My Take: The Importance of Education

To be educated is probably the most important stepping stone to a successful life. It allows us to have meaningful conversations with others on important issues and allows us to form our own points of view. This fundamental human right is also a tool for governments to control their population. One example of this going on right now is Republican attempt in the United States to make the Common Core federal school curriculum “more patriotic”, in other words teaching students a conservative view on History and English, two vital subjects in a child’s education.

We over the past few years have learnt of the extreme oppression of women in terms of education in Taliban-controlled parts of Pakistan, and of the particular story of Malala Yousufzai, a 17 year old activist and blogger who was shot in the head by Taliban extremists two years ago. The bravery shown by Malala is pursuit of education for women in Pakistan was remarkable, in that it showed others around the world that even the most vulnerable, weakest members of society could change society in a radical way. Malala’s bravery has led to her being awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, a fantastic award for an activist who with real action showed the world the sexist oppression of women in the education field. We need more people like her to be able to show the world that oppression, poverty and imperialism are things that are needed to be changed.

Another thing that we have seen of recent, here in Australia has been the attempts by the Abbott Government to change our higher education system to fit with an American model, meaning deregulation of fees, more student debt and a lower standard of education. I don’t know how the Abbott government, came to the idea that this would be a good idea, because the facts don’t add up, for example according to Uncensored Magazine the fees per year at Harvard University are now $35,000 and after two years of university, 45% of American students showed no significant gains in learning. These are the facts of the road Pyne and his henchmen are taking us down and these demonstrate the sheer lack of logic behind this government’s neoliberal agenda. Every great nation needs their children to be educated and thinking about the world’s problems, and by dumbing down our education system the Abbott Government is systematically denying children and young adults the chance to make their world a brighter place. We must condemn this Americanisation of universities for what it really is: a chance to deregulate and privatise another priceless public resource to help right-wing fascists to maintain their grip on power. We need to, as socialists take the lead of Malala and fight till the bitter end to stop the destructive changes to our society being made by Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and the Liberals.

Why Australia will never be lucky

To really understand the description of Australia as “the lucky country”, we first must look at its origin. The origins of that phrase came from Donald Horne’s 1964 book by the same name, and the actual quote “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck” tells a far different story to how the quote is used now, and Horne himself became annoyed with the way the term was used as a positive.

The term as it’s now used is really very difficult to argue for, I mean let’s start with this country’s Indigenous people. In 1788, British invaders came here for the sole purpose of taking over the land and creating a new chapter of the British Empire. The ensuing genocide committed by these intruders in the name of terra nullius killed somewhere from 60,000-200,000 Aboriginal people during the Frontier Wars between the Aboriginals and the English between approximately 1788 to the 1850s. The British also introduced new diseases like measles and tuberculosis, and in 1789, a deliberate epidemic of the disease smallpox wiped out 90% of the population of Darug tribe in Sydney in southern NSW. It was in this time that the only known full extermination in world history occurred: the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines, in which a population of 4,000 were massacred by the British. Flick forward to the modern day and the status of Aboriginal people in Australia is no less bleak, with 38% of Aborigines at working age unemployed, 48% uneducated and 1 in 3 Aboriginal men from the age of 15-44 can expect to be charged with a crime. While some have argued it is better than it used to be (and given the British treatment of Aborigines in early times, this woudn’t be difficult to achieve), even as recently as 2006, the Howard Government initiated a blatant military invasion disguised as the Northern Territory Intervention, which was a ploy to grab land and make lives miserable for thousands of Aboriginal people. This was spun by the corporate mainstream media to be positive. ABC’s Lateline even got Mal Brough, a minister at the time, to talk on their show about how there was paedophile rings running rampant in the NT, and that girls as young as five were being targeted. This was then substantiated by “an anonymous former youth worker from Central Australia” who was actually Greg Andrews, a friend of Brough’s. Of course these comments were easily proven to be false, but this was an excuse for a government to make lives for Indigenous people more miserable. Australia, the lucky country? Certainly not for Aborigines.

