Newspoll today
The latest newspoll, released today and surveyed on the weekend, has the Coalition ahead 53-47 on two-party preferred and widening its lead on primaries by 47 to 37%. This is in spite of the disunity within the Liberal Party regarding the asylum seeker issue and the announcement of industrial relations changes.
My interpretation is that neither issue has had traction within the general electorate. In terms of the former, the electorate has become so disengaged with worker's rights and so preoccupied with mortgage interest rates that people think it's a non-issue. In any case the changes would not affect the ordinary worker until next year at the earliest. As far as asylum seekers go, I believe that the majority of Australians believe in mandatory detention and would probably prefer a more hardline and less humane approach to their treatment. The issue of the Prime Minister standing his ground and refusing to allow children into the community would have increased his standing. This is disturbing as it presumes the nation has become shorn of its compassion and humanity, and it makes the task even harder for Labor to gain any moral ground on this issue without risking an electoral backlash. We must now campaign on two fronts: adopting a more humane approach on principle, and guiding the general public towards a stance of more compassion, equity and humanity, just as the Coalition has been so successful in manipulating the electorate in the opposite direction.
O what a week - Political commentary (long)
Last week, the Howard Government introduced a plethora of industrial relations reforms that will alter the fabric of Australian society. Businesses with less than a hundred employees (excluding artificially made sub-contractors or sole traders) will be exempt from unfair dismissal laws, making 99% of workers in private enterprises subject to termination without recourse to judicial arbitration. Superannuation will be removed from awards, effectively diminishing the compulsory real rate of pay in a wages package. Award rates will be adjusted by a "fair pay" commission, made up of representatives from the business community (read: exploitative capitalists), academics (read: those in the Flint and Windschuttle league), and the token malleable union official.
I believe that wages will not fall in absolute terms immediately. It would be electoral suicide for the Howard Government to allow an absolute reduction of the minimum award rate. Rather, future adjustments by the "Fair Pay Commission" will not keep up with inflation, hence resulting in a fall in real wages long-term. Many workers will be able to absorb the impact for a while, before massive increases in poverty lead to social disaster and eventually the loss of civil liberties. For the average worker, it will be like being subject to daily venesection: there will be a latent period before clinical poverty develops. And this suits the reactionary forces best: for they are less subject to immediate electoral damage in the short term.
Today, a poll issued by ACTU found that 70% of those surveyed did not support the Howard Government's IR "reforms". 600 people were polled with a margin of error of under 5%. This is the first significant litmus test for these regressive changes, but any partisan survey needs to be treated with skepticism. With the IR changes, Schapelle Corby's conviction and the ongoing immigration bungles included, it will be interesting how the next Newspoll (due on Tuesday) pans out. The last poll had the Coalition in front 51-49 on a 2pp basis. At this stage I am predicting little change.
Today's news indicated that Tony Abbott has mentioned that humanity, rather than Christianity, guided his political views, including opposition to abortion from a sanctity of life viewpoint. Today he also stood by Vanstone and the present system of mandatory detention. I find it perplexing to think that to lock up children for their entire short lives in electric-wire prisons with little or no stimulation or to deny funding to stem cell research which could save many people from the scourges of degenerative diseases is guided by humanity. The most disturbing thing is I predict he will become the next Prime Minister.
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Last night (Saturday) I had the prievlege of attending the New Internationalist Bookshop's annual Quiz Night. NIBS is situated in the Trades Hall on the corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets, Melbourne. Sebastian Prowse-Left-Focus and associates have provided a valuable resource for all progressive people in Melbourne. It was a fun night and it was good to see a number of my ALP Socialist Left turn up. The questions were, in general, quite difficult but this wasn't surprising considering the general intellect of the audience!
Afterwards I had a chat to some of the people involved with Socialist Alternative at Melbourne University, which constitute the "ultra-left" in terms of student politics. I found it disappointing that they considered the ALP, which objectively provides a much better alternative than the present regime, on a par with the Coalition to be opposed. I found theirs to be a vision of an unattainable utopia which, by their own admission, has not been achieved in any one country on the planet to date. Some of these people were apparently unwilling to consider the merits of other people's viewpoints, even when it seems a laydown misere that the general population do not share their specific model of society. By inciting extremist, unrealistic, unelectable and dogmatic views, they can only serve to split the progressive vote and hence unwittingly help the reactionary forces.
