Keating is lauded for his role in establishing compulsory superannuation. But his reasons for resisting Labor’s current changes cast his vision for the system in a more questionable light.
With each passing retort to the Albanese government, dutifully relayed by The Australian and the AFR, it becomes harder to maintain that former prime minister Paul Keating is any kind of progressive.
Sure, he may once have contributed to some noble policies, and some of his foreign policy views — vulgar China apologia aside — provide a useful counterweight to the defence establishment. But on economics, his supposed forte, he merely tries to drag an already lacklustre government further to the right.
Take his most recent pronouncement: last week, the AFRreported that Keating is opposed to Labor’s $3 million cap on superannuation tax concessions and has been saying so to various fund managers. He reportedly wants the threshold raised to at least $5 million.
I cannot best AFR reader Graeme Troy’s rejoinder to Keating on the paper’s letters page: “Any person who has in excess of $3 million in superannuation is not doing it tough. The sole objective of superannuation for such individuals is tax avoidance.”
Super-sized gains for the rich
Keating is lauded for his role in establishing compulsory superannuation. But his reasons for resisting Labor’s current changes cast his vision for the system in a more questionable light.
According to the AFR, he thinks Labor’s changes would “condemn super to becoming a low- to middle-income scheme, completely at odds with the universal scheme he introduced”. He believes the key to the system’s longevity is its support from high-income earners.
Let’s set aside the fact that superannuation was never “universal” — it was only paid to employees, leaving those outside the workforce worse off, which Labor is only now partly remedying by paying it to those on parental leave. Even among employees, Keating’s notion of universality is absurd.
Most universal programs, such as pensions paid to all elderly people, buy support from those on high incomes by benefiting them a little. However, they still benefit lower-income earners much more, relatively speaking. In Keating’s vision, high-income earners must benefit disproportionately ad infinitum, to the tune of untaxed millions, so that lower-income earners can benefit a little — or, for those who have spent significant periods out of the workforce, hardly at all.
The Howard government introduced many of the worst tax loopholes in the super system. But with Keating himself now defending high-income earners’ access to them, it seems his aims aren’t so different.
Fully automated tax increases
Keating is particularly incensed by the decision not to index the threshold to inflation, calling it “unconscionable”.
The Coalition, teal independents, Jacqui Lambie, Tammy Tyrrell and David Pocock have also expressed concerns about this, the latter three of whom will determine whether Labor’s legislation passes the Senate in the coming months. Even the Greens, who’d like to see the threshold lowered to $2 million, have argued it should then be indexed.
This is because over time inflation will lower the cap in real terms; when people now in their 20s and 30s retire, it will be more like $1 million in today’s dollars. The Financial Services Council estimates more than 500,000 current taxpayers will be impacted during their lifetimes.
But 500,000 is still a relatively small proportion of Australia’s population — and these would still be some of Australia’s wealthiest residents. Plus, once you consider such an account will keep accruing investment gains (most superannuants die with more in super than when they retired), $1 million is a reasonable nest egg — and the aged pension is always a fallback.
Super should be for your retirement, not your kids’ inheritance. You only need so much.
Not adjusting the bracket is politically cunning — it allows the government to draw some much-needed revenue from the richest in the short term. In the long term, it helps transition the superannuation system from the nation’s biggest tax avoidance scheme, to a more defensible supplement/alternative to the pension. It wouldn’t complete this task alone, but it would help.
Realising the benefits
Another bugbear of Keating and the crossbench is Labor’s application of the additional taxes to “unrealised gains”.
Yet taxing unrealised (not-yet-sold) capital gains is not a radical idea. It is supported by numerous economists across the political spectrum, including the former Ronald Reagan adviser Art Laffer, and is being pursued by the Biden-Harris administration.
Under regimes where investors only have to pay tax on assets when they are “realised” (sold), unlike other taxes on income and purchases that have to be paid more regularly, investors effectively get a long-term, zero-interest loan from the government to pay the tax when it’s most convenient for them. Better to tax more regularly than provide refunds if an asset later loses value.
Holding off the taxman might be fair enough for those with modest super balances — you and your employer had to contribute the funds, and you can’t access them before retirement, so it’s less reasonable to expect you to pay taxes on them during your working life. But for large accounts, most of which have accumulated due to voluntary contributions, the deferral of taxes is effectively another subsidy for lucrative investment choices.
For cash-poor people with large assets in self-managed funds (Keating raised the hypothetical of farm properties) the government could, as Biden and Harris are proposing, impose “deferral charges” which are payable later — effectively adding interest to that interest-free loan.
Keating should butt out
All of this tinkering is necessary because Keating’s overhyped superannuation reforms were full of holes from the outset. The least he can do now is get out of the way while his Labor successors tighten up the rules and impose limits.
Labor’s current reforms modestly backpedal from Keating’s flawed vision. Perhaps the elder statesman should consider retirement as the government — whose treasurer wrote his PhD on the man — charts a new course.
