En Passant

Me in Independent Australia. ‘Academic John Passant has been subjected to vile threats after writing about a recent demonstration against education cuts — and has traced some of them back to Victoria Police.’

http://www.independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/victoria-police-threaten-academic,5857

On Thursday police attacked a peaceful student demonstration in Melbourne. I re-posted an article from Red Flag about it on my blog and so far have been threatened with a bullet in the head, drowning, pepper spraying and other niceties, all from people, except for one, who use fake names.

On top of that one of those posting did so from a Victoria Police Centre ISP address, according to Whois. They delightfully called themselves – woman hating language warning – dirtyunwashedcunts (presumably a reference to the protesters) and me a cockhead.  I have referred the matters to Simon Corbell, the ACT Police Minister to oversight, because I don’t trust the police. Labor politicians I have my doubts about too, but let’s see what comes of it.

I may approach some Greens in Victoria. Know any to contact?

I wonder if this attack is payback for the unsuccessful Victorian Police charges against Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign in Melbourne? The cops, in trying to shut down that expression of free speech, were humiliated.

Remember the Victoria police attacks on Occupy and shutting it down?

This police attack on student demonstrators is just part of the wider trend to criminalise dissent and poverty. Aboriginal Australians represent 26% of prisoners with 2% of the population. This is systemic criminalisation of race.

In Queensland the Newman government will throw out public tenants suspected, but note, not convicted, of a crime. Throwing poor people out of their homes and on to the streets is a recipe for more petty crime.

No judge, no jury, no evidence

The attack on bikies continues, and even conservative judges are beginning to have doubts about Newman’s attacks on freedom. I have a suggestion.

Given Campbell Newman’s public direction to judges to harden the fuckup (or words to that effect) why isn’t he in the slammer for contempt of court? No trial necessary, just a decision by a judge that he is in contempt and off he goes for a few days or weeks or months in jail. No trial, no jury, no evidence. Sort of doing a Newman to Newman.

Bill Shorten has announced that Labor will vote for the repeal of the carbon tax if the Government agrees to an ETS scheme. The current legislation will do that anyway, with effect from 1 July 2015. in effect Shorten wants to bring that date forward to 1 July 2014.

I have written previously that I thought Labor was manoeuvring to  dump any form of a price on carbon. Now I am not so sure. maybe they will cling to an ETS. If they do, and eventually vote against the repeal of the carbon tax, then that might give Abbott a trigger for a double dissolution.

The timing however looks difficult. It would need to be rejected twice by the Senate, with three months between the first and second rejection. That looks to me like May at the earliest when that can happen.

Given the new Senate starts on 1 July 2014 and the Palmer United Party group, plus the libertarian, plus the Motor Enthusiast, plus the DLP, plus Family first are all in favour of abolishing the tax and it will be abolished then.

I doubt Abbott has the guts to go to a double dissolution.

There is an air of the surreal about this debate since neither a price on carbon nor the do nothing Direct Action plan will actually address climate change. It is an irrelevant discourse.

Do you think that by 1 July next year we will know the result of the Western Australian Senate election? It was on a knife edge with just 14 votes meaning we could have had a Greens Senator and Sports Enthusiast Senator instead of a Labor and Palmer United Party senator.

Later news: The Electoral Commission has declared the result of the recount. Scott Ludlum from the Greens and the Sports Enthusiast party candidate have won the last two seats, at the expense of Labor and the Palmer United Party. Given that 1375 votes have gone AWOL, I imagine both Labor and PUP will challenge the result in the Court of Disputed Returns, the High Court.

That may well see a new election for the Western Australian Senate ordered.

Democracy includes an involved citizenry. We don’t have that.

What socialists like me want is workers democratically running society.  That involves workplace councils electing representatives. A first step is to fight for democracy in our lives; to fight for it in the workplace.

More worker and union control might at least help address the explosion in bullying and other unsafe workplaces. Unions and workers have a real interest in safety. Bosses don’t because their overriding priority is profit or neoliberal ‘efficiency’ and cost cutting.

