En Passant

John Passant has just released his first book of poetry, Songs for the Band Unformed (Ginninderra Press 2016).

The poems are a mix of the personal and the political. The usual terrors of love and desire, of self-doubt, of longing, and of joy and happiness, find expression here. So too does Passant’s horror with much of the world today, with its barbarity, its wars, its monetary and spiritual poverty, and its cruelty. As Tom Griffiths from the University of Newcastle says: This is a collection of work for our times, sometimes bleak, hard, gritty, but indignant, mobilising and marching against the bombs and profits of injustice.’ The Awesome’s singer songwriter Mili Cifali calls it ”…a sublime collection of poetry, allowing us to reflect on humanity, in its nakedness, tenderness and brutality…’

To find out how to buy signed copy purchase details personal message me on Facebook so the whole world doesn’t see our details. Alternatively email me at en.passant@bigpond.com for details.

You can also buy copies from Ginninderra Press here.

The link to the Kindle version – on sale for $4.06 (US I assume) when I looked on 2 October – is here.

Other retailers also have it in stock. Just google Songs for the Band Unformed to find them.

John

I submitted this back in May to the Canberra Times after I had spoken at the National Law Reform Conference at the ANU on a whole range of national and local progressive tax reforms. They did not publish it. In light of the Australian Capital Territory election on Saturday, I thought I would publish it today to stimulate some sort of discussion about tax reform in the A.C.T.

John

Tax, inequality and challenges for the future

In a speech in 2013 Barack Obama labelled inequality “the defining challenge of our time”.

Oxfam has argued that 85 people own as much of the world’s wealth as the bottom 50%, i.e. about 3.5 billion people. In Australia, according to ACOSS, there are about 2.5 million Australians living in poverty, including over 660,000 children.

Australia’s inequality is above the OECD average and has been growing above average over time.  Two processes are in play. One is the growing income disparity between the top and the rest of us.  The increases in real wages and other income for example have gone disproportionately to those in the top ten percent of income earners, and even more so to those in the top 1%.

Our tax system has also become less progressive. This is because of reductions in top marginal rates, legislated tax havens for the rich like superannuation tax concessions and capital gains tax discount and our focus on regressive consumption taxes.

The revenue forgone from tax concessions such as superannuation and capital gains tax and the losses from negative gearing is about $40 billion a year. About $17 bn of that goes to the top ten percent.

So one task of tax reform would be to restrict these benefits to those in need, or to abolish them and use the extra revenue for socially useful purposes.

Another task should be to reverse the reductions in income tax progressivity by increasing income tax rates on higher income earners, those for example earning more than $130,000.

The top 10% of wealth holders in Australia own 45% of all the wealth, or about $3 trillion. A one percent annual wealth tax on them would raise by my back of the envelope calculations about $30 billion annually from them.

An alternative would be for the Commonwealth to tax net wealth transfers, for example, by reintroducing estate and gift duties.

The Panama Papers have re-ignited debate about the tax avoidance activities of high wealth individuals and big business.  In two recent ATO tax transparency reports on big business, the Commissioner of Taxation revealed that 36% of those entities did not pay any income tax in 2013-2014.  On top of that one third of ASX 200 companies have an effective tax rate of less than ten percent. More than half those ASX companies also have subsidiaries in tax havens.

Maybe the time has come to consider criminalising tax avoidance and making Boards and senior officers liable for prison sentences for any tax avoidance their companies undertake.

More prosaically it might be time to consider a minimum company tax, based not on actual taxable income but gross revenue. A tax of three percent on the $454 billion gross untaxed revenue of big public businesses alone would yield more than $13 billion. That is before we tax those companies whose effective tax rates are well below the company tax rate of 30%.

There are many other taxes we could consider that could reintroduce equity to the tax debates. Levying rent taxes on the monopolists and oligopolists making super profits, taxing the big greenhouse gas emitters, (while denying them the ability to pass on the costs to consumers,) investigating financial transaction taxes, considering land taxes, and urging the A.C.T. Labor/Greens government to do a Colorado and legalise the personal use of marijuana and tax the cultivation and sale, are but a few other options we could debate.

