Morrison’s got to go, but the Labor alternative is pathetic – Red Flag

The Morrison government is in deep trouble as it lurches from one crisis to another, and its attempts to cover up its mistakes only dig it into a deeper hole. On the surface, the government seems utterly incompetent as it engages in backflip after backflip. But underlying the incompetence is a callousness driven by its main priorities: a strident defence of the interests of the big end of town and ensuring its own political survival.

The government has spent years making things easier for the rich. Private schools have been rolling in money. Private health insurance companies have had taxpayer funds thrown at them. Private childcare centres charge extortionate fees and are cosseted by government. Private aged-care providers are making money hand over fist.

The Morrison governments tax laws have allowed hundreds of big companies to pay no tax, year after year. Changes coming in 2024 will cut income taxes for those on more than $120,000 a year. This will knock $16 billion from government revenues that could have funded better healthcare or higher income support for the unemployed.

Thanks in part to enormous government handouts, company profits have jumped 28 percent since the start of 2020, and the countrys 47 billionaires have doubled their wealth. The richest 20 percent of the population now have 90 times the wealth of the poorest.

The military too have been big beneficiaries of decisions by successive Coalition governments to boost spending. Eight nuclear submarines at a lifetime cost of nearly $200 billion and twenty new tanks costing $3.5 billion are just the latest splash-outs on military hardware. The Morrison government is gearing up for a future war with China.

For those not in the Coalitions charmed circle, its stiff cheddar. Workers real wages are now falling. Everywhere, the bosses have used the pandemic to push longer working hours, unpaid overtime and greater flexibility. The share of national income going to workers is at its lowest level since 1959.

Many people are suffering under the Morrison government, and its decision to let COVID rip only highlights its indifference to the lives of ordinary people. More than 2,000 people have died since public health provisions were removed in December as Omicron began to spread like wildfire. People with disabilities are forced to wrangle the NDIS bureaucracy to get decent assistance and have suffered some of the worst infection and hospitalisation rates.

Elderly people have been left to the mercy of private aged-care operators failing to provide even the most basic measures to respond to the pandemic, such as sufficient numbers of properly trained and well-paid staff, adequate amounts of PPE and RATs, proper ventilation of rooms or a timely rollout of vaccine boosters. More than 500 people have died in aged-care homes since the beginning of the year. The up to 1,700 ADF personnel the Morrison government has promised to be used in aged care in response to the crisis is a pathetic gesture nowhere near sufficient to make a real difference. Morrison refuses to sack the appalling Aged Care Minister, Richard Colbeck, despite him being more interested in hobnobbing with the corporate elite at the cricket than in saving the lives of aged-care residents.

Aboriginal people are also suffering disproportionately from COVID, which is taking an enormous toll on those with existing co-morbidities, the result of years of neglect by every level of government. Refugees in cramped and unsanitary conditions of detention in hotels have experienced high rates of infection, while those who remain offshore in Papua New Guinea are left to rot for years on end with no prospect of a visa to come to Australia.

The Morrison governments grotesque sexism is obvious in the appalling treatment of women highlighted by Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins. All Morrison can offer is vague and meaningless promises and an empty parliamentary apology.

As for the environment, the Morrison government, with its subsidies to the coal, oil and gas industries, is sabotaging what needs to be done to slow, let alone reverse, global warming. Morrison also refuses to lift a finger to limit the relentless process of rural land clearing that adds to global warming.

Morrison has given succour to anti-vaxxers such as Coalition backbencher George Christensen and has parroted the extreme-right anti-vaxxers with his call in November for Australians to take their lives back. Morrison has allowed several of his MPs to attend and, on occasion, to speak at far-right demonstrations in Melbourne, and only under duress did he condemn Christensen for urging parents not to vaccinate their children.

The Liberals are racked by bitter divisions. In NSW, Morrison has managed to unite the hard right and the so-called moderates against him and his key factional ally and enforcer, Immigration minister Alex Hawke. Several sitting Liberal MPs, whom Morrison wants to protect, are facing preselection challenges, and there are threats of federal intervention into the NSW branch. He also suffered a significant defeat when five of his own MPs rebelled against the Religious Discrimination Bill.

Morrisons troubles have resulted in sections of the right-wing Murdoch press turning against him. Melbourne Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt declared ScoMo has got to go and called for Peter Dutton to be installed as prime minister, while Janet Albrechtsen, columnist at the Australian, wrote: Sorry PM, but youre just not up to the job.

All this means that Labor should be very well placed to win the election. The problem is that the ALP offers nothing.

In times past, Labor seemed to have a project, something to offer the working class, even if it invariably failed to deliver in office. Now its not even bothering to do that. The election strategy is simply to hope that people hate Morrison enough that theyll vote for the ALP.

