Public ideas

The lucky country

The ABC ran five Global Roaming sessions asking experts if Australia’s good economic fortune is sustainable.

“Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck” wrote Donald Horne in his 1964 book The Lucky Country. For the summer Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald return to that theme, dedicating five of their 30-minute Global Roaming sessions to the idea Getting lucky … again.

The sessions are in the established Global Roaming format – the selected guest speaks for 10 to 15 minutes, before Geraldine and Hamish conduct a short Q&A discussion.

1. Hannah Ferguson: Making caring cool

Ferguson runs Cheek Media which reaches young people, particularly young women, turned off or disappointed by legacy media.

Much of the discussion keeps returning to the question of “objectivity”. Ferguson acknowledges that professional journalism values the quest for objectivity, but legacy media is not providing people, particularly young people, with what they need to understand what’s going on in the world. Pointing out that people want interpretation and analysis as well as the news, Ferguson makes no claim to objectivity in her own media.

The interview was recorded before the Bondi murders, which revealed serious shortcomings in legacy media, illustrating Ferguson’s points. The partisan lines of Murdoch media are well-known, but other legacy media, including the ABC, made choices about whom to interview, what questions they would put to politicians and spokespeople for ethnic groups – or most importantly what questions they would not put to them – and whether to provide any contextual background (for example the Christchurch murders.) It’s not a new issue, but it’s a reminder that those who disparage new media don’t always admit to serious biases in legacy media.

The other main point of discussion, as the title suggests, was about “caring”. Does a post on social media, for example about the suffering of Palestinian people, indicate that people actually care about the hardship of others, or does it serve some other purpose, such as virtue signalling?

Ferguson is pushing against not only legacy media, but also legacy political parties. She is disappointed by the outcome of the 2025 election because she sees minority government as “the dream for a more progressive, genuinely-reformed Australia … but the Coalition didn’t offer enough of a challenge for that to be a reality. Instead what we got is a disappointing Labor government”.

She intends to start her own party.

2. Peter Varghese: Re-thinking Australian foreign policy

It would be hard to find a person who has been more immersed in the politics and economics of the global economic order than Peter Varghese, former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

That order, crafted and once held together by the United States, supported by norms of economic openness, is now coming apart – indeed is being pulled apart by Trump whose MAGA vision is underpinned by a unilateralist view of the world. Varghese refers to a “bonfire of certainties”, including a return to trade protectionism, led by the United States.

For Australia our longstanding US alliance looks rather fragile:

The one thing that would end the alliance is that America would cease to be a liberal democracy. Trump is succeeding where eighty years of anti-Americanism failed. He is creating a moral equivalence with authoritarian powers. Left unattended it will leave Australia stuck between a Leninist autocracy in China and an illiberal United States. That’s a lonely position.

Even if a post-Trump America resembles the America we once knew, there would remain the realization that it could revert once again to domestic and foreign madness – not the sort of country we want to be dependent on or interlinked with for our own defence.

The discussion touches on Australia’s defence options. We shouldn’t drift along, clinging to what’s left of the American alliance. We do have options, which means we have to re-think how we relate to countries in our own region – countries with different alliances, different military strengths, and different priorities.

We should also be re-thinking our defence capability in terms of deterring those who pose a direct threat to Australia, rather than in terms of a grand alliance with a power with shared interests. In this regard Varghese is understandably sceptical about AUKUS: “What is the strategic rationale for what is a very expensive defence project?” he asks.

The discussion concludes with Varghese’s observations on the Australian economy. To him economic and foreign power go hand-in-hand. (That’s hardly a radical view, but there are those who believe there has to be a trade-off between military and economic power.) Our politicians don’t seem to be up to the task of dealing with the economy’s need for fundamental structural adjustment.

Varghese is asked for his reading recommendations. If you face the risk of getting stranded in floodwaters, or are planning to drive from Pacific coast to Perth, you might care to download Joe Walker’s four-and-a-half-hour discussion with Hugh White: Why great powers sleepwalk to war, recommended by Varghese. It’s a review of 11 books that shaped White’s views on strategy and international relationships.

3. Alan Finkel: Fixing the rocky road to net zero

Alan Finkel’s contribution draws on his experience as Chief Scientist from 2016 to 2020.

Our resource endowments – our luck – set us up to be a green energy superpower. That is, as a low-cost supplier to the world of energy-intensive processed products, including green iron, green steel, green aluminium, green jet fuel, and hydrogen as feedstock for chemicals.

Loy Yang B
Loy Yang B – one of the last to close

This is essentially a summary and update of his 2021 Quarterly EssayGetting to Zero: Australia’s energy transition.