Under Australia's electoral system, the only party in the "nominal left" that is capable of forming a government is the ALP. Current factional alignments and breakdowns have made many policy positions of the ALP less than optimal (although still always far more amenable than the Liberal Party). I believe that if people yearn for real change, they should, like myself, get involved with the progressive wing of the ALP and campaign from within to move the party in a leftward direction and further differentiate itself from the Coalition as a moderate, compassionate, humane and electable social democratic party. While the Greens can take some credit as a force to keep leftist initiatives on the agenda, they also serve to split the left vote with 30% leakage of preferences to the Liberals. Only a major party has any hope of forming a government and hence only a major party has a hope of making any difference to this nation.
To join the Labor Party please go to: www.alp.org.au
Naomi Leong and the neighbours in Mongolia
The Howard Reactionary Forces have been forced to release 3-year-old detainee Naomi Leong and her mother Virginia into the community, albeit only in the limbo-like state of a bridging visa, without access to the right to work or welfare benefits. The poor girl has spent her whole short life incarcerated in barbed wire, unable to get a glimpse of the butterflies or taste a Nasi Goreng.
Most deploringly of all, this token gesture came only over the back of Malaysia offering the Leongs a permanent haven, although Virginia rejected this for she would not able to see her other child who is living with his father in Sydney. Malaysia is, among other nations, not a place noted for its liberal civil rights, the then Mahathir Government having jailed the reformist Amwar Ibrahim only seven years ago and a nation where homosexual acts are still punished by custodial sentences. For a first-world country like Australia to stoop so low to only wake up when its human rights might be seen as inferior to Malaysia's just shows how bereft of fundamental humanity the present regime is.
Petro Georgiou, the Liberal Member of Georgiou and perhaps less evil than most of the others, has tabled a bill to release women and children (and men after 1 year if they no longer posed a threat to harm) from the detention centres but Howard has said he remains opposed and strongly supported Vanstone's administration of her portfolio, despite the bunglings of the Rau and Solon affairs.
Many thousands of miles away, the long-suffering people of Mongolia, a proud state who once ruled most of East Asia and neighbours of my kinspeople, finally had something to cheer about as the wild geese flew and the red sun shone brightly on a warm spring day in Ulan Bator - the City of Red Heroes. Last year's legislative elections there ended in deadlock with the ex-communist and now social-democratic Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) and the conservative Democratic Coalition failed to gain majorities and entered into a tenuous power-sharing agreement. After seven decades of authoritarian, but stable, communist rule, privatisation and capitalism left the mostly nomadic nation a most unequal society. Wealthy people chat away on their Smartphones and Treos whilst orphans take refuge in the city sewers during the long, dark winter. In this week's presidential elections, the MPRP won with a clear mandate getting 53.4% of the vote and providing a socialist President with power to veto legislature and shift the nation's focus to social spending notably health and education.
I hope to do the Trans Mongolian railway from Beijing to UB one day in the not-too-distant future!
Budget, Hollingworth, Thornley
I read today that the appalling tax cuts delivered squarely at the wealthiest sections of Australia are to be opposed by the ALP. The reactionary media are already reporting it as a blunder and a lost opportunity to exploit disunity by Labor and yesterday's front page of the Sydney telegraph hailed Costello as a hero to low-paid workers. What crap! Pay the zillionaires ten times the amount and you don't have to have a PhD to work out how inequitable it is.
Last night, I attended the Evan Thornley lecture on the economy delivered by the Fabian Society. The main theme was Australia's myopic and consumption/debt driven management of the economy. We all know this is unsustainable in the long run and we have one of the worst indicators of economic performance in the developed world. However, I think selling the long-term, visionary statements to the public will be much harder than the current short-sighted, hip-pocket agendas of the reactionary forces. Mr Thornley is an intelligent person and would be an asset to the party, in my view, if he took up federal politics.
