Morality, history, linguistic precision, sociology, aesthetics: adding these to our thinking would allow us to honour the complexity, generosity, creativity and even majesty of working-class life and work in wider and more honest ways than economics alone makes possible. Yes, economics has something to say, but on its own it tells us almost nothing.
Ordinary people do not live their lives according to the sort of narrow parameters that can be plotted on graphs. Their thinking on economic, social and political issues doesn’t revolve around the concept of productivity but around whether their children have jobs to look forward to, whether they can afford to buy a home, their level of employment security, the quality of their jobs, the physical state of their neighbourhoods, and the civility or otherwise they encounter in their daily lives – and all these things at once.
Politicians nowadays try automatically to reduce these concrete concerns to supposedly measurable concepts such as ‘cost of living’, and they roll everyone together under the nonsensical imported American term ‘working families’. Why is this? Is it cynicism? Is it because they haven’t the capacity to stand up to the pollsters who bribe them with promises of easy victory, or the tabloid editors and shock jocks who bully them with simplistic and anti-intellectual explanations of what ordinary people really care about? Or is it because politicians and their advisers today lack the wider education, the imagination or the verbal capacity necessary to articulate something broader, deeper and more meaningful, something that can move people in genuine and even profound ways?
The management consultants and the pollsters don’t have the answers, and it’s time we tell them: ‘Enough!’
We need to connect, now more than ever. This is becoming increasingly urgent. Some would say it is the urgent issue of the day. But how are we to do it?
It is a common complaint of the creative destroyers that our political system is broken – broken because economic reform is no longer possible. At election after election, governments that advocate privatisation and cut thousands of public-sector jobs are being tossed out or having their majorities slashed. The economic reformers and their boosters in the press tell us that we, the people, led by populists the way a beef farmer leads a bull by its nose ring, are the problem, and that we must be ignored for the good of the country. What politicians must do, they say, is prepare the electorate for uncomfortable truths by providing them with a new narrative, and ideally one which involves multiplying the current rate of productivity by two or three. The debate about this narrative and the policies that flow from it, they argue, must be taken out of the public arena and discussed in forums insulated from the special pleading of vested interests and the emotion of the electorate.
For some, this means a new economic forum of wise economists, led by the old advisers from the glory days of the 1980s and ’90s. For others, it means a national summit of businessmen and sensible welfare leaders, led by the productivity commissioners and the men who brought us the Great Australian Economic Miracle: Hawke, Keating, Howard, Costello and their former advisers. With the exceptions of the prime minister, the treasurer and a few other office-holders who can be relied upon to support the Productivity Commission’s line, all current members of parliament must be excluded. Only in this way – by locking out the people and their democratically elected representatives, and thus by engineering an appointed Parliament of Creative Destruction – can economic reform be certain of coming out on top.
In other words, democracy can’t be trusted to get things done, and economics must be made safe from it, safe from the potential losers from change, safe from the human yearning for equality and creativity, safe from moral reasoning, safe from the memory of something better. This is essentially the same lament about people power first mouthed by the elites in fifth-century Athens, but whereas the Athenians said, ‘Leave the decisions to the philosopher kings,’ we say, ‘Leave them to the economists.’ Like the Eastern European communists before them, the creative destroyers have finally found the root of their problem: to succeed in their plans, they first need to elect a new people.
They know that, out in the open, their philosophy of creative destruction is doomed because the people are wary of it. You can’t smash what’s left of the car industry, put the remaining canneries out of production and replace their produce with contaminated food from China, get rid of penalty rates and the minimum wage, privatise what’s left of electricity and rail and ports, make people pay to visit bulk-billing doctors when their children are sick, price university degrees at $100,000, break what remains of union power, shift an even greater share of GDP from labour to capital, make more people redundant at the age of fifty, murder more neighbourhoods and destroy more lives without expecting a democratic fight. The Australian people do not want these things, and never will.
This has enormous significance for our democracy. If our political system is really broken, as the common slogan today says, it is because while the reformers want creative destruction, the people do not. The popular will is being subverted. The people may be willing to accept change, but they are unwilling to accept change for change’s sake, or for the sole sake of the people at the top. Bringing these two sides of our democracy back together requires our politicians to listen to the people.
It comes down to this: change can’t be avoided. Everyone knows that. But just because change can’t be avoided, it doesn’t mean that everything has to change at once, or that it has to change in the way decreed from on high. This is not an argument for replacing hard reckoning about the present with some naive form of nostalgia. We can’t create a time machine and we shouldn’t try. But perhaps nostalgia can sometimes have a point, because when we look back we can attempt to understand what the past got right, and we can see that sometimes our parents’ generation got it more right than we have. The idea that life in the future will always be better than it is now is just as naive as the idea that the past was always better.
