Hitting Australians When They’re Down: Unemployment Payments and the Demonisation of the Unemployed

During the 2007 election, Kevin Rudd’s mantra of support for ‘working families’ caused many a journalistic snigger. During the recent election, the two larger parties were rightly derided for their shameless dog whistling in regard to an irrational fear of a few thousand unfortunate boat people.

But to my knowledge no journalist has admitted that the concept of working families is in itself a form of dog whistling. The unmentionable ‘other’ is of course the ‘non-working family’ – as well as, heaven help them, the single unemployed who have failed to fulfil even their reproductive duties. Julia Gillard’s announcement during the campaign that unemployed people would be stripped of their benefits if they did not turn up to employment interviews was a whistle so clear it could have been heard by every toy poodle in Paris.

In the current climate it is politically unwise to mention unemployed people in the mainstream media, the very group that is most in need of the assistance of government, unless it is in the context of turning them into part of the favoured group – the employed (a worthwhile aim, but not one that justifies starvation-level payments). Both of the larger parties are now willing to alternately demonise and disregard this group of Australians in order to appeal to the ignoramuses in the country’s most marginal seats.

Not only does this process create a convenient scapegoat, but it also makes it easier for the parties to ignore the very real suffering caused by the grossly inadequate welfare payments that unemployed people receive, confident that Australians like you and I won’t be clamouring for change. If the unemployed are inherently shifty, if they are markedly less deserving than aged pensioners and those with disabilities, and if they cannot be trusted to have a good reason for not attending an employment interview, they should be grateful for what they get.

The rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor is not simply a matter of semantics; it has huge ramifications for the kind and level of support that people down on their luck receive. After the 2009 bushfires in Victoria, the country watched astounded as an avalanche of community goodwill and generosity blanketed the survivors, many of whom had lost most of their belongings. Donations of goods quickly arrived by the truckload and some people even offered cars and caravans to the victims. The Victorian Bushfire Appeal eventually raised an astonishing $379 million.

Yet later that year the federal government had no difficulty selling the fact that the 2009 budget included a $32.50 increase to disability and age pensions while the Newstart (unemployment) Allowance, already significantly lower than the pension, remained unchanged (in July 2010 it was a miserly $231 a week for a single adult). Perhaps governments fear the goodheartedness of their citizens as much as they fear unpopularity; a fully informed citizenry might clamour for a tax system that funded adequate unemployment benefits, leaving less money for electoral bribes to the pampered middle class.

This situation is all the more offensive given that unemployment is an accepted part of, and even considered vital to, the running of modern growth-based economies. Zero unemployment is said to lead to wages growth, which may lead to inflation, and high inflation is a politician’s worst nightmare. Governments are therefore busy scapegoating a group whose disadvantaged status it is arguably in their interests to maintain. (Outrageous growth in executive salaries, however, is assumed to have no effect on inflation.)

Poor people weren’t always the scapegoats of politicians. Remember Bob Hawke’s impassioned declaration in 1987 that no Australian child would live in poverty by 1990? At the time he was laughed at for having such a lofty and unachievable goal. But compare the urgency of his rhetoric, and the apparent electoral importance of the issue at the time, with the silence on poor children, as opposed to average families, today.

So what’s the situation for those receiving Newstart Allowance in Australia? Here are some disturbing facts:

• About 600,000 Australians receive the Newstart Allowance. More than half of them have been receiving it for over a year.

• The Newstart payment for a single adult was only $33 a day in July 2010. This is almost $120 a week lower than the Disability Support Pension, and less than half the minimum wage.

• In July 2010, a family with two children headed by an unemployed sole parent had to make do on only $460 per week.

• While Newstart has not increased in real terms for almost two decades, in the last ten years electricity costs have nearly doubled (91 per cent), while housing and health costs combined have risen by about 60 per cent.

• The national unemployment rate for 15 to 19-year-olds was almost 17 per cent in June 2010.

• Providers of job services for long-term unemployed people receive an average of only $500 per person to assist them to return to work, less than most other wealthy nations.

In the absence of visibility, unemployed people endure a hardship that the rest of Australia, apart from the welfare sector, largely ignores. Many will be forced to accept food parcels, clothing and emergency payments from charitable organisations. Large numbers will shiver in cold houses or risk getting the electricity disconnected because they can’t afford to pay heating bills. Unemployed single parents will watch helplessly as their children are marginalised through their inability to provide for their educational needs. The threat of homelessness will loom when the rent goes up or a long-term landlord decides to sell. The costs of petrol and public transport, especially for those living in remote areas, may be prohibitive.

In its 2010 election statement, Australia’s peak welfare body, the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), asserted that blaming unemployed people for their predicament was ‘both cruel and pointless’. It called for wholesale reform of the welfare payment system to reflect the cost of living, and for the single adult rate of Newstart to be immediately increased by $45 a week.

Yet from the moment of her ascension to the prime ministership, Gillard’s rhetoric has in effect been moving in the opposite direction, suggesting that first and foremost it is the business, even the duty, of government to reward those who are lucky enough to have work – those good, solid, irreproachable folk who ‘set their alarms early’. In her acceptance speech she affirmed that ‘I believe in a government that rewards those who work the hardest’.

During this speech Gillard acknowledged the role of the entire workforce in bringing Australia through the GFC relatively unscathed – ‘the working people, employers, employees, the trade unions, the small and big businesses, the employer associations who all made this possible’. Yet she failed to commiserate with those whose lives were thrown into chaos due to the rise in unemployment at the height of the GFC.

It’s true that during the GFC many employers, fearing a skills shortage, reduced their employees’ hours rather than sacking them, and good on those who did; it’s also true that the official unemployment rate, which is always far lower than the actual rate, rose to 5.8 per cent, an increase of 1.6 per cent, between May 2008 and August 2009. For Gillard, employers and employees who weathered the storm were worthy of congratulations, but not any former workers that employers had dumped to maintain the viability of their businesses.

This kind of rhetoric signals an astonishing reversal of the self-definition of a Labor government, which has traditionally associated itself with advocating for the disadvantaged. It also ignores one of the most important roles of the tax system: to redistribute the nation’s wealth in order to improve equity.

