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Not
seeing the Forrest for the twigs
Income
management for two million more recipients of welfare payments. That is the
reform (read deform) proposed by paper billionaire Andrew Forrest. The
Coalition had commissioned him to investigate indigenous affairs. He has gone
way outside that brief.
Instead
of joining the half-hearted disagreement from the ALP, socialists should turn
the tables by arguing that Forrest did not go far enough to achieve equality.
We should demand income management for billionaires by stripping them of their
ill-gotten gains. A marginal tax rate of 95 per cent would be a start.
One
reaction to that proposal is that it is too extreme ever to get up. If that is
so we need to ask why? In this case, we
need to ask why the confiscation of unearned income is ‘too extreme’ but
Forest’s call for massive income management can become part of the
‘conversation’?
A
wider point is even more important. The only battle that the Left has won in
the past twenty years was Work Choices – a victory for mass action betrayed
through parliamentary cretinism. One reason why the Left has been losing is
that the Right is no longer afraid to reset the agenda by launching extravagant
ambit claims. The ALP limps along behind them or establishes its cred with the
Big End of Town by coming up with more efficient ways to be vile.
The
outcome is that the goalposts keep being shifted to the Right. That will
continue for as long as the Left fails to take up confiscatory rates of tax on
individuals and corporations and the replacement of the Goods and Services Tax
with a Financial Services Tax.
Those
reforms would do away with the cravenness of seeming to be ‘fair’ by imposing
means tests for social services on high-incomes since they would no longer
exist.
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