Despite the Deputy VC’s claim that only 8 percent of staff participated in strike action, all reports from staff indicate that some departments were all out, and at the very least, half the staff were on strike. The campus was almost empty, and food outlets complained about how much money they were losing. Four libraries were shut for the day.

The resolve of picketers at each gate held up traffic and disrupted deliveries and other business. At the Carillon Avenue gate, one look at the picket was enough for a furniture delivery driver not even to try entering. Cars passing by sounded their horns in support of the strike.

Pickets and the strike campaign have now been well established at the university as a result of this semester’s campaign for a new collective agreement. This was evident from the number of people who respected the strike by either not showing up on campus or showing support for the staff in various ways. The campus was the most deserted this time.

University management has invited the police onto campus several times in the last few years to intimidate protests and strikes organised to defend job security. It is part of the increasing corporatisation of the university in every aspect, and stifling criticism and dissent. During a previous two-day strike, the police shamefully arrested five students for entering lecture theatres and making speeches about the strike. This week, their aggressive handling of the City Road picket resulted in a student breaking a leg.

The strikes have forced management to move on several issues in the EBA. More importantly, industrial action has significantly strengthened our union – since the start of February, 361 people have joined the NTEU at Sydney Uni. It shows the unions will grow when they fight.

However, despite the success of the strikes so far, more serious industrial action is needed. The public face of management intransigence, Professor Ann Brewer’s latest email to staff, reaffirmed that the university will not be backing down on a range of clauses that will impact job security and worsen conditions. Management wants to slash sick leave by 60 percent, increase the time for academic probation to two years, increase workloads, force the union off campus and make it easier to push through redundancies and restructures.

Brewer has tried to use the excuse of the government’s funding cuts, saying they affect what is possible in the EBA. But despite the budget cuts, the University of Sydney has a healthy cash surplus of $93 million. In addition, big savings could be made by cutting the ridiculously high salaries of senior management. Brewer herself was paid $443,728 in 2011 and awarded a bonus of $61,000. Her salary increase on the previous year was 6.21 percent, well above the 2 percent offered to staff.

The campaign has escalated because management is continuing to make every attempt to slash conditions in the EBA, while painting the unions as unwilling to negotiate. Recently, Brewer sent an email to all staff outlining where negotiations were at, during an actual bargaining meeting with the unions, i.e. before the discussions had even taken place. Clearly, management is not interested in negotiating and continues to stall, treating the unions and staff with contempt.

Neoliberal attacks on education are indeed coming from the federal government, but they are being enforced by corporate-style management at universities. Funding for universities exists, but is not being directed that way. Instead of cutting $2.8 billion from higher education, the government should cut the money spent on the war in Afghanistan and locking up refugees. Instead of taxing the poor and attacking single-parent pensions, the government should tax the rich, such as the mining bosses stealing billions of dollars of public money.

Our unions need to organise serious industrial action to fight not only for our own conditions as workers, but against the general assault on the higher education sector. With the impending election of an Abbott government, this will become even more critical. Our next strike is planned for Wednesday, 5 June. A successful strike then will not only help us challenge the university management – it will place us in a better position to fight Abbott.

[Alma Torlakovic is a member of the NTEU branch committee at Sydney University. The Education Action Group has called a snap rally against police violence at Sydney University, to be held at 1 pm outside Fisher Library on Thursday 23 May.]

Palestinians in Gaza march to mark Nakba Day (Joe Catron)

Patrick O. Strickland in Socialist Worker US reports from the West Bank and Israel on protests to mark 65 years since Israel was established through the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

EVERY YEAR, Palestinians in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and the diaspora mark the Nakba (which means “catastrophe” in Arabic), referring to the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel that led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land and homes.

This year, protests and commemorations for the 65th Nakba anniversary brought out thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank as well as a significant number of Israelis and international solidarity activists.

Hundreds gathered on May 15 in Ramallah to hear politicians deliver speeches, though representatives of the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, having long since abandoned its democratic mandate in favor of American funds, lack little legitimacy in the eyes of a growing number of Palestinians.

In Bethlehem’s Manger Square, thousands came out and held a candlelight vigil. “Nakba has always been the deepest wound in our modern history as 70 percent of our people are still identified as refugees, either in camps or in the diaspora,” Najwa Darwish, director of Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, told the crowd.

Elsewhere, clashes erupted across the occupied West Bank. Unarmed Palestinians chucked stones in Qalandia, Beituna, Jerusalem and elsewhere, and Israeli forces used tear gas and “riot dispersal means.” In one case, four Israeli soldiers were injured in Hebron when their jeep was struck by a Molotov cocktail.

Earlier in the day, “17 Israelis tried to enter [Al-Aqsa mosque] before local Palestinians obstructed them,” witnesses told Ma’an News Agency. Clashes broke out, and “Israeli forces intervened to protect the Israelis.”