Objective 3 (a) of the ALP constitution states that the party stands for ‘the abolition of poverty, and the achievement of greater equality in the distribution of income, wealth and opportunity’. Point 23 in Chapter 7 of Labor’s national platform makes a direct reference to unemployment benefits, revealing that the ALP’s aim is, in fact, that they be sufficient to live on. It states that Labor is ‘committed to ensuring that pensions and allowances support a decent standard of living and full participation in Australian society’.

In addition, through the tax system governments of all stripes are required to redistribute resources to make society more equitable. That’s not some socialist goal; it is reiterated in the Henry tax review, which unequivocally states that ‘Australia’s tax and transfer system needs to raise and redistribute revenue efficiently, equitably (my italics) and in a fiscally sustainable manner …’

Sadly, the present low level of Newstart payments is counter to both Labor objectives and the fundamental role of taxation. They fail to take into account the most basic realities of the cost of living – housing, for instance.

According to housing advocacy group National Shelter, rents are rising at a rate three times that of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). In the March quarter 2010, the median rental for a newly let one-bedroom flat in Sydney was $385 – almost $100 more than the single adult rate of Newstart and the maximum weekly Rent Assistance payment ($56.70) combined! In addition, the miserly Newstart Allowance ensures that the costs associated with searching for work – transport, decent clothing, access to computers and so on – are prohibitive.

To make matters worse, the gap between unemployment payments and pensions will continue to widen if the system isn’t overhauled. This is because increases in the former are calculated using the CPI, while pensions increase in line with wages, which are historically higher than the CPI. In addition, Newstart recipients face significantly harsher income tests than do those receiving the DSP, and lengthy waiting periods if they have substantial savings.

If Gillard’s rhetoric uses silence and innuendo to suggest an undeserving poor, the Howard government deployed a metaphorical pick-axe in its wrecking of the public image of unemployed people. Following its 1996 election victory the Coalition began demonising unemployed people with particular zeal; they were lazy dole bludgers who were lucky to get anything.

The government introduced Work for the Dole and the concept of mutual obligation, tightened access to benefits and reduced levels of payment in some instances. Tony Abbott coined the term ‘job snobs’ and reportedly claimed that the welfare state encouraged welfare dependency, while Mal Brough falsely stated that one in six unemployed people were ‘cruisers’ and ‘dole bludgers’ who were exploiting ‘the generosity of the Australian taxpayer to fund their lifestyle choice’.

At the same time, the Howard government reduced the ability of the welfare sector to challenge these negative images by effectively muzzling it. It defunded some advocacy groups, required welfare organisations to provide advance warning of any public criticisms of the government, and threatened to introduce legislation that would take tax breaks away from non-government organisations that advocated changes to legislation, if this advocacy was ‘more than ancillary or incidental to their core purpose’.

The rhetoric of the undeserving poor helped to justify Howard’s refusal to increase Newstart (and pension) payments despite the economic boom, as well as his shameless finessing of middle-class electoral bribery and tax rorts for the wealthy to stay in power (what the Welfare Rights Unit labels ‘upside-down welfare’).

Howard changed the tenor of federal budgets, turning them into Christmas-style handouts for voters who were encouraged to care only about how they would benefit financially. He increased funding for wealthy private schools, introduced a rebate for private health insurance and created a First Home Owners Grant. In 2006, Coalition treasurer Peter Costello announced profligate superannuation concessions that blatantly favoured the wealthy and created a tax rort for older high-income earners.

The Labor government has continued to produce regressive policies and encourage the ‘gimme gimme’ attitude of voters. Its proposed ‘cash for clunkers’ (Cleaner Car Rebate) scheme – which may now be on the scrapheap – is a relatively minor example. The scheme would throw $2000 at those who could already afford to buy a brand new car, and would no doubt be enthusiastically taken up by comfortably-off parents whose university-attending children were currently driving bombs.

More disturbingly, the government foregoes billions of dollars in tax revenue each year by giving generous tax breaks, such as negative gearing, to property investors. (This policy has also contributed to steep increases in the price of property, and therefore helped to fuel rent increases that have worsened hardship for the poor.) Moreover, despite the recommendations of the Henry review, the Labor government has maintained the superannuation concessions for the wealthy, concessions that are costing the country billions. Removing these property investment and superannuation tax breaks would release funds for fairer Newstart payments, so that the poorest Australians could afford the basics.

The mainstream media has been doing little to champion the rights of unemployed people. This year the voice of the social welfare lobby was conspicuously absent from post-budget ABC radio news bulletins, while Lateline did its bit to keep social justice out of the post-budget discussion.

On the program that followed the budget speech of 11 May 2010, the only non-government perspective was given by the dry-as-dust Chris Richardson from Access Economics (Richardson is, in any case, a former Treasury staffer). Predictably he called for the government to cut spending, failing to distinguish between worthwhile and wasteful spending; interviewer Leigh Sales made no attempt to challenge either the social or economic basis for this assessment.

In fact, while the ABC is obsessed with balance, in the area of social justice it makes no attempt to give equal time. Journalists are required to be fluent in the rhetoric and jargon of neoliberalism, so why aren’t they equally familiar with the concepts of social justice, equity and inequality?

On the contrary, seasoned interviewers such as Fran Kelly and Kerry O’Brien repeatedly fail to call politicians to account on the regressive aspects of their budget and election giveaways. Nor do they raise the contradiction inherent in politicians repeatedly saying they can’t afford to fund adequate income support and services for disadvantaged people while blithely handing out tax cuts to those who don’t need them. In the fourth estate, the idea of a nation that supports the ‘fair go’ seems to have been abandoned.

This lack of oversight has enabled the government to make life increasingly difficult for disadvantaged people, the unemployed among them. Initially applied to Indigenous welfare recipients in the Northern Territory, welfare quarantining for non-Indigenous welfare recipients was to be rolled out in the NT from July this year, despite evidence that it doesn’t work. It will apply to long-term unemployed people, some young people on benefits, those deemed to be at risk of financial crisis or domestic abuse and people referred by child protection authorities. At the end of 2011 the scheme will be assessed with the possibility that it could be rolled out nationally.

This scheme costs a whacking $4400 per person on average, money that would be much better spent on family intervention programs – such as those run by Uniting Care, which cost less and are proven to work – as well as treatment for addictions, financial counselling services, greater job search assistance and an increase in allowances. ACOSS has labelled the scheme ‘a top-down, one-size-fits-all, bureaucratic solution to complex social problems’ that is ‘poorly targeted and expensive’ and will ‘inflict shame and indignity on income support recipients’.

