As we begin to lift our heads and look beyond the lockdown, it’s easy to see the many other problems we face. It’s possible to view those problems with fear and disheartenment – and it suits the interests of many groups to play on our fears.
But it’s almost as easy to see Australia as still a lucky country, with a populace that’s confident, resourceful, committed to the “fair go” and capable of co-operating to convert our problems into opportunities to flourish.
The keys to making life in Australia better rather than worse are to face up to all the change being forced upon us, and to unite in finding solutions that share both the costs and the benefits as fairly as possible.
Ideally, we’d have a political leader who offered us a more united, optimistic and confident vision of the path to a better world, but the sad truth is the two main parties are locked in a race to the bottom that we can’t even be sure they’d like to escape.
In reviewing our problems, let’s start with the pandemic. There’s a risk that we’ve opened up too soon, that our hospitals are overwhelmed and death rates rise unacceptably, forcing the premiers to backtrack.
But it’s only a risk and, assuming it doesn’t happen, I think we can be confident the economy will bounce back strongly and quickly, as it did last year. It won’t be quite as strong as last year because the feds haven’t splashed around nearly as much money as last time.
Even so, most households have saved a lot of their incomes and, as we saw last year, will spend much of the increase over coming months.
At a global level, the risk is that the pandemic continues for years more, as long delays in vaccinating everyone in the poor countries allow new variants to emerge. That the rich countries, having hogged all the vaccines, then lose interest in the topic.
Our first post-pandemic problem is that the economy will rebound only to the plodding rate of growth we were achieving before the plague arrived. Like the other rich countries, our rate of improvement in productivity – production per worker – is anaemic.
Our business people are going through a phase where the only way they can think of to increase profits is to use every tactic to keep wage rises as low as possible. The penny is yet to drop that, since wages are their customers’ chief source of income, this is not a winning formula.
Other problems abound: ever-rising house prices that can’t keep rising forever; adjusting to the ageing of the population and the growing demand for aged care; continuing digital disruption, with all its benefits to users but upheaval in affected industries; handling the growing assertiveness of China, while still taking advantage of being part of the global economy’s fastest-growing region; and the less tangible but no less worrying problem of the breakdown of trust in Australian and global institutions and relationships.
All that’s before we get to our biggest problem – responding to climate change – which, with the Glasgow conference starting in less than two weeks, is also our most pressing challenge.
No issue better illustrates the lesson that, if we want to be on top of our problems rather than crushed by them, we must face up to inevitable changes being forced on us by forces we don’t control.
We must stand up to powerful interests – our coal, oil and gas industries, in this case – hoping to stave off the evil hour as long as possible. They’ll protect their own interests at our expense for as long as we let them. We must be suspicious of political parties accepting donations from these urgers.
We must resist the blandishments of populist politicians – yes you, Tony Abbott – promising to save us from sky-high power costs (we got them anyway) because we can just let the whole thing slide.
Now we have the farmers-turned-miners National Party holding themselves out as champions of the put-upon regions and using their veto over adoption of the net zero emissions target to extort money from the Liberals.
People in the regions, we’re told, bitterly resent Liberal city slickers sitting pretty while imposing all the costs of adjustment on the bush.
This conveniently ignores two points. First, farmers are the biggest losers from climate change and the biggest winners from successful global action to limit further global warming.
Second, as Scott Morrison rightly says, coal mining jobs in NSW and Queensland will decline as other countries reduce their own emissions by ceasing to buy our coal and gas. But acting to get on with making Australia a renewable energy superpower – including by exporting hydrogen, clean steel and clean aluminium – will create many new skilled manufacturing jobs – all of them in the regions.
But only if we stop thinking and acting like losers, and do what it takes to be winners in the new, decarbonised world.
