Photo Above: The government’s planned attacks on unemployed workers and other welfare recipients will lead to still more homelessness in Australia.
STOP GREEDY BOSSES FROM SLASHING JOBS!
DEFEAT THE MORRISON REGIME’S WAR AGAINST WELFARE RECIPIENTS!
16 October 2019 – The right-wing Morrison government is waging a multi-pronged attack on Australia’s lowest income people. Having rejected widespread calls to boost the cruelly low, Newstart Allowance, the Liberal-National government is seeking to push through legislation that will extend beyond June 2020 the trials of the Cashless Debit Card. Under the harsh regime of this “cashless welfare” system, welfare recipients will only receive 20% of their income through their bank account. The remainder must be spent through a Cashless Debit Card which can only be used at shops with Eftpos machines and cannot be used to withdraw cash or for alcohol or gambling. The government’s legislation will not only extend the period of the cashless welfare trials in the existing four sites but expand the trials to two new areas: the Northern Territory and the Cape York Peninsula. Welfare recipients in those two areas were already under compulsory income management as a result of the racist Intervention into Aboriginal communities begun in 2007 under the Howard government and extended under the following Labor government. However, the new measure will see the system where 50% of people’s income was restricted under a Basics Card replaced by the even more severe Cashless Debit Card, where 80% of income is quarantined. Moreover, if the new legislation becomes law, a minister will have the power to arbitrarily increase people’s rate of quarantining to 100%!
It is pretty clear that the government’s aim is to use the trials as a stepping stone to impose cashless welfare on most welfare recipients. Last month, the junior partner in the governing Coalition, the Nationals, decided to push for the Cashless Debit Card to be imposed on all people who are unemployed or receiving parenting payments and aged under 35. For his part, prime minister Scott Morrison openly stated that the cashless welfare trials were “commending itself for wider application.”
In yet another scheme to subject economically vulnerable people to more indignities, the Coalition government wants to drug test people receiving either the Newstart Allowance or the Youth Allowance. The measure will be introduced first as a trial at three sites involving 5,000 people. The bill enshrining the scheme is now before the Senate. Those who refuse to be drug tested will have their payments cut off and those that fail a second test will have to pay for the test, which would amount to hundreds of dollars. The scheme is so draconian and punitive that almost all health and drug treatment experts have slammed the plan.
All these proposed measures are not about supposedly using “tough love” to help unemployed people as the government claims. Rather, they will make the lives of low-income people more miserable. For starters, with welfare recipients often having to sub-let from a better-off tenant in order to be able to get rental accommodation (since landlords are reluctant to let to the lowest income people), cashless welfare will mean that many will simply not be able to pay their rent. Moreover, by curbing a person’s use of cash, the Cashless Debit Card will restrict low-income people from buying items at markets or second-hand from other people. They will also no longer be able to get a tradie to do a job at reduced rates for cash. Yet it is precisely the economically poor who most need to be able to get good deals from cash payments and bargains from markets and second-hand purchases. In short, the imposition of cashless welfare amounts to a sizable cut to the income of unemployed workers. How are people going to afford that when the Newstart Allowance is already so meagre? Take a single person trying to live in the working class Sydney suburb of Auburn, about 35 minutes from the city. The cheapest shared accommodation, single bedroom advertised there is going for $200 a week – that is, $400 a fortnight. Yet Newstart for a single person is just $559 a fortnight and the maximum rental assistance is only $138 per fortnight. So that single, unemployed worker has just $297 per fortnight left after paying rent. How the hell can a person survive on just $148.50 per week? Already many on Newstart are forced to skip meals, avoid using the heater during even freezing winter days and pass over purchases of essential medicines. Now, being denied the discounts that are possible through cash transactions will drive them further into poverty. And low income people face a second blow. With Liberal and ALP state governments alike continuing to sell off public housing, private landlords will know that they can jack up rents since people will have nowhere else to go.
