We can't just talk about growth. Equity needs a look-in, too

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy

Like everything in national affairs, the centre of the economic conversation feels entirely hollowed out

‘The message was simple. We are here, Malcolm, Scott, Mathias – and we are watching.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

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Friday 31 March 2017 13.23 AEDT 

Chief executives are busy people. They can be quite hard to catch and, in the normal course of events, they prefer to leave politics to their government affairs teams and their lobbyists, and the associations they bankroll to advance their policy interests in Canberra.
So it was quite the gesture to see a flock of high flyers in Canberra getting their hands dirty.
A small battalion stood sentinel in one of the parliamentary courtyards this week – Alan Joyce of Qantas, Ian Narev of the Commonwealth Bank, Richard Goyder of Wesfarmers, Andrew Mackenzie of BHP Billiton, Catherine Tanna of EnergyAustralia – a bit like the Occupy movement in reverse.

You might have thought they were there to argue for their tax cut, the issue that pushed the Senate to the brink in a gruelling and, at points, grimly combative parliamentary sitting week.
They were, of course, ostensibly. Gimme gimme gimme. It’s what every rent-seeker of every stripe visiting Canberra does.

But the visit had a more important strategic purpose. The show of force was not only about squeezing the best possible deal out of the Senate (which got complicated when Nick Xenophon had to commit the cardinal sin in contemporary politics of being a human being, having an obligation to his elderly parents when a beloved uncle died). It was also about the medium term.
It was about making sure the Turnbull government did not go to water and dump the big business tax cuts if the Senate gutted the package. It was about pressuring the government to commit to maintaining the full $48bn policy, and trying again in the highly likely event the stressed-out Xenophon can’t be massaged or manhandled over the line.
The message in the courtyard was simple. We are here, Malcolm, Scott, Mathias – and we are watching.

‘Sally McManus has the presentational stillness of a chief executive but preaches with a glint of steel.’ Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

A different strain of Occupy appeared midweek when the new ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, spoke at the National Press Club. She delivered a meticulously researched union recruitment drive on live television.
McManus, who has the presentational stillness of a chief executive but preaches with a glint of steel that makes you look up and take notice, reasoned that neoliberalism and trickle-down economics – of the type that were playing out in real time up the road in the parliamentary precinct with the company tax debate – had screwed working people.
“The Keating years created vast wealth for Australia but has not been shared, and too much has ended up in offshore bank accounts or in CEOs’ back pockets,” McManus noted calmly during her address. “Working people are now missing out and this is making them angry.”
The speech was shaped by McManus’s own values – everyone active in the public sphere now has a log-cabin story – but it was studded with highly relatable focus group phrases, including: “We are now a country of stressed-out people, worried about our jobs and wondering why things have not turned out as we thought they should in Australia.”

Indeed we are.
Millions of us are exactly that, and feel something akin to homicidal rage when we look at the mulish boarding-school antics that characterise our daily politics, and feel confused when ideological frolics and abstract score-settling hog the national agenda rather than the existential policy challenges of our time.
McManus is evidently formidable enough as a campaigner and communicator to be the target of full-throated political attacks by ministers including Peter Dutton, who described her this week as a modern-day communist, and by that most loyal of establishment organs, the Australian, which took time out from its enormously important and successful 18C campaign to fire off a couple of left-right combinations with such commitment a senior reporter landed on his backside.
The union movement was primed with the amplification effort the moment McManus walked offstage at the press club. It has built up a professional activist structure since helping to run John Howard out of office during the WorkChoices campaign – some well-placed critics would say at the expense of nurturing its organisational capacity in workplaces – and unions pushed the key messages out through social media after the address.
Down with neoliberalism! Up with Sally! Join the union!
Like everything in national affairs, the centre of the economic conversation feels entirely hollowed out.
There’s not much obvious middle ground between Andrew Mackenzie in a parliamentary courtyard saying neoliberalism will save us, give us that sweet tax relief and the benefits will trickle down – and Sally McManus at the press club saying down with neoliberalism, death to deregulation.

But Malcolm Turnbull and his government have to occupy the national interest space between the two propositions and find something remotely compelling to say. If you had to find a working definition of competent government in contemporary Australia, what I’ve just said would cover about 70% of the task.
If we pull out from all the positioning and filibustering of the political week and just ask that basic question – is the government finding anything compelling to say about Australia’s economic story in the wake of the disruption that has occurred since the financial crisis? – the answer has got to be a resounding no.
The government is being killed on the politics of declining wage growth, income and work insecurity, equality and fairness. It literally has nothing compelling to say on these themes, which are the things Australians worry about.
If the government had perfect freedom, and it was still remotely connected to the preoccupations of the real world, rather than expressing itself constantly as government by appeasement – appeasement to the reactionary right and its fake freedom debate, appeasement to those occupying CEOs – it would dump the whole economic program and start again.
If it had a minute to think, it would understand that the centre right cannot avoid the equity conversation after the GFC. It would breathe, and do some work and some deep thinking, rather than just bumping from event to event, cock-up to cock-up, and constantly taking the path of least resistance.
It would understand that no one in contemporary politics can avoid equity. It would understand the imperative of developing its own inclusive growth story, rather than just mouthing that as a proposition periodically while clinging tenaciously to the shibboleths of the pre-1998 world.
The conversation now cannot all be about economic growth. Equity has to get a look-in as well, not only because that’s the right thing to do, and the economically sensible course, but because if it goes on being ignored, Australian voters are in a mood for punishment.
If he doubts that, Turnbull need only have a word to Colin Barnett.