THE DISINTEGRATION OF POLITICS IN AUSTRALIA REPLACED BY IDEOLOGICAL TOTALITARIANISM WHERE GREED AND UNBRIDLED CORPORATE POWER AIM TO MANIPULATE THE MASSES
With
Dutton's medical co-payment on the rocks, the government can only
recover if it navigates away from the rocky seas of its own budget,
writes Ben Eltham.
The Abbott government is in deep trouble.
That’s the take-home message from a turbulent week of federal
politics, in which the possibility of a first-term Coalition defeat
began to be seriously discussed.
Talk is cheap. But the scale of the government’s recent blunders have
started to shake the long-held consensus that the Abbott government
would eventually be able to arrest its unpopularity and campaign
strongly for a second term.
The government has trailed in the opinion polls for most of the year,
but recent surveys have seen its support sink to new depths. A
short-lived bounce from the government’s pivot towards national security
and foreign affairs petered out after a dismal G20 meeting. New
calamities seem ready to engulf Abbott and his front-bench at any
moment.
The government’s handling of the funding cuts to the ABC and SBS is a
case in point. The Coalition has been badly wrong-footed by the
intensity of the public backlash; worse, the controversy bled quickly
from anger at Malcolm Turnbull into a damaging debate over whether the
Prime Minister had broken an election promise.
Abbott is now struggling to right a listing ship, telling the Coalition party room this week that he is prepared to knock some “barnacles off the ship” – in the form of unpopular policies.
This is presumably why the government is reported to be planning to abandon the unpopular $7 fee proposal.
Actually, “abandon” might be too strong a word. The measure,
announced in Joe Hockey’s disastrous May budget, has never even made it
to Parliament. Unlike Christopher Pyne’s equally contentious university
reforms, the $7 co-payment hasn’t had any legislation introduced.
Should a bill be introduced, it’s unlikely it would pass the Senate.
Labor and the Greens remain vehemently opposed, while few of the
cross-bench Senators have signaled their support.
The very fact that the $7 co-payment proposal is still being debated is a sign of the Abbott government’s political challenges.
This is one of the Abbott’s cherished fiscal reforms from the May
budget. But it is deeply unpopular, not just in the health sector and
among doctors and policy experts, but throughout the electorate.
The fee is sometimes describes as a GP tax, but that’s actually
underestimating its impact. The fee will be levied on all basic
pathology and radiology tests, effectively imposing a consumption tax on
health services across the board.
And yet, despite the government’s rhetoric about the fee being
necessary as a “price signal” to make the health system more
sustainable, the money raised by the fee won’t actually go back to the
health system. Instead it will be quarantined in a medical research
fund, to support basic research in health and biomedical science.
As with so many of the government’s neoliberal convictions, there is
precious little evidence to suggest the $7 fee will work. A Senate
Committee took extensive submissions on the issue earlier this year, and concluded the fee would be counter-productive.
A huge evidence base across the world shows that the best way to
improve health outcomes is to fund and support public, primary health
care. The government’s health policies do precisely the opposite, by
attacking the universality and accessibility of primary care.
Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that forcing poor
people to pay an extra $7 just to see a doctor or get a scan will only
make the health system more costly and inefficient. Public hospitals in
particular are terrified of the proposal, which they believe will cause a
flood of presentations for minor ailments to emergency departments.
Modelling recently released by the New South Wales Health department shows that the fee could lead to an extra half million people seeking treatment in public hospitals in the state. Grattan Institute health economist Stephen Duckett agrees and told a Senate committee earlier this year
that “if more than one in three of these patients go to an emergency
department [instead of visiting a GP] there will be no saving to the
government.” To top it all off, recent government health statistics show that Commonwealth health spending is actually falling. So much for the unsustainability of the health budget.
The contrast with Pyne’s higher education changes is instructive. The
Education Minister may not be everyone’s idea of an effective political
operator, but he has at least organised a coalition of support for his
changes – including a chorus of highly-paid Vice-Chancellors and the key
universities lobby group, Universities Australia.
In contrast, Health Minister Peter Dutton has been conspicuously
unable to win the support of doctors or health groups. The AMA, normally
a supporter of a more privatised health system, remains opposed to the
$7 co-payment, as do patients’ groups and many health policy experts.
The ongoing speculation over the co-payment is damaging the government politically. In a recent Essential poll
on government decisions, the GP fee racked up a hefty 66 per cent
disapproval figure. The only decisions more unpopular were the
university changes and the Abbott government’s massive cuts to public
hospital funding.