What these planned new welfare measures aim to do is to stigmatise unemployed workers and all the poor – portraying them as lazy, drug or alcohol-addicted people who need a firm hand to bring them into line and make them job ready. This is a disgusting slander! The reason that so many people do not have jobs and many, many more have less work hours than they want is because of the greed of the corporate bigwigs who are forever trying to boost profits by slashing their workforces and driving those left behind harder for the same pay. Greedy business owners are, meanwhile, reluctant to spend any resources on training new workers unless there is big money to be made out of it. It is because of this capitalist system, where every economic decision is determined by the drive for profits for rich bosses, that there are nearly five unemployed people for every available job. Even if those small percentage of unemployed workers who have become, understandably, despondent at their prospects of finding work are pushed into becoming more active in job hunting this will only mean that instead of 19 people on average applying for each job vacancy, as is currently the case, there maybe say 23 people on average competing for each vacancy (even whether this will occur is questionable since the unbearably low level of the Newstart payment and greater costs inherent with cashless welfare will mean that people often cannot afford to buy clothes for interviews, travel to job opportunities or print their own CVs). Thus, at most, government “tough love” measures will mean that different people will end up getting the same scarce jobs. The same overall number of people will still be unemployed!
What the government’s schemes to stigmatise welfare recipients will do is to severely demoralise unemployed workers and lower their self esteem. When a worker gets retrenched by a boss or a young person struggles to get their first, secure job they feel demoralised because humans by nature want to be able to utilise their skills and as social animals we long to contribute to society’s development. Part of the egalitarian culture of so-called hunter-gatherer societies of the past came from the fact that everyone was able to contribute to satisfying their clan’s needs and those contributions were valued by and, indeed, essential to all. Yet in the profit-obsessed, capitalist system so many people are cruelly denied the basic human need to be able to utilise one’s labour and contribute to social production. These victims of capitalist greed then have to also put up with being vilified by the tabloid press, right-wing TV commentators and radio shock jocks and being looked down upon by a society whose values are shaped by the corporate ruling class. And ever more and more, these people are being stigmatised by punitive government policies like cashless welfare and mandatory drug testing. Meanwhile, the economic hardships imposed on welfare recipients through below poverty-level payments – increasingly compounded by restrictions on their access to cash – lead to social isolation as people can’t afford to travel to social events, pay entry fees to shows or nightspots or even go out for a coffee. So, unemployed workers are pushed into depression. Quite understandably, some in this predicament will seek solace in various forms of escape from reality – whether that be in the illusory salvation of religion or other cults or the “alternate reality” of a drug high.
But any suggestion that it is the lowest income people
who are especially prone to drug use or
alcoholism is repugnant. Welfare recipients
simply don’t have the money to be buying large amounts of drugs or alcohol. It
is the cocaine snorting, chardonnay swilling corporate high fliers, managers,
barristers, yuppies, rich kids and the like living in places like Bellevue
Hill, Mosman and Vaucluse who get to
indulge and spend far more on drugs and alcohol.
Of course, the government is not
suggesting compulsory drug testing of these social classes – after all, these
are the very people whom their regime serves!
In this soulless, dog-eat-dog capitalist society, many people from all classes seek various forms of escape from reality. And as with plunging into religion or cults, using drugs to escape – especially when it results in actual addiction – can often make reality even worse than it currently is. Yet for some of those being isolated and stigmatised at the bottom of this ruthless, class-divided society, having a means of “escape” is what stands between them and deep depression or even suicide. What these people need is not punitive drug testing – and being made to pay for the exorbitant costs of these tests – but an end to the stigmatisation, a system that provides guaranteed jobs for all and something else that definitely does not exist now: widely available and free addiction treatment, counselling and mental health services. Ironically, contrary to its claimed goals, the government’s policies, by further stigmatising welfare recipients will drive more people into seeking to escape reality through drugs, alcohol or religion (the bible-thumping members in the regime like Morrison, Eric Abetz and Christian fundamentalist Andrew Hastie would, of course, love the latter).
In their policies to punish the poor, the right-wing
government also imparts their own racial prejudice into the process. The
existing cashless welfare trial areas as well as the two new proposed sites
have a disproportionately high percentage of Aboriginal residents. Indeed, nearly
80% of people affected by the cashless
welfare trials are Aboriginal people. Notably too, one of the three
sites selected for the mandatory drug testing of welfare recipients is
southwest Sydney’s Canterbury-
Bankstown area, a region with a very high proportion of residents from various
Asian and Middle Eastern backgrounds. For a regime that oversees racist police
brutality against Aboriginal people and the stealing of Aboriginal children
from their families; and which regularly incites racist fears against one
minority community after another,
from Muslims, to African youth to Chinese
students, such discriminatory behaviour
is not surprisingly overtly racist.
