I’d pay good money to watch a detective show called Roskam & Sloan. Two hard-bitten, seen-it-all right-wing cops set out to clean up the mean streets of this rotten town, or at least Melbourne. I can even hear the theme music, a bit like the melancholic version of The Sweeney theme that would play over that show’s end credits.
Due to an unforgivable lack of judgment on the part of local drama producers (cosseted lefty luvvies, as the pair would doubtless point out), I’ll have to make do with writing about Roskam and Sloan’s columns this week in the national broadsheet and the national business publication.
John Roskam is probably better known these days as a serial unsuccessful Liberal preselection candidate in Victoria, but he hails from a distant past when, with Chris Berg, he lent the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) some intellectual rigour. This week in the Financial Review he opined about the merry gathering of right-wing grifters in London called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, organised by noted Benzo spokesperson Jordan Peterson.
So far the reactionary festival has mainly attracted attention for Tony Abbott launching an IPA report on the “sidelines” (LOL) of the gathering and using it to effectively admit he lied as prime minister whenever he spoke about climate change in any terms other than what he now says — that it’s a fraud and a cult.
But Roskam is intrigued not merely that Antonio Gramsci is the most-cited figure at the gathering — charmingly, and presumably at the prompting of subeditors, he has to explain to AFR readers who Gramsci is — but the view of many that “big business as much as government was responsible for the corruption of the free market into the crony capitalism from which the West suffers”.
“The stereotype of the UK Tories and the Australian Liberals as the parties in the pocket of corporate interests is well past its use-by date,” Roskam says, a statement that will come as a shock to the fossil fuel companies that tipped $420,000 into Liberal coffers before the last election, and to the big banks ($480,000), the gambling lobby ($435,000), the big four consulting firms ($415,000) or Anthony Pratt ($1.7 million); all wasted money, apparently, so Liberal treasurers ought to be prepared for a big dip in contributions next year. But Roskam, who has previously discussed crony capitalism, is right to identify this as an interesting moment in the changing mindset of the right.
I don’t merely say that because I’ve been banging on at doubtlessly dreary length about the corruption of markets by big business for many years, and arguing it’s a key problem in voter perceptions that the economic system is broken and only working in the interests of the powerful. The argument from some on the right is that this is because we’re not being neoliberal enough, when in fact it’s an inevitable consequence of neoliberalism and its rationale that government must always be subordinate to the wisdom of the market — which means, in practice, large corporations. There’s also a strong suspicion right-wingers have only really turned on big business because the latter have had to abandon the rank climate denialism and offensive culture warring that continues to characterise the right.
The unresolved question is where that leaves the right in a country like Australia on economic policy. The Liberals, for example, last had an economic vision in the early stages of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership, until he was told by the Nationals that all that stuff about innovation and disruption and modernity was frightening farmers. The only vision that was left under Morrison was selling policy outcomes to corporations in exchange for donations and comfy post-public life positions. If we take Roskam seriously, and the Liberals are joining a general shift on the right away from corporations and selling policy to them, what replaces even that tepid strategy, especially when the permanent increase in government spending to 26%+ of GDP initiated by Morrison and confirmed by Labor has to be paid for somehow?
Judith Sloan, one of approximately one op-ed contributors at The Australian worth reading, was more surprising this week. You’d think Sloan would be a fearsome scourge of the inner-city latte set who want to block all development, that she’d look with a jaundiced eye at the Max Chandler-Matherses of the world who demand more housing but just not anywhere near them, thanks very much. Not so: Sloan regards NIMBYism as “local democracy”, because “the property rights of homeowners are made up of both the actual home/land and the general nature of the precinct. By and large, local government planning restrictions reflect the preferences of ratepayers whereas state governments have other objectives.”
Indeed, this isn’t the first time Sloan has railed at criticism of NIMBYs.
Her broader point was that surging migration has placed us in a position where no amount of NIMBYism and fiddling with housing supply is going to be able to respond to the housing crisis. “Unless the federal government is prepared to restrict the intake of migrants to cool demand, the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon.” She also made an underappreciated observation that building new infrastructure for housing was a damn sight harder in established suburbs than in new ones.
While right-wing economists like Steven Hamilton are maintaining the old faithful rationales for high immigration, Sloan’s criticism of high migration (she’s been making it for a while) suggests that the big business enthusiasm for high migration isn’t cutting it any more in sections of the mainstream right, and that strong migration is increasingly being seen as a kind of sugar hit to economic growth rather than the real thing.
If there’s a theme to Roskam & Sloan, it’s a shift within the right to an economic mindset far more sceptical of, even hostile to, the demands of large corporations, at least in some areas. Who’s to say this won’t spread, eventually, to industrial relations as well, which remains the last great area of commonality between the Liberal Party and big business? That would truly prove the Liberals are no longer in the pocket of big business. At that point, the pretence that the Liberals could genuinely appeal to working Australians in a way that goes beyond low tax slogans and culture wars might start to develop some substance.
Do you think the Australian right is falling out of love with big business? Or do the two remain as hand-in-hand as always? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
