Australia. Done well, it will be a game-changer. There are some
challenges, of course, but there are things that can make starting the process
easier and quicker. Speed and efficiency are of the essence if we are to reverse
the things we are in so much trouble over, particularly climate change. As
such, momentum can be built more quickly if we do not go back and reinvent
what others have already assembled in terms of the content – content that
would potentially fit logically in any QBL plan that seeks, for example, to help
us turn away from impending climate disaster or inequality. Some of this
content will be standard. Lots of it has already been adopted as decent, logical
and insightful policy in local government area plans and it will remain relevant
for a national plan. We simply need to integrate that existing wisdom into the
wider national framework. But other content will need to be imagined by
working together creatively before it can be integrated. That is a fun bit that
we can look forward to as a community. The opportunity for enhancement of
the plan, over time, and enhancement of social cohesion itself that will arise
from getting together as a national community for such imaginative
discussions – this is something we should look forward to with optimism.
Since speed and efficiency are important it is fortunate that we do not
need to reinvent the wheel or start from a blank slate as far as the Vision goes.
As I have noted, Australia reMADE has already given us a Vision for Australia
that we know has been supported by multiple communities. That Vision is
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sitting on the internet, due to their generosity, and is tailor made to form the
basis of a first draft of an Australian Community Futures Plan for 2050. There
is also material that can be used in visions like the “Vision for Waverley
Together 2”. As the process moves on we can refine that Vision material. But
these visions are good starting points and they function nicely as a sort of
checklist of aspirations. The simplest organising principle to ensure we can
connect the Vision to viable Strategies is to set the Vision elements up by
asking ourselves what type of community, environment, economy and system
of governance our children should be living in by 2050. We can comb through
the vision for Australia reMADE for the draft answers to this and use it as an
effective organising principle for strategic thinking.
In relation to developing Strategies to make the Vision a reality, we don’t
need to start with a blank slate there either. Other community strategic plans
set up by local councils across Australia, and strategic studies that I have
quoted already, also hold strategies that can be used to form a first draft of a
strategic plan that will propel us more quickly towards our Vision, once it has
been articulated in a way that allows us to assemble strategies easily. This
book itself also functions as an issues paper that we can use to guide
population of the plan. Here I have tried to be comprehensive in setting down
the challenges we are facing in 2020, just to put those issues in one place,
where they might function as both a reference point and a point of departure.
These issues and challenges will no doubt be added to, changed, thrown in a
bin, re-prioritised or just expressed differently as we move through the
process of developing a first draft of a plan. But they will help us start the
whole thing somewhat more efficiently. Once a first draft is up and running,
everything should get easier from there.
The only area where we might struggle somewhat in a first draft is on the
economy. Even with all the detail and discussion about the challenges in our
economy and the limitations we place on it with our own attitudes, the
concept of a community organising itself to plan its own economy is so new
that there could be a fair bit of trial and error. This will be an interesting ride
but I think many Australians after a time would find it stimulating and
enjoyable. It is an opportunity we have never yet been given.
Local councils faced the prospect of trial and error when IP&R was first
introduced. They coped with the newness of it all by accepting that they
would have to do things in stages. This included doing things like asset plans
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in pieces over years – asset class by asset class – until they were confident
they had it all set down and costed. It also included developing long term
financial plans each year that were better and more comprehensive than the
year before. Councils commenced IP&R with the expectation that
improvement would be incremental. I would suggest that a national
community futures planning and reporting process be embarked on with the
same expectation – that improvement will be incremental.
Under IP&R, community strategic plans follow a fairly standard format
and this format can be easily adapted for purposes of a national plan.
Accordingly, I have begun to populate a standard community strategic plan
template with examples of Vision elements, Directions and headings for
Strategies that might achieve the vision elements, across the QBL. Some of
the things included in the examples may well be discarded or re-worded when
the community engagement process begins, but the populated template – or
what I have called a “prototype” – will help us organise the engagement
process far more efficiently and help more and more people to get used to
using it to be creative, strategically, or to resolve practical issues.
The populated template also allows us to begin collecting data and
indicators for the associated QBL Wellbeing Index. The articulation of the
Directions we want to take towards the Vision will help here. In developing
any plan it must be acknowledged that while most people will agree on where
we want to arrive eventually, they will have different views on which route –
which “Direction” – we should take to get there. Settling on the right
Directions can become something of an iterative process where we might pick
a Direction and a target for achieving it, and then find that it wasn’t a
practicable Direction to take in the first place. But this is what the ongoing
planning process is for. Continual review of the plan before each federal
election strengthens the Directions progressively and edges us closer to the
right targets.
In the first round of planning we should expect that we won’t have
enough financial data to work out costs and drive the federal budget. It is hard
to say how long it will take to get to the point where we can use the QBL plan
to drive public spending decisions (instead of the other way around). That will
be a work in progress.
One thing to note: QBL plans in IP&R are “strategic”. They don’t write
down every little detail. That is not the point at all. Communities don’t have
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to take on responsibility for foreseeing and solving every single challenge in
the next three decades. Nor do they need to do this with the precision of an
expert. On the contrary. The strategic approach is meant to provide a context
for decisions about which policies and actions will be acceptable in responding
to challenges as they arise. It is meant to ensure that as time passes and the
foreseeable and unforeseeable happen, we have a yardstick for decision
making or, say, a map that enables us to assess whether a politician’s
proposed solution will pull us off track further than we would prefer or speed
us along as we would wish. This “strategic” focus is what makes integrated
planning practicable. It is what gives me confidence at least that every
educated Australian, from school age up, can participate if they wish. Bring on
the kids!
Part 3 contains the populated prototype plan along with a few examples
of data for inclusion in a QBL Wellbeing Index. I am mindful that wordsmithing
on the plan, and pictures and graphs, to ensure it is compelling for as many of
us as possible, will be an ongoing task, refined by the results of community
feedback and surveys. But as a working title for what I hope will turn out to
be Australia’s first quadruple bottom line, integrated, community futures plan
and wellbeing index, I thought “Australia Together” might be worth a trial.
After all, it is meant to be the product of engagement – of our working
together in the national interest to design a plan to secure a better future for
all our children by 2050. Henceforth, Australia Together (i.e., italicised) will
refer to the prototype plan.
Institutional arrangements
Throughout the writing of this book I have puzzled privately over what might
be the best institutional arrangements for any entity that might be
established to steer national community futures planning and reporting.
Because this process is entirely new at a state or national level, there are no
precedents. Hence the puzzlement, particularly in any area where the process
has not been implemented before, such as for economic planning. By
“institutional” I mean the governance and funding arrangements that would
ensure the integrity and inclusiveness of the process on an ongoing basis.
At the outset I thought it would be great if governments wished to get
involved and would fund and facilitate the process. By “governments”, I did
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not necessarily mean state or federal parliaments. I simply meant that if we
had some elected leaders and skilled public servants, as we do in much of local
government, who would engage in this sort of planning with communities,
without being dictatorial, then we could come up with a plan in which all
participants might understand their role. We might come up with an agreed
partnership, a solid social contract in which all parties – communities,
businesses, non-profits, researchers and governments – were held to account
for neither more nor less than their agreed part. This would make better
partners of us all. And we might treat each other better than we do in our
current use of our democracy.
However, as I have travelled through the book, I have come to a view that
the whole project might begin with less undue interference if it were
commenced independently as a community trust. Government and even
politician involvement work well in community futures planning at the local
government level when the politicians sit with communities to develop
community strategic plans. But politics at state and federal level is so debased,
confused and conflicted in 2020 that the culture isn’t there that would foster
partnership. We could end up with a political party’s plan, not a community’s
plan. With that cultural contrast between local government and the other two
levels of government, it would be reasonable to expect that while local
governments may pitch in to help lift IP&R to the national level, state and
federal governments are simply not ready to impose on themselves the sort
of democratised planning that they imposed on local government a decade
ago. State and federal governments are not team players yet and they are
certainly not ready for the concept of the community taking charge in such an
organised and transparent way.
My confidence in the potential for the ethical involvement of local
government, in the early stages of a national community futures planning
process, comes from my experience. Anyone reaching this point in this book
would realise I am one of a large band of Australians with little trust in state
government and even less in federal government. The Australian research
company, Essential Research, confirms that there is indeed a consistent and
quite sizeable difference between the trust Australians place in federal and
state government compared to local government, with trust for local
government being higher by up to 10% in some survey years. In the Essential
research, trust in all three levels of government rose between 2016 and
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March 2019 (notably before the 2019 federal election) but local government
still achieved the higher trust scores and the federal government always
attracted the poorest scores774. None of the scores for any level of
government were very high – they were all under 50%. But then, other than
our police forces, the High Court and the ABC, no institution scored more than
50% at any time in the research. We are not a trusting nation when it comes
to our institutions.
My experience as documented in this book shows why I share the nation’s
apparent distrustful views of state and federal government. However, fifteen
years of close familiarity with the best and worst behaviours of local
government – both the elected councillors and the public servants – has not
resulted in the same lack of trust, for me at least. This trust differential arises
from differences since the early 2000s in the way governance has been
reformed along two lines in local government: along one line in implementing
IP&R, and along another line in reforming codes of conduct and codes of
meeting practice. While many would not credit it, local government is the
level of government with the most rigorous set of rules and codes in place
today to prevent intrusion of conflict of interest into decision making. And
they have the highest levels of transparency in decision making. At least that
is the case in NSW, and it has been this way for more than a decade.
Progressive changes have been made over about fifteen years in NSW to
strengthen codes of conduct and codes of meeting practice and to introduce
non-political decision processes (such as independent planning and
assessment panels for building and development approvals) to take conflict
of interest out of the polity and give pre-eminence to community interest and
openness. Councillors have become more skilled than state and federal
parliamentarians at recognising conflict of interest, declaring whether it is
significant and/or pecuniary, and ruling themselves out of voting whenever
the conflict can be perceived as significant and/or pecuniary. This gives them
a greater capacity to govern for all instead of the few and many local
councillors take this sense – now habitual – of their role as partners, into
community strategic planning sessions with the community. It is not perfect.
Sometimes they still end up at one of the state-based independent
commissions of corruption. In fact, in NSW there have been famous cases of
774Essential Research, “Essential Report: Trust in Institutions”, 13 March 2019, accessible at
https://essentialvision.com.au/trust-in-institutions-12
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uncovered unethical behaviour by some councillors and senior officers, such
as at Botany, Auburn and Canterbury Councils. But overall ethical behaviour
has improved. There has been a cultural change and councils can be trusted
in the main to engage with communities more as equals. Legislation is in place
in local government that really does make a difference to culture and the
process of democracy – legislation that state and federal parliamentarians
would not dream of imposing on themselves (yet). This legislation means local
government involvement in IP&R has worked well. It is not an area fraught
with conflict.
In contrast to local government, state and federal parliamentarians
operate under codes of conduct that are less transparent and, in the case of
lobbyist registers, not always well maintained (and they are never maintained
in real time). They also tend to refuse FOI applications more. And in
parliament, they certainly don’t declare interests and rule themselves out of
voting because of conflict of interest. At the federal level they keep
themselves out of independent commissions against corruption simply by not
having one. If they consider the possibility of having one, they work to neuter
any power it might have and ensure that it remains virtually non-existent
(because it is so dispersed it is impossible to find).775 This makes a difference
to their culture. It sets a power arrangement in place that is decidedly non-
egalitarian, no matter how much some might pride themselves on
commitment to equality. In the hands of an unethical government, federal
775See Australian Government, “Australia’s Second Open Government National Action Plan 2018-20”.
This “plan” contains a commitment to “strengthen the national anti-corruption framework” and
acknowledges that there is a problem arising from the dispersion of anti-corruption administration.
However, it suggests nothing more by way of remedy than to continue the dispersion, thereby
ensuring that Australians will not be able to see any anti-corruption process. See page 10: “The
government will continue to consider and assess all options for strengthening the national anti-
corruption framework to ensure that sectors and activities vulnerable to corruption are covered,
improve the framework’s coherence, effectiveness and functioning, and better communicate the
framework”. We will do this by analysing the coverage afforded at present by relevant government
departments, agencies and other bodies, and identifying any significant gaps in their jurisdiction,
functions and resources. Our intention will be to continue to ensure the national anti-corruption
framework is comprehensive, cohesive and effective.” This is an attempt to look like something is
under consideration within a “framework” (which itself does not exist) that will make powerful federal
ICAC unnecessary. It is a plan to ensure a continued ability to cover up corruption and militates against
transparency and accountability. Accessible at
https://ogpau.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/australias-second-open-government-nap-
2018-20.pdf
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parliamentary conduct and government conduct outside parliament are
unlikely to be regulated to a standard ensuring integrity, ethics and
egalitarianism. As John Daley, Chief Executive of the Grattan Institute noted
in January 2020, the Morrison government, in receiving the 2019 Independent
Review of the Australian Public Service, “Our Public Service Our Future”,
known as the “Thodey Review”776, rejected “all of the recommendations that
might constrain the power of politicians or their advisers”:
Recommendations that the government rejected include a legally
binding code of conduct for ministerial advisers, more public servants in
ministerial offices, more systematic public evaluations of programs and
policies, protocols for the public service to publish independent and
timely research, principles to govern "machinery of government"
changes, an independently written Intergenerational Report, a more
transparent process (including formal advice from the APS
Commissioner and the Secretary of Prime Minister & Cabinet) to
appoint and terminate departmental secretaries, and more
transparency for agency head appointments.777
This defines the Morrison government’s resistance to ethical conduct and
independent oversight.
Therefore, while it would be easier to enjoy the stable source of funding
and professional skills for a national IP&R system that is enjoyed at the local
government area level, the price we might have to pay for that at a national
level, given the questionable culture of state and federal government, is
probably too steep. It might de-stabilise the whole process, at least in the
start-up period. Bottom up planning may simply revert to top down autocracy.
Assuming that is correct, the best option for an institutional arrangement that
can protect the process from the undue influence of sectional interests is
probably some sort of independent non-profit trust. A charter for this trust
would need to be developed and arrangements for funding that would be
permissible within that charter could then be derived by discussion between
trustees in the first instance. The charter might also set out the circumstances
776 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), accessible at
https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/independent-review-aps_0.pdf
777 John Daley, “Good policy making is a game of inches, not kneejerk reactions”, Op. Cit.
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in which government involvement would be ethical, legitimate and in the
interests of the nation. Government involvement could then be phased in.
Until that time the trust could still run perfectly well, parallel to and
monitoring state and federal governments, highlighting problems of direction,
strategy, and transparency, and establishing itself as a force within the
sociopolitical matrix of Australia as a people's auditor of governmental
success or failure at realising their aspirations as a nation going forward. In
time, it is likely that politicians will be forced or at least feel an obligation to
reckon with it and fall in with it or be exposed as abusing the will of the people.
If Australian political culture was healthier – if we had a national politics
we could trust – we wouldn’t need to set this trust up as an independent body
and we could legislate to compel governments to participate properly, as they
must under local government legislation, to facilitate (not dominate) the
process whereby a community can develop its own plan for the future. But
then if we had a politics we could trust, we wouldn’t need to be starting this
whole planning initiative on our own at all. We could step straight into
partnership with a trusted government and speed the process up. The sad
truth is we don’t have a political culture at state and federal level that we can
trust. We haven’t had that for a long time now. Our politics has weakened our
democracy and sent us into populism and withdrawal, stifling the creativity
we should have access to in a more egalitarian society and polity.
Notwithstanding all of that, if we want our plan – whatever it turns out to be
– to be effective in delivering our Vision, then we will need governments at
state and federal level to sign on at some stage.
Although the paradigmatic shift to community strategic planning is in its
infancy here, it is likely that the existence of a national community futures
plan itself – one which gathers support over time – will act as an incentive to
political parties to drop their top down habits (the habits where they impose
what they want, not what we want). If, as I outlined above in “Activating
Element 8”, we shift to electing a plan before we elect a government, then
this can stand as the yardstick by which – for the first time in our history – we
can measure a political party’s credentials for office. If the plan has significant
support from Australians and is known to have that support, then each party
would need to demonstrate their credentials for office by committing to the
plan – by taking up the role we have assigned them in the contract and
pledging faithfully to play that role. It might ruin their prospects of election to
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do otherwise. This shift may take a decade or more, but it is possible. At the
end of that decade – or however long it takes – it may be possible to consider
legislating for the establishment of national community futures planning, with
a secured source of funding and a charter of independence and non-
interference from vested interests (including from governments themselves).
By then we could have amassed considerable experience in and
understanding of best practice in community futures planning, making
Australia a world leader in the healthy reform of democracy.
Taking all this into account it seems that, at the outset of establishment
of a national community futures planning process, the best funding
arrangement would be to establish an independent not-for-profit trust to
develop an Australian community futures plan, where donations are
disclosed. The question of who is permitted to donate and how interests
might need to be declared when someone is participating in community
planning can be settled by trustees, whoever they turn out to be.
An appropriate name for that trust? My eldest son suggested “Australian
Community Futures Planning”. Not bad. I think we might go with that for the
present.
Organising for speedy, quality implementation of national
IP&R, unfettered by politics
National community futures planning is a paradigm shift in democracy.
Implemented well, it could make transcendence of politics and ideology a
common feature of our democracy instead of a rarity. We tend to assume that
politics is where all progress in our society begins and ends – that progress
can only arise from politics. But all our observations and evidence today show
that politics in Australia in the 21st century is the source of very little change,
especially for the better, and yet nothing of the good in our situation is stable
or assured either. Politics in the 2010s became a place of utter uncertainty
and impermanence, and whenever things changed, they changed much more
for the worse than the better. The one demonstrably good change of the 21 st
century in Australia – marriage equality – happened despite poor politics
rather than because of decent politics. And in terms of Australia’s economy
and the environment in the 2010s, good change – change for the better –
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whenever it occurred, did not emanate from politics, certainly not in any
lasting way. Politics reversed good changes that would have benefitted us all,
such as the carbon price. Good change, when it did come, was more often
than not the result of initiatives outside government. It resulted from
communities working with responsible business owners who tried to improve
the lot of themselves and their workers and the environment by ethical
investments, a trend which as we have seen resulted in people trusting none
of our institutions except our direct employers778. Although industry and
communities had some assistance in the first thirteen years of the century on
financing of things like a shift to renewables, in the end it was left to a small
number of ethical businesses and the community to drive the investment
necessary for a shift to a decarbonised economy and to do that despite all the
political barriers put in the way of progress by both state and federal
government (for example, the failure to develop a sustainable energy policy
and ongoing attempts to weaken regulations for protection of the
environment).
Writing in early 2020 about the prospect of a better standard of politics
in the new decade, I can only report that the outlook is not encouraging. We
have good prospects as a country as indicated in the “Australian National
Outlook 2019” and in Ross Garnaut’s Super-power. But we do not have good
prospects in our polity. Climate change was successfully weaponised by
conservatives in the 2010s and this devastated the ambitions of progressive
politicians. The likely result of this is that Labor and the Coalition will move in
uncomfortable and cautious lockstep with each other from 2020 onwards in
relation to climate change. In expecting that this debasement of our polity
might be reversed by reform from within rather than outside the political
sphere, we do have the option of voting in independents, and that can be
helpful up to a point, although not in a lasting way. It has been helpful in the
past, for example, when independents have successfully introduced
legislation for reforms such as Medevac. New climate change bills from
independents such as Zali Steggall may help in future, if they are passed
without too much amendment. But even if bills like these are passed, they are
all too often easily overturned or white-anted by conservatives who might
masquerade as moderates or “modern Liberals” but are highly skilled in
778 “2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, Global Report”, Op. Cit., pages 39-42.
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running interference for the arch conservatives and climate change
deniers779. If progressive climate change bills are passed, they may also have
to be paid for in the first place via deals done behind closed doors between
independents and the conservatives. In these deals, independents have no
option but to barter away something else we might want to keep in order to
obtain the government’s support for their bill. Such secretive horse-trading
has become a feature of the federal parliament since elections have given
cross-benches the balance of power in the senate780. As such, in federal
parliament at least, the election of a few independents and fringe parties such
as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is no way to secure a nation. It consigns us to
uncontrollable flux. We end up being ruled by the few, not the many.
