Hard issues
[The following letter was first submitted to the Sydney Morning Herald, which did not print it.]
Peter Hartcher's article on Paul Keating's Aboriginal stance (Sydney Morning Herald, 27.3.92) states: "The two hardest issues are the two biggest ones: jobs and land". Perhaps the most difficult is land in view of the fact that in this vast continent nearly all Aboriginal land has been occupied. As Xavier Herbert stated, we are "a people without integrity, not a nation, but a community of thieves ..."
Federal governments have poured millions into all sorts of schemes to solve this "white" problem. Much of the money is spent on white bureaucrats' salaries, job creation cum welfare schemes with little relevance to Aboriginal needs or input, and also on many commissions of inquiry.
Paul Keating appears to be continuing this process with a few ornamental additions: mining employment and community assistance with capital equipment to aid projects. Echoes of our assistance to Third World countries?
However, the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission recommended a sensible programme of more land grants. Is Paul Keating prepared to reverse the Labor Party's betrayal of Aboriginal land rights claims during the '80s? Is he prepared to stand by the 1968 Referendum which gave the Federal government power to make laws on behalf of the Aboriginal people irrespective of objections from the States?
As a starting point all existing National Parks, forests, nature reserves and what remains of other Crown Land pockets, could be unconditionally handed back to Aboriginal Land Councils. Such a decision would give them a realistic stake in their own land. Such a policy may go a long way to repairing the alienation, despair and unemployment that relegates Aborigines to the bottom rung of the Australian social ladder. It may also lead to worthwhile employment in many areas.
Paul Keating may pay lip service to the Aboriginal philosophy of caring and sharing, is he prepared to implement it?
Eric Earley
Alstoneville NSW
Pie in the sky
The very interesting and informative article by Peter Boyle "Jobs and the tariff debate (GL 6/5/92) sags fearfully towards the end. Demands for "government-funded retraining at full pay, job creation in ... health and environment protection, and a reduction of working hours with no loss of pay ..." are simply prayers for pie in the sky.
Those governments which offer tariffs-in-reverse by subsidising exports fund those subsidies by massive privatisations, progressive withdrawal of welfare and social maintenance — look at USA and UK. How can an Australian government do better?
The federal and state governments say "shift to high tech production". We translate: "the only remaining effective demand is that of the top multinationals. What do they want? Ans: more labour-saving computerisation and rationalisation." An increasingly narrow market, and one which involves yet further mass unemployment.
Now some analysis, please, of the feasibility of a different alternative. What would happen — short-, mid- and long-term — if the federal government put on massive tariffs, so that the Australian population is confined to what it can itself produce and consume? Rather minimum woodchipping and mining. More expensive household goods, and therefore less gadgetry.
But perhaps our population is already too fat? — inflated by capitalist organisation to hosts of unnecessary occupations oriented towards profits rather than sustenance.
But I am not too sure that any suggestion which seeks to prolong the death-throes of capitalism is something one should pursue. Capitalism seems to me to be sinking into the widening gap between profitable production and mass effective demand. Should we be plugging holes or hammering them wider?
Of course, our own personal interests might be a consideration. Perhaps a decisive one — if all you can suggest are appeals to the federal government to give us something to eat, or something to hope for.
Sally Trevaskis
North Adelaide
Political orientation
Having been an occasional reader of GL over the past year (and of Resistance before it) I was intrigued to read your extended apologia "What GL is ... and isn't" in the April 29 edition.
Both GL and Resistance have been good at carrying news and information from community groups that the mainstream media covers insufficiently if at all. For this it deserves to continue.
To write, however, that GL does not have "a political orientation" would seem to be understating the appearance that GL, only slightly less so than Resistance, is the mouthpiece of the Democratic Socialist Party. This is nowhere more evident than that just under half of "What GL is ... and isn't" was dedicated to a rival socialist group — rival in terms other than readership.
