En Passant

So the Bobbsey twins of racism, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, got a little back today of what the thugs who protect them and their ilk dish out to Aboriginal people every day.

Lunching at the appropriately named Porkbarrel Café for an awards ceremony, Gillard and Abbott became the target of a large crowd of demonstrators from the nearby Tent Embassy 40th year commemoration.

Earlier that morning 2000 of us had gathered at the Australian National University for a welcome, some talks, rap and dancing before marching up to Parliament House and then on to the Tent Embassy at Old Parliament House. 

It was a fantastic march. At the front where I was we were chanting ‘What do we want? Land rights! and ‘When do we want it? Now!’, followed by ‘What have we got? Fuck all!’, all the time raising our clenched fists to the heavens in a show of defiance and solidarity.

As the head of the march reached a fork in the road we voted unanimously to go up to the New Parliament House. A bit further up, I turned around to see a sea of people, with aboriginal and other flags fluttering and banners raised, all accompanied by a  cacophony of sound.

There was joy and laughter, and love and hugs all around, but anger too.

The anger was directed at both Labor and Liberal governments who had done nothing but invade the Northern Territory; nothing to really address the life expectancy gap; nothing to end poverty and disease among Aboriginal people; nothing about sovereignty and paying the rent; nothing about land rights.

We reached the Tent Embassy, exhilarated.

Witnesses reported that during one of the speeches a woman interrupted to say that Tony Abbott had said the Tent Embassy should be moved on. He was fifty metres away with his twin in racism, Julia Gillard.

Why doesn’t he come here and tell us that, they asked? Then someone suggested if he wouldn’t come to them, they should go to him. It spread like wildfire through the crowd.

Soon about 200 of the demonstrators moved from the Tent Embassy commemoration to the café to tell Abbott what they thought of him.

There was a bit of banging on the glass walls. 

The chants started as ‘Shame, shame’ and ‘Racists, racists’ and then became a steady “Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.’ This is a truth the one percent and their paid mouthpieces, Gillard and Abbott, cannot acknowledge let alone address.

The cops reacted as they always do when confronted by angry Aboriginal people.

The riot squad and the Prime Minister’s protection unit brutalised the crowd to clear a path for Gillard and Abbott, the two politicians of the Northern Territory invasion, the two politicians of hate, the two politicians of dispossession, the two politicians of aboriginal genocide.

Some of the demonstrators banged on Gillard’s car as it left and slowed down its exit.

It shows you how divorced from ordinary people Gillard and her Labor Party are that instead of coming out and talking to the protesters, she got her hired goons to attack them. I guess when you don’t have any case to make for having bettered Aboriginal lives then you need to use force rather than reason.

Then the cops tried to wreak their vengeance on the crowd – an Aboriginal crowd and their supporters – for having dared to protest against these two representatives of the mining companies that are stealing Aboriginal land. Together in a line, they walked slowly towards the protestors chanting ‘Move, move, move’ and in one case, shoved a pepper spray bottle into a demonstrators’ face.

 

A group of women sat on the road. They named 3 family members who had died in police custody.

As they said, the same brutality the cops had used against the protestors was the sort of brutality used against their family members.  They were sitting down and not moving to protest against racism and use of arbitrary force that led too to deaths in custody.

The demonstration was  a reminder that polite conversation isn’t going to shift entrenched capitalist interests and their representatives in the Parliament. It might give you fake constitutional changes but not land rights, not sovereignty, not a treaty.

One way to win land rights is for more and bigger and more radical demonstrations for justice to draw in more and more people committed to the struggle and eventually to bring in workers as workers to change the world and recognise sovereignty and negotiate a treaty.

These are the sort of protests that should greet Gillard and Abbott wherever they go.

And when it comes to Aboriginal land rights there is no question of lesser evilism here. Neither Labor nor the Liberals are going to grant land rights unless there is a concerted mass movement on the streets expressing its anger with the lack of progress.

Anything is possible if we can mobilise people. Tahrir Square toppled a dictator.