Palestinian citizens of Israel, often overshadowed in mainstream coverage, also mobilized. In defiance of a loud right-wing counter-protest accompanied by a handful of supportive Israeli parliamentarians, hundreds of Jewish and Palestinian students assembled May 13 at Tel Aviv University (TAU). Activists read off the names of demolished villages, students told their families stories, and others recited poetry about the collective tragedy of exile and dispossession.

“The Nakba commemoration at TAU is…held in Hebrew and Arabic [in order] to spread Palestinian history to anyone who doesn’t know it…Jewish Israelis in particular,” said Ruba Salem, student organizer from the left-wing Israeli political party Hadash, in an interview.

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ONE DAY before the British Mandate expired, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state, presumably on all 10,430 square miles of the Palestinian map: “We appeal…to the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the state on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.”

This appeal must have rung hollow to Palestinians as Zionist militias proceeded to destroy more than 500 Palestinian villages and scatter more than 750,000 refugees across the Middle East. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé notes, thousands more became “present absentees,” a Kafkaesque term that refers to “Palestinian refugees wandering within the state of Israel, homeless and stateless.”

What Ben-Gurion referred to as “the age-old dream–the redemption of Israel”–has translated into the erasure of Palestine, a process that has continued unabated since 1948.

Israeli settlers continue to chop up the West Bank at a breakneck pace; the saturation bombing of Gaza has become so routine that it’s hardly news; the population of refugees exiled in neighboring countries is swelling; and Palestinian citizens of Israel face at least 67 discriminatory laws that impede political rights and reduce access to state resources, particularly land.

In an environment of legal impunity for Israel and its colonial settler front, Nakba has come to refer to an ongoing process that assumes the forms of present injustices: evictions, home demolitions, administrative detention, land theft, imprisonments, extrajudicial killings and other violations of human rights and international law.

“Nakba today means being confined to a little refugee camp that is overlooked in the political process,” Ehab El-Shafie, a 21-year-old resident of Al-Amari camp, said in an interview. “It means that, even though it’s our right to decide, the president [Mahmoud Abbas] has dropped our [right of] return in order to be ‘pragmatic.’”

“Every day is Nakba for me because I’m doubly exiled, demanding to return to my home in Lod, but forced to live in this Ramallah camp under the rule of the PA, which privileges and gives advantages to a tiny minority,” concluded El-Shafie.

Six-and-a-half decades after the original catastrophe, there are almost 5 million registered refugees living in camps, 4,900 prisoners in Israeli lockup, and a growing population of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that already tops 500,000.

Is it any wonder that Palestinians don’t understand the Nakba as a single historical event so much as a daily reality?

Instead of arguing over keeping a highly regressive tax or making it even worse, I have an alternative suggestion. Abolish the GST. Get rid of it. Send it to hell.

Replace the GST with a wealth tax and increased income tax rates on the rich and capital.

Why? Because workers and the poor would be better off overnight. Lenin put the case well when he said:

We see that the demand put forward by the Social-Democrats—the complete abolition of all indirect taxes and their replacement by a real progressive income tax and not one that merely plays at it—is fully realisable. Such a measure would, without affecting the foundations of capitalism, give tremendous immediate relief to nine-tenths of the population; and, secondly, it would serve as a gigantic impetus to the development of the productive forces of society by expanding the home market and liberating the state from the nonsensical hindrances to economic life that have been introduced for the purpose of levying indirect taxes.

Here are a few examples with very rough guesses about revenue to make up for the loss of GST revenue of around $45 billion.

The top 20% own 62% of Australia’s wealth, which is in total about $6 trillion. So they own roughly $4 trillion. The bottom 20% own less than 1%.

So a wealth tax of 1% on the top 20% (none of whom will be workers but rather capitalists and their managerial class and upper middle class) would yield, by my calculations, $40 billion a year. What better way to get those who have benefited the most from the 2 decade long boom to help all of us survive the coming recession?

According to Essential Vision 64% of Australians support increasing taxes on big business. We could increase the company tax rate to 35% from its current 30%.  There’s $10 billion. Now, this gain would be offset by an automatic increase in tax credits for shareholders, known as dividend imputation. So halve dividend imputation. Billions.

61% of business is non-taxable, with mining companies on 73% the highest non-taxables. Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Metal’s Group has paid no income tax in the last 16 years and with accumulated losses and credits is unlikely to pay any income tax before is 20th anniversary of tax free status.

During the battle over the Resource Super Profits tax the Treasurer estimated that the effective tax rate (tax as a percentage of accounting income) of mining companies was between 13% and 17%, the difference depending on whether they were foreign owned or Australian owned. The company tax rate (tax as a percentage of taxable income) is 30%.  Now there is debate about the accuracy of these figures but they might hint at the general direction of the mining companies low contribution to the income tax coffers.

As Martin Parkinson, the Secretary to the Treasury, has said:

In other words the effective tax rate of mining companies is about half the 30% company tax rate.

