Whether it’s Labor working to get transmission lines and offshore wind up and running or the Coalition working to create a nuclear industry from scratch, it will take a strong government with the capacity to articulate a plan, and the legal, financial and human resources to make it a reality.
All of these requirements were met when we constructed the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a decades-long federal government initiative undertaken in cooperation with Victoria and NSW.
Are they still in place? Not yet. Government capacity to act has been eroded over decades of neoliberalism. Particularly at the national level, public service expertise has been hollowed out and replaced by reliance on private consulting firms.
To rebuild the federal government’s capacity to act will require recreating the public service as a career which attracts the best and brightest graduates – many of whom currently end up in the financial sector.
By John Quiggin
Achieving net zero with renewables or nuclear means rebuilding the hollowed-out public service after decades of cuts
by John Quiggin in The ConversationFull employment and working future
by John Quiggin in The Economic and Labour Relations ReviewAfter decades in which macroeconomic policy focused primarily on inflation, the announcement of a renewed commitment to full employment, made by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in 2021, was a major step. Labour’s election campaign included not only a commitment to full employment but the promise of a Jobs Summit leading to a new White Paper on Full Employment, modelled on that of 1945.
Upon taking office, the Labor Government backed away from this commitment. The Jobs Summit was relabelled a ‘Jobs and Skills Summit’ and much of the discussion focused on supposed skills shortages. This was a misnomer. The problem faced by employers was not a shortage of particular skills but the difficulty of filling vacancies of any kind in a situation of full or near-full employment. After decades in which the number of unemployed workers routinely exceeded vacancies, employers found this situation difficult to accept.
An even more consequential change was the removal of the word ‘Full’ from the name of the proposed White Paper. The decision to break with Labor’s history on this crucial issue seemed to portend the abandonment of the entire process.