Is it time for Paul Keating to butt out of politics? Does the superannuation system need reforming? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Benjamin Clark is an Australian writer and digital journalist, now based in London. He is currently Prospect Magazine's head of digital audience, and previously worked for The Conversation.
This “moment” refers to a private conversation between Anthony Albanese and Kurt Campbell — the US deputy secretary of state — on the sidelines of the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Tonga. Campbell was caught on film by a New Zealand journalist saying to Albanese that America had “given … the lane” to Australia to implement the new Pacific-wide policing arrangement, to which Albanese responded “you can go us halvies on the cost if you like.”
Two years ago, the Solomon Islands signed a security deal with China, but in the same year, other Pacific leaders rejected a Chinese proposal for a comprehensive treaty. Now, with a price tag of $400 million attached to this new policing program, Australia can be seen to have secured its status as the partner of choice in combatting the increasing threat of transnational crime in Pacific nations.
Like Basil in Fawlty Towers trying hard not to mention “the war” in anticipation of the arrival of some German guests, China was the elephant in the room whose name was not to be mentioned at the forum. Everyone — the Chinese, the Americans, the Australians and the Pacific Islanders — knows that the PPI is about countering China’s influence in the Pacific.
China’s official response to the PPI has been “mild”, with its foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian simply saying that China supported “all parties to make joint efforts for the development and revitalisation of Pacific Island countries”. Semi-official voices were critical, but also relatively restrained. The Global Times, a nationalistic Chinese newspaper, quoted a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry as saying that “the Pacific Islands are not the backyard of any country, and China has no interest in competing with any country for influence or seeking a so-called geostrategic presence or sphere of influence.”
But it was the hot mic exchange between Albanese and Campbell that animated China’s WeChat groups and blogosphere: the video of their conversation has been doing the rounds in both China-based and Australia-based WeChat groups.
In China, public opinion of world affairs is increasingly being shaped by commentary in two arenas — one inhabited by international studies scholars and intellectual elites who write mainly in reputable journals, the other by bloggers whose populist writings tend to be the most widely posted and read online. Some of these bloggers, using a pen name, work for state media for their day jobs, while others are in some cases uncredentialed writers who have a small amount of knowledge but plenty of passion. To attract eyeballs, these writers tend to use more colourful, folksy language, and appeal to the lowest common denominator.
The most frequently reposted criticisms on China’s social media following the hot-mic incident seemed to come from Guancha (The Observer), a Shanghai-based commercial online media digest known for its nationalist bent. A Guancha reporter argued that the exchange between Albanese and Campbell was evidence that the United States intended to patrol the Pacific, and that Australia was willing to play second fiddle in this plan. However, rather than relying on official Chinese responses to the incident, the reporter pursued the argument by citing critical voices from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.
To a blogger with the pen name NiuTanQing, who trends very well online, the hot mic incident sheeted home three things:
First, she saw this as evidence of the West’s “double-standard”:
When China seeks to cooperate with the Pacific nations to combat crime, the West sees it as China’s attempt at military infiltration, and thinks it will harm [the West’s] interests. But when Australia does the same thing at the behest of the US, this is described as routine policing cooperation.
Second, the blogger thought the incident revealed the true colours of the politicians involved:
To be honest, we used to regard Albanese as a decent man, diplomatic with words and flexible in attitudes, and he has contributed to the improvement of China-Australia relations. But having seen a few video clips of him recently, we see a different side of the man.
Third, this writer remarked that if Australia wants to play the game, it must be prepared to pay the price:
Australia wants the US to share half of the cost, but will the Americans pay anything? It seems Australia is prepared to take a hit for the US, but may end up being hit by the US.
Judging by the comments at the end of NiuTanQing’s article, it seems most readers agree with her, although one person saw this incident as proof that the Western media are superior to the Chinese media:
How come our own journalists could never uncover the US’ dirty laundry in this way, and instead rely on Western journalists to expose such wheeling and dealing?
Another blogger called youli-youmian, who also attracts much traffic online, used more plain language to make sense of the hot-mic exchange:
The reason Australia was so anxious to secure the policing deal was because ‘big brother’ USA was getting concerned that the Pacific nations were beginning to go their own ways instead of listening to the US, and feared these nations might become closer to China, and therefore might threaten the US’ strategic security arrangements.
Again, while the blog post attracted some agreement from readers, one reader offered an implicit criticism about the lack of freedom in the Chinese media, saying, “I’m really impressed that their media dared to broadcast this.”
While the assumed closeness between the US and Australia is clearly valid, neither blogger seems to realise that Australia was not merely doing the bidding of the US, and that as a Pacific nation itself, Australia is motivated by its own security agenda.
This being said, Australia’s security agenda has for so long been shaped by its alliance with the US that it is almost impossible to form a clear sense of what Australia’s own long-term security interests actually are — especially in light of our leaders’ ever-growing commitment to AUKUS. It seems unlikely our nation will make any serious attempt to detox itself from this entrenched codependency, but arguably the current, rapidly evolving geopolitical climate provides a clear incentive to do so.
