The Public Trustee will do all kinds of things to your brain, to your head
They’ll drive you crazy
Mesmerize, hypnotize and demonize,
Told your lies too many times,
kept us down so you can steal our land
– Theresa Creed
Both parties contending for government in Australia are no longer capable of writing good policy, if they ever were. This is because the same bad politics afflicts both Liberal and Labor in government. It is dubious that the United States government will never be able to deliver on its promise of the AUKUS nuclear powered submarines despite Australia’s offer of $368 billion.
Just thinking back on bad policy, I have been writing stories about the failing of the Public Trustee’s office (PTO) since 2009 and have broadcast on Brisbane radio 4ZZZ a number of interviews with people who have been adversely affected by the decisions of the self-funded Public Trustee. Of these two interviews stand out. One was with Bernie Neville and Rosslyn Mirciov and the other was with John Tracey and his family, from memory, in 2013 & 2017.
The former dealt with the public trustees decision not to support AHIMSA house in West End. This was a political decision, not a financial one. The finances of AHIMSA house could have been resolved, were it not for ‘unconscionable behaviour’ of Challenger Bank and the intervention of one of the lawyers at the public trustees office, Ian Campbell. Campbell sold out AHIMSA house when Sam Watson put up $2.5M to buy the property outright for the aboriginal community. Instead Challenger Bank sold the property for less than half its market value ($970,000).
Neither the government nor the parents nor the school principal wanted to have an aboriginal drop-in centre next door to its growing West End Primary School. People are often critical of racism among working class people in Australia, but this was middle class racism in practice. The architect, Will Marcus, who received free rent at AHIMSA from 2003 till 2012, then lost his supreme court action against the bank, was but one example of that racism.
The latter interview showed the straight-out racism against Therese Creed’s son Marley which Therese depicted in her poem “Liars” during one of those interviews broadcast on 4ZZZ.
Even if the vote for ‘the Voice’ gets up, which I doubt (especially in Queensland), the entrenched racism in our community will attempt to thwart any positive aspects that may be gained from it.
Lies
AUKUS Submarine. Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy told the 2023 ALP National Conference they would be China “appeasers” for opposing AUKUS and that we need nuclear submarines to protect human rights.
Aboriginal cultural centre. I sat in the room and heard the Deputy-Premier of Queensland promise Sam Watson an aboriginal cultural centre in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park.
Toondah Harbour. Labor says it will protect Ramsar-listed and other wetlands across Queensland and prohibit large-scale reclamation within marine parks and wetlands. So Minister Plibersek should reject Walker’s bid to build 3,600 high-end waterfront apartments, a hotel, shops, restaurants, marina berths for owners of large motor yachts and a newly dredged channel extending a kilometer into Moreton Bay.
Public Trustee. Previous Attorney General, Jarrod Bleijie, set up one of many inquiries into the Public Trustee as long ago as 2013. About that time Bleijie’s CEO told Bernie Neville (Ross Taylor’s EPA) and me that we needed ‘to get over having a Labor appointee as Public Trustee’. All they need do to put the office of public trustee back into the public service and provide ordinary people with free financial advice regarding their estate.
Uranium. Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke told the Australian people that there would be no risk in mining and exporting Uranium. Both Chernobyl and Fukushima followed. Uranium mining and export should be banned, as should nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
SEQEB. Simon Crean told SEQEB workers in 1985 he could negotiate with the Bjelke-Petersen government to get some of their jobs back if they would support the Accord. Worker organisations should not be made slaves to any political party, they should focus on looking after their members and their class.
Community. LNP Premier Campbell-Newman told me that he would help the owner of AHIMSA community house get justice from the Public Trustee’s office. It would have been a simple matter of restoring AHIMSA to its original aims and/or to set up a community house for young aboriginal people.
Palestine. Penny Wong has change the wording from ‘contested territories’ to ‘occupied territories’ but will not recognise the state of Palestine. Wong should recognise Palestine and support boycotts on the apartheid state of Israel.
Housing. Governments insist on selling off public housing. When local government rezones to allow building new housing they let the sharks at Air BnB charge huge rents for workers to have somewhere to live.
Don’t believe government lies.
I would be happy to write good policy for government.
I would not rip off the public purse like PwC and KMPG do.
Ian Curr
21 August 2023
Radio program for Alternative News
The ALP Government’s betrayal of Australia’s national sovereignty increases the US grip on Australia, enmeshes Australia in US war plans and endangers peace in our region.
