En Passant

Most readers would be aware that the Greens have agreed to back Abbott government cuts to the asset test for the pension. According to Sky News the whole package

… will mean about 170,000 pensioners will get an extra $15 a week, while about 91,000 homeowner retirees will lose their part pension and another 235,000 will have their pension reduced.

Here’s how the Nationals Seniors group in their campaign against the cuts describes them:

The Coalition and the Greens have struck a deal to cut your pension.

If passed by the Senate next week, 325,000 pensioners will lose some, or all, of their pension.

From 2017, the assets test threshold for home-owning couples will be lowered from $1.15 million to $823,000.

For single home-owners it will drop from $775,000 to $547,000.

In addition, the current taper rate will double from $1.50 to $3.

The changes mean a single person with a small home, with an income of $17,875 p.a. (3.25% current upper level DSS deeming rate) from $550,000 in additional savings will no longer qualify for a part pension.

Yet a single person with a small home but no additional savings will continue to receive the full Age Pension of around $22,365 a year (2015 Age Pension amount) plus state and territory concessions on rates, utilities and registrations.

The cuts will ‘save’ $2.4 billion over 4 years. The Greens and others are painting them as a redistribution from the rich to the poor. They aren’t.

Not only that but the Greens won a meaningless ‘concession’ from the Government to include the superannuation tax concessions (which forgo revenue of over $30 billion with 38% of that going to the top ten percent of income earners) in the recently finished public consultations on tax reform prompted by the tax white paper Re:think.

So the Government has re-opened the consultation process but both Abbott and Hockey have made clear there will be no changes to superannuation while they are in power. The tax concessions of the rich are safe, and the Greens know it.

Are the changes fair? No. Dave Oliver, the Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, sent me and millions of other unionists an email on Saturday. It said in part:

This deal will see ordinary Australians worse off while wealthy self-funded retirees continue to receive generous tax benefits.

Analysis by respected research firm Rice Warner and superannuation experts Industry Super Australia shows those hit the hardest by the Greens – Abbott deal are middle to low income working people earning $75 000 or below.

That’s most of us.

You can read the full details here but it’s pretty shocking that the Greens have signed up to a deal that will disadvantage around 80% of single women retiring in 2055 as well as single men across most age groups.

Here’s part of what the linked press release (above) of Rice Warner and Industry Super Australia says:

According to data produced by actuaries Rice Warner and ISA, the proposed changes will impact most heavily on middle to low income workers earning average wages of $75,000 or below, and women most severely.

“One of the most troubling outcomes of this proposal is that around 80% of single women retiring in 2055 will be disadvantaged,” said Mr Whiteley.

“As it is, around 63% of single women will not be able to retire comfortably through to 2055, even with super, pension payments and other savings combined. This measure will deepen that inequity.”

Other impacts indicate:

•Single males currently aged 25-29 on incomes between around $27,500 to $143,000 would be adversely affected by the proposed cuts to the age pension.

•Single males currently aged 45-49 on incomes between $56,000 to $183,000 would be adversely affected by the proposed cuts to the age pension.

•Single males currently aged 55-59 on incomes between $52,000 to $160,000 would be adversely affected by the proposed cuts to the age pension.

These figures from Rice Warner on the pension changes show that the cuts are about attacking one section of the working class plus others and giving a few other retired workers a small pension increase.

All the while Don Argus and his wife continue to receive their $1.2 m super pensions tax free.

This is part of the Government’s strategy – protect the rich and their super while screwing workers and others on the pension. This chart – Chart 6 – from the Murray Inquiry into the Financial System – shows how unfair the superannuation tax concessions are.

 

The Abbott government’s pension cuts are part of a wider agenda to cut the pension even further over time. They failed with their pension indexation changes in the 2014 Budget so now are trying a more sneaky approach – us and them fake class war – to achieve a similar result. The cuts themselves are part of a wider attack on state payments to poor and working class people. It is no accident Morrison has begun calling the pension a welfare payment.

