Is it too late to solve some of our most wicked problems? The Australia Institute won’t let us die wondering
- Written by: Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
As I begin this review sitting in a Canberra cafe, there are two blokes on the next table complaining about the present federal election campaign’s lack of substance. The complaints of one of them about the Coalition’s fuel excise cut were the first to catch my ear, but it was soon clear enough that they didn’t think much of either party’s policy performance.
It was a very Canberra moment. I suppose that if I were eavesdropping in Melbourne, I would hear about football and in Sydney, property prices. But the opinions of these Canberra folk would not be unusual outside the capital’s inner north.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying any think tank devoted to promoting ideas that are not simply about getting one of Australia’s political parties over the line on May 3 is doing a public service.
Review: What’s the Big Idea? 32 Ideas for a Better Australia – edited by Anna Chang and Alice Grundy (Australia Institute Press)
What’s the Big Idea? marks the 30th anniversary of the Australia Institute, a Canberra-based think tank that has become part of the nation’s policy architecture and media culture. Its executive director Richard Denniss recently appeared on the ABC’s Q+A, where his gifts as a public communicator were on full display. This is an outfit willing to get out and about. There is no ivory tower here.
If there is a Darwinian survival of the fittest at play in the world of think tanks, as there surely is, the Australia Institute must be one of the success stories of the present century. It attracts impressive thinkers and good communicators, and it manages to find enough money to pay them.
It also has a good claim to having exercised clout – in recent times, over Labor’s redesign of the stage-three income tax cuts that redirected benefits to low- and middle-income earners. The Australia Institute was relentless in advocating for this change. It would be unfair, and probably inaccurate, to deny it a share of the credit.
The Australia Institute is not afraid to get into the political wrestling ring, unlike the stereotype – and to be frank, a good deal of the reality – of Australian academia. Bill Browne, director of the institute’s Democracy and Accountability Program, has a piece here called “Politics is Good”, which is full of wisdom on this point. As he remarks:
There are some experts and commentators who would rather be Cassandras than dirty their hands to stop their dark predictions from coming to pass.
Think tanks often do have to play a long game, as the right-wing variety did, through the 1970s and 1980s, over the kinds of free-market reforms of which the Australia Institute is so critical. In his afterword, Denniss says that it took him “10 years to figure out that it takes 10 years to change something big”. Sometimes it takes even longer.
Research meets politics
What’s the Big Idea? brings together a stellar cast of Nobel laureates, Australian of the Year winners, former leading politicians and assorted thought leaders. It begins with former High Court judge Michael Kirby, who spoke at the Australia Institute’s launch back in 1994. According to Kirby, the institute has “advocated solutions to national and global problems in the economy and in society that look similar to those offered by the left side of politics”.
That’s perhaps a bit coy: the Australia Institute is unquestionably left-leaning. But Kirby also believes the nation has caught up with the institute, so ideas that were once radical “are all now mainstream”.
There is something to be said for this view. Compare attitudes to taxation today to the 1980s. Governments back then had to contend with the constraint that public opinion was solidly in favour of lower taxes. Australia Institute research in 2021, however, indicated that people were more amenable to the idea that they need to pay higher taxes for the services they funded – though you wouldn’t really know that from this election campaign, or any other than I can recall in recent times. Tax cuts are still treated as an unalloyed good by much of the political class. The Australia Institute still has work to do.
And it is doing it. One of its current campaigns is to argue that gas exporters should be paying more tax, rather than being allowed to collect windfalls from increased global prices. The institute does research on matters like this, but it also does politics. Denniss’ frequently heard observation – it appears again in this book – is that the government “collects more money from HECS” (that is, from domestic university fees) “than it gets from our Petroleum Resource Rent Tax”.
This is the kind of statement that academic market economists really hate. What, they ask, do these two matters have to do with one another? But this is to misunderstand what a think tank does: it is perfectly legitimate in political discourse to ask questions about how rewards are structured and resources are allocated.
Polly Hemming – like Remeikis, based at the institute – also addresses our lack of courage in confronting and fixing the surprising number of problems we have as a very privileged country. She bemoans all those “commissions, committees, strategies, reviews, consultations, economic modelling and endless cost-benefit analyses”.
It’s easy enough understand, as well as to share, this exasperation. The literature on policy-making confirms that such measures can be and are used as a substitute for grappling with real problems in order to fix them. But such instruments are also used for good instead of evil, as Maxwell Smart might have put it. Enquiry can be a positive good. It can help to identify problems, give a voice to the voiceless (as so many royal commissions have done), and advance the process of devising solutions.
Several chapters seek to expose, and supersede, the received wisdom of present public and policy discourse as wrongheaded and debilitating – for example, the notion that exports are always good, and that wage growth is bad because it is responsible for inflation. Greg Jericho argues that recent inflation was driven by profits, an Australia Institute claim that has aroused much debate among economists.
Economist Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, claims Australians have been sold a pup that has convinced them that “the state can never be too small”. But do most Australians really believe any such thing? Or is it simply what we find in the commanding heights of politics, media and business?
Yanis Varoufakis claims Australian have been sold a pup.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
ABC journalist Alex Sloan eloquently defends public broadcasting, but most Australians probably don’t need convincing. It is ideologically motivated and self-interested elites who prosecute anti-ABC culture wars. They will continue to do so as long as they believe they derive political and commercial benefits from their campaigns. What can be done about this problem?
Some authors, such as human-rights lawyers Kieran Pender on whistleblower protections and Jennifer Robinson on anti-SLAPP laws (that is, lawsuits designed to silence people), identify well-defined problems and solutions that lend themselves to familiar forms of lobbying and publicity.
But other contributors identify problems at a scale so daunting, even frightening, that a solution or even mitigation is hard to bring into view. One can agree with climate scientist Joëlle Gergis that failing to shut down the fossil-fuel industry is “an intergenerational crime against humanity”. But how do we get from where we are – a federal Labor government still approving big gas and coal projects – to where we need to go?
Some of the book’s chapters do envisage a different kind of politics. Alana Johnson, director of the Community Independents Project, calls for a different kind of relationship between citizens and representatives, and former Greens senator Christine Milne argues for multiparty governments.
But will this be enough? Perhaps we’ll get there. Or perhaps it’s already too late for some of our most wicked problems. It is to the credit of the Australia Institute that it refuses to allow us to die wondering.
Authors: Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University
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