Under Anthony Albanese, the party has eliminated any of the modest reforms previous leader Bill Shorten took to the 2019 election. The only income redistribution Albanese favours is towards the well-off. Labor has committed to keeping the Coalitions income tax cuts and has abandoned Shortens promise to reduce tax breaks for those with large portfolios of shares and rental properties. Thats tens of billions of dollars more taken from the budget, which future federal governments will use to justify spending cuts that hurt the poor.

Business will continue to prosper under an Albanese government. Labor has no plans to reverse the long-term decline in company tax rates.

The unemployed, however, will have to sit in line and wait. After years in opposition and numerous reports demonstrating that the dole is too low to live on, Labor will still only consider an increase in the JobSeeker allowance if it wins office. Low-paid aged-care workers will receive no help from Labor, which attacks the Morrison governments failure to support a wage rise for aged-care workers at industrial tribunal hearings but refuses to nominate a figure for what they should be paid or to throw its weight behind the union claim.

Labors whole project is not to fight for the working class but to work with the bosses at the expense of workers. In a speech to the National Press Club last month, Albanese said that Labor wants to tackle insecure work. His solution? To convene a Jobs Summit with government, business and unions. The agenda? Higher productivity (i.e. bosses screwing working more), more infrastructure spending (which these days usually means handouts to big construction businesses) and cutting red tape (i.e. reducing business accountability). No hint of support for stronger trade unions or workers rights. Labor will offer free TAFE places to students, but only in areas of skill shortage! Nothing to do with helping young people realise their dreams, only to make them valuable human capital.

Labor is as much an environmental vandal as the Morrison government. On global warming, the best that Albanese can come up with is a 43 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, something so feeble that all the big bosses groups backed it. Labor now supports the federal government building a $600 million gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley, something it initially rightly opposed as a giveaway to the fossil fuel companies. Labor boasts of its support for the coal industry and says it will do nothing to make it uncompetitive in global markets.

On Indigenous rights, Labor offers token measures at best. It promises to organise a referendum to enshrine a First Nations voice to parliament. But theres nothing about land rights, nothing about deaths in custody. Even when News Corporation and AFL clubs have supported changing the date of Australia Day, the ALP remains committed to 26 January, unwilling for now to support even this token change.

On refugees, Labor is still wedded to the longstanding and disgraceful policy of imprisoning them in offshore concentration camps. Immigration spokesperson Kristina Keneallys main line of attack on the Morrison government has been from the right: that the government has lost control of our borders when it comes to asylum seekers arriving by plane.

For the first two years of the pandemic, Labor was more concerned to present itself as a responsible partner with the Morrison government than as a force holding it to account or fighting for the best interests of workers and the poor. In the middle of one of the countrys greatest ever health and economic crises, Albaneses main contribution has been to lose 15 kilograms so that he appears more electable in his photoshoots with the corporate media. Talk about priorities.

An Albanese government will continue the Morrison governments largesse to the military without skipping a beat. He boasts that Labor was the party responsible for the US alliance and backs US military bases and spy stations in Australia and is prepared to spend even more when needed.

There is not a hint of opposition to any of this within the shadow cabinet. Both the left and right of the party are united on this program for what is shaping up as the most right-wing Labor government in history.

In short, at a time when the pandemic has demonstrated the need for dramatic overhaul of the basic structures of Australian society, Labor offers nothing. While the bosses are filling their pockets and workers are being squeezed, this supposed party of labour only wants to give the bosses a hand. When the very future of the planet is in the balance, Labor is making the situation worse.

There is nothing new about any of this. Throughout its long history, Labor has been fully committed to maintaining capitalism and advancing the interests of Australian imperialism. But the capitalist economy can continue to function only if businesses go on making substantial profits. Those profits in turn can be obtained only off the back of the workers, who produce the wealth of society.

That means that Labor is compelled to severely limit any reforms it grants to its working-class supporters, as any significant redistribution of wealth would undermine capitalist profitability and infuriate the bosses. Labor cuts its cloth to suit whatever big business will tolerate.

It would be great to see Morrison break down in tears on election night after a crushing defeat. But our satisfaction will quickly fade when we wake up the next morning and find capitalism continues to grind us down and Labor offers next to nothing to advance the interests of working-class people.

So voting Morrison out is nowhere near enough. We need to build a fighting socialist movement that campaigns against all the horrors of capitalism and for a new, genuinely democratic social order that puts the interests of the mass of people above the dictates of profit.

We need a socialist party that fights for working-class interests, not for the bosses. A party that sees social change coming through mass struggle and is prepared to lead such struggles of the exploited and oppressed, not one whose leaders look only to get themselves into parliament, where they may feather their own nests while serving the bosses. A party that fights for liberation, not for token reforms to the system of oppression that leave the foundations of injustice untouched.

We need a genuine socialist alternative to the Liberals and Labora party that does not bow down before the rich and powerful: a socialist party that seeks to spur on every manifestation of working-class resistance with the goal of getting rid of the exploitative capitalist system entirely.

Excerpt from:

Morrison's got to go, but the Labor alternative is pathetic - Red Flag