Glenn Stevens, Retiring Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia proffered this advice in an address to the Anika Foundation Luncheon in Sydney on the 10th August 2016:
Many difficult choices will need to be made along the path of budgetary adjustment. At present, general public debate starts with commitment to the need for reform and for putting public finances on a sustainable medium-term track. But when specific ideas are proposed that will actually make a difference over the medium to long term, the conversation quickly shifts to rather narrow notions of ‘fairness’, people look to their own positions, the interest groups all come out and the specific proposals often run into the sand. (Italics not in original) http://www.rba.gov.au/speeches/2016/sp-gov-2016-08-10.html
Stevens went on to say:
In Australia, gross public debt, for all levels of government, adds up to about 40 per cent of GDP. We are rightly concerned about the future trajectory of this ratio. But gross household debt is three times larger – about 125 per cent of GDP. That is not unmanageable – but nor is it a low number.
Malcolm Turnbull is running around strutting his stuff about his “omnibus bill” of $6 Billion plus Zombie Budget measures proclaiming that Labor has to agree to every skerrick of it because the Labor Party had announced in its pre-election submission to the Parliamentary Budget Office that it would accept them.
What Mr. Harboursidemansion did not say was that Labor was prepared to agree to some of these measures in order to fund specific policies that Labor wanted to be able to fund whilst still being engaged in lessening the Budget deficit.
In a carping speech to financial executives in Sydney on the 26th August 2016, Treasurer Scott Morrison, laid the blame for the parlous state of the Budget at the feet of young people and welfare recipients. In an attempt to appear even more out of touch with reality than his predecessor’s “end of entitlement” rhetoric, he declared that the country was divided between those who are “taxed and the taxed-nots”.
He went on to warn that:
More Australians today are likely to go through their entire lives without ever paying tax than for generations. And more Australians are likely today to be net beneficiaries of the government than contributors — never paying more tax than they receive in government payments.
Paul Bongiorno on the ABC Breakfast program, in the morning, prior to Morrison’s speech pointed out that less affluent people can’t avoid paying the goods and services tax on most of the things they buy in order to survive and that as a proportion of their income poor people pay far more tax than do their more affluent counterparts.
BuzzFeed’s News Political Editor in Australia, Mark Di Stefano notes that more than one third of Australia’s largest businesses (including Qantas, Apple, Transfield, Lend Lease and General Motors) didn’t pay any tax in 2013-14. http://buzzfeed.com/markdisantefano/morrison-taxed-and-taxed-nots?utm_term.wiva61D3M9#xanBpvwJa4
Oxfam asks “so who are the real ‘Taxed-nots’ ?”
The last Whitlam budget in 1975, introduced by Treasurer Bill Hayden, heralded the first footholds of neo-classical (neo-liberal) economics in Australian government. Gradually, but surely the tentacles spread and within a decade Ministers on both sides of the house were taking about level playing fields, slashing protectionism, cutting business regulations, corporatising /privatising government agencies, efficiency dividends, the magnificent efficiencies of private businesses when compared with government run agencies, the need to contract out aspects of government departments and so forth.
The term economic rationalism was the descriptor applied to various neo-liberal economic ploys and scams. The implicit suggestion being that neo-liberal policies were the only rational form of economic theory. Keynesian counter cyclical spending that had helped drag Australia out of the 1930s Depression and helped Menzies avoid the worst of the 1961 recession became an anathema.
On the winding road since 1975, there has been many a twist and turn, but the overall direction has been relentless. The ex-merchant banker, now prime minister, has imbibed a heady dose of neo-liberal economics as have the bulk of his party. They are saddled with Maggie Thatcher’s “There is no alternative” mindset. They don’t see the Rudd/Swan counter cyclical Keynesian style actions that prevented Australia joining the rest of the world in recession, in 2008-9 as good economics. They see it as a cost.
They see social security as a cost, disability services as a cost, health services as a cost and family payments as a cost. To them public schools and universities are a cost. The ridged determination of most, if not all, economic neo-liberals to regard any welfare payment as a cost comes through clearly in Morrison’s Sydney speech to the business elite. They see every welfare measure as wasted expenditure pandering to the slothful, indigent failures of society.
