Lisa Macdonald
While the Coalition is currently riding high in the polls, the prospect of a fourth term, and control of the Senate, has the bosses baying for blood. As the inevitable attacks on workers and the poor kick in, we can expect PM John Howard's approval rating to take a battering.
In December Howard told the media: "We will not allow our natural humility about getting control of the Senate to induce timidity in using it The people gave us control of the Senate for a reason, because they supported us. They gave it very deliberately, they will therefore get the government they voted for..."
To summarise what that means in industrial relations: the government has announced that following a review of the industrial relations landscape, including what it should look like in four or five years' time, it will put to parliament in July a piece of legislation that packages most of its attacks together, including requiring secret ballots before strikes and cutting the number of allowable matters under awards from 20 to 16.
The government will negotiate with the Democrats to get legislation passed before July on unfair dismissals, exempting small businesses from redundancy payouts, tougher right of entry laws for unions, and outlawing legal industrial action during the life of an enterprise bargaining agreement. If no agreement with the Democrats (or the ALP, who might well collaborate on some of these attacks, such as unfair dismissal) is reached, these four attacks will be included in the package for July.
Separate legislation will also be introduced to police the construction industry, and limit pattern bargaining, closed shops and strikes; and to "quarantine" independent contractors from unions and awards.
The second major area flagged for rapid government action is tax cuts, specifically to the top personal tax rate. A group of 25 Liberal backbench MPs is pushing for a cut from 47% to the company rate of 30%. This would, according to Victorian senator Mitch Fifield, reduce the "incentives" for rich people to avoid paying tax!
Figures released by the Australian Council of Social Services in November reveal that those paying proportionally most personal tax are, of course, the poorest people.
In addition to personal tax cuts for the rich, the Business Council is pushing for another company rate reduction. This is essential for Australia's future economic health, it claims, so is a good use of the budget surplus, projected to be $6.2 billion in 2004-05.
The bosses are arguing that the record amounts of company tax the government's collected in recent years is a self-evident iniquity. Never mind that the record tax collection has been a consequence of the proportionally much bigger record profits being pocketed by companies, nor that company tax has already been cut from 46% in 1985 to 30% today.
Privatisation
Two further prongs of the government's agenda for immediately boosting the private profit share of national income are privatisation and welfare cuts.
On December 13, cabinet agreed to begin the process of selling the government's majority share in Telstra by seeking contractors for a study of how to (supposedly) maximise the sale price and work out the structure of the sale. This study will include identifying how service delivery to rural and regional Australia can be improved, apparently the mechanism for pacifying the National Party MPs under pressure from their electorates. The report is expected to be ready by mid-year.
And Telstra is not the only major revenue-raising target for privatisation. In late December, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry ratcheted up the pressure on all state governments that have not yet done so to sell their multi-billion-dollar power generation businesses. With South Australian electricity costs having escalated since its sell-off and public calls now for the Rann government to buy back into power generation, this might be a harder goal for the privatisers, but it is a key one.
Welfare
While few details have been released yet, Howard made the government's welfare agenda clear when he said in December that the government aimed to "increase the numbers of workers in the labour force by removing them from welfare". "If the incentives are right, people will leave welfare for employment", is how the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs puts it.
The central plank of the government's plan is to "streamline" a range of working-age welfare payments into a single payment. A discussion paper will be presented to cabinet in the next month or so setting out options for the change, but a Centrelink report leaked in November made it clear that, surprise, surprise, cost cutting is the primary consideration. One indication of just how draconian these "reforms" might be is the leak that the government plans to remove childcare entitlements from the unemployed and low-income single mothers.
The erosion of Medicare, a further shifting of government funding to private schools and health services, greater subsidisation of private insurance, and the expansion of user-pays higher education while weakening the student unions are all on the government's economic rationalist agenda.
Indigenous
Indigenous people are being lined up for a specific type of battering by Howard. With the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and its replacement by a National Indigenous Advisory Committee — which has no decision-making teeth and even less political backbone — it seems the government has the infrastructure in place to implement what has until now been rhetoric.
"Shared responsibility" is the euphemism for allowing the government to wash its hands off any financial and moral responsibility for reversing the Third World living conditions of most Indigenous Australians, and to do so in a way that (they hope) will not galvanise into active resistance the still strong anti-racist sentiment in the general population.
A lot of outrage has been expressed by Indigenous community leaders to the government's horrendous "land rights are dispensable, but wash your children daily and we'll give you a petrol bowser" policy. But we shouldn't expect much from the Labor Party. ALP vice-president Warren Mundine (who will be the federal party president from January 2006) wants his party to embrace the Coalition's policy. "Federal Labor needs to join the state [Labor] governments and accept this is the right approach", he said.
Revealing exactly where he and many of the Indigenous bureaucrats are coming from, Warren Mundine was reported in the media as saying that Indigenous leaders who criticised his views are "not interested in allowing more Indigenous people to accumulate wealth".
Civil rights
Alongside its economic assault and efforts to demolish workers' organisations, the Coalition government will be trying to roll back legal rights that might help people resist its offensive.
Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced last October that the Coalition will be amending the terror laws to be able to monitor SMS messages and email, and will introduce secrecy provisions into "terrorism" trials.
Already, the draconian "national security" laws passed last year with the ALP's support are starting to be used against Australians accused of having aided "terrorist organisations" overseas. In Sydney's south-west, local Muslims homes are regularly raided now, or watched by police surveillance 24 hours a day.
It seems too that another Coalition term has given confidence to the bosses to launch their own attacks against democratic rights that interfere with their profit-making. Gunns Pty Ltd, the biggest hardwood-chip company in the world, last month served writs amounting to $6.4 million on 20 anti-logging activists and organisations in Australia for damages to their corporate profits and reputation. The Wilderness Society and its staff face damages of $3.5 million, including for "publicly denigrating, vilifying and criticising" Gunns and encouraging others to boycott or protest against the company.
The ramifications go way beyond those being sued. This suit is intended to bully protesters into silence and make protest against corporations too costly to attempt. If successful, the case could also add to the arsenal of means by which bosses can sue unions and individual unionists for taking industrial action.
So this is an important campaign in defence of the right to protest and could be a rallying point, not just for forests campaigners, but for all anti-corporate and civil rights activists.
War
On the world stage, the Coalition will use its fourth term to consolidate its alliance with US imperialism, cementing its partner role in particular, though not exclusively, through a more aggressive intervention in the Asia Pacific.
The huge military expenditure increases in the 2003 and 2004 federal budgets, the now apparently permanent stationing of Australian troops and police in East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Solomons, in addition to the Butterworth base in Malaysia, and closer military ties with Indonesia, all give the Australia ruling class pretty much a free rein — militarily and economically in the region.
Fully intending to continue its active support for US wars of aggression wherever it is called upon (Australia sent more troops to Iraq on December 29), and to ensure that it can launch pre-emptive strikes in our region whenever Australian capital requires it, the government will continue to rachet up its racist "war on terror" and "national security" propaganda, and use it to justify the further, erosion of democratic rights and the expansion of the state security apparatus.
Such attacks will not necessarily be successful, however. A lot depends on just how many of us are prepared to organise against the tightening of the screws on working people, here and abroad.
[This is abridged from a talk given to the 2005 Marxist Summer School, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective, and affiliate to the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 26, 2005.
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