Here’s my list of some of the recent unintended consequences of a loss of social cohesion: Australians treat politics and politicians with contempt, and because politicians know this, we now have a government driven by what the latest round of focus groups have said – that is, politicians have become followers, not leaders – they bring out the worst in us, not the best in us.

And because voters have become so mistrustful of all elites, they are in a mood for more and more regulation, as they endeavour to bring certainty to an uncertain world.

The increasing casualization of the workforce means that families now need to manage more jobs, but with little or no security.

And our treatment of refugees reinforces with our Asian trading partners that Australia is a hypocritical nation, keen to lecture them on what we perceive as their human rights violations, but refusing to concede that we have human rights issues of our own.

And that’s just the big picture!

Thinking about your own business, you might consider the implications inherent in the loss of trust in your brands.

The definition of a brand that we like to use is this: “A brand is the intangible values associated with a badge of reassurance” – so for Volvo its safety, for Coca-Cola it’s fun, but if trust has ever been an important component of your brand values, then its loss means your brand is worth less than it was.

To say nothing of how hard it is to get productivity gains out of people who might work for you, but who don’t trust you, or how hard it is to get them to stay, if all that binds you together is money.

Now my list is by no means exhaustive, but it does demonstrate that there are real, bottom-line consequences for business when Australians get out of kilter with each other.

Belinda Probert, a professor in the Centre for Applied Social Research at RMIT University, delivering the sixth Barton lecture, came at this topic from a different direction, and using very different language, but I want to quote her in some detail, because I think what she had to say was absolutely germane to the point I’m trying to make.

After a scholarly dissection of the deepening class divisions in Australia, she accused us (i.e. business) of losing what she called “our egalitarian manners”, and here I quote:

“If we want to be able to go on sitting in the front seat of the taxi, and talking respectfully with each other across class differences, then we must first face up to the scale and depth of the social and economic marginalisation that we have allowed to occur in recent years, and the intensity of people’s feelings of insecurity.

If we want to revive our egalitarian manners, we must engage in a mutually reinforcing process of mobilising our egalitarian traditions and building new institutions that regulate the market and redistribute the wealth it creates.

The possibility of political solidarity between the middle class, the working class and the underclass – I don’t think I’d count on the overclass”, she says, “depends, in part, on our ability to remember and revivify an emotional solidarity that is there in our history.”

End quote.

Now if you’re not really alarmed by that, you’re not paying attention.

Basically, Professor Probert seems to be saying that we, i.e., the business, are the problem, not the solution – and she is inviting basically everybody, except us, to manage around us to create new structures and institutions that will re-regulate markets and redistribute wealth.

Now I’ve deliberately picked out the most inflammatory bits of what is a fine, very thoughtful paper – and frankly girls have always felt that sitting in the front seat of a cab is highly overrated - but it is a powerful metaphor for remembering our egalitarian manners.

Because if we respond to this in the way we too often do, with the Business Council of Australia or the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry delivering another lecture on why globalization is good for us, then we merely enrage our fellow Australians further, and reinforce Government’s view that there are no votes in being nice to business. As a consequence we are less likely to get the reforms we need to continue to operate effectively, and our lobbying falls on deaf ears.

Now this is not some plea for a return to the 50’s, or a rant against economic rationalism, but Professor Probert is right to this extent – we could do a better job of remembering our manners. We could begin by acknowledging that our relentless, and necessary, war on costs has hurt a great many people. If you are a blue-collar worker, over 45, you face a very bleak future, particularly if you live in regional Australia. These people are unlikely to be successfully retrained as knowledge workers, or to find a job in the hospitality industry – and once they reach 55, they’re not even counted as being unemployed – they’re officially invisible.