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June 30, 2014
Coalition: "reward the lifters” and “discourage the leaners”
The Coalition's rhetoric around welfare reform is harsh.
It says that Australia's welfare system is unsustainable (even though the welfare state is actually shrinking). The rhetoric says that it is unfair to keep a welfare system intact that is not encouraging participation and personal responsibility. It is up to individuals in the community to accept responsibility for their lives and their destiny.
Reform is needed, this rhetoric holds, because the long-term unemployed and the disabled are deemed by the politicians to be part of a "something-for-nothing culture". The receipt of benefits is a lifestyle choice that breeds intergenerational poverty, imposes a burden on the taxpayer, and constitutes a national crisis. Poverty is the result of people making the wrong choices and not working hard.
David Rowe
In this neo-liberal ‘workfare’ rhetoric welfare is a term of abuse whilst the blaming and shaming is designed to encourage or "nudge" people into changing their behaviour by getting a job. Even though the neo-liberals know that most poverty is caused by economic factors over which individuals have little or no control, they continue to say that the "leaners" are the cause of their own misfortune because they didn't put in the hard yards to get ahead and improve themselves. The recipients’ of welfare have a social obligation to prove themselves worthy beneficiaries.
This rhetoric of ‘personal responsibility’ that lies behind the ‘lifters’ and ‘leaners’ slogan justifies a neo-liberal interpretation of the welfare reform that proposes to streamline benefits into four or five types of payments, the expansion of Work for the Dole, income management and the tightening of criteria for disability carers payments. The proposals in the review's interim report, are to shift people with disabilities onto a "working age payment" and quarantine the disability support pension (DSP) for those with permanent disabilities,
For neo-liberals, the welfare state is a threat to freedom, is ineffective and inefficient and is economically, politically and socially damaging. It distorts family responsibility, destabilises the family and creates dependency. So the social democratic notion that the welfare state was designed to prevent poverty is transformed into the system actually discouraging work. Hence the idea of the deserving poor: those willing to work hard and play by the rules of taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the market.
The interim report of the Review of Australia’s Welfare System, led by former Mission Australia CEO Patrick McClure, assumes that everyone who has some capacity to work should work and that economic growth is the best means to counter unemployment. It is the individual's responsibility to acquire the necessary skills to prevent the tendency to degenerate into unemployability caused by shrinking employment opportunities for low-skill workers.
Consequently the prime purpose of social welfare is to set such people on course for obtaining employment through targeted and individualised assistance as well as appropriate education and training, especially linked to local employment opportunities. Ye the Coalition has been cutting training programs, cutting TAFE's budget and making higher education much more expensive. What if the jobs are not there for people with disabilities to move into? Then people should work for free as volunteers. Is there is even enough unpaid volunteer work to viably engage very many of the disabled especially when you consider the extra support that many of the disabled would need to be able to work at all?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:55 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
June 29, 2014
a Liberal victory?
There is a lot of nonsense written about Clive Palmer on climate change policy. The Canberra Press Gallery focuses on the politics and interprets it in terms of smoke and mirrors by the showman seeking to increase his public profile. It's the image that counts.
David Pope
Those on the political right concentrate on the removal of carbon pricing (the "Carbon tax" is axed) and assume that nirvana is just around the corner. It's a grand victory for the climate do-nothings in the Coalition and all the rest is a sideshow, rather than a political headache.
The Coalition and its denialist allies and conspiracy theorists want no meaningful action on climate change, are deeply hostile to green technologies and want to remove restrictions on coal mining and fossil fuel energy in Australia. In doing so they have embraced the of the Coalition base.
In contrast, Sophie Morris in Goring the Tax in The Saturday Paper, doesn't line up with the denialists. recognizes that carbon price pushed up power bills by about 10 per cent, but it was just one of a number of factors contributing to higher prices and so electricity prices will not plummet. Though she recognizes that some climate change architecture will be salvaged by Palmer she doesn't address the significance of this.
