SONNY MELENCIO is a representative of the Philippines socialist workers centre BMP. This is an abridged version of his talk to a May Day Solidarity Forum in Sydney.
We are living in dangerous times. Events today evoke memories of the 1930s, when the working-class movement was defeated almost everywhere in order to restructure the capitalist system.
There are forces today using the same fascist arguments to scare the population, especially the white working class, into supporting the racist agenda and submitting to the neo-liberal policies of the government.
Like the argument that the economic crunch is caused by Aborigines and Asian immigrants, that the "cannibals and the gooks" — that is what they call us in the privacy of their boardrooms — are responsible for taking away the benefits intended for white Australians.
These stupid arguments, which could not be countered by a pathetic media, nor by an equally pathetic Labor Party opposition, have come to dominate the debates. Whenever I see Kim Beazley on the television, he just opens his mouth and whimpers without making any sense.
An ideological and political offensive against the working class is being waged everywhere. It goes by the name of neo-liberalism. It aims to cripple the working-class movement, take away all the gains that it fought for in the past, and create a scenario where labour could be made cheaper and the working class docile.
The Workplace Relations Act, for example, comparing it to our experience in the Philippines, is a throwback to the dictatorship period. It necessitated a dictatorship in the Philippines to enshrine this kind of bosses' attack against the labour movement.
We have the same problems of privatisation, cutbacks in social spending, downsizing, right-sizing, closure of companies, factory restructuring and the like. The attack has been particularly focused against radical unionism. They are trying to break radical unionism there, sometimes by simply closing the factories and moving them elsewhere, where unionised labour is replaced by non-unionised.
They make a scapegoat of people who are also part of the working class. In the Philippines, we are taught to hate our Asian neighbours who are taking away our jobs. We are told to compete with them by lowering further the costs of our labour. Here in Australia, workers are taught to hate the immigrant workers, especially the Asian immigrants.
But who brought the immigrants here in the first place? The bosses and the bosses' government. When the economy is booming, immigrant labour is good. When the economy is in the crunch, immigrant labour is bad, immigrant workers are the devils themselves. (Perhaps they will trace our history and find out that we too were cannibals in the old days.)
What the bastards do not tell us is that Australia could not be as prosperous as it is today without immigrant labour. They do not tell us that not a single cent has been spent by the Australian bosses and its government for the training of immigrant workers. They come here ready to be used — and the bosses like that because they come without any cost to them.
Now they want to throw out immigrant labour. But at the same time, they want their cheap labour too. That's why they're transferring some of the jobs to the Third World. Telstra, for instance, is sacking thousands of workers and transferring part of its operations to the Philippines.
So they can have cheaper labour minus the costs of maintaining the dependents and the families of the immigrants, minus the hassles of taking away the social benefits (which they cutting anyway) for white Australians. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They would rather divide the world into two: those whom they can fool, and those whom they can just kick around.
What is the way to fight this scenario? In the '30s, they first defeated the communists, then the socialists, then the Jews, then the unionists, then the church and the religious — until everyone had been too weakened to fight back. That's the way they want to break our ranks now.
We have to resist. We have to turn this offensive around. And we have to do that collectively. In the Philippines, we are trying to do that by unifying the labour movement in order to fight, and by unifying the various social movements, especially the urban poor, the rural poor and the women's movement.
Here in Australia, I know you are doing that too, developing the collective fight together with the Aboriginal movement, the labour movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement and the solidarity movement.
We know that our struggles are linked, that we can not defeat the ideological and political offensive of the bosses and their government if we go separate ways.
We live on the same boat. Not only that: we built this boat. Now they tell us to get out of the boat because it is sinking. Their solution is to drown some of us, in order to save themselves.
The boat will sink because it is full of holes. The only way to survive is to grab the wheel from those bastards who are taking us into stormy waters in order to drown. Grab the wheel, for heaven's sake, pull the boat ashore, and rebuild it the way we want. That is the only solution.