WA writers on the failure of the market economy to deliver social and economic and environmental justice

Western Australian writers and thinkers continue to write about the market and corporate economy and issues of social, economic and environmental justice.

Sarah Burnside has published recent pieces in online publications New Matilda and Online Opinion. In New Matilda she challenges the idea that the majority of Aboriginal people benefit from the mining and resources industry. In reviewing a recent Australian monograph on Indigenous people and the mining industry Sarah suggests that there little evidentiary support for the idea that mining is clearly good for Aboriginal people.

On his blog Neville Numbat, Piers Vertegen continues to write important pieces on environmental issues. His most recent piece, also published in the online publication Wangle, discusses the likely impact of Julie Gillard's ascendancy for climate change policies. Piers argues that based on her past record the new PM appears unlikely to support real action to address climate change.

In other articles Piers writes about a recent WA Auditor General's report on the failure of WA government agencies to reduce energy consumption and the lack of tangible action and commitment by the Barnett Government to take action to reduce the alarming growth in carbon pollution in WA.

Colin Penter has published this piece in Online Opinion contrasting the ways that civil society groups are whistleblowers are criminalized, while corporations that break the law regularly avoid any substantial penalty. The tenets of limited liability and corporate personhood are used to enable corporations to avoid facing the full force of the law for their criminal behavior. This is a protection not available to individuals and civil society and violates the idea of equality before the law.

Perth based journalist Vicki Laurie has published a long essay in the July edition of the Monthly on the response of WA government agencies to Aboriginal disadvantage. Using the lived daily experience of one Aboriginal family, Vicki demonstrates the enormous gulf between the policy rhetoric of politicians and government agencies and the realities of life for Aboriginal families.

Disability activist Erik Leiopold has published a number of recent pieces in the West Australian and Online Opinion on the private members bill on Euthanasia currently before the WA Parliament. Erik's piece draws on his new book, based on his PhD thesis, which explores the links between market values, disability and euthanasia.

Academic and Director of the WA 2020 Project Peter McMahon has published an Op Ed piece in the West Australian (Monday July 5 2010) on the coming energy crises and its likely impact on Perth. Perth is one of the least sustainable cities in the world and Peter's article describes the energy challenges facing the State as a result of dwindling oil reserves and climate change.

In the lead up to NAIDOC Week Myrna Tonkinson from the University of WA has written this piece in Eureka St lamenting the lack of progress and commitment by Governments in addressing Aboriginal disadvantage.

Sarah Burnside on the Politics of Envy in a new Gilded age

Wealth and income are now more unevenly distributed in Australia than at any time since the 1920's. The last 2 decades has seen an unparalleled redistribution of wealth upwards.

Income and wealth are now concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who have reaped the benefits of economic growth by disproportionately increasing their personal wealth. This has been at the expense of Australians at the other end of the income scale whose share of personal wealthy has declined relative to high income earners.

In a piece in the Australian e-Journal Online Opinion Sarah Burnside discusses the linguistic and political strategies deployed by the powerful (and their courtiers) to counter and limit restrict discussion about inequality and wealth redistribution in Australia.

The Politics of Envy
Sarah Burnside*

Recently, Education Minister Julia Gillard unveiled a plan for an “education overhaul” to review the funding for all Australian private and public schools. The Australian noted that Gillard's emphatic statement that “this is not about taking money from schools” represented a desire to “avoid a repeat of the divisive 2004 election campaign debate about private school funding that destroyed Mark Latham”s leadership”

