En Passant

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After the Chilcot Report was handed down, the lying rodent, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, crawled out from under his taxpayer funded dung heap today to defend his decision to join with Blair and Bush in invading Iraq in 2003. Among other things he said: ‘There was no lie. There were errors in intelligence, but there was no lie.’

Let’s be clear. They lied to us to justify the criminal imperialist invasion. Bush lied to the American people and the world to justify it. Blair lied to the British people and the world to justify it. Howard lied to the Australian people to justify it.

As independent MP Andrew Wilkie says Howard and others have blood on their hands.

It is the blood not just of those, including Australians, who have died at the hands of the terrorists that the invasion spawned. It is the blood of the perhaps more than 1 million Iraqis, mainly civilians, who have died as a result of the invasion. It is the dead and destroyed soldiers on all sides.

The madness the invasion began continues today in Iraq and Syria. ISIS is the end result of the invasion. Millions of refugees in the Middle East and a few hundred thousand in Europe or wanting to flee to Europe are a testament to the lies of our bloodthirsty rulers. Today’s version of those rulers now wants to stop the tide of humanity their bombs have unleashed. Don’t invade might be a good starting point.

War criminals like Bush, Blair and Howard will never face any court of justice. That is for Western supported dictators who go rogue.

The real justice they must face is that of the millions who said no to the war in Iraq before and while it was happening. The demonstrations in Australia against the invasion of Iraq were the biggest ever seen in our history. I along with 15000 others marched in Canberra against the war. Hundreds of thousands turned out in the big Australian cities. Howard ignored us all to join with Bush in this reckless imperialist adventure to re-establish the US as the dominant power in the region and the world. It failed miserably.

Howard joined with Bush not because he is a Yankee lap dog but because it was in the interests of Australian capitalism to do so. Australia is an imperialist power in the region and wants to expand its influence. It can really only do so now under the umbrella of US power. Joining the invasion is also an insurance policy for future US protection against the other growing power in the region, China. That is why we are hosting a US base in Darwin as the uS under Obama tilts towards the region, recognising the growing threat Chinese imperialism poses to the US’s dominant role across the globe.

By all means let’s demand Bush and Blair and Howard be sent to The Hague to be put on trial for war crimes. It will not happen. Let’s build a mass movement that doesn’t fall like a shooting star (as the anti-Iraq War movement did, partly because the ALP supported it once troops were sent.) That means building movements against war, against racism, against Islamophobia, against attacks on unions and on living standards. Most of all it means building a vibrant fighting left. That is why I am a member of small socialist group Solidarity. Let’s join together in the fight against war, against imperialism, against austerity, against capitalism.

Terina: ‘I hope that Tony Blair is held accountable for the lies he told and the deaths he caused’ (Pic: Socialist Worker)

Socialist Worker UK has ongoing coverage of the Chilcot Report. It is time to try Tony Blair for war crimes.

To read the regular updates click here. Chilcot Report destroys Blair’s case for war

The election has delivered a savage blow to Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition government write the editors of socialist magazine Solidarity.

Turnbull’s attempt to convince voters he could offer jobs and stability has failed. His corporate tax cuts and his attempt to use Brexit and global uncertainty to push up the Coalition vote went nowhere. Now, the Coalition is in turmoil.

Their efforts to fearmonger about boats and border security couldn’t save them. The face of their efforts to blame refugees for terrorism and taking jobs, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, is only hanging on by a thread in his own seat.

There are weeks of turmoil ahead as counting is finalised. It seems most likely that Turnbull will have to get support from crossbench MPs to form a minority government. Even if he succeeds, he will struggle to get legislation through parliament and certainly through the Senate.

The Liberals couldn’t even keep the infighting off TV on election night, and some are already baying for Turnbull’s blood. Right-wing Liberal Senator Eric Abetz is hinting at moves to overturn the Liberals’ superannuation changes—the centre piece of the Coalition’s budget—in the party room. Right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt denounced Turnbull as “a disaster” who has “led the party to humiliation”.

Turnbull’s plan for a double dissolution to clear the Senate of annoyances and pass his anti-union ABCC has completely backfired. The Coalition is unlikely to have the numbers to pass the ABCC legislation at a joint sitting.

