Across the world, as business people take control of the levers of government, or throw spanners into its wheels in the name of efficiency, some people are celebrating the idea of government functions being abandoned entirely, and left to the private sector.
Leaving aside the question of whether multiple bankrupts or business people whose financial success is built on large scale public welfare are even qualified to attempt this, there are a few fundamental reasons why running a government like a business is bound to fail.
In simplified terms, businesses exist to generate profit for owners and shareholders. Success is measured in financial terms. Governments exist to provide services for populations. The only meaningful measure of their success is the well-being of the people and their wider environment. This includes economic factors, but extends far beyond that.
Public monies don’t exist to be banked in the Cayman Islands (with some dishonourable exceptions), but are supposed to be returned to the people in the form of services, prioritised according to need.
Obviously no one enjoys grappling with bureaucracy, and waste has always existed in the public sector, but leaping to the opposite extreme, by taking a chainsaw to all government services, is a pathway to chaos.
Profit and loss
Corporate decision-making is generally opaque, and short term. Government decision-making is supposed to be open to scrutiny, and takes a longer term view. Corporations are able to take risks because less is at stake, and they need to gain a competitive edge. Governments tend to be risk-averse because they need to prioritise the public good.
Businesses make money. Governments print money. Businesses innovate. Governments regulate.
While corporations traditionally compete with one another, government services tend to operate as monopolies (you can’t choose your brand of police service or military). When fundamental services are opened to competition, as happened with banking and telecommunications in Australia, or the postal service in the UK, then you get the waste associated with service duplication.
The supposed benefits of competition, such as lower costs, often fail to eventuate.
Corporations may have the rights of people in many jurisdictions, but most of them don’t behave anything like sane human beings. They tend to be more like tumours; growing at the expense of their hosts, taking far more than they give, and ultimately threatening both themselves and their hosts when they run up against the limits of reality.
What shall we cut next?
Elderly people and little children clearly aren’t earning their keep this financial quarter – who needs them?
The poor aren’t paying enough tax or buying enough products – into the grinder or back to the Dickensian workhouse with them.
Slavery looks better for the bottom line? Let’s bring it back, pronto.
What about all those expensive public service functions, like fire brigades and hospitals and park rangers and safety inspectors? Surely they can be dispensed with. Like Margaret Thatcher said, there’s no such thing as society, and public good is a luxury – the rich can pay for their own security, health care, air and water, and everyone else can go to hell.
The fantasy seems to be that the survivors of the purges, AI and robots will do the work that keeps everything actually running. Revolution will be staved off by keeping people arguing about transgender athletes, the woke mind virus, and immigrants.
Of course none of this will work long term, but this is the fantasy world we’re sliding into, thanks to our glorious American overlords and their multiplying fellow travellers.
The worst of both worlds
For the last few decades, since ‘both sides’ of politics in Australia and most other democracies decided to let the corporate heavyweights have their way with the big questions about how society should work, we the people have mostly had a choice between Coke and Pepsi when it comes to our democracy. Mainstream politics has been about fiddling around the edges.
Now we’re entering a world where if the far right gets its way, there will be no edges. The truth, inconvenient and otherwise, will be surplus to requirements.
Peter Dutton continues to coast towards the 2025 election with fear and division in his sails. Having no substantial policies of his own, he’s content to copy anything popular-sounding that emerges from Labor, such as upgrading the Bruce Highway, or most recently improving Medicare, even though his party’s record shows infrastructure and health are both extremely weak points.
Dutton is also echoing the worst of Labor’s ideas, such as giving special treatment to Tasmanian salmon businesses while they trash the environment and send the Maugean Skate into extinction.
Globally, the choices seem to be oligarchy, idiocracy, or corporatocracy. Why not a foul-tasting brew of all three? Australia’s geography and nuclear submarines won’t protect us from any of this, we will have to find our own way. Perhaps George Conway has come up with the best term for where we are all heading unless something drastic happens: psychopathocracy.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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