Read my lips, Mr. Rudd. I will never vote Labor if you continue down this path

For over a decade the former Howard Government ignored this country's own democratic heritage, international law and UN conventions; as it sought ways to quash many of the historic human and legal rights of Australian citizens, turn the safety net welfare system into a form of alms giving dependant on a whim of the government of the day, commence the transformation of public infrastructure/services delivery into 'user pays', and convert a significant part of government pensions, benefits and allowances into a non-cash component.

 

It was easy to turn away from the Liberal Party and the Nationals when faced with this concerted effort to destroy what was left of the ideal of an egalitarian society and the notion of a fair go.

 

Now barely four months after the federal election which saw it installed, the Rudd Government continues to support most of the legislation and regulations which the Howard Government created as its preferred vehicle for the destruction of our civil liberties and the idea of a fair go.

 

We still see racist law operating, habeas corpus remains missing in action for some criminal charges, draconian sedition laws chill dissent, judgemental and punitive attitudes to the poor still flourish within government policy, and there is a continuing push to transform certain pensions, benefits and allowances into a modern version of food stamps under the guise of income 'management'. 

 

The Northern Territory intervention clearly demonstrated that this current push to replace a percentage of welfare cash payments with vouchers or cards has nothing to do with the cited reason of protecting children in dysfunctional home situations. Because income management there was immediately applied across the board in designated indigenous communities and involved people without children, family commitments or any form of addictive/anti-social behaviour.

 

This push originally started as a possible method to control and restrict the lives of welfare recipients in an effort to disguise the fact that the former government was intending to dismantle the welfare system overtime and the Rudd Government allows the push to continue for very similar reasons.

 

Like the Howard Government before it, this Federal Labor Government is first targeting groups which society has always felt comfortable about negatively labelling before it inevitably widens its 18th century net and goes after the unemployed and those with a disability. 

 

Sadly, modern Labor governments right across Australia are turning out to be nothing more than a collection of self-righteous suits eager to assume the position in front of neo-con think tanks, big business and professional god-botherers. Always happy to demonise the weak and vulnerable if doing so pleases these politically powerful sectors. Seeing nothing wrong with the diminished autonomy, discrimination, humiliation and financial loss that ensues.

 

So read my lips Mr. Rudd. If you continue down this path towards establishing debit cards for any or all 'welfare' recipients, I will not be voting for a Labor candidate at any future election.

What's more, I will treat Labor as I treat the Coalition and make sure that my ballot is likely to be exhausted long before my preferences could flow on to its candidate.

 

Therefore, although the Labor MP for Page may be a genuine and hard-working local member she will never see my vote.

No Labor candidate for the NSW Clarence electorate will ever get my vote in the future. Nor will any Clarence Valley local government candidate identified as a member of the Labor Party.

The ball is now in your court, Prime Minister.

Breaking news: Pensioners in financial stress

Australian pensioners will wake to the news today that their politicians have arrived at the ground breaking conclusion that pensioners don't live on easy street.

An Australian Senate committee report has highlighted that those who rely on the pension as their sole income are among those most in financial stress.

The committee's findings come as no surprise to those who struggle to subsist on the meagre pension, particularly single pensioners.

For some perverse reason, politicians, bureaucrats and other assorted bean counters have long figured that single pensioners have overheads that are significantly less than those of their married counterparts.

Even the most cursory examination of pensioners' expenditure records readily reveals that, for want of a better term, 'economies of scale' are had when couples live under the one roof and contribute towards their shared overheads such as rent and utilities.

Single pensioners face the same costs as couples. One doesn't have to be an Albert Einstein to understand that a more equitable approach to pensioner payments is long overdue.

That the committee has reported its findings and recommended an overhaul of pensions is commendable, but for something to be done about it, well that's another thing completely different.

Pensioners can expect to have to wait in their queue for some time. They would be well advised to not hold their breath while waiting for an appropriate course of action that would improve their lot to be implemented.

Heaven forbid, but some fiscal nerds are likely to respond that married pensioners are too well paid and call for their pensions to be cut, bringing them in line with their single counterparts. Too silly for words? Don't be too sure of that!

In part, The Sydney Morning Herald (March 21) reports:

Older single women tend to have missed out on compulsory superannuation and must rely on a pension that is low by English-speaking countries' standards.

They receive a pension of $546.80 a fortnight, compared with the $913.60 for couples, even though many fixed costs such as rates, rents and bills vary little between singles and couples.

The meagre payment meant pensioners were often reduced to relying on donations of food from friends and even, according to one inquiry witness, to "raiding dumpsters to retrieve bread, fruit, vegetables … and sometimes meat" discarded by grocery chains. Others told the inquiry of going to bed early to cut heating bills, and forgoing social visits to or from friends because of transport and meal costs.

The committee agreed to a bipartisan verdict acknowledging pensions had increased in real terms in the past decade. But after hundreds of submissions the committee said the comparatively widespread prosperity "obscures the fact that the distribution of wealth among many older Australians is unbalanced".

Many Australians, particularly those on low, fixed incomes with little discretionary spending capacity, were vulnerable to living cost rises. They were disproportionately affected by increases in essential goods and services: food, rent, petrol, utilities and health care. Growing medical and pharmaceutical costs and the lack of affordable dental services were disturbing.

"These older Australians do not enjoy a decent quality of life," the committee said.

The committee's call for a rethink on the level of the pension and the way it is calculated triggered a chorus of calls from seniors groups for the single pension to be lifted from the current 60 per cent to at least two-thirds of the couple rate.

The chief executive of National Seniors Australia, Michael O'Neill, said the findings "confirm what every pensioner knows: living on a pension has become almost impossible unless you have additional income".

