the Banner Bright

Too many defences of Labor’s franking credits policy (such as this otherwise solid one from Emma Dawson and Tim Lyons) concede the greedy shareholders’ claim that “double taxation” is unjust. Jim Stanford explains why that’s rubbish: “Progressives shold reject the whole idea. Companies benefit from public spending (on infrastructure, training, innovation, property rights etc) and so should pay a direct share. Then company owners should also pay a fair share toward the public goods which benefit them as individuals. … This ‘principle of no double taxation’ never applies to workers: they pay income tax, then GST on the after-tax income, then other taxes, fees, tolls, etc. after that. As long as the ultimate incidence is fair, that’s not a problem. Govts collect many taxes from many sources. Tax preferences for capital income (which is concentrated at the top) in all forms (franking, cap[ital] gains, dividends, neg[ative] gearing) have been a key cause of growing inequality since the 80s. Lower tax rates on high incomes were another. This year Aussies have a chance to push back.”

Katha Pollitt wants to see something different from Democrat politicians: “Free public college, health care for all, a living wage: These are all important causes that will improve life for millions. But there’s another proposal that belongs on the progressive to-do list: universal affordable high-quality child care.” The same is true here in Australia. Real support for early childhood education would lift a major financial burden from families, help to equalise the gender gap in pay and participation, and have major educational benefits for the next generations of children. The best way to promote the change that is needed is to support the United Voice Big Steps campaign.

The Morrison Government was defeated in the House of Representatives yesterday, as Labor and the crossbenchers combined to pass a bill to facilitate medical transfers of asylum seekers and refugees to Australia. While the bill is imperfect — it contains, for example, the disturbing implication that people who have committed crimes should be denied humane medical treatment — it is nonetheless a big step forward for the victims of our shameful island gulag policy.The ABC’s Laura Tingle identifies the most significant aspect of yesterday’s vote: “A defeat for the Government might be what makes the headlines, but the real significance is what the vote this afternoon says about how our politics is changing. For the first time, a majority of our politicians have stood against the tide of asylum politics. … This has happened amid signs that the Government’s escalations of its warnings about the risks of the medical evacuation amendments, everything from letting rapists and paedophiles into the country to restarting the boats, seems to have done it no good with voters.” Green shoots!

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is terrifying bankers with her refusal to play by the insiders’ rules — “The fear is, it’s like going in to talk to the FBI, anything you do or say can be used against you” — and she is setting the agenda with her push for a Green New Deal. Writing for Eureka Street, Osmond Chiu argues for a similar push in Australia: “Just as the focus of post-war reconstruction was not merely demobilisation but the maintenance of full employment, developing social security and economic development, decarbonising Australia must involve rebuilding faith that politics can deliver a better Australia. We need to ensure that our response leads to a good society and a life that people want to live… The idea that responding to climate change means a life of misery is nihilistic and will doom action. It must mean a better and fairer future for us.”

Tim Dunlop’s The Future of Everything: Big, Audacious Ideas for a Better World is a thought-provoking and optimistic read. Tim sets out his guiding principle as follows: “For people of the left, political progressives who believe in the common good, there is no substitute for allowing ordinary people to be the instrument of their own betterment, and this is the idea at the heart of this book: all the reforms suggested in these pages begin with the idea that the people themselves should be in control of their own lives, and they should be given the means to achieve that.”

The Australia Institute’s Ebony Bennett suggests some policies to tackle the greed that is festering in Australian business: “If cutting penalty rates is good incentive for hospitality workers to work harder and longer, it’s about time we talk about reigning in CEO pay to incentivise some better behaviour from bankers. Options to tackle CEO greed include setting a maximum wage, just like we set a minimum wage, introducing a new top marginal tax rate or simply forcing companies to pay tax on excessive payments to executive staff. Australia Institute research shows more than three quarters of Australians would back any one of these measures.”

The NSW Land and Environment Court has blocked an open cut coal mine, in large part because of its likely impact on the global climate. In a detailed judgment that devoted over 100 paragraphs to the climate impact, the Chief Judge wrote: “The Project’s cumulative GHG emissions are therefore likely to contribute to the future changes to … the climate system, the oceanic and terrestrial environment, and people. The approval of the Project (which will be a new source of GHG emissions) is also likely to run counter to the actions that are required to achieve peaking of global GHG emissions as soon as possible and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in order to achieve net zero emissions…” He also rejected the simpleton’s argument that Australia should do nothing because it can’t single-handedly solve climate change: “It matters not that this aggregate of the Project’s GHG emissions may represent a small fraction of the global total of GHG emissions. The global problem of climate change needs to be addressed by multiple localactions to mitigate emissions by sources and remove GHGs by sinks.”

Steve Randy Waldman: “It is reported ad nauseam, when people point out that the US did very well under the high top marginal tax rates that prevailed from World War II through the 1980s, that those high rates were rarely paid. People bring this up as though it was some kind of policy failure. No, it was then and would be again quite the point of the policy. The purpose of very high tax rates at very high incomes is not to generate revenue. It is to make costly the practice of making payments to people who are already very rich relative to other things the payers could do with their money, and so reduce the opportunity cost of doing other things. … Very high top tax rates are a means of encouraging ‘predistribution’ rather than the tax part of tax-and-transfer redistribution.”

Patrick Stevedores has been fined nearly half a million dollars for threatening workers who raised safety concerns. Workers objected to a demand that they move steel coils weighing more than the safe limit for the forklift. In response, the port operations manager launched a torrent of abuse and threatened to sack and blacklist them: “I’m going to get that c***… You don’t want to go down that track. You’ll be on a list — a list you don’t want to be on. One by one we’ll put you on there if you don’t do as you’re told.” And the worst thing about it? The incident occurred in 2009, and the manager “knew that a worker had been killed in an accident with a coil in 2007.” (WorkSafe explained the long delay as being “because it was heavily contested and a previous trial was abandoned when the jury was unable to reach a verdict”.)

Richard Flanagan writes about Australia’s climate disaster, with a mix of righteous fury and despair: “What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. Power grids collapse, dying rivers vomit huge fish kills, while in the north, in Townsville, there are unprecedented floods, and in the south heat so extreme it pushes at the very edge of liveability has become everyday. And the future in which the people of Tasmania now find themselves, in the evacuation centres, camped in friends’ and family homes, fighting fires day after week after month, isn’t just frightening. It’s terrifying.”