BY ALISON DELLIT
"Don't believe them when they tell me there ain't no cure. The rich stay healthy, the sick stay poor" — U2's 1988 song God Part II contains a pretty good summary of the Howard government's seventh budget, delivered on May 14.
The main proposals Treasurer Peter Costello outlined — increasing military spending by $544 million, spending an additional $1.2 billion on keeping out refugees, decreasing the pharmaceutical subsidy so that medicines increase in cost to save $1.9 billion over the next four years and kicking thousands of people off the disability pension to save $337 million over the next four years — had all been leaked to the press in the months leading up to the budget speech.
The proposed investigation into privatising Medibank Private had also been leaked, and the budget confirmed the government's intention to sell Sydney Airport this year and to sell off the rest of Telstra next financial year.
The deliberate leaking of this budget was part of the government's plan to "sell" its harsh attacks on the sick. The 30% increase in the price of medicines is the second significant hike in a decade, and will hit some of the most vulnerable.
The government has sought to justify its decision to restrict access to the disability support pension to those unable to work for at least 15 hours a week by claiming that thousands of people were moved onto the pension in the 1990s to get them off the dole queue. There is some truth in this, though Costello didn't mention this was unofficial Coalition policy. But the number of such people is infinitesimal in comparison to the number of sick and disabled people who will be caught in the Coalition's changes.
Shunting people who are sick or who have disabilities back onto the unemployment round-about will do nothing to help them while there are seven job seekers for every vacancy. Even those whom the government claims it is targeting — mostly workers over 50 with problems such as chronic asthma and bad backs — are going to find it very difficult to find work (this is the reason many ended up on the pension in the first place).
Instead, these people will have less money to spend on more expensive medicines, and be forced, like others on the dole, to jump through pointless and degrading hoops every few weeks just to get enough to live on.
The government is working hard to convince voters that the attacks are necessary for two reasons — because it needs to find extra money to protect us from terrorism and because if it doesn't make life difficult for the sick and the old now, then "taxpayers" have to inflict even harsher cuts on social welfare 40-50 years from now.
This political spin might be the way the government has calculated it will sell the budget, but it is bears little resemblance to the budget proposals.
The ALP, Democrats and the Greens agreement to vote in the Senate against the attacks on the sick is welcome, but a commitment to block the increased war spending and attacks on refugees would be better.
The significant increase in military spending was projected in last year's budget, and is a result of the 2000 defence white paper, "Defence 2000 — Our Future Defence Force". This increased spending is aimed at enabling the Australian military to intervene more decisively in neighbouring countries on its own and in the wider Asian area in tandem with US forces. It has nothing to do with fighting terrorism.
Even the most significant "anti-terrorism" proposal in the military package — the creation of a special services unit based in Sydney to help in "domestic law enforcement and anti-terrorist activities" has been discussed since well before September 11. A similar unit in Perth has been harassing biker gangs for a few years.
The increase in military spending is dwarfed by the doubling of expenditure on "border protection". In 2002-2003, more than 1.5% of the federal budget will be spent on trying to stop a few thousand refugees from reaching Australia.
About a third of this money will be spent on constructing a new 1200-bed refugee prison on Christmas Island, and on processing asylum seekers who end up in it.
Under legislation passed with bipartisan support last year, arriving on Christmas Island no longer gives asylum seekers rights under Australian law. Like the asylum seekers transported by the Australian navy to Nauru and PNG's Manus Island, Christmas Island arrivals will be processed with Australian money under United Nations auspices, but will not be able to appeal adverse decisions in Australian courts.
The Coalition government is clearly hoping that by shifting refugees to Christmas Island, it can significantly downgrade the two most publicly condemned refugee prisons in Australia — Woomera and Curtin — and also lessen the burden on two of Australia's neo-colonies resulting from Canberra's "persuasion" of them to take thousands of asylum seekers.
Australian government aid to Nauru has been increased by 197% in the budget — to $1900 per Nauruan. (While the government has boasted it has increased the aid budget by $90 million — to $1.8 billion — $116 million of this is allocated to processing refugees currently held in Pacific island countries).
Even if this expenditure was justified, however, Costello's budget takes money from the very poor while the Howard government is still shelling out to the very rich.
Means-testing the "baby bonus", the rebate of private health insurance and scrapping the plans for the superannuation rebate for high-income earners would easily pay for the increasing costs of caring for the sick and the old. Even better, raising taxes on big business would be the most equitable way of funding a comfortable retirement for the workers whose labour creates company profits.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, May 22, 2002.
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