What the mainstream press consistently overlook with their focus on the fossil-fuel producers being regulated about their pollution, is the antipathy towards the Renewable Energy Target (RET) from the electricity utilities, the steady decline in the demand for electricity, and the increasing importance of renewable energy (solar and wind) in supply electricity at the expense of the coal fired power stations. The mainstream press, like the politicians, just assume that since energy demand growth is essential for a growing economy, so demand growth must inevitably continue to rise and that the coal fired power stations will supply more and more energy across the ever expanding grid.
Maybe those assumptions no longer hold because renewables are disrupting the national electricity market to such an extent that the process of creative destruction is well and truly under way.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:24 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 25, 2014
being taken for a fool
The Abbott Coalition still appears to have one style of governance. Bash the doors down, yell at the buffons to clear a passage way and kick those who get in the way. It comes across as tactics of the bully boy throwing his weight around.
I cannot see these techniques being a successful negotiating strategy to deal with the Senate acting as a house of review. Trying to pushing senators around is just going to get the cross bench Senators backs up.
David Rowe
The Coalition's assumption is that once the Green/Labor control of the Senate passes and the new Senate takes its place the Independents and PUP will fall in line quickly and pass all the Coalition's legislation to wind back Labor's reforms.
They are in for a surprise. The new Senators are in no mood to be kicked around given the contradictions in the budget, its inequities, the slogans (“debt and deficit disaster”), the small government ideology, the lack of an economic crisis, and the use of fear as a sales pitch for the neo-liberal winding back the welfare state.
The cross bench senators can also see that the rhetoric of the " end of the age of entitlement" applies to poor people, not to big corporations like Big Mining. The know that the states have less money for schools, hospitals and public transport and yet the subsidies to Big Mining continue.
The Coalition's political strategy is to polarize a divided electorate, ensure that the right is in the majority, and so continue to stay in power. It's the US Republican playbook. News Corp can be expected to help the Coalition by using its media power to deepen the polarization in the electorate.
No doubt News Ltd and the Coalition will push a link between Islamic terrorists (jihadists), asylum seekers and Australian jihadists in the name of national security and defending Australia from the threats of gangs of Islamic fundamentalists.
Update
Now here's a surprise from an inconvenient senate.
Palmer's United Party will use its balance of power to ensure that the carbon price will be repealed. The Coalition's, alternative, Direct Action, is likely to go down as well. But PUP has blunted the Coalition's attempt to destroy the renewable energy industry. Some parts of the current climate change laws will be retained: the clean energy finance corporation (CEFC), the independent climate change authority (CCA) and the Renewable Energy Target. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency is in limbo.
What Palmer appears to have done with his intervention is to leave the key infrastructure of the carbon pricing mechanism in place. A market based mechanism can be dusted off and re-introduced at short notice when Abbott is gone.
What is unclear is whether there will be new investment in renewable energy, and if so, how long before it starts to flow?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:17 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
June 18, 2014
The Coalition's "lifters and leaners" rhetoric
Abbott-Hockey budget have failed to convince the public of a budget emergency. So they are shifting the rhetoric to lifters and leaners with unfairness being defined in terms of the lifters having to work a month a year to support the "leaners"--those Australians on pensions and benefits. The "learners", by implication, are the undeserving poor.
David Rowe
Abbott-Hockey seem to unaware that after the global financial crisis the political terrain has shifted to seeing economics in terms of the increasing economic inequality under a neo-liberal mode of governance. Their budget was seen to be increasing this inequality and that is why it was seen to be unfair. The Abbott-Hockey rhetoric of lifters and leaners basically says that inequality exists and that it is okay and runs counter to the view that the degree of inequality is both unfair and increasing.
So Abbott and Hockey's budget is seen to be based on inequality and social divisiveness in a rogue coal state trying to keep King Coal alive despite its key contribution to climate change. The budget is hard to sell cos making the rich richer by squeezing everyone else, and making taxation become regressive---the rich pay less, the poor pay more---goes against the grain of the egalitarian ethos in Australian culture.
