Speaking at the The Australian-Melbourne Institute Growth Challenge conference, Tony Abbott cast aspersions on ‘the quality of our economists’. A few days later (4-7-2011) interviewed by Chris Uhlmann on the ABC’s 7.30 Report, he could not provide ‘a single credible economist’ who believed that his plan would work. There are plenty of economists who would take issue with the carbon tax position of both major parties, many of them feminist ecological economists, who now provide a robust critique on where neoclassical economics has led us, and the damage it has done to traditional communities world-wide.
Tony, it appears, has been squeezed right to the edge of a space full of money, in which there are few living voters. If he wants to find sound economic policy, he may have to jump to hyperspace and reemerge in the land of the increasingly dispossessed, inhabited by the majority of us voters. Tony has proved fond of the workplace photo-opportunity; child-care centres, hard hat zones etc. More attention to place and particularity might see him at the kitchen sink, doing unpaid care for relatives, delivering the children to school, or perhaps picking up rags on a waste dump of some “third world” country – there is value in any of those supposedly ‘uneconomic’ externalities conveniently ignored in the abstractions of the contentious economists he correctly wishes to portray as lacking quality.
Such a jump may not be to stretch the imagination too far. Some of his coalition partners are already having to decide between the big money and hyperspace – big energy and coal-seam gas, or their traditional voters in the rural sector of the Liverpool Plains, the Western Plains and New England???
This kind of attention to place and particularity is what feminist economists are good at. I just wonder how long it will be before names like Sabine O’Hara, Maria Mies and Susan Hawthorne’s ‘diversity matrix’ start to roll off politicians’ tongues, as a matter of course.
Paul Reader
