Solidarity meets in cities all around the country. Check here for details of the latest upcoming meetings.

MELBOURNE

Contact melbourne <at> solidarity.net.au or Feiyi on 0416 121 616 for more info

All meetings are at the New International Bookshop, Trades Hall, 54 Victoria Street, Carlton South

SYDNEY

7pm Thursday April 25

Marxism and anarchism

7pm Thursday May 2

Are we getting Gonskied? Gillard’s funding plan, education, and neo-liberalism

7pm Thursday May 9

Vietnam: how the war came home

7pm Thursday May 16

The lost revolution: Germany 1918-1919

All meetings are at Brown St Hall, Brown St, Newtown [off King st, above Newtown Library]

All welcome.

Contact sydney <at> solidarity.net.au or 0449 646 593 for more info

BRISBANE

For more information contact Mark on 07 3123 8585 or brisbane<at>solidarity.net.au

PERTH

For more information contact Phil on 0423 696 312

CANBERRA

For more information contact Geraldine on 0458 039 596

Rather than use their last budget to provide real change, Labor have imposed sweeping cuts that Abbott will be happy to keep when he more than likely comes to power in September.

Despite ditching its plan for an immediate return to budget surplus, Labor remains wedded to the neo-liberal mantra of balancing the budget, arguing that new spending on the Gonski school reforms and DisabilityCare Australia must be offset by cuts to other areas.

But they are robbing Peter to pay Paul—the bulk of their cuts concentrate on family, education and welfare benefits.

Even while trying to sell their commitment to Gonski and DisabilityCare, Labor’s priority is to be seen as prudent “economic managers”. Labor are posing as the ones prepared to impose “responsible” cuts in order to fund spending on schools and disability support.

Treasurer Wayne Swan thinks he can make electoral mileage by somehow forcing the Liberals to reveal the scale of the cuts they have planned. Gillard thought she was being smart challenging Abbott to support the increased Medicare levy to fund DisabilityCare—but he simply agreed to support it.

Referencing Liberal Treasurer Joe Hockey’s comments that it is time to attack welfare and end the age of entitlement, Wayne Swan challenged him to come clean, saying people could, “choose between making motherhood statements about ending the age of entitlement, or putting their words into action”.

The Liberals have taken the invitation to keep the cuts and let Labor wear the blame.

Hockey even told the Liberal party room meeting that, “the easiest cuts to make are the ones that Labor makes for us”.

Besides the university cuts already announced, Labor has kept last year’s cuts to single parents payments, while further cutting climate programs, foreign aid and scrapping the baby bonus.

There is absolutely no need for this. The government could get billions more in revenue if it was prepared to seriously tax the profits of the mining companies and banks, and target the rich.

Even The Greens have pointed out that fixing the mining tax would raise $26.2 billion over three years.

Reality

Even with its big flagship announcements about Gonski and DisabilityCare, as usual Labor’s big promises don’t measure up to reality. The boost in funding to schools from July will be a tiny $473 million (see page 10).

The DisabilityCare scheme provides a much-needed reform, but again the immediate funds being committed are tiny.

Wayne Swan is desperately claiming that Labor’s budget is one that “puts jobs first” by avoiding savage austerity. But the government will slash another 1262 jobs in departments including Centrelink, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Quarantine. This comes on top of 5000 positions cut in the last year because of Labor’s 4 per cent “efficiency dividend” imposed in the last budget.

Swan has admitted it will get worse—unemployment will rise in coming months as the economy slows. Resources companies Ausdrill and Iluka Resources have each cut 300 jobs in recent months. Newcrest mining cut 150 jobs in March. Engineering firm, Coffey International, announced 150 sackings in May. Despite record profits, the four big banks have sacked 1600 people over the last six months.

Make the rich pay

The rallies on budget day jointly called by the National Tertiary Education Union and student groups showed the kind of response to the budget that is possible. Demonstrations against the $2.3 billion cut to universities drew good crowds across the country.

We need similar mobilisations to continue the fight against the uni cuts, the cuts to public sector jobs, the cuts to single parents and to push for increasing the dole.

Raising extra funding for services and welfare—like a $50 a week increase to Newstart, reversing the cuts to single parents payments and funding renewable energy, jobs, hospitals and public schools is urgent.
Much of the union bureaucracy, however, is backing Labor’s budget. The Australian Education Union has been totally uncritical of the Gonski funding plan and is now simply focused on calling for Abbott to maintain the funding increase.

But the threat of an Abbott government is no reason to go quiet on Labor’s cuts. They are only opening the door to him. Mobilising against the cuts and demanding the wealthy pay for the much-needed boost to spending is both the best way to keep Abbott out of office and the best way to prepare if he wins.

“Your Rights At Work”-style mobilisations can send a clear signal that there is a fighting union movement willing to take the fight to Gillard and Abbott.

And it can give people a vision of a real alternative to fight for—not simply a choice of Labor’s cuts or Abbott’s cuts. Such a vision is going to be needed to see beyond the gloom of the coming election. It is only through building fighting unions and movements on the streets that we can turn things around and begin the struggle for a different society.

Victorian Libs: Austerity for us, pay rises for them

CUT, CUT, cut has been the mantra of the Victorian Liberal state government—for us, not them.
The Napthine government has revealed new pay rise plans that will see backbenchers receive an extra $11,000 per year, boosting their base-pay to around $150,000.

Super contributions will increase by 4 per cent to 15 cent and a new “golden handshake” payment for dumped MPs will increase to up to $70,000.

The news is a kick in the teeth for the 4200 Victorian public sector workers who lost their jobs in the last 18 months and the school staff and students who had $550 million ripped from public education in the last two budgets. Hypocrisy is the word; the announcement came as the Libs flagged $209 million more public hospital cuts over the next four years, and as paramedics fight for a pay deal above 2.5 per cent.

Labor’s mining tax keeps the big miners rich

Labor’s pathetic Minerals Resource Rent Tax only raised $126 million in its first six months, crumbs compared to the $2 billion it was supposed to take back from the big miners. Now it has been revealed that four mining companies, BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals and Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting booked tax credits of almost $6.4 billion over the six month period. As a result, BHP paid a measly $77 million.

Fortescue and Rio Tinto paid a big fat sum of zero dollars. Fortescue and Hancock Prospecting’s deductions are so big that they don’t expect to pay any tax for the foreseeable future.

The miners’ annual reports expose that the real reason for the failure of the tax is not falling commodity prices, as Treasurer Wayne Swan claimed, but the fact that it allows mining companies to offset the value of their assets against the tax they have to pay— effectively getting them off the hook. Swan has paid lip service to “class war” but he has only been prepared to spread hot air, not the benefits of the mining boom.

Australia’s racist injustice system: locked up for being black

A sentencing Council of Victoria report has damned the state’s justice system, revealing it is worthy of no such name. Its findings reflecting broader trends across the country.

The report exposes that Aboriginal people are disproportionately on the receiving end of prison sentences when compared to the non-Aboriginal population. After adjusting for criminal history and offence type the report found 37 per cent of Aboriginal people received a prison sentence before the courts, as opposed to 28.5 per cent of the non-Aboriginal population.

Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service chief executive Wayne Muir has called for a review of police practice, saying the statistics reflect “the ‘build more prisons and lock them up’ approach” of governments. Muir also pointed to the failure of police to use “discretionary powers” in cases involving petty crimes like shoplifting and riding a bike without a helmet. This is a polite way of saying racist police use laws like this as an excuse to lock up Aboriginal people.

The massive over-representation of Aboriginal people in prisons has also sparked a national Senate inquiry beginning this month. Across the country Aboriginal kids are disgracefully locked up at 31 times the rate of their non-Indigenous counterparts and for adults its shockingly 15 times more. Clearly it is the Australian criminal justice system that should be on trial.

Sexual assault rife in the US war machine

According to recent survey results, 26,000 US military personnel may have been assaulted last year, a disturbing increase on the 19,000 in 2011. The statistics reveal a culture of fear and impunity. The figure of 26,000 was arrived at through anonymous surveys.

Official reports of sexual assault were dramatically lower at 3374. This is no surprise given that the rot goes all the way to the top. The Air Forces own head of sexual assault prevention was arrested for groping a woman in a parking lot in Virginia just days before the new numbers surfaced.

Women, who make up just 15 per cent of active forces, were victims of around half of all sexual assaults. One consequence of this disgusting culture is that female veterans are the fastest growing section of the US homeless population, with researchers pointing to “Military Sexual Trauma” as a key cause of their homelessness.

Obama has trumpeted the success of the Afghanistan war in realising women’s rights but it is a sick joke to claim the US military could be an instrument for exporting women’s rights anywhere at all.

It’s official: poor more charitable than rich

NAB figures have revealed that as a share of average income Australia’s poorer post-codes give more than Australia’s richest. While much is made of the dollar value of donations by the rich in suburbs like Killara and Vaucluse in Sydney, poorer people in suburbs like Gungahlin in Canberra are willing to sacrifice 40 per cent more of their income for charity. When measured in this way Killara and Vaucluse didn’t even make the top ten.

Teachers have a lot of “down time” and need bigger classes, say NT Libs

The NT Country Liberal Party government is tightening the screws on schools, announcing plans to increase staff student ratios from 17:1 to 20:1 in middle schools. High schools ratios will jump from 14:1 to 18:1. Education Minister Peter Chandler justified the changes by saying teachers have a lot of “down time”, and said there was no clear research that suggested students performed better in small classes.

There seems to be enough evidence for the wealthy though; nationally they are pulling their kids out of public schools at record levels in favour of private schools that have much lower student to staff ratios. In 2010 Chandler himself admitted paying for extensive private tuition for his son who attended a public school at the time.

Labor tells us that there have to be cuts elsewhere to fund any new social spending programs. Universities have felt the axe to pay for the Gonski schools spending. Yet there are billions of dollars that could be raised through targeting corporate profits and taxing the rich.

The big banks ANZ, Westpac and the Commonwealth made a combined total of over $10 billion profit in the last six months alone. All three posted profit increases, with ANZ and Westpac boosting their takings by a whopping 10 per cent each.

In 2009-10 the mining companies made total profits of $51 billion according to the Bureau of Statistics, up from just $13 billion a decade earlier, and the figures have been climbing since.
BHP’s last six-month profit alone came in at $5.7 billion. In the same period Labor’s useless mining tax took back just $77 million of BHP’s profits.

Julia Gillard’s cave in to the mining companies that watered down the tax means it is now expected to raise a paltry $200 million in its first year, and just $3.3 billion over its first four years.

The Greens have called for the tax to be restored to its initial rate of 40 per cent and applied to all minerals that produce super profits. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates this would raise $26.2 billion over three years. This is almost eight times what Labor’s tax will raise.

That amount of money alone could fully fund the introduction of DisabilityCare at an extra $7 billion a year as well as pay for raising Newstart $50 a week at $1.8 billion a year.

And there are plenty of other government handouts to corporations. Holden has received $2.17 billion in government subsidies over the past 12 years, yet slashed 500 jobs in April and is now rumoured to be set to close completely, threatening another 3500 jobs.

But it’s not just the banks and the mining giants dodging tax. Since the mid-1980s corporate tax rates have been slashed from 46 to 30 per cent across the board. Restoring the rate could raise up to $50 billion a year.

That amount could more than pay for the Gonski schools spending at an extra $6.5 billion a year.
The amount still left over could provide enough funds needed to allow a ten-year program to completely transition to renewable energy, based on solar thermal and wind power, and still leave billions for other projects.

Tax cuts for the rich

But the government could also immediately reverse the tax cuts the Howard government promised to high-income earners at the 2007 election. Labor was unwilling to stand up to the rich and so agreed to match them and has avoided the issue ever since.

Calculations by the Australia Institute show that reversing just this one round of tax cuts to the top 10 per cent of income earners would raise an extra $16 billion a year.

Plenty of millionaires seem to get away with paying nothing. According to the Tax Office, 70 Australians with incomes over $1 million in 2010-11 paid no tax, despite earning a total of $194 million between them.
Clearly the loopholes in the tax system for the rich are big enough to drive a truck through.

The top rate of income tax, which applies to those who earn over $180,000 a year or the top 2 or 3 per cent of earners, sat at 60 per cent in Australia before 1985 but is now at only 45 per cent.

Instead we have seen an increase in regressive taxes that hit workers and the poor, like the GST.

Finally there is the obscene level of wasted spending on the military. The Australian government insists on seeing itself as a player on the world stage, able to send troops alongside the US into wars like

Afghanistan and Iraq and to police the local region.
Currently this costs $25.4 billion each year, more than the federal government spends on universities or schools.

The money to fund spending on schools, disabilities, renewable energy and services is there. But finding it requires confronting corporations and the rich to take back some of the wealth they have stolen from the rest of us.

This is a task that the Labor government has failed at every opportunity, despite the fact that it would be massively popular.

They have consistently chosen the side of the rich, choosing to cut payments to single parents instead of targeting the wealthy, backing down over the mining tax and avoiding a fight over superannuation deductions for the wealthy. This is not a government on the side of workers and the poor.

By James Supple

Working class and poor people expecting relief from Labor’s budget did not get any. Disappointment rippled through households as it became clear that they were the targets of a raft of “savings measures”, meaning cuts.

Treasurer Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard insist these “tough” cuts are necessary to fund the Gonski education reforms and DisabilityCare Australia (the re-badged National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS). But they are seriously out of touch if they think robbing Peter to pay Paul is going to be a vote winner.

Cuts for us

We already knew Labor were to shamelessly pit schools against universities by paying for Gonski with $2.3 billion ripped out of universities, rather than stomach getting the money from the miners and the corporations.

While they have tweaked laws around tax evasion, to raise $1.1 billion a year, the bulk of the pain will be felt by those already struggling while those raking in the profits have been left off the hook (see opposite page).

The government will scrap the Baby Bonus, which amounts to a $1.1 billion cut to welfare. And this comes on top of last year’s changes that have thrown 80,000 single parents onto Newstart, cutting their payments by approximately $115 a fortnight and forcing them to look for work. Despite hostility from Labor’s own backbench at these brutal cuts and a hope that they might revise this decision, they have stubbornly and cruelly stuck to it.

Widespread institutional support for increasing Newstart, too, was ignored. Instead Newstart recipients who work can keep an extra $19 a week of their income; a measly total of $988 a year. This will mean nothing for the four our of five people on Newstart who can’t find work. They will need to continue to survive on $35 a day.

The government did however find money to punish—investing an extra $64.9 million in investigating welfare fraud. Yet more money will be thrown at income management programs—another $26.3 million for Noel Pearson’s Cape York initiatives, and $16.4 million for the expansion of income management.

As well as dropping new tax concessions for families, parents dealing with excessive child care costs get no relief. The government will freeze the child care rebate at $7500. The latter was already a stop gap measure for their failure to invest in providing any public child care at all.

Carbon tax compensation through raising the tax-free threshold has been quickly forgotten, justified by the falling EU carbon price. Those of us dealing with massive electricity price rises (80 per cent in NSW in the last four years, for example) will just have to cope.

Costs for us

On top of this pain, DisabilityCare Australia will be funded by increasing the Medicare levy by 0.5 per cent. Rather than institute a progressive system where the rich pay a higher proportion, Labor’s plan means everybody that pays the levy will be charged the same proportion of their income.

Even Abbott is prepared to raise corporate tax to fund his maternity leave scheme—but Labor won’t do it for the disabled! This needed investment in disability funding does not need to come from people already struggling.

As well as no relief from the rising cost of living, there is next to no new spending to fix the endemic problems in the health system. In fact $644 million will come out of primary hospital care. And the costs incurred to access to the Medicare Safety Net, which reimburses out-of-pocket health expenses, will be raised to $2000, leaving people out of pocket unless they spend over that amount.

The budget also puts a freeze on rebates for General Practitioners, meaning some doctors will decide to stop bulk billing and charge their customers more to cover increasing costs.

Big picture

The promise of tackling climate change has been abandoned, with just under $1 billion cut from the already tiny spending on renewable energy.

Disgracefully, cutbacks in foreign aid of $1 billion have been justified by increased spending on refugee detention and deterrence measures. The money will go to punishing asylum seekers, but the government is creating an image of asylum seekers taking from the deserving.

Yet the government has decided to increase defence spending overall. In fact $3 billion will go into buying 12 new Boeing Superhornet Growler Fighters to add to the 24 we already have.

It is these nasty cuts that will live on after the Labor government is turfed out at the next election.

By Amy Thomas

Keep quiet on industrial relations—until now, that was the Coalition’s plan for sweeping to power come 14 September. But after coming under serious pressure from business groups and the right of the Liberals to reintroduce WorkChoices-style policies attacking unions and working conditions, the Coalition has finally released a policy to take to the election.

The media has gone along with complaints from business that the Coalition’s plan is “soft”. (Hospitality and tourism bosses in particular were hoping Abbott would announce Coalition for abolishing weekend penalty rates).

However, there are plenty of nasty elements they have not spelt out.

The Coalition has tried to claim there will only be minor changes. Abbott has tried to divert attention from his plan to attack union rights by focussing his comments on “dodgy union officials and their supporters”.

But he wants a Registered Organisations Commission that will function as a union watchdog, providing a greater capacity for the state to interfere with union finances and governance, and to tie unions up in investigations and court cases.

Abbott will further restrict union right of entry to workplaces, making it almost impossible for unions to get access to workplaces where they don’t have members. He will reintroduce Howard’s industrial police for the construction industry, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).

For all the talk that WorkChoices is “dead, buried, and cremated”, Abbott wants to lay the basis for the reintroduction of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) by expanding the use of Individual Flexibility Agreements (IFAs). This will bring us closer to individual contracts, a way of dividing the workforce and breaking down collective agreements and union power.

Abbott also wants to make sure industrial action is always confined to circumstances where the Fair Work Commission is satisfied unions and bosses are bargaining in “good faith”. And negotiations for “greenfields agreements”, where unions and employers negotiate a union agreement on major projects before they begin, will be automatically forced into Fair Work if there is no agreement within three months. Arbitrated Fair Work agreements will no doubt favour the employers more than workers.

Dead, buried, cremated?

Despite Abbott claiming WorkChoices is “dead, buried and cremated”, it is obvious that the Liberals have plans to re-introduce it by another name. Abbott proposes to establish a Productivity Commission review of the Fair Work law that will provide the excuse to push further anti-union legislation.

He is promising to take proposals from that review to the 2016 election. But the Business Council of Australia is in a hurry. Chief Jennifer Westacott said employers did not have time to wait until 2016 to crack down on penalty rates, and reintroduce anti-dismissal laws and individual contracts.

And like the LNP in Queensland, the Coalition will commission an audit of Federal finances to justify major spending cuts and attacks on jobs.

This is exactly what John Howard did after he was first elected in 1996. His discovery of the famous budget “black hole” was the excuse for him to drop all his “non-core promises”, privatise the Commonwealth Employment Service and attack education and government services.

The Howard government was in power less than a year before it attacked unions with the Workplace Relations Act. It was never raised before the election.

Abbott is already promising to cut 12,000 public service jobs through attrition. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey announced that a Coalition government will start a “[wind] back of universal access to payments and entitlements from the state”. He has plans to abolish Centrelink offices by moving its operations to the Post Office!

Fighting Abbott

As successive opinion polls have given the Coalition a winning lead, Abbott has become more confident to reveal his real policies.

But still Abbott has held back from announcing the full re-introduction of WorkChoices because the Liberals are still concerned about reviving any Your Rights at Work union campaign.

That should be a signal to the union leadership. This is no time to go quiet in the hope that Labor will somehow sneak back in. The union movement has been too quiet for too long, thinking that going quiet will help Labor’s electoral fortunes.

The best preparation for an Abbott government is to mobilise union power now. Mass Your Rights at Work demonstrations backed by strike action against budget cuts and the Liberal state government cuts could boost workers’ confidence, shift the political mood and show Abbott and the bosses that there is a union movement prepared to fight back.

By Amy Thomas

The $2.3 billion cuts to universities have unleashed a wave of anger across the country. A national day of protest on budget day organised by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) along with student groups drew 1500 people in Melbourne and 500 in Sydney. Hundreds more protested in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and across regional campuses.

NTEU national president Jeannie Rea told the Sydney crowd that, “More than $4 billion has been slashed from higher education federal budget allocations since 2011”. She highlighted how Labor’s cuts target the poorest students, who “are the ones that are having the start-up scholarships ripped from them”.

The demonstration was also supported by a number of other unions, with speakers including Teachers Federation President Maurie Mulheron, Unions NSW Secretary Mark Lennon, Public Service Association General Secretary Anne Gardiner as well as Greens Senate candidate Cate Faehrmann. This shows the fight for higher education has potential to connect with broader layers of society also feeling the pressure of Gillard’s neo-liberal agenda.

But the student movement still has a big task ahead of it. With the cuts going through in the budget, the focus will shift to fighting the implementation of the cuts on individual campuses. These will begin at the start of next year as university management are faced with a 2 per cent “efficiency dividend”, code for a funding cut across the board.

Sydney University has already told students and staff that the cuts mean a $45 million hole in its budget across the next two years. But university managements are not allies in the fight against cuts. They will be the ones implementing them, and paying themselves bonuses for the trouble.

We won’t have to wait until next year to see the impact on campuses. Cuts are already being forced through even before the new funding cuts hit.

This year Architecture students at Sydney Uni have been fighting cutbacks to contact hours in Studio classes, and Education and Social Work has been told it will merged into the Arts Faculty in order to cut costs. Last year LaTrobe Uni’s Humanities Department lost 25 per cent of its staff, and around half of the 24 teaching jobs at ANU’s School of Music were cut.

But these cuts can be stopped if there are activists on the campus able to make contact with students in affected departments, and to build a campaign. By holding stalls, leafleting lectures and holding even small rallies on campus, education campaign groups can begin to build up face-to-face networks of students prepared to fight.

Last year at Sydney Uni a concerted campaign through first semester saved at least half of the 100 academic jobs management wanted to axe. Even over smaller cuts protest action can make a difference. Geosciences students at Sydney Uni in 2010 saved a number of subjects from being cut in their department after organising department meetings and a rally in protest.

If Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister we can expect more cuts, and a push for the re-introduction of up-front fees for domestic students. Getting organised to strengthen the education activist groupings on campuses now will see us better placed to meet these threats.

Sydney Uni staff took their fourth day of strike action this semester on 14 May. Once again the university was successfully shut down, with even less people visible on campus than during the previous days of strike action.

The strike campaign has forced university management to back off on some of their more outrageous demands—such as writing out the union as a party to the agreement and scrapping the anti-discrimination clause.

But the management has dug in its heels over a series of crucial issues. It wants to remove the NTEU site office from the campus and take away the union’s access to internal university systems and services. It also wants to reduce staff rights to consultation and review processes, making it easier to sack people.

After the university’s failed effort to axe 100 academic staff last year, this has left many seething. As French studies academic Browyn Winter wrote in an open letter to management, “Last year’s redundancy exercise has shown us that if anything, those processes need to be strengthened”.

To top it off, management wants to make it harder to enforce limits on workload for both academic and general staff. After a series of cuts on campus, overwork is already rife. As Spiro, a general staff member told Solidarity, “In the last three years where I work there was a staff freeze, from about 45 staff we’re down to less than 20 now. The workload’s tripled for most staff and conditions have worsened dramatically.

“Management need to face that they can’t keep hurting their staff if they want quality education for their students.”

This dispute has an importance well beyond Sydney Uni. Every university management is watching to see if whether the best unionised workforce in the sector can be beaten.

Staff are set to strike again on 4 June. It’s clear that the pressure on management will have to increase further in order to force them to back down.

Many people have welcomed Julia Gillard’s plan to boost funding to public schools. But the scale of the money continuing to go to private schools ensures an already drastically unequal funding system will remain entrenched.

According to education experts like David Zyngier, Australia has probably the highest proportion of students in private schools in the entire developed world. Nearly 40 per cent of school students are in the private system, compared to an average of 17 per cent across the OECD group of nations.
Julia Gillard’s funding plan does offer a real increase in funding to government schools, of $12.1 billion over six years, including state government contributions.

But the details are less impressive. The plan provides much less than the amount recommended by the Gonski review. The total funding over the next six years is only half of the $39 billion required to fully fund Gonski’s recommendations. The funding is also “back-loaded”, with very little money available in the early years.

What is clear is the scale of the concessions to private schools. Gonski proposed a funding model based on providing a base level of funding for each student and targeted top up funding for students from poorer backgrounds, for Aboriginal students and students with a disability.

Gonski recommended this extra funding be directed to the most disadvantaged 25 per cent of students. But Gillard has watered this down to spread the money over the bottom 50 per cent. This will ensure that many private schools will have access to the extra funds. All this means that the funding pool is spread more thinly, and less of the money will get to where it is most needed.

Private schools

Enormous government subsidies to private schools were at the heart of the Gonski review from the beginning. And Gillard has guaranteed that every single private school, no matter how wealthy, will receive a funding increase. This is on top of the funding boost they received from the Howard government as a result of its ideological obsession with undermining public education.

Already private schools receive more federal government funding than universities; $36 billion between 2009 and 2013. The decision to boost their funding again means they will be able to maintain their advantage over government schools in terms of teaching resources. This will see the drift from the public education system continue.

Research by Barbara Preston for the Australian Education Union shows that the proportion of low-income students at government schools doubled in past 25 years. It found 75 per cent of students in government schools were from low-income families compared to 27 per cent in Catholic schools and 24 per cent in independent private schools.

In addition 85 per cent of indigenous students and 78 per cent of students with funded disabilities attend government schools.

The middle class and the well off have increasingly opted out of the public system, draining resources from government schools, which are left to educate the most disadvantaged and marginalised.

Conditions

In exchange for the extra funding the states must also sign up to Gillard’s national plan for school improvement, which entrenches the regressive standardised testing regime, NAPLAN. An extra test will even be introduced, in science.

This testing regime distorts the school curriculum and degrades learning by forcing teachers to teach to the test in an effort to boost school ratings. Still more information will be put on the government’s MySchool league table to publicly compare each school’s NAPLAN results.

The government claims MySchool gives parents information to make an informed “choice” about which school is best for their kids. But its real effect is to deepen the educational divide as middle class families move their children out of “under-performing” schools, creating pockets of entrenched disadvantage.

The focus on test scores will be reinforced by giving principals more power over budgets and staffing, which in turn will depend on their school’s ranking in the education market.

Tragically, teachers’ unions, state and federal, have uncritically embraced Gonski (and now, Gillard’s version) in the hope that it might boost funding to public education. Similarly, they now also accept NAPLAN, allowing the market to eat away at public education.

The Labor government is hoping to be able to campaign in the federal election as the party of education by stitching up agreements with the state governments. But the Liberal state governments have savagely attacked public education (see Victorian teacher’s story). So will Abbott.

Gonski won’t save public education—that will still take a fight by the education unions and parents demanding extra funding, and opposing NAPLAN, MySchool, and the continuing hand-outs to the private schools.

By James Supple

Ten thousand construction workers and supporters marched to demand improvements to workplace safety on Grocon sites in Melbourne on 30 April.

Grocon workers are fighting the company’s refusal to allow the union to appoint health and safety representatives and delegates—the accepted practice across the rest of the industry—along with Grocon’s general attitude towards safety. Last September thousands of construction workers blockaded the Grocon Myer Emporium site in central Melbourne over the issue, but backed down after the threat of large fines.

Four workers have already died on Grocon sites this year along with three members of the public. Several more workers have been injured and a number of other safety concerns have seen CFMEU safety officers called out to Grocon sites over 30 times in the past six months.

Victorian Liberal Premier Denis Napthine denounced the rally, labelling it, “beneath contempt” and “an insult to the people who lost their lives” as did Melbourne’s Liberal Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. They claimed the protest had used the deaths of three members of the public, Bridget and Alexander Jones and Marie Faith-Fiawoo, in the collapse of a wall on Grocon’s CUB site in Swanston St, as a political stunt.

But there is nothing disrespectful about insisting that this tragedy is not repeated. It has emerged that Grocon had not obtained a permit for the Swanston St wall and building site hoarding it was attached to, which was higher than the maximum height allowed by the law.

The march was quiet and respectful, commencing from Victorian Trades Hall and heading for the Worksafe Office in the city. One minute of silence was observed at the Swanston Street wall to demonstrate condolences for Bridget and Alexander Jones and Marie Faith-Fiawoo, the three people killed when the wall collapsed in April. The demonstration continued slowly and quietly through to the Grocon development site for the Myer Emporium on Lonsdale Street. The march stopped again to observe another minute of silence for crane operator Bill Ramsay who died on the site in February.

The march finished outside the Worksafe office where the union raised concerns about official investigations into the Swanston Street wall collapse and who was responsible for investigating the site.

Deaths and serious injuries are all too common in the construction industry. If Grocon is able to get away with weakening union control on building sites, it will mean the loss of safety and lives as they drive to increase profits.

By Katie George