Issue 105: 7 – 14 September 2022
## Battles At the Summit
Jobs summit: Key commitments and take-aways
Jake Evans | ABC
Alan Kohler: Among its outcomes, the jobs summit underlined irrelevance of Opposition
Alan Kohler | The New Daily
Australia a ‘green Wall Street’? Labor moves to the dark side as job summit concludes
Guy Rundle | Crikey
Progressives still can’t believe that Labor is now the party of total capitalism. They’ll waste years if they don’t get wise — fast.
Australian women left behind as pay gap rises
Andrea Bortoli | Green Left
Childcare centres shut down across Australia
Rachael Ward | The New Daily
The stage three tax cuts are a pile of garbage, and everybody knows it
Greg Jericho | The Guardian
Fortunately, the policy can be easily changed – if you have the conviction.
Breaking promises isn’t easy. Keeping the wrong ones is just as painful
Richard Denniss | SMHAge
Keeping Morrison’s 2018 tax promise isn’t just a gift to the highest income Australians, it’s a gift to the Liberal Party, which has already made clear its intention to campaign in Labor’s outer suburban seats rather than try to win back the high-income seats it lost to the teals and the Greens.
Greens “climate trigger” bill faces tough crowd in parliament, but gets billionaire backing
Sophie Vorrath | RenewEconomy
Albanese Government favours jobs and growth over biodiversity
Sue Arnold | Independent Australia
In Australia, Workers Are Facing Another Decade of Wage Suppression
Chris Dite | Jacobin
Victorian Government urged to let First Nations group lead healing of popular state forest
Aaron Bloch | National Indigenous Times
How Labor is jeopardising its own climate target
Mike Seccombe | The Saturday Paper
In approving almost 47,000 square kilometres for offshore oil and gas exploration, the Labor government is jeopardising its climate target and echoing the Coalition’s spurious case for energy security.
Raise the corporate tax rate and kill three birds with one stone
Alan Austin | Independent Australia
# Workforce
Increased migration must come with planning and expanded services, councils say
Peter Hannam | The Guardian
Increasing the migration intake was a key subject of the jobs summit in Canberra, with employer groups in particular complaining that staff shortages were holding back the economy.
What it really means to work in the book industry
Bethany Patch | Overland
It’s difficult to get a true picture of the exploitation in the industry without having visibility of the real profits being taken by publishers. These are not publicly available, so we can only extrapolate them.
AI abuses revealed, including in employment selection procedures
Contributor | Vanguard
There are at present few, if any, safeguards in place in Australia to protect citizens and residents from the uses and abuses of high-tech espionage, which they encounter in almost every part of their private and everyday lives, including their employment.
Childcare owner to join Early Childhood Strike amid staff crisis
Michael West | Michael West Media
Australian union limits Qantas aircraft engineers to one-minute strikes
Patrick Davies | World Socialist Web Site
# Miscellaneous
When the Indigenous voice referendum is upon us, be wary of misinformation and scare campaigns
Gabrielle Appleby, Lisa Hill | The Guardian
The Italian road to fascism
Luca Tavan | Red Flag
The right has thrived in the atmosphere of social decay and crisis in Italian society. The country is in a constant state of emergency economic management, teetering on the brink of collapse.
Mining, participation and hegemony in Mexico
Valeria Guarneros-Meza | Progress in Political Economy
Ukraine, war and the British left
Federico Fuentes, Phil Hearse | Green Left
Turkey: Another left-wing MP arrested
Peter Boyle | Green Left
# Memory
‘He was deadly, a deadly man’: remembering the incredible life and work of Uncle Jack Charles
Julie Andrews | The Conversation
Uncle Jack Charles was born on the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve in 1943 and was descended from the Victorian peoples of the Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and the Yorta Yorta. He spent his life retracing his ancestral heritage after being forcibly removed from his family.
Swimming in molasses – Elizabeth II leaves a mixed legacy in Australia — and not just for republicans
Frank Bongiorno | Inside Story
The other side of Elizabeth II’s reign: How to profit from plunder while disclaiming responsibility
Binoy Kampmark | Pearls and Irritations
Reactions to the death of Queen Elizabeth II from victims of atrocities during her reign were less than warm. Did the British Crown derive profits of plunder yet disclaim responsibility for colonisation, they asked? The Westminster shroud, in this regard, is thick indeed, a layer of forced exculpation.
With the death of Queen Elizabeth comes the death of a republican dream
Guy Rundle | Crikey
For republicans, the rise of King Charles III has come too early. But their failure is that of rationalism itself, in the face of unifying myth.
Labor approves removal of sacred rock art on the Burrup Peninsula
Jesse Noakes | The Saturday Paper
As Tanya Plibersek grants final approval for a fertiliser plant on the Burrup Peninsula, Woodside has quietly begun expansion of its enormous Pluto gas project.
