GST: rolling back the opposition
In the month since the introduction of the Howard government's goods and services tax, the big-business propaganda machine — commonly referred to as the "mass media" — has mounted a sustained attack on the ALP's promise to "roll back" the tax if it is elected to government.
The tone of this attack was graphically illustrated by the following comments in a July 31 editorial in the Sydney Daily Telegraph: "For months political, business and public opponents [of the GST] filled the community with dread about the tax they claimed had eaten economies all over the world.
"But a month after the GST's arrival the doomsayers have been silenced and the critics forced, to a large extent, to eat their words.
"There has been no descent into financial chaos. Poverty has not yet gripped low and middle income earners. So far the transition ... has been relatively smooth.
"... the GST has been a success for the Government and will force the Federal Opposition to rethink its strategy."
NSW Labor right "numbers man" John Della Bosca's comment on the "roll back" promise in an interview published in Kerry Packer's Bulletin magazine a week after the introduction of the GST — "shit, it's complicated enough already" — was gleefully seized on by print, radio and TV commentators as evidence of a lack of support within the ALP leadership for the "roll back" promise.
Opinion polls taken two weeks after the introduction of the GST provided further ammunition for the corporate media's anti-"roll back" campaign. "Voters back PM on GST" proclaimed Rupert Murdoch's Australian on July 18. In a front page report on a July 14-16 Newspoll survey of 1200 people on their attitudes to the GST, Dennis Shanahan, the Australian's political editor, claimed, "... voters have comprehensively rejected Labor's plans to roll back the tax".
According to Newspoll, only 38% of those surveyed where in favour of a "roll-back" of the GST (though this rose to 43% among people with household incomes of less than $60,000 a year). However, the poll was taken well before most people will feel the full impact of the GST. A host of household bills — such as electricity, telephone, water — will incorporate the full impact of the GST only later in the year.
Furthermore, according to a report in the July 29 Sydney Morning Herald, "Accountants and business leaders say between 20 and 50 per cent of small businesses, particularly clothes shops and cafes, have not passed on the full 10 per cent GST because they fear the price increase will scare off customers ...
"Experts say the rebound in consumer confidence in surveys taken since July 1 and Australians' general acceptance of the GST might be the result of the high rate of absorption of the new tax."
ALP leader Kim Beazley's roll-back promise is already a major retreat from Labor's pre-1998 election position of outright opposition to the introduction of the GST. Della Bosca's comments to the Bulletin that the ALP had to "confine" the roll-back to as few goods and services as possible, far from contradicting the ALP leadership's real plans, was in line with the direction that the ALP leadership has been travelling ever since it lost the last federal election: making vague promises to the electorate to remove the GST from a few items, while assuring big business and the rich that it will retain the tax if it wins government.
Despite Australian Democrats leader Meg Lees' announcement on July 23 that her party would use its votes in the Senate to block any attempted roll-back of the GST under a Labor government, big business and its media mouthpieces fear that even vague promises will heighten expectations among voters for the removal of the tax from widely used goods and services. A Herald-AC Nielsen poll conducted a week after the tax's introduction revealed, for example, that 72% of those surveyed wanted the GST lifted from petrol.
As the full impact of the GST is felt over the next six months — the lead-in time to the next federal election — we can expect the corporate media to continue to tell voters that the GST has been a "success" and that they have all benefited from and support it. And we can expect the ALP — as the alternate governing party for big business — to heed its master's voices and to confine promises of any roll-back to the minimum necessary to capture enough marginal electorates to win government.