Roo in the Headlights

In the third essay in this series, I ask why a once proud and plucky country like Australia should be stupefied and immobilised in the path of era-defining challenges.

Dr Stephen Porges, originator of Polyvagal Theory[1], noted that Covid-19 exposed how individual physiological states intersect with the health of whole societies.

Mammals including humans are normally highly social but revert to a more primitive reptilian state when threatened. This is the famous ‘fight or flight’ response. But in fact, it includes some other variations: ‘freeze’ and 'fawn'.

We don’t need a pouncing tiger to trigger it. Loss of livelihood can do it, as can a bad boss, mortgage or rental stress, family conflict and anything else which undermines trust. The pandemic exacerbated all those factors.

Out of danger, we need to restore equanimity quickly before our health is damaged; and the best remedy is co-regulation, the healing effect of good company. The social isolation which accompanied the pandemic made that difficult.

Other factors prolonged our threat arousal. Its purpose is to get us out of trouble. But when that trouble is systemic, we rely on our institutions to fix it. What happens when they don’t do that? What if instead they add to it?

The Erosion of Trust

Public trust in authority reached an all-time low in Australia in 2022 and with good reason. Obfuscating, evading, and sometimes outright lying had become common practice for politicians, senior public servants, and CEOs. As attention spans shortened and news feeds occupied public spaces and personal devices, impression eclipsed substance as the guarantor of popular support. Careers waxed and waned with stock prices and opinion polls. The zinger and the dog whistle entered the essential repertoire of high office.

Unfortunately, both the old media who once held power to account and the new media platforms stealing their audiences found this trend lucrative, capturing public attention by inflaming fears and enmities while reaffirming partisan prejudices and rewarding mischief from culture warriors. Politics and media had snared each other in a diabolical feedback loop, blood siblings to a Faustian bargain.

Polarisation induces threat arousal in conformists and dissidents alike. In that state we are cognitively diminished, quick to anger, impervious to reason and vulnerable to demagoguery. More laws and police won’t fix it; and to not fix it is reckless.

So what’s been stopping us?

How We Got Stuck

Upton Sinclair, who challenged the unjust orthodoxies of his era before he was expunged by its oligarchs and media barons, famously observed that it’s difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Imagine how dangerous it is when a whole society operates on that basis.

The term ‘system justification’ describes our instinctual urge to reinforce the system to which we belong. Most of us prefer a system which is just and fair, but what’s most important for long-term endeavours like developing a career or raising children is that it’s dependable. System justification helps ensure that. But when a society’s institutions are diverted by people with ignoble intentions the same instinct can betray us.

There is a great chasm between the world commonly presented in Australian public life and the one that appears in evidence. The public world is a marketer’s confection, sponsored by big business and the billionaires who own the platforms, curated and presented by a parade of well-remunerated public officials, prominent figures, and anodyne spokesmodels who, along with some flag wavers in protected niches, still share in the security and prosperity bestowed by our formerly thriving economy.

In this world, threats like climate breakdown, disease and conflict are overcome with business acumen, new technologies and modest interventions by governments so people can carry on working, borrowing, shopping, and accumulating. It’s the world of ‘us’.

The world of evidence is a world of collapsing ecosystems, fires, floods, and freak storms, faltering supply chains, increasing inequality, diminishing opportunity and millions pushed toward pointless destitution. This is the world as it appears to most scientists, social workers, and Indigenous leaders, plus a few principled politicians and businesspeople, some independent media, and each day more ordinary citizens trapped by misfortunes for which there is seemingly no redress.

In this world, the planet is rapidly heating, deadly pathogens are mutating and spreading, and societies are being eviscerated by voracious mega-corporations. It’s the world of ‘them’.

You can miss it if you’re a ‘winner’, or at least in with a chance. Just as white South Africans could avoid the horrors of apartheid for a time, more fortunate Australians aren’t usually confronted by collapse. Abandoned shops, hungry children and overwhelmed medical services are mostly hidden in places they don’t go; and lost species and civil liberties may not register until they obstruct ‘investor returns’.

But the main beneficiaries of this arrangement belong to another class altogether.

Capture

Katharine Murphy once characterised LNP federal electoral strategy since Howard as a decades-long project to become a permanent government[2]. The 2022 election seemed to interrupt that plan. Some conduct is simply too odious to be countervailed with pork barreling and public relations. Though assault had left it comatose, democracy retained a pulse. But what was one-party rule intended to achieve?

There are clues in what the Morrison regime left behind. The bureaucracy is typically aloof from the vicissitudes of politics. Its indispensability to the modern state ensures it lumbers implacably on while rival ideologies tussle over the direction of travel. But that changed during ‘the lost decade’.