If our treatment of Aboriginal people isn’t bad enough, our government’s treatment of foreign immigrants is enough to make a person sick. First it was the White Australia policy that officially came into fruition with federation in 1901 and eventually demolished in 1973. This policy was an attempt by consecutive Australian governments, both Liberals and Labor to “maintain a high Western standard of economy, society and culture” which was actually a racist immigration policy hellbent in making sure that our country became a country dominated by people of Anglo-Saxon heritage. Edmund Barton, the very first Prime Minister of Australia, in 1901, even said in support of the policy “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman” proving from the very beginning of this country, equality of race was not going to be well supported by governments, particularly as this was a man from the Protectionist Party and supported by the Australian Labor Party. When this policy, signified by the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 was debated in Parliament, there was almost universal support from the MPs, many of whom were clearly paranoid about an invasion from Japanese or Chinese. This became our immigration until 1973, when it finally scrapped in its entirety and replaced by the Racial Discrimination Act, a watershed moment in the fight against racism. However, our immigration policy took a dreadful turn for the worse in 1992 when the Keating Government implemented mandatory detention for asylum seekers, a policy that has been extended by all governments since. The Abbott Government’s continuation and extension of this policy called “Operation Sovereign Borders” to stop the boats is just the latest human rights abuse in our immigration policy, and it has thousands of human lives at risk of death. They are punishing people for fleeing persecution from countries with tyrannical regimes, and putting them in gulag-style concentration camps in places like Manus Island and Nauru. Australia the lucky country? Not for immigrants.

The last of my examples of Australia not being the lucky country is perhaps the most pressing: the constant attacks on the working class by continuing governments. Ever since Federation in 1901, governments in Australia have made attack after attack on the working man. Workers being made to work in unsafe workplaces, unions oppressed and witch-hunted and poverty and inequality skyrocketing. Whether it was conscription during the Vietnam War, which sent many a young working man to die in a foreign country away from their family, or the recent comments by Joe Hockey in which he said there was “lifters” and “leaners” who were the two types of people currently in Australia, in which of course, the leaners, were the impoverished and working class people who either couldn’t physically work or were earning so little from their totalitarian corporation that they had to get money to pay for food, water and other essentials, the ruling class in Australia has found a way to attack the working class and make the lives of the people miserable. Since September 11, 2001, at least 495 workers have died on unsafe workplaces on the docks, in the mines and on the building sites. The only protection against unsafe workplaces that workers have in this country left are the trade unions and what’s happening to them? There’s a royal commission into trade union corruption. Now I know that union corruption is an issue, but compared to the issue of people not having a union or the benefits that trade unions have given the working person, like the 8 hour day, like the minimum wage and like holidays it is rather small. It is the working class people that built the infrastructure and the country that we call home, but for these people to be persecuted and forced into homelessness because of redundancies and staff cutbacks, is a birthstain on our nation’s history. The worst case of worker oppression was probably John Howard’s WorkChoices to attempt to rid Australia of unions and workers rights. Luckily it got beaten because workers and unions united together to beat this oppression. Australia the lucky country? Not for the workers.

If Australia isn’t a lucky country for immigrants, its indigenous people or its workers, who is it lucky for? I’ll tell you who: the businesspeople and capitalists who have pillaged this country for its wealth and resources while making huge loads of money and not paying any tax. The idea that this is a lucky country is delusional, utopian thinking, because the number of people who have been oppressed in this country over the years far outweighs the oppressors. We need to change the way Australia treats its people, both domestic and foreign. But in order to do this, we can’t just let the system run its course. The system of imperialist capitalism is the problem, a problem which enables these right-wing nut-jobs to control our lives and make lives for minorities miserable. As Socialists, we need to defend minorities from the system by taking it into our own hands to destroy the real reason why Australia isn’t the lucky country: capitalism.

My Take: ISIL Crisis

The major issue facing Australia today really is what to do about the Islamic State, the terrorist organisation that has been rampaging through Iraq and Syria in the name of forming a caliphate. All Western countries have been put on high alert due to the risks of this organisation, and the fact that they are looking to spread their brand of extreme Sunni jihadist Islam to other parts of the Middle East, which is a danger to many men, women and children across the region.

Unfortunately, this is a double edged sword, because countries have been gearing up for a war effort, which if unsuccessful, would just add to the number of radicals who would join for these terrorist groups, due to their hatred of Western war-mongering. The decision of Prime Minister Tony Abbott to wage war on ISIL is exactly what this group wants, they want the West scared. It is what they thrive off. This is the main reason behind the recent beheadings of David Haines, Steven Sotloff and James Foley, to scare countries in the West into waging war.

The problem with not doing anything is that we know ISIL will continue to spread their extremism further into the Middle East if we do nothing. I personally think, the West should consider giving Peshmerga more arms and equipment, because at the end of the day, we don’t want to be considered as being a major player, because that will make ISIL and al-Qaeda more attractive to moderate Muslims, and the Kurdish people need support to form their own independent state.

