In the pointiest of ends of global media, in those high-end magazines, university presses and Substacks, it’s hard to miss the all-but-settled consensus: we’re done with the late-20th-century neoliberalism that shaped the global political economy for nearly half a century.
In Australia? Not so much. Our political commentariat, comfortably embedded in traditional media that defines our Overton window, are all commentating like it’s 1989, singing along with Margaret Thatcher’s political slogan: “There is no alternative”.
The result? When Albanese’s Future Made in Australia announcement this month unveiled the first tentative steps towards whatever more government-interventionist political economy comes next, it was as though he’d, umm, farted in court.
“Flat earth economics”, thundered The Australian’s editorial; “A regression to the past”, sniffed the AFR. “Spare us this dog’s breakfast of failed thinking,” demanded News Corp’s economic expert Judith Sloan.
There was less analysis of what comes next and instead a desperation to whip the government back in behind the neoliberal line — that grab-bag of government retreat from the market through privatisation, deregulation (of corporations, at least), free trade and (aspirationally, at least) balanced budgets.
Too late. The world’s already moving on.
Walk into any bookshop, and you’ll find leading economic historians proclaiming the end of neoliberalism, leveraging their academic status to position as the leading public intellectuals of the political economy of now: Columbia’s Adam Tooze, Mariana Mazzucato at London’s University College, Berkeley’s J. Bradford DeLong, Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle or the godmother of modern monetary theory, Stephanie Kelton, and the rigorous explainer of inequality, Thomas Piketty (there’s an Australian front too, occasional Crikey contributor John Quiggin).
Their books bring heft, but the real intellectual fight is being slugged out across newsletters, long-form magazine articles and podcasts (and, yes, still sometimes on the platform formerly known as Twitter).
But the knee-jerk reaction to Future Made in Australia (like the “broken promise” of January’s rejigged tax cuts) demonstrated that too much of Australia’s traditional journalism remains obsessed with an “it’s all about the politicking” sensibility of “what just happened”. It’s poor at putting its collective finger on long-rolling trends, much less at picking turning points in those trends until we’re well into what comes next.
That’s nothing new, the same happened with the turn to neoliberalism itself. It was once seen as a shocking Reagan-Thatcher lurch — most writers now root it back to the early 1970s, or perhaps, in Australia, to the Whitlam government’s big ticket kick-start to free trade’s tariff reduction demand. (“Ill-conceived”, said the then Liberal opposition, in a reminder that then, as now, its opportunistic opposition usually comes before policy.)
Since the 1980s Australia’s political press corps has invested deeply in the “there is no alternative” narrative, led by the gallery’s influential thought leader, Paul Kelly, in his authoritative book The End of Certainty.
It turned the journalistic “holding to account” into a more political “holding the line” that judged governments by their fealty to the principles of neoliberalism, diminishing over time to a narrow focus on just one measure: the federal cash budget’s bottom line.
“There is no alternative” has had a tighter grip on Australia’s media, too, because it’s had a tighter grip on both major parties, with ownership of Australia’s particular neoliberalism journey contested between Labor’s “soft” (per Quiggin) or “left” (per Gerstle) version and the tougher (but still cautious) Howard version.
Now, the climate emergency is forcing change. Neoliberalism’s three big responses to the crisis have each failed: not marketising emissions through some sort of trading scheme, nor regulatory nudges like Dutton’s favourite opening up to nuclear, nor Morrison’s preference for some magical innovation.
Perhaps we won’t recognise how far we are into the new moment until we have a name for it. Just don’t say “green” or “climate”. We can’t be provoking the fossil fuel bear and the media outlets that support it, which in Australia is pretty much all of the ones that matter.
In the US, it’s “inflation reduction”. Even, briefly, “Bidenomics”. Here, Albanese seems to reckon he can pivot from neoliberalism under that most neoliberal of taglines: “The new competition.”
