Given all this, it’s no wonder that even the Productivity Commission itself can’t agree on exactly how the concept should be measured – and if it can’t be certain, how can we? Certainly the general idea of economic efficiency has its logical attractions, but to propose widespread economic change solely on the basis of a concept as impossible to define and measure as productivity is the height of insanity.
The second count against productivity is that there are so many priorities of government – even so many economic priorities of government – that, far from being ‘everything’ or ‘almost everything’, productivity is, arguably, almost nothing. Let’s set aside the thousands of legal, administrative and technical things we expect governments to do in our name and consider only the numerous economic ones. We expect governments to raise revenue and manage the nation’s finances responsibly; to raise loans in order to finance investment, and to pay them back; to ensure that our schools and hospitals and other services are well funded; to stop bridges from collapsing, roads from developing pot holes and ports from rotting into the waves; to reduce the extremes of poverty and wealth through progressive taxation and a sound welfare system; to keep an eye on the balance of trade and stop it from ballooning in either direction; to prevent recessions; to keep interest rates at optimal levels; to keep inflation in check; to keep unemployment down; to stop the currency from getting too high or too low; and so forth. And yet so many of our economists think that everything must come second to continuing economic reform, as measured by the statistical phantom of productivity increase. It all reminds you of a cricket coach so lost in the data spewing out of his computer that he forgets that the idea is to win the game by scoring more runs than the other team.
One might argue that, in the pursuit of rising productivity, we sometimes stuff everything else up; numerous highly productive American cities with competitive business taxes and low minimum wages but bankrupt budgets, crumbling infrastructure and mass poverty can attest to that. Does this mean that raising productivity isn’t an important goal of government policy? Of course not. Efficiency has its place. Within selected government departments there could usefully be units working on strategies to make our nation more productive in various ways, but even within the Department of Treasury this should be a boutique task in comparison with the core jobs of managing the nation’s finances, creating jobs, fighting inflation and so forth. To judge everything else – fiscal policy, employment policy, living standards and social equality – according to what it means for productivity is folly. And for a party like the ALP to reduce its social-democratic quest to the morally and emotionally empty goal of raising productivity is the slow road to political suicide. People will follow Labor to the barricades in defence of the ideal of equality, but not for the productivity ratio.
There is no surer sign of the weakness of this managerialist approach to politics than that it has already hardened into a template. Examine almost any major policy idea these days – it might be designed to improve the performance of early childhood education, schools, universities, hospitals, rail transport, freight delivery or a dozen other things – and you will find a similar formula. Announce a national goal of achieving universal access to a certain minimum standard; set new performance targets; establish a framework against which to measure service standards; define the sort of data that would be useful to achieving this; introduce a data-gathering process; publish the data on a public website to put pressure on the service deliverers and create a market with perfect information; link this data, perhaps in the form of statistically modified league tables, to new pools of quality-assurance funding to correct failure; and, finally, set up peer-to-peer information sharing among the relevant professions to drive continuous learning.
This sort of thing, bought off the shelf from the large management consulting firms, seldom works. The data may get collected and published, eventually, but the necessary funding to make it all work and achieve the promised results never seems to appear. The Gonski school reforms are the greatest and saddest example of this, but far from the only ones. It’s managerial fantasy by formula, and only serves to stop politicians from thinking about what they should really be doing.
If you watch our politicians talk about reform policies like these, you seldom hear simple statements of common logic, belief, ideology, philosophy, morality or even emotion. All you hear is them flipping over in their minds the PowerPoint slides the consulting firms have devised using the logic, symbols and priorities of managerialism. The following fictional exchange would be typical:
INTERVIEWER: Minister, your policy isn’t working, is it?
MINISTER: That’s not correct. The goals have been set. Our Quality Standards Framework is in place. Crucial data has been gathered and is about to be published …
INTERVIEWER: But you’ve just announced that early targets have not been met – in fact results are going backwards. Your flagship funding program has been radically scaled back, promised training programs to build the new workforce have not eventuated …
MINISTER: That’s because the states and territories won’t cooperate …
You know the rest. Devising policy like this makes perfect sense to the managerialists in charge of our reform processes, but the people can see through it. And that’s why they are switching off in large numbers and seeking answers beyond the major parties.
Let’s think about what the managerialists have done to our language. This is an easy target, admittedly; lampooning managerialist sludge has itself descended into cliché, and I won’t do it here. It suffices to say that when policymakers talk about ‘inputs’, ‘interventions’ and ‘outcomes’, and especially about ‘productivity’, they’re not talking about real changes to the way we live. They’re talking about the symbols, abstractions and data they use to measure and represent the results of these changes. It’s a new language that is altogether different from the one ordinary people speak: words become numbers, verbs become processes, poetry becomes two-dimensional and prose becomes PowerPoint. It’s dull and alienating, obviously, but it does more than simply damage a government’s ability to communicate with the people (which in a democracy is serious enough); it also stops a government from having any true purpose at all.