It is not just mining companies. Starbucks has paid no income tax since it set up in Australia in 2000. Google has revenue in Australia of between $1 billion and $2 billion for Australian sources but paid., according to some reports, only $74000 tax in Australia last year.

Between 2005 and 2008 40% of big business paid no income tax and after the GFC the figure is likely to be higher.

A minimum company tax based on turnover would get some money out of these tax bludgers. Billions.

Labor could abolish tax concessions for the rich and big business. $20 billion. This includes the superannuation tax rort for the rich.

What about quarantining rental negative gearing losses to be offset only against future rental income? Billions.

Tax capital gains like all other income and abolish the 50% general concession to bring in $5 billion.

Make the income tax rate steeply progressive by increasing tax on income over $120,000 a year rapidly and impose a 100% rate on incomes greater than $210,000. Those earning $210,000 make up 1% of personal income tax payers, the top 1%.

Impose not only a one percent wealth tax on the rich. Impose a wealth transfer tax on them. Tax the gains on their homes. Billions.

Impose a super profits tax on all super profits – not just coal and iron ore but all minerals and other industries like the banks. $20 billion.

This gives you enough money not only to fund socially necessary activity on public education, health and transport, and addressing climate change. It also gives you enough to abolish the regressive the GST. That would cost $45 billion.

There are many more progressive tax changes I or others could suggest.

This isn’t ‘socialism’ but it will make life better for workers and the poor. Enough of the charades Labor and the Liberals are playing over tax. Abolish the GST and soak the rich till their pips squeak.

The sector I work and study in, higher education, is being attacked to fund the mild education reforms known as Gonski. The cuts will total almost $4 billion over the last 6 months – $2.8 bn of ‘savings’ in this round and $1 billion of cuts in November last year.

My Vice Chancellor has announced this will means cuts of $23 million in 2014 and $28 million in 2015.

This is the same VC who last year smashed the internationally recognised ANU School of Music because it was running at a loss of just over $1m.

Imagine what this take no prisoners VC will do now? Mr ‘I don’t like the Music’ will try to get rid of courses and hundreds of jobs in ‘unprofitable’ areas. Current Enterprise Agreement negotiations are likely to see a pittance of a wage increase if any offered.

The fight to defend higher education needs to be built now independent of the union bureaucrats in the NTEU and the Labor apparatchiks in the National Union of Students.

At Curtin University for example 600 students demonstrated against Labor’s cuts. This great turnout was built by socialists who won the elections last year to run the Student Guild and worked tirelessly to put the cuts at the centre of students’ thinking and the need to resist.

In Quebec last year students defeated a Conservative government over fee increases. The new government removed them. It was left wing and socialist students who built a democratic strike movement that destroyed the Liberal government, saw up to 300,000 demonstrate in Montreal against that government’s repression of students and eventually won.

Australia is ranked 25 th out of 29 developed countries in terms of its spending per student on higher education. The cuts will worsen that ranking. Labor won’t reverse its cuts to higher education – the biggest since Howard’s in 1996 – unless a militant and democratic movement is built to stop business as usual on campuses across Australia.

Julia Gillard cried in Parliament in introducing Disability Care into Parliament. Such is the degeneration of politics in Australia that Labor can paint an essentially market based voucher system for people with disabilities as some great reform.

It is the same with Gonski, the reforms which spend a little bit more on school education but lock in the present inequities and reinforce the idea of education as a training ground for docile future workers. It is still education on the cheap, just slightly less cheap.

Seventeen billion dollar woman Gina Rinehart has warned against the rest of the country using the mining industry as a giant ATM. Evidently she can’t afford it.

As both Labor and Liberal governments attack or will attack the poor and working class maybe it is time to make some big withdrawals from the Bank of Rinehart to provide for socially useful spending.

I went to a public forum on Thursday night in Canberra on moves towards left unity hosted by Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance. It attracted members and people close to both organisations. None of them were new to politics.

It made me less pessimistic about a possible united group. However as those who know me will realise, my concerns relate to for example winding the film of Stalinism backwards and the abandonment of any formal commitment to state capitalism and its parent, the self-emancipation of the working class.

My concern relates too to what unity with people and parties coming out of the stalinoid tradition means not just for debates and discussion about the nature of the former Stalinist regimes in Russia and elsewhere and the current one in Cuba but also for the here and now of political activity and practice in Australia. Unlike others I do not see a seamless divorce between the two.

On the other hand it does mean that the space for further debate on issues like the women’s movement now opens up.

To have your say on these or other issues of the day hit comments button under the heading. Like all posts on this site comments close after 7 days.

People with disabilities need free universal health care, not the NDIS

It is tragic. The desperate situation of the disabled – who endure, in the words of the Productivity Commission, a “support system [that is] underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient” – has led to virtually universal support for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). But it is just one more notch in the neoliberal, reactionary agenda which dominates social policy these days wrote Sandra Bloodworth in Socialist Alternative in July 2012. Her message is still relevant today.

