Get Funds We Badly Need for Public Housing, Public Hospitals & Public Schools –

Rip The Wealth from The Mine Owners & Bankers & Place It into Public Hands!

When ALP treasurer Wayne Swan announced the Federal Budget in May, he spoke of the need to restrain spending and implement a “responsible fiscal strategy.”  As usual that means that it is the most vulnerable who are going to be squeezed even more. Most notably, the Labor-Greens government will slash payments to many unemployed single parents (mostly single mothers) by $56 a week even while offering no initiatives to provide the affordable childcare crucial to enabling many single mothers to work. Twenty-one year old unemployed youth will also have their payments reduced as will newly disabled people relying on the Disability Support Pension.

Meanwhile, there were no new measures announced to relieve the terrible shortage of affordable housing – of public housing. Indeed, in many cases the government continues to sell off or demolish public housing. That is what they are doing in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Glebe. Meanwhile under the ALP government’s plan announced last year, 100 public housing homes in NSW’s biggest public housing estate Claymore (in South Western Sydney) will be sold off to private buyers. The government’s fanfare about pumping money into such housing estates turns out to be merely an act of fattening the cattle before slaughter. With public housing thus often being replaced by higher rent privatised housing and at best being neglected, we can expect the number of homeless people in this country to continue to rise. Already at the last census in 2006 it had reached the terrible level of 105,000 people.

Indeed, social services for low and middle income people are being neglected across the board in this country. So while the Budget announced some modest but wholly inadequate funding boosts for mental health and rural health care there was nothing to relieve the serious underfunding of public hospitals in the main urban centres. Currently, there is a huge shortfall in hospital beds at key Sydney hospitals. St Vincent’s hospital in inner-city Sydney’s Darlinghurst is running on average with 99% of all beds occupied. That’s just 1% of beds available! What happens if there is a major accident? Meanwhile, a survey performed in March last year found that over half the patients admitted to the Emergency Department of Westmead Hospital in Western Sydney had to wait over 8 hours just to get a bed. Over 8 hours!

Yet, while there are such deficiencies in the public services that working class people need the most there are others in this society who are creaming off billions. A small number of people are becoming billionaires – not through their own labour – but by looting the fruit of other people’s work. These tycoons are certainly not being forced to tighten their belts. Quite the opposite! Instead, they are getting ever more bloated with fatter profits.

Prominent among these are the big owners of the mining companies. They hoard for themselves the treasure buried under stolen Aboriginal land and then they go on to exploit the labour of mining workers who dig this treasure up for them. Last financial year, Australia’s biggest mining company BHP more than doubled its previous year’s profits. Its annual profit was 15 billion dollars. 15 billion dollars! And what about the spectacular profits that the hated bank owners are leaching out of the economy.

The greed of the bank and mine owners is truly unquenchable. Thus, even when the former Rudd government proposed a weak mining tax the mining tycoons lost the plot. They used their incredible wealth to finance an expensive advertising campaign against the tax. Rudd was in the process of capitulating fully to them but did not do it fast enough to save his skin from his ALP rivals’ eagerness to pander to the mining tycoons even more slavishly. The first thing that Gillard did when she became prime minister was to suck up to the bosses of BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata over the mining tax. She made this already limp tax even weaker. Now mining billionaires like Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer continue to demand even more concessions.

It is high time that someone stood up to these greedy exploiters. None of the current parliamentary parties are going to do this. It is up to us – the masses – the working class and its allies to challenge the tyranny of the tycoons. What we should demand are not negotiations with the mining tycoons over a paltry tax, much of whose revenue will go into the hands of other business bosses through lower company taxes. No, we must fight for a serious seizure of the ever growing wealth of the mining bosses and bank owners to provide the resources desperately needed for public housing, public hospitals and other public services – including public schools, childcare and public transport.  .

