'Values-based capitalism' leaves no room for the nations poor
'Values-based capitalism' leaves no room for the nations poor
368 billion for subs, 253 billion in tax relief for high income earners, no increases to JobSeeker, and warnings about further austerity to come. Who bears the brunt of this budget?
The ALP Government continues down a track of bipartisan policy, ensuring the legacy of its predecessor by implementing the Stage Three Tax Cuts and turbocharging its commitment to AUKUS. As the budget lurches closer towards its delivery, and in spite of all the big spending, it seems nothing will be done to raise Jobkeeper payments for millions of Australians living dangerously under the poverty line.
Recent announcements of all-in $368 billion dollar military agreement and stubborn protection of the $253 billion dollar tax cuts, contrast with tooth and nail fighting over the funding significance of a housing bill. There will be no respite in this budget for millions of poor Australians from a government that channelled the essence of Gough Whitlam in the election campaign. There will be no attempt to address the warnings from ACOSS or the OECD, nor to heed the findings of the recent interim economic inclusion committee that recommended raising Jobkeeper to 90% of the aged care pension, a seemingly fatal break from the proud legacy of the Australian Labor Party.
Leading into its first annual budget night, economy-facing senior Labor politicians were attempting to smooth over the harrowing news. Fresh back from his trip to World Bank meetings with RBA Governor Philip Lowe, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers was out on the hustings delivering the news of additional hard times forecast by the International Monetary Fund, alluding to further austerity required in the budget. Social Services Minister Bill Shorten, the man who on several occasions has ‘championed’ for higher Newstart allowances, said he “couldn’t live” on what is currently being offered, before blustering that there would be no respite for the nation’s poorest in the upcoming budget. They all spoke about the cheaper childcare designed to get people back to work for the productivity commission, and that was about it.
There has been a collective solemn realisation that no help will be arriving under a new government that many elected to address deeply entrenched social imbalances, and little hope remains for them to live up to their claims to be the party of the working class and the downtrodden. When asked on the ‘Insiders’ program if those on JobSeeker were living a “dignified life”, Katy Gallagher replied "It's hard for me to pass a judgement on that", instantly knocking off a another group of slightly rusted marginalised Labor voters who have decoupled from the political movement. Unperturbed, from the subsurface of the Henderson Poverty Line and buried in the pertinently new-born recommendations of the economic inclusion committee, the Minister for Finance and Women sat guarded and sanguine as she passed her government’s final judgement regarding the fate of the nation’s marginalised for its first budget.
In lieu of scuttling a quarter of a trillion dollars in irresponsibly legislated Stage Three Tax Cuts, and with her government’s insistence on defending them over addressing the deteriorating social issues in a nation where one in six children are living in poverty and millions live on under fifty dollars a day, the minister’s response came across as callous, reverberating across Labor’s lower-earning supporter base.
The Stage Three Tax Cuts are bad economic policy, sitting in the depths of what has become the murkiest economic times in recent memory. Making matters worse, profit-fuelled inflation and record dividends for corporate Australia are driven by a decade of LNP profit-assisting policy “features” baked on top of “bugs”. The ALP, while still in opposition, acknowledged these issues and gestured towards change. The mandate it received in the election was to expand on the detail, but since coming into power, it has preserved the corporate scaffolding upholding unfair profits, protected previous norms like the tax cuts, and dumped obscene amounts into vaguely defined submarine and weapon procurements for vaguely defined hypothetical regional conflicts with our largest trading partner. Where does fairness for the millions of Australians slipping into poverty fit in to this?
The Labor party claims its values are based on the legacy of its former champions when speaking to the county. The Prime Minister speaks about his single mother housing commission upbringing on rotation at home and abroad. He sits in the afterglow of this story, increasingly knowing that the opportunities his mother had cannot be replicated by someone in the same scenario today. The chances he was offered within an imperfect but functional welfare system are no longer available to the youth that sit on the bedrock of social mobility today.
Fact is, the Prime Minister’s family pension when he was a child had far superior purchasing power to what one receives today. The modest but important housing that he grew up in was guaranteed in the Menzies era, and continued for decades as a bipartisan policy that reflected the country’s values. Today, this bipartisan policy has morphed into a corporate-facing neo-liberal nightmare designed to maximise the benefit of the profit makers at the expense of the polity. The guarantees nowadays seem to be around preserving the values of wealth hoarding entities, adhering to the abject values of superpowers, and espousing spongy concepts like ‘values based capitalism’ -- but what of the values of the Australian people who voted in a Labor government last year for social and economic reform, instead of year-on-year record profits for NAB and eyewateringly expensive ballistic-capable submarines?
