Attention reader:
- This article is about the Labor Party
- This article is about the Labor Party because it lost an election it could have won handily, and now is the time to make changes and get in new ideas
- It is not about the Liberals and what poobums they are because i) that simply increases the sense of self-righteousness that led to fatal smugness in the first place, and ii) the seven people who read me who are Liberals know what they are and are not going to be convinced to be otherwise by the likes of me
- It is not about the Greens because we will get to them
- For I will consider that cat, Anthony…
Labor’s capitulation to the Coalition’s entire tax programme last week has been taken by some as a sellout afresh, the next betrayal, etc etc. To be honest I find myself utterly bewildered by that attitude. Once it was clear that Centre Alliance had made a deal and had also so quickly and easily dominated Jacqui Lambie that her vote was gone, Labor’s vote against would have made no difference.
As your correspondent noted last week, there were no good choices to make — as is the case when you’ve gambled and lost. Good gamblers cut their losses by taking the loss. Losers let their losses run on in the vain hope of avoiding them altogether.
Labor cut its losses, got it over with and moved things on. It was the right choice. That it was so can be easily gamed out. To have voted against and lost was to invite a taunt for the next three years, a tagline that wouldn’t grow old as the rebates flowed. The reverse taunt — “well you, uh, voted for the thing we wanted” — doesn’t have the same force. Voters don’t care about who made who whose bitch, they care about things being done.
The need to cede the position was not a thing of the moment either. It was the logical conclusion of a path Labor put the country on in the Hawke-Keating years: individualising welfare; making the state an umpire of labour agreements rather than a prime mover; in general, depriving the state of its identity as a moral agent and the representative of the collective good. Having arranged a situation in which some workers can pull miles ahead of others — having created a situation in which there is, in other words, no class common good — defending progressive taxation was always going to look quixotic.
Hundreds of thousands of couples in classical working class jobs have now slipped above the old $90,000 bracket, and then above the $180,000 higher threshold. Many have passed office workers who have a residual higher social status. The ALP should have offered a new tax deal before the Libs did, with a better deal for low-income earners, and an extra band for the rate between 32.5 cents and 37 cents per dollar, for example.
The response by many to Labor’s quick pass on tax struck me as curious. The first common reaction was that people wanted Labor to die valiantly on that hill, which had a touch of old Whitlamite lost causers about it. The second reaction was that it was rewarding “selfishness”. But the politics of progressive taxation never relied on altruism. It was demanded by and offered to a working class with very little capital, and a far narrower wage range than now exists. It was an expression of collective class interest. Now that class is entirely fractured, wage differentials and capital ownership is vast.
Flattening the tax rate between $90,000 and $180,000 was to the advantage not only of many workers, but of many strongly unionised workers — construction, teachers with senior loadings, agency nurses. The howl that such an offer to them was selfish came from knowledge class people whose attachment to Labor has had a longstanding altruistic/ideological attachment, and a romanticised image of a unified working class.
Australia is a very unusual cat among the advanced capitalist societies. Elsewhere, the working class is far more unified in terms of economic interest and a simpler programme can be offered. Labor is going to need a more complex programme which serves high-wage earners while raising up the benefits-dependent and precariously waged through transfer payments and the increased universal provision of services.
These two big policies can be joined together as part of a social liberal compact — if you’re doing well you get to keep more of it; if you’re not, you get more help than hitherto — with the application of a third element: real taxes on corporations, which makes them pay more of what they owe.
We are going to have to do that anyway. The combination of monopoly, automation and consumption means that wealth transfer to the dead capital of corporation and the finance sector is now so great that transferring money back into the labour-centred economy is not even a particularly left-wing proposition. Currently, Labor is so sluggish on really big structural macroeconomic innovation that the Libs’ll probably be offering a universal basic income before Labor does.
Should the party not have the nous to spend the next 18 months exploring the most dynamic and creative solutions to a society with unusual features, then come next election it will be in even worse shape than it is now. Getting the tax stuff out of the way was only a start, but it was a good move.
If the Coalition returns to attacks on trade union rights, Labor is on firmer ground — if only because many working-lower Liberal voters gained the high wages they want to hang on to because they’re members of strong unions. Labor, though it cannot fly, is an excellent clamberer.
A ripper.
Gotta love the “Attention Reader” at the beginning! Trumps to GRundle!
I also sense that Morrison and Albanese have called a cease fire on the bitterness that Abbott introduced first as opposition leader and then as opposition leader on a PM’s salary.
Those who want more aggression are going to be disappointed by Albo. I’m expecting a much quieter Parliament save the odd Coalition scandal (Taylor is primed here). Morrison has so far been a much less confrontational and much more prone to use the term bi-partisan.
