En Passant

I am unwell again. I won’t be posting much, other than perhaps links to other articles and short comments.

 
It’s called the dead cat strategy.  Here, according to Sam Delaney in the Guardian, is how Boris Johnson describes it:

“There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

Dutton’s comment about refugees being illiterate and innumerate, stealing jobs and living on benefits is a classic example. He has put one of the government’s seeming strengths, the brutal treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and protecting Australia’s borders (so the rhetoric goes) front and centre of the campaign.

The Turnbull government is in trouble. The Labor Party’s focus on fairness, and Shorten’s win in the well hidden leaders’ forum, on Murdoch’s pay TV Sky News, and Labor’s drip, drip, drip release of programs like getting rid of the Turnbull government’s freeze on Medicare rebates have swung support behind Labor, and the Greens.

For example, after the first week of electioneering the Roy Morgan election poll had Labor at 52.5% on a two party preferred basis compared to the government on 47.5%.

So Dutton swings the dead cat. Suddenly all the talk is about his refugee comments and this may reinforce the Turnbull government in what it sees as one of its strengths. I say may because it doesn’t always work. David Cameron for example tried to swing the dead cat on terrorism at Muslim and Labor candidate Sadiq Khan in the election for mayor of London and it backfired. Khan won easily.

Dutton’s dead cat could do the same. There are many many refugees in Australia, and their children and grandchildren. There are maym many more immigrants and the children and grandchildren of immigrants who may also feel it is an attack on them and their forebears. Karl Stefanovic captured the disgust with Dutton’s comments when he explained his family’s hard working contribution to Australia as immigrants and called Dutton un-Australian.

The real question is will Dutton’s comments resonate with workers and see them vote for the open party of capital? It is possible, mainly because this fear of asylum seekers is built on other deeper insecurities and is fanned not just by the first eleven of capital but by the second eleven, the Labor Party.

The fear of the other is driven from the top and as Dutton’s comments make clear the idea is to intersect with the concerns of workers about jobs and inadequate social welfare spending.

The response of the left should be clear. It is not refugees or asylum seekers who sacked 4400 tax office workers. It is this government.

It is not refugees or asylum seekers who sacked or are sacking Queensland Nickel workers, or Arrium workers, or car plant workers. It is bosses.

It is not refugees or asylum seekers substituting part time for full time work. It is bosses.

It is not refugees or asylum seekers who are freezing the Medicare rebate, cutting billions from aged care, cutting family tax benefits, cutting health and education spending by a total of $80 billion and giving tax cuts to big business and those earning more than $180,000. It is this government.

The real enemy is Peter Dutton and all he represents, not asylum seekers and refugees.

This is the link to my article in socialist magazine Solidarity on the untouched billions in tax rorts for the rich.

resources0.news.com.au

This is the link to my analysis in Independent Australia of the first week of the election campaign. I start off by saying:

‘IT HAS NOT BEEN a good first week in the election campaign for Malcolm Turnbull and his Government.

‘The Prime Minister looks and sounds out of touch, aloof, and to use the words of Peta Credlin, comes across as “Mister Sydney Harbourside Mansion”.

‘There is a good reason for this. He is.’

To read the whole article click here. Election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull’s shaky start

Here is the link to details of the panel I am on on Tuesday at 6 pm at the University of Queensland on the Panama Papers.

 
The rich run society in the interest of profit—and we can’t vote them out come July, explains James Supple in socialist magazine Solidarity. He starts off by saying:

‘Elections are about deciding who runs the country, they say. But most of the power in our society is not held in parliament, and even the choices of elected governments are heavily restricted.

‘This is because a tiny super-rich minority, the ruling class, control most of society’s wealth.’

To read the whole article click here. No matter who wins the election: It’s the rich who rule

Duncan Storrar asked a question on Q&A on Monday night and then made a comment that, with blinding clarity, highlighted the unfairness of the Budget and the wealth shifting agenda of the ruling class. Here is part of his exchange with Assistant Treasurer Kelly O’Dwyer and Chief Executive of Australian Industry Group Innes Willox.

“I’ve got a disability and a low education, that means I’ve spent my whole life working for minimum wage. You’re gonna lift the tax-free threshold for rich people,” he said, addressing federal minister O’Dwyer.

“If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life,” he went on. “That means that I get to say to my little girls, ‘Daddy’s not broke this weekend. We can go to the pictures’. Rich people don’t even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don’t I get it? Why do they get it?”

O’Dwyer told him it was all about balance (seriously!) and business now being able to buy $6000 toasters.

Willox said:

“Duncan, I’ll be harsh in my message. If you’re on the minimum wage and with a family, you would not pay much tax, if any at all. Would you? You would not pay much tax.”

Duncan replied: “I pay tax every time I go to the supermarket. Every time I hop in my car.”

The exchange revealed how out of touch the ruling class are. Duncan’s question and response resonated with many many working class people whose living standards have been under attack or falling or who are seeing growing inequality and wondering why the rich are getting richer but they are not.

