En Passant

Tony Abbott’s paid parental leave scheme is more generous than Kevin Rudd’s.

The leader of the Opposition says it will cost about $3 billion a year to pay for six months’ full replacement of wages  up to $150,000.

The Government’s scheme comes into effect on 1 January 2011 and provides the minimum wage (currently around $543) for a maximum of 18 weeks. It will cost $300 million.

Women are now almost half of the workforce, around 46 percent of all workers.

The proportion of women working has doubled since the 50s, with women’s participation rate increasing from 29 percent in 1954 to 46 percent in 1985 to 58 percent today. Men’s participation rate is 72 percent.

While most women work full-time they are more likely than men to work part-time. 38 percent of women work part-time, compared to 14 percent of men. 70 percent of the part time workforce is female.

I take these figures to mean that Labor’s parental leave scheme is a wage cut for most women workers while the Liberals’ scheme will disadvantage those part time workers earning below the minimum wage and compensate  rich workers and ruling class women disproportionately.

Nevertheless on balance women in general will be better off under Abbott’s scheme.

A women on the average wage of about $1220 per week would get $543 under Rudd’s scheme for 18 weeks but under Abbott’s scheme would get  her full wage of $1220 for 26 weeks.

Even taking into account the gender pay gap of about 17 percent between men and women for work of equal value it still means that, on average, women will be paid twice as much for two months longer under Abbott’s scheme as compared to Rudd’s.

In concrete terms a women on the average wage will be about $20,000 better off under the Opposition Leaders’ proposals. It is that which in large part explains why the Liberals scheme is ten times more costly than Labor’s.

Sharan Burrow from the Australian Council of Trade Unions has condemned the Liberals’ proposals as a smokescreen for Workchoices and an imposition on big business which will cost jobs. This is reactionary nonsense and shows how out of touch the ACTU is with the reality of the lives of working women.

Burrow and the rest of the union movement should be pushing Labor to match the Liberals on paid parental leave.

It should not be beyond the ALP to develop a paid leave scheme which benefits most working women rather than penalises them for taking maternity leave, but they won’t because it would cost money.  They had billions for pink batts but have little for working women.

Least of all will Labor tax big business to pay for a decent parental leave scheme.

Let’s look at the Liberals’ thought bubble in more detail.  They propose a 1.7 percent levy on companies with a taxable income of more than $5 million a year.  The Liberals estimate this is about 1300 companies.

It is wrong to imagine this is a tax on big business. For a start many small to medium enterprises have a taxable income over that amount.

Second, according to Jim Killaly, a Deputy Commissioner of Taxation in the Australian Tax Office:

Over the 2005 to 2008 financial years more than 40% of the company income tax returns lodged by large business taxpayers had a tax payable of zero and around half those were showing losses.

In other words 40 percent of big business won’t pay the levy.

Business groups have nevertheless gone spare, crying that civilisation as we know it is about to collapse. 

Evidently unemployment will skyrocket say the people who sacked tens of thousands and cut hours for millions of Australian workers during the global financial crisis.  Foreigners won’t invest.  Prices will go up. Profits will go down.

As Joe Hockey, the Liberal Shadow Treasurer, told Sky News on Tuesday evening, business always screams about these sorts of things but clearly has the capacity to pay. He didn’t say it was the usual bullshit from business, but that’s what he meant.

Socialists have another explanation. Business likes paid parental leave. They just don’t want to pay for it. 

It is after all business which benefits from the burden the nuclear family mainly imposes on women to raise kids. The nuclear family is a cost shifting device from capital to labour.

One of the interesting things about this is that it is the Liberals who are proposing to tax business to pay better benefits than Labor to most working women.

I wonder if the ghost of Bob Santamaria is  starting to stir in Abbott’s mind.  Abbott has described Santamaria, the family values and anti-communist warrior from the 30s onwards, as his first political mentor. 

