Catholic education office lobbies against fairness

(Two views, above, of the Caritas College junior covered area, which won the top award in the 2011 SA Architecture Awards.)

The OECD, hardly a left-wing think-tank, has today issued a report on Equity and Quality in Education. It notes that across OECD countries, the highest performing education systems combine quality with equity. In relation to “choice” it observes that “Providing full parental choice can result in segregating students by ability, socio economic background and generate greater inequities across education systems”.

The release of this report is quite timely given that proponents of school choice in Australia are cranking up their engines in anticipation of the release of the review into the funding of schools led by David Gonski.

One such proponent is the Catholic Education Office.

A few days ago, Caritas College, a Catholic R-12 school in Port Augusta, sent home a letter to parents urging them to “become aware of the funding situation for Catholic schools”. It stated that, on average across Australia, CEO schools received a net income of $10,008 per student compared to a net income per student of $11,132 in government schools. It was silent on the fact that, on average across Australia, other private schools had a net income per student of $13,700.

The Caritas letter (I suspect it is a form letter being sent out by many Catholic schools) states that “Catholic schools have a commitment to supporting all families – no matter what their economic or social circumstances”.

“Suffer the little children of the poor and the marginalised to come unto our Catholic schools”?
I think not.

Before we get onto Caritas, the recent study by Richard Teese mentioned in a previous post, claims that “Private non-Catholic schools are found in low social status areas, but their intakes vary in different ways from the complexion of the area. This is also true of Catholic schools.” He provides summary figures for primary school enrolments across the whole of the nation that show that for the ten years 1996-2006, the percentages of students from the two lowest SES quartiles remained static at 14% and 16% respectively, but that the two highest quartiles rose from 16% to 18% and 21% to 22% respectively (Teese, p.32). Some good Catholic marketing there!

In the secondary sector, there were small increases in the Catholic share of each of the SES quartiles, but the proportions are revealing: from the lowest to highest, in 2006, the Catholic share was 13%, 16%. 19% and 24% respectively. In other words, the Catholic enrol nearly twice as many wealthy students as they do poor students.

Moving from the general to the particular, Teese provides a detailed study of schools in a number of low SES communities in Western Australia and Victoria and concludes that “As socio-economic status rises, an increasing share of enrolments is found in the Catholic school, and conversely as SES declines, an increasing share is found in the public schools (Teese, p. 45)”.

With that background, let’s look at Port Augusta.

Port Augusta is a large regional town with many unemployed and low wage families. It has significant Aboriginal and LBOTE communities and these attract additional funding, so the figures below are not representative of the Australian average. Nevertheless, they raise questions about the social integrity and political agenda of the Catholic school lobby.

Based on student data for 2009, Caritas had a student profile against the SES quartiles (lowest to highest 25% segments of the population) of 61%, 27%, 12 %, and 1%. (For 2010 the figures were 13%, 36%, 29% and 22%!)

This compares with public secondary school and primary schools as follows:

Pt Augusta Secondary School: 83%, 16%, 1%, 0%.

Augusta Pk PS: 97%, 1%, 1%, 0%.

Willsden PS: 92%, 8%, 0%, 0%.

Caritas College, in a community with a large Aboriginal population, had only 5% Indigenous students. It had only 1% of students from a Language Background Other Than English (LBOTE).

Pt Augusta Secondary School had a 36% Indigenous intake, and 24% LBOTE students.

Augusta Pk Primary had a 50% Indigenous intake, and 46% LBOTE students.

Willsden Primary had a 62% Indigenous intake and 83% LBOTE.

(Above, students at Port Augusta Secondary School).

Remember Caritas’s self-serving and sanctimonious claim about Catholic schools serving “all families – no matter what their economic or social circumstances”?

Excluding parent fees and other private sources of income, and on the basis of financial data for 2009, Caritas received government recurrent funding of $8580 per student.

Aggregating the funding for the three government schools to produce a comparable R-12 profile, these schools received government recurrent funding of $13,112 per student.

Whereas the government schools were able to raise some hundreds of dollars per student in fees and other income, Caritas raised an additional $2698 per student for a total net per student income of $11,279.

That is still below the funding received by government schools for the students they cater for in Port Augusta. Perhaps Caritas might have advised its parents that if they wanted more government funds for their children then they should enrol them in the government sector. But in a town like Pt Augusta, white flight is a one-way street.

