Write on: Letters to the editor

The Socialist Alliance vote

Perhaps you need some help with the calculations? If the Socialist Alliance received about 1% in the 15 seats in which it stood, that works out at 0.1% of the total House of Representatives vote. The vote for the Senate was much less in all states except Queensland where the donkey vote contributed roughly 0.3%, which is a few thousand votes.

Paul Petit
Adelaide

Bosses or unionists?

To most people having a position in the Queensland trade union movement would be enough of a job. Trying to fight job losses and forced redundancies, not to mention the odd pay cut or two. However, the secretary general of the Queensland Council of Unions, Grace Grace, is a director of Energex, the state's electricity utility. Grace is also on the board of Sunsuper and the South Bank Corporation. Workers in Energex were recently in a dispute over job security and job cuts.

Energex, whose previous name was SEQEB, had a particularly vicious dispute with its workers under the Joh Bjelke Petersen conservative government in the mid 1980s. In the recent dispute, Grace would have stood down from the debate around the dispute.

However, being in such a position it is not unfeasible to think that indirectly there may be some influence on the conditions of the workers involved. Grace was quoted in the Courier Mail as saying that since she was appointed there has been a turnaround in industrial relations at Energex. I'm not exactly sure what this means given the recent dispute over job cuts and job security.

However, it begs the question about what is the most important bottom line. Is it the jobs of hundreds of workers, their communities and ordinary consumers or a profit driven enterprise where big business has the ultimate say and cutting jobs is all about giving large shareholders a comfortable dividend?

Julie Bignell, Australian Services Union branch secretary, national vice-president and state ALP vice-president is a director on the board of the Ports Corporation of Queensland. Dawson Petie, former ACTU Queensland secretary, is on the board of Queensland Rail. Petie also works full-time at the government-owned Queensland Investment Corporation.

These union "leaders" can get the first whiff of plans for job cuts and then use their well-oiled networks to hose down any industrial action that might just get out of their tight fisted grip. The example of workers organising might actually achieve a more positive outcome than all the days spent shining the leather in the boardroom.

Kerry Vernon
Brisbane

Fundamental misunderstanding

Narendra Mohan Kommalapati (Write On, GLW #472) seems to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between political divisions, and ethnic/national divisions.

In relation to Israel and the Palestinians, he now says that he only seeks the abolition of Israeli capitalism, not the destruction of the State of Israel or its population. But in his original letter (GLW #470), he specifically argued for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel and its replacement by an Arab State of Palestine.

Using his analogy with Australia, this is the equivalent of expelling or killing all white immigrant Australians by violence, and creating a new state consisting solely of indigenous Aborigines. We could argue the merits of this proposal elsewhere, but surely it has little to do with either capitalism or socialism.

Two other points: many Ashkenazi Jews in Israel including important components of the socio-economic elite are secular, and amongst the strongest supporters of the peace movement and left. In contrast, the Sephardi Jews tend to be the strongest supporters of the anti-Palestinian political right due to a complex range of factors. I would also point out that anti-Zionist fundamentalism is no substitute for a rational debate on the implications of potential national genocide.

Philip Mendes
Kew Vic

From Green Left Weekly, November 28, 2001.

Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

From GLW issue 473