Yesterday's Murdoch media reported that the former Governer General of Australia, Peter Hollingworth, was suffering from "severe clinical depression" and that the child abuse affair has clouded his life, with organisations no longer willing to have him as patron or speaker. He categorically denied covering up child abuse within the clergy, but as a religious leader, he should clearly have known when these incidents occurred if they did. He was reported to lament a shift towards a "secular, anti-religious, unforgiving" society. Let's just put that in perspective and consider how forgiving religion has been in the world since antiquity. Countless people have been persecuted to their deaths for not adhering to the prevailing religious dogma. Religion continues to be a vehicle for the reactionary forces to persecute minority groups such as non-heterosexuals through interpreting the Bible in their own way and to impede revolutionary, life-saving research on stem cells and other topics. This clearly shows that Hollingworth is not in a state of genuine remorse but rather simply going into victim-complex as a defence mechanism for his own inadequacies.
And might I just mention, that he continues to leech from taxpayers a generous life pension greater than the average Australian's pay packet with a myriad of fringe benefits such as an exclusive apartment in Melbourne's CBD and multiple first-class international and domestic flights per annum.
I have been diagnosed with clinical depression before myself, and I wish it upon no-one. But in the context of the above information I've no sympathy at all. Maybe going to visit Baxter Detention Centre might go some way to treating his numbness to the issues of the real world.
Costello's appalling 10th budget
The Treasurer, Peter Costello, has handed down his budget for the next financial year.
And what a deplorable budget it is. Tax cuts purportedly to all, with a miniscule reduction in the lowest tax rate (from 17% to 15%), but a huge increase in the threshold for the highest two rates. The top rate of 47% will now apply only to those earning above $125K per annum - something that three percent of the population reaches at the moment.
The net result is a huge boon for the wealthy and precious little for the poor and the middle-income masses. Single mothers will now be forced into work, making their already difficult lives even more hard. Rules for the unemployed will be tightened with more draconian penalties - and people with disabilities will be forced into part-time work for next to nil net gain in income.
The taper rate for welfare recipients will be reduced from 70% to 60% - which, combined with existing tax rates, equates to an effective marginal tax rate of 66% (compared to 81.9% earlier). This is of course still a grossly unacceptable figure and an absolute insult on the unemployed (often involuntary), the disabled and the student community. It is nothing short of an international disgrace that university students now face astronomical fee debts and higher marginal tax rates than millionaires who actually pay tax legitimately without evading the system.
The scrapping of the superannuation surcharge will benefit only the most wealthy of those employed (income of 100K and over), including very successful businessmen, and perhaps some doctors and lawyers.
Mr Costello's tenth, and unlikely to be last, budget has failed middle Australia and more importantly the sections of the community that are most vulnerable whilst pouring vasts sums of dough into those who don't need it. Shame!
The latest AC Nielsen Poll has Labor in front on 2pp by 51% to 49%. Costello is garnering little support as PM compared to Howard, but this is to be expected as the public have not had Costello as PM to compare. And after this shameful budget, this is perhaps hardly surprising.
On Thursday, the United Kingdom went to the polls. The Labour Party were given an unprecedented third term in office, albeit with a reduced majority.
With 645 of 646 seats declared, the Labour Party has captured 355 seats, giving it a majority of 64 in the new parliament. This means that it can no longer assume the Commons to be a rubber-stamp chamber and will have to watch very carefully for rebellion within its own ranks. The progressive factions of the party were not pleased with the decision by Blair (or rather the more technically correct spelling, Bliar) to go to war or impose top-up fees for university students. Many of their members decided to vote on their conscience on these issues, and Labour with a much reduced majority must now listen to all sides of their own spectrum.
The Conservative Party are on 195 seats, five short of Michael Howard's declared "minimum goal" of 200. They have made little inroads with the electorate and their vote is the third-worst on record in a century, after 1997 and 2001. They may have won back a few seats but it was mainly because Labor's votes leaked into the Liberal Democrats rather than the Tories picking up much ground themselves. They still need to pick up well over a hundred seats to get anywhere near a working majority next time, and I don't like their chances. M. Howard has quite rightly decided to step down as leader, and good riddance to a Thatcherite rodent who was happy to pander to the electioneering strategy of the Tampa architect Lynton Crosby. For both of you, the message is you have FAILED!!!!!!!!!
