Australia has issues. All Australians have issues – whether here for ten days or ten generations.
In no particular order, they include:
- House prices.
- Private debt they are forced to take on to buy a home.
- The rents they pay.
- The number of additional people they face on the roads or accessing services has increased compared to a generation ago.
- The price of energy for household use
- The number of people employed directly or indirectly via government (federal, state, and local) in generally low-level positions.
- The country has experienced weak income growth for more than a decade.
- An inward-facing economic structure, comprised of low-remuneration service positions.
- Australia has a tertiary education system that is among the world’s most expensive, overtly focused on providing visas for international citizens and education for Australians, which is costly and rarely leads to subsequent employment opportunities.
- Taxation concessions, which appear to favour the far more affluent than ordinary workers.
Our politicians and bureaucrats have determined all of these policies over the course of more than a generation. All shaped with input from the think tanks and vested interests and a range of academic types and exhorted through our media at us.
In that time, these have avoided national discourse on
- House prices and rents, and the locations and types of housing we want, and demand dynamics driving these.
- Immigration volumes and the infrastructure, social, and economic structure impacts of the immigration volumes we have.
- ‘Free Trade’ agreements and the economic structure we are providing for tomorrow’s Australians.
- Giving away Australian gas in such a way as to provide almost no return to Australians while ensuring globally expensive household electricity.
And when these issues have been presented in the public domain, through pawned mainstream media, they are invariably presented against the backdrop of the following:
We can’t have house prices actually go down because
- We trap recent first home buyers, and others, in negative equity.
- Investors will be less inclined to build more housing, which we do need.
- That may create a banking system problem given Australia’s financial sector’s over-reliance on mortgage lending
We can’t reduce immigration volumes because
- Only racists would think that, and we may be racists for thinking that.
- We can’t control immigration because many migrants come here to study first.
- We ‘planned’ to have more migrants and we are just ‘catching up’ with the plan.
- We need ‘skills’, which we largely do not use.
- Migrants will do jobs we won’t.
- Heavy immigration is needed to improve our diversity.
We can’t do anything about our economic structure because
- The rest of the world has got out of manufacturing.
- We are too expensive as individual labour units.
- It is cheaper to import merchandise from offshore.
- We should work with our natural advantages (mining and agriculture mainly).
- Education of international students is an export.
- Protecting industry in Australia to serve our national interests is protection and not the global market and free trade.
We can’t do anything about gas exports because
- Foreign participation in the consortiums that have built Australian LNG plants and exploration and production facilities is an investment in Australia’s interests.
- Revisiting the contracts which underpinned these investments is ‘sovereign risk’ and we deter foreign investment if we do so.
- Contracted production volumes sold to foreign investors give them freedom to do whatever they want with those volumes and leave us no right to determine what is in our national interest.
- Pricing energy so as to deter gas usage in Australia is an essential part of the green transition we all have to make to minimise the climate impacts of anthropogenic carbon emissions.
- Pricing gas expensively and making electricity expensive promotes the uptake of renewable energy.
But it isn’t just Australia with issues; the world has them.
On top of that, over the last decade we have seen the geopolitical world fracture. Not just in Australia, but across the developed world. What was once a seeming certainty of ever-expanding free trade has foundered. The internal contradictions in the ‘neoliberal’ model have come home to roost.
That model could be and has been gamed.
- By mercantilist approaches to trade by states (see Japan and China at various points).
- By global capital itself (see plants formerly in North America or Europe but also Australia, closed or relocated to Asia).
- By the financialisation of entire economic sectors and the introduction of false markets and financialised structures, in particular, social infrastructure (from education to water rights, numerous pensions, housing, transport, and aged care facilities).
- By the actions of the global and local ‘elite’ (those with money or making it) themselves, who exhorted the ‘trickle down’ mantra of economic gain but have been exposed as utter frauds by data showing that the financial gains of neoliberalism have gone almost solely to the wealthiest 5-10% of people across the developed world over the course of nearly 50 years.