Excessively generous tax breaks for the affluent are regarded as incentives. Hence they are prepared to give away $50 billion in tax breaks to business. Australian Governments already provide the fossil fuel miners an annual subsidy of $17-20 billion. The affluent have obviously a God given right to negatively gear houses and other asset and by way of added further incentives the neo-liberals want them to have subsidised capital gains taxes. Then there are family trusts, tax loopholes, off shore bank accounts and transfer-pricing mechanisms. A lucrative tax avoidance and evasion industry exists to smooth the wheels.
When it comes to superannuation the neo-liberals do not see it as an obscenity that many of the richest Australians receive more dollars in tax exemptions on huge superannuation investments than age pensioners receive in social security payments. The conservatives in the Liberal Party are horrified by the idea that tax-free superannuation should only apply to the first $1.6million in their super account or the suggestion that limits should be placed on the amount of after tax income that can be added to the retirement nest eggs of the affluent. They certainly mean to reassure the top 10 per cent on the income scale that it will be business at usual so long as the liberals can hold sway.
Whilst the Liberals are set upon trying to force conformity with their priorities and refuse to sit down with all the members of Parliament and work out sensible compromises, as Julia Gillard did, then the rest of the parliament should say “Up yours”.
The Liberals have yet to come to the realisation that they did not win the election. They have a technical majority of one in the House of Representatives. No single party won the election. They have no mandate to govern alone.
What the long election campaign established was that many Australians were dissatisfied with what was on offer. For the moment what the leaders in the Liberal Parliamentary Party have yet to realise is that life is like a monkey tree.
Those at the top of the tree when they look down – all they see are smiling faces. Those on the lower branches when they look up – all they see are arseholes.
Written September 2016.
Australia I love you for what you could be
land of the fair and the free
we could stand for justice and democracy
as we inspire hope, truth and decency.
From Queensland’s rainforests
to Tassie’s windswept coast through
the Centre’s red heart
over deserts and mountains
to Ningaloo’s coral reefs
you have unsurpassed beauty.
From Woomera’s atomic tests
to Baxter’s detention centres
through brutalising watch-houses
over-allocated water rights
to Centrelink’s imposed obligations
we betray our sense of ourselves.
Australia I love you for what you could be
land of the fair and the free
we could stand for justice and democracy
as we inspire hope, truth and decency.
From a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay
to a sense of noblesse oblige
through pensions for those who can’t work
over-excited children in the playgrounds
to a concern for the underdog
we knew where we were going.
From Worst Choices workplace contracts
to the rat-race of individual exploitation
through cutbacks in social security benefits
over-supervision of the powerless
to the marginalisation of Aborigines
we have lost our moral compass.
Australia I love you for what you could be
land of the fair and the free
we could stand for justice and democracy
as we inspire hope, truth and decency.
First published 1/10/2008 Union Song web site http://unionsong.com/u485.html
What are we to do with the refugees
when we have racists to appease?
What we needed was a specific resolution
but had to make do with the Pacific solution.
Just across from the Long White Cloud
in the land of the John White Howard
lived a people who once were proud.
Now the province of Long John Laws
is reduced to a bunch of bores.
Pauline Hanson “please explain”
xenophobia once again.
Then from the commanding heights
lies, half-truths and such delights.
We have to ignore asylum seekers’ rights
or we’ll be overrun.
Besides it’s so much fun
pushing their leaky boats out to sea
to see if they’ll float or what will be
as they try to make it back across the Timor Sea
and sinking our humanity.
Written 2002.
ON LINE opinion – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate
Posted Thursday, 8 November 2007
In February this year I wrote:
The Howard Government will be remembered for progressive gun control in the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre, helping to liberate East Timor from Indonesia, drawing Australia into the Iraq morass, the expansion of Federal control (particularly in the area of Work Choices), balaclavas on the wharves, attacks on the welfare state (particularly its crackdown on single parents, disability support pensioners and unemployed people), repressive treatment of asylum seekers arriving without visas, paternal intervention in Indigenous affairs, neglect of David Hicks’ rights as an Australian citizen and taking over of the Murray Darling River system. (Howard’s gone to water).
