
Issue No 57		09 June 2000

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The Soapbox

Enough is Enough

By Speech to the PSA's Annual Conference 25 May, 2000

Having viewed the ravages of life from the Magistrate's bench, Max Taylor reckons the time has come to put society ahead of the economy.

What I want to talk about today is a matter that has arisen for me I guess throughout my life but been reinforced in the recent times since I've become a magistrate and it's this: you go to the courts all day, the local courts and you work with adults or currently as I am working in the children's division and you come home at night and you watch television and what you see on the news is basically a discussion on the strength of the dollar, the business report, the price of shares and this seems to be the be all and end all of all discussion these days.

What concerns me about that is this: the economics of society is in my view, of course as important as it is to anybody else in this room, and indeed to society as a whole. But we seem to have turned it in the twenty years since the Thatcher Government's election and the era of economic rationalism, into an end in itself. We no longer seem to discuss the social issues that that is supposed to be about.

And I've been thinking about this in recent times as I go to the courts in the real world say, west of Parramatta in those areas that make up half of this city, and I ask myself are we seriously suggesting that what we hear is the be all and end all of what life is supposed to be about? For I say that there are huge percentages of our society who are suffering greatly in our society which allegedly is so happy and booming along.

When I see members of the Federal Government on television talking comfortably about our society it disturbs me. When I see the Federal Labor party giving predominant emphasis to the economic issues as though they're the be all and end all of life it disturbs me. Because they are not the be all and end all of life and for many, many people in this society not just the bottom two or three percent, I'm talking about significant numbers of this society, the distribution of wealth is now such that their lot is becoming worse.

And my deep concern is that what used to make the difference was the public sector and the public sector has been one of the great modern creations of the last 100 years if we take it in its modern form in this country and in others and what we're seeing is people over worked and under resourced in the public sector, federal and state, trying to do more and more because of this capacity of government, Labor and Liberal alike, to say we will rely on the good will of the people in the public sector while under resourcing them more and more and more, and I see it more and more and more, and frankly, I'm sick of it. Now.

I've raised in discussions with Maurie and the Teachers Fed and ACOSS and the national union of students that I believe there is a need for a great coalition to be set up. I don't believe any one organisation can match anymore the sheer sophistication of the power lobbies that support the multinationals and which terrorise politicians of all political persuasions to total silence about the real issues in our society. I don't think the Teachers Federation can do it, I don't think the PSA can do it, I don't think ACOSS by itself can do it. It's just too big an issue. What is needed is a major coalition. These statistics came from ACOSS. The top 2,000 people in this country have had a 60% increase in wealth in five years.

You may have heard on this morning's radio the announcement about the current breakout of who the wealthiest people in Australia are. We're talking billionaires, a number of billionaires. Now I'm not so unsophisticated as to say that all we need do is tax such people harder. What I am saying is that the distribution of wealth in this country patently obviously is being distributed in a less and less fair manner all the time. The bottom 50% now have 5%; the top 10% increased their wealth in the last 15 years from 43 to 48%.

Just how much longer does this have to go on before we say the economy, in a global sense, may be going well and without knocking the importance of issues like the strength of the dollar and share prices etc the reality is for most Australians that it is not being spread evenly. That is the role of government. But government seems to be dominated by cowardice these days whatever its political persuasion, in the face of these huge and powerful companies. The question I ask myself is, when are we going to set up a sophisticated lobby group on the social issues to say to government well, you've listened to them and you'd better listen to us because we're serious about organising campaigns, about organising demonstrations, we are not putting up with this distribution process any more, and in particular we are not putting up with the destruction of this country's public services any further. Enough.

In the middle of it all of course we see the total disintegration of permanent jobs. I have watched from my work with the Teachers Federation and the PSA, the disintegration of permanent jobs in the public sector for over a decade now. The casualisation of work has reached astronomical proportions. In teaching the amount of casuals used to be a very small figure 25 years ago. There are now approaching 20,000 casuals.

