Union lefts
Your editorial on June 2 1993 entirely misses the point when you concentrate on the fact that the NSW trade union right are not serious about moves by the NSW right wing in lodging a claim: for an $8 wage rise.
What is more significant is that the alleged left are condemning them, not for their hypocrisy, but for daring to seek increases in wages for their members against the advice of the ACTU; with the attack being led by Anna Booth, the leader of the Clothing Trade Union, and staunch upholder of the Accord even when it is dead. She is simply carrying on the inglorious class collaborationist tradition demonstrated by her NSW colleagues, who took a deputation to the State Minister for Labour and Industry in 1986 asking that worker compensation benefits to their members be reduced.
She is also heir to another tradition, that of the Carmichael wing of the late and unlamented Communist Party, well established by the great guru himself in 1983 when he tipped a bucket on Gail Cotton of the Food Preservers Union at the ACTU Congress for daring to seek wage rises for her lowly paid members.
Today that fake left is led by Martin Ferguson, a trade union leader who never did a days real work in his life, and Brian Howe, a former parson. They collaborate on one overriding aim, to keep in office the Keating right wing servitors of capitalism. They are even more subservient to the ruling class than the right, because they do not base themselves on the working class at all, but on the rotten structures of bourgeois parliamentarism.
When a trade union leader does dare articulate the aspirations of the working class, the fake left does not hesitate to collaborate with the right to vilify and defeat them. Witness, how the fake left and the right combined to wipe out Jenny Haines of the NSW Nurses Association for daring to vote against the Accord in 1983. Note the way in which union resources were deployed to defeat Phil Sandford in the Commonwealth Public Service Union elections,
and the tactics used to defeat the recent rank and file ticket in the BWIU in NSW. And the fake left and the right are combining to try to defeat the militant leaders of the Victorian State Public Service Association.
In the lower ranks of the left bureaucracy, and amongst the periphery of the New Left, there are some individuals who possess a loyalty to the working class. But they do not make the running. It is vitally important that the genuine left expose the treachery of the fake left and separate them from the militants who support them. This can only be done by a thorough exposure of their treachery whenever it occurs. It should not be ignored as your editorial did.
George Petersen
Shellharbour NSW
[Edited for length. The left attack on the wage claim had not been made publicly when our June 2 issue went to press. We reported it in the following issue.]
Human rights
A recent newspaper advertisement called for submissions regarding "Australia's international efforts to promote human rights".
One important human right is the right to information.
In Somalia, a radio station has been blasted to smithereens by United Nations forces shortly after it called for the withdrawal of all United Nations forces from that country.
Other than that call, there was no apparent reason for that destruction and none was given.
Will the Australian Government now withdraw its remaining forces and publicly condemn that action? Or are we seeing another East Timor?
C.M. Friel
Alawa. NT.
Docu-drama
I can't wait to see the finished results of the docu-drama the UN is filming in Somalia. It's called "They shoot protesters, don't they?". Not satisfied with the first day's shooting they reshot the same scene with even more dramatic results the next day. What professionals. It's sure to be a
raging success — what with the Australian Government earmarking some $10 billion for it and similar projects; and that's only this year's budget.
Robert Wood
Surry Hills NSW
Fuel by road
Caltex Oil has asked Hawkesbury Council to rezone 8 hectares to build a 90 truck trip a day, fuel storage depot.
These "mobile napalm bombs" will roar up and down the Great Western Highway, through the Blue Mountains. Two Blue Mountains City Council aldermen, John Pascoe and Duncan Berriman, have publicly opposed this. Mr Berriman called on Caltex to transport its fuel by rail.
"The rail lines are already set up, and it is the cheapest and most efficient way of transporting fuel", he said. "It's also a damn sight safer."
The Caltex proposal comes pat after a State Liberal Government decision to cease transporting bulk fuel to Bathurst/Orange by rail.
The decision comes despite the State Government spending a mint to replace rail, ballast and sleepers for about 100 kilometres, from Penrith to Victoria, in Barry Morris's electorate. The 4-year revamp has driven hundreds of commuters into cars, swelling the coffers of petrol baron Barry Morris and bus company Westbus.
