The shadow finance minister, Jim Chalmers, will warn that Australia is “dangerously ill-prepared” for technological changes revolutionising employment, and argue that the Labor party must focus on finding a fair distribution of the benefits of the new machine age.
Chalmers will use the annual John Button lecture on Monday night to argue that policymakers need to ensure “people aren’t left behind when the nature of work changes” and also to ensure “the benefits of the new machine age are distributed widely and not just concentrated in the hands of the few”.
“We can’t use unpredictability as an excuse to do nothing,” Chalmers will argue. “We can’t just throw up our hands because the challenge might seem too hard.”
He says policy paralysis will expose Australians to the potential pitfalls of technological change and leave them unable to grasp the benefits.
Chalmers, who has written a book about technological disruption with the former telco boss Mike Quigley, says the rise of machines, automation and artificial intelligence is happening at a time when economies are still unwinding from the effects of the global financial crisis.
In the Button lecture, he will note wages growth in Australia is low, living standards are declining, underemployment is at or near historic highs, “GDP has a one in front of it”, and Australia has record gross and net debt.
He says voter discontent with politics, while not a new phenomenon, is fed by perceptions of division and polarisation “and a prime minister more focused on shoring up his position in the party room than showing some leadership – on energy, on marriage equality, on anything”.
He says Labor needs to persist with ambitious policy rather than a small-target political strategy and “resist the temptation to be the gleeful spectators at the federal political circus”.
“We want to be more substantial than the proverbial last angry paragraph of a news story,” Chalmers will say. “We don’t want to be the lesser of two evils.
“We are determined to enter government via the front door of substantial policy work, not sneak through the back door of despair or disappointment with our opponents’ failures.”
Chalmers says Labor policy needs to grapple with the big upsides and the big challenges of the next industrial revolution, starting with reforms to education.
He says restoring full needs-based funding for schools “will combat technological inequality”, and lifelong learning is essential to ensuring participation in an evolving labour market.
Policies such as income smoothing could help with peaks and troughs in employment “whether that’s through supplementing income once a displaced worker is forced to accept a far lower-paying job, or incentives to encourage workers to take out wage insurance.”
He will say: “Workers in the gig economy, or those working several jobs at once, will need to be able to pool or take their entitlements with them. Portable entitlements will give those in insecure work the opportunity to save for retirement and insure against sickness or other risks.
“In a world where some jobs will become obsolete, we’ll also need to help workers find completely new jobs. Labour market programs focused on the skills people have, not just the occupations they have filled, could make a big difference here.”
