Tax cuts in The Cage

This is a script for the The Cage, written in November 2022

Two ideas have come together in my mind, during the long nights, here in The Cage. One idea is the importance of numbers, the centrality of maths, the role of science. That idea underpins the age in which we live. The other idea is the recognition that we don’t know what others think. That idea is part empathy, part psychology, part communications science. It’s the heeby jeeby, mumbo jumbo that makes advertising or politics part art form and all art part miracle.

Let’s start with numbers. Very important here in The Cage. It keeps us sane. Some of the others down here — no man is an island, completely — count sheep. I calculate prime numbers. It’s surprisingly easy. You can eliminate all numbers ending in five or zero, they are divisible by five. Every even number is divisible by two. So you skip along the numbers ending in one, three, seven or nine. Adding up the digits tells you if they are divisible by three. 29 is not divisible by three because two plus nine is eleven and one plus one is two. 29 is a prime number. Not seven, not 11, not 13 not 17 and now you are more than half way to the number itself so it is prime, prime, prime.

Whatever blows your hair back, as we used to say in the coke days, or gets you off, or more accurately here, whatever gets you off to sleep, in the endless, spooky, dripping, echo chamber of the long long night.

So numbers work. You can play games with them. You can connect the behaviour of triangles to the circular rotation of straight lines. You can connect both of those geometric patterns to the behaviour of exponential growth, which is something that everyone suddenly understands thanks to COVID and the importance of getting the infection rate to less than one. Numbers are important to everyday life.

Now, some of you share the endless, spooky, dripping, echo chamber of the long long night, but you do not like numbers. You float off on clouds of ecstasy, visualize great dramatic works of art, epic poems or, like Peter Cundall who used to pretend to eat compost on Gardening Australia, when I was a boy, great music. He was a prisoner of war for four years with six months in solitary confinement and stayed sane by remembering long passages of music he had heard in his local mechanics hall. His penchant for holding up compost to the camera and saying, “look at that, you could jolly well eat it,” was a dramatic flourish designed to encourage ABC viewers to feed our gardens with food scraps. I consider that the height of sanity, despite the way he rolled his eyes.

So, numbers are not everything, there are other patterns and systems of meaning, but numbers are impressive. Numbers are the magic that make your phone work. Just think about that for a moment. You can whisper into a block of glass and one person, just one person, on the other side of the world can hear you whisper as clearly as if you were whispering in their ear. You are connected. How? There is no wire, no rope, no little men waving semaphore flags from hilltops all the way from you to Outer Mongolia. It is the pure magic of numbers, translated into electromagnetic waves which are just patterns in the fabric of space time, which is a four-dimensional concept based on numbers.

And numbers are important right now in the debate about tax breaks, inflation and the role of economic growth. Those of us worried about the big picture, looking at the impact of the global economy on the environment, on climate, on the global injustice of the Global North raiding the Global South and impoverishing billions of people so we can catch an uber to a friends house and have a few drinks. You know who I mean, you people, us, the ones who care… We know that the global economy is pushing the agenda and ripping of the carers, the shop workers, the drivers and the other essential workers that keep us fed and clothed and moving around.

What we don’t really have a handle on is why this is so hard for the mainstream media to get a grip on. Sure there are some vested interests. The wealthy do not want to give up their privilege, the one per cent of one percent, (the one per lakh, as the Indians say) will use their wealth to back the Trumps and the Bolsanaros, the Malcolm Roberts and the George Christensens who will go into bat for their mad schemes of world domination, but that is not the problem. Brazil is voting out Bolsanaro, we voted out Morrison, Boris has gone, Putin is in trouble, the pendulum swings. The problem is different. The problem is that the Australian government is too timid to reverse the tax breaks for the rich, and no government in the world is brave enough to tackle the issue of property as a commodity responsible for shoring up middle class wealth while robbing the poor of decent housing.

The problem is statistical. The problem is the difference between the median and the mean. And I’ll explain what I mean. The average wage in Australia six months ago, in May, was $95,435. That’s the Australian Bureau of statistics published figure. All of the research shows that scientists, teachers, middle management on the average wage find life tolerable, and that big increases in the amount of money they get will not make them much happier. Once we get above about $120,000 the money is not what rocks our boat, blows our hair back, or gets us off. So the media, the government and the policy wonks argue that if the average person is happy then things are rolling along quite nicely.

The problem is that most of us do not get the average wage. We cannot even imagine what it is like to earn $2,000 a week, it seems like an impossible dream. If only we could do that, we would not struggle in everyday life in the way that we do. The idea that such a wage could be the average wage just makes no sense. We earn the median wage or less. The median wage is $41,860 per year. That means that half of working Australians earn less than $40,000 but politicians and the media thinks that most Australians are earning $95,000 a year. Think about it.

This is not just a two speed economy, in which half of us are below the poverty line and the wealthy do not care. This is a two speed economy that is hidden, unrecognised, absent from the statistics.

And that brings me to my second thread. We do not know what other people think. We do not listen to other people because we think we know where they are coming from. I went through this recently trying to support my fellow students. They kept complaining that they are paying one third of their wage in tax. I kept telling them to fill in their tax declaration and wait until the end of the year. The first $18,000 of your wages is tax free, if you earn less than that you will get all your tax at the end of the year. It was not until I actually helped one of them with their tax return that I realised that we (the Australian people) tax all non-citizens at 32.5 cents in the dollar, for every dollar they earn. I simply did not hear the complaint, because I thought I understood the tax system.

Donald Rumsfeld will remain famous for saying "We don’t know what we don’t know", long after his role as the US secretary of state - responsible for 9/11 and the subsequent recolonisation of the Middle East by his oil rich, war mongering companies - has been forgotten.

We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t hear people we don’t understand. We assume the world has a certain shape, which fits the shape that fits our expectations and it is exceedingly difficult to see the things that do not accommodate that shape.

Until we understand the gap between the median and the average wage, we cannot even see the two speed economy let alone understand the accommodation crisis, the need for better wages for carers, drivers and shopworkers. We have to get our heads around the numbers and we have to hear the people we don’t understand.