Critical Times

No matter how hard you search the 2020 Summit documents, you just can’t find it.

Among all the Big Ideas there’s no reference to our rights at work, nor is there anything about getting the troops out of Iraq (let alone Afghanistan).

Yet everyone (even the Liberals) now acknowledges that hostility to WorkChoices and a desire for decent wages and conditions, job security and union rights were the key reasons Labor won the election. A majority has always opposed the war in Iraq, and the most recent poll about Afghanistan had half the population now opposed to war there too.

These are not accidental omissions from the Summit. The anger at the inequalities and warmongering of the Howard era that drove millions to vote the Liberals out is not shared by the Rudd government.

Instead, Rudd’s recent world tour involved cementing the US Alliance and attempting to rope in more nations to the continued slaughter of the people of Afghanistan. The abolition of any new AWAs in March was accompanied not by the dismantling of the rest of WorkChoices, but its continuation. Workers who want to fight will come up against the same laws that outlaw strikes, or deny the democratic right to meet and decide collectively on industrial action.

We live in a world divided by class. The interests of the working class and those of the capitalist class are fundamentally counterposed.

Where does the Rudd government stand? In the lead-up to the Summit, Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner concluded that “all of those tough reforms in the 80s and early 90s have borne fruit in recent times and they’ve been of great benefit to Australian working people generally”. Yet for working families who have found in competition and productivity nothing but speed-ups, job insecurity and rising living costs, these “reforms” have only benefited the bosses.

Workers voted for change at the last election, but we can’t rely on Labor to get it. For that we will need to continue to organise and fight in our workplaces and on the streets.