It’s more than a year after the $26 million, 21 month-long trade union royal commission handed down its report, and the gloss has well and truly come off two of the commission’s star anti-union witnesses.
Key witness and Class 1 Form company boss Elias Taleb has been fined $30,000 after a judge found that he had underpaid a former employee over a three year period. Taleb, an eager participant in the royal commission union witch-hunt, declined to appear at the recent court proceedings where it was his company’s practices under scrutiny.
The bosses of ACT construction company, Capital Hydraulics and Drains were also witnesses at the commission. For the benefit of the commissioner, Joe Lo Re and Nikki Lo Re recounted their tale of being bullied to sign an enterprise agreement with the CFMEU that included income protection and redundancy entitlements for their workers.
Explaining how they always had their workers’ best interests at heart, the Lo Re’s told the commission that “there’s nothing more important than paying your staff”. Their company collapsed in April owing hundreds of thousands to its employees. The CFMEU is calling for an audit of Capital Hydraulics, which also owes millions to the tax office.
The royal commission’s police task-force has been having a difficult time of late too, despite receiving a $21 million funding boost late last year. Its very public 2015 raid of the ACT CFMEU office has been found to have been “unlawful”, and the federal court has also criticised the “unreasonable” conduct of the police while raiding the CFMEU’s Brisbane office. Canberra CFMEU organiser Johhny Lomax is suing police over his high-profile arrest on a charge of blackmail. The case against Lomax was dismissed when police prosecutors presented no evidence to the court. Charges have been dismissed or dropped in at least seven other cases pursued by the royal commission task-force in recent months.
Then there’s the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), the anti-union goon squad that all the royal commission beat-ups were supposed to justify. In March, federal court justice Tony North criticised the “terrible waste of everybody’s time” that was the $100,000 dollar ABCC case against two CFMEU officials for, in justice North’s words, “having a cup of tea with a mate”.
North said it was “astounding” that ABCC commissioner Nigel Hadgkiss had briefed barristers, gone through two years of submissions and conducted hearings with dozens of witnesses over “such a minuscule, insignificant affair”. North said that, “This is all external forces that are beating up what’s just a really ordinary situation that amounts to virtually nothing”.
Unfortunately the anti-union witch hunts of the ABCC and the royal commission police task-force don’t just waste time and money. They are an attempt to hobble one of the most active unions in the country, and intimidate union members out of standing up for their rights.
The concerted campaign against the construction union makes it easier for bosses to flout the law and cut corners – which can have fatal consequences. In the year the commission was established, 29 workers were killed in the construction industry. While the royal commission was holding its hearings in Canberra in 2015, Work Safe Australia released a report that revealed that Canberra construction sites are the most dangerous in the country.
Speaking to the media after another recent ABCC case against the construction union was dismissed, ACT CFMEU secretary Dean Hall said, “We will never stop standing up for safety and the community, no matter how hard the government want to send their secret police after us”.

Dean Maloney

Union witch-hunt continues to unravel as major players exposed

Hundreds of people rallied in Melbourne on 18 February to support refugee rights and to denounce the immigration policies of the Trump administration and the Turnbull government.
Addressing the protest, federal Greens MP Adam Bandt said of the fight against racism: “It’s going to be up to every one of us who knows that no matter where you come from, we’re all equal”.
Placards calling for “No walls, no bans, no camps” connected the racist “Muslim ban” executive order of president Trump with the brutal treatment of asylum seekers and refugees in Australian-run detention centres.
Comedian Corinne Grant, speaking on behalf of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, spoke about the union’s campaign to free journalist Behrouz Boochani, actor Mehdi Savari, and the man known as Eaten Fish, from the Manus Island detention centre.
Eaten Fish is the pen name of a 25-year-old award-winning Iranian cartoonist. For more than three years, the Australian government has overseen his incarceration in appalling conditions.
Eaten Fish suffers mental illnesses that have been compounded by his detention. He sometimes scrubs himself until he bleeds. On 31 January, he went on hunger strike. In one message to advocates he said: “I think you should give me the right to die and stop this torture and suffers and pains. I have no energy left to tell my stories to Australians anymore”. 
When he decided to break the strike on 18 February, he weighed only 47kg.
There is a growing campaign to save Eaten Fish. Cartoonists and media workers have been leading the way, demanding freedom for their detained colleague. 
There is an avalanche of solidarity sketches by cartoonists from across the globe circulating on social media using the hashtags #addafish and #EatenFish. 
Last year, Cartoonists Rights Network International (CRNI) gave Eaten Fish its Courage in Editorial Cartooning award. “CRNI believes that his body of work will be recognised as some of the most important in documenting and communicating the human rights abuses and excruciating agony of daily life in this notorious and illegal prison camp”, said the organisation.
On Christmas Eve, Faysal Ishak Ahmed, a 27-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker, died from a seizure after months of medical neglect. This was not the first death on Manus. It is urgent that we build the fight to free Eaten Fish, to close these torture camps and to bring the refugees here, before the Australian government kills another young man seeking protection.
How you can help 
Draw a fish and share on social media using #addafish #EatenFish and #BringThemHere. If you work in media, add your name to the union campaign at <a href="http://www.meaa.org/campaigns/bring-them-here">meaa.org/campaigns/bring-them-here</a>. For more info on the campaign visit <a href="http://www.eatenfish.com">eatenfish.com</a> and <a href="http://www.cartoonistsrights.org">cartoonistsrights.org</a>.

