Category: Friday on My Mind

A long time ago in a faraway land…
So there’s me and 20 other foreign travellers, sitting around a bonfire on a farm in the south of France. We are there for the vendange – the grape harvest. It is well-paid, hard work − dawn till dusk − and only rarely can we find the energy to stay up late socialising.
Sitting around a campfire under a sickle moon singing, as you do, the Romanian girl I find attractive in an un-declarable way, the one who speaks only one word of English (‘cigarette’), reveals that when it comes to singing popular folk songs, she’s a master linguist: “How many rotes must a-men wark down?” she warbles.
Someone passes a joint around from hand to hand, some of us demurring, some taking a little sip and handing it on. Then it gets to the hairy German lad, who sticks the joint in his mouth and sucks until the tip glows bright red, dwindling until all that is left is a stub, which he pinches out with his fingers and promptly swallows.
“Don’t Bogart that joint, my friend,” I start singing, having not long ago seen Easy Rider for the fifth time. No-one joins in.

A short urban history

The urban dictionary defines Bogart as taking an exceptionally long drag on a marijuana cigarette (at the expense of others).
The tradition of songs that exalt the smoking of marijuana seems to have emerged in the Depression era. In 1927 blues Mama Rosetta Howard recorded “You’re a Viper” (early slang for stoner), Cab Calloway penned “Reefer Man” in 1932 and Fats Waller (pictured) rolled out “Viper” again in 1943.
“Don’t Bogart Me” by the Fraternity of Man in 1969 is best known because it featured on the soundtrack of a counter-culture movie. There was also the timing, being released in the decade when rock music, Woodstock, the Vietnam War protest movement (and the influx of drugs from south East Asia) turned a generation on to pot smoking.
I sometimes wonder about those 20-something European backpackers (and one Kiwi). How many turned out OK and how many let drugs and alcohol blight their lives?

Drugs, task forces and TV shows

You might have noticed a sudden onslaught of TV programmes about drugs this week. I watched Australia on Drugs for about 10 minutes until concluding it was just another talking heads show which would prove little and solve nothing. By far the most pertinent observations were those made on the Twitter feed scrolling along the bottom of the screen.
“Drugs ruined my life”, said one, “and you guys make it sound OK.” (or words to that effect).
“Legalise it, tax the shit out of it and pay off Australia’s debt,” said another.
Statistics on marijuana use estimate there are 177.6 million dope smokers in the world and 2.65 million of them live here or in New Zealand.
The United Nations World Drug Report in 2014 ranked Australia and New Zealand (Oceania), as, per capita, number one in the world for ecstasy use (although the trend was already tapering off). We were also the world’s third biggest user of marijuana (10.3% of the population) and fourth in the use of cocaine. The use of prescription opioids was also on the rise, with around 3.5% of people using codeine and morphine, legally and illegally. I use past tense deliberately since the data was collected in 2009 and therefore its usefulness is limited to demonstrating the scale of the issue.

What about alcohol, then?

There’s not much in the UN’s report about alcohol. It gets a mention in the section about poly drug use. The use of more than one illicit drug usually goes in tandem with alcohol, often as the fall-back substance when the favourite substance is unobtainable.
We all have a vague idea about the common statistics on alcohol use in Australia. Alcohol causes more than twice as many deaths as road accidents, killing 5,554 Australians each year. It also hospitalises 157,132 Australians each year and the harm from alcohol is said to cost $15.3 billion a year. Excise on alcohol only generates $7 billion.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) said there were 9.7 litres of pure alcohol per person ‘available for consumption’ in 2013-14. Fifty years ago, full strength beer made up 75% of all alcohol consumed. Now it is 41%, with wine making up 37.5%. The majority of Australians seem able to control their drinking to acceptable levels, and overall we are drinking less alcohol than we did 50 years ago. However, about 15% of men and 12% of women drink at very high-risk levels.

The abuse and over-use of alcohol in Oceania militates against decriminalising or legalising marijuana and other drugs. Why, governments will say, would you legalise marijuana when we already have one legal drug that causes huge social problems? But they might be tempted, as our pithy twitterer said, to “legalise it, tax it and pay off Australia’s debt.”