The biggest casualty of all this for Australians has been the rejection of
their growing demand that something should be done to prevent climate
change. The polls about community opinion show clearly that towards the end
of the 2010s Australia was ready for a change on that particular defining
matter of our future. It became clear by 2019 that climate change action
would be where the following decade’s appetite for change would become
overwhelming, probably leading to the biggest societal, economic and
planetary shift since the industrial revolution. But as the appetite for doing
something about climate change grew in the 2010s it was constantly thrown
off track by venal and ideologically driven neoliberal politicians who positively
revelled in warping the democratic process, which culminated in toppled
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referring to his own parliamentary
779 A good example of this is the establishment by Independent MP for Warringah, Zali Steggall, of the
“Parliamentary Friends of Climate Action Group”. This group was joined by conservative MPs, Jason
Falsinki, Tim Wilson and Dave Sharma, who call themselves “modern Liberals”. They failed to turn up
to the first meeting of the Group after engaging in publicity about their intention to join. See Paddy
Manning, “Zali’s game plan: Backing a climate-emergency declaration is just the beginning”. The
Monthly, 6 November 2019, https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/paddy-
manning/2019/06/2019/1573016123/zali-s-game-plan
780 For example, Independent Tasmanian Senator, Jacqui Lambie, made a secret deal with the
Morrison government in exchange for her support on the bill to repeal Medevac legislation in 2019.
There was no transparency about what was gained for Australia in Ms Lambie’s decision to support
the repeal of Medevac. The public record shows only the loss of Medevac and no accountability on the
government’s part to live up to its end of whatever the deal was. See Sarah Martin, “Medevac repeal
bill passes after Jacqui Lambie makes 'secret deal' with Coalition”, The Guardian, 4 December 2019,
accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/04/medevac-repeal-bill-passes-
after-jacqui-lambie-makes-secret-deal-with-coalition
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colleagues as “terrorists”781. This mischief, this dismantling of our democracy
must be short-circuited – and quickly, if we expect to be able to fairly and
efficiently finance a sustainable future. If we can sideline the sort of political
interference that we have been subjected to in the 21 st century, and replace
it with the introduction of a coherent and accessible national community
futures planning and reporting process, we will speed up our ability to defeat
imminent threats to our life, liberty and happiness that have been brought on
by the neoliberal hegemony of the last forty years. We will also prevent a
repeat of the lost decade of the 2010s in terms of progress on climate change.
To date we have assumed that sidelining pernicious politics can’t be done
because we have seen no alternative way of organising ourselves. So many of
us have chosen to sideline ourselves. But in national community futures
planning there is a way to organise, and this particular way takes a lot less
energy than civil protest, costs a lot less money than remediation, and saves
far more lives and families than can ever be saved by governments that, with
good or poor intentions, throw money ineffectually at ostensible cures
without addressing the root causes of our socioeconomic breakdown. The
approach being taken to climate change, post the 2019/2020 bushfires in
eastern Australia – the approach of adaptation and resilience with an added
layer of undefined technology development – is perhaps the most ineffectual
of all government curative approaches. It is not a cure at all. Rather, it is akin
to spitting on a volcano. There is no preventative effort aimed at dealing
effectively with the cause of climate change and everyone has simply been
reduced to a vain hope that the big blow won’t come. Volcanic eruptions
aren’t made by humans and can’t be avoided; we can only move away when
we know they are imminent. Climate change, however, is made by humans
and could have been avoided had we turned up in time with a plan to stop it.
Our tragedy is that we have not planned and consequently we have passed a
tipping point, a point beyond which there are some things we can no longer
prevent. However, there is still much that we can prevent in regard to the
future effects of climate change. Some politicians may choose to call this
781 See Matt Edwards, University of NSW, “Coalition wilfully blind to economics of renewables”, Op.
Cit.: “We must fight the political expediency of appealing to a voter base spooked by fossil fuel scare
campaigns and the denialists in the media, while avoiding getting rolled by rogue elements within the
party, those whom Malcolm Turnbull labelled “terrorists” at our Climate Conversations event on
Wednesday night, “willing to blow the joint up if they don’t get their way”.
615
“adaptation”, but it is more than that. Adaptation is, at best, a band-aid
curative approach because it will always be too little too late. If we persist
with that sort of cure and without simultaneous preventative approaches,
then all the efforts in adaptation will simply be overwhelmed, making the
expenditure on it pointless for all but a tiny few who might come through
relatively unscathed. We need to push ourselves to a place where as many of
us as possible can be rescued. To do that, we need national Integrated
Planning & Reporting.
National IP&R can turbo charge our remaining potential for preventing
the worst effects of climate change. This is because IP&R can integrate
preventative efforts so that the sum of those efforts will be greater than the
individual parts. It takes account of the multiple causes of our various
breakdowns, and we can synchronise preventative efforts with curative
efforts, the former making the latter cheaper and cheaper as time passes.
Humans have caused climate change not just by emitting too much carbon
through industrialisation, but by failing to address a whole range of other
problems in our society which are exacerbating the seriousness of climate
change and speeding it up. Climate change itself can seem like the big problem
we should concentrate on solving and if we do, all will be well. But looked at
more closely, climate change is just the biggest, most obvious symptom of a
much bigger malaise – atrophy within our democracy and our approach to
working together, to organising human endeavour, building human capital,
sharing knowledge and sharing wealth. If we keep diminishing our power via
such a decadence, all these bad things will just keep happening.
How have we come to cause climate change? We haven’t maximised our
chances of thinking ahead by working together. Our approach to organising
and running ourselves is the real cause of climate change because as our
democracy is currently organised it is a barrier to early detection of the need
for change and a barrier to finding the best way to change before it is too late.
If we can reorganise that, by integrated planning, we can head off some of the
worst effects of climate change, although not the entirety of the change itself.
In fact, this is the only way we can ameliorate climate change, so late in the
day. Thinking and acting only on climate change will not fix it and certainly not
before climate change gets worse. We need to integrate action on inequality,
democracy, industry development, international relations and multiple other
QBL policy areas, alongside action on climate change. National IP&R is
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necessary for that integration. It can’t be delivered by politics. Independent
politicians may be able to deliver pieces of the plan, but they are unlikely to
deliver the integrated planning necessary to deliver the broadest and most
effective amelioration of climate change.
A national integrated planning and reporting process is also our best hope
of taking full advantage of the enormous opportunities that, if we carry on
without IP&R, will always be just out of our reach. In Chapter 9 I spoke of a
massive opportunity for Australia that we are yet to grab. Australia is on the
cusp of an economic transition. This transition is akin in size to the transition
we were taken through by the Hawke-Keating government from an economy
dependent largely on commodities and the sheep’s back to a diversified, open
economy based on partnership, cooperation and fair sharing of burden and
benefit – the transition that set us up for almost thirty years of growth. That
period of growth is about to end – in fact it started its slide in 2014. As I finish
this book in February 2020, Australia seems poised for economic mediocrity
in the world, if not recession, leaving us and our economy as ill-prepared as
they could be for the impending onset of the Coronavirus (Covid-19)
pandemic. And all of this ill-preparedness and economic contraction was
caused by the neoliberal ethos enacted through the Abbott-Turnbull-
Morrison government’s:
• stolid refusal to invest in nation building and industry transition while
debt was cheap,
• obsession with pointless, indeed destructive, efforts to produce
budget surpluses,
• equally pointless and cruel dismantling of our welfare system, and
• strangulation of support for all those who are pushed out of the
middle class by these sorts of governments into poverty and who can
therefore no longer play a role in expanding the national economy.
But there is an opportunity in the offing and this time it is at least threefold
and much bigger. It begins in the triple possibilities of:
1. becoming a renewable energy superpower and carbon trader,
2. expanding our health, welfare and education services sectors, and
3. stepping back in to take more control over our own natural resources
and assets and operating them profitably to bring the returns back to
617
ourselves – the taxpayers who built those operations in the first
place.
It also consists in financing ourselves and funding our future differently. This
book has shown how for most of the forty years of neoliberalism’s reign we
escaped some of the worst of the deregulation and the inequality (at least
until 2014) but we did not escape the slice-by-slice theft of our resources and
the sell-off of our assets and services for far less than their real value. We
stand now to lose just about all of what is left of our most valuable capacity
with ominous sounds about an impending sell-off of our public education
system (one state government is already contemplating the privatisation of
TAFE782) and the reduction of funding planned in the federal 2019/2020 ten-
year budget and “2015 Intergenerational Report”. It is a long game that
neoliberals are playing and they are nearing its conclusion.
But if we step back and take a look, it is clear that two can play at the
slice-by-slice game. Everyday Australians can slowly re-strengthen their
position in the game but only by also playing a long game and by doing it with
a new framework of reference:
• a national integrated planning and reporting process hosting a long
term plan for Australia and
• a system for watching the participation of politicians, government,
business, NGOs, and our diverse institutions such as the media and
universities in accordance with that plan.
If we work together to develop a plan that we believe holds our best chance
of picking up on these big opportunities that are lying at our feet, then we can
steer our way steadily to that better future. This is what national community
futures planning offers that politics can’t. Here we are with all these amazing
opportunities – the lucky country once again – but this time it doesn’t have to
be run by “second-rate people” as Donald Horne lamented. With better
participation in our own democracy and with our plan in our hands we can do
a far better job of it this time around. It is not too late. For instance, we
haven’t given the politicians their massive, regressive tax cuts yet. I emphasise
their tax cuts. These cuts (which have been legislated but which will not be
782See Premier Berejiklian refusing to rule out privatisation of NSW TAFE in February 2020. Accessible
on Youtube at https://www.facebook.com/JodiMcKayMP/videos/525483331684435/
618
disbursed for some time) are not something we are giving ourselves. They are
something we are taking away from ourselves and our services – and merely
to give the private sector a chance to buy us out at rock bottom prices. If our
public education system is starved of funds and then privatised for instance,
slice by slice, we will have replaced a system which returns enormous
economic benefit to all Australians with a system under which we, if we can
still afford it, will need to pay a small number of very rich, possibly unethical
education entrepreneurs, when we simply could have shared the cost by
hypothecation of a small fraction of our tax to education and secured access
to it in a fee-free arrangement, like that in Germany where tertiary education
tuition fees for undergraduates were abolished in 2014783.
Because of where we are in our economic turning point, speed is of the
essence in implementing national IP&R. The challenges we are facing may
overtake our opportunity to grab that better economy, and they may continue
to do so for at least the next decade – even if we manage a paradigm shift to
national IP&R by the mid-2020s. This is not to imply that careful, high quality
implementation of a national IP&R system should be sacrificed in a panic. That
would risk defeating the whole benefit. A poorly executed, speedy
commencement would be all to easily undermined by unscrupulous
politicians who doubtless will be eager to discredit the notion that Australians
are smart enough to organise themselves. Politically, particularly for
conservatives, there would be a lot riding on discrediting national IP&R since
it would be seen as having the potential to become an even bigger
organisational collective negotiation process than trade unionism ever knew
how to be. No politics would be involved in national IP&R so, should politicians
see it coming, they might in the first instance be non-plussed as to what to do
to stop it, but stop it they would. The only defence in that situation is to build
the credibility of national community futures planning over time and certainly
not by compromising on quality implementation right at the start. The
likelihood is that we will only get one shot at this so it would be best not to
risk a still birth. Nevertheless, speed is still important from the point of view
of getting runs on the board in dealing fairly with the biggest challenge of our
current century – transition to a decarbonised economy quickly enough to
limit global heating to 1.5o Celsius.
783See QS Top Universities website, accessible at https://www.topuniversities.com/student-
info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-germany
619
At the outset of the 2020s there are thousands of jobs in industries that
due to climate change will probably not exist by 2030. And if they do still exist,
at least in thermal coal mining, gas fracking and coal fired power generation,
then the rest of us and our economy will be devastated. The cessation of
thermal coal mining and export is both imperative and inevitable. The sooner
we recognise this and get started on transition the better for everyone, miners
included. It is the same for agriculture. In the 2020s, food production will
undergo a revolution which is likely to spell the end of agriculture as we know
it.784 Agriculture will need to shift into an entirely new economy, where far
less land is used for crops and fodder (because it can be grown in other ways)
and far more land is given over to carbon sequestration through forestry and
to biodiversity. The opportunity this presents to Australia is enormous but
organisation of the transition for farmers needs to commence now. These
shifts in mining and agriculture – and the collapse of the way those economies
are currently organised – is much closer than we might imagine. It is closer
because the speed of technology development and innovation has been
greater than expected. Competition between traditional and new, far more
sustainable forms of agriculture will intensify rapidly in the next five years, as
we are already hearing warnings that traditional agriculture will become as
financially unviable as fossil fuel energy generation. This time we should take
the warning, not ignore it until it is too late. Fortunately, Australia has a stock
of research tools and data that can deliver a transformation for us quite
quickly, particularly in agriculture, if we attend to what those tools have to
say. The CSIRO has made significant advances here:
Combining artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud-based
geospatial technology, [the CSIRO] is using technology to address a
number of challenges. In agriculture, for example, working with rural
technology start-up Digital Agriculture Services (DAS), the Rural
Intelligence Platform is the first ever software to comprehensively
assess and monitor rural land anywhere in Australia, drawing on
information about productivity, water access, yield, land use, crop type,
784See George Monbiot, “Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet”, The
Guardian, 8 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-
food-destroy-farming-save-planet
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rainfall, drought impact and more. Allowing the producer to better plan
for the future.785
In other words, the CSIRO can already point farmers to exactly what they
should be growing and grazing and where. We can completely reorganise the
distribution of agriculture across our land to maximise efficiency and
conservation. This must be accomplished inside the coming decade.
This is why I have thought so very carefully about national IP&R and
tested in such detail its capacity as a national planning and reporting
mechanism. I have tested whether it can be successfully lifted from local
government to the national level by analysing what the current challenges are
for Australia in 2020 and have worked through how the mechanics of local
community IP&R need to be enhanced to enable us to address those
challenges. Part 3 of this book shows that national IP&R can work to organise
a swift transition for Australia from the truly alarming nature of the situation
we found ourselves in at the end of 2019 to a better one by 2030 and a much
better one by 2050. This has been a little like writing a twenty-year diary of
Australia, as it were – a letter to ourselves in which we can search for and
express what it is in our lives that is not making us happy and what we might
long for instead if only we could assemble ourselves to bring it about. In
assembling the issues that we need to address across the entire QBL – putting
the key issues in one place so that we can stand back and see a fuller picture
of our current state – I hope to have smoothed the way to swift
implementation of an IP&R framework that can actually cope with these
wider challenges. I have done this because if we can get that all straight at the
start we will save time at the end. Democracy through quality national IP&R
is essential to the speed we need to recover from the time and skill we have
lost in the decade to 2020.
A prerequisite for speed in democratic delivery of a better future,
however, is a restoration of a place for truth in our society. As Essential
Research’s Peter Lewis has observed, we live “in a world without an agreed
place to mediate the truth”786 – and without that, democracy is impossible.
785CSIRO & National Australia Bank, “Australian National Outlook 2019”, Op. Cit., page v.
786Peter Lewis, “The poll surprise is that Scott Morrison’s popularity hasn’t taken an even bigger hit”,
The Guardian, 14 January 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/14/the-biggest-poll-surprise-is-that-scott-
morrisons-popularity-hasnt-taken-an-even-bigger-hit?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
621
But if Integrated Planning & Reporting becomes a staple of our democratic
process then we will have a place to mediate the truth – at least the truth
about whether we are heading toward or away from our vision for a better
life. With our own agreed national community futures plan as a reference
point, and our own QBL Wellbeing Index, the distractions of social media and
fake news may well lose much of their sway. With such a planning and
reporting system in place, it will be so much easier and quicker for all of us to
settle our anxieties about whether something is being done that will secure
our children’s future and whether our governments are competently and
faithfully managing that or not. We will have advance notice of the next great
challenges and be able to head them off in what we agree is the fairest and
cheapest way over the long term. The advent of national IP&R may be too late
in the day to help us avoid all of the catastrophe of climate change that is
already here or imminent, but it would definitely help us avert much of the
pain arising from that catastrophe, particularly by setting out how we can
alleviate the growth in inequality that climate change will exacerbate. Short
of a renaissance in our politics which is utterly unlikely in the circumstances
of our “truthlessness” and in the way our power system is organised in 2020,
national IP&R is the only thing that could work to deliver us safely through the
coming challenges. It has to be said that because of the failure of politics there
is now no other way to ensure we arrive safely in a better future, other than
by taking control now through bottom up national IP&R. Nothing better is on
offer. Indeed, in the decade to 2020 governments have attempted to remove
as much control as possible from ordinary people in our democracy via the
slow dissolution of our rights – the few that we had and took for granted. But
one right, the right to freely associate and use our collective intelligence to
select and drive desired change, has not been removed – yet.
Bearing that in mind, it will be important to recognise that it will not be
enough for us to simply put all our issues and plans in one place. The ultimate
aim is to draw people towards that one place – into the modern democratic
agora, a lively space where all our diverse intelligences are allowed free rein,
hopefully so that what we come up with together is an inspiring harmony. To
that end, Australian Community Futures Planning in its start-up phase will
work not just on integrating Visions, Directions, Targets and Strategies into
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plans but on building an array of alliances with willing participants in local
government, the progressive media, open-minded progressive activist
community associations, relevant university institutions, specialist centres of
excellence in ethics and governance, think tanks, peak environmental groups,
scientists, economists, Indigenous and human rights advocates, and
statisticians. It will be a big job to organise alliances of intelligence and
generosity, but with a quality process of national IP&R it can be done.
Part 3 of By 2050 sets out how we can organise to share our massive
intelligence by coming together and placing our aspirations, and our preferred
strategies for achieving a better Australia, in one place – a place where we can
see clearly how we need to link our efforts if we are to transcend mere
politics.
623
Part 3 – A Framework for a National
Community Futures Plan, Australia Together
624
Chapter 11 – A Prototype of Australia
Together
All community futures plans have the following main parts:
1. a “Vision”;
2. a set of “Direction” statements outlining the preferred routes
towards the Vision (the roads we want to take as opposed to the ones
we don’t);
3. “Strategies” to deliver the Vision, consistent with the preferred
Directions; and
4. “Indicators” of and “Targets” for successful performance – or what I
have called a “QBL Wellbeing Index”.
The following section provides a partly populated prototype of a QBL
Australian Community Futures Plan that covers these things. The content of
the prototype fits with a starting point of our situation in Australia in 2020 and
provides examples of recently imagined futures by 2050, alongside imagined
Directions we might want to take to reach that future. It also suggests a way
to organise Strategies, basically by providing examples of the type of headings
(or administrative groupings) under which Strategies can be assembled as
they change through time. Additionally it includes examples of Indicators for
assessing success and provides a framework into which we can slot the data
from measurements on the Indicators, all of which will show whether we are
moving toward or away from Targets. The prototype illustrates how the fully
fleshed out QBL Wellbeing Index (the monitoring system which contains all
the Indicators, Targets, data sources and results) will connect to a QBL plan
and how it will create the means of ongoing revision of the plan by the
community.
625
The Vision is the equivalent of Element 2 as described in Chapter 10. It
should be noted that in discussing Element 2, I argued that there will probably
be very little difference of opinion about what we want for the future, and as
such, we will probably settle fairly readily into agreement about a Vision for
Australia Together. Even if we use a variety of wordings or styles for it, it will
usually come down to the same things. However, within the Vision we will
need to set out the Directions in which we want to go to make the Vision a
reality. This comprehends that there may be differences of opinion about the
routes we should take to achieve the Vision. In short, we are very likely to
agree on the “what”, but it will take more time to agree on the “how”. Despite
this, and for purposes of ensuring that the framework of the plan is workable
and can contain everything we need to reach the Vision, I have populated the
prototype with Directions which are useful for purposes of illustration. These
Directions and the groups of Strategies which can be designed for each
direction are more progressive than conservative. Community futures plans
can be designed to preserve the status quo, if conservatives prefer. But at this
point in Australia’s history, where things are simply not as we would want
them to be for our children or grandchildren, and there is so much evidence
that we do not want things to remain as they are, Directions and Strategies
which simply preserve the status quo are largely – although not entirely –
inapplicable. The prototype allows for the reality that there are some things
we will want to stay just as they are, but it recognises that this too will require
planning.
Communities working together are far more likely to come up with better
plans than the suggested content in this prototype plan. But the intent of the
prototype is to give them a structure in which to place those better ideas,
Directions and Strategies and to revise them over time.