In Australia Equal Love has put gay marriage on the agenda, but not yet won it, through a long hard campaign building up to the demonstration of 10,000 outside Labor’s National Conference in December. The struggle continues.

Now for land rights. Today’s protest was a first step in that direction.

You might also like to read my article Australia Day celebrates racism and genocide.

There is also Of course Julia Gillard is a racist which I wrote in June 2011, prompted by Labor’s proposed Malaysian non solution for refugees.

Brett commented on my recent article about the attempted genocide of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. He said:

‘You either believe in an erroneous definition of the word genocide, or are ignorant and/or bat-shit crazy, pardon my French.’

Thanks Brett. Why is my view of genocide erroneous?

I quote from the Bringing Them Home report done for the Howard Government on the Stolen Generations and headed by Ronald Wilson. Wilson was on the High Court of Australia between 1979 and 1989 and was the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission between 1990 and 1997. He describes the stolen generation action as genocide. But I guess he is batshit crazy too.

A former judge of the High Court wouldn’t know as much as you, Brett, about the issue of genocide and the treatment of aboriginal people would he?

Here is what the Australian Human Rights Commission says on its website about the Inquiry:

An act of genocide

The Inquiry concluded that forcible removal was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide ratified by Australia in 1949. The Convention on Genocide specifically includes ‘forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group’ with the intention of destroying the group.

Genocide is not only the mass killing of a people. The essence of genocide is acting with the intention to destroy the group, not the extent to which that intention has been achieved. A major intention of forcibly removing Indigenous children was to ‘absorb’, ‘merge’ or ‘assimilate’ them, so Aborigines as a distinct group would disappear. Authorities sincerely believed assimilation would be in the ‘best interests’ of the children, but this is irrelevant to a finding that their actions were genocidal.

But I guess the UN and the Human Rights Commission are batshit crazy too, eh?

Maybe you should look at the UN Convention on genocide. Or what Wilson wrote, or Colin Tatz on the issue, instead of deliberately ignoring the fact that Australian society is built on the attempted genocide of the Aboriginal people and the consequences continue.

Telling the truth, as George Orwell wrote, is a revolutionary act.

The reality is that the consequences of genocide continue to this day but new automates at wiping out Aborigines, driving them off their land etc arise. The Northern Territory Intervention, the loss of lands to miners, what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession,  these are genocidal actions too.

No wonder our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bothers and sisters are angry.  They are right to be. So should you be.

Apropos of nothing really, I thought I’d post a speech Malcolm X gave to Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee workers at Selma, Alabama on 4 February 1965.

There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master’s house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, “We got a good house here,” the house Negro would say, “Yeah, we got a good house here.” Whenever the master said “we,” he said “we.” That’s how you can tell a house Negro.

If the master’s house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, “Let’s run away, let’s escape, let’s separate,” the house Negro would look at you and say, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a “house nigger.” And that’s what we call him today, because we’ve still got some house niggers running around here.

This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He’ll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about “I’m the only Negro out here.” “I’m the only one on my job.” “I’m the only one in this school.” You’re nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, “Let’s separate,” you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. “What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?” I mean, this is what you say. “I ain’t left nothing in Africa,” that’s what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.

On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro — those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ‘em “chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.

The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn’t try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he’d die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, “Let’s separate, let’s run,” he didn’t say “Where we going?” He’d say, “Any place is better than here.” You’ve got field Negroes in America today. I’m a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man’s house on fire, you don’t hear these little Negroes talking about “our government is in trouble.” They say, “The government is in trouble.” Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant — and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” — that’s a Negro that’s out of his mind. That’s a Negro that’s out of his mind.

Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That’s Tom making you nonviolent. It’s like when you go to the dentist, and the man’s going to take your tooth. You’re going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they’re not doing anything to you. So you sit there and ’cause you’ve got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don’t know what’s happening. ‘Cause someone has taught you to suffer — peacefully.

You are right of course. Protests never achieve anything.

Resistance across the Arab world. The occupy movement in over 800 cities in over 80 countries. Strikes and demonstrations across Europe against austerity. The Equal Love campaign and the Baiada poultry workers’ picket in Australia. 

