Refit the ship of state

Wednesday, 18th March 2009

The post-war era of smooth sailing is over, says John Heard, and Australian conservatives must repair the damage

Yare is an old term, taken from sailing. Very fine vessels are said to be yare. In The Philadelphia Story, where it has a particular narrative role to play, Katharine Hepburn’s character gives its meaning as ‘easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright’.

Thriving economies can seem to be yare; so too successful political parties. Systems of global markets, resources booms and supple electorates, all can appear to be easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, and — for a great many individuals — endlessly bright. Indeed, to someone at the tiller of a yare political machine, or even lounging on the decks of a yare craft, it can appear that smooth sailing is all that awaits, that prosperity and achievement stretch to the horizon.

Australian society has certainly seemed yare these past years. Right up until the GFC, the late post-war era was one of relatively steady sailing. Serious, undeniably sage people, such as economist and Fair Pay Commissioner Ian Harper, even wondered aloud — with an entire generation — whether or not the post-war miracle, the ‘sheer scale of contemporary affluence, the ready attainability of cheap goods (or cheap credit) by all except the very poorest members of society, suggest[ed] there really [was] something new under the sun’.

We know now, as careful thinkers like Harper were inclined to believe all along, that there is no such thing as a bull market of near-infinite benefit. There is no such thing as endless credit. Bad decisions, no matter how creative the accounting, will come back to haunt any decision-maker cavalier about risk, and formerly titanic systems, whole ways of doing business (the US investment banking model, the sub-prime lending market) can disappear, virtually overnight.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 Next page