Liz Walsh

Save Eaten Fish

Some of the biggest corporations in the US collectively have stashed US$2.1 trillion in offshore tax havens, according to a new report.
“Shell games 2015: the use of offshore tax havens by Fortune 500 companies”, published by Citizens for Tax Justice and the US Public Interest Research Group, highlights the massive scale of corporate tax dodging.
The report calculates that the US’s 500 leading companies would owe $620 billion in federal taxes if their cash was held in the United States, rather than offshore. According to the US Census, poverty could be eradicated in the country for less than a third of that amount.
Tax dodging schemes are managed by large and creative accounting departments, which set up shell or subsidiary companies in different countries. Pharmaceutical company Pfizer, for example, holds $74 billion offshore and operates a web of 151 subsidiaries in tax havens.
The Cayman Islands is apparently a firm favourite for companies looking for a haven: Ugland House, a five-storey building in George Town, the capital, is the registered address of no less than 18,857 companies.

Corporate tax dodgers sitting on trillions

More than 100 people braved cold and rain outside the ACT magistrates’ court on the morning of 5 August to support John Lomax, a CFMEU organiser facing blackmail charges. 
Lomax is alleged to have forced a Canberra painting company to sign an enterprise agreement in April last year. That agreement set hourly wages for employees at $26 an hour, instead of the $17 that the owner of the company claimed he could have paid if he hadn’t signed.
“There are three types of blackmail under the law, I have recently found out”, CFMEU Construction and General Division secretary Dave Noonan told the crowd. “One is blackmail in connection to a public office; it’s not that charge. One is blackmail for personal gain; John Lomax is not charged with blackmail for personal gain. The third is called blackmail causing a loss, and you can see the charge sheet, it’s public. What they say is that by getting those workers a pay rise, John Lomax has caused the employer a loss – and they call that criminal!”
The union movement is understandably worried about the precedent the case could create if he is found guilty. A guard of honour was formed for Lomax, who arrived to chants of “Johnny Lomax here to stay”. The crowd was determined to give him a warm and loud welcome, and flags from several different unions flew above the protest. “I’m here to defend workers’ rights to organise”, Rachel, one of the attendees, told Red Flag. “It’s great to see so many different unions represented here today.”
Lomax entered a not guilty plea. His trial will continue in October.

Unionists rally against criminal charges for organiser

Without major changes, the future will look grim for many retirees, new research suggests.
The University of Canberra National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling report Going the distance: Working longer, living healthier has investigated the impact of Australia’s rising retirement age, which is set to hit 70 in 2035.
“In 2035, the majority of retired or unemployed Australians in their sixties will not have enough superannuation for retirement”, the report says.
“Modelling in this report predicts that in 2035, one in four men and one in five women in their sixties are expected to assess their health as fair or poor.
“For those expected to be in fair or poor health, the majority (65.1 per cent) of men and more than two-thirds (72.1 per cent) of women are likely to be unemployed.”
Many workers will face an impossible situation, both unable to retire and unable to work.
Increases in the retirement age and a weakening of the age pension system have been on the wish list of Australian business for many years. The findings of this new study confirm that, if the Liberals get their way, the future for many workers is grim.

