Since 16 January, workers at the Australian Paper plant in Preston have been on strike. They have set up a picket. It came after months of negotiation through the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) that produced no result.

The purpose is to put pressure on the company to negotiate and shift from its earlier attempt to impose a cut to existing conditions.

This amounted to a real cut in wages growth, through holding down the wages highest classification, until those on the lower catch up. About 80 percent are on the highest and will be kept on just over $23 an hour for up to 6 years. There is also a reduction in the number of rostered days off

Australian paper is the country’s largest envelope manufacturer, and the plant is in Preston an inner Melbourne suburb.

Many of the 90 workers involved in the strike, have been there for many years. One of them Margaret Peacock, who has worked at Australian Paper for 33 years, said that “we are still all determined, still all standing strong. We are going from 5:30 in the morning to 11:30 at night each day. We started on Tuesday, we had a meeting and we all unanimously voted to go out. There are about 88 people in the union and a couple are still working but the majority are outside. We cannot go back inside, they will take everything off us.

“Our main concerns is them taking away our RDOs, I have worked here for a long time and we have had 16 and now they want to take four away. People here work for them. There is also the grandfathering, people on top of the tier cannot get pay rises until everyone catches up. This covers about 80 per cent of our work force, they probably will not be able to get a pay rise. They have spent 20-30 years working towards this, doing the training and learning the machinery and now they are expected to train new people coming in, who will get rises while they do not. It is not fair.

“The discussions for the agreement have been going on since March last year. Then Australian Paper produced envelopes for the gay marriage survey, which was a big job but during that time the company stalled on any decisions. They said your RDOs will be alright and then after the job they came back with an agreement that had only 12 RDOs.

“We are hoping they will come out and talk by next week.

“It is hard economic times, we do not understand why they will not cooperate with us. I have worked here for 33 years and have never seen a strike here like this. We are all pretty close, like family. Most people here have worked here for 20 plus years and they have a lot to lose.”

On 22 January, management announced that it would not negotiate until there was a return to work.

Although founded in 1868 in Melbourne, Australian Paper is now Japanese owned (Nippon Paper Industries) and decisions are made by directors, according to their own global strategy, and passed along by local management. This is a factor that is making the situation harder to resolve. They are restructuring their operations, which includes a plan to cut wages in the countries in which they operate. Those working at the Maryvale Mill in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley, have already experienced a five percent pay cut.

The determination of the strikers to make a breakthrough is determined as ever.

They are calling on supporters to drop in at 54 Raglan St.

Video from the AMWU

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We knew about the foreign antecedents and dubious practices of some of the more prominent members of the Minerals Council of Australia already, of course.

We knew about Peabody, for example, the largest private coal mining company in the world. It has been well publicised for many years that the American company was one of the major funders of climate change denial organisations and front groups. It is well known, too, that the company filed for bankruptcy in the United States in April 2016 but emerged from it a year later after Donald Trump’s election brought a surge in its share price.

Then there is Glencore, another coal miner, the world’s largest commodities trading company and, according to the Australian Tax Office and Paradise Papers, a major tax dodger in this country and elsewhere, with an unsavoury history of dealing with corrupt regimes and sanctions busting around the world. It is Swiss.

Of course, we knew a lot about Gautam Adani, the Indian billionaire and his eponymous company, proponent of the giant, controversial Carmichael coalmine in Queensland. His company’s history of international tax avoidance, failure to comply with environmental laws, and labour and human rights abuses have been well documented by civil society groups and the media, including The Saturday Paper.

“Foreign money from the multinationals or billionaires will continue to flow, and there’s no cap on the amount that can come in”

But new analysis of the ownership of the member companies of the Minerals Council of Australia, the peak lobbying body of the mining industry, shows foreign interest doesn’t stop with these major operators. About a third of the council’s members are wholly foreign owned, or subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies.

The work, carried out by Ross McClure of the University of Technology Sydney business school, at the request of the activist group GetUp!, set out to identify the “global ultimate owner” of every member of the Minerals Council.

The aim of the exercise was to make a point about foreign influence on Australian politics. For, as the council conceded only a week ago in its formal response to a Senate committee inquiry into the political influence of donations, it gives money to political parties to buy access so it can “update members of parliament about conditions in the Australian minerals industry and the policy priorities of the MCA”.

Perhaps some credit should be given to the MCA for the admission that it gives to political parties in furtherance of its efforts to lobby for policy outcomes. Many other business donors – including Crown Resorts, the Insurance Council of Australia, the Financial Services Council and the ANZ bank – continued to insist, in their responses to the inquiry, that they gave money for the altruistic purpose of supporting democracy.

The reality, though, is particularly obvious in the case of the mining lobby group and its constituent members, given their long history of massive spending in pursuit of policy changes to advantage their corporate interests, both directly, through party donations, and indirectly, through “third party” campaigns such as those against the Labor government’s mining and carbon taxes.

And, as McClure’s analysis shows, those interests are substantially foreign. It shows 15 of 48 members are 100 per cent foreign owned. Less than half the companies are publicly listed in Australia.

