PRINCIPLES
1. We need a system of governance that benefits the many - not just corporations and the wealthy few - and delivers progressive change and economic, ecological and social justice.
2. Measuring government performance should include impacts on people, communities and the environment
3. We recognise our economy has been built upon the ongoing dispossession of First Nations Peoples’ lands. Economic justice requires paying reparations and supporting sovereignty for First Nations Peoples.
4. First Nations communities must be specifically and formally included in all aspects of government decision-making.
5. The tax and transfer system should, on the whole:
a. be both progressive and redistributive in respect to income and wealth
b. incentivise desirable activities while disincentivising less desirable ones
c. ensure the environmental and social costs of certain activities are accounted for in a way that is reasonable and proportionate
d. be easy to understand and, to the extent possible, broad-based
e. be sustainable throughout the normal range of changes to economic activity, and
f. be relatively simple to administer in respect to assessment and collection.
6. Public financing is always the preferred mechanism for funding public infrastructure.
7. Essential public services and natural monopolies (where high barriers to entry make a lack of competition inevitable) should be democratically owned, controlled, and regulated to serve the public good.
8. Governments are a role model that other sectors follow – a model employer, a model buyer, and a model business partner. The example that governments set must always be an ethical one.
9. Not-for-profit involvement in the delivery of public services should enhance, not replicate or replace, services better delivered by governments.
10. A well-resourced public service would ensure capacity, knowledge and skills are kept in house. Systems, services and skills that have been outsourced and privatised should be returned to democratic control within the public sector.
11. The capacity of the public service to provide independent advice must not be compromised by the use of consultants. The public service should only be answerable to the public and their democratically-elected representatives.
12. The tax regime can be a tool to transform the economy using appropriate incentives and penalties that reward socially and ecologically responsible effort. Taxes should be used, alongside efficient regulation, to set a framework for market activity in which capital is most profitably deployed for environmentally sustainable, productive, and socially progressive purposes.
13. Social services such as public housing, health, education and social care, should be available through universal access to high quality public and community services.
14. Social and environmental goals should be prioritised in any reform of public service delivery. Where market-based mechanisms are used in the delivery of public services or goods, such mechanisms should not undermine the achievement of social equity and ecological sustainability.
15. Natural capital is equally important as produced capital and the value of services provided by ecosystems should be given equal consideration as those with equal value provided by humans.
16. Governments can and should regulate essential services in order to ensure fairness, affordability, equity and accessibility.
AIMS
TAX
1. A comprehensive tax and transfer, market intervention and business regulation scheme which protects the environment, funds the services we need and builds resilience and democracy
2. Abolish insurance taxes and duties.
3. Replace stamp duties with land value tax.
4. Abolish land transfer duty ('stamp duty'), while increasing the scope of existing state-based land value taxes, ensuring they are levied on a more progressive basis on the total value of an individual's land holdings.
5. Convert gambling taxes to capture the economic rent provided to gambling venues by the restrictions placed on gaming licences.
6. A reduction in inefficient state taxes on production and employment, and an increase in charges on pollution, monopoly, rent seeking and degradation or extraction of Victoria's shared resources.
7. Establish arrangements which would reduce the need for states to outbid each other in an economically destructive race to the bottom to attract private investment, with tax, regulatory and services concessions.
8. Remove tax breaks and incentives for polluting and environmentally destructive industries.
9. Abolish payroll taxes.
10. Ensure private developers pay more tax by increasing and better enforcing infrastructure development charges and rezoning windfall taxes
11. Implement taxes on the extraction or importing of non-renewable materials, such as minerals and fossil fuels.
State Finance and Budgets
12. Enable the principles of sustainability to be given effect to in all government spending decisions, to give simultaneous improvements in social, economic, and environmental outcomes.
13. Require transparent accounting of state finances on an accrual basis, including income and expenses, assets and liabilities, and inward and outward cash flows, as well as non-financial measures including indicators of ecological sustainability and social wellbeing.
14. Ensuring transparent financial reporting that removes perverse incentives to hide state debt in inefficient structures such as Private Public Partnerships, and encourages the efficient use of state finances.
15. The introduction of broad measures of genuine state progress including the production of a comprehensive state balance sheet that reflects this.
16. Transparent and accountable public utilities and government business enterprises. Where public subsidies are provided, information on the full environmental, social and fiscal costs should be publicly available.
17. Ensuring economic benefits of projects are not overstated due to the omission of negative impacts on environmental assets by requiring all Environmental Effects Statements to include a statement of impacts on Environmental Economic Accounts.
18. The gender impacts of all budget measures to be measured through gender impact assessments.
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
19. Bring outsourced and privatised core services back into the public sector.
20. Stop imposing blanket budget savings measures like base efficiency reviews and staffing level caps on public sector agencies.
21. Enhance diversity targets for government executive and board appointments to include a diversity of educational, career and socio-economic backgrounds.
PUBLIC INVESTMENT
22. Embed stronger guidelines in government industry participation and procurement policies to prioritise local and ethical industries, social procurement principles, and prevent unethical and anti-worker businesses from benefiting from government procurement.
23. Ensure public investment in any organisation is conditional on democratising governance and ownership structures, and on the advancement of demonstrable social and environmental objectives.
24. Abolish public-private partnerships and market-led proposals for major projects and infrastructure in favour of direct provision by government or robust and democratically-controlled tendering processes.
25. Governments to manage the direct provision of infrastructure and major projects with robust and democratically-controlled tendering processes, rather than relying on market-led proposals or public-private partnerships.
26. Invest in infrastructure that deliver tangible public benefits.
PUBLIC SERVICE WORKFORCE
27. Facilitate workplace democracy in public sector workplaces through proactive union encouragement policies, formal floor committees and elected employee representatives on executive committees or governing boards.
28. Prioritise the use of ongoing employment arrangements, including where individual positions or projects may be of a fixed duration.
29. Enshrine public sector workers’ rights to engage in political advocacy and activism, run for public office, participate in their union, and represent or be elected to activist organisations.
30. Increase the availability of entry-level positions, cadetships, traineeships, and apprenticeships in the public sector with dedicated professional development pathways for regional workers and people without university qualifications.
31. Implement affirmative measures that are endorsed and supported by the authorised First Nations community across all recruitment processes and prevent mainstreaming First Nations identified positions into general recruitment pools.
32. Protect the public service against outsourcing to private consultants and minimise the use of labour hire and external contractors.
33. Review government bargaining and wages policy to enshrine above inflation pay increases for non-executive employees, a right to flexible and remote working and to transition a four-day working week with no loss of pay.
Finance and Public Administration Policy as amended by the membership on 23 June 2024