CHAPTER 5

HISTORY TO THE DEFEATED

Who controls the past controls the future:
who controls the present controls the past.

— GEORGE ORWELL

Let’s begin our examination of the future by thinking about the thing that must make it better: the Australian Labor Party. Over the last thirty years Labor has lost its way amid the economic revolution it started and led for much of the time. Like a wild horse, that revolution has escaped from its handlers and is threatening the party’s future. What must Labor do to find its way again?

A good place to start is to think about why people join the ALP in the first place. A while back I had lunch with a thirty-something Labor lawyer who revealed that, having joined the ALP just after her fifteenth birthday, she had recently resigned, dispirited at its failure to project sufficient idealism. Stories like this are commonplace, so rather than ask why she left, I was more interested to ask why she had joined at just fifteen, which is somewhat unusual.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s part of the family’s story.’ When her grandfather, a docker, was killed just at the end of World War II, his former comrades, hardly well off themselves, sacrificed their spare shillings to a widow’s fund that helped her grandmother to keep her nine children from hunger and cold.

That’s why people once joined the ALP! Thanks to Australia’s recent wealth spurt, few today live in fear of the penury that grandmother faced. My point is that while this Labor story involves economics, it isn’t essentially an economic story, and one shouldn’t answer it simply by emphasising modern Labor’s economic credentials. It’s a romantic moral tale, one that appeals to a radical spirit in Australian culture, and one that today’s progressives, considering joining the Greens but not really wanting to, are crying out for Labor to tell anew. That grandmother’s life may perhaps have been improved by a productivity ratio with a 2 in front of it – or maybe not, if it involved industrial-relations reform that threw her benefactors out of their jobs – but making the economy stronger isn’t an end in itself; creating a better society is. In short, Labor has to remember that it is primarily a social movement, not a policy unit of the Department of Treasury.

Downplaying its own radical history would be a mistake for Labor as it seeks to build a viable future. To paraphrase Orwell, if Labor’s managerialists control its past, the party may not have a future at all. Labor’s thinkers should get writing. And one of the things they must do for a start is get over the Hawke and Keating era.

This may seem strange. After all, that duo is generally regarded as having presided over the most successful government the ALP has ever formed. My problem isn’t that people continue to recognise and celebrate the successes of that period in office; it’s that for too many in modern Labor, and the political class generally, Labor history doesn’t seem to exist prior to 1983, the year the party began its reinvention as one of market-liberal economic reform.

This idea occurred to me a few years back, when a Gillard government speechwriter showed me a draft of a speech that contained a curious historical simile. Praising some new government initiative – I can’t remember what it was – it said: ‘This is our floating of the dollar.’ Not our Snowy River Hydro Scheme or our Medicare; our floating of the dollar. The great nation-building achievements of Chifley and Whitlam had been replaced as Labor’s ‘Light on the Hill’ by the deregulation of the currency. Since 1983, Labor’s purpose, along with its history, has been turned on its head.

How has this happened? One obvious reason is that a number of ministers in the Rudd and Gillard governments once served in or worked for the Hawke and Keating governments, and they saw their job as completing its program. This is only natural – after all, it wasn’t until the rise of Bill Clinton that the Democratic Party stopped trying to complete the New Deal. But I think there’s another explanation: the extraordinary success of the Hawke/Keating generation of ministers, advisers and senior press gallery figures in writing and selling the first – and, to date, unchallenged – draft of the history of their own era. The recent history of the modern ALP, and of Australia more generally, has largely been written by participants in the great economic reform crusade and their admirers. Their books take up at least half a shelf in my study. Not just Hawke and Keating themselves, but the former advisers and the commentators who took their economic reform program on as a cause, especially the Australian’s Paul Kelly with his (currently) three-volume End of Certainty thesis. Theirs was the era of the economist as hero, the neoliberal reformer as revolutionary, the big-picture man as patriot, the productivity ratio as the measure of national progress. Never, it seems, has a generation been so worthy and its vision so noble and unchallengeable.

So thorough has been their crafting of this new narrative that they have imprinted on the Labor psyche the belief that only those who take up and carry forward the dropped banner of managerialist ‘economic reform’ are worthy to be considered true national leaders. Hence the appeal to ‘our floating of the dollar’; hence the feeling of déjà vu brought on by the ‘new’ big-picture narrative of the Asian century; hence the never-ending calls for more tariff cuts and more business tax cuts and more labour market reform and so on. Together, these storytellers have raised the philosophy and practice of the Hawke/Keating governments to the status of a religion, and made the productivity ratio the measure of all things. Those who buck it by definition fall short.

