John Rainford

If the need for an Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in NSW was obvious when it was established in 1989, a report released in 2010 showed why it is absolutely indispensible. This was an ICAC study of registered lobbyists that found there were 272 individual lobbyists listed in NSW. They included 22 former state or federal MPs and 112 staffers and advisers — about half of all lobbyists.

Forgotten War By Henry Reynolds New South, 2013 In August, Prime Minister Tony Abbott attended a ceremony in Sydney to mark the 100 years since the Australian Naval and Military Expedition Force sailed out of Sydney Harbour to German New Guinea shortly after Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. The occasion was the official start of a four-year-long Anzac centenary of jingoism. Abbott was anxious that we “should know all our great war stories better” by the time the centenary commemorations come to an end.

The number of people on the waiting list for public housing in NSW has increased by 3.5% in the past year to almost 60,000. This is forecast to increase to 80,000 in 2016. According to a report last year by the NSW auditor-general, the present figure represents only about half of the people in NSW who actually need housing. The one thing that all policy analysts agree on is that demand will increase.

Earlier this year, US and European banks — the ones that were too big to fail — settled US$18 billion worth of fines with regulators. These fines were for money laundering activities, breaching sanctions violations, and manipulating the Libor (London interbank offered rate). The Libor is used to set interest rates on about US$800 trillion of borrowings and derivative contracts.

The word “socialist” first appeared in print in Italy in 1803. In the early 19th century there appeared to be two alternative roads to socialism: violent revolution or establishing cooperative communities separate from the state and capitalist social relations. Towards the latter part of the century, a third possibility opened up: the working class could take control of the state through the ballot-box and reconstruct it on a socialist basis.

The Great Artesian Basin is one of the world’s largest underground water reservoirs. It is the only source of water for towns and farms across almost a quarter of Australia, from far north Queensland to northern South Australia. On November 7, the NSW Great Artesian Basin Advisory Group received a scientific report commissioned by the Artesian Bore Water Users Association (ABWUA). The report found that the reservoir’s recharge area is about a third as large as previously thought — covering less than 10% of the basin’s 1.7 million square kilometres.

One of the more important promises that Prime Minister Tony Abbott made in September last year was to create jobs at a rate of 200,000 a year. But the scorecard for the first year is just 105,500. The official Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) October national unemployment figure remained the same as in September at 6.2%. However, in the ACT, which usually has the lowest unemployment rate in the country at less than 4%, this has increased over the last four months to 5.4%. This is a direct result of the federal government’s sacking of public sector workers.

The witch-hunt into unions descended into farce last month as the Royal Commission’s attempt to justify its existence instead showed that it is an inquiry compromised by its politically motivated construction and damned by its own incompetence. The week began with Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) assistant secretary Tim Lyons attacking royal commissioner Dyson Heydon and senior counsel assisting Jeremy Stoljar for confusing workplace bargaining with corruption and failing to understand the role of unions they had been asked to investigate.

For all the supposed faults of Keynesian economics, the so-called cure of neoliberalism is proving far worse than the counter-cyclical spending disease so despised by conservatives. From the early years of the Industrial Revolution, a cycle of “boom and bust” was identified as a distinctive feature of capitalism after the first global slump in 1860. It was these crises, expected to be repeated every seven to 11 years, which led Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to predict that they would bring about the destruction of the system that engendered them.

The long-term average rise of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) wage price index is 3.6%. In the first half of this year, it increased at an annualised rate of only 1.7%. The latest National Australia Bank quarterly business survey shows labour costs have been rising at an average annualised rate of 1.5% since the last quarter of 2012. This compares with an average of 3% a year between 1998 and 2008.

When New South Wales Minister for Resources and Energy Anthony Roberts cancelled the three coal seam gas (CSG) exploration licences held by Leichardt Resources near Kandos, Nowra and Moree on October 14, he said it was because the company had failed to fulfil its licence conditions. The alleged compliance breaches included failure to engage with the community. Roberts had earlier complained that it was the previous Labor government that made it easy for “speculators and cowboys” to be granted licences without proper regulatory oversight.

In Problems of Greater Britain, the English politician Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke concluded that high wages, cheap food and the time available for sporting and cultural activities made Australia a workers’ paradise. If Dilke’s observation in 1890 ever had any truth to it, it was a paradise soon lost. The average weekly wage did not recover from its fall in the 1891 depression until 20 years later. For the less skilled in the labour force, the 20% wage loss in the depression wasn’t clawed back until 1921.