Any honest audit of Australia’s current position should give serious pause to anyone who believes the country is on a sustainable path.
40 years ago that Australia risked becoming a banana republic did something no polished ministerial statement has managed since: the telling of an inconvenient truth with a dare to the nation.
On May 14, 1986, Keating was attending a fundraiser in Melbourne when talkback radio host John Laws sought an impromptu interview. The Treasurer – his mind already fixed on a collapsing terms of trade, a yawning current account deficit and a currency under pressure – spoke without the fluff that characterises so much of today’s politics.
Keating told listeners that Australia was importing expensive goods and paying for them with cheap ones, requiring large licks of foreign capital to sustain the difference. The dollar soon came under pressure and inflation threatened once more. The message from the Treasurer was that the Wages Accord was still fragile and without a serious structural rethink, the country was heading not for temporary embarrassment but for long-term decline.
Keating was emphatic in his call: it wasn’t going to be about managing decline, the country had to arrest its course. Alex Sanchez is an economist and former senior adviser to the Albanese government and formerly General Manager of Policy at the Insurance Council of Australia.
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