There's nothing like a crisis to shake up the status quo.
Ever since the pandemic took control of our destiny earlier this year, there have been constant calls for reform from some of the normally conservative areas of politics and business which, by definition, are supposed to adhere to a philosophy of opposing any form of change.
Each week seems to usher forth ever more cries for urgent "reform" of all the areas stifling the lifeblood of our economy.
Taxes for the relatively well off, we're told, need to be lowered.
And the workforce needs to become more flexible if we are to survive in a post-pandemic world.
If there's a vague familiarity about all this, it is perhaps because these very same calls have dominated economic debate for the past half century here and across most of the developed world.
Deregulation of the financial system and vast parts of the economy, along with the removal of trade barriers, has boosted global economic growth and, in the space of little more than one generation, transformed once-impoverished nations, particularly throughout Asia, into economic powerhouses.
But economics, like many things in life, is all about balance.
Once that delicate equilibrium shifts too far from the centre, a rapid and violent reversal often takes place, a phenomenon we now are witnessing in the political sphere across the developed world.
Half a century of "trickle-down economics" has seen wealth flourish at the top, graphically illustrated last week when Tesla founder Elon Musk secured a $US2.1 billion ($2.93 billion) bonus just as the ranks of America's unemployed swelled to 30 million.
While Australia remains a far more egalitarian society, several million, through no fault of their own, suddenly have found themselves being supported by the state for the first time.
Their lives have been thrown into turmoil.
Their future, and that of their families, is deeply uncertain.
The idea they will willingly embrace a push for lower wages and greater employment uncertainty, or flexibility as it euphemistically is called, at the next election is the stuff of pure fantasy.
Your workers are also your customers
If you could pinpoint the two biggest problems facing our economy before the onset of all this chaos, it would be thus; record household debt and the lowest wages growth in history.
Waning consumption and stagnating retail sales forced the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates three times last year.
Add in an overreliance on a handful of raw materials to mainly one market, China, as a source of export income and we were vulnerable to an economic shock.
Whereas a wages explosion in the 70s and 80s was a major problem, it has been the lack of it in the past decade that has held us back.
Also missing are the strikes and industrial disputes that accompanied that militant period and disrupted business and the economy.
Compare this: In March 1974, 2.5 million working days were lost due to industrial disputes.
During the Accord era of the Hawke and Keating governments, that plummeted to around 500,000 lost working days per quarter.
And here's the most recent graph from the Australian Bureau of Statistics detailing strike action.
Excluding this year, for obvious reasons, the days lost to strikes have ranged between 15,000 and 45,000 per quarter.
These numbers wouldn't even register on a graph going back to the 1970s. Days lost to strikes are down to about 1 per cent of that 50 years ago.
The idea the Australian workforce is inflexible is a misrepresentation.
Around a quarter of Australian workers are casuals. Business lobby groups argue that has been the case for 25 years and they're right.
But go back a little further, to the early 1980s, and only 13 per cent of the workforce was casual.
That increased flexibility — the ability to shed workers more easily — has been beneficial to businesses. But it has come at a cost.
Employees who are less secure find it more difficult to secure a loan. They're more cautious spenders, particularly in tough times, when they're more likely to be laid off.
Less security and reduced wages equal lower consumption.
Ultimately, that hurts profits. So, the idea that greater workforce "flexibility" would help an economy suffering from weak consumption appears muddle-headed at best.
Workers of the world disband
There was a revolution in economic thinking in the early 1970s that permeated its way into Western politics.
As inflation and unemployment ran rampant, a push gained momentum to get governments out of economic management.
Instead of taxes and government spending, interest rates and money supply were used to control our economic destiny.
Keynesian, which had dominated economic management in the aftermath of World War II, was replaced by Milton Friedman's monetarism and central banks assumed control of economic management.
It led to the rise of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Small government, lower taxes and privatisation became the creed.
Governments wanted business and entrepreneurialism to take the running and markets to determine how best to allocate resources.
Business boomed, profits soared, corporations went global and growth took off.
But several other things happened as well.
As in any boom, the spoils weren't equally shared. The power pendulum shifted from workers to firms.
Globalisation and trade liberalisation transferred entire industries from developed nations into the growth economies of Asia and particularly China.
Workers ended up with a much lower share of the national income, as this graph from the Reserve Bank shows.
That share has been in decline since the 1970s as wages have undershot the growth in profits.
Tougher industrial relations laws and the decline in union affiliation among workers are some of the reasons that explain the decline.
But improved technology and firms' ability to now employ workers in other countries at much lower rates have also had an impact, while in Australia the strong lift in population and working-age migrants has added to the workforce and lifted competition for labour.
Many economists and most business leaders often complain that for workers to achieve higher pay, they must lift their productivity.
Until the 1970s, that was the golden rule, and labour productivity rises were almost always accompanied by wage increases.
That's no longer the case.
This graph, in a recent Bloomberg study of American working conditions entitled, How the American Worker Got Fleeced, illustrates the breakdown.
After being in lockstep for decades, the nexus was severed by the onset of the new economic order as firms outgrew national borders and governments clamped down on labour disputes.
Reform or regress?
Once again, the winds of change are blowing through the global economy.
We've reached the limits of monetary policy. Global interest rates at zero and even below have fired up a surge in financial markets at the onset of the worst recession in at least a century.
Those with assets are being protected by central bank policy as tens of millions find themselves bereft of income.
Governments, including our own, previously committed to austerity and minimal intervention have been forced into an abrupt U-turn.
Nations were looking inward even before the onset of the pandemic as restless workers in Europe, the UK and US vented at the ballot box over lost jobs, stagnant incomes and declining living standards.
Politics is shifting to the extremes and the escalating power play between the US and China threatens to derail the great global expansion of the past 50 years.
There is plenty of scope for economic reform.
But the definition of reform is change for the better, change that will lift all society, not just a privileged few.
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