My Take: Politics Does Matter

In this time of great unrest and violence around the world, it is a scary thought to think that we are becoming less interested in politics as a nation. As the percentage of people voting informal continues to rise by the election and the number of people not involved in a political party at an all-time low, the world’s problems continue to increase, with wars in Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, a civil war in South Sudan and Afghanistan. There are two major contributing factors in my view to this. Firstly, the media is every single day brainwashing people into thinking that this is the lucky country, and that we have no problems, and that we don’t need to worry other issues because we’re OK. This leads to what can be called “middle class apathy”, a problem which rises as a person’s status in the world improves and means that you don’t think about problems in the world, you just think about maintaining your status and maintaining that status quo. Many a poor person has voted Liberal because they have been brainwashed by Mr Murdoch and his henchmen at News Corp.

The second major issue (or a positive, as I’ll come to in a second), is that people don’t feel like the political system but continue to vote for one of the parties or donkey-voting. This is a problem because these people are contributing to the mess we have, be giving their vote to these capitalist, neoliberal parties, both Liberal and Labor and not helping to find a way to change the system so that it might help them. The reason this can be a positive is that, if we as socialists can find a way to get in the public eye and sell our message to a greater number of people, then just maybe we can gain to support we need to further messages of socialism and equality. Working class people want living wages, they want reasonable work days and good conditions, but due to government privatisation and decisions by governments both Labor and Liberals, they are being ripped off and exploited for their labour.

Socialist groups and trade unions have a proud history in this country and around the world in helping the working and oppressed people of Australia. It was this combination that got rid of the anti-worker WorkChoices by Howard and it was this combination that helped the Aboriginal people in the fight for independence and land rights. We need to continue this fight, and we need to continue to spread our message to a wider world of people, because revolutions start small with big dreams, but one day when we take our message to the masses and show them how the system has failed them and how neither party will save it, maybe then we can destroyed this fascist and totalitarian system they call Western capitalist democracy.

 

Neoliberalism in a nutshell

The political scene in Australia has been corrupted in the last 30 years, starting with the election of Bob Hawke in 1983, which signalled the beginning of a new destructive ideology in mainstream Australian politics: neoliberalism. This ideology, which was passed down to Labor and Liberal governments alike, has now found its way into the most totalitarian government in Australian history: Tony Abbott’s Liberal administration.

This government, dedicated to building an society of two Australias, one for the rich and upper class people, where you don’t have pay taxes and because you have money, you can afford things like deregulated healthcare and private education, and the other Australia which is the reality for most in this country, where you get left behind if you didn’t inherit copious amounts of money from your parents. It is this idea that fuels this Liberal government and influences each and every policy decision Abbott and his henchmen make. It is the idea behind the hideous $7 GP co-payment and the lack of means testing which pushes the poor further behind.  We can’t let the next generation live in a worse Australia than we do at the moment. Neoliberalism must be destroyed and we need it destroyed quickly.

Unfortunately, neither Labor nor Abbott’s Liberals will destroy or want to destroy it because they are the ones who profit from it. These two parties and the ruling bourgeois class are the ones who are driving this destruction of humanity. Socialists, social democrats and just people who care about the future of humanity and equality need to stand up and take action in destroying the two party system which drives this terrible anti-proletariat ideology they call neoliberalism.

Death to the NCAA

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), since its formation in 1910, has arguably been the world’s premier national amateur sport organisation. Only now, in the wake of the Northwestern players union dispute and the O’Bannon vs. NCAA court case, is it being exposed for what it really is: a greedy and exploitative capitalist organisation, whose revenue is made on the back of effectively slave labour. The NCAA makes a killing in profits each and every year and yet the workers at the bottom of the food chain, the players make nothing apart from scholarships provided by universities. If they were a listed company, they would be found guilty of paying below the minimum wage, but because the NCAA is a “non-profit” they get away with it. Worse than this, the NCAA in their rulebook state that student athletes are prohibited from working for a wage, even though a normal student, even an academic scholarship one can work. This means that for many students living in poverty, their only hope is to be a star and make it big time into the NFL. This is a stunning example of the failure of our capitalist system of which sport is a microcosm.

My take is that the level of the NCAA’s exploitation is such that the players have become modern day slaves with such oppressive rules that a player can’t be given money from a friend for lunch or clothes. This is a scandal that must be resolved with the players in mind. Any other resolution would lead to more oppression of players already burdened with studies and caring for themselves and often families. The NCAA’s control of players’ identity through video games and merchandise is beginning to be tempered only now through the fight by people like Ed O’Bannon, a former UCLA Bruin basketballer.

