“They” will never let you stop working
but who are “they,” exactly?
In late March 2020, as COVID was making inroads into Australia, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, declared that the new “National Cabinet” would replace the old Council of Australian Governments (COAG). This rather dry story, of interest to only the most dire wonks, was accompanied by a rationale for this sudden and sweeping reform: “This is a congestion-busting process that will get things done with a single focus on creating jobs.” Morrison’s job-creation agenda seemed unconnected from the pandemic that had caused it; he even identified employment as the entire motivating force behind the maintenance of Federation: “It will have a job-making agenda. And the National Cabinet will drive the reform process between state and federal cooperation to drive jobs.”
There is a note of anxiety in his laborious repetition of the word “jobs”. This anxiety is hardly uniquely Australian, even if it is perhaps most visible in a country where employment has always been a particularly keen political battleground. At first blush, Morrison was clearly assuaging the anxieties of an electorate worried about the security of their own jobs in the face of a pandemic-led recession. He was also clearly speaking to an imagined taxpayer who doesn’t want “their” money going to some “dole bludger”. Coalition governments have made…
