With neither side confident of victory, neither the Coalition nor Labor party has been keen to get into hot-button ideological brawls during the federal election campaign. Instead, the Libs promise to be a good daddy government, managing the economy well and staring down an increasingly belligerent China. In (muted) contrast, the ALP promises it will be a good mummy government, spending more on aged care, child care and healthcare.
Yet despite the desires of the instinctively pragmatic ScoMo and the tiny target Albo to steer clear of contentious issues, there has been the odd angry shot. Early in the campaign, there was a brief-lived brouhaha about Labor’s ‘Secure Australian Jobs Plan’.
In the post-WorkChoices era, industrial relations is dangerous territory for the Coalition. But the ALP’s plan to somehow allow gig economy contractors and freelancers to enjoy most of the upsides and few of the downsides of wage slavery got a mixed response. The news and political cycles then immediately moved on.
Examining the merits or otherwise of blurring the boundaries between those who are definitely employees and those who sort of are employees but also sort of aren’t will have to wait for another time. What I found interesting about the fracas was the different perspectives about the prevalence of insecure work.
Is job security in the eye of the beholder?
Those on the Right argue only two in every 10 Australians in the workforce are casually employed and that this figure hasn’t varied much for the last quarter of a century. There’s plenty of reliable statistical evidence to back up this claim. Those on the Left argue, accurately, that casual employment increased substantially between the early 1980s and mid-1990s. More debatably, Leftists insist that the official figures are somehow underestimating the present prevalence of insecure work.
I don’t have a dog in the fight and don’t know which side of politics is describing reality more accurately. On the one hand, I accept the large majority of the workforce continue to be either full-time or part-time employees. On the other hand, it sure does seem like the gig economy has grown significantly over the last decade and that there are a hell of a lot more people who are self-employed than used to be the case.
I suspect, as is often the case with politically contentious issues, that pundits are paying too much attention to facts and figures and insufficient attention to how voters feel. My guess is that many private-sector employees and even a significant number of public-sector employees feel they don’t have much job or income security. Those of us in the gig economy tend to be regularly reminded that we have absolutely no income security. This widespread insecurity may be good for productivity, but it doesn’t do much for the mental health of Australians.
We’re all insecure workers now
My father, who just missed out on being a boomer (he was born in 1943), only ever worked for the one company. For much of his life, airlines, banks and telecommunication companies were publicly owned. Those who worked for the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas and Telcom had something approaching total job security. Up until the 1980s, or even the 1990s in some cases, it wasn’t unusual for Australia’s state and territory governments to own energy, gambling, insurance and public transport companies and provide the (heavily unionised) staff of these companies something approaching a lifetime employment guarantee.
It wasn’t like nobody ever got fired or made redundant in the private sector back in the olden days. But, as far as I can determine, losing your job – either through no fault or your own or fault of your own – was a much rarer event prior to the arrival of what was then called economic rationalism (think neoliberalism) in 1983. Long story short, relations between employers and employees in both the public and private sector were much more Japanese during Australia’s post-war boom years.
I’m hesitant to present this era in too rosy a light. There was much less expectation back then that a job would deliver a sense of fulfilment and happiness. Many people hated the jobs they had little prospect of either losing or escaping. Not unrelated to that point, workers who had no reason to fear getting fired tended not to overexert themselves when providing customer service. Most Australians of a certain age have horror stories about desperately pleading with a truculent Telstra (née Telecom) staffer or a sour-faced Qantas stewardess.
All that noted, people on both the Left and Right tend to be nostalgic for what the French refer to as the three glorious decades that followed WWII, in large part because jobs did seem to be more abundant and secure. There’s also an argument to be made that these jobs were relatively better paid in the sense that even modestly remunerated blue-collar workers could support a wife and several children on one income. And, more often than not, have enough left over to pay off a pleasant house in the suburbs.
He’s grinning because he just outbid you on that apartment you had your heart set on, whippersnapper!
What neither side of politics is promising
Like Hewson in 1993, Shorten was so sure he couldn’t lose the unlosable election in 2019 that he made the courageous decision to try to make it marginally easier for people under the age of 45 to buy one house or apartment at the cost of making it slightly more expensive for people over the age of 45 to accumulate multiple properties. As John Howard was fond of pointing out, politics primarily comes down to arithmetic. Shorten learned the hard way that the number of Australians who possess one or more properties is still far greater than the number of Australians desperately trying to get a foot on the property ladder.
So, here we are in mid-2022. Except for a relatively small number of public sector workers, most Australians fear they could wake up one day and find that they no longer have an income. Even if they do have an above-average and relatively secure income, it’s increasingly difficult to buy a home with it.
When my father bought his first home in Sydney in the early 1970s, the average house cost four times the average income. Over the last half-century, that multiple has skyrocketed to 14 times annual average earnings. (The good news is that if you’re willing to live in a poky apartment, it’s a mere nine times average earnings.)
This election cycle, neither side of politics is proposing to do anything serious to allow Generations Y and Z to enjoy the kind of lifestyle most boomers and some Gen Xers did. Rather than rant impotently yet again about Australia’s slide into gerontocracy, I’ll end by quoting the words of a Red Tory. Talking the ABC’s Radio National at the start of the election campaign, Gen X barrister Gray Connolly opined:
“I cannot believe how little work either side of politics has done on the housing issue. It’s an absolute disgrace that the Coalition, on the Right of politics, for whom home ownership is usually something very important, has done so little to promote home ownership among young people. You cannot have a stable country where so many people do not have security in their homes, do not have security in their work, don’t feel they’re getting ahead, and do not feel they have a stake in society that causes them to want to preserve it. If you don’t have secure work, chances are you’re not going to form a family because chances are you cannot afford a home.”*
*Check out this excellent article by Ross Gittins if you’d like to know more about what Connolly had to say. If you’re interested in learning more about Red Toryism, you may find this article I wrote for the ABC many election cycles ago interesting.