The Abbott government wants to reintroduce the kangaroo court known as the Australian Building and Construction Commission. If they get away with this deaths on building sites, already double the UK rate, would increase, as it did when the ‘construction worker killer’ Commission was first introduced in 2005.

I wonder who Obama hasn’t been spying on? Australia is perhaps safe because we are part of the US spy network. We have been spying on our good allies. Indonesia is not happy.

Some have claimed this is par for the course and all countries do it. Even if true, powerful countries do it more and better. Indonesia can’t hack Merkel’s phone. The US can.  Iran can’t tap the phones of the UN. The US can. North Korea can’t hear what EU Parliamentarians are discussing in secret. The US can.

Australian facilities, such as Pine Gap, helps US war criminals track down ‘terrorist’ grandmothers and blast them away in front of their grandchildren.

Why aren’t those involved in the murder of the innocents, people like Obama, Bush, Blair, Cameron, Howard, Gillard, Rudd and Abbott on trail in the Hague before the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Could it be that the Court is only to try the victims of Western terrorism and their leaders, not the Western terrorists?

The US did blast away one leader of the Taliban in Pakistan. He was involved in a recent meeting of the Pakistani Taliban on peace discussions with the Pakistan government. His assassination is part of the US strategy to derail the peace talks.

Australia is cutting and running from Afghanistan, along with the US. Abbott and Shorten have dressed it up in the usual bullshit about valiant fighters.  The Taliban will be back in the saddle soon enough.

So what did the $7 billion, 40 dead Australians, 260 seriously injured and the deaths and injuries of thousands of Afghans achieve? Nothing. It has ended in defeat but our ruling class won’t tell you that.

Vale, Lou Reed.

To have your say or see what others are saying, hit the comments link under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

Yesterday a worker from one of Samsung’s semiconductor plants in South Korea was found dead at 5am. It appears that he was subject to months of adverse action and management cut his pay because he was in the union. It is suspected that he committed suicide due to management bullying.

As you all know, Samsung is one of the most viciously anti-union companies in the world. For decades they have used violence, murders and bully tactics to keep unions out of their factories. Samsung is known for It’s “no union” policy and the company’s late founder said he will negotiate with unions “over my dead body”.

Despite all odds, a small union has been set up by contract workers at one of the semiconductor factories. It appears that this death could be signs that management are going to push back hard to enforce its “no union” policy.

http://www.cmedia.or.kr/2012/view.php?board=total&nid=77848&service_mode=mobile

Independent columnist Mark Steel thinks Angela Merkel and her austerity policies are dangerous enough that we should all be listening in on her phone calls.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel

THE REASON there’s now such a vast network of global surveillance, we’re told by British and American governments, it’s essential in defending our security against terrorist plots. So that must be why the U.S. authorities tapped the phone calls of Angela Merkel.

She doesn’t look the type, but that’s always the way with radical Islamic jihadists who’ve worked their way into being chancellor of Germany so they can inflict glorious holy war upon the infidels, so we should be thankful the Feds were on to her.

They’ve probably already decoded her sinister messages, declaring, “This call here, where she says ‘We must maintain the strength of the euro for the fiscal year 2013-14,’ it means ‘Kill the bastards. Kill them all without mercy. And don’t forget to strap the explosive to your chest extra tight as that Velcro tends to come undone, and if those explosives spill all over the bus, you’ll feel a right fool.’”

There are other possibilities, I suppose. Maybe the FBI suspects she’s part of the Berlin criminal underworld. So while she’s in her office late at night, Obama’s in a van outside, listening to her make calls such as, “Oi Nobby. I think Plod’s on to us. We’ve got an informer, and I suspect François Hollande. If he asks any questions, don’t say nothing, he might be wearing a wire.”

Or she might be dealing. All evening, when the other German ministers think she’s preparing her speech for a summit somewhere, she’s weighing out grass and telling customers, “This is good shit. At the G20, this was everywhere, the prime minister of Japan was ripped all through the agreement on fishing rights.”

The only other explanation is there’s a side to Barack Obama we haven’t seen before, and he’s like an old man in an East End pub. So he kept saying, “I tell you what, Michelle–that Merkel might look all innocent, but as my granddad said, never trust the Bosch. One minute, they’re having a friendly chat about interest rates, then while you’re not looking, the Sudetenland’s gone. I’ll tap her phone to see what she’s up to.”

