Productivity-driven reform is impossible when the rhetoric is all about threats to security and sovereignty.
Not since the World Trade Center bombings almost two decades ago have world events conspired to create such a climate of fear. In the coming election year, conservative forces will stoke fear in the Australian electorate with the aim of persuading voters that a change of government is too risky. It’s a tried and proven copybook, but it will have high costs for the country: essential economic reform is impossible when people are so frightened that they bunker down and cling onto what they’ve got.
Consider a couple of chapters from the playbook. Just weeks before Al Qaida’s attack on the World Trade Center, a Norwegian vessel, the Tampa, sailed into Australian waters under the guidance of the Australian rescue coordination centre, carrying asylum seekers it had rescued from a sinking vessel.
The Howard government introduced the Border Protection Bill, which deemed lawful any action taken by officers or agents of the Commonwealth. Labor opposed the bill on the basis that no one should be exempted from Australia’s laws relating to assault and murder, however unlikely those crimes would be committed.
Speaking on the bill in Caucus, I concluded: “This will cost Labor the election, but we must oppose it.”
I was right. The Howard government warned there might be terrorists on those vessels and Labor was portrayed as traitors to the Australian people.
Throw forward to the period leading up to the 2013 election. Labor’s market-based carbon price would wipe Whyalla off the map, force up the price of a leg of lamb to $150 and jack up electricity prices to unimaginable levels.
Then in the 2019 pre-election period, Labor’s support for the Medevac legislation, possibly allowing up to a couple of dozen sick asylum seekers to be treated in Australia, would cause a flood of “murderers, rapists and paedophiles” who would take the places of Australians in public hospitals and on public housing waiting lists.
These fear campaigns were not conducted exclusively by the Liberal and National parties; they were assisted and funded by Facebook groups and conservative supporters including NewsCorp outlets.
Labor, too, has run effective scare campaigns, its 2018 claim that the Turnbull government planned to privatise Medicare helping it gain 14 seats. But in the modern era it hasn’t resorted to race-based politics.
For a government keenly searching for a bogeyman, Chinese spies and their Australian sympathisers seem ideal. To be clear, China has been behaving appallingly in the last few years, in the South China Sea and Hong Kong, threatening Australian exporters with reprisals for Australian government national security measures, launching spurious anti-dumping actions and harassing Australian journalists in China.
But if the Australian government has a national security announcement to make, it should hold a media conference instead of tipping it out the previous evening to its favourite NewsCorp newspapers so they can spin it as anti-Chinese, complete with mugshots of suspicious Chinese academics.
And if national security officers are going to raid the home of a state Labor MP, or any elected official for that matter, perhaps it would be prudent that the media not be invited to accompany them.
Notice that in the US Presidential election campaign Donald Trump refers to his rival as “Beijing Biden”, to China as “Chin-ah!” and to COVID-19 as the “China virus”?
Now that all those Sudanese gangs the Liberal Party claimed were preventing Melburnians from going out to restaurants have disappeared, conservatives will be keenly looking for a new group to vilify.
A restraint on the Liberal Party doing this is its hold on the marginal seats of Chisholm, Reid and Banks, which have large numbers of Chinese-Australian voters. But that won’t stop the Liberals’ conservative proxies and NewsCorp.
After a couple of early slipups, where Prime Minister Morrison appeared to take on the mantle of deputy sheriff to Trump, he has been adroit in his public statements about the Australia-China relationship. Foreign minister, Marise Payne, and trade minister, Simon Birmingham, have been excellent. So, too, has the Labor leadership.
But in a climate of fear engendered by COVID-19, its economic aftermath and the fractured relationship with China, words such as “security” and “sovereignty” are appearing every day in the government’s economic rhetoric.
By way of example, security and sovereignty have provided the political context for Liberal interventions in gas markets.
In a climate of fear, productivity-raising economic reform, vital to Australia’s future prosperity, will be impossible. The landmark reforms of the Hawke-Keating era to fashion Australia’s open, competitive economy, though undertaken in challenging economic circumstances, nevertheless were sold to the Australian people in a spirit of optimism about the future.
At a time of great-power rivalry, when the global trading rules are being flouted, the main political parties should reject the political allure of turning inwards, protecting industries under the banner of sovereignty and intervening unnecessarily in markets. And the Coalition’s proxies and media allies should refrain from further damaging Australia’s trade relationships by stoking Sinophobia.
Craig Emerson is a distinguished fellow at the ANU, director of the APEC Study Centre at RMIT and adjunct professor at Victoria University’s College of Business.