The only thing wrong with Labor’s new revival of Australian industry policy is the way that it has wrapped it around military production, specifically the vast expense devoted to AUKUS materiel and hardware.
Look, I can see why the ALP did it. Too clever by half. It really jams the Coalition up. Start bawling too much about free trade and featherbedding etc and Labor can ask why the Libs and Nats are being traitors and white-anting our defence capability.
But it seems not even that is required. A “made in Australia” policy is popular. It’s never been out of popularity with the mass of the population, simply with the elite. Occupying the world’s only continent-nation-state, there has always been a sense that we should have some components of self-reliance.
Components of self-reliance at this point. Full self-reliance is obviously impossible, save at a much reduced standard of living and technical level. But we would want — and here we are talking military exigencies — to have the structures in place to retreat to that more spartan and directed way of life, should the balloon go up.
By “balloon” I mean of course a regional or world war, one that stays at the non-nuclear level by common unspoken agreement and is a series of interlocking struggles. Then we would have major disruptions to sea lanes and imports, and we might want the capacity to produce our own tech and medications, and process the stuff we have plenty of that we ship overseas.
That is the necessity that in part drives greater self-reliance. That we would fight for our community to continue, and not roll over and die/surrender. That would be a factor in industry policy even if the AUKUS crap wasn’t lacing us into US forward projection of its infinitely extended empire as “defence”.
The baying chorus of ’80s tragics that have been howling down the policy since it was launched haven’t factored any of that in. They’re stuck in the Hawke-Keating period, when China was still an inward-turned peasant nation, US hegemony was total, and the global South was our plantation.
We were in the waiting room for the End of History, with the USSR losing its vestigial legitimacy long before it collapsed. In Australia, the only cause of modernisers was to get rid of that deadening, backward protection regime that reached into every corner of Australian life.
There’s a certain type of anti-protectionist from the era for whom the ending of what was unquestionably a degraded, sedimented, backward system was about more than just a shift of economic settings. For them — and Paul Keating was the most prominent among them — tearing down the tariff walls would liberate us, help us become something more than the rather dowdy burg that protection had made us.
There was never really any public support for it per se. Ken Daidson’s Dissent magazine through the ’90s and into the 2000s used to run polls on support for Australian production and public ownership, and, to the best of my recall, it always came out as holding a clear majority.
The political, media, and public service elite just believed that this had to happen, and so they imposed it. The process almost lost Labor the 1990 election when Andrew Peacock, sniffing the wind, came out against the “Multi Function Polis”.
This was a bizarre Japanese proposal for a Japanese-Australian super-city which served as a convenient — and not always morally, er, sound — image for the world Hawke and Keating were creating. The Coalition actually won a narrow overall majority in that election, just not in the right places.
Labor escaped again in 1993, even after the full bonfire of tariff walls and unnecessary privatisations when John Hewson took the Coalition even further to the free market right, while also spruiking a GST, which double tap of genius has landed John the plum spot of an op-ed slot in The Saturday Paper.
Keating’s “necessary” recession and an austerity budget had him finished in 1996, but only because John Howard recognised that resistance to a reconstructed Australia had now shifted to the cultural register.
As the real structures of the Australian way of life were demolished, Keating transmuted “Australianness” through symbols, kissing Kokoda, palling around with concert pianists, berating the country for not producing greatness, etc.
Had you asked the mass of Australian people at anytime from 1996 on whether they would have preferred that there be a state-owned Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, etc, and protection for Australian industries to develop, they would have said yes.
Had you said, correctly, that this would raise prices on various goods, they would, I believe, still have said yes, until you ratcheted the price beyond a certain point.
This desire for a real commonwealth, however partial or compromised, having slumbered, has been revived. No surprises why. We live in a multipolar world now. In the 40 years since, the US is being pushed out of its assumed role of “total empire”, one present everywhere.
Meanwhile, Chinese, Asian and Indian middle-working classes are now vast, and have vast consumer power. That provides new markets, but it also provides new competition — one factor in the shortage of many common medications, for example.
But the new powers and nations are also being nationalist, in a spirit of doing something obvious: who would prefer an abstract ideal to one’s people? The Australian public has noticed, and their never-abandoned desire for more self-reliance has met up with objective national interest and mirrored by our potential adversaries.
No wonder the neoliberals — left, right, and those who can’t decide from one month to the next whether they’re neoliberal or not — howl at the moon! They did what many have done: generalised the period of their lives as a universal and unending condition, and so now they simply rage at the obvious sign that things have changed.
But many have also missed the deeper cultural and existential reasons for renewed industries. We should not only have a government steering production to some degree, and using the vastly improved computing power we have to do so. We should be making more stuff here too.
Yes stuff, actual stuff, actual things. We should, to some degree, at a national and regional level, make more of the things of our life, and know that we are doing so. Why? Because we are a physical, social, cooperative species, not the airy avatars of economic models, point particles of labour and desire.
We derive our most basic sense of meaning, connection and purpose from some sense of making and remaking the world we live in, and will bring children up into. However vestigial an industry policy is, it is some restoration of that ground that has been worn away by the 20th century and by the enthusiastic neoclassicals and neoliberals.
You can see from history what happens when some reality of security is swept away. You can see it now in the right-wing tide sweeping Europe. Or in the support for Donald Trump in 2016, and perhaps again in 2024.
Where the ground is swept away it is rebuilt in air, as symbols, memes, obsessions of a more compressed and simplistic form representing collective life, to supply an analogue of the lost reality. When the ground is totally swept away, then the myth must be total, and therefore extremely violent, i.e. fascism.
Ideally, a revived manufacturing and “made in Australia” policy would be a gateway to a deeper regrounding of life, however modest the start. By that I mean the revival of making, small-scale production, etc, taken wholly or partly out of the commodity system altogether.
That is partly through public ownership, and through state frameworks making fully cooperative production far more possible — by reduced working weeks, state support, zoning changes etc, alternative measures of social and economic activity, etc.
The era of national decommodification has already begun in China. The place is obviously on a post-capitalist path. It, and others, can’t believe what our useful idiot elites gave away by deindustrialisation, uprooting not merely physical plant but the cultural and intellectual “plant” that industry deeply embeds and then in turn develops from.
The ’80s fan club have no way of understanding this, no desire to. It’s fantastic that the Murdoch right seem determined to enforce an ’80s style “economic rationalist” model on the Coalition so that it must ride out and argue against a policy that is aligned with people’s deeper assumptions about solidarity and loyalty.
Hopefully the AFR and the middle pages of The Weekend Australian will thunder on about what a depredation it is, how immoral to want the money you spend to buy a fellow Australian a job. The horror! Most other rights in the world has been busy getting rid of free market policies (Milei of Argentina being the rule-proving exception, and experiment, as Argentina always is).
Please Liberals, and media, and (ex-)public service elites, continue to misread history, the present and the public mood. Growl about “picking winners” and “animal spirits”, and that the marketplace comprises the whole of the city. Given that you’re just about to announce the six electorates that will get a nuclear reactor, you’re doing great, honey.
Hopefully Labor will decouple this policy more actively from the trajectory of death it has set us on with the AUKUS commitment. The public support is there to do so, and to actually have a more imaginative idea of possibility and the future. Been a little critical of Labor of late, but two cheers for them on this one.
Should we be making more things in Australia? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
