Fighting Fund

After a week of being subjected to headache-inducing politicians posturing and spinning about the Great Budget Deficit, all that was needed was that speech from Richest-Australian-and-Walking-ATM Gina Rinehart.

Billionaire Numero Uno was only outdone by Billionaire-Would-Be-PM Clive Palmer, who successfully outflanked, on Q&A, Labor and Liberals from the left on the treatment of refugees.

The online Sydney Morning Herald published an interesting interactive table of possible federal budget expenditures and cuts. You can click on an icon for several costed items listed as "Cuts to programs" or "Raise taxes or end concessions". As you click on a cut or revenue measure the budget balance shifts.

The federal Labor government had a rare win when it wedged Tony Abbott and the Liberal opposition into supporting its plan to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) through an increase in the Medicare levy.

But will this be enough to stop Abbott from winning the next election? If the bookies know their business, few are game to put money on this. An ALP win is at its longest odds since Sportsbet opened betting on the election result.

Does Australia really need another party for the billionaires? Aren't the Liberal and Labor parties enough? Surely both have proved that they are loyal servants of the rich?

But when a billionaire mining tycoon like Clive Palmer sets his mind on becoming prime minister, he just goes out and buys himself his own instant party, the "United Australia Party", which he announced will contest 127 House of Representative seats and all Senate seats in the coming federal election.

Business Council of Australia (BCA) chief Tony Shepherd was on his bipartisan and diplomatic best when he addressed the National Press Council on April 17 to outline the peak corporate body's “economic vision and action plan for Australia”.

But if you sweep aside the verbal camouflage, these were the core messages from the corporate rich delivered in the BCA chief's speech:

1. “We own you.”

“We are not doing this work because we see ourselves as having special authority,” he said.

Rupert Murdoch's recent speech to the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) was so full of bizarre contradictions it could easily pass as satire.

He spoke proudly of the IPA's founders — his father among them — who came together in 1943 “concerned about the drift to socialism”. He went on to say with a straight face: “What they wanted was simple: an Australia where men and women would rise in society not because they were born into privilege — but because they earned it with their hard work, their thrift, and their enterprise.”

The annual Western Sydney fundraising dinner was held on March 23. In a great start to the year, organisers filled Granville Town Hall and raised more than $1600 for the Green Left Weekly fighting fund.

The mining companies’ best friend in the federal Labor government, former resources minister Martin Ferguson, supported a Kevin Rudd comeback and fell on his sword after the Labor leadership spill-that-wasn't.

Ferguson said he was resigning from cabinet and retreating to the backbench on March 22.

He said: “The class-war rhetoric that started with the mining dispute of 2010 must cease. It is doing the Labor party no good."

He appealed for Labor to "govern for all Australians" like the Hawke and Keating governments supposedly did.

Green Left Weekly's 2013 Fighting Fund appeal for $250,000 was launched in January. Since then volunteers and supporters around the country have been busy raising funds and generously sending in donations to keep the project afloat.

It's relentless work, but vital in order to keep an independent media voice alive in Australia; a voice that puts the truth and journalistic integrity before sensationalism and profit.

In the week that US citizen Bradley Manning admitted in court that he leaked military secrets to reveal to the public the “the true costs of war”, I attended the first screening in Sydney of the documentary On The Bridge.

The screening was part of the inaugural Big Picture Festival, a social justice film festival.