Write on: letters to the editor

Tasmanian Greens Bob Brown (GLW 22/11/95) objects to my statement that "the Greens ... tarnished their public image" in the Tasmanian Green-Labor Accord of 1989-92. It is true that it was Labor that put forward the resource security legislation that caused the break-up of the accord, as the Greens would not accept such an attack on the environment. The Greens were right to do this. But why wasn't it one of the Labor budgets, for example, that the Greens refused to support? Bob admits that the budget was harsh but argues that "the accord required the Greens to pass budgets and we did". Is Bob justifying the budget's attacks on education and health? Obviously not, but then why excuse Labor and support these attacks by allowing such budgets to pass? In answer Bob says that, unlike the Laborials, the Greens will not send voters back to the polls again and again "till they vote in a Labor or Liberal majority". But does this quest for stable government excuse the costs to the majority of Tasmanians' standard of living that a stable, economic rationalist Labor (or Liberal) government means? It seems that the Greens sometimes elevate the principle of responsibility to the institution of parliament over their political principles which include grassroots democracy and social justice. Parliamentary seats ought to be used to campaign against economic rationalism, not to (however unwillingly) support it in the guise of accepting voters' will: what about the people who voted for Green policies including better health and education?
Ben Courtice
Hobart Towards 1996 Before looking forward to the news and views of 1996, we should all think again of how in 1995 conservative powers showed their true colours at Murorua Atoll and Nigeria. Yes, the dangers is still there. However 1995 also showed that opposition at all levels has grown enormously! So if 1995 was a bad year, it was also a good year! Furthermore there is no need for people like Joan Coxsedge to go all the way to the US to find evidence about CIA influence in the labour movement here. Bob Hawke, as leader of the opposition, spent the last full day before elections, as a "guest" of the Fairfax family! No doubt he received his final instructions before becoming PM! No doubt who is pulling the strings in Australian politics. Labor or Liberal, the White House or Westminster, all are puppets guided and directed by powers who are eager to go to war anytime, anywhere! Why else the need to upgrade nuclear weaponry that is already quite sophisticated!
Henk Hout
Sydney NSW Oppression Colonel Komo of Nigeria says his Nigerian military have "not used even one hundredth" of the "material and methods" used "by the British forces" in Northern Ireland, (SMH 28/11). The last African leader to make such a comparison was Prime Minister Voerwoerd of South Africa. Mr Voerwoerd said that he would give up all of his Security Laws, for one clause of the Northern Ireland Prevention of Terrorism Act. Equanimity in oppression can almost conquer racial apartheid, it seems.
Denis Kevans
Wentworth Falls NSW Chemicals and food Mr Dennis Avery, director of the Hudson Institute's Centre for Global Food Studies, has been quoted as having made a virulent attack on environmentalists opposed to the widespread use of chemicals in agriculture. Such an attack must be answered. Pesticides may "have dramatically increased the world's output of fruit and vegetables" but that is a temporary phenomenon until the pests build up a resistance to the present array of pesticides. As for the residual effects of farm chemicals being trivial as he asserts, the chemical DDT left a trail of destruction, and near extinction for some species, through the wildlife of the United States. He makes no mention of the eutrophication of our waterways caused by the run-off of farm chemicals, with consequences such as blue green algae in many of our water systems, nor of the loss of our arable land by poor farming practices, the salinisation of rivers and land as a result of land clearing and other inconvenient, but real, side effects of the insane drive to maximise food production. He says, "We should aim to triple the output of world farms in the next 45 years without sacrificing more land, to feed the world's growing population". No! We should aim at reducing the world's population to suit the yield from a sustainable form of agriculture. If we follow the advice of this "expert" and do nothing about reducing the world's human population, we logically come to the situation where a continually increasing population relies on the maximum possible agricultural production. That puts us on the edge of the abyss, where one crop failure, or two or more consecutive crop failures, dooms millions to starvation. Even the most avid supporter of perpetual growth will have an "extreme knee-jerk reaction" then.
Col Friel
Alawa NT
[Edited for length.] Trotsky and Bolshevism Anthony Hayes' letter in GLW 213 totally obscures what the differences were between Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and the Bolsheviks' strategic perspectives for the Russian revolution. According to Hayes, "After the defeat of 1905 Trotsky theorised that the working class leading the peasantry in their common struggle against Tsarist autocracy would have to fight the cowardly and ever compromising Russian bourgeoisie turning the 'bourgeois-democratic' revolution permanently or uninterruptedly into the socialist revolution." But this was also the strategic perspective that Lenin and the Bolsheviks fought for. "Our Party", Lenin wrote in 1909, "holds firmly to the view that the role of the proletariat is the role of leader in the bourgeois-democratic revolution; that joint actions of the proletariat and the peasantry are essential to carry it through to victory; that unless political power is won by the revolutionary classes, victory is impossible." In 1905 itself, Lenin explained that "...from the democratic revolution we shall at once, and precisely in accordance with the measure of our strength, the strength of the class conscious and organised proletariat, begin to pass to the socialist revolution. We stand for uninterrupted revolution. We shall not stop half-way... "We shall bend every effort to help the entire peasantry achieve the democratic revolution, in order thereby to make it easier for us, the party of the proletariat, to pass on as quickly as possible to the new and higher task — the socialist revolution." Thus long before 1917 Lenin's strategy was based on the conviction that the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia could be carried to victory only through a revolutionary government based on an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, organised through soviets and led by a revolutionary workers' party. Further, that the completion of the peasant-democratic revolution led by the working-class would enable the workers, in alliance with the poor peasants, to pass on uninterruptedly to the socialist revolution. This was the strategy that the Bolshevik party was built upon and which it successfully implemented through the October Revolution. What then was Trotsky's view before 1917? Contrary to the picture painted by Hayes, Trotsky did not believe it was necessary or possible to forge a revolutionary-democratic alliance between the workers and the peasantry as a whole. This led him to reject the very possibility of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, and to counterpose to it the perspective of an immediate socialist revolution. He expressed his views most succinctly in a September 1915 article on "The Social Forces of the Russian Revolution": "Our social relations in this decade have developed toward a further reduction of the potential revolutionary role of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry and a further growth in the numbers and productive importance of the proletariat. If a 'national' revolution could not be completed in 1905, then a second national revolution, that is, a revolution that unites 'the nation' against the old regime, cannot now even be posed."
Doug Lorimer
Sydney
[Edited for length.] ALP Any illusions one might have had that the Australian government led by the ALP is on the way to a more equal, just and classless society must surely have been demolished with the Carmen Lawrence affair. Here is an important woman in Labor circles found to be untruthful by the evidence of lower-down members of the ALP and the rush is to support her and dismiss as unimportant nonentities those who didn't agree with her version on the Penny Easton affair. Makes we wonder. If one cent of taxes pay is used to pay her costs then it will be imperative for me to approach the taxation department to try to stop any such thing.
Jean Hale
Balmain NSW