In support of free enterprise

In April 2001 CCIWA launched 'In Support of Free Enterprise', a paper which seeks to challenge the increasingly prevalent hostility to economic reform, free markets and business generally in Australian and wider political and economic debate.

It is paradoxical that the unparalleled prosperity delivered by economic reform over the past twenty years has been accompanied by a widespread flight from economic reality.

The recent downturn in GDP should not disguise the achievement of 37 successive quarters of positive economic growth up to September 2000 – a record unprecedented in the post-war period.

Over the longer term, virtually every measure of our well-being is improving – whether measured in narrow economic terms such as the purchasing power of income or the quantity of goods and services we each consume, or more broadly in terms of health and life expectancy, access to education and so on.

Yet recent election results seem to show that, in a significant portion of the electorate, there is a widespread feeling that the economic change which underpins this expansion is a threat to our security whether as individuals, as families, or as communities.

There is a widespread feeling that governments have for too long now been under the sway of faceless 'economic rationalists', and that reform has gone too far.

There is still a belief among the voters of regional, rural and outback Australia that they have been abandoned – by State and Federal governments, and by Corporate Australia – to an irreversible economic and social decline, losing both population and infrastructure.

There is, as well, a perception that the increased 'globalisation' of the world's economy is a threat to our economic and political sovereignty.

This economic insecurity is often backed up by a cultural and social insecurity, a strong belief that an authentic Australia has been abandoned to modish multiculturalism, usually coupled with a strong resistance to higher levels of immigration.

This phenomenon usually expresses itself in negatives, as being 'against' this or that. Insofar as it can be expressed in positives, it would seem to be 'for' a closed economy, and 'for' big and intrusive government. This is in itself another irony, since one of the sources of disenchantment is a loss of faith in politics, in politicians and their bureaucracies, and in the political process itself.

We begin the new century, then, with a paradox firmly established at the heart of Australia's political and economic life: as the benefits of the last twenty years of economic reform become more and more apparent, as both the nation and its citizens become steadily more wealthy, the constituency for reform is smaller and less secure than it ever was.

The general if unspoken consensus on the important point of economic growth provides a potential starting point for a clearer debate on these issues. With the exception of a very few ecological extremists, virtually all Australians realise that economic growth is the foundation on which each of us builds the future – and we want more of it.