This week’s news that Sussan Ley has been rolled by Angus Taylor has largely been met by yawns. Who really cares?
Nobody in their right mind thinks the Liberals are anywhere near being able to return as government. They are still redolent of the party in power, which did essentially nothing for three terms while blowing the national budget on Covid freebies for the already affluent, garnished by coal, the perception they may have an issue with women, and Peter Dutton’s use of his son as a housing battler, against the backdrop that in power they are more about doing things for themselves than they are for any of us.
That may be a problem for them, but not for most of us, now that they’re out of power. We don’t really want them back.
We have Albo and the ALP in power. They are in power with a very large parliamentary majority sitting on the foundation of a primary vote of only 36%. That means they have many members in parliament sitting on reasonably small electoral margins.
While nobody is seeing it right now, if something came along as a popular political cause, then the ALP could be in trouble.
Outside them we have the Greens and their open borders stance, the Nationals pushing the lines that play well in Tamworth, and a range of Independents who represent surprisingly good value on a number of issues, but are disparate.
Then we come to the focus du jour that is One Nation—having absorbed Barnaby and Cory Bernardi to go with Pauline. They have a plausible stance in the eyes of most Australians with their position on immigration volumes, and they are surfing that wave. But their ability to forge positions that would seriously challenge the duopoly we have had since WW2 is terra incognita.
All these factors contribute to a weaker polity than we have seen in previous generations, making it challenging to introduce policy reform into the political arena. The beneficiaries of this weaker policy reform environment are the large corporates, the public sector (state and federal) or taxation-funded employment, and largely the status quo.
That status quo has been crafted by all of the above over the course of a generation to consist of :
- Rising house prices
- Increasing private debt
- Increased employment insecurity
- Increased education cost
- Increased energy cost
- Increased immigration
These phenomena—which have been analysed with data at Macrobusiness for well over a decade—serve some basic purposes.
First of all, they underpin corporate profits. Australian corporations aren’t about competition in any meaningful sense. They are about harvesting Australian demand and supplying that demand at a margin that maximises corporate profits.
Think of them as mining consumers. In most sectors any significant competition is minimised by size—all sectors of consumer demand, from groceries to retail energy, the holidays, healthcare, aged care, the financing for any given consumer demand, insurance, banks, and telecoms, are dominated by large players who are largely owned or funded by global capital.
Where they aren’t about maximising profits by harvesting your demand, they are about maximising profits by harvesting Australia’s natural bequest with as little benefit for Australians as possible. Anything left for future Australians is a profit point or efficiency they could be making now.
They are also fronts for global capital. These, of course, include your BHP and RIO, to go with the Gas Cartel, and the large agribusiness concerns that have proliferated since the early 1990s and either directly produce or control the sectoral choke points and market access of much Australian primary production.
Although these sectors of the economy are profitable, they aren’t large employers, and although they certainly use skills, the skills they need are reasonably specific and only transferable to a like organisation undertaking a like activity.
Because that doesn’t absorb the range of skills evident in larger, diverse economies, the capital controlling those companies relies on the government to create a market for other skills and attributes beyond those required for primary production and export.
This is where government—state, federal, and local—steps in. Government creates demand for those skills and attributes that there is a ‘market’ for in most other developed nations.
The lawyers, the accountants, most medical and healthcare, academic and research institutions, all public servants, the marketing people, and almost all creatives.
Almost all of these, if they are not working directly under public employment or contract, will be working in an environment where government mandate, accreditation, health and safety, reporting and compliance, or risk management imperatives are shaped predominantly by government regulation.
This makes rising house prices, underpinned by heavy immigration, essential. The rising house prices make those even partly owning their homes more potentially affluent—even if it consigns those renting to ever greater trauma.
It enables those from the top—owning their homes outright—to retain the implied support from those who, in a falling house price market, would either diminish their spending scope, increase their repayment need, and potentially expose themselves to consideration of whether the mortgage they have is worth it.
The immigration volumes, which essentially present an Australian way of life as being purchasable for nationals of countries where the quality of life is lesser or where Australian law makes them safer from authority in their homelands, make the issue of Australian rents one of the Australian way of life still being purchasable as long as employment can be found here—or there is capital enabling the education in Australia.
That employment is generally at the lower end of complexity and remuneration and, again, is government driven—in a nation with the highest levels of temporary employment and casualization in the OECD. That brings us back to the government or a large bureaucracy, where they join, as minnows, joining countless Australians.
It is here that these people will join existing Australians in their experiences of management—either their own if they are directly employed by a larger entity, or the mother ship, if they are contracted to someone with a contract with the larger entity. Think of office cleaners or maintenance types.
Beyond that, in the offices where Australians undertake office work in its many guises, Australia has had an explosion in toxic workplaces or claims of toxic management over the course of a generation.
Many public sector organisations regularly report that half their workforces have experienced bullying or harassment or staff which don’t have confidence in their own managements. Many smaller contractors default to a mindset of ‘it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t need to be done; it is in the contract so we do it’.
More and more of the work undertaken requires less intelligence and more compliance, which mitigates against the need for the education in the first place.
Ultimately the people undertaking this work wallow, become transactional, and quietly quit or find another job. In contemporary Australia, the other job is as likely to include a quiet quitting need as the one they are leaving.
At a higher political level, the electorate experiences its politicians behaving exactly the same way. Barefaced lies are asserted, data is denied, and discussions avoid acknowledging key issues.
Those who ask uncomfortable questions or point out data that contradicts the given narrative are sidelined, quietly shuffled out the door, or become ‘unpersons’ who cannot express their views.
This is how the views in the electorate have largely ceased to matter and why the public domain is filled with countless lines that barely touch on the lived experiences of ordinary Australians—regardless of whether their families have been here for generations or if they got off the plane last year.
This is how voters have largely tuned out the politicians and the corporations and bureaucrats connected to them.
We are being ‘managed’ and the managers are more concerned with their own circumstances and imperatives and the unknown imperatives of something shaping their actions.
These issues are something to think about next time you are waiting in line being told, “Your call is being recorded for coaching purposes”. Is that coaching for better service for people like you, or is it to discipline someone?