{"id":590681,"date":"2026-09-05T05:08:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T05:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/590681\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T05:08:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T05:08:19","slug":"afraid-of-change-political-optimism-now-a-rare-commodity-in-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/590681\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Afraid of change’: political optimism now a rare commodity in Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

What a despairing mob we’ve become.<\/p>\n

This week’s national accounts confirmed how stuck we are in a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours \u2026 to steal from English literature’s greatest melancholy wobbler.<\/p>\n

It’s doubtful Hamlet ever dwelt on the state of Denmark’s real net national disposable income (RNNDI) per capita.<\/p>\n

But if he had he might have embraced what a downer it is.<\/p>\n

RNNDI is one of those measures that helps explain why voters look desperate to try new and “dangerous” things, as the prime minister put it this week. He was referring to One Nation and its quickening political momentum around the country, where Pauline Hanson is eagerly harvesting the dark mood.<\/p>\n

\"Prime<\/p>\n

Anthony Albanese this week spoke about One Nation and its quickening political momentum around the country. (ABC News: Adam Kennedy)<\/p>\n

Prosperity heading in wrong direction<\/p>\n

The Australian Bureau of Statistics says RNNDI estimates the income a person derives from the economy that they can spend and save after the pernicious impact of inflation is taken into account.<\/p>\n

It renders what’s left in people’s pockets after cost-of-living increases.<\/p>\n

“This is a broader measure of prosperity than the commonly cited measure of real GDP,” the bureau explains on its website.<\/p>\n

“It more accurately reflects the average lived experience and prosperity of Australians.”<\/p>\n

In the June quarter, it shrank by 0.4 per cent from the previous three months. And from the same period a year earlier it was unchanged.<\/p>\n

Over the last two years it has been either falling outright or pretty much flat.<\/p>\n

By contrast for most of the last half century this measure has enjoyed steady gains with brief exceptions such as the early 1990s recession and the post GFC “secular stagnation” of the early and mid-2010s.<\/p>\n

In the real world, this reflects how pretty much every generation since federation has secured a better quality of life, greater opportunity and choice than their parents.<\/p>\n

But now, living standards and prosperity are headed in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n

Which is where a majority of Australians think the country is going.<\/p>\n

Albanese government’s performance judged harshly<\/p>\n

Perceptions of the national economy, as well as state and territory economies, are at their lowest level, according to a nationwide poll in August by JWS Research<\/a> that began testing views on this question in 2013 during the dying days of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd turmoil.<\/p>\n

And to the degree that governments are responsible for the gloomy sense of national direction, the JWS survey shows they’re getting a good slab of blame.<\/p>\n

Views of state and territory governments are at their lowest ebb since early 2017.<\/p>\n

For the federal government it’s particularly acute.<\/p>\n

\"Graph<\/p>\n

A graph showing perceptions of state and territory governments are at their lowest level since March 2017 from JWS Research.<\/p>\n

Judgements on the Albanese government’s performance have never been this harsh.<\/p>\n

It’s worse, according to JWS, than at any time during Scott Morrison’s oft-derided prime ministership.<\/p>\n

And is now on par with levels of disillusionment that accompanied Malcolm Turnbull’s time in office not long before his colleagues rolled him out the door.<\/p>\n

War, bond markets and AI<\/p>\n

These may turn out to be temporary miasmas of the public’s mood.<\/p>\n

But there was a creeping sense this week that the federal government hasn’t yet figured out how to flip the script. And that time is starting to run out.<\/p>\n

To be sure, some of what ails people and the economy that dictates their fortunes is externally driven.<\/p>\n

There’s a lengthening war in the Middle East.<\/p>\n

Loading…<\/p>\n

Bond market klaxon horns are blaring about the dangers of ballooning government debt and persistent global inflation. And AI is giving many the jitters.<\/p>\n

Yet Labor is already well into its fifth year in office.<\/p>\n

By the standards of Australian governments this is early middle age.<\/p>\n

Well before the autumn of life, so to speak, but also when things start to get tired.<\/p>\n

