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The storm is coming

By Christian Marx

How did it come to this? I am writing this article on the eve of a potential leadership challenge. It is Sunday 8th April, and next week will be D Day for Turnbull. A potential leadership challenge will take place sometime within the next week. This will be our 6th leadership change in less than a decade. Something is rotten in the heart of Canberra.

One important factor which has changed the political landscape is the weakening of the gatekeeper’s narrative. Every miscalculation, every lie, and every clumsy manoeuvre is now available to any budding citizen journalist via digital media. Privacy is now gone, and the populace know far more than ever before (well, many of us do). However, there are still some dinosaurs who cling to the old propaganda of the mainstream media and their sanitized misinformation. This can only be a good thing …

However, while many are slowly waking up, the country remains in dire straights. Politicians themselves have become increasingly beholden to the narrow self-interested paradigm of Neoliberalism: the zombie, economic voodoo cult which seeks to abolish all that was gained via grassroots militancy. Think of every major gain for the collective good and society as a whole: affordable, universal healthcare, public infrastructure, public education, cheap housing, health and safety laws and regulations, and the affordable upkeep and running of all our utilities via government ownership. All either gone or in the process of being severely weakened.

The bottom line is that there are no independent thinkers in Parliament. No bold visionaries who will stand up for the benefit of the majority, rather than the greedy self-interest of the parasitic few who own and control both sides of government. What Australia needs badly is a real progressive statesperson. A man or woman with the courage to agitate for real and lasting change. A leader who will go against the wealthy establishment and enact a real and radical change. The past 40 years have been a train wreck in slow motion. Australia now has 3 million on or below the poverty line.

Coupled with this is our extraordinary media ownership laws. Our media is one of the most monopolised in the world. A handful of moguls own Australia’s media. All of them filthy rich capitalists who push their hard-right laissez faire economic dogma and narrow world view onto the populace. These propagandists will use racism, smear-campaigns and superficial distractions to throw the spotlight away from their economic bastardry. People are slowly waking up, but it has taken a a long time, and Australia is fast running out of time.

Australia is far from unique in this situation. Both the U.S. and the U.K. have the same problems and one could argue that their problems are even more advanced than in Australia. Even the so-called BBC has blatantly gone out of its way to destroy Jeremy Corbyn. Much like our own sister channel, the ABC, it has been gutted of independent editors and journalists and stacked with a bevy of hardcore, ultra right-wing, economic rationalists devoted to the cult of Austrian economics and Ayn Rand type philosophies. This makes for a very dystopian future.

Which brings us to the point of a potential Fascist taking the reigns of government. 30 years ago this would have been unthinkable … Today it is a possibility. While the weakening of the mainstream media has shone a light into the corrupt crevices and the machinations of Canberra, it has not been enough to destabilise the hard-right Machiavellian nature within the LNP. Unfortunately, mainstream media still has a very powerful hold on many, especially the over 50s.

While Neoliberalism is able to go unchecked and the dominant media is owned and controlled by the extreme-right, it may take another decade before the majority finally wake up to a scenario not dissimilar to 1973 Chile. My Chilean friend who fought against Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s, thinks Dutton is disturbingly like Pinochet and can now see the pre-Fascist shift toward a Fascist Australia. If he is worried, then so should you be! One man in control of a super ministry always spells bad news. Time is running out. Get militant!

Christian Marx is a political and social activist interested in making the world a fairer place. He has a Bachelor of Social Science and has a keen interest in sociology, politics and history. He was one of the organizers of the March in March rallies in Melbourne and is the founder of the progressive news and information page, “Don`t Look At This Page”, and is also a co-founder of “The Global Revolution” website.

 

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14 comments

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  1. john ocallaghan

    A good article and yes, we are heading into dangerous waters and i dont have a clue what to do about it!

  2. Glenn K

    love the quote from Tommy Douglas. He was the premier of Saskatchewan (a province in Canada), and the leader of the first and only elected socialist party in Canada (at a provincial level, not federal). He introduced Medicare in his province and it eventually rolled out to all of Canada. It was one of the inspirations and model for the Australian Medicare system introduced in the early 80’s. A great and visionary man.

  3. Stephen2012

    If you look at the origins of facism and compare them to the neoliberal agenda, there is a surprising similarity.

    Add racism and you get full blown nazi.

  4. Stephen2012

    The neoliberal agenda is strong in almost all our current crop of politicians.

    I have been assured by my local Labor MP that Bill is aux fai with MMT.

    I wonder what that means?

  5. New England Cocky

    An excellent article and a timely warning. Those who have read the history of the rise of the germanNazi Party in the 1930s will recognise too many similarities, especially the concentration of power into the hands of a person exhibiting many of the characteristics of an amoral, ill-educated psychopath suffering delusions of personal grandeur.

