Nicholas kindly suggested to me that we might like to cross post our three favourite posts from August at each other’s blogs to see if commenters’ reaction is different. So here’s the first of mine, originally published at LP.
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One interesting by-product of the tax stoushes that Naomi wrote about the other day might be an awareness of how few Australians are in the top bracket, and how many are struggling along with 30-60k household incomes (and that’s before we even talk about the large number of really poor people on welfare and/or very low incomes). There may or may not be a case for tax reform at the top end, but Emerson and Swan are quite right to say that fixing the welfare to work barriers and meaningful tax reform for the great majority of Australian citizens are far higher priorities. In this context, Wayne Swan’s book Postcodes: The Splintering of a Nation might be an instructive read for citizens, and particularly commentators and journos.
It’s not hard to assume from the assumptions that underlie most media reporting (with some distinguished exceptions like George Megalogenis) and interviews by the likes of Maxine McKew that the Canberra elites seem to have great difficulty understanding that over a decade of economic growth doesn’t mean that most Australians are rolling in dosh, driving SUVs, feeling aspirational, obsessed with property, building McMansions, troubled only by whether to go for the platinum as opposed to the gold Visa card, and so on. It’s been really weird watching McKew’s face as various Labor pollies and ACTU folks have explained the circumstances and choices which beset rather than empower most working Australians.
Sociological research – beginning in the 1960s with the debate over the (then) new phenomenon of the affluent worker – has shown that most people have very little idea of the prevailing wage levels and distributions across the economy as a whole. Rather, people pick what they know as a comparator. Thus, journalists like McKew or pollies like Costello who think it’s important to preserve uber-generous super lest Parliament become populated by useless timeservers, are probably comparing their own generous remuneration to the much higher levels of professionals and business people with whom they interact. Similarly, white collar workers in most public sector organisations earning in the low to mid 40ks will tend to compare their wages to those below them and above them and think in terms of what they could get through their next pay increment or promotion.