The old sparkle doesn’t come so easy. There’s no blaming youthful indiscretions when things go wrong. The last lot is long gone.<\/p>\n

The buck is firmly in hand. And consequences from mistakes or omissions of the past begin to accrue.<\/p>\n

While much of what ails people can be linked to a crazy world, voters often respond to two big drivers: a sense the government has a positive plan and knows where it wants to go.<\/p>\n

And a belief that it’s fighting for people rather than its own preservation.<\/p>\n

ABC Politics in your inbox<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to the ABC Politics newsletter with Courtney Gould<\/p>\n

The government claims it is embarking on the most thorough economic reform program in a generation with its changes to capital gains taxation of assets and overhaul of trusts.<\/p>\n

Promoted as “fairness measures” they’re mainly about collecting more tax.<\/p>\n

For many critics in the business community \u2014 and voters more generally \u2014 they’re a drag rather than an inspiration.<\/p>\n

For economists they fall short of producing what used to be called a “growth agenda”.<\/p>\n

And Labor’s opponents accuse it of running a redistributionist program rather than an expansionist platform.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the progressive left is frustrated that the government isn’t targeting the honey pots of billionaires and “greedy” foreign corporations.<\/p>\n

Loading\u00a0A reminder that leadership matters<\/p>\n

Paul Keating this week told an audience in Sydney that governments are “afraid of change”.<\/p>\n

And not-withstanding the adjustments to negative gearing and capital gains on housing that have been legislated to boost affordability, he warned the country needs to “manage capital accretion \u2026 more ambitiously than we have in recent times”.<\/p>\n

“We’ve gone 26 years without any structural change. And of course it shows [in] the lag in productivity and the lagging growth numbers.”<\/p>\n

A new history of Keating’s prime ministership by historian James Curran published this week makes the case for boldness and bravery.<\/p>\n

Keating’s legacy \u2014 as recognised by both sides of fair-minded elements of the political divide \u2014 is that he delivered that in spades when it came to economic reform.<\/p>\n

But Curran’s book, Grand Ambition, is a reminder that he can flourish in other realms.<\/p>\n

Keating became prime minister within days of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, a geopolitical rupture that compares surely to anything happening today.<\/p>\n

Grand Ambition details how the new prime minister didn’t retreat into passivity in the face of that new global reality \u2014 the moment, in Keating’s words, when the “electromagnets of the Cold War were switched off”.<\/p>\n

\"James<\/p>\n

A new history of Keating’s prime ministership by historian James Curran published this week makes the case for boldness and bravery.<\/p>\n

Others might have been content to merely describe the new world for Australian voters.<\/p>\n

Keating, according to Curran, saw the juncture as an opening.<\/p>\n

He pressed George HW Bush \u2014 just arrived in Sydney \u2014 to engage in the region, setting the stage for Keating to win support for turning APEC into a leaders’ forum.<\/p>\n

One that endures to this day.<\/p>\n

Keating noted this week that the November APEC leaders meeting will allow Donald Trump and Xi Jinping to meet and “discuss their real matters”.<\/p>\n

“That’s been going on now for 34 years. This was a gift to the West by Australian foreign policy and it made a very big difference,” Keating said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

“And because we invented the show, we were in charge.”<\/p>\n

Whether you bought into Keating’s story \u2014 one that fused foreign policy and domestic reform into one big “ball of wax” (as Keating’s advisor Allan Gyngell told Curran) \u2014 or not, that’s not the point.<\/p>\n

It was a time when Australia aspired to be more than history’s passenger. Or a fixed South Pacific aircraft carrier for a powerful friend.<\/p>\n

A reminder that leadership matters.<\/p>\n

Jacob Greber is political editor of ABC’s 7.30 program.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a despairing mob we’ve become. This week’s national accounts confirmed how stuck we are in a foul…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[28340,138,219,290841,111,139,69,290842,290840,290839],"class_list":["post-590681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-australian-bureau-of-statistics","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-net-national-disposable-income-per-capita","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-rndi","tag-rnnd","tag-rnndi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}