Why isn't Australia more like Argentina (or vice versa)?

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Sun Aug 5 00:49:03 PDT 2001


G'day all,

I had a chat with Nestor about the Oz/Argentina thingy on PEN-L a year back. For what it's worth, I speculated as follows ...

G'day Nestor,


>Being a Dominion allowed you not to have to stand a Central Bank such
>as the one, designed by Sir Otto Niemeyer and rejected even by the
>Indian colonial parliament, we had to suffer after the crisis of
>1930. This Central Bank was so designed as to drain as much riches
>from Argentina as possible.

Not so, comrade. In their attempt to keep our betters at the Bank of England happey, Australia's Scullin government agreed to give Otto free reign over 'our' finances in June of 1930. The bastard Niemeyer then helped the bastard Scullin reappoint the head bastard of the Commonwealth Bank Board, Gibson (who duly went on to refuse short-term funds to all states who would not slash public works). In late August the bastard Niemeyer lent Scullin's bastard Tories support in their (tediouisly predictable) claim that Australia's workers had been enjoying too high a living standard, prescribing 20% cuts in wages and pensions and the cessation of 'unreproductive' public works.

So we duly had an imposed depression, too, mate. Maybe our relative prosperity (relative, that is, to Argentina - we have slowly been going down the international ladder of living standards throughout the century) was down to the fact we spoke English and got guaranteed markets in perfidious Albion and her dominions ('the Commonwealth'). That was never gonna be a long-term panacaea, and when the Poms joined the EEC in the early seventies (just as the Bretton Woods currency-pegging was stopped, a minerals boom crashed, OPEC did their thing, and world manufacturing hit the wall), well, we didn't klnow what to do. So we did nothing. So now we've a $400 billion national debt, a structural current account deficit, a 'dollar' that's worth 55 cents, and a smug government who reckon everything's going beautifully - except, of course, wages are too high and 'unreproductive' public works need to be stopped ...

...

Bill, Paul and Nestor are very much on to something, I think. Australia, too, consciously nourished its (relative) independence, largely through mutually constitutive ties between Australia's government and bourgeoisie - ensuring that the latter would not serve as a compradorial local elite for foreign interests. Straight after the war, we nationalised Cable and Wireless's international communications monopoly (funny that, they now control our erstwhile public telco's main competitor), nationalised QANTAS, opposed US aspirations over sovereignty over the SW Pacific islands they had garrisoned (the Manus group near PNG), and arrived at a cozy balance throughout many sectors (eg aviation, broadcasting, banking, education, insurance, health) whereby private operators got to seek profit, but standards were regulated and ensured by public sector competition. They poured money and people into publicly funded universities and technical colleges, funded mammoth immigration schemes.

The war had also provided the impetus we needed to get a decent manufacturing sector going, and publicly subsidised enterprise was promoted in a new, urban Australia (proving, I guess, that Australia's rural 'squatocracy' had lost much of the political clout they'd had). In the bush, the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric project, a public undertaking, was to ensure reliable and sufficient power for the manufacturing turn and irrigation for New South Wales and Victoria. And nearly all funded from public debt acquired within the country. (the domestic share of public debt went from 50 to 77% between '39 and '50). Taken together, all these developments served to strengthen the infrastructural and social capital available to domestic capital, and it had become inextricably linked with Canberra and the State Governments. Tariffs, quotas and subsidies were poured into the coffers of the new manufacturer capitalists, whose fortunes and investments depended on the government rather than Wall and Threadneedle Streets.

Then the Tories came in on a tide of 'red under the bed' scaremongering in 1949. The corporate state Labor had put in place throughout and immediately after the war was not instantly to be undone though, as domestic capital knew where its interests lay by then and Menzies conservatices (called Liberals here) had very little interest in policy anyway, and were happy to allow their phalanx of nation-building civil servants (all brought up during the wise-making years of the depression) to have their way.

Yep, it took decades to ruin all that ...

Apologies for the nationalist-Keynesian tone - but it does all sound rather better than the particular mode of 'globalisation' currently afoot, no?

...

I'm not disagreeing with anything you say, comrade, but am left wondering if a significant difference between Australia and Argentina might not be precisely that we did follow our masters to war.

It certainly occasioned a massive and belated shift from the almost entirely agricultural economy we'd been. This at once reduced an aspect of dependence, diversified our stock market, and made us less reliant on a low-value staple (we were more the price taker than the price maker in our agricultural exports). The Pacific War (beginning with the pathetic Singapore disaster in '42) significantly contributed to a resentful suspicion of the UK (already in place, given the equally pathetic Gallipolli disaster and the continued and expensive mediocrity of British general staff on the Western Front), itself occasioning a popular desire for less dependence on 'em - indeed a distance from them (funnily enough, many on the left were persuading everybody we should make for Unca Sam's open arms with expedition).

And it made Australia's Labor Party, and a large slab of the public, look away from the old Commonwealth in its strategic (we immediately signed some treaties with NZ) and trade policies (even Asia copped some overtures, but that stopped when the Tories got in). So both the sectoral structure (higher value production and the creation of a new and integrated national bourgeoisie) and the political culture (self-reliance and nation-building) of the country were very much positively affected in the context of the times. Not lastingly and not completely, but perhaps decisively at and for the time.

Perhaps the ALP did not face the problems Peron faced because of the war, then?

Cheers, Rob.



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