REBUILDING TRUST
ACADEMY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN AUSTRALIA
2024 ANNUAL DINNER KEYNOTE ADDRESS
CANBERRA, 19 NOVEMBER 2024
Thanks Richard [Holden], for the introduction and to the Academy for the kind invitation –
To speak to a room full of so many thinkers, authors, researchers and educators who make lasting contributions to our country through your scholarship and influence on policy.
We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, their tens of thousands of years of cultural, legal and social systems of knowledge, and the richness of those traditions.
And we’re joined by the Governor-General Her Excellency Sam Mostyn, which is a special honour.
***
The timing of this opportunity couldn’t be better or more welcome.
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time with students studying economics, global politics and modern history – many of them, but not all of them, just finishing up high school.
Like Muhammad and Pranav from Parramatta High, who came with their classmates to the Australian Business Economists speech last week, and asked me a brave question about AI policy in the discussion afterwards.
Like Sarah and her classmates from Firbank Grammar School in the Melbourne Bayside suburb Brighton.
Like Alison Harris whose students I met with and introduced to the PM and Cabinet in Perth.
Some really amazing young people.
Same goes for the more than 100 students from Sydney schools who came to help us launch the 25th edition of their economics textbook in September.
The Business Management students from Ballarat High I took an hour of questions from soon after.
And the 200 younger students I spoke to last week at Calamvale Community College, in my electorate south of Brisbane.
This was not just fun, and not just work.
It has for me a deeper meaning and purpose.
And it goes beyond fulfilling generational obligations – though I did want to talk about those obligations a bit tonight.
It’s more than recharging the battery or replenishing stores of faith or seeking encouragement in the idealism of the young.
It’s all of this but it’s more than this too.
It’s looking for answers to probably the defining social, economic and democratic challenge of our time which is the decline of trust.
In the last week and a half I’ve delivered half a dozen speeches in 3 different cities, about foreign policy, productivity, wages and the cost of living, the financial system, investment, retirement incomes, economic reform.
And tomorrow I’m giving a major ministerial statement to the parliament, on the economy.
But underpinning if not undermining all of our efforts across all of these policy areas is the sense laid bare in the final report of the COVID review that there has been an erosion of trust in institutions, like governments.
As Mark Butler said when we released that COVID report, it is going to be a long, hard road to get trust to the level it was before the pandemic.
It’s easily lost and hard to build it back up.
Mark sees part of the answer in his new Australian Centre for Disease Control.
This is an independent, authoritative body to provide advice to the community and to governments, and which will be critical to rebuilding trust in future public health responses.
The loss of trust is not just from COVID, though, that’s just one of three shocks in 15 years –
The GFC before it and an inflation spike exacerbated by two wars –
Which have created economic and social undercurrents that revealed themselves around the world over this longer period, and not just recent weeks in US politics.
These undercurrents have created a sense of alienation.
But a focus on institutions is just as relevant to us in economics and the social sciences as it is to Mark and his friends in the health sciences.
This year the economics Nobel was awarded to Daron Acemoğlu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson for studies of how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.
They see economic institutions as the main reason for differences in economic development.
But as they also write “inclusive economic and political institutions do not emerge by themselves.”
We need to take responsibility, and we are.
That’s why I’ve tried really hard to renew the institutional base we rely on to make better policy in this country.
By revamping the Intergenerational Report and releasing it more regularly.
By reforming the RBA and strengthening its independence.
By refocusing and renewing the Productivity Commission.
By establishing Australia’s first national wellbeing framework – to better align economic and social goals.
And by establishing the Australian Centre for Evaluation to conduct rigorous evaluations of government programs.
I thank my terrific colleague Andrew Leigh, who is here tonight, for his leadership in getting that off the ground.
It’s why when I dropped Professor Katie Steele a line to tell her about some of the students I met who were heading to her PPE degree at the ANU –
I was so delighted to hear she’d been part of a roundtable to consider the next steps here in our agenda to renew our institutions.