Wanning Sun is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also serves as the deputy director of the UTS Australia-China Relations Institute. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts (2020-23). She is best known in the field of China studies for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration and social inequality in contemporary China. She writes about Chinese diaspora, diasporic Chinese media, and Australia-China relations.
Brittany Higgins and Senator Linda Reynolds (Images: AAP)
The defamation case between Linda Reynolds and Brittany Higgins is drawing to a close. Here's a clarifier on everything we've gleaned from the trial.
The latest chapter in the various legal cases associated with Brittany Higgins’ allegations of rape against Bruce Lehrmann in 2021 has come to a close, with the WA Supreme Court hearing closing arguments in WA Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds’ defamation suit against her former staffer Higgins.
It comes after Justice Michael Lee’s decision earlier this year in Lehrmann’s defamation claim against Network Ten and Lisa Wilkinson. Lee found on the balance of probabilities that Lehrmann, then a colleague of Higgins, raped her while she was intoxicated on a lounge in Reynolds’ parliamentary office in March 2019. Lehrmann has maintained his innocence of the allegations and has launched an appeal.
What’s different about this case?
Reynolds is not suing over any of the interviews Higgins gave in 2021. She is suing over a series of social media posts made by Higgins and her partner David Sharaz in 2022 and 2023, which Reynolds claims defame her by implying she mishandled Higgins’ rape allegations by failing to provide her with support, and that she had engaged in a public campaign against her.
The social media posts, made on Instagram and Twitter, were quickly deleted, but Reynolds claims Higgins and Sharaz used social media to publish “carefully curated press releases”.
Reynolds had initially sued Sharaz regarding social media posts he published. Several months later the senator then launched an almost identical suit against Higgins (so much so that the matters would be heard together).
In April this year, Sharaz announced he was dropping his defence in his matter owing to the costs involved. Despite Sharaz’ defence being dropped, he is still substantially involved in the case against Higgins. Reynolds’ lawyers argue Higgins was a “joint publisher” on social media posts initially attributed only to Sharaz.
The timeline effectively begins from the point of the alleged rape. And while the matter concerns many of the same parties (indeed, many of the same people were called upon as witnesses or were parties in Bruce Lehrmann’s initial defamation suit), it does not concern the matter of whether Higgins was raped, but instead the actions of those involved in the aftermath of the alleged rape.
Higgins has relied on defences of truth, qualified privilege and fair comment.
Reynolds comes to the case having had a relatively positive characterisation of her account from Justice Michael Lee in the initial case, who found that a narrative of a cover-up was “objectively short on facts, but long on speculation and internal inconsistencies”. He also found Reynolds’ chief of staff Fiona Brown had acted with “commonsense and compassion”.
The case has heard from several notable witnesses, including former prime minister Scott Morrison (during whose term Higgins was allegedly raped) and WA Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash (for whom Higgins worked after leaving Reynolds’ office).
Journalists Samantha Maiden and Lisa Wilkinson, as well as Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, have been issued subpoenas to provide evidence. However, Higgins herself did not testify, with her lawyers believing they can win the case without her testimony. Documents in relation to her health have also been tendered in court — Higgins is pregnant and would have to fly from France to Perth to testify in person.
What have we learned about Linda Reynolds?
On Senator Reynolds’ conduct, the case has unearthed — as defamation litigation tends to — information that no doubt she would have preferred to stay private.
The trial has also revealed the senator repeatedly leaked confidential correspondence about Higgins’ $2.4 million Commonwealth compensation payout to The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen, three days before Albrechtsen proceeded to author an exclusive article titled “Linda Reynolds muzzled in Brittany Higgins lawsuit defence”.
Reynolds told the court she chose Albrechtsen because she considered her “fair and balanced”, admitting she was “incredibly angry [that] the attorney-general was stitching me up … I wanted her to know and the Australian public to know”.
“I believe the attorney-general manipulated the law to muzzle me, I saw it as government corruption,” Reynolds said.
What case are the lawyers making?
This week in closing arguments in the defamation trial, Reynolds’ lawyer Martin Bennett said “every fairytale needs a villain”, arguing Higgins and Sharaz had chosen Reynolds to play that part.
Bennett said Higgins had created a “fictional story involving allegations of a political cover-up”.
Higgins’ lawyer Rachael Young SC said Higgins’ alleged rape had “never been a fairytale”. She said Reynolds had tried to characterise Higgins’ motives as “sinister” and “gratuitous”, having had a “dogged focus” on events in 2021 and 2022 rather than the social media posts of 2023 she was suing in respect of.
Young said Reynolds failed to provide a “basic human response” to Higgins. Text messages tendered in court revealed Higgins had said: “I was literally assaulted in [Reynolds’] office and I collectively maybe took 4 days off / was offered jack shit in terms of help.”
Are we done yet?
As the defamation trial was coming to a close, Reynolds launched a separate lawsuit against Higgins and the entity managing the trust set up to manage her compensation payout, which was established a day after the Commonwealth settlement was finalised.
