En Passant

At the moment Australia is in electoral limbo. But the big bosses still rule, which is why things are ticking over as usual – war, climate change, economic crisis, racism, homophobia… The election won’t change any of the systemic drivers underpinning these things and the Greens’ vote, while a powerful signal of the desire of millions of Australians for a better world, won’t challenge the rule of the bosses. So even with the Greens in a more powerful position (or even if they were in power) it will be business as usual for the bosses with a  few different crumbs from their table. Unless we organise a fightback in our unions and on the streets, and build a socialist alternative to Labor and the Greens. Have your say on the election, war, racism, economic crisis. Just hit the comments button.

The Greens have completely capitulated to the Labor Party.

According to Emma Rodgers, in her ABC News website article Greens, Labor seal deal, the concessions secured by the Greens include: 

• the formation of a climate change committee
• a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan
• a referendum on recognising Indigenous Australians
• restrictions on political donations
• legislation on truth in political advertising
• the establishment of a Parliamentary Budget Committee
• a parliamentary integrity commissioner
• improved processes for release of documents in Parliament
• a leaders debates Commission
• a move towards full three-year parliamentary terms
• two-and-a-half hours of allocated debate for private members’ bills
• access for Greens to various Treasury documents

Is that all? Here is a party which holds the balance of power in the Senate and could be instrumental in who forms Government, and they demand future negotiations, and ignore the big questions.

Where is the action on climate change? Their much vaunted price on carbon?  What about the humane treatment of refugees? Same-sex marriage?  Denticare now?  Nothing. Zilch. Zip . Except to have talks about talks in never never land. So for example there will be $20 million set aside for a study into high speed light rail. Wow. That’s progress!

Here are some of the demands I suggested in my article Greens: make the parliament unworkable that the Greens could make from their position of power.

The immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.

A super profits tax on the miners to fund denticare, public health, education and transport.

A massive tax on the polluters, with the green cheque to be used to lift the poor out of poverty.

A massive program of green jobs and green retraining as needed.

An immediate price freeze on electricity costs.

An end to demonising boat people both in words and actions and their processing onshore and release into the community.

A viable same-sex marriage regime.

The abolition of the anti-worker Fair Work Act and the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the empowerment of unions in the workplace and of their struggles to win better wages and conditions and protect and create jobs.

An end to the racist Northern Territory intervention, recognition of prior aboriginal sovereignty and the signing of a treaty, coupled with more spending under the control of communities to address aboriginal disadvantage.

An immediate increase in pensions and other social security payments by $100 a week.

An immediate increase in the minimum wage of $100 a week.

A massive program of Government solar and wind farms and other renewable energy programs to generate enough energy to turn off the coal fired power stations by 2020.

Huge tax increases and new taxes on the rich to pay for these socially necessary spending programs.

Rigorous price controls over big business.

The surrender means the Greens didn’t even get halfway decent commitments. They have betrayed their millions of voters.

They have abandoned their reforming project in the interests of bourgeois stability and good government. This is code for letting Labor continue its neoliberal agenda.

Here is what the agreement means if we let the Greens get away with this complete sellout.

In 3 years time there will still be nothing done on climate change, the dead in Afghanistan will have doubled, denticare won’t be ‘affordable’, people who love each other won’t be able to marry if they are gays or lesbians, our aboriginal brothers and sisters will be dying 20 years earlier than the rest of us, refugees will be locked up in concentration camps and the miners and big polluters will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Unlike Judas the Greens didn’t even get their 30 pieces of silver. They got a worthless piece of paper.

The Labor-Green agreement shows that the need for a real fighting alternative to Labor and the Greens is greater than ever.

Let’s build a socialist alternative to eventually lead the fight for real action on climate change, for refugees, for same-sex marriage, for getting the troops out of Afghanistan, taxing the rich and improving the lives of the poor and working class.

That is a fight that to be successful must be waged in our workplaces and on the streets, not in the talks fests of Parliament.

Taking bribes is a natural market response to inequality.  Where some are rewarded with millions and others doing similar work in a global competition receive very little, one logical individualistic response to this systemic inequality is to line your own pocket.

