Tony Shepherd, the former president of the Business Council of Australia, could have been talking about the election result in either Queensland or Greece when he said the "philosophy of tax, borrow and spend is being rewarded". As it was, he was talking about Queensland.
Not surprisingly, left-wing commentators have welcomed Campbell Newman's defeat. For them it's proof "Austerity is Dead" not only in Athens and Madrid, but also in Brisbane. If Queensland does go broke, Brisbane could claim from Melbourne the title of Australia's most European-like city.
But the reality is that austerity is not dead. Austerity is simply not leaving beyond your means. No individual, no state government, and no country can live beyond their means indefinitely. And living beyond your means has consequences, as the young people of Greece are discovering. In 2013, youth unemployment in Greece was 61 per cent. The situation has since improved. That figure is now 51 per cent.
The Queensland election outcome and the travails of the Abbott government's first budget don't actually tell us much about the public's appetite for economic reform. What they do tell us about the public is that the public doesn't like politicians who break their promises.
Campbell Newman was absolutely right to cut the size of the Queensland public service. Under successive Labor governments the number of public servants in the state increased by 40 per cent in just over a decade. What Newman did that was wrong, was as opposition leader, to as good as promise that every public servant's job would be safe. And the same applies to what Newman said about privatisation.
In opposition the federal Coalition enthusiastically supported the unfunded spending commitments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Then the Coalition got into government, said there was a "budget emergency", and walked away from the promises it made in opposition. The Coalition shouldn't just reduce slightly reduce what it pays the ABC and SBS, it should instead be planning to ultimately sell them. In a liberal democracy government-owned television and radio stations are no less objectionable than government-owned newspapers. But the statement "No cuts to the ABC or SBS" that Tony Abbott made before the election is pretty unequivocal. If he said it, he has to abide by it.
Economic reform is hard. But economic reform has always been hard. Somehow a myth has developed that the economic reform in the golden age of the 1980s and 1990s was easy. It wasn't. Viewing history through rose-tinted glasses can be dangerous. In November 1992, 100,000 people marched through Melbourne in protest at the Kennett government, which had been elected the month before. It was the largest protest since the Vietnam War. Kennett shut 350 schools, more than 10 per cent of all the schools in the state. In 1996, he was easily re-elected after losing only two seats in the lower house. John Howard's introduction of the GST was anything but easy.
When politicians claim the blame for the lack of reform rests with a recalcitrant Senate, the rise of social media, and the onset of 24/7 news — they're simply looking for excuses. The task of any democratically-elected politician who wants to change something is no different today from what it was a hundred years ago. Put simply, politicians need to communicate what they want to do and why.
And perhaps that's the difference between now and the 1980s and 1990s. The modern-day presence of an all-pervasive media has fooled politicians into thinking that they need to communicate less, when in fact they need to communicate more. In a world where they have to compete against the latest Twitter storm for the attention of voters politicians need to think hard about what they say and how they say it. And the truth is that in recent years as government revenue surged our elected representatives didn't have to think very hard. All they had to do was ponder how to spend taxpayers' money. Those times are now over.
After the Queensland election Tony Abbott said "the lessons are not to give up on reform, but to make sure that everything you propose is fully explained and well-justified". He's right.
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