In an address to the National Press Club on April 17, Robert Fitzgerald, president of the Australian Council for Social Services (ACOSS), provided a partial list of the problems faced by Australian society. These included: 1.8 million people living in poverty; 230,000 people without jobs for more than a year; appalling health and living conditions and the nation's highest unemployment rates amongst indigenous Australians; two and three quarter million workers earning less than $25,000 per annum; people with disabilities struggling for access to the services they need.
Fitzgerald strained to present a case that improved social welfare is compatible with the general policy parameters of the Coalition as long as these economic strategies are "tempered if the social cost is likely to be too high". "We need efficiency and we need equity", says Fitzgerald.
But "efficiency" under an economic order defined by the chase for profits, means efficiency in maximising profits. The drive for efficiency that both Labor and the Coalition are committed to requires an increase in the number of people working in lower paid jobs; an increase in the pool of unemployed people; a reduction in taxes on companies; and channelling of taxes collected from wage earners away from community services and into services for big business and large property owners.
That is why the Coalition is planning bigger public spending cuts, privatisation and especially the end of a real award system for wages.
The solution to the problems of increasing poverty, unemployment and the erosion of public services must be found, not in a "balance" of policy mixes, but in a reversal of policy direction. This would require a drive to bring back into the public sector already privatised institutions, to institute national wage indexation in line with inflation, to reduce the working week without loss of wages and to increase public services in all areas.
Fitzgerald's attempt to come up with a framework that the Coalition can consider more or less compatible with its priorities leads him to advocate policies that will actually hurt the poor. He wants to "examine options" on a goods and services tax as part of consideration of broader tax reform. There is no case for any consideration of any kind of GST. It is a regressive tax. It hits the poor more than the rich. A progressive tax on the rich and on company profits is the only equitable basis of a taxation system.
Attempting to convince the Coalition and big business that it is in their interests to give a greater priority to social equity will only lead to being entrapped into support for policies like that of the GST. The reality is that it is not in their interests to give any priority at all to social equity.
This reality poses another challenge to ACOSS, a challenge at the level of political strategy. It means that big business and their parties — Liberal and Labour — will need to be forced to retreat on their policies rather than convinced by argument to temper them.
This can happen only if all those institutions, political organisations and individuals who stand for social equity make their first priority convincing broader 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ of the community that they have to organise to fight for the policies they want — through campaign mobilisations on the job and on the street and providing the resources needed for those campaigns.
Ultimately we have to build a movement that can provide a government that will make social equity its first priority, even if that means completely reorganising the economy out of the hands of big business.