En Passant

To win back our trust maybe the Parliament should open up all the expense information it has to public scrutiny. It could set up an expense investigation committee to go over all the claims of the last few years with a forensic fine tooth comb.

We have a good role model. The equivalent of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and its draconian powers could be set up to smash alleged rorting by a small group allegedly holding the rest of us to ransom through their allegedly criminal behaviour.

Dave Oliver from the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Dave Noonan from the building workers’ union and Julian Assange might be good nominees to carry out the investigation.

Yes, it is obviously very important work talking to Boris, William and Mervyn in London instead of reading the damning indictment of one of your mates. Is this how your government will operate Mr Abbott? Mates can do no wrong? Ignore the findings of judges when they impugn your mates? Is that it?

If there should be, as the Opposition leader claims, an inquiry into the AWU slush fund of 20 years ago, should there not also be an inquiry into the very very recent Ashby abuse of process affair?

There is something else in all of this too. The strutting roosters of neoliberalism in Australia have done little to distinguish themselves from each other. Where there are differences, they are usually of degree, not substance. The political cock fights are over reputation, not policy, because both Labor and the Liberals basically agree upon the neoliberal policy framework.

A pox on both their houses. Maybe it is now time for the working class fox to enter the chook pens of the major parties and put pro-working class policies and politics on the table of state.

Instead of taxing Gina Rinehart, the world’s richest woman, Labor is attacking single mums, some of the least well off women in Australia. Maybe it’s time for the social media crowd to defend them in a massive campaign against Gillard.

Changing Labor leaders would be like changing deck chairs on Clive Palmer’s new Titanic. Labor’s embrace of neoliberalism from 1983 has left it high and dry, with no wind in the sails and no steam in the engines. Its iceberg approacheth.

The Slipper scandal will drag on for a while. Labor could well survive with his support and that of Craig Thomson till an election in 2013. Then they will get annihilated because of the Slipper syndrome, power without principle, rule for the rich.

Maybe we could find a more fitting eulogy. How does this sound? This is the way Labor’s world ends, this is the way their world ends, this is the way their world ends, not with a bang but a slipper. Labor are indeed the hollow men and women.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day for democracy. Every day is bad day for democracy until we have a truly democratic system in which workers, those who produce the wealth, run society democratically in their own interests. That is socialism.

The nurses’ actions, the Portuguese general strike and the Egyptian revolution won’t rate too much of a mention in the news in Australia. It’ll all be Slipper, Slipper, Slipper. This Parliamentary cretinism is a side show to the class struggle. Victory to the Egyptian revolution. Victory to Portuguese workers. Victory to Victorian nurses.