The confusing part is you could understand America tapping the phones of world leaders if it was Silvio Berlusconi or Vladimir Putin. Their calls could be put on sale, to be downloaded for a dollar each or put on an 800 number to wipe out the American debt.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

BUT TO be fair, this comforting sense of us all being constantly surveyed ought to be extended, if we’re to feel truly safe. For example, surely no one would object if the CIA had a secret camera placed in all our toilets, in case any of us is using the privacy of our khazi to plot a hijacking.

This is why no reasonable person objects to their e-mails being checked and passed on to governments. Because how can our police force expect to protect us from suicide bombers if they don’t know when a woman in a cottage by a river in Suffolk has ordered a set of china cups and saucers on special offer on Amazon?

The only complaint that can be made is that if everything we do and say is being so closely monitored, we ought to be allowed to get our phone calls sponsored. Then, whenever we phone a relative, as long as at some point we say, “While I remember, Mum, one thought I was having about Christmas is elephant.co.uk–that’s elephant.co.uk–then we can come up on Boxing Day,” we can make surveillance pay. With all the security officials who will hear that, there could be an arrangement that would make telephone calls almost free.

The justification for these levels of spying is that we’re facing a threat to our way of life, so that’s why we need more of it–to protect all those ways of life and not just a few. For example, the disabled should be allowed to tap the phone of Iain Duncan Smith, so they can be aware of whatever he’s plotting next. This could be valuable information, giving them advance notice of a “one wheelchair between two” scheme, or a plan to make them rent out their artificial legs as poles in lap-dancing clubs.

So we need more surveillance, but it should be us surveying them. As one of the most powerful people in Europe, Angela Merkel should be surveyed, by everyone except the only institution even more powerful than hers.

The American government hasn’t, over the years, been all that touchy about blowing things up–so it’s probable that the main reason they want to listen in to the phone calls of terrorists is so they can pick up tips. So we should be listening in to them. Over the last decades, if people round the world had found out that Henry Kissinger or Donald Rumsfeld had Googled “Flowers of the Amazon” or bought tickets to see Barbara Streisand, we WOULD be entitled to think, “Hang on, what are they up to”–and detain them for a couple of months, just in case.

So it seems quite reasonable to propose a deal in which the taps on Mrs. Merkel’s phones stay in place, and all the spying equipment in the world is kept going. It’s just the people doing it that’s changed. Maybe Edward Snowden can be put in charge. He seems to know how it works.

First published in the Independent.

Cops attack demonstrators

Students protesting against education cuts were attacked by police in Melbourne today writes Red Flag. Seven were arrested during the demonstration.

Sarah Garnham, spokesperson for the Victorian Education Action Network, which organised the rally, told Red Flag:

“Victoria Police clearly had a premeditated agenda of attacking our peaceful protest. They came out of nowhere. Riot cops moved in on the crowd and pulled people out. One of the first people they arrested, Lauren Stevenson, was unconscious as they pulled her towards the paddy wagon. We attempted to get an ambulance to her, but police said an ambulance would not be allowed to attend because she was under arrest. So they put her in the paddy wagon unconscious and drove away.”

Among those arrested was Jay Wimarra, the 2014 First Nations Officer at the La Trobe student union. Garnham says that his arrest was no coincidence: “Organisers of the protest believe this is in accordance with the racial discrimination that is well known in Victoria Police; they regularly harass and arrest indigenous people.”

Wimarra spoke to Red Flag after his release from police custody, saying: “Under no circumstances should any student stand for this kind of hostile reaction from the state. No student should have to bear the brunt of some bureaucrat’s decision to slash nearly $3 billion out of education. This is our education. The only ones who should be defining it is us and our educators and of course our unions.”

Jessica Lenehan, recently elected Education Officer at La Trobe University, and an activist in the La Trobe Socialist Alternative student club was also at the rally. La Trobe students had a particular incentive to join the anti-cuts protest today. Their university administration has just announced devastating cutbacks of $65 million. Lenehan told Red Flag:

“We had a peaceful protest. After starting at Parliament House we marched to Liberal Party headquarters. While we were there we threw a couple of shoes at the building, we chalked some slogans on the ground. Nothing violent. But at a certain point the police clearly decided this was unacceptable, and marched through shoving people out of the way, and made a couple of arrests.