Instead of bashing government schools for the funding they receive for the "heavier lifting" required to meet minimum standards for disadvantaged students, the Catholic lobby would be better advised to call on its parents to query why other private schools, most of which serve the higher end of the SES profile, should receive even more recurrent funding per student than those in both the Catholic and government systems.

Responding to Kevin Donnelly

Yesterday, Dr Kevin Donnelly placed a piece defending the inequitable schools funding model on OnLine Opinion. His purpose was to undermine the credibility of a research paper by Prof. Richard Teese commissioned by all State (except NSW) and Territory Departments of Education for the Gonski Review of Schools Funding. The Teese paper calls a spade a spade. It is very good. The commissioning governments tried to keep it under wraps but it was leaked to the media. The link to Donnelly’s article is here: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13203 .
The link to Teese’s paper is here: http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/2012/RTeesereport2012.pdf

Donnelly is a prominent conservative academic much beloved of the Murdoch media and often sought for comment by radio and TV personalities.

I responded to Donnelly’s piece as follows:

I wish to thank Kevin for reminding us that facts should not get in the way of a good story.

I’m not referring to his quotation of that old saying, but to the rest of his article.

Donnelly cites OECD research that “proves” that “Australia is one of the most egalitarian countries in the world”. Note that “in the world” includes the A-Z of the world’s poorest countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe. But let’s look at child poverty across the OECD. In Australia 14% of children live below the poverty line (2008 OECD figures), compared to rates like 3.7% (Denmark) 5.4% (Finland) and 7% (France). In fact (if you don’t mind my saying that Kevin), 24 out of the 34 OECD countries had a lower rate of child poverty than Australia.

Donnelly argues that it is “also the case” that the “current socioeconomic status (SES) model of funding” (through which private schools receive Federal recurrent funds) “is based on need”. Yes, and mothers’ milk comes from mothers. So what? Is Donnelly seriously going to challenge the fact that public schools do the heavy lifting, that as a system, public education has a much larger proportion of socially and educationally disadvantaged students than either of the Catholic and “independent” systems? So why should the cost of educating these students benefit non-government schools?

Even if it could be argued that the Average Government School Recurrent Cost is a fair basis for funding non-government schools, how can he defend the “funding maintained” provision that ensures that no private school will lose funding even if the fact is that they should?

Opposition education spokesperson Christopher Pyne’s seat of Sturt is an example. Nine out of the 14 private and Catholic schools in the Sturt electorate have “funding maintained” status in respect of their recurrent funding from the Commonwealth. For example, St Ignatius College was entitled to receive 56.2% of the Average Government Student Recurrent Cost (AGSRC) in 2008, and is maintained at that level despite the 2009-12 entitlement being only 36.2% of AGSRC. On average, there is a difference of 10.7 percentage points between what these schools’ current real share of AGSRC should be, and the percentage at which they are being maintained by the Commonwealth Government’s unfair funding formula.

Donnelly says that “Australian research also proves that socioeconomic background is not the most influential determinant of educational success or failure…” What research? The speciousness of Donnelly’s fact here is immediately obvious when one looks at this qualifying comment: “…equally as important are factors like student ability and motivation, teacher effectiveness, school climate and the quality of the curriculum”. Only a person with a Doctorate would have the insight to disassociate socioeconomic background from student ability and motivation, and those in-school factors that are determined by where and in what community a school is sited.

Another “fact” cited by Donnelly “is that most of the growth in (private school) enrolments over the last 20 years or so has been in low fee-paying non-denominational schools serving less affluent communities.” Yet the Teese study of changes in enrolment shares over the two decades 1986-2006 demonstrates “that the greatest increase in the proportion of students attending private (including Catholic) schools has occurred in high SES localities, while no increase at all has been registered in low SES localities”.

Donnelly writes that “state and federal governments spend millions every year on programs designed to strengthen educational outcomes, especially in literacy and numeracy, for under-performing and at-risk groups of students.” Here he unwittingly endorses one of Teese’s observations, namely that the government funding of choice, by moving more highly achieving students out of the public and into the private system, creates the need for extra funding to address the resultant increase in low achievement in the public system. Research by the NSW and SA education department, and by Teese in Victoria, shows that low SES students do better in schools where there are higher SES students than in schools where there are concentrations of low SES students.