In an eloquent example of bipartisanship between the two larger parties, prior to the election Tony Abbott declared that he approved of the scheme and suggested that he would implement it if the Coalition won government.

If governments can get away with such an ineffectual and even harmful policy with little public protest, there is a strong risk that unemployed people will be unfairly targeted in other ways when the economic good times are gone.

The UK offers a sobering example of what can happen when the concept of the undeserving poor takes hold. According to journalist Johann Hari, the people most able to shoulder the burden of David Cameron’s obsession with reducing debt – the wealthy – aren’t being asked to do so.

Instead, in another example of the twisted logic of upside-down welfare, the poor are being hit; the unemployed, for example, will lose £6.50 from the £65 they receive a week. Hari quotes a chilling off-the-record remark made to The Times by a government minister: ‘the undeserving poor are undeserving’. He goes on to show that cutting government spending is not only bad for poor people, but also disastrous for the economy – that is, it will simply create more poor people.

So how to counter both the demonisation of and the silence around unemployment? How to build sufficient momentum in the community to pressure the government to raise unemployment payments to reflect the cost of living?

The human brain thrives on narrative. Australians need to hear the voices and stories of unemployed people themselves, and to begin to understand what their lives are like. Just as Howard knew that it was vital to prevent the media from humanising the Tampa boat people, both the government and the Coalition no doubt realise that if unemployed people were to tell their stories they would receive a measure of sympathy from the community.

The voices of unemployed people can be heard in a report the Brotherhood of St Laurence produced in March this year, Making Work Pay and Making Income Support Work. The report found that the social security and tax systems created significant barriers for people trying to return to work and combining part-time work with welfare payments. It called for ‘a wide-ranging overhaul of income support, housing and employment services’ to ease the transition. But in doing so it also exploded the popular myth that the unemployed are somehow different from, and less motivated than, the rest of us. Conversely, it found that:

… given their personal circumstances, income support recipients are shown to make sensible decisions regarding engagement with paid work … in stark contrast with the stereotypes of welfare recipients as ‘dependent on welfare’ or incapable of making ‘responsible’ decisions …

Indeed, the report concluded that ‘even the most disadvantaged participants held positive attitudes to paid work’. It laudably includes quotes from unemployed people themselves – people like Ian, who says: ‘I want to be cut off the [Newstart] payment as quick as possible … to get back to work, even if it’s just a bit over Newstart, I’d rather do that’.

The welfare sector needs to continue its fight to get the issue of unemployment payments into the mainstream media, and to tell the stories behind the statistics. In turn, journalists need to understand that the experiences of disadvantaged people are vital to presenting a complete picture of this country, and to bringing back the concept of the ‘fair go’; but they also need to realise that news stories that don’t demonise the poor or oversimplify their circumstances make for stronger, more accurate and more hard-hitting journalism.

The policies of both the Coalition and Labor need to incorporate basic fairness for unemployed people through income support payments that enable them to retain dignity and a lifestyle not ravaged by desperate want. The Greens haven’t specified a particular level of increase for Newstart payments in their policy platform, but say they want to ‘simplify the system of targeted pensions and allowances into a universal guaranteed adequate income scheme’. Now that they have obtained the balance of power in the Senate, it’s vital that they push to bring unemployment payments into line with pensions. They should also maintain their opposition to welfare quarantining.

Unemployment can happen to anyone who is an employee, and a fairer, more cohesive society benefits every single one of us. Our new minority government needs to foster in this wealthy country a generosity of spirit and an understanding of the right of every Australian to a standard of living that preserves dignity, enables participation and provides the basis for creating a better future.

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Scuttling social justice – Julia Gillard and the 2010 federal election

Australia is going to the polls in a month’s time. Julia Gillard, the Australian Labor Party prime minister, looks set to win. But, in playing so clearly to middle Australia, she is using her considerable political talent to further drag the ALP away from some of its primary responsibilities: the upholding of human rights and support for the disadvantaged.

For the benefit of overseas readers, Gillard, then the deputy prime minister, shocked Australia when, following weeks of Kevin Rudd suffering in the opinion polls, she deposed him in an unforeseen overnight 'coup' on June 23–24; knowing he no longer had the numbers, Rudd stepped down rather than face a leadership ballot.

It may be that the coup wasn’t quite as sinister as it must have appeared to international observers, despite the involvement of faceless union officials and the fact that Gillard got multinational mining companies onside by ending a terrible imbroglio over mining tax soon after taking power. Rudd appears to have been stuck in a compulsive, controlling, workaholic state that he was unable to shed – some have hinted at mental health issues, and it was impossible not to anticipate the advent of some sort of personal crisis.

The event was notable regardless, being the first time in Australian history that a first-term serving prime minister had been deposed. And, as most people know, Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister.

An election was due anyway, but Gillard was always going to call it early because she wanted to rule as chosen prime minister, rather than being seen as a pretender. Now a snap election has been called for the 21 August.

There are a few things I’ve been dying to write about Gillard ever since her surprise ascension.

Like some others, I hoped that she was more radical than she appeared, and that with Rudd out of the way she would take some simple progressive steps such as allowing gay marriage (Rudd’s a god-botherer and has always opposed this; Gillard is an unmarried atheist with no kids).

It was difficult not to assume, or at least hope, that Gillard would be a little more radical simply because she was a woman. Having slogged her way to the top in a male-dominated party, surely she would have empathy for the marginalised, and go into bat for them once she got into power? My hopes were ill-founded – Gillard soon stated unequivocally that she had no plans to legalise gay marriage.

This should have been no surprise – Gillard as education minister and minister for workplace relations was disturbingly reactionary. Despite her frequent eloquent pronouncements on her commitment to education, she seems to have done absolutely nothing to reduce the glaring inequities of Australia’s education system, a two-tier system that blatantly favours private schools and suffers from hopelessly complicated federal–state funding arrangements.

Gillard specialised in gimmicky, hugely expensive policies that caught the attention of the media as they were designed to do, before at least partly crashing and burning on their ineptitude and lack of groundwork; but she did absolutely zilch to reduce the system’s glaring inequities.

