In 1989-1990, as the ALP-ACTU Accord limped towards collapse, a new slogan emerged from the Labor Party: the clever country. The key to Australia's economic future was said to lie in industries that relied on brainpower and precision technology rather than large-scale heavy industry, which has limited scope in Australia due to a small domestic market and long distances from international markets.
To the extent that any piecemeal approach can succeed within the context of a crisis-stricken international capitalism, such an approach might have had some limited success, but as time passes it becomes clear that the clever country was just another empty slogan from a government that has produced more than its share of them.
According to the vision splendid, private capital was to lead us to a glorious free-market future as multi-function polises sprouted across the land (well, at least in Adelaide, the Gold Coast or somewhere). But with the end of the '80s boom, the funds dried up, and it seems the MFP was never much more than an elaborate real estate scam. With property speculation no longer a favoured pastime among the rich and infamous, the future of the MFP looks anything but rosy.
So much for the private road to the clever country. Meanwhile, what's the government doing? Very little, it seems, if the beginning of the university year is anything to go by. Wouldn't a clever country need a good supply of clever people, or at least well-trained people? But around the country, tens of thousands of students have been turned away from universities and TAFE colleges, many with the advice to go back into an already overcrowded school system and try again next year.
What's the cause of this criminal waste? Ironically, one of the major causes is the big business drive for “smaller government”, the code term for lower taxes on business. Even if the MFP ever gets off the drawing board, the skilled workforce essential to it won't exist because of government cutbacks dictated by the business philosophy/religion of economic “rationalism”.
And as our public education system stagnates due to Labor's irresponsible policies, there is nothing to replace it. Bond, Australia's only major private university, like its namesake, is in deep financial trouble and brawling over its board of directors. In reality, it too was more about real estate speculation than about education.
Bond's contribution to the education system certainly doesn't go close to paying back the tax breaks and other government perks tossed the way of Bond Corp during the '80s, and it doesn't even begin to plug the gaps opened up in the public education system by the government cutbacks of the '80s.
