"greater inequality might be inevitable" - Abbott

The Abbot nightmare is nearly upon us. Soon we'll have Yosemite Sam as our PM who will embark on policies that don't seem to be getting much attention from the main stream media. 

This piece is from last month, by Tim Dunlop in The Drum. It gives a fascinating glimpse into Abbott's vision (if you could call it that) of Australia under his leadership. To summarise, his policies include bringing back the ABCC, ending the low income superannuation contribution, undermining collective agreements for workers and a move back to individual contracts, applying to the Fair work Commission to dismantle penalty rates, sacking 12,000 public servants (he praises Queensland's fascist premier Campbell Newman who's cut so many public service health workers that health care for people must surely suffer), abolishing the mining and carbon tax, "climate change is crap", and cutting public service regulation. 

Scared yet? We should be. So where is all this information on the telly and radio? Where? I know I'm pretty switched off this election but I'm still getting bombarded with political crap from both major parties. Why aren't we being bombarded with these simple facts?

As if that's not bad enough, this is the last bit of the Tim Dunlop piece. If you're wanting Australia to in any way remain a fairly egalitarian society, this last bit will scare your pants off. Being as I'm poor, it certainly scares mine off.

As Mr Abbott himself has said, "in the end, we have to be a productive and competitive society and greater inequality might be inevitable". 

Well, bugger that. 

A society with "greater inequality" isn't a society. It's a market. And a market isn't driven by values of burden sharing or a fair go. It is driven by power and wealth; it is a place where the strong prosper and the weak are blamed for not being strong enough. Why would any national leader just shrug and say "greater inequality might be inevitable"? 

Inevitable? 

We don't even have to imagine what happens when countries shred the social contract in this way; we only need to look overseas. Mr Abbott's approach is the same one that underpinned Margaret Thatcher's view that there is no such thing as society, and that has allowed her current successors to instigate austerity measures that have kept Britain in recession for years. It is the same approach that has seen the United States become the most unequal developed nation on earth to the endless detriment of the national economy and the majority of people in it. 

The issue isn't that Tony Abbott doesn't have policies. The issue is he that he does and that they are horrible. Or at least, they are horrible if your idea of a civilised society is one in which we aren't all increasingly left to fend for ourselves. more

Anybody wanna work all weekend for normal time?