The Commission of Audit pantomime and the Coalition's big lie
The Commission of Audit report was just a pantomime to help Hockey to sell his fictitious "debt crisis" line. Managing editor David Donovan explains why the Coalition are desperate to continue selling this lie.
THE COMMISSION OF AUDIT report has just been released and the Budget is just days away from being delivered.
Before discussing these important matters, however, it is important to set to scene. How a nation that is AAA credit-rated and has one of the lowest levels of public debt in the Western world could be widely seen (in this country, not overseas) to be in the grip of a potentially calamitous "budget crisis".
Indeed, a debt crisis so urgent that the Federal Government has
suggested it has no choice but to remove much of the social safety net,
sack thousands of public sector workers and sell off swathes of
government assets.
Well, it all comes down to the selling off a big lie – the very
successful selling, in this case – that the Coalition has been doing to
the Australian public ever since the previous Government saved the
country from the Global Financial Crisis through the use of a modest
fiscal stimulus in a quite masterful piece of Keynesian economics. So masterful, in fact, the then Treasurer Wayne Swan was awarded the title of world's best Finance Minister in 2011 and Australia went from having the 9th best economy in the world to 2007 to having the best in 2013.
I was aware of the lie for a long time, but its ruthless
effectiveness was brought home to me in the months leading up to the
2013 Federal election. It was at that moment that I knew for sure that
Labor would lose that election.
I was at a party just after Rudd had been returned and Labor were
enjoying a brief resurgence in the polls — they were, in fact, back in
front. But I knew they'd lose anyway when I asked someone – a personal
trainer running his own small business – who he was going to vote for.
He said the Coalition — because the country "needed to sort out all this debt".
I tried to explain to him that Australia had very low debt in world
terms after the GFC, but he looked askance at me and said he had a
mortgage so he knew how important it was to manage debt.
The Coalition's big lie - that Australia's is in a serious debt crisis - is obviously false. (Table via austrade.gov.au)
I told him the level of Australia's debt was like a $50,000 mortgage on a $300,000 house, but he wasn't interested.
The message of debt – and the subsidiary image of Labor's "reckless spending" –
had been so imprinted in this otherwise very reasonable voter's mind,
as it had on the Australian population who get their little bits of
"news" from commercial radio or TV, that Labor didn't have a hope.
The fearful mind of the electorate – most working hard to pay off
massive mortgages or hefty credit card debt – was easy to convince about
the bogey-man of public debt.
When you are telling stories about bogey-men to impressionable minds,
it is irrelevant whether the bogey-man is real or not — all that is
required is that it produces the desired emotional response, as it is
that response that is imprinted long-term in receptive minds. Thus, the
Coalition had absolutely no reservations about pulling out the bogey man
of debt — as they don't about debt's bogey-colleagues of asylum
seekers, Islam, dole-bludgers, government waste, lefties, socialists,
Communists, greenies, bikies, or whoever may seem like a threat in the
minds of ordinary Australians.
The technique is an ancient one — it is that of the 'big lie'.
Adolf Hitler explained the big lie his infamous prison cell treatise Mein Kampf [IA emphasis]:
'... in the big lie there is always a certain force of
credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily
corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than
consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive
simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big
lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in
little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal
untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the
impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the
facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds,
they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there
may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie
always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a
fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who
conspire together in the art of lying.'
Everything done by the Government subsequent to the election has been
aimed at continuing the public's acceptance of the 'big lie' about
public debt, as it is intrinsic in providing political cover for the
budget they have long planned to deliver.
Just over a week ago, Treasurer Joe Hockey was ruthlessly exposed trying to sell this 'grossly impudent lie' – something he dubbed in 2012 the "end of the age of entitlement" – by veteran British journalist Andrew Neil, but still he doggedly persisting with it, even in the face of Neil's utter incredulity:
Joe Hockey's "budget emergency" myth blown away by Andrew Neil (24/4/14)
It was a blatant, obvious lie – or rather a comical series of series
of them – but Hockey was reassured afterwards by his minders, I'm sure,
that most of the Australian public would never be exposed to this
embarrassing disaster by Australian mostly compliant media.
