Learning the lessons from our Decade of Disruption

The outset of the 2020s is a good time to take stock, which The Weekend Australian does today in a 14-page Inquirer special, Decade of Disruption. The years from 2010 to the close of 2019 have brought political and social upheavals and technological progress unimaginable in more sedate times. It also has been the decade in which Napoleon Bonaparte’s 200-year-old prophecy — “China is a sleeping lion. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world” — has come to pass. On a visit to France in 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping confirmed: “Today the lion has woken up. But it is peaceful, pleasant and civilised.” On the cusp of the 21st century’s third decade, the challenges facing Australians at home and in the Asia-Pacific region, not least because of China’s expansionism, are manifold. For all that, we are in good shape.

One of the main factors that define the 2010s, Adam Creighton writes on Saturday, has been the long shadow of the GFC, which shunted economies, including Australia, on to a path of wage stagnation, soaring house prices and zero interest rates. This is not a time for pessimism, however, which in economic terms tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Australian households are finishing the decade the richest they have ever been, Patrick Commins writes on Saturday’s front page. In the three months to September, Australians’ net worth grew at its fastest quarterly pace since late 2016 to $428,600 on a per capita household basis. That is a 60 per cent surge from $270,000 in 2009. The sharemarket is set to close the year up 20 per cent, a bonus for retirement savings. Unemployment is low. And after an interim downturn, housing markets, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, are roaring back, with gains in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Perth and Adelaide following sustained growth in Hobart. Shoppers are out in force for the sales.

Prosperity and jobs are vital to our quality of life but not its only determinants. Decline of trust in institutions — politics, churches, banks, big business, media and trade unions — has been a vast change in the past decade, as veteran social observer Hugh Mackay told Creighton. Trade union membership has crumbled. Banks’ and insurance companies’ shameless fleecing of customers has left the public angry and distrustful. The incompetence and cruelty in some nursing homes have been exposed. Churches’ despicable failures over child sexual abuse have shredded their credibility. So has Vatican financial corruption, its green-left activism of the past seven years and its extraordinary cave-in to the Chinese Communist Party with its 2018 pact.

China, as Greg Sheridan writes on Saturday, has firmly rejected mild liberalism in favour of more strident Leninism under Mr Xi. In the third decade of the 21st century, China’s continuing economic rise and strategic and military expansion will be an influential backdrop to Australia’s foreign and domestic policies.

In the decade just concluding, our nation’s prime ministerial churn — from Kevin Rudd to Julia Gillard, back to Mr Rudd, to Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison — has been indicative of fracturing within the main political parties. It also added to widespread dissatisfaction with the political class. Protest parties remain an impediment to progress; witness Pauline Hanson’s One Nation blocking the Morrison government’s much-needed Ensuring Integrity bill that would bring the militant Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union to heel. The greater concern, however, is that only 55 per cent of Australians under 30 support democracy over authoritarian forms of government, as Troy Bramston writes on Saturday.

While a revolution in communication technology that was unimaginable a generation ago has unfolded, it is deeply problematic that basic knowledge about current affairs and the political and economic life of the nation can no longer be assumed. Australians spend as much time on Snapchat as they do on the websites of News Corp Australia, the ABC, Nine, Seven West and Ten combined, leaving much of the nation, especially young people, poorly informed. As the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission revealed this year, only about 2.3 per cent of the five-plus hours Australians spend online each day is devoted to reading news.

Regardless of such shortcomings in Australia and internationally, the resilience of democracy has been demonstrated by events in the US, Britain and Australia. Confronted with different challenges, voters in the three nations cut through the prescriptions of elites, who advocated collectivist, interventionist government policies funded with higher taxes as the answer to the challenges of the day. In Washington, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on January 20, 2017, spoke of a “forgotten generation of men and women”. In Britain, voters doggedly backed their 2016 decision to break free of the EU by voting in Boris Johnson. And in Australia, despite the Coalition’s manifest weaknesses and disunity under Mr Abbott and Mr Turnbull, “quiet voters” had the sense to reject the runaway spending and big taxes pledged by Bill Shorten.

Australia begins the 2020s amid a fierce bushfire season and severe drought. In coming years, water and energy policy will be major challenges, both at federal and state level. So will economic policy, as always. Pressing ahead with reform and boosting investment and productivity will be vital. So will regional engagement, defence, providing for the needs of an ageing population, and improving an education system that is leaving too many young people ill-equipped for the future. Politicians should not allow themselves to be distracted by activists at the margins, such as students boycotting classes or Extinction Rebels. Learning from the disruptions of the past decade would be a good start to tackling the challenges of the 2020s.