Big small government

There is a conspiracy theory that has long animated the hard right in Australia, as in the United States and other places: that what it calls “the left” is committed to the introduction of “socialism”, and that this socialism would obliterate individual freedom. Anxious warnings about particular policies of the Australian Labor Party and the Greens can be found regularly in the pages of the hard right’s journals (Quadrant and The Spectator Australia), frequently in its mainstreaming operations (The Australian and Sky News Australia) and occasionally in the speeches of its parliamentarians. “I would characterise Labor’s policies as socialist, absolutely,” Mathias Cormann famously declared in 2017.

Specifically, it’s the prospect of individual freedom’s erosion under policies of redistribution (higher taxes to pay for public and social services, including social security) that most concerns the hard right. So it’s somewhat surprising when a right-leaning government implements laws and technologies that undermine individual freedom much more successfully than redistributive tax-and-transfer could ever manage.

Centrelink’s automatically generated robodebts; the Coalition’s plan to drug test welfare recipients; the ever-expanding “quarantining” of social security incomes on BasicsCards; even the Australian Tax Office’s use of “hi-tech cross-checking” systems to detect workers who have overclaimed deductions “even by just a little”, as assistant tax commissioner Karen Foat put it today – these are all examples of high-tech tools that directly diminish individual freedoms.

Robodebt’s automated, algorithmic data-matching is now notorious, mostly because of its use of impersonal and apparently flawed technology to generate debts – sometimes seven years old – that individual welfare recipients then need to prove they don’t owe. Robodebt’s initial targets were young people and single parents. A confidential departmental cabinet submission last month outlined plans to expand its focus to include aged pensioners and Aboriginal people living in remote communities. In a submission to the Senate committee inquiring into the scheme, the department confirmed this week that it wants to run almost double the number of automated “income reviews” that it’s already run to meet its own “savings targets”.

The ATO’s annual warnings to individual taxpayers are even more galling given the ability of giant multinationals to escape tax burdens almost entirely – it emerged this week that Netflix paid $182,000 in tax in Australia despite earning $533 million in Australian revenue. The Morrison government has signalled its intention to go after the tech giants, but it’s much easier to use automated systems to track, audit, fine and punish individual taxpayers who can’t rely on teams of well-paid lawyers and accountants.

The need for departments to think up ever more innovative and effective methods to “save” expenses is made increasingly necessary due to the Coalition’s insistence on two other policies – tax cuts and budget surpluses – and these during a time of economic sluggishness. These policies have their origins in a simplistic commitment to what the right calls “small government”; it was, after all, the denial of individual freedom under Soviet-style “big governments” that animated the right’s intellectual prophets, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.

Despite the hard right’s conspiracies, nobody in Australia is advocating for a Soviet-style socialist system of central planning, protection for state-owned monopolies and absolute income equality. In his influential argument against Soviet-style socialism, The Road to Serfdom (1944), Hayek even allowed for the kind of limited redistribution, economic policymaking and social and public service provision with which Australians are now familiar.

Yet it is those who would be most sympathetic with Hayek’s views – the Morrison government – who are stewarding the regime of “automated inequality” and its surveillance of poor and, increasingly, middle-class Australians. It’s a regime that is actually harming individual freedom, quite unlike the redistributive policies Labor took to the last election.

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