Why we all need Shorten in The Lodge. No, seriously

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

It is often said that, in a democracy, voters get the government they deserve. Tinkering with that slightly, there is also a case to be made that, from time to time, we get the government we need.

And in 2019 we both deserve and need a Shorten government.

First, some background to this astonishing statement. Australia holds the world record for the longest period of economic expansion, edging close to 30 years now. Our economic indicators point up or down in all the right ­directions: living standards up, unemployment down, disposable incomes up, consumer spending up, too. Australian banks survived the GFC in good health. The country has grown rich from mostly decent policies, a healthy dose of happenstance, plentiful underground resources, and a blessed and booming local geography.

There are warning signs, to be sure. Wages are stagnant and productivity has been flat. Young people find it hard to break into the big-city housing markets and there is rising underemployment too, meaning more people want additional working hours.But it seems that few people look at horizons and see dark clouds. No world wars for more than two generations, no depression for even longer, no millennial memory even of the last recession.

The upshot of all this good fortune is that Australians have sunk to a level of complacency not seen before. How so? Because the Shorten government looks to be a shoo-in at the next election. And that is as it should be. We need a Shorten government.

Just like the dalliance with Gough Whitlam and Labor in 1972, it’s time for Bill Shorten to be prime minister. Australians need a lived experience of a Shorten Labor government to fully understand the danger of some really bad ideas.

There has been ample analysis of the poor economic outcomes that will arise from Shorten’s policies. From hitting up the rich to pay more in tax, to pushing up wages with no matching ­produc­tivity gains, bigger government, higher spending, reintroducing pattern bargaining and greater union power in the workplace, none of Shorten’s old-style Keynesian policies have made Labor any less popular. Which is saying something given that Shorten is about as personally popular as a close shave in a hipster cafe.

We need to discover the hard way then that Shorten is more Gough Whitlam than Bob Hawke. Of course, the Opposition Leader lacks Whitlam’s vision, panache, authenticity and conviction. But there are parallels for voters to discover in due course.

In his book The End of Certainty, my colleague Paul Kelly says Whitlam embodied “the 1960s grandest delusion — that continuous prosperity was Australia’s destiny and that politics was about the distribution of wealth, not its creation”.

Just as post mortems agreed that economic management was the Whitlam government’s biggest weakness, the same conclusions will be reached about a Shorten government. Because, if Whitlam’s government had grown complacent on postwar economic growth, it is not hard to track, in Labor’s ill-conceived policies today, even worse complacency in Shorten’s Labor Party after three decades of expansion.

It is a symptom of Labor’s complacency today that Shorten has forsaken the Hawke-Keating commitment to economic rationalism in favour of forging an unhealthy marriage with a trade union movement led by ACTU boss Sally McManus, as lunatic a left-wing class warrior as we will see for a long time. In fact, the contrast between the Hawke era, with the trio of Hawke-Paul Keating-Bill Kelty at the helm, and the Shorten-Chris Bowen-McManus trio about to take the helm is so sharp it hurts. The ACTU leader has a resemblance to a Soviet-style comrade, confecting facts to suit a stream of consciousness about class war, downtrodden workers and fat-cat bosses, repeating empty slogans about “evil America”, making claims to boost central power entirely divorced from economic impact.

Whereas Kelty believed in consensus politics for the nation’s economic good, the ACTU believes in confrontational worker v boss paradigms and breaking the law to grab headlines. McManus’s claim to be a modern-day Mandela of the workplace is a cloak for the pursuit of greater power for union leaders, and through them entrenching the brute financial force of industry superannuation funds to secure changes that parliament won’t deliver.

It is not hard to predict similar outcomes from a Shorten government as the country experienced under Whitlam. The harsh reality of that fine sounding “living wage” will be higher unemployment, higher deficits, a wages explosion and higher inflation. Labor’s 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030 and higher energy ­prices will hit consumers, especially the poor, and inevitably will force businesses to relocate to countries with cheaper energy prices and lower wages. Labor’s ideological hatred of coal will create Australia’s very own Appalachian areas of poor, unemployed miners and disadvantaged communities.

That all explains why we need a Shorten government. Maybe then Labor can return to sensible policies. It took the harsh realities of the Whitlam years for Hawke and Keating to turn the Labor Party in an entirely different economic direction. It learned the lessons of Whitlam so well it won four successive elections.

In the same way, the Labor Party needs a Shorten government, in cahoots with McManus and her 1970s-style union movement, to realign itself with the immutable reality that economic growth depends on jobs and profits. Whereas Whitlam loathed labour and capital, and Shorten loathes capital, Labor might then return to the Hawke-Keating realisation that co-operation between labour and capital is a powerful force for economic and political good.

A rotten Labor government may be just what the Liberal Party needs, too, forcing it to reflect on wasted years in government, factional fights, personality contests and only then discern what it stands for as political party. That means returning to core liberal values. But best of all, voters need a case of buyer’s remorse. A Shorten government, with its Whitlamesque flair for mixing big promises with economic cluelessness, is just the tonic for a new generation of voters to work out the high price of our complacency.

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