Unable to retire, but unable to work: the Liberals’ future for older Australians

The rooms of Parliament House we­re left dirty on 15 June as cleaning workers took industrial action over pay rates. At 7:30am, cleaners marched out of work and across the Parliament lawns to cheers from a crowd that had assembled to show solidarity. 
Unionists, union officials and supporters from the community provided an honour guard with raised broomsticks. Everyone joined in the cleaning workers’ chant of “The workers united will never be defeated”.
The cleaners voted to strike as part of their fight for a wage increase of $1.80 per hour, which would bring their pay up to $22.90. Since the Abbott government scrapped the Commonwealth Cleaning Services Guidelines, their pay and conditions have stagnated. They have not had a wage rise since 2012.
“The withdrawal of the commonwealth cleaning guidelines means cuts in pay of $6,800 a year for people who clean commonwealth buildings. That is a shameful situation”, United Voice national president Jo-Anne Schofield told the crowd.
United Voice also used the occasion to award the “golden toilet brush” to Joe Hockey. The award is presented yearly to the person or organisation that has done the least to support cleaners. Despite the award being well earned by Hockey, who never shies away from a chance to attack those on low incomes, the golden toilet brush is unlikely to find a place on his mantelpiece.

Striking cleaners protest at Parliament House

The government is cracking down. A task force is being created with a senior federal police officer leading the charge.
In a show of bipartisanship senior Liberal and Labor Party figures have both agreed that the problem must be stopped. The problem they’re so keen to confront is not global warming, war, or poverty, but so-called welfare cheats claiming benefits.
Social services minister Scott Morrison has promised to “put a strong welfare cop on the beat”, and Bill Shorten has been quick to add that the ALP doesn’t like welfare fraud either, before helpfully reminding the media that “it is illegal”.
This is only the latest in a long line of crackdowns on welfare recipients. Every year ministerial press releases, TV exposés and newspaper column inches are dedicated to worrying about “dole bludgers” and scheming welfare fraudsters.
A quick glance at the facts shows just how out of proportion this attention is. Of the 7.3 million people who received Centrelink or family assistance payments last year, just over 1,000 were investigated for potential fraud.
 “Unfortunately, it is a common misconception that there are significant levels of fraud in the social security system”, National Welfare Rights Network President Kate Beaumont said in response to the government plan.
“Recent research commissioned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions found that people think that 17 percent of social security recipients are prosecuted for ‘welfare fraud’ whereas in fact, the real proportion is just 0.02 per cent.”
The social services minister knows the facts and figures. Talking up the non-existent “problem” of welfare fraud helps create a sense that those who receive social security payments are a problem, or are undeserving of an income. For the government and its big business friends, it’s extremely useful to give the impression that “bludgers” and “cheats” are found in the dole queues, rather than corporate boardrooms and mansions.
Who are the real crooks in our society? There has been recent attention on the billions of dollars shifted around by major corporations in tax minimisation schemes. But under capitalism this sort of creative accounting is just window dressing for a more pervasive and fundamental theft carried out by the bosses.
Capitalism is based on systematic cheating and robbery. Every workplace, from a sweatshop to an office block, is based on the exploitation of workers. It is wholesale theft. But, unlike the lords and barons of old who openly took what others produced, the exploitation at the heart of business and industry is disguised, normalised and perfectly legal.
Company owners and investors don’t do the work or create the goods. Often they don’t even do the paperwork. Yet the value that is created ends up under their control. Mining magnates like Gina Rinehart have added billions to their net worth without ever having to set foot in a mine.
For the rest of us, it is very different. When we go to work, we produce a certain amount of value per day. We only ever receive a fraction of that back as pay. We work part of the day creating the value that is repaid to us in the form of wages, and spend the rest working just for the boss’s benefit. It’s no more fair or equal than it was for the peasants of Europe centuries ago, who were forced to work for free on their lord’s estate.
It is clear that something exploitative is happening in the sweatshops where workers are paid so little they can’t even afford to buy the goods that their labour created. But exploitation isn’t confined to the lowest paid workplaces.
Even in the comparatively well paid Australian mining industry Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for 2008-09 (during the mining boom) showed that the mining companies made on average $470,000 in profit per worker. But labour costs were only $130,000 per worker.
That the workers of the world create the wealth that the rich steal and hoard is confirmed in every strike. When miners in the Bowen Basin went on strike in 2012, BHP lost billions of dollars and the company tried every trick they knew to force the workers back. Without workers no new value is created and the flow of profit stops.
On the other hand, if the major investors in BHP decided to spend the rest of their lives on holiday nothing would change.
In our society the greatest thieves of all are revered, while the people who actually worked to create the wealth often are demonised.
Corporate crooks such as Alan Bond are venerated by respectable society, and state funerals are held for the most successful exploiters and bludgers like Kerry Packer. In reality, the bloated bank balances and business fortunes of today’s rich are no less revolting than the blubber on an old feudal lord, who grows fat while those who work his land starve.

