Centrelink Debt Recovery, Milk Workers Strikes, and Albo Toes the Imperalist Line in Palestine: Red Report Back 30.10.2023-12.11.2023
Centrelink Once Again in Hot Water Over Sketchy Debt Recovery Practices
Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Centrelink repayments for 86,000 people have been paused over concerns the debts may be unlawful, the Guardian reported on Monday 30 October 2023. Income apportionment methods used by Services Australia for over two decades, up to December 2020, have been revealed as potentially illegal by the Commonwealth Ombudsman. Several welfare fraud cases affected by income apportionment have already been dropped by Commonwealth prosecutors, with historic fraud convictions potentially up for review.
This is yet another embarrassment for Services Australia in recent months, after their dismal call wait times were exposed by the AUWU and subsequently backed up by raw call data revealed in a senate estimates hearing on 31 August 2023. Just 22% of phone calls were answered in July/August of this year, with the most disadvantaged at most risk of not getting through.
Australia’s welfare system has been neglected and eroded since the privatisation frenzy of the Hawke/Keating era, with services increasingly outsourced to private companies who profit by churning the poor through the system. An exclusive report by the Saturday Paper in its October 21-27 edition exposed the ongoing cruelty inflicted on welfare recipients by private labour hire companies, who can suspend the welfare payments of the unemployed and the underemployed instantly and without evidence or government approval. One welfare recipient described multiple incidents in which she received an unexpected text message stating that her payments had been suspended, only to discover that the suspension had been the result of a technical “glitch.”
The claim on Services Australia’s website that “income apportionment is not Robodebt” will be cold comfort to those who have been subjected to the indignities and excessive “mutual obligations” of our welfare system. It is yet to be determined how many debts from the past two decades were illegally raised, and the exact quantity of preventable misery that was inflicted on the most vulnerable Australians. A picture is emerging of a welfare system that is not fit for purpose, that can’t even get its legal basics correct, and that somehow always falls on the side of screwing people over.
Services Australia’s panicked attempt to put “Robodebt” in the past shows the department’s awareness that the term continues to haunt the public psyche. The term captures more than just a single historic policy blunder. It represents the dystopian reality of calling phone lines that hang up on you, receiving texts you can’t reply to, and reaching weekly “points targets” that are always just out of reach. “Robodebt” is the faceless, relentless practice of outsourcing and automating the project not of uplifting people who have fallen on hard times, but of punishing the poor for being poor.
Australia Toes Imperialist Line as Genocide in Gaza Continues
While Australians remain homeless in their thousands and countless people across the country worry about making ends meet, the political elite spent much of their time “addressing” the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine. While the government tries to have it both ways, vomiting up the occasional platitude in support of Palestinians or offering meagre aid to people who are being indiscriminately slaughtered and driven from their homes, the Prime Minister made abundantly clear where our capitalist leaders stand on the issue. Albanese travelled to Washington to eagerly perform his role as representative of Australia, the lieutenant of American imperialism. The PM stood idly as US President Joe Biden, leader of the imperialist world, spread disgusting propaganda that cast doubt on the death toll in Gaza – comments which caused the Gazan health ministry to release a 200 page document listing 6,474 names of people killed in this latest flare-up in the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
Not to be outdone, the Australian ambassador to the UN, James Larsen, joined 44 other cowards in refusing to even vote on a resolution demanding a ceasefire – the smallest demand of those who support Palestine during this crisis. While “our” government likes to talk the talk to some degree when it comes to Palestine, when push comes to shove it becomes clear that they will always side with their settler-colonial cousin, Israel.
It’s also worth looking beyond the words of politicians and ultimately meaningless resolutions passed by the United Nations to see how quickly the Australian state can bring resources to bear to solve a crisis – when it suits their interests. Within days of the current crisis, the RAAF as well as Qantas (“working closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs”) were on hand to fly dual citizens out of Israel back to safety in Australia. Gazans, on the other hand, have been left in the path of Israeli bombardment and will now face more barbarity with the ground invasion that follows.
Next time you pass a homeless person on the street, or hear about a single mother who can barely afford to feed her children, it’s worth remembering these events. If you are an Australian-Israeli settler, someone who chose to leave Australia to participate in a genocidal project of settler-colonialism, the Australian government will rush to your aid at the first sign of trouble. However, if you are one of the countless Australians doing it incredibly tough, through no fault of your own, or an innocent Palestinian living in the open-air prison of Gaza, not knowing if today is the day your house is hit by an Israeli missile, this government will abandon you to your fate. The resources to solve crises at home and overseas are available, but those in power refuse to use them unless it suits them. Once again we see that the capitalist system and its faithful government servants only look after their own, while the rest of us are thrown into the furnace.
From the Picket Line
Dairy Workers Take Action
SaputoInc2020, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
On Wednesday the 25th of October, strike action led by the United Workers and Transport Workers Unions ended in a pay increase for roughly 1,400 Victorian dairy workers across 13 sites. Following the two-day action, UWU National Secretary Tim Kennedy announced that a large majority of employees from Saputo, Lactalis, Fonterra and Peters Ice cream companies would be receiving pay bumps of roughly 12 percent over three years. At the time of writing this article however, the TWU informed the Red Report Back that the revised deal offered to milk tanker drivers is still being finalized.
It has been reported that workers initially voted in favor of indefinite strike action before the unions limited the strike to two days. When this was suggested to the TWU, the union informed this publication that the duration of the strike was put to a vote by the members and that any preference for a shorter period needed to be reflected by a majority of members before it could be decided upon.
Tensions between management and dairy workers have come to a head on the heels of years of contracting milk production and giddy industry profits. From 2012, the major supermarkets aggressively lowered the price of their dairy products, forcing enough farmers and small producers to leave the market as to create a near shortage. In later years, large producers such as Coles and Woolworths capitalized on the self-created shortage and in 2018 slapped Australians with whopping price increases.
The major supermarket owners have raked in wealth on an enormous scale amid years of widespread hardship for the Australian people. Coles has posted escalating profits year on year from 2020 culminating in a $1.98 billion dollar profit in 2023. As profits, no one who works for a living benefits except through meagre super returns. It is shareholders and corporate board members who reap the rewards of squeezing Australian consumers. Saputo also reported a $622 million ($702.5 million AUD) profit in 2023, more than doubling its 2022 high. Despite the excess and the modesty of gains won, we sincerely congratulate the Victorian dairy workers and urge them to hold on to the spirit of struggle.