Reynolds claims Higgins retired as trustee and gave control to a company called Power Blazers Pty Ltd in an alleged attempt to defeat any potential creditors who may pursue her, claiming she is one of those creditors. Higgins, along with her father and her friend Emma Webster, are listed as directors of Power Blazers Pty Ltd, with Higgins and her father splitting shareholding in the company.
Reynolds has said she has been forced to mortgage her home to cover her legal fees, while Higgins has said she would have to sell her home in France (purchased following the Commonwealth compensation payout) in order to defend the case.
The matter is expected to conclude by Wednesday, after which Justice Paul Tottle will retire to deliver a verdict.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Bruce Lehrmann was found to have not been defamed by Network Ten’s reporting. The judge in fact ruled that Lehrmann had been defamed, but that a defence of truth applied.
Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
The government's economic critics want it both ways — complaining it's not doing enough to lower inflation while also not doing enough to support growth.
Which of the following economic narratives accords with reality at the moment?
That an irresponsible Labor government recklessly encouraged inflation with its big-spending budget and fake anti-inflation measures?
Or that an irresponsible Labor government has allowed economic growth to fall into near-negative territory, and is wrongly blaming the Reserve Bank?
Or that greedy, lazy workers are demanding too many pay rises without matching productivity increases, risking a wage-price spiral? Or that wages growth has slumped as consumers retreat?
All of those narratives have been on offer from right-wing economists and the Financial Review recently, with the gloom-and-doom ones coming to the fore this week as the latest economic data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics — ahead of Wednesday’s June quarter national accounts — suggests the economy barely ticked over in the three months to June.
As we pointed out back at budget time, the government’s budget deficit this year looks reckless — until you realise how weak the economy might be as a result of repeated interest rate bludgeonings by the Reserve Bank. The AFR and the opposition have been trying to conjure up a narrative of Treasurer Jim Chalmers engaging in a “stoush” with the central bank over his remark that the RBA’s rate hikes were “smashing the economy”. In fact Chalmers’ description was a statement of the obvious — unless you’re engaged in a partisan act of trying to push two economic stories at once; that the government was somehow simultaneously being too stimulatory and not stimulatory enough in its fiscal settings.
And after years of Weekend At Bernie’s-style propping up of the wage-price spiral myth, even the AFR reluctantly conceded yesterday that wages growth in the private sector was weak and had fallen to a two-year low. It’s only a few days since we were being told increasing childcare salaries without productivity increases would drive inflation up (presumably we should ditch staff ratios and abandon qualifications and criminal checks for childcare workers?).
We’re at this particularly embarrassing (at least for the AFR) juncture in economic spin because the economy is at, and arguably past, a turning point at which repeated hammer blows with interest rate hikes have crippled growth and begun pushing even Australia’s super-strong, immigration-fueled labour market into higher unemployment — especially once you factor in our two-speed economy of booming health and caring services and comatose market sector.
The Reserve Bank, however, is a hapless bystander at this point. Governor Michele Bullock and the RBA board have painted themselves into a corner, having paraded before the business media and the markets’ screen jockeys as the John Wayne of inflation fighters, only to be left looking more like Gary Cooper in High Noon as, one by one, other central banks start cutting rates. The RBA can’t cut rates this year without performing another backflip — not exactly up there with Philip Lowe’s disastrous “no rate rises before 2024” call, but sizeable enough to make the exertion necessary too intimidating.
The June quarter results on Wednesday will be historical, of course — the current September quarter should be a very different beast with the tax cuts and increased Commonwealth rent and energy bill assistance. But they may — contra the silliness from the liquidate-them-all crowd — look like they arrived not a moment too soon given how badly the market sector of the economy was reeling from the RBA’s punishment.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
Glenn Dyer
Glenn Dyer is Crikey's business and media correspondent.
Weather is not climate, of course, but the upward trend is unmistakable. The temperature records all lean to the right. Not just here. The hottest June on record globally. Summer heat records in the United States. After a record hot summer of 2023, new heat records are being set in southern Europe.
Meanwhile Australia’s greenhouse emissions remain well above where they should be to meet the government’s target of a 43% reduction of 2005 levels by 2030. Our gas exports have fallen a little, but they remain at levels well above any time before the pandemic, and thermal coal exports, which have also fallen slightly, are expected to return to record levels in coming years.
The government is entirely indifferent to this contrast between Australia’s continuing addiction to fossil fuel exports and an ever-worsening climate crisis.
Just this week — with cabinet moving en masse to Perth to convince West Australians to keep Labor in majority government at the next election — Resources Minister Madeleine King and Trade Minister Don Farrell were spruiking the visit of the South Korean trade minister to the state as an opportunity to discuss importing South Korea’s carbon emissions to WA for “permanently storing carbon in our joint fight to achieve net zero. With limited carbon storage capacity, the Republic of Korea is looking to partners like Australia to progress carbon capture and storage projects and technology.”