There is an alternative. There are many imaginable futures, and it seems to me that the future the people will accept is the one that adequately respects important elements of the past, not one that tries to wipe the past out and simply start again. This requires an effort: we must think for ourselves as a people, and not accept the tired, imported, out-of-date, out-of-time, off-the-shelf theory of creative destruction that is being offered as our only option.
We need instead to choose a future that – like the past – is designed to benefit all the Australian people, not just some. It’s the future we were heading towards before the unfortunate revolutionary changes of the past thirty years derailed it. Back before that time – an era still within the span of middle-aged memory – we believed our economic future lay in making things, and we believed our social future lay in supporting communities. We saw ourselves as more than just an agglomeration of individual consumers left to fend for themselves. For the people of Doveton, this meant making cars, trucks, trains and processed food, and it meant supporting neighbourhoods that were built around job creation and the provision of real opportunities for ordinary people. It meant nation-building for every member of the nation.
Thanks to sometimes unstoppable change, but also to stupid, shortsighted and overly theoretical policy – the too hasty closing down of car manufacturing in the face of a temporarily overvalued dollar being but the worst example – we can’t any longer make all the sorts of things we once did. But we can aspire to make things, to create skilled jobs, to value creativity, to replace urban blight with urban regeneration, not in the bits-and-pieces way we currently do, as a sort of penance for smashing things up in the first place, but with real purpose and real investment. The way our parents lived, and the sort of egalitarian nation they worked and fought for, provides us not so much with a model but with the moral inspiration we need to get started.
Go out and look for it, because it is still there. Sous les pavés, la plage!
CONCLUSION
TO REALLY CARE
The
impulse of the senses … and the conclusions of Reason, draw men together; but the Imagination is the true fire stolen from heaven …
— MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT
I thought I’d finished my modest little story about Doveton, but I decided to spend another week or so searching for some positive things to say – some green shoots, a little hope; God knows the place needs it.
I’ll admit my motivations for doing so weren’t totally honourable. When you write honestly about somewhere going through hard times, you inevitably encounter criticisms of the ‘How dare he?’ type. ‘He’s a blow-in … he’s talking the place down when what it needs is talking up … he’s not here battling away every day like us … he’s overlooked all the positive economic development that’s going on … why didn’t he talk to me?’ and so on. All of that, obviously, contains an element of truth, even if you ignore the fact that I’ve cared enough about my old home town to spend half a year writing a book about it. Anyway, it’s just as big a mistake sometimes to artificially talk a place up. There are affluent people in Doveton, certainly, but writing about Doveton to illustrate affluence is about as enlightening as writing about Toorak to illustrate the adverse effects of unemployment – it might exist, but it’s hardly typical.
I spend a day in meetings with economic development experts in the City of Casey and the City of Greater Dandenong. (Doveton, which lies on their boundary, is technically in the former but historically linked to the latter.) I’m impressed by the economic development efforts being made and come away with a folder two inches thick, full of glossy strategies, plans, partnerships, regeneration initiatives, stakeholder newsletters and the usual offspring of the marriage between management consultants and highly committed municipal officials.
And it does indeed seem that there is much going on, some of which I can see from the cafe at which one of the meetings takes place. The cafe is part of a Revitalising Central Dandenong initiative, which opens up the city centre and links it to the railway station and a new shopping plaza – the locals refer to the new development as the Pompidou Centre. Panda – who, as the former state member for the area, was involved in the planning – had taken me on a tour of it a couple of months before, and locals rightly regard it as a symbol of how things can be improved if you try hard enough. The problem is that from my seat in the café, looking out into Dandenong’s main street, it’s all too obvious why this new development and a lot more like it are needed.
At the end of the meeting I take a walk down the street, and in two blocks count forty-three shopfronts, of which four are untenanted, four are $2 shops, one is a pokies venue, one is a charity shop, and three are variations on the ‘buy, sell and cash loan’ businesses that in generations past would have been called pawnbrokers. I walk into one of them and see the usual collection of household items offloaded by people desperate for cash, some of whom, perhaps having already disposed of the kids’ Xbox for $100, are standing at the counter and negotiating desperately needed loans which, in the long run, will likely make their finances worse.
This brings back a bad memory of a single desperate moment my father had when he and I were alone together in Doveton, and it strikes me that the owners of these businesses are attracted to poverty like sharks to a school of pilchards. Don’t you hate them? I also find the Coles Variety Store outlet where my Aunt Ena sold the garments her mother made; it is now one of those discount chemist chains filled with disorienting fluorescent lights.
