The trivial tribulations of Gladys Berejiklian versus true crime stories

 Written by: Louisa L. on 8 November 2021

As late October rolled through NSW, family and friends emerged from virtual connections to face to face happiness. Fuller lives beckoned beyond our five kilometres. 

It’s notable then, that in early November with people thoroughly sick of the online world, a NSW ICAC livestream crashed when ex-premier Gladys Berejiklian was grilled over corruption allegations.

It’s almost certainly a first for a corruption or royal commission in any jurisdiction. 

The massive bank rip-offs, that destroyed thousands of lives? The NT Commission into Dondale where young First Peoples were routinely tortured? Neither of these grabbed as much real time online interest here as the words of Gladys and her secret boyfriend.

Whether gleeful or sympathetic to the apparent fall of the workaholic Gladys, the minute-by-minute account saw many thousands determined to know first the story’s unfolding. 

What did they hear? That pork barrelling is legal and everybody does it. That colleagues and ex-colleagues were prepared to throw her under the bus. That the line in the sand of corruption might be failing to say she had a conflict of interest in funding a clay pigeon centre and hospital in Wagga Wagga, because of her relationship with boyfriend Daryl McGuire. And that they were truly in love and were considering marriage and children (Daryl) or yes to the first, and no to the second and third (Gladys).

This 24/7 online connection parades the trivial as ground breaking.

It reduced the huge class forces operating across NSW, and the country, to individual failings or criminality. 

Real crimes?

What are the real crimes? Many and varied, none of them belonging solely on the ex-premier’s shoulders.

The far right of Berejiklian’s Coalition have been gunning for her for several years, for all the wrong individualist reasons. 

Let’s set that aside and start with skyrocketing housing prices and its trappings: new high rise (some uninhabitable) looming over numerous suburban areas; demolition of swathes of homes a century or more old; Covid used to force a CFMEU backdown on its first green ban in decades on 1886 riverside mansion Willow Grove in Parramatta.

Developments pave almost the entire Sydney basin, and concrete sprawl spreads to much of the coast and regions.  There’s toll road construction and privatisation, plus tolls on previously free roads. 

Home owners and renters are evicted for an airport, for car parks, for roads. Payments totally inadequate. 

Who benefits? Foreign owned developer and construction corporations, real estate giants and banks. WestConnex, is set to reap $11 billion in coming years from tolls on just one section of previously free, public road, the M5 East.

Who in Sydney or the coast or regional towns decided they wanted their towns or cities to change like this for the benefit of monopoly capitalists? When were we asked? Democracy? We’re expected to swallow the whole scam.

Use and exchange

Sydney homeowners are slandered as thieving from the young people, who are priced out of a manipulated market that benefits giant corporations most, a market a minority of homeowners are involved in. 

We’re "richer than we’ve ever been". Ah yes! We’re all investors waiting to reap profits. 

Yet, for most of us, our homes have what Marx defines as having "use value". We just want to live in them not use them as "exchange values" in search of greater resale profits. 

Beyond shelter (denied by poverty to too many people here) the deepest parts of that use value are the neighbourly relationships built over decades, families raised and gardens planted with hard work and love. We have furniture and objects we purchased or inherited to use in such and such a specific spot, that maybe catches the light, or lifts a dark corner, or reminds us of the loved one who once owned it or gifted it to us. 

Maori, who owned far less, speak of an object being imbued with the spirit of those who once owned it. 

Maybe when we die or head to nursing homes or downsize, all our stuff will be junked, our gardens and homes flattened. Only then will profit, from use value transformed to exchange value, be realised.

But for now, owners are paying upwards of 25 per cent more for land rates, which will cause many real hardship. 

More crimes

Another crime. Decades of regurgitated mantra that the "deadly Pacific Highway" between Sydney and Queensland, needing dual carriageway now reveals itself as opening the lovely north coast to the blight of overdevelopment. 

Southwards, remaining bright beauties like the Farm south of Wollongong are set for plunder as the highway expands southwards. (The opening seconds of this writer’s first post lockdown city visit last week saw a group with placards protesting developments in beautiful South Kiama, a little further down the road.)
This decade, bird species have plummeted across the Sydney basin as concrete displaces wild habitat, prime farmland and welcoming back yards. Koalas face the chop, along with numerous small mammals, insects, reptiles, rare plants and fungi.  

