En Passant

I have written about the Australian Labor Party and its changing nature viewed through the Minerals Resource Rent Tax disaster. I argue basically that it is moving from a capitalist workers’ party to a capitalist party. Passant, J. (2014). The minerals resource rent tax: the Australian Labor Party and the continuity of change. Accounting Research […]

Alex McAuley in Red Flag discuses the attempts of the government and the bosses to further cut, or even abolish, penalty rates. This drive won’t go away despite the ongoing crises in the Abbott government seeing the Employment Minister, Senator Abetz, divorce the government from the Productivity Committee inquiry and from implementing any recommendations about either penalty rates or the minimum wage before or after the 2016 election. They know as well as anyone that embracing cuts to the minimum wage and penalty rates would destroy completely their very slim chances of re-election. If, god forbid, they were re-elected they could then change their minds and implement the recommendations to cut the minimum wage and get rid of penalty rates. A government saying one thing before an election and doing something different after. Hard to believe eh?

Given that the AFP is investigating whether Gillian Triggs was asked to resign and if an inducement was offered to get her to do so, isn’t Tony Abbott’s categorical and unequivocal statement that ‘she was not asked to resign and no inducement has been offered’ itself possibly an attempt to influence and perhaps pervert the course of the investigation? Will he too be investigated?

Gillian Triggs was quite right to point out the abuse of asylum seeker children that went on under Labor and is going on under the Liberals. That should be our focus instead of the circus about so-called political partisanship that the Abbott government is using to hide its abuse of children. There is an alternative to brutalising kids. Bring them and all the other asylum seekers to Australia for release into the community.

The Australian government’s attacks on refugees have operated as a distraction while union rights, jobs and hard-won conditions and wages are under attack. Unions have always been at the forefront of campaigns for social justice, and they play a vital role in the fight for refugee rights. Please join us for the launch of Unionists for Refugees at a public meeting with ACTU President Ged Kearney from 6.30pm, Tuesday 3 March at the Belconnen Labor Club (Fred Daly Room), Chandler St, Belconnen.

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

If or when the Australian Federal Police refuses to investigate, or finds no breach, can we mount a private prosecution against Attorney General George Brandis? And if the meeting took place in Canberra, can the ACT Attorney General, and Labor Party Deputy Chief Minister, Simon Corbell, launch a prosecution?

‘This government, and the opposition that so often backs it, preaches freedom, democracy and fairness. This pledge is hollow, cover for a future of fear, poverty, desperation and insecurity, all in aid of giving a worthless government a mirage of strength and the rich a more pliant workforce.’

Remember David Hicks, Mamdouh Habib and Muhamed Haneef. Remember David Eastman. Remember the tens of thousands of asylum seekers and their children we lock up for no crime. Remember all the Aborigines our rulers imprison and our police silence.

I have no truck with Hizb ut-Tahrir. However if we seriously believe in freedom of speech and association, and understand the sorry history in Australia and elsewhere of silencing people, including the left, then we have to defend the group against attempts to ban it. Je suis Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Detention without trial, torture and other crimes are what happens, Prime Minister, when you remove ‘the benefit of the doubt’. Remember David Hicks, Mamdouh Habib and Muhamed Haneef?