By Shaun Carney
How does a government - not just the Gillard government but any government - set out on a reform program when the public simply isn't interested?
Last Friday, Ken Henry signed off as the head of Treasury by delivering a provocative lecture at the University of Tasmania. Henry attracted headlines by asserting in a question-and-answer session after his speech that, in terms of its infrastructure and fiscal settings, Australia was over-populated to the tune of about 7 million people.
But he also diagnosed a deep political problem within the community. In his speech, Henry sought to find lessons for today's politicians and policymakers from the experiences of the Hawke government as it reshaped the economy in the wake of the 1982-83 recession.
''Right through the 1980s, Australian policymakers, haunted by another deep recession attributable to policy failure over many decades, found themselves on a burning platform. With high inflation and high unemployment, and another negative terms-of-trade shock that threatened a further hit to living standards, the imperative for action was broadly understood and accepted. I'm not saying it was easy. It wasn't,'' he said.
''And accounts of that period that would have you believe that it was not politically contentious - and I've seen more and more of these accounts popping up in recent years - are simply wrong. But the circumstances were so confronting that action was inevitable. Today we find ourselves having avoided a recession that paralysed the rest of the developed world. We have low inflation, low unemployment, and a terms-of-trade boom that has, to date, boosted average living standards. How does one, today, communicate the imperative for action? That is the question.''
Henry did not have the answer, but later, in response to a question from the audience, he took the trouble not to sheet home blame for the lack of reform-policy appetite to the usual suspect-in-chief, the minority federal government. He saw the genesis of the problem as extending beyond just one side of politics and put it down in part to voters.
''There is not the same sense of urgency among our politicians as there was in the 1980s,'' he said. ''There is a sense of complacency in the broader community that hasn't put the political system under as much stress as there was in the 1980s.''
This is an important piece of intelligence for the government as it sets out to establish its carbon price regime. Henry knows, as a former ministerial adviser and then as a department head for 10 years, just how hard it is to get ministers and leaders engaged in big, challenging policies when they all know the public won't have a bar of change.
It's an interesting perspective. The orthodox view of today's politics is that politicians produce the policies and then have to go out and sell them to a public that has a static, benign, almost uninterested stance.
If the politicians cannot win voter support for the policies, then it must be down to the politicians' failings; the voters, like customers availing themselves of a business, are always right. That is certainly how liberal democracies work.
But that does not mean that profound changes aren't taking place among electors - changes in their economic and social relationships, and their sense of commitment and obligation to each other. The reasons for much of the natural resistance to big contemporary policy reforms are not hard to find. Henry nominated the biggest one: the fact that Australia got through the global financial crisis largely unscathed beyond a few years of budget deficits has inured most Australian voters to the need to continue remaking the nation's economy.
Rather than instilling a sense of economic and social boldness, this economic escape trick - which in many respects compounds Australian society's status as the luckiest and most affluent on the face of the earth - has encouraged voters to become more cautious and protective of what they have.
As it stood even before Julia Gillard pledged herself to introducing a carbon tax, after ruling one out before last year's election, voters in general were disdainful of politicians and their promises and surprises (such as John Howard on the GST and WorkChoices, and Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan on the resource rent tax). The fact that the community refused to grant outright power to either side in 2010, only two elections after giving the Coalition control of both houses, tells us something about the falling standing of politicians.
Add to that the increasing resistance to any policies that require any form of financial sacrifice, and you have a political environment that militates against all policies that go beyond anything other than managing what's already there. This should be food for thought for people on both sides of the main political divide.
In effect, there is a sullen attitude to politics generally, and a refusal to accept new ideas and new concepts that threaten to be disruptive. Social researchers describe this as co-morbidity, a medical term that has found its way into the social sciences. It is defined as a condition that exists along with, and independently of, another condition. And it doesn't mean the body is getting healthier.
Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.
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