3. Lecture Plan
1. The Long Economic Boom – ‘lost opportunity’
2. The Age of Menzies?
3. Australia’s place in ‘The Golden Age’?
4. The Suburban Imperative
5. ‘Is an economic policy possible’?
6. The affluent society
6. We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore
the terms do not mean the same; so I must define what I
mean when I use the expression "middle class."
Let me first define it by exclusion. I exclude at one end of
the scale the rich and powerful: those who control great
funds and enterprises, and are as a rule able to protect
themselves - though it must be said that in a political sense
they have as a rule shown neither comprehension nor
competence. But I exclude them because, in most material
difficulties, the rich can look after themselves.
I exclude at the other end of the scale the mass of
unskilled people, almost invariably well-organised, and
with their wages and conditions safeguarded by popular
law. What I am excluding them from is my definition of the
middle class. We cannot exclude them from problems of
social progress, for one of the prime objects of modern
social and political policy is to give them a proper measure
of security, and provide the conditions which will enable
them to acquire skill and knowledge and individuality.
These exclusions being made, I include the intervening
range - the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament
- salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional
men and women, farmers and so on. These are, in the
political and economic sense, the middle class. They are
for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious.
7. ‘The Age of Menzies’: 1949-1966
Liberal-Country Party coalition: 1949-
1972
8. ‘
Donald Horne (1964)
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by
second rate people who share its luck. It
lives on other people’s ideas, and,
although its ordinary people are
adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields)
so lack curiosity about the events that
surround them that they are often taken
by surprise.”
9. Paul Keating: Menzies had “held us back for nearly a
generation“, presiding over a ‘the golden age when Australia
was injected with a near lethal dose of old-fogeyism by the
conservative parties, when they put the country into neutral
and where we gently ground to a halt in the nowhere land of
the early 1980s” – still captive to the age of the "Astor TV, the
AWA radiogram and the Morphy-Richards toaster"
10.
11.
12. Eric Hobsbawm: ‘The Golden
Age’
‘ … the Golden Age from 1945 to the
early 1970s produced an astonishing
economic transformation and an
unprecedented prosperity. The
bourgeoisie learned its lessons and
revamped its economic system in ways
that socialists, or at any rate Marxists,
had believed impossible’.
18. Population growth and real GDP per person
Population Real GDP per
person
1948-49 to 1953-
54
2.6% 1.8
1953-54 to 1962-
63
2.2% 2.4
1962-63 to 1973-
74
1.8% 3.6
19.
20.
21. ‘Into this mess of social conflict the economist plunges with a happy,
heady missionary zeal comparable to that of the psychiatrist dealing
with personal conflicts. This precisely what we are trained for – to
identify what it is we have to give up, and how much, in order to get a
little more of something else that we want: to present the facts to the
people; and to leave them to choose what they want’.
R.I. Downing, 1956
(‘In my strictly personal platform for economic policy, in fact, my main
plank is the abolition of Canberra. You all ought to come back and live
with us’).’
22. Real GDP per person: Australia and OECD
countries
Australia OECD
1950-1960 2.1 2.8
1960-1973 3.0 4.0
23. Greg Whitwell: the suburban
imperative
- The need to buy a house
- To fill the house with a range of a
range of appliances
- To acquire a car
‘One of the best instincts in us is that which induces
us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a
garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw, in
which we can be among our friends, into which no
stranger may come against our will’ – R.G. Menzies,
‘The Forgotten People’, 22 May 1942
24. ‘… the post-1949 tendency to transfer the task of providing protection to
publicly guided private institutions rather than relying on public programs …
the increasing dependence on the private market (or to a much less extent
on private non-market behaviour) after the Second World War … [and] a
shift in emphasis from a concern to protect categories of individuals from
severe poverty to the identification of and support for a large variety of
“disadvantaged” groups with less regard for their general economic status’ -
Butlin, Barnard and Pincus, Government and Capitalism (1982), p. 335
28. This used to be a place where a man could find some work
Put together Holdens or a foundry job at worst
I can hear the noises coming from the Karawara deep into the
night
The roads were filled with kids playing after dark
Sent to get their fathers who were sitting at the bar
Eat, sleep, work, drink, that's all they ever did
Oh, they're shutting down our town
They're cutting down our town
No more production line blue collar can be found
They'll tear it to the ground
They're shutting down our town
Oh, they're shutting down our town
I started raising hell before I came of age
Running from my past with clenched fists of rage
And I fought my way through every other day never looking
back
Oh, and everything I knew was back there on those streets
Every lesson learned kept me on my feet
But I can't help thinking of the ones I left behind
Jimmy Barnes, ‘Shutting down our town’ (2019)
29. J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent
Society (1958)
- ‘In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of
private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere
of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway’.
- ‘countervailing power’ of organised interests
37. Australia’s Long Boom, c. 1950
to 1973: ‘The Affluent Society’
High rate of economic growth (4.8% average, 1961-74)
Rising prosperity (per capita GDP) (2.5% average, 1961-74)
Low unemployment (Usually under 2%)
Low inflation (2.5% in 1960s)
High immigration
Consumer economy
Manufacturing development (29% of economy in 1961 on eve of mining
boom)
Mining Boom of 1960s
Trade with Asia, especially Japan (Largest trading partner by 1960s)
International economic stability
But then …
