No matter the conclusions of independent experts, backed by Treasury modelling, that a contribution rate of 9.5 per cent is already pushing the living standards of people on low wages lower than their incomes will be once they retire. I’m unaware of any of them having conceded in the past few years that an increase in that rate will lead to lower wages. To take another example, no serving federal Labor member has publicly acknowledged that there is any argument against increasing the superannuation guarantee from 9.5 to 12 per cent.
What unites those beliefs is not a value, or an observation about what kind of policy works best, but a commitment to a particular policy outcome. Some of them don’t think that carbon emissions are leading to global warming some think global warming is a good thing that will increase rather than reduce prosperity some think the costs of reducing emissions exceed the costs of living with a hotter world. Having fought and lost two elections over a GST, though, it’s hard to move on.Īmong the conservative wing of today’s federal Coalition, you won’t find anyone who thinks government should do anything about climate change. A well-designed GST reform package could deliver welfare changes and income tax reductions that would make people in the bottom 30 per cent of the income distribution much better off on average, an outcome Labor has traditionally sought. It’s not a belief based on ensuring the needs of the worst-off are met. Rather, they’re often the result of history - political battles won or lost, sometimes many years ago.įor example, you won’t find a single Labor parliamentarian prepared to suggest (publicly at least) that changes to the rate or scope of the GST might be a good idea. Often these beliefs aren’t based on any consistent view about the importance of one value over another, or about what kind of regulatory structures work in practice. These are tribal beliefs that some policy positions are simply right. Today, a new kind of tribal belief is increasingly blocking policy reform, as we show in our recent Grattan report, Gridlock. Of course, that meant market design was vitally important, but that’s another story. And so privatisation - well designed - was an idea that all sides of politics could back. They were instead disagreeing about a factual question rather than a values question: which structures delivered the best results? Experience showed that well-designed competitive markets, with government regulations to protect the worst-off and prevent exploitation, delivered cheaper and better electricity services than a government monopoly. People on all sides of politics realised that much of the time they weren’t disagreeing about which results were worth having. The Liberals believed that competition between service providers would deliver better services overall.ĭuring the 1980s and 90s these ideologies broke down in many ways. Labor believed that government delivery of services would solve the failures of the private sector to deliver. Political ideology was also driven by assumptions about what structures would deliver the best results. The two parties put different weights on individual reward, individual choice and the universal provision of basic needs. The Liberals believed that governments should focus more on ensuring that people were rewarded for their effort rather than on providing for everyone’s needs. Historically, Labor believed that workers should get a higher share of profits and investors less. Political parties have always had shared attitudes.
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