Not that simple, really

Just pause for a moment to consider why more governments around the world have not tried to solve the illegal drugs problem by making all such drugs legal.
Whatever you or I think of the demon weed and just how harmless it is or isn’t, there is a global push to at least decriminalise possession for personal use. Washington State and Colorado lead the way in the US (though you would not want to get busted in Oklahoma or Texas).
Some countries have already decriminalised possession of marijuana for personal use, including Argentina, Chile, Peru, The Netherlands and Ecuador. In Columbia and Jamaica you can grow plants for your own use. In May 2014, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalise the drug, allowing marijuana users three ways to enjoy their habit: grow it at home, buy from a pharmacy or join a grower’s club. Canada seems to have a relaxed attitude, with dope smoking and possession tolerated in some provinces. A petition urging the UK government to legalise pot has reached 50,000 signatures – but still 50,000 short of the number needed to trigger a debate. In South Australia, the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory you can be in possession of a small amount of marijuana or grow one or two plants for your own use without risking a criminal conviction.

Who me?

I suppose you’re waiting for me to declare my hand? I refer to the line in Paul Simon’s song, “Old,” from the album, “You’re the One”.
“First time I smoked, guess what? Paranoid.”
Dope has the potential to unpick the few stitches left binding deeply buried anxieties; to stir up the first signs of mental health disorders in those with a tendency. Dope has a clearly understood way of making Dark Side of the Moon sound awesome and encourages the deep-seated human need to loll about on the couch doing not much.
Then there’s eating cheese on toast at midnight and watching The Big Lebowski (again), giggling about a joke the rest of us didn’t get.

What is it about the flag that has us all in a flutter? From the red corner (anti-monarchist, anti-nationalist), it pains me to admit I felt a bit affronted by images of Reclaim Australia supporters wearing the flag like a cape. Fair go, fellas (and ladies), a great many people died in wars on behalf of that symbol. With one exception (Cathy Freeman spontaneously celebrating her epic athletic feat), I reckon people who use the flag as a cloak or cape have some serious issues about identity.
This festering topic prompted me to do a little online research, asking the question – is it illegal to wear the Australian flag? Well, no, it isn’t. Nor, somewhat surprisingly, is it a crime to burn the Australian flag. There have been attempts to bring flag-burning and flag-wearing into the definition of desecration, but so far it seems one of the great Aussie freedoms is to ponce around wearing the flag as if it says something noble about you.
You’ll see a lot of that on Australia Day, cars cruising the streets with small Aussie flags fluttering from the windows, flags flying from certain establishments, not all of whom (like the RSL), have a concrete reason for doing so.

You don’t speak for me

The media has done a fair bit of stirring this week about the “clashes” between Reclaim Australia and their opponents. Nothing excites the media more than conflict, and even when it is under-stated, mute even, they will stir it up.
The ABC made something of a story from Jimmy Barnes’ Facebook Page where the Scottish-born singer said he was affronted by the playing of his signature tune Khe Sanh at a Reclaim Australia rally in Brisbane.
Barnes wrote on his Facebook Page (which now makes me complicit, like the ABC reporter who went “file perving”):
“It has come to my attention that certain groups of people have been using my voice, my songs as their anthems at rallies,” Barnes wrote.
“None of these people represent me and I do not support them.”
Barnes, whose wife was born in Thailand, says the Australia he belongs to and loves is a “tolerant, open and giving” place.
Yes, Jimmy, for you and me both. I, too, long for this to be a country that embraces all sorts of different people, even Kiwis.

Ask me why I’m a Citizen

It’s a while since I filed into Brisbane City Hall with 700 other people who were that day to become Australian Citizens. I feel somewhat lucky I did not have to pass an exam about Australia’s history, lifestyle and values to prove I was worthy of being here.
I was perusing some of the questions commonly asked in that exam the other day. I even tested myself a few times, scoring 78%, 67% and 71% respectively.
The questions I got wrong nearly every time were those that delved into minutiae about the flag – how many stars are on the flag (swot up on that,Tone), from which constellation, where in particular are they placed, what are the four primary colours (that’s a trick question). And so on.
I’d suggest the anti-Muslim protesters who flaunted the flag as a piece of attire last weekend might be more up on this subject than I, but to what effect?
If we are expected to have a good general knowledge about Australia, surely there are more pertinent questions:

What percentage of people living in Australia was born somewhere else?
(a) 12% (b) 17% (c) 25% (d) 40% (e) why don’t they go back where they came from?
What suburb of Sydney has the highest proportion of residents born in the Middle East?
(a) Rose Bay (b) Homebush (c) Woy Woy (d) Lakemba
What is the rate of the goods and services tax?”
(a) 2.5% (b) 5% (c) 10% (d) 15% (e) he promised we’d never have one
Which four of the following people were never Australian Prime Ministers?
(a) Jeff Kennett (b) Joh Bjelke-Peterson (c) Gough Whitlam (d) Harold Holt (e) DameEdna Everage (f) Fred Nile
What is “Q&A?”
(a) Common questions asked about internet companies;
(b) A whooping cough vaccine;
(c) An Australian shipping line;
(d) A live ABC political talk show.

I could go on like this ad infinitum and soon I’d be at the end of the column, which is clever if you are bereft of ideas, but it also duds your readers.
The idea of having aspiring citizens sit for an exam on how well they know the country is not such a bad idea, but must it be loaded with jingoistic questions about nascent nationalism?
My aversion to flag adulation dates back to primary school in New Zealand when one had to salute the flag and sing both national anthems at morning assembly. And drink warm milk at little lunch.
For at least 20 years our cuzzies across the dutch have been arguing for a new flag, saying theirs is too similar to ours. The overt aim is to remove the Union Jack from the national flag. NZFlag.com, a trust established to encourage New Zealanders to change their flag, recently canvassed a design that too closely resembles Islamic State to make the cut. Hence my choice the Eureka Flag as a sort of neutral illustration.
The Returned Services’ Association (RSA) opposes any change to the Kiwi flag, but nevertheless New Zealanders will have opportunities to vote on the issue this year and next. But wait, it’s not a republic. Surely you must wait until the people have decreed Queen and (her) country to be irrelevant before you can (a) become a republic and (b) design a new flag?

Wear the flag and all that

But getting back to the Aussie flag and why we don’t have laws that prevent people from desecrating it. So it is not illegal to burn the flag, we established that. There have been recent examples, but no-one got arrested, apart from a chap who was given probation for destroying “property of the RSL”.
In 2006, contemporary artist Azlan McLennan burnt an Australian flag and displayed it outside the Trocadero artspace in Footscray. He called the art piece Proudly UnAustralian. Uh huh.
As for wearing said flag, the RSL has campaigned to make it illegal, various amendments have been proposed to change the Flag Act 1953, but none can get around the fact that a ban on wearing the flag (it’s illegal in the US) would impinge on somebody’s right to be a dickhead.
You can while away most of the weekend reading up on this subject, unless (ahem) your interest is flagging. You will find gems like this, from someone responding to the debate on a Yahoo forum:
“It isn’t a good idea to burn a flag anyway because you might end up lighting yourself on fire and get sent to the hospital.”
(Silently salutes).

A long time ago in a faraway land, a friend mentioned a young colleague’s name for promotion, citing this person’s problem-solving abilities and agreeable attitude.
“But he’s a clock watcher,” his boss said, closing the discussion right there (implying by a terse choice of words that my friend was a poor judge of character).
The term “clock watcher” cuts both ways in industrial relations circa 2015. The management clock watcher keeps a close tally on when employees arrive and leave, how long they take for lunch and what they get up to in working hours. The latter is much to do with monitoring at-work internet use and whether or not employees are using Facebook and Twitter for productivity, or sharing pictures of the cat stalking the goldfish.
The worker bee clock watcher is said to be showing a lack of interest in the job by watching the time closely, less he/she miss the 5.14pm bus. These are the workers said to take an hour to complete a task the ambitious, slightly manic worker bee completes in 20 minutes. But not all clock watchers deserve the derogatory tags – malingerer, idler, slacker, do-nothing or goldbricker.
Some might be in the wrong job, out of their depth, bored, dealing with personal issues or just worried about their job security, hence the punctilious, work-to-rule approach.