Taken together, the Directions, Strategies, Targets and Indicators equate
to Elements 3, 4 and 7, as described in Chapter 10. A broader planning
framework (as opposed to the structure of the plan itself) includes Elements
1, 5, 6 and 8, as per Chapter 10.
Building a Vision for Australia Together
To build the prototype of an Australian Community Futures Plan it has been
necessary to develop a suggested Vision for Australia Together. As I said in the
626
discussion about Element 2 – the Vision – there are already some well crafted
Visions that have been developed through good community engagement in
Australia. In forming the prototype, I have assumed there is no need to
reinvent the wheel here and that we might make use of the Vision already
developed nationally by Australia reMADE and the one developed at the local
government area level for “Waverley Together 2”. This will ensure we are
working on a draft Vision that integrates plans arising from at least two levels
of our governance developed in close and extensive consultation with
communities. Australia reMADE’s vision covers many of the things that can
only be arrived at through national reform by the federal government, and
the Vision for “Waverley Together 2” fits in with that and brings perspectives
about life in city based local communities. But plans and reforms at the state
government level need a place in this framework too. Otherwise we are not
going to marshal the power of all our services and infrastructure. Therefore,
to ensure we can integrate the role of state governments into the plan, I have
chosen to rely on “The Queensland Plan: Queenslanders’ 30-year Vision”,
because it is the only state plan I could find which looks at the long-term
future of a whole state, does so from the community’s point of view, and
articulates a Vision.
To meld all these visions together I have done an audit of the detail of
these three visions and lined them up to ensure that there is a place for the
aspirations of all three levels of our governance: local, state and national. This
was an interesting exercise, providing some insight into what we are set up to
achieve in Australia, and what we might be ignoring or not working toward
together. The Australia reMADE Vision was by far the most comprehensive,
although it did not reflect a couple of things always evident in the local
government area plans such as heritage architecture protection, urban
design, urban planning and indeed a range of things “urban”. Space for some
deeper thought on state government services, such as police services, would
also be necessary. Space for all these things must be made available in the
framework; otherwise we lose the value that comes from integration.
Space for thought over a long timeframe is also important. In the Preface
to this book I observed that our children form the ground on which we are
most likely to realise a need to overcome the inertia that arises from feelings
of powerlessness in a globalised world. Taking that as a given, it is likely that
if we keep our children uppermost in mind during planning, we will stretch
627
our imaginations further, preferably out to 2050, and most importantly, find
common ground and agreement on the best paths to a better life for them.
This is what the designers of the Australia reMADE Vision have done.
However, that has led to a vision that is over 2,500 words long. It is the most
comprehensive painting of our aspirations for our children but because it is
long, for purposes of reporting we need to find a way to roll it up to something
more distilled – a set of distilled aspirations under which all the Directions and
Strategies can be grouped and integrated. This is where the QBL system
comes into its own. It allows us to draw from each quadrant all the dispersed
bits and pieces of our efforts in Strategy and link them through to the Vision
via the Directions. This maximises the power of the plan to achieve whatever
we are aspiring to. Instead of the bits and pieces being scattered and
disaggregated, or not seen at all, we can not only see them, we can see how
they link. Starting with this distilled Vision, we might not find it as compelling
as a longer vision or really good novel or movie, but we will have a means of
double checking that the Vision is what we want and that we have an
organised capability in delivery.
In developing a viable prototype it is therefore advisable to distil a Vision
from the detail of Australia reMADE and stay as true to it as possible, but still
link in aspects of the Queensland and Waverley visions to ensure there will be
a place for all our necessary Directions and Strategies. But for a Vision to be a
successful driver of our preferred future it needs to be both:
• inspirational – in the sense that we should be able to recognise our
own aspirations in it; and
• functional – in the sense that we can find our way through to
agreement on how we should realise it.
This means a little compromise needs to be made: a slightly drier language for
the Vision, in which we sacrifice some of its compelling or poetic nature
maybe, but we inject a sharper focus on the practical side. The imperative is
to get the whole Vision covered but not lose Direction and not lose a spot for
all the “hows”. Accepting that this is a reasonable compromise, what I have
come up with in my audit is to work along the lines of the structure of the
Vision for “Waverley Together 2” but adapt it to ensure it draws in the other
two visions and that everything desired by the aspirants in those visions will
find a place somewhere in the Vision itself or the Directions or the Strategies.
628
I am doing this, even though it is in some sense presumptuous, because I have
learned from experience that starting from a blank slate tends to add to
confusion and disagreement. It is better to have a draft that everyone can
engage with and refine until they reach something that is to their collective
taste.
As a double-check on the whole approach I have consulted one extra
source of Australian opinions on aspirations and values – the Australian
Bureau of Statistics’ Measures of Australia’s Progress (MAP)787, a program of
monitoring commenced in 2002 which among other things conducted major
surveys asking Australians about what is important to them for national
progress in society, the environment, the economy and governance –
obviously highly relevant for a Vision statement for something as aspirational
as Australia Together. MAP is now a little out of date as a register of what
Australians value and aspire to, since it was unfortunately shut down in 2014
due to removal of funding by the Abbott government. Since its last iteration
in 2013, Australia and Australians have changed quite noticeably – something
that becomes evident when we place the list of our aspirations as we
expressed them in MAP next to the list in Australia reMADE.
MAP has somewhat more emphasis on family connection and living
standards, similar emphasis on environmental sustainability and racial
diversity, but no emphasis on things like climate change, Indigenous
recognition, financial inequality, gender and LGBTIQ+ inequality, lifelong
dignity, regional development, human rights, or global leadership (except for
trade). Our aspirations prior to 2014 seem less complicated than they are now
(the world was simpler) and we have noticed a big difference in our quality of
life, the threats to it and our attendant anxieties. It could be said that the
horizon of our thinking has changed or spread out wider as the threats have
set in. Indeed, our aspirations as expressed in MAP seem to have evolved in a
fashion parallel to the way aspirations of people the world over evolved
between 2001, when the United Nations adopted Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs)788, and 2015 when, after intense world-wide consultation it
787 See Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1370.0, Measures of Australia’s Progress, 2013, accessible at
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1370.0~2013~Main%20Features~
Homepage~1
788 See United Nations, Millennium Development Goals, accessible at
https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
629
replaced the MDGs with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)789. The
difference between these two sets of goals reflects a global shift in focus or,
more accurately, the depth of field of our vision. We (Australia is a signatory
to the SDGs) have shifted:
• from the MDGs which focussed on lifting developing countries out of
poverty, hunger and disease but made no mention of financial
inequality, human rights or the impacts of economic development,
• to the SDGs which, in addition to goals for eliminating poverty and
hunger, focussed on a far wider set of goals for both developing and
developed countries, including for:
o inequality,
o human rights,
o climate change,
o sustainable and affordable energy,
o sustainable cities and communities,
o health for all,
o equitable access to education,
o inclusive economic growth,
o decent and productive work for all,
o responsible consumption and production,
o terrestrial and marine ecosystem protection,
o a halt to biodiversity losses,
o innovation and infrastructure provision,
o accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels, and
o revitalisation of global partnerships.
This was a remarkable global attitudinal evolution, particularly for the
developed world, and it occurred in a very short space of time.
Australia is no exception to this evolution of demands and aspirations.
We are expanding the depth of field of our vision just as other countries have,
and we need to organise ourselves to meet those new demands. In 2018,
789See United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals 2015 to 2030, accessible at
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs See also Liz Ford, “Ssustainable development goals: all
you need to know”, The Guardian, 20 January 2015, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jan/19/sustainable-development-goals-
united-nations?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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Australia submitted a “Voluntary National Review”790 of implementation of
the SDGs, a review which provided information on Australian activities but no
data on progress towards the goals themselves – nothing to indicate whether
those activities were succeeding or would surely speed us in the right
direction. The reluctance to provide such an insight for Australians was typical
of government reporting, designed more for obfuscation than clarity and
involving quite a bit of selectivity in reporting or “indicator shopping” in
keeping with the NSW approach to deliverology791. Suffice to say the
“Voluntary National Review” glanced over where we have gone backwards in
poverty, hunger, inequality, human rights, environmental protection, and of
course economic strength. The demise of MAP is a double loss in these
circumstances. Nevertheless, the data in MAP are still useful for monitoring
and reporting purposes and if we combine the ABS’s MAP assessment of the
aspirations of Australians with those in our other Visions, we should be
confident that we have taken a full array of 21 st century aspirations of
Australians into account in developing a Vision for Australia Together in 2020.
But just to be sure we are working on the broadest array of perspectives of
our diverse nation I have also combed through the UN SDGs, the “Australian
National Outlook 2019”, and even the Business Council of Australia’s “Vision
for Australia”792, scanning them for any visionary insights.
Using the structure of the Vision for “Waverley Together 2” as a base for
integration of the other visions and the ABS MAP survey, what I have come
790 Australian Government, “Report on the Implementation of Sustainable Development Goals 2018”,
Op. Cit., accessible at https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/sdg-voluntary-national-review.pdf
791 See Australian Government, Ibid. This “Voluntary National Review” of the SDGs states at page 111
that: “The Australian Government has developed an SDG data platform to house available Australian
Government datasets on the SDG Indicators, and to indicate the status of Australian data collection
against all 232 SDG Indicators. The platform is a whole of-government initiative, funded by DFAT,
produced by Australia’s Department of Environment and Energy, in close cooperation with the ABS,
and relying on data contributions from across all relevant government agencies. The platform provides
a single point of access to anyone wishing to find out about the status of Australia’s data on each of
the SDG Indicators.” However, as at March 2020, based on the indicators selected, the portal appears
to provide more information about the “status” of assembled indicators than it does about progress
towards the SDGs. See https://www.sdgdata.gov.au/reporting-status and
https://data.gov.au/organisations/org-dga-18b6b47c-13fc-4d7c-b873-43b6b2e663d2
792
Yes, even the Business Council of Australia has a vision for Australia. It says nothing
about our dependence on the environment and is generally about money and prosperity,
but there is an element of support for social inclusion and fairness. Accessible at
https://www.bca.com.au/
631
up with as a synthesis is set out below. The Vision for “Waverley Together 2”
started with a simple statement of what united the people of Waverley and
what inspired them. In their case it was their passion for their home – by
which they meant the beaches. But of course, this was just a local plan. In the
case of a Vision for Australia Together, we have no idea of what unites us
because, as I discussed at length in Chapter 2, we have never sat down and
developed a statement of what we value as Australians together and what we
wish to assert as rights held in common. It is regrettable that this will weaken
our Vision for Australia Together until that problem is remedied.
Nevertheless, even though it would have been great to be able to commence
the Vision for Australia Together with a statement of what unites us, we can
still assume that we are united by our aspirations for a fulfilling life for our
children, here in this place and with this national community at this moment.
If we start from there, this is the sort of Vision that can emerge – at least until
we confirm that it is what we want by activating Element 5 of the community
futures planning process.
A working draft Vision for Australia Together
By 2050, we and our children and grandchildren will be living a fulfilling life
in an Australia where:
We are safe
We are reconciled with and celebrate our First Nations peoples and
their cultures
Everyone is welcome to participate positively in community life
We are inspired and able to renew our physical and spiritual wellbeing
We act together as a compassionate society
Equality is valued as enriching human community, cultural harmony
and social progress
Diversity is positively appreciated as a basis for a successful society
Everyone can realise their full potential in life, as individuals, members
of a family and citizens though unlimited opportunities in education
and employment of choice
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Vital services are fully accessible
Scarce resources are conserved and fairly shared
National wealth is fairly shared
Our economy is sustainable and supports rewarding opportunities and
continuous improvements in living standards for everyone
As a nation we have the courage to take a leading place in achieving
the environmental aims of a global society
Strong democracy is assured by a well informed and engaged
community
We are confident our leaders will reflect thoughtfully on our views and
best interests when making decisions for our future
We take pride in Australia as a responsible international citizen, active
in building a safer, more peaceful and united world
These are the aspirations of our hopeful generation. We commit to this
Vision for Australia Together so that we can pass the gifts we have inherited
to our children, and they to theirs.
A couple of points about the selections in this draft:
1. The decision to put “We are safe” front and centre is based on
experience. When people are surveyed about what they most want
for the future, safety always seems to come first (even before wealth
and riches). But putting safety at the top of the list is also
mechanistically essential to the success of the other parts of the
Vision. Research shows that when people feel unsafe due to social
disorder, impending climate catastrophe, violence in the home or
any other destabilising force in their lives, their reaction to the
anxiety is often to latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. Fears
for personal safety often lead us to seek less freedom, not more, and
those fears are deliberately stoked by authoritarian leaders to push
us into being more comfortable with hard rules, predictability and
the status quo, rather than with the freedoms we might otherwise
declare to be vital. The fear associated with a feeling of being unsafe
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can set people into a pattern of resistance to change, into acting
against what they know to be their own interests in the long run, and
into disabling their democracy and their power over their own lives.
The truth of this has been empirically demonstrated in studies since
the 1940s including studies carried out recently in America793. A
feeling of safety is a pre-condition of an ability to deal with change.
Hence the priority of building a sense of safety and security. It is a
prerequisite to the success of the rest of the plan.
2. The suggested inclusion of “Equality is valued as enriching human
community, cultural harmony and social progress” as a Vision
element is likewise based on a conclusion that equality is an essential
prerequisite to success. But I am aware that this may not gel with
many people who may have an instinctive suspicion of equality or
egalitarianism. While most Australians seem readily to accept that
inequality is not what they want (remember 76% of Australians think
the gap between rich and poor is too wide – see Chapter 9), many
may well still baulk at the notion of total equality or even at the
notion of a “more equal” society. As the authors of The Spirit Level
observed:
Many people have a strong personal belief in greater equality and
fairness, but these values have remained private intuitions which
they fear others do not share … Part of the reason for this is that
in recent decades most people in the world’s richest societies
have been persuaded to doubt the validity and relevance of
egalitarian values. The rise of neoliberal political and economic
thinking in the 1980s and 1990s meant that egalitarian ideas
disappeared from public debate and those with a strong sense of
justice became – in effect – closet egalitarians.794
I expect this will become less of a problem as more and more people
realise the undeniable connection between growth in inequality and
793 See Michele Gelfand, Professor of Psychology, University of Maryland, “Authoritarian leaders thrive
on fear. We need to help people feel safe”, The Guardian, 3 January 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/02/authoritarian-leaders-people-safe-
voters?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
794 Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Op. Cit.,
Kindle edition, pages 247 and 272.
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contraction of economies. There is today a strong body of evidence
that growing inequality played a large role in the economic crashes
of 1929 and 2008795. This is evidence which gives the lie to every
neoliberal myth that “bosses know best”, that “the private sector
does it better”, and that creativity rests in and depends on a free,
entirely unregulated market rather than cooperation between
educated and properly informed workers and providers of capital. As
more people realise the strong link between inequality and their
declining fortunes it is to be expected that more will come out of the
closet about their instinctive egalitarianism. Until they do, this part
of the draft Vision for Australia Together may not resonate with
many or it may disconcert them. But it will nevertheless be vital in
reversing our fortunes.
As far as everything else in the draft Vision goes, experience tells me there
is unlikely to be much disagreement. But I have always found it useful to
double check a Vision statement and examine what might turn up in our
future if we don’t pursue it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to imagine a
life that is the opposite of the Vision. In that process, doubt is often reduced
and people rally more strongly around the Vision. If we do this exercise of
reversing the draft Vision for Australia Together, here is what life could look
like by 2050:
A Draft Vision for
A Reverse Vision
Australia Together
We are unsafe, either from threat of war or
military invasion, invasion of privacy,
increased crime rates, risk of domestic abuse,
We are safe … or … traffic accidents, bushfire, poverty, financial
ruin, infectious disease, debilitating air
quality, toxic water quality, workplace injury –
etc.
795Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Ibid.,
Kindle edition, page 272.
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A Draft Vision for
A Reverse Vision
Australia Together
We have made no place available in our
Constitution or legislation for the oldest
We are reconciled with continuing civilisation on the planet. They still
and celebrate our First have no Voice. And we still carry on without
… or …
Nations peoples and their having acknowledged a need to work as a
cultures unified, uplifted nation. Our human rights
record and credibility plunges. We are unable
to define ourselves with decency.
We exclude people from participation. There
Everyone is welcome to is little or no sense of community or
participate positively in … or … belonging. Volunteering is reduced. Transport
community life and communications systems are inadequate
for connecting communities.
Sports, creative arts and music play little role
in our wellbeing. People succumb more
frequently to illness, including mental illness.
We are inspired and able Life expectancy falls. Cultural heritage is
to renew our physical and … or … forgotten. Opportunities for fulfilment,
spiritual wellbeing purpose and meaning in our lives are
significantly reduced. The possibility of
defining ourselves, culturally and as
individuals, is diminished.
Disadvantaged people suffer and grow in
numbers. A survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog
culture prevails. People cease to help each
We act together as a other in crises. Refugees from climate change,
… or …
compassionate society war, torture and economic disasters are
turned away and no reciprocal kindness is
shown by other nations to Australia in our
own disasters.
Inequality is continually growing and the
Equality is valued as
economy is contracting due to the hollowing
enriching human
out of the middle class. Poverty is growing.
community, cultural … or …
Social capital is depleted. Business plays a
harmony and social
socially irresponsible role instead of
progress
cooperating with workers as partners.
Diversity is a source of division. Social
Diversity is positively cohesion is fractured. Religion divides, not
appreciated as a basis for … or … unites communities. Contributions of all
a successful society cultures, genders, faiths, sexual orientations
are lost and the creative economy suffers.
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A Draft Vision for
A Reverse Vision
Australia Together
Everyone can realise their
full potential in life, as Optimism is lost. Self-actualisation and self-
individuals, members of a determination are impossible. Suicide and
family and citizens though … or … violence are endemic through a
unlimited opportunities in preponderance of shame. People are unable
education and to distinguish truth from fake news.
employment of choice
Vital services are fully Human dignity is lost for the aged, in family
… or …
accessible services, justice, health and employment.
Scarce resources are
Resource consumption is entirely excessive
conserved and fairly … or …
and national assets are not shared.
shared
Meanness prevails and the economy
contracts. The wealthiest 20% of households
hold over 80% of all household wealth and
the lowest 20% still control less than 1 per
cent of all household wealth796. The neoliberal
project has been completed. Australians own
National wealth is fairly few if any of the government services and
… or …
shared assets they owned in 2020. If they can afford
it, they pay a small number of excessively rich
private interests (monopolies and oligopolies)
for their education, health and other vital
services. Redistribution of income raised by
Australians via an equitable welfare system
has ceased.
The economy sustains only the rich and
poverty is widespread. Human capital is
Our economy is
depleted. Our natural assets are depleted or
sustainable and supports
lost. A once burgeoning eco-tourist sector is
rewarding opportunities
… or … devastated. Other nations fail to invest in
and continuous
Australia due to the risk of investing in a
improvements in living
country that fails to achieve sustainability.
standards for everyone
Living standards fall continuously for the
majority of Australians.
796Compare this to wealth distribution in 2020 when the ABS reported that “In 2017–18, the
wealthiest 20 per cent of households still held over 60 per cent of all household wealth … the lowest
20 per cent controlled less than 1 per cent of all household wealth.” ABS, Media Release, 12 July 2019,
Op. Cit.
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A Draft Vision for
A Reverse Vision
Australia Together
Our international reputation for
environmental and humane responsibility is
As a nation we have the
lost. Our climate has heated by more than 4o
courage to take a leading
Celsius due to our obstructive and destructive
place in achieving the … or …
international participation. Vast areas of
environmental aims of a
Australia are uninhabitable for humans.
global society
Ecosystems have collapsed and with them our
economy.797
Democracy is weak or overtaken by
Strong democracy is
autocracy. People are too frightened to
assured by a well informed … or …
participate, let alone protest. Human rights
and engaged community
are extinguished.
We are confident our
Authoritarianism is entrenched and the
leaders will reflect
national interest is sacrificed to a rich and
thoughtfully on our views
… or … powerful elite. We can design no way out of
and best interests when
our problems that will be heard. It is
making decisions for our
impossible to identify either truth or falsity.
future
We take pride in Australia We are an international pariah. Or worse –
as a responsible the United Nations has collapsed and military
international citizen, alliances vanquish diplomacy and the rule of
… or …
active in building a safer, international law. International collaborative
more peaceful and united research has ceased. We have become a poor
world nation, more vulnerable than ever to invasion.