Former ALP leader Mark Latham was pilloried in 2004 for inciting a “politics of envy” in calling for redistributive funding of schools. His plan to divert funding from 67 elite private schools to needy government schools was slammed as a “private schools hit list” – terminology recently revived by Coalition education spokesperson Christopher Pyne. Then-Prime Minister John Howard suggested that Latham's educational policies were “based on class and envy”. Similarly, former teacher, writer and campaigner Kevin Donnelly argued that the ALP schools policy was “guilty of the tall poppy syndrome – let”s attack those schools that achieve the best academic results and that promote values that parents want”. Journalistic wisdom, citing the 2004 election as an example, holds that the ALP is vulnerable to indulging in the “politics of envy” and must guard against such tendencies if it is to enjoy electoral success. Anthony Ashbolt, a senior lecturer in politics, has subjected this “perplexing myth” to analysis, concluding that the policy had been electorally popular and that a combination of Liberal Party spin and soundbite reporting had buried it. In particular, Ashbolt charged that the ALP had mistakenly “managed to convince itself of the mythology surrounding its electoral loss”.

The expression “the politics of envy” requires unraveling. Such language is arguably symptomatic of the way real and substantive concerns about the kind of society we live in are reframed by the right in terms of personality, character and “values”. The reframe is powerful; arguing in favour of envy would appear as difficult as opposing hope, faith or charity. The identification of ideological difference with mere character flaws not only reinforces the banality of contemporary political debate. More dangerously, such reframing draws the life out of the arguments of the social democratic left. If a desire to create a more egalitarian society boils down to mere envy, then social democrats can be nothing more than a group of jealous people with an inexplicable inability to appreciate the fine things that capitalism has to offer their fellow citizens. Rather than a commitment to see all Australia’s children receive an optimum education, the ALP is characterised as having a (seemingly irrational) dislike of private schools. Tony Abbott queried Gillard’s call for an inquiry into schools funding, warning voters: “You can’t trust these people. They don’t like private education…if they’re re-elected, as sure as night follows day, they will try to cut private-schools’ funding."
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Similarly, former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has suggested that the ALP simply disliked the well-to-do. Nelson criticised the Rudd government’s first budget in 2008, which introduced means testing for the baby bonus, tighter thresholds for family tax benefits and an increase of the threshold for the Medicare levy surcharge to $100,000 per year for singles and $150,000 for couples. For Nelson, these measures were an attempt to “appeal to the politics of envy and resentment”. Nelson charged not only that the ALP had “always been opposed to people who do well”, but used extraordinarily emotive language in concluding that the Party had a “deep-seated vendetta” against them. The debate thus shifts from ideological ground to that of personality flaws, allowing the Liberals to avoid enunciating their own position in any depth by effectively accusing their opponents of mere mean-spiritedness. The real debates that underlie these issues – differences as to conceptions of the nature and extent of the state’s role in providing education and health to citizens – remain stagnant.

Some parallels can be drawn between the accusations of “envy”, “resentment” and “dislike” leveled at aspiring educational and tax reformers and the now-ubiquitous charge of “elitism” favoured by commentators such as Janet Albrechtsen. Thomas Frank, a journalist and editor of The Baffler, has written perceptively of the success of the Republican Party and its allies in linking liberals (in the American sense) inextricably with snobbery and elitism in the public mind. In his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Frank notes that a repackaging of social class was effected in America using the notion of a “liberal elite”. Such a notion, he argues, is “not intellectually robust”, has “never been enunciated with anything approaching scholarly rigor” and falls apart “under any sort of systematic scrutiny”. However, the trope of the elite liberal remains a powerful tool to sidestep ideological difference in favour of illusory generalizations as to personality. Frank cites a particularly instructive passage by the right-wing American writer Ann Coulter, who simplifies liberals as follows: “They promote immoral destructive behavior because they are snobs, they embrace criminals because they are snobs, they oppose tax cuts because they are snobs, they adore the environment because they are snobs”.

Parties of the right, on the other hand, have learned how to portray themselves as down-to-earth, abandoning or downplaying the patrician outlook of traditional upper-class Tories. John Howard’s self-assessment as “an average Australian bloke” appealed to a longstanding egalitarian instinct that has resonated throughout Australia’s history. That the kind of egalitarianism offered by Howard was one of character and personality rather than of economic equality sits comfortably within a Liberal Party tradition that eschewed class divisions. Professor of Politics Judith Brett noted in her 2005 Quarterly Essay Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party’s Australia, Howard’s promise to govern “for all of us” echoed Robert Menzies’ commitment to the “forgotten people” of the middle classes and his conviction that: “We don’t have classes here as in England”.

