(c) Copyright 1999: Antonia Feitz.
One can only marvel at human beings' capacity for self delusion. In an excerpt from "Future Tense", the Australian's Paul Kelly has expressed concern at the 'paradox' of Australians being pessimistic when Australia's "economy and standards of living having never been stronger or higher". [1].
In fact, in Australia today, one third of all households are dependent on welfare as their primary source of income. [2]. As Kelly is not a stupid man, it would seem worthwhile to try and understand what he means. The only rational conclusion is that in the Kelly cosmos, globalization's 'losers' - all those who have lost their jobs and their businesses, all those whose wages and conditions have been reduced, and all those living on social security - just don't count anymore. They are invisible as people. They are just statistics. For Kelly, the economy is figures: if the figures come in as a Keatingesque 'lovely set of numbers' the economy is in good shape. It seems he has no conception that the national economy is really about people. Or should be.
Quite simply, this is the root of the mood of pessimism which perplexes Kelly. As a globalist he does not understand that Australians are increasingly alienated from government and distressed not so much by their own personal situation (even though many of them are going backwards), but by the government-engineered collapse of their once civil society into one that offends their deepest traditions of a fair go, egalitarianism and mateship. Hanson arose from this pain, and Kelly knows it. Commenting on the reasons for the pessimism and hostility in the nation he included the following as one of those reasons, "the myopia of the media who spent much of the past two years falsely declaring a "race-based" 1998 federal election".
Yes, "falsely" indeed. As I recall, the Australian led the pack in dishonestly condemning Hanson for 'raising the spectre' of a 'race-based election'. Yet not long after the election, one of the Australian's more incoherent Hansonophobes - Greg Sheridan - said that the 1998 federal election had really been about globalization, not race. Again, after the event. Whatever happened to the journalists' code of ethics?
Perhaps because of the harsh environment, Australians have traditionally kept an eye out for, and have looked after one another. Mateship is at the core of the Australian identity. It is well documented contemporaneously by Weary Dunlop, and more recently by Paul Sheehan, that Australian men in wartime exhibited an exemplary concern for one anothers' welfare that was simply unmatched by any other national group. [3, 4]. Women had their own version too, demonstrated by their profuse community voluntary work and by taking in (and folding!) their neighbour's washing if it looked like rain. Current economic rationalist policies are a gross assault on, and insult to that tradition, accepting as they do that society is now inexorably divided into 'winners' and 'losers'. It's totally un-Australian.
Kelly claims that the current pessimism "has deep roots in our history'" This is simply wrong. Despite the black armband brigade's version of events, Australia from its earliest days had a youthful exuberance and excitement about it. It was a land of opportunity and settled in the main by the young, the enthusiastic, the courgeous and the hopeful. From the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the voluntary settlers must have possessed some or all of these qualities, and this self-selection of positive-thinking people eventually formed the national character referred to above. The involuntary migrants - the convicts who decided to stay because Australia offered them a better life as well as a better climate - must also have possessed these qualities. The wimps and wusses went home. Natural selection at its best.
Academics and 'opinion-makers' endlessly wring their hands in a cultural cringe about the Australian identity. They don't know what it is, or who we are. Well I can tell them in twelve words: Australians are co-operative, inventive people who have traditionally cared about the underdog. That's it. Along with its natural resources, this national identity is the reason why Australia had the highest standard of living in the world, and why it was the world leader in such progressive social legislation as extending the franchise to women, and accepting the principle that a man's minimum wage should be sufficient to keep him and his family in frugal comfort. As so many post WW2 migrants told my parents, Australia was paradise.
Australia was most prosperous when 'the market' was not our god, but the good of the nation was paramount. The old Australians built a good society because even if they'd never heard of Socrates, they perfectly understood what he meant when he said: "I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue come money and every other good of man, public as well as private." The old Australia was living proof that conducting national affairs with the common good in mind - i.e. acting virtuously - works.
Kelly's obduracy is puzzling, as he wrote an excellent summary of the outward reasons for the current pessimism. But though he sees the problem, he fails to understand it because he is blinded by the figures. For Kelly, the fact that Australia's economy grew at an average of 3.8 per cent during the 1990s - superior to the US - and that growth has been at the top of the OECD range is almost reason to break open the champagne. He fails to see that the response of the majority is to say: "So where is this growth?" After all, it's a funny sort of economic 'growth' when people's living standards are falling, unemployment is high and intractable, the foreign debt continues to climb, the percentage of people on welfare has never been higher, and the jobs keep disappearing.
The 'growth' is a mirage: last year $51 billion dollars was spent on mergers and aquisitions in Australia. Just think what that $51 billion dollars would have achieved productively invested. Real growth. Real jobs. But they're not interested. For the foreign and the Australian globalists, investor profits are the bottom line of the economy. People don't count.
All the gurus of globalization present their cause as progressive and dismiss all opposition as regressive, and Kelly is no exception. He says: "The central lesson is that there is no hope in a flight to the past. Internationalism will reward those nations that adapt, and punish or crush those that succumb to nostalgia". Apart from it's being a most dishonest tactic, this idea strains credulity: the Asian nations that submitted to globalization's harsh demands were the ones that got punished and crushed. Malaysia, which was defiant, survived and prospered.
Though derided by the international community (whatever that is) for imposing currency controls, pegging the value of the ringgit and prohibiting overseas dealings in its currency last September, Mahatir has had the last laugh. By battening down the hatches in defiance of current economic orthodoxy Malaysia seems to have weathered the storm which left its neighbours ruined. And guess what? Impressed with Malaysia's performance, investors are expressing interest in re-investing in Malaysia, even on Mahatir's terms. After all, despite the unanimous predictions that Malaysia would become a pariah nation, the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange has risen from a low of 261 in September to 578 on 4th February.
For having the courage to tell the international community to go and jump in the lake, Malaysia, not the IMF, is still in charge of its own economy. It has eased some controls, but has locked in responsible behaviour by introducing a graduated levy or exit tax on foreign investments in Malaysian stocks. Funds invested before February 15 will be subject to a levy of 30% if they are taken out within 7 months. The levy falls to 20% if the period is 9 months, and 10% for 12 months. Instead of swallowing the globalist clap-trap about the demise of the nation-State, Malaysia called on its people's loyalty and survived the crisis - as a nation.
The charge of 'nostalgia' is dishonest because it sets up a false dichotomy: it is not a matter of accepting globalization OR retreating into nostalgia' for the past. To suggest such a thing is an insult to the intelligence of globalization's critics. Few things in life can be reduced to either/or, and globalization is no exception. The correct response to the current problems will more likely be some regulation on the movement of capital, and that is what Dani Rodrik and even George Soros are calling for. Critics of globalization are saying words to the effect of: "Even blind Freddy can see that globalization is not working, so let's put our heads together to find ways to tame it. Perhaps Dr Mahatir has something going for him."
In contrast, globalization's proponents such as Kelly are saying: "Trust us, globalization is working; the golden age is just around the corner".
As if. Increasingly the purported benefits of globalization are very reminiscent of Keating's infamous J-curve. Remember? Australia was always on the brink of making that turnaround; we just had to accept the current pain for the promised future gain. It never arrived, and nor will globalization's promised benefits. (If the globalists treat the people with such contempt now, imagine what's in store when they get their way smoothed by the MAI!). Despite all his rhetoric, Keating delivered nothing but debt. With that feat - Australia's foreign debt rose from a manageable $23 billion in 1982 to $233 billion last September - no wonder he was honoured by the globalists with the title of the "World's Best Treasurer". What a good little globalist boy he was. Kelly's hero, no doubt.
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