A world of connected problems needs an election better than anything we’ll get

What issues do you want to hear politicians and would-be politicians addressing seriously in the election campaign?

Probably climate, right? Integrity in politics; the health of the economy; the sustainability of our government spending? Health spending? Housing affordability? Aged care? Childcare? Education? Indigenous recognition and Closing the Gap?

We know the big issues that people say decides their vote are the economy — both “economic management” (which the Coalition owns as an issue) and jobs and household incomes (which tends to favour Labor), and health (also Labor). For younger voters, housing is more likely to be a key point. But for voters with greater economic certainty and higher incomes, subjects such as climate, refugees and integrity are more likely to sway votes.

The problem with any list of “big issues” that should feature in election campaigns is that it will fail to convey the connectedness of many of them. And invariably, major parties won’t grapple with complexity, except in the most obvious and politically advantageous situations.

Take aged care, which Labor is seeking to make a central issue in the campaign, while the government argues it deserves credit for the big increase in spending (primarily to home care) it has made in the past two years.

Aged care by itself merits being a major issue — one of basic decency. But it is primarily a workforce matter — any serious reform of aged care must address the problem of attracting a lot more workers. That means it’s a budget issue as well — one of fiscal sustainability.

As a workforce issue, it’s also one of industrial relations — the Fair Work Commission is hearing the work value case that should increase aged care worker remuneration. But it’s also a migration matter: we are relying heavily on migrant workers to look after our seniors. More than 20% of aged care workers are born outside Australia, and up to 30% of more recent arrivals in the aged care sector before the pandemic.

And the challenges of aged care are all the greater in regional and remote Australia, where workforce problems are far more acute — regional and especially remote health services struggle to attract enough staff, let alone aged care providers who can’t pay as much as health providers.

That’s one example of how connected issues can be. But let’s tug on some of those threads. Take the workforce in regional communities. There’s a growing crisis with rental and housing affordability in regional areas, smaller capitals and the farthest-flung areas of our large cities as part of the broader hosing affordability crisis.

Michael Pascoe and Alan Kohler at The New Daily have been banging on about this for months. It’s no good trying to attract workers to move to a regional centre when there are no affordable houses to buy or rent. We’ve stolidly refused to address housing affordability even as it has radically worsened in the pandemic (the parliamentary inquiry was a facile political exercise chaired by a facile politician).

And housing is related to our dependence on migration as an engine of our economy, with the government keen to reopen our borders and let in more than 200,000 (in net terms) new arrivals a year. That can only dramatically worsen housing affordability. It also acts to suppress wages (quite deliberately), which exacerbates household income pressures. It also puts further pressure on our infrastructure, including energy and transport, two of the three key sources of CO2 emissions (the third is agriculture).

Pull these threads and you can quickly find yourself in issues apparently unrelated to where you started. Many problems in aged care have resulted from the overly close relationship between for-profit providers and the Coalition, just as climate policy is hostage to the control exercised over the Coalition — and Labor to a lesser extent — by fossil fuel interests.

These are problems of state capture that go to matters like political donations, providing jobs for former public officials, public influence campaigns and stacking state institutions. The lack of a federal ICAC and basic transparency measures thus connects directly to issues such as climate policy and problems in key sectors like aged care.

The same applies to defence and the obscure relationships between arms companies and the defence establishment. And while we’re on national security, we’ve learnt that while our addiction to fossil fuels can generate big profits for fossil fuel companies, it also means households are hostage to international price spikes in energy prices — something the transition to renewable energy and large-scale electrification will end if the government ever allows it to be achieved. It doesn’t take much to get from aged care to political integrity and from there to defence.

There’s little effort to connect these issues in the public mind by major party politicians, who — even if they understand the connections — default to simple narratives, three-word slogans and campaigns pitched at the attention and intelligence level of the least engaged voters in the country. In a connected world, we’re controlled by silo thinking.