In London, our Treasurer, Scott Morrison made the observation that negative gearing wasn’t responsible for higher house prices because Britain had high house prices too, and they didn’t have Australia’s tax concessions. Now, while I could spend a long time speculating about why that makes about as much sense as smoking doesn’t cause lung cancer because Fred got it and he doesn’t smoke, I think I’d be better to concentrate on the fact that he went on to tell us that if we did what Labor wanted and grandfathered negative gearing for existing properties then real estate values would crash.
Some of you may wonder – as you did in the election campaign – how such a thing could be. I guess we truly are living in a world of “alternative facts”. No, it doesn’t push up prices but they’d suddenly become a lot lower if we abolished it. I vaguely remember some Coalition MP trying to tell us that it would push the prices up for buyers but down for sellers. Huh?
Now it would be presumptuous of me to lecture the Treasurer on matters economic because I’m no expert. I have no qualifications or training. And it’s only in the area of climate change that one can say that one’s opinion derived from a gut instinct is just as good as people who have spent years studying it. So I’m just going to compose a little reading list for Scott which might help more than a trip to the UK, where he can come back and tell us that he learnt that not only were prices high in London, but they were in pounds.
The first thing I’d recommend that Mr Morrison read is Tim Dunlop’s excellent book: “(Why The Future Is) Workless” 
Dunlop places our current predicament in context by examining the history of the work ethic and looks at how robots and apps like Uber are changing the way people work. While our politicians and some of the commenteriat take the view that this is just a temporary blip and when things get back to normal then we can get those lazy bludgers back to work, “Workless” sets out the reasons why this is unlikely to happen. Dunlop further challenges the notion that every time we use a machine to perform a job that a human once did, then another less mundane job is created. It’d certainly be worth Mr Morrison’s time to read it, but failing that, perhaps a few of us should clip out bits and start sending them to our MPs. In light of the recent Centrelink debacle this quote from the book with a question about the extent to which they agree might be good place to start: “The privatised employment agency became an agent of government control while the role of government changed from provision of welfare to one of surveillance.” However, if you feel that your MP is capable of reading more than one line, then this it might be worth seeking his opinion on this:
“In a world where technology is likely to drive either job losses, or at the very least, a rise in precarious employment, the idea that people should have to rely on having a job in order to participate in society in a decent way is an increasingly obscene idea. To maintain our current work ethic –one that equates having a job with human decency and moral rectitude –is not only anachronistic but cruel. In a world where huge swathes of humans are surplus to the requirements of the economy, you either change the means of distribution or you create a world where a substantial part of the population are forced to wallow in squalor and insecurity, while a tiny proportion of people live lives of untold luxury.”
Of course, Scott may not have enough time to read a whole book in between meals on his trip back from London, so perhaps this short article might help him grasp the concept that jobs won’t appear by themselves: How To Make American Robots Great Again!
I was going to recommend that our current Treasurer also read Kevin Kelly’s “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future”, but, like the decision not to do any modelling on the USA pulling out of the TPP because it was hypothetical, this book talks about the future and nobody can predict the future. (Even if I had a stab at writing the news stories for February last week!) For example, just look at this excerpt from Kelly’s book:
‘In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.” Wow! Newsweek put the doubts more bluntly in a February 1995 headline: “The Internet? Bah!” The article was written by an astrophysicist and network expert, Cliff Stoll, who argued that online shopping and online communities were an unrealistic fantasy that betrayed common sense. “The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.”
‘This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the corner-office crowd about this “Internet Stuff.” To their credit, the executives of ABC realized something was happening. ABC was one of the top three mightiest television networks in the world; the internet at that time was a mere mosquito in comparison. But people living on the internet (like me) were saying it could disrupt their business. Still, nothing I could tell them would convince them that the internet was not marginal, not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys. But all the sharing, all the free stuff seemed too impossible to business executives. Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP at ABC, delivered the ultimate put-down: “The Internet will be the CB radio of the ’90s,” he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC’s argument for ignoring the new medium: “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
‘I was shown the door. But I offered one tip before I left. “Look,” I said. “I happen to know that the address abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer geek, and have him register abc.com immediately. Don’t even think about it. It will be a good thing to do.” They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still unregistered.’
See, people can’t predict the future. That’s why the Liberals keep trying to return us to the 1950s. Ok, not all of them. Turnbull does seem to think that by clicking his heels and saying “Innovation…innovation…innovation, there’s no need for the CSIRO”, he and Toto will return to Kansas and discover it was all a horrible dream… Oh wait, that was that old film with Judy Garland in it, not the Coalition’s innovation policy. Easy mistake to make, they’re both a sort of fantasy about a place called Oz.
Anyway it’d be nice to actually have some sort of informed discussion about the nature of work in the coming decades instead of simply asserting that everybody needs to have a job. Perhaps, we should all chip in and buy a copies of “Workless” and “The Inevitable” to send to George Brandis’ library. While we’re at it, we should probably add “Most Likely To Succeed” by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith. At least then, there’d be some books written this century that wasn’t a biography of a Liberal politician.