Recently, nearing the end of an election campaign, I heard a party leader answer a question about what sort of government there would be should he win by saying it would be ‘a government focused on outcomes’. To any political leader, this sort of thing makes a rough sense, being shorthand for ‘we won’t be ideological or extreme but moderate, sensible and middle-of-the-road, and we will keep our promises’, or some other variety of blandness. But to the rest of us it is meaningless. In this case it was proof that the prospective new government’s priorities would be little more than those the management consultants could redefine, measure and tick off. Hospital waiting lists down – tick. Suburban train delays down – tick. Spending on school maintenance up – tick. And so forth, all while horror stories about postponed operations, late trains and demountable classrooms continue.
Dependent on their policy advisers, such politicians are like the prisoners chained to the wall of Plato’s metaphorical cave: they see and hear only abstract representations and echoes of political, economic and social reality. From the perspective of the policymakers – who have never left their caves, never spent much time in places like Doveton and therefore have never seen what effect their ideas have on the lives of actual people and communities – their formulas and ideas are unquestionable, the height of wisdom itself, and opposing them seems completely irrational. If we just get rid of the minimum wage and penalty rates to make workplaces more flexible (or put a ‘price signal’ on visiting a doctor and extend the GST to cover food, or let the market determine the level of university fees, or test every school student and put the results on a website, or get rid of subsidies to manufacturing and buy our vehicles and submarines and processed food from other countries, or remove the restrictions on the
importation of foreign labour), then we will attain rising levels of economic productivity, win the praise of Paul Kelly, be compared to Paul Keating, have a graph that rates high on both the vertical and the horizontal axes simultaneously, and be considered truly great.
There is only one way to proceed: we must heed Robin Williams’ call, take the ‘Framework for prioritising economic reform’ and rip it out.
To understand what’s really going on in our economy and our society, we need a better language than the one on offer from the managerialists, one that tells us the truth but hasn’t had the important elements of human feeling sucked out of it. It wouldn’t hurt occasionally to listen to artists.
In literature, the past is usually one great eternal summer. To George Orwell, writing between his mid-thirties to mid-forties (roughly 1939 to 1949), childhood represented not just carefree youth but a past that he was certain was superior to the present. Yes, it included coal miners coughing their lungs up in rain-swept northern villages, men doffing their caps in the presence of the landlord or the boss, and the thin red line protecting the opium monopoly in some far-flung colony. But the countryside had not yet been overrun by suburbia – Orwell’s detested ‘villa-civilisation’ – with its motorways and faux Tudor pubs. Sturdy carthorses grazed in open fields; dace still swam in unpolluted streams and ponds; beer still tasted like beer; the Great War hadn’t killed a million Englishmen; the Great Depression hadn’t reduced the working class to starving beggars; totalitarianism, with its propaganda and surveillance, hadn’t been thought of; and the Luftwaffe hadn’t turned London into a rubble heap. The things we now consider unquestionable benefits of scientific and technical progress – which prolong our lives, keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, and allow us to travel the world for a few thousand dollars – had not yet arrived, meaning that, to the majority, the idea of ‘progress’ was largely theoretical, a swindle, a bringer of mass destruction. Looked at in this way, Orwell had a point. He called this memory of the past ‘the Golden Country’, and it is central to the meaning of his best novels, Coming Up for Air (1939), Animal Farm (1946) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Orwell, of course, isn’t the only writer to notice that progress comes with a cost, and that the march of time doesn’t necessarily make life better. Two of my favourite novels, L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between and J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, also deal with this idea: men returning to the places of their youth, where the formative events of their lives took place. Why is the superiority of the past such a recurrent theme of literature? It’s a form of pastoral, of course, and thus nostalgia, not meant to be taken literally. But does the appeal of the past lie only in the fact that the past was when we were younger and more carefree, fitter and stronger, without mortgages to pay and superannuation balances to worry about, and had possibly fallen in love for the first time? Maybe. But could it be that, in some essential ways, the past was better? Could it be that, as Shelley once observed, it is actually great artists (and not, we might add, economists and change-management theorists) who are most sensitive to the transformations going on around us, who best understand what those changes have in store and whether they really do add up to something superior, and who are best placed to tell us how to proceed?
If this is so, then pastoral has something to tell us, because in all pastoral, as in the paintings of Poussin, beneath the drooping vines and beyond the prancing minstrels, there lies a truth of sorts: that life, in many of its important and easily definable aspects, actually was better once. When, in their dismissive way, economists tell us to forget the past and embrace a risky new world, we should not necessarily acquiesce, at least not fully or without a fight. Ordinary people – and by this I don’t mean ‘change agents’ – understand this, and this is why change is often resisted, and why opposition to change will always find a listening ear.
