Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is an ongoing source of frustration. Intelligent, hard-working, with much more to offer than the mugging and smirking of his non-leader Scott Morrison, Frydenberg is also nearly invisible as treasurer at a time when the economy needs leadership.
While no substitute for productivity-enhancing reforms or fiscal stimulus, a high-profile and authoritative treasurer might instil some desperately needed confidence in consumers and business. We’re not getting that from Frydenberg.
Yesterday he gave a major speech at the ANU on “Australia and the Global Economy”. Like every speech by a senior politician now, it was dropped to newspapers, dutifully reported without analysis or critique, and then sunk without trace in the media cycle — and not just because the day was dominated by bushfires.
In their efforts to get speeches some sort of media coverage (from a media that laments the poor quality of political communication and public debate), politicians now guarantee they’ll get five minutes in the papers and then nothing. They may as well simply issue them as media releases and not bother showing up to deliver them.
Frydenberg’s speech is at a crucial time for the global economy, with the institutions that underpin the international economic order under attack as never before in the 75 years since Bretton Woods. Frydenberg himself argued back in September, along with international counterparts, “there is no alternative to multilateralism”. Much of the speech was devoted to Australia’s economic history from federation, when “the Australian economy looked very different to the one we have today” and “tensions between nations in Europe were building and erupted into World War I in 1914”.
The Little Golden Books Economic History aside, Frydenberg’s focus was on the “importance of recapturing the cooperative spirit of Bretton Woods”. If you don’t know your history, you might be forgiven for thinking it was Robert Menzies — invoked twice by Frydenberg — who presided over Australia’s role at the Bretton Woods conference, and not the government of John Curtin and his treasurer Ben Chifley, but a little partisan revisionism is forgivable.
When it came to actual substance, however, Frydenberg had little to offer. The “new set of challenges” facing the post-war architecture were, he said, an ageing population, debt levels, rapid urbanisation and great power rivalry. Climate change, apparently, isn’t significant enough to make the list.
The only mention of climate change was to blame the developing world for it:
“As more people are lifted out of poverty, the pressures on the environment will only increase. In Asia alone, energy consumption has quadrupled over the past three decades. These challenges, many of which have been positive, have also contributed to the impact of human-induced climate change.”
So there you have it — climate change is nothing to do with wealthy, emissions-intensive economies like Australia that have enjoyed two centuries of industrialisation.
Which brings us to a bigger point missing from the speech. Bretton Woods led to “institutions that remain important to this day”, Frydenberg said. “The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation.”
True. And it was the IMF that recently demolished the government’s lie that it will easily meet its Paris Agreement emission reduction, noting that even a massive carbon price would now not deliver the abatement necessary to curb emissions by 26% on 2005 levels. And it was the World Bank that two years ago urged Australia to allow open labour market access for workers from Tuvalu and Kiribati, enabling those two countries to deal with the devastating economic impacts of rising sea levels.
Scott Morrison’s response has been a Trumpesque attack on international climate critics and a conspiracy theory about how multilateralism was “an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy” and “a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate”.
Frydenberg’s speech thus exposed a tension at the heart of this government: rational ministers like Frydenberg understand that Australia, more than most, benefits from an international rules-based order that seems to constrain nations from unilaterally asserting themselves in areas like trade and finance. But Morrison is happy to ally himself with the Trump project of undermining exactly that rules-based order and portraying international cooperation as some kind of world government assault on national sovereignty.
But Morrison is happy to ally himself with the Trump project of undermining exactly that rules-based order and portraying international cooperation as some kind of world government assault on national sovereignty.
Of course, given the government is committed to doing precisely nothing of any note, this tension can persist in the abstract while Australia drifts and stagnates.
Correction: This article originally stated that the World Bank report urged open borders with Pacific states; in fact it urged open labour markets for Tuvalu and Kiribati given their acute climate risks. The text above has been corrected.
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“Intelligent, hard-working, with much more to offer than the mugging and smirking of his non-leader Scott Morrison”.
Such as? Looking permanently dumbstruck? I wonder how you came up with that assessment?
I have regularly watched him try to sell ideology as analysis, he talks about the economy with all the insight of the average galah in the apocryphal pet shop. I have seen nothing there, no spine to stand up to Morrison, no genuine insight on what ails us or the best policies to head off the coming economic and environmental catastrophe.
Just a straw man, that’s all I see.
Agree DB. I’m also not prepared to give Joshie a pass on “a litle partisan revisionism”, falsely crediting Menzies and not Curtin and Chifley. There’s far to much of that coming out of the maw of the LNP and their boosters to ignore. The propaganda assault is underway well and truly. The treasurer is a tool in more ways than one.
I am confused Bernard.
On one hand you laud Frydenberg as level headed, intelligent and more desirable than ScuMo (a turd in a swimming pool would be too) and the next you show us how he is equally untrustworthy and basically continues the neoliberal line, complete with climate change sidelining, a variant on denial.
What are we to take away from this?
And why can’t we just revert to using the old, correct adjective “global”, instead of the exclusionary bureaucratic term “multilateral”?
Care to provide any evidence that Fraudenburg is intelligent or hard-working? Being more desirable than Scummo is hardly an endorsement……..as Scummo is able as desirable as a facial with a cheese grater.
I am not so keen on Frydenberg. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He tailors and changes his facts to suit his audience. I do not think it is acceptable to claim something for Menzies that was actually done by Labor; and that is the sort of thing he does. He is my local member and during the last election campaign he sent us all a 3-page letter about the LNP’s progressive climate policies. Not once did the word coal appear.
As an adherent to the neo-liberal philosophy of small government outsourcing everything to the private sector, it is not surprising that he has nothing to offer. If you outsource everything else including policy advice, then you are not equipped to develop policy.
I wished to place a comment about Pell’s High Court appeal and found that Crikey has not allowed comments on this article. Thinking at first it was a problem with my browser I rang Crikey and was informed that it was probably an article that had comments blocked possibly due to the sensitive nature and high probability of legal issues around this matter.
Morrison who when chastised by the Turkish President, claimed that Australia was a “Free and Open” society which implies among many other things freedom of speech and opinion. It would seem that Crikey is skeptical of this claim given the AFP’s raids on the ABC and the journo. This seems to have spooked Crikey to the extent they don’t want to upset the High Court.
I sympathise with Crikey as I too am scared of Morrison and more particularly, Dutton his Chief of the Thought Police and sadly some real police. I mean he’s a pretty scary guy.
So i won’t comment on the Pell case.
A hypothetical look at Australian Law, however shouldn’t be a problem viz.
Hypothetically and in general the idea of “impossibilities” in a matter may be thought of as a body of evidence that forms an alibi. A hypothetical jury can weigh up the hypothetical alibi and either accept or reject it. It is up to their judgement of the credibility and weight of the evidence that forms that alibi whether they choose to believe it. That’s what juries provided for in the Australian constitution are obliged to do.
It’s strange how the tried and true word “alibi” has turned into “impossibilities.” Work of the thought police perhaps?