the Banner Bright

“[A]ll of the government’s policy settings pre- and post-COVID have been directed towards cheapening labour: it opposes a significant minimum wage increase, and previously support[ed] reductions in penalty rates.” The trouble, say economics wonks Ray Markey and Martin O’Brien, is that the neoliberal dogma underpinning this policy is contradicted by the empirical evidence: “For the first time we have directly addressed the dearth of empirical evidence regarding the employment impact of penalty rates, with a customised longitudinal survey of 1828 employees and 236 owner-managers. Because penalty rate cuts were phased in over a number of years we analysed the sequential impact of different phases at three points: 2016-2017 (pre-cut), 2017-2018 (first cut) and post July 2018 (second cut). We measured employment levels and hours on Sundays and public holidays, as well as weekly employment and income patterns. We demonstrate conclusively that penalty rate reductions from 2017 did not impact positively on employment in Retail and Hospitality sectors. Results are uniform for all of our employee measures: the prevalence of Sunday employment, average Sunday hours worked for those employed on Sundays, and average weekly hours and wages. Similarly, for employers we were unable to establish any statistically significant improvements to the percentage of Sundays open nor the average hours open on Sundays in either Retail or Hospitality Award-reliant businesses compared to those using enterprise agreements. These results correlate with industry-level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics for this period regarding aggregate employment and average weekly hours.”

So-called mutual obligations are a waste of everyone’s time and money: “Guardian Australia on Thursday revealed a report by Boston Consulting Group had found recent reforms to the $1bn a year scheme had delivered a windfall to privatised job agencies but not improved outcomes for the unemployed. … However, the draft version of the Boston Consulting Group report, also obtained under freedom of information, goes further, revealing employers and job agencies are generally unsatisfied with the regime. The draft report says ‘providers also expressed considerable negativity towards the mutual obligations system overall … considering that it does not on balance, improve the likelihood of employment’. ‘Similar negativity was expressed by several employer interviewees, who expressed the view that mutual obligations job search requirements simply result in an excess of unsuitable applicants for advertised roles,’ the draft report added.” Remember, these obligations are not about helping people — they are about punishing them. The cruelty is the point.

I hadn’t heard this justification for a Universal Basic Income before: “As a matter of justice, we should acknowledge that the income of all of us is far more due to the efforts of the many generations before us than anything we ourselves do. Even billionaire Warren Buffett knows that, acknowledging the benefits given to us by our ancestors, when he said: ‘I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant portion of what I’ve earned.’ If we allow private inheritance, then we could see basic income as a dividend on inherited public wealth created by our ancestors, paid equally because we cannot know whose ancestors contributed more or less. Critics who claim it is ‘something for nothing’ and reduces the incentive to work, should logically oppose private inheritance for the same reasons.”

Great news: “The federal court of Australia has found the environment minister, Sussan Ley, has a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis in a judgment hailed by lawyers and teenagers who brought the case as a world first. Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun had sought an injunction to prevent Ley approving a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to expand the Vickery coalmine in northern New South Wales, arguing the minister had a common law duty of care to protect younger people against future harm from climate change. Justice Mordecai Bromberg found the minister had a duty of care to not act in a way that would cause future harm to younger people.” The judge described the impact of climate change as “catastrophic”: “Perhaps the most startling of the potential harms demonstrated by the evidence before the court, is that one million of today’s Australian children are expected to suffer at least one heat-stress episode serious enough to require acute care in a hospital. Many thousands will suffer premature death from heat stress or bushfire smoke. Substantial economic loss and property damage will be experienced. The Great Barrier Reef and most of Australia’s eastern eucalypt forests will no longer exist due to repeated, severe bushfires.” And this evidence was not controversial: “An independent expert witness put the loss at between A$125,000 and A$245,000 per person. The calculation was a conservative one, and did not include health impacts which were assessed separately. The evidence was accepted by both the federal government’s legal team and the judge. That it was uncontested represents an important shift. No longer are the financial impacts of climate change a vague future loss — they’re now a tangible, quantifiable harm.”

Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker on the gulag gravy train: “A multinational company that secured a $121 million contract to support asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea boosted its profits by billing the Australian government $75 an hour for local workers it paid just $8. … Company records show that Spanish-owned Applus Wokman, which in 2017 won the contract to provide case management and resettlement support for hundreds of asylum seekers, paid local workers as little as 10 per cent of the wages it claimed from the Department of Home Affairs. … In February last year, then auditor at Applus Wokman, Samuel Kelly, raised the gulf in wages claimed compared with wages paid with Home Affairs on behalf of about 30 local staff. … Mr Kelly told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald that the company sacked him and 10 other workers after the payment issue was raised with the Australian government in February 2020.” And in a separate scandal: “Canstruct has been paid $1.4 billion over five years to run Nauru’s offshore processing scheme and last financial year pocketed a net profit up to $100 million, according to corporate filings. While media reporting has linked Canstruct to two political donations, federal and Queensland records reviewed by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald reveal 11 political contributions to the Liberal National Party in Queensland made by company executives or closely linked corporate entities. The donations total at least $47,500 and were made between October 2017 and July 2020. Queensland’s most senior federal government member is Peter Dutton, who was until recently home affairs minister. There is no suggestion the donations were made by Canstruct to influence contractual dealings with the federal government.”