So, to paraphrase Donnelly, who would have believed that the good Doctor would be at it again, trying to justify educational inequality and privilege?

Posted by mike-servethepeople, Monday, 6 February 2012 1:38:44 PM

(Great cartoons by Simon Kneebone, Adelaide).

Expose the fact of death at work and act to prevent it!

When media personality Molly Meldrum fell from a height at home and was hospitalised with head injuries radio, press and TV covered the story like ants on a chop bone.

Some publicity was to be expected, but this was saturation coverage. The impact of his fall on Meldrum was one thing, but we had to “share” its impact on fans, friends and family, as well as reviewing his status, interests and lifestyle.

Molly’s injuries were severe and unfortunate, but he has lived to tell the tale, unlike another pre-Christmas accident victim, a member of the CFMEU employed by Alinta Energy at the Leigh Creek coalfields.

This death at work was virtually ignored by the media.

It’s not that there wasn’t a story: this comrade had a family, including children, and friends, and their grief was all the more poignant for his death having occurred the day before Christmas.

But the capitalist press gets no mileage for the class it serves by publicising death and injury at work. Rather than appearing as stories in the press, these incidents are “disappeared”. At most there is a passing reference to an “industrial accident that claimed a man’s life”, but no exploring the circumstances, no use of the power of the press to tell the human story involved so as to pressure the capitalist class and its managers to clean up their act and stop killing workers.

The Leigh Creek man was operating a 30-year old hydraulic excavator. The machine operates 24 hours a day, so compared to a machine operating on an eight-hour shift, its effective working age was around 100 years.

Safework SA has yet to deliver a report on the state of the machine, but it would be a safe bet to say that they had not inspected it, or had not done so recently.

That was the case with the metal borer that caught and killed young Daniel Madeley in 2004. It had never been inspected. Even as late as 2010, and despite having discovered that there were 78 workplaces which operated borers in SA, the SafeWork SA inspectors had only managed to visit seven.

At Leigh Creek, a turbine on the excavator overheated and burst, spilling hot oil onto the operator who was then immolated. Suffering severe burns, he was airlifted to Adelaide, but died in hospital.

Five days before, a 58 year old man was killed at a stockfeed manufacturing business at Kapunda when he was hit by a large shuttle used to transport hay bales across the site.

The press treated this tragedy in the same way – with indifference.

The working class is not expendable. The life of each working person is precious.

The requirement for safety at work is a set of understood safe operating procedures that take priority over production for profit.

And the foundation of safe operating procedures around machinery is regular and thorough maintenance and repair despite what this may mean in terms of capital costs and interruptions to production.

No more deaths at work!

Hands Off Kim Sattler!

(John McTernan and The Thick Of It's Malcolm Tucker. See below for the link...)

Kim Sattler is Secretary of Unions ACT and is the person who is being hung out to dry by Julia Gillard in the wake of the stupid decision by her security staff to rush her in a wedge of copper heavies to her car.

Sattler had been tipped off by Gillard’s press secretary Tony Hodges to the effect that Opposition leader Tony Abbott had made remarks indicating that there was no future for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which was celebrating its 40th anniversary. She was also told that Abbott was at a function with Gillard at a nearby restaurant.

Kim is well-known to have close links with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. The information she was given by the Gillard staffer was obviously meant to be passed on to the hundreds of people at the Tent Embassy with the aim of making Abbott a target of their complaints and that expressed in the form of some sort of anti-Abbott protest.

Kim took the advice she was given in good faith and passed it on as any supporter of the Tent Embassy would have.

As intended, a group of people from the Tent Embassy rushed across to the restaurant and demanded that Abbott come out and speak to them about his comments.

When Abbott declined to do so, they began hammering with the hands on the windows of the restaurant and chanting.

The capitalist press whipped this up into reports of a “riot” and deplored the “violence” directed, as a result of the security over-reaction, at Gillard who was photographed minus a shoe and stumbling – not from the actions of any protester – but because of the way her security was bustling her to her car.

I wasn’t there, so I can’t give an eye-witness account.

But these people were, and here is what they say. From a contributor to Inymedia:

Not for the blink of an eye were Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott so much as threatened, even less endangered, on the 26th of January by demonstrators from the 40th anniversary Aboriginal Embassy camp in Canberra.

