Peter Boyle
"Since 1996 Australia has had continuous growth averaging 3.5 per cent per annum. During that period Singapore has had three recessions, Hong Kong has had three recessions, Korea has had one recession, Taiwan has had two recessions, Japan has had four recessions, the United States went into a recession in 2001.
"Over the last 10 years Australia has earned a great deal of respect amongst its neighbours and the other economies of the world. Australia's achievements have given its people a lot more self respect. The nation feels more secure about itself.
"This is the Australian Revival." — Treasurer Peter Costello in a speech to the National Press Club on March 1.
Costello's usual boasting about the economy is being given a definite nationalistic slant. In this speech, he boasted that Australia had proved wrong Samuel Huntington's prediction in his much-reported 1996 work The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order that Australia might defect from the West and redefine itself as an Asian society.
That's the direction the left wanted Australia to go but the Coalition rescued the nation, he asserted.
This is racist-nationalist myth-making of the crudest kind. While Costello criticises Huntington for his prediction, he agrees that the the main conflict in the world today is the "clash of cultures".
Working-class Australians of Anglo-Celtic backgrounds ("real Australians", as Abbott let slip on February 28) are encouraged to believe that they have more in common with a boss of the same origin, even if that boss has an income 63 times higher — a direct result of the exploitation of their labour.
Our eyes are turned away from the facts that, even in this time of economic boom, some 2.4 million Australians are living on below half the average weekly earnings.
There are more than a million Australians in paid work who live below the poverty line — the working poor.
According to St Vincent de Paul, on current trends, by the year 2030 the richest 20% of Australians will own 70% of the nation's wealth (in 1967, the top 20% owned only 53.5% of wealth).
When debts are taken into account, the Reserve Bank found in 2004 that the poorest 20% of Australians own just 0.2% of the nation's wealth.
The much bragged about official unemployment rate of around 5% has workers with just one hour of work a week as "employed". According to Vinnies, if we were to use a minimum of 15 hours of work a week classified as the employment benchmark (as is done in Germany, for instance), then the unemployment rate rises to 10-12%.
The real divide in Australia is not between Alice and Aisha, two cleaners of different cultural backgrounds working on the same minimum wage and facing the insecurity that comes with a 30% and growing casualisation rate in the work force. It is between Alice and corporate CEO John/Bob/whoever on an average annual income of $3.4 million a year.
The real clash of interests is between Alice and Aisha, who pay a 30% effective tax rate, versus their bosses who dodge most of the tax they should pay.
There is a widening gulf between what Vinnies calls the "two Australias", and it is widening because the country is ruled by the wealthy elite in their own interest. "National interest" is bunkum; it is dirty political talk to hoodwink us into playing along with this corporate racket.
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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