Nothing. Absolutely nothing came of them.

The toppling of dictators and governments.

The shifting of the debate in the US so that even Obama, Wall Street’s man, is talking about taxing the rich.

In Australia gay marriage is only on the agenda because of the magnificent demonstrations Equal Love and others have organised.

Baiada chicken factory workers in Laverton won much better wages, conditions, safety and job security after a two week picket supported by the community.

Nah, protests never achieve anything.

On the first anniversary of the mass mobilizations of January 25th 2011, we have launched an international solidarity campaign with the Egyptian revolution.

For the text of the petition and to sign on, please visit http://www.egyptsolidaritycampaign.org.

We hope you will add your name, send solidarity statements, and help promote the effort as widely as possible.

If you have any questions or comments, please send them to us at egyptsolidaritycampaign@gmail.org.

Best.

David McNally &
Ahmed Shawki

‘Oh no, black people are protesting. Call in the white cops.’ It was ever thus.

Stop the media lynching.

It wasn’t a wild protest. It wasn’t a riot. It wasn’t thuggery.

Those false accusations are examples of the constant racist stereotyping by the one percent and their media and part of the wider agenda to deepen even further the oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

No arrests. Why not? Because there was no criminal activity.

For a more balanced report read my article ‘It is right to be angry; it is right to protest – Land rights now!’ on my blog En Passant with John Passant.

Here is a link. http://enpassant.com.au/?p=12131

I wrote this last year in the run up to Invasion Day. It has received a number of hits today so I have decided to republish it, with a few minor amendments.

John

____________________________________________________________________

If Wikileaks teaches us anything it is that our leaders lie. And lie. And lie.

Australia Day will be no different. Bourgeois clichés about the lucky country (what irony!) and our great nation will compete with bullshit about our brave soldiers overseas and how we all in  this together. 

It’s time for some truth about our genocidal and racist history. As George Orwell said, and Wikileaks emphasises, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Australia has a black history.

For 65000 years Aboriginal people lived here in harmony with themselves and the environment.  Australia Day does not recognise that proud history and prior stewardship. It whitewashes this history by celebrating the arrival of a bunch of neocolonialists and their convicts and guards a mere 224 years ago.

Australia is built on the bones of aboriginal people.

Our country is trapped in its genocidal history. Henry Reynolds estimates that, between 1788 and 1920, 20,000 Aboriginal people fell defending their land in an ongoing war against the invaders. The Indigenous population dropped from 300,000 at the time of the invasion to 70,000 130 years later.

Many of these people died because of disease, itself a consequence of the invasion, but they also died as a result of the consequences that flow from genocide and dispossession – murder, poverty, alienation, loss of social structure, alcoholism, racism, lack of food, stolen generations to name a few.

Genocide against Aboriginal people is one theme that runs through the history of the last 224 years. The failure to recognise that genocide is another ongoing theme.

The myth of Australia Day – of Australia as some sort of peacefully settled country – reflects the white bourgeoisie’s attempts to airbrush its brutal role from history.  It is also about lulling working people into a mistaken belief they have an interest in the present economic system, that we are all in this big one happy family together.  

Aborigines were not passive victims of the white invasion. In and around Sydney, for example, Pemulwuy was a famous freedom fighter defending his land and life. From 1790 to 1802 he waged a sporadic, and then more concerted, guerrilla war against the white invaders.

In 1801 Governor King ordered that Aborigines around Parramatta, Georges River and Prospect could be shot on sight. Late in the year he offered a reward for Pemulwuy’s death or capture. That ‘worked’. Pemulwuy’s killers decapitated him and sent his head to England in alcohol.

There are many other Indigenous freedom fighters we whites ignore; fighters who in a less racist society would be honoured for their stance and the courage of their resistance. Where are our monuments to these fallen heroes?

It was Marx who wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living. This is true in two senses for Aborigines.

