This is a budget written for the millionaires and delivered in parliament by their spokesperson, Joe Hockey. It is a budget that will screw the poor, the unemployed, the students, the sick, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the working class as a whole while fattening the rich.
It will transfer billions of dollars over the next four years from the less well off to the wealthy and create fear and misery far and wide. It is the biggest corporate smash and grab raid in many years.
Less than 12 months ago, the Business Council published its wish list in two fat reports. They demanded cuts to government spending on the poor and the working class. They demanded reduced entitlements for those dependent on welfare. They demanded a tax system that would give them even bigger profits.
Now the BCA has got the lot. The suckers in the NSW Labor Party are mere amateurs compared to this mob when it comes to corrupting the political process. The Council got its preferred party into power and then lined itself and its mates up to write the list of demands – that was the Commission of Audit headed up by BCA president Tony Shepherd. And now Hockey has given the authors pretty much everything they asked for.
“When one person receives an entitlement from the government, it comes out of the pocket of another Australian”, said Hockey. He’s right – in the name of fixing the debt, the rich are helping themselves to money filched from the pockets of the poor and the needy. Not just this year. Nor even just for the next four. This is a manifesto for the millionaires for years to come.
The Liberals have drawn up just the first phase of a series of attacks that will roll out over decades. They haven’t even got started on other elements of the onslaught – the hikes to the GST and an end to exemptions on fresh food, the attacks on union rights and minimum wages, and the further waves of privatisation and outsourcing of vital public sector services. This budget is just round one.
Hockey said, “The age of entitlement is over, it has to be replaced, not with an age of austerity, but with an age of opportunity.” One thing is for sure: the rich have taken plenty of opportunities to rake in their entitlements and there’s no sign they’re about to stop.
The rich have stacked the system in their favour for years – with tax cuts, privatisation, user pays, government handouts, attacks on trade unions and the minimum wage. They’ve created a society in which the rich trample the poor. They demand a US-style health and education system where only the wealthy get a chance in life. They berate the unemployed and the low paid as social failures while celebrating the lives of the crooks who steal from people’s life savings. But three decades of enriching themselves at our expense hasn’t been enough. It never is.
Whether we’re talking about the chronically sick whose medical bills will now skyrocket, the worker who loses their job, the student trying to get into higher education, the single parents and families struggling to feed and clothe their kids, the young unemployed person who can’t find a job, this Budget will hurt them.
It’s a budget through which billions will be sliced from the company tax take. Yet the sick will be slugged with co-payments for GP visits. It’s a budget through which billions will be added to student debt. Yet the mining companies will continue to take home $2.4 billion in diesel fuel rebates every single year.
This is a budget through which age pensions will be driven below the poverty line. Yet high income earners will reap tens of billions more in tax concessions on their superannuation. It’s a budget in which the government finds $12 billion to spend on new fighter jets. Yet $8 billion is cut from foreign aid. And it’s a budget where tens of millions can be cut from the ABC and SBS but where $250 million can still be found to pay for school chaplains.
Perhaps the worst piece of Hockey bastardry is his attack on Medicare. It’s gone now as a system of free universal health insurance. Every way the sick turn they’ll be hit with new charges: $7 to see the GP, get a pathology test or an X ray; $5 added to the cost of every single prescription drug, quite easily adding $20 or $30 a week to the cost of medical care for many chronically sick people.
Hidden in the fine print are cuts which will have savage effects on public hospitals. Hockey is planning to slash federal contributions to state hospitals within three years, meaning that states will have to make up the difference. This in turn will put pressure on them to start lobbying for an increase in the GST to fund the shortfall.
Students will also get slugged. The last two years of the promised Gonski funding have been scrapped, only exacerbating the widening gap between private and public schools. In total, these cuts in federal transfers to state governments will rip $80 billion out of health and education within 10 years. When students finish school their chance of getting into university will be much diminished as the vice chancellors have been given the right to jack up fees. Government contributions to HECS will diminish and repayments will be higher and earlier.
Old people will be hit hard. Not just the headline things like pushing the pension age back to 70 by 2035 but also the abolition of the yearly Seniors Supplement and the indexation of pensions to CPI rather than average weekly earnings. People with disabilities are getting kicked in the guts. The disability support pension is going to be tougher to get, tougher to hang onto, and gradually reduced in value as, like the age pension, it is indexed at a lower rate.
Hockey’s $10,000 give away to bosses hiring people over 50 who have been unemployed for more than six months doesn’t hide the fact that pushing back the pension age and stripping back access to the DSP will mean tens of thousands more older workers will now have to rely on the dole. Many will simply become dependent on family members, savaging working class incomes more widely.
Then there’s the $8 billion that will be taken from family payments. You don’t have to be wealthy to be impacted by this. “Pausing indexation of thresholds” for two or three years and “tightening eligibility” for various payments like carers’ allowances and Medicare rebates won’t make the headlines but they will have drastic effects for many.
