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Public Service deal
Here's an addendum to your article on the public service wages deal (GLW #23). According to a Public Service Union activist in Perth, the WA branch of the PSU only discussed taking their wage claim to the Industrial Relations Commission on August 12, the same day that the PSU officials lodged the claim without waiting for the decision of the WA members. So much for democracy.
However more importantly, only five members out of about 600 opposed a rank and file resolution rejecting wage bargaining on an agency by agency basis, ie enterprise bargaining. Thus WA joined Melbourne members who endorsed the same resolution the previous Friday. Even the PSU officials of the WA branch voted to reject enterprise bargaining.
Rank and file members chose different tactics in Sydney but still achieved 40% of the vote on a resolution that included a no enterprise bargaining clause. Those opposing enterprise bargaining within the public service believe that it will have devastating effects for public sector workers and the community.
The question now is what kind of trade offs will be sold to them by their officials on behalf of the federal government. The recent meetings showed encouraging signs that PSU members are prepared to fight any further attempts to undermine their conditions.
Jack Wind
PSU member Department of Veterans Affairs
Melbourne
Top-down green process
In his letter (GLW 14/8), Doug Hine makes a number of assertions which need correction.
First, Doug states that the "DSP does not support the formation of a coherent national Green political organisation/network". Has Doug already forgotten how he welcomed the proposal from Janet Parker (a Democratic Socialist Party member in Sydney), for the formation of national green network as a national clearinghouse and to "encourage political, social and electoral activity of its affiliates ... and convene regional and national conferences as necessary"?
Secondly, Doug claims "there has been no working together nationally to date". Another memory lapse. The national registration applications committee, declared out of existence by the conveners of the "new" national process without even a pretense at consultation with its full membership, cannot so easily be written out of history.
Thirdly, on the question of exclusive decision-making telephone conferences, none of the Western Suburbs Greens, Eastern Suburbs Greens, Victorian Green Alliance, ACT Green Democratic Alliance, SA Green Alliance, Lowe Greens or South Sydney Greens were properly informed of, let alone invited to participate in, either the July 8 or July 30 teleconferences. (Indeed, the only teleconferences I have seen advertised to green groups beforehand were those proposed by the AGWG). Is it coincidence that the only things these excluded groups have in common is that they are recognised green parties which have stood candidates in state or federal elections, and that they uphold the green principles of openness and grassroots democracy by refusing to adopt a policy of proscription?
Fourthly, on the question of the agenda for the national meeting on August 17-18. Since Doug's letter, a formal agenda has been issued and unfortunately does not allow for "usual meeting procedure" and will not "be put to the meeting for acceptance or amendment before it proceeds". On the contrary, just in case any of the autonomous green parties want to insist on their democratic right and responsibility to participate in the discussion about our collective future, the agenda has been set as: 1. Proscription 2. Agenda Review 3. Discussion of National Structure — in that order. While Doug may be technically correct to argue that the conveners of a meeting have the right to invite whoever they choose to discuss whatever they decide, they can hardly do so in the name of a commitment to grassroots democracy, one of the essential principles of green politics.
I and many other activists (DSP members and not) do have major concerns about the exclusiveness, secrecy, censorship and top-down decrees which have characterised this supposedly consultative process. I guess whether or not you perceive a political process as top-down depends on your standards of democratic participatory procedure and/or your current position in the hierarchy of decision-making. From the perspective of many grassroots activists committed to work collaboratively with anyone willing to develop a new sort of politics to try to save the planet, the main movers in this national process seem so far up a hierarchy of their own making that they are completely out of touch and no notions of accountability or responsibility to membership seem to matter. And that does matter.
Lisa Macdonald
Western Suburbs Greens & DSP
Sydney
Traditional men
Steven Hill (GLW 7/8) omits to mention that, by providing "traditional men" with masturbation fodder, Madonna helps them to contain their "need to dominate women", thereby decreasing the incidence of rape and lesser forms of domination.
A person's sexual orientation is acquired very early in life (some psychiatrists claim that it is already fixed by the age of nine). Whether a man has a desire to sexually dominate women, or be sexually dominated by them (equally likely for those who masturbate over Madonna) he can deal with it in one of three ways:
1. Attempt to live it out (probably destructive to himself as well as to women).
2. Repress it (causing frustration which will be expressed in other destructive ways, e.g. religious fundamentalism).
3. Fantasise (thereby directing these unacceptable drives onto Madonna, or whoever, instead of onto the women with whom he lives or works).
