- The Guardian
- Issue #2129
It was the UN Secretary-General who famously said, “The world is burning. We need a renewables revolution.” It is literally burning in California. Other parts of the US are frozen over. Climate records are being broken around the world – drought, famine, massive flooding, and wild fires. They are a stark warning of what lies ahead if governments do not act immediately and decisively to wind back fossil fuel production and use. There is no time to waste. Humanity is on the brink.
Western governments continue to pour billions upon billions of dollars into the deadly and toxic war machine. With conflicts raging in the Middle East and Europe, and the US and Australia preparing to launch a war against China, the potential for things to get out of control is significant, even for a nuclear war. With the unpredictable, ultra-reactionary Donald Trump, backed by neocons like Musk, the next four years could see the spread of conflict. Global security is under threat as never before. Fascists are on the ascendency in Europe and elsewhere. Social democracy which once offered some social advances is all but dead.
For the past 4 decades successive neoliberal governments have been on a privatisation and deregulation frenzy resulting in higher prices and a decline in services such as health and education. They have wound back wages, working conditions, social security payments and other aspects of the welfare state. Much of the workforce has been casualised and wage theft has become a way of doing business. Trade unions have lost many of their hard-won rights and their density decreased. In Australia the CFMEU has been taken over by a so-called social democrat government. Workers and social security recipients face a severe cost-of-living crisis with poverty on the rise. The right to protest is being reined in. Voters are increasingly rejecting the major parties who have failed them. Instead many are turning to the extreme right who tell them what they want to hear.
The two-party system has for some time been in its death throes. It has been kept alive with artificial respiration through laws biased against third parties, by protections sold to the public as “electoral reform,” and by a mass media that backs it all the way along the two-party line.
In the coming months Australians will be voting on a new government. Labor has betrayed the working class. It has failed to condemn the genocide in Gaza or settlements in the West Bank. It has done nothing, not even withdrawn its embassy from Israel or expelled the Israeli ambassador. By equating opposition to Zionism and genocide with antisemitism the government has fuelled divisions and not only antisemitism but islamophobia. If the opinion polls are accurate, then the full-on attacks by the major parties and media have seen the Greens fail to gain significant traction. The success of the teals and independents may result in a hung parliament, but their positions vary from mostly progressive on the environment and social issues but swing more to the Coalition’s position on industrial relations and the economy.
Our leaders and political institutions are failing the people. Bourgeois democracy is being undermined. In the few months left to the federal elections it is critical that the trade union movement unite with peace, environmental and women’s movements, left parties, progressives in the Labor Party, Indigenous organisations, and others to build the widest possible militant movement to defeat neoliberalism and the ascendency of fascism. Where possible vote for left and progressive candidates. Progressive organisations should stand candidates offering the electorate a genuine alternative to the Lib/Lab alliance.
It is necessary to raise class consciousness. But that is not enough. The movement must be politicised if real change is to be achieved. Join the Communist Party of Australia which fights for the interests of working people. Which strongly opposes the genocide, supports climate action, public housing, the strengthening of Medicare, lifting social security recipients out of poverty, raising the minimum wage, and is for peace and against war.
