En Passant

The racist ad is part of Labor’s well worked out and deliberate Trump strategy. The Liberal Party has disguised racism in its turn to ‘Australian’ values; the Labor Party has disguised racism in its lies about Australian jobs.

Mr President, I rise to inform the Senate that this morning I have resigned as a member of the Labor Party to set up a political movement of Australian socialists, a community of working class Australians who will share their unique gifts and talents to chart a democratic and socialist way.

This is a Queensland Labor Party ad in the run up to the Queensland State election in 2015, when they were elected. The Party, in government, approved the Adani mine.

Imagine if Labor mobilised hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to win equal love. That is a real plan B, Labor. Lead a mass civil rights campaign for equal marriage. Do it now. Call us out on to the streets to stop business as usual until we win equal love.

Amy Thomas writes in the July edition of Solidarity: “Labor is back”, claimed a triumphant Bill Shorten in his election night speech. But in truth, the result was Labor’s second lowest primary vote since the 1930s. Of an overall 3.71 swing against the Coalition, only 2.27 per cent went to Greens and Labor.

The real threat at the moment to Medicare is not privatisation. It is underfunding. Underfunding is the half way house on the way to privatisation and Labor by its failure to commit to restoring previously agreed $57 billion of funding is a key party to the long term destruction of Medicare.

A pre-occupation with Triple-A ratings mean Labor’s economic policies are only marginally more considerate of Australia’s rising inequality than those of the Coalition, writes John Passant in Independent Australia. To read the whole article click here. How can there be fairness in an unfair economy?

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.

Given the intransigence of this Australian government on baby Asha and all asylum seekers, Turnbull and Dutton will only be moved by mass action in the streets and industrial action to protect her. That mass action, like all mass movements for justice, must include a debate at least about civil disobedience. Shut down Melbourne to shut down Manus. It must include discussion of workers banning any action that might involve deporting Asha, recognising such action would be ‘illegal’ under current bipartisan industrial laws. The call by the Queensland Council of Unions for people to join the vigil and circulating a roster is especially important in this context. Unions are beginning to get involved. Now our task must be to try and harness the power workers have, to save Asha.

Let’s hope your decision to publish Kuhn’s article is a light bulb moment for Fairfax owners and senior managers that there is a big audience for left wing ideas in your newspapers, driven by the desire of millions of Australians for a social democratic country. Who knows, printing more of such articles might actually help address the disastrous decline in the Canberra Times’ readership numbers.