In that article I stated that: “In political terms, it matters not one jot whether Howard’s plan delivers more water, better environmental outcomes or more secure water supply to irrigators. The next election will be well and truly over before the outcome of the Howard plan can be assessed. So Howard is running on water and Rudd’s joined the swim”. Before concluding that:
Clever, consistent politician that he is, nothing will save Howard from losing the next election. The Government, even with its new faces, looks tired and all the spin in the world won’t be enough to hide its 2007 use-by date. There are just too many people who have woken up to the fact that they have been conned by clever words and half truths. They want a change and will turn to the dream team to provide it.
Many of my friends at the time suggested I was being overly optimistic about the chances of a Rudd-Gillard victory. Since that time, the public opinion polls have consistently shown Labor maintaining a strong lead.
In the February article I suggested that the Murray-Darling water plan would be the last major initiative of this government. I was wrong is one particular regard. The intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory announced in June is an initiative in Aboriginal policy, albeit one that returns us to the 1960s (See Altman, J. and Hinkson, M .(eds.) [2007] Coercive reconciliation. Arena, North Carlton). Minister Brough has even re-established the old ration voucher system for groceries that I had had to utilise when I worked as a social worker in the NT Welfare Branch between 1965 and 68.
In late June I wrote:
Howard’s failure to address the practical problems confronting Indigenous people is a disgrace. Over the last 11 years the Government he leads has not significantly improved the health, housing, sanitation, employment, nutrition and even access to clean drinking water confronting the majority of Indigenous Australians in most rural and remote areas.
To rub salt into the wound he has denigrated those who have requested he come to terms with the need for symbolic reconciliation. He has refused to say “sorry”. He has demonised those who have sought self-determination for Indigenous Australians.
Now, in the dying days of his government, he is again attempting to stir up a storm of moral panic about the mess that confronts many Indigenous communities in rural and remote areas of this continent. It’s time he admitted that his government’s policies and actions are a substantial part of the practical problems facing Indigenous Australians (We are having a ‘save the Aboriginal children’ blitzkrieg).
Since February, there have however been some amazing continuities with previous Howard Government policies. Perhaps the detention of Dr Mohammed Haneef was the most alarming (Jumping at shadows, The treatment of Haneef is beyond belief). On the 24th October the Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said he had told the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions that he thought the case against Dr Haneef was weak. Presuming that Keelty’s statement is true, then it is even more disturbing that Kevin Andrews, the Immigration Minister, cancelled Dr Haneef’s work visa. Andrews has always claimed he had evidence from the Federal Police, which he could not disclose, justifying his decision to cancel the visa.
There was more than a hint of racism in Andrews’ handling of the Haneef matter, but Kevin Andrews did not rely on explicitly racist pronouncements. In early October, Andrews declared that the Howard Government was suspending further refugee applications from Africa, until June 2008, because people from the war torn parts of the African continent were finding it hard to assimilate into Australian society. Such claims were refuted by the Victorian Premier and Commissioner of Police (Govt under fire over ‘racist’ refugee ban). Once again we are seeing the race card played in the run up to a Federal election.
In the opening days of the 2007 election campaign proper, Howard and Costello announced their $34 billion tax cut spread over a number of years was conditional upon the budget staying in surplus. Rudd held his nerve and waited until the Friday of the first week to announce his me-too tax policy, albeit with a delayed tax cut to those fortunate enough to pay the highest rate of tax. Rudd said the $3 billion saving would be used to provide an educational tax concession for lower income families who purchased educational items for their children and to establish a small fund designed to shorten elective surgery waiting lists. Rudd was plugging into the research which shows that many electors would prefer improved services over tax cuts.
The Howard/Costello rhetoric on tax policy, which has prevailed during the last 11 years, is that tax cuts give back a bonus to those who have made a productive contribution to budget surpluses. In those 11 years, those who pay the most tax have got the biggest tax cuts. Those on the minimum wage, those who can’t find work, those who make the greatest caring contribution to partners and children with a disability, those who stay home to care for children, and those with the most severe disabilities get little or no advantage from such tax cuts.
