OPINION: You have to go back quite a long way to find prime ministers who grasped the advantages of letting debates play out to create room for a reformist government to subsequently move.
The cultural cringe used to form a central part of discussions about where the nation would head next. In those now much-vaunted days of the 1980s, for example, the need to change our economy was argued very much in terms of our equally vaunted national competitive spirit.
And we did. Australia’s economic performance over subsequent decades – supercharged by resources booms – took off, and we did rather well, if we said so ourselves .That whole comparison thing has become a bit more of a fraught exercise these days: the economies with which we were so often compared are all looking a bit, well, ordinary. And their political systems are creaking on the verge of collapse.
Now, if the ACTU was proposing a return to centralised wage fixing, in which everyone’s wages would ultimately be tied to the old metals industry award, yes, that might be a return to the ’70s. It might be a return to the ’70s if there was actually a highly unionised workforce in Australian manufacturing, too.
Either way, the summit has reflected an operating style for our prime minister which does take us back to at least the Howard era.Think about Anthony Albanese’s approach to the Indigenous Voice to parliament, to industrial relations changes, to boosting migration numbers, even to tax cuts. So you have to go back quite a long way to find prime ministers who grasped the advantages of letting debates play out a bit by themselves, often in ways which actually created room for the government to subsequently move, and had the confidence to let that happen. Think John Howard and the GST.You can describe that process in a few different ways.
He noted that Australia had broken with economic orthodoxy on two previous occasions after World War II to achieve successful change, and argued that this has to happen again.
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