Those ultimate owners or largest shareholders, it shows, were incorporated in various places. As noted earlier, Peabody is a US company, while Glencore and the Australia-based Adani Mining’s parent, Adani Group, were incorporated in the tax havens of Switzerland and Singapore respectively. Other members of the Minerals Council were based in places including Canada, South Africa, Bermuda, Japan and France. The ultimate owner of one was a Chinese state-owned company.

Why does this matter?

Well, if you accept the rhetoric of the Turnbull government you might conclude it matters because the flow of foreign money into the Australian political process represents a threat to our democracy.

At the end of last year’s parliamentary sittings, in the wake of the scandal involving Labor senator Sam Dastyari’s links to China, the government introduced legislation proposing sweeping changes to Australia’s electoral funding laws, purportedly to prevent potentially corrupting flows.

In his speech introducing the electoral funding and disclosure reform bill, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann noted “concern amongst the community about foreign interference with our domestic political landscape”.

“Media reports of foreign donations to parties, candidates and third parties have affected the perceived integrity of elections, which is critical to our peaceful democratic government,” he said.

To keep foreign money out of Australian elections, Cormann said, the government planned to ban “political parties, candidates, Senate groups and significant political campaigners” from receiving “foreign gifts over $250, or any money transferred from foreign accounts”.

That sounds good on its face, except that the detail of the government’s proposed legislation suggests it is less about curtailing the influence of foreign money than about nobbling advocacy by domestic charities and other civil society groups.

Which is the point GetUp! is seeking to make in its analysis of the membership of the minerals council: that multinational corporations, which are by far the biggest sources of foreign money in the political process, will be unaffected. GetUp! would face audits, but at the Minerals Council it would be business as usual.

“They won’t be impacted by this legislation at all,” says GetUp!’s national director, Paul Oosting.

“Foreign money from multinationals or billionaires will continue to flow, and there’s no cap on the amount that can come in.

“All you need to do is have a bank account, a local entity set up, even a shell company, and you will be able to … donate to political parties or run your own campaigns, just as we’ve seen the Minerals Council do, spending tens of millions in knocking off the mining tax, the carbon price, among other things,” Oosting says.

“Adani will be able to funnel money from its operations in India and continue to be a major donor to the Liberal Party. Instead, this legislation has clearly been designed to silence the charitable sector.”

Notably, the concerns voiced by GetUp! are substantially shared by the Institute of Public Affairs. The right-wing think tank has warned the changes risked curtailing the activities of charities, professional associations, even churches, which seek to advocate a cause in opposition to government policy.

“My concern is it will cast a very wide net at anyone expressing a political opinion,” the institute’s executive director, John Roskam, told Guardian Australia a couple of weeks ago.

Which, it would appear, is exactly what it is intended to do, notwithstanding Cormann’s assurance when introducing the legislation.

“This bill does not restrict the ability of charities to receive foreign gifts for non-political purposes,” said Cormann. “Nor does it restrict the political activities that charities can engage in with contributions from Australians.”

However, “to maintain the integrity of the foreign donations ban, no entity will be permitted to use foreign money for their political expenditure”.

In reality, this means any organisation that has spent more than $100,000 on “political” activity or advocacy in any of the previous three years, or $50,000 in the current year, must register as a “political campaigner”. They then become subject to an onerous provision requiring them to report which bits of their income were spent on what activities.

The proposed legislation threatens to see charitable groups categorised as “associated entities” of opposition parties, simply for advocating against government policies.

It’s a trick straight from the playbook of the conservative governments of Canada and Britain, which also sought to shut down critical civil society groups by gagging them with red tape and the threat of heavy penalties if they transgressed.

“We know from that international experience that when governments interrogate the lobbying activities of charities, require an audit of the income and details of their advocacy, it serves to frighten many charities into inaction,” says David Crosbie, chief executive of the Community Council for Australia.

“In this country, charities are already heavily legislated when it comes to political parties and elections. They cannot support a particular candidate, cannot donate any money to any party, cannot support any political party and cannot hand out how-to-vote cards or propose that people vote a specific way. All they can do is advocate on their issue.

“Those restrictions do not apply to the Minerals Council or any private entity. They can do all those things that charities can’t and get a tax deduction for doing them.”

Crosbie scoffs at the suggestion foreign donations to civil society groups could undermine the integrity of the electoral system.

“There is no evidence, anywhere, of foreign money coming into the country and supporting charities to advocate for foreign interests,” he says.

“The biggest single source of foreign money is Bill Gates, and most of that money goes to health research. Presumably under these changes anyone who gets money from Bill Gates would not be able to speak up about the need for more health research.

“Apparently now you should not be able to advocate in areas in which you have expertise and community knowledge; we have a government that would not allow people to advocate for the poor to be better looked after, or for the environment or for more investment in education and health.”

Crosbie has no doubt the proposed measures are primarily directed at a few charities, particularly environment groups, with which the government and its backers in the Minerals Council have major issues, because of their criticism of climate change policy and green issues.