“They dragged one woman away. They shoved her into a police van, and another man was arrested. After that the police again and again charged the crowd. They dragged people away, they beat people up. It was just an incredibly brutal display.

“Accusations of protester violence from the police are ludicrous. We told them what our intentions were. We told them we were marching to Liberal headquarters. We had informed them about shoes being thrown at the building. It’s just ridiculous, especially given there were so many police there. Many times more than were necessary for the protest. They were deliberately trying to intimidate people out of protesting.”

Declan Murphy, recently elected Education Officer at Monash Student Association, explained how the police attacks continued even after demonstrators had left Liberal Party headquarters:

“Some of us decided to march down to East Melbourne police station to make a formal complaint. The police told us we were allowed to do this. Nonetheless on the way down the police assaulted the demonstration four additional times. I think a further four people were arrested. They were clearly targeting non-white people and women who happened to find themselves on the fringes of the demonstration.

“Then, on Swanston Street after we’d decided not to continue marching on to East Melbourne police station and we were coming up to Trades Hall, they assaulted the rally again and arrested another person. It was a clear and despicable attempt by the police but we will not be intimidated and we’ll keep protesting both for our democratic right to demonstrate and for a fair and equitable education system.

“People are a bit shocked by the disproportionate response of the police but are also quite defiant. We just had a post rally meeting where we got together and decided how we’re going to respond as a collective campaign. The clear vibe was that there would be more demonstrations. We’re not going to put up with attempts by police to shut us down.”

Here is an interview with Sarah Garnham on 3AW.

And Sarah on Sunrise.

To comment or see what others are saying, hit the comment slink under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

Marx’s statement that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class is fundamental to the socialist project. It is the working class which liberates itself. Socialism is not the Red Army marching into Eastern Europe; nor is it peasants and intellectuals leading the charge to socialism on behalf of workers.

Only the working class can liberate itself. Workers cannot rid themselves of ‘all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’ without being the revolution.

So it was that in Russia in 1917 workers entered onto the stage of history and set up their own democratic organs of power – called workers’ councils or Soviets in Russian.

These were the most democratic institutions the world has seen – direct representation from the workplace, the right of instant recall by workers of representatives who voted against their wishes, Soviet members with their pay limited to the average wage, all with the aim of the councils making decisions about what to produce to satisfy human need.

The elected representatives would go back every day to the factories to debate and discuss issues with workers and receive instructions from them about forthcoming sessions and how to vote.

The war, foreign invasion, the destruction of industry and the working class and the failure of the revolution to spread to Germany (although it was a close run thing) and thus provide material support to help re-build the Russian economy, saw the Russian revolution isolated.

The workers’ councils, without a working class to run them, became shells, and Stalin, the gravedigger of the revolution, over time rose to power. He did so on the bodies of the old Bolsheviks, those who understood the centrality of the working class to revolution and democracy, in other words to socialism.

Stalin and the bureaucracy he represented established state capitalism in Russia. This is where the state becomes the embodiment of capital and expropriates all the surplus value its workers create. One of its historical roles is, in the name of ‘socialism’, to pull peasant countries up by the bootlaces to become fully fledged capitalist countries. As Stalin said to his managers in 1931:

We are 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us!

The first Russian five year plan in 1930, by halving wages, driving peasants off the land and into the cities and moving to build large scale industry in competition with the West, was the first step in building state capitalism in Russia. Primitive accumulation and then competition, especially military competition, imposed the law of value on the USSR and its satellites.

Having created its own gravedigger in the form of a powerful working class, is it any surprise Stalinism is merely transitory? Historically it looks as if state capitalism is a conduit or stepping stone from peasant societies to market capitalism.

The dictators can attempt to control this move to the ‘free’ market much as China and Vietnam have done and Cuba is doing by the state itself managing the transition. The fear the dictators have is that the masses will rise up against the rotten regimes as they did in Eastern Europe and the USSR and replace the state capitalist regimes and their political leadership with some form of more democratic capitalism.