The only violence came from a young copper who punched and choke-gripped a young painted up Aboriginal man, a young Aboriginal woman, an SBS cameraman and I believe one other person standing harmlessly near the restaurant side exit through which clumsy security men rushed out Gingeralla, causing her to lose that now famous blue suede shoe. The only “violence” from the demonstrators I’m aware of was a punch by an activist to the copper who had roughed up the woman without cause. “I won’t stand for any man doing that to a woman,” he told me, showing me bleeding chapped knuckles that must have connected with something metallic on the copper. Nothing would have been easier than to just form a corridor of two lines of coppers for the PM to calmly walk though to her car.

It went the rounds of the protest encampment that that choke-gripping copper is the son of Canberra’s police chief. True or false – I don’t know. But one can imagine that someone from such a stable might think they’re above the law and can do anything with impunity.

Violence from us? Rubbish. I stood close to a handful banging for a while with their hands on the about 2cm-thick glass walls of The Lobby restaurant, part of a group of about 50 making a lot of noise. A bit of noise is enough to spook our two top political leaders and agents guarding the prime minister? No wonder the Americans commented gleefully, can’t they even protect their prime minister?

Violence? How about this for potentially disastrous violence: One copper in the line pushing us back was seen unbuttoning his pistol holster. Another copper had his hand on his taser weapon. A third had his truncheon extended. We heard no order given for any of this. We did, though, see a lot of frightened young faces in that blue-black line advancing on us. The Australian Federal Police said its officers lost control and had no choice but to bustle Gillard and Abbott away in the prime minister’s car. Lost control over 50 noisy but otherwise peaceful demonstrators with almost the same number of police there?

And the story above is corroborated by this account from a website covering current affairs in the ACT:

Rod and I were at the Embassy and I must explain what happened to counteract the fantasy many in the media have created regarding the so-called riot. Media in Australia are often pathetic in their requirement for the sensational - if it isn't, they will make it up.

We were all listening to the speeches by the elders when they were interrupted by the news that Tony Abbott was at a function close by and had called for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy to be torn down. This, of course, did not win him many friends in the gathering. From what I gather, a group of five or six walked across the rose garden to the restaurant that was called The Pork Barrel Café on the sandwich board outside but was really called The Lobby. The group asked to speak to Tony Abbott but he wouldn't come out so the group told him through the surrounding windows how they felt about what he'd said.

It was at that point that Julia Gillard's security people began to panic. Instead of formulating a plan to get her and Abbott out of the restaurant with as little fuss as possible which would have been quite easily done, they instead called the police - local and federal - and then pushed and dragged the PM in a flying wedge toward her car. The crowd of people they pushed and dragged her through consisted of media and security. That's when the PM lost her shoe. Michael Anderson was knocked to the ground on the same steps and several others in the group were manhandled by the police.

The PM was never in any danger, there was no riot. By the time the rest of the people came across to see what was going on, the PM was long gone and Abbott too. Rod and I arrived to see a police cordon across the street - blocking it as well as police cars at the other end blocking that. If a riot had occurred they would have had us like fish in a barrel. There was a bit of shouting by individuals but the police never moved - just looked grim and menacing - no one was arrested. I saw a cop unclip his gun holster and put his hand on his freed gun and it occurred to me that the police might not need much to lose their cool. Rod was just walking forward and I warned him about the gun and the mood of the police.

The leaders from the Tent Embassy called for everyone to go back to the site and people began straggling back.

So much for a “riot”!

Then it was revealed that Gillard’s press secretary had resigned.

That was a bad look for Gillard and her office - that the so-called “riot” had been initiated by her team to get at Abbott.

So someone must have suggested that the blame be placed elsewhere. Anything to take the heat off Gillard.

That was when Kim Sattler received a phone call from John McTernan, the former Blair adviser appointed to manage Gillard’s communications strategy.

I give some background on McTernan in an earlier blog post here: http://mike-servethepeople.blogspot.com/2011/09/gillards-spin-doctor-wont-cure.html .

Elsewhere (see: http://www.thepowerindex.com.au/power-move/gillard-to-get-media-makeover-from-a-whip-cracking-spinner/20110925455 ) he has been linked with the character Malcolm Tucker, from the excellent BBC series The Thick Of It.