Labor hasn’t just bought the snake oil of carbon capture, it’s now pressing it on other countries as the ideal tonic for fossil fuel-dependent economies to pretend they’re taking action to curb carbon emissions while the planet cooks. Or, as Labor calls it, the fight to achieve net zero.
The indifference, even insouciance, on the part of Labor towards a developing climate catastrophe has been one of the hallmarks of the Albanese government. It has confirmed, more than a decade after the Gillard government introduced a highly effective and enormously efficient carbon pricing scheme, that while contemporary Labor’s rhetoric on climate might differ from the Coalition’s — and it is committed to a renewable energy transition in a way that the Coalition, seemingly, never will be — it is indivisible from the Coalition on fossil fuel exports: they are to be encouraged, with billions of taxpayer dollars, along with the fiction of storing carbon emissions safely underground.
From the wider perspective of the pressing need for real, large-scale carbon abatement to avert what will, in human and economic terms, be permanent significant costs from a more extreme climate, the 2022 election was a missed trick. Labor’s ability to form a majority government without needing to rely on a crossbench with a serious commitment both to carbon abatement and reducing our fossil fuel exports has meant an expansion of those exports and taxpayer funding to enable further expansion into the future.
Only a minority government dependent upon climate-committed crossbenchers will deliver meaningful climate action in Australia. A majority government of either persuasion will simply mean more fossil fuel exports — which generate little in the way of tax revenue — and more taxpayer handouts to an industry that effectively charges us to make billions from a finite supply of fossil fuels.
From a climate perspective, the only good outcome from the 2025 election is both major parties falling short of 76 seats. Then we’ll see what records the winter of 2025 brings.
Is Labor doing enough on climate change? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Bernard Keane is Crikey's political editor. Before that he was Crikey's Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.
A test of AI for Australia's corporate regulator found that the technology might actually make more work for people, not less.
Artificial intelligence is worse than humans in every way at summarising documents and might actually create additional work for people, a government trial of the technology has found.
Amazon conducted the test earlier this year for Australia’s corporate regulator the Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) using submissions made to an inquiry. The outcome of the trial was revealed in an answer to a questions on notice at the Senate select committee on adopting artificial intelligence.
The test involved testing generative AI models before selecting one to ingest five submissions from a parliamentary inquiry into audit and consultancy firms. The most promising model, Meta’s open source model Llama2-70B, was prompted to summarise the submissions with a focus on ASIC mentions, recommendations, references to more regulation, and to include the page references and context.
Ten ASIC staff, of varying levels of seniority, were also given the same task with similar prompts. Then, a group of reviewers blindly assessed the summaries produced by both humans and AI for coherency, length, ASIC references, regulation references and for identifying recommendations. They were unaware that this exercise involved AI at all.
These reviewers overwhelmingly found that the human summaries beat out their AI competitors on every criteria and on every submission, scoring an 81% on an internal rubric compared with the machine’s 47%.
Human summaries ran up the score by significantly outperforming on identifying references to ASIC documents in the long document, a type of task that the report notes is a “notoriously hard task” for this type of AI. But humans still beat the technology across the board.
Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information. Three of the five reviewers said they guessed that they were reviewing AI content.
The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely.
The report mentions some limitations and context to this study: the model used has already been superseded by one with further capabilities which may improve its ability to summarise information, and that Amazon increased the model’s performance by refining its prompts and inputs, suggesting that there are further improvements that are possible. It includes optimism that this task may one day be competently undertaken by machines.
But until then, the trial showed that a human’s ability to parse and critically analyse information is unparalleled by AI, the report said.
“This finding also supports the view that GenAI should be positioned as a tool to augment and not replace human tasks,” the report concluded.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge, whose question to ASIC prompted the publishing of the report, said that it was “hardly surprising” that humans were better than AI at this task. He also said it raised questions about how the public might feel about using AI to read their inquiry submissions.
“This of course doesn’t mean there is never a role for AI in assessing submissions, but if it has a role it must be transparent and supportive of human assessments and not stand-alone,” he said.
“It’s good to see government departments undertaking considered exercises like this for AI use, but it would be better if it was then proactively and routinely disclosed rather than needing to be requested in Senate committee hearings.”
Cam Wilson is Crikey’s associate editor. He previously worked as a reporter at the ABC, BuzzFeed, Business Insider and Gizmodo. He primarily covers internet culture and tech in Australia.
Asylum seeker Mano Yogalingam died by suicide last week, following a 49-day protest against Australia's immigration limbo. Crikey examines the numbers of a broken system.
Note: this article mentionssuicideand mental trauma.
Last Tuesday, 23-year-old Tamil man Mano Yogalingam self-immolated at a skate park in Noble Park, and by Wednesday had died of his injuries in hospital. Yogalingam had been a key organiser of a 49-day protest outside the office of the Department of Home Affairs in Melbourne, asking for government intervention on behalf of the thousands of asylum seekers in Australia effectively in limbo under the previous governments’ “fast track arrangements”.