First the consequences of the invasion continue today. The war against Aborigines, what I describe as genocide, has fundamentally alienated many Aboriginal people from their land, their identity, their culture and themselves. For example there is a shocking 10-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The second aspect of being trapped by the past is that the policies of dispossession and genocide are being implemented even today.

The Howard Government invaded the Northern Territory in 2007 to further the destruction of our Indigenous people’s links to their land and culture. 1788 is being repeated today.

Disgracefully the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments continued Howard’s racist Northern Territory intervention, an invasion clearly aimed at further dispossession of aboriginal people and their complete subjugation to the dictates of their white masters around grog, what they can buy, how much they can spend and whose land it really is.

The Stolen Generations represented an attempt to wipe out Aborigines through forced assimilation.

The Bringing Them Home Report on the Stolen Generations says that the past is very much with us today, in the continuing devastation of the lives of Indigenous Australians.

The report clearly recognises that removing children from their parents in order to wipe out the Aboriginal race is genocide. It says:

Systematic racial discrimination and genocide must not be trivialised and Australia’s obligation under international law to make reparations must not be ignored.

Far from being socially divisive, reparations are essential to the process of reconciliation.

I would suggest to ‘left-wing’ Labor Party Minister Macklin that she re-read the report and implement its recommendations: recommendations that for years festered in the bowels of John Howard’s mind and have remained undigested in the constipation that is the ALP.

Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations was symbolism substituting for action.  It is clear that Rudd and now Gillard have no intention of taking the apology its next logical step,a step Roland Wilson urged in his Stolen Generations report – reparations for this attempted genocide.

Land rights at present are a sop to big business and the racist mentality that aborigines will steal our backyards.

I have been struck  by another solution, encapsulated in a Midnight Oil song called Beds are Burning. Peter Garrett sang:

The time has come
To say fair’s fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share
The time has come
A fact’s a fact
It belongs to them
Let’s give it back

Exactly Peter. Let’s pursue real land rights in the context of fundamental reconciliation, because reconciliation is about more than a half-hearted apology aimed at disguising the lack of action.

For overseas readers, Garrett is now a committed member of the Gillard Labor Ministry and such words no longer pass his lips.  He has sold out.  

It is not the man who changes the system but the system that changes the man.  Or maybe it is a case of the host taking over the parasite.

Like the warriors of old, Aborigines today will need to fight for justice. Appealing to the good nature of all Australians will not work. Relying on Gillard and Macklin will not work.

Now is the time for Aboriginal people and their millions of supporters to mobilise and force the ‘Labor’ Government to recompense the stolen generation, withdraw the troops and others from the Northern Territory, introduce land rights that recognise prior ownership and set up a system of compensation for the loss of sovereignty.

The equal love campaign with its large and vibrant demonstrations has put gay marriage on the agenda. Without that campaign the issue would not even be on the horizon. land rights is not at the forefront of most people’s ideas about political priorities.

Demonstrations like the one of 1500 people today in Canberra marking the 40th anniversary of the Tent Embassy and with lively chants for land rights can bring the issue back into sight and change government approaches. (I will report back later today on this site on the demo.) 

Aborigines have never ceded sovereignty to the colonial invaders. There must be a treaty recognising prior ownership and all the legal, social and financial responsibilities that flow from that. Just as importantly there has to be aboriginal management of aboriginal affairs.

None of this will be won by petitions, or electing aboriginal people to Parliament, or relying on Labor. As the Arab Spring shows, only struggle from below offers the chance of changing the world.

That means to me uniting the struggle for aboriginal liberation with the struggle for the liberation of all humanity – the fight for socialism.

Australia Day perpetuates the country’s ‘founding’ racist myths and is part of the system that enslaves our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters and as a consequence, all of us here. In the spirit of true reconciliation let’s abolish this celebration of genocide. Let’s instead celebrate the 65000 years of indigenous history and stewardship of this land. Recognise aboriginal sovereignty, negotiate a treaty and pay the rent. It is time to fight for justice.