It is tempting to blame the media for all social problems from violent crime to anorexia, but the media only reflects the human condition, it didn't cause it.
The cause of all the world's problems is our insecurity. Men feel the need to dominate women (and children and animals) because they feel threatened by the innocence which implicitly criticises their lack of innocence.
Uncompromising idealism, more often than not of the "born again" (i.e. repressed) variety, whether religious, feminist, environmental or socialist, only serves to exacerbate the problems it seeks to solve when it attacks the compromises (such as pornography, abortion, materialistic consumption) which the human condition entails.
The energy expended in such futile conflicts is better directed into the positive, constructive activities which each of these movements performs.
If we can tolerate each other's compromises and work together towards relieving the insecurity which underlies them we can build a world in which they are no longer necessary.
David Munn
South Brighton SA
Spurious science
Phil Shannon (GL #21) misunderstood my letter criticising vivisection. After conducting twelve years of research into the theoretical bases of "alternative" and conventional therapies, I have come to the inescapable conclusion (along with Dubos, Illich, Beale, Hume, Mendelsohn etc) that modern medicine is a spurious science — with or without vivisection. I merely wanted to state clearly that the entire field of modern medicine is replaceable with superior, and more rational, scientifically sound alternatives.
But Phil goes too far in hinting that acupuncture, which was around long before Christ or Buddha, is a "pseudo-science based on New Age human energy fields". Equally dubious is his caustic dismissal of the lifelong research work of medical geniuses like Dr S. Hahnemann, discoverer of homeopathy, Constantine Hering and Antoine Bechamp, as well as nearly 200 years of subsequent research and clinical evidence from men and women of the calibre of Dr Dorothy Shepherd, Phatak Eizy Aga, Prof. Tissot, Ethel Hume etc. etc.
Frankly I cannot believe that Phil has had the time to merely read 1% of this research and clinical evidence which supports homeopathy, let alone understand, evaluate, criticise and condemn it as an irrational bogus science with little or no conclusive evidence.
I appreciate that most new age therapists don't know what they're talking about and I too got sick of listening to drivel about energy balancing from people who were as useless as ordinary doctors, but let us not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Homeopathy and acupuncture are true independent sciences, while their practitioners are mostly unaware of the scientific tenets. This is the logical result of decades of pharmaceutical medical monopoly — even the "homeopathic" drugs available in pharmacies here in Australia are not homeopathic. We are forced to buy ours independently.
I began the Campaign for Real Medicine (C.U.R.E.D.) not only because vivisection is bad science, but because until the energy-based therapeutic sciences are rationally taught by scientists to scientists in scientific institutions we are going to be stuck with semi-trained therapists with little scientific background (is it their fault?).
In the hope of changing this situation I have nearly completed a report (for the WA Greens and hopefully for other political parties) on the futility of biochemically based therapy and the superiority of energy based science. With socialists as open-minded as Phil Shannon, I may as well go crystal gazing and a fat lot of good it will do us all.
Rob McKinnon-Lower
Denmark WA
Cartoons and environment
Chris Kelly's "Once Upon a Time in NW Tasmania" (GLW #23), is a comic strip that I feel can't pass without criticism.
It was a comment on the NBH company pulling out of Burnie and moving offshore to the third world where environmental regulation wouldn't be so restrictive. Kelly sent up the local community as being outraged — not because the town would lose its major source of employment, or that a company shouldn't just be allowed to exploit the workers and resources of one country and then move to another when the rate of exploitation is better — no, these "yobbos" were outraged because the local environment would improve when the company shut down, and they would be forced to breathe more oxygen.
This portrayal of workers as being against the environment, and too stupid to know what's good for them, is I feel, all too common among some sections of the green movement, and is undoubtedly partly why many workers are so hostile to the movement, as opposed to the environment itself.
The people of Burnie would no doubt have welcomed a campaign to force NBH to adopt the technologies available and pollute the local environment as little as possible, but the general strategy of the green movement in Tasmania has not placed as much emphasis on the urban issues or public regulation of industry.
The strategy of the green movement must be to make industry and the economy more socially controlled, rather than simply limiting where these companies can devastate the environment. That is the only strategy that can be socially just, and that can work on a global scale.
Unfortunately it is not a victory for the environment in Tasmania that NBH is pulling out of Burnie, it's a defeat for the environment of the third world country that inherits NBH.
Teresa Dowding
Adelaide SA