En Passant

The refugee protest at Parliament House was a great display of democracy, bringing the voice of voiceless refugees to the attention of the wider public. It interrupted for a few minutes the daily posturing of the wafflers and trough sniffers in Parliament and highlighted the lives permanently interrupted on Manus Island and Nauru. This is what democracy looks like.

John Passant, well known Canberra based socialist and prospective ACT Senate candidate in 2019, welcomed the refugee protest at Parliament House. ‘It was a great display of democracy,’ Mr Passant said, ‘bringing the voice of voiceless refugees to the attention of the wider public.’ ‘It interrupted for a few minutes the daily posturing of the wafflers and trough sniffers in Parliament and highlighted the lives permanently interrupted on Manus and Nauru,’ he said.

To me the Australian police raids on Senator Conroy and his staff look very much like a gross abuse of process and an attempt to undermine democracy and one of its outlets, parliamentary privilege. They are also I suspect an attempt to silence any future whistleblowers who might reveal inconvenient truths about this or other governments. We are losing our freedoms over time and the NBN police raids on Conroy and his staff are just another striking example of that loss.

Abolishing the Senate would be the first step in democratising the bourgeois institution of Parliament.

Bob Douglas (Canberra Times Letters 19 August) has given eloquent voice to the despair many many Australians feel about their elected ‘representatives’. However I don’t think, as Bob seems to, the answer lies just in searching for better candidates. The problem is systemic. By all means consider forming new electoral alliances to fight for better representatives. But understand that the forces at play are much deeper and more entrenched than can be solved by having that nice Mr Turnbull or likable Mr Albanese (or variations on that theme) in the Lodge rather than the two pathetic alternatives offered up to us at the moment.

Abbott said the problem was not individual parliamentarians but the system of entitlements itself. That is a bit like blaming the bank for lax security rather than the thieves for stealing the money. Certainly capitalist politicians are corrupt. However the whole capitalist system is corrupt. Mass struggle against it in all its manifestations is the answer.

The Australian Federal Police won’t investigate possible misuse of parliamentary expenses independently or systemically. They and the politicians are all part of the ruling class and won’t do anything to undermine the facade of parliamentary respectability.

The police don’t normally investigate the bosses in any systematic was because they are all part of the biggest group of robbers on the planet today, the ruling class. Far better to target alienated working class men and distract attention away from the real criminals

The Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research, Chris Bowen MP, and the Minister for School Education, Peter Garrett MP, have announced an ambitious plan to improve the quality of Parliamentarians.

Everyone recognises we are tired of the crooks, duds, time servers, megalomaniacs and lazy bastards who make up our parliamentary class. We demand and expect more and this Labor government is at the forefront of delivering on its promises to increase the quality of parliamentarians through its National Plan for Improvement of Politicians.

Here is a transcript of an interview with the Ministers explaining the government’s approach. In the interests of literacy a few words have been changed.

To win back our trust maybe the Parliament should open up all the expense information it has to public scrutiny. It could set up an expense investigation committee to go over all the claims of the last few years with a forensic fine tooth comb.

We have a good role model. The equivalent of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and its draconian powers could be set up to smash alleged rorting by a small group allegedly holding the rest of us to ransom through their allegedly criminal behaviour.

Dave Oliver from the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Dave Noonan from the building workers’ union and Julian Assange might be good nominees to carry out the investigation.