I doubt many Australians of any political persuasion wanted chaos in water and energy, damaged diplomatic relations, whistle-blowers on trial, and national icons like the Reef and the koala in peril. Nevertheless, that’s what we got. Why?

According to Scott Ludlam[3], by the 2022 federal electoral campaign the process of state capture was at the last hurdle in Australia[4]. It had colonised our media, built a ‘dark money’ system of lobbying and donations, and made servants of both major parties. Local candidates had been nudged aside by career politicians eager to do their sponsors’ bidding.

The preceding decade of federal politics makes sense only as a process of premeditated destruction. Like a parasitoid wasp laying eggs in a paralysed host[5], private interests had repurposed the party of Robert Menzies to shrink the public service, purge it of competencies, and stack it with political appointees, leaving it a fragile carapace. It was the dismantling of government from within, an attempt to prevent public goods and elected officeholders from limiting the profits of well-connected people.

To gain office, Labor made themselves almost indistinguishable. They aren’t the oligarchs’ natural choice, and they haven’t been in power as often, but they are still obsequious to big money. Their donors are largely the same, preferring to put a bet each way.

The 2022 election result proved to be cosmetic rather than substantive. The new government repaired some of the damage caused by malfeasance and incompetence but its predecessor’s policies remained. Neither major party proposed to do more than assuage public disaffection with a show of accountability while perpetuating business as usual, relying on media messaging and system justification to keep us placated. But this could only be short-lived.

Crunch Time

Earth and its inhabitants are struggling now to fulfil global capital’s demand for continual profit growth. Governments face a stark choice: act quickly to protect populations and the planet we live on, or surrender the future to the extraction, production, consumption, and work which will deliver next quarter’s returns.

In public it’s presented differently, as a choice between vague, distant, unlikely threats and our immediate personal prosperity. But that’s a ruse. Refugees from fire and flood know these are real and present dangers. And for many others, the most immediate threat to personal prosperity is predation by the class who run the discussion.

Thomas Picketty showed that when returns to investors exceed other measures of economic success, someone else must be getting poorer[6]. Taxes and public spending compensate but if moneyed interests seize control of government and media these also tend to decline. And if some of the growth derives from adverse consequences such as addictions and medical emergencies, positive feedback magnifies the damage.

Planetary boundaries make it worse again. No one has figured out how to create more Earth or more hours in a day. Up against these limits, hungry capital must seek other sources. And there’s really only one: us. The experiences of rich countries show a clear correlation between the status of investors and the prevalence of social problems.

In the US, where capital rules, life expectancy is falling[7], and opiate use and gun violence[8]are rife. An expanding reservoir of working poor spends an ever-increasing share of earnings on rent and debt repayment[9]. Part of America’s workforce now sleeps in cars[10].

Finland, on the other hand, prioritises quality of life and now sits astride international measures of wellbeing[11]. When Finland discovered homeless people, they set about building houses for them[12]. Even unemployed Finns with drug addictions are more secure than some hard-working Americans.

These different destinies don’t simply reflect the preferences of different populations. Desire for safe, harmonious, and equitable living conditions is universal. The factor which steers popular opinion towards the selfish goals of private capital is capture. The US succumbed to it. Finland has so far resisted it.

But messaging isn’t enough. Capture also seeks complicity. Wherever possible it rewards support with a share of the spoils, dividing the population into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. In this regard Australia is in serious trouble.

Predation as Policy

Elizabeth Farrelly[13]has warned for many years that the primary purpose of housing construction in Australia is to enrich developers and land grabbers[14]. People wanting homes merely underwrite the investment vehicle. But in recent decades there has been a queue of other rent seekers – speculators, portfolio builders and professional landlords – assisted by cheap credit, interceding between housing supply and the people who need it, pricing dwellings beyond the reach of owner occupiers and renters in a scramble after tax-advantaged capital gains.

Rather than provide alternative housing for the needy, we’ve pandered to the real estate lobby by pumping the existing market, finding eager buyers wherever they exist in the world while adding inducements for already wealthy Australian families to buy more.

Many of these properties become tax shelters for their owners, not actual shelters for humans, remaining empty or occasionally let on Airbnb to the same investor class enjoying leisure travel. Consequently, there are single mothers living in cars with their children[15], young professional couples pitching tents[16]or paying extortionate rents for derelict dwellings[17], and landlords who demand sexual favours from desperate tenants[18].

There’s no mystery about how to solve the housing problem. We’ve done it previously in Australia[19]. And it’s working elsewhere today. Even Singapore – the ‘millionaire factory’ often used to sell the virtues of private enterprise – founded its success on public housing[20]. And there’s no cost benefit to not providing it; homelessness costs more[21].

