By John Coulter
Australia has produced three strategies aimed at providing jobs for the 1 million unemployed. One is called pray now, pay later. That's Mr Keating's. The second is called fat cats favour lean wages. That's Dr Hewson's.
The third is ours. It's called Getting to Work, and it's a comprehensive plan to provide jobs, pay for them and sustain them.
Prime Minister Keating, still worshipping at the altar of economic rationalism but under threat from rising unemployment figures, plans to create some jobs and a lot of training places, but he's booking up the bill in the form of a huge budget deficit that our children will one day have to pay.
Dr Hewson, on the other hand, suggests penalising our children right now with slave labour wages, which he hopes might encourage the economy to turn itself around, regardless of the older workers displaced in the meantime.
Both these solutions pose threats to our future before which even the most sanguine economic forecasters should tremble.
I believe that the Democrats alone have come up with a workable jobs creation scheme. We would provide 150,000 jobs immediately, while setting in place policies for long-term, sustainable job creation. But we believe in paying for these jobs as we go.
We suggest that employed Australians make a small sacrifice to provide work for others now and a secure society for us all in the future. Self-interest, as well as humanity and justice, demand an end to the current obscenity of an 11% unemployment rate (35% among young Australians).
In the short term, we propose to tackle the human, social and economic costs of unemployment with a 1.25% jobs levy, an income tax surcharge structured identically to the Medicare levy. (Low income earners would therefore pay nothing.) Such a levy would yield $2.5 billion annually for infrastructure, environmental and community programs to be run by local, state and federal governments and community-based non-profit organisations.
There is no shortage of work to be done. Australia's public facilities and environment have suffered from a decline in public spending in the 1980s and are in urgent need of rejuvenation.
Projects would include soil conservation, urban renewal, rail development, recycling, foreshore reclamation, improved sewage treatment and disposal, restoration of heritage buildings and road repair.
Land rehabilitation projects in urban as well as rural regions would d contribute to sustainable development, and would therefore be prime contenders for jobs levy funds.
Soil erosion and salinity control, revegetation of cleared agricultural land, protection and management of remnant native vegetation, assistance to farmers in establishing plantations and agroforesty systems, control of feral animals and weeds — these are just a few of many areas demanding attention.
A recent study by the Evatt Foundation suggested that $2 billion would fund nearly 240,000 jobs. We prefer to estimate conservatively, thus allowing, too, for some relatively capital-intensive programs, like inter-city rail upgrades.
At the same time, we would initiate a long-term strategy to release Australia from its prison of boom-bust cycles and provide sustainable jobs for generations to come.
In Getting to Work, which I launched at the National Press Club in Canberra on July 9, we give the details of a $2.4 billion program of industry development and restructuring to rejuvenate and redirect Australian industry.
We would fund it by cutting defence spending (saving $1.25 billion), increasing company taxes from 39% to 42% for companies with taxable incomes above $100,000 (realising $900 million), taxing incorporated persons at personal rates ($200 million) and abolishing company tax deductibility for fat cat salaries above $150,000 ($10 million).
A small fossil fuel levy yielding $750 million would boost Australia's sustainable energy industry and upgrade our public transport.
Social and moral alienation are as much a threat to our security as any army. Even now the wealthy are walling themselves and their possessions into fortress ghettos as protection from the despairing new poor outside.
Is this the Australia we want? We believe not.
And we believe that the concrete and practical steps we propose will circumvent that awful Antipodean Los Angeles and give our children a productive, prosperous and protected future.
[Senator Coulter is parliamentary leader of the Australian Democrats. Getting to Work is available from his office in Parliament House, phone (06) 277 3222, fax (06) 277 3235.]