Belly - "While workers lost it proved workers understood unions had a part to play with Labor in Australias well being."

I could really rest my case here Belly. As I said, all unions and the ALP care about is defending their position within the capitalist system - and you have just proven it.

When politicians talk about Australia's "national interest" or well being as you put it, they are talking about the interests of the financial elite (the bosses), and their right to extract more and more profit from the hard work of workers. As you said in an earlier post, bosses have the right to profit from their investment.

The fact is Belly, that the unions and the ALP have made workers pay for "Australia's" prosperity by telling them that we're all in it together and we have to take some pain now to make it better. When will the pain stop? When we have no rights at all - like now?

The only way for the majority of people to be better off is to get rid of capitalism. Unions are a dead end.

tao: Yeah, yeah, get rid of capitalism. Wake up and move into the twenty first century.

If Australians didn't waste so much money via consumer debt they'd actually be doing pretty well. Certainly I'd like to compare them to Venezuela in five years' time if that country continues down its anti-capitalist road. How many more times will people flog a dead horse? Anyone who is anyone in the world, from China to Finland, has realised that capitalism is the way to go. Does anyone but handful of crackpots actually believe in this pseudo or outright Marxist nonsense?

The trouble with the anti-capitalist approach is there's no way to actually objectively measure it. When it inevitably fails, it's always the fault of other capitalist countries trying to bring it down, or there were too many problems left by the previous capitalist system, etc., etc. The anti-capitalist brigade will never accept that reality doesn't bear out their nonsensical visions, not because capitalism is somehow the problem, but because anti-capitalism is the entire problem.

Tao, you have some very good points.

Unfortunatly the on way forward is to get rid of Howard and put in a
Labor Government. I do agree with you but I say again Howard and the Business Council of Australia are trying to destroy the fair go.
They are even forcing disabled to work(welfare to work bill)

Labour has not screwed us for ten years and they deserve a second chance. I think Bill Shorten might have his heart in the right place, time will tell.

shorbe(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4452#41757),

It seems that neo-liberal free market extremists such as yourself want to have their cake and eat it too. Your type tell us on the one hand, that 'capitalism' the best possible economic system, but on the other hand we have to accept sub-standard working conditions, loss of public holidays, weekends and meal breaks, poverty, homelessness, crime, pollution, environmental destruction, global warming etc, etc in order to keep it functioning.

Whether or not the answer is 'socialism' we deserve much better than the abysmal standards of mis-government that we have endured in this country for at least the last three decades.

tao, (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4452##41754) if 'unions are a dead end', then why should anyone be concerned with John Howard's efforts to make them effectively illegal?

Also, just how to you plan to 'get rid of capitalism'?

Are we all to join your organisation(http://www.wsws.org) of all of the dozens of organisations now in existence claiming to be socialist, and from now on, give to it all of our spare time and money and our souls?

I would guess that your organisation has been in existence for at least fifty years and, in that time, in common with just about every other 'socialist' organisation, has had made no measurable impact in advancing the cause of socialism. So, why should we expect any better over the next fifty years?

I find myself largely in agreement with Belly(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4452#41750), Sly(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4452#41767) and 'Country Unionist'(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4452#41592).

It's critical for the future of democracy that John Howard's Government be removed as soon as possible. What sort of 'democracy' can allow a Government to introduce such far reaching legislation as the IR 'reforms' without it having ever having been put to the electorate, either at election time or as part of a referendum.

It is a constant cause of dismay to me that many on the left (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/05/02/finally-the-organ-grinder/#comments) have failed to grasp that the choice between Labor and the Liberal Party is important, however dimly we regard Beazley and other Labor politicians, and we are now paying the terrible price.

daggett: The free market doesn't necessarily imply the things you assign to it. What it does is assign power to individuals to make their own choices (for better or worse). The problem is that often people won't, or don't want to, take responsibility for themselves. That's their own fault and nobody else's. If people don't want the things you mentioned then it's up to them to make decisions and personal actions that prevent such things from happening. People take the softest/cheapest/easiest option though, which may indeed lead to the things you mention, but that doesn't mean such things are the only possible outcomes. That having been said, I have no problem with some of the negative outcomes you mention.

People keep talking about the loss of rights of workers, but at the end of the day, the company does not belong to the workers, and democracy should have no role to play over how a person runs his or her life or business. Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner; it's two morons outvoting a genius; it's tyranny of the masses; plain and simple, it's just another form of tyranny. Most of all, it's a contradiction -- either people are capable of running their own lives (libertarianism, anarchy) or they're not (totalitarianism). You can't have it both ways and say the government should protect people from themselves and each other on economic issues, but not on social issues (eg. that it has no right to bring in draconian measures such as an ID card or legislate against various "sins").

Anyhow, if people don't like where they work, they can go elsewhere or start their own businesses and compete with their own former bosses. Any business that drives its own workers away through not being attractive enough to them will soon go out of business, both through a lack of workers and a lack of customers as word gets around.

Graeme, I haven't been here for a while but it seems the redesign has not stopped this site becoming increasingly a union whinge fest.

As for Bill Shorten in Tassie - less than 20 per cent of the mine workers are actually unionists, much like the rest of the country.

Out of date and irrelevant.

t.u.s