  6. Blinky

    I can picture it in my mind but i can’t quite believe it. Dictator Dutton: decreeing detention, deportation, destitution until every person of whom he disapproves, is dead!
    Return to white Australia – over our dead bodies.

  7. Phil

    If a truly socialist leaning progressive even articulated an inclusive vision for all Australians just watch the corporate and privileged elites shut that movement down in the blink of an eye. Labor under Shorten is playing the smart game – the waiting game – this is not the time to spook the privileged into a panic response and a further shift to the more extreme right.

    I don’t think Dutton believes for one minute that he has fascist tendencies – such a characterisation can only come from those observing and experiencing his behaviour first hand and he sure has displayed his credentials to join that class of despots.

    The most powerful politician in this rapidly destabilising country, he now controls all of the critical enforcement and coercive elements that define the full police state – he will use these powers to the maximum extent possible, without a doubt.

    Watch the corporate media fall into lock-step with him if he takes over from Turnbull. We have Turnbull’s pitiful lack of leadership to thank for the rise of this psychopath Dutton. We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

  8. helvityni

    Excellent post, Christian Marx, I also agree with all the commenters here…even with Phil’s warning: We ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

  9. Florence nee Fedup

    The resemblance of today to the 1930’s is frightening.

  10. Alpo

    Ultimately, the Pinochet coup was only possible because a Marxist Government wanted to impose a Marxist revolution of the economy and society against the will of the majority. Allende didn’t win a majority of votes at the presidential election in 1970 (he was elected president with the votes of the Christian Democrats in Parliament) and he didn’t win a majority of votes at the mid-term parliamentary election in March 1973. By September 1973 the country was split and on the verge of a civil war. Yes, the plutocrats plotted against Allende, the CIA and the USA were involved in destabilising the regime…. but Allende simply became anti-Democratic, most likely under the pressure of the hot heads in the Socialist Party (the Communists were more intelligent and they advised him to slow the revolution down).

    On the other hand, between 1964 and 1970 the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei was able to introduce many Social Democratic reforms, including the beginning of the nationalisation of copper mining, an agrarian reform, etc. that enraged the Conservatives but that didn’t lead to social collapse.

    Take home message: Social Evolution is far more effective and sustainable than Social Revolution.

    Dutton, the idiots in the Monash Forum, and our local authoritarian lunatics are more a source of laughter, clownish figures, than anything else. Yes, they may be dreaming of some military intervention if the “communists” are coming…. But the only one coming are Shorten and the ALP. They are not like Allende and the Unidad Popular, they are far more like Frei and the Christian Democrats….. They are Social Democrats.

  11. Potoroo

    @Alpo

    The ALP are Social Democrats? It is to laugh. Have you been asleep for the past two or three decades? The ALP have been eager participants in almost every aspect of the neoliberal race to the bottom. Rudd’s moral cowardice aside, on climate change they have some claim to have been on the right side of history but in everything else, no. Their only claim to distinction for a generation has been to be the lesser of two evils – but the lesser of two evils is still an evil. They have been as much a part of the problem as the Coalition. They are finally showing vague hints of returning to decency but that is far from a given and it is far too late. In the meantime, every vote for a major party is a vote to reward bad behaviour – which is why it doesn’t stop.

    We have something like a Social Democrat party in Australia but its colour isn’t red.

  12. paul walter

    Speaking of fascism, it was an education watching the 4 Corners on the ATO small business rerun of the Centrelink scam. In corporatism the Oligarchy itself is above such interrogation as occurs with the rest of us, as the energy and mining TNC’s and Murdoch perplexing immunity has demonstrated.

    We operate under the illusion that there is still a self contained, self administering entity based on democratic principles, called Australia.
    But more and more it seems, “Australia” is just a facade or shopfront controlled and run by local satraps answerable ultimately only to shadowy influences outside the country, whereby in the two tier economy, the masses are screwed to pay tribute to a largely anonymous and unaccountable offshore configuration.

    Turnbull, Morrison, Porter and the rest are only Klinks or Shultzs’s, feeble and deluded camp guards.

    One sure did fly over the cuckoos nest.

  13. Howard Patterson

    This extreme right State doesn’t need fascism, it already has complete control of all the levers necessary to make sure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Its more like a totalitarian state were its nearly impossible to find out the truth, or be able to challenge its power. The Federal police don’t even try and hide their politics anymore were they intervene in the last federal election and also arrest the last of the union movement.

  14. Josephus

    I was told that all refugees get free cars and accommodation. When asked for the evidence the man looked surprised. How I wish the above comments were not supported by the evidence.
    Maybe we can understand the despair of the Aborigines now.

    Written by a refugee descendant.

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