Morris owns Morris Petroleum and fleets of tankers. All petrol decisions swell the Morris profits. He is also behind moves to chop Mountain train services to feeder buses to Katoomba or Springwood. His National colleague, Jerry Peacocke, who kept threatening to sack Blue Mountains City Council, is the convenient rep in the Bathurst/Orange area.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls NSW.
.PC 35
.CW 13
Macedonian identity
I have followed the debate between Michael Karadjis and Gyorgy Scrinis on the issue of Macedonian identity with intense interest.
What bemuses me about the view of Gyorgy Scrinis is not so much the content of his argument — I sympathise with Karadjis — but rather his interpretation of Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm's theories of nationalism. These are cited by Scrinis in support of his argument. In my opinion, they could be easily employed to strengthen Karadjis' position and to problematise that of Scrinis.
The real issues in this dispute are the cultural content of the imagined Macedonian identity and the role that nation-states play in its formation. The former has real cultural roots that lie mainly in a specific language (at least in this case). This is clearly highlighted by Karadjis (GLW, May 5), but escapes Scrinis, who prefers to see the issue of identity as a generalised struggle over the name "Macedonian".
The Macedonian language was the basic ethnic bond which buttressed Macedonian proto-nationalism (to use Hobsbawm's phrase) in spite of Greek, Bulgarian and Slavic attempts to appropriate and suppress it. Furthermore, Scrinis in his survey of the rise of nationalism in the late 19th century fails to note that a central element of their refinement was the suppression of competing ethnic identities. This is a history of political conflict central to state formation in which states do oppress nationalist opponents in a variety of ways, including depriving, or attempting to deprive them of the roots of the culture — language and symbols.
Jeremy Smith
Fitzroy Vic
Mabo
I think Peter Boyle (GLW 26 May) was a bit rough on the High Court in relation to its Mabo judgment. As Peter says, the judges did not consider the Land Rights claims on the basis of need. Such claims may eventually find their way to the High Court, but in the Mabo case the Court was specifically asked to address the Murray Islanders' claim.
I don't see much point in blaming them for not addressing, in a single judgment, the accumulated wrongs resulting from colonisation. My perception of the Mabo judgment is that it is not so much a signpost for the future as a watershed. It indicates that the
highest court in this country is now just as embarrassed by the story that Australia was "terra nullius" in 1788 as the rest of us have been for some time. And they have put this story behind us once and for all.
Exposing the lie doesn't lead to instant justice however. That is for all Australians, and particularly for activists, to put on the agenda: that the High Court is hamstrung in many ways by inheriting the obnoxious as well as the better aspects of British law. One of these obnoxious aspects is its feudal perception of land ownership. If we reject this perception it's up to us, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike, to come up with a concept of land ownership that addresses the deprivation of Aboriginal people and that we can all relate to unashamedly, and to get this firmly established in the Constitution of this country.
What most Australians are not aware of is which Aboriginal peoples related to which geographic regions, in what ways they related to the land, what they meant by "owning" land, how they looked after it etc. Achieving a change of awareness in this direction is a political challenge for us over the next 5-10 years. The environmental crisis shows that Western exploitation of land based on a concept of absolute ownership is unsustainable.
But non-Aboriginals don't need to stay locked into a fossilized, exploitative concept of land ownership. We can learn from Kooris and we can change our ownattitudes to land. Once a perception shift in this regard has occurred, not only will governments and the High Court be unable to resist demands for land rights but all of us will learn to care for the land.
Bob Berghout
Lambton NSW
[Edited for length.]
.PC 35
Mates
What is the use of asking the British government to clean up the radioactive mess they have created in Australia? The bootlicking Menzies government gave the poms a blank check in the same way as the present government lets their the Americans entertain their secret bases. Legal proceedings in the case of Maralinga will be fruitless because Britain
will simply point to Menzies' blank cheque and the kow-towing in 1968 by the Liberals. If your country is a willing vassal state you can't do much but cop it sweet.
Australian soldiers in Cambodia should keep in mind that is was their British and American "mates" who together with the Chinese trained and armed the murderous Pol Pot gang. Killing millions of people really did not bother the Allies as long as the Khmer Rouge kept up their fight against the Vietnamese.
The conclusion of all this can only mean one thing: a republic of Australia needs to develop and maintain an independent foreign policy and keep the lessons of the past and the present firmly entrenched in its mind.
Michael Rose-Schwab
Gurambai NT