Most of the mainstream media ran with that unsubtle lead and went berserk with another round of Trump-style China-bashing, even though the Chinese government had promptly denied the accusation.
Peter Boyle
The JobMaker plan, announced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on May 26 at the National Press Club, is an attempt to get us to accept a post-COVID-19 return to the neoliberal regime that made jobs precarious, ran down hospitals and other public services, and made housing and education unaffordable.
The slogan “There’s no going back to normal” has gained considerable popularity for good reason. As governments all around the world have struggled to deal with the health and economic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have been forced to take emergency steps they would not have countenanced just months ago, challenging the idea that greater public spending to address social needs is simply unaffordable.
The fall in the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases over the last few days has been received by most people with cautious relief. The official advice of federal and state governments remains to maintain the social distancing and to stay at home.
But the capitalist class is looking at things very differently. It is growing impatient for capitalist exploitation to return to “normal” and they are preparing us to accept the cost in lives.
If there is one thing the recent unprecedented bushfire emergency has proved to us in Australia — and to millions in countries who watched on in horror — is that the climate emergency is not just something to worry about in the future: this is the climate emergency and it is already catastrophic.
The context in which Plibersek is attempting her insulting dressing-up of Australian patriotism is the ugly, nakedly racist push by right-wing politicians to whip up nationalism and jingoism at a time when Australia (and the rest of the world) is divided by greater inequality, spawned by a sharper exploitation by the corporate rich.
The ALP's recently released federal election post-mortem has a giant invisible elephant in the room: the party's own culpability for its defeat through its embrace of neo-liberalism and its abandonment of progressive “traditional Labor values” over decades.
While Albanese made a vague assurance that Labor would take a “progressive agenda” to the next election, everything he said about Labor’s election defeat was an excuse to tack to the right.
It is an image that captured Labor’s class betrayal on July 3, the first day of the new federal parliament.
On one side sat the sole Greens MP Adam Bandt and independent MP Andrew Wilkie. On the other, Labor and Coalition MPs.
It’s clear we have a government in the pocket of fossil fuel companies and allied rip-off merchants who are hell-bent on sacrificing our future.
The ALP lost the NSW election with its small-target strategy, its refusal to take on the privatisation agenda and its sly accommodation to racism.
“NSW not for sale!” was one of the chants at a Fix NSW rally on March 3, 20 days out from the state election.