From time to time, the Victorian Liberals make a good point: “The Victorian government has spent millions on addressing ­issues with Indigenous inter­actions with the justice system through the state’s Aboriginal Justice Agreements but there has been no public evaluation since 2012. The 2012 evaluation called for greater accountability of the outcomes listed in the agreement and an improvement in data. … A Department of Justice and Community Safety spokesman said the AJA was the longest running agreement of its kind in Australia and had self-determination at its core. ‘We are working with Aboriginal communities to listen, support and deliver real and lasting change — building a stronger, fairer and more accessible justice system,’ he said. ‘We’re breaking cycles of offending and connecting people with culture, country and community through a range of initiatives led by Aboriginal Victorians.’ Opposition legal affairs spokesman Edward O’Donohue pointed to imprisonment data from the report on government services showing a 55.6 per cent increase in the rate of Indigenous adults from 2013-14 (the last full year under the Coalition government) to 2019-20. In comparison, the non-­Indigenous rate increased by 16.9 per cent.” Not great. Maybe it would be worse without the AJAs, but we can’t know without an evaluation — simply asserting that you are “breaking cycles of offending” while incarcerating more and more people is not good enough.

Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer: “What remarkable sophistry governments engage in when it comes to discussing wages. And not just Coalition governments. … The Victorian government and its treasurer Tim Pallas would have us believe that wages growth floats free of any connection with what that state’s biggest employer does. Pallas’ budget papers note that ‘Victorian wages growth had been subdued in recent years’… Not a word about Pallas’ own wages policy for his public service — which the budget papers elsewhere describe as a ‘rebalancing’. … That ‘rebalancing’ is a cut in the Victorian public service pay rise cap to 2% from 3%, along with a cut in the guaranteed annual base increase for public servants from 2% to 1.5%, below inflation, and the same level as that of the NSW government. … The beloved-by-progressives Andrews government is thus further tightening its restrictions on wages growth which, as the state’s biggest employer, will inevitably filter through to the wider Victorian employment market.”

The Age: “Last year, *Rachel was jailed for six days for stealing an ice-cream — a $3.50 Bubble O’Bill from a St Kilda convenience store. It was the kind of minor transgression that might once have prompted a stern reprimand from a police officer or a magistrate, but this was 2020 and Rachel was remanded because she’d committed an indictable offence while already on bail. So under laws that Premier Daniel Andrews had spruiked as the toughest in the country, she spent two days in the custody centre and four in Dame Phyllis Frost prison in Ravenhall. Victoria’s bail laws were tightened … These changes have put a spiralling number of unsentenced remandees on low-level offences — people like Rachel — in jail at a rate that is fuelling concern about human rights, social impacts and the burgeoning cost to taxpayers. In April, a record 44 per cent of the state’s 7227 prisoners were on remand, many awaiting court dates on criminal charges where bail would likely have been granted before the crackdown. Government documents indicating Indigenous women are now jailed at 20 times the rate of non-Indigenous women. Women’s and other legal groups are now demanding urgent reform. They say the government’s tough-on-crime policies are both costly to taxpayers and damaging to some of the most disadvantaged people in the state.” How bad is it? “Confidential high-level government documents from late 2019 and early 2020 seen by The Age forecast that under existing policies the prison system would be over-capacity by 2024 despite record spending on prison infrastructure in the 2019 budget.” But… “Senior government figures also downplayed the likelihood of bail reform before the November 2022 election.”

Jeff Sparrow: “In colonial Australia, the white settlers spoke constantly about defending themselves against terror. … In Western Australia, Lieutenant-Governor James Stirling faced resistance from the Pinjarup people. After one violent encounter, Stirling wrote back to London warning ‘that their success in this species of warfare … might tempt other tribes, to pursue the same course, and eventually combine together for the extermination of the whites’. On that basis, he urged the authorities to end the conflict with ‘such acts of decisive severity as will appal them as a people.’ Again and again, we find the colonists describing themselves as victims and presenting their massacres as defensive measures. Today, no-one believes them. We don’t nod along when Lachlan Macquarie talks about the necessity of striking ‘terror among the surviving tribes [to] deter them from the further commission of … outrages and barbarities’. We don’t accept a narrative of conflict beginning when an Indigenous person mysteriously throws a spear. We don’t agree that European punitive expeditions brought ‘peace’ by subduing local tribes. Nor, for that matter, do we declare the hostilities too complex to understand, a mysterious ‘cycle of violence’ only attributable to immutable, ancient hatreds. We recognise at once what was happening as a colonial settlement displaced traditional owners, with the profound and systemic brutality of dispossession forcing Indigenous people to either fight back or die. That’s why Australians, in particular, have no excuses for not extending their solidarity to Palestinians.”

Subject to appeal, of course, but this is a big decision: “Deliveroo is facing the prospect of a wave of backpay claims after a tribunal ruled one of its contracted couriers was actually an employee with a right to an industry minimum wage. The ruling poses a major challenge to the delivery giant’s reliance on classifying workers as ‘independent contractors’ who have much more flexible hours but lack the protections employees have and are therefore generally cheaper to employ. … Commissioner Cambridge said all of the facets of Mr Franco’s arrangement with Deliveroo, taken together ‘like the colours from the artist’s palette, emerged to form a complete picture’ and showed he was an employee. Among the reasons were that Mr Franco did not build up his own business or brand as a rider, booked his shifts through a company system, did not have a distinct trade or profession, dressed in clothing with Deliveroo branding, and did not bring his own significant assets to the business.” The upshot? “Workers are typically entitled to six years’ back pay for lost wages, meaning the company could be up for a huge bill if Mr Franco’s case sets a precedent for more than 20,000 people who have ridden for Deliveroo in that time.”