By her own admission Jennifer Meyer-Smith has never said she knows all the answers when it comes to how we Aussies are going to get ourselves out of this neo-liberal quicksand mess we have been submerged in by the “dinosaur duopoly” over the past 4 decades.
“What I can say in my defence, is that it takes all of us on the true Left to collaborate – in order to find and implement the answers. If that means forming alliances or ‘The ALLiance’, then that’s the way to go”.
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I’m just about recovered from the disappointment of the 2016 Federal election results. Like most of us on the Left, I wanted the LNP degenerates to be dramatically defeated for an assortment of reasons. My reasons were as follows:
- They are largely nasty bastards who demonstrate little individual, and absolutely no collective interest, in defending or advocating the interests of grassroots people who come from the spectrum of our demographics.
- They were instituted by Uncle Rupe’s dad, Frank Murdoch, in the first place 100 years ago as a counterforce against grassroots people collective organisations. This shows me the spirit and reason for the birth of the LNP was poisonous in the first place and its perpetuation by subsequent generations of brown-nosers, proves its malevolence.
- Modern LNP are losing the battle of good governance. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to work that out. We ALL knew if LNP won, they would struggle to prove their worthiness to the Australian public in the following interim. Notice I said interim and not 3 years? The reality is they won’t last the distance but we, The ALLiance must keep the pressure on so they don’t last the distance.
So what can we do when sitting on the Left of the spectrum?
We can recognise each other’s strengths and prowess. Labor obviously has the numbers and only needs a few extra to exert pressure. This is not an optimum situation in the current make-up of Parliament but it is necessary in order to exert pressure on the LNP who will destroy everybody’s lives now and in the future.
Except Labor needs to differentiate itself, as such:
- Make friends with the Greens. Yes, the Greens have faults too and I agree there have been some obvious mistakes in recent months with the Senate changes and recent years with Climate Action.
- Make friends with disenchanted Labor supporters who may never come back to the fold of Labor but who will support in secondary and tertiary capacities while supporting further alternative political forces.
- Even make friends with sympathetic Micro alternative, progressive parties and Independents who would value-add to progressive, grassroots focused policies.
- Devise policies and improvements that include and promote vulnerable people. Obviously, I mean detainees in Nauru and those still trapped in isolation on Manus and other on-shore detention camps.
- Devise policies and improvements that include and promote vulnerable people on welfare whether they be single mums with school age kids, unemployed and under-employed people who don’t want to be subject to the devastation of lesser respect for their qualifications, expertise, experience and talents while stuck on Newstart.
I’ve said these points on numerous occasions on The AIM Network in response to other writers.
So OK, now I’m the writer and must face the music, so give me your feedback as to how clever we together can be, as a collaborating force for reformist, social justice AND environmental change.
Remember though, obvious neo-liberal stubbornness from the dinosaur misses the point.