If I went through the public service, various groups that you all represent, we could talk about the same thing for every one of them. I ask myself why are we doing this? Because, it is said to save costs. Well, it would have saved costs twenty or thirty years ago. The real reason we are doing it is because we are not prepared through tax to provide governments federal and state with enough money to provide permanent work to provide the public servants we want. So the answer - make it cheaper. Everything comes down to your credit rating. Everything as a state or a federal government. Everything comes down to minimising the cost. And there is no combined response to that by those who feel it deeply: you, and the members you represent. Because it's impossible to match those organisations as single organisations.

I see it in the courts. If I go out to the adults courts, I go out from here today to one of them, and if I was doing the list day where you do short matters, pleas of guilty, adjournments, matters like that, I would deal with fifty or sixty people in a day. If I went and dealt with the AVO (apprehended violence order) list which each of the big city courts would have a day at least, sometimes two, every week, I would deal with fifty to sixty people in a day.

People assaulting each other, people abusing each other. Immense unhappiness. And yet I can go home at night and turn my television on and I can hear them yakkety yakkety yakking about the strength of the dollar, the shares, the exports, I can see a major business report, and that's all important. But why don't I see equivalent time on the issues I am describing - those big social issues of the day? Because we're not in a position at the moment to do anything about it in my view. If I go to the Children's division I can deal with kids coming out of custody as young as ten, and I do. I can deal with kids dealing with robbery in company for the second time around of twelve and thirteen. I can deal with care cases whereby kids are as young as two days or two years. I'm in a situation where we have to decide between what's the best way to deal with the needs of that child - the parents, the grandparents, close family relationship, DOCS itself? So my description of those various court themes is to make this point: your members, perhaps some of you who are here, are under tremendous strain in that system. Tremendous strain. The people who work in DOCS are under-resourced and overworked. That's a fact of life. The people who work in legal aid and legal aid's there for all the children's matters, are under resourced and overworked.

If I was to move on to the police area, another union, the police prosecutor sits there on AVO day with a pile of papers going up to the height of his or her head! And the upshot is, the complainants come down and talk with the prosecutor who then deals with the defendant and we move on through a day of great tension. And everybody there is under tension and the court staff themselves are under tension.

And why are they under tension? Because they're underresourced and they're overworked. I keep asking myself how much longer is this going to go on? I see it with teachers. What are they supposed to make of public sector education? They're continually told they should do this, they should be doing that, what's wrong with them. What's wrong is, they haven't got enough resources to do the job properly. For example, if you're going to put kids in those classes with various intellectual or physical handicaps, then provide the resources to allow them to do the job. Otherwise what you get are complaints by parents of other kids saying this is disturbing for me.

Or complaints by the parents of those kids saying my kids are entitled to be put in that ordinary class. Fine. But provide the resources. How do we do that? Well we look at that distribution of wealth and say to ourselves, this is ridiculous. The global economy might be going alright, the national economy might be going alright, but what about all the people it's supposed to be about? If we want to talk about shareholders, everyone talks about shareholders these days. These chief executive officers, as you know, with their millions say "My basic responsibility is the bottom line. The profit level - I'm a CEO." OK, let's accept that's true. While everybody 18 and over is a shareholder in this country with governments, and I say to those governments, labor and liberal alike, you are not representing the majority of your shareholders anymore.

You simply represent the rich and powerful at the top and your terror in the face of the multinationals. And enough is enough. What about us, the shareholders?

When I find myself in these courts dealing with people I come across a range of problems. I come across mental illness, I come across drug problems, drug problems which can involve young people say in issues of shoplifting for drugs, or middle aged women who need the basics of life. I tend to find poverty and alcohol are huge problems because they probably go together to a significant extent, and the violence of course flows from all of that. All of that is being dealt with by members of your union. And you know it.

And they are all under-resourced and they are all overworked. And the question I then ask myself is, what are we going to do about this?