According to Sattler, McTernan phoned her to say that she would be named as the person who had given the information about Abbott to the Tent Embassy people.

Sattler told McTernan she had a right to privacy.

“He said, ‘Well, we are going to release your name’. He said, ‘We’re going to have a press conference and we are going to name you’”, reported Sattler.

The she accurately described herself as the meat in the sandwich, as the messenger that was being shot.

Now, I’ve got to admit that I knew Kim a long time ago when she was living in Adelaide.

I haven’t seen or spoken to her for years, but I hear of her from time to time and I know that she is an absolutely genuine supporter of the working class and of progressive causes, which is more that can be said of either Gillard or Abbott.

So I say “Hands off Kim Sattler”.

She doesn’t deserve to be sacrificed to the capitalist media by Gillard’s team of spin doctors just to get a totally unprincipled traitor to whatever the Labor cause might mean these days, off the hook.

Long live the Aboriginal Tent Embassy!

For a Treaty and a new Constitution!

Great news: capitalism to lurch to new crises in 2012

The world crisis of capitalism will continue and deepen in 2012.

This is not the view of Marxists alone, but of many bourgeois economists and finance capitalists as well.

For example, Bill Gross, co-founder and co-Chief Investment Officer of the US multinational PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company) stated on January 6, 2012 that the “financial markets and global economies are at great risk” (Gross, Paranormal Economic Activity).

Gross should know: PIMCO oversees investments totaling more than $1 trillion on behalf of a wide range of clients, including millions of retirement savers, public and private pension plans, educational institutions, central banks, foundations and endowments, among others.

While world attention continues to focus on the eurozone countries, the fact that the United States is a geographically separate entity can no longer mask the intricate web of financial ties between it and Europe. Ultimately, the buck still stops in the USA.

Contradictions within the eurozone will continue to unravel. As economic commentator Stephen Bartolomeusz commented on January 9, “If the eurozone were to splinter, deep holes would be gouged in bank balance sheets across the region, requiring more massive taxpayer bailouts from economies that can’t afford them.”

The logical inference of his observation that capitalist “economies” can no longer “afford” to bail out the rich is that further attacks on the people are on the agenda.

Karen Maley, writing in the same day’s Business Spectator, pointed out that “eurozone countries will not be able to fall back on government stimulus packages to get their economies moving. Instead, economic activity will contract sharply as governments embark on a draconian tightening of budgetary policy aimed at eliminating budget deficits that range between 2 per cent and 12 per cent of GDP.”

“Draconian” indeed! As if the belt tightening imposed by the speculators and their governments have not already been draconian enough.

But with repression comes resistance. Rich lessons have already been learned throughout 2011 in all areas where capitalism and imperialism are in control. Or, based on the above, out of control.

Bring on the further unravelling of the crisis.

Away with the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange…..

Cleaners Rising Up

Cleaners around the country are some of the most lowly paid and precariously employed members of the working class.

For several years, United Voice (formerly the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union or LHMWU) has been organizing these workers in its Clean Start campaign, winning impressive victories around some of the capital cities’ CBDs.

Now the campaign is getting out to major shopping centres in the suburbs.

A case in point is the Chadstone Shopping Centre in suburban Melbourne.

Like workers throughout the cleaning industry, Chadstone workers have been subjected to an intensification of their labour by their profit-hungry bosses, putting the public at risk as short-cuts are taken particularly around toilets and food courts.

Gamal Babiker(above) has been a cleaner at Chadstone since 2000 and said conditions had got worse over the last five years.

He said the budgets for training and health and safety had been cut as shopping centres pushed for tighter and tighter contracts.

What happened yesterday is that cleaners went on strike at lunch time only for an hour or two and as they went out a large group of community supporters went in. Those in the photos include United Voice delegates who held their annual convention yesterday. As part of their training and skills development they were bussed down to Chadstone shopping centre to get some practice in community support action!

Apparently Westfield locked the doors to the Centre after about 80 community supporters had walked inside, leaving about another 80 demonstrating on the outside. In other capital cities including Adelaide, cleaners are taking short strike action supported by community including sit-ins, cavalcades around the centres, balloons, leafleting shoppers etc.

Spotless, backed by the Shopping Centre Council are showing no public signs of giving in, so it could be a long fight. The Shopping Centre Council is actually arguing for a reduction in retail workers’ wages through ‘freeing up’ penalty rates on weekends.