Nowadays, we see more presentations in front of the Business Council of Australia by our ministers than down on the factory floor. The ALP says they haven’t changed their position on the Stage Three Tax Cuts, but they talk about $1 Trillion worth of debt when it could quite easily be $750 billion if they were axed, then they tell us about understanding that those on JobSeeker are doing it tough, before saying that they aren’t doing anything about it. They mutter it all in the shadow of a seemingly endless financial commitment to submarines that don’t exist, spending towards threats with nations that haven’t yet materialised, while protecting the corporate interests of the donor class and their record profits by dismissing any true reform.
The values that Labor projects onto the nation via government don’t reflect their legacy anymore, and they don’t look the same to those on the ground either. For all the words and proclaimed empathy that the ALP has dictated to the Australian people, the population has not been able to see the words bloom into actions. Workers can’t see their wages keeping pace with the CPI of the banker class, or the profits of the corporate class, and the poor can’t live a dignified life under another major party government that refuses to increase one of the lowest welfare payments in the OECD. By choosing the $253 billion Stage Three Tax Cuts over a much needed chop-out to millions of poverty-stricken Australians, the Labor party has totally abandoned the essence of its progressive social policies and its traditional base, alienating itself from the everyday people that still hold the legacy that the party has now left behind.
In the world over, for many years now, both conservative and progressive governments have been privatising public services.
The argument runs that services like health, water, electricity, gas, transport and telecommunications can be operated much more efficiently, effectively and cheaply by business than government.
That this is a capitalist fallacy is now readily apparent.
See, for instance, articles by Professor John Quiggin, ‘Fallacies of Privatisation’ (Financial Review, 2008), and Andrew Hunter, ‘Modern Times: Power privatisation's failure is no shock’ (Adelaide Review, 2019).
These, and many credible books and rigorous academic articles demonstrate beyond refutation the range of public services which have been unable to operate better when the motive is profit.
Such a motive often means paring back services to a bare minimum so as to increase profit and returns to shareholders.
Aged care is an example of privatisation decreasing operations and diminishing the quality of the work being done.
In Australia, the privatisation of aged care facilities has seen private companies cutting employees, lowering the quality of food and generally lowering the standard of care provided because decisions were made with profit not care being the most important consideration.
One of the most tragic outcomes of this in Australia is the number of deaths from Covid as it rips through ill –protected aged care installations.
Similar undermining of quality has routinely occurred in other privatised services.
Public train or bus routes are cut back or discontinued, not because the need for them diminished but because some routes were unprofitable.
The same profit motive long ago infiltrated services run by governments, resulting in inferior and more expensive medical, internet and telephone services to regional areas. Often services are simply not established because they are considered to not be profitable.
Public need is less of a consideration than private profit.
The same thinking has deteriorated postal services and in Australia plans are afoot to curtail and discontinue letter deliveries because they are not profitable.
There is a lot more money to be made delivering the packages of internet driven shoppers than the antiquated letters of non-digital savvy members of the public.
The cost of subsidising essential medicines is not made primarily on the basis of need but on how high much pharmacy companies want the government to pay them.
If the subsidy offered is considered too low, in many cases the pharmaceutical companies medicines simply do not make them available,
Many governments go along with this because they believe they should not run these products at all or because they are offered kickbacks or donations by these companies.
The profit motive has them in thrall.
The end result, of course, has been increasing inequity. If you have the money to pay for certain privatised services you are lucky. If you haven’t got the money then tough luck.
And there is an increasing number of people who don’t have the money and may go without the medicines they need (Australia is a sorry example), or can’t afford heating in winter (England has seen the price of domestic gas double) or not visit doctors when they should (US health costs are enormous), or have seriously inadequate telephone services (as in Papua New Guinea).
The term ‘privatising profits and socialising losses’ refers to the practice of companies retaining their profits but passing on their losses to government (and so to the public).
This term has become a cliché in financial circles but it ultimately creates real pressures on the public, who most often experience these inadequacies which lead to poverty.
Another cliché, ‘bread and circuses’, means that governments try to divert the public’s attention from poor or non-existent services.
In Australia, sport is a major form of public distraction along with friendly media coverage.
It is hard to fathom how these distractions work because they are mostly stupid. Maybe that’s why they succeed.
Another saying that has become a cliché declares, ‘nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public’.
This cliché – in a variety of forms – is still going strong 100 years after it was first created by US humourist HL Mencken.
Having a dumb public and keeping it that way is a key strategy of these greedy pirates, the profiteers.
Waking up people to what is being done to them seems impossible, but it has been done.
One can only hope.
hey joel - appreciate the sentiments and it's nice to hear from a person in the media who understands the battles the less well off deal with on a daily basis.