Australian Affluence and the Left

Abstract

In recent years the Australia Institute - or more particularly its Executive Director, Clive Hamilton - has been advancing a view about Australia's level of affluence and its implications. As a flow-on perhaps of his interesting and useful work on the Genuine Progress Indicator (Hamilton 1997), in which he rightly questions the use of GDP growth as a measure of wellbeing, Hamilton has extended his concerns to a point where he now questions a number of important presuppositions of the political left.This article takes issue with the main direction of Hamilton's argument about what Australia's affluence means for the left. We argue that, at the level of theory, the 'affluenza thesis' fails to take account of some central insights of political economy, and, at an empirical level, is silent on or indifferent to a number of developments.