Saturday, June 23, 2012

Laura Tingle - "Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation" (QE46)

A lot of people have been talking about this one, and for good reason, I think - in this Quarterly Essay, Tingle has hit upon something. Like all the best diagnoses, it seems somehow obvious once laid out, but that's a function of it having highlighted something that underlies a lot else rather than of any triteness. Having said that, to the extent that Australia is nowadays an 'angry nation' - a not insignificant extent, for sure - I think that it's at least as much due to disillusionment and disgust with the current state of federal politics and political discourse as to the now-unmet sense of entitlement to government provision of the good life, historically developed and more recently fed by successive governments of both political stripe, so neatly analysed in the essay.