- The Guardian
- Issue #2166
Here’s a question you won’t hear at a trivia night.
What do Electric Vehicles, or EVs, Labor’s First Home Buyers scheme, whereby some young people can buy houses with only 5% deposit, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Aged Care Packages have in common?
EVs are a good thing because people drive them instead of carbon/pollution-emitting internal combustion engine cars. The First Home Buyers scheme will be good for some young people who want to buy houses, but has been widely panned because it looks like it will make homes even more expensive. The NDIS is widely used, but the government worries about the cost and is looking at clawing back some of the money (something they won’t do with the AUKUS nuclear submarines – if the USA doesn’t deliver any submarines, they get to keep our money). Aged Care packages help older people stay in their own homes, but there aren’t enough of them (see Guardian #2165).
Still can’t guess? Each of these items involves making an issue that faces Australians as a group into an individual problem.
Sure it’s better if someone drives an EV instead of a car which emits carbon and pollution, but before EVs existed, we already had a solution to carbon emissions from transport. It’s called cheap (or free) high quality public transport. If PT is so good that only car freaks will still bother driving a car, that’s a lot of emissions avoided.
The First Home Buyers scheme guarantee is worse. At least EVs reduce carbon emissions. First Home Buyers gets some people into home ownership, but does nothing for the rest of us, other than help keep house prices high. What would make a real difference is a massive investment in public housing.
The NDIS, like Job Network, deals with a whole of society issue by farming it out to private agencies who are only looking for themselves. Both give ‘clients’ the impossible job of sorting out which agency is best. If you have a disability, you have to go through a morass of form-filling before choosing a private agency that meets your needs. Is it better than competing private agencies? You can only find out by having an awful time with one agency and then moving to another one which might be better. Likewise with Job Network. If you’re unemployed, you have to choose from a range of agencies. Is the one you signed up with the one that suits you? Since you’re not an experienced bureaucrat in the unemployment field, you have no way of knowing. Changing to another agency you don’t understand is difficult and chancy.
This approach, putting a social problem onto individuals, is an ideology called neoliberalism. It treats society as a collection of lone individuals, not a collective with shared interests. It worships free markets, even when they’re not really free. Markets make everything better, even when they obviously don’t. It’s a deep-seated approach to the world that is impervious to facts.
Contrary to popular belief, Communists don’t want to make absolutely every last thing publicly owned and run. A lot of things work fine just the way they are. What we want is what’s good for the majority of the people – that’s the working class. Tackling – or pretending to tackle – big problems by breaking the population down to individuals and putting responsibility onto each single person – that’s not good for anyone. Neither is fetishising the market.
Let’s face the big issues shoulder to shoulder, as a class and as a society.
