A ‘good life’ can be ours: The curious common ground between Labor and Coalition

A month ago, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said her proposed changes to social media laws would help parents decide what they should allow their kids to do. The new rules would “help signal a set of normative values that supports parents”.

Last week, making the case for those laws, Anthony Albanese conceded they wouldn’t work every time. “It’s like the ban on buying alcohol for under-18s – this weekend chances are there’ll be someone under-18 … who will get access to alcohol. That doesn’t mean that society doesn’t show its values by having that law in place.”

Illustration: Joe Benke Credit:

This echoed something the prime minister had said the week before: “What this will do is send a social message about what society thinks is appropriate.”

Social message. Normative values. Society’s values. You could, cynically, frame all this as pre-empting the fact the laws are unlikely to work – which is an argument being made strongly in some quarters.

But what is at least as interesting is the way in which Albanese is correct: in his assertion that governments can play an enormous role in shaping how the rest of us believe our lives should be lived.

Until perhaps quite recently, we have been living through a technocratic age. Experts have been given primacy, politicians say they are “pragmatic” rather than “ideological”, laws are evaluated, at least in part, by whether they will do what leaders claim they will. And so it is interesting to hear this government – which has definitely leant towards the technocratic – emphasise the moral and social consequences of its laws.

Not that Australia is alone in this. The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently argued that growing calls for tech regulation in America are tied to a “moral turn” in political life, a questioning: “Did all this individualism work? Is a world where kids are on their smartphones all the time and families are having this much trouble … did we get something more fundamental, almost spiritual, wrong?”

Klein was interviewing historian Gary Gerstle on the subject of political orders – that is, long-lasting “structures of political consensus”. Gerstle argues that American politics was shaped by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and then by neoliberalism. During each of these “political orders” there was a set of ideas which were shared across the major parties. This, Gerstle told Klein, gives us “a way of thinking differently about political time”, to see what features stand out beyond the short-term cycles.

Are we now emerging from that previous technocratic age with its neoliberal consensus? Of course, it’s possible that this period will seem, in hindsight, less decisive than it does right now: that all the drama fades away as the pandemic recedes and inflation passes. But at present it seems more likely that Klein (and others) are right in speculating that we are now between political orders, when we “can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape”.

What, then, can we see in that hazy outline? Reading Klein and Gerstle’s list of its possible emerging traits was striking because so many are shared here. Last week I noted that what divides the Democrats from the Republicans is similar to what divides Labor and the Coalition. But it is equally fascinating to consider the elements that cross both the aisle and oceans, that are shared between parties and between countries. In all four parties there is – drawing from that list – rising opposition to immigration; a sense of China as an economic and foreign policy threat to be managed (AUKUS is the main symbol here); an attack on oligopolies (see the fight against supermarkets in both countries); and a reinvestment in infrastructure and manufacturing.

In Australia, you can see this even in an area where the two parties seem divided, such as climate change. At a broad level, they are united in their economic approach: both want massively interventionist industry policy (Labor through Future Made in Australia and the Liberals via nuclear).

One of the most compelling aspects of Gerstle’s analysis is that these “political orders” were not only economic models or ideologies. Each carried with it “a vision of a good life” – and that vision, in turn, was central to “selling the virtues of that political order to a mass base”.

Which brings us back to social media. At a time when you might think Labor and the Liberals are far apart on issues of “values”, this is a shared moral project: when it comes to barring kids from social media, the two parties basically agree.

This emerging Australian consensus on what a “good life” might be is evident elsewhere, too. Recall that two of Albanese’s more important reforms have opposition support: making both the National Disability Insurance Scheme and aged care funding sustainable. You could present these as mere budget fixes. But they are also part of a larger cultural shift: the acceptance of the idea that care can and even should be outsourced to paid workers outside the family – with its corollaries that care is a central part of our economy and care workers are essential.

A consensus like this can easily pass almost unnoticed, precisely because it has become consensus: there is no political battle to draw our attention. But as our experiment with rampant free markets should have taught us, consensus does not equal correct: often it should be a call to interrogate more deeply what we have accepted too easily.

What underlies all this is a search for what is common to the two parties. But at the same time, there is huge political opportunity here. There has not yet been a successful effort to describe the “good life” that might result from a new economic order; nor, in Gerstle’s words, to outline an “underlying economic program” that makes that good life possible. The party that succeeds in doing so will both win elections and shape our future.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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