As at 2020, it is disturbing, when looking at the reverse vision, to consider
that we are somewhat closer to it than we are to the ideal. This reduced state
of things has crept up on Australia while we were looking elsewhere in our
busy lives. This is what I meant when I said that we are at a turning point and
that we might not be able to rely in the future on our past run of luck. But we
are still able to rescue the situation and can still afford to do it, financially, if
we collect, use and share our wealth wisely and fairly. If we let the reverse
vision become any more of a reality, we will reach a tipping point – something
like the tipping point that scientists speak of when they talk about global
heating rising above 1.5o Celsius. While we are near or past the tipping point
797
For the full picture see David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, “The Third Degree”, Breakthrough - National
Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne Australia, July 2019, accessible at https://52a87f3e-7945-
4bb1-abbf-9aa66cd4e93e.filesusr.com/ugd/148cb0_c65caa20ecb342568a99a6b179995027.pdf
638
in environmental terms, Australia itself is not at a tipping point yet in
economic or social terms. We can still afford to steer ourselves toward a
better future and away from the reverse vision, if we start now.
Noting that little bit of luck we have left – that we are not entirely without
cohesion as a nation and we are still relatively wealthy – this suggests an
opportunity to strengthen the Vision for Australia Together with a statement
of our commitment not just to our mutual benefit but to the benefit of future
generations. Adult Australians of 2020 are in the enviable position of being
the beneficiaries of the generosity of generations of the past. We owe
previous generations a debt that they have never asked us to pay. But we are
not following their generous example because we are stealing from our
children and piling up a particular type of debt for them which they are likely
to find insurmountable. With Australia Together we have a chance to put this
right and to stand alongside our parents with some deserved self-respect.
Every Australian generation before ours passed on a better world overall. If
we want to do that too then it might be a start to add a statement of
commitment to our children in the Vision. In the above draft of the Vision for
Australia Together I have accordingly suggested the following:
These are the aspirations of our hopeful generation. We commit to this
Vision for Australia Together so that we can pass the gifts we have
inherited to our children, and they to theirs.
It is fine enough, probably, to enter into a contract with each other for this
Vision. But it will be a far more compelling and powerful contract if we enter
into it with our children – the born and the unborn.
Building the Directions of Australia Together
The Directions of the plan for Australia Together constitute the means of
steering ourselves toward the better future and away from the reverse vision.
If they are organised well, we can check that they are driving us to the place
we want to go via a tolerable route. The QBL approach provides an efficient
and transparent framework for this. Once we have the Directions in place, we
have an organised capability and we have a map we can easily follow.
We haven’t built this sort of map for our nation before and haven’t gifted
ourselves this capability. But there are precedents for such a map at the local
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government area level. These can be adapted and lifted to serve the national
planning purpose. When we lift the local government IP&R framework to that
level, and we take into account the larger vision for a national future, a
populated QBL framework of Directions for achieving the Vision can be rolled
out quite naturally. The following tables provide a list of the types of things
we can set Directions for. They amount to all the areas of administration,
policy and services which are necessary for the running of a modern country.
At this point it is helpful to assign a colour to each quadrant. Colours make it
quicker to figure out what part of the map we are in.
Quadrant Topic areas for the Directions of Australia Together
Soc 1 Safety
Soc 2 Indigenous heart
Soc 3 Belonging & inclusion
Soc 4 Health & wellbeing
Soc 5 Education
Soc 6 Equality
Soc 7 Diversity
Soc 8 Women & LGBTIQ
Our Society
Soc 9 Housing
Soc 10 Family & community services
Soc 11 Early childhood care
Soc 12 Aged care
Soc 13 Arts & culture
Soc 14 Police services
Soc 15 Justice
Soc 16 Emergency services
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Quadrant Topic areas for the Directions of Australia Together
Env 1 Environmental advocacy
Env 2 Climate change prevention
Env 3 Climate change adaptation
Env 4 Environmental regulation & approvals
Env 5 Environmental education
Env 6 Energy
Env 7 Transport
Env 8 Agriculture
Env 9 Fresh water supply
Our Environment Env 10 Biodiversity
Env 11 Vegetation
Env 12 Land & resource conservation
Env 13 Parks
Env 14 Air & water quality
Env 15 Marine protection
Env 16 Waste reduction & recycling
Env 17 Architectural & cultural site heritage
Env 18 Cities planning
Env 19 Regional planning
Quadrant Topic areas for the Directions of Australia Together
Econ 1 Economic planning, growth & transition
Econ 2 Employment planning & industry transition
Econ 3 Income & wealth inequality
Econ 4 National wealth generation & sharing
Econ 5 Market regulation & competition policy
Government competitive business
Our Economy Econ 6
participation
Science, research, innovation &
Econ 7
collaboration
Econ 8 Technology development & digitisation
International economic engagement &
Econ 9
trade
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Quadrant Topic areas for the Directions of Australia Together
Gov 1 Strength of democracy
Gov 2 National values & identity
Gov 3 Human & other rights
Gov 4 Constitutional reform
Gov 5 Transparency, openness & accountability
Gov 6 Government ethics
Our Governance Gov 7 Public service independence & excellence
Gov 8 Electoral system & funding reform
Gov 9 Corporate & NGO responsibility
Gov 10 Free communications policy & regulation
Gov 11 International participation & global justice
Gov 12 Peace & security
Gov 13 Humanitarian effort
These headings can be changed at any time, added to or deleted as we
choose (although additions are more likely than deletions). The aim is to cover
the things we consider essential to a better future. Of course, to ensure we
move in the right direction for each of these areas – however many or few
there may be – we need to say what that Direction is. This too can be done
quite simply, by asking what we want to become as a nation. The sort of thing
we can come up with by asking that question for each Direction area is shown
in the following tables. At this point it is useful to assign each Direction area a
code or a number:
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Directions in Our Society for Australia Together
In Our Society …… Australia becomes:
Soc 1 Safety …… A safe home
Soc 2 Indigenous heart …… A land with an Indigenous heart
Soc 3 Belonging & inclusion …… Inclusive, welcoming & enabling
A place of optimal health and
Soc 4 Health & wellbeing ……
wellbeing
Soc 5 Education …… A model of educational opportunity
Soc 6 Equality …… A society of equals
Soc 7 Diversity …… A success because of its diversity
A success because of gender
Soc 8 Women & LGBTIQ+ ……
equality
Soc 9 Housing …… A land without homelessness
A place of supportive familial &
Family & community
Soc 10 …… other connections & without
services
domestic abuse
Soc 11 Early childhood care …… A land without child disadvantage
Soc 12 Aged care …… A sure provider of lifelong dignity
A wellspring of inspiration &
Soc 13 Arts & culture ……
creativity
A model of community service &
Soc 14 Police services …… responsible exercise of authority in
policing
Soc 15 Justice …… Confident of justice for all
A society prepared and resilient in
Soc 16 Emergency services ……
times of disaster
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Directions in our Environment for Australia Together
In Our Environment …… Australia becomes:
Environmental
Env 1 …… A global climate change leader
advocacy
Climate change
Env 2 …… A net zero emissions nation
prevention
Climate change A proactive planner of climate
Env 3 ……
adaptation change adaptation
Environmental A nation that puts the environment
Env 4 ……
regulation & approvals before unsustainable consumption
Environmental An environmentally educated
Env 5 ……
education community
Env 6 Energy …… A renewable energy superpower
Efficiently connected through low
Env 7 Transport ……
emissions transport
Environmentally and economically
Env 8 Agriculture ……
sustainable in agriculture
Confident of safety and security of
Env 9 Fresh water supply ……
its water supplies
Env 10 Biodiversity …… A biodiversity haven
Env 11 Vegetation …… A replanted and reforested land
Land & resource
Env 12 …… A protector of scarce resources
conservation
A provider of accessible national &
Env 13 Parks ……
urban parkland
Env 14 Air & water quality …… A pollution free biosphere
Env 15 Marine protection …… A marine wildlife haven
Waste reduction &
Env 16 …… A producer of zero waste
recycling
Architectural & A conservator of cultural & built
Env 17 ……
cultural site heritage heritage
Multi-central in its cities, efficiently
Env 18 Cities planning …… connecting people with jobs, health,
education and recreation
A land of thriving self-supporting
Env 19 Regional planning ……
regions
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Directions in Our Economy for Australia Together
In Our Economy …… Australia becomes:
A model of transition from
Economic planning,
Econ 1 …… excessive consumption to
growth & transition
sustainability
Employment planning A model of employment planning
Econ 2 ……
& industry transition & justice in industry transition
A country where economic growth
Income & wealth & prosperity are equitably shared
Econ 3 ……
inequality & living standards improve
continuously for all
National wealth A nation fairly raising and sharing
Econ 4 ……
generation & sharing its wealth
A strong regulator of fairness in
Market regulation &
Econ 5 …… markets creating confidence for
competition policy
investors
Government
An economy with competitive &
Econ 6 competitive business ……
profitable public participation
participation
Science, research,
Econ 7 innovation & …… A collaborative intelligent nation
collaboration
Technology Enabled in meeting the
Econ 8 development & …… communication & information
digitisation demands of the future
International economic Productive and prosperous
Econ 9 ……
engagement & trade through fair trade agreements
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Directions in Our Governance for Australia Together
In Our Governance …… Australia becomes:
A proactive participatory
Gov 1 Strength of democracy ……
democracy
National values & A nation knowing and affirming
Gov 2 ……
identity decency
Gov 3 Human & other rights …… A nation with avowed rights for all
A free, self-governing, modern
Gov 4 Constitutional reform ……
nation
Transparency,
A state of governmental &
Gov 5 openness & ……
institutional transparency
accountability
A world benchmark in leaders'
Gov 6 Government ethics ……
conduct
Public service
Committed to public service
Gov 7 independence & ……
independence & excellence
excellence
Electoral system & Protected from undue sectional
Gov 8 ……
funding reform influence in elections
A nation outlawing corporate greed
Corporate & NGO
Gov 9 …… & encouraging private sector ethics
responsibility
& community partnership
A guardian of freedom &
Free communications
Gov 10 …… accountability in both the media &
policy & regulation
political discourse
International
A just participant on the global
Gov 11 participation & global ……
stage
justice
Gov 12 Peace & security …… A nation assured of enduring peace
A nation leading in empathy &
Gov 13 Humanitarian effort ……
global cohesion
What might be noticed from the above suggestions is the aspirational
quality of what we might want Australia to become. This is a picture of a very
different Australia to the country and life we have at the outset of the 2020s.
If you run your eye down the list, the gap between where we are and where
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we could aspire to be is so stark that instead of appearing modern as a
developed country, we appear more like a backwater. And that is in fact how
Australia is beginning to look to the rest of the world in 2020, especially after
the bushfires of recent summers. We simply are not an enlightened, outward
looking, leading nation.798
Some will believe that Australia cannot possibly become these things. But
there is no reason not to want to be these things (and every reason to avoid
becoming the reverse). And if the plan is to work at all, the Directions must be
as aspirational as the Vision dictates. While many might be sceptical, the point
is this is a long term plan and if we don’t aspire to become these things, we
will not become them – ever. With a long term plan, though, we are giving
ourselves the time to fix and prevent things that we know we don’t want in
our lives as well as imagine and plot our way towards things hitherto thought
impossible. Logically, if we don’t aim over the long term to completely fix
something, then we will not fix it. This is a surety. If we don’t aim to develop
anticipatory skills and then to prevent further problems, we will simply find
ourselves defeated. A long term plan is not the place for a defeatist,
pessimistic mindset. And if we allow pessimism to clip off our aspirations, then
we are simply playing back into the hands of base politics, accepting whatever
they might tell us we can and can’t have and settling for compromises that
leave more and more of us excluded over time. If pessimism or a desire to rein
in our ambition in these Directions overtakes a QBL plan, that will send us
back into the failures already exhibited by state governments and others who
have reduced their planning to the absurd and have relied on “deliverology”.
We know that deliverology – the crutch of those unimaginative politicians
who reason they can achieve more by aiming to achieve less – doesn’t work.
Nor does disintegrated planning. Nor does deregulation of our environment,
economy and markets. Nor does divestment of public assets and services.
798See Matthew Knott, “An unbridgeable fire break divides a paradise politicised”, Sydney Morning
Herald, 24 January 2020: “When I moved from Australia to the United States in 2017 locals would
often ask: ‘Why would you want to live here?’ [But when I returned for the new year of 2020] it felt
eerily familiar to life in modern-day America, where facts play an increasingly peripheral role in
political debate. … Since returning to the US, no one has asked why I'd choose to live here rather than
Australia. They've been reading about the bushfires in the paper and watching them on the television
news. Australia no longer seems like a distant paradise.”
Accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/an-unbridgeable-fire-break-divides-a-
paradise-politicised-20200121-p53t6w.html
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When all these D-words – deliverology, disintegration in planning,
deregulation and divestment of national assets and wealth – hunt as a pack,
corporate greed runs amok and everything gets worse in our lives. But even if
patchy premiers’ priorities and deliverology did work from time to time, they
can’t replace the energy that can come from aiming for an agreed ideal and
methodically strategising our way towards it.
Having said that, perhaps the most inspiring reason for not stinting in our
ambition in Directions is that if we do, we simply end up no better off in thirty
years, or we end up worse off. For some examples of how much worse things
can get if we do not energise ourselves to achieve the most ambitious
Directions by 2050, we can undertake an exercise of formulating “Reverse
Directions”, along the same lines of the “Reverse Vision” I set out above.
Anyone can undertake this exercise. It paints a ghastly picture of what we
could become and doesn’t paint an edifying picture of what we have already
become either. There is only one way to reverse such a ghastly present and
prospects. As I said in Chapter 6, “In all quadrants – Aim high.”
Directions are where we must be as ambitious as possible. Then we need
to assemble Strategies that will take us in that Direction.
Building the Strategies of Australia Together
Experience in community engagement for IP&R has taught me that the more
we get into the detail of “the how”, the more we will begin to disagree.
However, IP&R has an in-built mechanism for reducing disagreement and
reducing it early enough – before we find ourselves in a place we would prefer
not to be. That mechanism is given in the way Strategies for Australia
Together can all be put in one place and thereby integrated. This brings our
creativity to the fore. Our collaboration on Strategies can be accelerated, and
duplications and contradictions can be eliminated.
For my money, organising and designing Strategies to achieve a Vision has
always been fun. It is where we let loose with ideas. And when we come up
with them, suddenly it is possible to see how we might make the Vision a
reality. The most sensible “hows” emerge and what might have looked like an
impossible Vision or Direction is transformed into a practical, achievable
thing. But in addition to the fun, there is a boost to optimism and energy that
we can derive from the feeling of being able to get a grip on our future. The
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mere activity of developing Strategies can make a significant difference to our
sense of safety and security by giving us a feeling of control and a capacity for
averting disasters which we might otherwise wish to avoid thinking about,
because we feel there is nothing we can do about them. When this happens,
many of us resort to hoping we will simply muddle through – we hope for luck.
However, in the sort of strategic planning available under IP&R, muddling is
not necessary. What I call “planning endorphins” take over and suddenly we
are in charge. So to build Strategies for Australia Together, we simply need to
take advantage of the mechanisms that IP&R can provide for putting
everything together – in one place.
The benefits of locating strategies in one place
When we get down to the level of Strategies for Australia Together there can
be an explosion of creativity. But in addition to that, because everything is
written down in the one place and can be easily seen in an integrated plan, it
is also possible to weed out weaker strategies and avoid wasting money. Here
are some examples of the sort of weak strategies in the past that could have
been weeded out long before they caused problems for Australia.
Example No. 1 – In fossil fuel subsidies: A classic example of the sort
of weak strategy that could have been avoided would be the decades
old strategy of taxpayer subsidy to the fossil fuel industry, which
currently runs at around AU$42 billion per annum for Australia799. If we
put that strategy next to an alternative strategy of taking that same $42
billion (that’s about $1,700 that each of us pays per year in subsidising
prices and costs for fossil fuels) and spending it on a just transition for
communities to new industries and local economies, suddenly it
becomes obvious where our money might be much better spent for the
many, not the few. These subsidies artificially depress fossil fuel prices,
and in the process reduce economic growth and increase national
799Source: International Monetary Fund, David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, and Baoping Shang,
“IMF Working Paper: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level
Estimates, WP/19/89”, 2019, page 35. This report cites Australia’s subsidies for fossil fuel in US$ for
2015 as US$29 billion (AU$42 billion approximately or 2.3% of GDP) and US$1,198 per capita
(AU$1,700 per capita approximately) Accessible at
https://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019089.ashx
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liability for environmental restoration, when in fact the subsidies could
be far more efficiently used to transition economies and communities
to sustainable industries and to renewables, so that we can each have a
piece of the action – a share of return on our investment. At present we
have the subsidies set up so that the mining, oil and gas corporations
get the vast share of the profits which then largely goes offshore. Twice
in Australia’s history we have crippled our shares in future national
prosperity by setting in place a virtual theft from ourselves of our own
minerals and energy resources by these appallingly inefficient subsidies:
• once in 1975 when we let ourselves be distracted by point-
scoring politicians from taking a $4 billion loan to establish an
Australian taxpayer owned and controlled mining and energy
sector (in other words to do what Norway did and boost national
income and profits dramatically); and again
• in 2014 when the Abbott government repealed the Gillard
government’s Minerals Resource Rent Tax800, the removal of
which effectively increased the taxpayer funded subsidy for
fossil fuels.
However, if we had had a plan in place that allowed us to make a
simple comparison of policies for subsidisation of industry and energy,
we might have seen the light a lot sooner. As it is, the continual artificial
suppression of fossil fuel prices made possible by the prevailing subsidy
has hamstrung our economy to a fraction of its capacity and left us all
with an unfunded bill for clean-up. As the International Monetary Fund
has observed in its research on this problem world-wide:
If fuel prices had been set at fully efficient levels in 2015, estimated
global CO2 emissions would have been 28 percent lower, fossil fuel
air pollution deaths 46 percent lower, tax revenues higher by 3.8
percent of global GDP, and net economic benefits (environmental
800See Wikipedia, “Minerals Resource Rent Tax”, accessible at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minerals_Resource_Rent_Tax
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benefits less economic costs) would have amounted to 1.7 percent
of global GDP.801
Example No. 2 – In allowing neoliberalism: Our attitudes to tax, and
our near total concession of victory to neoliberal myths about the evils
of tax, have resulted in our missing out on incalculable financial and
environmental benefits that could already have been accruing from
carbon trading. Our attitudes to ownership and control of our own
assets has also led to us short-change ourselves seriously by selling off
assets and services for a fraction of their future worth to unregulated
monopolies or oligopolies which have far less capacity (and no
intention) to run those assets and services in the public interest. As Ross
Garnaut has stated:
Australia lost its old domestic advantages in the fossil-energy world
economy in the twenty-first century through the
internationalisation of local gas and coal markets, and through the
privatisation and corporatisation of electricity systems without
effective regulation in the public interest.802
In short, our neoliberal governments since 2014 have encouraged a
sell-off of our energy resources internationally in such a way as to direct
profits away from Australians and send our domestic energy prices up.
The list of how we have short-changed ourselves will grow while ever
we continue to hold these self-destructive attitudes to tax and public
ownership of assets and services. A strong national integrated planning
framework would have helped Australians see this for what it is – the
slice-by-slice theft of Australia. Fortunately, integrated planning can
reverse the neoliberal project in Australia – slowly but surely.
Example No. 3 – In tertiary and vocational education: Free tertiary
education is another example of a great strategy, the demise of which
led to missed opportunities and a significant reduction in the growth of
the nation’s social capital. Had we had an integrated planning system in
place when we were being persuaded by both sides of politics that our
801 David Coady, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, and Baoping Shang, “IMF Working Paper: Global Fossil Fuel
Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates, WP/19/89”, 2019, Op. Cit.,
pages 5 and 6.
802 Ross Garnaut, Super-power: Australia’s low-carbon opportunity, Kindle edition, Loc 1409, Op. Cit.
651
generation (i.e., mine – the baby boomers) cannot afford to offer all our
children the same world class post-secondary school free education that
we had enjoyed (courtesy of the Whitlam government), is it likely that
we would have chosen a system which means our children start out
their adult lives with debts they can’t pay? Admittedly, the debts being
imposed when free tertiary education was abandoned weren’t that
great because fees were lower. These sorts of regressive policies are
always slipped in slowly and sideways – a thin end of the wedge – so
that we can’t see forward to the ultimate loss. So in the 1990s, even if
IP&R had been in place, we might still have chosen to dismantle free
tertiary education. But if IP&R had been in place, and we were able to
compare the returns from different approaches to education funding
over the long term, would we have gone as gently into that good night?
