crunchysteve

Our politicians are obsessed with a cult. They cultishly worship the ideal of "productivity" but they then "honour" their paymasters, the "gods" of capitalism, by handing all the benefits of this productivity to them, sharing none of it with the vast majority - those who actually did the work to produce it.

Modern economics can give, say, a road an actual value. When the cost of construction is weighed against the benefits of access, transport and social interconnections, the ratio usually, if the road was well considered and needed, has a broad net benefit. It is productive. The problem is, in the modern world, the construction of an evident public asset assigns the labour of those doing the actual building work as a cost. It's is a cost to the contracting firm building the road, but to the people of a nation, who are the ones actually paying for the construction, those wages are a benefit, because the workers will have spent every cent before their next pay. Even their savings are eventually spent and create "reserves" in the broader economy to fund new roads.

And here is my problem with this model. The wealthy owner of the construction firm building that road calls the flow of capital via the worker, back into the wealthy road builder's pocket, via their diverse investments in other sectors, directly or indirectly, yet they call the money labourers earn then spend a "cost."

Here's the real cost. Looking at another industry, mining, Sweden taxes resources taken from Swedish soil, Australia does not. People like "Gina", "Clive" or "Twiggy" can extract all of Australia's wealth, bitch and complain about the cost of wages paid to their workers, pay hardly any (if any at all) tax because they pay lawyers to find ways to dodge tax, and just get to help themselves to resources that belong to all Australians. Sweden's economy is currently stronger than Australia's and the Swedish people have better access to healthcare, education and financial security than Australians do.

And our politicians call this productivity.

A rising tide is supposed to float all boats. Not in Australia, where "weirs" are erected to not allow the tide into the harbours where the dinghies and "tin dishes" are moored, diverting those tides to where the secret bays harbouring the mega-yachts of the privileged. Worse, the lack of any satisfactory resource tax in Australia, keeps the pumps running, driving the cash into the floating the rich instead of the poor, left struggling in the mud of a drained and dying mangrove swamp.

I wax lyrical, like the aging "trot" I am, but we live in a deeply unlevel playing field of a nation. I say again, productivity belongs to everybody, not just the rich who profit off the workers' sweat. I use the "dying mangrove swamp" as both a metaphor for relative poverty and cite coastal development in Queensland as another example of how the rich get richer while the poor get the picture and the bombs never hit you while you're down so low. The eloquence of Peter Garrett's lyric rings truer today than it even did in the 80s. Under Labor today, Australia is worse off because all they have done is softer pedal the same policies of the previous 9 years of the grossly misnamed "Liberal Party."

I was too young to vote in 1972, but just old enough to begin to understand the implications of the "It's Time" election. Whitlam was a great man, leading a party of "pissants" as he allegedly once called them for a petty dispute in cabinet about cutting travel allowances for members, such they'd have to fly in the cheap seats. Like the majority of people who voted in 1972. Whitlam and Barnard (the latter somebody my trade union leader grandfather ("Pa") had known, well before "Pa" died, and had had the ear of) worked hard to shape Australia in a fairer image. There were Labor members in the house in 1972 to 1975 (and later) who had worked in respectable, Methodist charities, who know what real poverty looked like. To vote Labor in the 70s and 80s actually meant something! Bob Hawke and his Parliament in 83 was as optimistic as the Whitlam years but in the shadows was a Voldemort, a class traitor, the economics student in his uni days, a music promoter - how is this a Labor path?

Almost his first act after rolling Hawke for the Labor leadership, Keating ended free education. A Parliament of privilege pulled the ladders up behind them, "Hear hear, hear hear," from both sides of the floor as he announced the Bill to the house. Sure, the Liberals have made education more expensive since but it was the antique clock collector and former rock promoter that betrayed the working classes in the first place.

Whitlam's "dismissal" in 1975, by the then Governor General, Sir John Kerr, was a coup d'etat, organised by privileged people who wanted to preserve privilege at the expense of the rest of us. Education, healthcare, Federal funding to pave streets in "remote" communities (Glenorchy, in Tasmania looked like a shanty town until Whitlam funded proper sewage and road seal) all targets of the 1975 Fraser (Liberal) government.

Then there were the Young Labor members at universities who "turned coat" to the Liberal side. This all became loud and hotly debated. Meanwhile, a bunch of Labor members plotted to end free education once they overthrew the "old guard", to create a 2 tier health system - and Labor's Voldemort, Paul Keating, floats up without all that much questioning of his background? A rock promoter who fancied himself a "dry economist" and collected antique clocks. This was a Labor member, our new PM?

Just because it sounds like a conspiracy theory, doesn't mean there wasn't a conspiracy behind all of this. I can't prove it. But I see it. You should question my theory but also look at the Australia we might have had and compare it to the Australia we have - not a land of a fair go, a two-tiered society, a land of "middle class welfare" and EV subsidies for those who can already afford EVs, no subsidy of education, the erosion of health funding and Medicare, of tax breaks for the rich "balanced" by wage cuts for the poorest paid, and where the rich get richer, the poor get the picture and the bombs never hit you when you're down so low.

Productivity belongs to us all, but we repeatedly vote for those who help the wealthy get wealthier in the name of productivity. We are all productive! We all created the wealth of this land, equally, working just as hard as any other! We all deserve our share!!! Investors be hanged! Literally for all I care.