Building a more compassionate society

In the debate following the budget almost all commentary has been about who should have their taxes cut and by how much. The Coalition’s proposals to give massive handouts to the undeserving rich are obscene: the Labor party at least recognises this as an obscenity.

The fact the ALP opposes the inequity of the distribution of Government tax cuts on grounds of principle is lost on the Coalition’s thinking. They can only see a gain in terms of putting money in people’s pockets and, in this instance, for reasons that are at best obscure, want to put much, much more money in the pockets of the rich than those of the poor.

Both Government and Opposition however start from the neo-liberal premise that individuals want to have as much money as possible to spend on personal consumption and that low taxes and small government are a good thing. All that separates them - and yes it is important even if secondary - is how the low taxes are to be levied across the population.

Peter Costello implied on the ABC’s 7.30 Report that the current proportion of GNP on tax is somehow about right, maybe even too high. Yet there is nothing magical in economic terms about the size of the Australian public sector. It is very low in comparison to most OECD countries. It is much smaller than in countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, which many of us recognise as not only having well managed economies, but also as being affluent, caring and decent societies. Indeed it can be argued that the more willing a society is to pay tax, the more socially decent and caring it is likely to be.

In the post budget debate the benefits derived from taxation hardly get a mention. It is as if our taxes disappeared into some black hole, lost for ever and for all useful purposes. Yet as Oliver Wendall Holmes, the US Chief Justice stated in the late 19th century: “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society”.

There are those benefits of taxation that are fairly obvious: our public hospitals; our pharmaceutical benefits scheme (PBS) that helps all of us when sick but especially the poor to afford otherwise unaffordable drugs; our state schools; our defence forces; our ability as a nation to contribute to the poor of the world through the overseas aid budget; and many other social and political activities that too often get mentioned only in negative terms.

So while it is true that the costs of the PBS are blowing out, so too are the benefits. Welfare benefits are going to an increasingly larger proportion of the population. Why is it assumed that that is bad? Why can’t we have universal benefits but also more progressive taxation thereby doing away with means testing of benefits and fostering solidarity in the community?

The list of social policies supported by taxation is substantial. It is a list which importantly is also descriptive of our ability as a nation to look after not just the disadvantaged but also the social fabric of Australia.

The budget fares badly in terms of social decency. The Government’s attitude to disabled people takes the “Thatcherite” philosophy of ”stand on your own two feet” one step further by demanding that they “stand”, whether they have two good feet or not. The single mindedness of the Government in pursuing their neo-liberal dreams now extends to chasing single parents into the work force. The 2005 version of Animal Farm reads “two parents good; one parent bad”.

Stigmatising the disadvantaged is taken yet further in the neglect of the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal people as mutual obligation deals and Shared Responsibility Agreements are used as still other means of oppressing the oppressed. Were there any mutual obligations placed on the rich to get their massive tax cuts last week? Has the government any Shared Responsibility Agreements signed with them? The budget itself provides but a few crumbs to aid Aboriginal people. The Community Development and Employment Program (CDEP) is being converted by the Government into a solely market employment scheme and the CD becomes history.

The policy of stigmatisation and meanness of spirit knows no bounds when Senator Vanstone and DIMIA (two very separate entities it now seems, at least to the Minister) can continue to make the lives of asylum seekers and detainees miserable as they try to prove their nationality and credentials. As Kate Gauthier of A Just Australia stated in The Weekend Australian (May 14-15, 2005) in the wake of the Rau and Solon cases: “If immigration could not tell that these women were Australian, how can they tell if someone is a Pakistani or an Afghan?”