Moreover, the racist,
rich people’s regime knows that racism is widespread in their society
and so think that trialling punitive measures in heavily Aboriginal or heavily
Asian/Middle Eastern regions will meet less resistance. Yet all working class people should know that repressive schemes
first unleashed against Aboriginal people are often later rolled out more
broadly. For example, compulsory work for the dole was first unfurled against Aboriginal people and then subsequently
rolled out against most long-term unemployed workers. And, of course, cashless
welfare itself began with the racist Intervention into NT Aboriginal communities.
RIGHT-WING GOVERNMENT: BASHES THE POOR, BASHES THE WORKERS MOVEMENT
So why are Scott Morrison and Co. on this crusade against welfare recipients apart from, of course, the fact that they are heartless, upper class snobs with contempt for the poor! For one, they want to cut spending on welfare. They hope that by punishing welfare recipients and increasing the number of reasons why a recipient will get their payments suspended, they can drive down budget outlays. That will allow them more funds to lower tax rates for their big end of town mates, give negative-gearing tax concessions to wealthy investors buying multiple properties and support the government’s increasingly large budget for spy agencies and for their military build up against socialistic China. Last year, Australia, a country with a relatively small population, was the second biggest arms importer in the world, spending more on weapons imports than China, a country with sixty times our population (see: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-30/australia-worlds- second-biggest-weapons-importer-behind-saudi/11558762)! The rich people’s regime’s annual defence budget is now $38.7 billion which, spread out and spent on welfare instead of war, would amount to about $52,000 per year for every person on the Newstart Allowance!
However, cutting costs is not the government’s only motive. After all, the Cashless Debit Card itself initially cost $10,000 per person per year to administer and even the lowest estimates of this operating cost now stand at $2,000 per person which amounts to about $40 per week that could, instead, be used to boost the income of each welfare recipient!
A big part of the motive for the government’s war on welfare
recipients is to blame
unemployed workers for their own plight so that people will not focus on those
really responsible for joblessness – the corporate bigwigs who, after sweating
out millions and billions in profits from their employees, don’t hesitate to
throw some of these same workers out of their livelihoods whenever pruning
their workforce is what it takes to further boost profits. Thus, despite
extracting a whopping $1.2 billion profit out of its workers in just the first six months of this year, Telstra
bosses have thrown 3,200 workers out of a job since June last year as
part of a plan by this rich Australians-owned company to axe 18,000 workers by
the end of 2022. For its part, David Jones bosses are in the process of axing
120 jobs, including 28 jobs at its Wollongong store.
This despite the company’s rich shareholders making a $37 million profit last year and
over $200 million over the last three years. With
more than half of young adults without a permanent job and as the
capitalist world lurches into another economic downturn, the capitalists’ government is determined to ensure that
the masses don’t identify the greed of the owners of Telstra, David Jones, NAB and the other corporations as the reason
for rising unemployment.
And when the parties that uphold the capitalist order aren’t blaming unemployed people for their own plight they use nationalist and racist scapegoating instead. The Liberal/Nationals specialise in blaming migrants and refugees for unemployment, the ALP and Greens are focussed on blaming imported products and guest workers and the far-right outfits, like One Nation, rabidly do both.
Perhaps the main reason that the Morrison government wants to make life more miserable for welfare recipients is to help their rich business-owning mates by driving down the wages and conditions of employed workers. By keeping welfare payments so small and imposing such cruel restrictions on recipients, Morrison and Co. know that unemployed workers will become more willing to accept jobs with terrible wage rates and working conditions. Already there are hundreds of thousands of workers in Australia – disproportionately young or female or migrant toiling away for below award wages in sectors like retail, hospitality, aged care, warehousing and restaurants. Moreover, by making the conditions of life so terrible for those who lose their jobs, the anti-working class government hopes to intimidate existing workers into putting up with poor conditions and shying away from risking involvement in trade union struggles for rights at work. That is why the entire workers movement – and in particular our trade unions must champion the struggle to smash the Morrison government’s attacks on welfare recipients.