The morass of health policy is a mark of this government’s poor
political acumen. Not only is the government copping flak for a proposal
that hasn’t even been voted on by the Parliament, it’s also directing
the electorate’s attention back to an area where the Coalition is
mistrusted.
And yet the government still can’t seem to bring itself to axe the unpopular policy. While journalists are being backgrounded about the $7 fee being dropped, Dutton is still holding the line that the co-payment will go ahead.
Some kind of circuit breaker is clearly required: a ministerial
reshuffle, perhaps. But a reshuffle won’t remove the real albatross
around the government’s neck: its demonstrably unfair budget, and the
resolute judgment that voters have passed on it.
In similar tight squeezes, John Howard was adept at crafting
political compromises, in ways that wedged his opponents and reinforced
his claim to occupy the middle ground of Australian politics. Tony
Abbott has showed little of that tactical nous, time and again taking
hardline positions far to the right of the cautious conservativism that
Howard made his own.
Polls come and go. But if the government continues to blunder and
drift, Abbott’s own leadership will inevitably come into question.
Coalition backbenchers are far more loyal than their Labor opponents.
But they’re not stupid.
If the political standing of the government continues to deteriorate
in the new year, leadership speculation will begin in earnest.
Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have been at pains to tell us it’s all
about “jobs and growth”. Now that we have “a number” the economies of
the world will be saved. But how do we intend to reach this magical
figure of “2% growth above what is expected”?
The government’s action plan has listed five “key commitments” to underpin its pledge.
The first key commitment to expanding economic activity is
infrastructure spending, including its “asset recycling initiative” –
encouraging state governments to privatise assets and then plough the
proceeds into new projects.
Considering we are selling the profitable Medibank Private to invest
in railways for dubious Indian coal mining ventures, this seems an
avenue to privatising profits and socialising losses. No doubt some
Liberal Party donors will do well out of it.
“Employment welfare reforms” is ranked as the No 2 commitment, and
notes that the changes will “strengthen participation and activation
strategies”.
By cutting payments entirely to some unemployed and requiring
jobseekers to search for more jobs to qualify for payments, the
government argues it will spur the unemployed to look for work rather
than live on welfare, thereby boosting economic activity.
But that boost can only come if there are jobs for the unemployed to
get and there seems little in the way of a plan to create jobs beyond
“axe the tax” and “build some roads”.
Anglicare Australia commissioned a report called “Beyond Supply and Demand”
which rubbished the Abbott government’s treatment of the long-term
unemployed, calling for a “life first” rather than a “work first”
approach to end joblessness.
Anglicare executive director Roland Manderson said
“It’s a problem if the public debate hinges on an assumption that
people can just try harder and get work, that’s not true. What is true
is that people can get work and develop really great work but you need
to put that investment in at the front end. The problem with the ‘earn
or learn’ (budget measure) is it makes the assumption that any training
will do the trick. It’s disempowering to train people who might find
work for a short time, but then are out of work again because they
haven’t worked through their life barriers.”
Labor assistant treasury spokesman Andrew Leigh said cuts to welfare
payments such as the unemployment benefit, family tax benefits and the
pension would act to suppress economic growth.
“If you produce a budget that reduces the income of the poor, it has
an impact on consumer demand because they spend everything they’ve got,”
he said. “That will detract from economic growth.”
The other key commitments are “cutting red tape”, “contributing to
global trade liberalisation” and “creating self-reliant industries”.
If one thing came out of the many millions spent on inquiries into
the Home Insulation Program, it was to underline the dangers of “cutting
red tape” and oversight.
The most obvious result of this commitment is to fast track
development and mining approvals without regard to environmental
impacts, and to remove rights of appeal.
The detail of the China Free Trade Agreement, or Memorandum of
Understanding to be more accurate, is yet to be released so it is
difficult to assess its impact but one concession we made was to allow
Chinese companies to bring in their own workers. I’m not sure how
selling our assets to foreign companies who send their profits back home
and who employ foreign workers will actually boost our economy.
Andrew Robb also admitted that Treasury has not done modelling on the
overall impact of this agreement and he does not know how it will
affect our balance of trade.
The commitment to “create self-reliant industries” seems to fly in
the face of Abbott’s staunch resistance to reducing fossil fuel
subsidies. And how does Newman’s Galilee railway and Hunt’s Emissions
Reduction Fund fit into that plan?
As was forcibly pointed out over the weekend, renewable energy is an
industry of the future, but rather than taking advantage of the billions
available for investment in this area, Abbott seems determined to kill
off this industry and the tens of thousands of jobs that go with it,
presumably because it offers competition to those humanitarian coal
producers and users.
