The Kennett Government has shown admirable courage in tackling the state's financial problems. Now it needs to apply the same resolve to achieving social justice, writes Richard Wood.
COURAGE is an ambiguous virtue in politics. Aristotle rated it highly, but that master of realpolitik, Sir Humphrey Appleby, equated it with recklessness. John Hewson's GST was a courageous policy.
The Kennett Government has displayed admirable courage in its willingness to tackle head-on the state's financial crisis.
It has weathered the flak fearlessly, like the Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba. And, remarkably, it has managed to retain much of its popularity. Shell-shocked and weary of battle though they are, most of the Silent Majority are silently cheering.
Of course, not everyone is cheering. Mr Kennett's imperious style has alienated some. His impatience with procedure has worried others. And there are those motivated by ideology.
Posters proclaiming "People before Profits" punctuate walls in Melbourne's inner suburbs.
Organisations with names reminiscent of the old Eastern Bloc, like the People's Committee for Melbourne, issue protests. But their ideas are as stale as their slogans.
Even the Right wing of the Labor Party knows that.
Still, the criticism has been intense and a government has only has so much courage. Although we ask for leadership from governments, in truth they are followers. The paths they go down are paved with ideas originated by others.
The Kennett Government's confidence and competence in matters of economic and administrative reform is built on the ascendancy of free-market thinking in the 1980s, which made terms like competition and small government almost respectable. There's nothing like winning an argument to add spring (or Spring Street) to your step. But the Great Debate of the 1980s was about the economy, not the culture. As a result, the Government has dragged its feet on difficult areas of social and cultural policy. Welfare and education are prime examples.
The Government's challenge to prevailing assumptions about the role of the state in the economy has no parallel in community services. There are those who want more welfare spending and there are those who want less. But the level of spending, while obviously relevant to welfare policy, is not the most important question.
In the United States, the welfare debate is no longer principally about money; it is about civil society. Last year, Senator Dan Coats put forward legislative proposals that aim to bolster the role of charities in welfare. He recognises that, unlike government agencies, charities often being a spiritual vitality and moral concern to their task.
He cites the example of the Gospel Mission in Washington DC, which has a success rate in drug rehabilitation many times greater than a comparable government program three blocks away. The reason is, as one former addict says, that when government programs take away the addiction, they leave nothing in its place, whereas the Gospel Mission tries to fill the spiritual vacuum that drug addiction leaves.
In raising this example, I am not trying to preach Christianity, just emphasise the primacy -- the therapeutic potency -- of moral concern. Because of their position in the public sector and their tendency to be bureaucratic, state agencies (and non-government agencies heavily dependent on the state and its controls) can have difficulty communicating moral concern.
This is key consideration for public policy.
In education, budgetary -- not educational -- imperatives have dominated, opening the Government to the accusation that it cares more about efficiency than educational quality. In fact, the spending cuts and their consequences -- school closures and rising staff-student ratios -- will have negligible impact on the quality of most children's education beyond the initial disruption. But, from the beginning, Mr Hayward should have paid more attention to the quality of education and so should his critics.
There have been some educational gains during the past three years. The devolution of administrative control to schools is productive. The LAP tests provide useful information about student performance. Linking classrooms to the Internet -- the minister's current enthusiasm -- will expand learning opportunities, although it will not help students distinguish the trivial from the valuable and the flood of information. The Understanding Australia Project is a promising development.
But a good education depends most of all on proficient, inspired teaching, aided by a well-constructed syllabus. Little has been done to reform the selection and preparation of teachers and too much of the curriculum document -- the Curriculum Standards Framework -- is a rehash of the draft national curriculum rejected in 1993. It is of little use to teachers.
Some Liberals argue that to tackle social and cultural questions directly is asking for trouble. The reformer of welfare or education has few allies and faces opposition from powerful coalitions of interest groups. To take them on would indeed be courageous, in Sir Humphrey's sense of the word. Where programs are deemed undesirable, financial reasons can always be found for cutting them. There's no need to challenge the Left's view of social justice or community welfare or cultural creativity. Let the Budget take the blame.
The problem with this approach for the Kennett Government is that it leaves the high moral ground to its opponents and confirms the suspicions of those who see the Government as controlled by cold-hearted economic rationalists who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. In the end, voters do not want an efficiently managed economy if it comes at the expense of a decent and just society.
If, as it should, the Kennett Government believes that efficiency and justice are compatible, that improving the quality of education is, within limits, independent of the level of public spending and that a compassionate welfare policy requires a large and vigorous voluntary sector, it should justify and define its reform program in more than just economic and administrative terms.
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