Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – Tolstoy, opening sentence in Anna Karenina
Former ALP leader, Paul Keating, claims that most Labor branches would support his opposition to the purchase, at a cost of $368 billion, of nuclear submarines by the Australian Labor government. [National Press Club luncheon broadcast on ABC TV on Wednesday, 15 March, 2023.]
Today we go inside one of the Labor electorates (Rankin) – that of Federal Treasurer, Jim Chalmers – at Logan city.
We are at a protest organised by Just Peace Queensland in opposition to AUKUS. Key people involved in the protest are Labor Party members. 4PR interviewed and listened to one of those people, Mike Henry, who wrote a letter (below) in opposition to the military spend in the 2023 budget on behalf of Just Peace. His final plea in that letter to the Federal Treasurer was: “Redirect military spending to community wellbeing now.”
Part of the interview with Mike Henry a member of the KGB (Kelvin Grove Branch) is included in the podcast below. Further protests against nuclear submarines are planned outside the Brisbane Convention Centre in August 2023 at the ALP national conference in Meanjin.
Listen to what he and others had to say about this decision.
A number of the people at the demonstration plead the case for more being done to protect the environment. The ABC’s Annabel Crabb in her review of the budget papers took up the announcement by the treasurer that he would not be funding dams in regional Australia : “An elegiac little note in Budget Paper 2 says simply that the Dungowan Dam, Emu Swamp Dam, the Southern Forests Irrigation Scheme and the Fingal Irrigation Scheme are all being quietly euthanased, for a bottom-line saving of $872.5 million.”
At the same time both Queensland and Victorian Labor governments willingly accept arms dealers and war technological businesses (Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, Dupont, Elbit Systems etc) into their economy as reflected in the land forces conventions that occur in both those states.
Despite this opposition to a war led economic recovery, the federal treasurer, Dr Jim Chalmers, announced in the budget that the government will go ahead with the AUKUS deal creating a pipeline of cash into the pockets of the arms dealers: Northrop, Boeing, . [Submarine bill swells as defence spending shoots past $50b – AFR 9 May 2023: “The budget outlines how $4.5 billion will be spent on delivering the AUKUS announcement over the next decade.”]
Ian Curr,
10 May 2023.