The building and computers-in-schools programs that characterised her tenure were open to the most obscenely wealthy private school, despite the fact that public education has been severely underfunded for years in Australia, resulting in rundown schools and inadequate teacher numbers and support services. The aim of the building program was partly to stimulate the economy, but, writing in The Age, Kenneth Davidson said that ‘Funding directed to maintenance upgrades according to the greatest needs would have had the same economic stimulus impact dollar for dollar and a far bigger pay-off in terms of equity and efficiency’.

Moreover, the public schools were disadvantaged in their access to the building program because they had much less choice compared with the private schools about exactly what was to be built, and no ability to negotiate the cost, resulting in ‘inflated costs and dubious projects’.

With regard to the computer program, private schools benefited while some government schools couldn’t afford to pay for the infrastructure that extra computers would entail.

Moreover, in her determination to impose a national test (NAPLAN) on skills such as literacy and numeracy and a website that would allow parents to compare the relative performance of schools, Gillard fought with the overworked teachers she should have been supporting – teachers who feared that the website would lead to the creation of divisive league tables, and that the expertise of teachers working with students with specific needs would be overlooked.

Also, Gillard had been part of the ‘gang of four’ that replaced Cabinet government under Rudd. The Cabinet still sat of course, but apart from Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, Treasurer Wayne Swan and Gillard, they were mainly asked to tick the boxes.

This anti-democratic tendency, a recipe for poor government, was part of the reason why MPs were willing to vote Rudd out; but I didn’t realise until after the ‘coup’ that it was Gillard, as part of the ‘gang of four’, who had urged that controversial emissions trading legislation be deferred until 2013 – a decision identified with Rudd at the time, and that had signficantly contributed to his poor showing in the opinion polls.

Perhaps the most shocking development since Gillard’s win has been her willingness to use the issue of asylum seekers as a political football. This was evident in the speech she gave on the issue on 6 July, when she signalled the possibility of a regional processing centre for refugees to be established in Timor L’este (using, incidentally, the inappropriate title ‘East Timor’).

But it’s become even more blatant now the election’s been called. In fact, ‘stronger borders’ is one of the key catchphrases on the ALP’s first television election advertisement featuring Gillard. Even before her asylum seekers speech, she was talking about ‘good migrants’ like her parents, with the strong suggestion that there was another sort of migrant that people were right to abhor.

This is simply astounding. I won’t go through the history of the issue, but since the Tampa incident in 2001, which saw the introduction of the notorious Pacific Solution whereby asylum seekers were removed to the island of Nauru for their claims to be processed, these vulnerable people have suffered to keep Australia’s politicians in power. And now the ALP, already accused of trying to please everybody on the issue, are indulging in shameless dog whistling, much more so than they did under Rudd.

Some progressives claimed that Gillard’s asylum seekers speech was nuanced and not as politically insidious as the selective media quoting would have it appear. It’s true that in some ways Gillard was trying to have it both ways – stating that those wanting greater border protection should not be labelled racist, any more than those concerned about children in detention should be labelled bleeding hearts. Responding to earlier criticism by refugee advocate and respected lawyer Julian Burnside, QC, she said:

… in the context of our migration program, the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia is very, very minor.

It is less than 1.5 per cent of permanent migrants each year; and indeed it would take about 20 years to fill the MCG with asylum seekers at present rates of arrival. This is a point well made.

On the second point [Burnside] is very, very wrong. It is wrong to label people who have concerns about unauthorised arrivals as ‘rednecks’.

Of course, there are racists in every country but expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.

Elsewhere in the speech she affirms as an organising principle of asylum seeker policy ‘That people like my own parents who have worked hard all their lives can’t abide the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges’.

This rhetoric is erroneous. It strongly suggests that the opinions of those fearful of the boats are every bit as well-informed and worthwhile as those who are steeped in the issue and have serious legal and moral concerns about government actions. And it completely ignores the fact that the role of a leader is to educate and lead rather than to pander to the whims of the least educated and politically aware; and to set an example and produce a vision that can make the nation more cohesive, not less.

Those criticising Gillard for aiming her narrow policies straight at the seats most under threat in Sydney’s west are fully justified. She should be explaining to the electorate the push factors that bring the boats here, and eliciting Australia’s collective compassion – the kind that erupted so forcefully after the January 2009 Victorian bushfires.

More generally, Gillard is encouraging voters to see this election as being all about themselves and their needs, rather than promising to look after Australia’s most disadvantaged, surely one of the major remits of any labour party worthy of the moniker? She has said that voters will choose the policies most useful to them and their families, encouraging the continuation of the solipsism that thrived under Howard.

Gillard has great charm and verve, and, it’s indisputable that since Labor’s coming to power in 2007 the conviction, authority and intelligence she has managed to project in speeches and interviews has only increased, despite the rubbish that so often spouts from her mouth.

But let’s be clear: there was nothing progressive about Rudd’s Labor party, and there’s nothing progressive about Gillard’s. Below are just a few examples of straightforward social justice actions Rudd and now Gillard have failed to take, apart from not allowing gay marriage. Not all of these would have involved the magic millions or billions that both these politicians love to announce; but they would have produced greater social justice for Australia’s most needy as well as improving environmental outcomes.

* No carbon tax

* No mandatory staff–resident ratios in aged care homes (such ratios exist in hospitals and child care centres), leading to a shocking lack of skilled nursing care and other staff for frail, ill aged people. This is despite a 2009 Four Corners report in which the Minister for Ageing, Justine Elliot, promised that the government would consider the issue as part of its review of aged care funding. In May this year the NSW Nursing Association had to call for such mandatory ratios – all the government had offered in the 2010 budget was ‘$500,000 to conduct a research study on staffing levels, skills mix and resident care needs in Australian residential aged care facilities’.

* No rescinding of the regressive changes to education funding made by Howard. These gave more money to wealthy private schools at the expense of government schools.

* No real increase to unemployment benefit (Newstart allowance), which has long given up even attempting to adequately cover the excessive costs of market rents. Because increases are measured against inflation and not male wages as the pension is, the dole will continue to decrease in value against the pension. The May 2010 budget refused a request by the Australian Council of Social Service for an increase of $42 a week for the Newstart allowance; this request was ignored. But in refusing the increase the government was also ignoring its own Henry report on taxation, which stated that ‘a single person relying on an unemployment allowance is well below the OECD benchmark for poverty’.

