Facts about the mining monopolies

Vanguard March 2013 p. 5

Facts about the mining monopolies are staggering!

The Australian mining sector has reached more than 83% big business foreign ownership. Giant multinationals BHP-Billiton, Rio-Tinto, Xstrata, Anglo-American, Alcoa, Chevron, Shell reap huge profits from our national resources and the labour power of Australian workers.

Mining profits have increased by 900% in the past 9 years. In the next 5 years these giant foreign mining monopolies will send $50 billion in profits out of Australia to their corporations' head offices, mainly in the US and Europe.

Imperialism in Australia has ensured the complete privatisation of the mining sector of the economy and the profits earned by it. The pillaging of mineral resources, where a large part of the economic surplus is diverted abroad, has crucified Australia's balance of trade and sent the country's current account deficit through the roof. Consequently, mining in Australia does not bring capital in for development, but takes it out. That is why the mining sector should be nationalised for the benefit of the Australian people!

The following facts from the Australian Bureau of Statistics speak for themselves. Australia recorded a Current Account deficit of AUD$14900 million in the third quarter of 2012.

			Jun Qtr 2012	Sep Qtr 2012
			$m	$m	% change
CURRENT ACCOUNT
	Trend estimates		-13 942	-14 466	-4
	Seasonally adjusted		-12 369	-14 900	-20
GOODS AND SERVICES
	Trend estimates		-3 286	-4 335	-32
	Seasonally adjusted		-2 114	-4 645	-120
NET PRIMARY INCOME
	Trend estimates		-10 406	-9 922	5
	Seasonally adjusted		-10 057	-10 023	-
LEVELS AT END OF PERIOD
		Net foreign equity	109 959	120 977	10
		Net foreign debt	750 969	748 654	-

Dairy farmers facing crisis

Vanguard March 2013 p. 6
Duncan B.

Australia’s dairy farmers are facing a crisis. Hit by falling prices for their products and rising costs, many are leaving the industry.

Fifty-five out of Queensland’s 540 dairy farmers have left the industry in the last two years. The Queensland Dairy Organisation president blames this on the discounting of house-brand milk by the supermarkets, in particular the giants Coles and Woolworths.

Queensland and New South Wales dairy farmers are the hardest hit by the cheap milk war. These states have limited export product processing plants and most of the infrastructure is geared towards supplying milk to the domestic market.

Feed costs have risen by 15% while electricity costs have gone up by 50% in the first quarter of the financial year. Costs of fuel and other farm inputs have also risen. Dairy farmers are struggling to pay their bills on time. Dairy farmer leaders claim that dairy farmer income could be down by as much as $260,000 this season.

Farmer Power

On a more positive note, Victorian dairy farmers have formed a new organisation called Farmer Power. This group has held well-attended public meetings at various locations in dairy farming areas in Victoria. They staged a creative protest by parking tractors on the front lawn of a Coles supermarket in Warrnambool in January.

Farmer Power is attracting some high profile support. Bob Katter addressed a Farmer Power rally in Warrnambool in January. Barnaby Joyce and Dick Smith addressed a Farmer Power meeting at Tongala on February 13, which attracted over 500 people. Farmer Power has put forward a list of demands which Vanguard readers can find at www.farmerpower.com.au .

In the milk wars - Coles in farmers' sights

Vanguard March 2013 p. 6
David B.

During Summer Holidays on the NSW South Coast, this writer visited a local family-run dairy farm.

On a previous holiday, a lot of signs were tied along dairy farmers fences denouncing Coles for driving dairy farmers broke. It had piqued my interest and a chance of a tour of one of the farms was an opportunity to see dairy farming up close and get some idea of their lives. On the farm tour they showed off the calves and machinery, as well as the herd in for milking, and took us through the processing.

Technology not the problem

It is clear farmers are right up with technology with some pretty sophisticated computerised recording of each cow, their weight, their production of milk, and a range of other automated systems. They were no slouches in applying science to their production. If you like that sort of thing it was quite interesting, the mix of bug-eyed calves and huge cows to keep the young kids engaged and some clever technologies interesting the older. 

While we enjoyed a chilled refreshment of fresh milk on a hot day as the tour wrapped up, the farmer asked us all to buy Dairy Farmers or other branded milk, and not help Coles and Woolworths destroy dairy farming in Australia.  She explained Dairy Farmers was a brand owned by 80 dairy farmers, who sell their milk collectively. Her frustration, and even anger, with Coles was palpable. Home brands of the supermarkets are ruining farmers.

Her husband now runs a backhoe and bull-dozer contracting company, to keep the farm afloat. She recounted their experience that when Coles started the milk price war, Coles promised that would have no effect on farmers.

