A second SBS journalist has been sacked for tweeting something that management didn’t like. Marion Ives has worked for SBS in various roles for the last seven years. On 7 May – the day after she shared an article critical of SBS’s “whitewashing” of the network in pursuit of advertising dollars – she was told she would not receive future shifts.
This latest dismissal comes on the back of Scott McIntyre, an SBS sports journalist, being fired for using Twitter to make some factual points about the causes of World War I, the atomic bombing of Japan and modern ANZAC festivities.
Clearly, the freedom of expression so cherished by those worshippers of the cult of ANZAC is more decorative than functional.
There is no doubt that SBS is feeling the heat from the right wing establishment.
Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull chimed in on Twitter in response to McIntyre’s tweets. He wrote that it was “difficult to think of more offensive or inappropriate comments” and that they were “despicable remarks which deserve to be condemned”.
While invading other countries, because “freedom and democracy”, you’d better not exercise these freedoms on the home front, unless of course you’re about to say something racist.
In 2011, on a day that right wing cultural warrior Andrew Bolt described as “a terrible day for free speech in this country”, a Federal Court judge found Bolt guilty of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act for two articles that were deemed offensive to the Aboriginal community, as well as containing multiple factual errors.
Bolt was not sacked.
In fact, attorney-general George Brandis later defended the “right to be a bigot” in parliament and promised to bring forward “very soon” an amendment to the Racial Discrimination Act, “which will ensure that can never happen in Australia again”.
If you want to keep your job, feel free to express your opinion – so long as it’s reactionary and riddled with factual errors.

Kim Doyle

No free thought, please, we’re SBS

Private job service providers have been caught once again defrauding the welfare to work scheme, cashing in on the government’s privatisation of employment services while the unemployment is at a 12-year high.
Unemployment is big business in Australia. Every year the government ploughs roughly $1.3 billion into its “welfare-to-work” scheme, called “Jobs Services Australia”. In total the scheme has cost taxpayers more than $18 billion since 1998, when the Howard Liberal government privatised the Commonwealth Employment Service.
Through this scheme, the government essentially bankrolls a lucrative racket, which defrauds … the government.
Job agencies make money by claiming government funds for “brokering” jobs for Centrelink recipients. The theory is that, if job network providers have an incentive to find unemployed people a job, then they will be more efficient at finding them a job. It’s market economics 101.
But an agency whistle-blower quoted in a recent Four Corners report, “The Job Game”, said: “I would say about 80 percent of claims that come through have some sort of manipulation on them.”
This generally entails taking credit – and cash – for jobs that individuals secured for themselves.
Four Corners discovered evidence of falsified paperwork, including one former jobseeker who said that her paperwork appeared to have been completely forged.
Other businesses have been getting in on the racket through the practice of recycling the unemployed through temporary jobs. Here’s how it works: the government provides money to subsidise the wages of newly-hired unemployed people so that businesses will employ them. Naturally, when subsidised trial period is over companies often sack the worker and put their hand out for more cheap labour from the job providers.
An external audit of Job Services Australia in 2012, conducted by former public servant Robert Butterworth, uncovered more than $100 million in fees that had been incorrectly claimed in just two years. The review provoked fraud investigations into an unknown number of agencies.
And it’s not just the for-profits getting in on the game.
In 2005, a government investigation into the Salvation Army in Victoria found that job seekers were fraudulently upgraded to a “highly disadvantage classification”, which increased the payments the organisation was able to claim.
After CatholicCare was exposed rorting its contract in 2011, the government undertook an industry-wide inquiry. Despite the limited nature and scope of this inquiry, it still managed to claw back $6 million of public money. In the last three years, the government has retrieved more than $41 million in false claims from agencies. Few are sanctioned.
There no such leniency for welfare recipients who are cut off or “breached” – in industry jargon – for the slightest aberration or simply at the vicissitudes of Centrelink bureaucracy.
Some argue that beaching is the real purpose of the scheme. Professor Bill Mitchell, an economist at the University of Newcastle, told Four Corners: “There’s a whole industry of punishment and coercion and monitoring of the unemployed when there’s not enough jobs anyway.”
In Australia, there are close to 800,000 unemployed people competing for only 150,000 job vacancies. And this doesn’t reveal the full extent of underemployment.
But people are still made to feel worthless by the mainstream media and the government if they’re not able to find a job.