The widespread crimes committed and the shocking retrograde rules put in place by the NCAA have led me to believe that the NCAA should be destroyed and collegiate sports should no longer be the pathway to professional sport. Through a club-oriented system as opposed to a school-oriented system, the lead-in leagues would be professional but with lower pay than the top flight leagues, a massive improvement on the dreadful conditions faced by student athletes in America today.

Finally, having been a massive Alabama Crimson Tide football fan before I saw the harrowing oppression that goes on in collegiate sports around the USA, it made me want people to know that their innocent amateur sport they love so dear is anything but innocent and just another part of the fascist capitalist world we live in.

 

Ferguson Blues

Much has been said in the past week or so in the media about the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri in which unarmed black man Michael Brown was shot multiple times and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. This terribly tragic event has led to protests by the African-American community ever since, which brought into question the caution taken by police officers around the United States when it comes to using potentially lethal weapons. In fact just two days later in Los Angeles, Ezell Ford, another unarmed black man was shot dead by the police. The issue of excessive force by police and policing figures is an issue that has surfaced here in this country too, with a 15-year-old girl being dropped brutally on her head by a Flinders Street station on July 31, 2013. Here was a defenceless girl being attacked rugby-style over what apparently was just a ticketing violation.

My take on this is that these are all examples of the same problem: people in highly ranked, powerful positions attacking the vulnerable and less well off. The African American community in the United States knows this all too well with the recent high profile case of George Zimmerman fatally shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager whose case bears striking resemblances to Brown’s.  Of course, even this example pales with the list of times that well-off, generally white people have taken to killing African Americans, which includes such events as the transatlantic slave trade, the Ku Klux Klan and the court systems which many a time have conspired to sentence a black man to death. In this country we too had a genocide, one in which Aboriginals were killed, treated as flora and fauna and as a community, had their land taken on the basis that no one had been living there. These are major atrocities against people who were living good and decent lives until foreigners from imperialist countries came to impose their tyrannical regime on the country they were invading.

The whole idea of all powerful, imperialist government is that it seeks to expand its power, expand its wealth and destroy systems in which less well off people get helped. This is the definition of fascism, an ideology with which capitalism and imperialism fit in nicely with. Socialists need to understand this and spread this message, because many people just think it is the particular people in power who commit these atrocities. It isn’t, instead it is the blood-thirsty system that we call imperialism that fosters criminals to take power and inflict pain and suffering on so many people. No person is perfect, that is certain, but if the idea of government was inclusion, like it is under real socialism, then maybe the leaders among us would not evil, maybe they would be a friend and someone that, if you were in need would give you a helping hand.

The Future of Batting

Watching India capitulate to an abysmal 94 all out last night, it got me thinking about why top class cricketers, seem to have such difficulty playing in the Test match arena in conditions that are not perfect. Even Virat Kohli and Cheteshwar Pujara, possibly two of the finest young batsmen in the world right now, looked out of their depth against James Anderson, Stuart Broad and the other English bowlers.

The problem with all of these players seems to be an over-tendency to play strokes and feel for the ball before they are set in. This, more often than not leads to an edge and an easy catch for the keeper. This has become more apparent in recent years as players have not put as higher price on their wicket as in previous years. The easy solution to this is for batsmen to see off their early deliveries to get their eye in. The more difficult problem is the putting a high price on their wicket, which comes from many factors, the most glaring of which is the amount of One Day and T20 cricket that players play around the world these days, which allows players to put in a few shocking performances as long as they entertain the crowd with big hitting, all the while making thousands and millions of dollars doing it.

Maybe a less obvious problem, but to my mind almost more important is that so few Test players play domestic first-class cricket, for so many years the stepping stone into the big time. Now, the stepping stone is just as likely to be the Big Bash or just being a talented player, which means you don’t really have to prove yourself before starting your career. Another reason for first-class cricket’s importance is that many pitches on the domestic scene are under-developed and bowling wickets and thus teach players about how to tough it out on tricky pitches, the sort that players like Jack Hobbs were known for their play on. Even the Sheffield Shield pitches now are batting paradises that are used for Test cricket like the Adelaide Oval and Brisbane. If we want our cricketers to truly be the best in the world, we would make our Shield games be played on suburban tracks rather than the best. This might teach our kids on the values of playing a ball on its merits and being cautious rather than slogging. It is no surprise to me that out of the top ten players with the all time test highest batting averages, four are English players who had long and illustrious County cricket careers (Sutcliffe, Paynter, Barrington and Hammond), who would’ve played on all sorts of pitches that swung and spun prodigiously and were unpredictable in bounce, which forced them to play each ball how they saw it and defend for long periods if they had to, which would’ve taught them well for Test matches.

