A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into stark relief. /1 #COVID19Aus #auspoll

Here’s government spending as a percentage of GDP, going back more than a century. Massive expenditure in both world wars, and then hovering around 15-25% of GDP, in non-war times. Next Tweet has the figures post-2008. /2 https://t.co/OUU5JfVupF

Average figure since 1990 about 25% of GDP. Whether that’s too little or too much is another question, a bit more on that below. What you can see clearly here though is that extra government spending for Covid raised this to about 35% of GDP. Compare with the previous graph,…/3 https://t.co/YSUfBLZ2rE

…for WW1 (about 50%) and WW2 (over 120%), and you can see government support for this current crisis is relatively puny. For those who object to comparisons to the world wars, current estimated excess deaths for Covid globally, in under 2 years, is 18.6 million. /4

That’s more than died in WW1, in under 2 years (WW1 was 4 years). And every member of the Australian population is at risk of Covid, unlike WW1. So at least as great a threat as that world war, and a long way from over. Another important historical fact to note is that this…/5

…huge government spending in both world wars led to enormous prosperity for decades afterwards, the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and ‘post-war boom’. So the common language of politics in our day of this (supposed) mountain of debt in our own time, that ‘will need to be repaid’…/6 https://t.co/Qqlrpt5bPE

…is nonsense. Our government debt is tiny by both world and historical standards, and history shows massive government investment helps create ongoing prosperity, across generations. But how have we managed to maintain prosperity, without large government spending in recent…/7

…decades? This is where the libertarian shift comes into play. It’s true we’ve led comfortable, prosperous lives in this time, but instead of government investment enabling that, we’ve paid for it ourselves. In private debt. Have a look. /8 https://t.co/iDEXwwzMqy

Historically the libertarian push began in the late-1970s and early 1980s, with the Thatcher and Reagan supply-side revolutions. Trickle-down society. The stagflation of the 1970s was conquered by replacing government investment with private investment, funded by private debt. /9

That’s you and me today, with enormous mortgages and personal debt, as well as vastly over-leveraged businesses. Libertarians shifted the driving force of investment in society from public hands, to private hands. More accurately, they shifted it from collective endeavour…/10

…(a ‘common-wealth’) to individual liability. But government always was just those same individuals, pooling their resources and efforts for collective benefit. Now increasingly they fund absent public services out of their own pockets, without the economies of scale. /11

Back to Covid. Australia’s success with Covid in 2020 had a lot to do with JobKeeper, government investment for the furloughing of business activity. I’ve Tweeted before that its lesser success in 2021 is almost entirely due to an ideological withdrawal of this same level of…/12

…support, by gutting JobKeeper. (I’m certain that was also strategic, to force Australia to adopt the let it rip strategy the libertarians fought for in early 2020.) Australia could easily afford to smash Covid again, as it did in 2020, but current economic mythologies,…/13

…shared by politicians of both sides and most of the Fourth Estate, won’t even consider it. It’s all the household economics lunacy, about ‘needing to pay down debt, and bring the budget back into surplus’. Countries aren’t households. History empirically shows the lie…/14

…of those mythologies. It’s not clear what proportion of political libertarians actually believe the nonsense beliefs they espouse, and what proportion know that it’s all just a strategic ruse to favour existing privilege. Either way, that set of beliefs is destroying our…/15

…societies and stopping us from even trying to defeat Covid. It’s difficult to see this ending well, given the level of neuro-programming libertarians have succeeded in exercising upon societies in the last 50 years. But diagnosis is a necessary first step. /end