En Passant

The aim of this paper is to give readers an introduction to the Asian Development Model and use that to examine mining reforms in Indonesia. The paper argues that there is an Asian Development Model and that the Indonesian mining reforms, in particular the requirement over time for 51 percent Indonesian ownership and the ban on the export of unprocessed resources, represent an attempt by the Indonesian state to speed up industrialisation in the country and spread more of the benefits from mining to ordinary citizens in the recently democratised and politically decentralised country. In attempting to show strength however, the Indonesian state is exposing some weakness. The impact on jobs, revenue and production has been adverse although Foreign Direct Investment has increased. This latter may be because it is foreign multinational mining companies who are better placed than local mining enterprises to build smelters. The success of industrialising mining might be at the expense of local capital. In other words state intervention does not always produce all of the desired outcomes. It is not a panacea.

Why the difference in the treatment of the death of Phillip Hughes and that of building workers? In a word, profit. Safety on building sites threatens the bosses’ profit. Cricket on the other hand, as a business, reinforces the profit system, and makes its protagonists well known and loved. Let’s fight for a world in which everyone is safe at work. That means at its most basic more power to our unions, not less.

This cartoon will appear in the next issue of Red Flag. It captures perfectly the racist system that polices and kills Aboriginal people in custody in Australia.

Maybe it is time for a socialist to not just be building or supporting these progressive campaigns but to stand for the Senate in the ACT against the sell-out that is Labor.

DARREN WILSON has gotten away with murder – and the American injustice system sent the message once again that Black lives don’t matter, write Nicole Colson and Alan Maass in Socialist Worker US.

This is the link to my 30 minute interview with Sharon Firebrace on Razor Sharp on 24 November about the Victrorian elections, Abbott’s rotten policies, Grocon, safety and the CFMEU, creeping repression, fascism, the malaise in Australian politics and much more.

In not defending jobs at the ABC, the leadership of the two main unions, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance and the Community and Public Sector Union, have so far shown all the fighting spirit of wet lettuce leaves. Only staff organising independently of the leadership of the unions to strike until the government withdraws its cuts can win.

Here is a snippet from a good article in Solidarity in Australia about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It describes the Stalinist regimes as state capitalist. I would urge those interested in understanding how ‘socialism’ could be overthrown by the very workers it supposedly ruled for to read this. I would especially urge members of Socialist Alternative in Australia to read it to help re-discover their hidden history and analysis.

Thank heaven for The Australian.