The Albanese government abolished the fast-track system but upheld rejected asylum applications made under the previous scheme. This included a rejected claim for refugee status from Yogalingam — who arrived by boat in Australia in 2013 as a 12-year-old boy with his parents and four siblings, fleeing alleged military persecution — meaning he was on a temporary bridging visa while seeking to appeal the decision. He had spent more than a decade in Australia not knowing whether he would be deported.
Crikey breaks down some of the numbers of Australia’s immigration system, which has produced horrors like this many times.
Length of time Yogalingam spent on a bridging visa: 11 years
Number of asylum seekers in Australia under these “fast-track arrangements”: 7,350
Average wait for a decision regarding a permanent protection visa (as of March 2023): 793 days
Charlie Lewis pens Crikey's Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN's Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.
Crikey readers volunteered their own economic analysis of the Greens’ latest tax plans, and ask whether it’s time for more radically leftist ideas in Parliament.
Tim Stephens writes: Whilst I frequently agree with Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer, I feel they have lost the plot on this one. I have a vested interest in superannuation (like most Aussies), so I would hate to see poor returns. However, lots of the big corporations pay bugger all in tax, as pointed out in Crikey at the end of last financial year.
Many also have huge foreign ownership, shipping profits overseas — not to Australian super funds. A shining example is gas. Australia is one of the largest exporters but returns about $1 billion in revenue to Australia, whereas Qatar manages $50 billion in tax revenue on gas exports.
Let’s face it, in the retirement phase a lot of money from super gets spent on healthcare. If we had cashed-up governments paying for a decent healthcare system (along with everything else that people need), then retirees could probably forego some returns.
Russell Searle writes: The analysis overlooks the effect of the tax on both the companies generating the profits and the super funds receiving the dividends. These oversights are at the level of a first year university accounting course.
Firstly, not all profits a distributed as dividends, some are retained by the company
Secondly, you’ve ignored franking credits. Higher taxes on these companies do not necessarily deprive the super funds, as the dividends received will be weighted more in favour of franking credits and less cash. But profit is profit; corporation tax to investors is netted off in their final tax position. The franking system also needs consideration to avoid a transfer of wealth from consumers to investors via gouging.
If extraordinary profits are the product of gouging, then perhaps the higher taxation (whatever is retained after franking credit refunds) could be applied to some relief for the poorer folks who are being gouged.
Keane and Dyer’s piece seems to suggest everyone is going to suffer and it has zero net effect. If the hypothesis is true then the people most affected remain those being gouged, while the investors may not see much difference. If they do alter the franking credits, then the magnitude of the impact will be marginal and proportional to the size of the tax-advantaged super fund. Hardly a zero-sum game.
Sandra Jones writes: Adam Bandt is right on the money going after super-profits. Perhaps it’s time to revisit franking credits, or reduce them to share the wealth? These companies make billions from consumers. It’s time to give some back — not just generate extra for wealthy shareholders.
Poverty and homelessness is still a big issue, not to mention the JobSeeker allowance is a pittance. If poverty is reduced, crime will go down.
Pauline Bleach writes: As someone who worked in the sphere: there is no privacy. Anything that is encrypted can be decrypted. And yes, all your phone calls could always be intercepted. As is the lesson from the Millennium Challenge 2002: if you want secure messages, don’t use digital.
However, we cannot allow evil to flourish. The most strident free speech advocates would tear down the walls of hell to get their 13-year-old child’s nude photos removed from a Telegram channel.
Instead of needless culture wars and thought experiments, we need rules and tools. Tools like using AI to identify and report encrypted information, without a human having to see it themselves. It could provide limited information to humans to identify, and then pass on the stuff we all agree is bad.
The “two key system”, which has been useful in so many methodologies, could allow law enforcement and moderators to access data via a digital key only provided in cases of clear evidence.
Let’s stop whining about free speech, and instead put in place the limits and guardrails required. If we don’t, governments will.
Bill Wallace writes: All individuals, organisations etc have a responsibility to the community in which they live and operate. Historically communities have built expectations, rules and laws to ensure use of facilities in their communities.
For example, road rules. I don’t hear anyone suggesting these should be abolished and we should have freedom to do whatever we wish on the road. The result would be chaos, increased injuries and deaths.
The same should apply to the “electronic highways” that have been built. The builders have a responsibility to ensure they do not have an adverse impact on individual users and the communities in which they operate. That means working with governments and communities to meet these expectations.
Lynne Hamilton writes: I have been a follower of @purplepingers for some time, and believe he has a lot to offer as a potential senator. Having been a Labor voter since I could vote, I have finally had enough and believe it’s time for a new left in this country; a serious alternative to what is on offer, including the Greens.
To focus on one issue that is obviously important to van den Lamb: housing, whether it be a crisis or market manipulation, needs a clean slate. Get rid of negative gearing, enforce the vacant residential land tax (which is a joke and obviously not working because no-one is complaining about it). However, with so many sitting members owning investment properties it’s hard to imagine that any of them would support real change.