Numbers tell the story

As you can tell, I like numbers, because they so often tell a story. I may have misled you a little last week, however, using the now-redundant British definition of a billion to emphasise the parlous state of affairs in Greece. But I usually get it right.
The number that got my attention in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend was that 51% of Australian workers were members of a union in 1976. Forty years later, the proportion of workers in unions is just 17%. The young people from my work life I keep in touch with are usually on contracts, the terms of which tend to favour the employer. As a result, those on contracts know when they are due to expire, and make sure they have something else lined up in case the contract is not renewed.
So what happened to the 40-hour week, the fair boss and the loyal worker; a time when in order to sack someone, you needed a reason, rather than just not renewing a contract?
First we need to roll back to the mid-1980s and the Wapping Dispute in the UK, when Rupert Murdoch broke the back of the printers’ union and revolutionised newspaper production. In the process, News International sacked 5,500 workers who had voted to go on strike and consequently set off a year-long industrial dispute. (The journalists and others who refused to go to Wapping became known as the refuseniks).
This happened in the same decade Margaret Thatcher introduced tough legislation to limit union powers. If you want to delve into the history of this, some hard core unionists maintain their rage by keeping an archive on what Wapping was about, how it unfolded, who won and lost and where we are today.

The old school printing and compositing trades were always going to get run over by technology. You could see it coming in the early 1980s as newspapers began phasing out the old system of creating news (telex, typewriters, hand-subbing, and “hot metal” typesetting and compositing). New graduates took to the “new” system, cumbersome word processors (see photo) linked to photo typesetting. Prior to that, the job called for someone who could make up type using lead slugs produced on a linotype machine. If you visit The Courier-Mail building in Brisbane, there is one of these machines and the last front page produced by this method on display in the lobby.
Printers had their own union and stern rules about demarcation. Technology and attitudes changed and Wapping allowed it to change quickly. Lead composition and photo typesetting were replaced by computerised news production and pagination, where journalists and sub-editors controlled the process at their desks.

Today’s journalists have Windows PCs, smart phones and Facebook and Twitter accounts. The modern journalist is a genuine multi-tasker − reporter, writer, editor, researcher, librarian and secretary all rolled into one, feverishly writing stories for tomorrow’s print edition and the online edition, while doing their own PR by building a profile on social media. Journalism has always been one of those jobs where it is hard to say “quittin’ time”. There’s always one last phone call to confirm the last piece of information so you can file tomorrow’s story and catch the 7.30 train. Some jobs are just like that and some workers always work until the job is done. I think it used to be called conscientiousness.

Nevertheless, our ancestors fought for a 40-hour week; an eight hour day with a lunch break and morning and afternoon tea breaks.
The 40-hour week was enshrined in international law by the early to mid-20th century, ridding industrial Britain’s factories of its 10 to 16 hour days and banning the use of child labour.
People were attuned to the 40-hour week in the 1960s and 1970s. If you are my age you probably miss those days – the chance to go for a walk in the fresh air at lunch time, eat a pie and a cream bun in the park and head back in time for a quick game of table tennis.

And don’t even say the word ‘intern’

The “flexible” work week came about, I suspect, because of the recession we had to have in 1991 and 16 years later the GFC. Suddenly, Australians could not take their jobs for granted. People starting working longer days, showing willing, you know? Eating lunch at the desk and going to seminars (in their own time) with titles like Work Smarter, Not Harder.
Big listed companies started hiring consultants from the US who came into perfectly sound Australian companies with a chainsaw and showed the board of directors how the same work could be done with 25% fewer people.

In 1992 Paul Keating introduced compulsory superannuation, so that wage increases sought by unions became rolled into employer-funded savings for their future.  Other changes which stripped unions of power and relevance included the push to amalgamate unions and the Secondary Boycott legislation which effectively banned trade union members from going on ‘sympathy’ strikes.

One of my former work mates used to refer to industrial relations in these times as “getting my enterprise for a bargain”.
The OECD Better Lives Index observed last year that 21% of Australian men work 50 or more hours per week (compared to 6% of women). Corporate consultants will tell you that many executives routinely work 80 hours a week, driven perhaps by their employer’s need for more productivity in these tight economic times.
The only weapon left in the workers’ arsenal, probably, is to work to rule. If yours is an unhappy shop and you think your employer is getting your enterprise for a bargain, just slow down and work strictly to the legal conditions of your award/contract. Watch the clock, in other words.

While angry young Greeks led 61% of their comrades to vote “Oxi” (No) to more austerity, Australians awoke on Monday to yet another “bees in a bottle” news story.
A national poll showed only 35% of those polled approved of Bill Shorten. The PM, however, fared little better, with a personal approval rating of 36%. Shorten was still ahead of Tony Abbott in the preferred leader poll (43/39).
The real story underneath these headline numbers was that 53% of the 1,402 people asked for an opinion said they preferred Labor in the two-party preferred vote.
Shorten’s low approval number emerged in the same week he was quizzed by the royal commission into trade union corruption. Timing is everything.

