Labor goes to water with Murray-Darling Basin sell-out

Nick G.

Conservationists have accused the Labor Party of selling out the interests of a healthy Murray-Darling river system. The party has withdrawn its support for a Greens motion to disallow a reduction in the amount of water to be kept in the Southern Basin of the rivers for their environmental health.

The federal Labor back-flip follows the release of an Issues Paper by the South Australian Labor-appointed Royal Commissioner into the Murray-Darling Basin that has questioned the legality of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan (MDBP). Labor claims its change of mind was partly prompted by the need to rescue the Plan from recalcitrant states – particularly NSW and Victoria -  that had threatened to withdraw from the MDBP unless the reductions went through.

Referring to the Water Act on which the Basin Plan is based, the Royal Commissioner states that the Plan erred in not basing its calculations on the amount of water required for environmental purposes only. Instead it had included social and economic factors which should only have been applied once a base level had been established.

Environmental scientists had calculated that a recovery target within the range of 3000 – 7600GL was needed to establish an environmentally sustainable level of take (ESLT). Instead, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA) has set the ESLT at 2750GL, substantially below the minimum amount required for the river system’s health.

The MDBA’s failure to comply with the law in setting the initial ESLT led the Royal Commissioner to state, in paragraph 61 of the Issues Paper, that “there is a real risk that all or part of the Basin Plan is unlawful”.

The Australia Institute has further attacked the legality of the adjustment to the ESLT on the basis that it has unlawfully included projected water savings measures that are anticipated, but not yet realised, and that may in fact never be realised.  It has referred its objections to the Royal Commission.

What’s at stake?

What is at stake is an immediate reduction of 605GL from the already inadequate and unlawful figure of 2750GL.  These 605GL are the proposed savings to the river system of 36 projects, not one of whose business cases has been made public. The theory is that if 605GL can be returned to the rivers by these measures, then the rivers don’t need the full ESLT of 2750GL.  There is no guarantee that these 605GL will eventuate, but if they did, they should be used to supplement the inadequate ESLT rather than further reducing it.

This is not about letting good rainwater drain out to sea, as the cotton growers and other big corporate irrigators claim.  It is about ensuring Broken Hill’s water supply, ensuring the Menindee Lakes and Macquarie Marshes remain viable as part of our inland biodiversity (essential for birdlife and the Golden Perch fish species), that there is water available for pastoralists along the rivers (their take is minimal compared to cotton growers and other big irrigators), and that the internationally protected Coorong is kept alive.

A broad alliance fights for the rivers

A broad alliance has emerged to fight for the rivers.  It includes the Greens, various conservationist organisations, the national Birdlife Australia, First Nations peoples, pastoralists and many, many ordinary citizens.

It was the Greens that took an earlier and successful disallowance motion, pertaining to the Northern Basin, to the Senate in February. On that occasion, Labor voted for the rivers and supported the Greens.

The Australian Conservation Foundation has criticised the passage of the reduction in the Southern Basin ESLT, saying that “The cuts to the river’s water are premature and reckless, and puts at risk the health of floodplains, wetlands and wildlife that call the basin home, and the communities that rely on a healthy river to thrive.”  It demanded “an end to the industry-dominated and one-sided approach from the Turnbull Government and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority to the management of the river system.”

Tolarno station pastoralist Robert McBride and his daughter Kate have campaigned strongly, including effective use of social media, for the rivers. Striking Tolarno shearers attacked scabs at nearby Moorara station on August 26, 1894 and burnt the paddle steamer Rodney (above), loaded with scab wool, to the water line. The Rodney was one of a number of paddle steamers navigating a then healthy Darling River carrying heavy loads of wool bales to Goolwa at the mouth of the Murray. They would be unable to do so today. Near Menindee, the Darling is a fetid gutter of green algae. It is so low passing Tolarno that Robert McBride, a relative of former Liberal Party President and Menzies Minister Sir Philip McBride, is able to appear to be walking on water in a recent photo.

First Nations peoples have won some rights to buy back water for Indigenous economic and cultural purposes in the deal struck between Labor and the Federal government.  Leaving aside the irony of Indigenous peoples having to buy back waters stolen from them during colonisation, the recognition of Indigenous rights to water is important. The Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations, peak body for 22 First Nations in the Southern Basin area has welcomed this but also decried the reduction in the ESLT, describing it as “a backward step for the iconic ecosystems of the Murray-Darling Basin.”