***
Institutions matter but so do ideas, and so does how those ideas are conveyed and considered.
Here there is work to do, too.
Our national policy conversation, especially our economic debates, run on too few voices.
If you look at airtime, column inches and attention online, they still skew too narrow.
Our job is to broaden and deepen the pool from which we draw opinion.
So that it’s not dominated by those with ideological, editorial, algorithmic, or other axes to grind.
By including more young people, and more women.
Dr Leonora Risse, who I have come to know, and who has done critical work on gender equality, points to the paradox that economics is increasingly concerned with issues of equity and equality, yet still is unequal as a field.
I also want to acknowledge Professor Rae Cooper and her important research on building gender equality in male-dominated industries. It is great to see you and my exceptional colleague Tim [Ayres] here tonight, Rae.
And also our tremendous colleague Carina [Garland], another PhD and friend of the social sciences in the party room.
As well as Senator Barbara Pocock, a distinguished researcher in this area.
In economics, the challenge starts with enrolments.
RBA data shows that in the 1990s male and female enrolments in high school economics were about on par.
Today men outnumber women two to one, and the ratio is similar at university.
A key social sciences discipline that was already male dominated could become even more so if we’re not careful.
Enrolments have become less diverse along other dimensions as well, including socio-economic status.
Leonora points to three channels of benefits from more diversity in the economics profession.
A deeper utilisation of labour and human capital.
A broader pool of knowledge, ideas and experiences.
And a more comprehensive representation of issues and needs.
These are important everywhere, but especially for our public facing economic institutions.
I’m proud to have appointed the first woman as Governor of the Reserve Bank, Michele Bullock.
And the first woman to chair the Productivity Commission, Danielle Wood, who is with us tonight.
Two outstanding economists and role models.
We also now have a majority of women appointees to boards in the Treasury portfolio for the first time ever – we are proud of that too.
So we are making progress and I want to shout-out here Dr Angela Jackson and the Women in Economics Network who have done terrific work to build the pipeline and profile of women economists.
As well as Her Excellency who among all of the incredible things she has done in her career has been a champion of greater diversity in business and on boards.
But there’s still a lot more to do to make sure that a wide range of voices and perspectives is represented in our economic debates and ultimately feed into better informed policymaking.
***
So I wanted to tell you tonight that I’ve just put this on the agenda to discuss with the state and territory treasurers next week at our formal meeting:
Exploring ways we can work together to lift barriers to the study of economics;
The role treasuries can play, as stewards of the discipline, in making the profession more inclusive;
How we can bring a broader range of views and perspectives into future public policy and advice;
And how we increase the number of women in economic leadership positions at all levels of government, including by exploring more robust and regular reporting.
***
So these remarks are largely a call to action for the academy and the commentary to be deeper, broader, more inclusive and more representative in our economy and society.
They’re also an opportunity for me to express my personal gratitude to you and for the social sciences.
I had a wonderful history teacher in High School, Norbert Greulich, who brought to life 20th century history with his own lived experience.
I was fortunate to spend time at Griffith and the ANU working for and with some of Australia’s most accomplished public policy thinkers.
I get to work with our best economists inside and outside the Treasury, including with a number of you here tonight.
Thank you.
Today, as I said, my parliamentary colleagues include social scientists who have been leaders in their disciplines and brought that skill, scholarship and sense of service to their work representing their communities.
One of them, Anne Aly, writes in her memoir of how “the need to understand” motivated her research.
And then of her compulsion to connect that understanding with practice and policy.
Using her understanding to counter extremism and radicalisation in young people.
It’s in that kind of understanding, in our institutions and in our ideas, we find trust.
In trust we seek progress.
Progress we owe the generations after us.
So that when we throw the keys to our economy and society to those students I spoke about from Parramatta and Perth, Brighton, Ballarat and Brisbane, they’ll be ready.
Enjoy your night.
