Critical Times

A plan to meet the oil crisis

Coalition MPs met on Monday in Canberra and failed to come up with any worthwhile policy to control the spiralling petrol prices. There was a lot of talk about various alternatives such as ethanol and converting vehicles to LPG but nothing is to be done to control prices, stopping the obvious collusion between the oil companies or lowering GST and excise on petrol. More radical policies such as nationalising the oil companies or looking for alternative sources of supply outside of those controlled by British and American oil companies will not have crossed the minds of Coalition MPs. Nor is there any emphasis on the development of public transport.

The high price of petrol will flow through the economy and inevitably put the price of other commodities up as almost everything is transported by motor vehicles at some stage of its manufacture and sale. In turn, the higher petrol prices become a reason for putting up interest rates as we have just seen.

This spiral inevitably results in lowered living standards. And when workers and the trade unions make claims for higher wages to meet the higher cost of living they are told that this will put workers out of a job. Because nothing has been done to meet the oil crisis which has been steadily emerging as a major threat to the economies of many countries, Australia may well be facing a severe economic crisis in the not too distant future.

It is nonsense for the PM to suggest that prices may come down to $1.15 a litre when all the indications are that it is more likely to rise well above the present $1.40. Some commentators and forecasters suggest it will be closer to $2. This is a clear indication that the PM has little idea of the realities and dangers being created for the Australian economy by an over-reliance on oil. The Howard Government supports the Israel-promoted war in the Middle East, one consequence of which could be a widening of the war and massive disruption to world oil supplies. His policies are breath-taking in their short-sightedness.

For the Howard Government the oil companies are sacred cows not to be touched by any worthwhile investigation, let alone be controlled or made publicly accountable. Yet the government must act to control the oil companies, rather than the oil companies imposing their control and their selfish interests on the community.

While Australian governments, whether Liberal or Labor, have been privatising public enterprises regardless of the overall interests of the Australian economy, it is ridiculous to claim that the same governments cannot effectively control if not nationalise private companies in the interests of the people of Australia. It is the political will that is lacking as the monied power of the corporations dazzle the main political parties who also lack the courage to act against big capital.

For many years governments have done everything to promote private motor vehicles and the road haulage of goods, including subsidise the profits of private tollway operators. This has been at the expense of the rail system and use of coastal shipping. Public transport has not been supported and it is only now that the high cost of fuel is beginning to force motorists to use the much cheaper public transport.

A realistic policy to meet the present situation, which together with higher interest rates is having a devastating effect on living standards, must include:

Ø Massive investment in, expansion of and encouragement to use public transport;
Ø Removal of the GST and a reduction of excise duty levied on petrol;
Ø Measures to encourage a switch to LPG and natural gas;
Ø Support for research into alternative fuels including the use of electric and hydrogen

powered vehicles;
Ø Diversification of the sources of oil supply and where possible the conclusion of trade agreements with suppliers on favourable terms for both suppliers and consumers;
Ø The planned use of Australia’s limited oil and gas resources regulating their domestic use and export to other countries;
Ø The public ownership of these resources which have lain in the ground for millions of years and can never be regarded as the property of this or that corporation;
Ø The public ownership of the refining and distributive networks of the oil companies to ensure that the public interest is served rather than the profit interests of the corporations.
The Guardian 9 August

Islamophobia and imperialist wars

The July 30 Melbourne Sunday Herald Sun reported that a McNair Gallup Poll commissioned by the newspaper had found that “Four in 10 Australians believe Islam is a threat to our way of life”. According to the newspaper, the poll of 502 people also found that, “One in three people are more fearful of Muslims since 9/11”.

Given the steady diet of Islamophobic views — portraying all Muslims as “terrorists” or ‘’potential terrorists” — that has been dished out by Australia’s corporate media since 9/11 to rally support for Australia’s highly unpopular participation in the US-led war on Iraq, these results are not really surprising.

In fact, if the NcNair Gallup Poll result is broadly representative of non-Muslim Australians’ attitudes, the number of Australians holding Islamophobic views has actually declined since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

A survey of 5056 people in Queensland and NSW, conducted for the University of NSW and Macquarie University in October and December 2001, immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, found that a majority (56%) felt threatened by Islam. A survey conducted by the Roy Morgan research in June 2003, three months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, found that 57% of Australians regarded “Islam” as posing a “military”, “terrorist” or “cultural” threat.

Since those surveys, the Howard government’s Islamophobic lies to justify its support for Washington’s disastrous occupation of Iraq — portrayed as the central battlefield of the “global war” on Islamic terrorists — and its brutal regime of mandatory and indefinite detention of, mostly Muslim, asylum seekers, have been widely exposed.

The realities of life for most Muslim Australians — the fact, for example, that as a result of anti-Arab racism they have higher levels of unemployment (19%) than the average (despite Muslims being better represented in higher education than the other religious groups) — have also begun to be recognised by most other Australians. According to the Sunday Herald Sun report, 56% of those surveyed in the McNair Gallup Poll believe that “Muslims are unfairly discriminated against” in Australia.

The Western elite, however, are determined to stoke Islamophobia among their largely non-Muslim populations. Our rulers’ goal is to ensure that the predominantly non-Muslim working people of the developed capitalist countries do not sympathise with the resistance of the working people in the largely Muslim countries of Iraq and Iran to the Western corporate elite’s attempts to steal these countries’ vast oil resources.

A brazen example of this was the argument made in February at the US National Press Club by US war secretary Donald Rumsfeld that, as the US NewsMax website reported it, “Western countries must increase their defense budgets in order to prevent the rise of a ‘global extremist Islamic empire’ that could be as deadly as Hitler’s Third Reich”.

Rumsfeld — who commissioned the lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to scare the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq — ludicrously claimed that al Qaeda’s tiny terrorist cells “could be just as deadly as Nazi Germany”, threatening to kill “literally tens of millions of human beings on this earth”.

The reality of the Middle East demonstrates the opposite of Rumsfeld’s Islamophobic rants. As is daily shown by the bloody US-led occupation of Iraq and the barbaric US-backed Israeli war against Lebanon (39% of whose population is Christian), it is the Western corporate elites and their huge war machines that pose the deadliest threat to the lives of Muslim and non-Muslim working people throughout the world
Green Left Weekly