the Banner Bright

Oxfam: ”Billionaires have seen extraordinary increases in their wealth. During the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis years since 2020, $26 trillion (63 percent) of all new wealth was captured by the richest 1 percent, while $16 trillion (37 percent) went to the rest of the world put together. A billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million for every $1 of new global wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent. Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day. … Billionaire wealth surged in 2022 with rapidly rising food and energy profits. The report shows that 95 food and energy corporations have more than doubled their profits in 2022. They made $306 billion in windfall profits, and paid out $257 billion (84 percent) of that to rich shareholders. The Walton dynasty, which owns half of Walmart, received $8.5 billion over the last year. Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, owner of major energy corporations, has seen this wealth soar by $42 billion (46 percent) in 2022 alone. Excess corporate profits have driven at least half of inflation in Australia, the US and the UK. At the same time, at least 1.7 billion workers now live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages, and over 820 million people —roughly one in ten people on Earth— are going hungry. Women and girls often eat least and last, and make up nearly 60 percent of the world’s hungry population.”

The cost of living crisis is driven by sheer greed, and wage rises would not add inflationary pressure if the filthy rich paid their fair share. Labor’s defence of huge tax cuts for the richest Australians is grotesque in this context.

”The City of Monash’s anti-gambling policy, believed to be the first of its kind in Australia, is facing coordinated opposition”, reports The Guardian. Of course it is, because pokie venues took about $85 million from victims in Monash last year. “According to the policy, sports clubs that continue to display the logos of sponsors that have gambling machines will eventually be banned from council grounds and clubhouses. At the moment, these logos appear on some jerseys, websites, newsletters and billboards around council grounds. City of Monash mayor, Tina Samardzija, said local governments should ‘absolutely’ play a bigger role in preventing gambling harm and dismissed claims that councils should not be involved in social policy. ‘Our community is very concerned about young people being exposed to gambling,’ Samardzija said. ‘In my view, there is nothing that’s more of a local government issue than kids going to play sport at their local clubs and being exposed to a message that gambling is normal.’” The policy is being phased in over four years to make sure clubs can adjust to the new requirements. It’s a great example of how local councils can show leadership on important issues.

Ormond Chiu: “Of our top five countries of birth excluding Australia, three are Asian countries (China, India, the Philippines), and one in ten now have a religion other than Christianity. As our population becomes increasingly diverse, we should be recognising many other significant cultural and religious days as public holidays to reflect this change. There has already been discussion about making Diwali a public holiday and given Australia already likes to boast that Sydney has one of the largest Lunar New Year celebrations outside of Asia, it seems like a no brainer to embrace them as Australian public holidays. It is far from a radical idea. While we mythologise ourselves as the ‘land of the long weekend’, many countries in the Indo-Pacific region have more public holidays than Australia because of their multicultural makeup. Neighbouring countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia recognise a range of diverse cultural and religious days as public holidays whether it be Buddha’s birthday, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid or Christmas Day. It is also not without precedent in Australia. On Christmas Island, Lunar New Year is a public holiday, and on both Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Eid is. … The debate over whether to change Australia Day shows us the symbolic power that public holidays can have on our national narrative and sense of identity. The impact of a more inclusive approach to public holidays would go far beyond our shores. … The message would be that Australia does not just talk about how it is a successful multicultural country, our society genuinely recognises that our cultural and religious diversity is important for every single Australian”.

Danilo Campos: “I volunteer helping seniors with their technology issues. … This technology is non-negotiable, at this point, even for seniors. They need it to keep in touch with people, to participate in cultural and civic life. These companies are just contaminating the every day experience of using them with incompetently-built surveillance crapware. My client paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege of using a machine that had been sabotaged by the greed and incompetence of its manufacturer, and they had no recourse at all. How are they supposed to figure this out? … It’s funny, working in the industry, how often you can smell some weasel’s little OKR [Objectives and Key Results] in the inexplicable frustrations of someone who just wants to use their laptop, phone, tablet… but they’re derailed by a popup, unnecessary login or other waste of time. These malignant incentives are an affliction amplified across the scale of any successful technology now. Maybe the most frustrating thing for me is how often I’m working with people who are apologetic and unsure because of these derailments. They think it’s their fault! They think they’re not capable of doing and learning on their own because they keep getting fucked with by this user-hostile crap at every turn.” The headline for this column sums it up: Junkware is Elder Abuse and a Menace to Society.

