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Nathan J Robinson: “One of the most important aspects of leftist thought is its insight that ‘power’ is more than just the government putting people in jail. Power relationships are everywhere… And you can make people freer in lots of different ways. If you have strong laws protecting political speech, then while an employer is less free to discipline people for what they do outside of work, the employees are freer to speak their minds. If you are free to easily unionize, then workers have the power to collectively withhold their labor if there are managers who abuse their power. If being a single mother wasn’t such a financially terrifying prospect, because we had a more generous welfare state that made it easy to raise children, the idea of leaving a bad marriage or relationship wouldn’t be quite as difficult to contemplate. If healthcare is provided free at the point of use, and funded through progressive taxation, then people are freer to go about their lives without having to worry about whether they can afford to get sick. … Having fairer and more equal society is not in tension with having a free society. It is a free society.”

Gay Alcorn has written a detailed and thoughtful overview of Australia’s awful policy response to unemployment and poverty. Low rates of welfare payments, the marketisation of support, invasive and punitive behaviour controls, and vicious dehumanising rhetoric. Jacqui Phillips of ACOSS says, “What we’ve got now is a toxic trifecta, of the lowest unemployment payment in the OECD among some of the harshest conditions in the OECD and one of the least resourced employment system systems, half the OECD average of funding. It’s a nasty combination of policies.” Elsewhere in the Guardian, Greg Jericho uses graphs to highlight how bad Australia performs — and he makes this shocking observation: “A comparison with the OECD nations also shows that our tax and transfer system is not as effective as is others. Prior to the redistribution of taxes and transfers we have the 11th lowest rate of poverty; after taxes and transfers, however, we fall to 19th.” This ought to be a national disgrace.

The Prosper Australia Research Institute analyses Melbourne water usage data to identify properties where so little water is used that it is likely the property is vacant. They use this to estimate the number of residential properties that are being hoarded by investors, rather than being used as homes. This year’s Speculative Vacancies report found that “Absolute vacancies using zero litres of water revealed 21,326 residential properties at 4.6% of the total rental market. The short term vacancy rate of 3.3% (SQM Research) could equate to 7.8% of investment properties if absolute vacancies were added. Up to 16.2% of investor owned rental properties were potentially vacant.” If we want houses to be used as homes instead of speculative commodities, we need to make it more expensive to keep them vacant. Prosper argues that a “reformed State Land Value Tax (SLVT) must be broadened to replace Stamp Duties. This is a more holistic technique to discourage vacancy that actively counters the market power land bankers enjoy. Such a policy switch will signal that both lazy land use and property flipping are no longer valid market activities.”

Over 150,000 people marched in Melbourne today, in support of the Change the Rules campaign. (I was there with my hand-drawn anti-wage theft placard…) The key issues were wage growth, job security — and an immediate federal election. Olisa Heard, a cleaner, told the crowd, “The contractors treat us like dirt because this government don’t care for us lowly-paid workers, this government were the ones who dissolved our weekend penalty rates. If we get a pay increase with one company they lose the contract to a cheaper company because whoever bids the lower tender gets the contract … so our wages don’t go up.” One of the core Change the Rules demands is that workers should be able to bargain where the real power is — with the head contractor, host company, or on an industry basis. When Morrison eventually calls the election, think about workers like Olisa when you decide where to direct your vote.

Activists in Berlin have a plan to deal with “rent sharks” who hoard vast property holdings and squeeze tenants for higher rent: “Activists have started collecting signatures for a ballot proposal that would require the city to take back properties from any landlord that owns more than 3,000 apartments. Polls suggest such a measure could pass, forcing the city to consider spending billions of euros buying privatized housing back.” Is this where Melbourne will be after the Andrews Government privautises public housing?

“If you’d told me a few years ago that a conservative government would criminalise wage theft, I would not have believed it,” writes Professor Anthony Forsyth. “That’s how far the dial has shifted.” However, he argues the recommendations of the Migrant Worker Taskforce (adopted by the government) are weak on labour hire operators: “the worrying term in the taskforce’s recommendation for national labour hire registration is ‘light touch’.” He says we need a “robust type of enforcement agency, with investigatory powers to enforce licensing standards… We need a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to effectively combat worker exploitation”. The experience of the light-touch Fair Work Ombudsman, which has allowed wage theft to become a widespread and deeply entrenched business model, suggests he is right.

A survey of gender representation in the news media found that Australian websites are a sausage party: “Women accounted for 34 percent of direct quotes and 24 percent of indirect sources in mainstream digital media sites… [M]en were the majority of direct and indirect sources across all story topics with the exception of those relating to celebrities and the royals. Men constituted 95 percent of direct sources in sports-related stories, 82 percent in business and finance stories and 79 percent in law, crime and justice stories.” And the gender of journalists is a big part of the problem: “Female journalists were more likely to use female sources (40 percent) than male journalists (24 percent), the report said.” The study, conducted by Jenna Price and Anne Maree Payne for the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia, includes transcripts of some very depressing interviews with senior managers who acknowledge the importance of gender diversity but then say things like, “I hire on talent. So, if I like a bloke and I think he’s right for the job, I’ll hire him. I won’t think, ‘Oh the last three people I’ve hired are men’, and I think it works out pretty well. I actually couldn’t tell you what the gender divide is in our newsroom…” These problems are systemic and they won’t be solved by good intentions — it’s well past time to move from principle to practice.

As predicted, the Coalition’s budget surplus is a fairy tale, a projection based on “fancifully optimistic forecasts” that also provide the cash (on paper) for some vote-buying tax cuts. Paddy Manning challenges the idea that middle-income earners are “winners” when they are given a pre-election tax cut: “as anyone who has ever struggled with addiction can attest, there comes a point where the temptation is accompanied by a knowing fear: the empty thrill of another hit comes with full foresight of the difficult battle that will follow to give up all over again. Australia is at exactly that point: the sugar-hit in the polls from a tax cut the country can’t afford will be weak and short-lived, and followed only by more grinding frustration.” And the ABC’s Michael Janda has another budget metaphor — that we are now holding a time bomb that is set to explode in 2024: “That’s when the vast bulk of the Government’s already legislated income tax cuts kick in. Tax cuts that overwhelmingly favour higher income earners and cost the budget tens of billions of dollars.” Labor agreed to pass those laws, but promised to repeal them after the next election — a stupid and short-sighted promise because it can’t predict the makeup of the Senate. We need leaders who make the case for strong revenue to support strong investment in our communities.

As the Morrison Government prepares to spin its early, last ditch, pre-election budget, it’s worth taking a moment to identify the statistical tricks used to skew our perceptions of fairness. The Grattan Institute reminds us: “‘Average’ (or mean) earnings are often used as shorthand for what the typical Australian earns. But the average can be misleading. More than three-quarters of Australian workers earn less than the average full-time wage of $90,300. The typical Australian worker earns just $57,918. Most Australians earn less than the average hourly wage, and many employees only work part-time. … [And] more than a third of Australian adults aren’t in paid work, so the earnings of workers aren’t a good guide to the incomes of all people. The typical adult’s income is only $36,893, according to the ABS.” Meanwhile, references to “taxable” income are used to hide aggressive tax minimisation schemes used by extremely high income earners; Greg Jericho notes, “in 2016-17 a growing number of millionaires were able to avoid paying tax. Sixty-nine people who earned more than $1m in 2016-17 paid $0 in tax – an increase from 62 in 2015-16, and 48 in the year before that.” And the simplest way to make wages seem higher is to just make up the numbers, which has been Treasury’s approach to wage growth projections throughout since the Coalition took office.