On Jobseeker? The Government Hates You, Scomo goes to America, Warships over Science Ships, Wage Growth - Not Keeping Up!,Secure Housing is Dead: Red Report Back 08.03.2024-22.03.2024
On Jobseeker? The Government Hates You
New data provided to the senate has continued to show alarmingly high rates of payment suspension by some providers under the Jobseeker system. Across all providers, roughly 45 suspensions were issued per hundred jobseekers – however, certain providers were identified as having rates closer to 90. Three of the five worst offenders catered specifically to the Indigenous population – this is hard to ignore, as First Nations people in Australia already suffer from notoriously high rates of unemployment and poverty.
For those already living week by week - particularly homeless or otherwise disadvantaged folks - a suspension interferes with money for food and basic living costs. In fact, nearly 100,000 suspensions were issued to homeless "clients" - which make up 10-15% of people receiving payments.
In over 60% of all cases, the suspension was not followed with any demerit - raising questions as to whether there was any cause at all, with many occurring simply due to software or admin error. In the remainder, of course, the client was punished with the threat of having payments withheld entirely, which inches closer with every demerit.
While the bureaucracy focuses on administering judgment, up to 50% of calls to Centrelink and over a million claims go unanswered. In answer, the Australian Unemployed Workers Union is calling for a suspension of Mutual Obligations and irrelevant eligibility tests, as well as better staffing and use of resources.
From the start, this is done in service of a system that withholds the means of life based on one's ability to meet arbitrary obligations. It demands that the working class give up the right to scrape out an existence, making the process of finding someone to sell our labour to a trial in itself, while permitting the capitalist class to coast on the work of others.
Under capitalism, unemployment works to keep workers living with meagre pay and working conditions, with "benefits" being a token gesture in the face of the widening gap between upper and lower class. In the long term, the issue can only be cut off at the root, with a system that provides work and goods based on need rather than the whims of the market.
Scomo goes to America
Photo credit: G20 Argentina (CC BY 2.0)
Former Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has finally resigned from Parliament. Even better news, he may even leave the country.
But unfortunately, this rosy picture is not entirely accurate.
Mr Morrison has accepted positions on the boards of a series of US-based “strategic think-tanks”. Translated to English, this means a well paid position on a series of clubs for retired generals, military industrialists and civilian war-hawks, coming up with ideas on how best to militarise society, bring nations into America’s sphere of influence and how best to fight China. Worse still, he’ll do this job through Zoom and won’t go to Washington to do this.
So he ends his premiership with a plum job with the people who he put $400 billion into the pockets of. His signing of the AUKUS treaty, which we still remain a part of, is one of the most disgraceful acts of highway robbery this nation has seen. It is the largest transfer of wealth from the public purse, which is filled with the tax dollars of ordinary working people, to American private interests. Wealth created by the Australian people which should be spent on housing, healthcare and general improvement of our conditions is given to the already obscenely wealthy.
This is not a new trend in society, this happens every day in all spheres of economic life: our economy is based on the exploitation of worker by boss. This transfer of wealth is seen as a good thing by both main parties. As Labor cheers his departure, they continue on the same policies, both with the transfer of wealth with AUKUS, or the systemic lack of care they show to ordinary working Australians.
Scott Morrison may be gone, but the system he served stays. No matter which party is in power, the top 1% will always benefit the most in our society as it currently stands.
Warships over Science Ships
Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
As the Australian Government pivots towards more and more funding for arms, and in particular the Navy, they are abandoning key research in humanity’s fight against climate change.
The RV Investigator, a ship surveying Antarctica and gathering crucial data on climate change, will now sit in dock for almost half of the year. This comes after the CSIRO asked for $93 million for 4 years to operate it, but instead only received $59 million.
On the surface this seems like not that big of an issue - $59 million is a lot of money, surely the boffins can do with that, no?
However this is wrong on two counts. The first is that science is not cheap. The people who go on these voyages are gone for long periods of time, with minimal contact to their families, to the most hazardous natural environments on the planet. They need to maintain advanced equipment very carefully in order that it remains precise. This is important because much of our understanding of how fast climate change is accelerating, no doubt something we in Australia who face hotter and hotter Summers every year, need to know.
Further, the effects of climate change show themselves in Antarctica first. To abandon our research there is to blind ourselves to any forewarning of disasters to occur here.
The other main reasons this is bizarre is the fact the government seems to have an infinite amount of money for naval rearmament. Australia faces no imminent or future threat of invasion. Even in the height of WWII, the Japanese never even considered invading Australia simply because the country was too big.
Yet the government has $400 billion, that is billion with a “b”, to buy submarines from America to protect our trade from “Asia-Pacific threats”. These threats of course are China, who is also our biggest trading partner.
The government has a sordid record so far on the climate crisis, and this is just ever more symbolic of this fact. If the militaries of the world were their own nation, they would be the biggest polluter - larger than any nation state. And yet in this time of climate crisis, the Australian government is shovelling more cash into the fire rather than trying to fix it.
Wage Growth - Not Keeping Up!