The task now is for that working class which state capitalism created, especially the massive and powerful Chinese working class, to rise up against all forms of capitalism and reclaim the tasks of democratic and economic liberation begun by the Russian working class in 1917 for all of humanity.

I live in Canberra, a supposedly a left wing town. It is more the town of comfortable middle class leftism than working class struggle, although the Liberals’ threat to get rid of 12000 public servants might spark some response. This is unlikely given the pathetic nature of what passes for a public service ‘union’, but it is possible if workers organised independently of the officials. I don’t see that happening at the moment.

Yet despite this reputation for being left wing our Federal Labor politicians are a conservative bunch. Gai Brodtmann, my local member, is from the right.

Senator Kate Lundy is Left but voted for Shorten, one of a number of the Left who delivered the leadership to the Right. Clearly the Left in the ALP is now nothing more than a job placement agency because it has nothing else to distinguish it from the Right.

Andrew Leigh, the MP across the lake, is an independent, supposedly a rank and file member. He is also a former Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and enthusiastically supported the Gillard government’s combined $3.8 billion in higher education cuts to a demo of over 100 ANU students at his Office.

In his role as Shadow Assistant Treasurer he was interviewed today about the Labor’s position on Abbott’s moves to abolish the Carbon Tax. Here is what Andrew told Sky News on Tuesday:

We said we would scrap the carbon tax, the fixed price period, and move straight to a floating emissions trading scheme. That’s something that we will be happy to vote for on the floor of parliament.

There is an ambiguity to that statement. It countenances scrapping the carbon tax without an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in place. Well, the legislation already does that. From 1 July 2015 under the law as it currently stands the carbon tax will go and an ETS will replace it.

In response to pressure from climate change denier Tony Abbott what Labor said before the last election was that it would bring that date for the ETS forward by a year, to 1 July 2014, if re-elected. That way Labor could say in the run up to the 7 September election it too supported the repeal of the carbon tax.

Labor wasn’t re-elected so the seemingly obvious position would be to oppose both the Government’s repeal of the carbon tax and their attempt to introduce the joke called Direct Action. That would see the ETS start from 1 July 2015.

Of course the change of the Senate on 1 July 2014 with an influx of nutters from the Palmer United Party and other fruit loops will see the Government have the numbers to abolish the tax the day after.

What Labor wants to avoid is being labelled carbon tax supporters over the next 8 months and blamed for electricity price increases.

In fact the main reason for price rises has been the need for the privatised providers to finally spend some money on infrastructure after years and years of under-funding. The tax cuts more than compensated, at least in the short term, for the anticipated impact of the carbon tax.

But Labor fear that Abbott might be on a winner with his latest slogan about Shorten, describing him as Electricity Bill and Electricity Bill Shock.

We need to be clear. Labor doesn’t have a commitment to the environment. It has a commitment to capitalism and getting elected. That means one conclusion some or even many of its parliamentarians will draw is that to get re-elected they have to abandon the carbon tax.

Certainly the Fairfax Press were reporting on Tuesday that Labor would dump the carbon tax and I think Andrew Leigh’s weasel words indicate the fix is on.  As Tom Allard and Mark Kenny put it in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Labor is expected to support axing the carbon tax, with senior figures – including leader Bill Shorten – now convinced that its case for action on climate change will be more easily sold if the politically toxic tax is abolished.

The more the irrelevant discourse between the Government and Opposition goes on, and the more the leaders of the major powers refuse to act, the more convinced do I become that capitalism cannot address climate change.

Capitalism is about short term profit. Sometimes the state steps in to impose longer term solutions on capital that benefit the whole system, but there is no supranational State body with the power to do or organise that in relation to the global threat that is climate change. Military and economic competition, especially between China and the US,  make any significant transnational agreement highly unlikely.

Attempts at a national level have been episodic and tied to markets and the neoliberal idea that adjustments to price (carbon taxes) or artificial trading markets in polluting permits (an ETS or ETSs) will solve the problem.