This thesis is repeated time after time after time by a new generation of Labor historians and chroniclers. The towering genius of Hawke and Keating and the inability of Rudd and Gillard to match it is the central message of just about every book on the Labor Party published in the last half-dozen years. No countervailing story has yet to knock this narrative off its course.

This is not to denigrate the achievements of the 1980s and ’90s generation in any way. Hawke and Keating did have a certain greatness, there’s no doubting that. And their chroniclers and policy advisers are merely doing what every generation does, which is to project their achievement as the end of history. But here’s the really big problem: history never ends. The Hawke government was elected thirty-two years ago, as I write. But the Berlin Wall fell more than a quarter of a century ago, 9/11 happened fourteen years ago, and the global financial crisis happened seven years ago. The world has changed, capitalism has changed, people’s priorities change, and so social-democratic parties and their objectives must change too. The old agendas simply won’t suffice. Labor has to stop listening to the critics who say it has diverged too far from the path of St Bob and St Paul, and start addressing the here and now, and the future.

Where are those answers to be found? That’s easy: in history, including the history of the Labor Party prior to 1983. As a speechwriter, one of my heroes is Cicero. In his book Orator, in which he sought to rouse Marcus Brutus to save the Republic from the chaos of the 40s, Cicero provided us with a line that should be every political historian’s motto: ‘To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.’ Greatness requires deep historical knowledge, according to Cicero. You can’t be insightful or persuasive if you don’t have the ability to make comparisons with past events and eras. Lack of a broad historical perspective produces a moral shallowness, a narrowness of purpose and a crippling inability to inspire. Worst of all, it leaves you poorly equipped to respond to change. This, Cicero tells us, is the power of history. (And that, incidentally, is why speechwriters are invariably historians.)

Reforming the economy to lift productivity worked as a framing objective for Labor between 1983 and 1996, and no doubt it will remain an important tool of Labor governments in the years ahead, because, as I have mentioned earlier, efficiency and productivity are moderately important policy objectives, though much overrated. But productivity cannot remain the Labor Party’s religion, and it cannot remain the sole measure of Labor’s success. The Hawke/Keating mythologists are, in my view, the pied pipers of the ALP, leading the party into a deep and dark place, one lacking in moral purpose, from which it will be hard to find an exit. Labor’s future success – and, potentially, its survival as the dominant party of the Left – lies in pursuing a much broader and more timeless objective. In short, it lies in rediscovering a moral and political language capable of appealing to a majority of its party members, supporters and voters. The managerialists’ message won’t suffice.

It all starts, I believe, with an effort to change the way we conceive and express our political and social problems. As I have stated, the economic reform ideology that brought on the great revolution of the last thirty years has hardened into a rigid formula that is robbing the ALP of its true purpose. And an overreliance on managerialist forms of reasoning has left us incapable of addressing the problems we face, causing our analysis to be channelled down narrow paths and our responses to be shallow and needlessly destructive.

We have become governed by the philosophy of the bulldozer, clearing the litter of human emotion, community cohesion and history from the path of economic reform, rather than considering how we can build on the past and ensure that economic change can be channelled to the benefit of society. So we need to enrich our thinking and our talk with insights from areas such as morality, history and aesthetics. By making a conscious effort to stop dismissing people’s lives as ‘outcomes’, to avoid using tautological maxims like ‘what gets measured gets improved’, ‘productivity is almost everything’ and ‘GDP × C = B’, and to stop using unhelpful epithets like ‘rent-seeker’ and ‘Luddite’, we can begin to think and speak in ways that give us a chance of addressing the problems facing us. Five ways of thinking can aid this.

First, thinking morally. We have to recognise that losers matter, and that the losers from change have just as many rights as winners. Throughout history the cause of the underdog has generally been the morally superior one: Spartacus against the legions of Crassus, African slaves against cotton planters, the Tolpuddle Martyrs against the threshing machine, Ned Kelly against the colonial police, Bernie Banton against the mining giants. Until very recently in our history, this belief in the moral superiority of the underdog and the loser has been at the heart of our culture: witness Jimmy Barnes’ ‘Working Class Man’. Can we really say with any confidence that this type of sentiment dominates now, especially when millions of underdogs are being pulverised by a changing economy?