Martin Kingsley from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Working people all around the country are feeling the strain of trying to make ends meet, with skyrocketing prices for the basics of daily existence pushing budgets to breaking point. Keeping a roof over your own head has become one of the biggest contributors to the financial hardships of Australian workers, and making mortgage or rent payments – or even securing a place to live in the first place – has become a huge task for individuals and families alike. What’s more, recent figures released by the ABS and Domain demonstrate the problem is only getting worse.
According to the ABS Wage Price Index, wages increased by 0.9% in the last quarter of 2023. Sounds pretty good, right? Not so fast! Data from Domain showed that median dwelling prices across Australia’s capital cities rose 2.2% over the same period. All of a sudden that wage ‘increase’ isn’t looking so crash hot. In terms of the housing market in capital cities across the nation, your dollar is actually worth less than it was three months ago!
And this isn’t a one off. The ABS also reported that wages have been growing steadily since the end of 2020, increasing by 10% over three years – but house prices far outpaced wages, rising almost 24% over the same time period. Indeed, these figures are a continuation of a trend that has lingered for almost two decades in the Australian economy, more than outstaying its welcome. During that time an entire generation of working people have grown up watching house prices passing further and further out of reach.
Meanwhile, politicians and union officials across the country can often be found patting themselves on the back for delivering ‘wage increases’ of a couple of percent here and there – or trying their best to take credit, anyway. However, if you stop and look at the numbers for even a moment, they definitely don’t add up to any sort of real ‘increase’. Trying to pass what amounts to a cut in real wages off as something that benefits workers shows that these political operators think they can play working people for fools, that we’ll swallow any lie hook, line, and sinker. But working people aren’t stupid. We look around and see with our own eyes that our standard of living has degraded considerably, and is worsening at an alarming rate. We see new reports and statistics being released, on what feels like a daily basis, that only confirm our own experiences.
Politicians will happily sell us these lies for another two decades, they will happily watch working people struggle for survival and lie to our faces about doing their best to help, while their mates – the landlords, mortgage brokers, and other capitalists – rake in money hand over fist. The same capitalists then turn around and pay off the political class to maintain the status quo, which it turns out is going pretty well – for the landlords and the mortgage brokers. The only way the rort stops is when working people stand up and demand it.
Productivity Commission - Secure Housing is Dead
The Productivity Commission’s report on Housing and Homelessness released last month exposes a fact working Australians know all too well – the dream of secure housing is eluding our grasp, and the government has no intentions of recovering it.
The report displays several disturbing trends, including the move from public housing to community housing, increased homelessness, and the worsening conditions of housing units. Despite the Australian Labor Party’s self-proclaimed dedication to ‘everyday Australians, ’ this report reveals one thing – the most that working-class Australians can hope for under a capitalist government, whether Labor or Liberal, are concessions and half-measures used to secure our vote in the next election.
The Productivity Commission report shows that, in the last decade, public housing households have decreased by 30,722 (from 317,008 in 2014 to 286,286 in 2023) while community housing households increased by 37,786 (from 66,708 to 104,494). Community housing is ‘affordable’ housing owned and/or managed by private firms unlike public housing which is state-run. The report shows that only 3.1% of community housing households face rental stress (rent exceeding 30% of their gross income) and that 99.6% of these households are classified as ‘low-income’. However, the statistics fail to reveal the people who have fallen through the cracks. Michael Fotheringham, managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, claims that the advantage of affordable housing is that “rather than providing a very deep subsidy for a small number”, like public housing, it provides “a smaller subsidy for a larger number of people.” The question then is – what happens to the tenants who can’t afford the smaller subsidy? Statistics for the number of homeless people after the instatement of Labor’s Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF) policy are not yet available. However, the Productivity Commission’s data shows that the government spent almost 1.4 billion on emergency homelessness services in 2022-23, an increase of over 30% in the last four years.
Not only has the accessibility of housing decreased, the quality and liveability of housing has also worsened. Acceptable dwelling conditions in the report are already defined very leniently, requiring at least four working facilities and not more than two major structural problems. Despite this, dwellings meeting an ‘acceptable standard’ have decreased in public housing (79.6% in 2014 to 75.6% in 2023 – almost ¼ living in ‘unacceptable’ conditions) and in community housing (89.3% in 2014 to 84.4% in 2023). Furthermore, although Indigenous social housing enjoyed marginally better conditions, the dwellings stood out for their overcrowding, with 26.6% of State Owned and Managed Indigenous Housing (SOMIH) and 14.1% of Indigenous Community Housing being overcrowded.
The fact is that the pressing need for social housing (which currently exceeds 600,000 units) does not translate to electoral politics. Bourgeois politicians have a vested interest in maintaining an inaccessible housing market (there are five Federal Labor MPs who own more than five investment properties). Each party is also concerned with maintaining power and current public sentiment favours assistance for first-home buyers over social housing. The idea of assisting working households secure housing through the market appeals more to our collective imagination of a capitalist meritocracy than state-owned public housing. However, last month’s report highlights how, under the current conditions, the housing crisis will keep worsening while support for those affected continues to fall away. Working Australians must leverage our collective power through militant tenant unions to demand more than infrequent, ineffective concessions