In the absence of IP&R:
1. It is doubtful that we would have foreseen in the early 1990s
(amid a recession) that conservative ideological pressures would
– as they did – pull more and more funding out of universities
and TAFEs over the subsequent two decades, increasing the
pressure for higher and higher fees.
2. It is doubtful that in the 1990s we would have foreseen the
conservative antipathy to tertiary education, particularly
universities, and that conservatives like John Howard would act
on views they would only express privately about universities, to
the effect that the government should not spend money on
them because people there don’t vote Liberal803.
3. And it is doubtful we would have foreseen that the value of our
children’s incomes would wither over time, as much as it did, and
reduce their ability to pay the loans and even to get a job in the
field for which they had paid for all that training.
803Mike Seccombe, “Turnbull’s war on universities”, The Saturday Paper, 6-12 May 2017: “In the early
days of his prime ministership, John Howard shared with some a private view about universities: don’t
spend money on them, the people there don’t vote for us.” Accessible at
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/education/2017/05/06/turnbulls-war-
universities/14939928004602
652
But with IP&R it could have been foreseen that things might get out
of hand. It could have been foreseen that dismantling of free tertiary
education would be entirely inconsistent with at least a dozen of the
above described Directions for Australia Together. With IP&R, if we had
been given a chance, we might also have been able to join more of the
dots and realise that what we might save in tax might be a lot less than
our children will pay in loans. With an integrated planning framework,
our foresight would have been boosted further into the long term and
we would have had some chance to detect that the demise of free
tertiary education, including vocational education, is not likely to make
the Vision for Australia Together a reality. Looking back, it is evident to
me now that I got that free tertiary education and I got the chance to
pay society back for everything they invested in me because I got a
better job than I would have without that education. In fact, according
to Deloitte Access Economics, society got back more for itself – in a
“spillover effect” – than it spent on my education. The numbers we have
available to us today bear this out. According to Mike Seccombe,
National Correspondent for “The Saturday Paper”:
Deloitte Access Economics reported [in 2015] on the contribution
of tertiary education to Australia’s prosperity and found “the
socioeconomic benefits accrue both to those directly engaging in
university-led activities and to society at large. In some cases, and
in research especially, it is broader society that is by far the greatest
beneficiary”. Deloitte valued the contribution of tertiary education
to Australia’s productive capacity at $140 billion in 2014, of which
$24 billion accrued to the tertiary educated themselves. The
“spillover effects”, it found, meant that for every one percentage
point increase in the number of workers with a university degree,
the wages of those without tertiary qualifications rose 1.6 to 1.9 per
cent.804
This quantifies what we all missed by limiting access to and de-
funding our own education system. And we did it simply by choosing not
to provide education to those who couldn’t pay – even though they had
804 Mike Seccombe, “Turnbull’s war on universities”, The Saturday Paper, 6-12 May 2017, Ibid.
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the talent and intelligence to achieve at the highest level – short-
changing ourselves seriously in the long term.
These days, the system we use to fund education will still work to
provide some spillover effects, but it has embedded far greater
inequality. It has atrophied to the point where we have given our
children a debt instead of a gift and cramped the economy at the same
time, making it difficult for them to pay it back, let alone pay it back in
kind as I could. All we have done is make future generations pay and our
current generation will miss out too. These impacts will get worse if
TAFE is privatised, as at least one state government is currently
contemplating805. But recognising that things have changed, we can use
IP&R to stem the losses. We can load our current strategies for funding
our education into the model and step back and see how they might
perform in the long term against other strategies in other countries,
such as Germany where tertiary education tuition fees for
undergraduates were abolished in 2014806. With IP&R, we can
significantly extend our foresight. Having all the strategies in one place
allows us to think big and for the long term. The long run savings and
benefits in something like education are incalculable.
Going forward, we can avoid a repeat of these sorts of mistakes in fossil
fuel subsidies, poorly regulated capitalism, education and countless other
mistakes. This is because an integrated plan works like a relational data base
for assembling Strategies. It doesn’t have to be detailed about the Strategies
or even do the research to flesh them out. It simply needs to act as a
collection, cross-referencing and communication tool to help us discuss and
then select the best Strategies and refine them through time. As more and
more Strategies are loaded in and lesser ones are weeded out, the power of
the plan ramps up, even though the plan itself doesn’t provide every little
detail. By letting us know that Strategies are moving into favour and out of
favour – because something new or better has come along that will get us to
the Vision faster – the path of progress becomes more front-footed and sure-
footed. We are gifting ourselves the capacity to decide the most effective,
805 See Premier Berejiklian refusing to rule out privatisation of NSW TAFE in February 2020. Accessible
on Youtube at https://www.facebook.com/JodiMcKayMP/videos/525483331684435/
806 See QS Top Universities website, accessible at https://www.topuniversities.com/student-
info/student-finance/how-much-does-it-cost-study-germany
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least painful path to the future, and the more of us who become involved, the
better.
Example No. 4 – In climate change adaptation: Perhaps the most
graphic example of all where such a relational capability of an integrated
planning system would have come in handy, to say the least, is in the
area of climate change adaptation. If Australia had had an integrated
plan for climate change adaptation in place before the catastrophic
bushfires of the Spring and Summer of 2019/2020, the agony of the fires
could have been significantly reduced. As climate change research
experts Dr Lauren Rickards and Professor Mark Howden observed in
January 2020, Australia has had a “National Climate Resilience and
Adaptation Framework” – of sorts – in place since 2015. But, putting it
bluntly, we might just as well have not bothered, because it hasn’t been
implemented and, in any case, it isn’t connected to all the other things
we need to do to increase the power of our climate adaptation
activities, such as they are. For instance, it is not connected to any
program to reduce inequality. As the Doctor and Professor point out:
Reverberations through shared systems such as the national
economy mean no one will be unaffected. Some will be – and are
being – affected far worse than others. But such inequalities are
underplayed in the framework, and yet reducing inequality is one
of the best ways to improve social resilience. … There are no related
national adaptation policies or plans. The framework calls for
climate change risks to be taken into account in policy and planning,
but this is clearly not happening in many jurisdictions.807
In short, the “National Climate Resilience and Adaptation
Framework” isn’t connected to any other Strategies that will make it
work. There is no guarantee that even if something in the framework
had been implemented, its benefits would not have been undone or
cancelled out by something done or not done elsewhere. Frameworks
807Dr Lauren Richards (RMIT) and Professor Mark Howden (ANU), “Climate adaptation is not a far off
idea – it’s here and it affects us all”, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 January 2019, accessible at
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/climate-adaptation-is-not-a-far-off-idea-it-s-
here-and-it-affects-us-all-20200109-p53q7r.html?btis
655
like this one simply don’t work if they are not integrated properly with
other related Strategies.
Additionally, there are other things that can be achieved when we put
Strategies in one place.
• We can improve certainty about effective spending and prioritise our
budgeting.
• We can pick out areas of impending shortfalls in funding and make
decisions earlier about how we will finance our future. In that regard
we can avoid being blind-sided by hidden plans to reduce spending
in areas that are important to us such as education and health – areas
which are being slowly and quietly de-funded under the “2015
Intergenerational Report” and the 2019/2020 federal budget (see
Chapter 4 – The failure of planning – nation-wide).
• We can develop a plan for equitable and economically sound
distribution of subsidies, noting where subsidy by public funds is
advisable, where it is not, and where it should be phased in and out.
• We can also look through the policies of any political party and be
able to decide if they make sense or not in the mix with other
Strategies that we know will get us where we want to go. The context
provided by our having put the Strategies all in one place frees us
from mere short term politics. We can select the things from all the
different political menus that will pay off in the longer term and
identify who will need help during the transition.
Instead of being confined to reading each party platform, not liking much
of most of them and picking the one we dislike least, we can scope out the
best combination of Strategies for Australia Together. We can mix and match
and get the best out of all the party political platforms. While it might not be
perfect and will change through time, such an integrated plan will have
credentials as the best optimisation of policies overall. Strategies we might
not like will be moderated or balanced by others that we do, and we can be
more confident that the pluses and minuses add up to giving us the best shot
at achieving the Vision and Directions and that the (ever present) trade-offs
are worth it. When looked at from this vantage point, where we can see that
we are selecting Strategies that complement each other, it is obvious that our
656
parliamentary system – with all its piecemeal management of legislation, all
the subterfuge of dialogue that can only occur between elites, and all its
divisiveness masquerading as reform – is outmoded as an efficient form of
democracy. This is not to suggest that we don’t need parliaments in our
democracy. But it does say that parliaments need our guidance on the “what”
before we select the who. Otherwise we set them and our democracy on a
course that is bound to be far less efficient than it needs to be.
The other big bonus of writing down Strategies in one place is that
someone always pops up and says, “I can help with that”. Someone,
somewhere, is already doing something that most of us don’t know about on
something that we have thought is a good idea for ages or that, conversely,
has never occurred to us at all. People start to figure out how they can
contribute, how their piece of the puzzle fits, and they start to connect more.
The possibilities for social cohesion are enormous, as are the possibilities for
the speed of progress. It’s like having a progressive policy incubator – with a
turbo charger. The mis-steps that can be avoided are incalculable. And when
the helpful someone that pops up is like the CSIRO, or other progressive think
tanks or research institutions, or big ethical businesses with lots of money,
then the speed of progress can be increased exponentially. Obviously because
of this, it is insanely destructive to reduce funding for the CSIRO and
universities, as conservative governments have been doing in the 2010s.
In Australia, because our government is simply not set up, or even willing,
to put any plans and strategies it might happen to have developed in one
place and make them accessible, we are going to be starting from behind in
national integrated planning. But there are some useful models for it. If we
compare the approach displayed by the government of Norway to integrating
plans in a consolidated place, with our own ability to access plans, we can get
a sense of how much room for improvement there is in Australia. In 2020,
Norway’s government provided a convenient one-stop shop for its plans,
strategies and reports on its website, Government.no808. This contained no
less than 123 plans and strategies as well as 334 reports on those plans. In
Australia, by contrast, no such consolidated site existed. Australians curious
about what plans the state and federal governments had in place for their
808Government of Norway, “Reports, plans and strategies” at Government.no, accessible at
https://www.regjeringen.no/en/find-document/reports-and-
plans/id438817/?documenttype=dokumenter/planer&term=
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future were reduced to shuffling around the internet hoping they might have
plugged in the right key word in their search. And what they were likely to find
in terms of sound and effective planning would be close to zero. Norway’s
plans covered everything from practical defined strategies to meet their
emissions reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, through plans
to achieve gender equality and eliminate harmful practices affecting women
and children, and on to plans to ensure reliable and sustainable food supplies
– a veritable cornucopia of plans for the lucky Norwegians. But Australians in
2020 are unable to make their own luck because they have no central
repository for plans and strategies and hence no way to determine how to fill
the massive gaps in strategic planning that we will need to fill to make that
luck.
Without the one-stop shop for Strategies for Australia Together, Australia
is completely exposed to a repeat of past failures in policy setting, legislative
programming, and even in public service. The above examples of how we
could have avoided significant problems in fossil fuel subsidies, neoliberal
decimation, education and climate change are instructive. But we are creating
new problems all the time and national IP&R can help us identify these and
avoid taking the wrong path. In particular, IP&R can boost the public benefit
that can be obtained from improvements or reforms we might undertake in
governance and the public service:
Example No. 5 – In modernising the Australian Public Service: A good
example of an opportunity to obtain improved public benefit from
reforms via IP&R arises from thinking about how the 2019 Review of the
Australian Public Service, “Our Public Service Our Future”, known as the
“Thodey Review”809, might have been conducted and implemented had
national IP&R been in place. The Thodey Review was a major review
attempting to reform the country’s federal public service so that it will
be capable of serving the people of Australia over coming decades. It
was not a review looking only for short term piecemeal improvement
and it probably has more far-reaching implications for Australia’s
potential success or failure by 2050 than almost any other reform
inquiry in the decade to 2020.
809
Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), Op. Cit.
658
One of the Thodey Review’s identified “priorities” was to “double the
trust scores” that are being achieved by the Australian Public Service
(APS) in terms of whether they are “trusted to serve the public
effectively”. The review noted that “only 3 in 10 Australians trust
government services”810 and accordingly an objective of the review was
to achieve:
A trusted APS, united in serving all Australians.811
But unfortunately, the reviewers did not check what Australians
might want for the future. They internalised a sense that Australians
want better services through (an already established) “Services
Australia” business hub, similar to Services NSW, and determined that
better technology is the answer in this service-focussed environment.
This will mean that the APS might improve its service levels in things like
provision of welfare, in the same way that NSW has managed to make
it easier through technology to supply a driver’s licence or a vehicle
registration. But it means little for service development and it means
even less in terms of setting up the APS to be able to drive policies and
legislative reforms that will edge Australia closer to anything like the
draft Vision for Australia Together.
One of the beauties of a national IP&R process is that it can tell
reviewers and reformers in the state and federal public service what the
public service ought to be for – what Australians want to achieve by
having it at all. But none of this was taken into account in the Thodey
Review. Nor could it have been, because Australians haven’t yet
coherently articulated what they want to achieve. As a result, the
Thodey Review, like so many other reviews before it, was essentially
reduced to an inward looking exercise. Reforms were proposed by
reference to existing “values” and “principles” for the APS, including
that it be:
810 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 21.
811 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 17.
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impartial, committed to service, accountable, respectful and
ethical812.
Further, the review recommended development of a consolidated
vision statement for the APS, although they recommend no wording.
However, this recommended vision was clearly intended to be a vision
of excellence only for the public service. The reviewers did not
comprehend any need to develop that vision by first gaining an
understanding of a vision for Australia, let alone Australia Together.
The APS is full of wonderful, committed public servants (although
they are becoming increasingly dispirited) but excellence in public
service can really only be measured in terms of whether the public
service, united or not, is actually contributing positively to the aims of
Australians. The Thodey Review made tangential mention of the need
to deliver “social, economic and security outcomes” but without
checking what those outcomes should be according to Australians. The
assumption was that with nothing more than the existing values and
principles of the APS and a new simple one line vision, the APS will be
lifted out of its silos and be united in serving all Australians, when all the
evidence is that those values have to date provided no stimulus to unite
the public service. The truth is that trust scores are very unlikely to rise
at all because of this, let alone “double”. Trust is likely to decline due to
some of the recommendations, particularly the misplaced
recommendation that in order to solve the problem of public servants
having become far too reticent to give free and robust advice,
“materials prepared by the APS to inform deliberative processes of
government should be exempted from release under FOI laws”813. The
logic behind this faulty recommendation is that:
The Commonwealth FOI laws now present a significant barrier to
frank written advice. The Commonwealth laws have had the
unintended consequence of constraining the content, form and
mode of advice presented to ministers. … The consequences
812 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 22.
813 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 24.
660
include a patchy record of decision-making and an increased
likelihood of decisions being made based on incomplete or poorly
argued information. This can ultimately only be detrimental to good
governance and the public interest.814
This quite incorrectly identifies the FOI laws as the cause of the
decline in the provision of quality advice by public servants, when in fact
the real cause of the problem is the retributive culture of politicians. As
the review itself notes:
A senior public service official told me that they, and other senior
public servants they know, will only disagree with the wishes of
their Minister once — and after that, they are afraid of losing their
jobs.815
The Thodey Review assumes that exempting public servants’ advices
from release under FOI laws is critical to restoring courage among public
servants, such that they will once again feel free and fearless enough to
provide free and fearless advice. The reality is that all this exemption
will do is remove yet another level of accountability for politicians
precisely at a time when more transparency is required, not less. Other
levels of government function quite well when everything is done in the
open. Local government publishes almost all officer advices in full (i.e.,
with all pros and cons made explicit) with every council resolution816
and there is no reason to suggest that it should be done any other way
at the state and federal level (unless there is a genuine national security
reason). Had IP&R been in place it might have been observed that not
only was such a recommendation inconsistent with the broader
interests of Australians, it would be likely to make matters worse in
terms of the capacity of public servants to prevail upon politicians to
listen to advice. Why would a politician need to listen to advice he
doesn’t want to hear in the first place when no-one will be able to see
that he acted against the nation’s interest by not listening to it? Such a
814 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 121.
815 Commonwealth of Australia Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service,
Our Future”, December 2019, (The Thodey Review), page 287.
816 There are very few exemptions for this and usually they relate to the need to comply with privacy
and personal information laws.
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retrograde step in openness and transparency would also be likely to be
entirely inconsistent with the interests of Australians as expressed in at
least five of the above draft Directions in Governance for Australia
Together and two of the draft vision elements. With or without national
IP&R, Australians have a definite interest in becoming:
• a proactive participatory democracy,
• a free self-governing modern nation,
• a state of governmental and institutional transparency,
• a world benchmark in leaders’ conduct,
• committed to public service independence and excellence, and
• a guardian of freedom and accountability in political discourse.
These are all draft Direction statements for Australia Together, and
while Australians have not yet been given an opportunity to adopt or
reject these Directions there is little reason to suppose that we would
not want Australia to become all these things. Even the Thodey Review
itself says it is committed to public service independence and excellence
and the stated APS values of openness817. But Australia will never
become these things if we can’t scrutinise the advice and decision
processes within our system of governance. It would be different if the
advice being recommended for exemption was truly confidential, but
the Thodey Review is suggesting that advice which is not confidential be
treated as if it is, merely to increase the courage of senior public
servants who have become fearful of their position. It means the
community will not be able to see that a politician was advised that a
strategy was against the interests of the nation but went ahead and did
it just the same. Nor will it decrease the fear among officers. It will
simply remove yet another barrier to politicisation of the public service.
817One of the defining APS Principles is Openness, which is described by the APS as: “Engaging and
partnering with stakeholders, and informing the public about how and why decisions are made.
Releasing data and insights, reducing barriers to access, and improving accessibility, accountability and
transparency. Ensuring that this does not preclude confidentiality, but enables a balance to be struck.”
The Thodey Review acknowledges this but its recommendation to exempt public servants’ advices
from release under FOI is in direct contravention of that principle. See Commonwealth of Australia
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, “Our Public Service, Our Future”, December 2019,
(The Thodey Review), page 92.
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A politician has the right to disregard advice but not to disregard
accountability for his or her decisions.
If IP&R had been in place, the Thodey reviewers would not have had
to make this recommendation. Australians could instead have been
offered strategies for improved training of politicians about how to
avoid placing undue influence on the public service when it is contrary
to the national interest. When Strategies are all put in one place, as they
are under IP&R, selection of a suboptimal approach, such as concealing
public service advice from public scrutiny (and a minister’s reasons for
rejecting it), is unnecessary.
There are some good recommendations in the Thodey Review. Sadly,
this one isn’t one of them. Moreover, the good recommendations that
the government has refused to accept (see Chapter 10) have made the
potential impact of this recommendation even worse. In the absence of
the government’s acceptance of recommendations that would have
somewhat counter-balanced this one, a faulty recommendation has
become downright dangerous. All the Thodey Review has done is invite
the Morrison government to increase secrecy in our governance, the
effects of which we have already seen in the loss of freedoms and rights
listed in Chapter 8. We are now set to lose more.
The above five examples show what can happen when we don’t build and
optimise Strategies by putting them all in one place. It is a summation of how
not to plan at the federal level, similar to the story provided in Chapter 4 of
how not to plan at the state government level, and an explanation of what
can happen when we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to strategise in an
orderly manner together by use of an organising framework. That framework
is, of course, national IP&R. Once we make use of that, disagreement about
Strategies will diminish and the Strategies themselves will shift towards the
progressive type. But it will be progress that enables us to manage necessary
change with as little negative impact as possible. The trade-offs will still be
there but the harm arising from them will be far outweighed by the benefits
and if they are organised properly along the QBL then no-one should be left
behind. The following section provides an organising framework to help us
build the best Strategies for Australia Together.