In the world of creative destruction, only the winners from change seem to matter and to have economic and social rights – it’s as if the losers magically cease to exist, and the condemnation of whole suburbs to poverty for several generations is not a fit subject for moral judgment. The unproductive have only themselves to blame. We are urged to celebrate as ‘lifters’ the entrepreneurs whose technologies throw people out of work, and to condemn as ‘leaners’ those who have worked tirelessly and conscientiously for their employers, only to have the rug pulled from under them. With the redefinition of trade unionists as corrupt, rent-seeking scroungers, targeted by a royal commission, this process of redefining the working class as the economic enemy is now all but complete.

Why is this important? Because it is only by acknowledging the moral shortcomings of economic and social change that we might advance beyond the morality of the early 1800s. It might be remembered that the Labor Party itself – in fact, the social-democratic movement worldwide – was a movement created by the losers from the disruption of the late Industrial Revolution, and that those losers, acting together, managed to create a future that few would dispute has improved life for the overwhelming majority. It’s from the losers that real change comes, not from comfortable winners, even if they’re well-meaning do-gooders who think they can tweak the market to help the poor.

Second, thinking historically. We need to recognise that the past and the present have rights and should be respected. This, at first blush, seems a strange thing to say; after all, how can a period in time possibly have rights? It is not a living thing. So what do I mean by it? Simply this: that our policymakers have too few qualms about destroying the industries and communities the nation has built up over many years if an economist tells them that doing so will make us wealthier in the future. If productivity demands it, just crush it flat. They should pause and reflect a lot more.

In the most extreme form, this represents an inverted form of Marxism. They want people and communities to get out of the way of history. Remove all restraints on the market, or else! Stop complaining about the car industry shutting down and your once beautiful suburb descending into welfare-supported decay, they say, because by ripping away support for these things, we’re creating a wealthier future. Your poverty is your children’s wealth (or, at least, the wealth of somebody else’s children in some richer suburb closer to the city). It might be pointed out that Stalin offered the Ukrainian peasantry much the same deal: stop standing in the way of the new economic revolution; stop holding up the future; get with the program. Here we have the philosophical essence of creative destruction: a historical and moral vacuum which heartless ideologues can fill with their crazy schemes to remake the world. And it turns out to be a historical ploy that is as false as it is shallow. Its origins are worth examining.

We’re awash these days with the Big Picture. Narrative – that’s the key to good communications, isn’t it! Once upon a time, these narratives were formulated by historians. Years ago, for example, when asked what they intended to read on their summer holidays, our political leaders would almost invariably say, ‘The latest volume of Manning Clark’s History of Australia.’ Whether, once they got to the beach, they actually read Manning Clark or the racing form guide was immaterial; the point was that they needed to give us a sense that they understood the river of history and where its mighty course was taking us. Nowadays, they’re more likely to tell you they’re reading the latest brace of books about the Great Australian Economic Miracle by senior newspaper columnists. This is because, today, our nation’s grand narrative is told almost exclusively by economic journalists. The odd serious-minded economist who once helped lead policy from within the PM’s office has a go, but usually fails to reach the bestseller lists, even in the high-brow indie bookshops. Such works tend to tell the same story: How We Made the Transition to a Modern Market Economy and Became the Envy of the World (and How We Will Continue to Make It as Long as We Forget All that Nonsense about Equality).

The thing we are transitioning from tends to be represented in the same way. Economically, it was corporatist, protected, insular, overregulated, heavily unionised, militant, seemingly always on strike and therefore criminally unproductive. Culturally, it was embarrassingly unsophisticated in the way all life seemingly was before the espresso machine: the men had large sideburns and wore wide-lapelled suits, big-collared shirts and fat ties; the women had beehive hair-dos and skimpy bikinis and drooled at surfing hunks; everyone drank generic-tasting tap beer and instant coffee, drove Toranas, Geminis and (of course) Leyland P-76s, and endlessly sought the approval of boorish, bored celebrities visiting from overseas. All up, these books tell us, the old times were misogynist, racist, lazy and – and here’s the real message – complacent, complacency being the most wicked of our modern sins.

