Another grey beard is on the hustings wrongly diagnosing our political ills. This time John Hewson:
Climate policy has now proved a defining element in the demise of a run of Australian political leaders, from John Howard through to Malcolm Turnbull.
…Each of the fallen increasingly played short-term, opportunistic politics, mostly for personal political advantage, on an issue upon which most Australians agree – the need to address climate change. How can it be that voters don’t get heard by our politicians, who claim to listen to and be in touch with their constituencies?
…Climate change policy has proved just too big an issue for our politicians and our political system to handle. It is reasonable to doubt the new Scott Morrison government will do any better – indeed, we may slide even further backwards.
Wrong. When I worked on the second climate change review during the rule of Julia Gillard – a spectacular piece of policy – it was often debated why Tony Abbott was getting more traction that the Government.
Complexity is one reason but not the key. The real reason was that most of Australia was in recession as house prices tumbled to “make room” for the RBA’s thirty year mining boom that ended in three.
This created a hotbed of discontent that even a very averagely talented demagogue like Tony Abbot could exploit.
Precisely the same thing has now killed Malcolm Turnbull.
This is the key point. No complex policy reform can get done until somebody owns up the bedrock fact of Australian politics; that broad living standards are falling. This simple reality holds every agenda hostage and it will not change until pollies stop lying about it.
This is a structural economic problem yet has been addressed repeatedly with cyclical solutions. Rate cuts for higher house prices, endless immigration for crushed wages and infrastructure pump-priming; fiscal deficits.
Instead, someone in power has to own up to the fact that the mining boom is over, that the housing booms are over, that mass immigration has more downsides than up including choked productivity. Only then will we get a plan to fix it that can reboot income growth per capita.
This is the disconnect that is killing PMs. Until living standards are raised on a per capita basis, or the plan to bring this about is laid out clearly, then headline numbers like GDP are only going to infuriate the polity because it disavows their lived experience every single day.
This is a kind of psychological abuse by the political system of the polity. It creates enormous anger. The result is that no PM can hold his polling support for long. That then opens the opportunity for the ambitious and ruthless to tear them down.
The fundamental problem is not climate policy. It is the mismanagement of the economy that only aims to keep a small number of property and mining rentiers in clover.
