Australia’s productivity debate is overlooking the deeper economic problems created by decades of neoliberal policy.
In response to downturns in Australia’s productivity, advocates of productivism are peddling a revised version of the old neoliberal ‘trickle-down’ dogma. Increased productivity, they assert, will return the economy to growth. They react negatively to any suggestions that worrying increases in inequality are what’s holding the economy and the country back.
What the productivists ignore is that the neoliberalism they’ve so assiduously defended has evolved into a form of monster capitalism that is beginning to devour itself. They assert, inter alia, that workers are lazy (as Pauline Hanson recently claimed), poorly motivated, controlled by dubious trade union apparatchiks, demanding unjustifiable pay increases or improved working conditions, resistant to upgrading their skills, or technology-shy (latter-day Luddites).
The result of the productivists’ neoliberal policy interventions and manipulations is an economy in which people are demoralised, disillusioned, reactionary and angry. They are also suffering. More and more people struggle with cost-of-living challenges while facing deteriorating infrastructure, degraded health services, disparities between regional and urban areas, crumbling public schools, disaffected teachers, and corrupt public elites, politicians and bureaucrats.
On the other hand, the privileged few and their productivist cheerleaders demonstrate little concern that many Australians today are living in a dangerously structured two-tiered economy and society. On the top level is a minority of the population who own a grossly unjust share of the country’s capital and who are able to bend the country’s political processes to serve their exclusive and exclusionary interests. On the lower level is the majority of people who are shut out from the commanding heights of public policy-making and so must suffer the consequences.
In the 1960s Donald Horne warned that Australia was run by “second-rate people”. Nothing has changed. Compared to their international counterparts (especially in the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the top economies in the EU), Australia’s business and political elites are dull and unimaginative, under-educated and narrowly provincial in their outlooks. They focus on their own interests, especially protecting and increasing their hyper-salaries. Their sense of entitlement assures them that what is good for them must be good for everyone.
For example, even though Australia’s security and prosperity are strategically dependent on cultivating good relations with the country’s Asian neighbours, the recent parliamentary report Building Asian Capability shows how ignorant Australia’s political, business and educational leaders are when it comes to speaking Asian languages, understanding the nuances of Asian cultures and politics, and successfully negotiating mutually beneficial agreements with their Asian counterparts.
Meanwhile, our educational institutions are failing to provide attractive and stimulating curricula in Asian studies to produce graduates who could provide Australia with the Asia literacy that the country so badly needs. For now, Australia’s widespread ignorance of Asia – much of it inflamed by racism – is one of its most negative cultural characteristics. The result is that the country’s political gaze remains nostalgically fixated – catastrophically so – on Britain and the United States, as the idiocy of the AUKUS deal continues to demonstrate in the face of all the evidence of it having been a dud deal right from the outset.
What the productivists need to understand is that what we can label as their economism is profoundly unphilosophical and devastatingly unethical. They assert that their advocacy of a deregulated and privatised economy is scientifically valid, value-free, objective. This is low-level scientism or positivism – a theory that stipulates that knowledge is strictly confined to the empirical world. It says that only what is observable and measurable is knowable. Any other view is dismissed as metaphysics, even though positivism is based on the flimsiest of metaphysical assumptions through which any undergraduate could drive a metaphorical freight train.
The point that the productivists must understand is that all psychological, social and political theorising is an exercise in moral philosophy. They need to examine the consequences of their neoliberalism, which disguises an immoral – even evil – set of economic arrangements that are most notable for producing widespread inequality and social injustice, while immuring the Australian belief in a ‘fair go’ in a fog of economistic gobbledygook. It’s not surprising that so many economics departments are so unattractive to today’s university students. They can see through the discipline’s unethical biases and its empirical limitations. They gain a different perspective by reading economic historians like Thomas Piketty, who have not only documented the growth of inequality worldwide, but have also exposed its fundamental immorality.
It’s time for the productivists to see that their economism is utterly wrong-headed, that their neoliberal adventurism has failed, both as a blueprint for public policy and as an ethically informed form of politics. What they badly need are lessons in moral philosophy and basic epistemology. Perhaps then they might realise that productivity will improve only when workers are treated with dignity and paid justly, that work should be meaningful and enjoyable, that it will not mean enslavement to AI and related technologies, and that the brutalising gaps between rich and poor are obviated, once and for all.
It’s high time that absolutely no CEO in any industry in Australia should be paid $6.5 million a year, or that absolutely no university vice-chancellor should be paid more than a million dollars, or that members of the professions (especially law and medicine) should not be allowed to price people out of receiving the best advice and most up-to-date treatments that should be their right.
Productivism is not the answer to Australia’s present economic problems. Answers will only be found when the country becomes a more independently minded nation, more self-reliant, while drawing from the best democratic principles and social practices evident in some of the Scandinavian countries and other, perhaps more surprising, social and political contexts.
Dr Allan Patience is an honorary fellow in political science in the University of Melbourne.