Ecological disaster spreads. New tunnels are planned through the Blue Mountains seeing the next "glittering future" spreading westwards. 

Three Brothers

This writer directly experienced other disasters, the 2019-2020 fires and the 2017 north coast floods, plus the aftermath of the 2020 floods, and wrote about them all. Ideas germinated from Laurieton Services Club evacuation centre where "greenies" were loudly blamed, though climate change was key. Divide and conquer raged with the flames.

Wild places near Laurieton are increasingly suburbanised in direct capitalist destruction.

The whole area is Birpai Country, overlooked by Dooragen, or the North Brother mountain. There are three brother mountains in all. Cook also named them brothers, North Brother, Middle Brother and South Brother, as he sailed by.  

Dooragen murdered his young brother, then he and his remaining innocent brother were killed by their enraged mother, because the youngest was her favourite. 

The Brothers were transformed into mountains as a warning to act collectively.

First Peoples know through adaptation to tens of thousands of years of ice ages and warming, of changed shorelines, inundations and droughts, that nature must be respected. They understand its living interconnections. Their Lore embodies this because it comes from Country and Water. They are owed much unpaid rent!

Dooragen’s story against favouritism, jumping to conclusions and attacking each other, contrasts with capitalism’s divide and conquer individualism.

Its message contrasts with the trivial pursuit of an ex-premier to guilt for greater crimes, of selling out precious lands and waters to benefit corporate masters.

It’s ruling class crime, gigantic in scale. Divided and passive though our peoples often are, we must find the ways to collective resistance. If we don’t try, we are already defeated.

 

Leaked Documents Offer No Surprise

Finn G.                                        15 October 2019

On Tuesday October 14 SBS reporter Brett Mason tweeted that the Governments talking points for the week were “inadvertently” sent to the press gallery. (1) This in itself is not surprising, as leaks are a common occurrence in bourgeois political circles as each ladder climber has their own axe to grind within their respective organisations.

What’s surprising is the lack of imagination portrayed in the document. One would assume that the government hires the best spin doctors available, but it appears that even they are unable to polish the turd that is the current economic and social situation in Australia. Perhaps the government feels that it needn’t waste its energy on such trivialities given that we are some time away from the next election, or perhaps they feel that the same tired phrases will continue to keep the general populace happy, a population that they clearly assume to be intellectually inept.

The key talking points, or topics that the LNP Government expects to be confronted with include:

- A stable economy

- Support for drought affected farmers
- Water infrastructure
- ACCC bank enquiry
- Welfare
- Assange
- Mandatory jail time for child sex offenders
- Northeastern Syria

The brief kicks off with one of the LNP’s favourite catchphrases - “a stable economy”. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Point 1 is a quote from the main man Scott Morrison: “From our government you have seen certainty, you have seen stability. You’ve seen a plan, and a plan that we took to the Australian people, a plan that we put in our Budget, a plan that foresaw the challenges that Australia was going to face, and a Government that’s just steadfastly getting on with implementing the plan.”

Has anyone reading this come across economic certainty, stability, or a plan? If so, please return to Parliament House as its owner misses it greatly.

Such phrases have been trumpeted since Malcolm Turnbull’s first election campaign (and decades prior). To continue this narrative whilst the country is in economic free-fall is the height of arrogance.

Support for drought affected farmers is the usual roll-out of current governmental “accomplishments” and committees, bureaucratic head nodding at its finest. Nowhere in the list of fainthearted measures is the climate crisis mentioned.

Water infrastructure is accompanied by a similar list of good intentions and funding announcements. The Murray River and the state of South Australia is not mentioned at all.

King sycophant Josh Frydenberg has pounded the table and demanded an ACCC enquiry into the banks not passing on the full interest rates. No matter what the outcome of this show investigation, do they really think that we believe that it will make any difference to the average worker? Debt is going nowhere as the reserve labour army continues to grow, wages remain stagnant, and the cost of living increases by the day. It would be fair to assume that a good majority of the population is aware that the banks and the government are connected at the hip, even if they are unable to articulate the reasons for this. Very few will buy this nonsense.

