Category: Julia Gillard

01 May

Cross-posted from Larvatus Prodeo. Thanks to Mark Bahnisch for convincing me to return to this subject.

I have to confess that I couldn’t bring myself to watch Monday’s Four Corners on the scandal of Australia’s “offshore” asylum seeker processing regime. I’m on the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition email list and read horrifying stories from Manus Island on an almost daily basis. Rather than being numbed by this atrocity exhibition I am scared I will simply lose control of my rage and frustration if I have to actually see the human cost on TV.

What makes me doubly angry is that it is a Labor government doing this. Now, I’m one of those hardened Marxist types who expects the reformists to do bad stuff, but there is something debased in this government’s attempts to surpass Howard’s record in “toughness” on refugees. To hear that Labor is now back-flipping on its policy of keeping children out of mainland detention centres just days after the Four Corners special suggests that their strategy is to plough ahead undeterred by basic questions of human decency. Clearly this government is not for turning; at least not in this race to the bottom. Continue Reading

Filed Under: Adam Bandt, ALP, class, dogwhistling, Featured, immigration, Julia Gillard, population, refugees

10 Apr

7 Comments

Thatcher, the ALP & the dregs of neoliberalism

by Dr_Tad

If there’s one thing the entire Australian Left agrees on right now it’s that “Thatcherism was a very bad thing”. But beyond that, it may be appropriate to ask what exactly it is that people think was a bad thing. The answer to that question rests on one’s interpretation of what exactly was going on in the high neoliberal period of the 1980s, and what followed it. There is an uncomfortable fact that many local progressives are also trying to dance around, one that impacts on their view of the domestic political situation. That fact is that the highpoint of the ALP’s federal political success with the Hawke and Keating governments shared much of its DNA with Thatcher’s neoliberalism, here understood as a political project to shift the balance of forces in the class struggle towards capital, and thereby enact a historic redistribution of wealth and power upwards.

Filed Under: ALP, class, Featured, John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Liberal Party, neoliberalism, social democracy, Tony Abbott, trade unions, UK

23 Feb

6 Comments

After the divorce: Contradictions of Greens strategy

by Dr_Tad

With a sense of crisis swirling around the government, last Friday’s post on how the ALP’s problems run much deeper than a faulty “narrative” was republished at ABC’s The Drum. Then Christine Milne announced the end of the Greens-ALP agreement, and The Drum commissioned the piece below on the Greens. Now that comments are closed at the ABC website, we’re reposting it here.

Greens in 2013: Between a rock & a hard place

By Tad Tietze

Karl Marx once wrote, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In the case of the Australian Greens one might say that the party’s now-dead alliance with the Gillard Government weighs like a nightmare on their current political options. Continue Reading

Filed Under: ALP, Christine Milne, Featured, Greens, Julia Gillard, Left strategy, Liberal Party, Tony Abbott

15 Feb

16 Comments

Truth, lies & narratives: What ALP’s crisis is not about

by Dr_Tad

Momentum

In a considered piece at ABC’s The Drum on Thursday, Jonathan Green highlighted a phenomenon that seems to overwhelm Australian politics — the inability of simple facts about the Gillard Government’s performance to overcome the stench of crisis hanging over it.

He is correct to point out “that in assuming that the mere facts of its record should be enough to carry the political argument, this Government fundamentally misunderstands the question.”

Filed Under: ALP, class, economics, Featured, Greens, John Howard, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Left strategy, Liberal Party, social democracy, the Right, Tony Abbott, trade unions

30 Dec

1 Comment

2012 in review: The year that politics disoriented the Left

by Dr_Tad

Immigrants protest against Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn

Just before 2012 closes out, I’m reposting my last Overland blog of the year, which originally appeared here. In some ways it is a summing up of themes we have developed at Left Flank since we started in mid-2010; chiefly in our attempts to present not just a general ideological or theoretical approach to the topics we covered, but to concretely analyse actually existing politics — something that we thought had not been focused on enough by the Australian Marxist Left in recent years. We hope readers have found the blog and our writings elsewhere stimulating because of that focus, and we look forward to developing these ideas more next year. Thanks to all of you for your readership, comments, criticisms and support.

The political prediction business is not one you should engage in unless you’re either willing to repeatedly admit erroneous forecasts (one of Ben Eltham’s most endearing qualities) or to march on obliviously ignoring them (most of the rest of the commentariat). It’s even worse for us Marxists, as we’re notorious for having accurately foretold five out of the last two recessions. The problem is that history unfolds dialectically in the real world, and not simply through a logical derivation from some initial starting point.

