By Sue Boland
Earlier this year, Australian tennis star Pat Cash received a lot of praise for donating a large sum of money to a charity for young people.
Cash also chooses to avoid paying tax on his wealth by living outside Australia in a tax haven.
The media failed to note the contradiction that, as a wealthy individual, Cash would help many more young people if he simply paid tax on his wealth than he would through his donation to charity.
Cash's practice of avoiding tax while salving his conscience by tossing small change into the charity bucket fits neatly with the practice of many big corporations and recent comments by Prime Minister John Howard. Howard has been promoting corporate philanthropy as a means of relieving the government of responsibility for providing social welfare.
Howard argues that the government can no longer afford to provide the same level of welfare and that, in future, corporations will have to play a greater role by donating more money to charity. What he doesn't mention is that government revenue has declined because of corporate tax and income tax cuts for wealthy individuals since the mid-1980s.
Now, the government is preparing to reduce even further the proportion of government revenue that comes from corporations by further cutting corporate taxes and shifting the burden of indirect taxes off corporations and onto the shoulders of workers, unemployed, students and pensioners with its goods and services tax.
Governments around the world are finding it increasingly difficult to persuade the majority of voters to accept a sharp drop in their living standards through implementation of austerity measures. Voter disenchantment is fuelled by the knowledge that austerity measures are not being demanded of all people equally. Company profits and salary packages for top corporate executives and politicians have been exempted.
The increasing anger amongst voters threatens to derail the whole neo-liberal project of privatisation and job cuts. To forestall this, the Howard government is attempting to create the illusion that corporations "care about the community" by encouraging them to donate to charity.
Howard even has the hide to use the term "mutual obligation " in an attempt to equate corporate (voluntary) donations to charity with the (compulsory) requirement that unemployed workers work for the dole.
By equating corporate philanthropy with unemployed people on work for the dole schemes, the government is trying to reinforce the illusion that we live in a classless society in which some people become capitalists because they work harder than the rest of us.
This contradicts reality. Big capitalists acquired their wealth by inheriting it, looting it from Third World countries and expropriating the wealth created by workers. For example, James Packer got his wealth from Kerry Packer, who inherited his wealth from Frank Packer. Frank Packer gained his wealth by using super-exploited labour to mine gold in Fiji.
Burns Philp, one of Australia's main corporate donors, acquired its wealth by kidnapping Pacific islanders and selling them as slaves to work on sugar plantations in Queensland.
Many companies listed as major charity donors are notorious for their ill-treatment of workers, opposition to unions and indigenous land rights and destruction of the environment. Such companies include Rio Tinto, Shell, McDonald's, BHP, Western Mining and Burns Philp.
It doesn't matter how much a corporation gives to charity or promotes itself as being "ethical", as the Body Shop does. All companies, including the Body Shop, derive their profits from the exploitation of workers, and they support government policies which facilitate that exploitation.
Companies that claim to be ethical have not opposed the Howard government's anti-union laws, the GST or the cuts to corporate taxes.
Even if corporations increase their donations to charity (for which they will get big tax breaks after July 1), they will be contributing less to the provision of welfare services than before, because of cuts to company taxes and the introduction of the GST.
In a rich country like Australia, the wealth exists to provide a good living standard for all and to return the stolen wealth to East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Fiji and other Pacific islands.
If we are serious about wanting to overcome poverty, then we must begin by taxing company profits and wealthy individuals more heavily and preventing the introduction of the GST.
However, these measures would not provide a permanent solution to the scourge of poverty. A permanent solution involves socialising the wealth of society, so that the majority of people can decide how best to produce and spend that wealth.
That would be far more democratic than the current situation in which only a tiny minority, the owners of capital, control the wealth of society and perpetuate a system and policies which result in the impoverishment of ever greater numbers of people.