'Values based capitalism', or capitalism based values?

It’s going to take more than a fancy essay and some sentiment to address the systematic inequality that threatens the heart of the Australian way of life.

Are we going back to the drawing board with ‘values based capitalism’? (Source: Twitter @news_australian)

A stranglehold is tightening around low-income families, the working poor, and the many Australians who are still expected to languish on $46 dollars per day, revealing an economic crisis that has been bearing down on everyday Australians. Twenty years of gamified market-driven government policymaking, incessant nattering from lobby groups, and ghoulish remonstrations from business councils have taken a toll on the equilibrium of our country and the fairness that has defined its success. The effects are increasingly devastating to many Australians, far more than the affluent decisionmakers seem to be able to imagine.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers spoke just recently of the need for “Values-driven capitalism” and dropped a line from Heraclitus to beef it up in an essay published in The Monthly. He stands before the country and delivers the same speech a couple of times a week, an interchangeable neoliberal pantomime from a treasurer operating a model that is not able to take this thing where it’s probably needed. With a glaring $243 billion in tax cuts sitting conspicuously next to the record profits for the lunch buddies, the crowd yells “behind you”, but the Canberra bubble floats away towards the antagonists again, and the audience is left wondering if it’s worth watching the act if the rules of the pantomime aren’t being observed by the people who advertised the show in the first place.

After deciding that he wasn’t going to address the Australian public about the latest rate rise, RBA boss Philip Lowe had time to hop off to a lunch hosted by Barrenjoey, where he exclusively briefed traders from the country’s largest banks. Another fancy private meal behind closed doors while the foundations shake outside, full bellies again for bankers and traders alike, attended by an unelected public official in preference to briefing the people he receives $900k a year to dutifully inform.

Those interest rates don’t matter anymore to the dynastic wealth of those who have penetrated the ceiling of money generation, beyond the mantle of fairness, into the vanishingly small percentiles of stratospheric wealth. They don’t matter to people who can melt down and redistribute their assets overnight at the expense of human livelihoods, people that can buy their children $3.8 million share houses to live like ultra-hipsters in an inner suburban bubbles, far away from the realities in the economically stagnated family households beyond the suburbs that don’t get delivered the Financial Review. Far from those who can no longer make ends meet, and who don’t feel connected to Australia anymore.

The Twindenberg @jonkudelka

I know this is a fish in a barrel situation, but this story is such a magnificent example of how completely stacked the deck is in favour of money in this country that it removes any need for satire.

But they do matter to those on the peripheries, away from the metropolitan inner-city elites, where overloaded homeowners languish to sustain their families on casual work in the suburban fringes, cheap fixed mortgages defaulting to brutally expensive variable ones, providing everyone involved with the sharp contrast of what it looked like back then and how it looks now. This is an experience that everyone needs to understand, but everyone who is making the decisions is not experiencing any of this.

Those on low incomes have seen the CPI take them down a paygrade or two in a couple of years, and the rent has risen with the fuel and the groceries. Avocados have fluctuated between 50c and $3.80 in the last six months at the duopolistic supermarket chains, but so too have the interest rates, impacting an entire generation of first home buyers, renters, the elderly, young families, and those silly enough to take the Reserve Bank Governor at his word, hacking into the fabric of our modern society. Yet somehow, against the grain, after unmitigated gains from JobKeeper, cutthroat layoffs and restructurings during the pandemic, and the assurance of two governments, the corporate profits have never been higher.

Those who look to assert values in this current society do so from the comfort of a status quo, one they may question, but in a position that is located away from the main issues that bring it into disrepute. A broken system cannot be fixed by someone who is only determined to restore a less broken version of it from a previous time, nor should it be determined entirely by people in power who inhabit a different reality to one that is unfolding on the ground. A gaping class divide coupled with a lack of economic diversity in public life has only sought to widen the class gap between the government, bureaucracy, the press, and the people.

“Values based capitalism” will continue to rely on those who are currently metering it out on us, to be in control of defining what these values actually entail. It will be the disproportionately powerful getting to decide how it trickles down, like everything else they’ve tried trickling using the famous gravity-fed technique, time and time again. Walking into a supermarket or a shop in the duopoly-riddled retail landscape has become anxiety-inducing for many low income families looking to shop frugally on the rollercoaster of unreasonable price fluctuations. There need to be safeguards and regulatory interventions to protect Australian consumers, but most importantly, there needs to be a re-imagining of how we are doing things.

Public officials, elected or unelected, who are charged with the responsibility to ensure regulation of these markets, have instead protected the status quo at all costs. We now see a new Labor government default and underwhelm disadvantaged Australians in front of us all, cherry-picking reasons for the continual decline in real wages and job security and downplaying productivity, price gouging and uninhibited profits. Too many can’t make ends meet working and existing in an economic environment ensured by major party economic curation. The people need something, and this government can’t even drop the grotesquely irresponsible Stage Three Tax Cuts, a vestige from a previous government who were thrown out for their excesses. If they won’t even do this, how can they begin to enact any real change?

Sally McManus @sallymcmanus

When are we going to talk about price gouging to deliver record profits adding to inflation? Energy companies and supermarkets are putting up prices more than they need to. #insiders

Price gouging, one of the key solvable human factors causing inflation, is unchecked by regulatory apparatus’ that have been stocked by LNP allies, cronies and stooges for over a decade at every public body imaginable from the AAT to the ACC. None of the political analysts on ‘Insiders’, nor Chalmers or Lowe, seem to mention this much. As many struggle to put food on the table, the prices set by the duopolies seems to swell on their own unique logarithms, seemingly fluctuating without any real method, and no one seems to have the ability to question it effectively. No one in Canberra is calling it out for what it is: a disgrace.

The working class do more for less in swelling pockets of Australian industry and are beholden to unstable employment under protected employers and tyrannical mega-corporations honed on the cultural edge of Howard’s Workchoices, grinding the working class into lines on productivity sheets. In an unchecked corporate cultural environment, CEOs look adroitly to shave down the overheads, cut well-paying jobs, close the bank branches, and eliminate access to a fair wage, while hollowing-out the historic Australian companies that once served the public well back in a time when capitalism was fairer, and governments were elected to ensure it remained that way

Chalmers isn’t playing a simulation run on the “Treasurer edition” of Tetris, he’s running a massive regional economy poised at the crossroads, in a state of flux with a set of important choices, that has grown to disproportionately benefit the rich in a way that is damaging to the security of our nation and everyone in it. If “Values-based capitalism” is not some kind of pre-work-choices bargaining environment featuring epic sweeping reforms, and is just some bogus neo-liberal Blairite rehash from 2004, what kind of chance does anyone really have? Why should anyone have any hope? This isn’t about brownie points with the industry groups that can be exchanged for vapid and insubstantial offerings to the beleaguered public, nor about blaming the trillion dollars of debt we keep hearing about, this is about the need for a systematic overhaul, and the courage to follow through from those we have elected to do something.