Santamaria saw industrial capitalism as the problem of the time and viewed communism and fascism as responses to this greater evil.

He pined for a world of agrarian production - a feudal world of catholic caring and concern.

Abbott has borrowed elements of Santamaria’s family values and his Catholicism and perhaps has added something else that was the essence of the man  – his abiding contempt for industrialisation.

Of course Abbott can’t go that far since the Liberal Party worships at the altar of industry, and Abbott’s ‘actions’ on climate change show a man, like Rudd, beholden to the polluters. Nevertheless I wonder if the glimmers of Santamaria’s agrarian reaction might be shining through in Abbott’s parental leave tax on business. 

If so, then the Liberal Party as the first eleven of capital has real problems. More likely however taxing the rich will strike a chord with many workers, and using the money to fund paid parental leave will appeal to many working women and men. Abbott can package it as part of his caring, catholic communitarianism. 

Abbott will win over a number of people with this paid parental leave proposal and show up the Labor Party for the cheapskates and reactionaries they too really are.

Is the national curriculum a Marxist plot?  Nationals’ Senator Ron Boswell certainly thinks so. He says that Labor’s ‘new curriculum reads like a learner manual for international socialism.’

This is a bit surprising since Labor is not a Marxist party. It is no longer even a social democratic one. It is one of the conservative factions of capital.

Admittedly it is not in the same faction as Boswell. So this is really an internecine battle between reaction and conservatism.

Partly Boswell is appealing to his petit bourgeois rural social base which sees enemies everywhere threatening its comfortable position in society. Thus it is that Boswell says:

Year 9 history involves learning about ‘the main features of the factory system and its effects on productivity, consumption, social structure, labour conditions and the division of labour’ – this reads like a Marxist learner.

No doubt this is to prepare our young for the anti-capitalist class struggle.

No doubt, Ron, no doubt.  Now try as I might, I can’t find any discussion of the labour theory of value in the national curriculum or  Marx’s ideas about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Nothing either about the emancipation of the working class being the act of the working class.

It’s a funny Marxist primer that doesn’t deal with the basics of Marxism.

The curriculum does give passing mention to some of the brutal aspects of our colonial past. It doesn’t however describe the original English invasion as the genocide it was. 

But even these watered down references to our past have sent Christopher Pyne, the Liberals’ shadow Minister for Education, into a rage. He is concerned that ‘Australian students will be taught a particular black armband view of our history without any counterbalancing.’

By counterbalance he means teaching that reflects the obsequiousness of some sections of the Australian ruling class to our former colonial masters and sweeps the genocide of aboriginal people under the carpet at Buckingham Palace.

Education under capitalism is a contradiction. It has to balance between producing creative thinkers who can take the system forward and propagating myths that unite us over and above class.

What those who oversee the process fear most is creating thinkers who might actually question the system.

Yet the whole institutional structure of the state is aimed at making sure the numbers who do begin to think outside the political and economic box is as small as possible.

The Labor Party and the trade union leadership are they key to this. They are that special group in society whose role is to bargain between capital and labour.

These leaders are the retailers of labour to capital.  This reflects the actually reality of life for workers.

Social democracy and the ideas of reform from above spring from the way society is organised under capitalism, from the very sale of workers’  labour power.

Of course as I have argued elsewhere reforms themselves are dependent on the health of the system and the balance of class forces.

The crisis of profitability over the last 30 years and the quiescence of the Australian labour movement mean that we are now in the period of reformism without reforms that impose costs on capital. Instead they impose the costs of reform, such as they are, on labour.

The Labor Party, with its links to the working class through the trade union bureaucracy, is uniquely positioned to do this. Its Workchoices Lite is a classic example of this.

Capitalism needs a well educated workforce. It needs to socialise its next generation of workers into accepting the anti-human nature of capitalism as natural and train that generation to become wage slaves. The education system performs that function.

The changing nature of Australian capitalism, in particular the national and international nature of production, make the states as policy developers and implementers less and less relevant.

