The Great Reset

This was the title of a plan launched by the World Economic Forum in 2020 in response to the COVID pandemic.  It proposes that after the great disruption to the world economy caused by the pandemic, we should not go back to the world as we knew it, capitalism as we knew it, democracy as we knew it, but rethink what those systems mean and how we can reshape them to produce a greener, smarter, fairer society.  One of the central propositions is that government and business should work together through private/public partnerships on projects in which social values are also given consideration.  Critics say that this creates a shift in power from elected governments to unrepresentative corporations who, it is claimed, are simply out to increase their markets.

All this might seem a little arcane except that, in a positive way, we see the ideas filtering down in the economic ambitions of our Treasurer, Jim Chalmers.