I want to start by acknowledging that we’re meeting here today on stolen Aboriginal land, the land of the Jagera and Turrbal people, and that their sovereignty over this land was never ceded, and that it always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.
We all know that Australia has experienced an unprecedented mining boom over the past decade. This boom is slowing now, but it is still producing huge wealth.
Over the last decade, profits of the mining companies have gone up by 400%. The big mining corporations now make almost a quarter of all profits in this country.
Gina Rinehart now has a net wealth of $29 billion.
In the same period, the effective tax rate of the mining companies has plummeted from 40% down to just 13.9%. This is a disgracefully low figure.
The banks have also greatly benefited. At a time when the global economy is in crisis, Australia’s big four banks have been making huge profits. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald revealed that the four big banks made $27 billion in profit this year — a record.
And at the same time, nearly 3 million people in this country are living below the poverty line. The poorest 20% of the population own only 1% of the wealth, and the poorest 60% — that is, the majority — own less than 20%.
Any increase in public spending, as in the Gonski reforms to primary and secondary education, comes at the expense of another area of public spending — in this instance, ironically, $2.8 billion from tertiary education.
In fact, to show just how insane the situation has become, the federal government has made $207.8 million in savings from their cuts to single parents payments this last year, and only raised $126 million from their mining profits tax.
That’s more money from throwing 100,000 people into poverty than from taxing the billionaires. Is this not the most perverse situation?
So what’s our solution? We are calling for the nationalisation of the mining industry, the banking industry, and the private energy sector. We are saying that now is the time to put these strategic sectors under democratic public ownership.
We want to take that wealth out of the hands of these rich fatcats, the Scrooge McDucks of Australia, and put it where it is desperately needed.
Use it for health care and education at all levels. Use it for welfare and real support for single parents, for the unemployed, for refugees, invest in a publicly funded renewable energy program.
But it’s not just a matter of wealth. It’s also — crucially — a matter of power.
The super-rich in this country, the owners of the mines and the banks in particular, exert huge pressure on the government to get exactly what they want, and to stall, co-opt or shut down any possible threat to their continual profit expansion.
It is not possible to have meaningful democracy in this country without bringing these sectors under democratic public ownership.
Aboriginal people won’t get a real say over what happens to their lands until we break the entrenched power of this belligerent oligarchy.
Our elected representatives will not represent us if they are dominated, willingly or unwillingly, by these greedy masters.
Climate change raises this issue of political and economic power in a more frightening and critical way than perhaps ever before.
Earlier this year scientists measured 400ppm of carbon dioxide in the air for the first time — well beyond the 350ppm needed to maintain a stable biosphere.
The science is very clear — we have to reduce our emissions to zero immediately and move to a much more sustainable economic model.
It is also very clear that BHP, Rio Tinto other big fossil fuel companies simply will not stop until they have extracted every last drop of oil, pound of coal or gas from the ground in their insatiable search for profits. By that time it will be too late.
So we are saying that the power has to be taken out of the hands of these industries and put in the hands of the Australian people — these industries should be put under community and workers’ control.
None of this can be achieved simply by voting the right people into parliament.
The power of the mining corporations and the corporate press — who have gotten rid of a government before — cannot be broken unless ordinary people get active and fight to create the future they want to see.
So this election campaign needs to be a fighting campaign, that will take the message to the people of this electorate and get them engaged and inspire them to stand up for their own interests, and for their future.
[This was a speech given by Liam Flenady at the Socialist Alliance campaign launch for the seat of Griffith in Brisbane on July 12.]