the Banner Bright

Osmond Chiu calls for Harmony Day to be dropped — it was introduced by the Howard Government to replace Australia’s observance of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: “Undoubtedly people feel an attachment to Harmony Day as a celebration of cultural diversity that schools, workplaces and community groups can participate in. It is a day that people have a positive association and feel very comfortable with. But it does us no favours by avoiding any hard conversations about racism. As educator Robin DiAngelo has pointed out, niceness is not anti-racism. A parallel would be celebrating International Women’s Day without mentioning ongoing under-representation, sexism or the gender pay gap.” Compare the themes for 2019: Harmony Day’s is the insipid “everyone belongs”, while IDERD’s is “mitigating and countering rising nationalist populism and extreme supremacist ideologies”. We need to rise to that challenge.

PP McGuinness Jr reckons the minimum wage does not exist in Australia [$] “because workers regularly accept [sic] less than the mandated minimum wage”. She cites 7-Eleven workers who were forced to accept half the legal minimum because they “needed to earn money somehow and feared reporting the below-award wage conditions would lead to their visas being cancelled”. She admits this “sound[s] uncomfortably like coercion” — yes, and if it quacks like a duck… Of course, McGuinness is the director of a PR firm that writes opinion articles to push the agenda of its business clients, and this PR column is designed to shift responsibility onto the victims of exploitation. Implicit in her argument is the idea that bosses should be free to pick and choose which workplace laws they obey — and this is certainly a view shared by the great many wage thieves who do not fear being caught by the underresourced and toothless Fair Work Ombudsman. But that need not be the case: we can make the minimum wage a reality by making wage thieves scared again.

We are seeing calls for increased moderation of vile content on social media — while this will not solve deeply embedded racism and misogyny, it is nevertheless reasonable to expect that companies will take responsibility for the impact they have on society. But spare a thought for the outsourced and exploited workers who are forced to wade through this filth. Facebook’s content moderators “make just [US]$28,800 per year and are micromanaged down to the minute; for instance, they are allotted nine minutes per day of ‘wellness time,’ but they are forbidden to go to the restroom during this time. Moreover, Muslim employees have been forbidden from using their wellness time to pray. Many content moderators have developed chronic PTSD or secondary traumatic stress from watching graphically violent videos for weeks, and months, or years on end.” That’s well below the Australian minimum wage, to do very difficult, essential work. These are tech sweatshops and the social media oligarchy should be held responsible for them, too.

A new report from the Grattan Institute highlights the gap between general health care and dental health care in Australia: people of all ages and income levels are more likely to skip or delay dental treatment, and the most significant factor is the out-of-pocket cost. The report puts forward a plan for dental care to be brought into line with Medicare: “There’s no compelling medical, economic, legal or logical reason to treat the mouth so differently from the rest of the body. But it would be impractical to move to a universal scheme overnight. … So, the Commonwealth should announce a roadmap to a universal scheme, including plans to expand the dental health workforce, followed by incremental steps towards a universal scheme.” They estimate the total cost at $5.6 billion, which seems like a big number but is actually only about a 3% increase in the health budget. Universal public dental care is well within our grasp, and Grattan puts forward a credible step-by-step plan for achieving it within a decade.

Australia’s discussion about the Christchurch massacre must begin with an acknowledgement that the monster who perpetrated it is ours. Not in the formal sense that he was an Australian citizen, but in the more important sense that his genocidal ideology was fostered here — as Bill Shorten rightly put it, “You cannot disown what crawls out of your swamp.” Jason Wilson notes how mainstream the murderer’s views, if not his actions, have been in Australia: “the decades-long drumbeat of xenophobia and Muslim-hate… has issued from some of the most powerful institutions in the country. This is the environment in which Muslims, refugees and immigrants have come to be understood as enemies of Australia. It may be an environment that has nurtured white supremacist terror.” This must change. Vigilante eggings and public shaming of racists show the right attitude — there must be real and immediate consequences for those who engage in hate speech, against Muslims or any other group in our community.