Michael Bradley: “Dutton makes Tony Abbott look subtle, so it isn’t difficult to pick up what he’s doing, or whose idea he’s copying. The play is an attempted repeat of John Howard’s successful three-card trick that brought down the 1999 republic referendum: 1) demand the detail; 2) when it’s provided, demand more detail; 3) claim there’s now too much detail and advocate a ‘No’ vote on the basis that, if you don’t understand it, you’re being conned. … Dutton will defend his perfectly reasonable queries all the way to referendum day, and point to any reticence about answering them as an indicator of something sneaky or even malign. … The proof of Dutton’s disingenuousness is in the detail of his supposedly open-handed approach. One of the details he demands will suffice: will the Voice body be empowered to make decisions? No, one million times, no. Nobody has ever said, suggested or implied that it will or should be anything more than advisory in construct and effect. It is a big lie, fully known to those who peddle it, to keep pretending otherwise. Dutton is propagating the lie. He has no intention of engaging sincerely with the Voice. He will, sooner or later, drop the mask and tell us to vote no. And we will know why.”

Marcia Langton — who coauthored the official report to government about how the Voice should function — has little time for obfuscation by its opponents: “Now there is a new creed. Albanese’s alleged ‘refusal’ to provide details about the Voice proposal, so described by conservative constitutional lawyer … Greg Craven, has ‘doomed’ the referendum. Craven’s latest tack follows years of influencing constitutional reform for Indigenous Australians towards compromise and minimalism. … Former minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt said he brought the reports I prepared with Calma to cabinet while in government and asked his former colleagues to consider them. He even offered those in parliament now the exact page numbers of the summary, to help them out. ‘What is obvious with the National Party,’ he said, ‘is they have not read the report and not given an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament an opportunity to be aired and listened to … There’s no excuse to say you do not know the detail. It’s laziness.’ The bleating about ‘detail’ is clearly a sign of laziness among the opposition parties, but there is another tactic at play. … Politicians and columnists and whatever Andrew Bolt is are working hard to ensure that by the time we get to the referendum most Australians will believe there is no detail. Their claims about the deleterious impact of the Voice on our great nation fail one by one as they become wilder and wilder, answered in detail by former High Court judge Kenneth Hayne and eminent lawyers including Mark Leibler and Anne Twomey. As Twomey says, all that is important at the referendum is to know the scope of the power being enshrined. This leaves the function in the hands of the parliament, with the oversight of democratic process. ‘It puts democracy, not the devil, in charge of the detail.’”

(Twomey’s patient rebuttal of some of the No campaign’s early furphies is also worth reading, as are Ken Hayne’s and Mark Liebler’s [$].)

The Australia Institute’s Matt Grudnoff: ”In Australia, the previous three generations — the silent generation, the baby boomers and generation X – all voted left when they were young, on average. Now the silent generation and the boomers, on average, vote right and gen X voting habits don’t appear to have changed much over their lifetime. As they age, however, millennials appear to be going in entirely the opposite direction. Moving more to the left. … This is a big problem for the parties of the right as millennials make up an increasingly larger proportion of voters and it had an impact on the last federal election. According to data from the Australian Electoral Commission there are now four electorates where those under 40 make up more than 45% of the voters in the seat… As older generations die out, millennials will increasingly come to dominate a larger number of electorates. If they continue to vote left, this will be catastrophic for the Coalition. But why are millennials continuing to vote left as they age? There are probably three main reasons, and they are all linked to their economic wellbeing. … These three issues — insecure work, housing affordability and climate change — mean that millennials are sharing in less of the benefits of the economy and are less secure than previous generations. … The rising importance of millennials as a voting bloc is bringing a seismic shift in Australian politics. Political parties will need to stop just promising better jobs, more affordable housing and action on climate change, and instead actually deliver. Those parties that fail to do so face becoming irrelevant.”

