Study of growing menace of fascism in Brazil helps deepen our understanding of social-democracy

This analysis of events in Brazil is worthy of close study by Australian Marxist-Leninists and other progressive people.

Brazil is a member of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). This group, which meets annually, aims at the creation of a centre of finance capital independent of the US imperialists. It has endorsed a new reserve world currency and established its own New Development Bank with reserves of US$100 billion.​

US imperialism has counter-attacked, hoping to prise both Brazil and India, in the first place, away from the group.  In the case of Brazil, there are echoes of the semi-fascist coup that saw Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Whitlam removed from office after he showed signs of becoming more independent than the US was prepared to allow. And like Australia, the Brazilian social-democrats are complicit in their own demise by refusing to stand with the people in defiance of the coup masters.

The new Brazilian leader Bolsonaro shares many of the repugnant features of Duterte in the Philippines. These are leaders who revel in their macho images, who have no hesitation in attacking women in the crudest and most sexually violent terms, and whose only response to workers and other democrats is straight-out coercion.

Our Party has written extensively about the sham of parliamentary democracy and its role as a fig-leaf for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.  We have recently republished the July 2016 booklet Parliament and Elections -  a superficial democracy.  It can be downloaded from our website.

We are not experts on Brazil, but we believe in learning from the experiences of others.  Belief in social-democracy (in a parliamentary “labor” party and the sanctity of parliamentary democracy) still has a strong hold on the outlook of many otherwise progressive Australians. The analysis that follows confirms our view that the working class must have its own independent political agenda and its own revolutionary party based on Marxism-Leninism.
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The political execution of Lula and the shadow of fascism falling across Brazil
18 April 2018. A World to Win News Service.

Lula (Luiz Ignacio da Silva), the Brazilian ex-head of state U.S. President Obama once called “the most popular politician on Earth”, is now in prison serving a twelve-year sentence for accepting the renovation of an ocean-front apartment placed at his disposal by a contractor.

The federal facility where Lula is now entombed bears a plaque commemorating the day when, as president from 2003 to 2011, he inaugurated it. Like any inmate, his access will be limited to family visits on Thursdays and consultations with his lawyers. Lula had generally been expected to easily win the upcoming October presidential elections on the ticket of the Workers Party (PT), which identififes itself as “democratic socialist”. Now it is considered very unlikely that he will even be allowed to run.

This is far from the first time a Brazilian politician has been jailed for corruption. But it’s not just more of the same of the country’s usual rough-and-tumble political manoeuvring. For Lula is not just the country’s most popular politician by far, especially among the lower classes, but also a symbol of their hopes for change – and his imprisonment is bound up with aggressive attempts by an amalgam of rising fascist forces to crush these hopes and usher in a much more reactionary order.

Two crucial lessons can be drawn from this episode: first, Lula and the Workers Party (PT) he represents were arguably the leading showcase of what militant social democracy can achieve when it forms a government in today’s world. The humiliating turn of events with Lula’s imprisonment following 13 years of PT governance during which, despite some limited and temporary success with the redistribution of income, overall saw a continuation of intolerable conditions of life for the great majority of Brazil’s oppressed, not least in its notorious urban shantytowns, the favelas, where police murder people with unrivalled impunity – in 2016, 4224 people (according to the 11th Annual Brazilian Yearbook of Public Security), more than four times the number killed by police in the US, even though Brazil’s population is one-third smaller. A generation of reactionary governnance by social democracy was one of the key ingredients in the rise of the fascist forces that have increasingly set the terms in the country’s political life.

Second, anyone who holds out hope that mainstream social democrats will lead a fight to stop the rise of fascists in their own country needs to take a long, hard look at this episode. If Lula and the PT, despite substantial continuing popularity, accepted his imprisonment like this do you really think social democrats anywhere else will do any better?! The problem lies not in any personal flaws in Lula, but in the character of social democracy itself. This article will examine these two points in more depth.

The severity of Lula’s sentence in comparison to the banality of his alleged crime is all the more remarkable in a country where the current president and his party have escaped prosecution for far more serious charges, backed by ample evidence. This political execution was demanded by a broad section of the ruling class as reflected in the media owned by its handful of leading families, and, under their baton, a significant section of the traditional middle classes. Whatever the various political agendas behind it, this step opens the way for the advance of naked fascism and has awakened frightful memories of the way a military junta ruled the country from 1964 to 1985.

