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Government in a time of crisis

By Peter McMahon - posted Monday, 28 May 2007


Interestingly enough, this is similar to the problems faced by Australia in the 1940s as prolonged depression and world war threatened to tear apart western civilisation. Australia, which has always been heavily reliant of the global economy, had been hammered by the Great Depression and faced annihilation by an implacable foe in Imperial Japan.

The country was led by a party still loyal to the fading British Empire and which believed in supporting business and farmers, and not much else. The alternative was a Labor party that could hardly stop squabbling long enough to mount a serious challenge.

We were lucky then. Genuine leadership emerged in the Labor Party, led by John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and the conservatives, bereft of ideas and knowing it, played along. We shifted our attention from the old power, Britain, to the rising power, the US. We defeated the Japanese army in New Guinea, removed the threat of invasion and went on to play an important role in winning the world war.

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Even before war ended Labor began planning for a new era. The vulnerability made so plain in wartime led to a series of economic programs which dovetailed with Labor’s commitment to social justice, while mass immigration was also encouraged. Both the social and physical infrastructure of the nation was rebuilt, resulting in new housing, better education and health services, and iconic schemes like the Snowy River Project.

Internationally Australian politicians took a lead role in creating new collective security and finance organisations, notably the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank. These bodies did not reach their real potential as the Cold War took shape, but they were epochal break-throughs nonetheless.

The great crisis of the last century, in the form of depression and war, arrived and was seen off, and Australia emerged stronger than ever. Our isolation and vulnerability were overcome by a willingness to act for the common good in times of trouble. Led by men who commanded respect, Australians were asked to think big and work together, and we did.

In the face of this new crisis, we need to respond in the same way. We need to rebuild our social and physical infrastructure to make us a more flexible and capable country. We need to recover social solidarity to ensure the costs of the crisis and the responses to it are shared fairly. We need to rebuild government as the central process in society, genuinely democratic and led by the best people we have.

We need to present ourselves as an example of how a rich western country can go green, and we need to play our part in global negotiations as an independent nation that will, nevertheless, act cohesively with all with the others to achieve a viable result.

If we do all these things, we might just squeak through, but the real work must begin with the next election. Crunch time approaches, and we will need the smartest and most hard-working governments we have ever had to manage the great changes to come.

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About the Author

Dr Peter McMahon has worked in a number of jobs including in politics at local, state and federal level. He has also taught Australian studies, politics and political economy at university level, and until recently he taught sustainable development at Murdoch University. He has been published in various newspapers, journals and magazines in Australia and has written a short history of economic development and sustainability in Western Australia. His book Global Control: Information Technology and Globalisation was published in the UK in 2002. He is now an independent researcher and writer on issues related to global change.

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