In education a parochial state based understanding of the nation and world conflicts with that internationalised and nationalised production process.

The national curriculum is one attempt to address that, and at the same time modernise some of the more backward state curriculums and drag them out of the grasp of yesterday into the realities of today and as a preparation for  tomorrow.

The Liberals and Nationals oppose that because they fear there is a danger that the process of socialisation might be challenged.

Labor on the other hand has no such fears since it believes that the the very process of questioning and critical thought (within strict boundaries) produces or may produce a more productive labor force.

But in doing that Labor also wants a numerate and literate workforce attuned to the needs of modern capital.  

A reflective and critical approach does that and opens up space for creative pro-capitalist thought at the same time.

Contrary to Ron Boswell’s bleatings the national curriculum is not a Marxist plot. It is an attempt to modernise the socialisation process to produce the next generation of educated wage slaves attuned to the needs of capital.

Rudd’s health revolution isn’t about better health care; it is about cutting costs and ‘inefficiencies’.

With an eye to the election later this year, Labor’s changes are about pretending to fix the health mess while adding to them. They are about wrong footing the Opposition who have been gaining traction against Labor, pointing out the ALP’s all talk no action agenda.

The ‘reforms’ will be popular, much like the Emissions Trading Scheme was initially was popular too, until people begin to realise the reality of what is being proposed. 

Rudd’s health changes give the impression of making things better while in reality over time making them worse.

Will there be more beds? More doctors? More nurses? More health care advances and new technology available across the country? Shorter waiting times?

The telling point for me is whether nurses will receive large pay increases to reflect their real value to society. Not while Rudd is around. 

Rudd wants health reform on the cheap.

His first move is to change the funding mix to 60 percent from the Commonwealth and 40 percent from the states and territories (from the current 40/60 split). He will do this by grabbing $90 bn over the next five years from the States’ GST revenue. 

Yet the amount the states ’save’ in health spending maybe less than this.  In other words this reversal may be a funding cut for the States and force them into raising taxes or diverting other priority spending into health to meet the 40 percent funding figure.

Further, Health Minister Nicola Roxon has said that there may need to be tax increases to pay for the health revolution.

When Labor talks about tax increases they don’t mean taxing the rich; they mean taxing ordinary workers.

Thus the disgraceful $3 billion annual subsidy to the inefficient private health insurers will continue in an attempt to prop up the private health ‘market’.

Indeed, what shines through in this health ‘revolution’ is Labor’s commitment to the market as the solution for all the problems.

Labor has a long history of reliance on the market – from tax cuts for the rich to a pathetic Emissions Trading Scheme which counteracted its own manipulated market mechanisms with proposals for huge subsidies to the polluters.

In education Labor’s My School is just another example of of parents and their children as consumers of a product rather than citizens of a polity.

Underpinning the stimulus package was not the idea that governments know best but that governments should prop up the market – indeed throw petrol on the pyre. One result was the roofing insulation disaster.

Rudd’s health reform will impose Victoria’s case mix approach (first introduced by the Kennett Liberal Government) across Australia. This has seen health costs fall in Victoria to become the lowest in the country.

Would you be surprised to learn that the level of health care and service in Victoria has also fallen too?

Estimates are that a national case mix scheme would save $1.3 bn in costs a year.  It would not improve care but reduce it, as  has happened in Victoria.

Eventually instead of the money going to the states it would go to local health networks. 

There will be ‘efficiency’ standards and comparisons of health outcomes, and those deemed inefficient will be under pressure to cut costs. The local health networks will shift the blame game to those like nurses directly involved in providing heath care.

Rural hospitals and health care for indigenous communities are by their very remoteness less efficient than big city hospitals and health care centres. 

The tourniquet will be twisted tighter and tighter to cut ’inefficiencies’. This will put incredible pressure on doctors and nurses working in those services. 

Although Rudd denies it, the logic of his proposals is to close down or amalgamate ’inefficient’ hospitals.

