By Mirko Bagaric
The biggest enemy of "working families" is not the financial crisis. It is the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and his offensive and simplistic suggestion that middle Australia should show restraint in wage negotiations so as not to compromise their jobs.
People are not morally obliged to remedy problems not of their doing. Families struggling to afford the necessities of modern life made no contribution to the financial problems. They owe nothing to the rest of community when it comes to wage negotiations.
The suggestion that more money for bosses equals more jobs for workers breaks the laws of economics and human nature. Trickle-down economics has long been discredited; there are simply too many greedy sponges at the top. Rudd's call for wage restraint is a misguided justification for employers to exploit the vulnerable by undervaluing the toils of their labour.
Moreover, imposing the same wage disciplines on rich and poor is a contemptible case of economic discrimination. Rich and poor come from vastly different starting points to attain human flourishing. Even slight reductions in purchasing power are felt far more heavily by those who are wanting. Being forced to sell the family home tends to ache a lot more than having to think twice before choosing to fly first class or business class on the next holiday.
Rudd's decision to defer a wage rise for federal politicians is a meaningless gesture for setting the tone for how many other Australians should behave. The financial pressures experienced by politicians with their $100,000 plus annual salaries and brimming superannuation entitlements - most of which, unlike for other Australians, are guaranteed - are negligible compared with those faced by many battling to save the roof over their heads.
But won't pay rises for the middle class encourage high-income earners to go hard in wage negotiations? No, they already do that. They always have, and they always will.
Even if there was evidence to suggest pay rises for the middle class would damage the economy, workers should still bargain for all they are worth. Admittedly, the reaches of our moral and civic duties are not confined to redressing problems of our doing. In some cases individuals need to help others or make sacrifices for the good of the community.
However, circumstances requiring such benevolence are rare. They are defined by the maxim of positive duty, which prescribes that we must help others in serious trouble, when assistance would immensely help them at no or little inconvenience to ourselves.
That is why it is repugnant to refuse to throw a rope to a person drowning near a pier, but why we are entitled to decline to allow a homeless person to live in our spare bedroom.
It is also why developing countries are entitled to refuse to adopt greenhouse targets. Global warning has been caused solely by Western nations, whose use of cheap energy increased their prosperity, while at the same time refusing to share the largesse with the largely hungry Third World. People in developing nations are no less entitled to improve their lot.
Why should hungry people in the Third World care if their use of fossil fuel risks making future people less prosperous? Current destitution bites more harshly than potential future discomfort.
On the economic home front, middle Australia is the very constituency feeling the economic pinch and is already immensely inconvenienced by rising costs. That is why it is impertinent for Rudd to urge it to show wage restraint. Middle Australians need - and are entitled to - every cent they can get in wage increases.
Moreover, they should not only be leaning on their employers to improve their lot. The Government also needs to step in. Most Australians will welcome the recently mooted tax cuts later this year. But their problem - as always - is that they will most benefit the rich.
No Australian living below the poverty line should pay tax. It is mindless, especially as they are then subsidised by the welfare system. It is bureaucratic, unjustifiable nonsense. About 10 per cent of Australians are living below the poverty line (about $700 a week for a family of four).
Instead of finding new ways to betray the constituency that gave him power, Rudd could contemplate one good reason for not increasing the tax-free threshold to the poverty line.
Mirko Bagaric is a professor at Deakin University's School of Law and author of How To Live: Being Happy And Dealing with Moral Dilemmas.