It’s interesting to watch the former politicians, economists and public policymakers who gave us The Transition talking about the past in the numerous documentaries made on the subject. When they reach the 1970s they tend to slip into comedy; with broad smiles breaking out on their faces, they say things like: ‘Just as they thought it was acceptable to listen to glam rock (ha, ha), they thought governments should control foreign investment,’ or ‘They thought they could determine the exchange rate of the dollar,’ or ‘They seriously reckoned they had the right to go on strike.’ ‘Can you believe it?’ their sneers imply, as the camera holds them in focus for a few seconds longer. You see, when it comes down to it, to the creative destroyers the past was simply corrupt, one great self-indulgent orgy like a Sodom and Gomorrah scene in a Cecil B. DeMille movie, something that must be expunged, vaporised, paved over, replaced.

To replace this Old Testament narrative, they’ve given us a new one, which always seems to begin with the same words: ‘And then there was Paul …’ Paul and his disciples led the way into the new future, where we dropped all that nonsense about full employment and collective bargaining, cut corporate and high marginal taxes, discovered China and the rest of Asia, created a pool of capital through compulsory superannuation and laid the foundation for three decades of economic growth that even the biggest global recession since the Great Depression couldn’t stop, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. St Paul and his followers did it, St John and his crew didn’t oppose it, and we all saw that it was good; so sayeth the Lord.

The sheer predictability of these narratives gives the game away. (I dare you to open the Australian or the Australian Financial Review tomorrow morning and not find an echo of them.) They comprise a hero narrative, obviously: with time fast running out (time is always running out where economic reform is concerned), a handful of heroic men and women, firm in their convictions, set out to save the nation from itself, and succeeded just before the International Monetary Fund had to step in. The narrative is not so much an economic analysis as a moral judgment handed down from the mountaintop (or, rather, the boardroom on the fiftieth floor), ordering adherence to a set of new commandments: thou shalt not restrain competition; thou shalt not go against free trade; thou shalt not deny the shareholders; thou shalt not deform the labour market by forming a union; thou shalt not redistribute wealth; and so on. You can find similar narratives in Britain and America; only the names change.

Something similar was happening in George Orwell’s time. He was at once fascinated and horrified by the Marxist obsession with reinterpreting and rewriting history, especially economic history. He recognised that those seeking to overthrow the way we live tend to start by falsifying the past – because it is only by discrediting the good things about the past that such people can make the present seem better and the utopian future they are offering seem inevitable, when in fact life in many ways has become worse. This is the meaning of the famous party slogan from Orwell’s dark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ By misrepresenting and discrediting the time before the Great Australian Economic Miracle, by portraying it as complacent and corrupt and laughable and poor, our present narrators are clearing away the positive human memories that might restrain their attempts to create a future that is 100 per cent safe for productivity.

In a famous scene from the novel, the character Winston Smith goes into a proletarian pub to talk to someone old enough to remember what life was like before the revolution, but finds that, under the onslaught of propaganda and mindless popular culture, the old man’s memory has turned to rubble. How long will it be, we might ask, before there is anyone who still remembers that the past was in many respects superior to the present, and who knows that the future can in fact be different from the one now being foisted upon us?

The economists’ hero narrative runs into an immediate problem. It is forced to recognise that the greasy-haired, wide-lapelled, Holden-driving past was in many ways a success on its own terms – and popular. Just view the images on the TV documentaries: crowds of people surging into factory gates; newspaper headlines screaming ‘full employment achieved’; highways full of Australian-made cars that people loved to drive; Australians at play on the beach, eating steak around the barbecue in the backyards of houses that were affordable to working people, safe from worry because their children’s education was free, Medibank was free, their regulated weekends were free; a political system that, by the middle of the 1970s, was modernising, optimistic, at once liberal and social-democratic, reforming and conserving. The truth is that the generations that were in charge of our nation prior to the 1980s created a society that was in many ways more successful and popular than the one the economic reformers have given us. It gave Australians a standard of living and a way of life which was the envy of the world – but which the economists, especially the creative destroyers, can only view as complacent. The economic growth of the past came with full employment. The creative destroyers’ growth has not. Whose is superior?

