Progress on Turnbull’s agenda despite backpacker confusion

Illustration: Sturt Krygsman

During the election campaign, Labor and several commentators sneered at Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison for visiting an average-looking young couple who had already bought a house for their baby daughter, even though it sounded eminently sensible, certainly more sensible than funding a teenage boy to go on his own to Bali for schoolies week.

Bill Shorten continues to scoff, asking the Prime Minister if his housing affordability solution is to be born with rich parents. Here’s the thing, though: housing has never been affordable for low-income families. It is not a new phenomenon.

Way back when, a few decades ago, if they worked in factories, or cycled or walked dozens of kilometres to pick fruit or vegetables — before lobby groups with vested interests and a highly abusive, offensive, decidedly unfunny Jacqui Lambie demanded temporary workers had to be imported to do difficult jobs at very low tax rates — they worked wherever jobs were available, saving every cent they could. Holidays away from home were unheard of. Takeaway food was never seen.

Siblings pooled their money to put a deposit on a house. It was rented out to help pay the mortgage, until one or the other could afford to move in. Or the whole family combined their savings, bought a house for one member, saved again to buy a house for another, and so on. No one waited for the government to come up with new ways to give them money so they could do the things they wanted or, more to the point, to avoid doing things they didn’t want to.

They didn’t sit in trendy restaurants eating the yummy if much derided smashed avocado on toast with crumbled Persian feta on top, or haloumi salads with watermelon — assuming you could find it, which you couldn’t. Mums who knew how made haloumi at home. Bernard Salt’s throwaway line, which created such frenzied mocking, was dead right because ultimately it is all about choices or priorities. Factories have closed, the nature of work has changed, but so has the culture in fundamentally bad ways, to one of grievance and dependency.

No longer can we make fun of whingeing Poms. The noise here of people whining is deafening and embarrassing. There are politicians who have lived off it like parasitical plants, claiming they are helping the workers or “their” farmers. They’re not. They are slowly killing us.

Yet it is one of many taboo subjects, like the cluster crimes of second and third-generation children of Lebanese or other migrants, or the dysfunction and violence in Aboriginal communities. What Noel Pearson provocatively, evocatively described as the soft bigotry of low expectations is not restricted to the reporting of indigenous issues. On Monday on ABC radio, Pearson expanded on that, observing that while media such the ABC and others among the Left/progressives were great at spotlighting problems, they failed to accept the solutions, which had to include welfare reform.

Discussion is smothered because of the mistaken belief that sympathy and handouts help more than the occasional slap on the bum or a nudge out the door in the direction of a job, no matter how lowly. Hairdressers complain they struggle to find juniors to begin apprenticeships; independent supermarket owners despair at finding people willing to take on jobs; coffee shop owners in tourist hubs would have to close down without foreign workers. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the working holiday visa program for young people, but it has morphed into a substitute workforce for jobs Australians don’t want to do. Hell, even Maccas, which once relied on the Opposition Leader’s recruitment of foreign workers, is now advertising for staff.

It doesn’t have to be a job for life, the beginnings are not always glamorous. It’s simply a first step to something. If proof of that were needed, it came with the appointment of former high school dropout Susan Kiefel as the first female High Court chief justice.

Political debates swirl around whether changes to negative gearing will help solve housing affordability, or whether a higher or lower tax rate will deter foreign workers. Debates focus on tax rather than the culture that relies on foreign workers to pick our fruit or serve our lattes. Perhaps Lambie, who wanted a zero backpacker tax, could think about how to tackle this, seeing that 16.1 per cent of her young Tasmanians were unemployed in October.

If people do try to talk about these things they are quickly labelled greedy, cruel, bigoted or racist, or out of touch. Or they are told they just don’t get it. Here is what most people get: if you set a goal and work towards it, it is pos­sible to get there. Waiting for the government to do it for you gets you nowhere.

Despite its protests, Shorten’s Labor Party carries a lot of responsibility for perpetuating welfare dependency. Who would have thought Shorten would make Pauline Hanson look responsible on the backpacker tax or industrial reform, although his support for Lambie’s compromise 10.5 per cent backpacker tax had more to do with messing with the minds of the Nats, already freaked out by Hanson, so much so that the deal could have been struck weeks ago except they wanted to hold out for the 19 per cent, hoping they could deny Hanson a victory.

That help­ed get everyone to yesterday’s muddle, when Derryn Hinch ratted because he reckoned the government ratted on the 19 per cent he had agreed to on Monday after the Nats backed off it. Confused? Almost as much as Hinch.

Tomorrow, when state treasurers meet to discuss how to help people buy a home, they should think about cultural changes too. Social Services Minister Christian Porter and Treasurer Morrison are working on housing affordability as well as welfare. Nick Xenophon’s amendment to the backpacker tax, allowing seasonal workers to earn up to $5000 without losing unemployment benefits, was inspired by Porter in another context.

Porter and Morrison will pick up the pace on welfare reform next year, looking at wholesale streamlining of more than a dozen payments and a revamp of mutual obligation provisions to ensure there is proper follow-up and accountability so that recipients are adhering to their part of the bargain, given that, as Porter told the Australian Council of Social Service a few weeks ago, the number of Newstart recipients exempt from mutual obligation had grown by 80 per cent to more than 100,000 since 2010. Not all offenders sport tatts and body piercing. Some carry degrees as well as snobbish attitudes towards work.

This an essential project, requiring the government to show teamwork, perseverance and political smarts in preparation and execution, similar to what has occurred in the past few weeks, which has succeeded (backpacker muddle aside) in legislating its pre-election agenda despite the doubts of the progressives or the desires of the delcons who persist in aligning themselves with people unfit for leadership. One of Turnbull’s senior colleagues likened his technique to that of a seagull, hovering over negotiations, then swooping in when necessary, as he did with Xenophon to resolve the water fight, although clearly Hinch requires more featherbedding.

Michaelia Cash — aided by Mathias Cormann and Mitch Fifield — with the full backing of the PM, has delivered four out of four. Slowly, and above the chants of professional protesters, it will seep through that progress is being made. No big bangs but gradual advances, which is all this system, with its combination of competing egos and interests, can tolerate.