There is evidence that the attitude of lower taxes at all costs is driven by an uncaring mentality that extends beyond tax policy and across the whole of government policy. From the Government and society the deserving poor get their “deserts” i.e. neglect and an imposed sense of unworthiness because of their disadvantage. Meanwhile the undeserving rich turn their backs on the poor and blame them for their poverty. The need to listen to the voices of the poor is nowhere put better than in the words of Mark Peel in his book The Lowest Rung on the plight of the poor in Australia:

You can pretend that it's all envy, and you can say that we're all equal and we all get what we deserve. Or you could listen to the prophecy and the challenge poor people don't always dare to proclaim on their own. That they are people. That they are citizens. That they have rights. That they don't have to deserve anything and keep showing how grateful they are. That they shouldn’t have to be heroes or victims because, in a decent society, that isn’t what entitles them to justice. Most of all, that you can’t do justice if you don't listen to the people who know injustice. It's time for them to be heard.

The imperative of cutting taxes needs to be stopped not just because it is destroying our universities and our public health care system but because it is destroying the social values of this country. Do we want our universities to be run according to the values of corporations? In my own university I am eligible for a customer service of the month award just like an employee of Coles. In the recent Woodside, Lightfoot, Curtin debacle, my university handed over money to an Iraqi hospital “on behalf of Woodside”. Nowhere along the line did it become the role of universities to act “on behalf of” a corporation especially with respect to handing over money. And why are the universities getting into bed with the corporates anyway? Not because they want to but because of the poor level of funding by government.

With respect to our health care system, the principle of equity which was originally built into Medicare is under threat. The 30 per cent private health insurance rebate went mainly into the pockets of the rich and did little for health. The blowout of the Medicare safety net is caused primarily not by the poor but by the rich.

Do we really want to follow the US neo-liberal road and have a large proportion of our population ineligible for health care and a very large proportion of our national income being spent on such inequitable and inefficient health care?

Where are we heading as a nation? Well at least partly down the US road, as the US Free Trade Agreement (there is a misnomer for what is a bilateral agreement that excludes every other nation!) throws the compassion of our PBS to the neo-liberal wolves of the pharmaceutical companies and their supposed competition in the market place. We fail to invest enough in our social infrastructure, especially in training skilled staff, and then “liberalise” our immigration policies to allow us to steal yet more doctors and nurses from, for example, sub Saharan Africa without any compensation for the costs of their training, nor any thought seemingly for the good they might otherwise have done in their own AIDS ridden and poverty stricken countries.

While the UN argues for a paltry 0.7 per cent of national income for aid budgets to poor countries, the mean spiritedness of the Australian Government results in us giving less than 0.3 per cent. That is less than 3 dollars in every 1000. This is in spite of the fact that so many of the world’s poor have to attempt to survive on less than US$1 a day. So the annual tax cuts announced in the Budget for each rich Aussie are equivalent to what about six of the world’s poor have to survive on for a year.

What also needs to be recognised here is that any cuts in the public sector or failures to spend the surplus on better public services hit and hurt the poor much more than the rich. Many sorts of benefits that the poor get from the public sector cannot be obtained or only obtained with difficulty by them in the market place. For them health care is unaffordable outside the public sector. The rich can opt for private schooling for their kids - and even more expensive private schooling in the wake of the tax cuts announced in the Budget; the poor still have to make do with the resource-starved state schools. Again as Barbara Hocking of SANE Australia argued in The Weekend Australian, for mentally ill people: “What is sadly lacking in Australia today is good supportive accommodation and rehabilitation services” unless of course one is rich. These are not available in the market place for the poor. Private affluence and public squalor may not yet have been achieved but we are getting there. What a squalid society we are building.

So it is not just that the tax proposals are hideously regressive; the impact of not spending the surplus on new and better services in the public sector is also regressive. It is a double whammy on the poor of Australia. And Aboriginal people must look on and wonder.

Holmes got it right. Paying taxes is about buying a civilised society. The only real question about the Government’s Budget and the Opposition’s response is this. Is the individualistic neo-liberal philosophy underlying these tax cuts based on an uncaring mean spirited society or are these uncaring mean spirited tax cuts aimed at fostering a yet more individualistic neo-liberal society?

Whichever, it is an obscene chicken and an obscene egg.