Employment services providers bludging off government

Australia has spent $15 billion on overseas military operations since 1999, according to recent Department of Defence documents.
The most expensive of these was “Operation Slipper” (the war in Afghanistan), which cost almost $7 billion. “Operation Catalyst” (the Iraq war) cost $2.3 billion.
Money spent spreading murder around the globe is to increase by a further $1 billion or more between now and 2016-17.
Australia’s contribution to the aerial war against the Islamic State is estimated to cost $500 million a year.
This at a time when the government is crying poor on the most basic welfare services, such as health, education and unemployment benefits. “Unsustainable debt and deficits” is the mantra of the government as it attacks basic services for the working class. But debt is no obstacle to the business of war.
The second most expensive operation was “Operation Astute”, the so-called peace mission to Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor. Far from restoring calm, the 2006 mission actually helped to force out prime minister Mari Alkitiri, a nationalist hostile to the Australian government and other foreign powers’ interference in local affairs.
According to a leaked Defence Department document, the “first objective” in Timor was for the military to “seek access” so that Australia could have more “influence over East Timor’s decision-making”. This undertaking cost $4.3 billion. It cost the Timorese more, helping to deprive them of the wealth of their undersea oil and gas resources in favour of Australian businesses.
The 2013-14 defence annual report states that “operations include those that contribute to the security of the immediate neighbourhood and those that support wider interests” – an example of what journalist John Pilger has dubbed “Australia’s hidden empire”.
“Operation Anode”, a colonial-style intervention into the Solomon Islands in 2003, cost $355 million and took over the central functions of the state, including finance, policing and the legal system, to the benefit of Australian business interests.
For ordinary people who foot the bill for militarism, this expenditure is a burden and a waste. For the Australian government and big business, it is an opportunity to expand their political and economic influence.

Australia’s war business

Australia’s gender wealth gap has widened dramatically. Young single women have just over half the average assets of their male counterparts, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at Curtin University.
The study examined how the wealth gap between single female and single male households in Australia developed from 2002 to 2010. It found the gender disparity in average wealth across all age groups grew from $18,300 to $47,000.
The largest disparity was for those under 35. An average single man in this demographic had assets worth $120,200 in 2010, $56,700 more than the average woman – a whopping 89 percent more. This is up from an average difference of $9,000 in 2002.
The gap for singles aged 35-55 years jumped from 4 percent to 28 percent, although the disparity between single households over 55 narrowed from 16 percent to 2.5 percent.
This is at least partly a product of the well-documented gender pay gap. In August, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that the gap has soared to more than 18 percent, the highest recorded since the ABS first began collecting the data in 1994. Women earn fewer than 82 cents for every dollar of their male counterparts, down from an average of 85 cents 10 years ago.
This flies in the face of arguments that education is the path to empowerment and equality. As Siobhan Austen, a co-author of the study, told Fairfax, “[D]espite young women now outnumbering young men in our universities quite substantially, we are not seeing a dramatic shift in the gender pay gap or the gender wealth gap. Indeed, they have trended upwards in the last decade.”
The study, Exploring recent increases in the gender wealth gap among Australia’s single households, fills a significant gap in the literature. Previously there had been studies of the gender pay gap. But differences in wages provide only a static picture of economic inequality; an analysis of wealth distribution illustrates how economic inequality accumulates over a woman’s life.
The study used data from the national Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. It found most of the increase in the wealth disparity was linked to the relatively rapid accumulation of housing assets by single men.
There are numerous burdens on women that may constrain their participation in the property market, such as lower wages, concentration in casual work, mortgage discrimination and the fact that single women are more likely than single men to have dependents.
Helen Conway, director of the federal government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, was quoted by the Sydney Morning Herald warning that this would have dire consequences for women as they age: “Women are likely to live longer than men and be more reliant on government benefits in retirement, so the fact that this group is financially disadvantaged over the life-course has serious economic and social implications.”
On the one hand, the figures help explain why so many women struggle to be economically independent of men. On the other, they highlight why class demands – for decent pensions, higher wages, good public housing, properly funded hospitals – should be at the forefront of the struggle against women’s oppression.