After keeping a low profile in the decades since the junta, the generals have stepped up their public interventions recently. The commander of the army reserves warned that the army would move in if Lula were allowed to remain free and win the elections. This stepped-up intervention by the military is linked to the rise of broader fascist forces in the country. One of the most prominent of their political representatives is Jair Bolsonaro, a former army officer who considers himself the junta’s political heir, recently baptised in the Jordan River and now born again in alliance with Brazil’s Evangelicals. Pentecostals and other Christian fundamentalists who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible have captured a quarter of Brazil’s 210 million population. Their proselytism and emphasis on personal conversion have made them more able to politically mobilize millions of people on a grass roots level than the equally reactionary Catholic Church that until a few decades ago claimed hegemony over Brazilian minds.

Bolsonaro, called “the Tropical Trump” by the Guardian, is far from the only prominent politician in this mould, but with Lula out of the way, he is touted as a frontrunner in the upcoming elections. He embodies the extremely dangerous intersection of generals and preachers with an organized mass following eager for war against what they consider the permissiveness that has taken hold of Brazil over the last decades. Even if he doesn’t win the elections still six months in the future, his sudden and unexpected advance, winning respectability and far more broad support than other, more traditional reactionary politicians these days, signals an upheaval in the political landscape.
Bolsonaro brags that after decades in the political wilderness he has restored the respectability of right-wing views unspoken for many years because of their association with the hated junta. He flagrantly proclaims his admiration for the general considered the most bloodthirsty of all the members of the junta that murdered hundreds of people, drove many thousands into exile and extinguished the cultural and intellectual scene that was Brazil’s gift to the world.

What Bolsonaro advocates goes beyond the replacement of of parliamentary democracy by a form of political rule based on open terrorism against the people. He wants this political “revolution”, as he calls it, to bring about an equally radical imposition of the traditional values that have lost some of their hold since the days of the junta. This has happened, in large part, because of the changes in the economic and social structure of Brazilian society brought about by the country’s development since then as part of developments in the world as a whole. Bolsonaro represents a qualitative ratcheting up of the traditional ideological values that have held together Brazil’s exploitative and oppressive society and are a key part of what gives the ruling classes anywhere the legitimacy and authority that no form of rule can long survive without.

Above all, this means what Bolsonaro calls “family values” –  the enforcement of the oppression of women and other forms of oppression associated with that, especially what reactionaries everywhere call “gender ideology” (the idea that traditional male and female social roles are not inherent in biology). Much of his violent discourse is aimed at LGBT people – he infamously said that he would prefer to see any son of his dead rather than “come home with some guy with a moustache.” This extends, however, to women as a whole. In parliament, he opposed the passage of more serious penalties against rape. When a fellow parliamentarian accused him of encouraging rape, he replied that she was “too ugly” to “deserve” being raped by him.

The prohibition of abortion is central to Bolsonaro’s platform. This issue came to the centre in Brazilian politics a few years ago, when the Catholic Church excommunicated medical personnel for performing an abortion on a nine-year-old Brazilian girl pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. (Her mother was also excommunicated for complicity in the abortion. The stepfather, while jailed, was deemed to have committed a lesser sin and allowed to remain in the Church.)

Current Brazilian law allows abortion only in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother. Until recently, many people expected those restrictions would soon be removed. Christian fundamentalists like Bolsonaro consider even these limited exemptions a threat to a social order based on God’s will that must be restored.

Bolsonaro also attacks the political stirrings among formerly totally marginalized people in the favelas and the countryside. In reaction to new demands to end colour-based discrimination, he said people in black communities were too lazy to “do anything, even bother to procreate”. Like Bolsonaro’s views of women, these rantings have a political programme. Earlier this year, the military was sent in to take over “security” in Sao Paulo. Military police and soldiers have conducted operations to take over one after another of the mountainside favelas that ring the city. In January alone, they killed at least 154 people, many of them black. Military officials have complained that they can’t do their job without guarantees they won’t be subject to civilian justice some day, as happened after the end of the junta. Bolsonaro proposes to legalize the murder and torture at the hands of the security forces that are already extremely widespread – to go from covering them up to making them the official order of the day.

