The Political Economy of Migration and Post-industrialising Australia by Patrick Brownlee

Author:Patrick Brownlee [Brownlee, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138386662
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Reflecting on the argument thus far, it is no coincidence that the 1970s global economic crises allowed space for social and cultural gains, hard won after protracted and significant civil and controversial military conflict experienced in many Keynesian liberal democracies the previous decade or more. For a brief period, the gains in and through multicultural policy and migrant advocacy in the 1970s can be understood as one part of asserting the ‘embedding’ of the economy. By the early 1980s market economic forms sponsored by an emergent neoliberal ideology challenged publicly planned industrialism and organised labour (as well as welfare). It would be erroneous to see this social contest simply as ‘double movement’, or as a sequential social phenomenon in this sense. Any such notion of historical struggle between capital and its social control is best seen in this period as dynamic, or ‘combined and uneven’ dependent upon major turns in the macro political economy.

The role of key actors within government, particularly Prime Ministers Hawke and Keating, are evident. Of course, they were supported by a bureaucracy with leading policy advisers who together were instrumental in shifting Australia towards being a regionally competitive trading nation. These dynamics emanating from within certain government circles are an indicator of how Productive Diversity would later be conceptualised and utilised. While their administrations clearly pursued market-based solutions to economic and social problems, neither Hawke nor Keating demonstrated a Thatcherite position that society itself, its institutions and ideals were anathema. Neoliberalism as ideology reveals only part of the story with the actions of the Hawke–Keating period best seen as a variation of neoliberalism. Laborite concerns for a national form of competitive advantage within regional cooperation, coupled with macroeconomic interventions aiming to attract new sources of FDI reflect their party’s approach to economic governance that was not of an ideal or pure laissez faire type.

Having outlined in this chapter key transformations in Australia’s competitiveness as a frame for understanding multicultural policy making, Chapter 8 examines just how grounded or embedded cultural values were in notions of Australia’s productiveness and competitiveness. It provides a basis for understanding the ideational limits to multiculturalism in Australia without also considering the emergent global political economy.

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