the Banner Bright

The story of Greens candidate Tim Hollo’s 14-month quest to prove his eligibility to run for election demonstrates the need to scrap the absurd citizenship restrictions in section 44 of the Constitution. It is ridiculous to suggest that Hollo might be a Hungarian or Chinese sleeper agent because his Jewish parents were repeatedly forced to migrate, but that is what our Constitution says. We should adopt the New Zealand rule, which only bans MPs who take up a new citizenship after they are elected.

In a secret report to investors, Credit Suisse assesses Labor’s industrial relations policies and predicts “a potentially transformative shift in the bargaining power of labour, leading to a rise in the labour share of GDP over and above cyclical dynamics”. Noting that “productivity has grown almost four times faster than wages” in recent years, the investment bank is forced to admit that a shift in workers’ favour would merely be a “structural unwind” in response to the “windfall” profits companies have taken from the current system. In public, bosses claim the current system is fair and balanced, but in private they acknowledge it is rigged in their favour.

Ryan Goss of the ANU Law School has written the first comprehensive summary of the voting franchise at local government elections throughout Australia. Disturbingly, in most places, non-resident property owners and companies can also vote — and in Sydney and Melbourne, companies get more than one vote. Goss argues that the Queensland model, which gives one vote to each human resident who is on the State electoral roll, should be rolled out nationwide: “Local governments operate as an important form of government in contemporary Australia, and Australians should have an equal say in electing those governments and an equal opportunity to hold those governments accountable at the ballot box. … Allowing plural voting by those who own properties or those appointed by corporations is inconsistent with … notions of political equality as assigning to ‘each citizen an equal vote’.” This is an important issue. We should not countenance any amendment to include local government in the Australian Constitution — and certainly not with powers of taxation, as the Liberal Party has suggested — without a guarantee of fair council elections.

Too many defences of Labor’s franking credits policy (such as this otherwise solid one from Emma Dawson and Tim Lyons) concede the greedy shareholders’ claim that “double taxation” is unjust. Jim Stanford explains why that’s rubbish: “Progressives shold reject the whole idea. Companies benefit from public spending (on infrastructure, training, innovation, property rights etc) and so should pay a direct share. Then company owners should also pay a fair share toward the public goods which benefit them as individuals. … This ‘principle of no double taxation’ never applies to workers: they pay income tax, then GST on the after-tax income, then other taxes, fees, tolls, etc. after that. As long as the ultimate incidence is fair, that’s not a problem. Govts collect many taxes from many sources. Tax preferences for capital income (which is concentrated at the top) in all forms (franking, cap[ital] gains, dividends, neg[ative] gearing) have been a key cause of growing inequality since the 80s. Lower tax rates on high incomes were another. This year Aussies have a chance to push back.”

Katha Pollitt wants to see something different from Democrat politicians: “Free public college, health care for all, a living wage: These are all important causes that will improve life for millions. But there’s another proposal that belongs on the progressive to-do list: universal affordable high-quality child care.” The same is true here in Australia. Real support for early childhood education would lift a major financial burden from families, help to equalise the gender gap in pay and participation, and have major educational benefits for the next generations of children. The best way to promote the change that is needed is to support the United Voice Big Steps campaign.

The Morrison Government was defeated in the House of Representatives yesterday, as Labor and the crossbenchers combined to pass a bill to facilitate medical transfers of asylum seekers and refugees to Australia. While the bill is imperfect — it contains, for example, the disturbing implication that people who have committed crimes should be denied humane medical treatment — it is nonetheless a big step forward for the victims of our shameful island gulag policy.The ABC’s Laura Tingle identifies the most significant aspect of yesterday’s vote: “A defeat for the Government might be what makes the headlines, but the real significance is what the vote this afternoon says about how our politics is changing. For the first time, a majority of our politicians have stood against the tide of asylum politics. … This has happened amid signs that the Government’s escalations of its warnings about the risks of the medical evacuation amendments, everything from letting rapists and paedophiles into the country to restarting the boats, seems to have done it no good with voters.” Green shoots!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is terrifying bankers with her refusal to play by the insiders’ rules — “The fear is, it’s like going in to talk to the FBI, anything you do or say can be used against you” — and she is setting the agenda with her push for a Green New Deal. Writing for Eureka Street, Osmond Chiu argues for a similar push in Australia: “Just as the focus of post-war reconstruction was not merely demobilisation but the maintenance of full employment, developing social security and economic development, decarbonising Australia must involve rebuilding faith that politics can deliver a better Australia. We need to ensure that our response leads to a good society and a life that people want to live… The idea that responding to climate change means a life of misery is nihilistic and will doom action. It must mean a better and fairer future for us.”

Tim Dunlop’s The Future of Everything: Big, Audacious Ideas for a Better World is a thought-provoking and optimistic read. Tim sets out his guiding principle as follows: “For people of the left, political progressives who believe in the common good, there is no substitute for allowing ordinary people to be the instrument of their own betterment, and this is the idea at the heart of this book: all the reforms suggested in these pages begin with the idea that the people themselves should be in control of their own lives, and they should be given the means to achieve that.”

The Australia Institute’s Ebony Bennett suggests some policies to tackle the greed that is festering in Australian business: “If cutting penalty rates is good incentive for hospitality workers to work harder and longer, it’s about time we talk about reigning in CEO pay to incentivise some better behaviour from bankers. Options to tackle CEO greed include setting a maximum wage, just like we set a minimum wage, introducing a new top marginal tax rate or simply forcing companies to pay tax on excessive payments to executive staff. Australia Institute research shows more than three quarters of Australians would back any one of these measures.”

The NSW Land and Environment Court has blocked an open cut coal mine, in large part because of its likely impact on the global climate. In a detailed judgment that devoted over 100 paragraphs to the climate impact, the Chief Judge wrote: “The Project’s cumulative GHG emissions are therefore likely to contribute to the future changes to … the climate system, the oceanic and terrestrial environment, and people. The approval of the Project (which will be a new source of GHG emissions) is also likely to run counter to the actions that are required to achieve peaking of global GHG emissions as soon as possible and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in order to achieve net zero emissions…” He also rejected the simpleton’s argument that Australia should do nothing because it can’t single-handedly solve climate change: “It matters not that this aggregate of the Project’s GHG emissions may represent a small fraction of the global total of GHG emissions. The global problem of climate change needs to be addressed by multiple localactions to mitigate emissions by sources and remove GHGs by sinks.”