How have Lula and his party reacted?

A judge ordered Lula to surrender to the authorities immediately, even though the process of appealing his conviction is far from exhausted. Instead, he took refuge in the Sao Paulo union headquarters where he began his career as an organizer before the founding of the Workers’ Party (PT) that eventually came to power under his leadership.

Although tens of thousands of supporters gathered to protect Lula from the authorities, they found themselves playing a different role, begging him not to give himself up and even twice blocking his car to prevent him from leaving. Finally he walked through their lines and boarded another car, beginning a journey to the city of Curitaba, where police fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse still more protesters lining the streets and in front of the prison. As many as 1,500 people a day are joining a vigil in the surrounding streets. Many plan to camp out there indefinitely.

Why did Lula and his party decide on this course of action, rather than defy the fascist forces, call out their illegitimacy even under the rules of Brazilian law, expose their horrific goals and unleash his supporters eager to stage massive resistance in the streets and force all the sections of the ruling class to soberly consider the consequences of an explosive political situation?

Lula explained that he wanted to show that no one, even him, is above the rule of law. But the rule of law the PT considers sacred has never been neutral. It reflects and perpetuates an inherently exploitative and oppressive economic and social system. In surrendering, Lula led people away from doing what is most urgently needed: to stand up and defeat fascist moves to take over the state apparatus and wield it to bring about a catastrophic change – the replacement of today’s form of rule by an undisguised, terror-based, unbridled fascism.

Lula’s  defenders, critical and otherwise, argue that by refusing to give the armed forces an excuse to stage a coup, he acted to save electoral democracy in Brazil. Yet the workings of the courts and parliament served to bring down Lula’s successor from the PT, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president from 2011 to 2016, who was impeached, and now, by jailing Lula, thwart the PT’s hopes for a comeback through an electoral process that is instead providing a platform for the views of Bolsonaro and his ilk and allowing them to claim they represent the will of the people. The terrible irony is that the PT’s reactionary opponents have not flinched at defying judicial rulings when it suits them, while also using the courts and the electoral system as fronts on which to fight for their fascist goals.

The PT and its defenders use the term “soft” coup d’etat to describe the sequence of events that began with the impeachment of President Rousseff and led to the jailing of Lula. If that’s true, why hasn’t the PT more seriously resisted it? The state’s repressive power can’t be the only reason, since the ruling class must consider the political consequences that the unrestrained use of that power could bring. Further, while a considerable section of Brazil’s ruling classes have turned against the PT and many support Bolsonaro, the PT was able to win acceptance from broad sections of ruling class forces in the past.  The starting point for the PT project is to work within the electoral system of bourgeois democracy, in reality a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class representing a capitalist system whose workings define what is possible for the lives of the people and even the exploiters themselves. This requires that the PT confine themselves to what that system defines as acceptable politics even when major parts of that ruling class are moving toward an open dictatorship based on undisguised terror, abolishing established rights, openly labelling sections of the people undesirable and unleashing soldiers and religious fanatics against them. This is fascism, with all its Brazilian specificities, but fascism just the same.

Lula’s surrender to the authorities encapsulates the role he and his party have played since the beginning as loyal participants in the country’s political system. His supporters’ slogan, “Elections without Lula are a fraud”, has some truth to it, insofar as removing the only truly popular candidate risks revealing to many millions of people a truth that is usually hidden: that the ruling class sets the terms for and manipulates the electoral process and decides what’s permissible. But what about the elections that Lula and the PT took part in, drawing people into the system’s machinery by raising hopes that were never anything but an illusion?

By channelling popular discontent into elections, the PT played an important role in shoring up the legitimacy of the Brazilian state following decades of rule by the hated military junta. The party’s supporters grew to include sections of the urban middle classes and people in the favelas around Rio, Sao Paulo and other cities, many of them, like Lula, immigrants from the country’s extremely impoverished, deeply oppressive backlands whose cheap labour has been at the heart of the Brazilian “miracle” from which they have been largely excluded –  the explosion of wealth produced by environmentally disastrous enormous soy farms and cane fields, cattle ranches often built on stolen land, manufacturing in foreign-owned firms and construction.