* No attempt to ditch the 30 per cent government rebate on private health care. Instead the government tried to make the 30 per cent rebate means tested (the rebate results in all taxpayers subsidising, for example, dental care for the wealthier while there is no national dental scheme for the poor, whether or not they pay tax. The bid to means test the rebate failed anyway because of a hostile Senate, partly the result of a preferences deal Labor had done with the conservative Family First).

* No change to the shocking lack of residential and respite places as well as educational services for children with severe disabilities.

* No change to outrageous tax breaks for property owners, with the result that tax-paying renters subsidise the wealthy. Negative gearing, which enables property investors to claim losses on their investments as a tax deduction, has encouraged property investment, thus helping to lift the cost of housing out of the reach of first home buyers. Home owners who live in their homes are exempt from capital gains tax.

* Not withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan. Despite the bravery and skill of our troops, Australia’s involvement in this war serves the sole purpose of maintaining the relationship with the US, which is supporting the very same corrupt, greedy warlords whose mass murdering, raping and pillaging contributed to the rise of the Taliban.

Despite this dereliction of duty, the government boasts about the tax cuts it has managed to budget for, while promising to bring the budget back into surplus within three years – on the backs of Australia’s most needy and marginalised, truly the forgotten ones in this election.

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The Age newspaper loves Greens policies, but hates the Greens

This blog entry is a letter that I sent to the Age newspaper this morning, objecting to the newspaper's coverage of the Greens on the previous Saturday. For overseas readers: the Melbourne Age has always been a progressive newspaper but struggles to maintain its role under the current management of its owners, Fairfax Media.

Last year the ALP government failed to get its legislation for an emissions trading scheme (ETS) through the upper house. The scheme was never popular with progressives but was even worse after amendments made following negotiations with the main conservative opposition (the government refused the Greens suggestion of a carbon tax).

With an election due around November this year, the ALP has shelved any reintroduction of the ETS until 2013. Two columnists in Saturday's Age managed to have a go at the Greens for opposing the legislation in the Senate.

I’m writing a general letter of objection to the coverage of the Greens and their policies on global warming in the Age of Saturday 1 May 2010, but also directed at the two columnists concerned, Tony Wright and Ross Gittins. Tony Wright’s column appeared in the Insight section of the paper and Ross Gittins’s appeared in the Business Day section (the business commentators seem to be Fairfax rather than Age journalists – this in no way lets the Age off the hook). For the record, I’m not a Greens member but I support and vote for the Greens.

It’s fascinating that the only direct endorsement of the Greens’ carbon tax proposal is not only buried in the business section of that edition, in Paddy Manning’s column, but seems to have produced a flurry of opposing opinion by other columnists (a spurious attempt at ABC-style ‘balance’?). Manning’s endorsement is also months after the fact – I’m not objecting to the views of this columnist, but to the Age’s willingness to publish a point of view that supports evidence-based policy only when that support is given far too late to matter.

In contrast, the coverage of the Greens in the columns by Gittins and Wright would have conspiracy theorists who fear anti-Greens censorship tearing up their Age subscriptions. It seems that the Age wants to have it both ways: present itself as a progressive paper by criticising government and opposition policies; then trashing, or more usually ignoring, the one party that offers a clear alternative. The ethos seems to be: ensure business as usual while enabling readers to feel vindicated in their anger about the complete inability of the large parties to pursue policies that are genuinely in the national interest.

The media is part of this deterioration in our democratic process. One of the problems is that journalists such as Wright and Gittins have taken on, to some extent, the twisted mindset of politicians. According to this mindset, there are two realities: what’s actually going on in the world; and the need to create an impression of government activity and relevance through spin. This second, alternative reality, born of the Canberra hothouse, is considered by the politicians to be far more important than actual reality, and is one of the major reasons the Labor government has failed to move effectively on just about every issue it has tried to tackle.

Unfortunately, some journalists also come to view this alternative reality as far more important than the real world. It is certainly much more beguiling, because it’s far easier to commentate a never-ending football match than to take a strong stand on matters such as democracy, human rights and social justice.

Take Wright’s column. He starts off in the real world, by giving an impassioned description of a recent Catalyst program that highlighted the effects of global warming on Antarctica’s ice sheet. He then turns his attention to government and opposition behaviour towards climate change, bemoaning the fact that ‘hardly anyone seemed to give a stuff’.

It would be logical for Wright to support the policies of the party that has done far more than either of the larger ones to both alert Australians to the true extent of the dangers of global warming, and to offer policies and targets that actually square up with the science and set us on the road to a renewable energy industry. But in his upside-down version of reality, the version he’s absorbed from the political spin-merchants, the leader of this party, Bob Brown, is an irrelevant ideologue. And the only one left with real integrity is the man who, at the time when the government’s climate change policy was being negotiated, made what was already a dog of an emissions trading scheme even worse – Malcolm Turnbull:

Bob Brown’s Greens … well, they just kept being the Greens, complaining that the government hadn’t taken their proposals seriously, which is another way of saying that they had played themselves out of the equation.

About the only politician of simple integrity still standing was Malcolm Turnbull.

This is outrageous. In implying that Bob Brown lacks integrity, Wright is denouncing one of the few politicians in the federal parliament who actually has any. (Brown’s opposition to unfair increases to parliamentary salaries is just one example.)

In contrast, Turnbull’s principles in relation to the ETS, principles which Wright lauds to the skies, were based on ensuring that the coal industry continued to flourish in Australia till kingdom come.

It’s disappointing for a reader to feel she is more cluey than the paper’s national affairs editor. The ETS (both pre- and post-Coalition versions) was a dog because:

• it offered compensation to polluters, doing the opposite of what an ETS should do, which is to encourage alternative energy, not to enable ‘business as usual’. The Age itself has reported that most of the compensation specified in the ETS legislation was unnecessary

• it locked in, for the long term, both this compensation and a low emissions reduction target, with the distinct possibility that if the government increased the pathetic 5 per cent target, it would be liable for a commensurate increase in compensation to the polluting industries

• the 5 per cent was a furphy anyway, because much of the reduction would have been obtained from investment in overseas carbon sinks

• the 5 per cent was an absolute target, discouraging citizens from making their own changes – for example, if I had switched my electricity supply to green energy, that would have increased my electricity provider’s ability to pollute elsewhere

• no one understood it!

