The explosive Robodebt inquiry and reinventing capitalism

New Politics: Australian Politics

It’s hard to believe how bad and illegal Robodebt was, but when you have the most incompetent government ever, anything’s possible.
There was a massive amount of explosive evidence to come out from the Robodebt Royal Commission this week, with ministers, political staffers and public servants all coming in to show how inept, corrupt and deceptive the scheme was – an illegal system that was created and instigated by the previous Coalition government, in the hope that nobody would ever find out.
Most of the evidence presented to this Royal Commission is unbelievable – that ministers could be so corrupt and negligent, public servants could be so incompetent, and political staffers could be so ignorant and dense. The Royal Commission is not a court of law, so it can’t prosecute anyone, but some punitive measures need to be taken, even if it is to make sure that these people can never again serve in public life ever again. That’s how bad all of this is.
The Treasurer Jim Chalmers has published a major article titled “Capitalism After The Crises” and the right-wing media had yet another field day – it’s too ambitious, it will end in disaster and the Treasurer is being too arrogant with his suggestion he might be able to re-define capitalism.
Chalmers wants to introduce values-based economics to the Australian community – harnessing the dynamics of technological change, the role of the public sector in innovation, and broadening the spectrum of finance and economics so it closely aligns to human wellbeing and behaviour, and not just a set of numbers.
And this sets up a series of exciting possibilities for the Australian economy – but it’s all been attacked by conservatives – they lack the imagination to understand what the future could look like, and they’re failing to understand history – and in terms of the economic changes that are happening around the world, Australia has to adapt to new economic thinking: otherwise, it’s going to be left behind.