As a Brazilian economics professor explains, when Lula ran for president for the first time in 1989, he made a promise – one that he was to keep – to maintain “the main economic guidelines of his predecessor: a primary fiscal surplus goal, a low inflation target and a flexible exchange rate”. However, Lula significantly expanded spending on fiscal transfers to the relatively poor, and extended previous social programmes, broadening their coverage. The Bolsa Familia programme was held up as a global example, touted by the World Bank as a “’quiet revolution’ that significantly reduced poverty.” (Matias Vernego, “Goodbye Lula?”, nacla.org). These welfare payments were made possible by a booming international market for the exports on which Brazil’s economy depends, especially oil and agricultural commodities.

But the country’s economic independence, a precondition for the people’s ability to liberate themselves as part of emancipating all humanity from the global imperialist system and all forms of oppression, is impossible without the revolutionary transformation of every aspect of life in Brazil. Instead, the PT policies made the country more dependent on the global market and international investment. That made it even more vulnerable to the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent downturn in commodity prices. In 2013 the PT government was hit by widespread protests against public transport prices so high that they often kept people imprisoned in favelas and other neighbourhoods, and found itself unleashing harsh repression.

Lula’s surrender is consistent with what he and his party have represented all along. Whatever their initial apparent successes, this appeasement of the military and far right, and their insistence on keeping the struggle within the limits of what the ruling class will allow, along with the disillusionment in electoral politics that their broken promises, brokered politics and corruption helped produce, have greatly aided the rise of fascists who promise to put an end to “politics as usual” by replacing it with openly violence-based rule.

What’s happening in Brazil will have huge repercussions on the continent and beyond. The 1964 military coup was aimed at a government that Washington feared would lessen Brazil’s economic dependency and seek more political independence from the U.S. Washington encouraged and financed the coup plotters and eventually stationed warships off the country’s coast in case the coup forces needed assistance. Then Washington used the Brazilian junta to help install U.S.-dominated military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, and wage horrendous wars to save US domination of Central America. But this is not a matter of history repeating itself. Events are being driven by global developments in the imperialist system and their dynamic interaction with the particularities of Brazil’s place in that system and its national and historical specificities.

Imperialism, rather than spreading enlightenment and progress as its apologists once claimed, today is giving rise to different kinds of fascism in different ways, along with new varieties of religious obscurantism. Crises in the old structures of political rule, and in the ideological glue holding together exploitative and oppressive societies, are major factors at work in many countries. One common feature in the rise of fascism in different countries is a move toward resolving the contradiction between the reality and false appearance of freedom for the people under bourgeois democracy by instituting openly dictatorial rule. Bolsonaro has openly proclaimed, “I am in favour of a dictatorship”.

This applies to what’s happening in Brazil. People like Lula and the PT, not just in Brazil but everywhere, are stubbornly – and maybe fatally – holding on to preconceptions that do not stand the test of reality (such as the belief that the capitalist system can be made tolerable for the broad masses of people by using its own political structures). Everywhere classes and people whose interests are rooted in the global workings of the imperialist system are, by that very fact, doing their best not to endanger those interests and the stability of the imperialist order by confronting these fascists.

Confronting these trends requires the most thoroughly scientific theory and method to identify the real dynamics driving developments and determine an adequate course of action, not only to defeat the rise of these fascist forces but to take humanity to a world free of oppression and exploitation where monsters like Bolsonaro can only be read about in courses on ancient history.

Nuclear waste dump: Jay walking on wrong side of the street

Nick G.

A citizens’ jury of 368 randomly selected South Australians has overwhelmingly rejected the proposal by the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission for a nuclear waste dump in SA.

In the report to the Premier, Jay Weatherill, a two-thirds majority of the jury state that they “do not wish to pursue the opportunity under any circumstances.”

The Premier, who has more spin than a toy top, immediately interpreted this to mean: “Their present view is that the proposal in its currentform should not proceed”.

No Premier, their view, now and in the future, is that they do not want the proposal under any circumstances.

A Flawed Royal Commission

The rejection comes in the wake of a flawed Royal Commission and opposition to the dump from every Aboriginal community consulted by the Government.

Appointed as Royal Commissioner was retired Admiral and former SA Governor Kevin Scarce.  In November 2014 he acknowledged being an advocate for the nuclear industry, and a month later told the SA Chamber of Mines and Energy that SA should develop nuclear industries to compensate for the downturn in manufacturing.  On February 9, 2015 Weatherill announced Scarce’s appointment as head of a Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission.  Scarce justified accepting the appointment by saying “I have not been an advocate and never have been an advocate of the nuclear industry”!

