The Level Playing Field is just a flat-earth theory. To hell with free markets. Imre Salusinszky's list of enemies is getting pretty long. It now includes, to judge by the polls, 60 per cent of the Australian people. Twelve million Australians must be wrong, Salusinszky writes in his Herald column last Monday, if they oppose - as does (oh, yes) One Nation, as does Bob Katter, as do Ross Cameron, Cheryl Kernot, Neville Wran, Duncan Kerr, Malcolm Fraser, as did Don Dunstan, as do I - the global process that is killing families, communities,universities, corner shops and human hope all over. And dairyfarmers, too.
Salusinszky thinks it's OK if a saving of 20¢ a week on milk destroys a civilisation, that the cost in lives and happiness is worth it. I don't. And most Australians, to judge by recent figures, don't. We think that a country with no small towns any more, and no middle-class farming families, is no longer a civilisation. We think that a world of Manilas with no Murwillumbahs is one we ought to get off. We think that the myth that Australia can win the computer race against California and Japan and India and Ireland is a myth. We think that Queensland should be growing bananas and Tasmania growing apples and Western Australia milking cows whatever the numbers lately, briefly, changingly say.
We think that Victoria should have a clothing industry and Newcastle a steel industry and Queensland a coal industry however cheap the wages paid to the Asian serfs who are our competition. We think that having a lot of industries, protected or not, is better than having none. We may be wrong. Perhaps Salusinszky can tell us how we are wrong in a public debate with me that he keeps refusing.
And perhaps he can tell us about this word "competition". As I understand it, competition is what you have before a victory or adefeat. Competition is only a stage. And once you are defeated you are out of the game - out of clothing, footwear, cars, radios,fridges, Arnott's biscuits, Cottee's jam, Compass Airways - and you never get back.
And as I understand it, if you wish to compete with slaves, you must become slaves yourselves. Because on a "level playing field" this, as I understand it, is the only way to win. If I understand it wrongly, please tell me why.
The level playing field is just another flat-earth theory: discuss.
If Salusinszky were right, there would be by now in the world somewhere some economically rationalised country whose average family is happier and richer than 20 years ago. I ask him to name one. If he were right, there would be by now in the world somewhere some population eagerly voting for economic fundamentalist policies. I ask him to name one. Even London, that hub of hard-nosed capitalism, last year elected Red Ken Livingstone as mayor. I ask Salusinszky to think about that. I ask him to think, too, why so many governments and so many parties that are on his side are in trouble. Can their policies be wrong? Is it possible? Can even Salusinszky be mistaken? Bad policies do lose votes. And no amount of spin, charisma, newsmanagement, sideshow and dictatorial propaganda, as Kennett proved, can stop the people from seeing they are bad for very long. You can't, as Abraham Lincoln remarked, fool all of the people all of thetime. Salusinszky hopes he can but he can't.
Slowly, surely, and more quickly of late, he and Piers Akerman and Christopher Pearson and Michael Duffy and P.P. McGuinness and Frank Devine and that subtler tout for global cruelty, Gerard Henderson, are shrinking into bus-stop grumblers about the way the world is going, which is against their cargo cult of a market god that is good for everyone. Soon, as in Queensland, they will have three seats out of 89 in every parliament and, pretty soon after that, none at all.
Prove that I lie.