Over a million young people around the world took part in the Student Strike for Climate on Friday, with large crowds in cities and regional centres across Australia. We have a lot to learn from these young leaders. While they are disillusioned with the performance of our political class, they are not disengaged or disinterested. On the contrary, these protests were an expression of hope — these kids know they are the future, and they are ready to take the reins. This is a crucial moment for our political future: previous student strikes against Hansonism and the invasion of Iraq were ignored and led to widespread cynicism, and we must ensure that does not happen again. We must respond to the leadership of our young people and show them that collective action is the best way to achieve progressive change.

US economist Gene Sperling calls for economic dignity to be placed at the centre of economic debates: “in the absence of that more clear focus on an economic fixed star, it becomes too easy to start to see the economic targets, political strategies, and specific policy postures as if they were the end goals in themselves—as opposed to means to arrive at a higher end goal for lifting up human fulfillment.” This is a concept that was a core part of Australian workplace law in the early years of our nation, but it has been eroded by economic rationalism over recent decades. In 1907, the landmark Harvester decision held that the basic wage in Australia should be sufficient to meet “the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community”; that is, enough for a worker to provide their family with “proper food and water, and such shelter and rest as they need… and clothing, and a condition of frugal comfort estimated by current human standards”. It is the restoration of this principle that underpins the ACTU’s call (lately adopted by Labor) for a shift from setting a “minimum wage” to a “living wage”. It must also underpin our social security system. Bringing humanity and economic dignity back to our economic debates should be a priority.

A landmark High Court decision has cleared the way for Aboriginal people to seek billions of dollars in compensation for the loss of their land to colonialism. The Court ordered the Northern Territory to pay $2.53 million to the Ngaliwurru and Nungali Peoples for the loss of their land around Timber Creek. More importantly, it rejected the NT’s argument that cultural loss and spiritual hurt caused by the extinguishment of native title rights should not be compensated. The effect of the decision is likely to take many years to be fully realised, as each Indigenous community must make a separate claim, and complex issues (such as how the impact of mining leases should be quantified) are yet to be resolved. (If you are interested in the legal technicalities, Kate Galloway has a good summary in this Twitter thread.)

Crikey’s Bernard Keane: “Wage stagnation in Australia, as in other economies, is an act of class war. It’s a war started by powerful corporations and enabled by their political and media allies. Wages are stagnant because our industrial relations playing field is tilted in favour of employers. … The result … is likely to be a permanent downward shift in wage expectations by workers — which is exactly what corporations want. Should wages growth eventually reach 3% some time in 2020, or 2021, workers will be told that happy days are here again. In fact, compared to the years before 2013, 3% wages growth — which is likely to represent just 0.5-0.75 percentage points of growth after inflation — is pitiful. A permanent cut in wages growth will be locked in, to the benefit of corporations and shareholders. … Wage stagnation is a slow, grinding war of attrition, being waged by companies against workers. And companies are winning.”

An undercover investigation by the ABC has revealed an Alice Springs hotel has a policy of segregating Indigenous guests in inferior rooms: “Undercover recordings of the Aboriginal guests checking in captured the group being assigned to room 86, which was one of the community rooms referred to in the leaked email. … Inside room 86, the ABC found stained sheets and towels, as well as clothing belonging to former guests. There was broken glass and rubbish in the patio area, dried liquids on the windows and walls, a stale smell in the air and exposed wires around the skirting of the room. The room assigned to the non-Aboriginal group had none of the issues that were found in room 86.” Although the claims were first raised by a whistleblower, the Racial Discrimination Commission said it was powerless to act unless a complaint was made by a guest. This strict requirement for legal standing is often a barrier in social justice litigation, but it can be changed by statute if governments are serious about tackling the issues — for instance, by giving relevant community organisations the right to make a claim on behalf of a hypothetical complainant.