Last night, the ABC TV program
Lateline included a segment where presenter Emma Alberici interviewed one of
the senior members of the Australian ruling class, Michael Chaney.
Unlike some of the buffoons belonging
to that class, Chaney is urbane, charming, personable, pleasantly-spoken,
articulate and oh so reasonable. His
formative years were spent at Aquinas College, which, together with his family,
can take credit for grooming and nurturing these qualities.
Speaking of family, Chaney’s
father Sir Fred was a member of the reactionary Menzies Cabinet, while one
brother was a conservative Senator, and another is a Supreme Court judge. Michael Chaney is in business, is Chancellor
of the University of WA and heads a federal government advisory body on
international education, so the family embraces capital, politics, education
and law in its areas of influence.
The Lateline segment can be
viewed here (http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3748800.htm)
and there is also a transcript of the interview. It is worth watching at least a portion of
the segment just to get a feel for how smooth, how unassuming, modest and
refined is our ruling class member Chaney.
But perhaps I’m concentrating too much
on the person. After all, if this were a
diatribe against Clive Palmer or Gina Rinehart or Twiggy Forrest a myriad of
bourgeois voices would demand that we “play the ball and not the man/woman”. So what did he say?
Firstly, Chaney was asked for his opinion
on the National Insurance Disability Scheme.
“Well, you know,” he began, “there
are many causes that people would like covered. I mean I don't think many
people in our community would deny the worthiness of that cause. The Opposition
supported it, the Government supported it. The question is whether these sorts
of things can be paid for….”
Despite his acknowledgement of
bipartisan support for a “worthy cause”, Chaney took a bash at the “size of
government”, a favourite hobby-horse of the corporate-financed Centre for
Independent Studies of which he happens to be Director.
Returning to the topic, which he
again stated to be one of a number of “terrific ideas”, Chaney effectively put
the kibosh on the NDIS, saying: “no one would argue with many of them, but we
need to be able to pay for them, and you can't just keep spending money without
getting the revenue.”
I was at this point busy picking
myself up off the floor.
We shouldn’t be having this “terrific
idea”, the NDIS, because the government can’t get the revenue to pay for it.
And who has been running
campaigns against the pollution tax, against the resources super profits tax, and
campaigning to reduce government expenditure from 35% of GDP to 30% of GDP if
not Mr Chaney and his cronies in the ruling class? And who would howl like a wolf in the night
if, in order to increase its revenue base, the government adopted a financial
super profits tax?
Perhaps the Chairman of the
National Australia Bank. Now, who might
that be? Oh, it’s the saintly Michael
Chaney in another of his roles as finance capitalist.
The banks are raking it in, as
this opening paragraph from yesterday’s Murdoch rags made clear:
“AUSTRALIA'S big four banks are tipped to pocket more than
$13 billion - a record high half-year profit - after refusing to pass on
interest-rate cuts in full and sacking thousands of staff.”
And if we were not all convinced
by the avuncular tut-tutting “great-idea-but-pity-you-can’t-have-it-‘cos-we-won’t-let-you-tax-the-super-rich”,
Chaney sealed the fate of the NDIS with a dire warning about Australia heading
for a crisis of Cypriot proportions: “
In the end you end up like the countries we're seeing now in Europe that have
very high levels of debt and very few ways of getting out of it.”
Emma demurely asked whether such
a scenario was likely, and Chaney smilingly assured her that unless “hard
decisions” were taken, we’d end up like that “basket-case, Ireland”.
That provided Alberici with a
hook into other areas of “hard decision”, like increasing, rather than
lowering, company taxes to pay for the Opposition’s Paid Parental Leave Scheme
should they win government in September.
“Is that something the economy
needs right now?” she asked, doing such a great job of really putting her
interviewee under pressure.
“Well, no, it's not,” replied the
patient and always helpful Chaney. "But it's another example of what I was
talking about.”
And just as helpfully he added
that “we need rationalisation of the red tape that faces companies trying to do
business in Australia. And also reforms in other areas I think like workplace
relations.”
Oh, they dare not whisper its
name, but give ‘em time, and they’ll have a re-christening of WorkChoices!
To achieve these items on the
ruling class agenda Chaney proposed a more powerful and more “independent”
version of the Productivity Commission.
The quotation marks are warranted because such institutions may be
independent of the government of the day, but they are never independent of the
ruling ideology in which is distilled the core values and outlook of the ruling
class.
And as for the people, they can
just be pushed aside, said Chaney, but much more nicely and reasonably. In fact, he prefaced that little piece of
fascism by citing the example of one of neoliberalism’s most eloquent
advocates, the ALP’s Paul Keating:
“In the early '90s the treasurer, then
Paul Keating, gave the Reserve Bank independence over the setting of interest
rates. One of the most sensitive political variables that you could imagine. He
did it, I believe, because he realised that's what the economy needed.”
A quick digression. Although they speak English, capitalists
often try to neutralise the language, or maybe it’s neuter the language, by
disguising the class content of meanings. An acceptable interpretation of the
word “economy” here would be “the financial elite and the giant mainly
multinational corporations”. Re-read that last sentence in the previous
paragraph and it will be clear why Keating is a poster boy for bankers and
financiers. But we have rudely interrupted Mr Chaney….
“It needed to be free of political
considerations and one of the problems we have today, I think, is that every
decision that's made seems to be coloured by how will this look politically,
how will it affect voters and so on. We need some sensible, long range
planning, of people who don't have those sort of interests at heart and who
have the national interest at heart.”
Ah yes, Hitler’s and Mussolini’s
concept of the “national interest” pursued without reference to “voters” and
their “sorts of interests”.
I took a bit longer to get up off the
floor at this point and missed some minor pleasantries between host and guest
about market solutions to climate change, and the possibilities of floating
liquefied natural gas technology, but at least I was in time to hear Alberici
courageously broaching the issue of Section 457 visas.
After all, the Federal Court this month
had heard allegations that foreign workers were paid less than $3 an hour to
work on oil rigs operated by Woodside Petroleum off Western Australia.
As a nice person myself, I have to
acknowledge that someone as busy running the country as Michael Chaney cannot
be expected to have known about the wages and working conditions of every 457 visa
worker employed on a Woodside oil rig, but he surely cannot be unaware that one
of his own companies is embroiled in the scandalous rorting of this scheme.
Did Alberici go him at this point? Even
Leigh Sales might have by now affected a quizzical stare and made some pointed comment. But not Alberici. She was too busy trying to
compete in the charm stakes. And Chaney?
For disingenuity he has no peer.
“I haven't had personal involvement in
this but anyone I've talked to who's utilised the 457 program has been really
enthusiastic about it in terms of filling skills gaps.”
I had taken to bracing myself against
another fall, so I only gasped a few times as he continued:
“…I've seen the comment that rorts have
resulted in a reduction of wages in the IT industry. … how could you pay anyone
less who's working alongside someone else, what would that do to the culture of
the company? So I can't really understand that point. But, you know, the
Minister says there are rorts and if there are rorts they should be fixed up.
People should be prosecuted if they're rorting and we should continue with what
is a terrific program.”
Hey Mr Charm, your company is facing
the Federal Court, and you don’t know about it???
After another
denial of knowledge about 457 visa rorts, and a pleasant sideswipe at Minister
Brendan O’Connor (“if there are some rorts they should be taken care of. You
know, I'm not sure what motivates people in politics, I've given up long ago
trying to second guess that. But I'm sure the Minister's genuine in his
concerns about some rorts but I suspect they're not material”), it was time for
host and guest to blow each other kisses (figuratively speaking) and say
goodbye.
Which
is what we will do one day to the ruling class, but without the kisses.
