When the chips are down, Aussies still pull together

Long queues formed at Centrelink offices around the nation as the pandemic hit the economy in 2020. Picture Rohan Kelly

Is it possible that Josh Frydenberg’s budget the other night caused as much quiet satisfaction on the part of the public as it did widespread alarm among the commentariat? And if that’s in any way the case, could it be because the Morrison government’s response to COVID-19 has been so much in the long tradition of Australian particularism?

It is that tradition related to the myth of egalitarianism that is much older than Federation and that some would trace back to governor Lachlan Macquarie. It underlines the centrality of government intervention.

Many years ago Don Watson, former and famed speechwriter to Paul Keating, wrote one of those nonfiction novellas in which he argued that Australia had become a harder, more American, society, more naked to the winds of market economics. The only thing odd about the essay was that the individual most responsible for this metamorphosis was Watson’s former boss.

But when the chips are down Australians believe in pulling together, which is why there has been such widespread support for the Keynesianism of the Morrison government’s response since the virus struck. Yes, it has spent billions. Yes, the deficit may stretch until the edge of doom, but the overall message is as Australian as Waltzing Matilda: save lives, save livelihoods.

When interest rates fell to nothing and all the ice seemed thin at the time of the Depression, John Maynard Keynes thought outside the box and said governments could push-start economies; that there was nothing intrinsically evil about borrowing or deficits. If you could make the economy grow, you could reap the harvest.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was not the most rosy memory to Thatcherite dogmatists in a market-rules world but history will remember him as one of the greatest US presidents, and his New Deal saved America in a time of dire danger — during which the patrician president in the wheelchair was accused of being a class traitor — but by the end of World War II the US was indisputably the greatest and most prosperous country on earth.

It’s interesting too that when Quinton Hogg, Lord Hailsham, Margaret Thatcher’s lord chancellor, was saying Te Deums should be sung in her honour he cited the economically opposite example of Roosevelt and said the reason the New Deal had worked was ultimately because people had put their faith in it.

Ultimately Australians will always put their faith in lives and livelihoods. If it took billions of dollars to keep people going on JobKeeper, so what? The unemployment figure is better than most economists would have predicted and Australians are happy not to count the cost. You can scream about unhinged printing of money, the insecurity of future borrowing rates, the kids saddled forever with their boomer and Xer parents’ debts, but when it all comes down to it we will not have people die and we will not have people starve under our watch in a time of plague.

That’s the myth and it expresses our deepest belief. Watson has written that you can’t disprove RG Collingwood, the idealist historian who said beliefs and ideas counted for more than material forces. Well, neither can you refute Keynes and his compatibility with our deeper national instincts. Macquarie, after all, seated the emancipist ex-cons at the governor’s table next to the exclusives, the free settlers with their merino wool, to the consternation of the self-appointed ruling class.

We are a huge island country, our population clinging to coastlines, but with an entrenched loyalty to the idea of the bush as well as an abiding sorrow for what we did to Indigenous Australians. Poor fellow, my country, is one of our laments. But we are also one of the oldest democracies. We led with the 40-hour week, with the vote for women, and in the days when Robert Menzies was prime minister we had one of the most powerful union movements the world has seen. Bob Hawke and Keating cut it back but it’s worth remembering when we’re shaking our heads at a budget like this that we once had one of the most equitable arbitration systems.

It’s also worth remembering that under Menzies the Country Party leader and trade minister was “Black Jack” McEwen, who was effectively an agrarian socialist. Not to mention that Menzies governed with the support of the DLP, the renegade anti-communist Laborites who also took a dim view of capitalism and ensured a Coalition government could not simply be a party of big business.

Things changed radically when Keating as treasurer deregulated the market, which his predecessor John Howard had been prevented from doing because his prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was economically to the left of his successors.

But the orthodoxy that has prevailed is now over. And how can the Labor Party object to a budget that is devoted to aged care, to mental health, to looking after the endangered? All the opposition can say is that it’s election-driven, by which it simply means bound to be popular.

The consensus on economic matters that has prevailed from Hawke and Keating and Howard and Peter Costello is over. It’s hard to know how Morrison’s budget will pan out but it looks pointed in the right direction.

Peter Craven is a Melbourne-based writer and critic.