In a recent speech to business leaders, Prime Minister Morrison made the remarkable claim that ‘we are going to meet our [climate change] ambitions with the smartest minds, the best technology and the animal spirits of capitalism.’
You heard right. The animal spirits of capitalism!
It’s not the first time the Prime Minister has used this term. In 2019, he spoke of the need to provoke ‘the animal spirits in our economy’ by removing regulatory barriers to business investment. You know the kind. Barriers like paying a fair amount of tax, paying decent wages, and providing working conditions that offer even a semblance of security.
In the neoliberal worldview, worker entitlements like sick leave (even in the midst of a pandemic!), annual leave, carer’s leave and domestic violence leave are seen as barriers to business investment and economic growth.
This is straight from the neoliberal playbook, the doxa that the role of government, rather than being there to achieve the collective dreams of the many, is to get out of the way to make room for those animal spirits so as to pander to the fantasies of the wealthy few. This is why he wants to 'remove regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to businesses investing and creating more jobs.' Except we know from what remains of the bedraggled IR Omnibus bill, from the defeated and epically misnamed Ensuring Integrity bill and earlier from John Howard’s WorkChoices that when they talk about creating more jobs they’re really talking about creating fatter profits. We also know that putting the screws on workers is neither a path to job creation nor a recipe for economic growth.
And this tells us everything about what the Prime Minister means when he talks about the animal spirits of capitalism or the animal spirits in our economy. Capitalism and the economy being in his view synonyms. In other words, what’s good for the chief owners of private capital is good for everyone. This is naturally followed by the woeful logic that if the rich get even richer, then some of the wealth will trickle down. Now, if you think it’s hard to get in touch with those mischievous little animal spirits, you should try listening out for the sound of the wealth trickling down! I’ve been listening hard for ages and all I can hear is the sound of the excluded still waiting.
It does not have to be this way. You can reconfigure the