|
June 21, 2006
Ross Gittens, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, has a useful account of what social democracy once stood for in Australia. It endeavoured to correct the underlying structural (class) inequalities of education, health, employment, housing and location to achieve a fairer society by actively by pursuing six policy goals:
* Full-time employment for anyone who wanted it;
* A legislated set of minimum wages and conditions sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living, rising in line with national prosperity;
* A balance of bargaining power in the workplace;
* A means-tested but dignified safety net of welfare payments to cover short-term contingencies;
* A strongly progressive tax system; and
* Equality of access, across socio-economic groups and geographic regions, to public services such as good education and health care, housing and public transport.
Gittens, commenting on a paper by Fred Argy for the Australia Institute says that Governments didn't always attain those objectives, of course, but they did accept their legitimacy and they did strive for them.
No more. That was yesterday. Today, a neo-liberal mode of governance equates social justice (a fairer Australia) with a job. As Kevin Andrews, the Minister of Industrial Relations, says on Lateline 'fairness starts with the chance of a job.'
Is that all there is to justice as fairness? How does the Andrew's conception of fairness temper the effects of markets on income and wealth inequality?
The most dramatic reversal in social democracy's policy goals has been the undermining of both the minimum wages and conditions sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living and the balance of bargaining power in the workplace. As Argy points out, as the spending on middle-class concessions increases the the share of government spending going to the poorest 20 per cent has tended to decline appreciably, especially in the spending on health and school education.
Gittens comments that as:
spending on maintaining general public services struggles to keep up with demand, we're developing a two-class system in education (public versus private), health (public v private), housing (owners v renters), public transport (inner v outer suburbs) and location (city v country).
Welcome to the new neo-liberal world and the aspirational middle class. Will they accept Howard in a world of increasing interest rates coupled with the effects of the IR legislation and an effective scare campaign being run by the unions?
|
Interesting stuff. The multifarious two-class system that we seem to be encouraging at the moment is an interesting way of looking at it.