We need new ways of thinking for a new world

The post-virus future, whether or not we get there, is going to be different and I would argue permanently different.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Getty Images

The post-virus future, whether or not we get there, is going to be different and I would argue permanently different.

It demands new ways of thinking.

There is precious little sign of any of that happening; or indeed, of even the preliminary step: an awareness of the need for fundamental and seminal change, the like of which we’ve never seen before, not even in the glory reform days of the 1980s and 1990s.

For all their revolutionary flavour, those were all essentially conventional policy changes — financial deregulation, tax and IR reform and so on — around the conventional domestic and global mixed Keynesian-market framework that had prevailed since World War II.

Right now, what passes for ‘‘thinking’’ turns on the central, for want of a better word, ‘‘debate’’ over whether the taken-as-read recovery will be V or U-shaped, but either way, that we will eventually get back to something akin to where we were in February: in a phrase, the same-old same-old.

Now, I do not the regard the outpourings of ‘‘never waste a good crisis to recycle old agendas’’ as examples of ‘‘new ways of thinking’’.

Whether that’s the Business Council, within the spectrum of reason, demanding implementation of its long-held and long unsuccessfully pursued micro-reform agenda of business tax cuts, IR and other deregulation and so on.

Or, outside the spectrum of reason, the Greens, both political and simply overwrought, demanding a new green agenda and economy.

To them it’s as if a virus has suddenly made functionally useless, so-called renewable energy work, along with the fantasy that the answer to multi-billion-dollar deficits and multi-trillion-dollar debts is even more of both to subsidise a rush back to pre-industrial poverty.

Nor am I demanding that we get those new ways of thinking pre-emptively now.

As I wrote last week, no one really has a clue. We’ve never been here before; we’ve never been where we are headed.

What I am saying is that we have to recognise the need for the new thinking that the new realities will demand, and that we can hopefully be nimble and flexible and receptive enough to ‘‘think into’’ what evolves and indeed will likely be coming at us much faster and on so many fronts.

Two examples during the week captured how thinking was not keeping pace even with demands of the contemporary reality, far less my hoped-for pre-emption into that developing future.

One was the Australian Bureau of Statistics publishing its 6.2 per cent unemployment rate. To quote myself from another place: this had has to be the fakest, the most meaningless and indeed the most directly misleading official number ever produced in Australia.

Yet there it will sit for the next 33 or so days, with pride of place at the top of the ABS’s home page, when the real and actually meaningful jobless rate is somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent.

Further, that 6.2 per cent official ABS number — and the 15-20 per cent I’ve worked off it — is not “for April”, but for the first two weeks of April, when the ABS does its survey — the same survey it did pre-virus and pre-lockdown; the same survey it will do as we live through the virus and lockdown; and the same survey it will presumably intends to do into that unknown future.

And which will in every month culminate in giving us a meaningless and misleading description of something that is already four weeks old.

It brings to mind someone on a certain ship named Titanic on a certain night in April doing the rounds unchanged from all the previous nights since it set sail on its maiden voyage.

Or that gatekeeper in another April, in the Berlin underground in 1945, demanding people produce the requisite pass before he would let them pass and continue to flee, as he had done unchangingly through the war and indeed before.

Now true, the ABS did produce a lot of other data and analysis to try to capture and explain the truer and fuller state of play in the labour market as a consequence of both the government’s ‘‘brake-and-accelerator’’ mandated recession and massive stimulus built on the $130bn JobKeeper spend.

But still it clung to that 6.2 per cent as a foundation statistic. For why? For historical and international comparability.

Earth to ABS in its Canberra ivory tower: we are never going to get back to a meaningful jobless rate as it’s been defined to describe (and then, only perhaps) the world not just of February but indeed of the 20th century.

Do you think it is possible to begin by understanding how the lockdown has acted as a seismic and permanent shift to job structures and dynamics, dramatically accelerating what had already been happening?

But the clinging by the ABS to the international comparability: we need to be able to compare to, say France — For why? Or indeed even pourquoi? — speaks to a much more fundamental thinking failure shared by all policymakers, not just Canberra bureaucrats.

This is that we can go seamlessly back to that (fake) market-based (fake) multilateralism.

To even attempt to do so, as the present ‘‘thinking’’ has it, would now be to betray Australia’s future.

Given what we will “emerge’’ into that post-virus future with — massive real unemployment and (at least) a trillion-dollar government debt and continuing huge state and federal budget deficits and a broken Ponzi population ‘‘growth’’ model, to say nothing of where China and the US will also be (and Europe, but who cares) — it won’t even be possible.

That was the second example of yesterday thinking: the timid and unknowing approach by the AOFM to the selling of commonwealth bonds.

AOFM boss Rob Nicholl was over the moon at selling (a record) $19bn of 10-year bonds. I’d have been thrilled if he’d sold $19bn of 30-year bonds.

But then, that would have required him to think 2020-style rather than 2010-style. Not even 2022-style, just 2020. Sigh.