En Passant

  Rightwingers think painting Bill Shorten as a radical will scare voters away from Labor. They’re wrong on all counts, I write in Independent Australia.

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 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.

I reckon Justin Trudeau is even more unelectable than that UK Labour bloke, Jeremy Corbyn. Thank heaven we in Australia have the very very electable alternative Prime Minister and Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and his party’s neoliberal, warmongering and racist policies.

Just as changing Liberal leaders won’t change the fundamentals, neither will dumping Shorten for a fake leftie like Albanese or Plibersek, or promoting a smooth right-winger like Tony Burke.

There is a message for activists and socialists in the fall of Abbott. It wasn’t Labor who defeated him. It certainly wasn’t Shorten. It was those Aboriginal, education, refugee, Medicare, feminist and other activists, the gay community and their supporters, the teachers, nurses, public servants, wharfies, building workers etc etc etc actually fighting against Abbott and his rotten policies and sending a message to the wider community about Abbott’s rotten policies and the fact you could reject them and resist them.

It is the same message we need to develop in fighting Turnbull’s neoliberalism and that of whoever is leading Labor at the next election. On to the streets to fight for equal love, against the closure of remote communities, against climate change, to free the refugees, for women’s liberation and so on. Close down our workplaces to defend jobs and wages.

The two things Tony Abbott has going for him are that the opposition within his party hasn’t coalesced around one candidate, and the Labor Party Opposition has.

Solidarity magazine has a good article on the AWU and Shorten deals with the bosses and the failure of many unions to fight the bosses. It finishes off with this: ‘Rather than a “modern” class collaborationist model of unionism, which has failed workers and just lays the basis for the Liberals to attack further, we need to get back to the politics of class struggle, by mobilising rank-and-file members, who have no interest in cosy deals.’ To read the whole article click here.

The process of the degeneration of the ALP from a capitalist workers’ party to a capitalist party is at best resulting today in a CAPITALIST workers’ party if not a capitalist party. Shorten is but one indicator of that process. Our task is to win over those who support reform to the side of revolution. Shorten and the rest of his rotten crew might make that task just a little easier.

On asylum seekers Labor has been hoist with their own petard. It would be laughable if it were not so serious. The time has come for Labor to abandon the stink bomb that is their refugee policy and welcome those fleeing war, rape, imprisonment and persecution. I know that will not happen. It is up to refugee activists to continue our long fight to defend asylum seekers. Instead of Labor and Liberal lies, that means, as a start and as Red Cross has shown, telling the truth about our abandoned brothers and sisters and exposing Labor and the government for the liars and criminals they are. It means pointing out too that the government (of whatever neoliberal persuasion) that is attacking workers and the poor also attacks asylum seekers. We are all in this together.

Why the silence on the racist nature of the Reclaim Australia rallies Mr Abbott and Mr Shorten? Could it be not only that you condone this racism but that your policies and actions have given it life and support? You can’t condemn your own children. Is that it?