Exit Strategy: Politics After the Pandemic. George Megalogenis, Quarterly Essay, Issue 82

Somewhere in the first third of this account of, and argument concerning, Australian politics and the COVID-19 pandemic, George Megalogenis — George Big Think, sorta — has a passage about Kevin Rudd’s ill-fated pink batts insulation scheme, part of the 2008 stimulus package. He might have been persuaded to leave that out because not only does it bring to mind the question of padding, but also because it is arguably an example of the padding it alerts us to.

In this essay on politics after the pandemic, there is an awful lot of politics from before the pandemic — rather more than is needed. Much of it is not politics at all, but rather policy and economics: related, but different things. About 85% of this essay is about the lead-up to the pandemic, lengthy discussions that go all the way back to the Whitlam era in detail, and touching on the Menzies era. Some of it is a reprise from Megalogenis’s earlier books, and he justifies it as a necessary prelude to his account of changed attitudes to government spending, and to federation. But these conclusions, when they come, are platitudinous and disjointed, even hesitant, written with none of the sureness with which he deals with something like the 1961 credit squeeze.

The strong suspicion would be that Megalogenis, perhaps the leading interpreter/theorist of contemporary Australia from the press pack, Hawke-era vintage, found out in writing an essay he couldn’t draw many strong conclusions about the nature of politics after the pandemic, or even suggest separate possibilities. One reason for that may be, simply, that everyone is thrown by the pandemic as a radical breach in the present (but if so, why try to write about politics after the pandemic?). But the other is that the pandemic has come at — and contributed to — a time in which Australian politics simply cannot be explained by the methods that Megalogenis has applied to understanding Australian politics over the years, and so interpretation breaks down.

Guess which one I reckon it is.

His argument about what has happened during the pandemic is not shockingly original, though he relates it with great narrative skill. The Morrison government, there largely by the accident of internal Liberal Party politicking and an election narrowly won by pitting regions against the city and resources states against Victoria, was suddenly forced to think in policy rather than political terms as the pandemic descended. This gave it no choice but to become what it never intended to be: an emergency Keynsian government handing out vast sums to businesses and individuals to maintain demand, and life itself. It made it impossible to duck the question of who should be running things like aged care and education — all the stuff John Howard had hived off.

This put the Morrison-Frydenberg government in the same space as the Rudd-Swan government in relation to our history of dealing with recessions actual and potential. Where, until 2008, we had been haphazard in our approach and often reluctant to prop up demand, the 2008 response broke with that voluntarily, and the 2020 COVID response out of necessity. But the latter opens possibilities for Morrison in the areas of economics, climate change, federation, etc, that he might pursue, and must pursue if he is to “accept responsibility for [our] future”. 

That’s a bit thin as far as politics after the pandemic goes, so no wonder there are several (illuminating) pages on Treasury-Reserve Bank relations in the 1960s when a paragraph would do. Megalogenis’s model of politics-policy relations in our era seems skewiff to me, a point to which I’ll return.

The hesitancy about making predictions might be because the rise of the Morrison government, the politics immediately preceding it, and its actions before and during COVID, really stand as a comprehensive refutation of the model of Australian history and possibility that Megalogenis has been arguing since Faultlines of 2003. His approach has been mostly wrong all the way through.

To say that is almost gauche, like farting in a Grattan Institute seminar on energy pricing. Megalogenis is the great big hope of journalists-as-intellectuals, with The Australian Moment of 2012 serving as a rallying point for progressives, offering the hope that this flood of resources, money and prosperity might float a broadly progressive Australia. Though there were the usual caveats, some of them forceful, about fortune-telling, Megalogenis’s arguments were that recent decades had laid the groundwork for a great national flourishing.

Now? Well, I mean look at the joint. The resources boom inflated a consumer and housing economy, drew resources and initiative away from non-dependent areas, misallocated the surplus, turned the Coalition into its client party, provided cover for the destruction of remaining heavy industry and created a monopsonistic relationship with a superpower we have wandered into a lethal clash of civilisations with. For years we have been undermining our university sector as both a place of free thought and an R&D sector, and then during COVID the government just took it behind the ute and shot it in the head.

Nothing has happened even remotely in the way Megalogenis sketched out as a model of political action. No wonder he is wary of offering anything more than a few commonplaces about “politics after the pandemic”. Nothing he could read off his past analysis, I would suggest, much fits the current conditions, and so he lacks a framework to give an account as bold as those earlier ones. 

The master error in Megalogenis’s account is one he shares with the rest of the class of 1983, especially Laura Tingle (the Megalogenis tingle is a feeling section editors get down their leg when they realise that the three-page hole in their looming weekend edition can be filled with an essay by George on the Ralph Willis era, or a plea by Laura for good government): the conflation of politics with policy because it dominated the Hawke years, a time when the opposition barely opposed its restructuring program. The Australian Moment was written in the overlap of the Rudd and Obama years, when it was possible to think rationality had made a return. Even the Abbott government had a program in its terrible budget. 

But the Morrison government marked the point at which pure politics took over. Team Morrison’s fusion of a secular religiosity, with his self-knowing tradie shots and the iron will to destroy the whole university sector, can’t be explained through policy analysis or the writers of Anglo-liberal traditions. You have to go to the dark European masters Schmitt and Strauss and others (or Boucher and Sharpe’s study of the Howard era, The Times Will Suit Them) to understand how things work now, to give us Scotty Jesus from marketing. 

Here’s the money quote from the essay:

But where the deaths of four young men helped undermine Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership in 2010, the deaths of 665 people in the Commonwealth-run aged-care sector in Victoria had no notable effect on the electoral position of either Morrison or Andrews in 2020 … People were beginning to trust their governments again.

(Page 66)

That last conclusion is exactly a 180 to the real direction of travel, and the point from which the whole essay unravels. Overall it is a breezy and readable piece, illuminating on our policy history, but the most useful thing George Big Think could give us now is an examination of how he got the recent history of this country so wrong, as it was happening.