September 17, 2011
Role reversal as Liberals belt Labor with class war rhetoric
[This article was published by the Age in Melbourne, 2 June 2011.]
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/role-reversal-as-liberals-belt-labor-with-class-war-rhetoric-20110601-1fgjv.html
Once the Australian working class was oppressed by big business. Today it suffers under the yoke of actors and actresses.
Is it just me, or have others noticed that the Liberal Party under Tony Abbott has become the party of class war, class envy and class hate?
In an astounding rhetorical trick Cate Blanchett is attacked as a symbol of wealth and power for speaking out on climate change. Yet dollar for dollar, she barely rates against genuinely wealthy Australians such as mining heiress Gina Rinehart who is a generous supporter of the climate denial movement.
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Posted by David at 9:41 PM
July 25, 2011
Rethinking Marx and Hayek
Most people who reach 90 years of age would be enjoying their retirement, perhaps reminiscing, probably relaxing. Instead, veteran political activist Eric Aarons has spent the last five years researching the conservative philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek and re-reading Karl Marx. While Marx is familiar to many people, Hayek is less well known. Yet Hayek's ideas have provided the intellectual foundation for the neo-liberal Right which has been so globally influential for the last 30 years. In Australia Hayek's influence is now better known thanks to Kevin Rudd's various essays attacking neo-liberalism. Occasionally, Hayek is discussed and defended in the columns of The Australian.
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Posted by David at 9:19 AM
May 3, 2011
Privatised, corporatised Labor has lost touch with its core values
Published in The Australian , 20 November 2010
Julia Gillard's refusal to consider regulating the banks highlights the reason for Labor's malaise
THE fate of the Rudd government and Labor's dismal election results have reignited a long-running debate about the beliefs and principles that underlie Labor's policy and public statements.
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Posted by David at 10:03 PM
January 15, 2011
The climate of opinion at The Australian
Published 11 December 2010, in The Australian
The Australian is undoubtedly the most serious newspaper in Australia and its record on climate change matters because of this. More importantly, its stance matters because of the civilisational challenge which climate change presents to Australia and the world.
This was recognized by the CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch who warned in 2007 that climate change posed 'clear catastrophic threats'. Mr Murdoch also pledged that News Corporation would 'weave this issue into our content' and 'tell the story in a new way'.
I happen to agree with Mr Murdoch description of the seriousness of the threat. But there is a puzzle. In recent years The Australian campaigned in favour of objective facts in the teaching of Australian history against 'political' interpretations. By contrast, its attitude to the science of climate change has zig zagged from a grudging acceptance of the facts to simple denial and back again. In all modes, its stance is invariably dominated by old ideological obsessions that are tangential to this profound issue.
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Posted by David at 10:52 PM
September 3, 2010
Underground in Asia
Excerpt from 'Espionage and the Roots of the Cold war'
by David McKnight
Chapter Four
Underground in Asia
On May 1, 1929 an unusual meeting of trade unionists took place in Shanghai. The communists who organised the meeting later regarded it as 'perhaps the biggest single feat of illegal organisation' at the time.
It was a copybook version of the kind of illegal activity under conditions of savage repression which was described by the Comintern Commission on Illegal Work:
A guildhall on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the Settlement was booked. Factory workers went to the hall in groups of three or four. Their times of arrival were carefully staggered. They were still arriving when a policeman walked into the hall to ask what was going on. He was politely disarmed and locked in a small room. The meeting was held, 400 people heard a 45 minute May Day address and dispersed into the night. Then the policeman was released.
The description is by a British communist, George Hardy, who worked underground in Shanghai for Profintern, Comintern's trade union wing. Hardy's task was to stimulate the left wing trade union movement in China and in South East Asia and he worked closely with historic leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) such as Chou En-lai, Deng Hsiao-ping and Liu Shao-chi who were all active in the underground trade union movement, particularly that part centred in Shanghai.
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Posted by David at 11:11 PM
July 15, 2010
A new Left today?
Published in Arena magazine, number 104,Feb-March 2010
Around the world the financial crisis and climate change have focused many minds on a revival of the Left. Some people point to the success of socialists in South America or the election of Barack of Obama, other point to the rise of a Left Party in Germany. Even Michael Moore's latest film, Capitalism, A Love Story, seems to be a straw in the wind. The fate of the Left was one of the topics at a conference of activists and thinkers at Deakin University recently and was discussed in an editorial of Arena (No. 102). The purpose of the conference was to rethink ideas from that broad political force known loosely as 'the Left'.
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Posted by David at 9:22 PM
November 2, 2009
Motherhood, work and children (Chapter 7, Beyond Right and Left, Allen & Unwin, 2005.)
I have only ever experienced one truly life-transforming event. It was being a house-father for six months soon after the birth of my daughter in 1981. It was transforming because it revealed a side of everyday life of which I was utterly unaware; it revealed a side of myself of which I was utterly unaware; it transformed my relationship with my daughter for many years and it permanently changed my way of looking at the world. Years later I was once asked 'if you had one wish to make a better world, what would it be?' I responded: 'that every father cares for their child at home for at least six months.'
Posted by David at 9:18 PM
May 6, 2009
What is the progressive alternative to neo-liberalism?
A talk at a conference of Australian progressive think-tanks.
http://www.crunchtime.org.au/
If we look back in a year's time to our meeting today, I suspect we will say that we were (or are) living in a kind of phoney war period, a lull before a storm. We are on the brink of a profound economic crisis which will be historic in its implications. A large degree of unemployment at best, or at worst, global tensions leading to local wars. But even more profound than this crisis is the growing climate emergency, with events moving far faster than expected while the leadership of advanced industrial countries continues to avoid decisive action.
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Posted by David at 10:48 PM
February 15, 2009
The crisis of neo-liberalism and the renewal of progressive ideas
[This article appeared in Arena,a magazine of left political, social and cultural commentary, published in Melbourne, Dec-January 2008-09]
There are have been many delicious moments in the last few months as the banks on Wall Street tumbled like an unstoppable sequence of falling dominos. Having the former chair of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan admit that he had misplaced his faith in deregulated free markets was one. Another was the sight of the British and American governments nationalizing banks as their losses forced them to the wall.
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Posted by David at 8:32 PM