Which seems strange as the Coalition’s plan for more jobs is based on improving productivity and competitiveness.
Across the globe, mining productivity has declined by 20 per cent
over the past seven years, despite the push for increased output, and
declining market conditions.
Efficiency in the Australian mining industry has received a stern
rebuke from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), rated as one of the least
productive regions in the world.
The damning report ‘Mining for Efficiency’
states that Australia is the second least productive mining region in
the world, with Africa taking the wooden spoon, and North America
beating Australia on all classes of equipment.
The report claims there is an inherent conflict between the
productivity plans of the mining boom which were based on increased
volumes, and plans based on cost reduction which are now coming to the
fore of business strategy.
Despite claims by industry lobby groups that high wages in Australia
will impact on our competitiveness, results actually show “significant
divergences” between mines in close proximity chasing the same minerals
under the same industrial relations conditions.
Equipment and the way it is used is a key focus of the report, which
shows that productivity differences between the best and worst
performing mines are stark, with some of the best practice outputs
coming in at more than 100 per cent greater than the median performers.
“The popular tagline of the mining sector is that the miners are serious about productivity,” PwC states.
“We suggest that most are reducing costs and increasing volumes but
there are precious few with legitimate claims to improving core
productivity in their open cut operations.”
Comments in the report echoed the new fashion for cost reduction
employed by the major miners who continue to sell off ‘non-core’ assets,
such as BHP Billiton had done earlier this year with Nickelwest
operations.
“Miners are banking the first available dividend, selling or
segregating mines deemed too hard to fix and tempering expectations of
further productivity gains by citing a combination of labour laws, high
costs, regulatory hold ups and mine configuration constraints,” Lumley
said.
And then this morning, we are hit with the news that the axe has fallen again at Australia’s research agency, the CSIRO, with another 75 researchers retrenched across the organisation’s future manufacturing, agriculture and digital productivity programs.
All three affected areas belong to the CSIRO’s flagship “impact
science” division, set up in 2003, which aims to partner with
universities and the private sector to bring “large scale and mission
directed science” to bear on major national priorities.
Future manufacturing research will be hardest hit, losing up to 45
full-time positions, including in advanced fibres, biomedical
manufacturing and high-performance metals.
Among the work to which future manufacturing research scientists have
contributed is state-of-the-art ceramic body armour for Australian
soldiers, the southern hemisphere’s first Arcam additive manufacturing
facility, which enables 3D printing of metals, and a spray-on topcoat
for aircraft.
But this shouldn’t surprise us from a government who thinks coal is
the industry of the future and a Treasurer who thinks that climate
change is “absolutely not” an impediment to economic growth
The death of Gough Whitlam reminds us that the great man was everything our new prime minister is not, writes Lyn Bender.
A GIANT EXITS AND A PYGMY ENTERS. Let the booing go on.
The results are in. Tony Abbott is a colossal non-hero and Gough Whitlam’s evil twin.
He is a master promoter of folly and disaster. Now languishing on the
sidelines, as China and the United States do a deal on big emissions cuts, he is left with only his feeble impotent direct action as his climate plan.
Meanwhile, the Russians
are ship-fronting Australia as he postures ineffectually on the bridge.
Abbott is exposed as the inept captain of a floundering vessel.
Tony Abbott is our modern Les Patterson abroad; he is as excruciating as any Barry Humphries caricature. Abbott is our own you bet, Putin defying shirt fronting, suppository of wisdom. He is very good at being deeply and undisguisedly bad.
He is our salutary lesson; he shows us where we must not go.
Abbott attacks science, supports the rich elites, and increases the hardships of the young, elderly, and the most vulnerable. He is as vividly explicit as the portrait of Dorian Gray in the attic, except his gruesome moral failings are on display for all to see.
In just a little over a year in power, Tony Abbott has
turned a blind eye to human rights abuses, in Sri Lanka;
returned refugees to potential danger in defiance of the Refugees Convention;
repealed the price on carbon, and other effective measures, when other nations like China and the US, are ramping up climate action;
put in place a worse than useless climate program called ‘Direct Action’, that pays polluters ‒ with taxpayer’s money ‒ to please pollute less, but only if they feel like it;
increased Australia’s terror threat, arguably, by hastily ‒ without parliamentary debate ‒ sending Australian forces to another war in the Middle East;
All this is terrible for Australians and the planet, but at least it is unequivocal.