Mind the gender gap

The CFMEU is fighting for the right to call a scab a scab. “The word ‘scab’ is of common and historical use in Australian industrial disputes”, says CFMEU national vice president Andrew Vickers. Bosses want its use made a sackable offence.
The union has taken the issue all the way to the High Court. The case stems from 2012 strike action against BHP Mitsubishi Alliance involving 3,000 miners working in Queensland’s Bowen Basin. One striking worker was sacked for carrying a sign displaying factual information: “No Principles – Scabs – No Guts”. BHP says it should be able to control the “degree of decorum” on picket lines.
This case is about the right to call a spade a spade. Vickers is right: Australian folk history is littered with references to scabs and their generally scabby behaviour. And there’s a deadly serious point to this vilification.
Australian cultural icon Banjo Paterson was contemptuous of scabs. His poem known as “Travelling Down the Castlereagh” reads: “I asked a cove for shearing once along the Marthaguy/ ‛We shear non-union here’ says he. ‛I call it scab,’ says I.”
In Broken Hill hangs a painting by Howard William Steer and Clark Barrett titled “United We Stand”. It depicts miners holding the police at bay while women tar and feather scabs.
Wharfies are another group famed for their hatred of scabs. This isn’t a natural aversion; it’s a political lesson. During the bitter waterfront strike of 1928, strikebreakers who responded to the calls of the shipowners and the Hogan Labor government for “volunteers” quite literally took the food from the mouths of wharfies’ children. The experience of hardship and naked class warfare fostered hostility to the scabs. A poem from the time read: “The Lord above, send down a dove/ With wings as sharp as razors/ To slit the throats of the bloody scabs/ Who cut down poor men’s wages.”
The scabs actually formed their own union called the Permanent and Casuals’ Wharf Labourers’ Union – known as “the P and C”. Its aim was to “preserve peace in the industry … by forbidding hold-ups, stoppages and strikes by its members”.
Despite enjoying special government protection, no scab was safe in Port Melbourne. Jim Nager, a union man at the time, recalled, “Many residents of the Port thought no more of killing a scab than an enemy soldier in war.”
The state certainly carries out strikebreaking as something akin to an act of war.
In 1949 the Chifley Labor government sent thousands of troops to work the coal mines in NSW to break a strike led by the Miners’ Federation. It wasn’t the first time – or the last – that military forces have been used in Australia as strikebreakers.
Governments and bosses have often orchestrated mass politically motivated scabbing. “The Slimy Patrick’s Scab” is a song that describes the “vampire bats and sewer rats” who did the company’s bidding during the 1998 waterfront dispute. In an attempt to break the MUA, the Howard government and Patricks colluded to train ex-SAS officers as scabs in Dubai. The richest lobby group in the country, the ultra-right wing National Farmers’ Federation, formed a labour hire company as part of the conspiracy. They named their company P&amp;C Stevedores after the old scab union: history matters.
In the labour movement, that special loathing reserved for scabs is a necessary – and often painfully learnt – political lesson born of class struggle.

