the Banner Bright

This time last year, NSW Police arrested a group of Extinction Rebellion protestors for blocking traffic, and subjected them to draconian bail conditions banning them from the Sydney CBD or attending any protests anywhere. Now the charges have finally made it to court — where they were summarily thrown out. The magistrate ruled [$] that because the protestors had a valid permit allowing them to be on the road, the police had no power to move them on, and the case against them was therefore doomed to fail: “'(The protesters were) already allowed to be on the road, (which is) why the road was closed,’ she said. ‘(I’m) not satisfied there could be a lawful conviction.'” Scott Ludlam — one of those arrested — said: “Nobody undertakes these kinds of actions lightly. But in the year since we were arrested, the evidence has grown even stronger that the Australian Government is captive to the resources sector. We spent January in the middle of catastrophic bushfires, which should have been the final trigger for the rapid phase out of fossil fuels. Instead, Morrison has handed the keys to our economy to the gas sector. My biggest fear is not that we’ll be judged by the future as being too radical, or too disruptive. It’s that we’ll be seen as too timid.”

Sherry Huang: “In 2010, I came to Australia from Taiwan as a working holidaymaker and began work in an apple-packing shed in Shepparton. The work itself was not too bad, but I was paid about $13 per hour — below the legal minimum. From that $13 per hour, the labour hire provider took 13 per cent in fees and charges that I later discovered were unlawful. These charges were ostensibly to cover things such as accommodation; we slept six to a small room in bunks, or two in a shipping container. … The three sexual assaults I personally took to the police on behalf of friends have still never been acted upon; the police told us there was no point as the victims would have left the country by the time the case was tried. Workers are still denied medical care when they are injured because non-European workers don’t enjoy reciprocal rights under Medicare, and labour hire companies typically fail to register our names for WorkCover. A man I know lost three fingers in a meat grinder — would you trade six months on the minimum wage for three of your fingers? … Australia’s fruit and vegetable harvesting industry is a house of cards, stacked upon the willing blindness of Australians to human suffering, poverty, and abuse, imposed by their fellow countrymen. … The pandemic has laid bare the intention of the government’s labour market strategy. … Rather than addressing conditions in the industry, politicians blame jobless Australians for valuing their lives and labour too highly.”

Bernard Keane: “[T]he industry has urged the government to force people into horticulture by cutting back JobSeeker payments, which are said to deter people from going bush to travel the ‘harvest trail’. It also wants borders reopened for temporary migrants and incentives for backpackers to stay longer. One Liberal MP… reportedly wants to conscript young people for fruitpicking. Realising the bad optics of this, he says he’d settle for cutting off JobSeeker payments to young people who refuse to pick fruit. … The government’s response is to announce it will use taxpayer money to ‘incentivise’ young people to ‘have a crack’ at horticulture. … As for union militancy, strikes are almost non-existent in Australia. This year, according to ABS data, days lost per 1000 workers to strike action fell to 0.3 days in the March quarter and 0.1 in the June quarter. Twenty years ago the comparable figures were 19.4 and 22.6. … One look at wages growth since the Coalition was elected will tell you we need a lot more, not less, union militancy. We need more strikes, not fewer. We need more workers engaging in industrial disputes, and forcing concessions from employers. Nothing else, it seems, is going to lift wages growth, and therefore strengthen demand. Indeed, if the horticulture sector had a stronger union presence… it’s likely there’d be a lot less wage theft, exploitation and routine sexual harassment. It might even be an industry that didn’t need the government to bribe or coerce people to work in it.”

Jan Carter: “Contracting out became central to the playbook of bureaucracies after the new public management (NPM) theories in the 1990s gripped Australian public services. NPM was the handmaiden of the neoliberal economics that marked the advent of Jeff Kennett’s and John Howard’s leaderships. The idea was that the private sector — profit-making firms and NGOs — could run things more efficiently and cheaply than governments. It was also an indirect way of breaking up those pesky, unionised workforces… Contracting out went hand in hand with … the elevation of the content-free manager. NPM disliked specialist managers, those who were either trained in their field or very experienced, or both. … Over the years the trend has been that specialist managers have been replaced with generalists, often referred to content-free managers. … [K]nowing very little, or sometimes nothing, could be an advantage… [C]ontent-free managers were thought freer to carry through the policies of government more efficiently and effectively. Many specialist managers and potential managers were sidelined, as we have seen in the Victorian case of the DHHS’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton, who, despite his serious legislative powers and central role in keeping Victorians safe, was refused a senior management role in his own department and effectively relegated to middle management. … [T]he cast-iron, twin assumptions that contracting out and content-free management are always the best, need close examination.”

Kathy Jackson has been convicted by a jury of embezzling $35,000 of Health Services Union funds, and pleaded guilty to stealing almost $68,000 more. This is in addition to being ordered to repay $1.4 million of misappropriated funds after being sued by the union in 2015. Tony Abbott famously described her as a “brave, decent woman” and “heroic” when she tried to hide her own corruption by pointing the finger at her factional enemies. The anti-union royal commission overseen by sex pest Dyson Heydon gleefully called Jackson as its star witness, before ignoring the emerging evidence of her criminality: “What do you do when your star witness in a politically motivated inquiry turns out to be an alleged thief…? Just ignore it. The credibility of the Royal Commission into trade union governance and corruption should suffer a serious blow from its glaring omissions on the allegedly corrupt behaviour of Kathy Jackson and how it has treated her throughout these hearings. … Jackson was always the commission’s star witness and treated far too gently… How seriously can the rest of the recommendations of this interim report be treated when this commission is prepared to ignore such serious allegations against a friendly witness?” Her guilty verdicts are further proof that TURC was a politically motivated circus.

