In a world riven by crises, we need new ways of thinking, knowing, and relating. We also need courage. The challenge is huge. There will be no return to a pre-Covid-19 normal, which for many Australians meant poverty, hardship, and marginalization. This book had rich promise but is a missed opportunity. A comprehensive, coherent vision of a just society post pandemic society still needs to be written.
Tanya Plibersek’s book, Upturn, is 260 pages with 30 contributors promising a ‘better normal’ post-Covid Australia. The promise is not realised.
For the Australian Labor Party, the search for a new “light on the hill” has never been more urgent. The party faces another election defeat, declining membership, and a movement that talks openly about social justice, but there are irksome shadows: Rudd’s U-turn on refugees, the marketisation of higher education, and the promise of continued coal production, the latter designed to placate nervous electorates in North Queensland and the Hunter Valley.
Visions offered up by the ALP often appear timid, more concerned with news and election cycles than with pursuing progressive agendas. There’s little that arouses passion or excitement.
Littered with references to jobs and growth, a familiar mantra borne of a desire to appear electable, Tanya Plibersek’s introduction to Upturn is a tepid cry for change.
Jim Chalmers’ assertion that “growth is central to fulfilling the potential of Australian society” will leave readers wondering whether the ALP has any easily explained vision. If Chalmers had spoken of the social and economic consequences of aggressive capitalism, if he had imagined income guarantees not just job creation, and if he had envisioned a country of fellowship and kindness that flourished in local communities during the Covid-19 lockdowns, Upturn could have given hope and might indeed have lit a light on a hill.
Economic growth as the aspirin for the future looks likely to continue inequality, environmental destruction, poor pay, and demeaning conditions for workers. Alternatives might have included proposals for a basic income and radical regenerative policies, creative responses to the climate emergency or what might make for a more equitable, just and humane society? Why not discuss how and why corporate capitalism can be replaced, and why not embrace radical agendas that already exist, like the Green New Deal and the Leap Manifesto? These spell out carefully crafted alternative policies. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.
Former cabinet minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, Midnight Oil crooner Peter Garrett, gets close to exposing the dangers of extractivist capitalism. After decades of economic growth, he says, we have seen inequalities deepen, communities fall apart, and our environment trashed. Despite this, few if any in the parliamentary ALP question the holy grail of growth, not even Garrett.
Poll after poll across the Anglosphere show that people are yearning for radical change. They want action on climate change, a fair economy, decent housing, education, healthcare, jobs, and a sense of security. They want their political representatives to stand up for people rather than big money.
Although lacking a coherent agenda, Upturn does record interesting policy scaffolding. Ross Garnaut’s vision of Australia as a clean energy superpower and Wayne Swan’s call for stronger workers’ bargaining rights, progressive taxation – with policies to “break the grip of big money” – resonate. As do other ideas such as full employment, a social wage, stronger safety nets, and positive measures to tackle youth unemployment.
June Oscar’s brilliant chapter on how Indigenous communities in Western Australia responded to the threat of Covid-19 shows what people can achieve when they’re given some material support, as well as the independence, dignity, and respect to which they are entitled. They soon rebuild support networks, lives and businesses, and reconnect with culture and place.
Upturn also calls for a return to something resembling reason. Without a revival of trust in facts carefully evaluated, various contributors note, recovery from Covid-19 will be marred by conspiracy theories, demagogues’ demands and anti-intellectual trends.
In urging citizens to drop the idea that markets will decide the future, former Chief Scientist Ian Chubb pleads for education that enables citizens to understand the nature and significance of science, evidence and expertise rather than indulge in crackpot theorizing.
In response to her question, which media can be trusted to convey news, Lenore Taylor, editor of Guardian Australia, echoes Chubb’s views, maintaining that facts and truth must become the guardrails of civic debate and discussion.
Professor Sharon Lewin, Director of the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, states her hope “that relationships of trust in science expand beyond health to inform other major global challenges such as climate change”.
