Open Australia
Lindsay Tanner, Pluto Press, 1999
Review by Tim Costello
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

SHORTLY AFTER THE RELEASE of this book, my brother, Peter Costello, asserted in Parliament that the Labor frontbench had turned from an Opposition into "a bookclub".
Notwithstanding this jibe, this title emanating from the 'club' is well worth the read. Lindsay Tanner is presently the Shadow Minister for Finance and is seen as being one of the leading generators of new ideas in Australian politics. Open Australia is his call for a radical overhaul of our system of representation and it is a challenge to past and present Labor thinking.

I like any political work that begins with a young boy's reminiscing about visiting his grandmother in Brunswick. On the way to Grandma's he walks passed the tip which locals boast is the largest hole made by human hands in the southern hemisphere. This prompts a reflection on an Australia that was content comparing itself with South Africa, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina but not Europe or North America. It neatly introduces that dominant theme of an 'open' Australia that seeks to compete with the best in the world.

"If Australia under British tutelage was a child, and under American influence an adolescent, the end of the Cold War and economic globalisation have brought an abrupt entry into adulthood. This sudden shock has unleashed a vigorous battle to determine the nature of our national identity."

Tanner takes us on a now familiar 1980s political tour of dismantling what Paul Kelly termed "the Australian settlement": tariff protection, Government intervention and financial regulation, which were limited or scrapped under Hawke and Keating. The tour continues with the equally familiar reactive fall-out of this opening up to globalisation. The loss of 'old' jobs, pain in the bush and the rise of Hansonism coincide with debates about immigration, multiculturalism and the republic.

All this is now well-worn terrain. Tanner helpfully summarises the past by referring to the social revolution, driven and won by the left in the 1960s. Feminism, environmentalism, indigenous rights and multiculturalism arose to challenge the certainties of the social order. Social progressives organised around the notion of personal liberation and threw off conservative political shackles under the leadership of Gough Whitlam.

He wisely notes that the community has paid a substantial price for its own liberation as the bonds restraining forms of social behaviour has been accompanied by an upsurge in loneliness, family breakdown and an unravelling of the moral fabric and the demise of religious beliefs.
The second revolution, fought and won by the right, was the economic revolution of the 1980s. Any collectivist vision, whether Marxist or social democratic, yielded to the logic of the global market. Government must now be neutral or withdraw from distorting intervention. The individual through market preferences again triumphs over the community.

The Government can no longer command or mandate but only persuade and facilitate economic planning. National sovereignty is profoundly curtailed and instruments of global governance, such as the World Trade Organisation, are weak and yet to develop teeth. Post these two revolutions, the individual has emerged as dominant and the twin belief structures that Western civilisation has built-a culture of community and collective participation-are fading.

Tanner believes that there is no turning back (or the even worse alternative of turning inward).The new economy is irretrievably based on information and services where in the last 25 years employment in this area has increased from 58 per cent to 73 per cent. It takes far less labour to produce the basic things we really need so the growth jobs are in personal consciousness areas like tourism, sport, entertainment, fitness, eating out and adventure holidays. He might add, but he doesn't, that these growth services now include table-top dancing, gaming and drugs.

The future belongs to responsive, technologically-creative industries. To build these we must be competitive and accept that structural adjustment with its consequent future pain is inescapable. Governments will need to permit sweeping media de-regulation as change has rendered newspapers and even television networks less significant compared to interactive internet communications. The day of mass media is seen to be passing.

These changes are inevitable according to Tanner and a Labor government must focus on a regulatory approach that abandons State intervention except in areas of "national importance". These include a system of regulation that protects the environment through introducing a scheme of green national accounts, much like our means that measure economic activity. A Labor government must also distinguish between functions that should be national and regulatory, and service delivery functions that can be private and regional.

I agree with Tanner that Government's focus must be on facilitating the creation of social institutions and reforming welfare to address our rampant individualism. I enthusiastically endorse his chapter on reforming Government by admitting that politicians and governments believe they are not in control anymore. However, he fails to answer the most profound question of identity now exposed by the Hanson victory in New South Wales. This question is more powerfully answered by blood, soil and tribal connections expressed in the rural older Anglo constituency of Hanson than in the liberal democratic notion that the globe now has 6 billion rights-bearing equal citizens.

Globalisation and competition suggest they are hardly equal, as yesterday's winners will be tomorrow's winners and, more perversely, yesterday's losers are likely to be even further behind. Government that affirms the social values of the capacity to participate must re-assert its intention to arrest this process.

Tanner, at the end of the book, fails to explain why acting collectively through government is no longer an option. Community-building is important but the strongest community remains the nation that still expresses its communal will through Government. Ultimately, a Federal and State Budget is a statement of values and priorities. It is those values that are being hotly contested. Open Australia is an important read for all who are seeking to keep up with the rapidly changing world of national and international politics. And I'm sure it will influence the formation of Labor policy in these coming crucial years.

Tim Costello is Minister of Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne, and author of Streets of Hope (Allen & Unwin, 1998).