The topic of welfare doesn’t break with tradition either, fudged numbers, stereotypes and lies fill out this section of the document. Every sleight of hand trick is used to make it look like they’ve built up a bold new workforce that will take the country into a new era of prosperity whilst ignoring the damning figures that show the opposite to be true. The cashless welfare card and drug testing are given the thumbs up in order to curb welfare spending and to “get people into a job” (the cost of these policies somehow didn’t make it onto the list). They also forgot to mention the yawning chasm between the amount of unemployed and available jobs. But it’s OK, they've got some television hack on board to sell their feeble propaganda.

Expatriate Julian Assange is mentioned with the solemn words: “it is important to remember that Australia cannot intervene in the legal processes of another country.” Hypocrisy at its highest level.

If anything, it’s been the Australian government’s policy to insert itself into workings of other countries as much as possible, whether the country in question is aware of it or not. Especially when natural resources are involved, and if the U.S war machine asks us to jump, we reply “how high?” That is, if the lives of our children had not already been offered in a pre-emptive act of Imperial brown-nosing.

Of course, this would not be a bourgeois document without a splash of opportunistic populism. Here it’s seen in the topic of child sexual abuse. This is nothing more than a chance to say what Labor, (who have not been in government since 2013) haven’t done. Essentially, they are using the horrific issue of child sexual abuse to score points against their political and ideological stable mates.

Turkey’s invasion of Kurdish held territory in Syria is mentioned in vague phrasing where the reader would quite easily see that what should have been said could be saved to one line: “we’re waiting to be told what to do and how to do it from the boss”.

What we can deduct from all of this is that the government is either fresh out of spin, fresh out of ideas, or morally bankrupt. My money is on a mixture of all three.

With revolutionary spot fires breaking out all over the globe and people taking to the streets at home, the Australian government couldn’t be more disconnected from the people it pretends to represent. It seems that it’s answer to the society’s woes is to close its eyes and hum ‘God Save The Queen’ whilst it’s people are expected to lie back and think of England.

 

This is a government with no opposition and no one to take it to task. Those eyeing them off from across the parliamentary floor are only different when it comes to tie colour. Albanese has proven to be more lacklustre than Shorten, quite an achievement in itself. Labor’s answer is to talk about free trade deals, vacillate between various actions on Newstart and generally to keep working on the disenfranchising of its former supporter base. Labor is only being kept alive by the “rusted ons” who cheer for them as if they were running onto the sporting field, regardless of the line-up.

The contradictions in Parliament House are becoming more apparent with each tick of the clock. Now is the time to immerse ourselves into the community, talk to people about what’s going on and the associated causes.

The people don’t need a new party running Coward’s Castle, they need a new system, and that system must have its base in the working class and fellow exploited classes.

 

(1) https://twitter.com/BrettMasonNews

Joe Szakacs: Uphill Battle for New SA Member of Parliament

Ned K.     10 February 2019

On Saturday 9th February, former SA Unions Secretary, Joe Szakacs, was elected Labor MP for the by - election in the inner north-western suburban safe Labor seat of Cheltenham in Adelaide. The by-election arose after former Member for Cheltenham and former Labor Premier, Jay Weatherill, resigned from the SA Parliament following last year’s election of a Liberal government.

Joe Szakacs received 58.8 % first preference votes with postal votes still to be counted. A local of the area, Joe said after the votes were counted that "...I'll be fighting for them (his electors) in the same way I've been fighting for working families for most of my life." He named his priorities as fighting against the SA Liberal Party Government's "cruel cuts to jobs, services and public transport."

In his capacity as Secretary of SA Unions, Joe provided leadership to affiliated unions in campaigns against privatization and cuts to services by both the former Labor Weatherill SA Government and the current Liberal Government.

InDaily, a local online news service described Joe Szakacs as a "thorn in the Premier's side " in reference to the former Premier Weatherill's love affair with a proposed nuclear waste dump in SA. Szakacs called Weatherill "tone deaf" when the latter called for a referendum to decide if the nuclear waste dump should go ahead. It was due to the active mass opposition to the proposed dump by Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and unions under Joe Szakacs’ leadership as Secretary of SA Unions that the former Premier Weatherill dropped the whole idea of a nuclear waste dump.

