Comment on RBA Monetary Policy Board member refutes on-going claims from the RBA governor about unemployment by Philip Lawn

The useful part

Every day that we fail to make the necessary reforms the more difficult it becomes politically to implement them. It was easier once, which is why the necessary policies and reforms should have been implemented when the opportunity was there. when individual sacrifices would have been small and the long-term benefits enormous.

How it works

• Instead, governments have tinkered around the edges, at best, to maintain electoral support, thus indicating how deficient our political systems and institutions are.
• The reforms required are considered extreme only because of the extent of the personal sacrifices most of us must make to bring about an ecologically sustainable, equitable, and truly efficient socio-economy.
• In most countries, it has been a political shift to the extreme right rather than the extreme left.

What to take from it

As the impending problems of the past become costly problems of the present and governments fail to bite the bullet, if only because it is political suicide to do so, the established political parties lose electoral support and there is a shift to political extremes.

Details worth keeping

I think this is due to the successful propaganda of the right (e.g., the Powell Manifesto in the USA), the failure of Communism, and the neoliberal reforms starting in the 1970s and 1980s, which has created an anti-left sentiment in many societies.