Last year, even the Dairy Farmers collectively had to drop the price they paid themselves. For now, they get 45 cents a litre for their milk. A year ago they had to cop a cut getting 45 cents a litre for 80% of their milk and 14 cents for the rest, dropping their average price to 39 cents, an average cut of 13%.

They don’t know what the price will be next year, but they aren’t hopeful of holding up the price. So much for the milk price war not affecting family-run dairy farms!

Half a dozen farmers near Berry have been so frustrated they contracted an independent processor in the Southern Highlands to bottle “premium-branded” milk and yoghurt. They sell them through boutique specialty stores to get a real return, but this is not open to the industry as a whole.

Monopoly kills the co-ops

The co-ops of the past came up, and the question was asked about what happened to them. The farmer recounted how a proposal came for privatisation of the co-op processing, and most farmers at the time were in their late fifties or sixties. They had mortgages on their farms and little chance of any comfort in their old age. When they were offered money for their co-op shares, 70% had to agree for it to go through. With the debt profile added to the age of farmers, it was accepted, and those left now deeply regret it.

The discussion among the 8 or 9 adults on the tour spread to the main processor in NSW National Foods being owned by Kirin Brewery of Japan. Farmers’ economic troubles are being forced on them by the dominance of their industry and markets by huge processing and market monopolies. Fundamentally, they are the same forces exploiting Australia’s workers. We have to support the poor family farmers.

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Further info:  milk facts

Some short facts about monopolies and pricing

• On Australia Day 2010, ironically, Coles lowered the price of its home brand milk to $1 a litre. Supermarket-branded milk has been selling for $1 for two years now. Coles and Woolworths sell their home brand milk at a loss.

• The penetration of in-house branded products is now high. 70% of the milk product, butter, sold in Australia is in-house brands.

• Greenseas tuna and salmon were dropped from Coles in 2011, to the advantage of Coles home brand seafood.

• Coles in-house brands account for 25% of the products in their stores. Woolworths says its in-house brands account for about 11% of products on its shelves. Coles and Woolworths get 80% of money spent on groceries in Australia.

• In the UK just under half the products on grocery store shelves are in-house brands.

Hands off our community Post Offices!

Vanguard March 2013 p. 7
Alice M.

When Australia Post deviously announced the imminent closure of Ferntree Gully Edina Road post office in Melbourne on March 1, it thought the local community would just silently roll over.

But the residents swiftly moved into action.   Within a couple of days of the announcement to close the post office, the postal workers’ union was inundated with phone calls from outraged local residents and small business operators asking to join the fight to keep the post office open.

The union was already battling with Australia Post bosses to stop the closure and protect workers’ jobs. The Edina Road post office is well staffed, conveniently located and easily accessible to the many elderly local residents and small businesses who rely on this post office.

Australia Post’s own Community Consultation Policy turned out to be nothing more than a bit of Senator Conroy’s window dressing.  Australia Post often try to close or privatise post offices without consulting the union or local communities, breaching their own policies on consultation. 

Union and community alliance

Local residents and small businesses organised the distribution of over 2,000 leaflets and post cards calling on the CEO of Australia Post to keep the post office open.  A hastily organised rally outside the Post Office brought together 90 local residents and small business operators.  The residents and the union pledged to take the fight to save jobs and community postal services to federal, state and local governments.  The residents formed a Save Ferntree Gully Edina Road Post Office Residents’ Committee and set up a facebook page to continue to rally the community.

Closure of this post office will wipe out more jobs from Australia Post retail centres, joining a string of local post office closures and cuts to jobs in the past 2 years.  It will leave the local community of residents and many small businesses without a local post office and force many into overcrowded, understaffed and mostly privatised, post offices several kilometres away.  At any time of the day and week these privatised post offices have long customer queues overflowing into the road.  Many are elderly, people with disabilities, and families with small children.

Globalisation kills public ownership

It’s not surprising that community pleas to keep the local community post offices open always fall on the deaf ears of Ahmed Fahour, the CEO of Australia Post and Senator Conroy, Minister for Communications.

Australia Post is the last federal government owned state instrumentality. For several years now, bowing to imperialist globalisation, Australian governments have been restructuring Australia Post resources and operations to help big business corporations to maximise their profit making. The needs of local communities and small businesses are trampled. Community postal services are cut back and more public funds are siphoned off to prop up the mega profit-making by big corporations and monopolies.  

Growth in lucrative parcels business is vied for by local and foreign monopoly transport companies.  Under the Federal Labor government, Australia Post is re-inventing itself into a corporate monopoly in a competitive market, with the sole aim of maximum profit making, and to hell with the postal services to the community and the livelihoods of small businesses.   You can bet your bottom dollar these profits will be used to prop up big business, not expand community services.