Asked to come up with a theme for a major lecture to be given by one of my speechwriting clients, the then Labor treasurer, Wayne Swan, I encouraged him to talk about something he knew and loved: the poet of blue-collar America, Bruce Springsteen. The speech made the point that artistic sensibility is much like the finely sprung workings of a seismometer, sensing motions deep beneath the surface of society, the first rumblings of change. Economists can do that, admittedly, with their repetitive predictions about how the global free market is coming to destroy everything, and that the best we can do is hasten its triumph by shutting our mouths and surrendering – freedom being nothing more to them than the recognition of necessity. But their chants are less like warnings than commands. This is because economics, unlike art, lacks a serious moral dimension. Data, after all, doesn’t ‘do’ morality, being incapable of telling us what economic and social change means for the quality of our lives, beyond how much GDP it might, theoretically, create for some of us. If, for example, the data tells us that greater inequality will produce higher GDP, then many managerialists, including some normally quite left-wing ones, will accept it as necessary for the national good. I wouldn’t. Springsteen’s songs, by contrast, amplified echoes of the decline of blue-collar affluence, quality of life and happiness in America that Springsteen had heard in his New Jersey home town, the sort of place the dismal scientists ignorantly or wilfully never see, and whose decline they can only conceive as a good thing.
The problem this analysis faces is our inability to recall what this quite recent past, this life before the economic transformations of the mid-1980s, was like. It may have sounded like a Bruce Springsteen rock ballad from Darkness on the Edge of Town, or maybe some song written for Cold Chisel by Don Walker – ‘Flame Trees’, perhaps. But what did it look like? It is too easy for the boosters of economic reform to dismiss this past as always overcast and raining, brown-walled and acrylic-carpeted, greasy-haired, cigarette-smoking, pallid and poor. If you look hard, though, you can still catch glimpses of how this past moved and worked.
I have before me a magazine called International Auge of Mexico. It’s a massive, magnificent, glossy representation of the world before the internet. Auge translates roughly as ‘peak’ or ‘apogee’, and every edition was a separate feature on countries or places then considered on the rise. This one is a special edition from April 1973 all about Australia, called Australia the Awakening Giant. Going by what the creative destroyers tell us, we should expect to see a portrait of a drab, dreary, bogan country, a place in decline as it is slowly strangled by corporatism, tottering on its wobbly forelegs like an obese heifer, waiting for the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embargo and Vietnam-linked inflation to finish it off. Instead, Australia is portrayed as full of life and potential. Australia was once cut off and largely unknown, the magazine says. ‘But today, with rapid communication and transportation, Australia is neither unknown nor isolated, and has taken its proper place on the map as one of the most rapidly growing and progressive countries in the world.’
Off every page of the magazine leap bright pictures of thrusting skylines of modernist architecture, rapid transit systems, high-tech communications, cultural sophistication, leading-edge manufacturing industries with new factories producing 450,000 shiny new cars a year, radio-controlled pilotless aircraft and bulk container ships, all interposed with the more traditional representations of agriculture, the outback, Indigenous history and Australians at play on the beach. ‘Australia’s industrialisation,’ it says, ‘has come a long way in a short time; all the ingredients – resources, expertise, sound economy, population growth and stable government – are there for it to continue its dramatic story of development. So this is Australia,’ it continues, ‘a land quite unlike any other. It is a country well worth getting to know, not only because of its intrinsic fascination but also because it deserves to be recognised as a nation with a tremendous future.’
All up, Australia in April 1973 looks a pretty damn nice place to live. No wonder Australians over fifty remember it that way. To put it mildly, this is not the picture the economic reformers want us to se
e, because it contradicts their convenient story that, before they came along to rescue it, the Australian economy was lying face-down in the gutter.
The Hollywood epic The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino, is another piece of evidence, though far less glossy. Much criticised despite winning five Oscars, most of the movie, especially its orientalist representations of Asia, doesn’t stand up today. However, the opening act, set around work, marriage, drinking and deer hunting in a Pittsburgh steel town, supposedly in 1967 but really in 1978, is like a time capsule of a way of life that barely exists today, except in folk memory and the grooves of Springsteen’s early LPs. What is of interest is the representation of a world in which the working class, through its unions, its culture and the economic power that resided in its muscles, was still master of its own little world. Its culture is rough, male, lubricated by beer and bourbon chasers, and punctuated by periodic fistfights – so it is best not totally idealised. But because we now know what came after – deindustriali-sation and economic devastation – we can see that something significant was lost with its passing. What was it?
This story of loss is told by the New Yorker writer George Packer in his book The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. As Packer tells it, in the wake of the Reagan revolution, de-industrialisation began to spread like a cancer along the highways of old blue-collar America, bringing with it unemployment, drugs and rising crime rates. In Ohio the steel plants downsized and then shut – or, rather, moved to Mexico, where the labour was cheaper (just like Heinz moved from Dandenong to New Zealand). Workers over fifty took their retirement and the younger ones left town; the owner-managed strip shops went under and were replaced by ugly, minimum-wage-paying low-cost chain stores like Wal-Mart, built on Springsteen’s dark edge of town; houses lay empty and then were vandalised and burnt; whole neighbourhoods were depopulated and became ghost towns; local taxes dried up, decimating municipal police forces and allowing gangs to get a stranglehold over the streets; schools went into decline and student grades fell, taking away any hope of upward social mobility; and crack cocaine finally dissolved what was left, the way gin did in Hogarth’s eighteenth-century England. Our picture of Doveton is starting to look familiar.
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