In the latest outburst of national security hysteria, ASIO spy chief Mike Burgess declared, in a speech on 28 February, that an unnamed former Australian politician had betrayed our beloved country by clandestinely working for an evil foreign spy network—which he called “the A-team”—to provide secret information to a rival power.
The US and Britain proclaim that the concerted attacks they have launched on Houthi military positions in Yemen are all in the noble defence of “international law”. In this, of course, they have the wholehearted support of the Albanese Labor government and Peter Dutton’s Liberal opposition.
US President Joe Biden continues to combine arming Israel to the teeth for its genocidal war on Gaza with hypocritical phrases about supporting a “just” long-term solution for the Palestinian people—a supposed Palestinian state alongside Israel. The other Western powers invoke similar platitudes about a “two-state solution”, including Labor’s foreign minister, Penny Wong, who could not bring herself to criticise even the Israeli blockade that cut off food, water and medical supplies to the civilian population of Gaza.
It is an indictment of Australian capitalism that, more than 230 years since the British Empire’s invasion of this continent and the consequent dispossession and widespread massacres of the original inhabitants, most Indigenous people remain confined to the very bottom of the social pile.
Tom O’Lincoln, one of the key founders of the revolutionary socialist current from which Socialist Alternative originated, has sadly died in Melbourne after a long illness.
Internal ALP opposition to the AUKUS pact, and to the Albanese government’s decision to announce hundreds of billions of dollars of spending on nuclear-powered submarines at a time of sharply falling working-class living standards, proved to be a damp squib at the recent ALP National Conference. The conference, dominated by union powerbrokers, overwhelmingly endorsed AUKUS and even wrote support for nuclear-powered submarines into the party platform.