The New Politics of Inflation and Economic Disruption: Unlearned Lessons from the 1980s and 1990s in Australia

In the 1980s, debate over inflation and unemployment in Australia promised to lead to new institutional priorities based on revised, corporatist principles. However, labour's functional capacity to influence policy, particularly anti-inflation policy, evaporated during the neoliberal era. Recently, new contradictions in the economy have emerged (as well as a new mode of accumulation, with altered production demands and political pressures), exposing lessons that remain unlearned from the prior stagflation years and permanent problems and incapacities for the contemporary polity.