The Australia Institute did some analysis this year which argues that abolishing the superannaution concessions could see the abolition of pension income and asset tests and an 25% increase in the pension for everyone. Thus David Ingles says:

Why not make the pension universal – free of means test – and abolish the tax concessions? This would leave enough – even on the Treasury’s conservative ‘revenue gain’ figures – to raise the base pension rate by 25% and thereby ensure that most people gained more on the pension side than they would lose on the tax side. Some 80% of the population are estimated to be net winners – that is, their total income in retirement would be higher than under the current system. Particular benefit would flow to people, such as mothers, who had broken labour force histories.

Like David I believe in a universal pension (i.e. for everyone over 65 regardless of income or accumulated wealth). Otherwise you end up with these sorts of ‘hit worker’ results disguised as hit the rich arguments which some people like the Greens have fallen for.

The best way to address the accumulation of wealth by the rich is to tax it as income as it is being earned or wealth as it is being accumulated, not deny people including workers a pension or cut their pension. That means among other things a more progressive income tax system and a wealth tax plus sweeping away the tax expenditures that favour the rich.

In their eagerness to prove their ‘realistic and pragmatic’ credentials the Greens have been sold a pension pup that attacks retired workers but leaves the superannuation of the rich untouched.

For more information:

The full Rice Warner report on the Bill cutting pensions can be found here.

Miranda Stewart from the ANU’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute says the cuts will hit middle and upper middle retirees (i.e. workers) but not the rich (ie bosses). She says the pension changes are effectively a 7.8 percent wealth tax on middle Australia.

Andrea Bunting in Green Left Weekly has a good analysis too. Greens support pension cuts but keep benefits for the rich.

 

So Bill Shorten as a leader of the Australian Workers’ Union negotiated some rotten Enterprise Agreement deals that kept the bosses very happy and the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union out. The CFMEU called one agreement, the East Link deal that saved the bosses up to $100 million, as second rate and a shocker.

It just so happens that some bosses like the AWU so much they make payments to it – up to $1m over the period 2004 to 2007 – to express their gratitude. Sometimes the payments are the union dues of the workforce. Bosses paying their workers’ union dues? Nothing unethical here. Move on. And it may be such payments increased the voting power of the AWU within the ALP.

Other payments appear to be for unexplained services or in one case for ‘an on-site “workplace change facilitator”, whose role was to balance the “needs of the unionised workforce and the company”.’

One Labor Party heavy, Richard Marles,  has defended Shorten saying that the East link deal is an example of how well enterprise bargaining works. In that truth lies a reality of the sickness at the heart of the Labor Party and the reformist project.

Labor is a party committed to managing capitalism. Its links with the trade union bureucracy mean it can often implement pro-boss policies that the Liberals, the open party of capital, can often only dream about. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments were the best of the neoliberal governments around the globe in delivering more and more wealth and income from labour to capital.

Hawke and Keating could only do this with the collaboration of the trade union leadership.  They got it with the Accord. The end result has been a massive decline in union membership, a massive increase in the total factor income share going to capital at the expense of labour and the collapse of strikes as a way of winning wage increases and defending jobs.

Trade union bureaucrats are not members of the working class. They do not sell their labour power to survive and have real control over their work.

The role of paid union officials is to haggle with the bosses over the price of labour power, that is wages. Often, especially if there is pressure from below, the price will be OK.  Of course that doesn’t challenge the exploitation at the heart of capitalism but can improve workers’ lives for a while.

Pressure from below is the thing that is missing today from most unions.

The Labor Party is the creature and creation of the trade union bureaucracy. It expresses the idea that what we need to do is negotiate between different classes for outcomes that are acceptable to workers and bosses but don’t challenge capitalism itself.

With the decline in rank and file influence (let alone control) of their unions the pressure from below to produce acceptable outcomes has collapsed. Couple that with a relative reduction in the social surplus available to Labor governments flowing from the global fall in profit rates from the late 60s or early 70s in Australia and the process of the degeneration of the ALP from a capitalist workers’ party to a capitalist party is at best resulting today in a CAPITALIST workers’ party if not a capitalist party. Shorten is but one indicator of that process.

Is there an alternative to the ongoing degeneration of the Labor Party? One response is to urge the left to join the party to win socialism or some version of reformed capitalism. This misunderstands the nature of the ALP as a party of capitalism and imagines change comes from above rather than from below.