During Joe's leadership role at SA Unions, the position enabled him to contribute to building an independent working class agenda expressed in the SA Unions' "Build A Better Future" campaign and the more recent Australia wide union movement "Change The Rules" campaign.

Now he will face the challenge that all "parliamentarians with the best intentions" who have risen to their position due to their participation and leadership within unions face.

That challenge is to continue to contribute to the working class movement and struggle which inevitably will take a direction beyond the confines and restrictions of the bourgeois institution of parliament.

This contradiction was blandly stated way back at the time of the strikes of the 1890s in Australia. The then President of the Railways Union in SA, W.F. Stock resigned his position as president because, "As a member of the House of Assembly I am representative of the people of all classes, and I should be violating the oath on entering Parliament were I to become an active partisan on either side of this great struggle" (quoted from "The Sound Of Trumpets, History of the Labor Movement In SA" by Jim Moss).

The "great struggle" was and still is the class struggle between capital and labor.

While we wish Joe well in continuing to be part of this struggle on the side unambiguously of the workers, but know that he faces an uphill battle.

“The record shows that all Labor Governments essentially administer and serve the capitalist system and those who have economic, political and media power. They change nothing fundamentally, and have helped to run a system that has recently seen the greatest transfer of wealth from the majority to the rich minority in the history of this country” (“Beyond Labor: the need for an independent working class agenda” published by the SA State Committee of the CPA M-L April 2013).

One thing is certain: the independent working class movement will not be channelled into the quicksand of parliament.

It lives in the communities and workplaces of the people.

Editorial

What lessons can we draw from the Victorian state elections?​

The November state elections in Victoria saw the Daniel Andrews led ALP return to the government benches. The LNP Coalition under the leadership of Mathew Guy suffered a heavy defeat, losing a number of safe Liberal seats. A host of reasons for the swing against the Victorian Coalition have been advanced. One of the reasons suggested for the election loss is the recent shambolic performance of the dreadful Coalition government in Canberra. Supposedly, the Federal government was ‘unable to speak Victorian’, an affliction that developed after the deposing of Malcolm Turnbull back in August. That is, the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison led Coalition governments effectively demonstrated to Victorians that the Coalition are far removed from ‘progressive’ values dear to the heart of many Victorians. The Coalition government and its Victorian equivalents’ political agendas, which included a fear-mongering and racist law and order campaign directed at African migrants, did not resonate with the majority of the Victorian electorate, hence the ‘unable to speak Victorian’ phrase. Richard Marles, the Victorian Federal ALP MP for the electorate of Corio, provided this rather nonsensical insight after the State election results became known.
 
The term progressive means different things to different people. For Marles and his ilk, progressive is shorthand for ALP policies. For other Australians progressive means more than small ‘l’ liberal policies and the building of major infrastructure projects, important though these things may be. Rather, there is a class basis to progressive policies. That is, progressive policies should reflect the views of and benefit the majority of the working population. Such policies should be based on what benefits the working class as opposed to what benefits multinational corporations, finance capital and imperialism. Progressive policies should have as a key part of their foundation an independent working class agenda, an agenda that strives to build socialism in an independent Australia. Limiting the term progressive to small ‘l’ liberal issues/campaigns, allied with an acceptance of the constraints of capitalism and the piece-meal reformism of parliamentarism is not only a mistake it devalues the term.
 
One point from the election worthy of comment and analysis is the campaign of the Victorian Socialists. A coming together of various progressive individuals and socialist organisations, notably Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, the party was formed in an attempt to get lead candidate Steve Jolly elected in the Upper House seat of the Northern Metropolitan Region in Melbourne. As a part of its campaign, the Victorian Socialists also stood a number of candidates in various electorates across the state. 
 
