BY DICK NICHOLS
The Socialist Alliance has called upon the opposition parties in the federal Senate to block all the Coalition government's budget-related bills, including supply, and force the government to an early election.
The alliance has initiated community protests in Sydney and Melbourne in support of Labor, Green and Democrat undertakings to stop the budget increases to prescription costs and cuts to disability pensions.
However, the Socialist Alliance believes that the senate opposition can, and must, go further. The Coalition government has lost every last shred of legitimacy and must not be allowed another two and a half years to commit more crimes against working people.
Look at what the first six months of this electoral term led by Prime Minister John Howard and treasurer Peter Costello have brought us.
Firstly, the government's election win was partly due to its shameless lies about asylum seekers throwing their children overboard.
Secondly, it is engaged in a "class war" program of attacks on the union movement (notably the Royal Commission into the Building and Construction Industry which has concentrated solely on militant unionists) and on our civil liberties ("anti-terrorism" legislation).
Thirdly, this budget is based on the principle "let the poor pay for war" and will cost disabled pensioners up to $56 a week.
Costello is wasting an extra $544 million on military spending and a total of $2.9 billion on "border protection" — mostly facilities to imprison refugees. Yet he is doing nothing to stop the tax dodges of the highly undertaxed Australian rich.
At the same time, indicating his fiscal sadism towards the powerless, he has refused to fund the mobile phone access promised to remote Aboriginal communities by communications minister Richard Alston.
The treasurer's rationalisation for his cuts to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and disability pension is totally fraudulent. He paints the cuts as the result of a difficult choice, imposed by the trend to an older Australian population.
However, even accepting the very questionable assumptions of the Costello's "intergenerational report" (which argues that by 2040 four per cent of GDP, or $27 billion, will be needed for health funding), a big slice of the increased funds needed could be found by eliminating tax dodges and exemptions for the rich, restoring the company tax rate to at least 34 per cent, increasing income tax rates for the wealthy and cutting unnecessary "defence" expenditure and subsidies to business.
But even the Coalition's health and aged care cost-projections are based on the false assumption that private health provision and insurance and pharmaceuticals supplied by multinational companies at monopoly prices are a costly law of life.
Not so: they are simply a policy choice by those who always put the interest of private capital before that of the community as a whole.
The rational policy — supported by Socialist Alliance — is to replace obscenely expensive private systems with properly funded public health care.
The alliance also opposes the Coalition's continuing vandalisation of what is left of the public sector.
Privatisation may have reduced the government's debt (which is already among the lowest of advanced capitalist economies), but this has come at the expense of jobs and real investment. It has also vastly increased private external debt (as privateers have funded purchases of public assets).
There is the one certain "intergenerational effect" in Costello's budget — this Australian generation and the next will be paying for the piracy of the public sector through higher interest rates and lower economic growth.
And if these aren't enough reasons for the Senate to reject supply, this government never loses an opportunity to reinforce the politics of fear and loathing towards fictitious external threats.
Spending the half a billion dollars proposed to boost military spending on increasing Australia's miserable levels of overseas aid would do more to reduce any "terrorist threat" than extra patrol boats and high-tech surveillance hardware will.
This budget is proof that the main enemy of the Australian people is to be found, not in Afghanistan, North Korea or Iraq, but in leafy Canberra.
If the grounds for forcing Howard to the polls don't exist now, when would they? What are the Greens, Democrats and Labor waiting for?
[Dick Nichols is national co-convener of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 29, 2002.
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