The IMF, the global agent of neoliberal capital, is trying on its old shakedown of Australia with its usual double act: “lower taxes and cut spending.”

Translation: “Cut services for the many to fund tax cuts for the few.” It’s the IMF’s typical attempt to institutionalise the money funnel from everyday people to the plutocracy.

The IMF wants to pay for “cuts to taxes on wages and companies” by increasing the regressive GST and slashing the NDIS.

When growth in the real economy stagnates, capital seeks to drain public funds to maintain profit margins. The IMF is demanding that the social safety net be turned into a private profit centre or, alternatively, be cut down to enable revenue to be transferred to the private sector via tax cuts.

This is textbook wealth transfer to the oligarchs from everyday people: the logic of capital accumulation in practice. Gut the NDIS to pay for more corporate profits.

The only thing the IMF gets right is introducing a broad based a land tax model. This should be done without cutting corporate tax or spending. Of course, they want it because it is more efficient for capital mobility, whereas we want it because it allows the public to capture social wealth from predominantly ultra-rich land-owners.

The IMF wants strict “fiscal anchors” and oversight on state debt. The “fiscal anchors” are designed to remove economic policy from democratic control, turning the Australian Government into a debt-collector for global finance.

To decode this, the IMF wants to hand control to the financial markets, banks and corporations, while disempowering local democracy. Basically, they want even more control over Australian fiscal policy given to Washington-based institutions to impose their anti-social model on public budgets. There is no real justification for the IMF’s prescriptions other than them trying to act as an austerity enforcer for global capital markets and the creditor class.

Everything else in their shakedown is a demand for the ritual sacrifice of public goods like health, education, disability care, to appease the neoliberal god of “fiscal sustainability.”

We need to strongly reject the “consensus” that the IMF is trying to impose on us, and be able to imagine more than just social services that are continent on “fiscal sustainability”. If the “fiscal anchors” prevent us from feeding and housing everyone, then those anchors must be cut.