One refrain in commentary on the Howard IR changes has been that Australians are change averse. Perhaps we’re a naturally conservative mob, or perhaps Howard correctly picked the public mood of “reform fatigue” in his victory over Keating (and surely the era of good feeling - at least in the media if not for a significant minority of working and welfare recipient people - reinforces an aversion to further “reform”) and governments in these apparently turbulent times trade on both numbing and creating insecurities.
A series of unfortunate events - increasingly politicised - whether natural disasters such as the Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina and now the Pakistani quake or terrorist attacks like the London bombings - periodically shock citizens out of their complacency and foreground fear and perceptions that we’re in some sort of apocalyptic doom laden age.
By a strange coincidence, Rebecca Solnit’s article The Uses of Disaster was published contemperaneously with Katrina’s savage impact. Solnit has this fascinating piece of info as the hook for her piece:
In his 1961 study, “Disasters and Mental Health: Therapeutic Principles Drawn from Disaster Studies,” sociologist Charles Fritz asks an interesting question: “Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” One of the answers is that a disaster shakes us loose of ordinary time. “In everyday life many human problems stem from people’s preoccupation with the past and the future, rather than the present,” Fritz wrote. “Disasters provide a temporary liberation from the worries, inhibitions, and anxieties associated with the past and the future because they force people to concentrate their full attention on immediate moment-to-moment, day-to-day needs.” This shift in awareness, he added, “speeds the process of decision-making” and “facilitates the acceptance of change.”
In a later essay, Solnit argues:
From the depths of gloom strange and even wondrous possibilities emerge.
Australia seems immune to this second effect of the age of disaster, if not the first. Why, I wonder?
Australians are now change averse or suffering from “reform fatigue”. I have suggested the “Decline of the [Cultural] Wets” thesis ie the popular mood is anatgonistic to New Left Political Correctness. But the corollary of that is the “Decline of the Economic Dries” ie the popular mood is pretty underwhelmed by New Right Economic Rationalism.
Over the 1965-95 period Australians endured about thirty years of hectic cultural and financial reform. The general mood of the nation is now “small ‘c’ conservative” ie steady as she goes, aint broke dont fix it. Howard’s greatest political asset is to appear to be a sure hand at the helm. I think Howard is making a huge mistake by trying to dustbing a century of industrial awards, just for the sake of wheeling out the unions for another flogging.
There are declining returns to all reforms. It might be a good idea to decriminalise marijhana but I think crack should stay illegal. It was good to liberalise exchange rate management but scrapping the minimum wage is bad.
Australians would now prefer to enjoy the fruits of reform in the quietness of their own property-price appreciated home and border-protected state.If Howard strays from those conservative mainstays (property and sovereignty) he will founder.