Low income workers and their families are the ones who most need publicly provided dental health and other community services. They are not in a position to communally pool their $4-8 dollar weekly tax cuts in order to buy a MRI machine for their local hospital. They can not afford to pay for private hospitals and commercial dental services. Access to private dental and hospital services is only available to the very people who have benefited most from the tax cuts. Such a government policy is the very antithesis of having a social policy.
During the 2004 election campaign the Liberal Party promised to keep interest rates at record low levels. Howard asserts that he did not promise this, saying he only promised that the Liberals would always be able to keep interest rates below what a Labor government would. Since that time there have been five interest rate rises with another one on the day after the running of the Melbourne Cup.
Interest rate rises were a problem for the Keating Government and it is true that, at their peak, the prevailing interest rates were more than double what they are now. The major difference between then and now is that the price of the average home mortgage is in 2007 more than double what it was then.
Howard must be regretting ever uttering his oft repeated question in the 2004 election campaign: “Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?”
For the last 11 years, Howard has run hard on his welfare policy of “mutual obligation”. Essentially his argument has been that if unemployed people, single parents and disability support pensioners are provided with a poverty line social security payment then “it’s only fair that they give something back in return”. This glib assertion has found support among some sections of the population who object to their tax dollars being spent on people who they see as making insufficient effort to help themselves (The real moral jeopardy of ‘Welfare Dependency’). How they believe they are in a position to know the extent of effort people who are unemployed or who have a disability are making to gain employment is beyond me.
It’s time for citizens of this affluent country to come to the realisation that if the concept of “mutual obligation” has any utility in the 21st century then it should mean that those who are gaining the most from the thriving economy have the greatest obligation to contribute to the welfare of those marginalised by the present system. When we do come to this position we might see that:
It’s the armless and the harmless
the senseless and the lame
who always pay the social cost
who always get the blame.
It’s the snivellers and the chisellers
the swindlers and the vain
ripping off the profits,
and it’s always been the same.
When I speak of social justice
you ask “What will it cost us?”
Advance Australia fairly,
Advance Australia squarely,
and let us reach the further shore
in the best way that we can.
Written in 2003 not published.
The United States of America now claims it wants to internationalise its operations in Iraq and to do this in a way that allows the US to maintain supreme authority. This is code for the US desire to have the member nations of the United Nations help pay for the continuing subjugation of Iraq.
America had the opportunity to internationalise the peaceful disarmament of Iraq but it refused to follow the decisions of the world body. The US refused because of its arrogant belief that it, with Britain and Australia, could handle the post hostilities situation in Iraq. It can’t.
In the aftermath of the First Gulf War the US was able to convince the United Nations to impose an embargo of Iraq for 11 years. This embargo contributed to the death of between 1 and 1.5 million Iraqi children. The embargo was supposedly imposed to encourage the dismantling of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. The embargo turned out to be more deadly than Iraq’s weapons.
If the United Nations again dances to the tune of the Americans and internationalises the continuing subjugation of Iraq this will just encourage the US to start bombing some other country: Syria, Iran, or North Korea. The Americans need to be taught the lesson that the world will not just tag along behind each of its invasions, pacifying the victims whilst allowing Uncle Sam pick the eyes out of the business opportunities in the defeated countries.
The Editor
The Courier Mail
Dear Editor
The Beattie Government has displayed remarkable arrogance in its handling of the winegate saga. There is one law for members of parliament and another for other Queenslanders. Under legislation that the Beattie Government passed last year police can seize unopened alcohol from people sitting in parks if they “believe” the owner intends to consume it. Just two days ago Police Minister Judy Spence wrote to me defending the legislation in relation to unopened alcohol.
Dr John Tomlinson
Written March 2004, not published.
Winegate relates to a plane carrying the Queensland Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, on which there was at least one bottle of wine, flying into an Aboriginal community where alcohol was banned.
On the 11th of September 2001, I had been watching videos and drinking red wine. I was about to go to bed, I stopped the video and my TV reverted to the ABC where they reported that a plane had just flown in to the World Towers Building. At first I thought I was watching War of the Worlds 2. After a while I decided that the News broadcast was live and it was really happening. I poured a tumbler of Single Malt and settled down for some serious viewing. Content in the knowledge that at last Americka was paying for what it had been doing to other countries for years. I felt a tremendous elation when the second plane went into the second building. “Got ya you bastards” I was yelling each and every time the overpaid yank television stations showed a new angle on the planes approaching or crashing into the Towers.