Global cricket is massively unequal.

As a worldwide product cricket is a very profitable venture. Most of the rewards go to the bloodsuckers in the media, the various cricket associations and the rich IPL franchise owners.

Some cricketers do very well too. But not Pakistan’s cricketers. They earn around $35,000 a year.

Ricky Ponting, Australia’s cricket captain, is paid a base salary of over $1 million and with endorsements and other emoluments earns more than $4 million a year.

Sachin Tendulkar, the Indian cricket superstar, signed an endorsement deal a few years ago worth $40 million.

After the Mumbai attacks in late 2008,  the Pakistan Government in 2009 banned its cricketers from playing in the very very lucrative Indian Premier League where they could earn  hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few weeks work.

This year 11 of them participated in the auction for spots in the various cricketing franchises the filthy rich own in the IPL, but not one was picked up despite the fact that Pakistan were the Twenty20 World Champions.

The massive inequality in global cricket is mirrored and intensified in Pakistani society. The poverty is staggering. Almost half the population live below the poverty line. The rich however are very very rich.

The country is one of the poorest and most unequal in the world. And yet its ruling elite are wealthy indeed. The political caste and business compete for the shares of profit the poor villagers and urbanised poor create. This criminal clique have and are raping Pakistan.

The floods in Pakistan have forced 20 million to flee their homes and now threaten the country with disease and starvation. The Pakistan Government’s lack of response to the  floods show their interests lie in protecting their wealth at the expense of their people.

The interests of the rulers of the West lie in continuing the poverty and inequality, and in a case highlighting the barbarity of the western elite, drone bombing people fleeing the floods to stay alive.

The time has come to sweep away the rotten systems in cricket and globally that produce these outrages.

The first step should be to pay the Pakistan cricketers ten times what they are receiving now and give them back a little of the profits they create for channel 9 and the other media conglomerates around the world.

The next step would be to stop bombing Pakistan and use the billions our rulers give the corrupt criminals in charge of Pakistan not to fight ‘terrorism’ but to feed and house the people properly.

Cut Packer’s profits and Ponting’s plenty, not the pay of Pakistan’s players. Feed Pakistan, not bomb it.

There is something truly inspiring about seeing thousands of mostly black South Africans blockading roads and hurling rocks at police in Soweto, Johannesburg, again, writes Ben Hillier in Socialist Alternative.

In the same district that saw the historic June 1976 uprising, which was the beginning of the end for apartheid, dissent and rebellion is once again the order of the day. Across South Africa, an estimated 1.3 million state workers have taken the step of launching an open-ended strike. And while a generation ago it was school students leading the charge, the third week of August saw schoolteachers take up their mantle as they joined with nurses and other hospital workers to demand the basic right to be able to afford housing. The strikers are demanding pay rises and improved housing allowances.

South Africa has been severely hit by two economic crises lately – first by the global financial crisis and then by the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Around $5 billion from the public purse was spent on the World Cup, leaving significant holes in a budget that had already been hammered by the GFC.

Despite their radical history, the ruling ANC (African National Congress, the most prominent anti-apartheid party) government are loyal servants of capitalism – and as any loyal servant of the ruling elite can tell you, the only solution to a budget crisis is to make the working class pay.

During the World Cup, stadium builders worked 70-95 hour weeks for around $160. And now that the party is over, the hangover begins. Government employees who are sick of being forced to live in shacks are being denied wage rises that might let them rent or own houses, in the name of “fiscal responsibility”. Meanwhile ANC President Jacob Zuma earns a cool $330,000 a year, and many government ministers and senior bureaucrats received free VIP tickets to the World Cup.

As is the case for workers in any country facing economic crisis, the public sector workers had two choices. They could sit back, tolerate their lot and help South Africa’s millionaires and billionaires try to restore profitability at their expense – or they could organise to fight for their rights. They chose to resist.