The Murdoch press have unleashed a barrage of ‘ revelations’ about Duncan. They are making clear that debates about the future of and future direction for capitalism are limited to the ruling class and their politicians, not poor people and workers struggling to get by. Dissent is verboten. Where a pleb like Duncan does slip though the heavily guarded battlements then the king’s entourage vilify him. Democracy is OK as long as it is effectively limited to polite chatter among the circles of the 1%.

The ruling class don’t and won’t address his valid point, because they can’t. Trickle down economics (which is what O’Dwyer was getting at when she referred to balance) is indefensible.

So the Murdoch mudslingers attacked the man rather than address the point he was making. I look forward to News Corpse now exposing the peccadilloes, misdemeanors, malfeasances and crimes of the ruling class. Phone hacking might be a good place to start. Some of the journalists at News and Fox have sordid histories too. Why not expose them?

Murdoch’s minions might then go on to investigate the underbelly of News Corpse’s tax affairs and why on $2.8 billion revenue News Australia Holdings Pty Ltd paid no tax in Australia. According to a report last year in the Financial Review, News is the ATO’s top tax risk.

Willox, and Murdoch, and other ruling class members, have a stock standard response to questions and comments like Duncan’s. You pay no net tax. Just think about that. Apparently the only people who have a right to discuss and debate issues are those who pay net tax. That rules out News from the discussion then, does it?

The very idea is anti-democratic to its core, but democracy is an add on to capitalism that was fought and won by the working class from the ruling class and can be disposed of, or restricted, when the primary goal of capitalism, the extraction of profit from workers, is threatened, or even queried.

The net tax argument is also wrong. It does not, as Duncan made clear, include the GST. As ACOSS says: ‘Households in the lowest income quintile pay 21% of their income (after income tax) in indirect taxes, whereas the highest income quintile pays only 8%.’ The same report shows that the lowest 5% pay 34% of their income in GST and for the top 5% the figure is 6%. (See ACOSS, Inequality in Australia, page 28.)

Indeed, if you include GST and other taxes in the ‘ net’ tax calculations then taxes effectively vary a little around 25% of income across all income deciles, (being slightly progressive), except for the bottom 5%. Their contribution is well above everyone else’s at 34.2% of income. By contrast the top 5%’s contribution is only 30.2% of their income. Again, see the ACOSS report referred to above at page 28.

Second, revenue raising and spending are separate issues. To net them off is a false equivalence.

Third, spending on social welfare is part of the social wage which is itself part of the value of labour power. If it is removed or cut then workers could and should make it up with wage increases if they are to retain the overall value of their labour power and their current standards of living.

Fourth, the conservatives do not factor support for the rich and business, either directly through grants or indirectly through the billions upon billions of tax expenditures (exemptions etc which as superannuation and the capital gains tax discount show overwhelmingly favour the well off.)

Fifth, this social welfare spending buys some form of social peace, and this is especially important for the ruling class both personally and economically.

Sixth, the economic history of the last few decades has been the history of growing inequality in Australia and across the globe. The causes are not individual but systemic. Duncan has not failed the system. the system has failed him.

Duncan’s contribution on Q&A on Monday night was a lightning rod of class clarity. That is why the ruling class is trying to silence his message and punish him and anyone else who might expose the rotten reality of Australia today. Defend democracy. Defend Duncan.

PS: Reports (Saturday 3 pm) are that Duncan is now on suicide watch.

Protesters in Melbourne have occupied Immigration and have called for civil disobedience to be our watchword and way forward.

Here is how Melissa Davey reported in the Guardian on the reasons for occupation of over 100 protesters  in The Guardian:

“I feel like the level of violence occurring in offshore camps is at a point where civil disobedience is the only way,” one of the protesters, Anastasia Kanjere, said.

“We want to show people the feeling is here for mass civil disobedience. Ordinary people are ready to disrupt in ways they haven’t before, and there will be more to come.”

An organiser of the protest, Emma Kefford, said: “The goal was to disrupt to some degree because we feel rallies haven’t been getting the message across, and the degree of despair and misery occurring offshore requires a heightened response that intervenes a bit more,” she said.

As Friends, Family and Feminists Against Detention noted ‘Hopefully this is the beggining of a movement for civil disobedience to ‪#‎BringThemHere‬!’

In the face of the barbarity of Australia’s detention centre gulags, the time for pussyfooting is over. If we can mobilise hundreds and then thousands in each major city to disrupt business as usual we can build a mass movement to close down these concentration camps.

When the rest of the world’s leaders moved swiftly to condemn the tax rorts exposed in the Panama Papers, our Prime Minister was curiously silent. Today, we learn that he was one of those named. John Passant in Independent Australia questions just how serious Malcolm Turnbull is on cracking down on tax avoidance.

To read the whole article click here. PM Turnbull named in #Panama Papers

Here by the way is the document, courtesy of the Guardian, about Turnbull’s involvement. Looks pretty cut and dried doen’t it?

When will Turnbull reveal all about his tax haven use?