Parliamentary politics is an act of faith. You give a signed blank cheque to a representative hoping against hope he or she will do the right thing by you. If they do not honour any of their promises, you can, in 3 years time, put your faith in another parliamentary representative and go through the same sorry process again. In what other field of human endeavour do you give somebody carte blanche to do whatever they like for the next 3 years?

The tragedy about the current election is that Australians are forced by legislation to participate in the electoral process. If parliamentary democracy is the pinnacle of human achievement, why are people dragged kicking and screaming to the polling booths? What you will not hear, read or see during this Federal election campaign is a debate about what democracy is; where power lies in our society and how the parliamentary process has been sabotaged by that small section of the community that owns the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication.

Irrespective of whether you refuse to participate in the political process and do not vote, whether you are so disgusted by the lack of real power exercised by Parliament and vote informal, or whether you reluctantly cast a ballot for one of the candidates - real change does not come from limiting your political activity to the electoral bargaining period when Australians are forced to participate in the decision to choose their masters for the next 3 years.

Change comes from below; it comes from people being involved in political, social, workplace and community activity every day of their lives. Radical egalitarian change will come when the people of this country tip over the apple cart so everybody in the community has access to apples, not just those who currently own and push the apple cart.

Political debate in Australia is contained within fixed parameters; ideas that do not support current economic and political orthodoxy are rarely canvassed in the fourth estate, let alone discussed. Both parliamentary and extra parliamentary alternatives to the current political process exist. They are being articulated by many people involved in this election campaign.

Australians who believe parliamentary elections are nothing more than 2 minutes of illusory power, and parliamentary democracy has as much to do with democracy as the A.F.L. has to do with promoting soccer in Australia, never seem to get a guernsey in the fourth estate.

Australian media outlets are the last organisations who should complain about a boring election campaign that doesn’t offer voters real alternative. If they insist on sowing the same stunted old perennials in their gardens, they cannot complain when the sea of colourful flowers they expect to grow during the election campaign, do not blossom.

They could have settled the matter months ago if they wanted to. Victorian nurses claims are relatively modest. They are asking for wage parity with interstate nurses, and they are asking to maintain current nurse / patient ratios - very acceptable demands in anybody’s language.

Federal Court intervention in the dispute is not inevitable. The Victorian government’s claims, that the dispute must go to the Federal Court because the nurses are defying the Industrial Relations Commission’s call for them to remove their bed bans, is incorrect. Although WorkChoices makes it difficult for nurses to take action, its full implementation is in the hands of the Victorian State government.

More importantly for health care workers around the country, the re-election of a Howard led government will accelerate the introduction of individual contracts in the public health care sector. Considering how much pressure is being applied to the nurses as they attempt to collectively bargain through their union, imagine the pressure that would be applied on individual nurses when they need to renegotiate their contracts. The Coalition’s policies are very clear – they want to totally disempower health care workers through the introduction of individual contracts.

The Victorian government’s handling of the nurses dispute highlights that, irrespective of what a government may say if the laws are in place to destroy unions and penalise workers for the heinous crime of withdrawing their labour, they will have no hesitation in using that power to intimidate, harass and manipulate workers. That is why it is important nurses and other workers openly defy the WorkChoices legislation.

This legislation can only be applied to the workplace if workers allow it to be applied. The nurses open defiance of WorkChoices in Victoria needs to be supported by every one of us. To allow this legislation to stand is a recipe for wage slavery.

Less than 20% of Australians workers belong to a union. Legislation has been passed during the last 20 years that makes withdrawing your labour outside a bargaining period a criminal offence. Unions have become quaint relics of a bygone age; their influence determined by paid advertising campaigns, not their ability to bringing society to a halt.

Considering how little influence and power unions really have, it is interesting to note how much traction the Coalition’s campaign against their influence has generated in the fourth estate. Pick up any newspaper, listen to any radio station, and turn on the TV set, the same message blares out in unison.

We should not be afraid because the neutered union lap dog has, in the public’s imagination suddenly transmorphed into a growling savage junkyard dog. We should be afraid because that rapidly diminishing group of people that own the means of production, distribution, exchange and communication are now so powerful their needs take precedence over the needs of the rest of the community.

What Parliament can and cannot do is not determined by the needs of those Australians who will be casting a ballot on the 24th of November, but by the need of a limited number of corporations to generate record profits irrespective of the human, social and environmental costs.

Yes, the wolf is at the door; but this wolf isn’t wearing a hard hat and flying a Eureka flag, this wolf is wearing a suit and tie and has a contract in his hand that demands you sign over your mind, body and soul for the right to earn a living.