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A framework for building Strategies for Australia Together
Strategies are best developed in response to a defined target or identified
outcome. As it happens, we are not running short of Targets for a better
Australia. Organisations like the OECD, the United Nations, the IMF and a host
of others have been setting benchmarks for performance of countries on the
QBL for decades and from these and multiple other sources we can assemble
a range of reasonable Targets. Again of course, we haven’t assembled these
things in one place because – dare I say it again – we don’t have a national
community futures planning process and we don’t have a QBL Wellbeing
Index (yet). So we will need to scope out the range of Targets that it will be
vital to achieve if we wish to realise our Vision, via the Directions set out
above. In the next section, “Building the Targets and Indicators of Successful
Performance”, I will show how these can be scoped, based on the
development of a QBL Wellbeing Index for Australia Together. This means
that in building the Strategies of Australia Together we will start shuffling
backwards and forwards between what the QBL Wellbeing Index will tell us
and what we have been able to gather or freshly imagine in terms of
Strategies. This iterative process is strategic planning in operation. It is IP&R
going live. From there on the planning never stops evolving and the more and
more intelligence people share in this process, the better it gets.
However, we have something of an imbalance between identifiable
Targets and identified Strategies at the moment. While we can scope Targets,
we are still running short of plans and Strategies to reach these targets. In
fact, we have very little in place by way of Strategy and certainly nothing
integrated. As I said above, our assemblage of plans and Strategies is woefully
inadequate compared to countries like Norway and we have in effect been
forced to go outside government, such as to the CSIRO/NAB “Australian
National Outlook 2019” to find anything even vaguely approaching a
collection of national strategies to achieve the QBL results that we might want.
Being practical, we can’t develop or collect everything we need in
Strategies at once. But within five or even three years we could drastically
improve the assemblage of Strategies to the point where we could catch up
with leaders like Norway and restore some of our credibility as a nation acting
as a responsible global citizen. Decisions about the Strategies which should
take priority will present themselves obviously when we isolate the Targets.
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Working backwards from the Targets, the Strategies that suggest themselves
as priorities will begin to merge into groupings. Accordingly, the full
framework will eventually be set up to create spaces where all Strategies can
be grouped. Through time we will be able to pick out where the gaps are and
our navigation through the plan will also become simpler.
As an example, if we take the Direction area of Health & Wellbeing,
Direction Soc 4 in the above drafts of Direction areas: I asked my children,
who are both health professionals, what they would want Australia to
become. They came up with the simple statement that they wanted Australia
to become a place of optimal health and wellbeing. When I asked them how
we could measure successful performance in that, they came up with a range
of Targets and Indicators which I was then able to put into the QBL Wellbeing
Index being assembled for Australia Together. Once these Targets and
Indicators are put down in one place, groups of Strategies begin to emerge
because we can see where we need to work harder and where we can simply
just hold performance at the current level. In the case of Direction Soc 4,
Health & Wellbeing it has emerged that, to begin with at least, we need
Strategies under the following groupings:
• preventative health,
• accessibility of health services, and
• security of health funding.
Each Direction area is different, but what is happening is that we are
organising where we are going to put everything. We may not know all the
Strategies but we know more about what we need to chase in terms of
Strategy development and where best to spend our time in community
engagement and in judging which Strategies – and mixtures of Strategies –
offer the most in terms of reaching the Targets at the least cost and least
negative impact. From there we can drive our demands for change and our
demands to preserve some things as they are. We can deliver clear and
coherent demands to governments about the agenda for Australia. We have
practical idealism in full swing in democracy.
Following this process, I have been able to come up with a structure for
grouping Strategies in each Direction area. The following tables provide some
examples of how this could be assembled. For this part of the prototype I have
not populated every Direction area. That will be done in web-accessible
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format as part of the gradual process of development of the plan. But the
examples here should make it easier to see how we will be able to connect
Strategies with Directions and chart an organised course to a safe home in the
future.
Examples of Strategies in Our Society for Australia Together
In Our Society … Australia becomes: … Via Strategies for:
▪ Preventative health –
including sport & recreation
▪ Accessible health services –
including under Medicare &
Health & A place of optimal
Soc 4 … the NDIS
wellbeing health and wellbeing
▪ Secured funding for health –
including taxation
arrangements & private
sector involvement
▪ Accessible education
throughout life – early
childhood, school-age,
vocational & tertiary
▪ Improved educational
A model of
outcomes – including school
Soc 5 Education … educational
age literacy & numeracy
opportunity
▪ Secured funding for
education – including
taxation arrangements &
non-profit/private sector
involvement
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Examples of Strategies in Our Economy for Australia Together
In Our Economy … Australia becomes: … Via Strategies for:
▪ Workforce planning –
including planning for
industry transition through
market loss, robotization or
Employment A model of Artificial Intelligence
planning & employment ▪ Industrial relations reform
Econ 2 …
industry planning & justice in – including reform of
transition industry transition enterprise bargaining,
productivity agreements,
wage setting, and
worker/employer
partnerships
▪ Sources of taxation –
including from individuals,
business, and distribution
of burden
▪ Sources of other national
income – including
National strategies for
A nation fairly raising
wealth diversification of
Econ 4 … and sharing its
generation government (non-tax)
wealth
& sharing income
▪ Distribution of public
benefit – including policies
on re-distribution and
transfers, subsidisation,
industry incentives, and
superannuation
Although the above examples illustrate organisation of Strategies for only
a couple of the Direction areas in a couple of the quadrants, the general
framework should be clear. Once this is fully enabled by community
engagement there should be no more waiting around for our leaders to
deliver a plan – a plan that we can be sure will never come if we leave it to
them.
A big advantage of working together to develop these Strategies, or even
just a list of the ones we need, is that we are effectively re-balancing the
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power arrangement in our democracy. By bringing these and other Strategies
together under our preferred Directions we can embed our preferred paths
to the future into the national political consciousness – meaning that we, and
not political parties, can start to drive the agenda. We can tell politicians what
we think is an acceptable means of achieving our Vision, and tell them in clear
terms. There is no need to wait for politicians to come up with solutions that,
frankly, in their ideological straitjackets they can never come up with anyway.
By strategising together, we can overcome ideology.
Using this iterative movement between Directions, Targets and Strategies
we can also build a much stronger plan, if we do it together. National IP&R
makes a space for intelligent, ethical and balanced engagement. In it we can
set out and refine the Directions of the plan, which, once they are agreed, can
provide a very efficient reference point for selecting and reviewing Strategies
through time. Directions play a vital role in increasing the efficiency of
intelligent engagement and ensuring inclusion. This is because everyone who
becomes involved and wants to contribute an idea or suggest a Strategy can
go through an orderly thought process to show how that suggestion is
consistent with one or more Directions and how it will not cut across any
others. Some Strategies may not be liked by everyone, but if they don’t
disable the Directions and Vision then there is no reason why they cannot be
accommodated. For instance, a strategy of fee-free tertiary education might
not appeal to those who want to pay less tax and are happy with a system
which involves high fees for those seeking higher education. But if fee-free
education fits with one or multiple Directions and does not disable others,
then the Direction has done its efficient work and we can proceed on the basis
that those who would generally prefer less tax and high tertiary education
fees will nevertheless have their underlying intentions met as far as they have
been expressed in the Directions and Vision, and without consigning someone
else’s aspirations to oblivion. This is the mechanism of inclusion.
Building the Targets and Indicators of Successful
Performance – the QBL Wellbeing Index
As I said above, if we are to develop Strategies, we need to define our Targets.
These need to be developed by selecting Indicators of success. We have
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defined what success will look like in our Directions and from that we have
given ourselves an easy means of selecting the relevant Indicators. For each
statement of our Direction we can select as many Indicators as we need to
give us confidence that we will get a clear picture, as time passes, of whether
we are moving in the preferred Directions or not – and from there whether
we are moving towards or away from our Vision for Australia Together. All
these Indicators make up our particular tailored QBL Wellbeing Index.
Once we have baseline data verified for each of the Indicators we can
begin to set Targets. In some cases we might decide that we are quite happy
with our performance at the baseline and in those cases we can decide that
as long as things don’t get worse then no improvement or stretch target is
needed. In other cases, it will be obvious that a Target is needed and in some
cases a stretch Target will be preferable (such as solving child poverty or
closing the gap in Indigenous disadvantage).
By selecting our Targets in this coordinated way, based on assembled
evidence, we are starting to prioritise our nation’s spending. We are isolating
the areas of genuine need and by developing Strategies to address those (and
not something else) we are taking more control of how our tax is spent and
ensuring it is spent cleverly. Once we have that greater control, we have
reached a democracy where we, the people, are equals in leading our own
destiny.
The following tables provide some examples of Targets and Indicators
that can be used to measure whether Australia is travelling along the
Directions of Australia Together. Of course, if in community engagement for
an agreed national community futures plan, Australians decide they want to
travel in Directions other than those I have used in the prototype, then
different Indicators may be required. However, this is reasonably unlikely
because even if my prototype Directions are deemed to be off the mark by
Australians, the Indicators themselves are very likely to function just as well
for modified Directions, due to the fact that the Directions are organised along
the QBL and therefore cover all the topic areas for Directions. These topic
areas encompass all categories of policy, legislation, administration,
institutions and services that we rely on when organising a country. If we
develop Indicators of success in all these areas we will have a QBL Wellbeing
Index capable of helping us distinguish preferable Directions and Strategies.
This will deliver us our own integrated plan encompassing diverse community
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aspirations and we will have the means of reporting on performance. With
this plan and monitoring system we can thereby overcome the short-sighted
platforms of political parties and drive the agenda efficiently ourselves.
Australia Together will take precedence over mere divergent politics and be
rightly set to guide our parliamentary and government programs.
Examples of Targets and Indicators of success for Our Society
Targets and Indicators of In the Direction of
Baseline data
successful performance becoming …
The percentage of people In 2016, 90.4% reported
who feel safe when at feeling safe when at home
Soc 1 A safe home. after dark.
home alone after dark
Source: ABS 4906.0 Table 39.1
meets or exceeds 95%. 2016
In 2018, the rate of
homicides per 100,000 of
The rate of homicide population was 1.5
Soc 1 A safe home.
declines continuously. (declining continuously
from 2.1 since 2010).
Source: ABS 4510.1, Table 1 2018
In 2018, the rate of sexual
assaults per 100,000 of
The rate of sexual assault population was 105.3
Soc 1 A safe home.
declines continuously. (rising continuously from
85.6 since 2010).
Source: ABS 4510.1, Table 1 2018
In 2019 there were 1,187
The rate of road deaths fatalities on Australian
Soc 1 A safe home. roads.
declines continuously.
Source: BITRE Road Safety
Statistics
A land with an In 2016 child mortality
Close the gap in child Soc 2 rates for 0-4 year olds
Indigenous heart.
mortality rates for 0-4 were 146 per 100,000 for
A place of optimal
year olds between the Indigenous population
Soc 4 health and
Indigenous and non- compared to 70 per
wellbeing.
Indigenous Australians 100,000 for the non-
within a generation (by indigenous population.
2031). Soc 6 A society of equals. Source: AIHW, Australia’s Health
2018
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Examples of Targets and Indicators of success for Our Environment
Targets and Indicators of
In the Direction of becoming … Baseline data
successful performance
Net zero CO2-e emissions
by 2050 (or earlier as
necessary to ensure
prudent carbon budgets
are not exceeded) with
the absolute maximum
carbon budget of 5,910
Mt of CO2-e by 2050 or
preferably 3,827 Mt of
CO2-e over the 30 years In 2019 Australia’s
to 2050. domestic emissions
A net zero (excluding exports) were
Minimum 58% reduction Env 2
emissions nation. 532 Mt of CO2-e.
on 2019 CO2-e emissions
Source: National Greenhouse Gas
by 2030 with a cap on Inventory, June 2019
total permissible
emissions to 2030 of
3,756.8 Mt CO2-e (or
deeper cuts as necessary
and a budget of 2,945 Mt
CO2-e until 2030 to
prevent unacceptable
transfer of burden to
future generations).
A net zero
Env 2
emissions nation.
100% of electricity comes
A model of
from renewable sources In 2019 the renewable
transition from
by no later than 2035 energy power percentage
Econ 1 excessive
and no later than 2030 if (RPP) was 18.60%.
consumption to
other sectors do not Source: Australian Government
sustainability. Clean Energy Regulator
reach emissions
A nation fairly
reduction targets.
Econ 4 raising and sharing
its wealth.
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Examples of Targets and Indicators of success for Our Economy
Targets and Indicators of
In the Direction of becoming … Baseline data
successful performance
A nation fairly raising In 2020, Australians
Establishment of an
Econ 4 and sharing its had no guarantee of
accord on wealth,
wealth. mutual responsibilities
welfare and wellbeing:
A country where to each other and they
By 2022, the federal
economic growth & were facing the risk of
government convenes a
prosperity are removal of most or
process of joint
Econ 3 equitably shared & even all aspects of their
development with
living standards welfare safety net and
community delegates of
improve continuously the universality of
a draft statement of
for all. health care. They also
mutual commitment to
Inclusive, welcoming had no principles in
the welfare of all Soc 3
& enabling. place to guide fair
Australians – an accord
sharing of national
designed to protect and A place of optimal
Soc 4 wealth for the
promote the economic health and wellbeing. wellbeing of all
and social wellbeing of all
Australians.
citizens by adherence to Soc 6 A society of equals
principles of equality of
Before any further
opportunity, equitable A land without
Soc 9 erosion of benefits and
sharing of national homelessness.
access to social
wealth and public A place of supportive
support, and in
responsibility for those familial & other
anticipation of
unable to avail Soc 10 connections &
transitional issues
themselves of the without domestic
associated with
minimum provisions for a abuse.
robotization and
dignified life. A land without child
Soc 11 artificial intelligence, a
By 2023, nation-wide disadvantage. joint statement of
community engagement
mutual commitment
on the commitment is to
within a social safety
be completed.
net is advisable for
By 2024, a legislative
purposes social
review is to be A sure provider of
Soc 12 cohesion, inclusion,
undertaken to give effect lifelong dignity.
fuller development of
and security to any
our human capital and
expressed mutual
ongoing national
obligations in the accord.
economic prosperity.
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Examples of Targets and Indicators of success for Our Governance
Targets and Indicators of
In the Direction of becoming … Baseline data
successful performance
A state of In 2019 35% of
governmental & Australians (net) said
Trust in the federal Gov 5
institutional they trusted the federal
parliament to reach 55% transparency.
and stabilise. parliament.
A world benchmark Source: Essential, Trust in
Gov 6 Institutions 2019
in leaders’ conduct.
In 2019 42% of
Trust in the Committed to public Australians (net) said
Commonwealth public service they trusted the
Gov 7 Commonwealth public
service improves independence &
continuously. excellence. service.
Source: Essential, Trust in
Institutions 2019
In 2019 Australia was
one of 8 markets
Australia is ranked as a globally which neither
A just participant on
truster of the United Gov 11 trusted nor distrusted
the global stage.
Nations. the United Nations.
Source: 2019 Edelman Trust
Barometer
Finally, one more advantage of building our QBL Wellbeing Index and
connecting it in this system to our Directions and Strategies is that it locks in
entirely advantageous dynamism. Because it gives us the capacity for much
earlier insight into where problems are arising, we can speed actions up in
areas of crucial potential failure and if need be slow down other actions to
help us shift our funds to the areas where the need is more pressing. This
helps us stabilise our national budgets through time, a vital capacity in terms
of our international competitiveness and our efforts to reduce inequality. This
early warning system functions via the Reporting system within IP&R. The
centrepiece of the Reporting system in the End of Term Report. The next
section shows how that is built.
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Building End of Term Reports on Australia Together
In Chapter 10, I discussed how we can activate “Element 8 – A transparent
reporting system” and cited the “End of Term Report” as a key element of
IP&R. Once we have our Indicators and Targets we have set ourselves up to
be able to generate that Report and we would do so every three or four years,
in time for people to use it to evaluate the performance of a government
during their elected term and to review whether other partners have been
living up to their commitments under the plan. At a glance we will be able to
see whether we have moved closer to or further away from the life we wanted
at the start of the plan. In one place we will be able to see what worked and
what didn’t in our own Strategies, and whether governments and other
partners to the plan stuck to their part of the bargain.
Because this sort of Report is based on evidence that we will have pre-
agreed is relevant and covers the full QBL, it is a quantum leap in
transparency. This in itself will require a new culture among Australia’s
politicians – to say the least. Genuine accountability has been assiduously
avoided by politicians since time immemorial, and in Australia the decline in
transparency and accountability has been steep in the 21 st century.
Accordingly, politicians will need to skill up not just on the agenda of the
community’s national plan but on the standard that is expected of them in
delivery of their part of that plan. Politicians will need training in this new and
improved standard of accountability and that training should be obligatory. It
is likely that such training would be equivalent to training for members of
corporate boards that can be certified by such institutions as the Institute of
Company Directors. No decent corporate board would be likely to consider
appointing directors who have not attained the minimum qualifications
necessary to run companies. That being so, there is no logic to our continuing
to allow politicians to run our country without passing the minimum level
skills, competencies and ethical conduct tests necessary for the nation’s trust.
In local government this sort of training for elected officials is compulsory (at
least in NSW). If we take the trouble to develop a plan for our nation, there is
no sense in trusting delivery of a large part of it to politicians who are unable
to prove even basic skills in leadership, ethics and management of conflict of
interest. Passing this sort of training should be a pre-requisite for pre-
selection as a candidate in state and federal elections. But if it is not treated
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as a pre-qualification, a requirement to establish such a process should be
listed as a priority in the national plan itself. I harbour no illusions that
politicians will willingly submit to this. But failure by politicians to master
these skills can undo the whole plan and hence the training should be
compulsory, once a candidate has been elected. If Australians will be putting
in an effort to plan their future, there is no sense in paying politicians who do
little but muck it all up and undermine our stated common interest.
However, properly skilled and ethical politicians can benefit from
attending to a national community futures plan. The transparency provided
by the plan and bookended by the End of Term Report will help both
Australians and politicians easily assess performance and drive future debates
about preferred Directions. End of Term Reports roll up lots of data into easily
viewed pictures of the truth about our wellbeing – both the perception of it
and the physical reality. At election time, or throughout the period of the
elected government, anyone can go to this one-stop-shop for non-partisan
evidence about movement towards or away from our Vision for a better life.
And the evidence can be viewed in as much or as little detail as we prefer.
Crucially, it is objective evidence. Even the evidence about our perceptions is
objective in the sense that it will come from statistically valid surveys. When
combined with data on physical measures it will be possible to see the trend
during the period. Those trends can be represented simply on one page and
might look like the following table (but obviously the arrows are not based on
data at this time and are purely illustrative of how results would be pictorially
represented). If people are disturbed or incredulous about the reported trend
they can delve further into the data:
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Draft Vision for Australia Together
Perceived and actual progress
Progress taking
Perception of
into account
Vision progress towards
perception &
the Vision
physical measures
We are safe
We are reconciled with and celebrate
our First Nations peoples and their
cultures
Everyone is welcome to participate
positively in community life
… and so on …
until all aspects of the Vision have been assessed
Additionally, because this is a QBL plan, readers will be able to view the
nation’s performance on movement towards a better society, environment,
economy and governance. The following table shows how those trends can
be represented in summary, providing guidance to everyone about where
evidence can be found in relation to any areas of concern. Again, the arrows
are purely for purposes of illustration:
Draft Australia Together
Progress towards quadruple bottom line
% of targets % of targets
moving in our moving contrary
Quadrant Trend
preferred to our preferred
Direction Direction
Our Society …% …%
Our Environment …% …%
Our Economy …% …%
Our Governance …% …%
Data in the above sort of tables would be derived from the QBL Wellbeing
Index. This is likely to consist of at least 150 measures of consensus about
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quality of life and physical measures of social capital, the environment, the
economy and our governance. The roll up will work on an easily explorable
framework and viewers will be able to roam up, down and sideways, through
the data in whatever way they wish. The explorable framework will be
connected to data sources as well – for example, to overseas data sources –
so that people can see the provenance of the data and continuous
improvement in evidentiary methodology can be achieved. This framework
can be simply represented thus:
Diagramatically, based on the evidence we will also be able to see not just
the Direction of travel towards the Vision but how far we have travelled
forward and/or backward during the term of office of our parliaments. This
will enable us to single out the big areas of slippage. Some of these will show
big areas of political failure. Others will show the big areas of failure in the
corporate sector – that is to say, failures in corporate responsibility. A QBL
plan assumes that buy-in from the corporate sector is a vital pre-requisite.