Is there an alternative? Empower hospital staff to run their hospitals. Fund them adequately. Pay nurses more. 

Tax the rich to provide every Australian with a free universal health care system.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Parthenon. Neoliberalism rose from the grave.

Not that it was ever really dead. It has just been resting, waiting for its Keynesian cousin to exhaust itself.

During the global financial crisis state spending replaced private spending in many countries. What that spending hasn’t done is address stagnant profit rates.

There isn’t a bottomless pit to fund state expenditure since the state depends on the expropriation of surplus from workers just as much as capital.

Greek governments – both conservative and socialist – have been spending much more than they collect in revenue.

This year government debt is over 12 percent of GDP. Accumulated government debt is around 120 percent of GDP.  

The Greek government funds this by borrowing. Some of the debt is due for refinancing soon and the bankers who bought us the global financial crisis are worried about the country’s ability to repay the debt.

This increases the amount of interest Greece has to pay, forcing more attacks on workers.  Last week the ratings agencies cut Greece’s debt rating again making borrowing even more expensive and prompting the socialist government of Papandreou to announce further attacks on living standards.

Despite all this Government spending, the Greek economy is in crisis.

Its unadjusted unemployment rate jumped in February to 10.6 percent. It was 7.8 percent in November last year.

For young people aged 15 to 24 the unemployment rate is nearly 30 percent.

The International Monetary Fund – the king of neoliberalism -  will provide guidance on the European Union bailout of Greece. It is of course a bailout that dare not speak its name. Its central theme is ‘destroy Greek living standards’.

In October the Socialist Party – Pasok – won the election on a keynesian platform that did not involve attacks on workers, jobs or living standards.

Within a month of taking power the economic crisis saw Pasok abandon every one of their promises and begin to attack workers.  It is working people who Pasok want to make pay for the bosses’ crisis.

Pasok has close inks with the trade union bureaucracy and so in the eyes of some members of the bourgeoisie it is a better agent for delivering big cuts to living standards than the conservatives.  Pasok is vindicating that judgement at the moment.

The latest round of attacks (because the banks deemed the previous ones inadequate) include 30 percent cuts to public sector workers’ annual bonuses, VAT  increases of 2 percent and freezing state-funded pensions.

Public sector wages are already frozen and the Government plans to cut them further, sack hundreds of thousands and cut services.

The keynesian soft cop has given way to the neoliberal basher.  They are one and the same person in Greece.

Henryk Grossmann, a Marxist economist, wrote about crises of profitability and political responses just before the great depression. He said:

Only now is it possible to understand why, at a high level of capital accumulation, every serious rise in wages encounters greater and greater difficulties, why every major economic struggle necessarily becomes a question of the existence of capitalism, a question of political power.(Note the English miners’ struggle, 1926.)

The struggle of the working class over everyday demands is thus bound up with its struggle over the final goal. The final goal for which the working class fights is not an ideal brought into the workers’ movement “from outside” by speculative means, whose realization, independent of the struggles of the present, is reserved for the distant future. It is, on the contrary, as the law of capitalism’s breakdown presented here shows, a result of immediate everyday struggles and its realization can be accelerated by these struggles.

Certainly the general strike in Greece last week, plus the ongoing and varied stoppages of public and private sector workers and the revolt of pensioners and students, all point to an intensification of the class struggle in Greece as the needs of capital directly confront the needs of workers.

To defend living standards is objectively to attack profit, and in doing that there opens up the possibility of a new world free of wage slavery and the ongoing crises of the capitalist system.

 

For more information on Grossmann, read Rick Kuhn’s Deutscher Prize winning book Henryk Grossmann and the Recovery of Marxism

Supporters of the Palestinians’ struggle for justice might well be amazed to see the Labor government criticising Israel.

Kevin Rudd, that self-proclaimed proud Zionist, said of Israel’s latest crime: “It is not just one of those little things that happens that you deal with today and it’s fixed tomorrow”.

