Managers

THE LONG AWAITED AMERICAN tariffs are announced. They promise to be as catastrophic for the largest economy in the world, whose currency is the global reserve, as anyone had predicted. 'The Markets' as at the time of writing are responding, also, predictably, but as though they could not quite have believed that a politician who made repeated statements that he would do a thing, is on record over decades supporting a thing, once in a position to do the thing, would do the thing. Who'd have thought?

There's been a decades-long conventional wisdom borne out in every opinion poll that the political Right are better 'economic managers' of Western developed economies, an assertion that goes along with all the mythology of the household budget model of public finance, and with Reagan-Thatcher era public morality. For Gen X and our peers, the international political Right enjoy an unquestioned lock on the claim to be Better For The Economy, while the political Left suffers, at least journalists' framings, an assumed requirement to live up to austerity principles it disbelieves in.¹

Or do they? Liz Truss's hilariously catastrophic Prime Ministership of the UK seems to have left the UK conservatives' economic reputation genuinely damaged. The United States' experiment with Trumpism seems to be continuing in that desire for disaster, and indeed destroying the whole concept of Economic Management, in favour of breaking as many eggs as possible in the hope that a delicious omelette will thereby be created. The European conservatives have, in the face of the Russian Army, just dropped the Eurozone austerity that was imposed throughout the 2000s and 2010s, and decided rearmament is the go regardless of domestic impacts. (Understandably).

It leaves the Australian political Right in an odd situation. They've always followed international trends and imported the received wisdoms from the Northern Hemisphere. But when those received wisdoms are, instead, examples of absolute nihilism and disaster, our domestic Right has a choice---continue in sync, and into disaster, with the overseas conservative and reactionary parties, or surrender the assumed better-economic-manager mantle.