In addition to sniping from the Liberals, Gillard has recently been criticised by Latham himself for wasting time on “stunts and trivia”, most notably the MySchool website, and for “putting politics ahead of policy”. In particular, Latham charged that Gillard had fallen prey to a “special kind of cynicism” in delaying an announcement of $11 million in funding for disadvantaged schools for 18 months, then releasing it “when she faced a PR battle over MySchool”. The MySchool website has been problematic for the left; the Australian Education Union has slammed national NAPLAN testing and its members have refused to administer them. The Union is supportive of the funding review announced last week, however, with federal president Angelo Gavrielatos calling for a new funding system to “ensure that the Federal Government meets its primary obligation to adequately and appropriately fund public schools”.

If the ALP accepts that redistributive policies on public education will inevitably constitute electoral poison, it will grant control of the debate to those who would deny the inherent value of substantive equality. Gillard would do well to refuse the reframe and respond vigorously in rebutting knee-jerk responses about “the politics of envy”.

*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.

Sarah Burnside on market logic and welfare reform

Most weeks Sarah Burnside*, a West Australian native title lawyer and writer, reflects on State and national issues in national online publications such as Eureka St, New Matilda and Online Opinion. A previous piece she wrote on the WA mining boom was published on this blog (and contains links to many of her writings).

In the piece published below Sarah analyzes Tony Abbott's recent statements on his plan to reform disability pension arrangements. Like Kevin Rudd before him, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is engaged in a concerted political strategy to re-brand his party's three decades long embrace of punitive neoliberal social policies under the banner of 'compassionate conservativism'. But the contradictions are always evident, as Sarah Burnside points out in this important piece.

What is also interesting is the silence of Tony Abbott, and all those who argue the urgency of welfare reform, over the bigger problem of 'corporate welfare' for corporations and business and the provision of generous 'middle class welfare' by the Howard government (of which Abbott was a key figure) and subsequent Rudd Government.

Tony Abbott's proposal to reform the Disability Support Pension
by Sarah Burnside
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott drew media attention recently for proposing a 'welfare crackdown' to include compulsory work-for-the-dole schemes and higher threshold for eligibility for disability pensions. With respect to the latter, Abbott proposed a review by the National Audit Office to determine more stringent eligibility rules for the disability pension and suggested that recipients with 'less serious medical conditions' be required to undergo annual medical reassessments and sit two interviews each year to 'encourage them into employment'. Currently, 700,000 Australians receive the disability pension. Abbott estimates that around one-third of these people have conditions he would class as 'less serious'.

The Centrelink website explains that eligibility for the Disability Support Pension (DSP) is determined by reference to a set of criteria and usually requires a report from a person's doctor or specialist, and a job capacity assessment. People may be eligible if they are unable to work for15 hours or more per week at or above the relevant minimum wage or be reskilled for such work for the next two years because of illness, injury or disability, or if they are permanently blinded.

Unlike previous Coalition rhetoric on welfare recipients, which tended to damn them as 'bludgers', Abbott's language is more sophisticated, being couched in terms of care. In his 2009 book Battlelines, Abbott posited that 'allowing people who could readily work to stay out of the workforce for long periods is cruelty,not compassion'. This is a classic example of 'compassionate conservatism', a trope employed by UK Tories and US Republicans to varying success in the past decade to counter perceptions of the Right's heartlessness. The implication is that progressives are ideologically wedded to the welfare state but have little empathy for those who are dependent on it; conservatives alone manifest genuine concern for those members of the community. David Penberthy of The Punch supports Abbott, writing:

Apparently it's better to maintain a welfare program that would consign people to a dispiriting life of idolence, exposing them to the mental health anguish that comes with non-participation, rather than ask them some slightly tougher questions about what they would actually do.

