Housewarming

Read the room, Anthony, all five of them, including the two bathrooms

The Guardian today has a story about Labor’s plan to introduce legislation to curb unfair online trading practices, and to my way of thinking, it is one of the most important and consequential areas of legislation the government has tried to address.

What’s more they seem to be doing it in a not half-arsed way:

Anthony Albanese and the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, will on Wednesday announce plans to ban unfair trading practices under Australian consumer law, the latest consumer-focused competition and pricing changes proposed by the government and badged as cost-of-living relief.

“Hidden fees and traps are putting even more pressure on the cost of living and it needs to stop,” Albanese said.

The government said it would legislate “a general prohibition on unfair trading practices”, including “specific prohibitions of a range of dodgy practices”.

The Treasury will consult on the design of that scheme, but Chalmers’ office said areas to be addressed include “subscription traps”, which make it difficult to cancel a subscription, “drip pricing”, where extra fees are gradually added along each stage of a purchase such as for concert tickets, or websites requiring customers to set up accounts which are unnecessary for the purchase they want to make.

Also to be banned are online marketing ploys which “aim to confuse or overwhelm consumers, omit or hide material information, or create a false sense of urgency or scarcity”. Those are said to include “warnings that a customer only has limited time to purchase a product”, commonly used by some large online retailers.

Another key proposal will be to address “dynamic pricing”, which the government described as where product prices change during the transaction process. It is a controversial fee structure, which can see prices spike high above the originally advertised price. The practice recently came under scrutiny after highly sought concert tickets went on sale in Australia.

We are all forced to live in a world where a significant part of our lives involves dealing with businesses in an online environment and it makes us incredibly vulnerable to scam-like behaviour. Even some of the best-known brands in the country ram us through algorithmic, black-box accountability sinks designed to not only strip us of our hard-earned money, but to make it impossible for us to seek any sort of recompense.¹

Labor’s decision to seriously tackle this problem—or these problems—is precisely the sort of legislation a Labor government should be pursuing, the contemporary equivalent of Gough making sure Western Sydney got an adequate sewerage system back in the day. It is the sort of bread-and-butter politics that defines Labor, the sort that was at the heart of Whitlam’s success and appeal as a politician (something we tend to forget these days).

I’ve always loved this extract from a speech Gough gave to the Federal Labor’s Women’s Conference in 1968 and which he reproduced in his book The Whitlam Government:

I am the first Labor Leader who has ever represented the urban sprawl, who has ever represented the outer suburbs. I have lived in those areas for 21 years. I have raised four children in those areas. We have built two houses in them. We have never been connected to the sewer. In this respect we are in common with three quarters of a million men, women and children in Sydney, we are in common with about two thirds of a million in Melbourne, or a quarter of a million - or maybe a third, it is difficult to get the figures - in Brisbane. Furthermore, when we have gone to those places, there was no high school within 12 miles. My children have always had to travel 20 miles to a high school, except our daughter, of course, as there is a high school about a mile away now.

When they were swimming, and two of them have been very good swimmers, at first they had to go 12 miles to a swimming pool. They now have them closer at hand. There were no municipal libraries. There were no paved roads within a mile of where we were. There are still no paved footpaths. For telephones you would wait four years. There is more hepatitis in our region than anywhere else. The only community facilities when the children were young were baby health centres. There was nothing else at all.

And, accordingly, I feel with some experience and conviction that more has to be done in these areas!

He goes onto say that “During the period of rapid growth in the 1950s and 1960s most of the amenities which the residents of Canberra took for granted were inexcusably
absent in the outer suburbs of Sydney. My great objective as a parliamentarian was to dramatise the deficiencies and devise practical government programs to deal with them. It was for me a cause that went to the heart of our way of life. It seemed to me that if governments could not do something for the conditions of life in our cities and suburbs there was something deeply wrong with our system of government and our national priorities.”

Chalmers’ and Albanese’s announcement that they will try to stop us being scammed online is precisely the same sort of retail politics because it goes, to paraphrase Gough, to the heart of our current way of life.

Of course, the announcement is going to be completely drowned out by the parallel revelation that the prime minister and his partner, Jodie Haydon, just coughed up $4.3 million for a waterfront home somewhere on the NSW Central Coast.

Labor supporters are rightly pointing out that this has unleashed another media pile-on for Labor and the prime minister, that it is yet another example of media hypocrisy in that they never go after Peter Dutton—a literal property developer and serial landlord—for this sort of thing. They are rightly pointing out that the prime minister can do whatever he likes with own money,

This is all true, but FFS.

How else are we meant to understand the purchase of this property as other than a completely avoidable, rookie-level political error from an experienced politician who—precisely because of the biases of the system—should’ve known better?

This is not the media’s fault. This is not just another example of the way in which our public political culture is inherently biased against Labor. A Labor prime minister buying this house at this moment in time is so blatantly, transparently stupid that it has the whiff of suicide about it.

It is an act of hubris by a politician who actually didn’t have a lot of popular ballast in the first place; a politician who is already governing on just about the lowest primary vote in our history; who is officially trailing in the polls on a 2PP basis; and who has already struggled to establish his bone fides as a progressive leader.

Buying this beautiful house is such a consequential misreading of the political moment—in ways that are so obvious I don’t even need to spell them out—that it brings into question not just Anthony Albanese’s judgement but his suitability to be Labor leader and prime minister.

The entire logic of Albanese’s approach to government has been that you have to take things slowly, not scare the horses, approach matters pragmatically, incrementally and competently to ensure the long-term viability of the government. We have regularly been told that you can’t do anything if you aren’t in power in the first place; and the new legislation aimed at protecting us online, which I highlighted above, is a perfect example of what can be achieved when a competent government wields that power effectively.

So, how exactly then, does this recent real estate purchase fit with that strategy? Exactly what did the prime minister think it would communicate to the electorate at large, when cost of living is the key political issue of the moment and when a generation of young Australians are being locked out of—not the property market—but of ever being able to afford a home to live in?

I despair.

You can whinge all you like about the unfairness of the reaction, and I understand why people are bristling at the pile on. But the inescapable truth is that the blame for this one lies incontrovertibly at the prime minister’s feet.

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1. “Accountability sink” is a term I have taken from Daniel Davies recent book on cybernetic governance (worth a read): “It is important to be clear, at this stage, exactly what an accountability sink is, and how they are constructed. It’s not just the way in which the hourly paid worker has been set up to act as a human shield. In order to make the sink effective, you need a combination of things: that person, plus a policy that there’s no way to appeal the decision by communicating with a higher level of management.”

Davies, Dan. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (pp. 16-17).