They won’t because pollution is an externality to production for individual capitalists and there is no capitalist mechanism to value the cost of the destruction climate change is and will wreak. Suffice to say that a carbon price of $23 a tonne of CO2 emissions wasn’t ever going to be enough to produce significant change. At best it would have locked in a shift to gas and locked in that fossil fuel for the next 50 years.

The move to an ETS and joining up with the European ETS would have seen the price drop to around the current $6 a tonne if implemented now. That’s not enough to scratch my bum let alone address climate change.

Yet a price of say $100 a tonne, while it would have made wind and solar power competitive with fossil fuel electricity plants, would destroy the economy.  First it would increase the costs of production (but only in Australia if it is not an international scheme.) Second, without price controls (something the Greens, labor and the Coalition, the parties of neoliberal capitalism are never going to do) such an increase would massively cut workers’ living standards and perhaps spark massive strikes to regain lost real wages, or destroy many workers’ lives with the consequent massive increase in unemployment and poverty.

System Change, not Climate Change

It looks to me as if profit and competition are the barriers to addressing climate change. If that is the case then only a democratic revolution of workers to run society to satisfy human need can address climate change. As the banners at some environmental demonstrations and eco-socialist conferences say ‘System Change, not Climate Change.’

To comment, or see what others are saying, hit the comments link under the heading. Comments close after 7 days.

The day after the bushfires ravaged the Blue Mountains and other parts of New South Wales, destroying hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of lives, the Abbott government cut back on emergency relief payments.

This was a deliberate, cynical cost cutting measure to save a few million dollars, spurred by the possible looming payouts for those adversely affected by the fires.  The decision to attack the victims of bushfires was either brazen braggadocio  or political stupidity.

Whatever it was, it certainly shows the contempt the Abbott government has for ordinary people.  So what did they do?

The misnamed ‘Justice’ Minister Michael Keenan decided that people who have been denied access to their homes for more than 24 hours or who have had their electricity cut off will no longer receive the emergency payment of $1000 per adult and $400 per child in a household affected by the fires.

Under the Liberals only those whose homes have been destroyed or significantly damaged, who have been seriously injured or had a family member killed, will be eligible for relief. Those kept out of or kept in their homes, those without electricity or water, or those with less than substantial damage will receive nothing. Under Labor they were helped.

This callous cost saving shouldn’t surprise us. The Abbott government is a government of vicious ruling class bastards whose ascension to power was only possible because of the anti-working class actions of the other party of neoliberalism, the Labor Party.

Already the Abbott government’s actions show what it really thinks about workers – we are all the enemy and that doesn’t matter if we are building workers, child care workers, low paid workers struggling to save for our retirement, or even bushfire victims.

Of course they can’t always openly display their contempt for us, if they want to get re-elected, so they often try to channel our anger at enemies. Refugees are the main target but the enemies within – bikies openly and unions more quietly – are beginning to come into target range for the representatives of the 1%.

The Abbott government fully supports its kindred spirits in the Queensland government and their repressive unlawful associations laws. It has rushed to the High Court to prevent gays and lesbians – often a favourite ruling class target of prejudice – from marrying.

It is reviving the Australian Building and Construction Commission under whose last watch deaths on building sites went up. While the Abbott government has launched a judicial enquiry into 4 pink batt deaths, there will be no enquiry into the direct link between the ABCC and increased deaths on building sites.

Least of all will there be an enquiry into the contribution rich donors to the Liberal Party make to building site deaths by cutting safety standards in the name of profit.

The Abbott government has reneged on a deal by the previous government to give child care workers better pay as they improve their qualifications.

Tony Abbott will pay women earning $150000 a year $75000 for six months maternity leave. That rich woman can then drop of her child at a child care centre where the workers, mainly women, are paid less than $40,000 a year.

Tony Abbott will also abolish the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, the tax that wasn’t but could have been under Labor.  Evidently Gina and Twiggy and their companies don’t earn enough to pay the tax.  Evidently a tax on the super rich is class war.

But abolishing the MRRT also means the Abbott government will save $13 billion a year by, among other things, abolishing the school kids’ bonus of $410 for primary and $820 for secondary students, a payment received by 1.3 million families.