The Government late yesterday signalled that it would consider lifting the single pension.

Read the report in The Sydney Morning Herald here.

The Easter Bunny in Australia

This weekend the Easter Bunny will begin his dawn journey across Australia laden with a limitless basket of chocolate eggs.

If you listen carefully, you may hear him cry as he tops a hill close by - Don't shoot!

OECD politely tells Australia it can do better for the environment

The 2007 OECD Environmental Performance Reviews: Australia is now available.

 

"Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett says the Government will act on the report's findings.

"Our response to this report will be genuinely whole-of-Government," he said.

"We know environment issues don't rest with one or two portfolios and that these issues don't stop at borders either, it's a whole-of-planet challenge and it requires a whole-of-Government response."

As Peter Garrett is new to the ministry only time will tell if he has any ability to live up to his words.

Hopefully before then he will learn that the environmental picture is larger and more complex than the issue of plastic bags.

 

Some of the main conclusions and recommendations of the OECD review suggest that Australia might be falling behind in effectively addressing:

transport sector emissions, air pollution control monitoring, fine particle pollution, urban growth pressure, use of market-based instruments to advance ecologically sustainable development, exit assistance for business/industry to protect environmental integrity, water scarcity, energy sector net greenhouse gas emissions, agency data collection, monitoring and reporting, integration of traditional owners into whole-of-government policy on natural resource management, equity for all Australian stakeholders, public consultation mechanisms, environmental impact training for business operators, integration of environmental objectives into government procurement and operation policies.

Joe Hockey loses his cool, again and again and again...

WorkChoices may finally be on the way out and Australian Workplace Agreements dead and gone, but Liberal and Nationals MPs brought the House of Representatives to a state of near chaos yesterday when the Minister for Workplace Relations Julia Gillard put forward a motion asking that the House recognise the ills caused by WorkChoices and undertake that statutory individual employment agreements should never be reintroduced into Australian industrial relations law.

The Liberals Joe Hockey went ballistic and tried to shut the motion down. The Opposition then tried twice more in succession to gag debate of the motion.
Thwarted they tried a third time and then Uncle Joe unsuccessfully moved that the Deputy Speaker's ruling be dissented from.

On and on and round and round the arguments and divisions went, from 11.39am to 1.02pm, until Ms. Gillard's motion was finally voted in.

Immediately after that the Opposition Deputy Leader Julie Bishop rose to a make a motion praising WorkChoices and the whole uproar started again for another 21 minutes, as the Government retaliated by gagging this debate and forcing a vote.

Almost two hours of parliamentary mayhem, only lightened by the unconscious irony of former Howard Government minister Tony Abbott referring to another party's parliamentary tactics as "jackboot government" and Labor's Anthony Albanese losing patience and calling Hockey "fool".
Such a waste of taxpayers money.

News.com.au reported on aspects of the uproar yesterday.
Hansard records it all here.

Those life-style nongs are at it again

I frequently have to wonder whether there is anything at all in the brainboxes of some who decide to purchase small parcels of rural land, for a life style change or a gamble on future rezoning.

These people are thick on the ground now on the NSW North Coast and a few like these misguided souls are objecting to payment of the Rural Lands Protection Board levy.

Yelling that this is a tax on seachangers they refuse to cough up for years on end.

Rarely do you find owners like these keeping their land in good heart. Often their plots are weed filled and sour, with no crop or stock in sight.

The half-hearted attempts at bush regeneration are often abandoned before completion. 

I have little sympathy with their views. All I see is more agricultural land being removed from any meaningful productivity and court time being wasted.

Gimme, gimme folks one and all. They give genuine small-acreage farmers a bad name.

It's not easy being green: time for Australian governments to put their investments in order

This month the Australian Conservation Council released its 32 page report Responsible Public Investment in Australia.

 

3 RESPONSIBLE PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN AUSTRALIA

Few of the government funds interviewed for this report appeared to have linked ESG factors with their material influence on returns and the associated risks and opportunities in investment management.

This demonstrates a worrying disconnection between many public sector funds and industry best practice developments.

In many cases government asset managers lack the transparency of private sector asset managers in terms of their investment strategy and portfolio holdings.

However, a small number of asset managers were aware of ESG developments and reported

that the UN PRI was being considered at board level.

Government investments in the energy sector may be undermining stated environmental policy

objectives.

The investment practices of government funds have the potential to support or detract from government policy goals.

Most Australian jurisdictions, for example, have policies and laws that related to climate change and energy.

But investment priorities sometimes appear to undermine stated policy objectives.

The total investment of all State, Territory and Commonwealth funds in the listed energy sector is estimated as follows:

Industry: Holdings ($ million):

Nuclear/uranium $ 559

Fossil fuels $ 5,379

Renewable energy $ 126

There appear to be contradictions between these investment holdings and the stated policy goals of some States and Territories.

In particular:

• NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia all have significant holdings in uranium-related equities, despite legislative or political bans on uranium mining;

• All jurisdictions have very low holdings in the renewable energy sector, despite a stated strong commitment to renewable energy as a critical part of future energy generation; and

• All jurisdictions have significant exposures to fossil fuel industries, despite a range of policy commitments relating to the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The imbalance between investment in fossil fuels and renewable energy sources is striking, given the public commitment of all Australian governments to renewable energy.

 

The report also identifies the Commonwealth Futures Fund as not taking social, environmental and governance issues into consideration when making investment portfolio management decisions.

 

It's time for a whole of government approach to public investment. The Rudd Government needs to lead the way by example on this and then drag the states, kicking and screaming if necessary, into a green investment plan.