By Gareth Hutchens

An investigation by the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) has found an "alarming lack of transparency" from major government contractors operating inside the privatised employment services system.

It has also raised concerns about the potential for conflicts of interest arising from for-profit companies in the system making large donations to Australia's major political parties.

[…]

It shows how for-profit "employment services providers" can use aggressive tax minimisation, large dividend payouts, offshore-related party payments, tax havens, and opaque financial reporting to extract profits from the system, without breaking any laws.

And it questions if the system is meeting the public's expectations.

"It's no secret that Australia's system of privatised employment services has failed," the report argues.

"The Howard-era system fills the pockets of private equity and millionaires, while leaving jobseekers without work."

Some state governments were suspicious of the Commonwealth's desire to involve itself in housing supply, but the government still managed to secure their support to introduce a national scheme for subsidised rental housing.

The policy was less ambitious than housing reformers wanted, but it was better than nothing.

During the second reading debate on the legislation, a Labor MP from Tasmania, John Frank Gaha, told his parliamentary colleagues that he supported the CSHA "in its entirety". 

However, he said, he regretted the fact that constitutional limitations prevented the Commonwealth and states from taking a "wider view" of the role that housing played in the structure of the economy itself.

He said it made a huge difference to people's lives when they owned their own homes, especially in retirement.

He said it would be great if the government could devise a scheme to keep rents at a low level nationally, so some of the money that low-income families would otherwise spend on rent could be used to help them pay off a family home.

"In this way, we would make the average worker a capitalist; and that is our only solution to communism in this country," Dr Gaha said.

A new study was released in recent days that should have been newsworthy, but it escaped the media's attention in Australia.

It showed Australian police are world leaders at arresting climate and environmental protesters.

According to the study, more than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent).

Australia's arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.

It's higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent).

The research makes it clear that Australia's political leaders have joined the "rapid escalation" of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest, while sovereign states globally fail to meet their international agreements and emissions targets.

[…]

When you read the Bristol University study alongside the special rapporteur's position paper and the EDO paper, you get a pretty good sense of how the clampdown on climate and environmental activism actually works, and why it's occurring.

Collectively, the reports discuss an issue that links political donations and pressure from fossil fuel companies, governments writing new laws and harsher penalties for climate and environmental activists, federal and state policing agencies being put to work to enforce the new laws, and legal systems and courts being used to bed them down.

And hanging over the entire political problem is the question of the "pricing mechanism" and the role it plays in a society like ours.

When you look at this issue dispassionately, you'll see that we're witnessing a nasty global battle over the attempt to have the negative externalities of fossil fuels properly reflected in the market prices of the products of fossil fuel companies.