And then came the Commission of Audit.
Not much needs to be said about this pantomime performance apart from the bare bones.
A few Coalition cronies were gathered together by Hockey and given
the express purpose to give life to their most far-fetched Ayn Randian
neo-con fantasies, which normally they were only allowed to talk about
over brandy in their gentleman's clubs or on their unlistened to ABC radio programmes.
To this, for a generous stipend, they duly complied. Some of its
recommendations included allowing the states to also levy income tax,
removing Medicare for most Australians and privatising the Australian
Mint — now there's a licence to print money.
As ABC Lateline
showed last night, it's key recommendations were eerily similar to the
report released by a Commission of Audit in 1997, soon after the last
Coalition Government gained power under John Howard.
When CoA head Tony Shepherd, the former boss of the lunar right Business Council, released this report, even he was finding it hard to take maintain the facadé.
He smirked his way through questions, offering glib and often evasive answers.
"How did you arrive at that figure, Tony?" a journalist asked him over some detail.
"Oh, we just thought they were reasonable payments people could afford," he replied.
Commission of Audit report a rehash of 1998 CoA (ABC Lateline 1/5/14)
That was the sort of rigour that went into this report. If you want to read a detailed exposé of it, read Ben Eltham's insightful piece in The Guardian.
Of course, the detail of the Commission's report was largely irrelevant.
Like the previous Coalition Government of John Howard, Hockey will no
doubt implement one or two of its less absurd propositions, but will
happily ignore the rest. The Commission of Audit was largely a stalking
horse to make the Government's real plans, which you can be certain have
been established for years, seem comparatively reasonable and fair.
The main role of the Commission of Audit, however, was to say
Australia needed to find a massive amount of money – they somehow came
up with $70 billion – to affirm Hockey's big lie that if Government
didn't rein in spending soon "we'll all be rooned!"
The main game for the Coalition now is simple.
To get the Budget through without losing too much political skin so
it can pay back the one who got it elected in 2013 — Rinehart, Murdoch,
big miners, foreign multinationals and assorted other plutocrats.
To do this, this will first try to the social safety net where
possible and remove workers rights and entitlements where possible. This
serves to increase the labour pool and drive down wages. This is
important for the big corporations and billionaires, as labour costs are
one of their major expenses. The effect this has on Australian society
and living standards is of absolutely no concern to the rich.
Gina Rinehart $2 a day
Secondly, and even more importantly for the corporatists,
Hockey will privatise anything he can and sell it off at firesale
prices. The big lie he will use there is that private industry is always
more efficient than government — simply nonsense. The truth is,
election campaigns and selling big lies are expensive projects and the
corporations will have demanded lucrative public assets at markdown
prices as their minimum return.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Proof of this is that there is a simple solution to Australia's
modest, yet growing, public debt and that is to increase revenue rather
than slash spending. Under the Howard Government, the tax take as a percentage of GDP decreased
to now become one of the lowest in the OECD. If Howard had maintained
taxation rates and not given away the profits of the mining boom in
middle class vote bribes, there would be no deficit now.
Therefore, the obvious way to increase revenue in a healthy AAA economy with widening inequality
is to restore equity through the progressive taxation system – that is,
tax the rich fairly – and remove the massive subsidies for wealthy
corporations, such as the diesel fuel rebate. Of course, keeping the carbon tax and mining taxes would also greatly assist in balancing Australia's books.
The Australia Institute has, indeed, detailed a compelling list of more than $40 billion worth
of comparatively easy revenue raising measures that would not inflict a
scintilla of hurt on the economy or the poor and underprivileged.
These, of course, were not even considered by the Commission of Audit
and are consistently deflected by Joe Hockey.
That's because none of those measures would be palatable to, for instance, Gina Rinehart — which says all you need to know about who really runs Australia.
As Budget night 2014 closes in, we are in the final stages of the
sale one of the most massive and audacious lies in Australian history —
one that is monstrous in its implications.
It remains to be seen whether the scales will fall away from Australians' eyes in time.
Senator's fiery start to Commission of Audit hearing
Read also David Donovan's speech to the Gold Coast March in March: Down with the corporatists. You can follow Dave on Twitter @davrosz.
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