Asylum seekers have been detained on remote Christmas, Manus and Nauru islands for many years, sullying Australian's once generous international reputation. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Asylum seekers have been detained on remote Christmas, Manus and Nauru islands for many years, sullying Australian's once generous international reputation. Photo / Jason Oxenham
COMMENT
Apart from having to wear the butt of jokes that the country was founded with convicts, and is still run by them, Australia has generally been seen worldwide as a basically "fair" country.
Kiwi cricket fans with long memories who can remember the underarm bowling incident back in 1981(plus the more recent ball-sandpapering scandal in South Africa) might choose to differ but, by and large, Australia has been seen as a tough but fair place.
However, over the past few years a disturbing "hardening" of the image and behaviour of a range of Australian business and political power elites has emerged. Morally dubious actions by people in both groups have unfortunately become common. Both sectors have fine, decent representatives - but also numerous less impressive ones.
On the business front, "wage theft", for instance, has become a recurrent theme in Australia, the only uncertainty being when the next major rip-off of workers will be revealed. The latest of these was Woolworth's owning up the other day to underpaying nearly 6000 employees by $300 million over the past nine years. This follows a conga line of other under-payers including, among others, Wesfarmers, Qantas, Caltex, 7 Eleven, Domino's Pizza, several celebrity chefs/restaurants, Super Retail Group (Rebel Sports, BCF), the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Commonwealth Bank, etc.
Almost invariably the multi-million-dollar shortfalls are put down to inadvertent administrative errors. Ironically, the CEOs of some of the companies concerned are among the highest paid in Australia and it is hard to imagine those CEOs being the victims of similar errors.
Another widening area of wage theft is the temporary migrant worker sector, where backpackers, international students and the like are employed on rates below the legal minimum wage as waiters, cleaners, fruit pickers and farm workers, taxi drivers, etc. All of this is well known, but allowed to continue largely unchecked.
Unscrupulous operators have similarly emerged in segments of the education market, ripping off vulnerable (particularly international) students. A leading example is the entrapment of students in sizeable debt by some private colleges. Instead of gaining a quality preparation for later university studies, many students are knowingly signed into heavy debt by excessively high fees, apparent gifts that subsequently need to be paid for (e.g. laptop computers, iPads), etc.
A recent Royal Commision into Financial Services provides further depressing examples of customer rip-offs, the most scandalous case revealed being the $850 million charging of financial advice clients by leading institutions (AMP, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac, among others) for services that were never delivered ("fee-for-no-service").
On the political front, similar morally abusive "hardening" trends can be discerned, the most distressing by far being the incarceration of asylum seekers on remote Christmas, Manus and Nauru islands for many years, which among other things has seen the suicide and other preventable deaths of a number of detainees, plus unfortunate sullying of Australia's lengthy generous immigration record.
Domestically, the current government's reduction in penalty rates for workers in June this year, on the same day the Prime Minister received a $11,000 pay rise, sends a clear message of where sympathies lie. Likewise a dogged refusal to increase the Newstart Allowance (income support for those unemployed and looking for work) to a realistic "living allowance" tells a similar story. It would certainly be interesting to see how government ministers on $300k plus a year would survive on the current allowance.
Kiwis living in Australia have similarly suffered from this hardening, being denied access to welfare and the prospect of citizenship, despite Australians having those rights in New Zealand.
Kevin McCracken. Photo / Supplied
Many more examples could be given – e.g. the widespread prioritisation of "profit" over "care" in many aged care facilities being revealed in the current Aged Care Royal Commission, the growing emergence of defective apartment buildings in the super-heated Sydney and Melbourne property markets and the leaving of owners "hanging" unable to get recompense from developers who in many cases have conveniently gone out of business, widening income inequality, declining housing affordability, etc.
Australia has a lot to be proud of, but none of the above are good signs.
Certainly the old adage of "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" seems to have been well and truly pushed to the back shelf by some powerful players.