Unity of postal workers and their union, local communities and small businesses will grow in the long fight to defend and improve the public postal community services, and the jobs and conditions of hard working postal workers.

An unhealthy system - health cuts in Victoria

Vanguard March 2013 p. 7
Bill F.

On February 3, Victorian health workers and professionals rallied in the Treasury Gardens to protest at cuts to hospital jobs, wards, beds and other medical services throughout the state.

The alleged reason for these savage cuts by the state government was a loss in revenue of more than $100 million in federal health funding to the state of Victoria.

According to the federal government, the reduction in funding reflected a change in the way the Australian Bureau of Statistics predicts population growth based on census data, and Victoria had plenty of money to provide improved services. With the state and federal governments blaming each other, no wonder people are frustrated and angry.

The Victorian secretary of Ambulance Employees Australia, Steve McGhie, addressed the rally, warning that “People will suffer and people will die, and they will die because they won’t be able to get an ambulance.” He noted that ambulance crews already spent up to 10,000 hours a month “queued up at hospitals with patients on their trolleys”, waiting for public hospitals to find beds. “If the cutbacks kick in, then obviously, hospitals will become gridlocked. There will be more patients than ambulances. There will be cutbacks to beds. There will be no beds to put them in, so they will have to wait longer.”

A statement by the Australian Patients Association national director Michael Riley said the bed closures and elective surgery cancellations in Melbourne hospitals had led to an influx of calls from patients considering overseas surgery. “You can hear the desperation in their voice. Many of the calls we’ve had in the last two weeks are from people in considerable pain who have been waiting for elective surgery for so long, they are willing to explore any option to get their surgery done.” Mr Riley said patients are “fed up with being used as pawns. It is time for both federal and state governments to immediately sit down, resolve this issue and start putting patients first.”

Many hospital administrations, local councils and state branches of the Australian Medical Association have all deplored the crisis in public health care and the ‘blame game’ waged between the federal and state governments.

Then, on February 20, the federal government Health Minister Tanya Plibersek announced the restoration of $107 million in health funding to the Victorian system. The money would be paid directly to hospitals, rather than through the Victorian state government. Now the other states which had their funding cut are jumping up and down and demanding restoration of their health dollars also.

While this is a victory for the unions and community campaign, it clearly demonstrates how Australia is held back by the division between state and the federal governments. 

What a disgraceful, stupid system where the people’s taxes are grudgingly doled out in a give and take circus between competing states! Meanwhile, beds are closed, waiting lists get longer, doctors and nurses and hospital workers lose their jobs, and patients suffer.

Putting ‘Humpty Dumty’ back together will not be a simple task either, as sacked medical workers have to be re-hired or new ones found, rosters re-drawn, and inventories re-stacked.

Just like public education, public healthcare is being run down by this crazy capitalist system, forcing desperate people into expensive private health insurance and the private hospital system.

Australia desperately needs a nationally-run public health system, and more and better public hospitals.

Woolworths attacks transport drivers

Vanguard March 2013 p. 8
Marcus H.

Retail giant Woolworths Limited has launched a bitter assault on workers in recent times, as the corporation attempts to maintain the edge over rivals Westfarmers and Aldi.

The latest attack on workers was announced by Woolworths on February 7^th, with the company confirming that the entire Victorian fleet of 200 drivers would be made redundant in April. This announcement was delivered just one week after the company had reported a first half year sales increase of $1.4 billion from the previous year.

The Woolworths transport fleet in Victoria will be outsourced to logistics and warehousing giant Linfox, with Woolworths confirming the decision; “this change will bring a consistent transport approach nationally, and allow Woolworths to focus on the core business of retailing.” This statement from a company spokesperson is of great concern, with distribution centre workers fearing that they will be the next group of workers to be culled, with the outsourcing of the transport division across Australia now complete.

The drivers, members of the Transport Workers Union, have achieved the highest industry conditions through their unity across the years, through well negotiated agreements, without the need for industrial action. These job losses are a massive kick in the guts to the loyal workforce, most of whom have given twenty years’ service.

The outsourcing model has been one all too well known in the logistics industry over the previous five years, with the employer shifting the risk onto companies carrying the contract.

Woolworths will attempt to re-deploy the sacked drivers into other parts of the company; on the back of recent form from the company this will no doubt equate to casual employment, at a time when this country faces a casualisation crisis, with more than 40% of workers in Australia placed in this form of insecure, precarious employment.

One of this country’s largest corporations, Woolworths should be taking a leading role in addressing the jobs crisis, and providing secure jobs that Australians can count on, to provide secure lives, and secure futures.

Rather, the ruthless company in which profit and productivity reign over any consideration of people, has chosen to follow the casualisation agenda set down by the industry groups and government in an attempt to claw back hard fought wages and conditions in order to maximise their ever increasing profits.