I call it scab

Militarisation of policing is a worldwide phenomenon, largely carried out under the guise of “counter-terrorism”.
The footage coming out of Ferguson, which the police have turned into a war zone, has catapulted the issue into the mainstream.
Is camouflage gear, designed for desert and jungle combat, really necessary or effective in shopping malls and convenience stores? Why is there an armoured tank in my neighbourhood? New questions for a new era of policing. This is not unique to the US. Australian police now have all manner of sadistic, and lethal, toys to deploy against the public. There is also an arsenal of anti-protest and counter-terrorism laws to crack down on civil liberties.
Electro-shock weapons – such as cattle prods used on protesters by dictatorial regimes and electrical devices used in torture – use to get a bad rap. But in the 1990s, Taser International successfully re-branded electro-shock as a “life saver”, to be used instead of deadly force. Since then tasers have become standard police issue.
At least five people have died in Australia after being shocked by these “less-than-lethal” weapons.
Aerosol sprays are also considered “less than lethal”, although Victoria Police decided last year to replace capsicum spray with more targeted and less flammable chemical weapons due to concern about secondary exposure and fire danger associated with using it alongside tasers.
The Queensland Police Service has flagged the deployment of military-style drones during the G20 summit in Brisbane later this year. It also recently purchased Remington R4s, a military assault rifle, to be used by general duty officers. Western Australian police last year procured a $400,000 “Ballistic Engineered Armoured Response Counter Attack Truck” (known as BearCat) for “counter-terrorism”.
Criminology professor Jude McCulloch argues that counter-terrorism units set up in the mid-1970s within Australian state police forces led to the blurring of the line between the military and the police.
One of the first of these units was the Special Operations Group (SOG) in Victoria. Established in 1977, it is a paramilitary group – similar to US SWAT teams – modelled on, trained by and including former members of the SAS. Like SAS soldiers, they are trained to kill.
“Politically motivated and criminal terrorist activity” is the raison d’être for such units, but in reality these and other police tactical groups operate almost exclusively within the purview of everyday policing.
And, rather hypocritically, their real function is to carry out politically motivated violence.
On 13 October 1987, during the battle to deregister the Builders Labourers’ Federation, SOG raided and seized the union’s office in Carlton. After gaining entry, the officers cut the phone lines, ordered staff not to move and repeatedly kicked and punched an organiser when he refused to obey the order.
During protests against the World Economic Forum, held at Melbourne’s Crown Casino in 2000, the “Force Response Unit” hospitalised 30 protesters after baton charging and subjecting them to pressure point neck holds.
During the eviction of Occupy Melbourne in October 2011, “snatch squads” of officers in full Darth Vader regalia – NATO-style helmets with visors, behind transparent shields, truncheons drawn – kettled (encircled and detained) protesters for hours, sending out “search” sorties into crowds of fleeing demonstrators to make retaliatory arrests, or simply inflict some damage.
These military-style tactics have become all too recognisable at demonstrations across Australia and the world.
The militarisation of the police has nothing to do with counter-terrorism and everything to do with policing political and industrial dissent.

Warrior cops are not for our safety

Rich people and bosses – the privileged minority of society – are more self-centred, less empathetic and consider themselves more deserving of their wealth. This isn’t a socialist prejudice. It has scientific backing.
A 2012 study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from top British businesses. The results were compared to the same tests conducted on criminal psychiatric patients incarcerated at Broadmoor special hospital.
It found that on certain accepted indicators of psychopathy – superficial charm, glibness, manipulativeness, egocentrism, a strong sense of entitlement, readiness to exploit others, lack of empathy – the bosses matched or even exceeded the scores of the inmates.
Most of us have experienced a boss whose sole intent seems to be to psychologically destroy the people around them. US psychologist Paul Piff calls it the “arsehole effect”. His studies provide an insight into how the mind rationalises advantage. He found that the wealthier you are, the more entitled you feel.
Piff and other researchers conducted a study in which they observed participants in a rigged game of monopoly. Based on the flip of a coin, one player was given twice as much money as the other, earned twice as much for passing “Go” and was given more opportunities to move around the board.
The study observed that the rich players started to become ruder to poor players, less sensitive to their plight and more and more demonstrative of their material success. They also helped themselves to more pretzels from a bowl placed strategically on the table.
At the end of the game, players were asked to account for their success. The winning players talked about the choices they had made to buy properties and earn success, i.e. they provided subjective reasons for their victory and ignored the systemic advantages given them and the lucky flip of the coin.
The rich have many elaborate social rituals to prepare the born-to-rule for their privileged position in society. Those born into money learn from a very young age about their privilege and alleged superiority. In private schools and university colleges there are no end of barbaric initiation rituals that further train them in callousness. It’s all about becoming confident in their right to rule.
But the few who climb the ranks from the working class must be just as ruthless. Bosses are always in competition with their fellow “players” in the business world. Workers are more like the pieces on a monopoly board than poor participants in a rigged game.
What presents as psychopathic behaviour is actually the expression of the way capitalist society is structured. To run a business in a competitive world, you have to make decisions that place last the interests of other human beings – usually the least affluent.
Under capitalism psychopaths such as these are not born, they are created. It’s not really surprising: once a person assumes a privileged position in society, lack of empathy and readiness to exploit others become not only competitive advantages but necessary just to stay in the game.
That’s reflected more broadly in the attitudes of the super-rich. The Russell Sage Foundation in the US polled people with an average income of $1 million a year or more for The Campaign for America’s Future conference this year. The perspective of these elites was compared with responses from members of the general public from other polls such as Pew and Gallup.
As you might expect, the results were not pretty. While 68 percent of the US public agree with the statement that “Government must see that no one is without food, clothing or shelter”, only 43 percent of elites concur. An even lower proportion, 40 percent, agree that “the minimum wage should be high enough so that no family with a full-time worker falls below the official poverty line”, while 78 percent of the public were in favour.
Such disregard for the welfare of others may seem sadistic to the rest of us, but for the capitalists it’s just sound business sense. No doubt, there is much wisdom in the union saying “Scum rises to the top”.

