Precarious, unsafe and socially inadequate

Military Spending

Australia uses the euphemism of "Defence spending" to describe our expenditure on equipment and salaries to maintain our war machine. We despatch troops around the world meeting nice people and killing them. Recently our governments have used the military to arrest asylum seekers arriving by sea, shipping them to Pacific Islands where they are incarcerated, slowly driven mad, raped and murdered by private contractors or local thugs.

We could save billions of dollars annually if we processed such asylum seekers on the mainland of Australian. We would save many more billions if we turned our foreign military machine into a true defence department and just safeguarded Australia from invasion.

Conclusion

These proposals do nothing to lower the corporate tax rate in Australia, they do nothing to attract business empires who need to be bribed with tax holidays, massive tax write offs or any of the other corrupt business inducements which have been part and parcel of the neo-liberal extravagance since the mid 1980s. These proposals are about addressing social justice agendas, about fairness, about the equity which all Australians should have in a decent Australian future.

The main purpose of a social security system is to provide emotional, psychological and financial security to people when they are prevented from adequately maintaining themselves. One hundred years of categorical means-tested income support has shown that only universal provision can guarantee the abolition of poverty. A major reason to have a tax system is to fund the welfare state and to provide necessary services and protections the populace requires. Under the proposals outline above we can do both. We don't need to threaten and cajole the least powerful of our citizens. We can assist them by reinventing a generous Commonwealth of Australia committed to social solidarity and universal provision.