Keating
It would be a disaster for Australia, and for the labour movement, if Paul Keating gained the support of the left wing and succeeded in taking the Labor leadership.
As Australia's greatest Treasurer, he left behind Australia's greatest number of unemployed, our greatest overseas debt, our greatest number of small investors defrauded by entrepreneurs (all friends of the government) and a hopeless economic mess.
Not that his retiring from the position of Treasurer has improved the outlook — he has now been succeeded by a man who has successfully brought the wool, wheat and meat industries to their knees all at the same time. By promoting the bankrupt theory of maximising production John Kerin has presided over the maximisation of land degradation, maximisation of farmer debt levels and maximisation of chemical pollution from pesticides, weedicides and fertilisers.
The farmer's friend has now become the taxpayer's friend.
And his successor, Simon Crean, has already declared his environmental awareness level by his call for the quadrupling of (value added) food exports by the end of the century.
C.M. Friel
Alawa NT
Queensland abortions
Abortions performed in Queensland have risen by 68% since 1984, according to a report in the Courier Mail on October 14.
"Financial pressures" are recognised as the reason for the rise since Medicare began seven years ago.
According to Dr Peter Bayliss, director of the Greenslopes Fertility clinic, an "appreciable increase in abortions around Australia has followed the recession". Bayliss said the increase in abortion rates was coupled with an increase in the number of people opting for sterilisation to avoid pregnancy. "The cost of educating and feeding a child is frightening and things are not going to get better for a long time", he told the Courier Mail.
These statistics once again reinforce the need for women to be able to make a choice about continuing or terminating a pregnancy. The question of abortion is not a moral one, but a socioeconomic and political reality for many women.
Susan Price
Brisbane
Art and politics
Tony Cammilleri's belief (Write on, GL #31) that art is apolitical implies art can be produced in a neutral environment. Certainly works of art are produced without a political consciousness but cultural production lives and breathes the same air in which we battle for economic survival.
Arguments that there is a neutral cultural backdrop to what is obviously not an unbiased economic and political system are ludicrous. Pervasive does not mean neutral. Concepts such as "Motherhood" are cited by patriarchy/capitalism as "natural" (read neutral) and TV shows promote loving nuclear families as "normal".
Icons such as the many Madonna and Child paintings have been used repeatedly in the propaganda campaign that tries to define women as "Mothers". However when the paintings were first produced they were religious artifacts — not "art" as we understand it after the industrial and museum revolutions.
And can you honestly believe that the recent upsurge of interest in Australian Aboriginal visual artifacts (now called art) can be anything other than the opening up of a new market for speculation?
Art for art's sake is completely at odds with the origins of "Art". Statues, pots and masks etc were integral parts of daily life. They were the result of a community's shared cultural practice. Art today is literally "cultural production" and the cult of individuality is encouraged as "art" is a powerful transmitter of the values within a society.
Perhaps if you experience the "arts" of feminists and Marxists it may help you understand the nature of the relationship between politics and art.
Andrea Sharam
Melbourne
[Edited for length.]
Less natural and friendly
In the 1960s, the emphasis was on increasing and even expanding freedom. People were more natural and friendly.
People wanted every beach to be a nude beach and every pop band to play with real instruments.
In the 1990s, the emphasis is on decreasing freedom and increasing social alienation. Economics rules all.
People get prison type lives, synthetic music and no nude beaches. Capitalism in the 1990s is Russia's pal.
Kerrie O'Rourke
Killara NSW
Disappointed
It is with great disappointment that I read editorial material such as that in issue #26. I had imagined, through wishful thinking I suppose, that you were running an open forum in which a broad range of views would be exposed precisely to avoid feeding back into old dogmas.
What do I find instead? An old line, almost identical to the Jesuitical evasion of responsibility for the Inquisition, namely, the idea was all right: it was the evil/incompetence/weakness of the people concerned that was at fault.
I hesitate to trot out the ancient cliche, but it is so appropriate: those who don't learn from their mistakes, etc.
Almost as disappointing is your flogging of the Sensitive New Age Man theory, indicated in the same issue #26, indeed strongly featured, under the name of Paul Whyte. Surely though, even in expressing whatever it is you want to get at you could have done better than this confused drivel. Ought you not encourage writers to come up with some basis for their assertions? Paul Whyte is evidently generalising from a single case, namely his own muddled state, to all males, including me, and you, in effect (by panelising it) give it your imprimatur.
By what process, for example, does Mr Whyte reach the assumption that we all need "closeness and caring"? Emotional infantilism is a pretty common malaise among today's young males, and Mr Whyte appears to be a typical case.
I do hope you get on to some rather more constructive ideas than some you are currently peddling, otherwise you are wasting good forest timber.
Jeremiah Deans
Toongabbie NSW[Edited for length.]
Why Cuba survives
In reply to Jeremiah Deans' letter in the issue of October 16 — Yes, I think Cuba survives partly because everything it has built up in the last 32 years has constantly been threatened by the US, and nothing welds a nation together like a big bully who may bring total destruction. Half Cuba's population is old enough to remember the bad old days, and all are sophisticated enough not to believe the delights of capitalism, as shown by Western television (which many East Europeans seemed to have believed).
