kitty tasselz

Liberal Government policies for the working class

(I gathered this fact sheet info in response to a friend who is a working class chef telling me he would vote for Liberal in the next election because he opposed the carbon tax and Gillard as a leader. I believe a lot of Labor voters feel this way and it concerns me. I just think they have lost sight of who the Liberal government are compared to the Labor government and although these days there is not much difference between them (why I vote Greens), I still believe there is quite a significant difference between them when it comes to the welfare of the Australian working class. And let’s face it Abbott is a dick.)

The Liberal-National Coalition governed from 1996 to 2007, with Tony
Abbott one of former Prime Minister John Howard’s closest allies.
Abbott, in effect, is arguing for another term of the Howard
government - albeit with a change of CEO - so Labor’s brief
interruption can be forgotten.

When Tony Abbott stands at the dispatch box and channels V.I. Lenin
speaking passionately about Australia’s ‘working people’ and his plan
to save them, remember Abbott’s ally John Howard’s policy that
severely effected thousands of working class people.

Work Choices!! exposed. Many workers were sacked on the day Work
Choices came into operation, immediately revealing that the new law’s
sole purpose was to screw workers.

In 2005, OEA head Peter McIlwain revealed to a Senate Estimates
Committee that every Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) lodged under
Work Choices has removed at least one protected award condition.
Penalty rates, shift allowances and annual leave loading have been
abolished in the majority of new individual contracts, leaving
employees thousands of dollars worse off than they would be under an
award.

McIlwain also revealed that:

annual leave loading has been erased in 64% of AWAs lodged under
the new laws;

penalty rates have disappeared in 63%;

shift allowances have been removed in 52% of AWAs;

16% of agreements have dropped all award conditions and replaced
them with just the government’s five minimum conditions;

40% of the agreements have dropped government-recognised public holidays;

31% of agreements modified overtime loading, with 29% changing
rest breaks and 27% altering public holiday payments; and

more than one in five new workplace agreements (22%) contain no
pay increases over the life of the agreement.

When Abbott gets into the PM seat Australia will rid itself of any chance of a price on pollution/carbon. Instead Liberal will push for more policies like work choices and more money for mining companies.

RETROSPECT – the price on carbon will effect average families by less than half of what the Liberal government’s GST did

Price impacts of introducing a carbon price

The impact of the carbon price will be modest compared to other price increases.

The carbon price will increase prices by 0.7 per cent over 2012-13, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI).

This is much smaller than the:

2.5 per cent increase from the GST and related tax changes

A Price on Carbon is simple

Currently, releasing carbon pollution is free despite the fact that it is harming our environment.

A carbon price changes this. It puts a price on the carbon pollution that Australia’s largest polluters produce. This creates a powerful incentive for all businesses to cut their pollution, by investing in clean technology or finding more efficient ways of operating.

You use carbon you pay. You don’t use carbon, you pay a percentage lower than 0.7%

you use A LOT of carbon you pay BIG. Including and especially the mining industry.

(There is obvious criticism that this tax won’t reach nearly enough clean air needed globally by 2020. HOWEVER it is an amazing positive step forward. If it was this hard to get Australia to (begrudgingly) agree to a 14% decrease by 2020 it would be significantly harder to bargain 45%. But I hope it’s a stepping stone toward the 45% decrease. Not that we have a huge amount of time to wait around for ignorant global warming skeptics to catch up to modern scientific evidence.)

Abbott on Mining Companies

Last week the labor government introduced the long-awaited Minerals Resource Rent Tax legislation (MRRT). Abbott is opposed to it. He wants hugely profitable mining companies, including giant multinationals, to pay less tax. He wants to give a tax break worth billions of dollars to the mining companies.

This would be the effect of the repeal of the MRRT, which is what Mr Abbott is promising. And when the tax is abolished, with it will go the new policies the tax will fund.

That’s the 1 per cent cut in the company tax rate, the $6500 instant asset tax write off for Australia’s 2.7 million small businesses, the increase in the super guarantee from 9 per cent to 12 per cent for about 8.4 million workers, $800 million in concessions for 3.6 million low income earners (2.1 million of them women) and billions of dollars for new roads, bridges and other infrastructure, much of it in resource regions – all of this would go.

So the position now seems to be that the Coalition wants to give billions of dollars to the huge, super profitable mining companies, and take benefits away from Australian working families.

Vote 1 Mining Companies (Abbott)……