Over the last 18 months Donald Trump has annihilated the last vestiges of the neoliberal gilded age with the sanctions imposed by the United States. Within the last 4 weeks President Trump has embarked on a course of action which will bring profound energy shocks with subsequent employment and inflationary impacts.
The era we have grown up in is over. Whether we like it or not, this is the new reality.
A couple of weeks ago David Llewellyn-Smith beautifully described Trump in psychological terms as the toxic narcissist Trump observably is. That he is such an individual has been obvious since well before he entered US politics.
From that point we need only to step further into the field of psychology to identify a few further facets of narcissism.
Those facets draw us inexorably to consideration of the ‘leadership’ we have experienced over the course of a generation. Stamford Business Insight from a few years ago provides an ominous starting point.
They’re adept at self-promotion and shine in job interviews. Then, once they’re in power, we find out who they really are.
Sometimes they’re as good as their promise. But many turn out to be not just confident but arrogant and entitled. Instead of being bold, they’re merely impulsive. They lack empathy and exploit others without compunction. They ignore expert advice and treat those who differ with contempt and hostility. Above all, they demand personal loyalty. They are, in short, raging narcissists.
The first is that the ‘overt’ form of narcissism, of which Trump is such an outstanding example, isn’t the only type. Narcissism is related to psychopathy or sociopathy and occurs on a spectrum (individuals can have it a little or a lot), with the more pervasive type likely to be the ‘covert’ or ‘vulnerable’ narcissist.
As with the overt type, these have damaged psychological make-ups, often resulting from childhood abuse. Unlike that overt type, they tend to engage in passive-aggressive blame-shifting and a range of behaviours likely to create chaos.
Presenting them with information or a narrative they would rather not hear can result in literal face spasms of anger and lasting enmity from above.
A psychologist I know refers to them as the ‘Win-Lie-it’ culture. They achieve success, whether it’s a higher-paying job, public recognition, or any other form of recognition, and deception becomes their primary strategy.
Like the overt type, they are almost solely about self-aggrandisement, have low levels of integrity, and are compulsive liars – especially when they think one may get them out of a need to account for anything they may be party to.
Like the overt, they are more likely to seek and attain positions of power, but doing so carries significant risk according to Stamford Business.
“Being elected or appointed to office validates their sense of entitlement. At the same time, even without narcissism, power disinhibits — it encourages people to indulge their worst instincts — so now you’ve got the two working together.”
Readers are highly encouraged to do some of their reading on narcissism, but to bring this back to consideration of the Australian economy, let us observe the following.
Currently, Australia has an exceptionally large sector of the community either directly employed by the government or indirectly employed by government policy in government-funded projects.
Narcissists thrive in bureaucracies, and those who are thriving in bureaucracies often create layers of sub-narcissists beneath them – all prioritising their self-righteousness and sense of self and often subordinating that to one higher-level narcissist.
Over the generation from the late 1990s, all Australian bureaucracies have become more about following political imperatives than acting in the ‘national interest’ of Australians and less about ‘frank and fearless’ advice.
As former senator Rex Patrick recently noted, Australian politicians and bureaucrats are among the highest paid in the world, often earning several times more than their counterparts in Europe or North America.
Countless articles have identified the outrageous senior executive incomes of a university sector which has become less about educating Australians and more about harvesting international demand to migrate to Australia via the education system.
Both state and federal levels have seen a disproportionate increase in public sector senior executive incomes and numbers, compared to their predecessors from a generation ago and their subordinates within those public sectors.
And over this time those politicians, and those bureaucrats, and tertiary education sector executives have shaped the policies which are now a blight on Australians and are often holding ordinary Australians to a form of ransom – agree with the policies they provide or experience pain.
That their policy prescriptions have failed us is now palpably obvious.
Our polity needs to revisit its leadership of our country, and it needs now to do it very quickly. And our toxic elite needs to start thinking in terms of accountability to us and the national interest rather than their interest.