By the time the Federal Budget comes around most readers have switched off. But the process and the ideas that have framed this coming budget deserve cool reflection.
The Government's preparation for the Budget has highlighted the need — confected or otherwise — to address the deficit, and so for the whole community to make sacrifices for the national good. It has defined the good of the nation in purely economic terms. Its underlying assumption is that economic health, and so the common good, is furthered by strengthening competition between individuals in a free market.
The difficulty with this assumption is that heightened competitiveness does not foster interest in the common or national good but creates a narrower focus on the interests of the individual or group. In the process it subverts competition itself. The use of drugs in cycling or in football illustrates the point. Doing what it takes meant taking competition out of the game by sidelining the competitors and excluding them from the possibility of winning.
This paradox can be seen in the making of the Budget. The Government certainly faces a difficulty in financing its contribution to the national good over the longer term. It needs to address the deficit. But this problem does not come directly from the rise in expenditure but from the fall in revenue. That shortfall should have been looked at by consulting how to care for the needs of the community, especially the most disadvantaged, and in that context by asking how appropriately to increase revenue and cut costs. That would be the cooperative way.
Instead it worked competitively. It turned it into a competition between the better off and the disadvantaged and proceeded to rig the competition. It appointed a Committee of Audit which didn't include anyone to represent the social needs of the community. All its members shared the view that economic growth demanded a reduction in the financial commitments of government. The committee predictably focused on cutting expenditure. This established a competition between winners and losers.
That the poorer members of society would lose was made likely by the composition and brief of the committee. It was made certain when the subsidies given the wealthy through negative gearing on property and through superannuation were protected. Savings then had to be made by reducing programs and services available to the less wealthy.
So it is predictable that in the Budget the financial burden will fall on the unemployed, on the ill without private insurance, on education and on those most disconnected from society. The result will be to protect the wealth of those better off and to isolate those worse off. The cult of competitiveness had led to a rigged competition in which the national interest will not be served.
Governments and the parties they represent, of course, will promise that they stand above competition and so can be trusted to ensure that the common good is protected. But in political life, too, competitiveness reigns. It leads individuals and parties to seek their own good at the expense of the common good.
The New South Wales Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) has shown the length to which politicians and parties will go to fund their parties and to win government. Their readiness to do whatever it takes has led them to conspire with developers and other corporate figures for their mutual advantage.
Highly competitive donors certainly considered that their donation would give them an edge in gaining government licenses and contracts. Here, too, unbridled competiveness destroyed competition as well as placing individual gain above a principled care for the common good and the environment. Move over Lance Armstrong.
It would be a brave call to argue that the sordidness of public life revealed by ICAC is characteristic only of New South Wales. It seems more likely to reflect the absence at Federal level and in the other states of effective and independent commissions of corruption, and to the lack of legislation to ban politicians and political parties from receiving donations from people who stand to gain from their decisions, and from charging for access.
Whatever of this, few Australians now regard politicians of major parties as credible defendants of the common good. Their competitiveness is seen to place the gain to their party or themselves before the national good. Nor does it inspire hope that their budgets will be fair.
The view that that the economy should serve the whole community, especially its most disadvantaged, and that people who enter public life should be inspired by the desire to serve the community and not to advantage themselves or their parties certainly sounds very old-fashioned. That is not how things are done now.
But when we look at the results of fashionable competitiveness even old-fashioned cooperation looks good.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.