An Economy is Not a Society Read Online Free

reformers, we can’t afford Medicare or the aged pension anymore either, even though they assure us that the reforms of the 1980s and ’90s have made us richer than ever. What alchemy of wealth creation meant that those tea ladies had to join the dole queue, and that an enjoyable part of thousands of people’s lives had to be cheapened and ruined? Why do we consider what replaced that past to be somehow superior, and why do we consider the past itself to be something to snigger and scoff at? These are good questions, which our managerialist friends and their boosters in the press would no doubt dismiss with the inadequate word ‘efficiency’, before themselves contemplating the client-funded cocktail party and dinner on offer that evening after work.
    When I recall my father’s addiction to tea – which he would drink while still in his blue overalls at the kitchen table each afternoon after work, strong and stewed in his old metal teapot – I imagine how much he must have looked forward to the tea ladies’ visits. Real tea! I’m suddenly touched by the thought of him, conscientious, hardworking, never offshoring his tax or turning his wage into a capital gain, putting down his clipboard and leaving his station for a hard-earned break, a difficult and rare smile breaking out over his face as he reaches out and says, ‘White, one sugar.’ A lifter, enjoying a simple pleasure no longer available to the little people. What sort of person would take that away? An economic reformer, obviously.
    Dominating this whole site today is something that is no longer there. The heart of any auto factory isn’t its spare parts warehouse or even the tooling workshops with their lathes, skilled toolmakers and apprentices – it is the assembly line. Ian and Russel point me to where it used to stand. The building looks far too modern. Russel tells me that it’s been re-roofed and is now the Australian headquarters of HSPO, or at least what’s left of it for the foreseeable future, Holden having already announced that it will be ceasing domestic production in 2017. I spy the high fences and the manned guardhouse and quickly conclude that there is absolutely no chance I can bluff my way in, even if I put on my hardhat and carry my clipboard. But where there’s a will, there’s a way.
    A couple of weeks later I’m driving in, past the friendly and busy guard, to my appointment with Barry Crees, manager of the HSPO complex. Ian has sorted it out for me. While I wait for Barry, I notice that in the space of just a fortnight the construction opposite, which had been rising out of the old truck assembly plant, has gone from a metal frame to a roofed and almost fully walled building; as I watch, a crane lowers on another giant concrete panel. (By the time I leave the plant an hour later, the panel had already been bolted on to form a wall.) How many people will work in this warehouse, I ask myself. Building it has given a team of men work for a few months, but then what? Probably another building, and then another after that. If rapidly throwing up almost empty structures in a building boom is the only source of new jobs, then our economy and job market have become a sort of Ponzi scheme, where building after building needs to be constructed to keep us all one step ahead of the crash.
    As we walk through to the warehouse, Barry tells me that the car assembly line plant has in fact been replaced completely. My heart sinks. I thought I’d be wandering across the original factory floor as it twisted around like a large intestine under the framework of the old aerial assembly line, going past the station where my dad worked fitting doors onto cars for almost thirty years.
    The jobs of our fathers …
    Instead, Barry stops me and points to a shallow drain running through rough concrete across a vast open space that is now used as a car park. This was once the floor under the