On May 5 traffic in Dubbo’s Macquarie Street came to a stop when more than 60 locals took to the streets with placards and banners supporting a healthy river system.  “Communities in the Murray-Darling basin are outraged at the perilous health of our rivers, marshes and lakes, and the impacts for all of the life that relies on them,” said rally organiser Mel Gray. Indigenous elders, Aunties Narelle Boys and Coral Peckham spoke about the healthy river that once existed.

Cotton and corporates – enemies of our rivers

Unlike corporates, cotton is socially useful.  However, it should be grown in an appropriate environment, and the arid and semi-arid regions through which the Murray-Darling river systems run is clearly inappropriate.  The water requirements of cotton are killing our rivers and killing the Lower Lakes and Coorong.

Since the corporate-led demise of water as a common good, and its subsequent transformation into a marketable commodity, huge corporations including overseas hedge funds and private equity firms have entered the market and have bought up big.  The more water stolen from the ESLT – from the environment – the more there is available for speculative purchases by finance capital.

Together, cotton and corporates are enemies of our great national icon, the Murray-Darling river system. The alliances that have emerged to fight for the rivers are the future independent and socialist Australia in embryo. Its future development is contingent on growing working class involvement in and leadership of the broader environmental movement.

Eureka flag – more than just a union symbol

Danny O.

In response to an outright attack on their democratic rights, workers are showing they are willing to fight to protect that most treasured symbol of Australian working class struggle.

After the Turnbull government’s building industry attack dog, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), issued a directive explicitly banning the Eureka flag from construction sites in February this year, unions and workers have rallied together in defence of their democratic rights and are taking up the Eureka flag with enthusiasm not seen for years. 

Construction workers are displaying the flag on job sites across the country in active defiance of the ABCC directive. It is now not unusual to see it flying high from the many tower cranes that litter the skylines of our major cities even where it had been absent before.

The construction division of the CFMEU has been leading the way with its call to ‘Break the Ban’, and solidarity has been strong from across the union movement. The Queensland Teachers Union notably came out in support saying that they would “make sure there are Eureka Stockade flags in every school in Queensland”. 

All of this is a very welcome development and should be encouraged. It is an opportunity for workers to rediscover the importance of the Eureka rebellion and its flag to the countless struggles of ordinary Australians. However, it’s also important to realise that the Eureka flag is attacked not just because it is a symbol used by the CFMEU, nor because it’s just a union symbol, but because it stands for so much more.

At the time of its creation, the Eureka flag represented the struggle against the oppressive British colonial authority and growing calls by the Eureka rebels for an independent Australia.

Today it has become a powerful symbol of ordinary people’s determination to stand up for justice, democratic rights, and liberties. It is a flag of resistance and defiance that continues to inspire unity, solidarity, and courage in the collective struggles of Australia’s working people against injustice and exploitation. What it represents scared the ruling class when it was first raised in 1854, and it still scares them today.

The flag of an independent Australia 

Dave Noonan, the national secretary of the CFMEU’s construction division, recently described the Eureka flag as “an Australian flag which represents the struggle for democracy and national independence.” He’s quite right.

In 1854, the British Governor of Victoria, Charles Hotham called it “the flag of Australian independence” that “threatened British rule.” The local newspapers echoed his words. 

For generations, activists, workers and ordinary Australians have rallied under the Eureka flag fighting for workers’ and democratic rights, and calling for national independence. 

Despite having achieved a certain level of formal independence, Australia has never been truly independent and since WW2 has been a client state of US imperialism. 

We see some examples of this in the giant US monopolies that dominate our economy and pillage our resources without paying tax like ExxonMobil and Chevron.

We see it politically when parliamentarians of both major parties fall over themselves to prove their loyalty the US.

Militarily we see it with ever further integration of the Australian armed forces into the US war machine and an unswerving loyalty to the ‘US-Australia Alliance’ and a commitment to fight in its perpetual imperialist wars. 

Our Party logo and the strategy of a two-stage Australia revolution 

The logo of our Party is the Eureka flag flying in front of the red star of socialism. This is a symbolic representation of our strategy of a two-stage continuous revolution in Australia.

In analysing the concrete conditions of society in this country, the CPA (M-L) puts forward the position that the current stage of Australia’s revolutionary struggle for socialism is the struggle against the imperialist interests that dominate this country economically, politically and militarily and for a truly independent Australia under the leadership of the working class. This struggle will continue to flow into the second stage of socialist development.