The aim of a neoliberal mode of governance is the restoration of the power of capital to determine the distribution of wealth and to establish the enterprise as dominant form. This requires that it target society as a whole for a fundamental reconstruction, putting in place new mechanisms to control individual conduct. It is Abbott and Hockey's job to implement this. Hence all their rhetoric about the Australian economy spirally down and becoming "sclerotic" due to its "excessive" welfare state and "rigid" labor markets.
Their ideology postulates that the reduction of state interventions in economic and social activities and the deregulation of labor and financial markets, as well as of commerce and investments, have liberated the enormous potential of capitalism to create an unprecedented era of social well-being in the world's population.
What people see is the substantial growth of social inequalities and that this fundamentally undermines the argument that market rewards are “fair.”
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 16, 2014
Iraq: the chickens come home to roost
Is anyone surprised by the sectarian civil war in Iraq? Or that Sunni Islamist fundamentalists---Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), an al-Qaeda offspring----are settling old scores with Nouri al-Maliki's heavy handed Shiite Government by capturing the cities of Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah and Mosul? This is the legacy of the American decision to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003.
A radical and brutal Islamist insurgency, which now controls large tracts of territory in northwest Iraq and northeast Syria, is a violent legacy of US policy in the Middle East. The Iraq-Syrian border no longer exists for most practical purposes.
David Rowe
These advances by Isis would not be happening unless there was tacit support and no armed resistance from the Sunni Arab community in northern and central Iraq because of their hatred of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government. Sunni Muslims have decided that the jihadists are preferable to persecution by the official Iraqi army.
It's regional conflict in the Middle Eastern sparked by the strong repression of Sunni Islamist paramilitaries by the Nouri al-Maliki's government in Baghdad. This Sunni-Shia conflict in post-Saddam Iraq does not affect Australia's national security or its national interest. It has little to do with the US/UK, Australia alliance's titanic battle against “Islamofascism” after 9/11, which they lost, even if they claimed victory.
The Americans, whose military intervention into Iraq under false pretences, are a primary cause of the recent sectarian conflict in Iraq, are in no position to dictate to other states how they should behave. Even if they still seem to see al-Qaeda, and its offshoots, as akin to a second coming of the Communist International, there is very little domestic support in the United States for new, large-scale American troop deployments in Iraq.
No doubt a weakened US will provide more drones and helicopter-gunships to the Nouri al-Maliki's government to help it fight the civil war and stay in power, and it will do so in order to prevent ISIS from creating a safe haven eventually stretching beyond parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria. That help will probably not be enough as the civil war is turning into a general uprising of the Sunni community in Iraq, which is five or six million strong and mainly concentrated in the north and west. Will the West be happy to see these great Muslim powers fighting each other?
Iran is moving to stop the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) from capturing Baghdad and the provinces immediately to the north of the capital. Will the US, Britain and their allies such as Saudi Arabia and the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf object to Iranian involvement in Iraq? Maybe what we are seeing is the end of the 1918 imperial Sykes-Picot division of the old Ottoman Middle East into Arab statelets---Syria, Iraq, Lebanon or Jordan, or even mandate Palestine, created by the British and French--- controlled by the West.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:54 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
June 12, 2014
hand in glove
The Murdoch press aims to harden the conservative views of the people who read it. That's it's political task and the Coalition sees this as helping them in the adversarial game of Australian politics . The conservative rhetoric is that the Murdoch newspaper group is the most trusted news source --fair and balanced---not the ABC, which is dominated by a liberal-left ethos. They desire a hobbled ABC to ensure a Murdoch news organization monopoly that sets the political agenda and shapes the national conversation.
David Rowe
Despite the up-beat presentation about its future News Corp there is a consistent concern about this period of declining circulation, falling newspaper revenues, the transition from print to screen given the gamble on putting its content behind a paywall. Is Murdoch’s strategy ensure a tie-up between News Corp and Ten and to be the last one standing in Australian news media?
News Corporation newspapers have become far more assertive in exercising media power, attacking its critics as pursuing “anti-Murdoch” agenda, and pushing for media laws to be relaxed to allow for a wave of media consolidation.