Over time this sort of reporting should shift both the government and the
private sector back onto an inclusive footing and towards an equitable sharing
of work and wealth in a truly liberal, open democracy.
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Australia Together – from 2020 to the future
In framing the above prototype for Australia Together I have tried to ensure
that it contains space for diversity – for opinions different to my own. The
draft statements used to illustrate how a Vision and Directions can cohere in
an IP&R framework have found their way into the prototype plan because of
my analysis of the issues all Australians are grappling with in their concern for
the future. They are not meant to be a dictation and if they were they would
not succeed. Australians sincerely and justifiably dislike being dictated to,
although it is also amazing how often they let that happen. Suffice to say that
if the Vision and Directions I have used in draft are wide of the mark, this will
be sorted out by the community and I am certain the nation will find its own
wisdom and truth if given a space for an organised engagement process using
quality IP&R.
Having said that, I sincerely doubt that I have misread the mood of the
nation by and large. Every day when I read the news, and each time I read
opinion surveys and research reports, what I see is a yearning among many
other Australians for the same things that have found their way into this
prototype as draft aspirations of a nation. There are things we do come
together on, and these all relate to what we want for our children. But we also
come together on many ideas about “the how”. Guardian Australia’s series
“2020s Vision: One idea to make Australia better”818, a series that asks some
prominent Australians (and all its readership) for one idea each on how
Australia can find hope to meet the challenges of the 2020s, is full of ideas for
a better life along the lines of the Directions I have used for the prototype and
exciting Strategies for “how” we might fulfil our aspirations acting as
Australians together. People in this series have said:
• If I had a single-use magic wand it would be to get every single one
of us fully engaged with the democratic process – Ian Chubb
• We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our
humanity – Thomas Keneally
818See Lucy Clark, “2020s Vision: One idea to make Australia better” and associated articles in the
series, The Guardian, accessible at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/31/after-
a-shocking-start-to-the-new-decade-how-would-you-make-australia-
better?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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• Reaching our potential as a nation begins with truth telling – June
Oscar
• Commemorate massacres for sanity, goodness and healing – Ben
Quilty
• The common sense of our shared survival will be enough for us to
come together and push for powerful action on climate change – Yael
Stone
• Now markets have failed, let’s talk about social wellbeing. We need
to address the distrust epidemic among voters and return to the
reformist urge to offer a better vision splendid – Eva Cox
• Let’s double the population outside capital cities – Fiona Simson
• We should increase our superannuation without delay – Greg
Combet
• Regenerative agriculture can revolutionise the continent. That’s not
a pie-in-the-sky utopia, but something we can all bring about – David
Pocock
• The lies of the climate deniers have to be rejected. This is a time for
truth telling, not obfuscation and gaslighting – Malcolm Turnbull
• We must cultivate the natural curiosity and capabilities of children –
Alan Finkel
• Please, can we move beyond GDP? How good would it be to identify
the best pathways to improve health and wellbeing and to ensure
the information is used in policy making? – Fiona Stanley
It will not surprise readers that the first and last of these are my personal
favourites. This is not to say that there is 100% agreement on the above
suggestions. For instance, there are quite a few people who don’t prefer Greg
Combet’s idea of increasing superannuation and even wish to reverse the
already legislated pending increases. Some bickering can be expected on that
particular “how” – not as much as over marriage equality or religious
discrimination, but still, a fair bit of brawling is on its way. But in any case
there is little value in aiming for 100% agreement. In a plan where diversity is
the basis of strength, a sudden surge of full consensus on everything would
look more than just a little suspicious. It would amount to the sort of plan that
can only come from top down autocracy instead of bottom up democracy.
Differing opinions about Visions, Directions and Strategies are a good thing
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and the cohesion that we need consists not in homogenising our life but in
making different strategies coexist more happily to enable us to lead our
diverse lives fully.
Nevertheless, there is an irresistible question about what sort of plan we
might end up with if we use the framework and techniques of IP&R and work
on the assumptions arising from the issues canvassed in this book. Apart from
the Direction suggesting that “Australia becomes a country outlawing
corporate greed” (something that might be a bridge too far for, say, the
Business Council of Australia) and apart from all the mentions about the
environment (all of which will be a bridge too far for the BCA until such time
as they are fully compensated for any expected sacrifice on their part), the
rest is pretty straightforward stuff that even the members of the BCA would
(and do) agree to be in their own children’s interests. Politicians in parties
which favour racism and exclusion would have a problem with the emphasis
on diversity as a strength. Politicians in parties which seek autocratic control
without accountability – preferring short term prioritisation over long term
strategic planning – would have a problem with several of the draft Directions
for our governance. And neoliberals would certainly have a problem with
equality, regulated markets and more competition from the public sector in
wealth generation. So what we may end up with – if we use IP&R techniques
and assume that the issues we must resolve are those that I have summarised
– is a plan that is not for big corporations or racists and not for their cronies
in parliaments. It will be a plan that works on the basis of diversity. It will
include. It will not be exactly simple – on the contrary it will be complex. But
it will nevertheless be entirely accessible because of two things:
• its structure as a road map of integrated routes to a future (rather
than a maze of dead ends), and
• use of the internet in nation-wide identification and coordination of
Strategies, in open communications and in reporting.
It will never be perfect but it will include the mechanisms of its own ever-
ongoing refinement. An asymptotic curve, as it were, towards our particular
more perfect union. We the people will have a way of working together.
If the nation turns out to favour such a plan it will be one that large
numbers of Australians are likely to find compelling, because it will be the
nation’s best chance of securing their children’s future. And seeing what
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politicians make of that plan may be just as compelling. They will be presented
with an understanding of Australia and Australians that has never yet been
clear. Australians and their leaders may then face each other as equals in their
democracy (if not in their wealth). For our part we might demand to know
whether politicians prefer to support big, faceless business and multinational
corporations, or the rest of us in all our complex but assembled diversity. In
national IP&R we have a practical means of making that demand and we
should expect a respectful answer. Our right to peaceful assembly is asserted
in the most organised, efficient and harmonious way in an Australian
Community Futures Plan. Politicians, take note. The paradigm in which
democracy may be conducted is on the brink of shifting and Australians are in
a position to offer a social contract in terms that are startlingly new, which
describe a very different Australia and which replace our current arrangement
of power with a far more egalitarian one. The final chapter sets out an
understanding of that new paradigm of power and how it can arise.
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Chapter 12 – A New Balance of Power
Where might all this planning take us if we organise ourselves inclusively to
do it efficiently and effectively? We are yet to decide that together. If it is not
to the land described in the prototype for Australia Together, it will
nevertheless be to a better place than the land we have now. But it will also
be to a place where power sharing is far better balanced than it is now.
By world standards, Australians are remarkably privileged. But they have
no decent share of power, nothing like the shares of power and influence that
could have been expected per family in the small municipality in which
democracy first arose in Athens. And nothing like the influence they can have
at the level of local municipalities today in Australia. The power of Australians
to specify the improvements they want in their lives at the local government
area level and to partner with councils to realise that better life has increased
steadily since the introduction of IP&R in the first decade of this century. It
has not increased uniformly due to the uneven level of implementation and
best practice in IP&R, but it is on its way.
At the national level, however, we are still vulnerable to massive power
imbalances and this needs to be reset. In mid 2019 Scott Morrison typified the
approach to power of past prime ministers when he paid lip service to a notion
that Australians are in charge and that governments are our servants. In an
address to federal public servants he stated:
We all have a job to do and that is to serve the Australian people.819
819Scott Morrison, Speech to the Australian Public Service August 2019, quoted by Shannon Jenkins,
“Prime Minister bucks up the troops of the public service in a call to remember the ‘quiet
Australians’”, The Mandarin, 19 August 2019, accessible at
https://www.themandarin.com.au/114097-prime-minister-bucks-up-the-troops-of-the-public-service-
in-a-call-to-remember-the-quiet-australians/
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But the reality is that leadership has become about the few telling the many
what the many want and what they therefore will and won’t be served with –
whereas, of course, nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of
democracy. If the job of the government is to serve the Australian people then
the obligation of government is to ask us how we want to be served. At the
moment, our system stops us from assembling to provide a coherent answer
to that. It stops us deciding what the common good is, what the national
interest is, and what it is not. It is also likely to stop our Indigenes from having
a Voice in the Constitution as to their interests. This is a system that would
consign us permanently to the bottom, stuck with top down authoritarianism.
No plan. No self-definition. No self-determination. And that applies for
Indigenes and non-indigenes alike.
Of course, according to the way our democratic arrangements are sold to
us by political marketers – we need leadership from the top. We want to be
quiet Australians and we prefer to abrogate our responsibility and autonomy.
We are incapable of acting in a democracy as anything other than a
disorganised mob. And the mob must be controlled by the few who are
capable of leadership. We are dished up this message subliminally, day in, day
out, under the cloak of statements implying that our leaders are here to serve
us. Some leaders may even believe this, but the fact is that our system of
governance and our mindset about our place in it are both organised so that
only the opposite master-servant relationship can arise. Scott Morrison stated
in his speech to the nation’s public servants in 2019 that a prime minister’s
job and that of his ministers is to “serve” the Australian people. But this was
really no more than a statement that we are to be “served” with agendas set
by the government, without consultation with those he implies are in charge
– us. This is all topsy turvy – an insidious cloaking of our disempowerment in
the garb of humility on the part of leaders. Scott Morrison’s stated approach
to governance is that
it is about … respecting the fact that responsibility for setting policy lies
with the elected representatives of the people820,
notably, not with the people themselves. And it is about:
820 Scott Morrison, Ibid.
683
expecting Ministers to provide that direction. This imposes an important
responsibility on Ministers. They must be clear in what they are asking
of the public service. They must not allow a policy leadership vacuum to
be created,821
probably lest someone other than the prime minister might step in to fill that
vacuum. This is the minister’s job apparently and according to Scott Morrison:
one of the worst criticisms politicians can make of each other is that a
Minister is a captive of their department. This is not a reflection on the
department, but on the Minister. It speaks to a Minister not driving their
policy agenda. I have selected and tasked my Ministers to set and drive
the agendas of our Government. I believe the public have a similar
expectation.822
If it is true that the public has a similar expectation, the best we could say
is that their expectations are not being met. Leadership in Australia is touted
by politicians as the font of all imagination, wisdom, inspiration, vision and
capability. But the reality is that political “leadership” is no longer the
preserve of these virtues (if it ever was). And it is certainly no longer where
progress happens. This is because top down leadership does not equal a
strong democracy. It simply equals autocracy.
Democracy has actually been set in an autocratic mode almost since day
one and it has been set that way because rule of the people has always been
feared as rule by the mob. No-one that I know of wants to be ruled this way,
but are we indeed a mob? It is 2020 and we have every right to resent such
an implication because we are a modern, educated nation. Moreover, now
we have the internet and this makes a big difference to the depth and breadth
of our intelligence and the speed and reach of our processes for sharing it. As
I noted in the Introduction, courtesy of the internet we have arrived at a point
in time when it is possible for millions of us to relate to each other, overcome
the tyranny of distance and find common ground – as long as we create the
space to do that in an organised way. The web has democratised education
and information access. And as a result, the so-called mob need be a mob no
more. We have arrived at a point in history where we are modern, not
821 Scott Morrison, Ibid.
822 Scott Morrison, Ibid.
684
primitive, we are educated, not illiterate slaves, we are articulate, not silenced
(yet).
Of course, our use of the internet requires some fine tuning. We have not
reached “webtopia” yet. As Peter Lewis, author of Webtopia: The world wide
wreck of tech and how to make the net work823, has pointed out, the world
wide web was full of magical possibility when it arrived and it invited us to
“dream big”. But we have fallen into a hole with our use of it – a hole which
disconnects us. Nevertheless, Mr Lewis has also acknowledged the
possibilities of the web, if we organise our use of it cleverly:
It’s not going to be easy to take back control. It’s not some law or
regulation that will deliver us, although laws and regulations could be
part of the accommodation. It starts with being alive to the
consequences of our own actions and those of the technologies we use,
to not be just passive consumers of bandwidth and apps and energy and
culture. The vast reams of data that can be collected and analysed do
provide a truth of sorts, but if the only purpose is to manipulate self-
interest for the sake of profit, then it’s truth without a purpose. It’s on
us to do something about that and rekindle our sense of human
agency.824
IP&R can help with that. At present the information we need to secure
our future as a nation is scattered all over the web instead of being organised
through one accessible portal. We are shunted all over the place by algorithms
into disarray, and this is preventing the integration we need to assemble the
best set of Strategies. But national IP&R can create a space where our
diversity is gathered and the different ideas arising from that diversity can
work in harmony instead of dissonance. We can rise above the din and set a
coherent, optimised path to our preferred future. Once we have done that,
we can serve our parliaments with the terms of the contract we wish them to
enter into as partners with us. In this arrangement the terms “master” and
“servant” should evaporate from our political discourse. The lie that leaders
are our servants should disappear and be replaced with a respectful
acknowledgment of equal shares of power.
823 Peter Lewis, Webtopia: The world wide wreck of tech and how to make the net work, NewSouth
Publishing, 2019.
824 Peter Lewis, Ibid., Kindle edition, Loc 3480.
685
Australia’s democracy has been set up on the basis of a balance of power
between arms of our governance system:
1. the parliament, which has legislative power;
2. the executive government, which has the power to administer laws
and carry them out through such bodies as government
departments, statutory authorities and the defence forces; and
3. the judicature, which has the power to conclusively determine legal
disputes, traditionally exercised by courts.825
But nowhere does this recognise the demos – we the people. It is all about
our governance, not our participation. It is really democracy in name only and
it has only ever been that because there has until recently been no way of
organising universal communication. IP&R is a mechanism for broadening
input to our democracy by vast expansion of communication and making that
input both intelligent and intelligible.
Australians need to choose where they want to go before they choose
who they want to lead them to that particular place. Otherwise leaders cannot
lead. They simply won’t know how. In the past we have always let our elected
leaders tell us how we will get there but without bothering to tell us where
“there” is. If we flip this around and find out where we want to go, then we
can tell them how we prefer to get there, which routes we want to take and
which ones we want to avoid. The role of elected leaders then shifts too. But
it would not be to the position of the servant they currently pose as but never
really play. The locus of their leadership would shift instead to being an equal
partner, certainly with power but, in principle, not to a level beyond our
overarching plans for our future. Their in-principle power would be limited to
facilitating the interests of the many, and not extend to facilitating the
interests of the few. That is a society of equals or at least it is a step towards
the more perfect society we might articulate in our Vision for Australia
Together.
Whether this arrangement would shift from the status of “in-principle”
to something more binding is something that requires more thought. If we
look at a national community futures plan as a new social contract then there
is an argument that the plan should be binding. And if politicians continue to
825
See Overview and Notes by the Australian Government Solicitor, October 2010, introductory to
“Australia’s Constitution”, 9 July 1900, page iv.
686
behave as badly as many of them have in the 21st century we might expect to
see frustrated Australians push for more specification of obligations of the
various arms of government under the plan. Having said that, we would not
wish trust in politicians to sink so low that the plan is then used or misused as
an unreasonable or unintelligent restriction on legislative reform. In this
regard it will be important to come to an agreement about the extent to which
the plan might and might not reasonably constrain government.
In the best IP&R legislation, the NSW legislation and guidelines, the
integrated community strategic plans of local communities are meant to drive
the elected councils and their policy program. While these community
strategic plans don’t have legislative control (it is the planning process that is
legislated, not the plan as a law itself) they are nevertheless meant to be
respected fully by the elected councillors. In that sense, electors and the
elected place trust in each other that all parties to the contract will behave in
a manner consistent with their obligations. People who vote then judge
whether the elected councillors behaved accordingly. If we extend the
thinking on this to the state and national level this would imply that
governments will still be able to do things in conflict with the plan, but if they
don’t work then the End of Term Report will show that and the government
will pay the price at the polling booths. So the national community futures
plan would work on trust and would guide rather than constrain. The electors
– not the elected – would have full power to develop the plan but thereafter
power would be shared and discretion to depart from the plan, if it is used,
would be judged at the next democratic election. As the nation improves its
integrated planning capacity and skill, and as plans themselves accordingly
become stronger – wiser and more insightful – we would be likely to see
political and government derogation from the plan to diminish over time.
Establishment of an Australian Community Futures Plan would, even in
its first iteration, add a huge amount of wisdom into the legislative programs
of our parliaments and into government policy development and service
delivery. The increase in the sheer efficiency of our democracy could be of
staggering proportions, eliminating decades of lost time in progress and
reform. In an age where elected governments have proved themselves to be
untrustworthy and we have been distracted also from just how incompetent
those elected people are, the whole idea that a few crown ministers and a
shallow prime minister (who must in the modern political rough and tumble
687
concentrate merely on being the marketing front man or woman – he or she
is mainly an “image” and a “brand” rather than a policy genius) are the best
Australia can produce in leadership and policy simply has to be seen for what
it is – dumb. In the age of the internet, we don’t need the mere marketing
that dumbs us down in Australia. On the contrary we now have too much
access to information to be rightly characterised as an unintelligent mob. But
if we keep running our democracy the way we are – that will be unintelligent.
Unscrupulous politicians do their level best to dumb us down and the fact that
they do is a key measure of their disrespect for us. But with IP&R we have the
means to share our intelligence with them in a coherent, mutually beneficial
and mutually respectful system. The whole notion of sharing intelligence far
more widely needs to become second nature. When it becomes the natural
and expected way of doing things, national IP&R will have done well.
With national IP&R, all four players in our polity must shift from their
place in the current arrangement of power – the three who have power in the
Constitution already (the legislature, the executive and the judiciary) and we
the people. All parties – including corporate players, institutions and the
public service – will experience an unleashing of their creativity in this new
and smarter sharing of power. The only group for whom nothing much would
change – at first – is the judiciary. But of course, nothing ever stays the same.
A national community futures plan is highly likely to list the need for a
Constitutional Convention. Once we the people place ourselves into the
power equation, we will need a new Constitution, a modern one. No longer
will we be able to define power to give a voice only to the elected. There
should be a shift from mere representative democracy to proactive
participatory democracy. This is a quantum leap in societal self-
determination. How we meld our voice into our parliaments and governments
is yet to be determined – although we are watching an interesting test case
about exactly that play out right in front of us in 2020 in terms of the process
for an Indigenous Voice. Conservatives are objecting to an Indigenous Voice
in the Constitution on the grounds that it creates a different status for one
group on the basis of race. This may set the whole Indigenous Voice up for
defeat in a referendum. But if a national community futures plan were to
schedule a Constitutional Convention so that we may secure our rights, state
our values, re-state power sharing arrangements and reset the checks and
688
balances in modernity, then the Convention would be considering the value
of all our Voices providing a basis for their equality in our democracy.
Finally, what of politicians – those poor, tired wrecks of people who, as
Martin Parkinson said, started out in public life “actually well motivated”826
and then were slowly ground down by combinations of their own ineptitude
and a grumbling, incoherent and insatiable electorate – what might happen
to them in this new smarter democracy? What positive place might they take?
As I said in Chapter 8, some of them have developed an intention to look for
ways to inspire us with a compelling vision. However, this is because they are
assuming that they need to take the oppressive weight of leading us to a
better future entirely on their own shoulders. That expectation is unfair.
Instead, it is we who need to compel them. And in that arrangement,
“compelling” them doesn’t mean dominating them – it means inspiring them
and then partnering with them in a new type of social contract, one which
sets out the terms of the trust we are placing in them when we elect them. A
national community futures plan will take precedence over their party
political platforms but it will not outlaw them. It will simply describe the
grounds on which politicians may win back the trust they have lost in the 21st
century, and keep it. If those platforms are worthy, if they facilitate our Vision,
they will end up in the plan anyway. The influence of such a plan will grow on
politicians only slowly. To those who prefer to dismantle liberal democracy
(while appearing to champion it) an Australian Community Futures Plan will
be inconsequential, until the weight of numbers behind it means it isn’t, at
which point the usual ad man’s snide disparagement will predictably make its
appearance. This is to be expected because Australia Together will be
operating within a parliamentary system of democracy. It will not dismantle
it. Instead it will put the liberal back into our democracy, reversing the
unceremonious ejection of liberality that has occurred this century, quietly,
while we weren’t paying attention.
