En Passant

The neoliberal snake oil salesman that is Turnbull is performing the role Labor wanted to play. He has stolen their ground and unless they come up with a real alternative, a radical alternative a la Corbyn that challenges austerity, then in the short to medium term, until the reality of Turnbull’s snake oil salesmanship is revealed in practice, they will continue to rot in opposition.

Here is photographic ‘evidence’ of my view that the problem isn’t who is selling us the shit sandwich. The problem is the shit sandwich.

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.

Germany will on current estimates take 800,000 refugees this year. Germany and Australia are comparable rich countries. Germany has not quite four times Australia’s population. So why aren’t we talking about Australia taking 200,000 refugees this year? We used to take that if not more migrants. We could do it easily.

It is all about priorities, and making sure that bosses don’t rip off their workers isn’t a priority for the Abbott government in Australia. Destroying the CMFEU, one of the few unions that fights to defend its members, is. If the government can do that it makes the climate even better to drive down wages and cut conditions in other industries across Australia. 7-Eleven is a microcosm of Australia’s industrial relations. What Abbott and his hired anti-CFMEU puppets in the Fair Work industry want is a cowered and compliant building workforce a la 7-Eleven. They want workers to work longer for less, just like the 7-Eleven bosses have been doing, with the same result – more profit for the bosses.

Until an anti-austerity mass movement and its political expression arise we will continue to have bad government after bad government in Australia. That new formation will I suspect only happen when we decide to take action as the working class against whoever is in power, the Liberals or Labor.

The last big demonstrations in Australia were against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the lies of our leaders. Maybe it is time to organise protests against the next instalment of that madness, bombing Syria.

Australia is a low tax, low spending country. It’s time we started taxing the rich and the big business tax avoiders more, not less.

Unite and fight this rotten Abbott government now.

Sacking employees by email and SMS has the approval of the Liberal Government. Politicians are servants of the people, right? They are our employees. So here is my Hutchison style email to our beloved Prime Minister Tony Abbott.