Empty promises by the Commission and the Labor government of a wonderful world in which the needs of the disabled are fulfilled under the NDIS feed off the sense of crisis and despair among people living with disabilities.

Senator Jan McLucas, parliamentary secretary for disabilities and carers, summed up the government’s claims for the NDIS: “It will be person-centred, providing choice for people with disability, their families and carers; putting people in control of the care and support they receive, based on their needs.”

When the states finally fell into line to help fund the first trials of the NDIS, disability discrimination commissioner Graeme Innes declared that people with disabilities were “Overjoyed, crying with relief because of the pressure involved with living with a disability but having the extra weight of having to deal with the poverty that’s related to disability because our system is broken and broke.”

But for anyone who’s been listening to the neoliberal chatter about constant cuts to government services of every kind, it sounds as if we’ve walked through Alice’s looking glass.

For one thing, the Commission is explicit that the NDIS will not address some of the most critical aspects of the daily discrimination which the disabled face – such as inaccessible public transport, inadequate support in the education system and unsuitable housing.

Any genuine policy to provide the needs of people with chronic disease or disabilities could, and should, make them accessible through improvements to Medicare. A universal health scheme which pays for the actual needs of people, not just those the government deems worthy of funding, is what we need.

As Eleanor Gibbs wrote in New Matilda, “The National Disability Insurance Scheme [is] a voucher scheme for disability cover”. The left has always vigorously opposed voucher systems for education because they encourage privatisation and inequity.

The fact that the NDIS is the brainchild of the Institute of Public Affairs, the most right wing think tank in Australia, and the model for it has been developed by the Productivity Commission, alerts us to the reactionary possibilities. Anyone who supports people’s rights over privatisation and government budgets should oppose this scheme. Someone working in disability services wrote to a friend of mine:

In a nutshell, global capital has been dismantling the welfare state for the past thirty years or so, and rights activists have been suckered into supporting it under the banner of individual choice and empowerment, and fuelled by their outrage at the systemic abuses of the old paternalistic system.

What is coming is a pseudo-market for disability services, and welfare (“workfare”) services in general, where everything is privatised yet still government funded, based on how individuals choose to spend their allocated government funding to them. People with private capital will get better services and the gap will widen.

And if we look at what the Productivity Commission has to say, leaving aside all the rhetoric about individual choice, better services etc, all these fears are well-founded. We are told that “if the scheme is to work well over the long-run it will need to have clear rules about who is entitled to what; careful processes for assessing the needs of people with disabilities; careful management of the costs of the scheme.”

References to how to control costs and make providers more efficient by introducing more competition recur throughout the document. Under the heading “What it will mean for providers” the first point is: “increased resources, but also increased competition”. Competition will lead inexorably to cutting corners to win government contracts by cheaper tenders and the commensurate deterioration of services.

Talk of rules and assessments for “individualised packages of supports based on meeting reasonable and necessary needs” which you spend on services you shop for; the statement that a “needs and approved spending plan will determine the types and nature of services they receive”; and the requirement to prove “significant and ongoing disability” – all this sends a chill down my spine.

The NDIS won’t fund what people know they need, it will fund what bureaucrats, implementing government funding cuts most likely, decide they need. Anyone who has applied for the disabled pension knows that the two are not necessarily the same.

When I applied for the blind pension twenty years ago, a right wing specialist refused to sign my papers because she judged that I should be able to cope because I was “only just” legally blind. Only the intervention of a specialist who regarded the pension as a right ensured I got my entitlement.

In the intervening years, the criteria for the pension have been tightened. Many who would previously have received it have been forced from that barely liveable income into the abject poverty of Newstart. So they face the stress of looking for work in the face of discrimination by bosses and struggling with inaccessible public transport.

Clearly, it is not even an aim of the NDIS to provide all the needs of the disabled. The Commission’s italics every time they mention “significant and ongoing disability” emphasises it as does the fact that the expectation is that only about half those now on the disability pension will qualify for NDIS funds.

And how often you will have to negotiate a “package” is not clear. If you live with MS, as I do, sometimes you need help from several regular therapists, but then you might go for months or even years with quite minor needs. But needs they remain. Whether they will be regarded as sufficiently “significant” will, I expect, be a constant source of stress as we grapple with bureaucratic rules. To say nothing of how increased privatisation will impact the availability of free services.

The nightmare that some who do qualify for funds could find themselves in is revealed by the comment that “they could choose an intermediary to be a service broker, provide management services, personal planning etc. Disability support organisations could act as intermediaries.”

Intermediaries! Service brokers! Just so you can access health care and support services you need and should have by right.

Glib “solutions”

The Commission lists a range of problems and “solutions”, without any evidence of how they would miraculously materialise.

Problem – Unfair and inequitable. For example, what you receive in assistance depends on where you live. Solution – National schemes with national standards and entitlements that would cover all people with disabilities who have high needs.