As I noted in the section on institutional arrangements for an Australian
community futures planning process in Chapter 10, it is both unlikely and
inadvisable that an elected federal government should take the lead on
826Martin Parkinson in interview with Katharine Murphy, “Martin Parkinson on Australia’s decade of
climate inaction – Australian Politics Live Podcast”, The Guardian, 19 December 2019, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2019/dec/19/martin-parkinson-on-australias-
decade-of-climate-inaction-australian-politics-live-podcast?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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implementing national IP&R. They will not have the will for it and the whole
concept of it is anathema to some politicians. This means there is unlikely to
be legislation in the coming decade in the way that there has been for IP&R in
local governance. In turn this means that the extent to which politicians may
be “compelled” by an Australian community futures plan will be limited for
some time to come. But if we organise ourselves to do it well, then it will
gradually gather status. Clever national IP&R would therefore build into its
own Strategies a program for its rise to precedence in determination of our
future. Slowly but steadily its credibility should supplant the credibility of
mere party platforms. Given how divisive and discredited those platforms
have become this century, that may not take as long as we might think.
What national community futures planning might mean for the shape of
democracy in Australia is yet to be fully understood. But what can be
immediately understood is that our democracy, which is currently all about
elections, can be far more effective if we move past the idea that elections
are everything. Representative democracy is all about elections – and if we
want to settle for that then we must also resign ourselves to the idea that our
preferred future will never be realised. That is a surety. Participatory
democracy in an educated, wealthy nation is, however, not about elections.
It is about something before elections, something which sets down what
representative democrats are to be trusted with and what they will be held
accountable for. In some of the best attempts at representative democracy,
particularly the greatest experiment that is the USA, the instrument they
relied on to set the terms of trust was a constitution and a bill of rights. That
was the only way that the will of “we the people” could be coherently
expressed. But that was before modern communications and full education,
it was before globalisation, and it was before the internet. These things are
game changers, but until now we have been unable to take full advantage of
this massive increase in and interconnection of human capital because we
have given ourselves no framework in which to organise it – no centralised
space of planning where what works for us, and for the nation we want to be,
can be specifically set down. But now with national IP&R we can assemble all
that and guide elected leaders who, at the moment, are running at a fraction
of their capacity.
By 2050 is a toolbox for democratic participation by Australians. It
provides a skill set for a nation to write its own plan. Instead of being driven
690
as a disorganised rabble or by the “invisible hand” of an unregulated market
(the system preferred by neoliberal corporations and top down governors) we
can suddenly move into the driver’s seat – bottom up planners combining
their intelligence and expressing their clear will for the common good to those
at the top.
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Epilogue – Australians Together
Sydney Australia
February 2020
I started this book at a point when my concern about the capacity of
Australians to appreciate diversity – diversity in both culture and opinions –
was deeper than it has ever been in my life. What brings us together in our
diversity? What can bring us together? These seemed to be vital questions
and writing By 2050 has helped me formulate a perspective as to the answers.
What has emerged is that it is not politics, policies, or even leadership in
government that can bring Australians together in the 21 st century. We can
clearly be brought together in a crisis, such as the Spring and Summer
bushfires of 2019/2020, which brought out the best in vast numbers of
Australians who have helped out and which also culminated in a steep rise in
convergence of opinion about the need to do something about climate
change.827 But in any sane society, the last thing we should want to be brought
together by is a crisis.
What can bring us together – and into far happier circumstances – is a
particular type of plan: a plan where each of us can see ourselves and through
which our particular aspirations will have a better chance of being realised; a
plan where we can see that we have not been excluded or forsaken, or asked
to abnegate ourselves; a plan where we are not pitted against each other and
against our own children; and a plan whereby we can achieve our own
aspirations without needing to lessen someone else’s. Indeed, we work on the
827Jessica Irvine, “Environment now trumps economy on Australian list of biggest worries”, Sydney
Morning Herald, 22 January 2020, accessible at https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-
change/environment-now-trumps-economy-on-australian-list-of-biggest-worries-20200121-
p53td7.html
692
assumption that we can only realise our aspirations because of the diverse
aspirations of others.
The ambitions of politicians to bring us together are probably not sincere
on most occasions. Such ambitions are not at the forefront of their minds and
even when they are the mindset is not to bring us together in our diversity, it
is to homogenise the majority and to shunt those who don’t fit to the margins.
But even if there are some for whom social cohesion is a genuine, noble
commitment, they nevertheless lack both the skill and the support from
Australians necessary to achieve it. Adversarialism cannot deliver
togetherness. We must find some other way. Fortunately, there is another
way to efficiently run our democracy, and that is to plan it together.
Until now we haven’t had a mechanism to do this. And even though some
may claim it is too difficult, in the end it is simply all about how people relate
to each other, how the conversation of humankind can rise above the
cacophony and be distilled in a space of clarity where the common ground
and the tolerable compromises and trade offs have been found. It will never
be an individual’s perfect world, but it will be a much better harmony than
the din we have suffered through thus far in the 21 st century.
Such a transition will take time, probably at least two election cycles after
the establishment of a reasonable degree of consensus on the first national
community futures plan. To facilitate that we should guard against the
reaction that will doubtless arise from conservatives who prefer that
Australians should stay quietly passive and above all should not become an
organised force with greater power over their own destiny. Conservatives will
attempt to disable rather than build the confidence of Australians in regard to
their capacity to take a greater role in governing themselves efficiently
through their democracy. But this is a country where in many other walks of
life we are considered capable enough to vote, hold gun licences, sit with
peers to judge others in jury trials, and go to war. We don’t question that we
are capable of these things and yet for some reason when it comes to our
leadership we think we are only capable of leaving it to a tiny minority of
vested interests – a group whose interests are in many cases not just
decidedly different but absolutely contrary to our own.
Bearing in mind that the success of a national community futures
planning process will depend not just on our appreciation of diversity as a
strength but on our willingness to frame the plan around our children’s future,
693
participation in Australian democracy should be established as a unit of study
in schools from year nine onwards. Three years before any Australian reaches
voting age, they should be taught about the decision processes they can go
through to cast that vote and encouraged to participate in designing their
future. At present there are Higher School Certificate courses on law, society,
the environment and the economy but not on governance as such, not on how
we can govern ourselves to best advantage, and certainly not on how we can
participate in planning our own future. This needs to become second nature
or those generations will simply and unnecessarily be throwing their future
away.
Children, by virtue of their freshness and imaginative creativity, are best
placed in each generation to make the world anew, over and over in a never
ending story describing the asymptotic path to a more perfect union. That
word – “union” – was a magical choice in the founding constitution of the
grandest of democratic experiments, the United States of America. The
founders could have said “a more perfect world” but the focus was on union
– togetherness. Inherent in that choice of word was an assumption that a
more perfect union is a condition precedent for a more perfect world and that
if we are to constantly make our world anew – without chilling upheaval,
violence and unnecessary destruction – then the travail of it all must be made
feasible, tolerable and uplifting by togetherness, and, if I may suggest, by a
togetherness which understands that it inheres only in equality and diversity.
If that is built into our attitudes, then armed with an education and good will
from their parents there is nothing to limit our children from extending their
creative power and putting it to use for the common good and for their
natural world. As such, Australian Community Futures Planning, utilising
quality IP&R for social cohesion and maximisation of collective intelligence,
might be the best gift we could ever give them. Our children are not likely to
be handed a better world on a platter. They will have to work together for it,
and we will need to make that togetherness possible for them if we are to
bring them safely home by 2050.
694
Afterword – At the Onset of Coronavirus
Sydney Australia
March 2020
By 2050 was completed in February 2020, just before the arrival of the
Coronavirus pandemic in Australia. In a book like this, which is about the value
of forethought, imagination and togetherness in securing a better future,
something as unexpected and momentous as Covid-19 prompts at least a
review of whether the thesis of the book, on the eve of its publication, may
have already been undone by the vagaries of history. How relevant is By 2050
and everything it proposes, in the wake of such an unimagined upheaval?
Looking squarely at this question, I am compelled to conclude that it is more
relevant than ever.
By 2050 makes it clear that Australia arrived at what we can only hope is
a once in 100 year event without being prepared for it. Indeed, we found
ourselves in two crises within a few weeks of each other – the east coast
bushfires and Covid-19 – both of them economy wrecking events. While we
were not entirely unprepared for Covid-19 – in the sense that we had not run
our health system down as much as, say, the United Kingdom – we were
nevertheless unprepared in several other critical directions. Our economy had
been run down to its lowest ebb since the recession of 1991 and we were
already on the brink of our first recession in 28 years. On top of that, we were
split apart as a nation – meaning that we were running on a faltering
democracy and polity. The government had developed a new-found focus on
“resilience” and “adaptation” for climate change after the bushfires. But the
resilience of our democracy was yet to be acknowledged by the government
as a vital input to a better, more secure future. On issues of democracy and
inclusion, the government remained silent.
695
As Coronavirus boomed as a story, journalists began asking if the
pandemic will bring us together. Without predicting whether it will or not, it
might be observed that while a crisis might bring us together, any newfound
togetherness or a surge in values about sharing may turn out to be fleeting. If
a shift towards social cohesion occurs, will it last if we remain disorganised –
if we run on, rudderless, without a plan, without a grasp of how we can
organise ourselves better to run our democracy to the best possible
advantage in good times and in crises? It will not surprise readers if I posit a
negative answer and say that lasting change cannot be expected if we
continue in disarray.
Australia encountered its last crisis – the GFC – when our economy was
in a much better state than it is in 2020. The lucky country, as was, had an
economic buffer in 2008 (due to a now-gone mining boom) and some level of
resilience in our democracy. By contrast, as we collided with Coronavirus we
had a far more fragile democracy and an exhausted economy which had not
yet had time to turn to its next form. We had not yet “crossed that bridge”
that Ross Garnaut talked of to a decarbonised superpower, let alone grabbed
any opportunity to expand the health, welfare and education sectors and pull
the government back into the market as a competitive provider of trading
enterprises. We couldn’t prevent Coronavirus, but we could have been far
better prepared when it came. We weren’t prepared – and not just because
we didn’t have a plan. We were unprepared because of what we had been
misled into valuing, because a neoliberal ideology had changed prevailing
attitudes to what really matters.
As the Guardian’s Greg Jericho observed as the Coronavirus hit home:
“This crisis reveals that many things that people told us mattered, don’t.” 828
We were told budget surpluses and government debt matter, that AAA credit
ratings matter, that a slimmed down (defunded) public service matters, that
an unconstrained private sector matters, and that self-reliance matters more
than mutual support, respect and decency. By extension, in this mean, small
minded reduction of what matters, we were being taught – subliminally, but
sometimes explicitly – that poverty, equality, wellbeing, diversity,
828Greg Jericho, “With the coronavirus, here’s what’s really going to matter for the Australian
economy”, The Guardian, 22 March 2020, accessible at
https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2020/mar/22/with-the-coronavirus-heres-
whats-really-going-to-matter-for-the-australian-economy
696
homelessness, domestic abuse, child disadvantage, human rights and
Indigenous recognition don’t matter. And of course, we were being told the
environment doesn’t matter, climate change doesn’t matter, ethics in
business and government doesn’t matter, and our national income built from
taxation doesn’t matter, unless it is set aside to bail out the private sector
failures and unsustainable consumption of natural resources.
Of course, a crisis of Coronavirus proportions makes it clear what matters.
What matters is that we should position ourselves as a cohesive society so
that we are best placed to deal with trouble when it comes. Coronavirus was
not caused by the private sector, but our lack of preparedness for it was. It
was caused by neoliberalism’s obsession with using public funds to maximise
private gain and minimise private losses. There should be no
misunderstanding here. When modern economies fail, it is caused in the main
by excessive forces in the private sector – by their refusal to share national
wealth fairly and pay their fair share of upkeep for our human and natural
resources and assets, by their corruption of politics, and by their hoarding
profits to the few not the many. But this does not mean that all our plans
should be set so as to ensure taxpayers will continually bail out corporations.
We do not need to repeat this mistake endlessly until we have no assets left
to socialise private sector losses.
Avoiding a repeat requires a plan – but not just any plan. It must be one
that drags out of us a picture of what really matters. Once we have that, we
can plot a course towards it and away from anything that would defeat it.
Plans won’t ever prevent crises. But they can be geared to help us sail through
such storms. They can shave off the worst of the pain for more of us, and the
more we base them on imagination of the finest future, the better they will
gear us to deal with the worst when it comes. This is what resilience really
consists in: generous thoughtfulness – pulling in as many diverse imaginings
as possible and integrating them so that they add up to more than the sum of
the individual parts.
It may be that due to Coronavirus we will witness the sudden death of
neoliberalism – that instead of having to claw back its decades of thefts, slice
by slice, it will evaporate as a prevailing ideology when it is recognised as the
thing that has left us far more poorly prepared than we should have been.
Certainly it would be a silver lining to the Coronavirus pandemic if it
exterminated neoliberalism and functioned to inspire us about what can be
697
achieved instead if we develop a new, shared understanding of the role of
welfare, taxation, bigger competitive government, participation in democracy
and genuine inclusion in delivery of a wonderful future for us all.
Building on that possibility, it may also be that due to Coronavirus we can
exchange our old economy for a new one more quickly than might otherwise
have been the case. We could do this by substituting some of our current ways
of supporting ourselves – those that are better suited to a dog-eat-dog world
– with completely different, fairer and more sustainable ways of mutual
support – those that would be better suited to a world where mutual support
is valued more highly than the “mutual obligation” that currently prevails for
Newstart recipients and requires them to seek jobs that aren’t there in
exchange for a humiliating pittance. In this subtle shift in the arrangement of
our values, and with an awareness of what it can really be like when 10%, or
even more than 10% of us can’t be provided with jobs, the form in which
“obligation” is expressed must shift, and shift suddenly, probably to
something akin to a living wage – some form of basic universal entitlement
that provides both dignity and smoothed economic stimulus. Our tax
structures could be reorganised to achieve this without any loss in quality of
life for the rich and a significant increase in the quality of life for the poor. It
is merely a matter of rearranging how we pay for everything we want for all
of us, rather than how we pay for everything that a few of us want.
And if we want to keep an economy ticking over in the face of climate
change, such a shift may be imperative. As I write this in March 2020, it is still
early days in the economic impact of Coronavirus, but we are already seeing
a shift away from the brilliance of self-sufficiency and budget surpluses in the
Morrison government’s marketing messages towards fiscal stimulus on a
scale never seen before. Australians are being treated to a demonstration of
how different everything can be. We can choose to return to the depredations
of neoliberalism as the crisis passes or we can choose to speed a transition to
a new economy by a complete re-think about how we share the wealth we
generate and perhaps by development of something like the accord I spoke
of in Chapter 7 on wealth, welfare and wellbeing. In the process we may speed
our way towards drops in carbon emissions more quickly than we might have
found tolerable under neoliberalism. If so, we might also head off future
pandemics that may arise from any hitherto sequestered viruses and bacteria
that may be released from thawing permafrost due to climate change.
698
Australians can only hope that our response to the Coronavirus will not
be to succumb to the dog-eat-dog mentality that nurtures neoliberal aims,
and that instead we will choose togetherness in diversity. It’s Australians’ call.
We have it in our power – if we choose – to remake our economy and
environment without leaving anyone behind. Such a commitment – to leave
no-one behind – is already inherent in Australia’s commitments to the United
Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It is nothing radical. But we are not
being organised to make it a reality. If we start with a picture of where we
want to be by 2050 and work backwards from that (rather than focussing only
on what we want to fix in the here are now) we can plot the most acceptable
and efficient way to that better place.
Because By 2050 has worked through the issues of how to achieve this
sort of organising capability within democracy, I anticipate that it should be
possible to establish Australian Community Futures Planning by mid-2020 and
that it can be founded on a sound, ethical and inclusive methodology for
national integrated planning and reporting. One of its first agenda items will
be to set out a community engagement program for refinement of a first draft
Australia Together. Community members wishing to become more involved
in setting up a better chance of the finest future for their children will be
welcomed.
For more information on, or to become involved in development of
Australia Together,
visit Australian Community Futures Planning at
www.austcfp.com.au
from mid 2020.
699
Acknowledgements
Writing By 2050 has been a labour of love and a privilege made possible by
the fact that in the 21st century the world has been able to speed up research
capability exponentially via the world wide web. That web has allowed me to
access the wealth of information from quality journalists who try every day to
bring the facts to us and point us to the sources of integrity in science and to
related books and research on things vital to our future. Nowhere in today’s
journalism is that more generously organised than at The Guardian. As such I
must extend my sincere thanks to the journalists and columnists of Guardian
Australia, particularly Katharine Murphy, Greg Jericho, Adam Morton, Peter
Lewis, Sarah Martin, Amy Remeikis, Anne Davies, Christopher Knaus, Gay
Alcorn, Jess Hill, Luke Henriques-Gomes, Paul Karp, Richard Denniss, George
Monbiot, Robert Reich and, of course, Lenore Taylor. They know not how
much their work and that of others at The Guardian has inspired me as I have
joined up hundreds of their pieces to reveal a coherent picture of where we
are as a nation in 2020 and where we are in trouble. Other great journalists,
particularly Ross Gittins and Eryk Bagshaw of the Sydney Morning Herald, are
also high on the thank you list.
The other main source of inspiration came of course from the privilege of
having a long career in planning in the public service. That career coincided
with the introduction of the most well thought out version of Integrated
Planning & Reporting in Australia. For this I must remember the contribution
of local government colleagues, particularly Ross Woodward (former CEO of
the NSW of the Division of Local Government) and wonderful colleagues such
as Paul Spyve, Karen Legge, Martin Bass, Meredith Wallace, Michael Mamo,
Ian Mead, Dan Joannides, Emily Scott, Robert Esdaile, Greg Worner, Martin
Forrester-Reid, Cathy Price, Maree Girdler, Rachel Trigg and the Hunter Valley
Research Foundation’s Jenny Williams. People like these quietly work away,
unseen and with complete integrity, in the public service with little prospect
700
of recognition. They are a small band but they make an enormous difference
to our lives. Key to this list of inspiring band leaders is the former CEO of
Sydney Water, Bob Wilson, who gave me the finest of opportunities in state
government and an appreciation of the importance of taking a visionary
approach to public service.
My beautiful children, Harry and Seanie Kelly, are the inspiration for By
2050. The worth of the book comes from them and is for them. My parents,
Albert and Elvire Bulgeries, have long since departed this world but their
influence is as fresh as if it had been yesterday. The book is proof that the
influence of the best of us filters down the generations well beyond our short
time here, even though we do not lead nations or seek fame. My extended
family, in whose conversations I have always found inspiration and generosity,
even in our diversity, have also contributed to the depth and breadth of By
2050. I hold a fond hope that this book and the foundation that arises from it
in Australian Community Futures Planning will constitute something in
gratitude to them for all the joy they have shared with me.
And finally to my darling husband, Dr David Kelly, who has been my
inspiration for more than 35 years and my persevering and painstaking editor
on By 2050. What we have discovered together! How wonderful. I love you.
701
Appendix A – Beliefs and Commitments of the
Community of Iona
702
703
Appendix B – The Vision for Waverley
Together 2
This Vision statement was published in 2009 as a draft for purposes of
developing “Waverley Together 2”, the Waverley community’s long term
strategic plan adopted under the Integrated Planning & Reporting Framework
legislated in NSW in 2009. The draft vision was adopted without amendment
in 2010. The same Vision was adopted for “Waverley Together 3”, in 2013.
704
Waverley Council has, however, since discarded the Vision for Waverley
Together 2 & 3 and has reverted to the traditional shorter vision statement,
which is less useful for community planning and reporting purposes but is
more useful for councillors’ purposes. Some of the 14 vision elements have
been converted to 11 themes in the 2018 plan to replace the more
personalised vision with a largely place-based vision. This is a vision for a
place, not a community’s vision of itself. The focus on working “together” has
been downgraded. The community is largely removed from the vision and
community imagination does not feature. No surveys appear to have been
undertaken to determine whether the community is more or less “compelled”
by the vision used in 2018 than it was in 2010 when 90% of the local
community supported the vision for Waverley Together 2. The new vision uses
politically acceptable language, not imaginative language. It eliminates the
need for reporting on whether the community is moving toward or away from
the its vision. Let this be a cautionary tale for those of good will ready to
undertake the task of coming together to plan our better future.
705
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