The Liberal Democrats increased their share of the vote to its highest level since the days when they were a major party in the nineteenth century, and picked up eleven seats net compared to last time. I wish them well in contributing positively in the battle to bring Britain forward, not back.
Overall, the election is a wonderful victory for the parties of light and the British people have staved off darkness, we hope, for another four or five years. The fact that a more "normal" majority and make-up has materialized this time round will mean that Bliar no longer has absolute power in terms of his party policy and must consult more often with his colleagues and the British people, as well as needing to maintain better working relations with the Liberal Democrats and the minor progressive parties, if they are to be ensured a fourth term. It will also shorten the tenure this time before he passes the baton onward to the more socially amenable Gordon Brown. And with the "nominal left" (Labour, Whigs and other small social-democrat parties) holding more than 420 seats, the mother country is in good hands and the sun will shine a bit more brightly in the land of Australia's forefathers.
Long live social democracy in the land of hope and glory!
Polls and portents
The latest polls have come out in their usual fortnightly procession. Newspoll shows the Coalition in front 52-48 on two party preferred (36-48 on primaries). Morgan poll has the forces of Evil ahead 42 to 40 on primaries, but Good maintained the barest of leads when preferences were taken into account.
Today's Herald Sun shows a less-than-flattering drawing of the fugitive businessperson Andrew Landeryou who was once president of MUSU and who has been an eminent figure in annals of the Labor Right. He has vowed to reveal shocking information into the doings of Solomon Lew whom he and his family are now in a financial mess to. It seems from the paper that the blog by "Andrew Landeryou" on andrewlanderyou.blogspot.com is genuine. From my own personal point of you I have no compunctions with Mr Landeryou revealing the supposed sins of Mr Lew. Mr Lew was personally responsible for the failed rescue of a zillion Ansett Workers who were duped into believing he might be a saviour for their dying jobs and as such I have little sympathy for him. I would happily gloat if they simply disemboweled each other on the legal battlefield.
Yesterday I attended the Ben Chifley Memorial Lecture, delivered at Melbourne University and organised by MU's ALP club. The keynote speaker was Peter Garrett, the federal MP for the seat of Kingsford-Smith. In a well-written speech he was able to reach out to the audience in a number of ways: to summarise the achievements of Ben Chifley as a historical figure of democratic principles in the ALP and Australian politics generally, and the current state of affairs where the reactionary forces are actively seeking to manipulate and deceive the people of Oz shamelessly for political gain, in the process undermining the democratic processes. Dissenting voices are silenced through withdrawal of funds and even the more liberal elements of the Liberal Party are being continually expunged.
This weekend has been overshadowed by speculation regarding Liberal Party leadership. Howard has effectively signified that he will stay on indefinitely as PM. To me this comes as no surprise and is a move to sideline Costello from the potential future leadership as within the Liberal Party he is considered a moderate. Howard would like to continue through the next election with a long-term goal to install someone who is as socially regressive as he to continue his legacy of turning Oz into a extreme free-market, user-pays, ultra-conservative, mysogynist, homophobic and racist dystopia, with all thoughts of reconciliation and republicanism banished. The best candidate for most, if not all of these would be the present Health Minister, Tony Abbott. If Mr Costello had any cerebral cortex, he should know that in the present state of affairs he has sweet f--k all chance of beating Howard in a challenge, and the opinion polls all indicate that Howard has vastly more electoral traction than Costello. He therefore needs to shut up and wait for Howard in the meantime to hand over the reins, even if this is a very long time. Doing the wrong thing could well result in political oblivion for him, which I believe is Howard's real goal.
I have been most fortunate to be able to join the campaign team for the seat of Wairarapa in the upcoming federal election in Aotearoa (NZ). I would like to thank Mrs Denise Mackenzie, the candidate, and Miss Georgina Beyer, the sitting member and NZ's "reverse Pauline Hanson" (she appeared on Dancing with the Stars!) for their gracious permission for me to be involved in the upcoming battle and I am sure for me it will be a most cherished learning experience and a step (made out of Aotearoa Giant Kauri wood!) on the Ladder of Opportunity.