Third, language and the meaning of words. As well as reclaiming the past, we have to reclaim language, especially the meaning of the word ‘reform’. By giving themselves the title of ‘reformers’, the people who brought us the Great Australian Economic Miracle imbue themselves with a moral authority and a democratic mandate that they don’t really possess. Who could reasonably be against reform – the removal of faults or errors to promote change for the better? No one. But in the arena of political economy, ‘reform’ has a meaning far deeper and richer than the one the self-styled economic reformers are offering us.

In its original political and economic usage, ‘reform’ was a nineteenth-century movement that set out to build a sounder moral basis for the new economy being created so rapidly by the Industrial Revolution, the faults of which were highlighted (either directly or by implication) by the great thinkers and writers of the day, most notably Charles Dickens, William Blake, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Bronte and many others no longer commonly read today. The Reform Acts to democratise the House of Commons were joined by Factory Acts, Mines Acts and other pieces of social legislation that limited the length of the working day, prevented the economic exploitation of children, gave people the right to join trade unionists, and improved public education and public health through, among other things, improved sanitation. (The eight-hour day movement here in Australia was part of this great reform era.) Reformers did more than remove outdated controls on the market; they also stopped the gerrymandering of parliament, ended the slave trade, prevented children as young as five years old from going down mines, and created the moral basis for the great improvements in life that were continued by social democracy into the twentieth century.

To place the freeing of the dollar, the introduction of the GST and the attempt to replace collective bargaining with individual contracts on the same moral plane as the great reforms of the past 200 years is a faux hero narrative indeed, absurd and delusional in equal parts, the sort of egotistical tribute that vice pays to virtue. The true reforming efforts of the nineteenth century were motivated in large part by moral concerns, whereas the faux reforming efforts of our time are usually motivated by a desire to remove moral concerns from economic policy almost completely, taking us back to the era of Gradgrind and his world, in which the reason of the market was completely unrestrained.

Fourth, sociology. Here’s another fact we need to grasp if we want to create a better future: the Australian working class is not the reactionary mass that many – including many on the Left – sometimes take it to be. These days, in certain circles, when the subject of working-class Australia comes up, the response is often negative. Recently, at a dinner for the visiting English intellectual Maurice Glasman, I heard the following response from someone at my table: ‘I agree with everything he said about the economy, except of course for all that praise of the working class and its values.’ These days, when educated people of the Right and Left think about the old Anglo-Saxon and European working class, they conjure up a mass of negative adjectives: xenophobia is usually the first, followed perhaps by sexism and homophobia, then anti-intellectualism, and finally (usually without irony) avarice. This view leads to policies of the worst sort as the political parties attempt to appeal to these negative stereotypes: the demonising of refugees, opposition to same-sex marriage, the creation of dumbed-down subjects at poorer public schools, the rubbishing of universities and the life of the mind, and a simplistic, populist approach to holding down the rising cost of living (which no one ever actually manages to do, despite all the hand-on-heart promises they make). It ends up with all parties, including Labor, pursuing a sterile, transactional form of politics that offers a combination of financial bribes and punitive social policy instead of a vision of a better society. It’s a formula that never delivers Labor victory, and simply robs it of its sense of purpose.

Such nonsense about working-class attitudes is easily debunked; all it requires is a few conversations. On one of my visits to the Holden plant at Dandenong, I got talking to one of the now retired chief engineers. He’d come to Australia from India in March 1974 and had got a job at the plant virtually the next day, working on the truck assembly line. He freely admits it was another world in which you sometimes needed a thick skin to survive. The foreman, for example, had names for everyone in his section of the line, most of which consisted of four letters. (This foreman was obviously not my father, who never swore and would cuff me if I ever did.) On hearing this, I asked the man whether he ever experienced racism while working at Holden. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Never.’ In fact, with the help of Holden he went on to become one of the plant’s leading engineering managers, and he later used this experience to take a sabbatical of sorts, when he worked for one of the world’s premier motor-racing teams. Working-class racism obviously never held him back.

One of the managers of the current spare parts operation also told me that racism had never been an issue at the plant; in fact, he said, the only ethnic tension he had ever had to deal with since he started at the plant back in 1979 involved tensions between workers from different sides of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and even then it was mild stuff.