Scarce then appointed an Expert Advisory Panel to assist the Commission.  Three of the four were nuclear industry hawks, including the notorious and outspoken Prof. Barry Brook.

Further undermining any claim that the Commission was an independent exercise, Scarce told the ABC’s 7.30 programme on March 14 that the question facing the Commission was “How do we convince South Australians that it is safe... and what are the benefits of so doing?”[

At this stage, Scarce’s and Brook’s pro-nuclear comments were unlawful under SA legislation, as was the funding of a Royal Commission on the nuclear fuel cycle.

When the latter unlawfulness was pointed out to Weatherill, he hurriedly tried to revoke the legislation and having failed in that, amended it after the fact to enable “discussion” of SA’s nuclear future.

Directing the Jury

The 350-plus Citizens’ Jury was conceived by Weatherill as a means of manufacturing the appearance of community support for the nuclear waste dump proposal which, incidentally, calls for the importation of 138,000 tonnes of high level nuclear waste and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate level nuclear waste, all to be stored above-ground for 80 years whilst an underground facility is built.

The Jury met over three weekends and had to digest an enormous amount of reading material and verbal presentations, much of it slanted in favour of the nuclear industry.

For example, only one economic report on the viability of an international nuclear waste dump was commissioned and its two authors were subsequently outed as having strong links to the nuclear industry.  One was vice-president of the Association for Regional and International Underground Storage and the other was previously involved in the Association’s former incarnation, Panagea Resources, which had spearheaded a nuclear dump proposal back in Howard’s time as Prime Minister.

It is all to the credit of the citizen jurors that they saw through the manipulation and rejected the dump proposal.

Specifically, they did not trust the State Government to deliver the dump safely and on budget; they acknowledged Aboriginal opposition to it; and they were sceptical of the sincerity of the jury process itself.

Which way Jay?

Weatherill has clearly been embarrassed, but not put off, by the Jury decision.

In addition to spinning their rejection into something it is not, he has cited the 38 years that it took Finland to decide to build an as yet uncompleted underground nuclear dump to let it be known that he was still pressing ahead. “We don’t expect that this is a debate that will be concluded any time soon,” he said.

After a three thousand-strong anti-dump rally outside SA Parliament on October 15, a vocal rally was held outside the ALP State Conference last weekend.  Faced with a raft of anti-dump resolutions, Weatherill retreated to accepting a Special ALP Convention “to be held at the conclusion of community consultation and before a decision is made on the development of a high level nuclear waste repository in SA”.

Weatherill had previously said that the latter decision would be made by the end of 2016, yet within days of the Conference motion being passed, he announced he was walking away from its motion  too: “There is no upcoming special convention…It may be a question of years away.”

This chicanery and duplicity is the hallmark of a social democratic party committed to managing the affairs of the drivers of the capitalist economy.  The primary drivers are the big imperialist finance capitalists, embedded within which are the big multinational corporations running the world’s nuclear power industries.

The working class and its progressive allies must continue their efforts to build a genuinely independent agenda to cut through the bullshit that comes from the parliamentary cesspit.

Our future lies in independence from imperialism.

Our future lies in socialism and not capitalism.

Our energy sources must be clean and sustainable.

No to nuclear power!  No to a nuclear dump!
 

The “Just In Time System” for Aspiring Parliamentarians

Ned K.

Earlier this year in SA in the long serving state Labor Government, Premier Weatherill announced that former Shop Distributive and Allied Trades Association (the SDA) secretary, Peter Malinauskas (left) was joining the ALP parliamentary team and becoming a Cabinet Minister. Malinauskas hails from the right faction Labor ‘stable’ overseen by former federal Labor Senator Don Farrell.

Historical links of this faction go back to the days of the DLP and Bob Santamaria. Both Farrell and Malinauskas served as secretaries of the shop assistants union, SDA, for many years. Malinauskas is being groomed as the next Labor leader in SA, mainly due to his connections with big business in the retail industry. Premier Jay Weatherill is from the ALP “Left” faction but the “Right” faction of the ALP in SA has the numbers,  so no surprises that such a rapid rise within parliament has been afforded Malinauskas.