So it is not surprising to see them pushing a hard line on cleaners’ demands which include increasing the base rate from the award $16.57 per hour to $21.17 per hour which is the rate cleaners in the Clean Start CBD have won.

The irony is that Spotless are a party to the CBD Agreement and major players in the Shopping Centre Council like Colonial First State, Stockland and Dexus are ‘funding’ Clean Start rates in their commercial cleaning contracts in the CBD.

The difference between the CBD and retail shopping centres is that most of the workers in CBD offices are salaried or on EBAs and well paid compared with cleaners who clean those buildings.

But retail, thanks largely to the tame cat union Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Union (SDA) is a low wage industry with many workers on $17 per hour or less as junior rates apply in retail. There are no junior rates in the cleaning award.

The SDA, led for years by a right-wing Catholic clique, spends most of its time and a large chunk of membership fees in factional influence inside the ALP.

The biggest ‘threat’ to the big retailers is they don’t want an organized workforce and that is what campaigns like Clean Start give, an opportunity to organize.

A far sighted big retailer would have settled already, but maybe their reduced sales and retail slump over-ride their thinking.

Business Council set to continue reactionary agenda

The Business Council of Australia is the representative of the biggest local and overseas companies.

In early November, it elected a new President, Transfield Services Chairman Tony Shepherd.

Transfield is an Australian company but Shepherd will speak as BCA President for the interests of imperialist capital – just over half of BCA’s members are foreign companies or their subsidiaries, and more are local companies in which foreign private and institutional investors have a controlling influence.

In any case, Transfield’s business and investment practices place it at the centre of the infrastructure development required by the multinationals to enable them to squeeze more and more profit out of the Australian people.

It has contracts with coal seam gas operators in the Surat Basin south-west of Gladstone, has major defence industry contracts for "garrison support services" at military facilities throughout the country, runs some of the biggest Public Private Partnerships projects in Australia, and was a major player in 1999 in the privatization of Australian Defence Industries which opened the war supplies sector to the US, French and British companies which now operate in Australia.

Shepherd is no shrinking violet.

He has spoken out strongly against the carbon tax ("We are a carbon-intense economy…we should do everything in our power to protect that"), and strongly supported Rudd’s "Big Australia" proposal for a population of 36 million. "Our domestic consumption base is too narrow to support the industries we need," he told the Australian Financial Review on 25 November. It was a fairly blunt statement that the basis for determining the size of our population is the need for capital to continuously accumulate. More people, more infrastructure, more Transfield profit.
What else does Shepherd have in his sights?

The big ticket item is industrial relations. He hankers for the days of WorkChoices and says that Fair Work Australia is flawed. Actually, FWA works pretty well for the ruling class as the Qantas and Victorian Nurses’ disputes have shown. But having the power to fine and jail unionists who dare go beyond "protected" industrial action is not enough for Shepherd - he wants individual work contracts back!

"I certainly have no problems if companies want individual contracts and employees want to do that," he told the AFR.

He also wants the Federal budget back in surplus "as quickly as possible", even if it means "cutting the cloth" to decrease government expenditure.

Education comes in for a big serve from Shepherd who complains of its "abysmal failure" to provide industry with a skilled workforce.

But what about a social vision for the country, for something that goes beyond the greedy demands of big business?

With more and more people outraged at sky-rocketing CEO salaries, Shepherd is simply dismissive. "Who cares? It’s irrelevant," he told the AFR.

That’s small consolation for the "overwhelming majority of the Australian community (that) is sensible, frugal and hardworking". Noses down, bums in the air and keep slaving folks while those who wallow in wealth praise you for your "frugality"!

But at least the social democrats can be pleased with the praise Shepherd heaps on Hawke, Keating and Kelty. They knew how to use class collaborationist policy to achieve an "integrated" populace without division "into a political class, a business class, and a working class".

Shepherd is not going to go away, but neither are the Australian people.

There are very good signs of an increasing awareness of the injustices of mega-wealth on one side for a tiny handful, and of "frugality" and "cloth-cutting" for the "overwhelming majority of the Australian community".

And that is leading to a rising tide of struggle, and to a willingness to defy rulings and injunctions against the very actions that are needed to address the yawning gaps between rich and poor in the country.

Let the Business Council be warned - the people are on the move!