I can tell you that with some resources, amazing things at times happen. For example, seven out of ten kids who appear in the children's court on criminal matters the first time never re-offend. Eight out of ten come back never more than twice. That's done with the limited resources we've got now. We know that we've set up nationally, as all first world countries have, public education systems; one of the great achievements, I would have thought, in civilisation in the last 150 years that we've done that in those countries. And now we're running them down. Our great welfare services. We're running them down. If we had federal public servants here I bet they'd tell us about how hard it is to work in various aspects of the federal public service at the moment. Well, we've all watched the annihilation of their jobs.

So I say to myself, enough. Just enough. What's needed is a great coalition to be set up. That coalition needs to be a seriously resourced coalition, if need be with people permanently employed in it, and it needs to have an umbrella effect in my view of bringing together all the great organisations in the public sector. Not just the unions. All of them. And running campaigns aimed at federal and state governments, labor and liberal alike. Overall, without such a coalition, you ask yourself honestly, what you will do over the next two days and rightly so is look at major issues that will affect this union directly. And rightly so.

And you will deal with them as best you can. But the fact is that everybody in this room knows that the overall cutbacks are having the effect that the total effect in the public sector is that it's going backwards. And what's happening more and more is that we say to individual public servants federal and state, do more, will you? We can't give any more resources, because we've got to make the budget balance. We've got to impress the credit organisations overseas. The multinationals won't invest. So do more. We never move on and say well hold on, we're the government, and we're going to have to come to grips with the responsibilities that that means for all people.

If people choose to be in public life in federal or state politics, they choose to make decisions for all of us. It's not good enough to say well what can we do - we're faced with a multinational - there's a very big problem. Then don't go into public life if that's your view! They choose to be elected by us - let them solve the problems for all of us and I'm saying to you at the moment they're never going to do that, because the individual organisations that make up what I call the social side of life by themselves are too small to worry them. It'll only happen when we get it together. And I just feel that enough is enough on this and I hope that eventually we can put something together on it.

I was thinking I mentioned this once before in a speech, I was going around a supermarket, I had a trolley and I'm putting the gear in, and you know they play that muzak for you as you walk through the supermarkets, and, as I'm walking through the supermarket, on came Bob Dylan. You know, I thought to myself, well that's the point we've finally reached, eh, that Dylan's in the muzak. And I thought, wow, the times are a changing (get the salt), the answer is blowing in the wind (get the tomato sauce). I thought I can't believe this. Everything reduced to this sort of "wow, isn't life terrific" atmosphere. You just go around, you buy your goods. What's that famous thing I saw on a railway cutting once? - consume, be silent, die. Well, I think it's time to stop the consuming, being silent and ultimately dying! I think it's time for this coalition I'm describing. And perhaps I might finish by just mentioning Dylan's lyrics as they ought to be mentioned. One of the verses "Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind."

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Issue 57 contents

Interview: Cocky Labor
On the eve of State Conference, Country Labor convenor Tony Kelly outlines how Labor is stealing the ground from under the National Party's feet.

Economics: Millenium Work Ethics - A New Social Partnership?
The future of work in the twenty-first century will be both provocative and challenging, according to Professor Russell Lansbury.

Politics: Extracting the Digit
Labor's federal communications spokesman Stehpen Smith outlines the Party's position on the controversial datacasting legislation currently before Parliament.

History: Hot Off the Press
Check out what's in the latest issue of Labour History - A Journal of Labour and Social History,

International: The East Timor of Africa
Nobel laureate Jose Ramos Horta will this week tell a Sydney audience of the parallels between East Timor and the nation described as the last colony in Africa - the Western Sahara.

Environment: MUA Snail Men Honoured
Brisbane wharfies Lehi Munday and Mal Monro look an unlikely Watson and Sherlock double, but their keen detective work has helped win the Southern Queensland MUA Branch two national environment awards.

Satire: Howard Says 'Sorry'
In a startling apology to the Aboriginal community, Prime Minister John Howard said last night he was deeply sorry that he turned up to the Corroboree 2000 celebrations.

Review: Front Stage and Pulp Fiction
The Waterfront War has made the transition from industrial showdown to cultural icon. Now it's inspiring artists.

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