Calling out some rubbish on the radio
Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing one of my favourite activities: listening to podcasts while cooking.
ABC economic and current affairs programs are some of the shows I’ve been playing as I chop chillies or give aubergine (the king of vegetables!) a stir. Cards on the table: I love the ABC. But listening to some of their podcast hosts (and the daily news shows) has got me shouting at the radio.
Too often, outdated economic orthodoxy gets parroted without question. Big assumptions get stated as fact. Points are made that are full of blind spots, but these are rarely called out.
I won’t name names because this is not about the personalities (despite them being people who loom large on the airwaves and who get prime billing as economic commentators).
The issue is the extent to which so much discussion of the economy in dominant discourse reflects a particular mindset. This mindset shapes the policy recipes that are reached for and deployed by governments. The problem is, many of these recipes have contributed to the challenges the world and Australia faces.
I am also wary of giving examples as I am mindful of what my communications colleagues say: “don’t repeat the myth, even to debunk it, that just reinforces it”.
But, I do want to illustrate some of the rubbish that gets thrown around, so let me just say that:
C40 and others have shown that fossil gas is as harmful as coal and oil, despite the assertions from those who claim it is cleaner and who boast of its credentials as a transition fuel.
Economic plans can be good practice, with several governments setting out visions for the economy and what sectors need to come to the fore. WA’s Diversification Strategy and Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation are examples. I might have problems with some of their detail, but that’s not the point here: the point is they aren’t “communist” as one of Australia’s most well-known journos claimed.
Capital cities need folks on median incomes to be able to live there. They need teachers, nurses, and aged care support staff. The idea that young people who can’t afford to live in Sydney should just move to a regional town is grand only IF
- a) they can get work there
- b) no one living in Sydney needs their kids taught, gets sick, or needs care in their old age.
Dismissing Sydney as simply “like Paris” (and that people who can’t afford to buy a house should get over it and move to a regional town) reeks of blind spots, at best…
This matters because how folks think about, discuss, and question the economy shapes expectations of the economy.
It is time to ask bigger questions of the economy, to discard outdated thinking and the policy recipes that are no longer cutting the mustard.
Instead, the ask is to imagine the economy we could have, taking inspiration from the array of instances where communities, enterprises and policy makers, here and around the world, have begun to envisage an economy that serves us, rather than the other way around. More on this here.