The arguments are persuasive- surely no one wants to condemn their fellow citizens to a life with no prospect of employment. Anecdotal evidence suggests that most welfare recipients wish to find employment and that, lacking the social hub of a workplace, they feel isolated and lonely. Several issues are glossed over, though, in the invocation of compassion to justify limiting access to the disability pension.

Firstly, welfare recipients and their families would no doubt challenge the assertion that it is easy to 'qualify' for the disability pension or retain access to it. Interactions with government bureaucracy, involving vast amounts of paperwork, are often frustrating at best and mystifying a worst. Former welfare rights advocate Susie Byers discerns a 'culture of punishment within Centrelink and its parent Department's', born of a 'suspicious pessimism about the motivations and goals of those who are unemployed, raising children, or living with disabilities'. Byers suggests that the process of achieving government benefits is dehumanizing and humiliating, noting that those who claim payments 'expose themselves to invasions of privacy that would make the humblest of aged pensioner feel like a criminal'.

Abbott's suggestion that an audit of the eligibility rules is needed 'to ensure that only those who genuinely deserve the benefit receive it' subtly invokes the stereotype of the bludger without providing any evidence of such exploitation, Generally speaking, it seems likely that any benefit system will attract the self-interested as well as the needy. So be it: this is the price we pay for living in a civilized community that cares for its citizens. To make a whole class of people suffer for the sins of a few- even under the mantle of compassion- would be in this context as in others, profoundly unethical.

Secondly, Abbott's classification of muscular-skeletal and psychological/psychiatric disabilities as the categories within which 'less serious' conditions might be found seems opportunistic. Muscular-skeletal conditions may involve chronic pain which is inherently difficult for external parties to perceive. Similarly, psychological or psychiatric illness is not readily identifiable by bureaucrats seeking to limit entitlements. The nomination of these categories suggests a certain lack of sophistication-if someone's not in a wheelchair or holding a cane they must be capable of holding work. These are people already people vulnerable to accusations of malingering, given the increasing sceptisim about diagnoses of mental illness. It is thus important to note that one cannot qualify for the disability pension by feeling a bit blue. The criteria regarding psychiatric impairment in the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth) specify that mild but regular symptoms which tend to case subjective distress' and give rise to 'minimal interference with function in everyday situations' will not of themselves render one eligible for the pension.

Thirdly, despite the existence of such services as Job Services Australia and the Disability Employment Assistance Services it is far from clear that there is an aequate level of support available to help people with disabilities find jobs and mentor them while in employment. A HREOC National Inquiry into Employment & Disability in 2006 noted that, although 'most people with disability want to work if they have the capacity to do so.. we cannot expect high participation rates if people with disability have work-related expenses that are higher than their potential wages or they cannot access the supports they need'. A 'tightening' of the criteria for access to the disability pension would increase the existing need for serious investment in encourageemnt of flexible workplaces and programs to help people find and stay in employment.

More broadly, there are problems with the prevalent view, integral to Abbott's rhetoric, that employment necessarily imbues people with self-esteem and a sense of purpose and enables them to lead meaningful lives. Such a claim might hold true for skilled workers, including educated professionals such as politicians, or those at the other end of the Australian job market, the prospects are less alluring.

The writer Anne Manne, a trenchant critic of the 'Get to Work neo-liberal program', cited her own experiences of dismal jobs, including a stint as a jillaroo, in her 2008 Quarterly Essay ' Love and Money:The Family and the Free Market'. Manne challenged the view that paid work is inherently fulfilling, noting 'when my university teachers talked of the liberation of work, they did not mean domestic help in rural NSW', but rather-like Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique- 'prestige work'. Self evidently, prestige work is not available to all. Many workplaces are not flexible enough to cater for the needs of people with disabilities, Further there will always be jobs no one wants to do; such roles are filled by the people relegated to being the leftovers of the modern economy.

