Written In Stone

Andrew Stone’s book of policy proposals is not only rigorous and systematic. It also adopts a seriousness sadly lacking in politics today. By Henry Ergas.

Introductory remarks at the launch of Andrew Stone’s Restoring Hope.

First of all, I would like to thank Nick Cater and the Menzies Research Centre for hosting this event. I would also like to acknowledge the parliamentarians who have taken the time to attend—time which has so high an opportunity cost. But my greatest thanks are to Andrew Stone for writing this important book.

Andrew’s book is a plea for seriousness: seriousness about the situation we are in; seriousness about the issues we face; seriousness about the choices we can and should make.

As Andrew lucidly explains, Australia’s performance belies the complacency which seems so pervasive in Australian society: growth is persistently below historical trends, and growth in disposable incomes even more so; productivity levels are barely rising overall and in some important sectors, such as construction, are actually falling; the fiscal position of Australian governments is poor and fiscal and monetary policy lack the room to cope with a major crisis; yet our dependence on China means that the threat of a crisis is greater than it has been for many years.

If policy does not change, we risk condemning this country not merely to stagnation but to decline. However, Andrew shows realistic options exist for charting a new and better course.

There is, in the assessment Andrew so rigorously and systematically undertakes, an enormous amount to discuss—and I hope that there will be many opportunities in the months ahead to go through each of the areas he analyses and work through the questions he raises and the policies he proposes.  

But as I read this book, what resonated even more than its analysis was its attitude—an attitude which is desperately required if we are to address the challenges Andrew highlights.

Max Weber, in his magnificent lecture on ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ whose centenary we celebrated last year, argued that anyone who holds power needs “three pre-eminent attitudes” in order to "do justice to this power"—“passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.”

Passion means having larger goals in mind, serving a cause in which you have faith. But passion without maturity is merely childish excitement, which can lead only to disaster or disappointment. Rather, rejecting the descent into puerile emotion and make-believe, the passion of mature politics must make responsibility its lodestar—responsibility for what it has wrought and what it will bring, the costs it will impose and the risks it must take. And that it can only do if it is infused by a sense of proportion, tempering each decision with a “matter of factness” born from what Weber identifies as “the decisive quality” mature politics requires: a “distance to things and men” that avoids the temptations of vanity, confronts decisions with “inner concentration and calmness,” and unblinkingly stares reality in the face.

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the first World War, surrounded by the ruins of the Kaiser Reich, Weber was notoriously—and, as events proved, correctly—pessimistic about whether that crucial mix of qualities could be found in the newly established Weimar republic.

But his pessimism had far broader scope, encompassing democracy more generally. Public opinion, once it was unleashed, would, he feared, push remorselessly either toward demagogy and fanaticism or to cynicism and callousness. Avoiding those perils required the virtue of a Pericles, the wisdom of a Lincoln and the discipline of a Gladstone; but the virtually insoluble problem of democratic leadership in modern societies, he argued, was whether “ [the] warm passion” needed to secure popular consent “and [the] cool sense of proportion” that is the hallmark of maturity could ever sustainably “be forged together” under conditions of fierce electoral competition.

“We seem condemned to live in an age of petulance, where it is far easier to be righteous than right”

There are, no doubt, plenty of reasons, as one looks at today’s world, to share Weber’s pessimism about the capacity of our system of government to balance the pressures of passion with the imperatives of prudence and responsibility. We seem condemned to live in an age of petulance, where the sole certainty is that it is far easier to be righteous than to be right.

The genius of democratic politics has always lain in its ability to set bounds on conflict, converting enemies into opponents and opponents into rivals, while reducing disputes over absolutes, which are incapable of compromise, into bargains over interests, which are. Nowadays, however, our politics seems to be doing the opposite, transforming every issue into a morality play that invites posturing and rewards intransigence. As for what passes for public debate, it is an intellectual dust bowl, smouldering with the empty symbolism of rage and hate. Viewing that debate, it would seem that there is nowhere further to go in terms of absurd simplification: once the link between symbol and reality has been entirely severed, politics degenerates into a campaign between illusions.

The result is a vicious cycle in which as the noise level rises, politics become ever more pervasive just as it becomes ever less effective, fuelling a decline in trust which makes securing practical outcomes even harder. Even here, in this venerable institution which is fast approaching its 120th year, one could forgive Australians for hurling the reproach the fool hurls at King Lear, that “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.”

But as relentless as the forces pushing in that direction are, and as powerful as are their structural causes, the undeniable reality is that over the course of its now long history, Australian democracy has proven extraordinary resilient. That, I believe, is at least in part because it has periodically benefited from calls such as Andrew’s for a return to seriousness. “Politics,” Weber famously wrote, “is a strong and slow boring of hard boards;” undertaking it successfully demands not merely tenacity and perseverance but sharp tools.

Andrew’s book is precisely such a tool. It fuses commitment to a cause—the cause of prosperity and freedom—with the sober detachment and sense of responsibility Weber called for. It tackles complex issues such as the appropriate level of immigration, the future of our fiscal federalism and the management of macroeconomic risk in the best spirit of scientific inquiry, clearly identifying the problem, frankly stating what we do and do not know, and carefully specifying possible solutions. In each of the areas it covers it scrupulously respects what I regard as the two fundamental laws of public policy: the first being that no matter where you wish to go, you would not start from here; and the second being that you cannot start from anywhere else. And it does that while always remaining readily accessible to the interested reader—far from being solely for policy works, it is, to hark back to an earlier vintage, the intelligent person’s guide to Australia’s economic choices.

Most of all, whether we share its recommendations or not, it reminds us this country has only been able to prosper when it brought together realism and aspiration. Australia has always been a land of hope: that is what has attracted millions to its shores. But hopes without the means to achieve them are little better than hallucinations. If hope is to be restored, we need vision without delusion. Defining such a program is the goal Andrew has set himself. In congratulating him both on the goal and on the achievement, I commend this book to your most serious attention.