Yesterday in America, President Donald Trump was handed another small gift by his liberal opponents. Just to add to the big pile they helped deliver last November. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow declared, “What I have here is a copy of Donald Trump’s tax return,” and then righteously tore the wrapper on nothing. Nothing but an endorsement of that monster’s clean compliance with the law. But yesterday in Australia, Trumpism copped its first meaningful public kick. There may be few more stupefied than me that this was powerfully delivered by the Greens.
If we can see past his occasional reflex to behave like a sensitive human resources manager, Richard Di Natale made some urgent sense at his National Press Club address. He had something to say, and it was said in plain language. Most leaders will declare, as Di Natale did, that they seek to speak beyond the press elite and directly to the people. Well, slap my arse with a red flag and call me Antonio Gramsci! RDN actually did it.
This is a nuisance for me personally as I have been adding to a document full of half-written jokes about a party long in the habit of cheesy virtue-signalling. It now seems unlikely that I will reference Larissa Waters’ call to have gender-neutral lavatory signs installed in Barbie’s biodiesel campervan at any time before the next election. But, this is no great cultural loss at all, most especially when set against the gains made from Canberra yesterday.
The leader was not speaking entirely to an audience of sympathetic journalists. He was speaking to voters who have a sense, even if unexamined, of our social approach toward some kind of limit. If RDN wanted to keep his fans at The Guardian and BuzzFeed completely on side, he would have echoed the injunctions that they write and that commentators like Maddow have unstintingly offered since the Western re-emergence of the nativist right. It would have been all, “People vote for meanies because they’re bad” and “white men are toxic” and “love Trumps hate!”
He did not describe Trump, and Trumpism, as a failure of public morality. He described these as the product of economic settings, often endorsed by liberals themselves.
[The problem is not that men don’t want women to work. The problem is there are no damn jobs.]
My friend Bernard Keane’s unique understanding of what is meant by the term “neoliberalism” notwithstanding, the distinct policy era to which that term is usually applied was a central focus for RDN. He said that it, “is an ideology that is now so thoroughly discredited, the impacts so widely despised, that the people of America were prepared to elect a dangerous, unstable, narcissist as their president to overturn it.”
The victory of Trump is largely the failure of a market-friendly regime. This is just the sort of thing I’d expect one of the West’s most prophetic political economists to say. Harsh economic conditions govern the behaviour of the people. This is just the sort of thing I’d expect me to say. Government has become a committee for managing the affairs of the rich. Well, we know who said that.
This is not to suggest, as News Corp erroneously has for so long, that Di Natale has come over all Marxist. But, like the post-Keynesian thinkers from which a great deal of Greens policy is now derived, Di Natale appears to share some genealogy with that great 19th-century philosopher. You don’t have to be a commie to agree with the very idea of a political economy; something that is a social organism and not merely a collection of organs. You just have to have a little discomfort with Margaret Thatcher’s two most famous denials: “there is no such thing as society” and “there is no alternative” to what is generously called a “fluid” labour market.
Di Natale had been foreshadowing his speech to media with hints about unveiling a plan for a four-day working week. As he appears, unlike most of the policy class, to acknowledge the growing problems of underemployment and “fluid” conditions, this was total spin. He didn’t really talk about formally reduced labour hours at all — what’s to reduce when the secure 40-hour week is itself becoming fiction?
But we can forgive him this moment of cheap promotion. It meant that he was able to utter a truth many of us can detect with our senses: there’s not gonna be that many jobs soon.
Malcolm can talk all he will about innovation and the infinite capacity for capitalism to produce new employment opportunities. The fact is, the private wealth accumulation our Prime Minister has championed for so long, delivered innovation of such excellence, it’s about to put many of us out of work. The robots are coming, said RDN. This need not be cause for panic. This must not be cause for another dose of Thatcherism. It is cause, he said, for a revised Keynesianism. And then, he broke the seal on the policy discussion we were always going to have, Universal Basic Income. (UBI. In the Green lexicon, Adequate Income Guarantee or AIG.)
[Our kids face a jobless future, and pollies (even Bernie) have been utterly useless]
If we don’t have the energy to exact all property from the perspiring hands of the investor class, then UBI is the best thing we’re left with. It is, in the view of many economists including Yanis Varoufakis, the best chance capitalism has for survival. So, it’s hardly a communist fancy. In fact, one of its early iterations, Negative Income Tax, was sketched by none other than Milton Friedman. Today, the IPA still tool around with Uncle Milty’s dream. The appeal for the material right is that free money for all will mean an easy end to Centrelink and all programs of welfare for the poor, and some bonus capital for the rich.
Policymakers on both sides have been talking about UBI among themselves for some time — although he did not mention it during his campaign, Bernie Sanders has been in favour of it for a few years. If quietly applied per the neoliberal preference, UBI will simply reinforce the divide between rent-seekers and the rest of us. If spoken about publicly and frankly, it has a greater chance of serving a greater number of people.
And this was RDN’s great achievement yesterday: to speak publicly and frankly about our political economy. Sure, he made concessions to his base and mentioned words like “love”. He introduced the good young speaker Nada Kalam in a fairly clumsy manner. He congratulated the lady journalists in the room. But, he was also the first Australian politician in a very long time to go to all the bother and the risk of honestly describing the national future.
Shit. I’m probably going to have to vote for them now.