There are the attacks on the unemployed. The dole is already disgracefully inadequate, but now those aged under 30 who lose their jobs will have a six month wait before they can get Newstart – and then they will be forced into crappy work for the dole schemes. Those aged under 25 will no longer be eligible for Newstart and will have to scrape by on the even more pitiful Youth Allowance.
This is an attack not just on the unemployed but on those in work: bosses will know they can push down conditions as the fear of unemployment is ramped up for young workers who might otherwise leave their jobs. And work for the dole schemes only push down wage rates on unionised jobs in the same area.
When Hockey says that “We are a nation of lifters not leaners”, you know he’s not talking about Gina Rinehart – who is happy to lean back in her office counting the royalty cheques coming in every quarter.
Public servants will get royally shafted by Hockey, who is doing his best to push up unemployment by sacking 16,500 of them.
More than $50 million has been set aside to beef up the presence of police in Aboriginal communities. But $500 million will be cut from Indigenous program funding over five years, including $15 million from legal aid funding. And just in case Indigenous people don’t get the message, $15 million is being sliced from the National Congress of First Peoples.
If there’s no money for pensioners and the unemployed, there’s plenty for the construction companies and property developers, with $12 billion being splashed out on infrastructure. It’s not the kind of infrastructure aimed at ordinary working class people: better public schools and hospitals, better parks and playgrounds for kids, more efficient public transport networks and public housing.
Instead, it’s bigger, more pollution enabling roads (like Melbourne’s East West link), ports, railways and airports to make the wheels of industry turn faster and more cheaply. That all this is for business, not workers, is clear from the reintroduction of six monthly fuel excise indexation – but only for cars and utes; commercial trucks will not get slugged by the increase.
The military brass will be pleased because defence spending will lift to 2 percent of GDP, or about $30 billion in today’s terms, within a decade. And $1.5 billion in hardware spending has been brought forward with immediate effect.
Even the things that look like sweeteners have a sour taste. The Medical Research Future Fund is a fraud. It’s funded by the regressive GP tax and by money diverted from the CSIRO and other health research projects. The road building program is funded by cuts to public transport, cuts to local roads funding and of course the increased fuel excise. The levy on high income earners will only be temporary and does nothing to make good the huge cuts in income tax that the fat cats have enjoyed now for the past seven years.
The fightback we need
If ever it was time to mount a campaign of sustained resistance to this government, it is in the wake of Hockey’s horror budget.
This budget has generated a groundswell of bitter hostility from ordinary workers, students, pensioners – everyone really, except the wealthy, big business, and their despicable lackeys in the corporate press.
On budget night Facebook and Twitter were ablaze with angry responses. When you add this to the already impressive mobilisations we saw at March in March earlier this year, it’s clear that the mood exists to make a fightback possible.
If the various social forces on the broad left – most importantly the unions – were prepared to mobilise people for a real fight, there is every chance that the measures in this budget could be defeated.
It is not as if the Liberals have any mandate for the savage cuts they have announced. Indeed, there is widespread unease among Liberal backbenchers, who know that whatever their personal love for kicking workers in the teeth, there simply isn’t much public sympathy for austerity.
Polls released in the lead up to the budget indicate that the only measure that has significant majority support is the short term tax on the rich – the 2 percent levy on people earning over $180,000. (This makes Greens and Labor opposition to the one good measure in the budget even more criminal).
If the unions called strikes and mass demonstrations they would have huge resonance. Indeed, the sheer scope of the attacks in the budget – the fact that it targets so many different groups – makes it the perfect opportunity to demonstrate in practice that the union movement can be a champion of all of those who find themselves in the crosshairs of the Liberals and their big business cronies.
The initial response to the budget from the Greens, and from trade unions and community groups, has been extremely hostile.
ACTU president Ged Kearney said it was “a savage attack on the standard of living that Australians have worked hard for”.
Cassandra Goldie from the Australian Council of Social Services said, “The real pain of this budget – crushing and permanent – will be felt by people on low incomes, young people, single parents, those with illness or disability, and those struggling to keep a roof over their heads. These are the groups doing the ‘heavy lifting’ for the Budget repair job.”
Greens leader Christine Milne went much further, describing it as “an unashamedly cruel budget. It’s a budget for big business, and a budget that will hurt the rest of us now while delivering nothing for the future. Tony Abbott’s rhetoric about sharing the burden is a lie. It’s a con to try to justify major cuts.
“Big business has been quarantined, and the government has unashamedly boasted about collecting less tax from big miners and polluters. Young people looking for work or studying, health care, the sick and vulnerable take the biggest hits.”
These criticisms are very welcome. The great problem though, is that so far there has been no indication that the unions – let alone the Greens or the ALP – plan to do anything to put real pressure on the government.
We need more than words if we’re to push back against the harshest budget in a generation. Everyone who is affected by the cuts needs to come together to make a stand.
Whether you’re a student or a pensioner, a parent or a patient, we need to fight these attacks. It’s up to each and every one of us to resist in any way we can.
We need to understand that the problem with this budget is not “broken promises” – we should always assume that the politicians are lying to us anyway – but that it’s a declaration of class war by the 1%. If they’re prepared to wreck our lives, we have to take action and give them hell in return.