But nor is there any mystery about why we don’t. Simply put, racketeers are running the sector. And millions of ordinary Australians, whether they intended to or not, have become parties to the racket.

To varying degrees, our problems with housing apply to other essential services.

Private Opulence and Public Squalor

The craze for privatisation was justified by neoliberalism’s devotion to markets. Competition in markets can foster innovation, efficiency, more choice and lower prices. But for something like water, roads or power, scope for competition is limited. Any savings are likely to be achieved by skimping on upkeep or staff and are readily pocketed by the operator. With something like insurance, they mostly depend on finding loopholes to withhold the service.

Sometimes we’d rather do without the ‘animal spirits’ of competitive markets anyway. You wouldn’t treat your family as one, unless you don’t care if you never see them again. Investors don’t really like them at all. Competition introduces performance pressure and capital risk. Investors prefer captive markets, where we are forced to pay what they demand for what they’re willing to offer; and those are the ‘markets’ which have tended to take charge of our basic needs.

Covid, ‘natural’ disaster, and the war in Ukraine provided cover for hostage takers to price gouge and post record profits[22]. Central banks, having only an interest rate hammer, concluded this artificial inflation must be a nail, and needlessly raised the cost of borrowing, making ordinary people pay a second time[23]. Western governments, rebuked by the big end of town for so much as contemplating spending into deficit, ignored the tax loopholes exploited by the rich and flensed public programs so the common folk would pay yet again.

The journalist Larry Elliot observed that British economic parlance is peppered with the language of S&M[24]. Ours is similar. ‘Discipline’, ‘restraint’, and ‘control’ mandate ‘pain’. But the pain seems to be selective. Investors apparently need ‘relief’ from taxes and compliance costs. It’s workers wanting a wage rise, people lacking services and businesses surviving on credit who deserve the fiscal and monetary spanking.

The End of Egalitarianism

When I speak with them, it’s clear most Australians still believe in justice, fairness, and equal opportunity, and would prefer to control carbon emissions. But in the atmosphere of anxiety and scarcity engendered by plutocrat politics they balk at any risk – real or imaginary – to their jobs and mortgages. And the wealthy among them won’t readily forgo tax breaks, property values or ‘investor returns’.

‘The economy’ has made personal success the enemy of the common good. A healthy society is now an after-market option, like a roof rack on a car; self-advancement is the car. While big business has largely managed to escape competition, it has become a way of life for ordinary people.

Richard Denniss recounts how political strategists love it when they’re caught pork barrelling because it advertises their effectiveness[25]. Even more than justice, fairness, and equal opportunity their target constituents respond to preferential treatment. And this relentless appeal to self-interest has opened the tomb of a malevolent spirit.

The problem with Australians, Clive James once quipped, is not that so many of us are descended from convicts, but that so many of us are descended from prison officers. In the era after Howard, seemingly possessed by a severe atavistic moralism, we set about restoring the Nineteenth Century, even appointing a cadre of modern day ‘flogging parsons’[26]to chastise the poor.

Having given up trying to be a ‘clever country’, Australia is now part amusement park part correctional facility, as if a lucky country ‘us’ and a penal colony ‘them’ are living side by side, with a nervous middle class running ever harder on the treadmills of the rich to reach the one and elude the other.

Robodebt[27], Workforce[28], and the Indue Card[29], which used public money to harass vulnerable, innocent people, some of them to a premature death[30], remind us that the cruelty of the lash was aimed not only at its pitiable recipient but also his watchful brethren.

Why would a supposedly free people inflict this on themselves?

The Decline of Civil Society

Neoliberalism purports to be a doctrine of freedom. But its freedom is the kind which escapes responsibility and accountability, and is reserved for those with money, power or influence.

For the rest of us, it’s a triumph of propaganda over common sense; a tent evangelist’s parody of economics; greed and selfishness masquerading as virtue and authority. It’s laissez-faire capitalism – the version which sent children down mines and starved whole countries – given a makeover and a comeback tour.

In the neoliberal era, we lost the sense to differentiate between practical results and financial returns, between personal and general prosperity, and between rewards for contribution, and windfalls from luck, chicanery or flogging off the national estate.

Our speculative real estate pyramid, the casualisation and offshoring of good jobs, the transformation of essential needs into rivers of profit and a litany of wholesale abuses in banking[31], superannuation, and the care sectors[32]tell an ugly story of unfolding national disgrace. We were even caught cheating at cricket[33]. And in case you imagine we reap genuine commercial rewards from all this skulduggery, it appears we’re no longer a preferred place to do business.