That no serious systemic progressive tax options are on the agenda is indicative of a wider political problem. The ruling elite and their major parties are keen to make the tax system less progressive. This is part of the wider 33 years to date neoliberal program in Australia of shifting wealth from labour to capital to address what Marx identified many years ago as the tendency inbuilt into capitalism of the rate of profit to fall.

That further regressive tax proposals such as increasing the GST are now off the table is a response to an untapped underlying anger with politics as usual that ordinary working people feel.  Therein lies our hope. It is time to put progressive tax reform back on the agenda. Growing inequality threatens our democracy. It is time to tax the rich.

John Passant is a former Assistant Commissioner of Taxation, former tax academic and is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the ANU. This is an edited version of a talk he gave at the National Law Reform Conference at the ANU in April.

The Turnbull government on Wednesday passed a Labor amendment to a Tax Bill which called on the government “to explain why it has failed to close tax loopholes and increase transparency in Australia”.

What next? Trying to organise a piss up in a brewery?

Screenshot via smh.com.au

 
Public anger builds and banking oligopoly and corruption are set to continue as Turnbull announces banking tribunal instead of a royal commission.

To read my full report in Independent Australia click here. The big 4 Australian banks said ‘sorry’ so Turnbull announces tribunal instead of Royal Commission

Image from samesame at http://samesame.com.au/news/14421/BREAKING-The-plebiscite-is-officially-dead

 
The Labor Party has decided to vote against the Bill to establish the plebiscite on same sex marriage and to call instead for a Parliamentary vote to change the law to allow equal love. This raises the question – where to now for the campaign?

If the Government is to be believed there is no Plan B. It is a plebiscite or nothing. So what prevents Malcolm Turnbull moving an amendment to the Marriage Act to allow gays and lesbians to marry? The reactionary and homophobic right in his party.

The Liberal and National Parties oppose any change to the Marriage Act to allow equal love. Their elected members are not allowed a conscience vote on the issue. One National Party backbencher has threatened to leave the government (which has a one seat majority in the House of Representatives) if it allows a vote to amend the Marriage Act.

The history of change that challenges the status quo in Australia is the history of struggle. Therein lies the hope for the way forward for the same sex marriage campaign. To date it has operated through ‘respectable’ channels.

To break the parliamentary deadlock in my opinion means becoming radical, and adopting civil disobedience as a way to win the goal of equality.

First, actions like militant protests that shut down the centres of big cities send a message. It is no longer business as usual. Human rights are not negotiable. Vote now for marriage equality.

Second it puts pressure on Labor. It was last year that the Labor Party bound its MPs to vote for marriage equality, but only from 2019. It refused to act on marriage equality when in Government between 2007 and 2013. Julia Gillard famously declared that she was opposed to equal love.

The move by Labor to oppose the plebiscite was in part a response to the decades’ long campaign by equal love activists for same sex marriage and their opposition to the plebiscite based in part on the dangers inherent in a divisive debate denigrating gays and lesbians. The cynic in me says that another reason is to contain the homophobic wing of the party. They can all ‘unite’ against the plebiscite and postpone the day when significant sections of the ALP expose themselves as opposed to equal love.

To move the ALP to really fighting for marriage equality maybe our demand should be for them to make the Parliament ungovernable. Labor could refuse to vote for any government motion or Bill, even ones they in theory agree with, until the Government allows a free vote on marriage equality.

We could begin that process by making the cities unworkable, by calling protests with the express goal of thousands of supporters closing down key entry points until the government allows a free vote on same sex marriage and calling on Labor to make the Parliament unworkable until that happens.

 
Who won the debate?

Let’s be clear. Whoever won, it certainly wasn’t American workers. However that answer was as relevant in 1960 as it is today, so really doesn’t help us much.

The question about who won is misplaced. It imagines this was a debate.

Of course Trump and Clinton have differences but those differences are minor compared to what they agree on. In essence they agree that US capitalism and imperialism are to continue and must remain strong or be strengthened. Their differences are occasionally over how best to do that.

However whoever wins the election will continue the system whose lifeblood is now the growing inequality of US society and the immiseration of more and more working class Americans (euphemistically labelled middle class in the caring sharing language of the brutal exploiters.)