Why is this important? Why does it matter so much that Australians, but especially Labor and the Left, should drop the misconception that the working class are beyond the pale in their beliefs? Because without the working class, social democracy loses most of its purpose. When you think about it, social democracy was founded on the very idea that the people with the least wealth, privilege and power can and should be a force for social change – because they have a direct and obvious interest in creating a more equal society. Once you regard the working class as reactionary, vulgar and stupid – even vaguely sinister and to be feared, as my friend at the Glasman lecture implied – the game is up. But this has been mostly forgotten.

As the educated middle class has grown, many on the Left have come to see it – supposedly more rational and amenable to progressive causes – as their new agent of change. But no matter what their progressive beliefs, the middle class, especially many highly educated middle-class people who form a progressive elite, will never be a sufficient force for greater economic and social equality, and can never be fully relied upon to worry about the fate of places like Doveton. This is not because they are intrinsically uncaring people, but because when it comes down to it, they benefit from such inequality and tend to be ignorant about its true nature and extent, no matter how hard they try to understand. Unless we truly care about the working class and the communities in which its members live, and unless we take their economic and social interests seriously, there will be no advances in economic and social equality. This is why the Labor Party and the Left cannot afford to cut itself off from the union movement, and it is why both must clean up their internal affairs and get their acts together as a matter of extreme seriousness and urgency.

Fifth, aesthetics, particularly creativity. Another important way of thinking about what’s going on concerns aesthetics, particularly urban aesthetics and the creation of beautiful objects. This is an area of crucial importance, although it isn’t often in the forefront of our minds – until, that is, we see it with our own eyes. Urban beauty is typically something we associate with the wealthy and highly educated. We expect their inner-suburban streets to be neat and leafy, their apartments to be old and art-deco or new and sharp-edged, and their holiday homes to look like spaceships that have parked themselves on ocean cliff-tops. We value this sort of beauty and prefer it to ugly squalor every time – and we do so for innate reasons that can’t be quantified on a spreadsheet. We tend to put this down to the superior taste of the people who live in such desirable places, but in reality it’s down to their superior bank balances. They may have a monopoly on expensive real estate and A-list architects, but can they possibly have a monopoly on finer human feelings? Show a working person a gracious mansion or an art-filled penthouse and he or she will choose it over a crumbling former public housing estate every time.

The fact that older working-class suburbs don’t look as nice as they once did, and sometimes look downright ugly, is something that should concern us because it affects everyone. Drive through the neighbourhoods with the highest rates of unemployment and you will likely see an unattractiveness that is unnecessary and self-perpetuating: broken or missing fences, rusting cars and unkempt lawns, and in the worst places shuttered shops, smashed windows, graffiti-scarred walls and burnt-out buildings. To put it simply, nobody wants it.

Although it was purpose-built for the families of factory workers, when my neighbourhood in Doveton was first constructed it was well planned and attractively laid out. Serious consideration was given to the look and feel of the streets, with plenty of parks with colourful children’s play equipment, public gardens opposite strip shopping centres, with even the trees and hedges in front yards well-chosen by the Housing Commission that built and then helped maintain it all. The planners of these places were in touch with the mass of the people in a way that public-policy experts tend not to be today. Aside from the obvious economic consequences of letting these sorts of neighbourhoods go – falling property values compounding year on year, aspirational flight, the concentration of people living on welfare, rising crime and so forth, all producing a downward spiral that is expensive to arrest – it naturally makes people feel depressed. Imagine waking up each morning, opening your blinds and seeing a sea of rusting trucks or a vacant block with weeds six feet high, littered with discarded bedding, whitegoods and syringes, a haven for bored teenagers to vandalise or take drugs. This, now, is a reality for many people.

If a concern with beauty seems an elite obsession, and one unrelated to a social-democratic agenda, think again. In purely utilitarian terms, beautifying our working-class suburbs would bring greater benefit and pleasure to more people’s lives than any number of highbrow art galleries, which of course are so generously endowed by the super-rich. Why can’t we have both? Indeed, one might plausibly say that a revulsion against urban ugliness was one of the original and most important motivating elements of social-democratic politics. After all, calling a workplace a ‘dark satanic mill’ is an aesthetic as well as a moral judgment. Here is Friedrich Engels – a founder of modern social democracy – describing the industrial suburbs of Manchester in the 1840s:

The cottages are old, dirty and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions … The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

This idea that the lives of everyday people could be improved by beautifying their surroundings is at the heart of the work of one of the greatest nineteenth-century socialist thinkers, William Morris, who, in addition to being a political activist, was an artist, poet and close friend of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Robert Browning. Morris grasped something that has relevance today and which puts the graph-wielding managerialists in their place: that progress can be measured by more than money. People don’t want to live in the most expensive neighbourhood they can afford, but the most beautiful one, and they want jobs that are not only well paid but also satisfying. Early social democracy was all about such things, not just more money, but we have forgotten this.