ANDREW 1: Good morning listeners. My name’s Andrew and with me is Bevan Ramsden. We’re from IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network. In today’s CICD Alternative News we examine the Albanese ALP government’s policy of enmeshing us even more tightly in the US war machine, a policy which, in the event of a US war on China, will place us in grave danger of retaliatory strikes and is proceeding despite the fact that Australia faces no military threat. We’ll commence by looking at the AUSMIN 2023 talks which took place a few weeks ago between Australia’s Defence Minister Richard Marles, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and their US counterparts, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.
BEVAN 1: The talksre-affirmed a joint commitment to operationalise the US-Australia military alliance through enhanced military co-operation across land, maritime and air domains as well as through what is referred to as the Combined Logistics, Sustainment and Maritime Enterprise. They declared Enhanced Space Cooperation to be a new intitiative under the Force Posture Agreement, to enable closer cooperation in this area.
ANDREW 2: Also, there will be a further expansion of the US forces deployed in Australia including amphibious troops and maritime reconnaissance planes.
BEVAN 2: US intelligence analysts will be embedded within Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation through the creation by 2024 of a Combined Intelligence Centre. This means that US spies will have access to all of Australia’s military intelligence.
ANDREW 3: On November 1st 2022 the ABC ‘Four Corners’ program revealed that RAAF Tindal will be upgraded to accommodate up to six nuclear-capable B52 bombers In addition to upgrading Tindal and Darwin there will be expansion and “hardening” against attacks of two other RAAF bases in the north, RAAF Scherger near Weipa in Qld and RAAF Curtin near Derby in WA. Both are presently so-called “bare bases” with runways and minimal facilities, and will be upgraded with fuel storage tanks, widening parking aprons to accommodate larger warplanes and hardened bunkers for storing explosives.
BEVAN 3: This upgrade will allow these bases to accommodate aircraft used by both Australia and the US including F-35 Lightnings, F/A 18 Super Hornet fighters and C-17 transports. On August 4th 2023 Four Corners disclosed that a search of US budget filings had revealed plans to build a US Air Force Mission Planning and Operations Centre in Darwin, plans which have never been fully disclosed by the Australian Government. The fact that Four Corners had to search US records in order to discover these plans illustrates the secretive nature of the whole process and suggests that there’s much more that we don’t know about.
ANDREW 4: Under the heading of Enhanced Maritime Cooperation there will be more and longer visits of US nuclear submarines to HMAS Stirling in WA from 2023. These visits are in preparation for Submarine Rotational Force-West involving UK and US nuclear submarines being berthed and serviced under the AUKUS Agreement.
BEVAN 4: The Americans will also conduct a so-called “regular rotation” of US army watercraft as well as deploying a US Navy spy plane to conduct surveillance flights.
ANDREW 5: The US announced its intention to pre-position US Army stores and materiel at Bandiana Army base near Wodonga in Victoria as a precursor to establishment of a permanent Logistics Support Area in Queensland designed to enhance interoperability and allow rapid response to so-called ‘regional crises’ which are in reality US-perceived threats to its hegemony.
BEVAN 5: The US will collaborate with Australia in the local production of multiple-launch guided missiles, planned to commence by 2025.
ANDREW 6: All this is in addition to the US bases already established in Australia. Pine Gap, the largest satellite spying facility outside the US, is central to its intelligence operations and provides targeting information for US drones and bombers. This so-called “Joint Facility” is commanded by a US officer and is staffed by approximately 400 Americans and 400 Australians with the latter largely relegated to cleaning, cafeteria, and ground maintenance duties, while the deciphering and intelligence analysis is restricted to US operatives including some from the CIA.
BEVAN 6: The Very Low Frequency radio transmitting station at North West Cape in WA, now called the Naval Communications Station Harold E Holt, allows the US Navy to communicate with submarines at a depth of 40 metres or more and to transmit the signal for these nuclear-armed submarines to launch their devastating payloads. Each year, Darwin receives a so-called ‘rotation’ of US marines, presently 2,500 and due to be increased, who train for war on training grounds in the NT. In addition, HMAS Stirling naval base near Perth has already begun receiving port visits by US nuclear submarines, with the accompanying toxic threat to the population surrounding the port in the event of a radiation leak
ANDREW 7: Further, the ADF trains extensively with, and is under the command of, the US military in war exercises such as Talisman Sabre. The ADF is now so integrated with the US military and our foreign policy so tied to that of the US that Australia will be swept into the next US war regardless of our wishes and with our political leaders offering no meaningful protest and instead giving their enthusiastic support. That the next US war will be against China, Australia’s major trading partner and that such a war will have a catastrophic impact on every aspect of the Australian people’s lives and those of the people in our region and the world, with the dreadful possibility of a nuclear exchange, apparently has not registered with our leaders.