A significant obstacle to a better post Covid-19 society, observed throughout Upturn, concerns a selfish enthusiasm for private interests rather than energetic investment for the public good. For instance, Gabrielle Chan, a journalist specializing in politics and rural affairs, identifies a precious, fragile environment being pushed to the limits to grow more food from an agricultural system organized largely in the interests of multinationals and pension funds.
In the perennial contest between private and public investment in education, Tanya Plibersek shows that the ideal of giving every child the chance to excel is obstructed by the idea that private money should be able to buy a better education.
There are also worrying indicators about fraying social bonds. Former Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane concludes that multiculturalism has been seriously wounded by racism which spawns divisiveness, endangers community safety and undermines efforts to achieve respect for every citizen.
Peppering pages with diverse ideas may alert readers to injustices, to policy patchwork and failures. Ultimately, Upturn slips around questions about life-enhancing ways of living and working, about public wealth not private accumulation, about protection for planet earth as a social, economic, and ethical priority. Instead, readers of Upturn are invited to wander through a maze of ideas with no coherent, well signposted ways to the future.
This book had rich promise but is a missed opportunity. A comprehensive, coherent vision of a just society post pandemic society still needs to be written.
Adjunct Professor, School of Health Sciences and Social Work,
Griffith University (Gold Coast Campus).
Adjunct Professor, Southern Cross University, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts.
Stuart Rees AM is Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney & recipient of the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize.
Comments
9 responses to “A tepid cry for change: Tanya Plibersek’s book “Upturn” and Labor’s prospects”
I am encouraged by Labor’s support of science against vested interests, which attracted contributions to the book by Ian Chubb and Sharon Lewin.
A good example of the clash between truthful science and lying vested interests was reported in the NYT on or shortly before 6/3/21:-
“You have decreases in cases and deaths when you wear masks, and you have increases in cases and deaths when you have in-person restaurant dining,” Dr Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC, said Friday. “And so we would advocate for policies, certainly while we’re at this plateau of a high number of cases, that would listen to that public health science.”
On Friday night, the National Restaurant Association, which represents 1 million restaurants and food service outlets, criticised the CDC study as “an ill-informed attack on the industry hardest-hit by the pandemic.”
Liberalism (vested interests, allowed to run rampant), drowns scientific truth in an ocean of lies. A population fed on bullshit has no chance of survival.
It is all very well for those in the top quintile of the income distribution to rail against economic growth, but the reason why politicians who mix with real people support economic growth is because they know that most of the electorate have unsatisfied needs and want higher incomes.
Also, economic growth is not the cause of the rise in inequality. The evidence shows that this has been mainly driven by technological change which has hollowed out middle-level jobs. Furthermore, as I have argued in my book “Fair Share” and numerous other articles, it is inequality that is the principle cause of the economic stagnation experienced over the last decade and more in most Western economies.
Chifley’s Light on the Hill speech is as apt today, as it was 75 years ago..
“I have had the privilege of leading the Labour Party for nearly four years. They have not been easy times and it has not been an easy job. It is a man-killing job and would be impossible if it were not for the help of my colleagues and members of the movement.
No Labour Minister or leader ever has an easy job. The urgency that rests behind the Labour movement, pushing it on to do things, to create new conditions, to reorganise the economy of the country, always means that the people who work within the Labour movement, people who lead, can never have an easy job. The job of the evangelist is never easy.
Because of the turn of fortune’s wheel your Premier (Mr McGirr) and I have gained some prominence in the Labour movement. But the strength of the movement cannot come from us. We may make plans and pass legislation to help and direct the economy of the country. But the job of getting the things the people of the country want comes from the roots of the Labour movement – the people who support it.
When I sat at a Labour meeting in the country with only ten or fifteen men there, I found a man sitting beside me who had been working in the Labour movement for fifty-four years. I have no doubt that many of you have been doing the same, not hoping for any advantage from the movement, not hoping for any personal gain, but because you believe in a movement that has been built up to bring better conditions to the people. Therefore, the success of the Labour Party at the next elections depends entirely, as it always has done, on the people who work.
