Ding dong

Eleven long, dark years of Liberal (read Thatcherite) rule have come to an end. Today we can look forward to a bright new dawn of Australian Labor Party (read Thatcherite) government. Triumphant ALP leader, Kevin Rudd, has, after all, proclaimed himself an ‘economic conservative’. In his victory speech, Rudd asserted ‘I will be a prime minister for all Australians’. And there’s no mystery about what he means by that – his government will work for the ‘national interest’ - profitabilty of Australian business – ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, a rising tide lifts all boats, prosperity trickles down…

[AFP photo]

For the past six weeks, the Liberal Party has bombarded us with adverts proclaiming that 70% of the Rudd front bench will comprise ‘anti business’ former union officials. You’d expect the Labor Party to have countered by pointing out that 100% of the Liberal front bench comprises people not with historical links to the labour movement, but with current, active, real, material vested interests in businesses. I surmise the reason this never happened was that those union thugs themselves have business interests of their own.

When Bob Hawke led the ALP to victory in 1983, the received wisdom was that because of the links between the ALP and the union movement, organised labour would tolerate attacks by an ALP government that we would never have tolerated from the Liberals. That turned out to be correct. It was the ALP that over the following 13 years proceeded to tame the union movement through its Prices and Incomes Accord, offering the union officials the seat at the bargaining table they’d always coveted. Rank and file union activity came to a virtual standstill, while the government smashed the militant Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, privatised Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, and many other publicly owned services. It was the Hawke and Keating Labor governments that introduced ‘enterprise bargaining’, which precluded workers organising on an industry wide basis and forced us to reach agreements from a position of weakness on a workplace by workplace basis. This smashed down the door and strew rose petals in the path of Howard’s ‘Workplace Relations’ agenda that eviscerated minimum award pay and conditions, marginalised unions, and forced many to work under inferior non union ‘certified agreements’ and individual contracts.

Almost everybody associates the atrocity of detaining refugees in remote concentration camps with the Howard government. In reality, it was ALP left winger, Gerry Hand, who as Minister of Immigration in the Keating government introduced mandatory detention in 1992.

The union officials have been running a campaign under the slogan, ‘Your rights at work – worth fighting and voting for!’ It goes without saying that the bit about fighting is just empty rhetoric. All industrial issues have been unceremoniously relegated to the back burner while they devoted their efforts to the electoral campaign. Now that the election is over, there is little cause for optimism either that a Rudd government will implement radical changes to industrial relations or that the unions will mount the kind of fight that can win such changes. With union membership at an all time low of about 20% and Australian working class militancy a dim memory, it’s still going to be up to us to act in our own interests and win back our rights at work.

But all is not gloom and doom. The silver lining is that the incumbent PM, the execrable John Howard, W’s ‘deputy sherriff’ in the Pacific, appears to have made history as the first sittiing Prime Minister to lose his own seat since Stanley Bruce in the 1929 Federal election. The latest results, with one booth left to count, show former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, held a lead of 51.84% on a two party preferred basis. The Liberal pundits on tv last night warned against writing Howard off too soon, projecting that uncounted postal votes could deliver an extra percentage point to Howard, but McKew’s lead is big enough to accommodate that, even if it eventuates.

May he enjoy a very uncomfortable retirement.,

Creating jobs

Last month I mentioned that John Howard’s boast that jobs growth vindicated his draconian WorkChoices legislation was based on a misinterpretation of the data. Specifically, his claim that 276,000 jobs had been created in the year since WorkChoices came into effect was nearly true - 276,000 more persons were employed, which is not the same thing, but is more important anyway. But because of an increase in the size of the labour force, this figure was an over statement of the net growth in employment by a factor of nearly six. In reality, the net growth was only 46,400. If fewer of the 230,100 new entrants to the labour force over the period from March 2006 to March 2007 had found jobs, Mr Howard would have had a much higher unemployment rate to boast of.

The ABC reported this morning in an item provocatively titled ‘IR changes creating jobs: survey’, that according to Christena Singh, author of the ‘Sensis Business Index’, a survey of 1,800 smaller businesses found ‘a significant number of businesses have decided to recruit staff based on the workplace changes’.

What the report actually shows is that although ‘15 per cent of SMEs’ reported ‘a rise in employment’, this ‘was offset by the 10 per cent of businesses that experienced employment declines’.