(Separately, Jackson is awaiting a decision [$] on the will of barrister David Rofe, who “wrote about 40 wills, most after 2010 as he slowly succumbed to advanced dementia”; Jackson “admitted in a signed affidavit to personally typing Rofe’s final will” which awarded her as much as $3 million from his estate. She reportedly met him [$] “almost two years after he was diagnosed with dementia”. The NSW Supreme Court will decide which, if any, of his many wills was valid.)

The University of New England’s Michael William Blissenden has a proposal for more effectively penalising corporate crooks — hit them in the franking credits: “Westpac’s record A$1.3 billion fine for breaching anti-money-laundering laws … didn’t bother the market. Westpac’s share price ended the week 7% higher. … If the biggest fine in Australian corporate history doesn’t make a difference to a company’s share price, it’s hard to see how that fine serves as a deterrent. … What doesn’t matter to investors won’t matter much to the board either. There could be a way, though, to use the tax system to give corporate fines more bite, by making shareholders feel more of the pain. … Franking credits on dividends allow shareholders to cut their tax bills… Where a company has not followed the rules relating to franking credits, the tax office can debit the company’s franking account, leaving less to distribute to shareholders as tax credits.  A similar mechanism could be used to impose fines. Instead of the company writing a cheque, the government would debit the value of the fine from the bank’s franking account. This would directly affect the bank’s capacity to ‘impute’ tax it has paid on profits. Though the same amount of money imposed as a fine might have little impact on a company’s operations or profits, the loss of franking credits is something shareholders are likely to notice.”

Catherine Ford: “[H]ow is it that city golf courses are only for golfers? A golf course in a large city is an anomaly, after all, and one whose clubbish exclusivity is — I think — hard to justify. If you consider that the average nine-hole golf course occupies roughly 30 hectares of coveted empty land and requires considerable resources to function — abundant water and specialist maintenance teams — while pleasing only a few dozen people brandishing sticks outside a weekend, that is quite a proposition. Thirty tastefully landscaped, publicly owned hectares in an urban area, enjoyed by only a tiny proportion of the population, is an astonishing and significant ‘private’ oasis. In this modern world, and pandemic-informed moment, it seems only sensible and fair to maximise the use of a course by opening it up to any in need of its benefits. By this, I mean long-term shared use for all, beyond lockdowns. A golf course — by the nature of the game — is used only intermittently, by small groups of people, many of whom are only free on weekends. … On many days it is completely devoid of people. Why, I wonder, can’t we find a way for it be shared — officially, that is, by clearly demarcating golfing and non-golfing days to ensure people’s safety — to satisfy everyone, both those who golf and those who do not?”

Tim Dunlop on Morrison’s shamelessly partisan covid response: “So in setting up responses such as JobSeeker and JobKeeper, the government has been able to pick and choose the way such funds are deployed, and, knock me over with a feather, but what do we find? The Arts Sector, higher education, and childcare have all been singled out for either receiving nothing, or having what assistance they did receive withdrawn early. The blatantly ideological and ‘mates rates’ aspect of all this is perfectly illustrated by how the government has responded to the high ed sector. Not only were universities made ineligible for JobKeeper payments, the government changed the legislation four times to make sure they received nothing. But — just in case their intent wasn’t obvious enough — they have nonetheless made payments available to four private universities. … Far from being ‘non-ideological’ as some journalists bizarrely claim, Morrison is as ideological as any prime minister we have had, and he is being aided and abetted by the cover provided by the pandemic to shake things up; by a weakened opposition, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, still haven’t got their mojo back after the last federal election defeat; and by a media industry that has moved increasingly to the right.”

A peer reviewed study has found a link between unionisation and lower coronavirus death rates in aged care: “[W]e used cross-sectional regression analysis to examine the association between the presence of health care worker unions and COVID-19 mortality rates in 355 nursing homes in New York State. Health care worker unions were associated with a 1.29 percentage point mortality reduction, which represents a 30% relative decrease in the COVID-19 mortality rate compared to facilities without health care worker unions. Unions were also associated with greater access to PPE, one mechanism that may link unions to lower COVID-19 mortality rates.” The study’s coauthors said the results “reflect what experts already knew to be true in normal times; that when health care workers have better pay and more control over the conditions of their workplaces, patient outcomes are better”, and “The benefits of labor unions were not just for health care workers or even just for nursing home residents… they’re for everyone. The fact that unions were associated with lower COVID-19 infection and death rates in the epicenter of the pandemic … really speaks to the broader societal benefits of labor unions.”

Jeff Sparrow: “In these difficult conditions, progressives need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. The Andrews government remains entirely correct to take action on Covid. Campaigns like ‘Give Dan the Boot’ appeal primarily to fantasists who imagine the virus as a UN plot and to free market fanatics prepared to sacrifice public health for the sake of profit. But that doesn’t mean the left should remain indifferent to, say, police using incitement charges to arrest people simply for posting on Facebook. … The defence of basic liberties matters in the midst of a pandemic in part because the precedents being set now will have implications long into the future. In New South Wales, for instance, the relatively low numbers of infections means thousands can attend NRL matches while casinos and pubs continue to trade. Yet police have been using public health legislation to arrest student protesters, even as activists assiduously wear masks and remain in small, socially-distant groups. … [A] health emergency does not change fundamental principles. … If Covid has shown us anything, it’s that Australia need more doctors, more nurses and more scientists, not an intensified repression.” (Bear in mind that while ‘progressives’ like Daniel Andrews crack down on protest, Britain’s Conservative government has protected freedom of assembly.)