Jury is still out on the actually voting for but I will concede a step in the right direction from RDN. I am keeping a close eye on him. Which less face it is not any real sort of threat to the Greens
Great article. Thank God someone with prominence on The Left is finally playing the vintage game again: ‘It’s The Economy Stupid’
Im surprised that anyone is surprised that Richard is the first politician to grab this one by the horns, this sits squarely in the centre of the Green sustainable paradigm , and lets face it we either transition to this paradigm or we destroy the world and everything on it
Pleasantly surprised, Susan. The Greens have had the previous habit of burying their economic policies and keeping their ideas to themselves. Even on their website, their macro aims have been very scantily described to date. This is not to say they haven’t been big fans of Minsky, or whoever. For all we know, they could have been talking nothing but Modern Monetary Theory/UBI/covert socialism. The point is that they’ve decided to lead with this, for the very first time, in public. It’s a huge shift for a party that has long called out a lack “compassion”. It now says that people are basically decent, but harsh conditions force them into terrible decisions. Publicly, this is a major shift. They’ve gone from being idealist to materialist. In this sense, it’s surprising.
Ive never thought their policies were difficult to find but I cant count the number of people who would agree with you on that. I think the main problem they have, and its taken me a while to come up with this theory, is that they dont explain that they are not presenting a different policy program but a different paradigm. For example they want to progress organic farming, but farmers argue that they cant afford to reduce yeilds and support the increase in manual labour that organic farming demands because people wont pay more for food to cover the increase in costs. But in the new paradigm people would be willing to pay higher prices for healthy food.
So people criticise Greens policies because they wont work in the current 20th century post industrial paradigm and Greens politicians dont make clear that we need to change the whole shebang not just tweak a few policies here and there.
I think the problem is how do we transition to the new paradigm ? In the example I used of farming it may be that it is forced upon us due to climate change induced food shortages that are hard to imagine in this time of plenty and plenty of waste.
I’m talking specifically about their economic policies, S. There was for the longest time the merest description of basic Keynesianism (spend in a bust) and very little else.
We know that there have been members agitating for a more open economic focus since the last election. They’ve written it all over Facebook and the Graun. This really, truly is the first speech that frankly describes economic policy as it currently is by any leader in years. It is a big change!
Again I think theyve been talking economics but new paradigm economics that doesnt necessarily involve terms like the next to useless ‘GDP’, the renewable energy programme that Labor introduced under Gillard was largely developed by Christine Milne and Ben Oquist and it has been hailed internationally as one of the most far reaching and comprehensive green energy packages developed anywhere in the world, and if we’re talking about transforming one of the most important sectors of a modern economy – the energy sector – then we’re talking macro economics.
Compare that to the crap Turnbull and the rest of the Murdoch minions came out with today, a load of cobbled together shite most of which will never happen
And the Greens are the pixies at the end of the garden ?
well if that were true then this government are the goblins in our worst nightmares and those nightmares are now real
Susan – the surprise, not to say stunned mullet amazement, is that the Black W(r)iggle, the greyest least green leader the Greens have ever had, has finally come out with something that has been Green policy for decades.
Don’t forget that he is so dumb that he agreed to the first attempt by Talcum Trumble to rig the Senate voting by allowing Above the Line optional voting without allowing it Below the Line as per decades of Green policy.
Only Xenophon saved him from himself and the nation from a rubber stamp Senate.
RDN put it out for all to hear, understand, and invited an open conversation. Refreshing and challenging. Alas, on reading Murdoch Media . . . same old, same old. Anything that conflicts with their world view is either dispatched by outright denial/obfuscation or; by minimising the message. Thus a reduction of RDN’s message to a straight forward single issue; RDN wants us to all work less hours i.e. adopt a four day week.
With you on this one Helen.
It’ll only be a discussion.
Sadly no mention of one of the biggest issues driving people towards Trump (and Hanson locally), and a key tenet of neoliberalism, the use of high levels of immigration to suppress wages.
Especially in the short term, a UBI is basically just a subsidy to business. A Jobs Guarantee is a better solution.
…because we can’t let the Christian work ethic die, right?
No, the Protestant work ethic is toxic.
A jobs guarantee is preferable so people feel engaged with their society, rather than just passive consumers looking for the cheapest place to spend their meagre subsistence UBI.
The most likely outcome in a UBI world, is a handful of workers putting in long, hard hours to make a reasonable income and everyone else with a UBI that’s just high enough to stop them taking to the streets with torches and pitchforks. It’s a fast-track to a massively stratified class society with wealth gaps that’ll make the ones we have today look positively desirable.
The problem with UBI believers is they think it will make everyone comfortably well-off (ie: the UBI will be roughly equivalent to an upper middle class income). The most likely reality is that it will put nearly everyone at the same level of poverty (ie: it’ll maybe be equivalent to a full time minimum wage job).
The thing is, DR Smithy, if some kind of UBI miraculously comes to be it will not be comparable to a full-time minimum wage – it will be comparable to the (un-indexed) dole.
Yeaah, but the equivalent earnings of a full time job at minimum wage is quite a lot more than the many, many underemployed Australians working part time or casual currently receive, not to mention Centres benefit recipients, and a Job Guarantee will only offer a full time job on minimum wage, too.
I’m with Helen: di Natale didn’t go far enough, but at least he publicly broached the issue of needing to fairly distribute income in a post employment capitalist world.
I’m a little puzzled as to why we on the left have this either/or attitude to UBI and JG. I’m not sold on the idea that we need to engage with society by working to feel needed. I haven’t worked for well over a year because I’m financially able to do without it right now and I certainly don’t feel disengaged from society, in fact, it’s the reverse. Having the leisure to read and study has deepened my engagement. But there’s still lots of work to be done in Australia and no one is doing it, so I see merit in a JG for those who want to get stuck in.
I worry about the universality of a UBI purely because I worry about the current skew of income, the calibre of the creatures that govern us and what has happened in the past. Look at Aged Pensions. They started as universal income support, everyone paid for them with 1% of their taxation and now the universality has eroded away entirely.