This is a trick. And a much nastier one than Mr Howard tried. There’s actually a pretty close relation between the number of persons employed and the number of jobs. In fact, as I pointed out in a comment on Lefti the other day, in the US last month, the increase in jobs and the increase in employment were actually equal.

What’s going on here is that the proportion of businesses hiring new staff, or laying staff off, is not necessarily the same as the proportion of people getting and losing jobs. So one possible scenario that the data could describe is that there was a net increase of 5% in the number of jobs. Another is that each of the businesses that hired new staff created 50 new jobs and those that laid off staff had each just let one go. Or vice versa. The fact is, the report doesn’t tell us anything at all about employment even if the survey actually collected data that would clarify the issue. And of course, the other thing it tells us nothing about is anything whatsoever about employment by larger business and non business employers.

Not that I would attribute any clairvoyant powers to small and medium business owners, I suppose it’s fair to attribute their ‘expectations’ to their intentions. And only 13% of SMEs surveyed said they expected an increase over the current quarter, down by two percentage points from the expectations recorded in the past two quarters. Similarly, while 24% said they expected an increase in their workforces over the next year, another 4% expected a decrease, giving a ‘net balance’ of only 20%, three percentage points lower than the corresponding expectation in the previous two quarters.

What I found most interesting about the survey, unreported by the ABC, was this ominous observation.

Despite strong employment growth, net growth in total wage costs decreased during the last quarter, and SMEs were expecting further decreases in their wages bills for both the short and medium terms, easing inflationary fears.

As a matter of fact, wage inflation is not my deepest fear. The conclusion I draw from this is that the wages share of the economy is declining, and more importantly, wages on average are declining, just in case anyone was entertaining any hopes that WorkChoices was going to deliver a higher standard of living for workers.

Crossword politics

Palestinian journalist for the Melbourne Age, Maher Mughrabi, wrote today that

On May 20, [Australian] Prime Minister John Howard will receive the Jerusalem Prize from the State Zionist Council of Victoria, the Zionist Federation of Australia and Israel's World Zionist Organisation "for his support of the Jewish community and Israel".

In his piece, he makes some interesting points.

To say, then, that Israel is "a democracy in good standing" is a bit like saying Philip Ruddock is a member of Amnesty International - as a statement of fact, it leaves too much out.

What’s left out of the claim about Ruddock is that, as Australia’s Minister for Immigration from 1996 to 2003, he presided over the policy of incarcerating all asylum seekers arriving without required documentation (mandatory detention) in remote concentration camps and the refoulement (return) of many Afghan and other refugees to their countries of origin against their will, against sound advice, and in some cases, as it transpires, to their doom. These policies are in direct conflict with Amnesty International positions. In fact, Amnesty asked that he remove his AI lapel badge when speaking about immigration issues.

In an interview with the Australian ABC’s Radio National’s Lateline in 2002, AI Secretary General Irene Khan said, ‘…the policies that he is carrying out in this Government are clearly policies which have been criticised by Amnesty…He is a member of Amnesty, but he does not represent Amnesty’.

As for what’s left out of the claim about Israeli democracy, Mughrabi explains

If you want to know how much, read The Age's Saturday crossword. On March 31, it contained this clue: "What is the nationality of someone from Haifa? (7)"

The answer is "Israeli". It is also incorrect. You see, there is no such thing as Israeli nationality. In 1970, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that there was such a thing as Jewish nationality, and such a thing as Arab nationality, but not Israeli nationality. And while Israel's Arab citizens have the vote, the state - defined by law as Jewish - discriminates against them when it comes to immigration, state resources, where they can live and even who they can marry.

It is strangely appropriate, therefore, that Howard will receive his award at a function of the Jewish National Fund, which identifies itself as "the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners - Jewish people everywhere". Try imagining an Australian version of this: "The Aussie National Fund is the caretaker of the land of Australia, on behalf of its owners - Anglo-Celtic people everywhere."

See the problem? This formula makes Israel the land of many people who are not its citizens, and denies the land to many who are its citizens. Democracy? Not as Australians know it…

Of course it’s not democracy as Australians know it. Israel is Jewish and democratic. It’s a Jewish democracy, where Jews have democratic rights. And everyone in the Jewish democracy must genuflect to the oxymoron of the Jewish and democratic state, or, like Azmi Bishara, stand accused of treason. It’s one of those mysteries that otherwise apparently intelligent, rational, thoughtful people who understand things like that you can’t fight terrorism by invading Iraq or Lebanon somehow believe that such a thing is possible.