Abbott tells us many lies, but it is his superficial selfies that truly demonstrate his narcissism.
Here is a sample:
Lifesaving Tony in red speedos — showing us he is physically fit to rule.
Lycra Tony on his bike —don’t look at my policies, look at my pins!
G.I. Tony, working out with the troops — but don’t expect good pay and benefits, veterans!
Fireman Tony, doing his bit to help fight fires — but not to fight climate change and reduce their risk.
Fighter Pilot Tony in a Striker Jet cockpit — can’t wait to use those on a “humanitarian” bombing mission.
Coal miner Tony, opening a “good for humanity” coal mine while stifling renewables — no worries, Gina!
When it comes to talk about increased fire prevalence and
intensity being induced by climate change, Tony will have none of it. UN Climate negotiator Christiana Figueres, was ‘talking through her hat’, he declared.
Abbott has almost entirely dismantled or reduced investment confidence in climate change action and renewables. This is a disaster but he has never pretended to care about climate change. His position has wafted from pronouncing it to be ‘crap,’ to a grudging acknowledgement of climate change being ‘real’. But Tony has stuck by his position of supporting fossil fuels, recently declaring that coal is good for humanity.
With Tony Abbott we should no longer be under any illusion. He is in
the pocket of his fossil fuel backers and has no interest in the well
being of Australians or future generations. In psychiatric terms, his
actions would be analysed as psychopathic.
‘If the Abbott government was an individual, he would be a psychopath.’
In the opinion of this psychologist, if the Abbott government were
your boyfriend it would be time to dump him and take out an apprehended
violence order.
The Institute of Public Affairs ‒ IPA‒ has even anointed
Tony Abbott to be Gough Whitlam’s [evil twin] successor, instructing
Tony Abbott to emulate Whitlam’s transformation of Australia; but in the
opposite direction. It delineates Whitlam’s ‘mostleft wing’
reforms in education, health, social justice, welfare, women’s and
indigenous rights, proposing that Tony reverse them — and fast. It lists 75 radical ideas to transform Australia — Tony has already embarked upon these.
Paul Keating has said, Whitlam changed the country’s idea of itself and changed its destiny.
Now Abbott wants to create an Australia with a new mean spirited
self-destructive idea of itself and a new and terrible destiny — its own
extinction.
His goal is to transform Australia into a country that is mean, inequitable, and an irresponsible global citizen.
None of us can claim that we don’t know. Unlike the German citizens in denial, who were marched past the corpses in the concentration camps by the conquering allies — we know.
Tony Abbott is destroying our children’s inheritance.
David Suzuki regards climate change denial as extremely dangerous. He has accused Abbott of willful blindness and criminal negligence.
Coal is not the future. Coal is not ‘good for humanity’. Coal is not ‘the foundation of prosperity for the foreseeable future’
Abbott is brutally and methodically dismantling much that has made this nation progress towards equity prosperity and fairness.
When he said that he is a PM of no surprises, he was declaring his gotcha moment. He will consistently lie and cheat, whenever it suits him. He will implement the agenda of big coal. He will keep his promises to his backers and friends - including Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch - and the right wing think tank - The Institute of Public Affairs.
That is why Abbott was heartily and deservedly booed at the Gough Whitlam Memorial service. We all know what Tony Abbott is on about, now.
He is no role model for the future. He is no hero. He is part of what has been dubbed ‘The age of stupid’ — the age that jeopardizes its own survival. In this paradoxical way Tony Abbott reminds us to:
Remember Gough. Maintain the protest. Maintain the scorn. Maintain the rage.
Abbott's public comments
about war have not always appeared to agree with his private thoughts
(Image from Channel Seven news report at end of piece) PM Tony Abbott is using the centenary of WWI and the
spirit of Anzac' as a cynical propaganda exercise to build support for
our latest foreign military adventure, writes Bruce Haigh.
IN ALBANY OVER THE WEEKEND, the Australian prime minister delivered what no doubt will be the first of many testimonies over the next five years to Australian involvement in WWI.
He spoke of Australian sacrifice, but not of the horror of war. And he did not place this sacrifice within the global context that marked this unnecessary war.
The substance of the address was as superficial and shallow as the
man delivering it. With a limited knowledge of Australian history,
Abbott was prepared to trot out the hoary old chestnuts that Australian sacrifice at Gallipoli and on the Western Front shaped the future of the nation.
This has become the central theme of the Anzac myth. It is conveyed as a positive, as nation building.