Corporate cheats are the real problem

The child care changes at the centre of the 2015 federal budget have come under harsh criticism for targeting many low-income families.
The government has committed to spend an extra $3.5 billion over four years on child care and families assistance, but in a move described by Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young as “blackmail”, ministers have confirmed that the spending is linked to the Senate agreeing to severe cuts to the family tax benefit.
The family tax benefit cuts were roundly condemned when first raised in the 2014 budget. They would stop payments to single-income families when children turn six. Under the new package, stay-at-home parents will also lose all child care subsidies if their household income is over $65,000. Parents will be required to do eight hours a fortnight of training, study or work to qualify for child care support.
“As a total package, the reforms to family and child care payments are unbalanced”, said Australian Council of Social Services CEO Cassandra Goldie. “Very low income families are being asked to foot the bill for generous subsidies to those who are already doing well financially.
“In addition, the package does not strike the right balance between workforce participation and child development, with some vulnerable children worse off. It is difficult to reconcile the generous assistance being extended to families in the top 25 percent of incomes with the severe cuts to payments for families struggling to make ends meet.”
The Liberals’ key concern with the child care and families package is workforce participation. The government’s page-long media release on the package makes no fewer than 10 references to workforce participation or helping parents re-enter the job market.
Just like the hated 2014 federal budget, it seems the key way the government plans to “help” low-income people back into the workforce is by threatening yet more cuts and deeper poverty.

Still trying to slug low-income families

For months, the media was saturated with accounts of the Gallipoli landing; TV schedules were filled with documentaries and dramas about the campaign and the lives of the soldiers who were sent to fight.
Politicians and generals took to podiums on ANZAC day, as they do every year, to make speeches about the importance of remembering and how Australia has been defined by its military adventures. Gallipoli “shaped Australia”, says Brendan Nelson, director of the Australian War Memorial and former federal Liberal leader.
Far from the official dignitaries, another history was remembered this year. Forced to the back of Canberra’s ANZAC Day parade, Aboriginal activists and their supporters assembled to remember the wars that are never mentioned from the stage, but which more profoundly shaped Australia.
The Frontier Wars lasted more than 140 years as the First Nations stood against the colonial invasion of their lands. In Queensland, where the wars were the bloodiest, recent studies estimate that 66,680 people perished, more than 65,000 of whom were Aboriginal.
The Australian War Memorial, one of the largest in the world, refuses to recognise the Frontier Wars and contains no mention of the fallen. Entire sections of bookshops are dedicated to Australian military history, but it’s often impossible to find even one history of the Frontier Wars among them. They have been whitewashed.
“If you want to know why we’re here just read these signs.” Ghillar Michael Anderson, who leads the Canberra march, points to placards held by the participants. Each tells some of the history that Australia’s ruling class is so keen for us to forget: “1867, Goulbolba Hill Massacre. 300 Aboriginal people, including all the women and children, shot dead or drowned”; “1838, Myall Creek Massacre. 28 Gumilaroi people killed”; “1790-1816, Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars. Pemulwuy leading the Eora, Dharug and Tharama people. 200 plus killed resisting white settlement”.
The marchers aren’t allowed on the official ANZAC parade, so the plan was to follow behind the last official contingent and lay a wreath at the War Memorial to commemorate those who died in the defence of their lands. As the march starts, onlookers clap and show their support, others take photos of the lead banner: “Lest we forget the Frontier Wars”.
But we have hardly moved 100 metres when the Federal Police block the path, forcing us to stop before we reach the bigger crowds.
Fred Hooper, chairman of the Murrawarri nation and an ex-navy submariner, carries the wreath toward the memorial on his own and is forced back by police. “You’re not part of the authorised march”, they tell him. “They don’t want you here”.
“What law did I break by wanting to march like the people I have served with?”, Fred asks. “Why aren’t I allowed to march?”
The police respond by threatening him with arrest.
Another Aboriginal man appealed to the small crowd of onlookers: “We’re not allowed to remember our people, on our land!”
The police respond: “If you continue in this manner you will be arrested.” He refuses to be silenced and the police try and grab him. More police come over. The march to remember the Frontier Wars is stopped. “We’re only half way up ANZAC Avenue”, Graeme Dunstan, long time political activist and alumnus of the Royal Military College tells me. “There’s a huge crowd ahead of us and they won’t let us go near them.”
Despite all the talk of remembering the past and honouring the dead, the RSL and the War Memorial have no interest in the Frontier Wars. It’s too clearly a reminder of the theft of land and the massacres, the destruction of Aboriginal society and culture. Those were the events that really shaped Australia.
The stopping of the march is also a reminder that the war on Aboriginal people is still being waged.