In Capitalist Australia Mining Profits Go to The Tycoons

To excuse their greed, the bosses of companies like BHP and Rio Tinto talk of their profits going to “mum and dad shareholders.” But these so-called “mums and dads” are actually really only the most affluent “mums and dads.” Furthermore, such “mums and dads” while they may be numerous in number amongst all the shareholders of a company, typically only own a small percentage of the big corporations. For example, taking figures from Rio Tinto’s own 2010 annual report, 97.4% of shareholders own less than 7.0% of the group. It is the very rich, big shareholders who own most of the company. Among them are the over-bloated executives. Then there are the parasites receiving huge royalties from mining profits. These include Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart. Her obscene 10.3 billion dollar fortune comes not from any work of her own but largely from receiving royalties from Rio Tinto’s Pilbara iron ore mines.

Then there are, of course, the tycoons that actually by themselves own controlling stakes in whole mining companies. These include Australia’s fifth richest person Clive Palmer, the owner of Mineralogy Pty Ltd. Palmer is also the owner of three private jets, two helicopters, several mansions and many lavish boats. A couple of years ago he gifted his 15 year-old daughter a 30 metre luxury yacht worth 5.3 million dollars! Yet, he is crying poor over even the ALP’s limp mining tax.

Also leading the charge against the tax is Australia’s third richest person, Andrew Forrest, the main owner of Fortescue Metals. To justify his company hoarding its profits, Forrest claims he is concerned about the welfare of Aboriginal people and that any loss in his profits would hurt his efforts to help them. What a disgusting liar! He has no concern for Aboriginal people – his concern is purely for his own ill-gotten billions.

Of course, we all know that the mine owners and the much-hated bank bosses are not the only people stealing the fruit of workers’ labour in this country. There are also the exploiting factory owners, the often corrupt property developers and so on and so on. We have chosen here to highlight the mining bosses because they were so obnoxious in their advertising campaign last year to stop Rudd’s proposed tax. But standing up to them is part of standing up to all the capitalist tycoons.
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Take The Road of The Class Struggle

To see how unjust the situation in this country is, consider this: a survey performed in 2009 found that more than one out of every 100 people in this country at some stage sought emergency assistance that year after becoming homeless. In other words, during the year of 2009, well over 200,000 people in this country were homeless at some stage. Yet just four Australian mining tycoons – Gina Rinehart, Ivan Glasenberg, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer – have a total wealth of over 30 billion dollars between themselves. Thirty billion dollars amongst just four people! If we brought this wealth that they’ve hoarded back into public hands, we could easily build enough affordable public housing to completely eradicate homelessness in this country.

We badly need a redistribution of resources from the mine owners, bankers and factory bosses into public services for the working class. We don’t need revenue from mine profits going into lower company taxes as Gillard has planned – are we going to let the bank owners grab even more money? We also don’t need just a limp mining tax – we need a serious grab of the corporate tycoons’ wealth.

But how we are going to achieve this? Certainly not by looking to any of the current parliamentary parties. We all know where the Liberals stand. The ALP is more worried about pandering to the corporate elite than it is to serving its working class base. And as for the Greens, whatever their talk, the truth is that they made a deal to back this Gillard government without getting even the tiniest commitment to boost public housing, public hospitals or public schools.

The problem is not only the current parliamentary parties but the whole process itself. The ultra-wealthy own the mass media, can afford to fund election campaigns and have the money to finance political advertisements.  We saw this in the way that the mining bosses were able to finance an expensive advertising campaign to pressure the government to gut, the already weak, mining tax. So, this basically shows us that democracy in Australia is a sham: the much-vaunted one person one vote in practice turns out to be a million dollars a million votes.

Therefore, what we need to do is to take on the exploiting class in the arenas where we are strong: on the streets and in the workplace using the industrial muscle of united workers. That doesn’t mean we do not need a political party to represent the masses’ interests. We certainly do need this – but not a party like the ALP that futilely seeks to administer the bosses’ state in workers’ interests but rather a party devoted to organizing the class struggle.

If such struggle is mobilized then the racist dynamic in this country will start to get punctured too. People will see that the reason that there are a lack of public services is not because of the influx of refugees or migrants as Gillard, Abbot and the media have implied but because most of the wealth is under the control of a tiny class of home-grown exploiters.

