Opinion
It’s a bad moment for conventional economics. When asked for modelling on One Nation’s superannuation policy, or about the possibility its immigration policy announced this week will tip the country into recession, Barnaby Joyce simply feels no need to engage.
“I’m not Jesus Christ,” was last week’s retort – which, to be fair is true – deployed here as another way of saying “how would I know?” This week, it was “because they’re not elected, I am” – a way of explaining why he had no interest in asking the Parliamentary Budget Office to assess the cost of slashing immigration.
Meanwhile, the Albanese government finds itself in a wicked bind on AI. It has spent months trying to exude control. It declared emphatically it would preserve artists’ copyright, stopping AI companies from vacuuming up their work without paying. It sprung out of national cabinet touting national standards for how and where data centres could be built.
Then this week, Anthropic popped up to show how contested this control is. Dilute your copyright laws, it demanded, or there will be no investment. The government has made plain it’s desperate for that investment. Now, we spy news reports that it is considering an opt-out model for artists, where they’re presumed to consent to their work being used to train AI unless they say otherwise. Artists are extremely unhappy, as you’ll see elsewhere on this page.
In both cases, we’re seeing an economic argument colliding with a social and cultural one. In both cases, it’s far from clear the economic one will win aggrieved people’s hearts.
In the case of immigration, the economic argument is familiar, but losing its power. In the case of AI, the economic case has not been forcefully made at a popular level. But even accounting for those differences, they’re joined by a common feature of this political moment: a sense that altogether too much for too long has been laid at the economic altar, and that the sacrifices must stop.
That’s stunningly clear in Joyce’s approach. His whole argument is non-economic. It is an argument of principle and raw political will. It’s not just that he is not Jesus Christ. It’s that he doesn’t need to be. If superannuation is your money, then you are entitled to it on principle, whatever the economic or budgetary consequences might be. To assert such things, he need only be elected, an embodiment of the will of the people. The economists or the civil service can say what they like. What business do they have telling the people they want the wrong thing?
That can fairly be described as populist. Not just because it posits what experts would call oversimplified, even counterproductive solutions to complex issues, but because it sets up a basic contest between the people versus an “expert” elite. Populism only works when those experts have lost their authority, and that moment is now. When we talk of an insurgency laying siege to the establishment, we’re not just talking about the traditional major parties. We’re talking about the whole system of knowledge and convention that surrounds them: all those deemed an authority. Journalists, academics, even (depending on your tastes) scientists and doctors. And naturally, economists.
If you’re deeply enough disillusioned, such people cease to be persuasive. They instead come to be the very experts who got us into this mess to begin with. Nowhere is that more potent than for economists, given we’re now living through an extended period of economic stricture and upheaval. A period that begins with ordinary people losing their life savings during the global financial crisis while the banks got bailed out, and culminates in an inflation dragon that will not be slain.
That has put a certain cohort in no mood to hear that only via perpetual immigration can we maintain wealth. At a certain point, it begins to sound every bit as unsustainable as the financial system proved to be: a plan for constant sugar hits rather than actual nutrition. Even conversations about skilled labour migration begin to clang, as if that is a shortcut for business that allows them to avoid the harder work of investing in growing skills here. If all this is the kind of thing you’re likely to believe, you’ll probably be unmoved by economists’ warnings because they’re the representatives of the order that has failed, and you’re looking for a new system to be built. The problem for economists here becomes one of legitimacy.
The AI example isn’t quite so populist. Instead, it presents as a clash of values. No one is denying that AI will be a better product if it has rampant access to the work of Australian artists. No one denies it will do more stupendous things if it can use enormous amounts of power. Most people probably accept it will enhance productivity. The objection is that none of this is worth what’s being sacrificed.
For artists, that amounts to the nation’s very soul: the arts and culture we produce, and which build the national character. For residents, it might be their community’s natural environment. For workers, it is the existence of their jobs. For the fretful, it’s the survival of the species itself following regular, alarming warnings from AI engineers – the latest headline-grabber puts the chances of our own extinction at 10 per cent in the next decade.
In all cases, though, it’s people being asked to compromise something ranging from essential to sacred, in the service of a machine they don’t trust, for a benefit they suspect flows mostly to tech oligarchs.
None of this means the economists are wrong. Their warnings on immigration are well-founded. And perhaps they’re right to say AI represents our best hope of solving the productivity problem, and therefore our only path to economic growth without inflation. But we’re well past the point where such things can simply be asserted, rather than demonstrated, at least if they are to be politically persuasive. And that’s a problem for the establishment politicians who rely on them.
It’s the economy, stupid, they say. And it is. But it’s now also a growing mood that politics should be bigger than the stupid economy.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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