They know about the terrible poverty in Latin American countries, the hells that were or are El Salvador, Chile, and the contra war in Nicaragua; and over the years Cuban leaders have educated the people to be genuinely unselfish. Mr Deans may have read Fidel's speeches to the non-aligned movement, published in The Right to Dignity (Ocean Press 1989), which show his immense love for humanity. In our times perhaps only Maurice Bishop of Grenada and Allende of Chile were so loved by their people.
The situation in Latin America is completely different from that in Eastern Europe. I remember some Cuban companeros who had trained as engineers in Bulgaria telling me that while their tuition had been very efficient, they thought the Bulgarians were totally lacking in revolutionary fervour and discipline.
We find that Cuban fervour, discipline and lack of egotism also among the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran freedom fighters.
Fidel said: "There will be some mistakes, some injustice, but by and large our system is one of justice, love and equality."
I have little doubt we may soon be gloatingly presented with TV pictures of Cubans quarrelling in food queues; if these do appear, let us remember they are human, and must be under terrible tension now, having been mauled by both super-powers; and a small quarrel does not mean they want to go back to the times when Cuba was known as the brothel of the Caribbean.
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda Vic
Dreadful old men
Part of the answer to Jeremiah Deans' question on the viability of socialism can be sought in the dreadful old men who have presided over atrocities in Russia, Romania and China. They are creatures of the sterile committee culture, with its recourse to bureaucratic procedures in the name of rationality (though the ood production escapes me).
Behind the managerial facade the real power is underhand and self-seeking, and like multinational capitalism it is alien to mainstream culture, anti-feminist and ultimately incapable of renewing itself, so that the old men cling to power. Once the lid is lifted and information is freer, ancient issues resurface, so that in Yugoslavia we are back to World War I.
It is amazing that a set of managerial notions, which might have been correct or incorrect in particular circumstances, were accepted as moral imperatives. By the same token we should be apprehensive of any self-congratulation on the part of market rationalists, because there is no difference between totalitarian systems. If socialism has several faces and can accommodate market gardeners and local enterprises, perhaps scale is also critical to capitalism. Principled opposition to multinational exploitation should not be compounded with mere envy of the local rich, who can at least be called to account — that is, if they still exist independently of conglomerates.
Claire Wagner
Albion Qld
United front
David Roberts (Write on, GLW No. 32) is obviously aware that members of the Sydney Branch of the Democratic Socialist Party and those of us active in the Women's Abortion Action Campaign were not at all happy with the International Socialist Organisation demonstration, held on October 7 (advertised with a poster calling on people to "Confront Fred Nile").
Sydney WAAC and the DSP had originally endorsed the idea of a counter-mobilisation to the Festival of Light's "Jericho March for Jesus" because we had been led to believe, by members of the ISO, that the gay and lesbian organisations, including the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, had been planning to organise such an action.
In fact we found out just a week or so beforehand, that such an initiative was not being taken by these groups, and that the demonstration was simply being organised by the ISO with little substantial support from other progressive organisations and campaigns.
Given that WAAC had already organised three major pro-abortion rights protests in recent weeks, and given that the ISO event looked like being quite small because of lack of effective planning and reach-out work, most members of the DSP and most members of WAAC did not attend the "anti-Nile" rally and generally did not think it a good idea.
It is quite wrong for David Roberts to label this, and the "laconic" reportage in GLW, as "sectarian jealousy."
Yes, we do very much support the "united front" approach in politics. It is a basic part of our socialist strategy. For that reason we do not attempt to organise demonstrations that have the support of little other than ourselves.
Also we are concerned with a tendency amongst some, including the ISO, to over-personalise, and therefore depoliticise, rtion rights campaign by constantly referring to it as the "anti-Nile" campaign. It is the political issues at stake that we must keep up front and not indulge our anger at what Nile and his followers represent by seeing him and them as the main target. They're not.
Rose McCann
Glebe NSW
Anti-family stance
I am writing to express my despondency at your anti-family, anti-Catholic pro-abortion stance. Do you not realize that you are alienating a large percentage of Australians (even socialists) by being so vehement on these issues?
I have enclosed an article from the Catholic Agitator that perhaps Tracy Sorensen or other pro-abortionists may care to read. It might improve the quality of their argument which I am afraid I find shallow and unsubstantiated, except by this or that juicy anecdote.
I would also like to point out that if the writer of the article on the "Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence" a few issues back had bothered to check on the quotes produced by the Sisters or even discussed them with someone who had read the bible they would have discovered that most of the quotes had been distorted and the wording changed by the Good Sisters to suit themselves.
Your articles often lack depth or quality particularly with the issues stated above and although I realize finances are a problem, does that really allow you to degrade your paper to the level of bitching in these areas?
I believe a socialist system can work. I am also a practising Christian. Why do you insist that I choose one or the other? In spite of a strong residual loyalty to it, I feel every issue, less and less inclined to read the Green Left.
Paula Gilet
Hilton WA