Having spent some years in the peace and environment movement, with much contact with the left, I personally believe that Green and Left have much in common, and are good companions in many campaigns, but that they have at least as much that is not in common. The challenge for the DSP may well be to articulate these clearly and coherently if they diverge in the future, as I think they will, ting, or without it losing a large number of members (and readers) to other groups.
E.S. Cameron
Balmain
Unhelpful comparison
Doug Lorimer's attempt (GLW 55) to counterpose the sober Bolshevik behaviour in the "July Days" of 1917 to the "ultraleft" Melbourne student demonstration during the March days of 1992 doesn't quite come off.
Doug seizes on what seemed to be a rhetorical flourish by the Victorian activists (Merry and Gallios) concerning the common spirit behind the storming of the Winter Palace and the militancy of at least a part of the Melbourne demonstration to argue that the two events were radically different — the former superior because it was an example of mass action following patient education and a winning of majority support, the latter an adventurist folly which enabled the Kirner government to bury the demands of the rally under shovel loads of dirt about student violence.
That the Bolsheviks favoured insurrection only at a time suitable to the revolutionary forces (October) is true. That they were assiduous with bucket and hose in damping down inopportune fervour (keeping the July protest in Petrograd peaceful) is true. Their behavior in July, however, didn't stop the government from repressing the movement (hundreds dead, Bolsheviks in jail, etc). Protester peacefulness is no guarantee of state reciprocation.
The comparison between July 1917 and March 1992, however, is not really helpful. The difference in revolutionary potential is vast and with the level of struggle as low as it is now, it is probably more important to cohere a minority which can keep alive ideas of militancy and prevent a drift to complete demoralisation.
Doug mentions the Vietnam Moratorium campaign as the exemplar of peaceful demonstrations forcing change. The demonstrations, however, were also accompanied by militant actions (often initiated by minorities) such as draft evasion, industrial action, and occupations, as well as coinciding with economic reasons for US capitalists to withdraw their support from the war because it was unwinnable and too costly. In contrast, the monster Palm Sunday rallies of the recent peace movement were, by and large, a failure because they had none of these objective conditions or militant leadership.
The Marxist tradition can provide a quote for all seasons and moods. Engels said on the art of insurrection that we need "in the words of Danton, the greatest master of revolutionary policy yet known: de l'audace, de l'audace, encore de l'audace!". There is a place for "boldness, boldness, yet more boldness!" in non-insurrectionary times, too, when a core of militants can lead a mass movement to more radical action without substituting themselves for the movement. There will be tactical errors of judgment made, but as with AIDEX, the political message about tertiary education was made with more concrete results than a month of Palm Sundays could R>Narrabundah ACT
Accepted standard
The recognition in the hearts of all men is that the verdict in the Rodney King trial was grossly unreasonable, unjust and unsafe. The sense of outrage is validated with the fear that this violation of justice could become the accepted standard. The compelling evidence available via the videotape left the ordinary man with no doubt as to what constitutes assault or excessive force. The jury, being the theoretical nucleus of society's accepted standard, on the other hand, incredibly, decided to endorse the police officers' conduct.
As Victorians, a similar test of the reflection of our community's accepted standard is about to be delivered with the Coroner, Hal Hallenstein's finding into the police shootings inquiry (to be handed down mid-year).
Of particular concern to all Victorians must be the circumstances which led to the killing of Gary Abdallah. As there was in Rodney King's trial, the electronic witness could have also been available had the police audio listening device in Abdallah's flat not been shut down on the morning of the shooting.
In any event, what the Rodney King trial has taught is that there is never room for complacency, no matter how blatantly compelling and to what standard the circumstantial evidence proves guilt beyond doubt.
Man's inhumanity to man is exacerbated whenever a collective "blind eye" ignores that which we know to be the truth. Australia has long followed America's pattern. May we pray that righteousness is not compromised in the outcome of this vital, socially significant coronial inquiry and that the way to a more refined, virtuous and distinguished living standard is left open and free of corruption.
George Maleckas
Burwood Vic