Last Friday’s cyber meltdown that affected everything from supermarkets to banks was an instructive event.
Like many, I have been trying to understand the recent tectonic shifting of political alignments.
How did hitherto business-supporting conservative political parties become not only champions of the working class but that the working class is increasingly supporting them? Donald Trump’s realigned Republican Party in the US and the Coalition in Australia are good examples.
More of the cyber meltdown anon.
But first, forget the traditional splits of capital vs labour, conservative vs progressive, right vs left and the parties that for decades have been identified with each side. We need to take a longer historical view. Much longer.
After the horrors of World War I, governments pledged that it would be “the war to end all wars” and that they would make it a “land fit for heroes”.
A decade and a bit later, the Great Depression hit. The heroes became destitute, and the masses fell for populism and fascism in the defeated nations, leading to World War II. As it ended the victorious allies learned the lesson. They helped the defeated nations rebuild and set up the welfare state or versions of it. Governments’ role was to ensure people could lead decent lives and not be victims of the heartless and unbridled capitalism that caused the Depression.
It worked well for more than 30 years. In the developed world, governments ensured people were housed, employed in good conditions, fed, clothed, educated and given health and aged care. It made people feel secure.
Even externally, mutually assured destruction (MAD) and various nuclear treaties gave rise to some sort of stability and security.
Then from the late 1970s, the welfare contract began to break down. In the name of economic efficiency and prosperity, bloated public sectors were dismantled with the weapons of economic rationalism: deregulation of capital and labour, privatisation, tax-slashing, government-spending cuts, and tariff removal.
These things were worth doing. They made economies more efficient and increased total wealth. But the wealth was not fairly spread.
Many people and classes of people, particularly youth, went backwards, not just economically. They lost access to many things which all added up to one thing – loss of security. The loss of security got worse and worse. In Australia this was especially true after the mid-1990s.
The erosion of affordable quality health care, housing and education and the loss of job security has alienated many people from society.
As conservative governments privatised, deregulated and cut taxes, so-called progressive governments did precious little to protect those elements of the welfare state that enhanced security while retaining the benefits of economic rationalism.
From 1990, after a brief period of peace dividend a completely unanticipated cascade of security eroding events occurred: the rise of terror, the global financial crisis, Covid, inflation, the rise of Chinese and Russian aggression, supply-chain shortages, inflation, energy costs, climate change, and immigration.
Last Friday’s cyber outages just added one more element to the sense of insecurity and loss of control that many voters have.
In the new cyber world, corporations have taken out-sourcing to the extreme. They have replaced human customer service. Customers now have to do their own customer care through a maze of clicks that frequently lead nowhere. People are worried about the impermanence of data. Many are falling for scams. Social media engenders a further array of fears.
So, the onslaught of security-threatening trends and events mean the old political divides have been replaced with a new political divide: the secure and the insecure.
Wealth and income, of course, define a lot of that fault line. If you have money or are getting regular money, security follows. If you have little money and little or none coming in, insecurity follows unless there is a government safety net. But the safety net is in tatters.
Education is also significant in defining the secure-insecure faultline. Higher levels of education, literacy and numeracy help people better negotiate change and to understand that simple solutions do not help in a complex world. Gender, too, helps define the divide.
In Australia, housing has widened the insecure-secure divide. While the wealth of many has shot up with price rises caused mainly by bad policy and the withdrawal of government housing, the position of many others has led to hopelessness and despair.
In 1994-95 only 18 per cent of households were privately rented (and they had good prospects of later ownership). Now it is 28 per cent with ownership out of reach for most of them. Social housing has plummeted from more than 10 per cent to about 3 per cent.
Nearly all the Australian rental market is made up of investors with only one or two dwellings and a high turnover rate resulting in evictions. Long-term rental security does not exist in Australia. With little prospect of owning, it adds to alienation.
It may well be that a voter’s sense of security will be a better guide to voting intention (major, minor or independent) than the hitherto usual markers of parental vote; wage earner or self-employed; age; gender; and so on.
You cannot blame insecure people for turning to charlatans and opportunists whose slogans offer hope and a return to the security of some better earlier time, however obviously delusional they are. The people to blame are those who could have done more to retain, or return to, a greater role for government in providing the things that add to security and genuine belonging so that the artificial sense of belonging and identity offered by cults and charlatans lose their appeal.
While progressive governments fail to provide more of what delivers security, the votes of the insecure will be ripe for the picking.
Crispin Hull
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times and other Australian media on 23 July 2024.
Fully agree with the sentiments in this article. There is an underlying push to shift the work from the provider to the buyer. “Just use our simple app …” ie. you do the work for us in completing the form etc or scan your own groceries without us giving you any discount for doing our work.
Of course, let’s not forget the lack of social housing following the bushfires on the south coast a few years back. Councils wrote to holiday house owners asking for their houses to be rented out to people who lost their houses in the fires. Some years after the fires the NSW government had not built one single social housing house since the fires. Instead, the onus of providing housing was shifted to the public – who of then become the “baddie” when they wanted their holiday house back and the family being asked to leave had nowhere to go as the NSW government had not built a single house to accomodate those families. [The Labor government may have built some but the previous coalition government had not done anything prior to losing office].
And finally, where are the promised “cheaper prices” we were all told would be assured when public assets (eg. the electrical networks) were sold off – mainly to reduce government debt. Can anyone really point out where selling off public assets had led to a real benefit to the public who used to own the asset?
A perfect summation – thank you.