It also imagines Parliament as an institution of capitalism is one capable of implementing socialism, or in the case of most ALP members, able to instiute reforms contrary to the wishes and needs of the capitalist class or its ability to pay for them. Without mass pressure from below (strikes, demonstrations etc) that will never happe

This desire for soemthing better often gets expressed as hope in particular Labor Party hacks. If only we had Albo/Plibersek/whoever in charge instead of Shorten. The trouble is that Labor Party hacks like Albanese and Plibersek are an expression of its degeneration, not its revitalisation. They will and do manage capitalism and as the economy worsens they will do whatever it takes to restore profit rates.

The revolutionary left in Australia is small and divided. I for example am a member of the small group Solidarity. There are other similar but small revolutionary groups.

We are with others trying to keep alive the ideas of resistance and fighting back and building as we can the idea and we hope eventually thata ctuality of workers’ control of their unions. We also help social struggles like equal marriage, asylum seekers, Aborigines, anti-racism and others that break out to fight for change.

We are minnows compared to the might of the ALP, the second eleven of capital. However, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg ‘those who choose reform in contradistinction to revolution don’t choose a calmer, more tranquil path to the same goal, but a different goal altogether.’

A society of peace, one where production is organised democraticlaly to satisfy human need – that is why I keep fighting.

One of our tasks is to win over those who support reform to the side of revolution. Shorten and the rest of his rotten crew might make that task just a little easier, especially when (or if) they get into power in a time of economic decline.

I have written about the ALP and the process of its change over time in some depth in this article: (2014) “The Minerals Resource Rent Tax: The Australian Labor Party and the continuity of change”, Accounting Research Journal, Vol. 27 Iss: 1, pp.19 – 36

 

Bill Shorten has denied that Labor ever paid people smugglers to turn back their boats. His weasel words were: “I am informed that Labor did not pay people smugglers to turn around boats.” The important words here are ‘to turn around boats.’

It appears the people smuggler disruption programmes run by say ASIS (Australia’s offshore spy agency), the AFP and/or others involves paying people smugglers not to leave port for Australia.

As Fairfax media has been reporting:

‘Cash payments have been made to members of Indonesian people-smuggling rings by Australian intelligence officials for at least the past four years – including under the former Labor government.’

When Labor accused the Abbott government of paying people smugglers to run boats around, most Ministers and the Prime Ministers refused to say yes or no and hid behind the smokescreen of on water operational matters. (At one stage Dutton and Bishop said no payments had been made but changed their tune after presumably being told the truth and adopted the mantra of not talking about operational matters).

When it became clear that ASIS may have been making payments to people smugglers under both Labor and Liberal governments, Labor, like the Liberals, found a convenient bolthole. As Fairfax reported:

‘A spokeswoman for shadow immigration spokesman Richard Marles said: “It’s unlawful for the government or the opposition to divulge security or intelligence information.”‘

Shorten joined in the rush to hide behind the national security excuse. When questioned about ASIS payments to people smugglers during Labor’s most recent term in government Shorten said:

‘You know it doesn’t matter what party the politician is from, when it comes to security matters, we simply don’t comment.’

How convenient. The same rotten politics the Liberals use to avoid scrutiny Labor adopts. And so it was that on Monday in question time every Labor question was about paying people smugglers. On Tuesday, after news broke of Labor doing the same, there was not one question on paying people smugglers.

On Monday, Labor demanded the PM give a one word answer – yes or no – to whether the government had paid people smugglers. On Tuesday, Shorten refused to answer that very question.

On asylum seekers Labor has been hoist with their own petard. It would be laughable if it were not so serious.

The time has come for Labor to abandon the stink bomb that is their refugee policy and welcome those fleeing war, rape, imprisonment and persecution.

I know that will not happen. It is up to refugee activists to continue our long fight to defend asylum seekers. Instead of Labor and Liberal lies, that means, as a start and as Red Cross has shown, telling the truth about our abandoned brothers and sisters and exposing Labor and the government for the liars and criminals they are.

It means pointing out too that the government (of whatever neoliberal persuasion) that is attacking workers and the poor also attacks asylum seekers. We are all in this together.

