By Nick Earls Updated Fri 2 May 201

Photo: We need a system that reflects who we are now as a nation and who we will be. (Julian May: photoxpress.com)

Australia is a nation full of humans, not a balance sheet. The Commission of Audit may have looked at the numbers but the Government needs to look after the people, writes Nick Earls.

According to Commission of Audit chairman Tony Shepherd, "We've answered a simple arithmetic equation". Maybe that's where the problem starts.

Ever heard of that old line about surgeons: "The operation was a success, but the patient died"?

A nation is not a balance sheet. Perhaps the Commission was asked to treat it as one, but there are 23 million humans here too, and I don't see much space allowed for them in the Commission's report. A neat set of figures a decade from now would be no compensation for serious negative social consequences.

The report seems to take a sideways look at America, a country that shows us the best and worst of capitalism, and cherrypicks the worst bits. It radically slashes the minimum wage, decreases a whole range of benefits connected to things like health and education, and imposes costs on people who can't afford to pay.

In too many ways, it looks like How to Create a Permanent Underclass 101.

It turns cooperative federalism into competitive federalism, something else that, in the US, has widened the opportunity gap between children born in rich states and those born in poor states.

Am I saying we should do nothing? No. We need to better align our spending and our tax base, but to do it we need a system that reflects who we are now as a nation and who we will be.

When the pension age was set at 65, that was close to the average lifespan. We now live far longer, are healthier for far longer and many jobs are less physical. I'm happy to work until I'm 70, if I'm able to. Actually, I'm happy to keep writing as long as people keep buying my books.

I want to grow up to be Tom Keneally or David Malouf, still in the game, relevant, putting out quality work and paying tax aged 78 and 80.

The Commission of Audit isn't the only group releasing a report this week. Anglicare's snapshot of rental affordability was taken on April 5. It found 62,000 properties available for rent that day. Single people on benefits could afford 1 per cent of them, single people on the current minimum wage could afford 4 per cent and age pensioners could afford 3.6 per cent. Welfare agencies say people are already eating less to pay rent.

This is a crisis involving people, not an arithmetic equation, and several of the Commission's recommendations would make it quickly worse.

I'm hoping the commission process is at least 50 per cent politics. (That we deserve better politics is a subject for another day, or indeed most other days.) The playbook goes like this:

Step 1: You go into an election saying there's a financial crisis, but promising not to cut anything that'll cost you votes.

Step 2: You win the election and set up an independent commission of audit run by people certain to tell you what you want to hear. (See how that word independent just slipped in there? The Government isn't coming up with this stuff, it's those independent people. It's been several years since any of them was on a Coalition front bench.)

Step 3: The independent commission discovers there's a crisis, but this isn't the lower-case pre-election crisis. It's now been revealed to be a sixteen-point, bold, italicised, capital letter CRISIS. We've moved from "don't frighten the horses" to "unless we face up to this, we could all be eating the horses". This crisis calls for drastic action.

Step 4: But not that drastic. Thanks very much, independent commission, but here comes the budget. Is it possible that, behind the scenes, Joe Hockey has been whittling away at the big stick to reduce it to something medium-sized? Something that might have looked brutal at any other time, but that's designed to look more like conventional warfare when sized up against a nation-buster?

Yes, that crunching you hear as the Treasurer walks to the podium on budget night might be him stepping on the litter of broken promises, but you'll remember him as the man who saved you from that nasty independent commission of audit.

That's a cynical view, perhaps, but politics is a game played cynically, and not only by one side. I hope it's a guess that's on the mark.

Much as I might not love it as a tactic, I'll take it over the idea of the commission's recommendations being implemented lock, stock and barrel.

Yes, we need to plan to manage debt, but let's not rewrite the federation and populate it with working (and not working) poor in order to do it.

The Commission of Audit looked at the numbers. The Government needs to look at the nation and plan for all of us.

Nick Earls is a novelist. His next novel, Analogue Men, will be published in July. View his full profile here.

We're a nation, not a balance sheet - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)