Note, not everyone with a disability, only those “who have high needs”. How non-existent services in regional areas, or catering to the specific cultural needs of Indigenous people or migrants, will suddenly be available is left to the imagination of the gullible.

Problem – Underfunded with long waiting lists. Solution – Funding would be doubled and tied to the Australian government’s revenue-raising capacity.

What will happen if the determination to maintain surpluses conflicts with the required funding is not even considered. But the report is riddled with ideas of how the extra funding will be covered by “reforms” to the disability pension and other means such as “encouraging” people to go to work in order to offset the extra funding. We know what “encouragement” means: punitive measures like forcing single parents onto the Newstart, reducing their income by $50-$80 a week.

The list goes on and the glib “solutions” have evidently raised unrealistic expectations among those living in desperate need.

But weekly we learn of cuts to hospital and other health funding. This plus the squabbles over what state governments would contribute to the pilot schemes is a warning that funding will not be automatic as disability agencies seem to believe.

There is nothing progressive about the NDIS. And the worst thing is that for years disability advocates and organisations have campaigned for it instead of fighting for the necessary funding and its equitable availability through a universal health scheme.

The NDIS is not expected to be fully implemented until 2019. In the meantime governments will continue to cut already existing facilities while all eyes are on this dead end scheme. It will promote privatisation and increase the stress people living with chronic disease and disabilities suffer as they navigate a punitive set of rules to prove their eligibility for what should be a human right.

The rally in Melbourne

Students mobilised in numbers not seen in years on 14 May against the Gillard government’s cuts to higher education writes Sarah Garnham in Socialist Alternative. The national student strike was called by the National Union of Students (NUS) in response to the biggest cuts to university funding in 17 years.

The funding cuts amount to 2.8 billion dollars and include restructuring youth allowance by scrapping the start-up scholarships at the start of semester (which about 260,000 students access) and offering loans instead, which will then have to be paid on HECS.

This means that poorer students will actually be paying more HECS than rich students.

In Melbourne, 3,000 turned out to the State Library. The fact that student activists have been building the campaign on their individual campuses really paid off. Contingents from most of the major campuses traipsed in on buses or marched down to the library after holding speak-outs and rallies in the morning on campus.

The rally itself was angry and energetic. Liam Ward, delegate from the State and National branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and a member of Socialist Alternative opened the rally with a condemnation of the Labor government’s constant grovelling to the rich:

We’ve got good news for Wayne, we’ve got good news for Julia – we know where you left your 17 billion dollars – it’s in the last place you looked – in Gina’s pockets.

We heard from a range of other speakers including a high school student who spoke against the idea that universities need to be attacked to fund primary and secondary education. Apart from Gina Rinehart’s stash, there are plenty of other ways we could fund education. Military spending has been expanded to make room for special drones which will hunt for refugees at sea.

From the library, protesters then marched down Swanston Street to Federation Square. Representatives from the NTEU condemn the cuts and spoke about the importance of student-staff alliances. Disappointingly, a Greens spokesperson turned her speech over to a “Vote Greens” plug, despite the fact that the Greens have not built this campaign and – for the last three years – have offered stability and an easy ride to the neoliberal Labor government who we are protesting against.

In Perth, there were two rallies: 700-strong at Curtin University and 50 people at UWA. To mobilise 700 people for a demonstration on a single campus – and one that has been devoid of a political culture until very recently- is a massive step forward. The reason for the success of the Curtin demonstration is that the student union is run by socialists who were committed to build the rally from the outset and used all of the resources at their disposal to do so.

In Sydney, the national student strike coincided with a strike called by the NTEU at Sydney University in response to ongoing attacks from the administration. Students began the day by helping the staff on the picket line. The administration allowed riot cops to attack the staff and students and left one man with a broken leg. Later in the day, Sydney University activists linked up with the NTEU and other Sydney students for a rally of 500, after which 350 then marched to the city.

There were reasonable mobilisations, ranging from 150 to 300, in other states as well. At all of the rallies, the NTEU had a presence and gave support but the rallies were dominated by students.

Overall, the actions have been a step forward for students in Australia. Over the last few years, higher education has been corporatised at an alarming rate and students now pay some of the highest tuition fees in the world. We have also seen the National Union of Students decline in influence because of the generally conservative approach of the Labor students who run it. These two things mean that the student movement is weak; a few months ago it would have been a real feat to have demonstrations even a third of the size of the ones we saw on 14 May.

The result has been a shot in the arm for student activists. But rebuilding the student movement will require a lot of work and left wing politics. We need more people in our student unions who do not shy away from criticising the government, who want to build grassroots organising collectives and who see ordinary people in the streets as the way to force change.

The most recent cuts are just the latest in a long stream of attacks on education and, under an Abbott government, we can only assume that they will continue.