Disaffection and the right

Yet despite the Coalition’s crisis, the disaffection did not all flow to Labor or Greens. Mirroring the turmoil in politics we’ve seen in the Brexit vote in the UK or the rise of Donald Trump in the US, this election registered a big swing to minor parties and independents.

This has produced a more right-wing Senate crossbench, with Liberal-lite Nick Xenophon and his team alongside a collection of racists including a revived Pauline Hanson, Jacquie Lambie and shock-jock Derryn Hinch.

Bill Shorten claims that “Labor is back”. Certainly, the effort to raise class issues such as the attacks on Medicare helped expose the Coalition as ruling for the rich.

But Labor got its second worst primary vote since 1949. A record 23.2 per cent voted for independents or minor parties.

Although The Greens did improve their vote slightly, their result was also disappointing. It seems The Greens have narrowly missed winning a second lower house seat in Batman and have lost at least one Senator.

While the party has established itself as the home of many left-wing voters, it has been unable to tap into the wider disgust with the political system or the concern about falling living standards. Instead of targeting concerns around Medicare and services, they focused on local issues and climate change, failing to pose the issue as a class question by raising demands like massive public sector investment and job creation. Instead they preferred slogans like “standing up for what matters”. Despite this, The Greens’ increased emphasis on refugee rights was a much needed counter to the fearmongering coming from both major parties, and continues to win the party support from disaffected Labor voters.

The danger is that the disaffection with the mainstream parties can be pulled to the right.

Turnbull’s anti-refugee racism, the dog-whistling over terrorism and the shootings in Orlando have all encouraged Islamophobia, with Labor failing to oppose it. This has legitimised the rise of Pauline Hanson, who has picked up a Queensland Senate seat.

The Australian election result mirrors the political farce in the US with Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton as mainstream Presidential candidates, after the Democrats rejected the massive popular upswell for Bernie Sanders’ campaign against inequality. The Brexit vote also represented a rejection of the neo-liberal status quo.

Over the next few weeks, the mainstream political focus will be on parliamentary manoeuvres of one sort or another.

A Turnbull minority government will be a weaker government. Yet we can’t just rely on Liberal legislation or the next round of cuts being blocked in the Senate.

The next few weeks are crucial for setting the political agenda for the coming period.

Refugee rights, equal marriage, saving Medicare, protecting penalty rates and action on climate change will not be determined by what happens in parliament. The fight against racism and austerity will be determined by what happens in the streets and the workplaces.

Public servants are still fighting against the Liberal government’s job and wage cuts. The industrial campaign needs to be stepped up.

Refugee and equal marriage rallies are already being planned. We need demonstrations to defend Medicare and action on the campuses to stop fee increases or cuts to university spending. We need a serious approach to fighting Islamophobia and standing with the Muslim community.

And we need to build socialist organisation to strengthen the fight in every campaign and to fight for a socialist system that produces to meet human need, and not for profit.

(Image by Alex Proimos via commons.wikimedia.org)

My article in Independent Australia today on the election

John Passant discusses Australia’s close election result and what is says about our disengagement with out of touch politicians.

Australians deliver reality check for major parties in election cliffhanger

Well, what an election. The electorate gave Mr Harbourside Mansion the up yours and he didn’t like it. In fact on election night he went into meltdown.

At the time of writing, a hung Parliament looks the best bet, with a very very slim Coalition majority an outside possibility. If so it means Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten will have to negotiate with five MPs on cross benches – the Greens’ Adam Bandt, the Katter Party’s  Bob Katter, Rebekha Sharkie from the Nick Xenophon Team (NXT) and the two Independents Andrew Wilkie and Cathy McGowan – to form government.

In the Senate the position is even more chaotic. Rather than cleaning out the cross benches the new voting system and the Double Dissolution have perhaps increased their number and given a platform for reactionary racists like Pauline Hanson and a probable 2 others from her racist lagoon, well known law and order  obsessive and human headline Derryn Hinch, and 3 NXT members plus possibles like Fred Nile’s group. There are also 9 Greens.

The ruling class is going berserk. Their strategy to smash the building unions and more generally to slash and burn social services and social welfare to pay for tax cuts for them is in tatters. Even if he manages to hobble together a government of sorts Malcolm Turnbull as the sword bearer for the ruling class is a dead man walking.