(MUSIC)BEVAN 7: Are these politicians and bureaucrats blind, uncaring or determined to stay in power at all costs by not upsetting the US like Whitlam did? Do they seek to avoid the whipping the US gave Whitlam by enmeshing Australia in the US war machine regardless of the disastrous consequences that involvement in a US war on China will certainly bring?
ANDREW 8: Or are they conscious collaborators who identify totally with the US Empire? At the very least they seem to be gripped by a sort of wild-west mentality which equates security with having the biggest ‘six-shooter’. Albanese, Marles, Wong and others would do well to remember Henry Kissinger’s remark that ‘it may dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal’.
BEVAN 8: By agreeing to the outcomes of the AUSMIN 2023 talks, the ALP leaders have shown that they are no more than flunkeys, willing to place the interests of the US Empire above those of the Australian people and whose actions arguably border on treason. They have enthusiastically embraced measures which effectively increase the US grip on Australia and infringe our national sovereignty in a most fundamental way, by denying us the ability to decide if, when and against whom, we go to war.
ANDREW 9: The US military has us in a grip which is ever-tightening and underpins US economic, political and military control of Australia. We are indebted to the historian Clinton Fernandes for his analysis showing that of Australia’s twenty largest corporations, 15 are majority US owned. This includes BHP Billiton, once called the Big Australian but now 73% US owned and therefore beholden to US shareholders. The four major banks, NAB, ANZ, Westpac and the CBA, once the government- owned peoples’ bank, are all majority owned by US shareholders, an example of foreign influence that doesn’t seem to bother the Government.
BEVAN 9: The huge public expenditure on defence, such as the 368 billion dollars for nuclear-powered submarines, 10 billion dollars for Hercules transport aircraft, 10 billion dollars for armoured vehicles, billions for runway extensions and port upgrades – the list goes on and is at the expense of addressing urgent social needs such as urgent measures to deal with climate change and address the serious crisis in public housing, health care and public education. There is no military threat to Australia justifying such profligate expenditure of taxpayers funds. The real beneficiary is the US military-industrial complex as it works to tighten its grip on our country.
ANDREW 10: If we are to have an independent and peaceful future, the US grip on our country must be broken. There can be no social or economic justice, no lasting solution to the ever-worsening crises in housing, public health care, public education, care of children and the aged, and no effective measures to address climate change, until we free ourselves from the death-grip of the US military-industrial vultures.
BEVAN 10: In order to free ourselves we must unite and we can, because increasing numbers of Australians from all walks of life and political persuasions are becoming alarmed at the suicidal direction the present Australian political leadership is taking us. We are many and are powerful when, and only when, we are united, while the US collaborators and their hangers-on are few. We need political leaders who will serve the interests of the Australian people rather than those of the US or any other foreign power. We need a new constitution, one which will respect the people who first walked this land, will forbid the presence of ALL foreign bases and foreign troops on our soil and will give emphasis to the promotion of peace and mutually beneficial relations with all countries. Only independence can give us back our sovereignty and self-respect.
ANDREW 11: That’s all we have time for now, though we’ll be returning to this theme in future. As always, we welcome listeners comments and suggestions, which can be emailed to peacecentre@cicd.org.au that is peacecentre@cicd.org.au.
Good morning and thanks for listening. (Music)
I was not in Brisbane during the ALP national conference, I was on holidays on Minjerribah. However I (on behalf of LeftPress) hired out two PA systems to two different groups involved in the protests. I was also registered to be part of the fringe event because I wanted to help on one of the stalls inside the ‘conventional’ centre (in the end, I gave my $30 ‘ticket’ to someone from the Cuba Friendship Society). I was also asked for input on how to secure an area under the Peaceful Assembly Act of 1992 – some of the most progressive public assembly laws in the country.
In the end I did not attend.