You might be thinking he’s running at least 14 months late. This would have been a reasonable start as a response to Israel’s slaughter in Gaza in January 2009.

Perhaps they’ve just recognised the crimes against humanity mentioned in the Goldstone Report to the UN, such as dropping white phosphorous on heavily populated civilian areas in Gaza.

Or perhaps they’ve just realised that Gaza is the largest jail in the world with its 1.5 million people living amongst the rubble of their homes from that bombardment, unable to repair them because of Israel’s blockade.

Or they’ve seen the statistics which demonstrate clearly that Israel’s blockade is a deliberate act of genocide – for example, the World Health Organisation’s report a year ago that more than 10 per cent of children younger than five have stunted growth, a figure which is worsening every week the blockade continues.

But hell no, that’s all quite acceptable. So perhaps this government, which opposes the death penalty, objects to the assassination of an elected representative of the Palestinians for his political resistance? Well, no again.

Israel’s actual crime – passport fraud – impacts on Australian dignity as a power to be taken seriously in the pecking order of world imperialism. Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith told the media:

“I made it crystal clear to the [Israeli] ambassador that if the results of [an investigation] cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, that Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend.”

Harsh words indeed from one of Israel’s staunchest and loudest supporters.

You might ask why Rudd and Smith have come out so stridently. After all, it’s well known that Mossad (the notorious Israeli secret service) regularly assassinates those fighting their atrocities.

It’s also well known that they use stolen identities from Western countries to get their operatives into countries that would never admit them under their own; at least one book has been published documenting these activities, and scandals involving New Zealand are on public record.

What is at stake is the validity of Australian citizenship and the doors it opens. Australia won’t stand for anything that might lessen the standing of its documents around the world. Australia expects its citizens to be able to use their passports to travel with impunity, to be treated with respect.

In this repressive age of the “war on terror”, this is nothing to be sneezed at. Australia does not want its passports’ unreliability leading to its citizens being harassed as suspect terrorists.

If Mossad can go around fraudulently producing passports using Australian identities, then Australian travellers might be inconvenienced. For the Australian government this is a much more serious state of affairs than the deaths of a few Palestinians.

Rewind here – if  it is widely known that Mossad can go around forging identity documents using Australian passports, then Australia’s place in the world is undermined. It does not mean, as a headline in the Electronic Intifada – a usually fantastic source of information on Israel’s crimes and the struggle of the Palestinians – that Israel “is on the road to self-destruction”.

Why did Mossad have to botch their operation so badly that the Western media can have a field day publicising their activities – which in the usual scheme of things are accepted as perfectly legitimate?

That’s why Israeli officials are so dismissive of enquiries about this scandal in a tea cup. In fact, one of them laughed in journalists’ faces as he flung at them “you should all be celebrating; we eliminated one of Hamas’ top operatives”.

They are genuinely surprised at the kerfuffle.

And why wouldn’t they be? When their crimes against humanity, their genocide of the Palestinians, their killing of peaceful protesters, the building of their security wall destroying Palestinian communities in the process, the continuing occupation of Palestinian land by settlers, all of this and more is not just ignored, but cheered on!

The vilest atrocities are continually justified as Israel “defending” its vulnerable self, only armed as they are with nuclear weapons and all the modern means of killing that the US can pour into their hands.

So while Rudd and Smith probably are genuinely annoyed, we should not expect too many ripples from this affair. It does not mean, as one headline proclaimed on Electronic Intifada – a usually fantastic source of information on Israel’s crimes and the struggle of the Palestinians – that Israel “is on the road to self-destruction”.

When it comes down to it, Australia, determined to be heard and respected in the imperialist club, will continue to cheer on Israel’s real crimes no matter how annoyed they are or how much they huff and puff about this stuff up.

At least they’ll expect Mossad to lift its game and carry out their illegal assassinations without discrediting the standing of friendly states’ identity documentation.