Police shut down Aboriginal ANZAC Day march

People are being turned away from community services in alarming numbers, despite life getting harder for those on low incomes.
The Australian Community Sector Survey, released in December by the Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS), reveals that 80 percent of community service organisations are unable to meet demand.
ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie warned that deep funding cuts proposed by the federal government will only increase the strain on the sector. “Our findings are deeply concerning and should ring alarm bells”, she told reporters at the survey’s launch at the Weave Youth and Community service in inner Sydney.
“On the one hand we know that the government is proposing to bring in half a billion [dollars] in cuts to services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals and communities. We also know the federal government is determined to pursue, we believe, over a quarter of a billion in cuts to community services generally,” she said.
“We’re really concerned about the cuts to the community services sector, and we know that we can only support about three quarters of the referrals that we get”, said Shane Brown, CEO of Weave, a community organisation that provides services to socially excluded young people, women, children and families in Sydney. “About 70 percent of the people we work with are Aboriginal and we’re deeply concerned about the federal cuts that might happen to Aboriginal funding … There were originally 150 funded programs, they’re now down to 5 funded programs in the whole of Australia.”
The vast majority of community sector workers surveyed said that, for sole parents, the unemployed and those on low incomes, the quality of life has fallen over the past year.
“We know for example that the amount of food aid that we have to provide has increased by 30 percent in the last 5 years”, Brown said. “That is a big indication that people don’t have enough money. These are people that are living in public housing and just can’t afford food.”
Accommodation services are particularly stretched. “We have great difficulty supporting young people into housing. There just isn’t any housing available … The average cost of living in Sydney is about $230 a week, and if you’re on a benefit of $200 a week you can’t afford a room,” Brown told Red Flag.
“I don’t know what’s happened to the housing agenda, I don’t know what’s happened to public housing, but every day I get up and think to myself, ‘When is the government going to start to build public housing again?’”
Many of the proposed budget cuts have yet to impact on social services, but changes to the income support system by successive federal governments have been a major driver of increased stress and poverty among people on low incomes. “The Newstart [unemployment] allowance is $36 a day because of the hopeless indexation”, Goldie told Red Flag. “More and more single parent families have been taken off the single parenting payment, and this has meant in the order of $60 to over $100 a week less income, you can imagine the big difference that made.”
Scott Morrison has now been appointed community services minister, and funding cuts have been announced for National Shelter (Australia’s peak housing advocacy organisation), Community Housing Federation, and Homelessness Australia. The federal government is crying poor, but social workers are far from convinced.
“Corporate welfare is the thing I’m most concerned about”, Brown said. “The amount of money spent on corporate welfare, propping up banks and other institutions, is much greater than what is spent on the community sector.”
One single mother who relies on community services told Red Flag: “It’s awful … These cuts won’t just affect the people using the service – it hurts the community as a whole.” She had been with Weave Youth and Community services for 2 years. “I sought help elsewhere but they couldn’t see me because of the demand”, she said.
“To think that in the future they might not be able to offer these services is just wrong … it has meant the world to me.”

Union witch-hunt continues to unravel as major players exposed

Save Eaten Fish

Corporate tax dodgers sitting on trillions

Unionists rally against criminal charges for organiser

Unable to retire, but unable to work: the Liberals’ future for older Australians

Striking cleaners protest at Parliament House

Corporate cheats are the real problem

Still trying to slug low-income families

Police shut down Aboriginal ANZAC Day march

Community services swamped by demand, yet more cuts proposed

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