If nothing else, former prime minister Paul Keating’s recent intervention in the national security debate was a reminder of what cut-through really looks like.
In his condemnation of Aukus, Keating not only challenged the Albanese government to better articulate Australia’s strategic interests, but his vitriol also served as a stark counterpoint to the glib technocracy that too often passes for modern public communication.
As Jim Chalmers puts the finishing touches to his first fully fledged budget, Keating’s National Press Club performance is a reminder of a time when budgets lasted beyond the news cycle as critical nation-building tools.
Through the 1980s, Keating drove significant economic reform by telling the nation a story: the self-styled Plácido Domingo belting out his aria with each budget cycle, building on the melody in fresh and sometimes surprising ways.
Pointedly, these variations were the product not just of economic imperatives but of geopolitical ones; an accord with unions synthesising macro and micro trends to build new strands in the social safety net as Australia confronted globalisation.
Floating the dollar, clearing trade barriers, simplifying awards, redirecting taxes, embedding Medicare and creating universal superannuation, Keating built a consensus for change by raising the nation’s economic literacy, spinning yarns that became their own form of music.
According to this week’s Guardian Essential poll, our current economic literacy leaves much to be desired. We asked respondents to rate their understanding of the budget and then took them through a series of truths and lies to see how much they actually understood. You can read the questions here.
The findings are confronting – about half of Australians would fail a simple test on what the budget is. Of those who make it through, older Australians (those who were exposed to Keating’s Treasury tuitions, perhaps?) are more likely to score a pass.
Why should we care? With low economic literacy, budgets become fringe performance pieces. The deficit becomes an analogy for the family budget, taxes are a sin, funding announceables are devoid of context. The nation is divided into witless winners and losers while the cartoonists torture metaphors for their once-in-a-year front page turn.
To make matters harder for the government, our research shows that disengaged punters want more spending on just about everything, while refusing to tax anyone more except the “foreign companies”.
While this is important work, it is no magic pudding given global capital’s access to the accounting consultancies who not only design tax codes but make their living helping their well-heeled clients avoid them.
Keating’s Press Club shooting gallery also reprised an era where the media operated as a genuine conduit to the public rather than a stakeholder to be managed or, worse, a bully to be feared.
Keating was never subtle with his media relations; he too boasted of placing select journos on “the drip” but he turned press conferences into information sessions that made his reforms less susceptible to self-serving scares. In the words of his speechwriter Don Watson he was a political leader who “was determined to be master of his environment rather than the opportunist waiting for times to suit him”.
Unsurprisingly, Jim Chalmers prepares for next week’s budget with a much lower public recognition than Keating had in his prime. While just one-third of Australians can name him, those who do are much more likely to rate his performance positively. In other words, those watching closely, seem to like what they are seeing.
Of all the senior figures in the Albanese government, Jim Chalmers hints he may be the one to bring our economic challenges to life. His embrace of alliteration, with his three Rs is a sign of positive intent: reducing prices and rebuilding supply chains, although reifying restraint as if parsimony is a self-evident good seems discordant.
To fill out this repertoire, it might be worth going back to his time in opposition and his contribution to What Happens Next? a collection of essays published by Per Capita in the midst of the pandemic, a time when progressives dreamed on Zoom of building back better.
Chalmers presciently embraces a form of creative destruction: “We need to surge forward to new thinking, new ideas and a new, more prosperous and inclusive economy, one built on a new honesty about the flaws and failings of the pre-Covid economy – not ‘snap back’ to neoliberalism, protectionism or nativism.”
Covid did not treat people equally, he argues: “those who started with the least have lost the most,” challenging Australians to think about the workers whose contribution was really valued when it mattered and to reassess their attitudes to those in need.
In his essay, Chalmers references American geographer Jared Diamond, who holds that in times of flux, individuals and nations must change in ways consistent with their true identities. “Diamond’s idea that crises are more likely to be averted or dealt with successfully by countries with the ‘ego strength’ that comes from knowing who and what they are, and that gives us the confidence to deal with the next crises or opportunity, applies to us now,” he writes.
Three years on, that self-identity is expressed in stark terms in our final question; when given the choice between investing in people and paying down the national debt racked up during the pandemic, the priority has to be on people.
Left to its own devices, the story of this budget would be one of regret as a progressive government confronts the compromises it made in order to attain power. The Aukus submarines deal and the stage-three tax cuts represent not just significant drains on the budget but opportunity costs for other important initiatives.
The refusal to address the loopholes that favour the wealthy in their calculation of property (negative gearing), shares (franking credits) and intergenerational wealth transfer (family trusts) compounds this tight fiscal straitjacket.
But there is a stronger rhythm beating just beneath the surface, consistent with Chalmers’ lockdown musings. Funding of childcare is a productivity measure to increase women’s labour market participant while increasing the quality of the next generation of learners.
The energy transition investments in pursuit of a renewable, electrified future, is a long-term strategy to reduce energy prices and relieve our national reliance on brittle global energy supplies.
But it goes further than that, not so much hinting but demanding a Labor government finds a way of repairing the damaged social safety net, not just the broken income support system, but the privatised jobs placement services, the parlous social housing and low-end rental markets that disproportionally affect the young.
It is impossible to see how this song ends in anything other than deferring the tax cuts to the very wealthy before they take effect in 13 months’ time. The notion of $9,000 extra in the pockets of everyone earning more than $200,000 is fundamentally at odds with our sense of self and our sense of nation.
Chalmers biggest budget challenge is not making the numbers add up, it’s making sure the words make sense as well.
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
