Southerner - you sound like you're speaking from an ALP Left perspective. I sympathise, and I agree that the Right's culture of careerism needs to be overcome. But at the same time I think that individual activists in the ALP, and in the Left, need a voice; and that if they don't have a voice, then inevitably all the decisions will be made by a handful of factional operators. In this scenario, there is no room for the Left as a movement; where free mind coalesce to engage in open discourse, and to make collective decisions.

I suppose I am afraid that the Left will make the same mistakes it made under Hawke and Keating. We refused to stand up when it came to privatisation, even when it was against the party platform. (eg: the Commonwealth Bank) We succumbed far too easily when it cames to 'reforms' such as dividend imputation; which have cost billions, while we depended on regressive bracket creep to 'fill the gaps'. We succumbed in the Accord proceess - even led it - but in the end we were betrayed, and were not willing to stand up and demand a compromise that gave workers something tangible for their sacrifices.

What I'm saying is that we need to stand up now to demand a better settlement from Rudd as a condition of unity. And I'm saying that a Party to Labor's Left, in the mold of the Left Party in Germany, could lead policy debate, act as a mobilisation point for counter-hegemony, and hold policy leverage over an otherwise conservative Labor government.

Now I'm not going to leave the ALP for a hopeless cause, but at least those forces already outside ALP processes - should be exploring these options. An awful lot of people are disllusioned by the ALP, and thousands upon thousands have simply 'dropped out' over the years. These people deserve to be organised, and to find their collective voice.

more to come...

cont from last post...

Some of us will do the hard yards in the ALP and accomodate the compromises necessary to win the centre. But if so, those people who do this need the determination and strategic vision to SHIFT the relative centre to the Left - on our terms - not just adapt to a centre that is determined by the conservatives. And in the meantime, we also need more radical voices - the relativise the field of debate - and open the way for others on the Left to bring progressive policies into the mainstream.

And for those not already in the process, a point of mobilisation to the ALP's Left, that nevertheless was determined to lead the mainstream, and shift the relative centre, would be a welcome development. Only if people with influence and credibility were willing to back that cause.

Tristan

Tristan, you ought to be a comedy writer. If you lived in Victoria in the 1980s, you'd have remembered that John Cain - a Labor Premier - preceded Joan Kirner, so if anyone handed her a 'poisoned chalice', it was him, surely. The fact is that Cain and later Kirner got into power because the Libs under Dick Hamer ran out of ideas (and puff). Cain was ultimately seen as a pretty dour plodder while the Kirner Government was seen as economically illiterate. It didn't take the public long to punt her government - it lasted one term. I seem to recall that the TriContinental Bank went bust in the late 1980s, around the time she was there. This kind of says it all really. If anything, Kirner took the poisoned chalice and then poisoned it some more.

By all means have an opinion, but if you expect your arguments to have credibility, they have to make sense as well as have a sound foundation.

Off topic but Liz's claim regarding men being the initiators of seperation requires correction.

http://www.aifs.gov.au/institute/pubs/WP20.html#initiating

"Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of women compared with one-fifth (21 per cent) of men indicated that it was mostly themselves who had made the decision to separate. Conversely, more than half (53 per cent) of men compared with 20 per cent of women said that the decision had been mostly made by their former partner. According to 26 per cent of men and 16 per cent of women, the decision was jointly made."

That's not a comment about the validity of reasons for initaiting seperation but the claim that it's mostly about men leaving women is blatently false.

On topic, perhaps Tristan could comment on the inequality of time experienced between many workers and those who make different lifestyle choices.
There are those who are genuinely marginalised who face great difficulty in maintaining a comfortable lifestyle for themselves and their families. There are others who choose a time rich lifestyle over earned income, why should those who choose to work continue to be penalised to redress the lack of cash experienced by the latter group.

R0bert

“Despite this, however, the vast majority of Australian citizens have nothing to sustain them but their labour and, in the sense intended by Marx, are members of the working class.”

As one of the “working Class”, by Marx’s definition, let me advise the notions of “enforced social justice” and a “tax-based equitable distribution of resources” is a crock.

It would take merely 7 years of self-determination for those recipients of funds under a “re-distribution” to lose it back to those with the craft to relieve them of it.

Reality is you cannot make people conform to the rules of fiscal wisdom.

You cannot defend the drunkard from accessing alcohol and you cannot prevent the gullible from their own stupidity.

All this rubbish is just a smoke screen of “faux-compassion”, designed to facilitate the introduction of centralist control of everything by the left.

It is designed to deny the individual freedoms of negotiation, which Australians enjoy in the workplace and in their private dealings with one another.

It is designed to institutionalise the Nanny state and prevent people from aspiring to their true potential.

It is the recipe of mediocrity, the hall mark of socialist thinking.

Tristan relies on quoting Marx, a German Jewish dilatant who thought revolution would happen in England and viewed Russia as a society populated by retarded serfs and now Tristan’s “socialist vision” is viewed by looking backward 150 years.

RobP the TriContinental Bank failure had all the characteristics of socialist mediocrity, pretending to make money from those who could borrow from no one else (high risk) and ending up handing the Victorian Tax Payers a $3 billion debt when the high interest bearing borrowers fell over.

Funding this debt, they sold off the State Bank to the CBA and their incompetence also brought about a reduction in Victoria’s credit rating, forcing tax payers to pay higher interest rates than before.

That is to say nothing of Jolley’s endorsement of Pyramid Building Society a day before it also fell over leaving Victorian motorists to be raped with a fuel levy to cover the deficit.

Probably, mentioning “Marx, a German Jewish dilatant” perfectly highlights reality and worth of dominating Australia a usual racist speechifying about “a knowledge of the English language” as an “important component of social inclusion”: Marx, a native German speaker as far as historical sources provided, was from a family converted to Christianity prior to his birth. Non-Anglos in Australia have perfect English skills-in generations-and are under-caste inferior anyway de facto.

Therefore, as already in this Forum noticed, a newcomers’ “real piss stain on a shoulder” is their non-Anglo-Englishness rather than one’s vogue speculation of an English skills – also it is extremely important for communicating in this Forum surely.

At the end of the pipe access to possible financial gains determines belonging to a particular CLASS regardless of biological background. That is why attempts to use mafia-style substitute of “mateship” helps a little: "mates" themselves differ for their possibility to recover their for instance gambling lose on merits of an access to a money flow, which one is predetermines class division between haves and not-haves practically.