Gittinomics reviewed

Drawing: By Rocco Fazzari Review by John Edwards smh.com.au February 17, 2007   Author Ross Gittins Genre Society/Politics Publisher Allen Unwin RRP $26.95 Ross Gittins has always been a liberal and compassionate voice. FOR 30 YEARS economics columnist Ross Gittins has delighted and instructed readers of this newspaper, bringing a clear and simple style to a notoriously complicated subject. Usually serene and gentle, he is ferocious when provoked and he is most often provoked by important people telling silly lies, so his denunciations are entertaining. Gittins's opinions have changed a lot over the years, as he himself acknowledges. But among the babble of mercenaries, doomsayers and blinkered business spokespeople in the finance pages his has always been a liberal and compassionate voice, more likely to have a go at the strong than the weak. For someone with a deep professional interest in how we work, how much we get paid, what we buy and what we sell, Gittins himself is unusually austere. He is generally the only guest at the Reserve Bank Governor's lunch table wearing scuffed runners. He does seem to make an effort to colour co-ordinate his runners with his pants and jackets, though this may be quite accidental. He likes taking taxis but regards them, I think, as a wicked luxury. I know Gittins well enough to have an argument about something when I run into him, but not well enough to know much about him outside his work. Reading Gittinomics, I know a little more. He drives a very old but apparently reliable car with which he is well satisfied. He goes bushwalking with a "neurologist mate". His dad, as he often tells us, was a Salvation Army preacher. It's the Salvation Army streak that runs through Gittinomics, a book built on his columns for the Herald and cast as a self-help manual on the business of life. Gittins likes us, but he is also cranky with us and he no doubt rightly feels we could do with some improvement. He scolds us for our materialism, our limitless and invented wants. We work too hard, we save too little, we neglect our families and deny ourselves the leisure to contemplate the true meaning of our lives. Mainstream economics doesn't much help because its working assumption is that the more we have, the happier we will be. As Gittins writes, some interesting recent work in economics demonstrates this is manifestly untrue. This book promises instead to tell us how to live "the good life without money stress, overwork and joyless consumption". Not altogether surprisingly, the answer is the one the Buddha discovered under the banyan tree two and a half thousand years ago. It's also the same one Gittins senior probably offered to Ross while he was growing up. The answer lies with us. "I'm the son of a preacher," he declares, "and if you think I am going to absolve you from personal responsibility you're much mistaken." We need to remember "there's more to life than work or consumption". We should not be in such a "tearing hurry". We should take all our holidays. Let the neighbours get ahead. Give our partners and our kids a higher priority. We should want less. There's a lot of wisdom in this advice and a lot of evidence and argument in Gittinomics to back it up. But I do think his portrayal of our contemporary life a bit unfair. It is certainly true that Mum today is more likely to have a job than Mum half a century ago. But it is also true that Dad's hours of work today are not as long as they were then. Gittins thinks we consume too much and perhaps we do, but at roughly 60 per cent, the share of Australian production appropriated as household consumption hasn't changed in half a century. It has increased exactly in line with our national output. Household saving has certainly gone down, as Gittins complains, but that reflects a higher level of taxes and of interest payments on debt than a higher share of consumption than our parents enjoyed. It reflects, too, the fact that we are very much wealthier than we used to be and don't need to save as much. And while our spending on big TVs and big cars is probably quite as wicked and silly as Gittins thinks, much of the increase in our household spending in recent decades has been on health, education, culture and recreation. In any case, perplexing as they are, the problems of having too much are surely preferable to the problems of having too little. In just opening up another argument with Gittins, I find I have already taken up one-quarter of the space allotted for this review. It reminds me of how hard it is to deal with economic issues in a simple and brief way, and what miracles of style and thought Gittins has wrought over the decades to say so much in such small spaces. John Edwards is chief economist for HSBC Bank, Australia and New Zealand

