En Passant

The nurses’ fight is the fight for the rights of the mass of the population to decent wages, safe workloads, and a quality public health system.

The farcical Punch and Judy show in Canberra is a consequence of the lack of fight from the trade union movement over the last 30 years. Victorian nurses are showing a different way, a better way, to win better pay and conditions and by doing that challenging the bosses’ industrial laws. Nurses in Victoria can win their demands, if they keep the industrial action going. They could even defeat the Fair Work Act penal powers and strike restrictions. The sideshow in Canberra won’t produce real change. Strikes can.

The nurses’ actions, the Portuguese general strike and the Egyptian revolution won’t rate too much of a mention in the news in Australia. It’ll all be Slipper, Slipper, Slipper. This Parliamentary cretinism is a side show to the class struggle. Victory to the Egyptian revolution. Victory to Portuguese workers. Victory to Victorian nurses.

Having socialists involved in the struggles of the day, socialists with an understanding of the tasks necessary to win a better world here and now and into the future and coalescing around common ideas about socialism and democracy is an important part of the ultimate success of the liberationist project.

QANTAS workers could walk off the job tonight, and picket to stop any supplies or personnel getting in or out. That way, like the magnificent Fair Work Australia and government defying Victorian nurses, they might have a chance of winning.

Victorian nurses have the power to destroy the system of fines and threats of jail that are part and parcel of Labor’s Fair Work Act. Indeed, such is the importance of this dispute that other workers and unions should be mobilising in support of the nurses to help them smash Labor’s draconian and anti-worker Fair Work Act and win better pay and conditions.