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Indy Neogy's avatar

I'll say "with love" that being a FBoEE puts you in a place where a lot more people are going to listen to you about economics and information than (eg) me (former engineer then anthropologist who studied economists and decided they had developed a weird set of tribal beliefs about information). Not sure what this says about Reeves, probably that if she actually wants to make the interesting and modern centre-left ideas she has happen, touting the FBoEE probably will make it easier for her to do it than it would be for (eg) John McDonnell. But the hanging question (as the spectres of Hancock and Haldane loom like Banquo's ghost) is does she actually want to push the good ideas, or whatever contrarian ones are buzzing in the back of her brain?

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John Quiggin's avatar

"Bank of England people have exactly the same cultural cringe with respect to the private sector as any other public servants of the last five decades"

This is a really big deal. I wrote something similar about Australia and Covid. Key quote asterisked

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2021/september/1630418400/john-quiggin/dismembering-government#mtr

I'll quote at length since you've already given the tl;dr version

Suppose that a Commonwealth government such as the one we had 50 years ago was in place when the pandemic began. It’s highly unlikely that the crisis management would have been left to the states. In the 1970s, the Commonwealth still operated quarantine facilities and had its own department of works, capable of building new facilities or expanding old ones. In the previous decades it had managed both the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of troops from World War Two and the provision of housing to support an immigration program on an unparalleled scale.

The farcical situation today where Australians stranded abroad have to pay horrendous amounts for a handful of available seats on commercial flights would scarcely have occurred if, as in the 1970s, the Commonwealth owned its own airline (and, for that matter, rail and shipping businesses).

On the medical front, the Commonwealth ran its own network of repatriation hospitals and owned Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, now privatised as CSL. The question of vaccine passports would certainly not have been controversial, since the government required a range of vaccinations for travellers (indeed, the scar from smallpox inoculation, required before overseas travel, served as a kind of permanent passport).

*Above all, the Commonwealth government had confidence in its own capacity, employing the best and brightest graduates of the universities that had expanded massively thanks to Commonwealth funding beginning in the 1960s. The Commonwealth government saw itself as both more competent and less subject to interest group pressure than the states. Under both conservative and Labor governments, the Commonwealth had steadily expanded the scope and scale of its operations, reducing the roles of both state governments and the business sector.*

The Commonwealth government of those times would have been far better equipped to deal with a pandemic, and would have seen itself as having the obvious responsibility to do so. We might therefore have expected a national response, including requirements for Qantas to repatriate Australians from overseas, a rapid expansion of dedicated quarantine facilities, and a consistent national policy on lockdowns and movement restrictions.

Of course, we have seen nothing like this. At almost every stage in the process, the Commonwealth has sought to avoid responsibility, and transfer it either to the states or to private parties ranging from management consultants to hotel operators.

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