Pope cold on market economy

With Australia’s debt ceiling lifted beyond $1.1 trillion, Josh Frydenberg no doubt will be looking for all the wisdom and good advice he can find ahead of handing down the deficit-heavy federal budget on Tuesday. Given the strict separation between church and state enjoyed in Australia, a 43,000-word encyclical offered by Pope Francis, thankfully, can be used for spiritual guidance rather than as a template for the nation’s economic reform.

There is much to admire in Pope Francis’s latest offering, Fratelli Tutti (Brothers All), even if the title offended some for its perceived lack of inclusion and overt sense of papal patriarchy. Respecting universal human rights regardless of a person’s place or status is a bedrock of compassionate humanity. But on economics and the future role of global institutions such as the UN, the lessons drawn by the Pope from the COVID-19 pandemic might hinder rather than assist Australia in meeting its economic challenge.

The encyclical is highly political. Pope Francis’s major targets include what he calls the dogma of neoliberal economics and its promises of trickle-down prosperity. The global financial crisis and subprime collapse in the US indeed have shown that a laissez-faire approach can have unintended and unwelcome consequences. But hankering for a new world economic and political order, as set out by Pope Francis, can be a dangerous thing with unintended results of its own.

The Pope calls for strengthening the UN and other multilateral structures to rein in a globalised economy beyond the power of nation states to regulate. COVID-19, he argues, has exposed false securities and, despite the new hyper-connectivity, has highlighted fragmentation that makes it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all. Anyone who thinks the only lesson to be learned is the need to improve what we are already doing, or to refine existing systems and regulations, is denying reality, he says.

The Pope’s response is to embellish existing Catholic teaching that says the right to private property is subordinate to the “universal destination of created goods”, something Pope Francis says extends beyond national borders. In his view, each country also belongs to the foreigner, in as much as a territory’s goods must not be denied to a needy person coming from elsewhere.

For Australia, one lesson from the pandemic has been its over-reliance on others for essential products and medical supplies. Greater self-reliance, as has been articulated already by the federal government, is perhaps a better remedy than a church-inspired global command and control over goods and services as envisaged in Fratelli Tutti. Shopkeepers also may be hoping that consumers ignore the papal advice not to “plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egoistic self-preservation” as they prepare to celebrate Christmas.

For Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis uses the biblical story of the good Samaritan to help make his bigger point. He also wants the issues debated, urging readers: “Let us arm our children with the weapons of dialogue! Let us teach them to fight the good fight of the culture of encounter!”

But if there is a time-honoured wisdom to be pondered by the Australian Treasurer as he puts the final touches to the budget, it is perhaps one that does not come from the Bible. Rather, it is the proverb raised by The Australian’s cartoonist Johannes Leak that teaching someone to fish will always be better than welfare, wherever it comes from.