Hospital sales
Mr John Hatton, Independent for the South Coast has tabled a bill titled "Privatisation of Core Government Services 1994".
The object of the Bill is to require the holding of a referendum to determine whether the people approve in principle of the privatisation of any of the following core government services: (a) public education (b) electricity (c) public hospitals (d) water.
The sale of government assets is concerning but the sale of public hospitals is outrageous.
Health care cannot be efficiently allocated by market forces or promoted in a context of growing demand, high unemployment or inability to pay. Good health and health care policies can only emerge in an environment where it is accorded primacy, along with education.
Privatising hospitals and interrelated services will lead to greater fragmentation of the public health care system as well as considerable variation in the quality and availability of health care.
Furthermore, can anyone explain to me why should someone make a profit when you boil a jug? Or when a child drinks water? Or when a pensioner keeps warm?
If they can't, then the reminder of Mr Hatton's Core Services Bill protecting public education, electricity and water will have little trouble passing the Lower House.
It is not known where Reverend Nile MLC stands on these issues but Mr Nile hods the balance of power in the Upper House. If you feel the need to express your concerns you should write to Mr Nile, Parliament House, Macquarie St, Sydney.
Don Mackay
Port Macquarie NSW
[Edited for length.]
Blue Mountains development
Mr John Pascoe, elected Ward 1 councillor for the Blue Mountains, is one of many residents and ratepayers who have been intimidated and threatened by developers and their agents in the Blue Mountains.
Over the past ten years, it is a common experience for any person who openly and vocally expresses their opposition to the suddenly erupting plans of developers, that they receive threats and various other forms of intimidation.
These include legal action for libel on the flimsiest of pretexts, abusive phone calls, silent phone calls with the "click-click" treatment, verbal attacks, ridicule in the press, threats of the sack and so on.
Developers, linked with the Liberal Party, placing their proxies on Council and in the Council Administration, are in a big hurry, and they don't want council or community opposition.
In the beautiful Blue Mountains, a World Heritage area proposed, a place as full of natural grandeur as any place on earth, resistance is extensive, profound and persistent.
The clash of the two produced Mr John Pascoe and other people of integrity and courage, who are prepared to stand up and be counted.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls NSW
Budget action and ALP
Over the past few weeks there have been very well attended Cross Campus Education Collective meetings in Sydney to discuss action against the upcoming Federal Budget. They have planned an action on the 28th which will take up the government's proposed training wage, cuts to the under eighteen dole, the "Job Compact" and the need for real job creation.
This sort of action is vital. The last eleven years of ALP government have seen unemployment rise to 11%, and a staggering 30% for young people. This has been coupled with a decline in real wages and increasing attacks on working people.
It is also the ALP that, through enterprise bargaining, has attacked working people's ability to defend their own interests. To defeat these policies, an active campaigning movement is needed, and the action on the 28th is an important part of this process.
Unfortunately, some within the CCEN, namely the International Socialist Organisation, have refused to hold the ALP accountable for these attacks. The ISO, in conjunction with Labor students, voted down Resistance's proposal to have as a slogan on the rally's poster "Neither Labor nor Liberal; For Jobs and Justice".
They voted against this slogan on the basis that it would alienate the good Labor left campus activists, particularly at UNSW, that they were trying to relate to. They also claimed that the majority of students support the Labor Party. They claimed that actions like those on the 28th are not part of building a political alternative to both major parties but merely a show of anger.
The point of the rally should be to mobilise the broad mass of students, unemployed people and workers who are hurting under these attacks, not to relate to the Labor left. People may vote for the ALP only because there is no viable left alternative. Depoliticising the demands of the rally is selling ourselves short.
The Labor left promotes the notion that the ALP can be reformed. Labor students at the CCEN meeting argued passionately that strengthening the "rank and file left" of the ALP will rewin it to a socialist agenda. The unwillingness of the ISO to challenge the ALP directly opens the door for this sort of reformist politics.
The key task for socialists is to build a viable left alternative that can win the majority to its project. The ISO hands the Labor left a platform on which to defend themselves. This only blocks the campaign to fight Labor's attacks.
Michael Tardif, Sam Lazzaro, Nick Soudakoff, Amy Phillips, Marina Carman, Sujatha Fernandes and Zanny Begg
Resistance, Sydney
[Edited for length.]
Capital punishment
There have been many calls lately (mainly from politicians seeking re-election) for the reintroduction of floggings and capital punishment. They are taking advantage of people fearful of crime. We all fear violent crime and the mainstream media plays this up because it makes a "good story" and sells papers.
Whilst it appears that violent muggings and robberies are increasing, in fact the Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics has confirmed that murders have not increased since the abolition of capital punishment 25 years ago in Australia. (The same thing has been experienced in Canada.)
I would suggest that a better way to prevent crime would be to improve the employment opportunities for young people — and this is what the politicians should be devoting their time and energy to, instead of calling for harsher punishments.
Stephanie Wilkinson
Co-Ordinator, Australians Against Executions
Seven Hills NSW
Con job
What a con job this "US jets kill 26 by mistake ... military personnel supporting humanitarian aid" by the mainstream media. Just Lies Lies Lies.
Turkish troops were attacking Kurds a few kilometres away — and the gungho yanks thought these were Iraqi helicopters coming up to their aid.
Poetic justice — if America didn't want all these hilariously stupid (killers hoist on their own petard) situations/events to "happen", they might have started investigating back when the USS Vincennes blasted an Iranian airliner out of the sky, murdering 270 innocents. They didn't even hold an inquiry — "It would be too embarrassing for the Navy, and seriously affect morale and recruitment". Result — Lockerbie as revenge.
When you consider the tens of thousands of babies and children that have died and continue to die of dysentery and typhoid and other diseases that the UN/US continue to cold-bloodedly cause via its revolting military blockade of that country you realize these were just 26 fools in the wrong country at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons.
Robert Wood
Surry Hills NSW
Tariff protection
The destruction of Australia's tariff barriers has been one of the greatest crimes of economic irrationalism. It is to be hoped that the individual academics, journalists and businesspeople who took part, will be held responsible.
As with the whole of Eastern Europe since 1989, we have taken a wrong turning into a dead-end. We need to return to the principle of the Harvester judgement of 1907, which was that manufacturers paid a living wage for a family of five in return for protection, usually by tariffs.
There are very good reasons for protecting domestic industries from the atrocity of globalism:
(1) to prevent the unpredictability that arises with dumping . A foreign firm might dump, e.g., cooking oil into Australia until the local manufacturer is put out of business; it can then double or triple the price.
(2) Australia's actual experience is very much that resources are not reallocated to more "efficient" industries;
(3) a domestic manufacturing industry will benefit the balance of payments;
(4) a small but growing firm can be destroyed by pressures that an adult firm would survive. All big firms started off small.
(5) a local operation reduces the reliance on imported skills and equipment, and preserves at least a small core of up-to-date skills that can be quickly expanded if opportunities arise.
(6) "domestic suppliers" comprise 80% of the economy. Without them we would have a very small economy.
It isn't surprising that labour-intensive industries such as textiles and clothing should be obliterated by the loss of protection. What is a little surprising is that even thoroughly competitive industries, that have always had very low protection, are doing very little better.
Roger Raven
Applecross WA