Eminent climate scientists agreed that the ETS would be useless, as the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Wright knows that the Greens were never merely naysayers, but offered a positive alternative, a carbon tax that might have squeaked through the Senate with the support of at least one of the two renegade Liberals and Nick Xenophon. Wasn’t the carbon tax option preferable to what’s happened now, with any action on carbon emissions being shelved till 2013?

This style of commentary illustrates the dangers of political commentators having the main say on climate change in the mainstream media. If the Age is to be relevant it needs to have a qualified science writer weighing up the parties’ climate change policies, not glorified football commentators like Wright.

Let’s now turn to Gittins. He makes an astounding claim in his column, yet doesn’t even attempt to back it up:

But why did the Greens pretend that 5 per cent was nothing when they must have known it wasn’t true? Because it didn’t suit the line they were running. It proves that the ever-virtuous Greens as [sic] just as capable of lying with statistics as the mainstream parties are.

Gittins produces no evidence to ‘prove’ that the Greens are ‘lying with statistics’ – he simply makes the assertion.

In considering the 5 per cent target too low, the Greens were merely listening to the climate scientists. The 5 per cent target has absolutely no relevance to climate science.

Similarly, Gittins seems to think that judging emissions reductions using per capita (head of population) measures would be a good thing. This is simply ludicrous because it would make targets meaningless as far as the actual climate is concerned. (In fact, the pollies would love it if they could use such standards to measure reductions in emissions, especially given Australia’s increasing population, and a couple have tried to do this.)

Again, it’s all about politics, not reality. Tony and Ross, isn’t ‘the greatest moral, environmental, economic and scientific challenge of our time’ worth more than a 5 per cent emissions reduction (on 2000 levels, by the way) and a bag of gold to the big polluters?

A newspaper in which the ‘ever virtuous’ Greens are treated with contempt because they’re more truthful, and the coal-friendly, Machiavellian Turnbull magically becomes ‘the only politician of simple integrity still standing’ may be terminally endangering its reputation as a progressive force.

It’s a shame, because the Age could be building strong customer loyalty based on an unswerving progressive vision, and on a genuine interest in engaging with its readers, rather like the UK’s Guardian. Instead, it seems almost entirely concerned with the advertising revenue it receives from the large parties. Many readers have already migrated online to sites like Crikey and New Matilda in response to the Age’s inability to respond adequately to the slow dismantling of democracy that Howard began and that Rudd has continued to engineer.

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Buying less, caring more: towards a sustainable, non-growth economy

Woke up early this morning with a blog entry clamouring to leave my brain and get onto the page.

There are two different knotty issues that I’ve been thinking about a bit lately and wanted to place side by side because I think they could illuminate each other. I’m not trying to solve these problems so much as simply start to look at them in tandem. Before I do that I want to warn that I’m just as much a part of the problems as anyone. In fact, it’s my own inconsistencies that lead me to contemplate these issues – the gap between my ideals and how I live my life!

So here goes.

Buddhists tell us that all living creatures want to be happy and enjoy the world. Yet our fast-paced capitalist society treats the earth, as well as human and non-human animals, as resources that need to be productive or at least managed. The effect of this is that we all overlook just how much care and nurturing the earth and its creatures need. In a sense, the whole set-up in many Western cultures requires us to do this if we are to function ‘properly’.

I suppose I’m talking a bit about sustainability here, but with a living creature component.

In his popular blog Rocky and Gawenda, former editor of The Age newspaper Michael Gawenda writes about the effects that his tiny, mischievous dog has had on his life. Since Gawenda’s retirement from full-time journalism Rocky has become his close companion: every morning they rise at dawn and go for a long walk along St Kilda beach.

But Gawenda still has many work obligations, and in an article in The Age a few months ago he wrote of his reluctance to acknowledge the depths of despair that his regular abandonment of Rocky produced in his beloved mutt. He feared that one extended absence had led to an estrangement so great that Rocky would never fully recover the depth of trust and affection he had once displayed towards his master.

In the article, Gawenda reluctantly grappled with just how delicate the emotional make-up of a non-human creature such as Rocky might be, and how much such a creature might require in care and attention.

When we start to be willing to look at a situation like that, the needs of the world can seem too overwhelming. In fact, it is nothing more than an invitation to put living beings before gain – an invitation that the world constantly tries to draw us away from.

Michael Leunig is a Melbourne cartoonist, illustrator and artist turned writer. In his regular pieces for the Age, Leunig contemplates life from the slow lane. Living in the bush, he is alive to its nuances, and documents with great honesty the rhythms of his own emotional life as he relates to an increasingly dysfunctional wider world.

Leunig is far from perfect either: his failure to see the sufferings of women denied agency and power in the world, as well as his inexplicable hostility towards Australia’s embattled intellectuals, not to mention thought itself, are baffling.

In 1995 he produced one of his most controversial cartoons, ‘Thoughts of a baby lying in a child care centre’. A tiny newborn lies in a crib at a child care centre. The child is in despair because it believes that its mother has abandoned it, and it then turns that despair in on itself, deciding that it must be unworthy. Feminists were furious.

No doubt one reason for this cartoon being controversial is that Leunig was pointing out an unpleasant truth: our society does not really want to think about the complexity of the needs of a single child, and instead puts the work ethic and the dollar first.

But what I think made feminists angry was the assumption that only one half of society was responsible for this grave failure to care: women. For one short moment, Leunig was able to contemplate the giant need and great loneliness of a single child; but it was too painful for him. Rather than remain in uncertainty, and invite the ‘negative capability’ that Keats suggests and that he himself claims to be comfortable with, he simply reached for a convenient scapegoat. If he could blame women for the problem, he no longer had to deal with its full implications.

Jeff Kennett was the conservative premier of Victoria from 1992 until 1999. Gung-ho, aggressive and revengeful after many years in opposition, and having inherited a huge debt from the outgoing Labor government, he seemed to take great joy in shutting down hundreds of government schools, carrying out mass sackings of public servants, and privatising the electricity industry (which caused massive job loss).

But since retiring from politics, Kennett has changed. A former chairman of beyondblue, an organisation that publicises depression and assists sufferers, he now regrets his failure to consider the social effects of electricity privatisation. This infamous right wing warrior made the following admission in The Age of 12 December:

It’s very easy to change the natural order of life but it comes with a huge social and economic cost. If I was in office ever again and implementing change as I did in the past … I would make sure that I had a lot of education in place … I would try better to understand the impact of change.