Mr. Cousins is a professional sportsman who gives a lot of pleasure to many people and makes a lot of money for those elements that control and market Australian Rules football. He many be a great football player, but this does not make him a role mode. Australia’s penchant for making sportsmen and women heroes and role models is a sad reflection on the type of society we are.

Unfortunately young people in Australia look for their role models in the sporting field because the lacklustre and unimpressive leadership skills displayed by prominent political, business and community leaders does not inspire young people. Cousins may have feet of clay, but he is only a professional sportsmen. What he does is only harm him, his family and his sporting contracts.

The harm generated by political, business and community leaders by their self serving, self centered, dishonest behaviour is real and immediate; it has a lasting and significant impact on the community. It is time the Australian media used the considerable resources at its disposal to shine the harsh light of publicity on the woeful political, business and community leadership in this country, and give the likes of Ben Cousins the space to deal with his significant personal problems in private.

Resistance to foreign occupation as we are witnessing in Iraq takes many forms. Nationalist sentiments play an important role in the struggle to expel a foreign invader. In such circumstances, it is not unusual for the struggle for human liberation to take on a nationalist tinge. Anarchists, like everybody else living in an occupied country, are involved in the struggle to expel the forces occupying that country. Unlike other players in the liberation struggle, they do not want to replace foreign rulers with local rulers.

Anarchists, who participate in nation liberation struggles, do not become involved in these struggles because they love their country, they become involved in struggles to achieve national independence, to create a climate for radical change. Opportunities for change occur when a power vacuum occurs. The struggle for national liberation creates a power vacuum. To sit on the sidelines and do nothing, allows nationalists to dominate the struggle and fill that power vacuum.

Anarchists involved in national liberations struggles promote human liberation, not national liberation, as the solution to the problems of occupation and domination by local rulers.

Collective effort does not resonate in an era when individuals do not need to interact with their neighbours to survive and prosper. In such an era, it is vital anarchists keep the embers glowing. As the green grass turns to brown, the embers that have been kept alive by generations of anarchist activists will start a bush fire that will transform society. If we cannot keep the anarchist embers glowing during periods of plenty, scarcity will be followed by despair and barbarism.

Irrespective of how marginalised, ineffective and hopeless the situation is, we need to keep anarchist ideas fresh and relevant. We must live in the present, and understand the communities we live and work in. Irrespective of how disgusted and disillusioned we become with what is happening around us, it is important we continued to keep our ideas in the public realm.

‘Horses for courses’ – ‘Political movements for specific conditions’. The 21st century is the anarchist century. Increasing population growth, diminishing resources, a rapacious economic system will combine to create conditions where collective effort, egalitarianism and direct democracy will become ideas that will help people to deal with the increasingly difficult challenges we face as individuals, communities and a species.

As the trial progressed, Barry highlighted the evidence was largely circumstantial and the confessions should not be accepted because they were from people “in a state of terror”. He attempted to win the jury’s sympathy by highlighting what every settler in the colony knew, but refused to acknowledge:-

“We must remember the course of their destruction, at first insidious and private, then open and declared, which eventually swept a numerous nation off the face of their native country and transported the remnant to a foreign to them, distant shore”.

Barry asked the jury how a people treated in this manner could be asked to “quietly forget” what had happened to them, and be expected not to exact revenge for their dispossession and misery. He was attempting to get the jury to put themselves in the place of the defendants, hoping the very people who had been responsible for their dispossession and murder would be able to identify and sympathise with the Aborigines.

As there were no white witnesses to the murder, the prosecution’s case swung on the confessions of Maulboyheenner and Truganini. Tunnerminnerwait and Pyterruner and Planobeena made no confessions when captured and while they were held in custody. Evidence which directly implicated Truganini in the murder of the whalers was ignored by the court. The defendants’ inability to give evidence or be cross examined meant that the evidence given by Powlett, Watson and Robert Robins (one of the whaling party) about Tunnerminnerwait’s and Maulboyheenner’s admissions had a greater influence on the jury than they should have.

George Robinson was called on to give character reference for the defendants who he had known for 13 years. He praised Tunnerminnerwait and told the court his conduct had always been “exemplary”. He told the jury that Maulboyheenner - as Langhorne’s and Bacchus’ servant - had accompanied them on an overland journey from Melbourne to Adelaide and back and had saved Langhorne’s life when they were attacked by Aborigines along the Murray. Robinson told the jury that Truganini had saved his life in Tasmania and made the important observation:- “I have never found these persons wanting in humanity”. Robinson sealed the defendants’ fate when he told the court the accused understood the principles of religion and knew right from wrong.

