Crean's 'alternative' budget

Crean outlined a commitment to save Medicare, public education and the Murray River. "Crean says he'll rob business to fund health plan", screamed a May 16 Australian Financial Review headline, referring to Crean's commitment to introduce tougher restrictions on big business perks and tax breaks.

In reality, the proposals are populist measures aimed at giving Labor some anti-corporate credentials at a time when public hostility to corporate high-flyers is high. They would do little to inject more corporate wealth into tax revenue.

Crean's health initiatives would inject slightly more money into public health than the Coalition, but they would merely delay the crisis which is developing. The biggest pot of money waiting to be put back into the public health system is the $2.3 billion diverted into the private health insurance tax rebate, a criminal waste of taxpayers' money. Too scared of putting the private health insurance bosses offside, Crean declared that it was "still under review".

Labor's alternative budget is not much different from the Coalition's proposals. The substance of Crean's budget reply was how to do the same things better, with some extra measures to patch up ailing public services. There was no objection to the billions of dollars squandered on the military. Crean praised the budget's "many worthwhile initiatives to make our nation safer".

While an ACNielsen poll published on May 20 indicated that a massive 77% of people would prefer that the money earmarked for tax cuts was put back into social services, Crean nevertheless announced that Labor would support the proposed tax cuts.

Crean talked about opening up universities to all, just like the Whitlam Labor government did. The detail of his plan is still to be revealed, but it's clear already that Labor has no plan to abolish all tuition fees as Whitlam did (under mass popular pressure) in 1974.

Abolition of all fees and restoration of public funding, now $4.61 billion, to at least $6 billion would go some of the way to open up universities to all. Expanding the number of student places and broadening access to more generous student income support would do more. But this is not part of Labor's "vision".

Labor offers little more than a paler version of the Coalition agenda. It is not prepared to make the serious decisions on wealth redistribution that would facilitate a transformation of society — from one moving rapidly towards a neoliberal user-pays nightmare to one that bases itself first and foremost on fulfilling people's needs.

The issue is not how much tax we pay, but who pays. A fair tax system is a progressive tax system, in which taxation increases according to income. Australia's tax system has been dramatically flattened out in the past 15 years. Corporations that paid 49% tax in 1988 now pay only 30%, while many millionaires only pay of 25% their income in tax.

Australia is a wealthy country. This year's annual budget of $178 billion gives the government an enormous amount of money to spend — around $9000 per person.

Crean was correct when he told Channel Nine's Today show on May 16 that "budgets are about choices and about setting out your priorities". But his budget reply speech would leave you thinking that the choices available are very limited — a little bit more money for doctors, a little less for big corporations. It wasn't really very inspiring stuff.

Labor sets these limits because it, too, is committed to a social system which is geared to helping corporations make the biggest profits possible. That's why Labor doesn't raise the issue of corporate taxation, or handouts to the private health insurance business.

A society run in the interests of the working-class majority would have much more far-reaching goals. A budget geared to meeting their needs would seek to promote democratically run, fully funded health and education services aimed at facilitating the physical, emotional, intellectual and creative potential of all of us. A working people's government wouldn't try to solve unemployment by begging the corporate elite to employ more people — it would directly fund the creation of those jobs that were most needed, and fund them by massively increasing the taxes paid by the corporate parasites who presently live off the wealth created by working people.

From Green Left Weekly, May 28, 2003.
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