If van den Lamb can have a voice on issues such as the climate crisis and our appalling attitude towards asylum seekers, maybe I will feel proud to vote again.
Bring on the democracy sausage, with vegan options available!
This article was written by a selection of Crikey readers. Letters may have been edited for length and clarity. If you’re pleased, peed off or piqued, get it off your chest by writing to letters@crikey.com.au.
A flooded road in Melbourne yesterday (Image: AAP/Daniel Pockett)
Gale-force winds and flash flooding have left destruction in their wake across Victoria, NSW and Tasmania, and despite an increase in the amount of houses getting built we're still not on target to achieve the national housing accord.
CLEAN-UP AFTER DEADLY WEATHER
The clean-up is set to get underway today after extreme weather across three states left a woman dead, homes destroyed and towns on flood watch, AAP reports.
Strong winds and rain, which began on Sunday evening, resulted in the death of a 63-year-old woman after a tree struck a cabin at a holiday park in Moama near the NSW-Victoria border on Monday, Nine News said. Her husband was taken to hospital and treated for minor injuries.
The AAP reports more than 120,000 Victorians were left without power on Monday due to the weather, with 660 homes damaged by the winds and abnormally high tides. The Bureau of Meteorology says low-lying properties in Tasmania could be under threat from flood waters with evacuation warnings in place, while the ABC reports thousands of homes and businesses in Tasmania remain without power.
The extreme weather comes as politicians continue to bicker over environmental reforms. The Sydney Morning Herald reports Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has had a dig at the Greens for getting in the way of the government passing legislation to create an Environment Protection Agency. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese caused a stir when he told The West Australian yesterday the government could water down the agency’s powers in a bid to gain the Coalition’s support to get the legislation through Parliament. Rather than having the power to approve or block projects, the new watchdog would instead just oversee existing nature protection laws, the ABC said.
The SMH quoted Greens environment spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young as saying on Monday: “Labor caving in on environment laws would be the final nail in the coffin for Labor’s environmental credibility before the next election.” In response, Plibersek cited Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather addressing a CFMEU rally last week. “[The Greens] are more interested in defending [former union boss] John Setka than defending the environment,” the minister said.
The political fighting comes as the Clean Energy Council’s latest investment readout shows Australia could miss its renewable energy target without a significant increase in financial commitments for new electricity generation in the last months of the year, the AAP highlights.
MISSING HOUSING TARGETS
Talking of missing targets, construction bodies have welcomed new figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showing a 10.4% increase in the number of dwelling approvals during July but warned the national housing accord is still set to be missed, the AAP reports. The newswire quotes Master Builders Australia chief executive Denita Wawn as saying: “If we remain at this pace, we’re looking at creating about 831,000 new homes over the next five years.” The housing accord says 1.2 million new homes need to be built by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt has backed Labor’s industrial relations changes ahead of his meeting with “frustrated” mining and business representatives in Perth today, The Australian reports. The paper highlights the industry’s belief Labor’s multi-employer bargaining and “same job, same pay” changes will undermine the Pilbara mining region. It’s understood Watt will seek to ease concerns but won’t walk away from any of the industrial relations changes.
Watt said on Monday: “It’s surprising that [Opposition Leader] Peter Dutton and his WA-based workplace relations spokesperson Michaelia Cash want to make life harder for local workers, by repealing our workplace laws. We also strongly support the mining industry in Western Australia and we support those mining companies, unions and workers who are seeking to collectively bargain. I certainly won’t criticise employers and unions who seek to reach a workplace agreement.”
Albanese and his cabinet are on a campaign blitz in WA this week with a series of announcements being made. However, they risk being eclipsed by Wednesday’s GDP data, especially after Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he would not be surprised if growth was “soft and subdued” and claimed successive interest rate rises were “smashing the economy”. The prime minister defended those comments yesterday, the AFR said, and added economists are predicting tomorrow’s data will show the slowest rate of GDP growth since the early 1990s recession, excluding the pandemic downturn.
All of which will need some seriously good political spinning from the government, which might be a tad tricky given The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday the prime minister’s communications chief has resigned. Brett Mason’s exit comes nine months after he took on the role following Liz Fitch’s resignation. The paper said Mason, who is reportedly off to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, is set to be replaced by Kevin Rudd’s former press secretary Fiona Sugden.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
(Apologies in advance for the slight UK focus in the next two sections, it won’t happen again…)
Harry Potter fans were left disappointed on Sunday after gathering at London’s King’s Cross railway station hoping for a nod to J.K. Rowling’s famous books.
Those in attendance had hoped to hear an announcement that the fictional Hogwarts Express would be leaving from platform nine and three-quarters at 11am on September 1, as has happened in previous years, the Press Association said.
Unfortunately, there was no repeat of the “tradition” which attracted hundreds of people last year. There was no announcement and the made-up train wasn’t featured on the departure board either.
PA said Potter fans booed when neither occurred.
To be fair though, they had been warned. Warner Bros Discovery issued a statement back in July declaring: “Come 1st September, fans are strongly discouraged from travelling to Kings Cross as there will be no event, departure board or countdown at the station.”
