Is the Productivity Commission neoliberal? Of course, many might say. Many on the Left, that is — “an advisory body that facilitates the development of neoliberal policy”; “part of a neoliberal agenda to push costs from society — by taxing the rich — onto individuals, which discriminates against women and the low-paid”; “providing advice that from a neoliberal mindset is rational, but may be politically inconvenient”; “the commission, in my view, is far too dominated by economists. Worse still, these economists are predominantly advocates of neoliberal economics.”
Not so, according to Peter Harris, outgoing chair of the commission, professing not to know what the term actually means, noting that there were a wide range of economic views within the commission and that, for an allegedly neoliberal body, it was odd that it had produced the crucial report that led to the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme or the study being presented by Harris and his fellow commissioner Jonathan Coppel yesterday, on changing inequality in Australia (take-out: it has worsened, but not by much, and not by much lately).
All of which is correct, and relevant. Nonetheless I disagree somewhat with my former boss. Back in the 1990s, I worked under Harris in the Department of Transport implementing national competition policy in the rail sector, and received a solid imprinting of Hawke-Keating era policymaking of a kind that has long gone out of fashion in this reform-averse era. There remain plenty of policymakers from that era in the top levels of the APS — Daryl Quinlivan, now Secretary of Agriculture, was also there in rail; Mike Mrdak, for years Transport, and now Communications, Secretary was in Aviation at the time. But the politicians have changed. And the electorate more so.
Harris’ point about the ill-definition of neoliberalism is an important one, and not just because the Left defines neoliberalism as pretty much any policy they dislike. Even the most ardently neoliberal governments of the last 30 years have often been conspicuous failures against the kind of criteria universally agreed as the markers of contemporary market economics. Government spending has grown, not shrunk. Intervention has persisted, in subtler forms. Favourite industries — like agriculture here — continue to get handouts. Infrastructure investment is skewed by political priorities.
And while I’ve argued that neoliberalism proved to be an inherently unstable model, one that delivered too much power to corporations at the expense of workers and consumers and thus contained the seeds of the backlash that is now destroying it, that’s not to say that many of its characteristics don’t have both good and bad sides. The way in which neoliberalism strips away other forms of identity — racial, gender, sexual preference, tribal — in favour of imposing a purely economic identity, in which one’s value is solely as a producer or consumer, ends up instead reinforcing tribalism and nationalism, for example. But the meritocratic principle at the heart of it is good for public policymaking. Why should one sector get assistance and another miss out? Why should influence, rather than efficiency, provide the basis for government support? If someone is to be supported, why not use the most efficient method, rather than a mechanism that the evidence shows is less effective?
That is, within the neoliberal “agenda” is a willingness to call bullshit on policy, to demand that it stacks up in terms of efficiency and fairness, to compel an explanation of why government is helping some groups and not others and, if so, whether it’s doing it as efficiently as possible; whether, in short, government is maximising community welfare (and even, sometimes, animal welfare). That’s why Harris is right to note the NDIS report or yesterday’s inequality report. Both are fundamentally about maximising community welfare. Are we looking after people with disabilities as efficiently and effectively as possible? If not, how can we do so? Is inequality growing in Australia? And who is stuck at the bottom? How do we best target that small number of people left behind by decades of economic growth?
The PC is no more perfect than other institutions, and can fall into groupthink and unquestioned orthodoxy like the rest of us can. But it’s neoliberal in the best sense, the sense that demands better public policy to maximise outcomes for the community. The sense most often ignored by politicians.
Hard to put too much faith in an organisation that spouted all the usual debunked BS regarding the cut to Penalty Rates.
Clearly the Productivity Commission is an inherently neo-liberal institution. It is constituted to see us purely as an economy, not a society living in communities. The only (or at least dominant reason) the commission recommended NDIS was that it would make the disabled and disadvantaged more productive and by neo-liberal economic magic NDIS will pay for itself. It may. But the point is the NDIS was not founded on any basis of compassion or sense of equity. That Harris claims to not know what ‘neo-liberalism’ means displays either ignorance or stupidity given that volumes of philosophical and political-economic texts written about it since the early 1990s. To defend aspects of neo-liberalism on the basis that at least it embeds ‘meritocracy’ misses the point that ‘meritocracy’ has long been a cover for maintaining wealth inequity.
And the NDIS will suffer the same fate as other outsourced programs – blind faith in competition and ‘consumer choice’ will destroy the quality of disability care as charlatans enter the field, as the workforce becomes casualised and deskilled, and those organisations with long-standing expertise and sufficient funding to deliver good quality services lose out to said charlatans.
The evidence is that this already happening. I predict within 10 years there will be a commission into the NDIS
“Harris’ point about the ill-definition of neoliberalism is an important one, and not just because the Left defines neoliberalism as pretty much any policy they dislike.” – Indeed (and I’ll let slide on this occasion the use of “the Left” as if it’s a monolith, because neoliberalism as a buzzword for “thing I don’t like” is just so bloody pervasive at the moment).
It’s interesting to get an insight into the Productivity Commission because to those of us outside government it’s a black box that spits out reports of varying quality which the government of the day cherry picks for their own use and uses for the classic appeals-to-authority. The Productivity Commission said it therefore it is gospel (except the bits the government doesn’t want to use, those bits aren’t).
I accept the general intention to carry out evidence-based policy development and maximise community outcomes, and sometimes the PC gets the blame for the way ideological governments carry out PC recommendations.
For example, on Penalty Rates. The PC suggests there is no real basis for Saturday and Sunday penalty rates being different and recommends they be aligned to create a weekend rate. That actually makes sense. The recommendation is not “reduce the Sunday rate to the Saturday rate” or “cut penalty rates entirely”. The PC also said “Penalty rates have a legitimate role in compensating employees for working long hours or at asocial times”. The actual decision by Fair Work to do the government’s dirty work on cutting penalty rates was not a PC decision and who knows how much weight they even gave the PC report on the subject.
“‘the commission, in my view, is far too dominated by economists. Worse still, these economists are predominantly advocates of neoliberal economics.”
Well, the fact that it is largely dominated by economists is axiomatic, they write the bloody reports and do most of the sums. That the field of economics has largely been derelict and without rigour has been evidenced by much of the last 20 years of public policy. There have been numerous exceptions in Australia and overseas, but overwhelmingly public policy based on base economic predictions have been demonstrably wrong, and they still aren’t close to that admission.
You are right about the slipperiness of the term neoliberal, but its definition is much less slippery than that vile term ‘merit’. The great issue here is that merit invariably is measured by income and wealth, subliminally and liminally, and that is rarely challenged (except in books like ‘bullshit jobs’ which you referenced yesterday.
Actual meritocracy is valiantly fought against by the right, the mid-right, the far right, sections of the left and most of the far left. It’s the hardest term to wrestle to the ground, and invariably is set against the deepest prejudices and biases hidden from the person defining it.
The PC has also been a tool of government, providing a veneer of respectability to otherwise crappy thought bubbles. I like the idea of the NDIS, but the outsourcing model has attracted charlatans by the hundreds already. Outsourcing itself has never been discussed by the PC to my knowledge and is a major failure of western democracies, as has been the austerity programs overseas.
A good idea, an often failing institution.
I would have thought a pure neoliberal attitude to disability would be to let the disabled beg on the street.
A lot actually are, especially those with mental health issues. They sleep on the streets of Melbourne due to a woeful lack of public housing.