They are going to stop paying superannuation contributions of $500 for workers earning less than $37000. They will also abolish the superannuation tax on the 16,000 Australians with superannuation balances greater than $2 million.

None of this of course is class war.  Neither is cutting the tax free threshold from $18200 back to $6000. It is not clear if they will fully reinstate the Low Income Tax Offset.  Cutting LITO was the sleight of hand Swan used to save money when raising the tax free threshold.

Estimates are that moving back to $6000 as the tax free threshold will see an extra one million low paid workers dragged back into the tax system and paying income tax again on their small salaries.

Abbott will abolish the private health insurance rebate restrictions, a measure that will cost $2.4 billion and benefit couples earning more than $168,000. Those workers earning less that $84000, the vast majority of workers,  will receive no benefit from this measure.

None of this should surprise us. The Abbott government is a government of the rich and powerful. It has shown by its actions that we workers are the enemy.

If it feels emboldened enough to cut funding to bushfire victims then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

That is where the Commission of Audit comes in. The Liberal government has set up this Commission under the leadership of Business Council of Australia henchmen and former Howard Minister Amanda Vanstone to slash public services  and privatise government agencies and instrumentalities.

The Commission will hand down 2 reports – one in January and one in March  and the Government will implement the recommendations as it sees fit as part of the Budget. There will be no consultation.

Public servants, whose wages and on costs make up about 15% of government spending, will be a particular focus.  Of course given that cutting their numbers by eight percent only reduces the budget expenditure in the long term by $5 billion, the Liberals will cut more than their promised ’12,000 by natural attrition.’ Or was that 20,000?

Either way it own’t make much of a dent in a $40 billion Budget deficit, a deficit likely to get bigger as business profits, and hence business tax, continues to fall.

The buzz words of the Government, of business and of the Commission are and will be efficiency and productivity. Labour productivity has increased markedly over the last decade with almost all the gains going to capital. Capital productivity has fallen.

Efficiency is just code for doing more work with less staff. All they can see by turning Post Offices into Centrelink Offices is the money they will save. They don’t see the long queues, the untrained post office staff having to deal with Newstart poverty and angry people everywhere.

There will be more of these harebrained schemes, all driven by the dollars saved and possibly implemented as a consequence.

More generally the Liberal government will try to slow down wage increases even more. Reviving the ABCC is an important part of that strategy because building unions are almost the last bastion of working class consciousness, and sometimes action, in Australia. If the Liberals can smash them then it will send a message to all trade unionists wanting to fight. ‘We smashed the most powerful unions; we can smash you.’

Of course the lapdogs of capital in the Australian Council of Trade Unions and most other unions won’t fight and won’t defend the building unions.

It is up to those unions and particularly the rank and file to lead the fight and for members of all unions and the Left to lend a hand at the picket lines, send solidarity messages, donations, make the case for the unions’ actions and the like.  Most importantly it is up to union members in the current lapdog led unions to try to build layers of resistance to the attacks of the bosses and their lackeys in the trade union leadership.

Let’s prepare right now for the conflagration the Liberals want to unleash on us in the May Budget and the spot fires the government arsonists have already been starting. Be Abbott aware now.

A more humane and just society where all bushfire victims are treated fairly can be won, but that means joining with all those under attack from the Liberals. Most importantly it means workers taking action to defend their own interests against the attacks of the one percent and their Liberal government. We can beat them back with strikes.

To comment or see what others are saying hit the comments link under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service in Melbourne writes:

My first reaction to seeing this article in the Hebrew was wow. I wrote: This is the kind of strong article with a message that even Gideon Levy only produces a couple of times a year. Fully expecting Haaretz to translate this item.

Well they didn’t so here it is. I reiterate IMHO this is exceptional article. I’d also like to point out that Thursday, the eve of the Israeli weekend is not a good day for difficult to translate items. Gideon Levy makes so many Israeli-specific allusions, this took a bit of effort and a lot of time. Not to mention it’s longer than the original – Sol.

