What happens if we shift the paradigm?

August 11, 2025

This is only the latest in an endless series of articles on what government needs to do to fulfill its raison d’etre, facilitating the improved well-being of the nation. Few ever question the paradigm that was adopted globally in the 1980s that replaced the once-clearly understood role with one that says the public sector is best seen as a profit-making business competing for customers’ dollars.

Few ask what turned the problems of the last quarter-century into seemingly intractible ones that are implied as permanent features of our supposedly best-ever economic system.

I’m talking about what George Monbiot termed “The Invisible Doctrine” which has many aliases; monetarism, neoliberalism, economic rationalism, Chicago School or Austrian School neoclassical economics, etc.

It’s invisible because it’s now a cultural orthodoxy presented as if undifferentiated and omnipresent, like water to a fish or air to a Neanderthal. It just is, this is how we discuss it. Economics behind all policy now a zero-sum game.

It is time the many excellent heterodox economists, some Australian eg Steve Keen, Stephen Hail, Geoff Harcourt, Bill Mitchell, Prue Kerr etc., currently treated as heretics, were given a chance to show how changing our view can change society