Watch this if you have a spare five minutes. Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this video contains images of people who have died

Forty years ago, at 1am on the morning of 27 January 1972, four young Aboriginal men – Billy Craigie, Tony Coorie, Michael Anderson and Bertie Williams – pitched a beach umbrella on the lawns outside old parliament house in Canberra and proclaimed the site the office of the Aboriginal Embassy, writes Mick Armstrong in Socialist Alternative.

It brought to the attention of the world the appalling health, housing and imprisonment rates of Aboriginal people. It highlighted their struggle against dispossession and their demand for land rights.

The immediate spark for the setting up of the Tent Embassy was a speech by Liberal prime minister Billy McMahon denying Aboriginal lands rights. McMahon offered a pathetic token concession of general purpose leases, which would be conditional upon their holders’ “intention and ability to make reasonable economic and social use of land”. He declared that mining would be allowed to continue on Aboriginal land.

The activists who sent up the Tent Embassy reckoned that McMahon’s statement had effectively relegated Indigenous people to that status of “aliens in their own land”. Thus, as aliens, “we would have an embassy of our own. One which in its form as a set of tents would physically reflect the typical housing of Aborigines in Australia today, and one which would be strategically placed under the noses of Australian politicians across the road in parliament house.”

The Embassy became the symbol of a new Black assertiveness uniting urban and rural Aboriginal people. In the face of criticism that the Tent Embassy was “an eyesore”, Embassy activist John Newfong responded, “If people think this is an eyesore, well it is the way it is on government settlements.”

The struggle for Aboriginal rights had been building for some years. 1965 had seen the Freedom Rides, inspired by the Civil Rights movement in the United States, highlighting the deeply entrenched racism in rural NSW towns such as Moree and Walgett. Then in August 1966 came the epic Gurindji strike by Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern Territory, which initiated the modern land rights movement.

Revolt was also brewing amongst the growing urban Aboriginal population. A young generation of activists from Redfern in Sydney, Fitzroy in Melbourne and South Brisbane formed the new Black Power movement. These young activists were central to setting up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

The Tent Embassy provoked an incredible amount of publicity and controversy and was hugely embarrassing to the Liberal government. On 20 July 1972, while parliament was in recess, the government sent in the cops who in the course of a brutal assault arrested eight protesters.

The television pictures of the police violently tearing down the tents stirred widespread outrage. Three days later hundreds of Aboriginal protesters and their white supporters engaged in a pitched battle with police as they attempted to re-erect the Tent Embassy. Eighteen more activists were arrested but the protests continued to grow.

The Tent Embassy was becoming a cause celebre and drew in significant support from militant unions, such as the Builders’ Labourers Federation, students and people like myself. (I had just started work as a public servant in Canberra and went down to the Tent Embassy as a show of solidarity during my lunch break.) On 30 July, about 400 Aboriginal activists and 1,000 white supporters defied the police yet again to re-erect the Tent Embassy.

Although the government managed to physically remove the Embassy the protesters had scored a major victory in highlighting the struggle for Aboriginal rights and in raising the confidence and political consciousness of Aboriginal people themselves.

In October 1973 around 70 Aboriginal protesters staged a sit-in on the steps of parliament house and the Tent Embassy was re-established for a period. In 1992 it was re-established on a permanent basis.

A major protest has been called for Thursday 26 January in Canberra to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Tent Embassy and to continue the ongoing struggle for Aboriginal rights. There is still plenty more to fight for with both Liberal and Labor governments relentlessly continuing their racist assault on Aboriginal people, graphically illustrated by the appalling Northern Territory intervention.

I will be taking a short break and resuming I hope in a few days or so. My posts will be intermittent and mostly I suspect they will be re-postings from Socialist Alternative.

All bourgeois politicians lie. It is their way of squaring the circle between labour and capital.

With the collapse of profit rates in the developed world in the late 60s and early 70s and the failure of Keynesianism to address the problems that arose as a consequence, the rise of neoliberalism saw both conservative politicians like Thatcher and Reagan and social democratic ones like Hawke, Keating and Blair implement explicitly pro-capitalist policies. 

For the conservatives the story could be more direct and for social democrats it was often disguised as being reforms to benefit workers, but at best those benefits were an adjunct to  shifting wealth to capital and making society more and more a market based one and inequitable.