August 18 saw an inspiring start to the strikes. Despite being considered “essential services” and thus being unable to strike legally, nurses and cleaners have largely paralysed hospitals by striking. Battles with police ensued after workers blockaded roads and attempted to storm the Chris Hani Baragwanath hospital in Soweto to try to drive out strikebreakers. Unlike 1976, the bullets used to disperse the protest were made of rubber, but the pictures of police firing at a protest in Soweto must conjure up horrific images in the minds of many older South Africans. In addition to violent repression, the government is trying to break the strikes by using nurses from the army as scab labour.

It’s important to support nurses and other hospital staff taking radical strike action. Striking and shutting down hospitals is a much more confrontational and militant action than shutting down a factory or department store, and it’s an action that will undoubtedly cause some working-class people to suffer. The ruling class knows this, and will always use it to attack strikes in so-called “essential services”.

Why does the South African government suddenly care about the hospital patients that they have for so long neglected? The answer is simple – they don’t. When the government elected to spend billions on the World Cup instead of health, they demonstrated their utter contempt for the health of workers and the poor. Any talk of concern for the well-being of patients now is nothing but cynical point-scoring, and an attempt to have ordinary people scapegoat trade unions for the real harm done by a system that puts profitability ahead of health, and prefers a balanced budget to a healthy population.

What would improve the lives of working-class South Africans – even those in the private sector which isn’t out on strike – would be for the strikes to win.

Workers are completely right to try to make South Africa as ungovernable as possible in their fight for better pay, which is really a fight about which class will pay for the country’s economic woes. Forcing the ANC to back down on the issue of public sector pay opens up the possibility of putting the brakes on austerity plans before they hit home, and can be an inspiration to people all around the world who are fighting the same battles in places very far from Soweto.

There may be a general strike of all workers – public and private sector – on Thursday to support the striking workers. I will update details in the near future.

The United Nations has pointed out yet again that racism is systemic in Australia.

This year it was the turn of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It condemned the ”unacceptably high level of disadvantage and social dislocation” of Aborigines and the fact the Australian Government does nothing but talk.

Right on cue the Minister for talking about aboriginal disadvantage, Jenny Macklin, pontificated about Labor’s aspirations for addressing the life expectancy gap.

Earlier this year a UN report, State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, found that Australian aborigines have the worst life expectancy rates of any indigenous peoples in the world. In Australia the life expectancy gap is 20 years. In Guatemala it is 13, and in New Zealand it is 11.

Last year James Aneya, the UN special rapporteur on indigenous rights, said racism was entrenched in Australia and that the Northern Territory intervention was an attempt to disempower Aborigines. “It undermines the right of indigenous peoples to control their own destinies, their right to self-determination,” he said.

The racially discriminatory Northern Territory intervention and the huge life expectancy gap are the two most obvious indicators of this entrenched racism.

The most recent example of this systemic racism is the hate mail and abusive comments Ken Wyatt has been receiving. Wyatt is the first aborigine to be elected to the House of Representatives in Australia.

This racism is important to the Australian ruling class. Capitalism was built in Australia on a campaign of genocide against the Aboriginal people. That genocide – dispossession, massacres, poverty, assimilation, stealing the children, disempowerment – continues today overtly and covertly.

Racism also divides workers and shifts the focus of anger from the ruling class and its exploitative system to aboriginal people and more recently refugees and Muslims.

But there is an honourable tradition of resistance to ruling class racism - from the aboriginal freedom fighters of long ago to today.

 One example is the Alyawarr people’s walk-off.  The Labor Government compulsorily “acquired” their community for five years. Their welfare income was quarantined, meaning a basics card replaced half their income. The card means they have to go to certain shops to buy basics like food. 

The excuse the Liberal and Labor Governments use to justify the Northern Territory invasion is to protect children from neglect and abuse. It’s a lie.

The intervention is about stealing aboriginal land and disempowering aborigines.

There is massive overcrowding in Aboriginal communities. After 2 1/2 years the intervention had not built one new house. Since then a few have been built in hub towns. This is a way of removing aboriginal people from their traditional lands. 

Earlier this year unions and activists got together and built a house at Ampilatwatja to highlight Government inaction and racism. It took a few days to build it.  

There is a wider message here. Liberal and Labor politicians used the Little Children are Sacred Report  to justify the Northern Territory intervention.

