The Treasury Secretary didn't come out and say it, but the conclusion drawn from his recent speech was obvious: governments are increasingly powerless to deliver the sort of policies that put their citizens first, writes Tim Dunlop.

Australia's Treasury Secretary, John Fraser, gave a speech the other day that generated a substantial amount of comment. Many stories picked up on his warnings about the need for Australia to maintain its triple-A credit rating.

Others highlighted the fact that he seemed to contradict Treasurer Scott Morrison's claim that Australia has an expenditure problem, not a revenue problem.

What I want to highlight, however, are comments he made that point to a much bigger issue concerning the way we think about politics and the role of government.

"Over the years," Mr Fraser said, "forecasting the budget aggregates has ... become more difficult":

This is because of continued uncertainty surrounding the forecasts that underpin the budget. We are now a far more integrated part of the global economy - and far more at the mercy of international financial and economic pressures. Unexpected movements in domestic and global factors that drive Australia's economic growth and the economic outlook, including greater than anticipated movements in commodity prices and a number of broader political factors, have meant that in every budget update since 2014, the fiscal outlook has been downgraded.

He does not go on to draw the obvious conclusion from this, but it is worth spelling out: we are increasingly in a position where national governments are powerless to deliver the sort of policies that put their citizens first. As I have noted before:

We are ruled by creatures who have entered into the conditions of their own irrelevance, who have handed over most of what they do to the so-called "market"... They have globalised the economy and thus handed the tools for economic management to vast private and semi-private instrumentalities like free-trade agreements ... and in so doing they have neutered themselves at home.

Related to this is a massive disconnect, one where global problems are treated as if they were local, and citizens end up in despair about their government's inability to get things done. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted in a recent interview:

We could describe what is going on at the moment as a crisis of democracy, the collapse of trust: the belief that our leaders are not just corrupt or stupid, but inept. Action requires power, to be able to do things, and we need politics, which is the ability to decide what needs to be done. But that marriage between power and politics in the hands of the nation state has ended. Power has been globalized, but politics is as local as before... We see this, for example, with the migration crisis: it's a global phenomenon, but we still act parochially. Our democratic institutions were not designed for dealing with situations of interdependence. The current crisis of democracy is a crisis of democratic institutions.

Amongst the political class, those who create and influence policy, there is a tendency to suggest that if we just leave things to "the market" everything will sort itself out. This view was put strongly in a recent article by pollster and political adviser Mark Textor:

Chattering commentators love buzzwords like "disruption" but that massively understates the impact of what's happening to the way we do business and live our lives. It's not disruption - it's the practical redundancy of an old political order; one predicated on old power structures and old relationships between politicians and the public and replaced with something more democratic and much more representative. If they're not careful, and deeply respectful of those who elect them, how politicians respond to this might not even be up them. For Western democracies, the impact of ignoring these massive consumer changes is even worse than revolution. It's irrelevance.

It's an interesting piece and not entirely wrong in its diagnosis. Indeed, it highlights the growing irrelevance of national governments that Fraser and Bauman comment on above. Where Mr Textor's piece goes astray, I think, is in equating democratic freedom with consumer choice.

Being a citizen and being a consumer are not the same thing, and conditions of political - let alone economic - equality do not emerge spontaneously from the unregulated operation of markets in the way his article implies.

Indeed, markets themselves are created by governments, governments increasingly at the beck and call of the powerful (as the Treasury Secretary notes), and it is their interests that are reflected in the design of these allegedly liberating, allegedly free, markets.

The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a classic example. It has provisions, for example, that allow corporations to appeal - via specially constituted forums outside the control of governments - against consumer protections affecting their products.

But it isn't just pan-national agreements like the TPP that drive us in this post-political direction. We might also look at companies like Uber, an example Mr Textor uses.

Yes, it is fantastic that their app is able to challenge a moribund beast like the taxi industry, but it does this not just by offering a better service, but by actively by-passing many of the usual conditions associated with decent employment.

So while this may certainly empower some people as consumers, it actually undermines the position of others as both employees and as citizens, by damaging or ignoring government regulation, and by creating precarious, casualised work.

The role of government is not reduced, but our trust in it is.

As Mike Bulajewski says in his essay The Cult of Sharing, by riding roughshod over government regulation, these companies help convince us that "public, democratic decision-making is clumsy, slow, a boondoggle, incapable of innovation, or an intractable deadlock that is best ignored while tech entrepreneurs get on with the business of changing the world through capitalism."

The irony is, even as they work to undermine our faith in government, corporations themselves are using governments to bend the world to a shape that suits them. Citizens are encouraged to turn away from political action, even as business and government becomes ever-more integrated.

Rather than leading to smaller government - as is often claimed - this sort of practice merely realigns the relationship between business and government, integrating them ever more closely, largely by the privatisation of government services, but also by the development of a business-friendly regulatory framework.

Indeed, if, as is reported, Uber moves towards the development of a fleet of driverless cars, they will need massive government intervention to create the regulations and infrastructure that such vehicles will require to operate efficiently, safely and profitability.

Uber's current attempts to overcome regulation are therefore best seen, not as anti-government, but as establishing a dominate role in their ongoing relationship with government.

The bottom line is, we need to be able to assert our rights as citizens outside any "power" we happen to have in a given market because the fact is, as individual consumers, we will never have the market power to challenge the corporations that dominate it.

At the end of the day, freedom does not arise from being able to operate as a consumer in a marketplace. It comes from our ability as democratic citizens to resist the need to do so.

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. He hosts the podcast Washington Dreaming, discussing the forthcoming US presidential election. His new book, Busted Utopia: The Future of Work, Rest and Play will be released in 2016. You can follow him on Facebook.