So the art of lying was to convince workers they would benefit when in fact the main game was benefiting the bosses.

Some politicians – Bob Hawke comes to mind – were consummate professionals as wordsmiths, story tellers or more prosaically liars. Others are amateurs. Julia Gillard is  pathetic.

She is so bad at lying she makes Tony Abbott seem like a saint. Of course Abbott is a liar too.

For example during the 2004 election campaign he promised that the Medicare safety net threshold - a protection for poorer families against health costs – would not be raised. This key election promise was, he said, “an absolutely rock-solid, iron-clad commitment.”

When questioned by Laurie Oakes about this after the election and the Howard Government’s decision to raise the safety net so more poor people would have to pay, he said:

Well, I can understand why people feel unhappy about the Government’s decision to raise the safety net thresholds. But we took a decision that in the end it was more important to be economically responsible, and more important to maintain the safety net in the long term than it was to avoid embarrassing the Health Minister.

Oakes persisted: So honesty comes a distant second in this?

Here is Abbott’s informative reply.

Well, Laurie, when I made that statement, in the election campaign, I had not the slightest inkling that there would ever be any intention to change this. But obviously when circumstances change, governments do change their opinions, and that is actually the responsible course of action.

Circumstances change. That sounds familiar doesn’t it? That’s what Julia Gillard has said about the carbon tax, and now about poker machine reform.

It seems like they are all singing from the same song book.

We might be tempted to think Gillard is a Labor aberration. After all, Abbott was a member of what seemed to be the most lying deceitful government in memory, the Howard Government with its core and non-core promises, its children overboard lies, its medicare safety net lies and on and on.

But Howard continued a long tradition of lying from bourgeois politicians from both sides. 

In the run up to the 1993 Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating legislated tax cuts that came into effect after the election. They were, he promised, L-A-W tax cuts. After the election he repealed the tax cuts and put the money into superannuation, with the ACTU agreeing to forgo a wage increase for that. 

It was the death knell for Labor and that other liar won the 1996 election handsomely. Voters were famously queueing up with baseball bats to smash Labor in that election.

Maybe the solution for Labor is to find a likable liar, a feasible fibber. Gillard isn’t that person. Rudd probably isn’t either. Labor need a new Hawke. Is Bill Shorten that man? Dunno. Maybe the task of selling the shit sandwich is too great for any Labor politician these days. Even Hawke might fail today.

Gillard’s carbon tax has infuriated many sections of society, especially workers, and it bolsters the claim she lied before the election. There is a case to be made she didn’t because she did talk about putting a price on carbon, but prosecuting that is only likely to dig her own grave even more politically.

And now she has reneged on poker machine reform. So says Andrew Wilkie. So it must be true. Well actually, she has. The agreement is pretty clear.

Circumstances have changed. First the licensed clubs have run a cashed up campaign against Wilkie’s pre-commitment agenda and threatened a $40 million election campaign. 

The voters in club land have voiced their disapproval and Labor backbenchers have got the message. Poker machine reform means certain electoral death in working class seats in New South Wales especially.

Most clubs with poker machines are in those Labor heartlands. Heartlands is probably too strong a  word these days to describe many of the seats given that both Labor and the Liberals are infected by the neoliberal disease and so are virtually indistinguishable to most Labor voters and indeed to those of us on the Left.

Most problem gamblers are working class. They use gambling and often grog with it to escape from life’s torments under capitalism.

The house is against them. Poker machines are programmed to return around 90% of an investment. The more you play the more you lose. The winners are the clubs, pubs and casinos with poker machines, and the State and Territory Governments who tax the turnover.

With about 200,000 poker machines, Australia has about twenty percent of these gaming machines in the world. Half of all the poker machines in Australia are in New South Wales which means about ten percent of the world’s poker machines are there.  Hence the nervousness especially of NSW Labor members.

The Productivity Commission estimates that “the number of Australians categorised as ‘problem gamblers’ ranges around 115 000, with people categorised as at ‘moderate risk’ ranging around 280 000.”