This debate was between a man who thinks it is OK to sexually assault women and a woman who thinks it is OK to kill foreign women and kids through indiscriminate bombing and military interventions and invasions. When it comes to killing people overseas Trump is a wannabe Secretary Clinton and President Obama.

The question of Trump’s ‘grab pussy’ comments has sparked a debate in some left-wing circles about systemic sexism and whether this sort of talk is natural for all men. It isn’t. However, comments from women about their everyday life of verbal and physical abuse has been an eye-opener for me, and for other men. Women I know well talking about how men have grabbed them in a Trump, fondled them, and worse, should force us all to think about the sort of society we live in.

Clearly women are still second class citizens, whether that be reflected in the 50 killed this year in domestic violence attacks by men they know, the 17% gender pay gap, the paucity of women in senior political, business and other roles, the burden of child rearing and house duties falling disproportionately on women etc etc. On and on it goes.

The systemic reasons for this have to do with the role of women in capitalist society as the unpaid labour force raising the next generation of workers on the cheap for capital.

The discussion about Trump’s comments misses something else, an aspect of truth that Trump inadvertently revealed. That something else is the power relations that give men like Trump (and Bill Clinton, and Bill Cosby, to name another two off the top of my head) sexual power over women and protection when they exercise that power. Trump captured this when he said:

“Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

When you’re a star … Political, business, entertainment stars, in other words powerful men. These men, all men, live in a society which sends messages day in and day out to all of us that women are second class citizens. Some like Trump and Bill Clinton express that power and have the ability to express that power in sexual conquest or in talk that reflects that attitude.

Electing Hillary Clinton won’t challenge let alone change the system of oppression or the positions of power that give some powerful men what they think is (and because of their positions of power often is) sexual power over women. Indeed, like Obama before her, as President Hillary Clinton will reinforce the oppressions of capitalism, the oppressions of gender and race on which capitalism has been and is built and reinforced.

What an exciting time to be an A.C.T. Legislative Assembly voter. Look at all the choices we have – neoliberalism to the left, neoliberalism to the right, neoliberalism everywhere in between.

Where is the ACT’s Jeremy Corbyn? Why is there not even one self proclaimed Bernie Sanders’ style democratic socialist among the 141 candidates?

Instead, we have 25 Labor candidates who dare not speak socialism’s name and the Greens who are neoliberals on bikes. The Sex Party has some decent social policies but erection stunts, a speedway, taxing the churches for charitable work and their lack of class analysis and working class structural support make me wary.

As the long term decline in Labor’s primary vote nationally (and I suspect locally) shows, working people are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately a genuine socialist left has not yet arisen to counter the rise of right wing populists, demagogues, racists and, frankly, nutters.

In Australia it was the Hawke Labor government which introduced neoliberalism and set in train the double helix dance of the Labor and L.N.P. with the beast. It did this through the Accord which oversaw the start of a process of wealth shifting from labour to capital unprecedented in our history, and all with the agreement of much of the trade union leadership.

The Accord gave that leadership greater control over members, and has resulted in a massive decline in strikes and other industrial action to near historic lows today. Record numbers of workers are now not in unions.

While our side has not fought, the bosses have waged an unremitting class war against us, so much so that the share of total factor income going to capital increased from 17% to 27% and labour’s share fell by about the same 10% amount, down to between 52 and 54%. Working class private debt has gone up massively.

What saved Australian capitalism and governments in the 2000s from the economic and political crises engulfing much of Europe and North America was the mining boom. That ended here in around 2012/13 and the consequences are beginning to play out in Australia with ongoing and increasing government attacks on health, education and social welfare spending as well as real wage cuts, sacking public servants and holding down their pay.

As the long recession of Western capitalism flows into Australia the class lines could be drawn more clearly and provoke a response, although neither Malcolm Turnbull nor Bill Shorten seem equipped intellectually or politically with the ability or will to deeply cut the living standards and social wage of workers for the benefit of capital. Instead both appear to be adopting slightly different versions of the scalpel rather than the hatchet. The time will come when capital demands their man or woman yield the axe. Will our side be ready and able to fight back?

