Confusions of an economist’s daughter
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Eve Vincent
Download the complete article PDF
Eve Vincent's biography and other articles by this writer
When we were kids, we loved the ABC newsreader Richard More-croft. He took care of rescued possums and gliders in his spare time. Sometimes he read the news with bumps under his suit jacket or an animal asleep on his lap. That's why we loved him - reading the news to the public, with his own secret. He was on TV telling us about the world and he was of the worlds we knew. We were used to people moving between ABC News and our world, and we were used to looking after animals: we'd wake to find poddy lambs shivering in tea chests by the wood stove on the winter mornings. We saw our uncle, who worked for Bob Hawke and then Paul Keating, in the background of a news story occasionally. And we saw our uncle, sometimes, on the weekends. Politics was not distant, or unreal.
When I was a kid, I spent my time in the back paddock. Terrified of snakes, I marched along in the summer, hoping they would hear my footsteps vibrate as I swung a stick through straw-dry grass. The sun split open the dirt, the creek jammed with dumped cars and washing machines trickled downhill, the sky went on and on. The blue hazy Brindabellas sat to the west, quiet. From the back paddock, the country stretched out and taut electricity lines followed, rushing down and then climbing away.
We lived half an hour's drive from Canberra. In the morning our dad would race into the kitchen after checking the sheep, his tie slung like a scarf around his neck. He'd leave in a hurry, his ute slipping around dusty gravel corners, the radio loud. "Good morning, this is AM." I imagine him now, knotting his tie in the rear vision mirror in the carpark at work. My dad is a free trade economist.
Dad wore his "It's time" badge with its rusted pin to our small country school to vote. He wore it to irritate the National Party voters and Christian fundamentalists whose community was ours. But it was important not to be selfish, our parents said, so we were a Labor-voting family. We were lucky because life was comfortable, but others were not so lucky and deserved a break. Fortunately, most Australians agreed, and our uncle stayed in his job for a decade. That was politics: the "It's time" badge, watching the news, Hawke's tears running down his crinkly face, Keating's "big vision", as dad described it, our uncle who was funny and full of stories, mum's interest in "the environment": we planted trees all through the freezing winters, we grew fruit and fixed the creeks. Actually, that wasn't politics - that was the just rewards of hard work and risk. It became politics when I moved to the inner city, where households I know build vegetable gardens on concrete and wait for the apocalypse because global oil reserves are, it turns out, finite.
POLITICS SHOULDN'T DIVIDE YOU FROM OTHER PEOPLE. My dad left the public service to set up a private consultancy firm with two Liberal-voting partners. They disagreed on politics, but their economics were harmonious. The kids of the partners went to private schools, and we went to Canberra's well-funded public high schools. (Mum was from establishment stock and sick of snobs; she wanted us to be "in society". Dad's father "grew up in a bark hut" and sacrificed a lot to give his family a chance: like this story, his life and fortunes map a national story - the post-World War II boom of affordable suburban homes and free tertiary education for my parents.)
In the 1980s and 1990s, free trade was right thinking, the "common sense" whose time had come. A Labor-voting economist and two Liberal-voting economists didn't just agree on economics, they were passionate reformers thriving on a shared sense of purpose. Economics transcended party politics, and became politics. The 1980s were a good time to be in the business of offering advice. Those beautiful paddocks, scattered with rocks and flecked with scars, quickly became ours. Just rewards.
If the Whitlam Government captured the political passions of the new social movements of my parents' youth, the Hawke-Keating era represented its capitulation to "pragmatism" - what critics came to call "free market ideology". In Australia, at the time, it was called economic rationalism. The country was remade, economic literacy campaigns explained, to meet the challenge of global competitiveness. Unless we come out from behind that high tariff wall, Keating coaxed, we would find ourselves in a "banana republic". And so, under the moniker of micro-economic reform, the dollar was floated, public assets sold off, and financial markets deregulated. According to Don Watson, Keating's speechwriter: "One school of hardline rationalists ... believed Australia began deregulation at the wrong end - the government should have started with the labour market and moved on to the financial markets later." The Hawke-negotiated Accords symbolised economic reform Labor-style: consensual, cushioned.
In feminist cultural theorist Meaghan Morris's portrait of Keating as treasurer, Ecstasy and Economics (Empress, 1992), she touches on the effect of the popularisation of the term "economic rationalism", otherwise known as "neo-liberalism", "market fundamentalism" (preferred by American commentator Thomas Frank) or "libertarian capitalism" (a personal favourite because it implicates the libertarians of the late 1960s and 1970s in the ascendancy of the free market in the 1980s). All refer to a radical reduction in the state's role and social responsibilities, a belief in "the market" as if it were a thing. For sociologist Michael Pusey, it's "market determinism", a faith-based system which recalls earlier dogmas. "Market determinism," Pusey writes in Economic Rationalism in Canberra (Cambridge University Press, 1991), "recasts society as the object of politics, rather than as the subject of politics. Further, society has been represented as some sort of stubbornly resisting sludge, as a ‘general externality' and even as an idealised opponent of ‘the economy'." Morris and others conclude that the term "economic rationalism" casts its critics as irrational: on one side, reason and "facing up to reality"; on the other, emotion and sentimental nostalgia.
Ironically, in a brave new world where "choice" and "flexibility" are the buzzwords, Australians were only ever offered a choice between two versions of one inflexible world-view: between moderate free market economics wedded to social programs, or a pure hit of the market, encapsulated in Liberal leader John Hewson's 1993 Fightback package.
After reading Morris's essay, I called the friend who recommended it: "I just didn't understand it."
"What's to understand?" he replied. "She loves Paul Keating."
Morris is entranced by Keating's media image - tall, dark, saturnine, seductive, and clear-sighted about what he stands for. "His attitude to my kind of politics", she writes, "is frankly contemptuous, [he calls it] ‘basket weaving'."
"That's what I don't understand," I told my mate. "She loves Keating, but he hates her, and she knows it."
He shrugged. "She's from that generation that believe in the Labor Party." That explained it.