Maybe this is what the country needs…a few years of quiet but largely ineffective Government?
Agreed totally.
The less government does the better.
No more pink batts/electric cars/solar panels paid for by hard working Australians.
Stick to excellent health and education, aiming to get as much bang for the buck.
Any money left over pay down debt and give back to tax payers
Bias Detector: You need to read something about your neo-liberal fantasies – something published since Milton Friedman’s economic racism opus, Capitalism and Freedom, published 1962. If you still believe in neo-liberalsim, as you clearly do, you, like the knuckleheads in the government have not been paying much attention to reality. The truth is that neo-liberalism is designed to create inequity, to entrench wealth and power and conceal to all with the sort of bullshit you have written here.
The antidote to the Friedman disease;
http://michael-hudson.com/2010/05/neoliberal-economics-v-theology/
“The Friedman Institute upgrades Theology to condone Neoliberal Greed
What would Jesus Say?”
That was 2010. This was around a week ago;
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/07/05/the-imf-and-world-bank-partners-in-backwardness/
“The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness”
Rundle’s fallen for the trap. To quote Hudson from the 2010 piece above;
“The Chicago Boys thus have inverted traditional theology.
Yet the teaching of economics as an academic discipline began as moral philosophy courses in the 18th and 19th centuries. The leading universities of most countries were founded to train students for the ministry. The moral philosophy course evolved into political economy, dealing largely with economic reform and taxation of the unearned income accruing to vested interests as a result of legal privilege. The discipline was stripped down into “economics” largely to exclude political analysis, and the distinctions between productive and unproductive investment, earned and unearned income, value and price.
The classical economists saw rent and interest as a carry-over from Europe’s feudal conquest of the land and the privatization of money and finance into an institutionally based debt and monopoly overhead. The classical economists sought to tax away such “unearned income,” to regulate natural monopolies or shift them into the public domain.
Needless to say, this history of economic thought will not be taught at the Friedman Center.
The first thing that the Chicago Boys did in Chile when they were given power after the 1973 military coup was to close down every economics department in the country – and indeed, every social science department outside of the Catholic University where they held sway. They realized that “free markets” for capital required total control of the educational curriculum, and of cultural media generally.
What free marketers realize is that without an Inquisition authority, you cannot have a “stable” free market – that is, a market free for the financial predators who presumably are targeted as the major potential donors to the U/C’s Friedman Center.
Chicago School monetarists have achieved censorial power on the editorial boards of the major refereed economics journals, publication in which has become a precondition for career advancement for academic economists. The result has been to limit the scope of economics to “free market” celebration of rational choice theory and a narrow-minded “law and economics” ideology opposed to the ideas of moral justice and economic regulation that formed the basis of so much Western religion.
I had a foretaste of this inquisitorial spirit when I attended the U/C Laboratory School. I remember the large banner strung over the blackboard in Mr. Edgett’s social science classroom in 1953: “Give them all what the Rosenbergs got.” After the Freedom of Information Act opened up FBI files, my fellow classmates got quite a kick out of reading the reports filed on them and their political views by U/C professors and those of its associated Shimer College.
Who would have anticipated that economics would end up more right wing and authoritarian, more explicitly opposed to the very idea of human rights and distributive justice than theology? Or that the latter discipline itself would be so inverted?
The classical economists were reformers, after all, seeking to free markets from unearned income – the “free lunch” of land rent by Europe’s hereditary aristocracies, and from monopoly rents administered by the royal trading corporations created by European governments to pay off their war debts. But the Chicago monetarists seek to deregulate monopolies and usury laws, favoring rentiers rather than the “real” economy of labor and capital………..”
What Albo does or doesn’t do is completely irrelevant.
Both ‘sides’ are invested in a system that is operating as designed.
Rundle (in this, certainly not always) is just rearranging words.
Seeing the mods have turfed my attempt to provide you with an antidote to Friedman, that being some of the thinking of Dr Michael Hudson on political economy, I’ll give another angle a fly, this time in the form of a book about consequences;
https://www.amazon.com/Charlie-LeDuff/e/B001JP41R8%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
“Sh*tshow!: The Country’s Collapsing . . . and the Ratings Are Great”
When someone works harder than someone else that of couse creates inequality. There is nothing wrong with that!
We some encourage hard work!
Only way to make everyone equal USSR Venezuela etc is to make very one poor and starving!
You fail to understand that this is nothing to do about who works hard. It is about a system structured to keep the poor poor, while increasingly the wealth of the rich REGARDLESS OF HOW HARD EITHER WORK.
Your Trumpesque views of the world is more at home in the USA than Australia.
The Americanisation of Australia (evidenced by people like you who fail to understand Australian history and politics) is almost complete. Perhaps that makes you happy, but for those of us who grew up here, it is sad indeed.