As well as laying the groundwork for the future, we need to focus on the immediate campaign against the cuts. There are more actions planned for upcoming weeks and we cannot afford to lose momentum. The government thinks students are a soft target. We need to prove them wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwAM-ZDmwzo

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s Global Wealth 2012 report, there are 228 households in Australia each with more than $100 million in financial wealth. A 2012 Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management report found that there were 180,000 individuals with US$1 million or more “at their disposal for investing”. The Forbes Rich List names 22 Australian billionaires, whose combined fortunes totals $73 billion.

Just last week National Australia Bank announced a $2.92 billion profit for the first half of the financial year. A week earlier, ANZ reported a 10 percent rise to $3.2 billion and Westpac reported a record $3.5 billion steal. Back in February, the Commonwealth Bank reported a first half profit of $3.7 billion. In the mining sector, BHP Billiton posted $4.2 billion and Fortescue half a billion. Hancock Prospecting previously posted $3.2 billion for the full year. The retail sector is crying poor, but Myer and Harvey Norman took home $200 million between them.

Yet the business lobby – the representatives of the moneyed few – has been calling on the government to reduce costs for business and lower the company tax rate. This budget is not delivering the business world’s ambit claims, but nor is it really taking back any of what the ruling class has managed to squeeze to their advantage over the last decades. The government plans to increase tax revenue by closing loopholes, deferring income tax cuts and changing some of the rules on coroprate deductions. But most of it is peanuts in the scheme of things.

Treasurer Wayne Swan is blaming a “savage hit to tax receipts”, amounting to $17 billion over the last year and $170 billion since the GFC in 2008, for cutting a hole in its plans to deliver a surplus. It’s all the fault of blind market forces, according to the ALP. But the main reason there is a government deficit is because the government isn’t taxing the rich. This budget does not change that. Australia has the fifth lowest tax to GDP ratio in the OECD – meaning it is one of the lowest taxing governments in the advanced economies. And so it will remain.

The mining companies have effectively taken the collective resource wealth of the country and been allowed to pocket the benefits from its extraction. Fortescue Mining Group hasn’t paid company tax in the last 16 years and took the government to the High Court to try and rule the mining tax unconstitutional. The banks have been able to gouge working class people with mortgages and credit cards for billions of dollars. There is no better word than theft to describe the practices of the banks and the mining companies – but it is perfectly legal.

In fact, the National Accounts show that more than one-quarter of all national income goes to company profits: that’s more than $330 billion every year. Yet, according to Deputy Commissioner of Taxation Jim Killaly, between 2005 and 2008, before the “savage hit” to government revenues as a result of lower tax receipts, 40 percent of big business in Australia paid no income tax. Think about that next time you’re told there’s no money for higher education or decent infrastructure.

It’s not only the corporations, but the ultra rich in general, who are allowed to minimise their taxes through a host of schemes. In early May Tim Colebach, economics editor at the Age newspaper, reported that data from the Tax Office shows 70 people with incomes of more than $1 million paid no tax last year. They collectively “earned” $194 million, while paying their accountants a total of over $30 million to reduce, on paper, their individual taxable income to around $20,000 – and it was perfectly legal.

It seems, and it is, pretty simple that we should dramatically increase taxes on the rich to fund education, health, welfare and infrastructure spending.

Yet the surplus that exists is about more than just money, taxes and profits. The country’s extensive productive assets – the factories, the telecommunications and electricity grids, the roads, the ports, the office buildings and raw materials etc. – provide the basis for a society of abundance; a society in which, at a bare minimum, no one goes hungry and where no one is forced to sleep rough.

The labour that millions of people perform day in and day out – stacking supermarket shelves, harvesting crops, transporting produce, building homes, manufacturing goods etc. – is enough to ensure that social life continues. And we have more labour that could be performed to fix the decrepit schools, expand the public transport networks, get roof over people’s heads etc.

Instead we see government cuts, homelessness, poverty and unemployment. We see factories closing and people struggling to get by, burdened by debt and stress. All because of the concentration of resources in the hands of the wealthy, whose decisions are based primarily on what will deliver them the most profit, rather than what is in the interests of workers. For the wealthy parasites, labour and resources are simply a means to enrich themselves.

Of this there is no doubt: there is an abundance of labour and resources and plenty of work to be done. This is the surplus. It should be under the control of the people who actually do the work, not the millionaires and their politician friends.

What Swan didn’t do and won’t do is tax the rich till their pips squeak.

A more detailed report will follow on Wednesday.

How is it then that one year later, Hollande’s popularity has plunged faster than anyone thought it would? According to recent polls, only 24% of French people trust him to change things for the better, a lower score than Sarkozy ever had. The liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur carried the headline this month: “Is Hollande done for?” Such is the atmosphere of political crisis that Nicolas Sarkozy, who has kept out of politics for a year, is thinking of a comeback.

The main reason for all this is Hollande’s seeming incapacity to do anything effective while unemployment figures are standing at least eleven per cent (the highest for 14 years), tens of thousands are being made redundant and living standards are dropping. Also, the recent discovery that Hollande’s budget minister was himself hiding millions in a Swiss bank account and lying about it in parliament caused a huge uproar in a country where distrust of politicians was already at a very high level.