The ALP has moved from being a capitalist workers’ party to a CAPITALIST workers’ party, and is well on the way to becoming a capitalist party. As a consequence Labor over time has been losing votes and members, reinforcing the conservatism of the party. The Greens’ history, structure, membership base and politics strongly suggest it cannot fill that working class electoral void.

The Barr Labor government is a managerial version of the free market Liberals. The Greens seem to think that slugging the working class is the way to address climate change and pay for their relatively minor social measures.

These come together in the light rail project which under the guise of better, cleaner public transport looks more like a plan to deliver inadequate transport at exorbitant cost to ten percent of the population while the rest of us pay for it. The real beneficiaries look to be property developers and real estate agents and a few extra building worker jobs. Building public housing for the homeless and poor would provide more jobs and at less cost.

So where is the politician of the left at these forthcoming ACT elections who will stand up and say we should tax the rich to fund a public housing program that actually houses the homeless? Where is the person who argues for taxing the rich and capital to fund rapid bus transport plan that floods the city with free to use electric powered buses. Where is the left wing arguing for such taxes to introduce a real Gonski into ACT public schools?

For example a super profits tax on the big four banks, at a rate of 40 cents in the dollar on 2% of their profits, would, by my back of the envelope calculations, yield about $250 million. What about rent and petrol price control? Imposing a small fee on the gross revenue of those big businesses that pay no income tax (about 38% of them) who are here in Canberra to continue operating could yield up to $100 million. On and on the suggestions could go.

As a first step a genuine left wing government in the ACT would negotiate a treaty. It would tax the top ten percent of income earners and capital to pay the rent to the local Aboriginal people whose ongoing genocide the ACT is built on.

I cannot vote for the Liberals, the class enemy. I will probably hold my nose and vote Sex Party then Greens then Labor, more to deliver a message to Labor and the Greens than as any endorsement of their anti-working class neoliberal policies.

I am comforted by the reality that voting changes little and it is struggles in the workplace and on the streets that can force governments to adopt policies that benefit workers and the less well off in our society. We on the left must continue to focus on that rather than the farce that is parliamentary politics.

I am a long term Canberra resident and member of small socialist group Solidarity.

(Bureau of Meteorology satellite image via abc.net.au)

In Independent Australia on Tuesday I discussed the absurdity of the Turnbull Government’s claims that the SA blackouts were caused by renewables.

Click here to read the full article, in which I raise privatisation and climate change as the real culprits of the blackout.  SA blackout: The ‘renewables and Labor did it’ tale

Shanah tova. Rosh Hashanah

A host of conservative politicians, including PM Turnbull, have opportunistically used the South Australian power outage to cast doubt on renewable energy, writes John Passant in Independent Australia.

To read the article click here. SA blackout: Australia storms Right into the dark over renewables 

My latest academic article has just been published and is available through this link to download. Once in, hit the download link up the top right.

Tax and the Forgotten Classes: from the Magna Carta to the English Revolution

If that does not get you to the link to download, try this direct link to the article.

This paper looks at three key early events in English tax history, the 1215 Magna Carta, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the English Revolution from 1640 to 1649. It uses these events to explore the relationship between tax, war, democracy and rebellion. Tax is both an expression of and a cause of class divisions that is can, and does as these events show, spark revolts against the state imposing the taxes. These revolts can be between members of the ruling elite, or between the people outside the ruling elite and that group of rulers both political and economic, or a mixture of both. The aim is to reintroduce class into tax history and show over time the crucial role ordinary people (for example peasants, artisans and workers) play in the history of taxation. Thus the people of London played a role in the successful rebellion of the Barons against the kings’ imposition of excessive tax and the establishment of a common counsel of the elite to approve future extractions. This gain became the bedrock for future democratic demands, for example no taxation without representation. Peasants drove the revolt of 1381 against poll taxes but could not make demands that transcended their particular class position although they gave hints of an alternative non-class divided society. In 1629 Ship Money enabled the King to rule without parliamentary approval and this eventually sparked the rebellion and then revolution from 1640 in the context of a society changing from feudal to capitalist relations. In all three cases the actions of the masses of ordinary people are a key to understanding the events and the intertwining of war, tax, democracy and rebellion that becomes evident during this investigation.