New Aussie rules: Conservative values have fallen out of fashion

The election campaign is under way in Australia, barbs are being exchanged, candidates denigrated and abused, and promises – many of which are just fantastic in the literal sense of the word – are being made. The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, who is the leader of the Liberal party, is being challenged by the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese. Although Morrison has the edge over Albanese as preferred prime minister, neither is much loved. The leaders are unlikely to be a decisive issue in the election.

What is the deeper mood of the country? That needs to be put into its historical context. Ever since the mid-1970s, Australians have expected political parties to be economically responsible. The public are smart enough to know that it’s one thing to make promises to spend money on all manner of popular causes, but that it must be paid for somehow. This mindset has served Australia extraordinarily well. It has enjoyed more than a quarter of a century of continuous economic growth, thanks to open markets, free trade and relatively light regulatory regimes. These policies have often been referred to in Australia as economic rationalism.

The pandemic led to an end of this rationalism. Suddenly, it became very popular for the government to impose restrictions on freedom of movement and activity, to close the national border with the rest of the world and for state governments to shut down the borders between the states. To compensate for this Stalinist-style closure of society, the government borrowed and printed unprecedented amounts of money and farmed it out to employees, businesses, and anybody else who said they needed help.