Building a more compassionate society

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.