 Woolies rip off road show hits Brisbane

Just weeks before Christmas, the company was found attacking worker’s rights yet again, on this occasion engaging a labour hire agency to undercut the Enterprise Agreement rate of pay for casual workers at the Brisbane Liquor Distribution Centre, located in Larapinta.

This amounts to another severe blow for those ever increasing employees employed as casuals, already placed in insecure jobs, unclear whether there will be work tomorrow or next week, and unable to provide any security for their families, unable to obtain finance for home loans.

Woolworths has attempted to engage these casual workers at a rate of five dollars an hour less than directly employed workers, despite these new casuals performing exactly the same work functions.

The cold blooded decision is in direct conflict with a memorandum of understanding signed off by company bosses and State Secretaries of the National Union of Workers, which was underpinned by this clause; “in line with our practice of paying people fairly and equitably, our practice of paying the same terms and conditions to contract casuals as to Woolworths casuals will continue”

The Union is now waged in a battle with Woolworths to adhere to this basic agreement, and to honour the Enterprise Agreement which was negotiated fairly between the union and company.

In the attack of workers’ rights, the overcrowding of labour hire agencies within the industry, and the casualisation of jobs, now is the time for workers, whether they be employed in a permanent or casual capacity, to stand united on the job against the assault by the capitalists in order to reverse the trend of the previous thirty years, at which point in 2013, we see the rate of casualisation at every one in four workers employed in insecure jobs.

Let's build our own agenda and act on it!

Vanguard February 2013
Nick G.

(Above: Maritime Union members in Fremantle make sure their agenda of opposing privatisation is heard)

In the prevailing circumstances of an essentially two-party parliamentary democracy there is no more important task for workers and their friends than to build the capacity to struggle independently of whichever party holds the reins of government.
 

A major obstacle to this is the residual loyalty that some express towards the Labor Party.  Historically the ALP has presented itself – dishonestly in our opinion – as the creation of the workers through their unions, and therefore as the party that represents their interests in the political arena.
 

Some in the union movement and in progressive circles cling to this sense of ownership of the Labor Party despite its having sold itself at birth to the big end of town. It did this  politically by confining itself to the big end’s institution, parliament; and economically by confining the steps it has been prepared to take to the continuation of the big end’s system, capitalism.
 

Some people seem unable to break out of a cycle of hoping for a better deal under Labor than they know they are going to get from the Liberals, and then losing heart every time Labor wins office and backtracks on its promises to the point where it seems indistinguishable from the more open party of big business.
 

Labor continually alienates itself from the class which it pretends to serve by its actions on behalf of the class which it really serves. Not only that, but in the sphere of foreign policy it has successfully sought to replace the Liberal Party as the closest ally of, and agent for, US imperialism in Australia and globally.
 

Working and other progressive Australians, with the industrial workers at the core, can point to little they have gained from Labor.  Indeed, many can point to much they have lost. This sense of loss is particularly acute within the lost disadvantaged communities: Aboriginal, asylum seekers, single parents and welfare recipients. In these circumstances, through disillusion with Labor, the danger of election of the political party which makes no pretence of its service to the big local and overseas corporations looms large.
 

Sensing victory at hand, there are repeated calls for Abbott to harden his industrial relations stance.  The Murdoch media aggressively pursues this approach, front-paging the views of Liberal MPs known to favour the IR policies of the Howard government, pushing the case for “greater flexibility in the workplace”, a “crackdown on union power”, “scaling back of unfair dismissal laws” and use of “individual contracts instead of union awards”.  They want to re-establish the ABCC so as to reignite the building bosses’ war against construction workers.

Our choice is to develop unity on the ground around a set of common demands that encompass defence of people’s rights and demands for independence from all imperialist entanglement, OR to wallow in the disappointment of Labor’s track record and resign ourselves to passivity and the inevitability of an Abbott government.
 

This goes very much to the psychology of the times, to the degree to which we as workers can hold on to the confidence that our actions can make a difference, that it is possible not just to defend ourselves, but to take the initiative in the struggle between the classes and against imperialism.
 

Current circumstances require readers of this paper and all other left and progressive individuals and organisations to be active in a non-left sectarian way: meeting people at their own level, in their own work and social environments, in the suburbs and the rural centres where the talk might more commonly be of footy rather than fascism, netball rather than national independence, socialising rather than socialism.
 

To read a paper like Vanguard is to look for ideas that can be brought into the most mundane of conversations in the most apparently casual and unassuming of ways, but always with the goal of lifting awareness of the possibility and necessity for change. 

We need our own agenda and we need our social connections as a basis for building it. 

Through this agenda and on the basis of good social connections we will be able to confidently face any unexpected and unwelcome developments on the domestic and international fronts.