I try to think of the Labour movement, not as putting an extra sixpence into somebody’s pocket, or making somebody Prime Minister or Premier, but as a movement bringing something better to the people, better standards of living, greater happiness to the mass of the people. We have a great objective – the light on the hill – which we aim to reach by working the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for.
If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labour movement will be completely justified.
It does not matter about persons like me who have our limitations. I only hope that the generosity, kindliness and friendliness shown to me by thousands of my colleagues in the Labour movement will continue to be given to the movement and add zest to its work.”
After the Hawk/Keating governments, Australia seems to have become increasingly inward looking. All I have read of any of our political leaders’ visions is not how to better engage ourselves with the rest of the world to keep abreast of others, especially those who are more successful in meeting the needs of their people and at the same time ensure a sustainable exploitation of the worlds resources. From what is said about “Upturn”, it looks as if we are again rearranging the furniture to ensure that everyone gets a fairer share of the sunlight coming through the window. What is even more worrying is that we cut our economic umbilical cord with China too soon.
China came to grieve because it was inward looking and suffered 100 years of humiliation. Mao Zedong brutally unified the country and instilled in them a national pride. Deng Xiaoping embraced capitalism and began the process of engaging with the rest of the world, Xi Jinping brought the country to what it is presently. Singapore is another example of how a country with no resources but a willingness to look outwards and learn from others progressed brilliantly to become one of the riches and most stable countries in the world. Donald Trump had an inward orientated economic policy that caused the US no end of social, political and economic problems much of which are currently been addressed by Joe Biden. The LNP government emulated Trump’s attitude and policies. What they fail to realise is that we do not have the capacity in terms of wealth and resources to recover like the US, if at all they manage to recover without huge setbacks that are yet to unfold.
Sure, we do not have to work the complementary way we did with the Chinese economy. Sure, we can look for alternative buyers of our products. The question is, who is lining up to buy our products, apart from iron ore and other minerals, when there are many competitors out there attempting the sell the same things to dig themselves out of the Covid19 quagmire? Many experts have pointed out that we can harness and sell renewable energy. Where is the plan and timeline? What other products can we produce to sell to others? We have to know what we can produce and sell to others before we can devise a relevant program to train and educate our people for the jobs. I notice that the question of replacing China or reengaging China has never been raised by either of the political factions. Has the China question become so sensitive that mentioning it would spell political disaster?
I do not look forward to a government that creates the delusion of change for the better by rearranging the furniture. I look forward to a government what has a plan (better still a bipartisan one) a timeline and a monitoring system to achieve its aims.
Well spoken, Teow Loon Ti. When I arrived in this country in 1974, it was, although much more conservative than Europe, a country with a healthy outlook to the future enthusiastically embracing new things and new people. In the last 20 years or so Australia has turned into an inward looking country, afraid of newcomers and foreigners. We are governed by inept and mediocre people who have no vision for the future of a democratic society. We have become meaner (just look at how we treat refugees and our own people, vide Robodebt). The focus now seems to be on making your own quick buck and stuff the rest. While this may be expected from a neocon government, one would expect the Labor Party to have more vision and idealism, even at the risk of staying out of government a bit longer. Reading this article on Plibersek’s book it seems not to be so. Some will of course argue that to do things one has to be in government. But there is no point being in government unless you have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and clear plans of how to achieve it.
Do only the Greens now have a non-egoistical and social view of the country?
Hans, I m beginning to like the Greens too. At least they are more sincere.
I also found the book disappointingly “tepid”.
“A comprehensive, coherent vision of a just society” would be ideal, but I would settle for some serious policy reforms.
There is plenty of scope for a left-of-centre party to canvass improvements to fiscal policy, monetary policy, tax policy, housing affordability or immigration. But instead, the ALP just gives us whingeing and symbolism.