This article, by Sandra Bloodworth, first appeared in Socialist Alternative.

The minority Canberra Labor Government will freeze public service recruitment in response to an $85 million cut in GST revenue.

It will not tax the rich; it won’t cut grants and subsidies to business; it won’t reduce its spending on the likes of Al Grassby statues. Instead it will attack its workforce.

Left Labor Treasurer Katy Gallagher has spelt out the logic. Public service wages and add ons make up about half the costs of government. So workers are a cost and costs have to be cut, don’t they, Katy the Cutter?

The Labor Government only survives through the support of the Greens.  It is unclear what position they will take.

However their agreement with the government (which the Labor Party wants to now ‘renegotiate”) says they won’t block the Budget. 

The present manoeuvring by Gallagher is a foretaste of worse to come in that budget in May. 

The Greens should block any budget measures which attack workers and urge the workforce to strike against Labor’s attacks on them. Show some leadership, Greens.

Last year the Labor Government imposed a one percent ‘efficiency’ dividend on its workforce.  This is already eating into the delivery of services.

Now the Government is going further and not replacing departing workers. 

They gild the lily with talk of not replacing non-essential front line staff, (whatever that means), but the message is simple. Don’t replace workers who leave.

Gallagher said on ABC radio that the average turnover rate for ACT government departments was 10 per cent a year. Not replacing a tenth of your workforce will destroy services to the people of Canberra across the board.  But it will save money, won’t it, Katy the Cutter?

Those workers who remain will bear an even greater burden and be expected to do the work of those who leave.  This will only see a stampede of workers quit the poorly paid ACT government workforce.  With unemployment low, it is a skilled employees’ market.

And what has been the response of unions?  A bit of huffing from the Community and Public Sector Union, but no threats of strikes. 

ACT unions are negotiating a new enterprise agreement with the local government. Their initial claim was for 4 percent for the first year and 4.5 percent in the following years.

The Government offered 2 percent and then 2.5 percent in later years. Given that underlying inflation is 3.5 percent, the Government’s offer is a real wage cut offer of between one and one and a half percent.

So on top of forcing their workers to do the work of more than one person, the ACT Government is going to cut their wages as a reward.

The 8 unions involved have buckled. They have reduced the claim to 3 percent initially and then 3.5 percent in later years.  In other words the unions are offering a real wage cut.  That should have people flocking to join.

The union leadership is an adjunct of the Labor Government -its puppet if you like in the workforce.

The main union, the CPSU, last year affiliated to the ACT Labor Party (and other jurisdictions too) on the basis that this would give them more influence over Labor governments and see more government employee friendly policies.

Of course it was nothing of the sort and with the impending departure of the National Secretary Stephen Jones to federal parliament, it looks more like a parliamentary jobs scheme for the boys and girls of the CPSU leadership.

Around the world real unions are resisting attacks from governments on the left and right. They are striking to defend jobs, wages and conditions.

In Australia we no longer have real unions – we have Labor Party hacks acting as conduits for their party’s anti-worker policies.

I have a novel suggestion for Unions ACT. Reject the efficiency dividend. Reject the recruitment freeze.  Demand a five percent pay increase. Tell this Labor Government to tax the rich to pay for better wages and more jobs.

If the Stanhope Labor Government doesn’t agree, bring it to its knees with strikes across the public sector. Shut down the hospitals and schools, the buses, revenue collection. Show some guts and stand up for your membership.

A stop work meeting of all ACT government union members to consider the next steps in a real industrial campaign to defend jobs and wages against the attacks of this conservative Labor Government would be a good first step.

In two years time former Australian conservative Prime Minister John Howard will be running international cricket.

Howard supported apartheid. He was supportive of white rule in Zimbabwe.

As leader of the Opposition in 1988 Howard suggested that in the interests of ’social harmony’ Asian migration should be slowed.