The reason was simple: ‘You cannot get blood from a stone’. Ernie Lane, a member of the Queensland Central executive of the Labor Party, once quipped: ‘fruit will not grow on barren trees’.
I am quick to say this is not the fault of the rank-and-file of the Labor Party nor is it a fault of the unions or their members. However there is a lot of confusion among these people.
A significant group of younger people believe that neoliberalism in Australia was the invention of the Tories led by John Howard. This of course is incorrect.
One of the problems for the Left in Australia is it is very small … in contrast to other countries. Another problem is the ‘infantile disorder‘ that exists within our ranks. They incorrectly feel an attack on the unions, its members and Labor members will build support for the Left. This is both politically naive, opportunistic and stupid.
One of the tenets of left-wing organisation in Australia is to work out our relationship with the Labor Party and the labour movement. The Greens have been uniquely inept at this. But then so have been the socialist grouplets.
The primary reason why I didn’t turn up and participate was because I could see no hope. Also, like others, I do not have the luxury of being able to turn up at every, mostly inconsequential events. The ALP conference is one of those because it changed a few words about its relationship with Palestine saying that the West Bank and Gaza are no longer ‘contested‘ but ‘occupied‘. Do these people even read UN resolutions about the war crimes being committed on a daily basis in Palestine? The ALP numbers men did not even put to the vote the question of AUKUS – a deal which most likely will never produce a single submarine.
There was nothing for the homeless on housing.
There was nothing for first Nations people on recognition, treaty, or ‘the voice’ (which may be already lost)
I’m not saying that within the labour movement there were not many good exchanges with rank-and-file people but the political leadership is so moribund they can’t see any of this. They live in an amoral bubble.
And hence the absurd pronouncements of people like Pat Conroy saying that human rights are being protected by the purchase of nuclear powered submarines at an exorbitant price. What is more, these AUKUS submarines will probably never be delivered.
Of course, Conroy was opposed by the Electrical Trades Union and the CFMEU but they don’t count anymore. Even the Right of the party represented by Paul Keating do not count any more. They are seen as an anachronism.
Little wonder there is so much confusion abroad.
Ian Curr
29 August 2023
What does everyone think about this? Am I the only one who has been ruminating on this stuff?
Last week was a big one for activism in so-called Brisbane. I think there were maybe 10 larger rallies plus many smaller actions targeting the Labor Party’s National Conference at the convention centre in South Brisbane (if you have any good photos from these actions, feel free to post them in the comments).
Some of these protests had 1000+ attendees, while others only had 50 to 100 participants.
I think it’s fair to say that many of the people who went to the rallies about housing justice or native tree clearing would have been equally supportive of the protests about Palestinian liberation and workers’ rights. But it would have been a real stretch for most people to make it to all those different actions (or even to find out about all of them).
If we’d had just one big, cohesively-promoted protest covering all of these issues together, it seems conceivable to me that as many as 10 000 people might have converged on the Labor conference to air grievances with the state or federal government and amplify each other’s voices and critiques. I spoke to a few attendees who expressed similar sentiments.
As it was, there was still a lot of positive, constructive energy and outcomes, including good media coverage and all the other community-building and solidarity-boosting benefits that flow from activists coming together in large numbers.
But I still felt like it might have been a bit of a missed opportunity.
So why couldn’t or didn’t we just have one big rally?
The convenient, shallow answer would be “oh the left is always divided and fractured,” but I don’t find that very satisfying. I actually feel like there’s a pretty strong sense of solidarity across struggles in Brissie these days and some good intersectional analyses about how all our different struggles are connected. And the different rally organisers were connected and coordinated enough to share a PA system and stage and to avoid direct time clashes. But there are evidently still some practical barriers for different movements organising together.
I’ve been off on holidays for the past few months and only recently got back to town, so I can’t say I was actively involved in many of the organising discussions and decisions leading up to the Labor conference (so take all this theorising with a grain of salt)…
Here are a couple things I’ve noticed:
– some of the groups involved in organising certain rallies – particularly a few of the unions and environmental NGOs – really wanted to focus on their one single issue and may likely have refused to simply be one small part of a larger intersectional protest. They evidently calculated (perhaps wrongly) that they’d get more media coverage and attention for their struggle if they held a standalone rally rather than just having one speaker within a larger multi-issue rally. They might also have had more money and human resources, and didn’t want to share a platform with smaller groups that “couldn’t pull their weight.”
