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Steve Randy Waldman: “It is reported ad nauseam, when people point out that the US did very well under the high top marginal tax rates that prevailed from World War II through the 1980s, that those high rates were rarely paid. People bring this up as though it was some kind of policy failure. No, it was then and would be again quite the point of the policy. The purpose of very high tax rates at very high incomes is not to generate revenue. It is to make costly the practice of making payments to people who are already very rich relative to other things the payers could do with their money, and so reduce the opportunity cost of doing other things. … Very high top tax rates are a means of encouraging ‘predistribution’ rather than the tax part of tax-and-transfer redistribution.”

Patrick Stevedores has been fined nearly half a million dollars for threatening workers who raised safety concerns. Workers objected to a demand that they move steel coils weighing more than the safe limit for the forklift. In response, the port operations manager launched a torrent of abuse and threatened to sack and blacklist them: “I’m going to get that c***… You don’t want to go down that track. You’ll be on a list — a list you don’t want to be on. One by one we’ll put you on there if you don’t do as you’re told.” And the worst thing about it? The incident occurred in 2009, and the manager “knew that a worker had been killed in an accident with a coil in 2007.” (WorkSafe explained the long delay as being “because it was heavily contested and a previous trial was abandoned when the jury was unable to reach a verdict”.)

Richard Flanagan writes about Australia’s climate disaster, with a mix of righteous fury and despair: “What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday. And the future in which the people of Tasmania now find themselves, in the evacuation centres, camped in friends’ and family homes, fighting fires day after week after month, isn’t just frightening. It’s terrifying.”

A Sydney pub chain has been forced to pay $100,000 in backpay, after staff formed an informal union to demand wages they were owed after being systematically misclassified as lower-level employees. The company initially denied any wrongdoing, sacked the staff member who initially complained, offered half of what was owed with a non-disclosure clause, before finally capitulating and admitting the full extent of its wage rip-off. The company admits that “Management did advise one specific employee that it was inappropriate for her to be asking individual employees about their pay rates (as this was the private information of each employee)” — this was the employee who identified the problem, and who was trying to ensure her colleagues. The Greens and Labor have committed to outlawing pay secrecy clauses, in an effort to reduce the gender pay gap. If a boss ever asks workers not to discuss their pay with colleagues, it’s a warning sign that one way or another, they may be up to no good.

It won’t be possible to properly assess the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry for some time, as recommendations will first need to be translated into policy, and then into legislation. If any criminal cases actually make it to court, it could take a decade. But to get a quick sense of how tough Hayne really was, it’s worth seeing what the in-house newsletter of the finance industry, the Australian Financial Review, has to say about it: “Hayne blames remuneration incentives as the source of just about all the unethical and illegal problems identified during questioning by the inquiry’s chief legal counsels, Rowena Orr and Michael Hodge. And yet, he does little to try and deal with this problem.” The AFR puts “big banks” at the top of its “winners” table — and over at The Australian, Adam Creighton agrees: “Banks’ and fund managers’ share prices may well surge today, as the modesty of the final report dawns on investors and financial executives alike. Bottle shops in Sydney’s and Melbourne’s east would be well advised to stock up on Moet.”

Daniel Andrews has announced Victoria will ban so-called ‘gay conversion therapy’: “everyone should be able to celebrate who they are with pride. But for far too long and for far too many Victorians, an evil practice has instead peddled in shame and stigma. These activities – commonly referred to as ‘gay conversion therapy’ – claim to be able to change someone’s sexuality or gender identity. What they really are is a most personal form of torture, a cruel practice that perpetuates the idea that LGBTI people are in some way broken. … But it’s not LGBTI people who need to change. It’s our laws.”

From an extract from Sally McManus’s forthcoming manifesto, On Fairness: “Rapid growth in wealth inequality results in the inevitable isolation of a very small, very rich, very privileged section of the community from the material experiences of everyone else. And when this out-of-touch minority group is enfranchised to make the decisions on behalf of people they don’t know, can’t see, have no wish to understand, and think of entirely in dehumanised, transactional, abstract terms, the results for the rest of us are devastating.” The book will be released this week.

A Dutch church held a 96-day vigil, ending it after receiving a guarantee that a family taking refuge in the building would not be deported: “Taking advantage of an obscure Dutch law that forbids the police to interrupt church services, ministers at Bethel Church in The Hague had been running a round-the-clock liturgy since October 26 in order to prevent the five members of the Tamrazyan family from being arrested and sent back to Armenia.”

The Andrews Government is setting up a workplace fatalities taskforce to advise on new health and safety laws: “The grieving families of Victorians killed at work will help the Andrews Government design new workplace manslaughter laws to put negligent employers behind bars for up to 20 years. The crackdown is expected to be introduced to parliament this year after a horror twelve months in which 23 Victorians lost their lives in the workplace.”