RELY ON WORKING CLASS POWER &
OPPOSE THE AUSTRALIAN RICH PEOPLE’S REGIME’S ENTIRE AGENDA
No one should
be under the illusion that we can rely on parliamentary machinations to stop the current
offensive against welfare
recipients. The cross-bench politicians are anti-working class. Tasmanian senator Jacqui
Lambie, who may have the deciding vote in the Senate on the various government
bills, broadly supports cashless welfare. Under pressure from their working
class base, the ALP is now opposing the government’s legislation in its current
form. Yet working class activists
should not have faith that the ALP will spearhead a movement against the
government’s measures. Remember this is the same ALP that previously voted for cashless welfare trials and when
last in government implemented perhaps the cruellest of all welfare cuts: the
throwing of low-income single parents (mainly single mothers) and their
families off the parenting payment and onto the much lower paying Newstart
Allowance. Even today, the ALP’s opposition to cashless welfare is
hardly staunch. They plan to amend the government’s cashless welfare
legislation so that the scheme becomes voluntary. That is, of course, better
than being compulsory but that still means that they will be promoting the
despicable stigmatisation of unemployed people inherent in cashless welfare.
And that stigmatisation is, indeed, half of the government’s agenda!
Now the Greens have been stronger in their opposition to cashless welfare than the ALP. The problem, however, is that the Greens accept the current social order, reject the idea of workers organising as a class against it and, themselves, receive big donations from rich capitalist high-fliers. Yet it is only mass action of the working class against the capitalist class that can force the capitalist politicians to retreat from their current course. When we see such militant, mass action – backed by the power of the union movement – then suddenly some cross-benchers or even government politicians, realising the need for the class that they serve to make concessions, will miraculously “discover” the injustice of their war on welfare recipients. So let’s have mass working class struggle to demand a complete end to cashless welfare, a total rejection of drug testing of welfare recipients, a massive increase in public housing and a big increase in the Newstart Allowance. However, we should not stop there. We need to fight for the basic human right of all people, who are able to do so, to use their labour and talents to contribute to social production. That means launching industrial action struggles to stop all job slashing plans by business owners. It also means demanding laws stopping all profitable companies from cutting jobs and laws which force profitable businesses to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. And to truly enable working class mothers to fully participate in work life we need to fight for free around-the-clock childcare, free pre-school education and free school lunches at all schools. To all these measures, especially ones that force business owners to retain more staff than is optimal for their profits, the capitalists will scream that this is unaffordable and impractical. To this we must reply: if your system cannot even provide jobs for all and, thereby, also utilise every person’s skills and energy for society’s benefit then it is so cruel and so irrational that it has got to go. We working class people will take the banks, factories, mines, transport and communication systems, utilities and agricultural land into our own able collective hands and run a socialist system that will serve all working class people and all the poor.
To realise this perspective we need to turn around the program that currently dominates our unions. Most of our unions remain led by a pro-ALP agenda that, while critical of companies when they cut jobs, rarely takes any action against this except occasionally in the small minority of cases where job losses are related to companies moving operations offshore. Instead, the only “strategy” that pro-ALP union leaders have to win more jobs for workers is to make economic nationalist appeals to restrict imports, curb the entry of guest workers or favour local businesses. Yet, such protectionism never helps save any workers’ jobs as overseas countries will inevitably retaliate with their own measures against Australian producers. All such schemes end up doing is dividing Australian workers from our true allies – the workers of all countries – while bringing us into a bloc with the very people that we need to be struggling against: the job-slashing local bosses. So we need to replace this Laborite perspective with one based on irreconcilable opposition to the local capitalist exploiting class. We need a union movement and a workers party that do not restrict themselves to demands that are tolerated by the capitalists but which, instead, unite the working class to fight for what we and all the downtrodden need. That means waging all out class struggle – including in defiance of anti-strike laws – to oppose job cuts by business owners, to smash the Morrison government’s entire war on welfare recipients, to defeat its planned laws making it easier to deregister militant unions and to force profitable companies to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. Such a program is part of a far-sighted perspective to win a future socialist society where it will be the working class and poor – and not the cruel capitalist exploiters – who will be the new ruling class of a fair and kind society and who, one day, will even abolish the very notion of a society divided by classes and the systematic, unequal distribution of wealth.