The Occupy movement has certainly been grabbing the headlines over the last week.
Apart from the protests that simultaneously occurred in capital cities around Australia, there was also the controversial police evictions of both the Melbourne and Sydney sites.
In the latest news, it was reported that there are concerns that Occupy Melbourne will be targeting a protest towards the Queen when she visits the city later today.
Unsurprisingly, there have been many in the media who have been having a field day with the Occupy Movement. Among the first was Sophie Mirabella writing for The Punch a few weeks ago whose biggest problem with the protestors seemed to be that they where ‘politically adolescent’.
Mirabella then reached for the conservative playbook and threw a litany of accusations at the protestors: they want free education, they need to get a real job, they support the carbon tax, are puppets of Bob Brown and the Greens and so on. If she had only managed to talk about ‘stopping the boats’ and poker machine reform, then she would have completed the clean sweep.
The usually erudite David Penberthy essentially accused them of not understanding economics by pointing to Greece and saying, see, this is what lazy socialism gets you. What was not mentioned was the role of the financial industry and speculation in fuelling this crisis or Greece’s excessive military spending.
The never erudite Gerard Henderson informed his readership that these people were all getting government handouts. Henderson used his column to attack the soft-bellied former Victorian Police Commissioner Christine Nixon and, of course, the Greens.
One of the areas that almost all critics have focussed on has been that the protestors have no clear agenda. While the same criticism can be levelled at the current Abbott Opposition, critics have failed to either understand what the protesters are saying or address the issues that are being raised: which are growing levels of inequality, profits ahead of human needs and the rising level of influence of corporations over democratic governments.
Are these fantasy concerns or is something real happening? Let me address each of these in turn.
Writing for The Australian earlier this week, Mike Steketee quoted some concerning Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showing that the top 20 per cent of Australian households earned on average 11 times more income than those in the bottom 20 – up from 8.5 percent in 2003-04. This comes to $3,943 a week compared to $360. Even after adjusting these figures for family size, taxes and benefits, the gap still widens (though less at a rate from 4.8 to 5.4 percent).
The distribution of wealth tells an even more concerning story: the top 20 percent of households have 70 times more net wealth as bottom 20 percent (again we are talking 2009-10 figures). This comes to an average of $2.2 million per household compared to $31,829.
We can drill down further. Queensland, one of the resource states flying high before the floods shows a large increase in people living under stress. The Queensland Council of Social Services found a 73 per cent increase in the number of people looking for financial assistance, unemployment rates for young people at 12 per cent and rising cost of living created by the mining boom that it is creating stress.
I could go on but I suggest a close reading of the ABS figures tells us what we all suspect: Australia is becoming a more inequitable place and this has nothing to do with Bob Brown or the price on carbon.
The second area of concern raised by the Occupy protestors is the fact that profits are placed ahead of human wellbeing. We do not have to look far to see the examples of this: The sports wear industry has become synonymous with ‘sweat shop’; clubs throughout Australia supported by state governments defending poker machine profits despite the overwhelming evidence of the social harms; the removal profitable manufacturing industries to places where labour is cheaper (and conditions much worse); and, environmental devastation that has ruined livelihoods.
Rather than naming and shaming any single corporation, the protestors are right in arguing that this is a systemic issue. Board members and managers are required by law to meet their fiduciary responsibilities with little or no account for the wellbeing of communities, future generations or fragile environments.
If we truly want a sustainable and fairer society, then this must change.
The third area is the rise of corporate power. In his recent book, Too Much Luck, Australian journalist Phil Cleary describes in detail the power of the mining lobby in Australia. Cleary articulates the way the well-funded mining industry brought down Kevin Rudd, a democratically elected leader, because of their resistance to the super-profits mining tax.
Within a week of reaching a compromise with Julia Gillard, Rio Tinto’s American chief executive, Tom Albanese, told mining executives in London that the Australian experience should act as a warning to other governments around the world.
The mining industry provides only one example. We could easily turn to the strength of the pharmaceutical industry, media empires, the pubs and clubs lobby groups and so on.
When I was an analyst in the finance industry, the concept of too big to fail was often discussed when evaluating the balance sheet of banks. Today, with the world economy almost brought down by the excesses and hubris of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the protesters are right to ask if certain corporations are too big to exist.
It is easy to hurl cheap insults at the Occupy crowd. They have been dismissed as naive, socialists, ignorant, middle-class kids who have it too good, unemployed bludgers and so on. It is also easy to shove a microphone in front of someone and pick apart his or her words.
None of these address the real concerns of the protestors.
The Occupy Movement may not have a catchy slogan like “save the whale”. What they have done, however, is identify a sense of unease that the economic system is letting down a majority of the world’s population: and the evidence is there to support them.
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