Would Abbott be prepared to claim that British sacrifice in WWI
brought in a new golden age in the United Kingdom? Or rather would he be
prepared to acknowledge that many British historians speak of the death of a generation? Would he concede that the bitterness of German sacrifice and defeat ushered in the rise of the Nazi Party?
WWI hastened the onset of the Russian Revolution,
an event that Abbott has not publicly lauded. And WWI led directly to
WWII. Is Abbott going to celebrate this disastrous development?
Young Australian men, their heads full of British, Australian and
Empire propaganda rushed to the colours, much as young men are swallowing Islamic State propaganda
and mistakenly rushing to the black flag. That is the fatal mix for
young people — propaganda, emotion, a quest for adventure,
dissatisfaction with current circumstances and off they go to meet the
demands of cynical power brokers, who rarely fight.
Right wing historians like to demonstrate the extent of the sacrifice Australia made to WWI. They cite the number of volunteers ‒ 416,809 ‒ in comparison to the number of white males — 2,470,000 out of a population of 4,870,000 at the 1911 Commonwealth Census. Aboriginal people were deemed non persons in 1911 and were not eligible to enlist, although some did.
Of those Australians who enlisted,
331,946 served overseas and 61,720 were killed or died of wounds and
disease. Of the total number who went overseas 181,221 were injured. The
ratio of 3:I of wounded to deaths also applied to some other combatant
nations, although a ratio of 2:1 was more common.
However, to put the Australian sacrifice in perspective,
8,600,000 combatants, stretcher bearers and medical staff were killed
from 1914-1918, of whom 774,402 were British; 1,385,000 French;
2,050,466 German; 1,200,000 Austrian and Hungarian; 1,700,000 Russian;
460,000 Italian; 463,241 Romanian and Serbian; 115,660 American; 300,000
Turkish; 38,172 Belgian; 101,224 Bulgarian; 7,222 Portuguese; and
203,621 from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India.
In the first three months of the war, France lost 300,000 killed and
600,000 wounded, by 1918 there were 630,000 war widows in France. Martin Gilbert in his book the, First World War, says on average 20,000 soldiers were killed every four days throughout the war.
Not all statistics are quoted by right wing Australian historians.
Of the Australians who went overseas 150 in every 1,000 contracted venereal disease
. The French averaged 83 cases per 1,000 and the Germans 110. The
Australian rate was amongst the highest. Perhaps Abbott can weave that
into one of his speeches?
The First World War was an unequal contest between men and machines, which the German artist Otto Dix graphically portrayed.
Nothing similar was produced by Australian war artists, who produced sanitised and romantic images of the Boys Own type — consciously or sub-consciously designed to keep the public onside should it be necessary to fight another war.
The official historian CEW Bean
was a primary promoter of the Anzac and nation building myth. Bean was a
man on a mission. He all but airbrushed the horror, anarchy and
futility of the war from his history and extolled the virtues of
Australian mateship as part of the myth.
Mateship was not unique to the Australian army. The German, British and French armies all had strong traditions of mateship fostered and exploited by the military hierarchy as a morale boosting and motivational tool to achieve difficult outcomes.
Bean, as part of his mission, swept post traumatic stress under the
carpet, yet most of the troops who returned from overseas service
suffered from it. Bean knew, but it did not fit the stereotype of the
Digger he had created. In this he was aided by the Repatriation Department, who sought to limit the number and type of war service claims.
No nation was ever built as a result of war. Nations are built as a
result of individual endeavour combining into collective enterprise
overseen and guided by good governance of a type we have not seen in
Australia for some time.
WWI gives the lie to Christianity as a civilising influence.
For those at the front forced to endure days of high explosive shell
fire ‒ to the point that they cried with terror, went temporarily or
permanently mad, defecated and urinated involuntarily and then crawled
out of trenches to face machine gun fire of between 500-700 rounds per
minute ‒ it could be said that they were in Dante’s Inferno. Christianity failed to prevent the Armageddon of WWI and some might argue that it contributed to its onset.
The story of war, particularly the First World War should be told as
it was and not as part of a propaganda exercise to get the Australian
public to accept, yet again, the deployment of Australian forces to war on the sole discretion and authority of a prime minister who has not had the courage to send Australians overseas to fight Ebola in case they return with the disease and threaten his comfort zone.
Bruce Haigh
is a political commentator and historian, who has written a book on WWI
called ‘Australia’s Armageddon, The AIF on the Western Front,
1916-1918’. He is looking for a publisher who is not in thrall to Anzackery and Abbott’s celebratory jingoism.
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