En Passant

The fight for marriage equality will have to continue until same sex couples have the same marriage and other rights as straight Australians. Having gay marriage in the ACT will contribute to that but true marriage equality can only be won by a massive struggle from below to force Gillard Labor to legislate for it . Continue the fight for equal marriage.

Equal love now; not in the mists of time but now. Over to you Shane Rattenbury, the one remaining Greens’ member of the ACT Legislative Assembly.

The best way to ensure there is safety on building sites is to give the workers power to cut off the flow of profits to the bosses, without loss of pay, when sites are unsafe, or for workers to take that power. The stakes are high. It will take a long and bitter campaign of strikes and wildcat action to force the building bosses in Canberra and elsewhere to take safety seriously and to save lives.

The ACT Greens had a chance to be bold and implement a grand vision for the Territory. Instead we got a milksop of an ALP/Greens agreement which all but guarantees that the political isolation and decline of the Greens will continue over the next 4 years.

My tentative conclusions about the Assembly elections in the ACT are that people moved back to voting for one of the two major parties of neoliberalism, that the move was in the main to the Liberals in Opposition rather than to Labor in Government, that the Greens’ support of a fairly modest and neoliberal Labor Government and their role as followers rather than leaders backfired on them and that a tax scare campaign full of lies can work.

If so, and if this response is typical of Australians more generally (and I think it is as the economic storm clouds darken and come closer) we will have an Abbott government with a big majority in 2013.

Without a fighting trade union movement and a left wing focus for real struggle and opposition to the neoliberalism of the ALP and the Liberals, there is I think an inevitability about the Liberals, the first choice party of the bourgeoisie, winning federally.

The vote in Federal Parliament against marriage equality shows not that the movement has failed but that it has not yet won the final battle. The fact that equal love is only on the agenda because of grass roots activism shows the way forward. Build the campaign. Make it stronger and bigger and louder.

We chanted on the rally that we want marriage equality now. Not the second class citizenship that is civil unions but full marriage equality. Speaker after speaker argued for it. Over to you to deliver, ACT Greens, not in some distant future but this week.

The ACT Greens have capitulated to ACT Labor and instead of introducing a marriage equality bill will support Labor’s civil unions Bill. This Bill accepts the discriminatory idea that marriage is between a man and a woman. There is no constitutional, legal or political impediment to the Greens introducing an equal marriage Bill now.

I sent this to the Canberra Times in response to a front page article today (Monday 6 August). Labor Party Ministers Barr and Corbell know full well that there is no constitutional or legal impediment to the ACT legislating for marriage equality immediately, (Peter Jean, ‘ACT keen to be gay wedding capital’ The Canberra Times [...]

Here in Canberra one of the most left wing Labor Governments has shown its true nature by attacking its workers. That is Labor’s role. And the Greens? They have traded away principles for power in their support of Labor’s attacks on workers.