We unashamedly raise the Eureka flag as a powerful symbol in this revolutionary struggle for real independence and encourage the people of Australia to understand its significance and fight for everything it represents.

Change the Rules! Change the System!

Mike Williss

The Australian Unions’ (ACTU) campaign to Change the Rules is deserving of the full support of all working Australians.

It is a comprehensive response to injustice and unfairness across a range of issues: social inequality, taxation, rights to industrial action and representation, wage theft, penalty rates, enterprise bargaining, insecure work, minimum wage, working women and working families, temporary visa workers and the construction “watchdog”, the ABCC.

The campaign statement reads: We all want a country that is fair, but right now the rules favour big business and the very rich…. Working people need more power to swing the pendulum back.

It would indeed be a very great thing if the ACTU campaign succeeds in restoring the right to strike, abolishes the ABCC, wins substantial increases to the minimum wage and Newstart Allowance, restores full rights of entry provisions for unions, and restores penalty rates. The rights of temporary visa workers, insecure and part-time workers, working women and working families also need new rules.

As well, one third of the largest multinationals pay no tax in Australia. Exxon-Mobil hasn’t paid for three years in a row. Others pay ridiculously small amounts. Changing rules to force them to pay would be great!

It’s a massive agenda. It requires strength and defiance.

Major victories have always come on waves of struggle on the job, in the streets and communities. Victories don’t come from the so-called “independent umpires”, the courts, politicians or parliaments.

Has Australia ever been “fair”?

Even if all the ACTU demands were won, that can’t be the end of it.

“The rules that made Australia fair are broken,” says the ACTU. This is a dangerous illusion for the people.

Rules and laws have always been written by and for the ruling class of big business and corporations. They’ve always tried to make Australia “fair” for the super-rich and “not fair” for the majority, the working people.

A quick glance at Australian history will show that unions have always been subject to heavy fines, their leaders and members have been jailed for defending workers’ rights, and that any improvements to wages and conditions have come by and large from action on the job rather than the benevolence of the so-called “independent umpire”. It has never been a fair country for working Australians.

The very worthy demands now being put forward by the ACTU would provide a breathing space for workers for a while, but pressure from big business to cut costs and remove conditions will always remain and  intensify.

Time to get off the treadmill

That is why the ACTU campaign Change the Rules is worthy of support, but the missing piece is that only when workers unite to Change the Capitalist System will fundamental sustainable improvements in workers’ lives take place.

Given that the decisive sections of the economy are in foreign, and predominately, US hands, the first stage in Changing the System must be the demand for a genuinely independent Australia – economically and politically.

Such an independent Australia must necessarily be a socialist Australia with all working people becoming owners of, and benefitting from, our natural resources and the enormous wealth created by the labour of workers. Only the working class has the capacity to unite and lead the Australian people to Change the Rules and Change the System.

It’s time to unite, not just to Change the Rules, but also to Change the System!

When red wine replaces red politics….

Ned K.

And so it has come to this – Australia’s best wines for the new ruling class of China!

South Australia's economy has a booming wine and viticulture industry. The industry ownership is a mixture of large multinational companies such as Pernod Ricard, Vinpac, Treasury Wine Estates and Accolade, a few medium size wineries such as Yalumba and Taylors Wines and many small family owned businesses. All of them look to the export markets of China and India for expanding their profits. No doubt some of the people from China and India who purchase wine from South Australia and other parts of Australia have worked hard to be able to afford a bottle of imported wine from "The Land Down Under".

However, the story in the Adelaide Advertiser on Saturday 5 May about purchase of local wine by a Chinese millionaire businessman says as much about what China has become as it does about the popularity and good quality of our wine produced here by union labour.

The story recounts how a group of Chinese business people visited Adelaide for a weekend recently. One of them went to the Casino on the Saturday night and left with thousands of dollars from gambling in the high rollers' room. Then on the Sunday he visited Penfold's cellar door at Magill and bought bottles of wine, including 200 bottles of Grange with a final bill of $187,750! He paid for it in cash with $100 notes and arranged for it to be exported to Hong Kong en route to his home in Shanghai.

Of course, Treasury Wine Estates, who own Penfold Wineries and the Casino and the state government applaud all this show of extreme wealth as an example of our booming tourism and wine industry.