The Fairfax/Ipsos poll asked respondents to rate the leaders on 11 attributes. Bill Shorten was ahead on being open to ideas (68%), having a firm grasp of social policy (59%), having the confidence of his party (56%), being viewed as more competent (52%), and having a firm grasp of economic policy (43%). But Shorten was also seen as being more easily influenced by minority groups and those who thought he has the confidence of his party fell from 71% in November to 56%.
PM Tony Abbott’s ratings improved from his poor showing in February. The proportion of those who thought he had the confidence of his party rose from 21% to 52%. But no Prime Minister had previously received such a low figure for being a strong leader (42%) and having a firm grasp of foreign policy (42%).

Now seriously, fellas, if we asked our wives for an approval rating and they dished out scores in the mid-30s, we’d all have to read the blog about “the eight books that can save your marriage”.

Politics, schmoliticks
It’s enough to make a man dream about retiring to a Greek island, lazing under Mediterranean skies, living on bread, cheese and olives, drinking Ouzo and Retsina, dancing on a moonlit beach with Kassandra.
You may remember the caves of Matala on the island of Crete, which were inhabited by European and American hippies in the 1960s until the churches and the locals ran them out of town. There was also a TV series in the 1970s (The Lotus Eaters), which followed the adventures of Brit expats with shady pasts, exiled on Crete and enjoying the indolent lifestyle. Yes, it has a mystique, Greece does.
Songwriter Leonard Cohen used a family bequest in 1960 to buy a run-down whitewashed house on Hydra (above). It was here he did some of his best writing, while taking up with a girl called Marianne.

We had a few adventures in 2004 travelling in Greece in the off-season, when the tourist season had not yet started. We found cheap accommodation, went in search of a local eatery in the cobbled lanes of Hydra and soaked up its sleepy atmosphere. Life is slow on Hydra. There are no cars but you can hire a donkey to carry you and your bags up steep winding cobbled paths to your Pensione. Every second day or so a cruise ship the size of a 10-storey hotel slides in to port and lets tourists off to barter with locals over hand-made arts and crafts and leaves two hours later.

We had found a small taverna on the harbour at Piraeus while we waited for the next ferry to Hydra. The friendly owner wanted to know “Where you from?”
“Ah, Ous-tral-eah. I have a cousin in Mel-bourne – Stavros. Maybe you know him?”
We ordered a meal and wondered not for the first time if Greeks eat any green vegies at all. They were probably not in season in early March, but no great surprise in a country where the soil is not very fertile and only 30% of the land supports crops. Apart from the main crop (wheat), small farms produce corn and other grains, figs, olives, oranges, peaches, potatoes, sugar beets, tobacco and tomatoes.
There’s a small band of FOMM readers who let me know, whenever I touch on the egregiousness of local politics, that they are seriously thinking of migrating to another country.

Expat-led counter-culture revolution
This week I’m suggesting we take a serious look at Greece. We could band together and buy a few of the 6,000-odd uninhabited islands between Greece and Turkey (upwind of Psyttaleia). Or just pick one of the under-populated ones and move in. Sure, there would be some cultural challenges, but no more so than the ones facing Greeks who came to Melbourne in the 1960s.
Our overall goal would be to use permaculture to make the best of the flinty, under-nourished soil. We’d utilise foreign capital and first-world technology to become self-sufficient, building mudbrick and straw bale houses, solar farms, windmills, water tanks and a recycling plant. We’d develop an income stream by attracting eco-tourists, with the work done by wwoofers and indentured asylum seekers (the latter funded by the European countries that are trying to keep refugees at bay). But the exchange rate is crap, I hear you say. No worries, we’ll just revert to the barter system, which modern Greeks have taken to in numbers since 2011

It’s not a bad exercise, when you’re feeling disenchanted with your own country, to have a quick peek into a nation which is really not doing well at all.