That report had at its heart aboriginal empowerment, giving the communities the power to address the problems. Howard, Rudd and Gillard ignored this and have imposed racist solutions on the aboriginal people of the Northern Territory.

The UN has highlighted Australia’s embedded racism. The  Alyawarr  people’s walk off and the community and union house building at Ampilatwatja show an alternative to systemic racism.

A long term solution must involve recognition of prior ownership and sovereignty, paying the rent and negotiating a treaty with aboriginal people.

 Only a mass movement from below involving hundreds of thousands of people across Australia can win that new Australia.

Ultimately, to be successful, the fight against systemic racism must be a fight against the system and its racism.

Newspaper and other reports are describing the Australian Tax Office’s action in issuing a Departure Prohibition Order against Paul Hogan, an order preventing him leaving Australia, as draconian, heavy handed, and even that it makes Australia a police state.

It seems I am the voice of reason in all of this, having been quoted in Saturday’s Australian Financial Review saying that it was perfectly OK to use these orders when there was a flight risk and that the orders weren’t draconian.

For example David Rydon, one of Paul Hogan’s lawyers, says that the Tax Office is holding Hogan to ransom with its order preventing him leaving Australia until his tax claim is settled and that he ‘could be detained for up to four years in Australia.’ Rydon goes on to claim that ‘news of the order could harm foreign investment’. (‘Hogan’s fate hangs in the balance’ The Sunday Canberra Times August 29 p 7).

The ATO very rarely uses Departure Prohibition Orders. In the last 5 years there have been 14 issued, mainly in relation to Project Wickenby, the multi-agency investigation into tax evasion and other criminal matters.

It is the role of the ATO to protect the revenue. DPOs do that by preventing those owing money to the community removing themselves (and often removing their assets too) from our jurisdiction.

The relevant law says that the Commissioner must believe on reasonable grounds that it is desirable to issue an order for the purpose of ensuring that the debtor does not depart Australia without:

·            wholly discharging the tax liability, or

·            making arrangements satisfactory to the Commissioner for the tax liability to be discharged.

The Australian claims the amount of income undeclared is $37 million and that the tax not paid plus interest and penalties possibly totals $150 million. One of his advisers has denied the figure but said it is substantial. I suspect the tax, interest and penalties assessed and in dispute will be less than $150 million but still very very large.

 While Hogan is currently under investigation as part of Operation Wickenby he has not been charged with any offence.

The DPO could be revoked if Hogan paid his tax debt or made satisfactory arrangements with the ATO for the debt to be discharged. The solution lies with him. Alternatively Hogan could apply to a Court for an order to revoke the DPO, presumably arguing that the Commissioner did not have reasonable grounds for issuing it.

That may be a high risk strategy for a debtor since it may put into the public arena the reasons the Commissioner had for issuing the DPO. This might lessen public support for the debtor.

As to the DPO harming foreign investment, the idea is laughable. It appears to be nothing more than part of the spin emanating from the Hogan camp in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Australian community.

What we have here is another instance of a very rich person thinking we owe him and that the tax laws that apply to us all are draconian when and if they catch them.  This is the nature of our society.

The main tax burden is borne by ordinary workers. We can’t manipulate our wage income, and we don’t have the money to pay advisors to structure our affairs to avoid or evade tax. This drive of the rich and big business (40 percent of whom pay not income tax) to cut their tax is inherent to capitalism.

Readers might also like to read an earlier article prompted by a court decision to release many documents relating to Hogan’s tax affairs called Hogan’s tax crock and the more general issue of the transfer of our tax wealth to big business and the rich called Fund the ATO to attack big business.

‘Independent MPs will do nothing to solve the problems facing workers and students in Australia today. Instead, we need a clearly left-wing alternative that is prepared to stand up for workers’ rights, against racism and war, and which will resist the pro-capitalist policies of Labor and the Liberals.’  So wrote Corey Oakley in Nothing positive about rise of independents in Socialist Alternative. I agree. Have your say on the Independents or ‘instability’ or anything else you want by hitting the comments button.