Who is our Government and what does it do?

Under public perceptions that the current system is broken and reforms are needed, Australians voted for change from a progressive Labor government. Many feel they are not getting it.

The Albanese government has gone out of its way to be seen standing with the business community (Source: Twitter)

Jim Chalmers addressed the National Press Club (NPC) in Canberra to talk up the findings of the 2023  Intergenerational Report (IGR). He posted a photo on the way there in the plane, showing a tranquil sky outside the window, above the clouds with an endless horizon. He Tweeted about “endless possibilities”, waxing lyrical on a “future we can be optimistic about but not complacent about”. Chalmers landed and delivered those words for an hour in front of the cameras, taking up minute after minute talking about being brave and thinking ahead, but falling short of demonstrating the courage to speak on the the profit riddled corporate elephants in the room that trample on a population that is only just beginning to suffer under this unsustainable status quo.

Both the supermarkets announced obscene record profits this week. The giant supermarkets that are now starting to impinge on the human right that is food, posted record profits just the same as last year. The CEOs and spokespeople said it was due to families eating together and meal-planning at home instead of dining out, but also sheepishly admitted that it was also somewhat due to prices being high as well.  

Woodside popped $2.7 billion in earnings just after its CEO took out a restraining order on protestors she labelled as “organised extremists”, right about the time Qantas posted a record rebound of over two billion dollars, and Alan Joyce, after hanging out with the PM to put his name to the Voice, pretty much told Australians to get fucked about paying back Jobkeeper on national television. All of this happened a week after the banks went into the history books with their own obscene dividends, talking down their pharaonic wealth and warning about the tough times that lay ahead. In the background one-by-one, the usual suspects, many of whom were bailed out of the pandemic by the taxpayer, suspended high on the economic levers and gears that are built to ratchet the super-profiteers into the stratosphere, continued earning in a broken system with no end in sight.

There was a celebratory mood amongst the big winners at the big end, as they were greeted at a $10,000 per head business dinner hosted by a moonlighting ALP, sneaking off in the shadows after days spent at their national convention in Brisbane. In light of the duopoly super profits announcement from the supermarkets, miners and corporate titans that had only just occurred, Anthony Albanese somehow attended another Business Council of Australia event on the eve of Chalmers’ NPC address, taking photos with outgoing President Jennifer Westacott for her farewell drinks, and proudly putting them up on his socials along with all the other black tie events he does with the big end of town. 

With all of this going on, the super profits makes the suffering of Australians, the unassailable Stage Three Tax Cuts, the awkwardly massive and alarmingly consequential AUKUS, the unsustainable decline in the Australian way of life, the housing crisis that gets a future fund instead of a government, and the inevitable environmental breakdown via the subsidised multinational fossil fuel giants his government protects – you’d think Jim Chalmers could have acknowledged that intergenerational change was actually needed, but instead he appeared on stage wrapped in the same neoliberal cloak as his predecessor, speaking the same sermon as Josh Frydenberg.

The uninspiring, hands-off direction set by the May budget set the tone for the IGR, and apart from working more and expecting less under the mantle of what could be interpreted as a form of emerging neo-feudalism, the IGR adhered to the narrow lines of end-stage neoliberalism, and had no more than the morbid and limited suite of the usual palliative care options it offers. One in six children live in poverty in the country with the highest per capita GDP in the OECD, First Nations people struggle to close the gap, single middle-aged men and women who’ve worked their whole lives live out of their cars, the landlord class turns the screws tighter and tighter every day without constraint, and people around the country slip below the poverty line every day. The IGR required a substance that wasn’t on display at the NPC. 

Mark McGowan joined BHP shortly after leaving politics to ‘spend time with his family’. This process of blurring the lines under a conflicted industrial-political confluence allows the mining giants continue to build their wealth off pilfering the lands of our country to fuel endless growth around the globe. They continue their barely regulated and inadequately taxed wealth extraction with the valuable government cheat sheets offered by former Premiers who perform mercenary work in support of the resources sector. As the situation becomes socially unacceptable, ‘Progressive’ governments in federal and state monopolies band together to make sure the madness prevails by introducing anti-democratic draconian measures to lock up the people who protest the genocidal ramping up of new coal and gas.

Many of Australians cannot afford to see above the clouds to the endless horizons that Jim Chalmers sees from his vantage point (Source: Twitter)

With all the obstructions baked into the Coalition-inspired deep dish, the pro-corporate tax structures that run as they were intended to preserve unsustainable record profits, and the neoliberal bugs that are actually features to deprive Australians of a meaningful existence, why wouldn’t a Labor government come into power after a decade and look to make the reforms needed knowing they had the support of the electorate? With the credibility of the Murdoch-led press in tatters after repeatedly misinforming the population on bushfires, floods and pandemics, and while it continues to divide the population using anti-scientific propaganda, cheap identity politics and corporate protectionism, why would a Labour government forgo a Murdoch Royal Commission and seek to break bread with the people that moved heaven and earth to deny them government up until the eleventh hour? With a population collectively distressed by floods and fires, those affected still unhoused on lowlying flood plains and living on the edge of burnt out biomes, with Teal waves redefining the electoral landscape and exemplifying the public’s demands for action, why would the government ape in with new coal and gas? And, with three in four Australians supporting rent caps and opposing Scomo’s AUKUS, why would a Labor government so stridently insist on walking the other way?   

The last government was a ruthless corporate facing coalition of conservatives who entrenched a culture of government that worked for the influential few. The Albanese government, armed with its vapid and uninspiring IGR, in the shadow of its first budget that dare not mention reforms to capital gains, without so much as an attempt to suggest revocation of the Stage Three Tax Cuts, nor the courage to whisper a reasonable tax on the unmitigated fossil fuel industry, and bereft of the appearance it wants do do anything meaningful to address those below the poverty line, just doesn’t look that much different to the last lot.    

Albanese keeps going on about “shaping the future, in the best interest of all Australians”, but he does so from the spheres of influence of a tremendously rich few. His government talks about future funds for build-to-rent housing projects standing next to CEOs that profit from them, preaches trad-Labor at the conference while dining with the profiteers, and it tries to speak of the significance of the Voice, but it does so next to Alan Joyce. The fairly new PM has spent so much time trying to be water to win an election after his party suffered a decade in opposition, that it cannot form any tangible ideas, and many of its offerings leak through the grasp of the Australian public.

Isn't a government meant to act for the people in times like these? Should it not step in, knowing it has the support of the electorate, to roll out some bold policies to improve the decaying situation facing millions of Australians? With one eye fixed on the translucent submarines within the unintelligibly endless implications of AUKUS, and the other on delivering the referendum, perhaps a few bold moves like a small boost to Centrelink, or axing the Stage Three Tax cuts could illustrate a middle ground, but without demonstrating courage to be a traditional government, it looks instead to be a consultant-riddled, future-fund dependent disappointment that will ultimately fail on the few big ticket items is expects our support on.

The government may think it wise to dip into the middle conservative voting blocs full of political refugees who cannot fathom the vehicle that is the current Coalition, but it rolls into this territory leaving a trail of sparks behind it. As Labor looks to set its bar to the standards of an inflated and undeserving group of former Coalition voters waiting for the next viable conservative leader to arrive, it loses so many in the working heartlands on which it leans with disregard, toying with their progressive hopes and rusted on footy-team allegiances and feeding them the dry bones of the working party that once built the nation.