– some groups were overly-cautious of sharing a stage with Greens politicians because they perceived they’d be taken more seriously if they were ‘non-partisan.’ I don’t think this approach holds up to close scrutiny, because their rally demands were essentially “Labor please be better, otherwise we won’t vote for you.” It’s possible for protest groups to remain non-partisan while still publicly signalling that one party has better policy positions than another. And really, it’s kinda naive to believe that Labor is going to take seriously your advocacy on a single narrow issue unless the party is worried about losing votes over that issue.
But the underlying problem is that all of us – from experienced activists to people who are only occasionally politically engaged around a single specific concern – have been conditioned and disciplined by colonial capitalism to pursue activism and advocacy strategies that revolve around a tunnel-vision focus on narrowly-defined discrete issues.
We understand intellectually that everything is connected.
We’ve heard the word ‘intersectionality’ before.
We are well aware of the links between climate change and the displacement of refugees, between the treatment of housing as a commodity and the proposals to build luxury apartments out on the water in Toondah Harbour. We even write “system change” on our banners and occasionally chant it at rallies.
But the political establishment has taught us (wrongly) that we will have a better chance of success in our advocacy and activism if we just focus on changing or objecting to one specific thing that we think is wrong, rather than articulating a broader, more expansive revolutionary vision of transformational change.
Naturally it feels easier to imagine the government relenting and agreeing to make a minor reform on one particular policy area, than that the entire system could change. But we’ve also seen first-hand how meaningless those hard-won narrow incremental reforms often turn out to be.
For a recent example, just look at plastic waste. Remember a few years ago when everyone was really mobilised and worked up about sea turtles choking on plastic bags, and there was a major groundswell of public support to do something about rising plastic waste?
That huge amount of energy and consciousness could have been channelled into a broader critique of colonial capitalism and materialist consumption… of how the lifestyles we’re forced to lead and the way most of our food and other products are transported and sold creates such a heavy dependency on single-use disposable packaging.
Instead, it was shrunk down into a teeny tiny discrete demand – for governments to introduce a top-down ban on single-use plastic bags, containers and straws, without changing any other aspect of our society. And of course governments eventually agreed to it, and it was nice to feel like we’d had a win.
But how much really changed? Today it seems to me like the major supermarkets just switched to different kinds of plastic bags that were slightly thicker (and might actually be more resource-intensive to produce), but were technically not defined as single-use.
For me, the campaign around single-use plastics really highlights the weaknesses of single-issue advocacy, as does the long, multi-day succession of smaller rallies outside the Labor conference last week.
It makes me wonder how we can stop ourselves getting siloed into these single-issue campaigns and activism projects when all the different changes we’re calling for actually support and reinforce each other.
In the electoral space, the Greens have had the most success when we campaign on a broader platform covering a wider range of issues. But even then, our campaigning approach generally involves trying to work out which particular individual issues each voter is most concerned about, as opposed to talking directly about system change as a holistic concept.
I wonder if some of us have been barking up the wrong tree? Rather than trying to discern whether strengthening renters rights or ending coal mining or making public transport free is THE issue that will swing the most votes, maybe we should circumvent that, and move straight to a conversation about how pretty much everything is fucked, and talk about the pathways towards deep, widespread transformation?
I understand the concern that if we jump straight to conversations about changing pretty much EVERYTHING, that might scare some people away from engaging. But I also feel like there are a lot of people out there who do have an appetite for conversations about system change, and might be willing to step up to actually fight for it.
Thoughts?
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley in Ozymandias
As people may know, recently a replica AUKUS submarine was on display outside the Brisbane Conventional (sic) Centre so that ALP members could observe opposition to the nuclear sub deal at estimated cost of $368 billion.
Many people are extremely sceptical of the ability of either the US or the UK to deliver the real submarine. This is understandable given many historic failures of the US military industrial complex.
Today I received the following message: “No AUKUS Qld is looking for long term storage for our submarine prop.
If you or someone you know has an undercover, waterproof space, such as a garage or similar, please get in touch with us by return email.
The submarine measures approximately 4.6m (length) x 1.0m (width) x 2.0m (height) including the conning tower and periscopes on top. Please see photos attached.”
As the replica may be both the first and last AUKUS submarine built in Australia, I think this excellent prop should be housed at the Queensland Maritime Museum, installed as testimony to the folly of successive Australian governments.
Ian Curr
24 August 2023