About 2.30am I finally lost the compulsion to keep watching to my compulsion to keep drinking and toddled off to bed. I had a nine o’clock Social Policy class. When I walked in the students immediately stopped talking and seemed eager to know how I was going to respond. I knew that an analysis along the lines of my outbursts of the previous evening would inevitably lead to the university administration having a field day trying to get rid of me.
So I said:
“Yesterday a terrible thing happened. The two millionth person was killed in the War in Sudan. And I think something happened in America.”
East Timor now is finally free
of Indonesian style diplomacy,
militias idea of democracy,
and other acts of generosity.
Twenty-five years of blood, sweat and tears
two and a half decades of struggle.
Some idiot put a microphone in my face
and asked “Was it worth the trouble?”
Each of us is put here in this time and this place
to personally decide the future of humankind.
Did you think you were put here for something less?
— Chief Arvol Looking Horse from White BuffaloTeachings
or
as Karl Marx said
we’re in this world to change it.
Not for me the yellow brick road,
it’s not the path my feet have trod,
no rose-coloured lenses glaze my sight,
I’ve neither love nor fear of god.
Peering into the cauldron of our history
I see shame, intolerance and evasion,
exploitation, genocide and misery.
From the convict-laden ships of Sydney Cove,
through to Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq;
a racist invasion – to Capitalism’s latest attack,
devastating the poor, the homeless and the Black.
We don’t need uranium’s polluted spills,
inequality, fast cars and other rich men’s thrills,
no missiles, bombs, guns, and tanks
or, come to that, any thing which kills.
From the convict cells to Baxter’s living hells
I hear the ringing of patriotism’s bells
and my nostrils fill with putrid smells.
Capitalist tongues scream patriotic commands
through the camp’s loud speakers over desert sands.
It’s hard to hear the weeping of the lonely refugee
worn down by the camp’s oppressive monotony,
slow grinding bureaucratic and judicial pedantry
and an endless longing to be free.
Their cries drowned by goose-stepping guards,
by the low humming of the electrified maze,
their sight blinded by the sun on razor wire,
and an indifference that leaves their senses dazed.
This is the face of Howard’s Fourth Reich:
uptight, out of sight and not to bright,
with all the generosity of a scrooge’s mite.
We will create a shared harmony,
white and Black, citizen and refugee.
That will become Australia’s destiny,
a land where everyone is free,
a sharing, caring, unity,
for one and all, for you and me,
from Tassie to the Timor Sea.
Come, help us build a national decency
on foundations of justice and humanity.
First published in Al-Moharer Issue 189 Vol. 13,16/8/2004
also in New Community Quarterly Vol.2 No.3 Spring 2004 p.7
I would like to call them murderers
but if I did they would haul me before the courts
where some fool would make an example of me
the prosecutor would suggest I endangered
the security of the realm
engaged in treason
abetted my country’s enemies
caused unrest
insulted those who are born to rule
upset the status quo
behaved in a disorderly manner
caused affray
hindered and obstructed
betrayed state secrets
or behaved in an unbecoming way.
The law is often just,
not in the sense of providing justice,
but just; just outmoded morality
codified, ossified ideas
whose relevance has expired
such ideas, however, are still desired
by those that I despise.
So I won’t say anything about
the Northern Territory laws
which allow coppers to arrest
Aboriginal people for minor offences
which results in their dying in custody.
I won’t say a word about
Immigration officials incarcerating
children, women and men in off-shore camps
where they are raped and driven mad.
I won’t mention on-shore camps where
asylum seekers are locked up
and driven to suicide.
I won’t talk about our maximum security cells
where men are raped by fellow prisoners
whilst guards watch on TV monitors.
I won’t mention country police cells
where Aboriginal prisoners are locked up
in disproportionate numbers –
where they are bashed
and hung from prison bars.
I won’t pay any attention to the
impoverishment of the poor
the disregard for homeless people
the neglect of those who are disabled
the insensitive treatment of the powerless
the excessive privilege of the powerful
and I suggest that you do the same
if you want to avoid having some fool
make an example of you.
Copyright © 2026 John Tomlinson