After four years of austerity which saw the country’s unemployment rate blow out from 9.6% to 27.4% (youth unemployment is 60%), Greeks said “No” to more austerity measures. There is much conjecture about what happens next about that country’s $317 billion IMF debt.
Greek Statistics says the general government deficit, expressed as a percentage of GDP was -12.7% in 2013. Only Slovenia was in a worse position at -14.7%. Greece’s gross debt as a percentage of GDP in 2013 was 175.1%.
Comparisons are odious, but Australia’s gross debt/GDP in 2013 was 14.1%, our unemployment rate is 6% and we can use 52.78% of the land mass to grow crops.
Dreams of an expat-led counter-culture revolution aside, the future looks bleak for Greece. The most telling statistic shows that 23.1% of the country’s 10.78 million people are at risk of poverty. More significantly, 15.1% of those people are employed. So they are working, but going broke anyway.

Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan blamed much of the crisis on the Greek people for refusing to reform. Greeks had made tax avoidance and welfare scamming the national sports, he claimed. As sweeping statements, go this was yard broom size, but it stirred up a few grains of truth. The Wall Street Journal carried a story in February by Matthew Karnitschnig and Nektaria Stamouli that the Greek government was owed $76 billion euros in unpaid taxes accrued over decades.
Sheehan’s observations will no doubt offend Stavros and the other 378,269 people of Greek ancestry who live in Ous-tral-eah. Like us, they are keeping an eye on Greece – a foretaste of things to come in Europe, maybe, with Spain, Italy and other countries carrying similar levels of unsupportable debt.
Next week: Light and fluffy.

I overheard a snippet of conversation outside the newsagency this week which I now embellish for literary purposes.
Bloke:“Whatcha up to?”
2nd Bloke : “I’ll be doin’ the books this arvo and probably tomorrow too.
Bloke: “Ugly. Don’t you have until October 31?
2nd Bloke: “Mate, if you don’t do it now, when are you gonna do it?”
Good point, given that the end of the financial year (June 30 for some countries), has come and gone. It’s true that the Australian Taxation Office (hereafter called the ATO), nominates October 31 as the last day to lodge your tax return – a fair bit later if you use a tax agent or accountant. You can download etax and do it yourself (most of the information is pre-loaded thanks to data-matching). But for those of us who wake up on Boxing Day with a hangover and a sudden rush of anxiety about the shoebox full of receipts, it’s time to find a tax agent.

Growth is good!

It’s good to see a successful business growing and the ATO is certainly growing, but it has apparently automated many of its functions. The ATO has only increased its staffing levels by just less than 1% a year or 5,785 people since 1987. Over this 28-year period, the ATO has picked up a bit of work (collecting $419 billion in tax from 16.5 million tax returns, administering the GST, supervising Australia’s 534,000 self-managed super funds, getting its collective head around 125 separate taxes and being the “custodian” of the Australian Business Number system). (She Who Puts Up With Me (thanks Rev), says a custodian is, strictly speaking, someone who safeguards something without doing much work).
This probably explains why it took months for someone to follow up the polite letter I wrote pointing out that whoever input the ABN data had mis-spelled my middle name. The person who called back explained how I could register online and make the correction myself. My complaint about the ATO and that other Commonwealth behemoth, Centrelink, is that their call centres are clearly over-burdened. The ATO logged more than 11 million calls last year, although they say 78% of calls were resolved first time round.
About 12 million of Centrelink’s 43 million calls in 2013-2014 reportedly went through to the keeper. Both agencies are increasingly trying to get “clients” to go online and do the work themselves. I have been studiously avoiding doing this with Centrelink. One the rare occasions when I have something to report, I write a short, unambiguous letter. No-one ever writes back. I keep a copy on file, just in case. But that’s another story.

Top heavy PR

This week the Canberra Times reported that the ATO was targeting redundancies in its marketing and communications unit. Noel Towell reported that the ATO found the unit’s staff was spread over 17 offices throughout Australia, often working to different performance standards. The unit is top-heavy with executive level 1 staff with a shortage of lower-ranked public servants. (Towell’s article does not go into this detail, but just so you know, an executive level 1 public servant earns about $100k, while APS4 to APS 6 get by on $63k to $89k).
The ATO had already cut its communications and marketing staff from 520+ in March 2014 to fewer than 400. The new cull aims to get rid of 30 executive level jobs while promoting the rank and file to middle managers. If this unit was responsible for the latest annual report, the razor gang may be a bit too penny-wise. The overview pages are easy to understand and use graphics to tell the story.