Part of the rationale advanced by those associated with the Victorian Socialists is that their electoral campaigning brings attention to socialism and provides a proper progressive alternative to the usual bourgeois parties. In addition, they are trying to provide a left-wing alternative to the many right-wing micro parties, the latter attracting the protest vote of the growing number of people completely disillusioned with the parliamentary system. In some of their election material, the Victorian Socialists did put forward policies that were focussed on and would be beneficial to working class people. For that they deserve credit. Whether the Victorian Socialists’ campaign can be deemed a ‘success’ is debatable. Although failing to get any of their candidates elected, both the Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Alternative, the key players in the Victorian Socialists group, were pleased with how they polled and have been quick to deem the attempt a success. The Victorian Socialists now appear likely to put up candidates in future federal and local council elections. This indicates a concerning trend that threatens to concentrate the energy and attention of hundreds of hard working socialists and activists into the false hope of electoral politics and reformism. Moreover it channels the growing disillusionment of working class people with parliamentary politics back into the very institutions which do not serve their class interests.   
 
For our part, the lessons to be learnt from the November state elections are the following: First, the success of the ALP’s election campaign, backed by the mobilisations of the unions and their members, did represent at some level, resistance to the Federal Coalition’s anti-working class and pro-big business positions. Second, the Victorian Socialists are not to be condemned for attempting to push forward socialist ideas and working class policies. Third and most importantly, we should never lose sight of the fact that bourgeois parliamentarism exists to serve bourgeois class interests; a revolutionary party should never make parliamentary politics and parliamentarism the cornerstone of their political work. To do so risks turning into a party of bourgeois reformism no matter how ‘progressive’ its policies may be. Major reforms and concessions can be won outside of parliament if the working class dares to struggle – we only need to look at France right now for an example of that! 
 

Parliamentary crisis reflects ruling class divisions over who can best serve their interests

Nick G.

Now that the dust has settled and the blades have been wiped clean, what can we make of the latest coup to unseat a sitting prime minister?

Whilst the entire focus of the mass media has been on the personalities involved – their egos, the personal motives of revenge, the infighting – what has been the class basis of the instability and division that we have just witnessed?

Comrade EF Hill, founding Chairperson of our Party, continually pointed out that the ruling class always discusses its tactics against the working class.  Lenin pointed out that those tactics are not constant, but are subject to change:

“If the tactics of the bourgeoisie were always uniform, or at least of the same kind, the working class would rapidly learn to reply to them by tactics just as uniform or of the same kind. But, as a matter of fact, in every country the bourgeoisie inevitably devises two systems of rule, two methods of fighting for its interests and of maintaining its domination, and these methods at times succeed each other and at times are interwoven in various combinations. The first of these is the method of force, the method which rejects all concessions to the labour movement, the method of supporting all the old and obsolete institutions, the method of irreconcilably rejecting reforms. Such is the nature of the conservative policy …. The second is the method of “liberalism”, of steps towards the development of political rights, towards reforms, concessions, and so forth.

“The bourgeoisie passes from one method to the other not because of the malicious intent of individuals, and not accidentally, but owing to the fundamentally contradictory nature of its own position. Normal capitalist society cannot develop successfully without a firmly established representative system and without certain political rights for the population, which is bound to be distinguished by its relatively high “cultural” demands. These demands for a certain minimum of culture are created by the conditions of the capitalist mode of production itself, with its high technique, complexity, flexibility, mobility, rapid development of world competition, and so forth. In consequence, vacillations in the tactics of the bourgeoisie, transitions from the system of force to the system of apparent concessions have been characteristic of the history of all European countries   during the last half-century, the various countries developing primarily the application of the one method or the other at definite periods.” (1) 

According to the Marxist world view, instability in parliamentary political parties reflects contradictions inside the ruling class over when and how to subdue the workers through coercion and when and how to subdue them with concessions.  Monopoly capitalists threatened by competition from other monopolising capitals and faced with diminishing returns on their investments tend to support more conservative and coercive measures; those who require continuity of government policy and social stability for a favourable investment climate tend to support concessions in relation to general rights and liberties.

How does this scenario play out in Australia? Lenin nailed it as early as 1913 when he observed that “the Australian Labour Party … is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really Conservatives.”  (2) From the very inception of federal parliament, the Australian ruling class thus had two political parties through which to exercise its options for greater or lesser coercion and greater or lesser concession. Instability in the conservative “Liberal” party reflected the conservatism that was its essential character, on the one hand, and on the other, the small-l “liberalism” through which it tried to broader its electoral appeal and keep the social peace and thus avoid rocking the boat of uninterrupted capitalist exploitation.