Realization of that opportunity is thwarted, however, by a dysfunctional regulatory environment that discourages investment in clean energy generation. He isn’t on the deregulatory bandwagon: on the contrary he is calling for well-considered and responsive industry planning, in a framework that doesn’t set economic and environmental objectives against each other.

Few would disagree with Finkel on these observations. He sidesteps the influence of those who have used their political power to hinder our energy transition, particularly Liberal and National politicians who have framed our energy transition as an issue in identity politics, and have lied about the drivers of our energy costs.

He is critical, however, of those who take a purist line in opposing the use of gas in our energy mix. He argues that the most urgent task in meeting our long-term commitment is to get coal out of the system. In the medium term as a means of firming the electricity supply, gas is more reliable, cheaper, and is a much more environmentally benign fuel than coal.

His presentation and discussion conclude with insights on artificial intelligence.

4. Lydia Khalil: Tackling new security threats

Lydia Khalil of the Lowy Institute reminds us of threats to our security perpetrated through the “grey zone”. That is the zone of hostile foreign activity that lies between diplomacy and armed conflict.

She lists four types of such activity:

(Within this first category could possibly be added the well-funded disinformation campaigns against renewable energy.)

There is nothing new about grey zone warfare, but new technologies and lower cost communication are making it easier. Also we are losing the relative protection of geographic isolation that Australia once enjoyed.

5. Michael Stutchbury: An economic wake up call

Michael Stutchbury is the former editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review and is now executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Like Finkel and Varghese he addresses weaknesses in Australia’s economic structure, particularly as they are manifest in poor productivity performance. He gives a potted history of Australia’s fortunes – a story about times of luck such as wool booms and iron ore booms, followed by a slow decline in living standards as our luck runs out. We’re currently enjoying good times, but unless we attend to structural reform we now face another such a slide in our living standards.

When he gets into detail however, his presentation loses credibility because of false and unsubstantiated claims, which seem to be lifted from Coalition talking points without the mediation and scrutiny we would expect from a professional journalist. His claims about the benefits of enterprise bargaining (rather than collective bargaining) and of privatization are highly disputable. He completely misrepresents the economics of renewable energy. He trots out the line that our 30 percent company tax rate makes us uncompetitive, without acknowledging that because of imputation the corporate tax rate for Australian investors is more like 15 percent. He mentions housing unaffordability, but by his reckoning negative gearing and capital gains discounts have nothing to do with the problem.

He makes a ridiculous and easily-checked claim that government expenditure has recently risen by 6 percent of GDP.  Reference to Treasury accounts (MYEFO) shows that in 2020-21 there was such a spike in Commonwealth expenditure: that was the Covid stimulus (on the Coalition’s watch), but it was not ongoing, as he implies. He gives the impression that Australia is burdened by high taxes, when in reality our taxes are much lower than they are in other prosperous countries, which is why we are burdened with inadequate physical infrastructure, high-cost privatized services, and diminished government capability.

In the discussion Geraldine Doogue gently reminds him that growing inequality is undermining people’s support for market-based capitalism. He responds with the valid claim that income inequality in Australia is still reasonably contained, but he completely avoids the much more serious issue of wealth inequality. In fact he seems to be enthusiastic about the way our tax and transfer system has made life easy for rich and idle retirees.

It’s an unfortunate way for the ABC to end this series, because Stutchbury’s strong points about structural reform and faults in our political system are lost in a diatribe of Coalition propaganda. His concluding observation that the political debate has moved from contrasting economic ideologies (the old “left-right” split) to arguments about identity is a valuable insight, but it needs to be made in a less partisan setting.

On antisemitism and Zionism

Three Australian Jewish public intellectuals discuss antisemitism and Zionism.

Even before the Bondi murders some political commentators were giving the impression that Australian Jews speak with one voice on public policy.

Three prominent Australian Jews – lawyers Ronald Sackville and Robert Richter, and historian David Sluki – dispel that notion in a lively discussion on the Radio National religious program God forbid.

Their discussion reminds us of the richness of the Jewish culture which sees argument and disagreement as a pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. Disputes about the meaning of antisemitism go well beyond the specific definitions that have dominated public discussions in recent times. Who are “Semites” – a language group, followers of Abrahamic religions, Jews who have lived in historically segregated European communities? Similarly with “Zionism”, another term whose meaning is shaped and re-shaped by its historical context. Was Jillian Segal really able to speak for all Australian Jews – a highly diverse and well-educated group with a huge range of ideologies, experiences and informed opinions?

Had we heard these voices earlier on, the public discussions about antisemitism and support of the Palestinian people may have been undertaken in a more civilized and less partisan context,