I, like most observers, were astonished by the reporting last week that 6 million workers were accessing the JobKeeper salary subsidy; including up to 800,000 people finding themselves in winding Centrelink queues, 56% of the labour force were receiving government support.

If you count those uncounted in the labour force numbers, the April unemployment rate jumps from a somewhat rosy 6.2% to an astonishing 10.2%, but the subsidised percentage drops to 53%. Small comforts for the government, I’m sure.

But the Government yesterday revealed that an “accounting error” caused by the paperwork blunders of just 1000 companies (of a approximate 728,000+ companies accessing JobKeeper) left the scheme with $60 billion unused funds, and 3 million less workers covered than expected.

How on earth does such a glaring miscalculation happen? And how was it not immediately recognised?

First things first. From the Prime Minister’s own press release of JobKeeper:

The Morrison Government will provide a historic wage subsidy to around 6 million workers who will receive a flat payment of $1,500 per fortnight through their employer, before tax.

The $130 billion JobKeeper payment will help keep Australians in jobs as tackle the significant economic impact from the coronavirus.

Immediately, the cover story falls over. The Government announced both the costing of the scheme, and the expected number of eligible workers weeks before businesses began to apply for the scheme. So, the wild disparity cannot be the responsibility of dodgy paperwork.

It’s shameful for the Treasurer to hide behind a public servant patsy in trying to explain away this disparity. But, there has to be a reason why the initial modelled expectations have diverged so far from reality.

Could it be that the Government’s explicit crusade against migrant workers, casuals, the arts and education sectors prevented 3 million fewer workers from accessing the scheme than predicted?

It is well known that the Government explicitly rewrote, three times, the JobKeeper criteria to exclude universities, now facing existential threat and cuts of staff and offered courses.

As seems to be the case with this Government, its policy is designed to reward those it deems worthy, and to mercilessly punish those that it views as ideologically despicable.

Investment fund managers, barristers, doctors and pensioners who reported a temporary dip in income are among the growing list of people being paid the federal government’s JobKeeper subsidy.

Fundies join barristers on JobKeeper, AFR

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This week brought another fresh example of rabid Government ideology taking precedence over cooler heads – the absolute nadir of the Australia-China relationship. While the Australian press fawned over a propaganda victory for the small Pacific power, careful examination of the timeline and actors involved shows how fraught and poorly executed this Washington whisper was.

The propaganda angle of WHA73 cannot be understated: the key results being that that China supported the resolution for a global review of pandemic response, but the USA did not. Xi Jinping pledged $2 billion USD funding to the WHO and pledged the COVID vaccine as a global public good. The USA and UK, in sharp contrast, are fighting against contributing to a global pool of patents.

But you won’t hear a whisper of that in Western press.

Let’s be clear – Australia’s proposals for an explicit investigation of China’s pandemic handling, conducted by an empowered WHO “weapons-inspector”-esque team, was completely rejected. The only thing heard was a loud foghorn in Beijing, signalling that Australian policymakers are completely captured by Washington’s interests.

And this is just the latest example of a long list of actions that demonstrate this – the most salient being Turnbull’s Huawei 5G ban. Malcolm Turnbull himself admitted in his memoir that there was “no smoking gun” evidence to ban Huawei. At the very least, there are inklings of some deeper reflective, concillatory thinking appearing.

As if we needed more evidence that the intelligence agencies are deeply driven by red-yellow peril.

The fallout of acting the imperial vanguard is starting to appear, in the form of a crumbling trade relationship. Despite media assertions that trade restrictions on barley and beef are retaliatory, while certainly a potential motivation, there exists a bilaterial equality element to China’s trade policy that is consistently downplayed, poorly understood, and potentially justified.

A damaged economic relationship with China would be detrimental to the Australian economy. China purchases 30% of our exports, and is vital for the tourism and education sectors. We, on the other hand, do not have nearly so much leverage. It is frankly suicidal to sabotage this for an ideological crusade. But we are being dragged into a struggle that is not our own.

Each diplomatic blunder drags the country more and more into an alignment with the US-capitalist bloc, of those hawks that would eventually condemn us to war in order to protect white Western supremacy, and the profit of capital. This is clearly, in my view, not in any peace-loving people’s best interest. And it must be resisted in the strongest terms.

Given this climate, it certainly is an uphill battle.