Infrastructure Investment for Full Employment: A Social Democratic Program of Funds Regulation

Abstract

Since the election of the Rudd Government in 2007 and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) from 2008, a new debate has begun in Australia that links social democratic socio-economic policy, infrastructure inadequacy, and retirement incomes. These issues can indeed be reexamined together in the light of the quasi-Keynesian state activism that has erupted in response to the GFC. Residual Keynesianism has come to the fore again in the advanced western capitalist countries, in the forms of deficit financing, increased state regulation, and nationalisations in the banking sector. Politically, this suggests that Social Democracy remained alive (although driven into temporary retreat) as the alternative regulatory framework throughout its period of supposed eclipse by Self-Regulatory (or Neo-Liberal) Capitalism since the 1970s. Perhaps we are now witnessing a significant shift in the dominant political economic regime in response to the GFC. This paper tries to make a contribution to this debate by examining the centrality of managed funds to the development of a social democratic strategy.