Forget the past, Australian governments face a tough road ahead

Australian governments will have to do much more than rely on another housing bubble which had become unaffordable for a growing proportion of Australians.

There is also little use in Walter making simplistic political points like citing how Labor's Clement Attlee, "who was considered a pygmy against the Churchillian lion", was "buoyed by research" (including the Beveridge report on the welfare state) to persuade the British to invest in "a postwar nation-building and welfare regime that hardline Tories have taken sixty years to unravel".

Of course we need policy alternatives in this problematic and competitive world, but where is the research or argument today that demonstrates an effective alternative to this globalised world given that freer trade has created enormous wealth with global production meaning cheaper goods, notwithstanding related environmental degradation?

While I too have long expressed concern about the reliance upon freer trade, particularly because it has benefited authoritarian China most, is Australia expected to defy the demands of the international economy and deny opportunities to other developing countries with no future consequences?

Are Australians prepared to pay much more for goods produced domestically given our relatively higher wages?

Is Australia to abandon its close political and security relationship with the US and simply take the money from authoritarian China by shutting up and abandoning our values?

Should Australia spend the required vast sums of money to become more dependent on renewables, with Labor fibbing before the election that lower electricity prices would come soon despite the necessary large infrastructure cost, while other nations continue to rely on fossil fuels to meet their demands?

Should Australia raise taxation levels, while other nations do not, and still expect to remain competitive in economic terms in order to meet growing budgetary pressures from further growth in spending for defence, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, aged care and health?

Should Australia keep relying on debt at a time when Australia's national gross debt reached $895 billion by June 2022 (about 40 per cent of GDP), albeit the net debt (taking account of government financial assets) was $515 billion (22 per cent of GDP), much lower than many other developed countries?

While the Hawke government successfully responded to Australia's economic problems evident by the early 1980s, notably through financial deregulation, freer trade and industrial relations reform while promoting social welfare benefits such as Medicare and superannuation, it did so by allowing net Commonwealth debt had again rose to 18.5 per cent of GDP by 1995-96 after also being in surplus in the early 1970s, but how much longer can the option of higher debt be accepted?

These are complex questions for both sides of politics, centre-left and centre-right, as the then British prime minister Liz Truss found out the hard way when she was forced to abandon a trickle-down economics approach in the form of tax relief that benefited the wealthy most at the expense of other urgent spending demands.

Difficult times confront all western nations and there are no easy answers, a reality that cannot be easily overcome by mere talk about the importance of leadership without any recognition how difficult the policy questions are in the current context.