Labor are cock-a-hoop and superficially you can understand why.  They might end up with around 72 members in the 150 seat parliament compared to the Coalition’s 73 or 74, or possibly if everything falls their way 75.   The problem is that Labor’s primary vote was only 35%, its second lowest in the last 82 years. 2013 was its lowest.

The primary vote swing to Labor is 2%. The swing against the government is 3.7%. The other beneficiaries have been the Greens (whose vote is up 1.3% to 9.9%) and groups like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the NXT.

The rise of the racist One Nation shows that 40 years of collaborative neoliberalism between Labor and the Coalition have produced lots of angry middle class people and workers. With a Labor Party that demonises refugees and supports the invasion of Aboriginal lands, and without a left wing working class radical party offering hope instead of hate, it is no surprise some workers (especially, according to the ACTU in its analysis of One Nation in its heyday before 2001 when Howard swallowed up its supporters , non-unionised regional workers) can fall for Hanson’s scapegoating of Asians, Muslims and Aborigines.  The major parties have sent the same message that Hanson gives open voice to.

The deadlock in Canberra, or given the amount of shock resonating through the ranks of the ruling class and their party, dreadlock as I like to call it, the attacks on workers in the name of the triple A credit rating, living within our means and other lies will intensify. Given Parliament will not pass many of the measures the focus will shift to battles on the ground between bosses and workers with perhaps more police activity investigating unions for their legitimate activity and dressing it up as illegal. And the cuts to health and education will be slower and over time to help buy off the crossbenchers, and the tax cuts limited for a few years to small business until the Coalition can regroup and win real power again. The alternative is Labor in power. It could well do the Liberals’ dirty work with a nod and a wink to workers while delivering structural changes that continue the shift in wealth Hawke and Keating started over 30 years ago.

We need to organise a left that opposes the racism of Hanson, Shorten and Turnbull, that opposes the cuts of Morrison and Bowen and that supports the struggles for equal love, refugees, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and women’s liberation. We need a left that points out the existential threat that climate change is to capitalism and to us.  We need a left that supports workers when they strike and fight back in other ways against the bosses.  We need a left that rejects the old state capitalist models of Stalinism and national liberation and understands that the emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class.

In the interim we must join as we can with those resisting the latest manifestation of capitalism’s cruelty and attacks.  That way we can ensure Jobson Grothe remains unemployable and we can get a glimpse of a new society built on love, not hate, and built on democratic decision making to determine what gets produced to satisfy human need not to make a profit.

Most important of all we need a left that unites to fight for Muslims, for Asians, for Aborigines against the racist attacks that governments have and will unleash. Hanson gives open voice to that and can push our society even further to the racist right if we let her.

By doing that let’s sack Jobson Grothe and all his mates.

I woke up to a TV full of smug, ugly commentators and politicians on election day. It made me coin a new word. The smuglies.

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Drinking game for tonight. Every time a commentator or politician mentions capitalism, wage slavery, abstract socially necessary labour time, exploitation, alienation, or surplus value, [fill in your own favourite Marxist expression here] have a big slug of grog. By the end of the night you will be completely sober.

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My prediction tonight – from 6 pm EST there will 52 minutes of banal banter from the smuglies and then as results begin to come in there will be smug complacent immaterial analysis from them.

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Every bloody election they parade their diabetes or heart attacks in waiting at us. And now friends are calling them democracy sausages. FFS people, this isn’t democracy… It’s a facade. They aren’t real sausages. And where’s the vegan option if this is all so bloody democratic? Answer me that you meat dictators.

There is a more serious side. This is P&Cs trying to get a bit of money because neoliberal governments don’t adequately fund education.

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Will this be 1993 or 1998?

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David Donovan from Independent Australia has his live blog on the elections here. #AusDecides2016: Federal Election LIVE BLOG.

It is a bit quiet there at the moment (4.30 pm AEST) but it will heat up once the polls close at 6 pm and the vote count starts. Declaration of interest. I write for IA every week.

Jeremy Corbyn issued the following statement, after 172 Labour MPs supported a motion of ‘No Confidence’ in his leadership.

“In the aftermath of last week’s referendum, our country faces major challenges. Risks to the economy and living standards are growing. The public is divided.

The first 3 sentences plus the last one of spin announce the Government’s priorities – making pensioners pay for multinational tax cuts. It is all about attacking the poor to give the big end of town more, and more, and more.

