We've heard it all before — especially those of us who can remember the rhetoric of the Hawke and Keating governments. A little pain now and everything will be much better for everyone in the long run.
Australia needs to be more competitive, more productive and more flexible. Working people need to sacrifice in the short term. It's necessary for the nation and we'll all prosper eventually.
The faces have changed but the rhetoric from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his essay, "Pain on the road to recovery", published in Fairfax newspapers on July 25, has the same message: working people will need to pay for business profits to rebound.
Rudd puts a timeframe on it. He said the next 10 years would be the "'building decade' — implementing a plan of nation-building unapologetically based on the sure foundations of continuing conservative economic management".
Or, to put it in plain English, business profits will go up again as long as ordinary people work harder and for less.
Get the message?
In what he coyly describes as a "paradox of recovery", Rudd forecast ongoing economic hardship for working people as the "recovery" from the global economic crisis begins.
"For some time after the worst period of the crisis, Australians will feel continuing financial pressures and, in some areas, increased economic pain", he said.
How could this be? Working people have already taken the brunt of the pain of the crisis so far.
Unemployment has risen and part-time employment has increased. The hours of those still working have been cut and wages, especially for the lowest paid, have fallen or stagnated. And now Rudd says we should expect a further 10 years of economic pain — for what?
Rudd's essay is a manifesto on the new opportunities for Australian big business that have opened due to the recession. It lays out Labor's plan to take advantage of the recession to further "reform" the Australian economy to the advantage of big business.
The key word of the essay is "productivity" — a word used 30 times in the 6100-word essay.
"Australia needs to build stable foundations for growth by reforming the economy to enhance long-term productivity growth — the only reliable driver of long-term improvements in national living standards", said Rudd.
"We need to implement a global competitiveness agenda for Australia that reinvigorates the drivers of productivity growth."
Rudd is careful to mince his words about where such "productivity" gains will come from. "Australia's future prosperity will rely on our willingness to make tough decisions, to tighten our belt as the economy recovers and to build our global competitiveness."
@subh = Budget cuts
However, he does tell us that "the government's strategy to return the budget to surplus will involve some painful and unpopular decisions that will affect many Australians".
Growth in government spending will be limited to only 2%. It means that, "as the recovery strengthens, the government will implement its plan to return the budget to surplus, which will mean tough decisions, unpopular decisions and budget cuts".
He fails to spell-out the detail of his policy for "reform". But Rudd's message to working people is clear: "By improving economic efficiency, micro-economic reform can drive the productivity gains essential for better living standards and long-term economic growth."
Under the past ALP governments of Hawke and Keating, "long-term economic growth" was achieved with similar "economic reform". But the growth came at the expense of "better living standards" for working people.
Real wages fell dramatically under the last federal Labor government. And because most of the union leadership accepted the government's bogus "economic reform" argument, rates of union membership also plummeted.
He rails against "a decade of neo-liberal free market fundamentalism" under former PM John Howard. But in government, Rudd has shown himself to be as much a warrior for the capitalists as his forerunner. Only the methods are different.
While Howard sought a head-on confrontation with organised labour — such as the 1998 Waterfront dispute and the 2005 adoption of Work Choices — Rudd seeks to work through the ALP-aligned union bureaucracy.
The Fair Work Act is one example of this. It keeps many of the draconian anti-union laws of Work Choices, such as the requirement of a secret ballot before all industrial action.
The Rudd government is also pushing its "productivity" agenda on public servants. It has directed most government departments to achieve "efficiency dividends" — in other words, job cuts.
In its negotiations with teachers and university staff, it has demanded measures such as performance pay, school league tables and more privatisation of higher education. In opposition the ALP strongly opposed similar proposals by the Howard government.
'Reform' agenda
The Rudd government has pushed a rapid "reform" agenda since its election. This has included weakening national occupational health and safety laws that protect workers; a review of the tax system that recommended raising the retirement age to 67, and keeping the undemocratic powers of the notorious Australian Building and Construction Commission.
The National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission, which released its report on July 27, called for more privatisation of the public health system.
And the government's Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will, if passed into law, hand billions of dollars to coal companies and other big-business polluters, while failing to significantly cut carbon emissions.
Rudd crowed about his government's investments in infrastructure. "The critical economic infrastructure investments we are making will not only support jobs and growth today but will enhance our long-term productive capacity."
Yet little of this spending will improve the lives of working people. Nor will it help generate the hundreds of thousands of green jobs we need to tackle the climate crisis.
Very few improvements will be made to public transport, for instance.
Instead, a big part of the government's funding will go to increasing the capacity of ports that export coal and iron ore, or increasing the capacity of coal-dedicated rail lines.