How come fortysomethings who can’t accumulate capital don't love capitalism?!
It’s not only unworldly young progressives who are blind to the eminently foreseeable, second-order consequences of the policies they promote
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Sometimes the confluence of news articles and op-eds in the papers on a given day sums up the insanity of the world.
On Monday, Australia’s newspapers were full of dire warnings that Australia’s economy would spontaneously combust if notoriously overpaid childcare and aged care workers were able to successfully demand above-inflation pay rises. With it looking likely that the newish Labor government’s IR reforms would be legislated, the wage-paying class, and its faithful stenographers in the business media, were apoplectic.
The Australian Financial Review argued we were on the brink of going back to “bad old protectionist Australia’. As sure as day follows night, the Fin thundered, if an entry-level childcare worker earning $900 a week received a $50 a week pay rise, it could only be a matter of days until vast tariff walls were erected to protect oligopolist businesses and their pampered workforces. Money quote:
From its early days more than a century ago, Australia’s arbitration system served to protect incumbent businesses, such as trucking hauliers, from upstart competitors by negotiating away competitive advantages rival firms gained from more flexible labour relations.
Over time, this came with pervasive price-fixing arrangements and “protection all round” backed by higher tariffs on imports.
Labor’s re-rigging of the labour market risks bringing back the kind of anti-competitive arrangements that the Productivity Commission and the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission have warned could flow from multi-employer bargaining.
NO, NOT THE “MORE FLEXIBLE LABOUR RELATIONS”! DON’T TAKE THOSE SWEET, SWEET FLEXIBLE LABOUR RELATIONS AWAY FROM US!
From my brief glance at The Australian’s coverage, it was taking the angle that even slightly tilting the balance of wage-setting power to the lower orders would plunge the nation into Weimar Germany-style hyperinflation, tank the mining industry, decimate rural and regional areas, destroy Australia’s global competitiveness and almost certainly lead to some sort of Rwandan genocide-style scenario involving feckless personal care assistants and early childhood educators macheting to death noble mining magnates, bank CEOs, tech company founders and sundry other industrious wealth creators.
Why isn’t Gen Y ageing into voting conservative?
As luck would have it, on Monday the Australian Financial Review also carried an op-ed from erstwhile Federal MP and one-time Institute of Public Affairs boy wonder Tim Wilson.
It didn’t attract much media attention in other states and territories, but on Saturday ‘Dictator Dan’, the ALP’s Victorian strongman, won yet another state election. This was the jumping-off point for Wilson’s argument that the Liberal Party, both at a state and federal level, should be concerned Australians are increasingly failing to age into voting for the Coalition.
Wilson, 42, argued – and I’m inclined to agree with him on this – that:
Around liberal democracies today the clearest indicator of a person’s voting behaviour is not traditional indicators of wealth, education level or social status, but their age…
The research shows that as people move through different stages of life, there are two significant events that shift young people from voting centre-left to voting centre-right: they get married and buy a home.
It was only in the 1990s that average-age young Australians bought their first home in their mid-20s – today it is their mid-30s.
Unsurprisingly, as home ownership rates among young Australians declines rapidly, so goes the electoral conversion and we are seeing a younger and more sustained progressive radical polity.
It is why inner-urban areas such as Melbourne and Richmond are trending Greens, and where once evolving in your electoral maturity might have been Labor to Liberal, their graduation is from Greens to Labor.
Labor hasn’t missed this reality. They learnt this equation a long time ago: no home owners plus no small business owners equals no Liberal voters.
That’s why one of the dividing lines in the 1949 election was between Chifley wanting to build housing for returned soldiers to rent, and Menzies building housing to own…
It seems obvious, but to be the party of aspiration you need to be on the side of the aspiring – which means fighting for their future from increasing home ownership rates to driving tax reform that stops favouring established capital interests over income from labour.
The demographic wave confronting Liberals will not be abated by simply waiting another four years [to the next state election]. But it can be surfed by fighting for a future where young Australians see Liberals on their side.
I don’t want to be too hard on Wilson, who is no doubt sincere in his desire for more of his fellow Gen Yers to own homes. He is doing the Lord’s Work in agitating for one of Australia’s two major political parties to introduce policies that will make it easier for post-Boomer generations to get a foot on the property ladder.
But you don’t need a PhD in Marxian economics to spot the disjuncture between Wilson’s (undoubtedly genuine) aspirations and his life’s work.
Wilson has spent much of his adult life advocating on behalf of either a neoliberal think tank or the more neoliberal of Australia’s two major political parties. I think it’s fair to say both organisations have long favoured “established capital interests” over those who sell their labour. (Liberal leader Peter Dutton warned the introduction of multi-employer bargaining would result in Australians being “sacrificed” – presumably metaphorically rather than in the Satanic ritual sense – “at the altar of unionism”. Among other Ayn Randian enthusiasms, the IPA has long campaigned to abolish the minimum wage.)
At the time of writing, the median price of a house in Wilson’s home city of Melbourne is about $920,000. The median price of a Melbourne unit is about $550,000. Even if an aspiring homeowner can talk their bank into accepting a 10 per cent rather than 20 per cent deposit, that still means they need to come up with $55,000 – $92,000 to buy a run-of-the-mill two-bedroom unit or three-bedroom house.
If you’ve got a well-paid job as a think tank talking head or federal parliamentarian, you might just be able to put together a house deposit by your mid-twenties, as your grandparents and possibly your parents managed to. If you don’t have a high-paid job, well, you better hope you inherit enough in middle age to belatedly get into the property market.
Wilson appears to have convinced himself that the key to fixing the housing unaffordability/ageing leftist problem is allowing Australians to raid their super for property-purchasing purposes. Everybody apart from Wilson believes this will just bid up house prices even further, but let’s assume it would magically make it marginally easier for younger Australians to make the leap from disreputable Labor/Greens-voting renters to solidly bourgeois Coalition-voting homeowners. It would remain the case that almost all low-income earners and a goodly proportion of middle-income earners would continue to find it difficult to enter the housing market.
Perhaps bad old Australia wasn’t all bad
I was born 12 years before Bob Hawke and Paul Keating began dismantling the Keynesian settlement. So, unlike Wilson, I’m just old enough to remember what pre-1983 Australia was like.
Those on the Left who decry post-war Australia as a sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, provincial, monocultural hellhole aren’t trading in pure hyperbole. Those on the Right who lament the high consumer prices, poor customer service, constant strikes, cosy corporatism and general inefficiency of post-war Australia aren’t entirely talking out of their arses either.
But it’s worth asking, if the pre-neoliberal past was so appalling and the neoliberal present is so much more enlightened, why are young people in 2022 so much more anxious, depressed and despairing than their counterparts were in 1982 (or 1972, 1962, 1952). I mean, you can understand straight white males, that Great Satan of the contemporary progressive imagination, being glum about being placed at the bottom of the intersectional status hierarchy. But why are thirtysomething and fortysomething women more depressed than their mothers and grandmothers were at the same age despite being subjected to far less patriarchal oppression?
The old Australia was a much more egalitarian, cohesive and laidback society. Ironically enough, it was a society where a working-class individual – OK, a working-class straight white male individual – who grew up in a fibro house on the wrong side of the tracks could drop out of school at age 14 to take a job as a pay clerk then end up a federal parliamentarian by age 25 and the nation’s Treasurer by age 40.
It was a society where the great adventure of adult life began a lot earlier, with the large majority of people entering full-time work as teenagers, then getting married, having kids and, yes, buying a house in their early-to-mid twenties.
It's almost as if, flawed as it was, Menzies-era Australia had a few things going for it.