Bakri, Bakri

Gideon Levy

24 October 2013

We love our “Israeli Arabs” in flat bread, whether in the smaller thicker pita or the larger, thinner Druze/Lebanese lafa. For us it’s hummus at  Abu-Shukri ( “the genuine article” ), Koftas at Diana’s and kebabs at Al Barbour – that’s the way we love them. That’s how we fancied  Muhammad Bakri when he played a leading role in Beyond the Walls. He was awarded the David’s Violin prize for it. That’s also how we loved his son Saleh: when he starred in the Band’s Visit. For that role he won an Ophir Prize – the Israeli equivalent of the Oscars. That’s the way we love ourselves as well: Look at us, so enlightened, so egalitarian. Arab actors are beautifully successful in the only democracy. Why, we even broadcast Arab Labour — which pokes fun at Jewish-Arab relations in this country — on prime time. How liberal is that?

But look, look at what happens when those “good Arabs” step outside the hummus-chips-salad boundaries that we’ve designated for them –  they immediately become the enemies of the people. It was like that with Muhammad, and same again with Saleh. Their story stretches far beyond the boundaries of their village, Ba’ana, it extends even beyond their roles in the Israeli theatre and cinema. The Bakri Saga is the story of the Israelis’ attitude to the Palestinian citizens of the state.

The slanders against Muhammad Bakri began immediately after several members of his extended family were suspected of involvement in deadly Mount Meron terrorist attack, for which two of them were convicted. Bakri the elder became a marked man. Then came Jenin, Jenin oh, Jenin, Jenin, and he was sentenced to the vilest form of character assassination and to a life of ostracism and persecution. All Israeli propaganda films, whether overt or covert, are all based on pure  unadulterated truth, and only the Jenin, Jenin is a lie that need to haunted to death. No war crimes were committed in the destroyed Jenin camp; of course not. And Bakri who may have exaggerated a little in his film, is the real criminal.

The High Court of Justice, sitting as Film Review Board, decreed that film was made for an improper reasons. That was a particularly puzzling and outrageous criterion, although it rejected the libel suit filed by a group of voluble, patriotic reservists. Since then, this gifted creator, this wonderful actor and esteemed director who was so integrated into the art scene, has become a broken man. He who was opposed to violence on both sides, and who was as sharply critical of his own people at least as much he was of his state has, became a bitter person  his voice has almost been silenced and the fount of his work has almost dried up.

Now it’s the son’s turn. Saleh said in an interview aired this week in Belgium, that he does not feel any connection to Israel. “It ruined my life, my father’s life, the life of my people.” Why should he feel otherwise. Unlike Istvan Szabo’s Mephistopheles, Saleh said that he won’t act anymore in Israeli plays and films. “My decision is a protest against the rising fascism”, he explained. He is unwilling to serve as fig leaf “to make Israel look good, as a flourishing democracy.”

Yuck, what ungrateful so-and-sos. The Israelis “let” the father study at Tel Aviv University and appear on the stages of the national theatre Habima, as well as in the Haifa and Khan theatres. The son was  permitted to study at the Ben-Zvi Institute and perform at national theatre and at the Acco Festival [in Acca/Acco/Acre.] To paraphrase the prophet Isaiah: Children [Arabs] we have raised and exalted, yet they have rebelled against us.

When Muhammad was being pursued over his film, almost all his fellow artists, actors and directors remained silent. Almost no one came to his aid, no one protested his persecution because of his work. Now that Saleh has expressed his protest and is willing to pay a heavy personal price, this disgraceful silence of the lambs would continue.

Mohammed and Saleh are bad Arabs. They are unwilling to continue to participate in a masquerade called Israeli democracy. They are unwilling to dance to the sounds of the Israeli Magic Flute, which shows them off as a badge of honour, as long as they are submissive slaves . They are  unwilling to cuddle up to racism whether institutionalised or popular. They don’t want to entertain the Israelis who are part of this racism and thus help them feel so good about themselves. But instead of father and son being shown solidarity and esteem, at least among the so-called Israeli avant-garde, the response to their action has been a shameful silence . Bakri and his son will not play with us anymore, so what? We have the next music reality TV coming up.

Hebrew original: http://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.2147653

Translated by Sol Salbe of the Middle East News Service, Melbourne, Australia. facebook.com/sol.salbe