George Megalogenis's The Longest Decade reviewed

A fascinating insight into the minds of Paul Keating and John Howard. By Michelle Gratton May 20, 2006 Two for the price of one: George Megalogenis compares and contrasts the Keating and Howard years. Photo: Andrew Taylor Author George Megalogenis Genre Society/Politics, History Publisher Scribe RRP $32.95 POLITICAL LEADERS love to talk up their own book. And, despite their disclaimers, they're natural-born commentators. George Megalogenis, a journalist with The Australian, has mined these vanities, persuading Paul Keating and John Howard to give him long interviews for his comparative study of the pair. This focuses on their prime ministerships and Australia in the 1990s, the decade that continued Australia's economic transformation but saw a redirection on issues of national identity. The interviews yield gold. The author describes Howard and Keating as "unplugged", and indeed they are, revealing much about themselves when they talk about each other. Listen to Keating, on character, or lack of it: "I don't think they (John Howard and Peter Costello) are perfectionists; they're not quality snobs. Whether constructing a moulding for my house, or working out a colour, I try and do it with the same kind of intense calibration I brought to the public task." And Howard, musing on who Keating did, or did not identify with: "He is not really part of the sporting thing about Australians . . . he was quite a good swimmer, wasn't he? He didn't seem to understand much about rugby league, for example, for a Labor leader coming from western Sydney." The cattiness and much else from the mouths of these protagonists give richness to a complex, closely woven book that is packed with information. Comparing and contrasting players is difficult, but when it works, as here or Michael Duffy's rather different exercise, his 2004 Latham and Abbott dual biography, the result is a sort of two-for-the-price-of-one book. Megalogenis' field is economics but he focuses heavily on the politics (including the One Nation phenomenon), as well as foreign policy and other preoccupations of these years. Throughout, the author makes the most of his number-crunching skills, whether it's slicing and dicing the demographics, party support or housing statistics. The numbers suggest we should think of the '90s not so much as belonging to Generation X as Generation W, "for women and 'wogs' ". The workforce was becoming "more feminine and cosmopolitan, because the shape of the workforce was being altered by the daughters of old Australia and the Australian-born sons and daughters of non-English-speaking immigrants". Meanwhile the men of "old Australia" were undergoing more difficult changes, with many trade unionists being shaken out of their jobs, and a lot becoming small business people, especially handymen - and Tory voters. While Megalogenis concentrates on one decade, inevitably his account spans a much longer period, because Keating and Howard "have split the past 30 years of power between them, almost evenly, as treasurers and prime ministers . . . treasurer Keating cleaned up the mess that treasurer Howard had made of the economy . . . Howard as prime minister was given a mandate to repair the society that had been divided by his predecessor". Stripped to the basics, and of self-serving political positioning and posturing, Howard and Keating as politicians agreed on economics (we're talking very broadly here) but were poles apart on Australia's identity. Treasurer Keating did better than treasurer Howard as economic reformer, but Howard had a chance to get the economic runs on the board as PM, including bringing in the broad-based indirect tax that Keating fought for and then, when he lost to Bob Hawke's pragmatism, turned his back on. PM Howard's retro attitudes on identity apparently resonate, after Keating's elevation of a more ambitious version guaranteed his end. "Keating's support for Aborigines, women, and artists grated with traditional Labor voters because they assumed he thought they weren't good enough for new Australia." Keating's own ultimate failure with voters (after his 1993 triumph over John Hewson) hasn't stopped him believing he knows what his successors' strategy should be. "Keating blames the Labor Party of Kim Beazley, Simon Crean, and Mark Latham for turning its back on upward mobility," Megalogenis reports, recounting how before the 2004 election Keating advised Latham to promise to cut the top income tax rate from 47 cents to 39 cents. Keating told him this would drive Howard mad. Latham rejected the advice. We'll never know how the Howard political psyche would have coped, though clearly it was in better shape than Latham's. Megalogenis' account does not pretend to be a behind-the-scenes story of how decisions were made within the Keating and Howard governments. We already have much of that on record for Keating's days; the Howard historians are yet to get into swing. This is the view from the helicopter, with the pilot carrying binoculars, allowing him to share with his passengers an enormous range of detail. While occasionally this overwhelms, the book is a good read for those wanting to understand two politicians who have made a real difference to modern Australia.