En Passant

The disendorsement of sitting Liberal National Party member and Assistant Minister Jane Prentice highlights the sexist nature of the Coalition parties, I write in Independent Australia.

#BarnabyGate has exposed the reality of the ineptitude of the Turnbull Government and the end is near, writes John Passant in Independent Australia

The desire for a better world is engraved on the hearts of workers and that longing gives hope to Labor. They will dissipate that desire for a change away from business as usual politics if they don’t make their arguments in class terms. Bill Shorten is no Bernie Sanders, but he is also not Malcolm Turnbull ether.

Turnbull can smile and pontificate all he wants. Ordinary workers want to see government action that improves their lives and that of their kids. The dilemma for Turnbull is that if he does that he has no room for cutting taxes on business. His shine is wearing off as the class nature of his government becomes clearer to us all.

With nearly 80% of the vote counted the swing against the Newman government in Queensland in the Stafford by-election is 18.6%. If replicated at the election in March next year the Liberal National Party government would be wiped out, much as the Labor government at the last election in Queensland was. My thanks to Daniel […]

We are faced with a fast food political choice on 14 September – between a Maccas Labor Party and a KFC opposition. We won’t be able to survive long on either diet, and sometime soon after 14 September they’ll be force feeding us austerity. There will be no foie gras, just dead ducks all over the place.

There is an alternative to this battle of the fast food political behemoths. It is the revolutionary left, small, isolated from the class, but building gradually and gaining a toehold in the debates of society. Socialist Alternative is part of that revolutionary left. Check us out if you want a steady and healthy political diet of debate and discussion, of ideas and action, of making sense of this slaughterhouse world.

The real way to win progressive change in society is through industrial action and street struggles and then through building a socialist workers’ party that reflects and fights for workers’ interests and leads the class forward, not backward.

That means putting class and struggle on the agenda as the driving force of progressive change. It means we workers taking into our own hands our own futures through our own actions, not relying on the ALP or the Greens to deliver neoliberal policies dressed up as progress.

Victory to teachers. Victory to building workers. Victory to Queensland public servants.

The lack of a real union fight against the Bligh government laid the groundwork for a vicious anti-worker Newman government. The same lack of a union fight against the Gillard government is laying the groundwork for a vicious anti-worker Abbott Government.

The time has come to stand up against the Bobbsey twins of job slashing wage cutting neoliberalism, Labor and the coalition.