Royal adulation keeps minds in chains
Sam Wainwright | Green Left
Right royal parasite is dead
Tom Bramble | Red Flag
Down with all parasites!
Humphrey McQueen| Vanguard
In her ‘devotion to duty’ the Queen sacked an Australian PM described by Philip as a ‘socialist arsehole’
John Menadue | Pearls and Irritations
A Tribute To Jean-Luc Godard
Julian Wood |FilmInk
Barbara Ehrenreich Made Socialist Ideas Sound Like Common Sense
Peter Dreier | Jacobin
In announcing his mother’s death, Ben Ehrenreich tweeted: “She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.”
# Climate
La Niña, 3 years in a row: a climate scientist on what flood-weary Australians can expect this summer
Andrew King | The Conversation
We don’t yet know how La Niña may change as the planet continues to warm, but evidence suggests climate change may make La Niña (and its counterpart El Niño) events more frequent and intense.
Reserve Bank the best bet to save humanity from climate crisis
Alan Kohler | The New Daily
First, it’s the only government body that’s entirely independent of politics and the need to be popular, and it’s clear that political democracy is failing to deal with climate change, and second, the Reserve Bank can create money.
Will climate collapse do our heads in?
Mark Furlong | Arena
One third of Pakistan’s arable land is underwater. Last year, for the first time, wildfires gutted lands above the Arctic Circle. Right now, drought is afflicting much of the United States, Europe and Africa. Temperatures have exceeded historical maximums in, well, heaps of places. Even big cities are not inviolate: insurance companies are doing the sums on the impact a hurricane will have if it strikes New York in the coming decades.
# Capital vs Economy
Australians are spending hard, despite real wages falling. It’s a fragile situation
Greg Jericho | The Guardian
On the surface the 0.9% quarterly growth and 3.6% annual growth is very strong. But you can thank people drawing down on their savings to spend, despite wages going backwards in real terms, rather than any boom in production.
Now Sydney has two casinos run by companies unfit to hold a gaming licence
Charles Livingstone | The Conversation
‘I am hopeless now’: Australia’s $9.65 billion torture camps
Mike Seccombe | The Saturday Paper
As the Albanese government prepares to finalise a Nauru contract with an American prisons operator, the cost of the brutal enterprise has stretched into billions of dollars.
Cap negative gearing and capital gains: how to patch Australia’s revenue hole
Benjamin Clark | Crikey
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated Labor might pivot towards raising taxes. It’s a sensible move, especially if it targets Australia’s wealthiest.
There is no ‘magic wand’ for Australia’s healthcare system, but we desperately need a rethink
Ranjana Srivastava | The Guardian
Imagine an ecosystem that served us from birth to death with an emphasis on preventative and community care
Our New New Times: Labor’s Alternative To Capital Is Capital
Guy Rundle | Arena
# Labour
Industrial-strength labour reforms
Paul Bongiorno | The Saturday Paper
The spectacle may not be as dramatic as that moment in French history that saw the old order swept aside in bloody revolutionary fervour, but its significance for Australia could be just as profound.
Australia’s Unemployment System Is a Marketized, Bureaucratic Nightmare
Owen Bennett | Jacobin
Australia’s privatized employment services system doesn’t help people find work. Instead, thanks to reforms first introduced by the Labor Party, it punishes welfare recipients with a bureaucratic maze of “mutual obligations.”
How we turned helping the disadvantaged find jobs into the Hunger Games
Ross Gittins | SMHAge
Workforce Australia locks people into an endless cycle of make-busy activities like Work for the Dole and poor-quality training courses. It reaches less than 10 per cent of employers, and offers them little assistance.
Where to after the Jobs and Skills Summit?
Sarah Hathaway | Green Left
Apple workers organise to fight for a fair enterprise agreement
Isaac Nellist | Green Left
Apple proposed a new EA that not only included a real wage cut, it would allow management to roster workers for 60 hours a week, without overtime.
Childcare workers strike for pay, conditions in ‘largest shutdown’ ever
Jim McIlroy | Green Left
Australia and New Zealand end daily COVID-19 reporting: The “let it rip” conspiracy against the population
Oscar Grenfell | World Socialist Web Site
The decision has no scientific or medical basis. It has been sharply condemned by principled epidemiologists in both countries as an attack on the populations’ right to know about the still unfolding medical emergency and the ability of public health experts to track it.
# Misc
Reformist strategy leads to defeat of Chile’s new constitution
Clara da Costa-Reidel, Tom Sullivan | Red Flag
Who controls your data online? Hint: it’s not you!
Manal al-Sharif | Michael West Media
Every day, living our busy lives, we are lulled into a false sense of security about our privacy. It happens almost every time we “agree to the terms and conditions”.