Queensland’s growth and employment figures are worse than when Newman assumed office, even as he has spent the term throwing more workers onto the economic scrap-heap. Queensland’s unemployment rate of 6.5% is now the same as Tasmania’s. But the picture is worse in the provincial cities of Australia’s most decentralised state: unemployment is running at 7.8% in Townsville, and 8.2% in Cairns. The real wage growth of low-paid workers has fallen below the rate of inflation. Austerity has translated into a direct assault on the economy and living standards, with no improvement in sight.
But beyond this, the LNP has attacked bedrock institutions which are not only integral parts of Queensland communities, but highly valued in and of themselves as “public things”. Hospitals and schools, railways and ports are not just infrastructure, but repositories of collective memory and achievement. Clean groundwater and the reef are not cesspits in which to dump our externalities, but things worthy of preservation. After decades in which market liberalism has triumphed, we have not only learned that we are permanently worse off when assets are privatised and economies liberalised, but that we lose a little more of our purchase on the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment