A little bit of good news from Australia

by John Q on February 15, 2024

Over the last few years, the Australian and UK Labor/Labour[1] parties, have followed strikingly parallel paths.

  • A better-than expected result with a relatively progressive platform (Oz 2016, UK 2017)
  • A demoralizing defeat in 2019, followed by the election of a new more conservative leader (Albanese, Starmer)

  • Wholesale abandonment of the program

  • Failure of the rightwing government to handle Covid and other problmes

Because we have elections every three years, Australia is now ahead of the UK and we now have a Labor government led by Anthony Albanese. In its election campaign and its first eighteen months in office, Labor ran on a platform of implementing rightwing policies with better processes and minor tweaks to the most repressive aspects. This is, AFAICT, what can be expected from Starmer in the UK.

But over the last month or so, we’ve had a series of significant policy wins, which may set the stage for more.

First, Labor had inherited from the previous government a staged program of tax cuts, and had promised to implement the final Stage 3 unchanged. The Stage 3 tax cuts massively favored high income earners and would have eliminated most of the progressivity in the tax system. Despite continuous pressure from Labor and Greens supporters, Albanese repeatedly restated his commitment to the promised cuts. But, facing a critical by-election, and (presumably) getting bad news from the pollsters, he suddenly announced the tax cuts would be remodelled, giving less to those at the top of the scale and more to every one else. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive, to the point where the conservative party decided not to oppose the change, while signalling that they would propose more and better cuts at the next election. The result was to re-open previously off-limits areas of tax for discussion, such as the treatment of capital gains.

Next, it was announced that Australia would finally have a vehicle fuel efficiency standard (we’re the only OECD country that doesn’t). This resolve a lengthy dispute about the treatment of ‘utes’ (utility vehicles, broadly equivalent to US pickup trucks), used by trades workers, but more broadly popular as a cultural symbol of masculinity. The fuel efficiency standard followed an announcement late last year of a strengthened renewable electricity policy. However, none of this has stopped the government approving new coal and gas projects aimed at the export market,

Finally, thanks to an amendment from the Greens, recently passed industrial relations laws included a ‘right to disconnect’, giving workers the right to ignore out-of-hours calls and emails, without being penalised. It seems as if Australia is actually ahead of the international pack on this one.

I don’t know if this is a harbinger of more good news in Australia, let alone whether anything similar might be expected from a Starmer-led government in Britain. But it’s nice to have some good news for once.

fn1. Although Australia follows UK spellings of words like “labour”, the Australian Labor Party adopted the US spelling a century or so ago, for reasons that are now obscure

{ 14 comments }

1

Matt 02.15.24 at 7:33 am

I don’t yet fully understand what the “right to disconnect” law comes to in practice, but it’s interesting to me that the vile Peter Dutton immediately said that the conservatives would repeal it if elected. It’s very hard for me to see that being a popular position, so I’m surprised he made such a big deal about saying it.

2

roger rabbit 02.15.24 at 9:11 am

The claim about the lack of progressivity is wildly factually incorrect.

Australia has one of the most progressive systems in the world: the numbers are something like 50% of adults pay no net tax (payments vs. direct transfers), the top-10% of income earners make c. 35% of income tax payments and the top-20% make 60% of income tax payments. The original stage-3 cuts would have made a modest difference to that.

See, for example, statistics and analysis cited here:

https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=1d6f4249-9e50-4e63-bc84-81b3a8752307&subId=566685

I find it striking that people hold such firm political and ethical positions that have so little connection to reality and that, further, the holders of them feel no need ever to verify whether their assumed axioms have any relation to reality.

3

MisterMr 02.15.24 at 12:34 pm

@roger rabbit

“Australia has one of the most progressive systems in the world: the numbers are something like 50% of adults pay no net tax (payments vs. direct transfers), the top-10% of income earners make c. 35% of income tax payments and the top-20% make 60% of income tax payments. The original stage-3 cuts would have made a modest difference to that.”

This would be perfectly possible even in a totally flat tax system.

In a perfectly flat tax system, with the simplyfying assumption that all taxes go into transfers (retirement or similar) and that transfers are also proportional to income (eg. retirement is proportional to pre-retirement income), everyone would be even, so nobody pays a net tax.
If you introduce even a small progressivity either on the tax side or on the transfer side, you will have the bottom half become net gainers; but this doesn’t mean the system is “very” progressive, just thati it is “slightly” progressive.
(whathever “very” progressive means, because in the early postwar years the top margina tax rate in the USA was around 90% so we should have a definition of what counts as very progressive).

Also the fact that the upper percentiles pay more taxes depends in part of progressivity, but in a large part on the fact that they haver more income, so that when income inequality goes up the percentage of taxes payd by the top percentiles will also go up.

4

reason 02.15.24 at 2:32 pm

Roger Rabbit
“Australia has one of the most progressive systems in the world: the numbers are something like 50% of adults pay no net tax (payments vs. direct transfers), the top-10% of income earners make c. 35% of income tax payments and the top-20% make 60% of income tax payments. The original stage-3 cuts would have made a modest difference to that.”

These statistics tell me NOTHING at all about how progressive the tax system is as a whole. In order to get that information, I would also have to know the indirect and other tax load AND the distribution of income (would you strategically omit).

5

engels 02.15.24 at 4:30 pm

I find that when annoying people want to force me to respond to an email at an inconvenient time they tend to include an implicit threat based on some ludicrous inference from my silence: “if you don’t reply to this in the next couple of seconds I’ll assume you’re okay with me eating the plums that are in the refrigerator…” etc. I very much hope the right to disconnect will make that a crime.

6

John Q 02.15.24 at 6:46 pm

WRT RR@2

As soon as I read something like “50 per cent of adults pay no net tax”, I stop reading: you’re just getting right-wing talking points, imported from the US (this was first put up the WSJ during the Romney campaign IIRC).

https://johnquiggin.com/2014/03/05/identity-crisis-2/

7

Ebenezer Scrooge 02.15.24 at 8:57 pm

In Japan, every office worker has a right to a four-week vacation, on condition that they never take it. I’m wondering if a “right to disconnect” will be any different?

8

marcel proust 02.16.24 at 2:22 pm

EZ@7: In Japan, every office worker has a right to a four-week vacation, on condition that they never take it

This sounds like the flip side of Anatole France’s quip about quality under the law. Contemporary France (perhaps distantly related to AF) seems to be well ahead of contemporary Japan on this standard.

9

superdestroyer 02.16.24 at 4:14 pm

How does the government enforce the regulations that employees can disconnect but not be penalized. If one works in an office where half the employees are connected and half are disconnected, how can those who intentionally disconnect expect to ever be promoted or rewarded? Also, what are the exceptions?

10

roger rabbit 02.17.24 at 4:06 am

Please, nothing more on any of my threads – JQ

11

John Q 02.17.24 at 5:35 am

@7,8 Employment protections are reasonably good in Australia, so sacking someone for ignoring an after-hours call or email will be quite difficult. And since such calls/emails are on the record, a boss planning to sack someone would be foolish to leave a trace

@9 This isn’t about remote work, it’s about out of hours calls. But as regards remote work, I’m surprised at the hypothetical nature of your comment. Most office workers in Oz and elsewhere have been doing some kind of hybrid for four years now, and don’t seem to have been deterred by threats of non-promotion.

12

Ebenezer Scrooge 02.17.24 at 10:52 pm

@11: Strong employment protections can discourage people from getting sacked. But they can’t do much about raises or promotion, at least at the level of individuals. And most young (i.e., relatively powerless) employees are very concerned about raises and promotions. If the norms say “answer e-mails at all hours”, e-mails will be answered at all hours, especially by the ambitious.
Yes, laws do influence norms, but only so much. And it is norms that govern behavior. Law is no replacement for the hard work of social persuasion, although it often serves to mark milestones in the process.

13

John Q 02.18.24 at 1:46 am

Ebenezer. As you say, law often serves to mark milestones in the process. Australia had a lot of work intensification in the 1990s (the conservative PM at the time memorably called the topic a “barbecue-stopper”). That produced a pushback from workers, which has continued, slowly, ever since. The success of work from home has accelerated the shift in social norms, as well as making it more urgent to determine who is in control of such things. Having the law on the side of workers will make a big difference.

14

engels 02.18.24 at 9:29 pm

It’s not just about competition for promotion but if someone is threatening to screw up something you’ve put a lot of work into it can be really hard to ignore them (and they know that).

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