Former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has penned a stunning rebuke of John Howard’s claim yesterday that Liberal bipartisanship facilitated the crucial economic reforms of the 1980s and early-1990s. From The AFR:
It has become a creeping part of the orthodoxy of late that the reformation of Australia’s financial, product and labour markets between 1983 and 1996 was not executed by the Hawke and Keating governments but was some kind of project undertaken with the active co-operation of the then Liberal-National opposition…
The Liberal and National parties were in office for 34 years between 1949 and 1983, bar the three years of the Whitlam government. During those years they stuck to the old closeted, protected model of the economy…
…I give John Howard credit for his GST. It changed the tax mix but, of course, it never changed behaviour. And in his 12 years of office, I can think of no other change or group of changes which altered the micro-economy or trend productivity…
In my view, both Howard and Keating have a point.
Howard is right to argue that at least some of the big bang reforms implemented by the Hawke-Keating Governments would likely never have succeeded without the opposition’s backing.
By the same token, Keating is correct to assert that the Coalition had many years in government whereby they both attempted and achieved little, including under the Howard Government’s reign (implementation of the GST being the obvious exception).
Regardless, neither Keating nor Howard properly acknowledge that both sides of politics are currently behaving like children, and thus are preventing meaningful reform from taking place.
One only needs to look at the sorry state of retirement policy reform, whereby we witnessed Labor stupidly opposing tighter means testing of the Aged Pension, only to then see the Coalition entirely rule-out changing Australia’s egregious and inequitable superannuation concessions.
Both sides are more interested in one-upping the opposition rather than doing what’s in the long-term interests of the nation. And it is difficult to see how the situation will change while low rent political hacks like Abbott and Shorten are at the helm.
