How do we want to live? The questions the roundtable failed to ask

A long-time intergenerational wealth advocate, Walker was speaking at Productivity with Purpose: Building Forward, Not Backwards, an online forum convened by the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), which also featured Australian Council for Social Service (ACOSS) CEO Cassandra Goldie, who had attended the roundtable, and Toby Phillips, from the Centre for Policy Development.

Walker remains concerned that the roundtable, and the government, did not have the right people in the room and may not have even asked the right fundamental question: how do we want to live?

“The social contract we’ve had for the last 20 or 30 years is breaking down now,” he said. “Getting a job, getting educated, isn’t enough to buy a home, start a family, have essential services anymore, and people are getting really fed up with that. Instead of letting the powers that be patch up a system that’s not working for us, [we should ask] what do we want our lives to look like in the future? How do we want our work rewarded? How do we want to care for our loved ones? What’s going to happen with AI? How do we want to relate to one another? What’s our relationship to government look like? It’s about not letting it erode any further, but instead asking how can we rebuild it, and what is the political and cultural project that goes along with that?”

Walker said Think Forward remained unhappy that there were very few young people invited to the treasurer’s roundtable, let alone representatives of young Australians facing a variety of pressures. “There’s a lot of talk about skills and education but there were no students trying to obtain their skills present,” he said. “There’s lots of talk about housing, but there were no renters. The people who might be losing their entry level jobs to automation weren’t included in that conversation, and so on.”

Goldie told the ARACY forum that she had made that point strongly at the roundtable, about who was not in the room. “It was a privilege to be in the room, but I was very, very mindful of who was not in the room, and I was not alone,” she said. “We highlighted that, of course, how important it was for us to have very inclusive discussions. I mean, let’s face it, if we’re going to talk about intergenerational equity, it’s really important to have the perspectives of people in the room who actually are living that reality. If you speak to a young person today, would they want a small tax cut or maybe they want free education? These are the sorts of debates that the country does need to have.

“I mean, how did we get here that we’ve got universities routinely providing food relief because younger people can’t afford to feed themselves and continue in tertiary education, and yet we are giving lip service to ‘skills’ as if everybody gets it, how important that is,” Goldie said. “As a student, you work so hard and you cannot see how you can even stay to complete a qualification, and you’ve got the debt already. In this political environment, I think we understand that we have a responsibility as participants in civil society to be out front sometimes as much as waiting for the decision makers in politics to move.”

Toby Phillips said it was not enough to endlessly discuss productivity improvements without considering the true goal of crafting productivity with purpose.

“If you’re thinking about productivity across the economy, a lot of that is about what is being invested in and are those things setting us up for a good and a sustainable future?” he said. “We need to achieve a better alignment between social value and economic value. We have these quite complex systems and measures and regulatory frameworks that try to optimise economic value, but if that isn’t optimising for social value, if there’s a drift between the two, then we’re not necessarily getting the outcomes we want.”

Phillips said reforms needed to create productivity with purpose to improve life for all Australians, and he felt the roundtable had fallen short. “I think if you view what’s come out of the roundtable as the end of the process and as a list of results, it feels a little bit ho-hum,” he said. “We’ve got things like road user charging, and getting rid of nuisance tariffs. I mean, I think these are mostly worthwhile things, but it’s not going to lead to the sort of step change in productivity that we were advocating for and the step change in social outcomes that we were hoping for.”

Walker said young Australians needed dramatic change. “It’s crazy that you start out in life and we load you up with hundreds of thousands of dollars of uni debt and then you spend your entire working life trying to climb your way out of it,” he said. “It feels very backwards to me.”

Walker said politicians spruiked the benefits of all the money being poured into extra aged care and childcare so people could be more productive, working five days a week without distraction. But he said nobody seemed to have asked whether that’s how people want to care for their parents and kids. “Have we even had a chance to have that conversation about what a good life looks like?” he asked. “It isn’t super productive where you spend all your time at work and then outsource the things that matter. I don’t think people want that. I think how we measure the things that aren’t productive or measurable is really important.”