“But our view is that is called democracy,” says Crosbie, “and attempts to stifle the voices of charities and advocates undermines that democracy.”

The debate over the government’s move has some distance to run. Submissions to the parliamentary inquiry closed this week. They have yet to be released. Next week, the committee begins public hearings. On past form, we can expect the Greens and Labor to oppose the plan to nobble charities.

Even if the government does ultimately manage to get its changes through the Senate, a number of civil society groups, including GetUp!, have flagged their preparedness to take the issue to the High Court, to argue the government’s muzzling of dissent breaches Australia’s implied freedom of political expression. A number of respected constitutional lawyers suggest they would have a strong case.

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The Australian Unemployed Workers Union (AUWU) is launching a campaign, to convince the cross bench Senators that they should reject the government’s Social Services Legislation Amendment (Welfare Reform) Bill, which is due to go before them again next month.

The AUWU is asking people to express strong opposition to a series of brutal “reforms,”  designed to make life even tougher for welfare recipients, who are locked out of the labour market, through no fault of their own.

You can sign the petition through this link at Megaphone.

Why is it important?

The Bill proposes three major attacks on the rights and dignity of unemployed Australians.

First, there is the demerit point system.

The Bill will impose harsher financial penalties on unemployed workers through a new demerit point system that can dock job seekers up to a month of pay, for failing to attend the barrage of appointments, Work for the Dole activities, training programs, and “volunteer” work placements.

Job seekers who miss appointments due to serious drug or alcohol related illnesses, won’t even be allowed to exempt themselves from incurring demerit point penalties under this new scheme.

Here, private job agencies are to be given unprecedented powers to make compliance decisions, without any governmental oversight; while unemployed workers will be left with no ability to launch appeals against judgments of their supposed “non-compliance.”

Gifting job agencies even more power over the unemployed is disturbingly ill-advised, especially when you consider how many of these (primarily for-profit) companies are already failing to enforce the compliance system fairly.

As documented recently by the National Welfare Rights Network, “nearly half of [job agency] provider [compliance] reports are rejected by Centrelink.”

Yet, the government plans to remove all checks and balances in a dysfunctional system, it already knows needs closer regulation and scrutiny. Under the new reforms, Centrelink will no longer be in a position to consider whether suspending someone’s pay will cause undue financial hardship (i.e. is likely to result in homelessness), when making its determinations.

According to the government’s spin, the demerit point system is designed to get unemployed workers “more engaged” with their activity requirements. Revealingly, in almost the same breath, the Coalition predicts that this system will also yield a budget ‘saving’ of $204 million, over four years by imposing more financial penalties.

This is an extraordinary admission that, rather than being ‘engaged’ with these requirements, many people (in their failure to comply) will in fact be punished and stigmatised by them.

Considering that, in 2015-16, the number of penalties imposed on jobseekers by their agencies exceeded two million for the first time (an increase of around seven-fold since 2011), this Bill will make surviving on Newstart that much more difficult and stressful.

Second, there are the increased job seeker requirements.

Despite already having one of the strictest requirements in the world, the Coalition wants to enforce more demands on unemployed Australians, to ‘justify’ their claim of benefits.

Under the Bill, close to 300,000 people aged between 30-49 will be forced to clock 50 hours a fortnight of Work for the Dole and other job seeking activities (20 more hours than currently required).

Unemployed citizens aged 50-59 will have to attend 30 hours of work and training per fortnight (up from 15 hours). While job seekers 60 and over will now have to attend at least 10 hours of “voluntary” work per fortnight to keep paltry benefits that are almost $200/week below the poverty line.

It beggars belief that the government wants to force hundreds of thousands of unemployed Australians to attend significantly more hours at a Work for the Dole activity. This is a program that, according to two separate reports commissioned by the Coalition, is both dangerous and pointless.

As a result of these ramped-up requirements, the government estimates that 80,000 people will lose one to four weeks worth of their Newstart. This is a devastating punishment for those who rely on paltry payments to survive.

Undoubtedly, such a punishment will directly result in homelessness and destitution for tens of thousands of Australians.

Finally, there is the longer waiting period for Newstart

It’s no secret that, through this Bill, the government wants to make applying for Newstart significantly harder.

Currently, jobseekers are able to receive payments from the day they submit their application (i.e. the day they start requiring support). However, under the new reforms, unemployed workers won’t receive their first Newstart payment until the day they attend their first appointment with a job agency.
Going by current processing times, this means a delay of at least 16 working days–a devastatingly long time to leave vulnerable Australians without an income.

The government estimates that unemployed workers will lose $198 million worth of payments as a result of this measure.

Tell Derryn Hinch (Justice Party), Lucy Gichuhi (Independent), David Leyonhjelm (LDP), Stirling Griff (NXT), Rex Patrick (NXT), Fraser Anning (One Nation), Peter Georgiou (One Nation), Pauline Hanson (One Nation) that they must oppose the bill.

The post Petition aims to stop Canberra’s Welfare Reform Bill appeared first on Fair Go For Pensioners.