How can we have forgotten about the importance of the quality of the work we do and the satisfaction it brings to our lives? There’s a certain nobility in making things, especially things of obvious utility or beauty, and this makes craftsmanship something we should strive to preserve. Think of our workers at Holden in Dandenong; they didn’t just collect widgets as they dropped from a conveyor belt, they made highly complex and beautiful machines that required skill and effort, and this gave them an enormous sense of satisfaction – certainly greater than that gained by staring at a computer screen all day or manning a consumer help desk. If we don’t value this sort of thing, what do we value?

It’s true that, even in the strongest manufacturing economy, not everyone can build cars and submarines and components for airliners; for some, catching a widget or responding to a disgruntled consumer has to be enough. But we rob our society and ourselves of something important when we fail to recognise the broad value of industrial craftsmanship and the opportunity it provides for the millions of people who happen not to be ‘artists’ to have such obviously meaningful occupations. Giving people the chance to lead creative lives should be an important objective of public policy.

Recently, the National Gallery of Victoria made exactly this point when it staged a major artistic exhibition of Australian-manufactured cars. It even featured the Valiant Charger muscle car owned by my next-door neighbour; how beautiful it was. Walking around the exhibition brought home to me the fact that every time we farm such meaningful work out to other countries (who unashamedly or underhandedly practise the sort of industry protection we find morally beneath us), a part of our quality of life gets exported along with it. These are the sorts of things that, in their unconsciously philistine way, the economic reformers neither measure nor value, and which they might unthinkingly dismiss as ‘rent-seeking’, but which ordinary people who haven’t been to university understand intuitively to be an important part of life. By creating a spreadsheet that closes a factory, even the most artistically inclined economic reformer can unconsciously condemn thousands of creative everyday people to lives of pointless boredom. Creativity should be better understood and valued more.

Morality, history, linguistic precision, sociology, aesthetics: adding these to our thinking would allow us to honour the complexity, generosity, creativity and even majesty of working-class life and work in wider and more honest ways than economics alone makes possible. Yes, economics has something to say, but on its own it tells us almost nothing.

Ordinary people do not live their lives according to the sort of narrow parameters that can be plotted on graphs. Their thinking on economic, social and political issues doesn’t revolve around the concept of productivity but around whether their children have jobs to look forward to, whether they can afford to buy a home, their level of employment security, the quality of their jobs, the physical state of their neighbourhoods, and the civility or otherwise they encounter in their daily lives – and all these things at once.

Politicians nowadays try automatically to reduce these concrete concerns to supposedly measurable concepts such as ‘cost of living’, and they roll everyone together under the nonsensical imported American term ‘working families’. Why is this? Is it cynicism? Is it because they haven’t the capacity to stand up to the pollsters who bribe them with promises of easy victory, or the tabloid editors and shock jocks who bully them with simplistic and anti-intellectual explanations of what ordinary people really care about? Or is it because politicians and their advisers today lack the wider education, the imagination or the verbal capacity necessary to articulate something broader, deeper and more meaningful, something that can move people in genuine and even profound ways?

The management consultants and the pollsters don’t have the answers, and it’s time we tell them: ‘Enough!’

We need to connect, now more than ever. This is becoming increasingly urgent. Some would say it is the urgent issue of the day. But how are we to do it?

It is a common complaint of the creative destroyers that our political system is broken – broken because economic reform is no longer possible. At election after election, governments that advocate privatisation and cut thousands of public-sector jobs are being tossed out or having their majorities slashed. The economic reformers and their boosters in the press tell us that we, the people, led by populists the way a beef farmer leads a bull by its nose ring, are the problem, and that we must be ignored for the good of the country. What politicians must do, they say, is prepare the electorate for uncomfortable truths by providing them with a new narrative, and ideally one which involves multiplying the current rate of productivity by two or three. The debate about this narrative and the policies that flow from it, they argue, must be taken out of the public arena and discussed in forums insulated from the special pleading of vested interests and the emotion of the electorate.

