[ad_1]
Buried beneath Jim Chalmers’ budget surplus and inflation tightrope is the hint of something more substantial; a bigger idea of government where tighter limits are imposed on the excesses of the free market.
After four decades of calculated abandonment, citizens are turning to government to intervene more forcefully in their market economies and take back some of the power that has been wilfully ceded to the amoral forces of global capital.
Whether they bang the drum like Donald Trump and his tinpot impersonators or embrace the more nuanced euro-beats of the Scandinavians, there is recognition that the era of small government is coming to an end.
Since the 2020 global pandemic, government has taken a heightened role in people’s lives and, on most policy challenges from cost-of-living “relief” to energy transition to housing affordability to the impact of social media and AI, people want government to step up.
The latest Guardian Essential report reinforces this simmering desire for active leadership, with half of all respondents wanting more active government intervention and just a handful saying they want less.
The only thing keeping the thirst for greater intervention below 50% is ALP voters who are more likely to say they are happy with the current levels of government action. But among all other voters the desire for more muscular leadership is stark.
These numbers are particularly striking given the low levels of trust in government that we repeatedly pick up in our polling. On reflection, I think the cause of a lot of this distrust is that the learned helplessness of the last 40 years has invited public disdain.
Since the end of the cold war, government has departed the field, privatising essential services, removing support for local workers and industries, wilfully ceding control of national wellbeing to large global corporations and ignoring stagnant living standards while celebrating aggregate growth.
Today, people rate corporate greed ahead of government spending or global instability as the main driver of the current cost-of-living pressures that are plaguing the nation. They welcome the budget measures announced last week but are sceptical they will have any real impact on their own financial situation in the face of corporate excess.
Chalmers is regularly measured against his mentor Paul Keating’s credentials for economic reform but it is worth recognising the nature of that reform, and that the problems it addressed were fundamentally different to the challenges facing policymakers today.
Working with Bob Hawke, Keating opened up our then-sclerotic economy, shepherded globalisation to Australia, floating the dollar, removing industry protection, privatising major utilities and deregulating the labour market.
To their credit they established Medicare and superannuation as part of that settlement, leaving Australians in far better shape than the US under Ronald Reagan or the UK under Margaret Thatcher but it still represented a submission to global capital on behalf of the nation state.
Chalmers’ challenge has an inverse focus. In its Future Made in Australia policy, Labor asserts itself an active architect of the energy transition, picking winners in new green technologies and building local supply chains even where cheaper product might exist offshore.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, dismisses this as “billions of dollars for billionaires” but, in doing so, he is also conceding the change in era where government has to more forcefully limit the power of capital. While he has been whacking corporate Australia for their commitments to diversity and inclusion, he continues to fight hard for their rights to operate free of industrial constraint.
The broader truth for both parties of government is that the expectation of intervention does not begin and end with renewable energy. At a time when the majority recognise rising economic inequality, voters from both the left and right flanks are looking for more active social interventions.
The budget had justified focus on helping those at the margins, with the reworked tax cuts, energy rebates, increased commonwealth rent assistance, increased funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and an overdue review of job services.
But absent is the proposition that government should also be placing limits on the extremities of wealth accumulation with a separate set of questions showing majority support for capping the accumulation of property and taxing extreme wealth.
Note the stronger support among Greens, independents and minor parties for these types of interventions. Hiding in plain sight we might be witnessing a shift from libertarianism to what Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns has coined “limitarianism”.
In her book of that name, Robeyns argues that unconstrained wealth accumulation is the key driver of many of our global challenges: climate, corruption, tax evasion, housing, the decline in services and the breakdown in liberal democracies.
She identifies three points of limit: “the riches line”, where extra money can no longer improve one’s happiness; the “ethical line”, from which people can no longer morally justify accumulating wealth; and the “political line”, where government should actively intervene to reduce wealth accumulation.
Roebyns is not absolutist on where these three points should lie and she argues it is up to each society to determine what these limits should be. A final question suggests that younger Australians, at least, are up for this discussion.
The politics of limitarianism would inevitably be attacked by the vassals of the super-rich as representing the “politics of envy” or undermining “aspiration” or worse “an attack on freedom”.
But this misses the point. Placing limits is not about envy, it is about recognising the consequences of excess and that the aspiration of a secure and happy life will only be enhanced if the opportunities and freedom to thrive are distributed fairly.
As Roebyns points out, limitarianism is not communism, it is making capitalism work better by putting a bridle on its most glaring excesses and removing the perverse incentives that exist to concentrate and embed power in the hands of the few.
A vision of government that actively promotes social cohesion, community wellbeing, opportunity and growth rather than just buying the debunked idea that wealth and happiness will somehow trickle down would be a reform agenda worthy of any treasurer’s legacy.