1993_03_march_pollsaty

One of the major debates in the industrialised world two to three decades ago was how to deal with increased leisure time.

That debate was sadly irrelevant if this election is anything to go by.

This election has been about work, more than anything else _ or more accurately paid work.

Both parties predicate their policies on the aim of getting one million unemployed people back to paid work. Both had an auction over who would pay the most money to (mainly) women for childcare while they were at work. A central part of one party’s policy is to change the relationship between those who get paid for work and those who pay to get work done. And a debate has raged about whether people should be taxed immediately before they get paid for work or only when they spend what they get paid.

A minor exception has been how people are to pay for health care. Note: not health care itself, but how it is paid for.

The other theme of the election has been about the role of the state. This has not been debated as an issue, because of the nature of the campaign, which turned into an auction. The conservatives could hardly promote the virtue of a small state doing less for people in a campaign which began on the basis of: Look what we (the state) can do for you.

None the less, the role of the state is a theme. Despite the $150 million for the sugar industry, the conservatives stand for less state interference in people’s lives and a smaller role for state institutions.

Labor calls that selfishness _ the pursuit of the individual rather than the community. The conservatives call it efficient _ the state does not do it as well as individuals because the state squanders resources; individuals target them precisely.

But these are very old platforms. They creak with irrelevance. The table comparing the polices is instructive. It was a difficult job extract the essentials from the verbiage. Much of the press and television coverage has been: 1. What the Opposition says the Government has done. 2. What the Government says the Opposition will do. 3. What journalists and commentators (including this one) think and feel about what each says it might do.

But even when the verbiage is pulled away and the policies stripped down to essentials, nearly all of it is about work and money. Both leaders have concentrated on those issues _ in Mr Keating’s words the 10th-order issue of the GST.

The GST is important. Taxing consumption rather than income and savings is an important issue. But it is still 10th order. The more important question is what are the other nine above it?

It is unlikely that the next week will see a re-ordering of those issues or more importantly some thinking about the interdependence of issues.

What is the use of a Better Cities Program if it is not intimately linked with a policy on fibre-optic technology, and also linked to immigration policy and a population policy (if either party has one)? What is the use of a Murray-Darling program that does not look at land use, over-grazing, over-cropping and soil erosion everywhere in Australia and the pressure on agricultural land from the cities?

What is the use of a health policy that is dominated by how and who pays and is not linked to preventative measures, bio-medical research and the changing way of Australian death? What’s the use of a child-care policy without an effective transport policy. What’s the use of a transport policy without a housing and aged-care policy. And so on and so on.

Perhaps the reason for the failure to co-ordinate policy aims is severalfold: growing specialisation, pressure-group politics and the political appeal in a democracy to the centre of the Bell curve because that is where the votes are.

Pressure-group policies mean politicians are forced to think piecemeal. Specialisation results in slot thinking and a disenfranchisement of generalists in policy discussions. The appeal to the Bell curve results in the positing of simple solutions because the people in the middle of the Bell curve cannot understand complex ones. And the simple solutions rarely suit the complex inter-relating world we live in.

The forecast two or three decades ago that we will have to deal with increased leisure-time debate should not have been irrelevant. Rather, it should have been put the other way: not how are we to deal with more leisure, but how are we to deal with less work?

This election sadly misses that point. It has been remorselessly about paid work in jobs at a time when paid work in jobs is rapidly shrinking as a proportion of people’s lives, because of changes in both industry and longevity.

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