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Gary, you're so right:"The Greens were faced with an open goal after the budget, and they should have called the Labor Party's bluff, and forced them to be the only ones to pass the supply bills." If the Greens had done that -- and identified so strongly with the rest of us -- they would have been made electorally and their '3rd Party' fortunes would have been guaranteed. So I reckon we just had a 'moment' in Australian politics that will still be played out over the next few years. IF the Greens had rejected the budget in toto there would have been a major shift in the groundswell but instead they sided with the bosses. As the front office spin goes:"The Greens are the only party to be powered from the bottom-up, engaging members and supporters every step of the way. We have the courage to stand with you to create a more caring society..." It looks a tad hallow at the moment, even hypocritical. The other element in the mix is a discernable shift within some trade unions. It isn't huge -- not yet anyway -- but its' clear that the ranks are a bit cheesed off that many of their officials have been mum over the budget and have merely channeled Bill Shorten's platitudes.At last weekends rally here in Brisbane there was a flagged trade union presence -- esp ETU, MUA, CPSU and NTEU. And what was really interesting was that this recent platform was way to the left of the one last time and the attendees' responses were absolutely in sync with it. Talk about hanging on every word! There was no organised Greens presence either -- unlike last time. The anger is very tangible...and my reading is that folk are in a sort of campaign mode as they realize that one-off rallies are insufficient to the task before us. Maybe we had advantages here in Brisbane in terms of the coalition that's leading this, but we know that the 2003 Iraq protest syndrome haunts the movements -- the one-off thing followed by abatement. The complication this time around is that we aren't confronted with an offshore issue -- but a massive change to our collective every day lives and the future both of ourselves and of our children. Its' even a bit more than a 'hip pocket' response as the budget brutality seeds so much of our existence. And having just recently ridded the chambers in most states of the ALP calling those dogs back isn't really cause for excitement --neither nationally nor in any state like Queensland. So folk are facing a conundrum...at the same time as the chronic cynicism and anti-politics attitudes pervades the population, the community has to deal with the complication of 'what is to be done?' if we can't rely to the pollies to do it....Yes: not even the Greens! Of course in the sweep of things -- the neoliberal arc stretching back to Hawke and Keating,back 30 years, herein we have a bit of a fight back mood that not only threatens the Laborist consensus but maybe the Greens carte blanche. How that plays out is sure to be interesting. What potential is there for industrial action? What campaign forms will be engineered? What sectors will sign up to activity? How much leeway has Labor (or the Greens for that matter) got to sabotage a more radical edge to this and an extra- parliamentary dynamic? Of course, any motion around this undermines the racism embedding in the refugee push...which is a kingpin of the federal government ideological credibility.The racism Labor and LNP helped create may not be sufficient to prop them up among what should have been loyal sectors of the population. But I expect we'll get a lot more of the asylum boat shebang in Howard style mode. dave riley ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