In her 2005 Griffith Review Essay law Professor Rosemary Hunter traced shifts within the Australian labour market and their effects on family disputes, noting that the 1990s had seen a 'rise of precarious low-quality employment'. Hunter suggested that 'Australia's current low unemployment rate.. does not signal economic prosperity but rather the rise of the working poor, and the phenomenon of labour market churning, whereby people move constantly between unemployment and poorly-paid, casual and part time jobs, which they must accept as a condition of continued support when they are again unemployed'. The superiority of such a life over one on the disability pension is not immediately obvious.

Currently families make up the shortfall in support of people with disabilities: this kind of informal care is characterized by feminist economist Nancy Folbre as the 'invisible heart' that combines with the 'invisible hand of the market' to render our society functional. Reliance on the family, however, is not sustainable. Its time for a real debate about how people on government benefits can be supported to live meaningful lives, including assistance securing employment where appropriate. The seductive language of dignity, choice and productivity employed by Abbott is unlikely to assist such debate.

*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.

Just who benefits from mining booms?

(image courtesy of the ABC)

In Western Australian the mining and resources industry is all powerful. But there are voices questioning the triumphalist narrative that the industry supposedly delivers benefits for all Western Australians equally.

Sarah Burnside* is one such voice and has published a challenging and important piece on Online Opinion. Sarah's other writings can be found at New Matilda,
University of WA Institute of Advanced Studies and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

The benefits of mining or not, in Boomtown, WA (published in Online Opinion, Thursday January 21 2010)

By Sarah Burnside

In their excellent work It’s Still in My Heart, This is My Country: The Single Noongar Claim History, the historians John Host and Chris Owen noted that the colony of Western Australia was initially:

... a capitalist venture that sent the weakest to the wall and allowed the strongest - those with stamina and adaptability but more importantly, assets, connections and a certain ruthlessness - to flourish.

Western Australia remains a state firmly wedded to market principles and in thrall to the romance of a certain rugged individualism; the mining industry occupies particular pride of place. To say that WA is pro-mining is to comprehensively understate the situation. In recent years, the mining boom - fuelled by Chinese demand for iron ore - has made the state an economic success story, if not a full-fledged capitalist fairytale.

The overriding narrative is triumphal: “WA has the best performing State economy in the nation as it shrugs off the global financial slump and enters the new year ready to reassert itself as Australia's economic powerhouse”. Late last year, a conference entitled In the Zone was held in Perth. The name referred to the time zone shared “by Perth, 60 per cent of the world’s population, and the nations that promise the greatest economic growth of the twenty-first century”. Having long been so far from the action, the isolated capital city is now asserting itself: rest of the world, meet Boomtown.

Perth has eclipsed Melbourne as the second-most affluent city in Australia, retail outlets from the likes of Gucci, Tiffany & Co and Louis Vuitton have popped up in the CBD, and the local media spent much of the last fortnight preoccupied with the fate of a yellow Lamborghini under the State’s “hoon laws”.

So far, so banal: money is being made, people are spending it and the cogs and wheels in the economic system are turning. Although there are legitimate concerns (expressed most prominently by public intellectual Clive Hamilton) about the conceptual confusion of consumerism with citizenship, economic growth is regarded as a boon for obvious reasons.

There have been several reports in recent years, however, of the uneven spread of benefits arising out of the mining boom, in Western Australia and elsewhere. Peter Kenyon, a Professor of Economic Policy at Curtin University, has cast doubt on the assumption that what is good for the mining industry is good for everyone, saying: “What tends to happen in these circumstances is those that are directly benefited through the mining industry and indirectly benefited through the mining industry tend to do very well but the significant proportion of the population do not do well.”

Professor Kenyon’s argument is supported by research (PDF 258KB) conducted by the Australia Institute in 2009 which concluded that overall, “the mining boom seems to have had very little positive impact on the wellbeing of the majority of Australians other than those directly affected by the expansion in the mining industry”.

