Free An Economy is Not a Society by Dennis; Glover Page A

dark flat in which they lived when they were first married and immediately understood why they had got on a ship to Australia and never gone back. In Doveton, life was stupendously better.
    Something similar to E. P. Thompson’s story of England in the first three decades of the 1800s has happened in Australia between the mid-1980s and today. Not the immiserisation (obviously, thanks to the victories of social democracy over the last century in creating a welfare state, there is no equivalent to the mass destitution of that time), but the pace and scale of social and economic change. The transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial era has been so total as to constitute the sociological equivalent of an extinction event.
    The queues of workers’ cars lining up to get into the factories – gone. The publicly owned banks and utilities – gone, or about to go. The union movement, which once covered half the employed workforce and rivalled the state for economic power – mostly gone (it’s down now to just 12 per cent coverage in the private sector, replaced in part by the welfare lobby, which has had to step into the breach to speak up for the working poor). Secure, full-time employment, with its guarantee of holidays, sick pay and promotion – in many industries long gone.
    And along with these changes to the world of work, the expectations of equal chances in life are also gone for many. The dream of home-ownership for all – gone. The levelling idea of the public school, attended by the children of factory manager and factory worker alike – gone. The easy-to-get apprenticeships that enabled young working-class Australians to get a toehold in the economy – gone. The hope of natural advancement through a firm, backed by in-house training – gone. Just as England’s green and pleasant fields were paved over with brick, its vocations replaced by the machine, its pastoral life rent asunder by industrialisation, in just thirty years our little world, with its factories and the communities they supported, has been made extinct, wiped out like the dinosaurs by Professor Schumpeter’s fiery asteroid. By a revolution.
    The big problem for the creative destroyers is that the political, social and economic values of the Australian people were formed during the long post-war era of success, before the factories and the factory communities began to be smashed up. Australians still want their country to make things, still want laws that limit the boss’s prerogatives, still want business and the better-off to pay a decent share of taxation, still want more training for their children, and still want a decent social safety net and universal health and education services. This egalitarian and nation-building outlook, which was formed in the post-war period of economic and social success, is the essence of the Australian national consciousness. It is the opposite of what the economic theorists want to impose upon us, and it is the thing that pulls them up every time they overreach. It is only because the Hawke and Keating governments tempered their creative destruction with imaginative and egalitarian social policy that they got as far as they did – and still, by the end, the electorate was waiting for them with its baseball bats. John Hewson ignored egalitarianism completely and failed completely. John Howard kept within eyesight of egalitarian sentiment for a while, but then tried to give Australia WorkChoices. Creative destruction is nothing if not unpopular.
    Time and again the economic narrators smugly remind us of the scale of their revolutionary achievement. But they never tell the whole story. Between 1983 and 2015, Australia experienced a social and economic revolution as profound as any in our history; contrary to what they tell us, it has not all been for the good, and it could have been done differently. Those from working-class communities who have failed