As Prime Minister Howard moved heaven and earth to keep refugees out, including from cricket playing nations Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He dog whistled to the racist One Nation supporters over asylum seekers and aborigines.

He supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the spread of the war of terror into Pakistan. 

This is the man who will now lead a cricket council consisting mainly of administrators from  Asian countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistani and people from the overwhelmingly black countries South Africa and Zimbabwe and the nations that make up the West Indies.

Now maybe these administrators are part of the elite of those countries and having a racist war monger leading them is a good thing to them, but for rank and file cricket supporters in most countries Howard represents everything they hate.

Howard hasn’t been elevated to the job because of any cricketing prowess or background. 

He has been nominated by Australia and New Zealand (over initial New Zealand objections) becuase he is a ruthless bastard who will steamroll the non-whites.

Are the last bastions of empire and conservatism hiding in Australian cricket?

The ICC started 100 years ago as the Imperial Cricket Conference. England, Australia and South Africa were its founding members. 

Howard’s impending elevation looks like an attempt by conservative white cricket elements to turn the clock back to the good ole days of empire, when those with dark skins didn’t run things – they did what they were told.

But globalisation means that the real strength of the game lies in the East – India in particular – and that economic dominance will continue to grow as the Indian economy grows.

King Canute Howard cannot stem the tide of change sweeping cricket, no matter how much the Colonel Blimps want it.

In 2007 the Australian electorate rejected the backward looking John Howard and his conservative values.  The ICC should do the same.

International cricket needs a leader of vision and acceptance, of diplomacy and diversity. Howard is not that leader.

Is the Rudd Labor Government mortally wounded? Or is it just resting?

A Sun-Herald/Taverner poll shows both parties at 50 percent on a two party preferred basis.

So we have gone from Labor a few months ago in the stratosphere with nearly 60 percent of the 2PP vote to now being neck and neck with the Tony Abbott led Liberals.

The punditariat and soft left commentators will talk about the hit the Government has taken from the home insulation fiasco.

They will proclaim that Labor can overcome these problems and is still the favourite to win the election, due some time later this year.

They will argue the poll was only 609 New South Wales voters.

True, but even the Prime Minister says Labor will get a whacking in future polls.

In fact Rudd, looking very much like Mark Latham on Prozac, has proclaimed that the Government will deserve this whacking.

Mr Do Nothing is apologising for, you guessed it, doing nothing. But apologising is not action. Rudd won’t actually do anything positive to address the problems in health and education and of climate change.

The soft left experts might go on to make a few disparaging remarks about Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce and shake their heads in middle class disbelief that these two, along with Joe Hockey and Julie Bishop, could soon be running the country.

What they won’t do is analyse the insulation imbroglio and the swing to the Liberals even before then as something more systemic, something indicative of a broader malaise in Australian reformism.

In fact I think we are witnessing the slow ongoing death throes of the reformist project in Australia, death throes played out over the last three decades as a complete capitulation to the ’free’ market.

Rudd Labor continues the Howard project. 

For example its Emissions Trading Scheme is based on the manipulating the market to price in externalities. 

Its insulation roofing program was a cheap political trick – jobs with a green tinge - that threw the lives of installers to the sons and daughters of Bjelke -Petersen’s white shoe brigade.   The market would regulate the roll out.

Even in those circumstances where Rudd uses the power of the state overtly – for example the Northern Territory intervention – it is to steal aboriginal land and put it on the market.

On Afghanistan Rudd echoes Howard – we are there as a down payment for the US/Australia alliance.

This is a compact under which we can expand into the Pacific and South East Asian region and be a bulwark of sorts with the US and its other reliable allies like Japan against Chinese expansion.

On asylum seekers Rudd’s anti-refugee rhetoric and actions match Howard’s.

The crisis of profitability in Western capitalism since the 70s has seen the nature of reformism change from reforms for workers (however piecemeal and half-hearted) to reforms for capital which will flow through benefits for workers, or so the Labor Party hopes.