For its part, instability in the bourgeois-liberal “Labor” party “is born of the conflict between the bourgeoisie whom it really serves and the working class whom it pretends to serve” (EF Hill, The Labor Party? p. 7). (3)

While the logical extension of the “dry” or conservative position is outright fascism, the logical extension of the “wet” or small-l “liberal” position is capitalist social-democracy manifested in either a “left” Labor government (or, has been seen in some countries, a revisionist “Communist” or “Marxist” government).  However, the “wet” or bourgeois-liberal position, as the middle ground between these two extremes, overlaps factions in both the Liberal and Labor parties in Australia, and is one reason for the frustration of many voters at the apparent absence of any real distinction between policy directions of the two main parties. This dissatisfaction is shared by both the right of the Liberal Party and the left of the Labor Party. The right in the former attacks and undermines its “wets” while the left in the latter rejects the neo-liberalism of its “dries”.

Behind the personalities that emerge in the course of these splits lie the different sections of the ruling class and the imperialist interests that they rely on and are dominated by.  The sacking of Whitlam government followed its attempts to "buy back the farm" and its feeble strivings for independence - which had strong public sympathy but angered US imperialism.

Rudd had attempted to bring in a mining super profits tax as a revenue source for infrastructure spending that would have benefitted the general interests of the ruling class.  But that section of it tied to mining flexed its muscles and brought forward a challenge by Gillard.  In her acceptance speech following her successful challenge to Rudd, she said:

“There is another question on which I will seek consensus and that is the proposed Resources Super Profits Tax.
“Australians are entitled to a fairer share of our inheritance, the mineral wealth that lies in our grounds. They are entitled to that fairer share.
“But to reach a consensus, we need do more than consult. We need to negotiate.
“And we must end this uncertainty which is not good for this nation.
“That is why today I am throwing open the Government’s door to the mining industry and I ask that in return, the mining industry throws open its mind.” (4)

“Open the door to the mining companies” she did - immediately dropping the 40% resource super profits tax, amongst others, and becoming the darling of the mining monopolies and banks. 

In Turnbull’s case, he was able initially to depose Abbott as Prime Minister because Abbott had lost the confidence of the Business Council and other peak bodies of monopoly capital in his ability to successfully carry through a program of attack against the working people. Turnbull paraded his smarmy affability and his leather jacket on Q&A and held out the promise that a “wet” could deflect the people’s growing anger and regain lost electoral advantage through “progressive” social policy. It seemed at the time a small price to pay for social stability and “investor confidence “.  However, sections of the ruling class, and particularly those associated with fossil fuels and banking were not reconciled to the change: the coal and other extractive industries regrouped, while the banks were dismayed and angered when the Royal Commission slipped out of their control and began exposing too much of their theft and corruption.

Sections of monopoly capital within the ruling class began openly manipulating the far right amongst the conservatives to get rid of Turnbull and his soft liberals who could no longer be relied on for their complete loyally to protect the interests of that section of the ruling class (eg NEG, climate change, banking Royal Commission and company taxes).  (5) Murdoch's News Ltd and resources monopolies had been undermining Turnbull for a long time and had a big hand in orchestrating the semi coup in which Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton have been their loyal puppets.

Observing this instability, this “revolving door” of prime ministers, has heightened people’s cynicism about parliamentary politicians. Talk back radio during the most recent crisis has been full of anger and disgust with self-serving politicians.  But there is still some way to go before anger at politicians reaches a higher level of understanding, namely that parliament is a complete dead end for workers, that the parliamentary system and the politicians will never represent their interests, and that the working class needs to build its own institutions of democracy in an independent and socialist Australia. 

 

(1) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1910/dec/16.htm 

(2) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/jun/13.htm

(3) E.F. Hill, “The Labor Party? Dr Evatt – The Petrov Affair – The Whitlam Government”, Melbourne, October 1974

(4) https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/edited-transcript-of-julia-gillards-acceptance-speech/news-story/5cc8e65950b9e0d407ffe397dc96a010

(5) See our earlier article http://www.cpaml.org/articles3.php?id=668