Australia’s Productivity Commission, like New Zealand’s, is an independent statutory commission tasked with advising the government on “a range of economic, social and environmental issues affecting the welfare of Australians”. Ahead of an upcoming review into Australia’s performance, the inaugural head of the Productivity Commission, Gary Banks, has launched an extraordinary broadside at not just the current government but the entire elite class.
Banks has lambasted years of government, on both sides of the aisle, for obsessing over nonsensical and staggeringly costly boutique trivia, while the big issues are either bungled or not addressed at all. It’s all too reminiscent of what Camille Paglia calls “how a civilization commits suicide”: even as the barbarians hammer at the gates, the elites indulge in emasculated degeneracy, deluding themselves “that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan” — when what they really are is dangerously weak. “The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on… lack practical skills of analysis and construction”.
I don’t know if Gary Banks has read or listened to Camille Paglia, but he has launched a scathing attack on the very sort of people she’s talking about, and what they’re doing to destroy our country.
Banks said Australia was going backwards on energy, industrial relations, tax and government spending, with the public losing confidence in democracy. His energy broadside didn’t miss: “the monumental bungling of the so-called energy transition”, he said, had seen governments “maximise the cost to the nation of reducing emissions” while evidence-based policy had been abandoned in favour of what he called “simple-minded belief”. So much so, he said, that the 24/7 electricity on which modern life depends had become “an unreliable luxury”.
The basic problem, he said, was that we had become incapable of having a sensible conversation about any serious subject.
“Any attempt to use evidence or logic immediately brands you as a ‘denier’.”
Energy loomed large in Banks’ critique.
“Any attempt to use evidence or logic immediately brands you as a ‘denier’.” In Ukraine, he said, “power stations are destroyed by Russian missiles. In Australia we blow them up ourselves. And we do this without having a way to replace the critical 24/7 service they provide.” And if “that’s not bad enough”, he said, “our governments are making it hard for gas to step into the breach – and are dismissing nuclear out of hand”.
At the same time that they are willfully wrecking the very base of a prosperous modern society — abundant, reliable, cheap energy — the political class are throwing buckets of money down any number of black holes.
“While education spending has gone up a lot, student attainment has gone down, at least by OECD standards. Health spending has continued its upward trajectory, but indicators of performance continue to languish. Then there’s the fiscal sinkhole called the NDIS, a painful lesson about the unintended consequences of policy on the run.” His conclusion from this masterly survey of the recent policy wasteland: “I never thought the sovereign risk issues prevalent in certain Third World or socialist countries would one day afflict my own.”
This is a scathing indictment, not just of the current socialist government, but previous, dripping-wet, so-called “conservative” ones. For all that the media-left screeched and gibbered that he was some sort of crusading far-right religious nutter, Scott Morrison caved to the left with barely a whimper on every issue of substance. Malcolm Turnbull didn’t even have to be nudged: he jumped into the watermelon patch with both feet.
While Labor and the Greens are the worst offenders, the current political class across the board — like their media camp-followers — is littered with Arts graduates with zero-to-no real-life experience outside politics. In any case, even a solid business background is no prophylactic against the malaise: Turnbull and Christopher Luxon are ample evidence of the capture of the business class.
In the sense that it’s so out of normal character, it’s the Coalition that’s more culpable for the subsequent drift into policy irresponsibility. If there’s no longer much faith in small government and private wealth creation, that can hardly be the fault of the Labor Party, which never really believed in it, but true Liberals should hang their economic head in shame. Tony Abbott was the last Coalition prime minister or premier who could be described as an economic reformer, with his scrapping of the carbon and mining taxes, annual red-tape repeal days and free-trade deals with our biggest economic partners.
The 2014 budget, with its Medicare co-payment (which foresaw the bulk-billing crisis we’re now in), earn-or-learn requirement for school-leavers and lower indexation for social security benefits was the last serious attempt to reduce the size of government. Since the gutting of that budget, and Abbott’s subsequent defenestration, the Coalition almost entirely has lost any appetite for economic reform […]
And the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic was the greatest expansion of government and restriction of freedom in peacetime history, compounded by the fact a centre-right prime minister did almost nothing to push back against authoritarian premiers.
The Australian
Even more than energy, perhaps, the Covid pandemic is the acme of the egregious inability of the elite to tackle real problems. As we’re learning, time and again, media, politicians, scientists, and public servants lied through their teeth. The top levels of public health bureaucracy in the US threw all their energy into covering up their complicity. Leaked correspondence in the UK and FOI releases in Australia show that number one priority for governments was not public health, but shoring up their own power.
Maybe we get the politicians we deserve. In which case, we have to ask: what did we do to deserve this lot?