Quarterly Essay 46 Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation by Laura Tingle

Author:Laura Tingle [Tingle, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Religious, Religion, Child Abuse, Family & Relationships, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Catholic, Writing, History, Abuse, Christianity, Politics, Sexual Abuse & Harassment
ISBN: 9781921870644
Google: Xxv2AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18203171
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2012-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

THEY’RE AN ANGRY MOB

Kevin Rudd raised voters’ expectations to a risky degree. He suggested that he could make government respond to our needs. It was a change from the politics of personal entitlement of John Howard. Labor gradually introduced tighter means testing on measures such as the baby bonus and private health insurance rebates, but Rudd was reluctant to challenge head-on the idea of entitlement that Howard had embedded in Australian governance. There things sat until September 2008 and the onset of the global financial crisis.

In the scramble to respond, Australians got the full monty of government intervention: cash payments to households, support for industry through building programs, support for the financial system through guarantees. Many of these measures replicated the protections that had existed in the original Australian settlement and been dismantled in the era of deregulation. There wasn’t protection for industries in the form of tariffs this time around, but there were cash payments.

Instead of the raft of legislation and controls that had once provided support and comfort to voters, the government had just one lever at its disposal: the budget. It used its financial resources and capacity to borrow, confident that the bottom line would quickly recover. After all, for the previous five years, the mining boom had repeatedly delivered billions of dollars in extra revenue. Saving Australians from the world meant going into deficit: it meant not offsetting the big fall in tax collections while also engaging in extra spending. Budget surpluses had by now become a talisman of good government for both sides of politics, seen to equal good economic management. One could almost hear a sharp intake of breath among journalists in the press gallery as the treasurer was asked in the early months of the crisis whether the times might actually call for going into (gulp) deficit.

The government’s measures to stave off recession and keep confidence buoyed were supposed to be one-offs that could be quickly implemented and equally quickly unwound. The reality proved more difficult. Having put financial guarantees in place for the banking system, it was hard to take them away. Many voters – rather than being grateful for the cash hand-outs and understanding that they were designed to keep consumers in shops and, therefore, the economy ticking over – were cynical about getting money for nothing.

Perhaps most significantly, the program that sought to double up the policy goals of providing employment and improving the insulation of Australian housing exposed a harsh reality: the changes of the previous two decades had left the federal bureaucracy with no direct experience of running service-delivery programs. This lack of experience also left the federal government at the mercy of the states to administer the huge outlay on school buildings. The vision of seamless, cooperative federalism that had been a central plank of Rudd’s 2007 election victory stumbled even before he ran into trouble on hospital reform.

By the time Rudd was toppled, there was a perfect storm brewing of confused expectations about what government and politicians could do for us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.