Say What?
Regrettably, I think we all forgot to wish him a happy birthday at the 08:30 [meeting] this morning, which I feel a bit embarrassed about.
Sir Keir Starmer’s official spokesperson
In a big oops, the UK’s prime minister’s entire senior team forgot to wish him a happy birthday on Monday. A No.10 insider was quoted by The Guardian as claiming it was “really bad” no-one remembered Starmer’s 62nd birthday. The PM probably has more than enough on his plate to worry about such things though.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)
The opposition leader could have said the government has no business prying into people’s sexuality, even on a voluntary basis. He could have said the census is already large enough and further expansion isn’t justified. Instead, he labelled it “woke”. Why?
Clearly he wants to paint Labor as the creatures of a minority of LGBTIQA+ people, while he represents the “vast majority” of ordinary (read: heterosexual) Australians.
This peculiar othering of LGBTIQA+ people passed without notice amid the furore caused by the government’s stuff-up. What also passed unexplored was the argument from LGBTIQA+ groups that not having a census question was not merely a broken election promise by Labor, which it was, but also one that made them, in the words of one representative, feel “invisible and demeaned“.
That seemed to sum up a widespread feeling among the LGBTIQA+ community that a census question not merely generates valuable data for policymakers, but its absence also showed they were once again being deliberately ignored by the census being “straightwashed”.
Even if we were to debate this on the grounds of free speech, it’s not clear this would be favourable to these two tech barons. It’s easy to get caught up in the online discourse about free speech, but much of it revolves around America’s extremely limited restrictions on speech. The reality is the majority of Australians want to see the internet more regulated. The vast majority sided with Australian regulators over Elon Musk in another internet stoush. Being a free speech absolutist is an extreme position, even if it might not feel that way when you spend time in online spaces where these issues are debated. It’s worth mentioning, too, that at least some of the charges for Durov are related to providing encryption services. The details of these remain to be seen but these unprecedented charges may in fact be a genuine attack on free speech.
But really, this debate is not about that — or at least, not primarily. This is about two companies who pick and choose when to champion free speech, and when to ignore it, or choose to twist its definition to mean something else altogether. As Musk accuses the Brazilian judge of being an evil dictator, consider this comparison: the legal systems of two democratic nations versus two tech oligarchs, elected by no-one, flaunting the rules of the countries they choose to operate in. Who do you think is exerting unchecked and extreme power over the way we are allowed to talk?
The past year has been a brutal one for the Australian media industry. Job cuts have been made all over the country (Crikey has been tracking them here), with more than 400 roles slashed in the past few months at Seven West, Nine Entertainment and News Corp alone. And the industry is set for even more pain as the money from publishing deals with tech giants Meta and Google dries up.
Despite the cuts, however, some of us are eating well. And by us, we mean those in the C-suites. Today Crikey rounds up the profits and executive pay at the biggest media companies in the country so you can see how much corporate executives are making relative to the performance of their companies (or the job cuts they’ve made).
‘It’s time to give up on normal’: What winter’s weird weather means for the warm months ahead — David Bowman (The Conversation): Heavy winds struck south-east Australia over the weekend as a series of cold fronts moved across the continent. It followed a high fire danger in Sydney and other parts of New South Wales last week, and a fire in south-west Sydney that threatened homes.
The severe weather rounds out a weird winter across Australia. The nation’s hottest-ever winter temperature was recorded when Yampi Sound in Western Australia reached 41.6C on Tuesday. Elsewhere across Australia, winter temperatures have been way above average.
We can look to the positives: spring flowers are blooming early, and people have donned t-shirts and hit the beach. But there’s a frightening undercurrent to this weather.
Earth’s climate has become dangerously unstable, and it’s only a matter of time before we get the bad combination of hot and dry weather, strong winds and a spark. None of this should come as a surprise. The sooner we stop expecting Australia’s weather to be “normal”, the sooner we can prepare for life in a wild climate.
Is Anthony Albanese fated to lead the last majority government? — Lidija Ivanovski (AFR): In the lead-up to the next federal poll, expect to see Dutton and his disciples like doomsday preppers warning of a Green infiltration of a future Labor government, while conveniently ignoring his own glaring predicament. Expect to see team Albo decrying any suggestion of it. And fair enough. The images of Gillard and Bob Brown sitting down to a signing ceremony in 2010 with wattle pinned to their lapels is still the stuff of trauma for seasoned Labor staffers. “Never again,” they say. The other fly in the ointment of that scenario is personal; Albanese has carved a career fighting off Greens at a local level. His loathing of their pantomime politics would see him prefer to deal with anyone but.
Still, the major parties might not have a choice. Marriages of convenience (even political ones) are just that — convenient. You’d rather not be there, but you’ve run out of options.
Rich James is Crikey'sWorm editor. He was previously news director at BuzzFeed Australia, executive news editor at the i paper, senior editor of EMEA at Storyful, and deputy news editor at Metro.