Australia underperforms on business advisory lists. Among the countries which encourage entrepreneurship[34], we don’t appear at all. In economic complexity we are a peer of poorer African nations[35].

What blinds Australians to the danger we are in is the lofty heights we are falling from. At the altitude attained by democratic reform in the century of transformation, the ground appears reassuringly distant. It’s only in the final stage of descent, when the private jet of the parasitic elite has long since flown into the sunset, and we realise their tax cuts cost us our parachutes, that it starts to look hard and fast approaching. And we aren’t all falling together. Some of us have hit the ground already; some never left it. But to a data scientist the overall trend is more important than a momentary snapshot of anyone’s personal circumstances.

The US and the UK benefit from size and centrality to the world’s financial systems. But the business friendliness of small social democracies like Finland demands another explanation. Contrary to the tenets of neoliberalism, a reckless free-for-all is clearly not the best environment for business, unless perhaps you’re a drug lord, or an extractive multinational.

Finland demonstrates that ethical businesses benefit from a level playing field in an educated society with robust public infrastructure, broad equity, and a strong safety net. These conditions encourage local investment, stimulate local trade, and furnish competent, motivated employees. And they have arisen historically through socialist policies and regulation of markets.

Keynesian capitalism – the version which facilitated unprecedented prosperity for ordinary people during the post-war boom – is socialism for essential needs with genuinely competitive markets for everything else.

Where to From Here?

Unless our national parliament can curb the influence of big money and captive media, democracy will be stifled. Without housing, safety, and equity for everyone, deprivation will be normalised. If we continue to favour speculators and foreign investors over contributory local enterprises, Australia will indeed become the “banana republic” Paul Keating warned about.

Global conditions won’t magically improve. If we can’t solve problems, more people will be disadvantaged, and the winner’s circle will shrink. Adversity makes people feel threatened; but so does privilege.

What do you think is likely in a nation of opposed groups with inflamed amygdala, one with unearned wealth and powerful friends and another more numerous with increasingly desperate need?

The protocols of minority enrichment will shift from opportunism to enforcement. The ‘daggy dad’ who indulges our nostalgic delusions will be superseded by the ‘hard man’, ready to do ‘whatever it takes’ to insulate investors, property-owners, and supporters from ‘troublemakers’.

We should hardly be surprised that different rules apply to ‘us’ and ‘them’. We’re used to seeing refugees, Aboriginal children, whistle-blowers and protesters face persecution. But these injustices didn’t previously happen to ‘normal’ people.

This is the message of Martin Niemöller’s famous ‘poem’[36]: justice applies to everyone or no one. As soon as there are different degrees of personhood, justice is really power in disguise, and to indulge its whims it simply moves the boundary of ‘normal’. Our own history should have taught us this.

Waltzing Matilda, our most recorded song, and sometimes referred to as our unofficial national anthem, was penned in the aftermath of the Great Shearer’s Strike, a milestone in the fierce struggle for a more equitable Australia. The song captures its rebellious spirit.

But the tune we hear at sporting contests and official ceremonies is Advance Australia Fair. Before its colonial anachronisms were redacted it was a hymn of praise for the classist, racist, misogynist patriarchy of the White Australia Policy.

A free and open society and a club for rich people are incompatible national objectives. We have an identity crisis. In the blunt language of seventh-generation Australian artist Abdul Abdullah: “They think they’re the swagman but they’re all squatters and cops”.

The Worst Pandemic

Covid19 is yet to reveal its full suite of consequences. Its own long-term effects, coupled with those of the public health measures it prompted, could be devastating. But self-advancement is more dangerous. Uncoupled from the common good, it will destroy us.

The capture of politics and media in Australia has shrunk the Overton window and moved it to the boardroom. We still have options, but they no longer include serious public investment in services, regulation, or scrutiny; those would be bad for ‘the economy’.

We are invited instead to ‘learn to live’ with risks like disease and climate disaster; ‘free’ to work, shop, build, and get infected or wiped out, unencumbered by meddling governments or concern for our fellow human beings. There are 'vaccines', where the state warrants profitability, though unfortunately not medical efficacy. And you may still be able to find housing with flood and fire insurance, albeit at eye-watering cost. But if illness persists or you get burned out or inundated, your fate largely depends on your own initiative and that of your family and friends, as it does if you get stuck overseas, even if you’re an award-winning journalist being tortured to death by a foreign power for exposing crimes against humanity[37].

The new rule, which isn’t new at all, but instead threatens to prove we never learn from history, is ‘might makes right’.