 

 

The Magna Carta is often used to support the argument that no person, not even the King, is above the law. No doubt the Australian Federal Police are this very minute thoroughly investigating King Tony and the Immigration Baron for their possible crimes in allegedly paying people smugglers.

But now that the government is starting to get its act together (after Bishop and Dutton both denied the payments and then backtracked) they’ll claim that the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (Australia’s overseas STASI equivalent) is not liable for any crimes committed offshore. The relevant Act says: “a staff member or agent of an agency is not subject to any civil or criminal liability for any act done outside Australia if the act is done in the proper performance of a function of the agency.”

This looks like a stitch up so Abbott and Co can hide behind more secrecy.

How convenient to suddenly find that it was ASIS who might have made the payments … It is always handy to have a secretive fall guy who may be outside the reach of Australian law in undertaking actions which if anyone else did them would be criminal. No doubt the AFP will be investigating these latest claims thoroughly too. Beware flying pigs…

Why is that an Australian agency is removed from the consequences of Australian law? Is this yet another example of the concentration and abuse of executive power?

It says much about Australian politics that an Australian Prime Minister can refuse to confirm what appears on the latest reports from the Indonesians and the UN to be the obvious – that his government paid those transporting asylum seekers to Australian waters to run back.

The current crew in charge of the sinking bourgeois democracy that is Australia refuse to answer basic questions about asylum seekers with a glib operational matters line and repetition of the lie that they have stopped the boats. They haven’t. And they haven’t stopped deaths at sea either. They have outsourced those deaths.

This is the same government that wants to give a Minister the power to strip a person of their Australian citizenship based on untested ‘evidence’ and without any criminal convictions to support the action.  The concentration of power in the hands of officials is authoritarian and another example of the chipping way of bourgeois democratic ideals both sides have undertaken in the last few decades.

The other depressing fact is that many Australians, including working class Australians, don’t care. Worse, they probably support the government doing ‘whatever it takes to stop the boats,’ including paying the people smugglers. By hook or by crook may well resonate with them.

As an aside, I support people smugglers. They have a long and honourable place in history, including saving the lives of many Jews fleeing the Nazis. Of course if we really wanted to save lives at sea we’d send chartered planes to Indonesia and Malaysia, with their agreement, to pick up the 100,000 or so asylum seekers in these countries and process them quickly here in Australia without locking them up.

This is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. One of its famous proclamations still resonates today:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

Our treatment of asylum seekers, of suspected ISIS fighters, of Aborigines dying as the dispossessed or in custody or both, breaches these ideals. Such is the degeneration of Australian capitalism and its politics that we are fighting today to restore the letter and the spirit of an 800 year old document.

Magna Carta is often described as saying in effect that no man, not even the King, is above the law. No doubt the Australian Federal Police are this very minute thoroughly investigating Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton over whether they broke the law in paying people smugglers. [Sarcasm….]

Why does the brutality we unleash against asylum seekers have majority working class support? Such is the alienation of sections of the Australian working class after 3 decades of neoliberal rule and policy from its traditional party, the Labor Party, that the only hope many workers have is in the false sense of superiority that attacking refugees (among other groups) apparently gives.  

No matter how badly Abbott and co treat asylum seekers, many workers will still have insecure, poorly paid unfulfilling jobs.  Joining in the demonisation of refugees won’t change that and only reinforces and assists the very people who create the rotten system that gives us rotten jobs and enables them to worsen our conditions.

The abject class collaboration of the trade union bureaucrats over the last 3 decades has left us in this position. It is time to fight back for better wages and conditions, for jobs and for safe workplaces. That will give workers a sense of their own worth and strength. When the class finally moves, the shit of ages – the racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia – will disappear in a unity of struggle. Ultimately that will be the way to win the case for asylum seekers.

While the one sided class war the bosses have waged successfully against us cannot go on for ever, mass class struggle isn’t going to break out in the immediate future. Instead we may well see Captain Crook and his listing ship Team Australia win the next election on the back of demonising asylum seekers, MUSLIM!!!!! terrorists and lifestyle choice Aborigines while a pathetic Opposition cheers them on and a cowed labour movement continues its surrender.

