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CURRENT POLITICS - Equality |
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SPEAKERS
NOTES from Forum on Equality, 10 June
2014 Uni
Pub, Canberra, sponsored by the Labour History Society and the Fabian Society. ‘Laws
and government may be considered … in every case as a combination of the rich
to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of goods.’[1] 1.
Economic The
global corporates control the means of production The
rest of us have to sell our human capacities to them. That
is the fundamental inequality under the rule of capital. Orwell – democracy is not a bourgeois fraud
but bourgeois democracy is. Talk
of equality before the law is not social equality. One vote one value and one person one
vote is not social equality. Mass murdoch has more clout than any
elector and more than any member of pariament. Yet
he traded his right to vote here for tv networks in the u.s, of a. Blackrock, a u.s. investment house
bought up 11 percent of the shares in the 123 biggest companies here as
measured by revenues. Never
went near the foreign investment review board let alone through parliament, or
raised in any of the last three election campaigns. Instead,
bullying intensifies exploitation. Housing, transport,
employment, health and education. They
interlock eg bad housing impacts on health and education. The fantasy of the very fast train –
never going to happen. Q.:
who would profit from the outlay of $110 billion? A. Merchant bankers and global
corporates under ppps. Q.
Who will benefit among the travelling public? a. The already priviledged who
rarely pay for their own tickets. Q.
Who will lose out? a. The people who now rely on buses
and trains to get around the south-east corner. Q.
Who are they? a. Women and children, the elderly
and the indigenous. often on concessional fares – will
they be available on the vft? Spend
$110bn on the vft and what will be left to upgrade services for the rest of us? One: equal outcomes not equality of opportunity; Two:
social equality not equal before an unequal system; That is the line that hanson ran about
privileges for aborigines; Three:
is a policy more or less likely to advance social equality across the
generations. The
panel included the ALP’S shadowy assistant treasurer, and member for Canberra, Professor
Andrew Leigh. The Coalition got mileage out of quoting Leigh’s ‘academic’
arguments for its budget. When he was promoting himself on ABC RN’s Life
Matters’ he sounded like a spokesperson for the corporate’s think-tank, the
Center for Independent (sic) Studies. To give some measure of how far the ALP –
the anti-labour party - has moved from ‘labour values’, I distributed synopses
from Leigh’s learned articles. Employment Effects of
Minimum Wages: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment ANDREW LEIGH John F.
Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Abstract To estimate the
impact of raising the minimum wage on employment, this article uses a natural
experiment, arising from six increases in the Western Australian statutory
minimum wage during the period 1994–2001. Relative to the rest of Australia,
the employment to population ratio in Western Australia fell following each of
the six rises, twice by a statistically significant margin. Aggregating the
increases, the elasticity of labour demand with respect to the Western
Australian statutory minimum wage is found to be –0.13. Employment Effects of
Minimum Wages: Evidence from a Quasi- Experiment—Erratum ANDREW LEIGH John F.
Kennedy School of Government Harvard University In
an article published in the December 2003 edition of the Australian Economic Review (Leigh
2003), the author mistakenly used data for labour force to population ratios in
place of the theoretical model requirement of data on employment to population
ratios. Changes in the Western Australian minimum wage could have impacted
employment on three margins, and this error meant that the analysis allowed for
an effect on only two of these margins. To the extent that increases in the
Western Australian minimum wage caused workers to become unemployed, or to
shift from full-time to part-time employment, this ought not to have affected
the empirical findings. But if increases in the Western Australian minimum wage
caused workers to leave the labour force altogether, this would not have shown
up in the figures presented. In addition, the original article presented
‘implied elasticities’, which were based on percentage point effects. Since
elasticities should, strictly speaking, be percentage effects, the results are
re-presented both as percentage point and percentage effects. The full dataset
and Stata do-file are available from the author … but the employment effect of
increasing the minimum wage is estimated to be somewhat larger than was
reported in the original version. The author sincerely apologises for this
error.
But not for
giving comfort to the enemies of a minimum wage? Being caught out did nothing to stop his repeating the
anti-worker line. Minimum Wages and
Employment: Comment Ian Watson, Australian
Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Training The University of Sydney Abstract Does increasing
the minimum wage lead to employment losses? For many years most economists
thought that the answer to this was a straightforward ‘yes’. However, research
during the 1990s began to overturn this conventional wisdom and showed that
increases in the minimum wage did not automatically lead to employment losses.
A recent Australian study, by Leigh (2003), examined the impact of statutory
minimum wages in Western Australia and reached conclusions which supported the
conventional view. However, close scrutiny of Leigh’s article shows that it is
fundamentally flawed. Despite Leigh’s efforts, it remains the case that we simply
do not know a great deal about the employment impact of Australia’s system of
minimum wages. Minimum Wages and
Employment: Reply ANDREW LEIGH, John F.
Kennedy School of Government Harvard University Abstract The results of
my study (Leigh 2003, 2004) on the effect of minimum wages on employment have
been brought into question by Watson (2004), which raises some potential
methodological concerns. Careful reanalysis of the Western Australian minimum
wage experiment demonstrates that this critique is not well founded. Further
checks show that the results are robust to a number of alternative
specifications, in addition to those presented in the original article. Does
Raising the Minimum Wage Help the Poor? ANDREW LEIGH lSocial Policy Evaluation, Analysis and Research Centre, Research School
of Social Sciences, ANU. What is the impact of raising the minimum wage on family incomes?
Using data from the 1994–1995 to 2002–2003 Survey of Income and Housing, the
characteristics of low-wage workers are analysed. Those who earn near-minimum
wages are disproportionately female, unmarried and young, without post-school
qualifications and overseas born. About one-third of near-minimum-wage workers
are the sole worker in their household. Due to low labour force participation
rates in the poorest households, minimum-wage workers are most likely to be in
middle-income households. Under plausible parameters for the effect of minimum
wages on hourly wages and employment, it appears unlikely that raising the
minimum wage will significantly lower family income inequality. Leigh got pre-selection when the so-called Left split in 2010.
Given the voting patterns of the ACT, he knew he had to be in the ALP to get
into parliament. Had he returned to a job in any other city he could have
chased selection for the other free-market party. A republican to his
cufflinks Andrew Leigh, ALP MHR for Fraser: ‘In 2012, when Prince Charles
and the Duchess of Cornwall visited Canberra, I was pleased to welcome them on
the tarmac of Canberra airport, wearing my Australian Republican Movement cufflinks’. How brave is
that. [1] Adam
Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, The
Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978, p. 208.
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