Media reform means that Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull will do away with the key rules around media ownership, covering the percentage of the population any individual TV network can reach, and the rule that in any given city, media owners can hold no more than two out of three of newspapers, TV stations and radio stations. There will be a simpler test from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on whether a deal reduces competition.
The ideological role of News Corp is to hide the ugly realities of capitalism beneath a fantasy of harmonious order (efficient markets operate under conditions of ‘perfectly competitive equilibrium’ ) with neoliberalism functioning as a form of crisis-management. In this neo-liberal order market society is the natural order of the social world and the policy aim is to liberate a pre-existing reality of ‘spontaneous market forces’, and ‘entrepreneurial zeal’ from beneath the dead hand of the interventionist state. The role of the state is restricted to providing the economic infrastructure, human capital, and ‘investment climate’ required for markets to operate efficiently. Stripping back the state reveals the spontaneous order of a market society.
There needs to be constantly attempts to cover over the gaps and ruptures in neo-liberalism's ideological fabric caused by the contradictions in capitalism that it is structured to conceal. An example is the attempts by the Abbott Government to cover the deepening of inequality its budget is causing by saying that equality is not possible and the critics of inequality are engaging in seventies style class warfare.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:03 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 10, 2014
the climate deniers club
Tony Abbott, the Australian Prime Minister, finally comes clean on global warming whilst visiting Canada. He is seeking a conservative alliance among "like-minded" countries, that actively aims to both block or dismantle global moves to introduce carbon pricing, and to undermine a push by US President Barack Obama to push the case for action through forums such as the G20. Abbott and Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, represent, and speak for their respective fossil fuel industries.
David Pope
This is not just a case of Australia being left behind on climate change. It's a defense of the coal industry (the rhetoric is about jobs and growth). This position says to hell with the pricing carbon to address climate change. Anything that substantially reduces emissions from coal fired power stations is seen to be destroying Australia's future.
Australia future is selling coal. Quarry Australia forever. Digging up the mineral resources of the country to ensure GDP growth now. So the costs on the coal industry need to be reduced to ensure their profitability.
Harper and Abbott assume that the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest is always good and that government is always the problem, never the solution. Hence the angry denials when the scientists say that government intervention is the only answer to address global warming.
As the scientific evidence for a changing climate keeps accumulating, the Liberal Party’s commitment to denial just gets stronger and their embrace of anti-intellectualism increasingly becomes an anti-science position. The Liberal Party is changing. The initial skepticism about climate science is turning into hostility toward science in general. It is actively engaged in dismantling and de-funding climate change bodies, significantly diminishes government funding for science and scientific research, especially on climate change, and denies the science of climate change.
Both Abbott and the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper have a similar position: they think maximising their countries’ fossil fuel export income is more important than addressing global warming.Abbott Abbott is using his current trip abroad to try and build support for a climate-denial coalition to thwart even the possibility of renewed international efforts.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:28 AM | Comments (14) | TrackBack
June 6, 2014
let the market decide
The Coalition is still struggling to overcome the budget backlash by selling its budget with slogans ---repairing Labor's debt and deficit disaster---rather than arguing on behalf of its policies. Slogans won't work given the extent of the broken promises and the budget's inherent inequity.
A classic example is higher education--a deregulation of fees in the university system was sprung on the electorate without warning. It is seen to be unfair and having little to do with the national interest and more to do with neo-liberal ideology of cutting public funding for universities by an average of 20% and getting students to pick up the shortfall.
David Rowe
The cost of university courses will rise dramatically, the debt load of students will increase and it wont pay women to do some courses --eg nursing -- because of low pay and time out from the workforce for family life. Low income students will be priced of the market in the face of being saddled with huge debts deep into middle age whilst the middle class is squeezed.
Even the university sector, which is favour of universities "being set free" to compete as businesses to avoid an inevitable decline in the quality of Australian universities is opposed to the increase in the interest rate on all student debts and the cuts to university funding.
Letting the market decide will see changes within the university sector--more low cost nimble private universities offering quick low cost business type courses, less cross subsidization of the humanities, more teaching only universities and squeeze the smaller universities.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:37 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack