En Passant

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.

Here is a  20 second video of Tony Abbott, a grog monster (his words) and Australia’s Prime Minister,  doing one thing well – being a  grog monster. Says it all about Australia today. The glass is fully empty.

Abbott may be on the ropes, but we need more strikes, protests and grassroots resistance to fight the Liberals’ agenda and finish him off write the Solidarity editors.

Given Labor’s bipartisanship (read capitulation to Abbott’s rabid jingoism, his warmongering and his cult of fear) as well as its neoliberalism, my guess is that the Liberals and the National Party will be ahead in the polls by about mid April.

Here is a Prime Minister who has lied to one of his own about a $20 bn Government submarine contract to help keep himself in power. That no doubt is what good government is all about.

If he lies to his own party backbenchers, imagine what he does to us?

Me? Instead of wasting $20 bn on submarines, I’d use the money to fix public hospitals, public schools and the health system. Throw in the $24 bn on fighter jets and we could end homelessness too, improve public transport and move towards 24 hour child care facilities. With that sort of money we could easily make higher education free as well. We could even begin addressing a very real threat, climate change. I guess however good government is about priorities.

The essentially social democratic desires of the majority of the Australian people are in conflict with the needs of capital. At the moment the political consequences of this are what seems like the eternal roundabout of Labor and the Liberals. The Labor Party attacks us for 3 years to be replaced by a Liberal Party that attacks us for 3 years to be followed by a Labor Party that attacks us for 3 years. That at least appears to be the current cycle.

Can we survive 19 more months of rabid neoliberalism, of overt and covert attempts to shift more wealth from labour to capital and of a thoroughly neoliberal Labor Party waiting in the wings with the same goal? The Australian Council of Trade Unions has called nationwide demonstrations on 4 March to defend our rights. Let’s make this the first step in destroying this weak Liberal and National Party government and putting some social democratic spine into Labor. We need mass mobilisations to throw Abbott and his motley crew out and to move Labor to the left or to create a new left. Demonstrations and strikes are the way forward.

Leaders matter. What the ruling class wants and needs is not only a political leader with a program to continue and intensify the wealth shift from labour to capital but also to be able to implement it, and do so in a way that plucks the working class goose with the least hissing. Abbott is not that plucker.

I wrote an article about Abbott back in August 2012. Recent events seem to confirm my analysis. Here is a snippet. The bosses will welcome an Abbott victory. Buffoons can make good leaders for them, as Ronald Reagan and George W Bush showed in the US context. But Abbott’s instability, his thought bubble approach to policy, his climate denialist base within the extreme right of the Liberal Party and the looming economic crisis in Australia all make for a possible tumultuous period of rule for the leader of the Opposition and his by and large unremarkable front bench if they win, as they will, the next election.

The choice is clear. One of the likes of Abbott, Turnbull, Bishop, Shorten, Albanese or Plibersek leading the neoliberal attack on our jobs, wages, freedoms and social spending? Or us as workers defending jobs, wages and conditions and fighting for and winning better social services, better public health, public education and public transport, justice for aborigines and asylum seekers and a managed decade long transition to renewable energy?