For some, this means a new economic forum of wise economists, led by the old advisers from the glory days of the 1980s and ’90s. For others, it means a national summit of businessmen and sensible welfare leaders, led by the productivity commissioners and the men who brought us the Great Australian Economic Miracle: Hawke, Keating, Howard, Costello and their former advisers. With the exceptions of the prime minister, the treasurer and a few other office-holders who can be relied upon to support the Productivity Commission’s line, all current members of parliament must be excluded. Only in this way – by locking out the people and their democratically elected representatives, and thus by engineering an appointed Parliament of Creative Destruction – can economic reform be certain of coming out on top.

In other words, democracy can’t be trusted to get things done, and economics must be made safe from it, safe from the potential losers from change, safe from the human yearning for equality and creativity, safe from moral reasoning, safe from the memory of something better. This is essentially the same lament about people power first mouthed by the elites in fifth-century Athens, but whereas the Athenians said, ‘Leave the decisions to the philosopher kings,’ we say, ‘Leave them to the economists.’ Like the Eastern European communists before them, the creative destroyers have finally found the root of their problem: to succeed in their plans, they first need to elect a new people.

They know that, out in the open, their philosophy of creative destruction is doomed because the people are wary of it. You can’t smash what’s left of the car industry, put the remaining canneries out of production and replace their produce with contaminated food from China, get rid of penalty rates and the minimum wage, privatise what’s left of electricity and rail and ports, make people pay to visit bulk-billing doctors when their children are sick, price university degrees at $100,000, break what remains of union power, shift an even greater share of GDP from labour to capital, make more people redundant at the age of fifty, murder more neighbourhoods and destroy more lives without expecting a democratic fight. The Australian people do not want these things, and never will.

This has enormous significance for our democracy. If our political system is really broken, as the common slogan today says, it is because while the reformers want creative destruction, the people do not. The popular will is being subverted. The people may be willing to accept change, but they are unwilling to accept change for change’s sake, or for the sole sake of the people at the top. Bringing these two sides of our democracy back together requires our politicians to listen to the people.

It comes down to this: change can’t be avoided. Everyone knows that. But just because change can’t be avoided, it doesn’t mean that everything has to change at once, or that it has to change in the way decreed from on high. This is not an argument for replacing hard reckoning about the present with some naive form of nostalgia. We can’t create a time machine and we shouldn’t try. But perhaps nostalgia can sometimes have a point, because when we look back we can attempt to understand what the past got right, and we can see that sometimes our parents’ generation got it more right than we have. The idea that life in the future will always be better than it is now is just as naive as the idea that the past was always better.

There is an alternative. There are many imaginable futures, and it seems to me that the future the people will accept is the one that adequately respects important elements of the past, not one that tries to wipe the past out and simply start again. This requires an effort: we must think for ourselves as a people, and not accept the tired, imported, out-of-date, out-of-time, off-the-shelf theory of creative destruction that is being offered as our only option.

We need instead to choose a future that – like the past – is designed to benefit all the Australian people, not just some. It’s the future we were heading towards before the unfortunate revolutionary changes of the past thirty years derailed it. Back before that time – an era still within the span of middle-aged memory – we believed our economic future lay in making things, and we believed our social future lay in supporting communities. We saw ourselves as more than just an agglomeration of individual consumers left to fend for themselves. For the people of Doveton, this meant making cars, trucks, trains and processed food, and it meant supporting neighbourhoods that were built around job creation and the provision of real opportunities for ordinary people. It meant nation-building for every member of the nation.

Thanks to sometimes unstoppable change, but also to stupid, shortsighted and overly theoretical policy – the too hasty closing down of car manufacturing in the face of a temporarily overvalued dollar being but the worst example – we can’t any longer make all the sorts of things we once did. But we can aspire to make things, to create skilled jobs, to value creativity, to replace urban blight with urban regeneration, not in the bits-and-pieces way we currently do, as a sort of penance for smashing things up in the first place, but with real purpose and real investment. The way our parents lived, and the sort of egalitarian nation they worked and fought for, provides us not so much with a model but with the moral inspiration we need to get started.

Go out and look for it, because it is still there. Sous les pavés, la plage!