They are watching you

One of the unit’s missions is to get the word out about which professions or workplaces the ATO is homing in on this year. Previously, these efforts have focused on tradespeople and small businesses. The brief, I believe, is to make people think they’re on to you. You’d think they’d be happy with $321.7 billion in tax receipts, but it’s probably the $97.5 billion in refunds which is bothering them.
I suspect this is all about making Honest John the taxpayer feel like he’s doing something wrong. And if he actually is, even if it’s a mistake, there will be hell to pay. Investigators are just waiting to pounce from the shrubbery to nail you for buying a new microwave for the office kitchen and then taking it home, replacing the clapped out office one with your four-year old household appliance which has scrubbed up pretty well. (I read that somewhere).
However, this year the ATO is targeting the 1.8 million people who own an investment property. Those who struggle to make mortgage payments or pay rent may be peeved to learn that investment property owners claim on average $25,717 in deductions every tax year. (A couple on Newstart get $24,366 – just saying).
Deductions include interest on loans and write-offs on capital works and other items. The ATO wants owners to know they should only claim for periods when the property was rented or genuinely available for rent.
Periods of personal use cannot be claimed. Apparently, some home-owners claim deductions for their holiday pad on the grounds that it is being rented out (to the owners, their family and friends). There are also a few instances where husbands and wives split income and deductions, with most of the tax benefit going to the higher-earning spouse, even though the property is owned 50:50.
We can’t have that sort of dodgy behaviour going on in small business can we? The tabloids and current affairs shows will be on to you too.

Small beer

But SWPUWM says that’s small beer compared to the recent revelations about the scale of offshore tax shenanigans by the multinationals (including the owners of said tabloids and current affairs shows). Many multinationals pay less than 5% tax in any given year by using offshore tax havens. The noose is tightening though, as you might have observed this week with a Senate committee grilling Big Pharma executives about their tax arrangements.

It’s great that the ATO is cracking the whip about large-scale avoidance, evasion and fraud. You can see it by the way they are trimming 4,700 people from their workforce. The ATO employed 23,631 people as of June 2014, of whom 2,764 worked part time. They’ve axed 3,000 jobs already and another 1,700 will go by 2018. Almost 25% of the culled jobs came from the audit team, which, as the Sydney Morning Herald rightly observed, exists to investigate and enforce tax compliance by individuals and multi-national companies.
I’m no mathematician, but somehow, that just doesn’t add up.
(Disclaimer: No GST inputs or deductions were claimed by the author.)

So how was your week? If you watched Q&A and the media orgy that followed, not to mention the final, cringe-worthy episode of the Killing Season, it was morbidly depressing. There are major problems with the two-party political system, not the least of which is the way a canny politician can divide and conquer.
“Whose side are you on?” Tony Abbott quizzed the ABC, after the live TV programme aired comments by Zaky Mallah, the first person charged under new anti-terrorism laws. Mallah was ultimately cleared of terrorism-related offences. The ABC’s Mark Scott defended the broadcaster against Abbott’s claims it had “betrayed” Australian values, saying that “Free-speech principles mean giving platforms to those with whom we fundamentally disagree”.

It’s a Democracy

Quite by accident this week, I found the webpage of a political party which appears to be dead but is decidedly not lying down. The Australian Democrats need to bring their membership numbers up to 500 so they can apply to have their party re-registered. The Democrats were struck off by the Electoral Commission in April. http://www.australian-democrats.org.au
So how did the mighty fall, then? The Democrats were once the official third party of Australian politics, led by former Liberal Don Chipp, wearer of loud suits; a man with a lived-in face, quick with a snappy one-liner. Apart from Chipp’s catch-cry about “Keeping the bastards honest”, The Democrats were and still are the only political party in which all members have an equal say in determining policies through policy ballots.
Parliamentary Library researcher Cathy Madden, summarising the end of an era in 2009, said the key features of a Democrat are adherence to the principle of parliamentary democracy and allowing MPs to vote according to their conscience. The Australian Democrats won seats at each Senate election from 1977 to 2001, supported by middle class, urban-based, educated and younger voters who were disillusioned with the major parties. They held the balance of power in the Senate from July 1981 to 2004 and were therefore able to influence the legislative agenda.

Factors in its decline include support for John Howard’s unpopular Goods and Services Tax in 1999, the turnover of parliamentary leaders and the rise of the Australian Greens.