However, while class struggle will challenge racism, we must in turn challenge racist scapegoating if we are to build the class struggle. Thus, the workers movement must fight for freeing all the refugees, for full citizenships rights for everyone who comes here and for the resolute defence of Aboriginal rights. The union movement must also itself be purged of all policies that play into the bosses’ divide and conquer plans like those policies that call for excluding overseas labour or for keeping out overseas made products. Such schemes divide workers from their true allies – the workers of the rest of the world. And boy if we are going to take on corporations like BHP and Rio Tinto that have worldwide operations themselves we badly need international workers’ unity and joint action around the globe.

Through united class struggle we can start to take back some of the wealth grabbed by the corporate elite and win improvements in public services. Of course, it is then that the capitalists will threaten that this will force them to slash jobs as they did when the mining tax was announced. When this happens we should respond: OK, you mining tycoons, if you’re not able to keep workers employed while handing over some of your profits for the public interest and if you’re not capable of respecting Aboriginal land rights and cultural treasures then we should simply take the mines out of your hands and nationalise them.

In a funny way, mining magnate Andrew Forrest kind of advocated this program without, of course, meaning to. When the mining tax was announced his big line was that China, the fastest growing economy in the world, was going in the opposite direction and, according to him, lowering mining taxes. Yes, Twiggy,we should indeed be following China. The Peoples Republic of China was the country that most successfully avoided the global recession. Except, Mr Forrest, you forgot to mention one crucial fact: in China the equivalents of BHP, Rio Tinto and your own Fortescue are all publicly-owned as are all the major banks, ports, airlines, oil companies and heavy industry. So, Mr Forrest, we are sorry to say that in order to follow the Chinese road we really need to do what China did in the wake of its 1949 anti-capitalist revolution which is the nationalization without compensation of the major mines, banks and factories. It is this public ownership which enabled China to have the resources to last year start building 5.9 million low-rent public housing homes. That is pretty spectacular anywhere, especially in a country that is still pulling itself up from the terrible poverty and backwardness of its pre-1949, feudal-capitalist days. This year the Peoples Republic of China will start building 10 million public housing apartments! Even accounting for the population difference between China and Australia that is the equivalent of building 154,000 public housing homes in Australia in a year – a figure that is more than half of Australia’s entire public housing stock! That is what you can do when the key mines, banks, ports, steel mills and housing construction firms are safely in public hands!

To be sure, there are many problems in China too. The compromising government there has allowed in too many capitalists and that threatens to undermine the dominance of the socialistic public sector. But nevertheless the state there remains a workers state, however deformed, based on public ownership and that is something we must always defend.

A workers state is precisely what we need here in Australia. For even if we achieve a big increase in funding for public services, while that would make for a big improvement, we still have the problem that the authorities running those services really serve the big end of town. Look at the way public housing authorities treat tenants with arrogance, impose unfair water charges and constantly threaten them with eviction. Furthermore, under the current system much of the money that is nominally earmarked for public services gets siphoned off to private building contractors charging exorbitant rates – as in the schools building program. So what we need is the nationalization of all key industries from construction to mining to transportation. This can only be achieved by sweeping away the capitalist state that defends the big business owners and building a new state that serves the interests of working class people.

To get towards that final goal the masses must today gain confidence in their own power. That means fighting to rip as much wealth from the exploiting class as we can today. It means fighting for a massive increase in public housing, for quality health care for all, for properly funded public education and for free childcare today. However, we are not going to get any of this through the good graces of parliament or that of the Liberals, ALP or Greens.  We are going to have to fight for these gains through the methods of class struggle. Such struggles are actually inevitable. In Greece, Spain and Portugal we are seeing militant struggles by workers desperate to stop governments from forcing them to make yet more sacrifices to bailout the collapsing capitalist economies there. In those countries, as here, victory for the working class can only be assured if it is guided by a political program that relies entirely on the power of the working class united with all of the oppressed and which places no trust at all in the institutions of the capitalist state. Guided by such a program, let us today build a strong class struggle movement to challenge the tyranny of the tycoons.