Treasurer Joe Hockey: Echoing the Howard government's mutual obligation mantra. Photo: Andrew Meares
“Not fair!” We’ve all heard the anguished cry of the toddler, a political argument with trainer wheels. Our obsession with fairness lingers throughout life, all the way to retirement, as the federal budget debate shows. But what do we mean by fairness?
Labor has seized on community sensitivity to unfairness, mining a seam of righteous anger as the polls swing their way. Yet the Liberals insist the budget is fair. This is not bearpit semantics. The opposing sides deploy the same word but mean different things. These different meanings mark peaks in their ideological landscapes, world-views separated by a chasm of misunderstanding.
Commentators make bold claims that Treasurer Joe Hockey ‘‘has managed to radically redefine the nation’s notion of unfair’’. But has he? Hockey’s exhortation for people ‘‘to accept personal responsibility for their lives’’ echoes the Howard government’s mutual obligation mantra, a consistent line over decades.
Hockey deployed his ''lifters and leaners'' analogy again recently, asking whether it was fair that ‘‘the average working Australian, be they a cleaner, a plumber or a teacher, is working over one month full-time each year just to pay for the welfare of another Australian’’.
The prominent US moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt says this type of argument by conservatives is values-based. ‘‘Everyone cares about fairness,’’ Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
But there are two major kinds of fairness, Haidt says. “On the left, fairness often implies equality, but on the right it means proportionality.” Same word, different meanings. For conservatives, “people should be rewarded in proportion to what they contribute, even if that guarantees unequal outcomes.” Hence the argument over equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes.
Proportionality is Hockey’s version of fairness. ‘‘Ten per cent of the population pays nearly two-thirds of all income tax,’’ he said. ‘‘Maybe these taxpayers would argue that the tax system is already unfair.’’ In Hockey’s world, taking money someone earned via tax is worse than reducing unearned welfare income. That was central to his ''End of the Age of Entitlement'' speech in 2012 when he said (previewing the principles underpinning the current outcry): “The problem arises however when there is a belief that one person has a right to a good or service that someone else will pay for.”
This argument is harder to sustain in the face of someone saying: “I have earned my pension, having paid taxes all my life.” Indeed, concern for pensioner rights might explain Australia’s dislike of the budget, with 61 per cent thinking it unfair. But I suspect the majority’s sense of fairness goes beyond pensioners and embraces all those in need, with most Australians believing “we are, as a people, in some way equal”.
Humans evolved a preference for fairness (however defined) and an abhorrence of cheating to increase our ability to co-operate while also avoiding being exploited – a reciprocity system. So the right, wary of cheating, views too much welfare as a moral issue, a case of right and wrong. Because the left is convinced that fairness means equality, they are blind to the values within the right’s fairness, mistaking it as mere self-interest and greed.
But the right can be too sensitive to cheating and the left a little naive about it. There’s too much scoffing and not enough analysis, on both sides, because people unite over shared morals, breaking down open-minded thinking. “Our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams, and then to blind us from the truth,” Haidt argues in a TED talk about political difference.
As a result of this blinding, the left sees the right’s respect for patriotism, religion and authority as clinging to wicked old days of repression. The right, in its well-intentioned desire to keep society ordered and safe, too readily rejects calls for social progress based on equality-inspired fairness, dismissing critiques as “1970s class warfare” and “old-style socialism”.
And the left believes it holds a monopoly on caring about the underprivileged and unlucky, that only it ennobles justice, because it glorifies fairness and caring. But the right sees more to moral life than care and fairness, including respect for authority, loyalty to the group and a sense of sanctity and purity. These values sometimes compete with care and fairness.
It’s time the left acknowledged the right’s world-view as moral and complex. And it’s time the right saw the benefits of change, not just the threats, and became more flexible on issues of equality. That might be like asking a zebra to become a leopard, but it would be fair.
Jock Cheetham is a Fairfax journalist.