Bias Detector, just because you get paid more than somebody else does not necessarily mean that you are working harder.
Some jobs are valued more than others, and some are very much overvalued.
Thanks that book looks awesome. Goong to buy it soon!
“The truth is that neo-liberalism is designed to create inequity, to entrench wealth and power and conceal to all with the sort of bullshit you have written here.”
Well said been Around. Sums it up perfectly. Thank you.
You’ve agreed totally with a comment you’ve totally misunderstood, opportunistically turning it into a thick-witted rant. ‘Bang for buck’ and ‘any money left over’ point to a simplistic ‘money-manager’ mentality; you obviously care nothing for the environment, or think that millions of individuals ‘keeping more of their money’ will do the trick.
Why not rave about the NBN debacle, the corruption-tainted Murray-Darling environmental catastrophe, or the $50bn and counting certain-to-be-obsolete submarines – all paid for by hard working Australians?
I agree NBN might be obsolete before it is finished what a waste of money!
5G 400 to 500 Mega bits per second after spent 10s of thousands of dollars to connect one home. Utter waste. At one stage our internet speeds actually went down.
60 000 000 000 dollars over 2000 per man woman and child wasted
All the more reason not to let the Government spend it!
They can’t help themselves. Labour/greens especially but Liberals are also at fault here too!
The government spend it? They just hand it over to their mates and big corporations (same thing really).
Look what a schmozzle the water handouts are at the moment. Carpetbaggers everywhere sucking on the public tit. Lifters and leaners are right, but the leaners have most excellent contacts with the LNP government.
The original fibre to the premises roll-out, if completed, would never be obsolete. Your speeds went down because the LNP’s version of the NBN is not fit for purpose. Your faith in 5G is misplaced – if the whole nation were on 5G it would slow to a crawl; fools like you will never understand this. Nor, apparently, do you understand the fact that the old copper bits which the LNP have based their dog’s breakfast version of the NBN on, MUST be replaced, sooner rather than later, urgently in fact. Billions more will simply HAVE to be spent doing that, and of course it would be sending good money after bad if it were replaced with more copper. Bring yourself up to speed with some factual knowledge before doing your next unintelligible rant.
I suspect you’ve nailed Morrison’s plan for his reign. Personally I can’t see an effective transition to new technologies without significant Government and taxpayer involvement.
Oh I dunno, I see innovative and progressive Australians doing amazing stuff in this sphere and leaving the government in their dust! Electric cars and renewable energy is going ahead in leaps and bounds despite our governments laggard attitude!
Exactly leave the tax payer out of it!
Very simple we no longer need a labor party. Morrison and Albanese, Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
We do need it but there is Bugger all chance of getting it.
I fail to understand the “cutting the losses” bit? The fix was already in with the cross bench – and Morrison’s particularly smug looks gave the game away – it was. That being the case, what was the loss that Labor saved? Nothing. The surrender just made Albanese appear weak and beaten. If you don’t see the optics I suppose that you may feel bewildered. Albanese tripped at the very first hurdle and everybody looked awkward.
Playing small target has seen Labor get it’s arse handed to it by the LNP ever since Rudd got the flick. Even when Gillard won it was only by a ciggie paper. Sometimes you must make a play and hit back hard even if a direct win is not possible. Albanese could have forced the point, and even if unsuccessful, draw a line in the sand and let Morrison know that the new man wasn’t about to play by the rule book designed by the Government.
I dunno Guy, perhaps you are right? I don’t think so. Having to vote with the Government against your own stated position makes you look like a bit of a wimp. The proof will be in the next three months. I say it will be more of the same from the party who never seems to learn anything.
The “small target” tactic – hardly the strategy into which it evolved – was begun by Bumbler Beezleblub, ironically in the vain hope that a sufficiently small foetal cringe would ward of the Rodent’s barbs & arrows of outrageous calumny.
Didn’t work for him or anyone since – can’t imagine why.
Slin Brothel didn’t even need that, being just a hole in the air, so insubstantial that one didn’t need to wait for him to cease making oral noises to forget that he existed.
Sigh! You are probably right Guy, as is often the case. Still. I couldn’t help thinking that if there was a ditch worth dying in it might have been preserving (or at least defending) a progressive tax system. Class these days is less about occupation than about access to the readies, and redistribution via a fair taxation regime could still have a place don’t you think?
Ah well, I may be a Whitlamite “lost causer”, but I gave my local (Labor) member a gobfull anyway.
“if there was a ditch worth dying in it might have been preserving (or at least defending) a progressive tax system”
I’m impressed by GR’s piece, but I agree with you. GR proposes “real taxes on corporations”; that might prove even more difficult to achieve than the re-introduction of progressive income tax. Both should be pursued.