Gambling losses in 2008/09 were round $19 billion, or over $1500 per year per gambler. Problem gambler lose about 40% of that.

The losses of problem poker machine gamblers were estimated at almost $5 billion or around $5000 per year each. For some you could lose that in a few hours such is the amount able to be gambled. 

About 400 people suicide each year because of gambling problems.

The recommendations such as pre-commitment, one dollar spin limits and ATM withdrawal limits at clubs address the symptoms, not the disease.

It may be addictive personalities are part of the mix of human nature. The thing about capitalism  – its exploitative nature, its limits on workers through wages and denial of the fruits of the earth and real democracy, its limiting of full human development – exacerbates and brings to the fore those addictive traits in some of us in destructive ways such as gambling and grog.

Certainly my own addictions have included in the past tobacco, alcohol and the pokies, to be replaced perhaps with more constructive or at least less destructive addictions like work, this blog, chocolate and soy chai. To that list we can now add aqua aerobics for 45 minutes every morning, a substitute high and poor memory of the hit I got from the 8 kilometres I used to run every day before children came along a quarter of a century ago and before my back and now knee surrendered.

Julia Gillard reneged on poker machine reform because her backbench were in revolt. For those millions who have the occasional flutter on pokies the idea of pre-commitment is anathema. Half a million of them alone play the pokies every week without any problems. It is their little escape.

Add in a duplicitous campaign from Clubs to protect their vested interests and it is not surprising that the punters were revolting.

The consequences for Gillard of the pre-commitment back down will be catastrophic.

The idea of her being someone who can’t be trusted will be reinforced. All those punters relieved by this backdown aren’t suddenly going to revert back to her and Labor.

They will stay with the liars from the Coalition who have yet to show us the calibre of their deceit or whose dishonesty is lost in the sands of time. They are rejecting neoliberalism and Labor’s version of it by voting for the Coalition and its neoliberalism.

Second, Gillard has lost Wilkie’s vote and trust. He could now possibly vote against all Labor’s key legislation or some of it at least.

After the defection of Peter Slipper from the Coalition and his elevation to the speakership, labour had a buffer of two votes over the Coalition. Now with the loss of Wilkie it is one.

The Labor Government depends for its existence now on the erratic (to be polite) Peter Slipper, the under criminal investigation Craig Thomson – he of alleged union credit card spending on prostitutes – and the likes of Adam Bandt from the Greens, and independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor. In the Senate they are dependent on the votes of the Greens. 

This puts the Greens in a special position to be able to demand more of Gillard than they have been prepared to do previously. Unfortunately they don’t have the political backbone to demand a more radical program from labor on social issues let alone economic ones.

Wilkie’s obsession with poker machine reform seems misplaced. While  the issue is important it is unclear why this is or should be a deal breaker. Aboriginal disadvantage, the ongoing genocide against indigenous Australians, the shift in wealth to capital at the expense of labour,  the disgraceful downward spiral of mistreatment of refugees, the creeping privatisation of public health and education, the failure to really address climate change, the possible forthcoming explosion in unemployment consequent, the failure to tax the rich, the crap levels of the pension and newstart allowance, all of these could and should be at the forefront of concerns about the here and now and the future.

A progressive party or politician could take these and other important issues and fashion a program for Labor support in exchange for votes in Parliament. That neither Wilkie, nor more importantly the Greens, have done that, tells us a lot about the inadequacies of parliamentary politics in Australia today and how far it has shifted to the right.

After 18 months, what major progressive  initiatives has the Greens/Labor agreement produced?

Maybe it is time the Greens threatened to join Wilkie unless Labor begins to seriously address issues like refugees, equal love, Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan, the wealth shift to the rich, jobs and the need for real action on climate change, such as taking over the car plants to produce buses, solar farms and wind turbines. They won’t. 

The task to win progressive reform is too important to be left to politicians. Only pressure from below – mass campaigns and strikes – can force the paid popinjays of profit to implement a program that benefits the 99%, not the 1%.