SM, Big central government also characterised Howard and Menzies - and Bush in USA - were they left-wing? Conroy's union affiliations hardly put him on the left. Unions are not left-wing. They're just legal state-sanctioned bodies representing less than 20% of the workforce.

BY,

"Unions are not left-wing" you must be kidding! The unions are the hot bed of socialist entitlement in the country.

As for Menzies, Howard and Bush being for "big government" I find the breaking up of monopolies and privatisation of common wealth assets to be somewhat contrary to your claims.

Big government as understood by most of us is the government trying to insinuate itself itself into the production of goods and services, making government owned monopolies such as the NBN.

SM, Menzies certainly left a lot for Keating to privatise! By your measure (and mine), Australia has never had a socialist government. You make a common mistake, I suspect, in conflating nationalisation with socialism. Marx and Engels had a different view, one hwich I think defines a left-wing position. As Engels said wrt Bismark: "But of late, since Bismarck went in for state ownership of nationalised industrial establishments, a kind of spurious Socialism has arisen, degenerating now and again into something of a flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic." (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific; Moscow, 1970, page 70)

Engels went on to point out that state ownership "does not do away with the capitalist nature of the productive forces . . . The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with."

The unions make no claim to be socialist and, as part of the legal structure of the capitalist system, cannot be regarded as left-wing, given that they accept the parameters of the system. That they want more from the system for their members is hardly left-wing. Wanting to overthrow capitalism - wanting socialism - that's left-wing. Once upon a time there were union leaders like that but they were still running organisations bound by the laws of the land

BY, I think you are confusing socialism with communism.

socialism definition. An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity. - (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

Note that even in the Soviet Union, workers worked for a wage.

Generally left wingers advocate greater government involvement in providing goods and services, whilst conservatives advocate for the limitation of government to public goods and services, and rewards for employees based on effort and competence.

Unions while working within a capitalist system, have almost universally supported left wing parties and advocated for government involvement in production and against privatisation

Socialists don't believe in censorship, Byork? Gee, that's funny, national socialist Germany, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Communist China, and every East European country in the Warsaw pact who had socialism imposed upon them by Russian bayonets, all had strict censorship of the press. You do your credibility no good when you make statements of breathtaking inaccuracy.

Your claim that the unions and the ALP are not left wing leaves me shaking my head in pitying wonder. I Joined the ALP in 1971 and I had to join the Electrical Trade Union to do it, because the ALP is quite obviously the party of the unions. I also had to take an oath to support "the democratic socialisation of Australian industry" even though nobody believed in that crap anymore. They are still the requirements to join the ALP today.

The strength of the unions is now centred upon those unions who represent the public service. That is why the public servants in the ABC have allowed the ABC to become the public relations arm of the ALP. To this end, the unions oppose privatisation of any industry now under government ownership. My own union, the ETU, is currently conducting a campaign to resist the privatisation of the electrical power generation industry. The socialists know they can never convince the Australian people again to support the idea that the government should own the means of production. But where governments still do own industries, they will fight to maintain that state of affairs to the bitter end.

The ALP may have made some concessions to economic reality in that they know that socialism does not work, but that hardly equates to them now being right wing free market capitalists. The government subsidies to failing car industries is just another means of buying the working class vote in areas of high unemployment, and the ALP could not give a damn if every Australian built submarine sounded like a rock concert under water, or cost the Earth to build, provided that unionised Australian shipbuilders built the subs instead of the Japs.

SM, your definition of socialism is unsatisfactory because it looks only at government involvement - the surface - rather than at the social relations of production based on private appropriation of socially produced wealth. By your definition, every post-war government in Australia has been socialist because there has always been a high level of government control through regulation of provision of goods and services. Socialism is not the abolition of the wages system, as you point out, but no-one has claimed that it is. Government involvement in the economy is determined by the needs of the system. In 'downturns' there will be heavier government involvement to try to keep the zombie alive - regardless of who is in power. You must regard Bush jr as a real socialist!