One Day and Twenty20 cricket need to have a diminished role in the future of cricket if the standard of batting is going to improve, because the fundamentals can only be found in a longer form of cricket where runs and longevity are valued more than fun and entertainment. Money and fun can only go so far in sport, and to my mind with the current leadership of the sport, batting and real batsmen who see off the new ball and don’t worry about run rate will soon be something of the past.

 

My Take: Political Madness

Australia is clearly in the midst of the most conservative, most neoliberal government in its history. Prime Minister Tony Abbott and henchmen have been making drastic cuts to government services left, right and centre. And what’s the Labor opposition doing, basically nothing, in fact it has been down to independent and small party senators like the Motoring Enthusiast Party’s Ricky Muir and the Palmer United Party to provide the true opposition to the most anti-worker government this country has seen. Because of the capitalist elections and the two party system, when we go to vote for the next Prime Minister in 2016, we will either have to choose the party whose ideology is all about oppressing workers and destroying the livelihood of our country or we will choose the party with no ideology that can’t differentiate itself from neo-liberalism. We need a difference and all the Greens give us is rhetoric on saving the environment, all the while maintaining the position as the third party in the establishment of this environmentally destructive system. Australia’s demockracy is allowing those at the top to make record profits by outsourcing overseas while many in the working class go to sleep at night not knowing if they’ll have enough food to get through the next day. These are profits which are leading to the destruction of the democratic ideals which makes nations great.

 

Unlike our totalitarian dictator Tony Abbott wants, we should not become more like the U.S, because the USA is what could be called a failed state with poverty at an all time high, a right wing that will stop at nothing to pursue its goal for the corporations to take full control and a current administration, albeit quite a centrist one, that wants to go back into Iraq into a war that could spark a new and even more dangerous than before jihadi movement. Revolutionary ideas are the way forward, and our left-wing parties need to show the way forward for the ultimate goal of destroying the system responsible for a large majority of our world’s problems, and creating a world free of leaders who want our world dead and buried, and in their place a democracy where people, no matter what their situation can be happy knowing that they won’t be abused in their workplace or home, and that their faith can be put in an inclusive system, that looks to help people in need rather than fight them. The system is in an unrepairable state and we have to be the ones making revolution happen, rather than just a dream.

 

My Take: The Palestinian Situation

The war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has been going on now for about a month now, and has been perhaps the biggest event to take place in that time. This conflict has to me been, unfortunately, a war that many would believe was inevitable, given the fact that both Israel and Hamas are led by nationalistic leaders, who believe that war and the destruction of the other side is the way forward in the region. This has led to the outbreak of war in the region, which has led to one main loser, the Palestinian people who in this conflict alone have lost in excess of 1,700 members including at least 296 children. To put this in context, more Palestinian children have been killed in the current conflict than have Israeli soldiers in conflicts since 2006. This is a dreadful loss of lives given this is just the latest in a long line of conflicts involving Palestinian land of recent times. These dreadful figures are the result of the fight between Palestinian self-determination and an Israeli leadership that has made it clear that it will do anything it can to stop the Palestinians from getting their sovereignty.

My take on this issue is that the only way for this endless cycle of conflict and bloodshed to end is for Palestine to be freed from its rulers and given its sovereignty. If this was the case, in my opinion, there would be less need for a ultra-nationalist group like Hamas to be the main military force in Palestine because the nation would have its army and Hamas, would indeed be just a terrorist organisation, rather than the militant nationalist force it currently represents. This however is a very difficult proposition currently, due to the level of support for an Israel-only solution from countries such as the USA, Australia and a large majority of liberal democracies across the globe. It is the exception rather than the rule when major world leaders speak out in favour of a Palestinian state, with two of the most prominent supporters being the late Nelson Mandela, the former South African leader and the late Hugo Chavez from Venezuela. The left-wing forces in Australia and throughout the world need to continue to support the oppressed in Palestine because very few groups nowadays are not a part of the Western ultra-Zionist lobby who are the imperialist rulers in the region. We need to provide a voice, like we always have for people in awful situations like the one people in Gaza and the West Bank have faced for long time. It has been shown for a long time that no-one in the mainstream can provide that voice because of the strength of the imperialist forces in making politicians and journalists tell their side of the story.

We must be active in our support for the oppressed people in Gaza and the West Bank living in such horrible conditions during this conflict that has destroyed so many lives and against both Israel and Hamas who brutally murder innocent Palestinian people in order to justify their destructive aims. Finally, our end goal must be the freedom of Palestine and their sovereignty