In 2016, the first-term Liberal–National Party Coalition, then led by Malcolm Turnbull, went to a federal election, promising the Australian people "Jobs and Growth". It won with the slenderest of majorities: only one seat. It then announced its "jobs plan" to the electorate. In the tradition of the ‘trickle-down’ economics that has defined the Liberal–National Party world view since Malcolm Fraser became prime minister in 1975, it planned tax cuts of unprecedented size for Australia’s richest businesses. The idea was that the sudden cash windfall to a company budget would inspire said company to spend money on projects that might employ people. Policy devised on this basis is how Australia strayed so far from its ‘vision splendid’ of the fair go, to the record inequality of the present. The government’s thinking goes by many names, depending on when and where it’s dominated political debate: free market ideology, economic rationalism, Reaganomics, Thatcherism, the Chicago School, market economics (when it’s friendly), neoliberalism (when it’s not). Whatever you call it, it remains a form of structured economic unfairness, and it’s been political orthodoxy around the world since the 1970s. It was the effects of the New South Wales government trialling neoliberal frameworks for state education that led me to my first union protest in the 1980s. Then treasurer Scott Morrison and then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull at a COAG meeting in 2016. Credit:Andrew Meares In the post-World War II period, the Western democracies’ governments had economic policies that were more about building institutions and infrastructure, regulating civic behaviour, maintaining full employment levels and providing quality public services, than they were about letting business do whatever it wanted.

But, internationally, 'free market' think-tanks - like our Institute of Public Affairs - campaigned to influence political parties, treasuries, business groups, economists, journalists and academics to believe that a deregulated 'market' of businesses and corporate activity was the best economic means to assign resources to people. They offered powerful groups and individuals the convenient

gospel that if you hand wealth to the rich, it will somehow ‘trickle down’ to the rest of us. Members of the modern Liberal Party are ideologues of these beliefs. "If you give businesses the incentive to invest more … they will employ more," Mr Turnbull told reporters when he was spruiking tax cuts in 2018. "It’s always worked in the past. It’s pretty basic. It’s Economics 101, really … so that’s why we’re pressing on with our enterprise tax program, because we know that it will result in more investment and more jobs." Turnbull and friends should maybe have stuck around for more subjects than "Economics 101", because what he claimed "always worked in the past" has never, actually, worked in the past.

***** Labor’s Paul Keating, as treasurer in the 1980s, led the most radical remaking of the Australian economy into a neoliberal framework. The government he led retained investment in

expansive social programs, infrastructure and services, and worked with unions to extend and deliver positive initiatives like Medicare and compulsory superannuation. At the same time, it privatised formerly government-owned assets like the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas. Keating is remembered as a "staunch defender of open markets", but he’s watched what neoliberalism’s wreaked in the last 30 years, and come to question its core assumptions.

Sally McManus addresses Qantas employees at the airline's headquarters in Mascot in September, after workers' wage claims were frozen even as management took bonuses. Credit:James Alcock "We have a comatose world economy held together by debt and central bank money," he said in March 2017. "Liberal economics has run into a dead end and has had no answer to the contemporary malaise." ***** I was travelling Australia, meeting union members, when then treasurer Scott Morrison fronted the nation and claimed Australia should "look to the US" to see how well corporate tax cut policies were working. Where I went, workers weren’t offering analyses of the role of "central bank money" in the running of the world economy, but that didn’t make their criticisms of the plan to cut corporate tax any less valid. People were asking: "But if they don’t pay even their fair share of tax now, why should we let them get away with paying even less?"

And: "If they will supposedly give us pay rises when they pay less tax, why aren’t any of the companies who pay no tax now already giving pay rises?" They were questions the government deflected, waving to the example of massive corporate tax cuts the US President, Donald Trump, had just introduced that reduced the rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent across America. As recently as August 2018, the Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann, was still insisting that: "The evidence on the ground is very clear. The Trump tax cuts have led to

stronger investment, stronger growth, lower unemployment rate and higher wages." But The Conversation fact-checked the claim, and discovered that the small gains made in these areas of the US economy weren’t caused by the tax cuts, as much as conforming to a pattern of growth that began in 2016, when the nation started to recover properly from the Global Financial Crisis. Economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times in April 2018, was more blunt: "A vast majority of businesses say either that the tax law has had no effect on their investment plans, or that they are planning only a modest increase," he wrote, identifying that the greatest beneficiary of the cuts to date had been shareholders receiving higher returns. It was a fact that inconveniently tallied with the contents of a secret Business Council of Australia (BCA) survey that had been leaked earlier in 2018. The Australian Financial Review reported that more than 80 per cent of businesses that responded to the survey planned to return the windfall in dividends to their shareholders or increase capital expenditure, but not to raise wages or create new jobs. Fortunately, our government lost the vote to pass its own corporate tax cuts, when the other parties and independents joined with the ALP and the Greens in the Senate after they got the message from the electorate that people were not believing the trickle-down promises. When something’s intent does not look fair, only a fool could believe its output will be anything like fair. While there are a few fools in Australia, fortunately they are not a majority.