Earth is sending dramatic messages about what this will cost us. People everywhere are starting to notice but many feel trapped. They can’t quite believe better alternatives exist. But they do, they are many, they are accessible, and because they are invisible in our captive media, we need to look further afield.

But first we should consider the deeper causes of inertia. That will be the subject of the next essay.

[1] Porges, S. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory, USA, W W Norton & Co

[2] Murphy, K. (2022) The ‘red wall’ and what it means for Australia’s election campaign, The Guardian, Apr 23

[3] Ludlam, S. (2021) Full Circle, Australia, Black Inc

[4] Ludlam, S. (2022) The scourge of state capture, The Monthly, July

[5] Nargi, L. (2019) Some wasps and flies can turn fellow insects into zombies, The Washington Post, Oct 28

[6]Picketty, T. (2017) Capital in the Twenty-First Century, USA, Harvard University Press

[7] Shmerling, R.H. (2022) Why life expectancy in the US is falling, Harvard Health Publishing, Oct 20

[8] Stein, M. D.; Kenney, S. R.; Anderson, B. J. and Bailey, G. L (2018) Loaded: Gun involvement among opioid users, Drug and Alcohol Dependence Volume 187, Jun 1

[9] Joint Center for Housing Studies (2018) State of the Nation’s Housing, Harvard University

[10] Bruder, J. (2017) Living in cars, working for Amazon: meet America's new nomads, The Guardian, Dec 3

[11] McKeever, V. (2022) This country has been named the world’s happiest for the fifth year in a row, cnbc.com, Mar 18

[12] Henley, J. (2019) 'It’s a miracle': Helsinki's radical solution to homelessness, The Guardian, Jun 3

[13] Farrelly, E. (2021) Killing Sydney: the fight for a city's soul, Australia, Picador

[14] Farrelly, E. (2021) The glorification of greed has left Sydney with a vast backlog of misery, The Sydney Morning Herald, Nov 27

[15] Holmes, J. (2018) Homelessness is a complex issue, especially when children and families are affected, abc.net.au, Nov 22

[16] Proust, K. (2021) Rental crisis pushes young workers into tents, converted garages as options dry up, abc.net.au, Dec 9

[17] Sati, W. (2021) Paying $500 rent for 'a glorified tent' as regional NSW housing shortage prices people out, abc.net.au, Jul 8

[18] Craw, V. (2018) ‘Sex for rent’ offered in Australian suburbs, news.com.au, Feb 26

[19] Wheeler, T. (2021) A History of Public Housing, Inner Sydney Voice, Mar 4

[20] Mustonen, E. S. (2018) From Slums to Sky Gardens – Singapore’s Public Housing Success, ASLA Professional Network Practice Blog, Sept 6

[21] Skinner, V. and Carnemolla, P (2020) If we realised the true cost of homelessness, we'd fix it overnight, The Conversation, Sep 22

[22] Richardson, D; Saunders, M; and Denniss, R (2022) Are wages or profits driving Australia’s inflation? An analysis of the National Accounts, The Australia Institute, July 2022

[23] Reich, R. (2022) Workers are being punished for inflation. The real culprit is corporate greed, The Guardian, Jul 31

[24] Elliot, L. (2022) The UK economy is about to be thrown into a black hole – by its own government, The Guardian, Nov 3

[25] Denniss, R. (2021) Roll out the pork barrels, The Monthly, Sept

[26] Forbes, G. (1913) The Flogging Parson, Australia, Good Press edition 2021

[27] Goldie, C. (2023) Robodebt inquiry is laying bare the horrific human cost of cheap and heartless politics, The New Daily, Feb 4

[28] Henriques-Gomes, L. (2022) Jobseeker asked to choose between work and job agency appointments under Workforce Australia system, The Guardian, Jul 27

[29] Ward, N.; Alderson, B. and Pedler, E. (2022) Scrapped Cashless Debit Card did not live up to potential in Ceduna, social worker says, abc.net.au, Jun 6

[30] Medhora, S. (2019) Over 2000 people died after receiving Centrelink robo-debt notice, figures reveal, abc.net.au, Feb 18

[31] Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, Final Report, Feb 2019

[32] Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, Final Report, Mar 2021

[33] Lemon, G. (2018) Caught on tape: the story behind Australian cricket's greatest fall, The Guardian, Nov 14

[34] Sahasranamam, S.; Ionescu-Somers, A.; Hill, S. and Coduras Martinez, A. (2022) Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Annual Report, www.weforum.org, Apr 5

[35] Harvard Growth Lab (2020) Atlas of Economic Complexity Atlas 8.0, Harvard University

[36] First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

[37] Hogan, W. et al (2020) The ongoing torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange, The Lancet, June 25