The economic base for real pro-working class reforms no longer exists so the reformists now dress up their changes in rhetoric without substance. We are in the period of reformism without reforms.

Rudd’s Fair Work Australia for example retains much of the anti-union constrictions of Howard’s WorkChoices.

Politics in Australia is now the debate between two openly pro-boss parties about the best way forward for capital, with labour supposedly to ride on the coattails.

The trade union bureaucracy has facilitated this process with its supine capitulation to Labor’s pro-capital policies and the destruction of the ideas and practice of struggle for real reforms.

The end result is a battle between two versions of the same neoliberal ideology.  Because Labor doesn’t challenge the ‘free’ market but aids and abets it, those who many see as the natural defenders of that market – the Liberals – will have an audience for their ideas.

Couple the systemic degeneration of Labor with a more aggressive Opposition, the weakness of Rudd as a Labor leader and his lack of ideas to differentiate him from the Opposition, the Labor party’s commitment to the market as the solution to human problem (and the consequent failure of some of its programs) and the swing to the Liberals is not surprising.

The lack of class struggle and a left wing, radical and revolutionary alternative to Labor – something in the long run only the working class itself can rectify – means that the electoral toing and froing between the two wings of conservatism will continue for some time.

The best way to stop deaths on building sites is to empower building unions and workers.

That means the Rudd Labor Government abolishing the anti-union Australian Building and Construction Commission and workers reclaiming their power to enforce safety standards through strike action.

After all, who has real interests in workplace safety, and who has the power to deliver it? Workers. The bosses’ real interest is profit, not safety.

Howard set up the ABCC to smash building unions, one of  the last group of workers in Australia with any tradition of strike action. Rudd Labor have continued this anti-union abomination for the same reason.

What has been the impact of the ABCC on safety standards? As I wrote in Is Ark Tribe Labor’s next political prisoner?:

Ever since the ABCC began its crusade against building workers and against their willingness to strike over safety issues, deaths and injuries on building sites have increased.

The year before the ABCC crawled from Howard’s swamp there were no deaths on building sites in Victoria. Now there are ten a year.

Without unions able to enforce standards through industrial action bosses have cut corners on safety to increase their profits.

Profit is king and a few extra deaths aren’t important to the bosses and the ABCC.

Every year 50 workers die on building sites around Australia. 

In the name of stopping the lawlessness of death and injury on sites isn’t it time the ABCC attacked the building bosses to enforce safety standards?  But they won’t because their real role is to tame the building unions.

Where was the ABCC when the shonks predictably moved in to the roof insulation business and put badly trained workers at risk?

Perhaps they were too busy trying to imprison Ark Tribe for the heinous crime of refusing to answer their questions about, you guessed it, a meeting on a safety issue.

Meanwhile the real criminals were cutting corners (literally), rushing to put foil in roofs and not training people properly. Unions could have enforced safety if there had been a program of empowering workers in the industry instead of worshipping at the feet of the white shoe brigade and quick bucks.

The Act setting up the ABCC says that one of its objects is ’improving occupational health and safety in building work’. How is that coming along, Julia Gillard?

The Act even sets up a Federal Safety Commissioner to, among other things,  ’promote occupational health and safety in building work’. Where were they, Julia, when young kids were dying putting insulation foil in roofs?

Could it be the real role of the Gillard Gestapo is to handcuff unions to stop them enforcing safety standards so the bosses can make more profits? Could it be their real role is to tame the building unions so that other workers won’t draw obvious lessons – strikes can enforce safety standards and win better conditions? 

Not voting Labor, not voting Green, not voting Liberal (shudder!), not relying on ‘independent’ state bodies, but workers using their power in the workplace.

That would mean breaking Labor’s laws.

No strike is illegal (something some in the ALP used to believe).

If the choice is between breaking the law by striking to enforce safety standards and protect lives or doing nothing and watching people die, I’m for breaking the law.