Although many people see the categories of right and left as outdated and meaningless, I don’t agree. It’s been said that what distinguishes them is the left’s willingness to actually consider the effects of political and economic decisions on the ground, for individuals, communities and particular groups, to look at the micro as well as the macro. Through his involvement with beyondblue, Kennett has learned to do this and is a wiser human being as a result.

So – what’s the other issue I wanted to look at? I know this post is getting long, so I’ll try and keep what is an infinitely complex topic outrageously short.

The journal New Scientist had a great collection of articles in its 18 October 2008 issue on why the continued growth model of economic development simply wasn’t possible any more. It’s not a matter of ideology – the earth can’t sustain continued growth any longer because its resources are finite, and they’re fast running out. Rapidly rising population is a large part of the problem.

In his contribution, Tim Jackson looks at the sustainability–growth issue in terms of the need to reduce carbon emissions. He warns that if we factor economic growth (which itself seems to require increasing population) into the equation, ‘the idea that technological ingenuity can save us from climate disaster looks a whole lot more challenging’.

Jackson goes on to calculate how low in carbon emissions our economies would have to be by 2050 if we a) want to stabilise greenhouse levels in the atmosphere at ‘a reasonably safe 450 parts per million’ and b) factor in projected population increases, continued economic growth and the need to eradicate extreme poverty. He demonstrates that to achieve such a stabilisation, ‘the carbon content of economic output must be reduced to just 2 per cent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union’. It would, in other words, necessitate more or less ‘complete decarbonisation of every last dollar’ – a well-nigh impossible task.

But if economic growth is the problem, adopting a different model would represent a change of gargantuan proportions. How is it to be done without causing widespread suffering? In fact, reducing growth in a chaotic fashion already has increased poverty and death – In March 2009 it was estimated that the recent global financial crisis would lead to the deaths of an additional 200,000 to 400 000 children.

Any discussion on changing our economic system to one that doesn’t rely on growth must look at how we can reduce consumption without increasing unemployment and causing widespread hardship.

What would a sustainable society and economy look like? Because goods would be built for the long term, maintenance and repair would become major industries.

There would be major government investment in services that have been sorely neglected for years such as public transport and social housing, as well as huge investment in renewable energy. But let’s not forget that, worthwhile as these investments are, they will still rely on the world’s natural resources to be farmed and dug from the ground (eg iron ore).

The need to care more, which I’ve identified in the previous section of this blog entry, is perhaps one of the solutions. Caring could be a significant form of employment in a sustainable economy. More teachers in classrooms. More childcare workers in creches. More psychologists and psychiatrists and counsellors in psyche units, community health centres, mental health outreach teams and jails. More nursing staff in aged care centres. More doctors in the western suburbs, new suburbs and rural areas.

But a lower consuming society would also leave more time for its citizens to care for each other, which wouldn’t cost anything, but would save a lot of money.

In the long run, this would lead to a reduction in crime and incarceration. Community bonds would strengthen.

Caring for the earth, through environmental employment projects and community vegetable gardens, could also increase.

I’m not an economist and can’t even begin to discuss here what the nuts and bolts of a non-growth economy would be, how it would actually sustain itself, pay its workers and feed its population. My point is that we need to start discussing what such an economy would look like and how we could move towards it. And perhaps the fact that the world demands so much care and attention – so much more than we can currently give it – is one reminder that something needs to change.

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Money for nothing: the Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme and the ascent of Abbott

I’m writing about an emerging form of mental illness that has recently been identified by mental health professionals, and that I think I may be suffering from: politician induced depression, or PID. It’s been found in dictatorships for decades, but in recent years has turned up in increasingly endemic proportions in Western countries like Australia.

The main symptom is a growing despair that is activated every time the sufferer sees or hears a politician speak. Treatment consists of graded exposure to current affairs programs and radio news broadcasts, plus compulsory reading of books such as Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy. Membership of the Greens is also recommended but not mandatory. As a final resort, sufferers are urged to run for parliament.

I’m only half joking. Australia these days is a hot place, and our capital cities are no exception. The evidence of climate change is everywhere, but all the pollies care about is keeping the coal industry onside.

I complained recently about a November heatwave in Melbourne – actually there were two mini-heatwaves, and the temperature reached 38.2 on 20 November before the cool change brought some rain.

But that was nothing compared to what the rest of the country was facing. In New South Wales, weather records were broken as some places reached 45 degrees. Meanwhile, South Australia’s equally giant heatwave saw eight consecutive days of over 35 degrees, between Sunday 8 November and Sunday 15 November. During the heatwave, maximum temperatures in parts of South Australia also nudged 45 degrees. On 19 November, Adelaide’s temperature reached 42.8 - the city’s hottest day ever recorded for November.

During these heatwaves catastrophic fire warnings were issued in both states. Dozens of bushfires swept across both South Australia and New South Wales, including Sydney’s northern outskirts; at different times in each state, at least 100 fires were burning.

There were also bushfires in Victoria and even one in Tasmania, which is known for its chilly weather compared with the rest of Australia.

And this was before summer had actually begun.

A climate scientist with the Bureau of Meteorology, Dr Harvey Stern, said that there was a ‘high chance’ that the hot weather that swept New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria was connected to climate change. As well as giving the world a sneak preview of what they can expect from global warming in the next few decades, Australia is currently the highest per capita producer of emissions in the world, so we really need to get our act together.

Climate capers
Meanwhile Australia’s politicians have been fiddling while the country literally burns. The two main party groups, the governing Australian Labor Party and the conservative Coalition (Liberals and the rural-based National Party) have been taking part in what amounts to a faux battle about climate change. The battle has resulted in zero action on climate change but huge media furore over the fall of Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull (pictured above), yesterday replaced by the right-wing Catholic Tony Abbott.

Because he does not have a majority in the upper house, ALP leader Kevin Rudd had been trying to negotiate with the Coalition a deal that would enable the passing of his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) before going to the climate summit at Copenhagen. The CPRS is in the form of an emissions trading scheme.

Former Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull and some members of the Coalition had been in favour of passing the Scheme, complete with amendments the Coalition had negotiated with the ALP, in time for Copenhagen. But a noisy minority of right-wing Coalition members were building up a simmering resentment towards Turnbull.