The psychology of privilege

The global ranks of the filthy rich were swelled by almost 2 million people last year. The annual Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management World Wealth Report estimates that the number of “high net worth individuals” (HNWI) – which it defines as those with investible assets of US$1 million or more – grew by 15 percent to 13.7 million.
Not only are the numbers of these parasitic life forms expanding, but their wealth is also growing. The combined total reached a record high of US$52.62 trillion, up from US$46.22 trillion in 2012. Over the past five years, these “have mores” increased their share of the global pie by nearly US$20 trillion.
 North America and the Asia-Pacific are leading the way. The Asia-Pacific is expected to have the largest HNWI population sometime this year and the most wealth by 2015.
Some are more super rich than others. Despite numbering only 128,000 – just 0.9 percent of the total HNWI population – the “ultra-HNWIs”, who hold more than US$30 million in investible assets, have accrued more than one-third of global HNWI wealth.
Wealth fads
It’s difficult to imagine what one person could do with so much money (aside from solve world hunger, maybe), but the rich are obviously more creative than the rest of us. Despite austerity and social crisis in Europe and elsewhere around the world, the global market for personal luxuries continues to grow.
 Headlines such as “Luxury goods market holding up despite economic uncertainty” show that while the economic crisis has provoked a massive capitalist attack on the living standards of the working class and poor, the rich aren’t letting it get them down. According to last year’s World Wealth Report, a rich person’s preferred “investment of passion” in 2012 included jewellery, gems, watches and art. But fashions in HNWI spending can be as volatile year to year as the financial markets.
In 2013, “social impact” was in vogue. Apparently, health, education and children’s causes became “top priorities” for HNWIs. Roughly one-third of HNWIs allocate “resources” – a vague term for money, time or expertise – toward each. Presumably, lecturing poor people would count as time and expertise.
What rich people actually consider charitable ranges from donations and volunteering to investment and business decision making with “social good in mind”. The report states that while no single “mechanism” stood out, making investment choices with the intent to create positive social impact was rated as the most important method of “giving back”, beating out the more old-fashioned idea of charitable donations and volunteering.
The new generation of elites finds it less fashionable to play philanthropist. Twenty-nine percent of HNWIs over the age of 60 consistently give to charity; only 13 percent of those under 40 do likewise. “[Y]ounger HNWIs are more inclined to adopt the newer approach of tying social goals into business decisions” – in other words, making money by pretending to give a damn.
Bloated with cash
While conspicuous consumption is a matter of taste, “good business” is always what drives the decisions of the rich. The report shows that they are confident that they will accrue even more wealth. They call it, ingeniously, “wealth growth”. In case you were wondering, it has nothing to do with getting a job.
Al Jazeera reported earlier this year that US corporations are making record profits – but they are hoarding them in the equivalent of a corporate mattress.
Companies also like to hoard cash offshore, which means that multinationals can siphon profits from a country and delay paying taxes – sometimes indefinitely. Using 2013 data from the US Federal Reserve, Al Jazeera estimated that US corporations hold liquid assets equal to more than two years’ worth of US federal government spending.
While the rich tell the rest of us to tighten our belts, they spend their money on gems and sit on piles of cash.
According to a June 2014 report on wages, income and wealth in the US, the top 1 percent of US households doubled their share of national income between 1979 and 2007. Income growth since 2007 has also been extremely unequal. Profits have reached record highs and the stock market has boomed. However, the wages of most workers have declined since the global financial crisis.
Not so for CEOs. The average CEO compensation was $15.2 million in 2013, up 21.7 percent from 2010. Long term trends are even starker. From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation in real terms increased 937 percent – more than double stock market growth and much greater than the 10 percent growth in a typical worker’s pay over the same period.

