One of the oft forgotten aspects of the ALP’s 2007 election campaign was that for the first time since losing the 1996 election it stopped being afraid of the Hawke-Keating legacy. After years of being worried of the tainted brush of high interest rates and recession, it embraced their reforms and dared the Coalition to run its scare campaign about interest rates and economic management in the face of concerns about economic ructions occurring overseas.

So wedded was the Coalition to these scare tactics that, in the run-up to the 2013 election, it was still saying interest rates would always be lower under the Liberal party, even though the cash rate was then over 4% points lower than it had been when the Howard government lost office.

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It’s a good reminder that reality will never stop the scare campaign, and that the Coalition is very slow to change – it will keep banging out its fear until well after anyone has stopped caring or listening.

2007 was also a good year for the ALP to push the issue of climate change. The nation was in drought and the push to reduce emissions and be active on the international stage was prominent.

This year economic ructions overseas are again present and so too is a drought and the need to take action on climate change. And where the 2007 opposition stopped being afraid of the economic legacy of the last ALP government so too should the current opposition not run from the climate change policies of the Gillard government. Because, as interest rates showed, regardless of the ALP’s policy, you can be sure the Coalition will keep shouting about carbon tax bogeymen.

It’s always amazing how things repeat themselves. Now, a decade on from the GFC, the worrying signs from overseas are there again just as we see the ALP looking set to take office.

The yield for US five-year treasury bonds is now lower than for one-year bonds – suggesting investors believe the economy is going to get worse.

This doesn’t necessarily indicate than the US will go into a recession, it’s just that when bond yields acted this way at the end of the 1960s, in the mid-1970s, the early 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, and before the GFC, a recession followed every time.

But hey, I’m sure Donald Trump will respond in a calm and well-thought-out way.

And while we remain more dependent upon China than the US, it too is showing signs of concern. The Chinese government has responded to the ructions of the trade war with the US by injecting $83bn into its financial system to avoid a credit crunch. That our largest trading partner is having to inject a record amount of money into its financial system does not exactly bring Marie Kondo levels of joy.

The Commonwealth Bank’s senior currency strategist, Joseph Capurso, suggests that “China’s economic miracle is over” and that its annual GDP growth will fall to around 4% over the next decade rather than the current average level of 6.5%.

This does not mean Australia is about to head into a recession – we are a very long way from such a thing. But it does serve as a reminder that projections of glorious revenue and growth that were found in the midyear economic and fiscal outlook over the next 10 years are rather hopeful.

It is now so long since the last recession that no one under 45 has really experienced it in their working life. Such a long stretch of time can lead to complacency and the type of dumb commentary that suggests “we need a recession to ...”

Recessions wreak destruction on families and lives. To measure them I prefer to focus on employment rather than GDP growth.

In the 1990s recession the percentage of the adult population employed fell 3.2% points in 18 months – the equivalent of 400,000 fewer people in work.

In recessions, masses of people in their 50s lose work and never return to the labour force. The overall unemployment rate rose from 6% at the start of 1990 to above 10% within two years; for men aged 55-64 it went from 6% to 14% in four years.

In the space of a year, real household disposable income fell on average by 2%.

Recessions are horrific. And while we should not talk ourselves into such a negative condition, the chances are that whoever is in power for the next three to five years will likely have to deal with an international economic slowdown. That does focus the mind, and yet what should also be at the forefront of our brains is another issue high on the agenda in 2007 – climate change.

Back in 2007 we were suffering from a drought, there was a push to reduce emissions and competing ways to do it as well as a desire from within the LNP to ignore international agreements.

Climate change policy became an election issue in 2007 because it fit with the new versus old difference of Rudd and Howard, and people could feel the change in the drought and heatwaves. Now people feel it still and also see it in the dying fish and terrible water management of the federal and the New South Wales governments. And they can see it in the division and idiocy that the government displays on climate change.

Climate change is now an issue that doesn’t so much differentiate old versus new thinking as it does between parties that are able to think with those utterly incapable of doing so.

And on this issue the ALP, like it did in 2007 with economics, should embrace its past.

Forget stale arguments over whether or not Rudd or the Greens did the right thing with the ETS. The Gillard government did introduce a carbon price – and it worked. It brought with it the long-term stability companies and their lobbyists such as the BCA now say they so desire. It reduces emissions.

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The carbon price did not lose the election. It was lost because the ALP was a basket case of a party so riven with discord that the electorate voted for someone so disliked as was Tony Abbott to be prime minister.

For now, the ALP is adopting a measured approach to emissions – focusing on electricity but fearfully doing all it can not to utter carbon and price (let alone tax) in the same sentence. And maybe a copy of the Gillard carbon price is not achievable now, but they should not cower – because regardless what they do the Coalition will cry “carbon tax”.

Now, like 2007, is a time in which the electorate can feel the need for action. It needs to be grasped. And it is not a time to be fearful. Given the economic ructions accruing, the easy way is to play safe and seek caution, but that will achieve nothing except someone in a decade’s time noting once again we’re in an election year during a time of drought and a country without a decent climate change policy.

Only by then it will be far too late.