From BuzzFeedNews:

Twitter: @latingle

And here is what Treasurer for the rich and powerful Scott Morrison said when asked about if the ‘crack down’ would apply to pensioners (from Van Badham)

Let’s put this in perspective.

(Image via @AntiMedia)

There are lessons for Australia from the Brexit vote but they have little to do with economic “stability” as Turnbull and the Coalition would have us swallow, I write in Monday’s Independent Australia.  I finish off by saying:

‘If Labor lose this election it won’t be because they were too left wing. It will be because they weren’t left wing enough.’

To read the whole article click here. Brexit, Turnbull and fake security

Albanese and Keating. Photo: Christopher Pearce

Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating unleashed a tirade of abuse against the Greens to defend under threat Labor luminary and MP Anthony Albanese. According to Adam Gartrell in an article called Federal election 2016: Paul Keating launches withering attack on ‘pathetic’ Greens in the Sydney Morning Herald, Keating said, among other things:

‘They’re a bunch of opportunistic Trots hiding behind a gum tree trying to pretend they’re the Labor Party.’

Typical mindless vitriol from Keating which no doubt will get the Labor Party apparatchiks excited. He descended into accusing the Greens of not being a party of the environment, a claim that does not stand up to much scrutiny, no matter whether it is the left wing NSW branch we are talking about or more centrist branches.

The former Prime Minister also criticised the Greens for diverting ALP resources away from other, marginal, electorates and argued that the ALP was a party of government, unlike the Greens. Keating praised his and previous Labor governments for completely remodeling the country and pooh poohed the idea that the Greens were now the natural home for progressives.

Keating didn’t analyse why the Greens and other third parties and independents are going to receive up to 25% of the votes on 2 July. In Keating’s time this might have been 10 percent or a little bit more. Why the change?

I think Keating unintentionally answered that. Yes, Labor is a party of government. It manages capitalism for the bosses. It was Hawke and Keating who introduced neoliberalism into Australia. They were able to sell anti-working class policies to Australian workers through the trade union movement, its abandonment of class struggle and its capitulation to capitalism and trickle down lies through the Accord. The end result of the Hawke and Keating market ‘reforms’ was a shift in wealth and income from labour to capital, a trend that has continued since the mid 1980s under both the ALP and the Coalition.

Anthony Albanese has been an important part of Labor governments that have been integral to that transfer of income and wealth to capital. He is under challenge from the Greens’ Jim Casey in this election in his seat of Grayndler. Casey is a former member of the International Socialist Organisation, a group that became part of Solidarity, an organisation I am a member of.

So Keating is right then that this really is a Trots takeover of the Greens? No, it is just red baiting. Indeed, Albanese a few months ago went so far in his own redbaiting to criticise Casey for being, shock horror, a socialist.

It shows the degeneration of the Labor Party when one of its leading ‘left-wingers’ sinks to redbaiting.

A few Trots have left the lonely world of Trotdom to join the Greens. In doing that they have abandoned their supposed Trotskyism. Many more have disappeared into the quagmire of apoliticism.

There is something else that is interesting about Casey. He is the Secretary of the New South Wales Fire Brigade Employees Union. He is an example of the sort of person who in the past would have been a Labor party member, an important player in internal party machinations and eventually been given a sinecure in Parliament. Again Keating stuck to abuse rather than analysing why some union leaders are members of, and some unions are supporting, the Greens.

What you sow you reap. For the last 20 years in Parliament Albanese has been sowing neoliberalism, sometimes with leftist rhetoric. he is reaping that. A fed up section of society is looking for not just a party that treats refugees decently but also actually improves heath and education and isn’t married to capital. While I have major criticisms of the Greens for most people they appear to the left of Labor on social and economic issues. And they don’t have a history of attacking workers and their living standards on the scale that Labor has.

More and more people are voting Green because they think they are the party of progressive politics in a way Labor is not.

Jim Casey may or may not win Grayndler. It is however pretty clear that the Greens will not go away and the reason for that is that the ALP is now so right wing and so pro-market and pro-capital in government that some of its previous supporters are shifting and have shifted to what they perceive as a progressive alternative. No amount of abuse from the likes of Keating is going to change that.

To win labour votes the ALP should have labour policies.