NEXT WEEK: ‘The Verdict’

The book ‘A Man Called Possum’ is a tribute to one of the many characters, many victims of mental illness who live outside mainstream society, shunning contact, keeping to themselves, surviving as best they can on the very margins of society. This book gives an account of a man who had no friends, but who touched many people’s lives. A kind and gentle man, a caretaker of the environment, he lived an independent solitary life well into the 20th century. He died in 1982 alone in the country he had come to love.

Slowly over 30 years, Max Jones was able to piece together he life of a man who in the end regretted his life. He lived alone, died alone, regretting that he had never made contact with his family back in New Zealand. This book does not romanticise the life of David Jones; it gives a realistic and down to earth account of a man who couldn’t tolerate society, and who society couldn’t contain, although he spent short periods in jail for vagrancy.

If you want to get hold of this interesting book, try your local second hand bookshop or your local library. If all else fails, the publishers Angus and Robinson could have a copy gathering dust somewhere in one of their storehouses. Thanks to BILL from MYRNIONG for giving me a copy of ‘A Man Called Possum’ to review.

He jumped into his car and drove off to do battle with a towel heads in his local shopping strip. Howard’s political children or Howard’s victims? Howard has played the dispossessed and marginalise like a Stradivarius. They have voted for him again and again and again and again and may even hand him victory on the 24th of November. His technique devastatingly simple – the latest group of refugees, the reason for every ill in society.

Maybe, the man with a pathological hatred for towels and nappies is also a victim. Injured at work, discarded, filling in time, waiting for death, he fumes as the suburb he was born in, is transformed into a ghetto for refugees living on the margins. He fumes, screams, dies inside, hates those around him, refusing to acknowledge to himself – he too is a victim. A foot soldier in a war he knows he cannot win - Howard’s battlers, his willing victims. They moan, groan, whisper obscenities indoors and speak in code outside. The backbone of Howard’s legacy – tired men and women hating in unison, blaming the neighbours for their problems, not realising they are pawns in a game where the dispossessed fight each other for the crumps that fall off the table, while a minority that despises and rules them, grows fat on their misery and hatred.

Every politician understands their first duty is to the party that has endorsed them. Without that party support, many of the lacklustre seat warmers in Federal Parliament would never have amounted to anything. A simple way of breaking the hold political parties have on parliamentary representatives is by giving electors the power of recall. If 20% of electors in a specific electorate signed a petition they wanted to call a fresh election because they were dissatisfied with their parliamentary representative’s performance, a fresh election would have to be called in that electorate before the next election.

If individual electorates had the power to call fresh elections in between elections if they were dissatisfied with their representative’s performance, Members of Parliament would stop taking the people they represent in Parliament for granted.

In an era of performance based contracts, mutual obligation and accountability, it is time parliamentary representatives were made directly accountable to their electorate, not the party that endorses them.

UMANITA NOVA Vol 87 No.32 EL 14th OCT 2007, Settimanale Anarchico, C.50 Palermo 46, 10152, Torino ITALY.
Tel/Fax : (011) 857850
Mobile : 338-6594361
Email : fat@inrete.it

• 4.00am - Dawn ceremony - Eureka Park at the Eureka Memorial

• 6.00am - Breakfast Eureka Park (bring your own food and drinks)

• 10.00am - March from Eureka Park to Bakery Hill to reaffirm the Eureka oath

• 10.30am - Presentation of Eureka Aust Day Medal at Bakery Hill

• 11.30am - Walk to Old Ballarat cemetery to pay our respects to all those who died in the Eureka battle who are buried at the cemetery

• 12.30pm - Walk back to Eureka Park through the centre of Ballarat

• 1.30pm - Late lunch and conversation at Eureka Park - (bring your own food and drinks)

• The name of the person nominated

• A few sentences outlining why they should receive the award

• A contact address for the nominee (We need to contact them if they wish to receive the award)

• The person you nominate can be a public figure or somebody only known to a few people

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“SEDITION – Conduct or speech inciting to rebellion”

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Terrible things happen when good people do nothing. Openly defy this government’s attempts to muzzle and intimidate opposition to their neo conservative authoritarian agenda – SIGN the ‘Sedition Charter’ TODAY!

THE POWER OF RECALL – Electors having the constitutional right to recall parliamentary representatives in between elections

CITIZENS INITIATED REFERENDUMS – The people having the power to initiate constitutional change through referendums

DIRECT DEMOCRACY – Electing delegates with limited mandates, to co-ordinate decisions that have been made by the people, not electing representatives to make decisions for us.

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