Alex Bainbridge

The shock resignations from parliament of Greens Senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters highlights one of many undemocratic features in the Australian Constitution.

Arguably the best approach we can take to help create the conditions for a mass left-wing break to occur is to build the social movements.

The most striking lesson to take home from the recent UK election is that left wing ideas can win popular support in an advanced capitalist country today. They said Socialism was dead but veteran socialist Corbyn is proving them wrong.

Complaints by conservative commentators that Treasurer Scott Morrison and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull have delivered a “Labor budget” show how low expectations are that any federal government in Australia will deliver a budget aiming to advance genuine social justice in this country.

According to federal government ministers, Medicare is unsustainable. The aged pension is also unsustainable. The NDIS is unsustainable. Many other social services are unsustainable. However, billions of dollars of tax cuts to big Australian companies are perfectly sustainable.

The disastrous Adani mine project illustrates why the entire mining and energy sector should be brought into public hands and dangerous fossil fuels rapidly phased out in favour of renewable energy.

As Invasion Day approaches, Murri leader and Socialist Alliance Aboriginal rights spokesperson Sam Watson told Green Left Weekly that January 26 was “only a date when a motley collection of boats made landfall on Gadigal country to establish the colony of NSW”.

After ripping up Australia's commitment to the 1951 Refugee Convention on several occasions in the past, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on October 30 that the Australian government intends to do so again.

Newly elected Senator Pauline Hanson gave her maiden speech in the Senate on September 14 — 20 years after her first appearance as a parliamentarian in 1996.

Her incendiary speech outlined a far-right agenda of racist bigotry, misogyny and attacks on welfare rights.

Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull have delivered a budget for the billionaires. They claim that opposition to their tax cuts for the rich is “class warfare”. But the truth is that they are the ones waging naked war against the ordinary people of Australia.

The Socialist Alliance will be campaigning in the coming federal election on a platform of raising taxes on corporations and the super rich while easing the tax burden on the poor. Abolishing the GST is a critical part of this campaign.
Any meaningful push for genuine democracy would require a lot more than just electoral reform. We need a change of government: not just a change from the Liberals to Labor, but a change from corporate power to people power.