A few days before my meeting in the new Pompidou Centre, local manufacturers used its forecourt to put on a display called ‘Dandenong on Wheels’. Featuring sophisticated trucks, trams, buses, emergency vehicles, garbage trucks and campervans, the exhibition showed off some of the high-tech manufacturing going on in the area. It was reported prominently in the Age the next day, but the AFR went instead with a feature story on an amazing high-tech Siemens factory in Amberg, in south-east Germany (where, coincidentally, Aunt Ena was interned in a Displaced Persons’ camp at the end of World War II), and another about how deregulating the car import market further will slash the price of a Ferrari from $525,000 to just $343,000. Now that they’ve stopped people like my father building cars, they’re planning to stop them selling them too. It’s clear that creating jobs for the little people in Doveton is of zero interest to the readers of financial newspapers, even though their investment decisions might make a positive difference.
It’s obvious that manufacturing is gradually regaining a toehold here. Could it be the hope the people of Doveton are looking for? Later, after talking to the organiser of the local manufacturing alliance, I decide to take a tour of the great manufacturing conurbation that is opening up to the south of Dandenong, stretching all the way to Mentone and Frankston. Driving along with massive trucks tailgating me all the way, I explore huge industrial parks (there are six on the map I am given), where concrete buildings are going up to house a mixture of medium-sized and boutique modern ‘factories’. This is going to grow – that’s obvious. The caravan manufacturer Jayco, for instance, where Fred worked for a while after leaving Heinz, recently put on another 200 workers, taking its workforce to 1000, and is even doing its best to give jobs to locals with drug, alcohol and other problems; more power to them, I say. It’s not on the scale of the old days, when GMH alone had between 4500 and 5000 workers on its payroll, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
Still, I can’t help but point out to the economic development officials that while manufacturing appears to be returning, unemployment in Doveton, very literally just over the road from some of these factories, is still significantly over 20 per cent. How can that be? They tell me, as a sort of afterthought: the sad reality is that despite the efforts of companies like Jayco, the new manufacturing jobs being created in the area are unlikely be filled by many people from Doveton. The clean, sleek futuristic factories (like the Siemens factory in Amberg), with their high-tech processes, need employees with medium to high-level trade qualifications, and even university degrees, but poor old Doveton has one of the least educated and least qualified populations in the state. And because it has become a destination for the least-educated refugees and asylum seekers from the poorest communities of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, much of Doveton’s workforce can’t even speak enough English to read a health and safety sign, never mind operate complex computer-based equipment. Many, because of their asylum seeker status, are not even legally permitted to work.
I decide to attend the National Manufacturing Week exhibition in Melbourne, where I’m told employers from the Dandenong region will be present in large numbers. It’s obvious the moment I walk in that manufacturing in the future is going to be lean – perhaps too lean for places like Doveton to benefit.
What stands out most are the robots. There are dozens on display, some of which look like programmable lathes and saws, but others which look like one-armed factory workers. I decide to make a pain of myself by asking difficult questions about the economic and employment effects of these human-like devices. It turns out that robots will save manufacturers serious money by reducing their wages bills. The salespeople give me calculations based on differing wage rates and on-costs.
For example, at a 3 per cent interest rate, a $25,000 robot that works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (including Christmas Day and Good Friday), costs just twenty cents per hour, plus electricity. My sister’s friend Cheryl costs $16.86. But when I press the point of what this is going to mean for unskilled workers, I’m told that it will have no effect on unemployment. ‘You see, the business owners who introduce robot workers aren’t doing it for financial reasons, but to relieve their valued employees of boring, repetitive tasks.’ They’re philanthropists, philosophers even, doing their employees a favour.
But after fifteen minutes of pressing for an answer, I’m told about a model factory in Belgium where 150 robots are supervised by just six humans, making it incredibly profitable. And anyway, you can’t get good human help anymore, even wh
en there is high unemployment – the lazy proles just don’t want to work. This claim is illustrated by anecdote after anecdote about languid factory hands who don’t pay attention to their tasks.
At one display I spot three of the $25,000 robots performing simple, repetitive tasks next to each other in a sort of mock assembly line. I ask the engineer if they could be put to use on a food canning and packing line, say, at Heinz. ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘That one could put on the lids, that one could put on the labels, and that bigger one could lift the cans into boxes, then cart them off to a truck on a computer-controlled conveyor belt.’ I tell him I’m naming them Audrey, Dawn and Pamela, after my mother and two sisters whose jobs they would have taken, had they been around a few decades before. He isn’t impressed.
My line of questioning is a little unfair, I admit, as the robot salespeople aren’t philosophers, just decent business-people trying to keep their own companies (located in China, Japan and Switzerland) alive, but I find this inability to engage in serious discussion of the social consequences of their technology a little annoying. One day we’re all going to pay for this unwillingness to think through what eliminating millions of low-skilled jobs will do to our society. Places like Doveton already know. When the computers eventually come for middle-class jobs – a process already underway – every suburb is going to get a taste of what it feels like to live in my old home town.
An Economy is Not a Society Page 11