Similarly, Committee for Perth spokeswoman Marion Fulker noted in late 2009 that “there are some disparities between those earning very good incomes and those not … I would say the divide between the have and the have nots is increasing”.

The divide to which Ms Fulkner refers is becoming increasingly apparent: the 2009 Counting the Homeless Report found that the rate of homelessness in WA increased by 14 per cent between 2001 and 2006. The division between Perth and the regions was starkly illustrated by the spike in homelessness rates in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions, which increased by 58 per cent during this period. The report’s author, Dr Chris Chamberlain, attributed these rates in part to the mining boom, which saw many workers moving to the northwest and finding a lack of accommodation that led to them “sleeping in their cars … sleeping in shipping containers”. Homelessness is also particularly prevalent among Aboriginal people in WA - in 2008, a survey of Broome residents undertaken by the local council revealed that 27 per cent of the Aboriginal people surveyed were homeless.

It is also commonly noted that Aboriginal people in remote and regional areas have not substantively benefited from successive mining booms within their traditional country, a fact often erroneously invoked to criticise the Native Title Act, which was predicated not on social justice grounds but on the recognition of rights held under traditional systems of law and custom.

The poverty in the midst of plenty (PDF 3.93MB) shocks us out of the complacency engendered by the comfortable Australian rhetoric of the “fair go”. Responses, from indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike, include sincere hopes that Aboriginal people will “share in the mining spoils”, “get out of poverty, get off welfare … have a better life”.

Mining, then, rather problematically assumes the status of Great New Hope for Aboriginal People. Such a mantle ignores the diversity of indigenous groups, assumes a monolithic “solution” will fix a loosely defined problem, and rather conveniently lets State, Federal and Territory governments off the hook.

It must be acknowledged that the resources industry is an easy target for glib critique. Issues are rarely as simple as environment v mining or traditional owners v mining: progressives and conservatives alike paint skewed pictures of complicated disputes. Some devotees of “the free flow of capital” have accused commentators on the “mining boom” of expressing an “elitist snobbery towards miners”.

The problem is not the industry itself, so much as our inflated expectations of what it can achieve. Reports about the “downside of the boom” are newsworthy because they are deemed counterintuitive - man bites dog; resources boom fails to deliver equitable levels of wealth. The question is: how surprising is it that the “trickle-down” theory fails to fulfil its promise? Do we really expect mining companies - whose primary purpose is the generation of wealth for their shareholders - to further an egalitarian state or “solve” ongoing post-colonial problems, without some kind of regulatory nudge in the right direction? Whether with respect to mining or any other area of wealth creation, the news that market capitalism does not automatically lead to equality of outcomes is hardly earth-shattering.

The past few decades have seen a gradual blurring of the roles of government and private industry in Australia; under neoliberal thought, the former ought to contract to allow the latter to flourish. It is worth restating that it is the role of government, rather than of industry, to safeguard citizens’ rights and their ability to enjoy those rights on an equal basis. This is not to say that private industry is a pernicious force; merely to acknowledge, as did humanities academic David McKnight in his 2005 book Beyond Right and Left, that markets “require a strong framework of law and civil society to restrain their dynamic but destructive tendencies”.

The reports quoted above indicate that what is good for mining companies isn’t necessarily good for all of us. What is often skirted around, however, is the fact that a buoyant economy will not, absent government intervention, reward all Australians equally either. The boom raises questions about what kind of society we want, about the concept of equality and the role of government in achieving it. In WA as elsewhere, our egalitarian self-image needs more than a bright new coat of paint in time for Australia Day: it requires some serious examination.

*Sarah Burnside is a West Australian solicitor with an interest in history, native title, nationalism and politics. She works at the Yamatji Marlpa Aboriginal Corporation (YMAC), which represents native title claim groups in the Yamatji and Pilbara regions of Western Australia. The views expressed in her articles do not necessarily reflect those of YMAC.