Mark Latham has been taking an interest in the present election on behalf of Channel Nine, and getting alternately savaged and sneered at by the rest of the bourgeois media, particularly for giving the PM a hard time. (The latter is purely illusory, of course. Julia Gillard is an old hand and can eat that kind of “tough encounter” for breakfast.)
There are a number of reasons for the unfriendly attitude of the non-channel-nine part of the capitalist media to Mr Latham but one you might not have thought of could be his penchant for saying unkind things about capitalism when he was an MP.
In a speech to the House of Representatives on 26 August 2002 about what he called the “New Political Correctness”, our Mark identified “the conservative establishment in this country” as comprising “money interests, the conservative think tanks, the Tory MPs and their fellow travellers in the commercial media”.
Even at that time Mark was being got at for being “uncivil”, a cry that resurfaced after his recent footpath encounter with Ms Gillard. In 2002, he labelled such complaints from the conservative establishment as “hypocritical”.
“They have spent the last 20 years hopping into the unemployed, Aboriginal communities, newly arrived migrants and anyone else at the bottom of the social ladder,” he said, “and now they want civility. ...
“For the establishment, civility is a way of preserving the social pecking order. It helps the ruling class to avoid public scrutiny and accountability. It tells working people to accept their lot in life, without challenging the power and privilege of the Tory elite.”
That’s right – he talked about the ruling class and working people. No wonder certain Labor Party quarters wish he would go away.
Talking of the Labor Party brings us to the imminent election and the spectacle of PM Julia Gilard and NSW Premier Kristina Kenneally fawning over each other in a rather desperate attempt to round up “the women’s vote”. As a ploy, it will presumably work to some extent.
Most people are deliberately kept ignorant of the forces that actually drive politics in this country, so achieving change by voting for a woman seems as viable to them as any other approach.
But there is a large and growing movement in NSW against the despoiling of the State by the insatiable greed of coal companies. A letter in the Central Coast Express Advocate not so long ago, from a woman named Anne Marshall in Holgate, expressed the view of many people in the region.
“Looking at the map of the Hunter Valley would shock most people. Enormous areas between Singleton and Scone show open-cut and underground coal mines, mostly the former.
“This was an area of rich farmlands, grazing, viticulture, horse breeding and tourism.
“Vast areas of some of the best food producing lands in NSW have been taken over by coal mines and more giant mines are in the pipeline. You can’t eat coal.”
Scone still proudly calls itself “the horse capital of Australia”, but with the plans by BHP Billiton and other coal companies to build “super-mines” hanging over the region, it seems only a matter of time before that too becomes but a sad memory.
BHP and the other coal companies have made and are still making prodigious profits from coal. That money has bought them powerful friends in Macquarie St.
The whole world (with the exception of Tony Abbott) recognises the extreme danger to life on Earth posed by the burning of fossil fuels, but capitalists are generally unable to see beyond their balance sheets. So long as their business is making money all’s right with the world.
But all is not right, and more and more people are voicing their concern. Taking the necessary steps to obviate global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change will necessitate governments dictating to corporations on behalf of the people, a move big business will fiercely oppose.
But people are refusing to be hoodwinked by corporate snow-jobs in the face of this global threat. Ms Marshall ends her letter by quoting “epidemiologist Associate Professor Nick Higginbotham, from Newcastle University, [who] when talking of increasing serious health problems near coal mines, said that the people were being sacrificed for commercial interests”.
That concept is hardly news to readers of The Guardian, of course. Bosses have been sacrificing the health – and the lives – of working people for commercial interests ever since capitalism arose.
What has shocked so many ordinary people into action over the coal and climate change issue is the blatant contempt being shown by big business for this extremely serious matter. The whole world is at stake, and they want to go on mining and polluting because “it makes money”.
The veneer of civilization has dropped away to reveal the mindless greed underneath, greed that refuses to accept any other alternative than “business as usual”.
To dig up “rich farmlands” so that a mining company can boost its bottom line, while elsewhere people go hungry and our water and air are poisoned, is a criminal act, that should be dealt with by responsible governments as any other criminal act is dealt with.
