You can’t say that the Abbott government doesn’t have a sick sense of humour. On international workers’ day, May 1, its Commission of Audit has handed down a report which is a blueprint for class war – a savage ruling class attack on health, education, welfare, jobs and wages for every single working class Australian.

Even if Treasurer Joe Hockey does not follow through with all its recommendations in his forthcoming budget, the report is a softening up process for what is to come on 13 May.

The report recommends among other things:

- The effective abolition of Medicare as a universal health insurance scheme, with the introduction of co-payments for visits to GPs and access to emergency departments in public hospitals. With the mandatory requirement for high income earners to take out private health insurance, Medicare will become a social welfare health care system, just like in the United States. The rich will have access to top notch private facilities, the poor will have to fend for themselves in an ever more stretched public health system. On top of this, patients will be slugged with increased costs for PBS-listed medicines, including those that are currently free.

-The immiseration of those with disabilities and their carers, as the roll-out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is slowed down. This scheme is far from perfect, but the government is certainly not proposing to replace it with anything better.

-The elimination of federal government responsibility for schools with the proposed abolition of Gonski funding and the handing over of schools to state governments.

-The degradation of state government services as governments compete with each other to cut income tax rates to attract private business investment.

-The removal of access to university for a new generation of working class students, with the let-’em-rip recommendation for university fees and the increased burden of costs shifted onto the shoulders of students, up from 41 to 55 percent. With the demand that HELP debts be repaid earlier, more quickly and at a higher interest rate, university graduates on incomes as low as $32,000 will be required to pay back debts as high as $50,000 or more.

-A wholesale attack on older Australians, whether working, looking for work or on the age pension. With the pension age pushed back to 70, with the Disability Support Pension cut to a measly 28 percent of average earnings and made harder to get, and with age discrimination widespread, many older workers in their 50s and 60s will be forced into destitution. Once retired, the punishment doesn’t stop there, with the inclusion of the family home in the assets test used to determine the level of age pension paid, and with the pension also pegged to a pitifully low 28 percent of average earnings.

-The impoverishment of young workers, with the scrapping of the national minimum wage and federal government funding for apprenticeship schemes.

-An assault on the unemployed, as tougher income testing is introduced for those on Newstart and as those aged 22-30 without dependents and receiving Newstart for more than 12 months are required to leave their homes to find work elsewhere, potentially even in another state.

-The destruction of whole areas of public service employment, with a recommended 15,000 jobs to go, on top of the 6,000 that have already gone since the election of the Abbott government.

-An attack on wages, jobs and trade unions as states are given the option to set their own minimum wage and a slew of government agencies are privatised, including Australia Post, the Submarine Corporation, Snowy Hydro Limited, Australian Rail Track Corporation and, ultimately, the NBN. This is on top of the privatisation of Medibank Private, already slated by the Abbott government.

-The elimination of important government agencies looking after the interests of the disadvantaged, including Australian Hearing Services which undertakes valuable work among Aboriginal communities where loss of hearing due to easily treatable diseases is at epidemic proportions.

-The abandonment by the federal government for any responsibility for disaster relief, whether bushfire, flood or drought, as these tasks are fobbed off onto what will be increasingly fiscally stretched state governments.

Hostile reception

Both the Greens and the Labor Party have rightly called the Audit Commission report a bonanza for the rich. Labor leader Bill Shorten described it as a report “written by big business, for big business that will hurt hardworking families. Families will get less, millionaires will get more”.

Christine Milne of the Greens said that it was “a hit on every Australian family, on carers, on those with a disability, while Gina Rinehart and her ilk get off scot-free”. Adam Bandt said that it was “a kick in the guts for everyday Australians, a recipe for higher unemployment, a divided Australia, where the poor and low paid workers are thrown to the wolves”.

When Hockey said that the report was a “call to arms for the Australian people: we don’t want you to work, we need you to work”, Milne agreed that it was indeed a call to arms: “It’s time we began the process of kicking this mob out.”

The idea repeatedly peddled by Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Matthias Cormann that there is a budget emergency is a big lie. The Australian government is one of best placed in the world in relation to public debt, something recognised by the international ratings agencies, the OECD, IMF and every mainstream economist. The problem is not spending, but the loss of government tax revenue because of successive cuts to marginal tax rates over the past decade. Any examination of the tens of billions of government money thrown away on these was ruled out in the Commission’s terms of reference.

This is a nasty, politically motivated hatchet job on everything that the Liberal Party hates to the marrow of its bones: public provision of health and education, social welfare and working class rights. They want to rip $20-30 billion in spending on the services on which workers depend in order to provide the wherewithal to cut taxes for the rich down the track. And, by promoting privatisation and outsourcing in areas like the Department of Human Services, the Liberals and the Audit Commissioners want to hand over slabs of the public sector to their rich business mates.

A den of thieves

The Abbott government got the report that it wanted. Little wonder when you look at the grubs that it appointed to the review. The Commission was headed up by former Transfield Holdings boss Tony Shepherd, a man who knows a few things about enriching himself on the public purse, given Transfield’s success in winning contracts to run refugee detention centres. Shepherd was appointed in his position as head of the Business Council and is a longstanding Liberal Party operative.

Other Liberal Party stooges included Peter Boxall, Peter Costello’s chief of staff in the 1990s and the man responsible for introducing WorkChoices as head of the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations in 2005.

Amanda Vanstone was another longstanding Liberal on the Commission. Vanstone was Howard’s Immigration Minister, responsible for persecuting asylum seekers and, since completing a stint as Ambassador to Italy in 2010, freelancing media spokesperson for the Liberal Party and knee-capper in the South Australian branch of the party.

Tony Cole, the fourth member, is a former Treasury Secretary and former head of the neoliberal Industry Commission, predecessor of the Productivity Commission, while Robert Fisher was a senior functionary for the Western Australian government in “Industrial and Regional Development”, i.e. handing out largesse to big businesses.

It is these bastards who are playing with the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in our community. They and their families will never know hardship or the worry of not knowing whether they will be able to pay the rent, get help if they are sick or have a job at the end of the month. They have been paid tens of thousands of dollars each for dishing up a report designed to do only one thing: screw the working class and enrich the capitalists.

Budget night is coming up in less than two weeks and we will know then the full scale of the horrors that Abbott and Hockey will unleash on us. Despite saying that he would not “rule anything in or out”, Hockey quickly confirmed that the government’s planned increases to military spending – to pay for the new F35 fighter jet among other things – would go ahead regardless of the Commission’s calls for restraint.

But the coming budget will not be the end of government attacks. In the pipeline are further privatisation plans, attacks on pensions and the ramping up of the GST.

Resistance

This attack merits decisive resistance from our side. This means not just running a public relations campaign in the hope that the ALP might save us in 2016, but a serious program of strikes and demonstrations.

It’s good that Shorten has come out and slammed the report, but let’s not forget that the ALP paved the way. After the GFC, the Rudd and Gillard governments imposed harsh spending ceilings on public services, tightened up eligibility to a wide range of payments, tossed single parents off the parenting allowance and onto Newstart once their child turned eight, and refused to lift the dole despite calls from even the Business Council to do so. And it was Wayne Swan as Treasurer who lifted the pension age from 65 to 67, the first increase since the introduction of the age pension in 1908.

Our unions need to lead a fight that can push back against the Abbott government. The 100,000 plus who turned up to the March in March demonstrations around the country less than two months ago show what is possible when such a call is given. The trade unions have immeasurably more social clout than the organisers of March in March, and if they chose to fight they could bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets. It’s that kind of fight that we need so desperately now.