Both Weatherill from the Left ALP faction and Malinauskas from the Right faction owe their rise to the dizzy levels of parliamentary Ministerial Office to low paid blue collar workers paying  dues as union members. In Weatherill’s case, the old Miscellaneous Workers Union now known as United Voice and in Malinauskas’s case the SDA. In the latter’s case, the numerical strength of the SDA for decades has depended on the SDA leaders delivering concessions to large retail companies like Coles and Woolworths in exchange for these retailers signing up new workers to the SDA or facilitating such membership. In exchange the SDA has engaged in concession bargaining, trading away working conditions in exchange for base wage rates only slightly above the minimum award wage.

Just In Time System

On occasions there has been resistance from retail workers to the sell out behaviour of the SDA leaders but usually not in an organised way and without much success. However in July last year, a Coles retail worker in Queensland, Duncan Hart, challenged in the  Fair Work Commission a new national Enterprise Agreement struck between Coles and the SDA. Under the new Agreement, Hart claims that he and thousands of other retail workers are paid about $60 a week less than if employed under the retail award. Hart’s legal team estimated in a hearing before Fair Work Commission in February this year that the underpayment for all similarly rostered Coles workers is about $70 million in total per year. At the hearing the SDA admitted that it was aware of the below award pay outcome for many Coles workers at the time it signed the Agreement and supported its approval by Fair Work Commission. Fair Work Commission is yet to hand down its Decision on the matter.

What has this to do with Peter Malinauskas’s rapid rise to Ministerial status in the state Labor government in SA? Perhaps it is a case of the “just in time system”, meaning that he has been moved upwards in the chain of service  to the big capitalists.

Is this a better option for the bosses than leaving him as leader of the SDA at a time when its credibility as a fighter for the cause of retail workers is on the verge of being exposed publicly even by the conservative Fair Work Commission? 

Social Democracy and the nuclear fuel cycle

Nick G.

(Above: Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta -  the Women of Coober Pedy successfully opposed an earlier attempt to place a radioactive dump on Aboriginal land)

SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s Royal Commission into the Nuclear Fuel Cycle is a gift to the big mining and energy corporations.

It is also a sign of the desperation of a state Labor government facing growing state debt and the nation’s highest unemployment rate.

Social Democratic parties choose to operate within the political and legal institutions of capitalism, and develop their policies on the basis of the continued operation of the capitalist economic system.

We sometimes refer to Labor parties getting into “power” at state and federal levels when in reality all they do is get into office: the real power resides with the ruling class regardless of which of the two main parliamentary parties holds office.

Weatherill is typical of a Labor leader who identifies the immense problems besetting his state and who wants to be seen to be providing a solution so as to justify remaining in office.  This is particularly so of Weatherill whose team failed to get a majority of the votes in the last election.  The result was a hung parliament in which Labor had 23 seats, the Liberals 22 and with two independents, one of whom died shortly afterwards.  The remaining independent went with Labor, the by-election for the now vacant seat of Fisher went to Labor by a handful of votes, and the government picked up one extra seat when the former Liberal leader Martin Hamilton-Smith defected and was given a Cabinet position.  To say that there is no guarantee of a re-election next time around is an understatement.

Grasping at straws to "manage" capitalism

In the face of the collapse of the car industry in SA and the uncertainty around the shipbuilding and submarine contracts, Weatherill sought straws to grasp.

The first was the Forrest Report, a thoroughly reactionary set of proposals to demonise and punish the poor written by a billionaire member of the ruling class.  Weatherill saw its proposed Healthy Welfare Card as a solution to problems on the APY Lands.  He rushed out an announcement during a consultation period that endorsed all 27 recommendations in the Report.  When told that SA Unions opposed the Report, Weatherill enlisted Forrest and Marcia “Rio Tinto” Langton to try and secure support from SA’s Aboriginal communities.  They failed and Labor’s State Convention subsequently adopted a motion proposed by the Maritime Union that criticised and rejected the Report.