Will no one sing my songs
Take my words
and belong,
Own the life of them
Revive their dead
And survive this old man
Another day?
Go, play.

 

Tony Abbott said the other day that wind farms were visually awful and wants to cut their numbers (‘reduce, capital R-E-D-U-C-E the number of these things we are going to get in the future’ in his words.) He raised that old furphy about the possible health problems they supposedly cause. They don’t, but let’s not have the truth interfere with a political argument the Prime Minister wants to run.

On the other hand fracking can cause major health problems. Yet the Prime Minister remains supportive of it. He also thinks that coal, one of the key contributors to green house gas emissions and climate change, is good for humanity.

Profit explains the difference.  Wind farms, and renewable energy more generally, threaten the long term profits of the big electricity companies and the coal miners.

There is a quick buck to be made in fracking too.

Abbott puts short term profit before the health of Australians and before the long term health of the environment and by extension, although he is too blinded by Profit Now! to understand this, the long term survival of his beloved but destructive capitalism.

 

Ken Olende in Socialist Worker UK cuts through our rulers’ attempts to spin the Magna Carta as the basis of democratic rights in Britain

The catch cry of every reactionary used to be ‘get a job’. With housing prices in Sydney continuing to increase at stellar rates (12.4% last year and 3% this first quarter) Treasurer Joe Hockey has upped that to get a GOOD job that pays good money to be able to buy a house there. So all you homeless people, or renters, or  low paid or middle income earners, resign your jobs right now and get a well paid one.

With official unemployment rising to 6.2% in April (and real unemployment according to Roy Morgan in May 2015 at greater than 10% with 8% wanting more work) there are [sarcasm alert] obviously plenty of well paid jobs around.

 

If Hockey is any guide you don’t need any skills to get a job paying more than $400,000 a year, including an allowance of $270 a night to stay in Canberra. Hockey pays that allowance to his wife because he rents the house from her. By mid 2014 he had claimed over $108,000 over the previous four years.

Not to put too fine a point on it, with Hockey showing us how, all you need to be to get a job paying more than $400,000 a year is rich and an idiot.

I reckon if I was paid a housing allowance of $270 a night like Hockey, on top of an average wage of $78,000 I might be able to buy a property in outer Sydney.

 

Of course Hockey is out of touch, just like the rest of the rule for the rich Liberals. On top of that, Hockey is one of the richest Treasurers we have ever had. Political and economic divorce from ordinary people is a deadly quinella.

It seems that almost every time he opens his mouth Hockey displays his contempt for ordinary people. It flows from his position, his background, his politics. Remember, this is the Treasurer who also said poor people don’t drive cars. Or  GP co-payment of $7 was only 2 small beers.

So instead of workers getting these better paid jobs that don’t exist, is there an alternative that provides people with affordable housing?

The market in Sydney and to some extent Melbourne is pricing people out.  Partly that is because negative gearing and the capital gains 50% concession are rewarding rich and well off people who invest in already established housing. They don’t create new housing; they drive up the price of existing housing.

Obviously part of any solution would be to abolish negative gearing and remove the CGT concession. However there is no guarantee that the market will build more houses to meet demand.

Maybe the time has come to begin building public housing that meets the needs of low and average wage workers.  That would require a state program of many billions of dollars to begin a life long building program.  The rich suburbs where Abbott and Hockey live would be good places to begin building them. Milsons Point too.

Where is the money coming from the reactions scream? Tax the rich to pay for adequate and affordable public housing.

I am not alone. The Per Capita think tank has just released its 2015 tax survey. Unsurprisingly respondents want more spending on public services like health and education and are willing to pay more tax for such improved services and transport. They also want the rich and big business taxed more.

Instead of fantasies about getting well paid jobs (which is just code for ‘only the rich can afford to live here’) tax the rich and big business to build affordable public housing for the people.

Another article will address the purchasing side. People already in good but not well paid jobs (e.g nurses, teachers, social workers, child care workers, cleaners, basically anyone on a salary below about $100,000 – the average wage plus 25%) can get the wherewithal to afford an appropriate place to live.