In the inaugural Iain McCalman Lecture, Frances Flanagan calls for a realignment of priorities with the needs of future generations front and centre: “From the streets full of schoolchildren on strike for the climate to the Green New Deal movement to the language of ‘circular economies’ starting to be heard in business and government, new modes of thinking about what human progress means are emerging and beginning to erupt into mainstream politics all over the world. And just as it is premature to give up on the possibility of a new social order, so too is it hasty to abandon the idea that work can be a political site from which to fight for the reform. For there is a crucial link between ‘sustainability’ and work that is perhaps very obvious but rarely made explicit: the process of ‘sustaining’ requires human labour. It means more than simply saying ‘no’ to damaging acts of consumption; it also means saying ‘yes’ to the human activities that are positively necessary for the repair, renewal and regeneration of our soils, our oceans, our cities, our critical human systems and our human bodies. … [L]ike any parent, I hope their little lines of personal progress rise, and that they find occupations that are useful and interesting and that nourish and nurture the people and places around them. But as every parent knows, I can’t do that for them. What I can do, and what all of us can do, is fight for a system that doesn’t press impossible dilemmas on their slim shoulders. It is within our power to reshape our present order of work in a way that does not insist that the next generation must choose between work that renews the world and work that is materially secure. We can, instead, fashion a system that offers them a stake in a deep and expansive environmental politics. One that isn’t just about what they do or don’t buy, but that yokes together their private lines of progress with that other great line that determines and marks our collective fate.”

It’s time again to set some practical resolutions for the new year. First, the success of the Voice referendum — which will be held in the second half of 2023 — is essential. This is a constitutional reform that has been developed by First Nations people and they have achieved remarkable consensus that this is the step towards self-determination they want to take first. I resolve to make some active contribution to that cause every week. Second, I am going to attend more meetings. Years ago, I heard Marcia Langton talk about how she built her influence — she sums it up in the saying, “the world is run by those who show up”, but she spoke specifically about always participating in the meetings other people find tedious, and slowly but surely advancing her position. Meetings are a big part of my work time, so I am not often keen to sign up for more meetings in my own time, but I am going to step up my participation in the groups I have until now been a paper member. I hope you will consider doing the same.

The Carmichael Centre’s Mark Dean and Lance Worrall argue for a standard 4-day working week: “The truth about productivity is that regardless of slow growth (which is not the fault of labour), there has been positive productivity growth that has outstripped real wage movements. Workers have not received a proportionate share of the productivity gains they have made. Almost all of it has gone to boosting the GDP profit share. Sharing the benefits through a shorter working week means rebalancing between the incidence of overwork and unpaid labour, and underemployment and too few hours. It also means recognising the need to compensate Australia’s workforce for its past contributions to productivity growth. … This fact of sustained, nearly-full capture of past productivity gains as rents by the corporate sector provides a part of the justification for statutory shorter hours. Together with the more equitable distribution of labour to address the two poles of exploitation — overwork and unpaid labour alongside underemployment, too few hours and acute insecurity — the case for shorter hours contributes to the argument for a larger full employment objective and framework. The case is further made by the fact that additional to the benefits of shorter hours to individuals and the social fabric, a shorter working week is often associated with higher productivity… We conclude strongly that shorter standard work weeks, and a corresponding redistribution of working hours (including longer and more stable hours for people in underemployed and insecure work positions), will generate improved work-life balance, stronger social stability, and improved environmental performance — without undermining productivity and material incomes.”