At the party’s 20th year anniversary conference in 1997, then leader Senator Cheryl Kernot said: “After 20 years, we are entitled to say with confidence that we are here to stay and, after 1996, we can say with equal confidence that our best is yet to come.”

Parties galore

Well maybe not. The Democrats polled just 3,614 primary votes in the 2013 election. If you consider all the good deeds that went before in that Party’s name, it is scary indeed that the strident Rise Up Australia party with its anti-Islam, anti-multicultural messages attracted almost 14 times as many votes (48,582).
The Australian Democrats were unceremoniously shoved aside in the late 1990s by the Australian Greens, a centrist party dedicated to conservation and responsible environmental management. As time goes by and the Greens do more legislative deals with Labor or the Liberals, we may find the environmental idealism giving way to something less than the reformists can stomach.
You can see the level of disenchantment with mainstream politics by the number of new parties at the 2013 election. More than 40 individual parties and many more independents who stood as individuals, participated in this election, which had been preceded by the tumultuous Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years.
Most new parties or individual candidates were aiming for the Senate. Some were single-issue parties (WikiLeaks, The Bullet Train Party, The Voluntary Euthanasia Party, HEMP and others). Almost all of them formed an alliance to use the divisive preference system to elevate micro-parties to otherwise unlikely Senate seats.
So where are the noble politicians of yesteryear, those of caustic wit, tempered by a courtliness which no longer has a place in the House of Representatives? Where is the wit and whimsy, the intellectual rigour, the principles, the conscience votes and the crossing of the floor? Will we ever see the likes again of James Killen, Senator Neville Bonner, Barry Jones or Gareth Evans?
Instead we are ‘led’ by an urban yokel who gets by repeating the same thing over and over, no matter how inane. His deputy beats up on the ‘leaners’ in society and insults them by suggesting the answer to poverty and homelessness is to “get a better job”. And what does Labor do in Opposition? They cut a deal to reduce the Renewable Energy Target.
Read Naomi Klein’s book, “This Changes Everything”. It’s about climate change, you idiot politicians!
For sure we need a new party, but one which allows individual members to serve their constituents instead of blindly following some die-hard creed controlled by a faceless caucus.
The Oxford dictionary which came free with my new Kindle Fire describes a caucus as “a group of people with shared concerns within a political party”. More tellingly, the synonyms for caucus include such pejorative terms as faction, bloc, gang, ring, cabal, clique, coterie, junta and pressure group.
So yes, as we are dragged relentlessly into the era of Peak Oil, Climate Change, 50 million displaced people and GFC Mark II, it is clear, as Human Rights lawyer Benedict Coyne told the recent World Refugee Day rally in Brisbane: “Australia needs a political paradigm shift”.

Fraser’s gift to the people

Former PM Malcom Fraser spent the last four years of his life building a new political party, drafting the Renew Australia Party manifesto with human rights barrister Julian Burnside and others. RAP is not yet registered as a political party, but its core values might appeal to the disenchanted masses. The Manifesto attacks both major parties for drifting away from an idealistic vision, saying “The country is looking once more for intelligent and enlightened leadership, inspired by a belief in justice, integrity and a sense of a fair go.”

Van Badam, writing in The Guardian, says it is surprising to recall that the Liberal Party Malcolm Fraser joined was founded in 1944 by Robert Menzies with a principle that, rather than begrudging assistance to the needy, it would extend the safety net in pursuit of that fair go. Fraser left the Liberal Party in 2009, saying it had turned into “A conservative party”.

In recognising what Benedict Coyne called “The toxicity of the two party race to the bottom system”, Fraser co-authored a document which advocates re-distributing the benefits of economic growth through the economy to those on low wages, not in work or reliant on welfare. Egad, it sounds like traditional Labor policy, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of policy Labor has drifted away from, much as Labor has agreed to shunt asylum seekers into alien territory; much as Labor has voted with the Libs to encroach upon our privacy and deny us freedom of information.

Badam says the RAP Manifesto lacks policy detail, “But as a critique of the present crisis in Australian politics it doesn’t require it”. Insightful as always, Badam concludes: “Whether plans to form a Renew Australia party even materialise is less important than the impact of forcing a re-consideration of what Australians may actually want in a political party, and who is capable of delivering it.”