Thomas Keneally's 2020s vision: We must abandon the language of the market to reclaim our humanity

Extract from The Guardian

2020s vision - one idea to make Australia better

Thomas Keneally

In the last 30 years we have been transmuted from pilgrims and patients and students to become, as our primary identification, consumers and clients

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Mon 10 Feb 2020 03.30 AEDT Last modified on Mon 10 Feb 2020 03.32 AEDT

‘It is OK with me if all the world is a stage and we are mere actors, because that assertion has a humane coloration to it. But I resist the idea that all the world’s a market.’ Photograph: Jonny Weeks/The Guardian

It is easy for punters to send up economists. First of all, they often adopt the gargling pomposity of an archbishop talking dogma. Their argot of terms like “quantitative easing” – which sounds like something we do after Christmas lunch – always suggests something grand whose wheels will run over us.
And since the new economics made the market the supreme entity in our world, all the world has become a market, and the status of humans and citizens has thereby declined. We can laugh when the late Gary Becker, neo-conservative of the Chicago School, defined marriage as a contract between “two utility maximising agents” in which “love as default” is identified as a “non-marketable household commodity”. We imagine lovers whispering “you maximise my utility like no on else can, honey” or “no, the stories I’ve been trading my non-marketable household commodity with him/her are absolute lies!”
But our laughter is cheap, and words used in the new economics have a huge heft to them. When it comes to health, education and welfare, we are no longer members of a human compact. We are no longer students, patients, battlers down on our luck. We are not members of a common wealth any more. We are clients of a system.

If you don’t believe, look at the website of the Department of Health and Human Services. The word “clients” is the blanket term. It is OK with me if all the world is a stage and we are mere actors, because that assertion has a humane coloration to it. But I resist the idea that all the world’s a market, including health, in which our reality is to achieve the role of consumer, customer, client. For there is an obvious difference in human imagination and experience between a human undergoing cancer surgery and one buying an SUV. But not in the perception of market economics.
Admittedly “client” was used by psychiatrists in good faith as recognising a less elitist way of recognising people who asked for their help, and acknowledging the patient was never passive in his own recovery. But when it came into use in the 1970s, it was marshalled to serve the ends of market economics. A client, after all, was until then used chiefly by lawyers and real estate agents, and in both cases it had economic meaning – “one who pays”.
The new nomenclature we’ve been subjected to alters our relationship to human services. Indeed, the trickle-down effect of the new economics was supposed by now to have replaced human services provided by government.
Funny that it hasn’t. Funny that it has increased divisions and that its jargon is abominated by ordinary people, who then look for love in all the wrong places amongst modern demagogues. If one looks at the long history of human experience, it is only in the last 30 years that we have been transmuted from pilgrims and patients and students to become, as our primary identification, consumers and clients.
Unemployment is a misdemeanour to be drug-tested and subject to delay in benefits, since the unemployed are a blot on the market, redeeming themselves only when they pay for things. This poisonous re-definition has allowed conservative prime ministers to see our universities, for example, as vocational schools in which the humanities, which used to be the whole point of university education, are an indulgence and must be pared down.
Hence, we can’t afford a professor of Australian literature at Sydney University now. And of course, the long-term awards to research bodies are not serving the market quickly enough, so cut that as yet un-applied stuff down too! In the words of Joe Hockey, chief architect of the notorious 2014 budget, research tends to “lean” with no guarantee that it will ever “lift”.

Thus, on his own obscure grounds, Simon Birmingham when education minister presumed to rule out a number of humanities research grants, and Dan Tehan, his successor, has declared that all research grant applications should explain how the research is in “the national interest”. Really, and decided by whom? To hell with you Mr Erasmus, Kant and Kierkegaard, because you would all fail such a test.
While I’m on the rant, as old guys like me love to be, may I confess to a similar distaste for the word “inevitable”. User-pays is inevitable in health services, we are told, and it is inevitable that pensions will become unsustainable because of age imbalance.
Challenging, sure. But the new economics are not new, and what was once called political economy was applied in famines throughout the empire, notably Bengal and Ireland, after prophets like Malthus had told politicians famine was inevitable, and they took that belief into their policy. Millions died, not for lack of food resources but because politicians considered their deaths inevitable. And because as a gifted economist of famine Amartya Sen said, they lacked, in government’s eyes, “entitlement” to the food they grew.
Politicians will steal your future with that word “inevitable”. So let us reclaim our self-definition as a start.

• Thomas Keneally is an Australian novelist