The fact is, in this sunburnt country, many of these renegades don’t actually believe that human-induced global warming exists, or they seem not to care, and they’ve publicly declared their stance. Basically they were trying to steal the glory from Rudd at Copenhagen, and to respond to Rudd's own move to the right by moving even further to the right than he has.

The anger of these renegades finally resulted in a dramatic change of leadership yesterday to Tony Abbott, who won by the narrowest of margins. This win was unexpected, as Abbott, a former health minister in the Howard Coalition government, is unpopular with voters, particularly women.

Turnbull was hoping to get the amended legislation passed in the Senate before his leadership showdown, but it wasn’t to be. With Abbott as leader, just hours ago the Senate formally rejected the legislation. This means that Rudd won't be able to take his CPRS to Copenhagen as a fait accompli. But it also enables the government, if it so chooses, to dissolve both houses of parliament and call an early election.

The great irony is that the ALP and all parts of the fractured Coalition have actually been on the same side all along – that of doing very little to mitigate climate change, and keeping the big polluters, particularly Australia’s powerful coal industry, happy. It’s difficult to understand how the international community could have been happy about the CPRS Rudd would have have taken to Copenhagen if the Senate had passed it. In fact, a recent article in The Guardian slams Australia’s record and current action on cutting emissions.

In negotiating CPRS amendments with the Coalition (Coal – ition?), and indirectly helping to precipitate their leadership crisis, Rudd made an extremely poor scheme even worse. He also demonstrated he would do anything to avoid negotiating with the Greens.

Disturbingly, the media have been reporting the leadership drama with the focus entirely on the politics rather than the planet. They’ve allowed Turnbull to portray himself as someone willing to sacrifice his prime ministerial aspirations for the principle of taking action on climate change. No-one in the mainstream media so far has directly challenged this breathtaking deception.

Meanwhile, the actions of the renegade Coalition members have enabled Rudd to pretend to the confused electorate that he’s their climate saviour, when the opposite is the case. Rudd might have got somewhere with his CPRS if he’d negotiated with the Greens, who have five members in the Senate, and independent senator Nick Xenophon, who at least believes in climate change (ironically, today in the Senate two disaffected Liberal 'wets' voted with the government on the amended CPRS; if these two Libs and Xenophon had supported a CPRS influenced by the Greens, it could have passed). Rudd chose instead to negotiate with a right-wing party that did nothing to mitigate climate change during its 11 years in office. And in the end it betrayed him, after giving him its word it was negotiating in good faith.

Despite all the spin, and the media focus on the Coalition in the last week or so, Fran Kelly reported on Radio National on 30 November that support for the ALP had dropped slightly, accompanied by a slight boost in support for the Greens. This suggests that at least some voters were unhappy with the further weakening of an already compromised CPRS that the Coalition's amendments would have led to.

Locking us into doing nothing
Even without the Coalition’s amendments, the incredibly complex piece of legislation installing the CPRS -- it will be reintroduced to parliament next year -- will lock Australia into targets so low they are laughable. The official target is 5–25 per cent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the conditions attached to a 25 per cent reduction are so many that this higher target is unlikely to prevail. And Treasury modelling indicates there’ll be no actual reduction in greenhouse emissions until around 2033, because investment in offsets such as overseas carbon sinks will count towards the reduction.

The CPRS also not only offers, but locks in for the future, massive compensation to the big polluters. Importantly, the compensation figures included in the legislation assume that Australia cuts its carbon emissions by only 5 per cent by 2020. This means that in theory a higher rate of compensation to the polluters could kick in if the cuts are steeper than 5 per cent.

According to the Citizens Climate Campaign, Professor Garnaut, the Government’s own advisor on climate change policy, has criticised the CPRS, especially the compensation it offered the biggest polluters.

The deal struck with the Coalition on 24 November, before Turnbull’s defeat, would have watered the legislation down even further. Under the deal the government would have doubled its handouts to the coal industry, providing $1.5 billion over five years. Power generators would have received a further $4 billion in permits to pollute, bringing the total in permits to $7.3 billion. Further, $1.1 billion would have been spent on assisting manufacturing and mining businesses with higher electricity prices because of the CPRS. To top this off, $5.76 billion set aside to compensate consumers for the increased cost of living would have been cut.

Ordinary Australians were already going to be subsidising the big polluters, which would be able to go on with business as usual. However, these amendments would have made their subsidy even higher – $4 billion, rather than the original $2.5 billion, which was bad enough.

The dramatic turnaround in Coalition policy leaves many environmentally aware Australians feeling confused. On the one hand, they're relieved that we are not yet locked into a useless ETS; on the other hand they’re dismayed at both major parties’ refusal to really tackle climate change.

However, they shouldn't get too excited. The Minerals Council of Australia stated today that this was an opportunity to improve the CPRS legislation (read: throw more taxpayer money at the mining industry).

The proposed CPRS was complicated to start with and always had pathetically low targets. But when the global financial crisis struck, and even before it started negotiating with the Coalition, the government had heralded further industry-friendly changes, including moving the starting date from 2010 to 2011.

This cavalier approach to the planet, along with the Coalition’s changing position and the willingness of the media to air the views of climate change denialists in the interests of spurious balance, sent a message to the average Australian that climate change was not as dire a problem as previously thought. A recent poll by the Lowy Institute of International Policy found that Australians were less concerned about climate change than they had been two years earlier. According to the poll, on a list of 10 goals in 2009, climate change had slipped from its 2007 position, when it came equal first.

The Greens in Higgins
On 5 December a by-election will take place in my electorate, the House of Representatives seat of Higgins. The Liberals have a new candidate, Kelly O’Dwyer, to replace the one-time Liberal treasurer Peter Costello. The ALP isn’t fielding a candidate as Higgins is a safe-as-houses Liberal seat, but the Greens are. Their choice of candidate has been controversial though: Dr Clive Hamilton is a progressive economics academic and commentator, and one of Australia’s most committed climate change activists, but he has trouble connecting with the electorate and getting his message across.

Given the current Liberal Party furore it will be interesting to see whether Abbott’s leadership reduces the Liberal vote in Higgins. O’Dwyer claims to believe that humans play some role in climate change, but any policy must preserve our economy.

The Greens are the only party in the federal parliament with emissions targets that recognise the climate science – by 2020 they want a 40 per cut in carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels. Whether Higgins voters recognise the urgency of the situation, and send a message to both the ALP and the Coalition to get their act together, is yet to be seen.

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