Reading this before attending the May Day rally in Adelaide, I wondered how this Chinese businessman accumulated his wealth? Was it from his work as a production worker in one of the many factories in China, or perhaps from his work as an agricultural labourer, or perhaps from his earnings as a migrant worker from far west China who went to Shanghai to feed his struggling peasant based family?

Or was he one of the comprador capitalists who has accumulated wealth from the labour of thousands of factory workers or peasants or migrant workers from peasant backgrounds handed over to foreign imperialist investors? Or perhaps he benefitted financially from the privatisation of State Owned Enterprise as part of the dismantling of public ownership of the means of production in post-Mao's China? Or perhaps he won very little at the Casino in Adelaide that Saturday night and was using the purchase of Penfold wines as a way of laundering money?

Perhaps I am being too negative? Is there an outside chance that in the spirit of May Day, the rich businessman from China was taking the wine back to Shanghai to share with Shanghai workers and migrant labourers in recognition of their role as the producers of wealth in China? To ask the question is to answer it.

No cuts to biodiversity staff!

Nick G.

The federal government will cut its biodiversity and conservation staff by more than 60, or around one third of its total.

Professor David Lindenmayer, an ecologist from the Australian National University, described the cuts as "an absolute calamity for the Australian environment and for the conservation of Australia's ecosystems and threatened species".

The move is a calculated insult to the thousands of Australians who recently participated in March for Science protests.  As a Spirit of Eureka leaflet distributed at these rallies pointed out: “…the attack on science throughout the Western world is continuing unabated. Massive political interference is rife against scientists and science whose conclusions might reduce multinationals’ profits.”

Biodiversity staff coordinate the listings of threatened species and their recovery plans, devise Australia's national biodiversity strategy, and coordinate action around the country against invasive species and other biosecurity threats.

Biologist and author Tim Low regards invasive species as the major threat to Australia’s environment and has argued that free trade agreements will only exacerbate the problem. In his 1999 book “Feral Future” he warned: “…free trade, the high ideal we are all asked to embrace, is a sure-fire recipe for a pest-infested world. The more we move goods around the globe, the more pests we move with them…companies will exploit free trade treaties to overturn environmental legislation”.

Biologist and author Tim Low regards invasive species as the major threat to Australia’s environment and has argued that free trade agreements will only exacerbate the problem. In his 1999 book “Feral Future” he warned: “…free trade, the high ideal we are all asked to embrace, is a sure-fire recipe for a pest-infested world. The more we move goods around the globe, the more pests we move with them…companies will exploit free trade treaties to overturn environmental legislation”.

Australia became a signatory to the international Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992. It remains a signatory.  Australia’s reputation for adherence to the protocols and requirements of international treaties and conventions, however, is in tatters. The provisions of the International Labour Organisation, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the UN Refugee Convention are just some of the better-known examples of government hypocrisy in action.

The Biological Diversity Convention, if really followed by Australia, would see an expansion, not only of government biodiversity staff, but also of its quarantine staff.  It defines biological diversity as “the variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are part; this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems.”  It requires signatories to “regulate and manage biological resources important for the conservation of biological diversity” and to “adopt measures relating to the use of biological resources to avoid or minimise adverse impacts on biological diversity”.

How can that possibly be done by cutting by one-third the already inadequate numbers of government employees tasked with those responsibilities?

How can it be done when current monitoring and management is so grossly inadequate that researchers at the Threatened Species Recovery Hub in the Federal Government's National Environmental Science Program found about a third of Australia's 548 threatened species and 70 per cent of its threatened ecological communities were not being monitored at all?

How can it be done when we have no completed understanding of what constitutes our biological diversity? “Best estimates suggest that a majority—around 70%—of Australian and New Zealand species remain undiscovered, un-named and un-documented” states a report released only a fortnight ago by the Australian Academy of Science and New Zealand’s Royal Society Te Apārangi.  It proposes a ten-year plan for expanding the work and the workforce associated with taxonomy and biosystematics, the two sciences underpinning research into biodiversity.

Yet the government, in its rush to cut staff and leave management to “operators in the field”, in other words, to private sector initiatives, is driving us further away from our treaty obligations, from our scientific community, and from the huge numbers of Australians who volunteer their own time and effort to protect the environment and its species.

No cuts to biodiversity staff!

Honour own international obligations!

Support, enhance and expand the scientific exploration of our biodiversity!

Fight for an independent Australia in which evidence-based science research is respected and not attacked by governments serving US big business!