The rich get richer

The government has refused a plea from the Tamil community to allow the family of 29-year-old asylum seeker Leo Seemanpillai to enter the country to attend his funeral.
Immigration minister Scott Morrison said that Australian visa laws could not accommodate Leo’s parents, who do not have passports. The couple, who live in a refugee camp in India, desperately tried to obtain emergency passports, but were denied any help from Indian, Sri Lankan and Australian authorities.
In a further despicable ruling, Leo’s brother, who does hold a passport, was told by the Australian High Commission that he would not be granted a visa to attend the funeral because it didn’t believe he has any incentive to return once arrived.
Leo, who was on a bridging visa, set himself on fire in the Geelong suburb of Newtown. Like many Tamil refugees, he was terrified of being deported back to persecution in Sri Lanka where it is not uncommon for Tamils to disappear into the Rajapaksa regime’s secret torture chambers.
“If I’m deported back, torture is certain because I’m a Tamil”, read one of his journal entries. Tragically, the cruelty of life on a bridging visa became too much.
“Leo experienced so much trauma in his short life. He was tortured in Sri Lanka, intimidated by police in India and sexually tortured while being held in an Indonesian detention centre,” said Aran Mylvaganam, a spokesperson for the Tamil Refugee Council and friend of Leo. “All he wanted was some peace and freedom in his life. That’s why he came to Australia. But the very real fear of rejection here, fanned by the fact that Mr Morrison kept on saying Tamils would be sent back to Sri Lanka, was all too much for him.”
On his good days, Leo managed to muster hope for the future. “In the midst of rejection stand tall. Life is hope”, reads another of his journal entries.
He gave selflessly to others, volunteering at his local church and his last act was to donate his organs. Yet, the government’s callous treatment of refugees denied him any peace in this life and has now refused his parents the opportunity to pay their last respects to their son.
Morrison claims that he made a “quite unusual offer” to repatriate Leo’s remains to India or Sri Lanka. This is deceptive and cruel. The government knows full well the dangerous situation for Tamil refugees in these countries. Its treatment of a man who had already endured so much is beyond appalling. What they are doing to his family only adds insult to the injury.

Tamil refugee’s parents denied visa for son’s funeral

Nganampa Health Council has warned that no one will visit a doctor in remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands (in South Australia) if it is forced to charge a $7 GP co-payment. Locals simply cannot afford it.
The council’s medical director, Paul Torzillo, told the ABC that the organisation will refuse to charge the fee at its clinics. However, absorbing the cost may seriously affect the viability of the council’s medical services and hamper its ability to provide vital health programs. 
“The $5 cuts in the standard Medicare item numbers and the proposed $7 payment for every pathology test and diagnostic imaging procedure will equate to a cut of about $1 million a year to our core funding”, said Ms Ah Chee, CEO of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress.
The Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service in the ACT has also decided not to charge co-payments to its patients. The organisation treats an average of 130 people per day, which means it will have to absorb a yearly loss of around $350,000. Chief executive Julie Tongs predicts that they may have to cut one or two doctors from their already busy practice to cover part of the shortfall.
A joint statement from 11 Indigenous organisations, which held an emergency meeting in May to discuss the effects of the budget, pointed out, “For every [health] dollar spent on non-Indigenous Australians now, only 60 cents is spent on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
Australia’s peak body for Indigenous health, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, is unsure whether some of its 150 medical centres would lose their tax-exempt status if they were forced to charge a fee.
The appalling state of Indigenous health funding thus looks likely to become even worse under this government.

No free thought, please, we’re SBS

Employment services providers bludging off government

Australia’s war business

Mind the gender gap

I call it scab

Warrior cops are not for our safety

The psychology of privilege

The rich get richer

Tamil refugee’s parents denied visa for son’s funeral

Indigenous clinics vow to waive GP co-payment

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