The most recent sign of Weatherill’s grasping at straws of possible “solutions” was his address to the National Press Club on July 8.  He embraced the Abbott-Pyne mantra that the states be “sovereign” in areas like education and health but only if the feds adopt “fair” revenue measures to support this.  He failed to understand that it is precisely because the feds want to ditch funding responsibility that they seek to give education and health back to the states.  There was no mention of the fundamental inadequacy of the current Constitution in providing for Australia’s future capitalist economic development and a very mixed message about imposing on the big end of town for the taxes they owe the community: on the one hand, he suggested expansion of the GST to cover financial transactions, whilst on the other he advocated “a reformed taxation system that removes taxation from investment and business activity”. 

Nuclear fool cycle  

In between the Forrest Report and NPC address lies the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission.

Although previously an opponent of the nuclear fuel cycle and a strong supporter of renewable energy (SA leads the nation in energy generation from wind and solar which together account for 39% of the state’s electricity generation), Weatherill has been lured by the pro-nuclear lobby with the twin carrots of income from the storage of Australian and international nuclear wastes, and release from carbon dependency through the allegedly “clean” nuclear alternative.

It appears not to matter that a nuclear waste dump is illegal under SA laws introduced and strengthened by former Premiers Olsen (Liberal, in 2000) and Rann (Labor, in 2003), nor that nuclear reactors, uranium enrichment and spent fuel reprocessing are illegal under Australian law and therefore outside SA’s jurisdiction.

What matters is that this Labor “Left faction” premier can paint himself as a business-, energy- and mining-friendly state premier prepared to rewrite policy on the nuclear fuel cycle via a supposedly independent and impartial Royal Commission.

Weatherill’s problem is that his choice of Royal Commissioner was derided from day one: Kevin Scarce is a retired Rear-Admiral and former State Governor, and current Chancellor of the University of Adelaide who in December 2014, suggested that South Australia consider developing nuclear industries to compensate for the downturn in manufacturing.   He was addressing the SA Chamber of Mines and Energy at the time.  When Scarce was appointed on February 9, 2015 to head the Royal Commission, he brazenly declared: “I come to this with no preconceived views”! 

Anticipating opposition to the nuclear fuel cycle, Scarce determined that all public submissions be typed and sworn under oath in front of a Justice of the Peace.  This was firmly opposed by the union movement as an attack on community participation, and on the ability of Indigenous communities to put their views forward.

At the ACTU National Congress, the Electrical Trades Union National Secretary Allen Hicks moved a motion, seconded by SA Unions Secretary Joe Szakacs, that declared that “To be required to type a submission then swear an oath just to have your say is simply not necessary, and will have a disproportionately large effect on regional and remote communities, a majority of whom are Indigenous.  Additionally, in many remote communities English is not a first language, so along with typed and sworn oath requirements means that many Indigenous voices will not be heard in the Royal Commission”.

In any case, the Olympic Dam Indenture Act, introduced by Labor when it seemed that an expansion of the mine by BHP Billiton was likely, exempted the giant corporation from the Aboriginal Heritage Act.  And yet the Royal Commission’s Issues Paper 1 misleads the public by saying that the Aboriginal Heritage Act will protect Aboriginal sites of significance.

“This inaccuracy is significant,” said Friends of the Earth Adelaide spokesperson Nectaria Calan on July 13, “as it misrepresents existing regulatory and legal arrangements and potential arrangements in the future, issues on which the Issues Paper invites public comment.”  Ms Calan called on the Commissioner to correct the mistake and extend the deadline for submissions on the basis of the corrected information.

Veteran SA anti-nuclear campaigner David Noonan described the conduct of the Commission as “a promotional exercise for nuclear industry vested interests” that would “target custodians’ country for nuclear waste dumping”.

The Weatherill government is a classic example of the reason the working class needs its own party and its own agenda.

Either you are on the side of the capitalists and prefer capitalism to socialism, or you are on the side of the workers and recognise the necessity of socialism’s victory over capitalism.

Either you are for depleting the environment of resources and creating nuclear wastes that require thousands of years of safe storage, or you are for expanding the use of renewable clean energy sources.

Either you are for denying Aboriginal communities their rights to self-determination and sovereignty, or you support these.

Mr Weatherill can’t do both.

He can’t be a Social Democrat, holding office in a capitalist institution and administering a capitalist economy, and have policies that put the people before profit.

The policies embraced by the Weatherill government indicate the path that Social Democracy has chosen to follow.

The people will ultimately decide on a different direction to take.