Hollande in the European Union has supported the institution of stricter rules on budget deficits which are the excuse for ever-harsher austerity measures in several countries. In France, he is clearly opposed to any real resistance to ruling class priorities. His government refused a bill which would have given an amnesty to a number of trade union activists charged with offences linked to strikes, and last week he declared to 300 businessmen he invited to his home that the “first duty” of the government was “to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit”.

While rafts of redundancy plans destroy many thousands of jobs (in oil, tyres, steel, cars and elsewhere), Hollande insists there is nothing a government can do about this, since the market is King. He has ruled out nationalization of industries to save jobs, and the new law he passed, making it easier for bosses to sack people and harder for workers to oppose their sackings at an industrial tribunal, was actually initially drafted by the MEDEF, the bosses’ federation!

Social budget cuts and deregulation continue apace. Reducing the cost of social services to the ruling class is at the centre of attacks on workers worldwide : One of Sarkozy’s major victories was to push through a law which meant people had to work longer for their pension, despite millions going on strike over the issue. Now, Hollande is already saying more sacrifices “are necessary” and 76% of French people do not trust the present government “to guarantee the future of retirement pensions” (which for the moment are considerably higher than in countries like the UK after Thatcher and Blair). We are expecting a major government attack on pensions soon.

Reforms

This doesn’t mean that Hollande’s government has not made any reforms in favour of our class, just that his general policy is in support of the dictatorship of market priorities. One very important reform was the recent legalization of gay marriage. This change came mostly, initially, from the Socialist party itself. Once the Right began organizing enormous demonstrations against marriage equality, gay organizations mobilized in favour of the law, and almost all the radical Left moved into action to build the demonstrations.

In other areas, modest reforms have been carried through. A little more taxing of the rich and better health insurance for the poorest, for example. The government has hired thousands more teachers, is opening far more nursery school places and has moved to stop richer parents choosing more privileged public high schools outside their local area. They have had more social housing built, limited some rent rises and improved retirement pensions for those who started work very young. A ministry for women’s rights has been set up, and women no longer have to pay part of the cost of an abortion. To please another constituency, they have reduced taxes for small businesses and given consumer organizations more power.

On questions of racism, the record is extremely poor. While a law was passed to make it much easier for foreign students in French universities to work in France, other even more important promises have been abandoned. Hollande had said he would make police officers give a receipt whenever they checked someone’s ID papers in the streets, so as to improve the present situation where Black and Arab people are often checked several times a week in Paris and you never see White people being checked. The interior minister, Manuel Valls, abandoned the idea because he says he trusts the police. As for the right to vote for immigrants, this promise, first made by the Socialist Party in 1981, has been abandoned. Meanwhile Valls is carrying out a policy of demolishing Roma encampments, and the numbers of unauthorized immigrants being given papers are no higher than under Sarkozy.

Worse still, the government seems keen to use Islamophobia to gain support. A recent court case where a tribunal found in favour of a woman sacked from a private crèche because she wore a Muslim headscarf was the excuse for the president to insist that he would examine the « need » for a law to stop women wearing headscarves from working with young children ! Interior Minister, Manuel Valls has declared that “The veil, which stops women from being what they are, will always be for me, and should be for the French Republic, something to combat.” In this atmosphere, criminal damage to mosques and to Muslim cemeteries is becoming commonplace.

Resistance on the industrial front

Faced with the social-liberal government, the Trade Union leadership is divided. Several unions have signed away workers’ rights in order to support a ‘left’ government, while others have been organizing resistance, if sometimes rather lukewarmly. There have been several radical strikes over the last year: airline staff, railway workers and television company workers, for example. An important car factory North of Paris has seen a strike lasting several months against its closure, and other fights against redundancies have been highly visible. Local teachers’ strikes against understaffing and arrogant management are not uncommon. And a national mass one-day strike and demonstration against austerity was well-followed, if not at the level of five years back. What is sorely needed are some clear victories for workers in order to inspire further resistance.

Naturally enough the fascist National Front is hoping to gain from the crisis and the disaffection with established parties. It has managed to modernize its image with its new leader, Marine Le Pen, got over six million votes in the presidentials and intends to use the local elections in 2014 to rebuild its weak activist organization, which has not yet completely recovered from the battering it took fifteen years ago from anti-fascist movements, a defeat which led to a damaging split in the FN. The traditional Right is now deeply divided over whether to begin alliances with the fascists.

Left Front

Anti-fascist campaigning is therefore crucial in this period, but only the rise of a Left alternative can brake the rise in fascist influence. And indeed, the situation has led to a sharp rise in political activity by those who don’t think that capitalism can be overthrown any time soon, but who think radical changes can and should be made through a combination of trade union and street struggles and electoral politics (that is to say, there has been a revival of what Marxists usually call Left reformism).

