Put More Pork on Your Fork

Pat F. 

The Victorian Government has announced an “unprecedented” increase in police funding, personnel, and resources. The police force will become the largest it has ever been. It will consume the largest budget it has ever had. 

The justification for this extra-ordinary expenditure, and for the required diversion of resources from other areas, is claimed to be the need to improve personal safety for people living in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and nearby areas. There is mention of domestic violence and drugs, which are a problem throughout Victoria, and Australia. So why is the focus on the outer suburbs of Melbourne?

There is no mention of the problem of tax avoidance by international corporations. No allocation of resources to collecting outstanding tax owed by internet companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. No resources to stop tax avoidance through transfer pricing by companies like Coca Cola. No effort to pull back the subsidies paid to Ford, GMH, Toyota, etc now that they have decided to cease the activities in Australia which attracted the subsidies. No funds allocated to compelling privatised electricity supply companies to pay their court approved tax bills; instead the ATO recently settled with Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, owner of the SA Power Networks for only $800,000 of a tax debt of $8m, according to Four Corners. And of course no allocation of resources to hit the biggest drug dealers (CUB) and gambling gangs (Packer). And there is no halt to the employment policies which cause the incomes of workers to crash. 

So why is the focus on the outer suburbs of Melbourne?

Because these are the working class areas where unemployment will be highest; where mortgages will be unpayable; where repossessions will become endemic; where working hours will be most reduced; where rising motor fuel prices will have most impact; where the misallocation of education resources away from state owned schools to private schools will be most disastrous; where youth unemployment will become an epidemic. 

These are the areas in which the anger and resistance of workers will be greatest. 

These are the areas in which workers without an articulate working class party will vent their justified anger in ways which will be expensive in casualties, and collateral damage to those who are not the real enemy. 

These are the areas which without a strong working class party will have no voice and no strategy. Without the Party working diligently within the suburbs, in the places where workers can still congregate, there will be opportunity for Judas goats like Trump, Hanson, and especially Shorten, to blame religious and ethnic differences, for the necessary outcomes of imperialism and capitalism. 

The rich in Australia are terrified of working class rebellion. They know that their situation is tenuous as imperialist powers squabble, compete and prepare for war with each other. They know that if the organised working class rebels, the rich cannot win. And that is why the police force is being reinforced, not just in suburban Melbourne, but wherever workers gather throughout Australia. And that is why the Party must urgently re-double its efforts to organise the working class, and those other non-working class elements which can be united against the hard core of US Imperialists in Australia. 

The police forces are the agents of the state. They are the enforcers of the state. They maintain the so-called “law and order” of the state which enables capitalism and imperialism to crush working class revolt, and continue their exploitation and destruction of Australia.

The police claim to be protecting the people from criminals, but the real criminals are the rich who sack workers, pay no tax, and force the people of the world into wage slavery.

As a draft resister comrade from the 70s once said, “Do not believe them when they say you never had it so good; for if you do, they will be completely in charge, in their marble palaces and granite banks, from which they rule the people of the world.”