People power can push back the austerity budget

Vanguard July 2014
Alice M.

The Australian people are angry with the Abbott government and the austerity budget.  The harsh budget attacks people’s livelihoods and delivers to the profiteering local and foreign big business corporations.

The Abbott government has done the people a favour in openly exposing big corporations and their peak representative bodies, the Business Council of Australia and the Mining and Minerals Councils, as the real architects behind the anti-people budget.

The tiny handful comprising big business, banks, mining corporations and multinational monopolies are the only ones to reap the benefits of this country’s wealth. This is the monopoly capitalist and imperialist class rulers in Australia who own and control Australia’s economy and parliament.

The mass anger and desire to fight back the Abbot government and the budget is wide and strong.   It’s publicly expressed in the grass roots March Australia and in unions’ rallies, the union delegates and community meetings, newspapers flooded with letters and on radio talk back.

More than 30,000 angry workers and community supporters took to the streets of Melbourne (above) on Thursday June 16 in the “Bust the Budget” rally organised by the Victorian Trades Hall Council.

In Sydney hundreds of union delegates packed an angry meeting, calling for immediate action by unions to “Bust the Budget”. 

The ruling class is sensing the growing public anger and the determination to resist the attacks.  Laws to ban protests and jail the protestors are rushed in.

Queensland and Victorian state governments are now joined by the Tasmanian government pushing through anti-democratic laws that openly intimidate and suppress peoples’ struggles.

The main target of these anti-democratic laws is the organised working class. When organised and mobilised, armed with an independent working class agenda and programme for a new society, working people collectively have the power to challenge the rule of capital and big business.

The ruling class of big business has its own class agenda that demands the economic burden of imperialist and capitalist crisis is shifted on to the people.  It instructs the capitalist state to crush peoples’ resistance.

The working class advances an independent people’s agenda that’s not tied to the profiteering interests of capital and its lackeys in parliament. 

An independent working class agenda and immediate demands that extend beyond the state and federal parliamentary elections will unite many diverse and large sections of the people, from different walks of life.  90% of Australian people are under attack.

Workers, city and rural communities, pensioners, small and medium farmers, environmentalists, artists, scientists, professional workers and many small businesses are all attacked by imperialism and monopoly capital.  

The lessons of the Your Rights @ Work are Worth Fighting For campaign should serve as a reminder. In channelling this entire broad grass roots, unions and communities campaign into parliamentary elections, and then shutting it down once Labor was elected in 2007, has left the working people weaker in fighting the present attacks.

The unions and all working people would be in a stronger position today to resist the attacks had the Your Rights @ Work Are Worth Fighting For campaign not been taken out of the hands of the people and dismantled.   

This was followed by the Labor government again hosing down the strong and wide public support for the imposition of a 40% super profits tax on the multinational mining corporations.  The Rudd/Gillard governments caved in to the demands of mining monopolies, and ended in a mini coup.

This budget is only a prelude to capital’s more severe attacks on the working people.

People’s demands for justice and fairness are being put forward around people’s needs and livelihoods.   Union and working people’s rights to organise; people’s democratic rights to protest; free health and education; decent community and welfare services, child care, affordable housing, public transport, environment.  Many will unite around these core demands of the people.

Nationalising the banks, mining corporations and other key sectors of the economy will enable the realisation of these people’s needs, and a first step towards building an independent Australian economy for the people.

An independent working class agenda collectively developed and built by the people in workplaces and communities, will fight for the interests of the people, unite the many, and lay the ground towards an independent and socialist Australia.