This is what is behind the rise of the Left Front (Front de Gauche), a political bloc including two big parties – the Communist party and the Left Party (Parti de Gauche), and six or seven smaller organizations of a few hundred each, mostly anticapitalist groups and including three organizations which split one by one from the New Anticapitalist Party over recent years.

Its main spokesperson, Left Party leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has thrilled millions of workers who want to fight with his impressive capacity to sum up the anger they feel. “Immigrants aren’t the enemy, bankers are!” he declared, and has several times wiped the smug smiles off the faces of conservative journalist interviewers with devastating critiques of the political establishment. “We need to sweep away those in power” he said. Socialist Party reps accused him of dangerous rhetoric which could only help the far right, but were left red-faced when Mélenchon brought out a 1930s Socialist Party poster which carried… exactly the same slogan!

The Front de Gauche is popularizing, with impressive creativity, proposals for left reforms in the interests of workers, for example a ban on redundancies in firms which are making profits. Mélenchon says that social-democracy across Europe has abandoned the workers’ interests and calls for the establishment of a maximum salary, retirement at sixty and a big rise in the minimum wage. Around the country a series of dynamic public meetings and teach-ins keep the political alternative in the public eye. A major conservative daily newspaper, Le Figaro, is asking in its readers’ poll this week ‘Is Jean-Luc Mélenchon a political danger for François Hollande’.

Naturally, Mélenchon’s ideas include all the contradictions of wanting radical change through the state and without social revolution. In particular, he defends the supposed ‘positive role’ of the French army abroad and France’s position as a nuclear power, and believes in the possibility of a revolution “through the ballot box”. In the long-term, in the struggle to overthrow capitalism, no doubt he will not go all the way. But for the moment, the role he plays is very positive, galvanizing and encouraging both workers’ struggles and the struggle for a Left alternative on many questions of great importance for workers.

The Front de Gauche is an umbrella alliance in which each organization keeps to its own principles. The Communist Party is by far the biggest component. A contradictory organization, sections of it concentrate on running town councils and on electoralism, while others are very much involved in trade union and other resistance actions. The Parti de Gauche (which split from the Socialist Party in 2009) has become more of a dynamic activist organization over the last year. It now has 12 000 members and can be seen recruiting students on university campuses, something the activist Left has not been strong on of late. The smaller organizations which are part of the Front de Gauche, each with two to five hundred activists, have been working closely together to form an ‘anticapitalist pole’, an ‘eco-socialist current’ within the Front de Gauche. A joint bulletin produced by six of the organizations, including mine, is making this joint work visible.

Taking the Bastille

120,000 taking the Bastille on 5 May

The Front de Gauche called a mass demonstration for the 5th of May, one year after Hollande’s election, to demand real left policies, and constitutional change. The demonstration was led by contingents of trade unionists from recent and ongoing strikes and found a tremendous echo. Hundreds of coaches came from around the country. A carnival atmosphere reigned in the Place de la Bastille, with thousands of placards and posters carrying such slogans as “It’s time for the people to take power”, “We will not give up”, “Finance markets are the problem, not the solution” and “Wages are the solution, not the problem”. Many people carried brooms to represent the need for a clean sweep of politics and policies. (Photos at http://www.mediapart.fr/portfolios/bastille-nation-un-dimanche-5-mai ). This collective expression of anger was a great success, and must be only the beginning. Recent dynamic protests against nuclear power and against the building of a new airport confirm that the desire to fight back is widespread.

If the Front de Gauche represents right now the centre of gravity of resistance politics in France, the revolutionary New Anticapitalist Party maintains significant activist forces. It is considerably smaller than it was a few years ago, principally because much of its leadership insisted that Left reformism could not exist or revive and therefore the NPA had nothing to say to activists close to the Front de Gauche except that the Front de Gauche would never fight against Socialist Party policies, an opinion which has proved to be hopelessly out of touch with reality. In a positive move, the NPA participated in the demonstration on the 5th of May, despite some sectarian articles in its paper. The other main revolutionary organization in France, Lutte Ouvrière, denounced the demonstration as “fomenting illusions” in the possibility of reform from above.

Islamophobia

As readers are probably aware, Islamophobia, rooted in a very old French Left tradition of hostility to religious believers, remains rife across all the Left in France, including the Front de Gauche and the New Anticapitalist party. In the Parti de Gauche there are several leaders who would like to see Muslim headscarves banned in workplaces where children are present, for example. The minority of Left activists who want to fight Islamophobia is however bigger than it was ten years ago when headscarves were banned from high schools. At Sunday’s demonstration a ‘collective of Front de Gauche activists against Islamophobia ‘ gave out leaflets calling for a rally against further islamophobic legislation.

The coming months will see if the widespread anger Hollande faces can be transformed into effective action against government policies and against redundancies.

John Mullen (Gauche Anticapitaliste activist in the Paris region)