Filed Under: age of austerity, ALP, Anti-capitalism, Christine Milne, Egypt, Europe, Featured, Greece, Greens, imperialism, Islamism, Julia Gillard, Left strategy, revolution, social democracy, social movements, Spain, trade unions

19 Nov

10 Comments

Gaza: How did taking the side of the oppressed get so hard?

by Dr_Tad

The Australian Greens are deeply worried about the civilian death toll in Israel and Palestine, and urge both sides of the conflict to put down their weapons and respect a ceasefire.

“The human suffering is too great and the continued recourse to violence has done nothing for peace,” Australian Greens Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“We support a two-state solution and urge the Government to support Palestine’s bid for a UN non-member statehood status.

“Now that we have a seat at the UN Security Council, Australia needs to step up to this role and take a more considered and independent position. Calling for ‘de-escalation’ is not enough – a ceasefire is what is needed.”

—Australian Greens media release, 16 November

The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for 40 years.

—Israel’s Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, 17 November

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

—Gilad Sharon, son of former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, in the Jerusalem Post, 18 November

In case you thought that Australian politics was all about interminable partisan sledging between the Right (a.k.a. Tony Abbott) and the Left (a.k.a. Julia Gillard and her Greens allies), along comes Israel’s attack on Gaza to unsettle things. Not because it has reproduced the same Right-Left divide, but because it reveals the near-unanimity of our political class in refusing to condemn Israeli aggression.

Filed Under: Egypt, Featured, Islamism, Julia Gillard, Lee Rhiannon, Left strategy, Palestine

04 Sep

1 Comment

This could take a while: The slow agony of the Gillard government

by Dr_Tad

Asylum issues behind them, Gillard and Bowen address, er, new asylum issues

When I wrote the Overland blog entry below, it was just before Newspoll showed a big jump for the ALP to a (still disastrous) 35 percent primary and 47 percent 2PP. As usual many in the commentariat saw this brief upward blip as an excess of swallows presaging summer, replaying the familiar tropes about Gillard having “cleared the decks” on asylum seekers and the carbon tax, and now being able to focus on “Labor” issues like disability and education. Suddenly Tony Abbott had to shape up or face losing the next election. And the chances of Kevin Rudd being an option were evaporating (although one would’ve thought that the ritual character assassination of Rudd in February was enough to make him an improbable choice no matter how bad polls got).

Filed Under: ALP, Featured, Greens, Julia Gillard, population, refugees, Tony Abbott

13 Mar

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Is the ALP’s condition terminal? A crisis of social democracy

by Dr_Tad

Celebrating a dubious kind of Labor ‘hero’

My latest piece for ABC’s The Drum was published yesterday. Here is the original text for your reading pleasure. Comments most welcome, and I will try to respond.

A flurry of excitement gripped federal politics in the last fortnight — from Kevin Rudd’s failed challenge for the Labor leadership to the parachuting of Bob Carr into the foreign ministry. Without doubt it represented a brief sharpening of the difficulties faced by the Gillard government. But it also highlighted much bigger and more longstanding problems for the social democratic politics the ALP articulates, troubles that cannot be swept away with facile claims like those that Carr’s foray into Canberra represents an “utterly transformative” moment.

Filed Under: ALP, Featured, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, trade unions

31 Oct

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Qantas lock-out: The 1% declares all-out war on the 99%, and Gillard lends it a hand

by Dr_Tad

If there was ever any proof needed that the central concerns of the #occupy movement, about rising social inequality and injustice, and the absence of democratic institutions willing to protect the interests of the vast majority, surely we got it in the behaviour of Qantas management over the last few days — and the Gillard government’s response, which took the bait and came down dramatically on the side of the bullying employer.

Filed Under: Anti-capitalism, Julia Gillard, trade unions

Category: Julia Gillard

The ALP & the politics of anti-immigration (both kinds)

After the divorce: Contradictions of Greens strategy

Greens in 2013: Between a rock & a hard place

Gaza: How did taking the side of the oppressed get so hard?

This could take a while: The slow agony of the Gillard government

Is the ALP’s condition terminal? A crisis of social democracy

Qantas lock-out: The 1% declares all-out war on the 99%, and Gillard lends it a hand

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Category: Julia Gillard

Greens in 2013: Between a rock & a hard place

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