Revolt against major parties explodes

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Lead Editorial

28 August 2024
Vol. 26 No. 35

This week, Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick sensationally quit the Liberal Party to sit as an independent, after party apparatchiks conspired to block his preselection for the next election. Rennick announced he intends to be an independent, but is forming a political party, Gerard Rennick’s People First Party, to be grouped above the line on the Senate ballot paper. For five years Rennick has worked to push the Liberals back to what he calls its “protectionist” roots, essentially the era before the neoliberal revolution in the 1970s and 80s, when the Liberals accepted the imperative of supporting industry and investing in infrastructure. However, despite Australians emphatically turning against current policies, evidenced in their hatred of privatisation born from bitter experience, the technocratic elite of the Liberal Party, like the Labor Party, are clinging to neoliberal tenets, due to their obligations to the vested corporate monopoly, duopoly, and oligopoly interests—the big banks, retailers, mining companies etc.—which have been the only winners out of neoliberalism. In quitting the Liberals, Rennick has joined a revolt against the major parties that is unprecedented in Australian history, evidenced in the size of the crossbench in both houses of Parliament.

(The Australian Citizens Party takes the approach of working constructively with all parties on issues of common ground, especially the cross bench, so we look forward to the opportunity to expand our collaboration with Senator Rennick that has been so fruitful in the past few years on issues such as the Senate inquiry into regional bank closures, to achieve the ultimate goal of a government bank, which is one of five policies Senator Rennick has identified as his priorities.)

For his part, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has just lost the support of the CFMEU and a chunk of the union movement, which is now in open revolt against the Labor Party. The CFMEU scandal is not as it seems from the outrage incited by the media exposé of organised crime and thuggery in the construction division. For one, the media attack was by 60 Minutes propagandist Nick McKenzie, whom the AAS has exposed for years as a liar and fraud. Also, whatever wrongdoing occurs in the union—which surely exists, but no more than it does in the giant construction companies— should be dealt with by the police and the courts following due process of the law. It does not justify what Albanese has done to the CFMEU, which has been to use the allegations against the union as the pretext for a sweeping intervention by the federal government that has included summarily dismissing around 270 elected union officials who no longer have jobs or an income, and suspending the democratic rights of the members. This is straight out of the crisis-reaction-solution playbook, which, for example, is how successive governments have passed more than 100 fascist anti-terrorism laws since 2001, which have shredded all principles of civil rights and massively expanded ASIO’s secret police powers. Such an intervention was never seen against the banks or other elite entities that have done enormous damage to Australians. Whatever the actual motivation for doing it to this union, the NSW Council of Civil Liberties has warned that, disturbingly, it sets a dangerous precedent for “membership-based organisations, and the rights of individuals to natural justice and procedural fairness”, because “membership-based organisations [including political parties] can have democratic control externally removed on the basis of untested allegations”. The bottom line politically is that the labour movement is also fracturing away from its side of the major parties.

On cue, Reserve Bank “reform” is back in a way that demonstrates how both major parties are subservient to the real power-elite over the needs of the Australian people. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is desperate to enlist Liberal support to bring Australia into line with the Bank for International Settlements (p. 3). We must educate Australians that this is what the revolt is really against.

In this issue:

• The RBA Reform bill is back! Take action now!
• Did Albo know? ASIC faces questions into bungled investigation of ABC Bullion
• Must watch—‘An ASIC Whistleblower is Screaming for Help!’
• Canberra cowards beg Biden not to butcher Aussie meat exports
• Chinese interference in Australia’s Parliament??
• NZ regulator recommends Kiwibank take on Aussie Big 4
• Australia saves Pacific bank branches … from China
• ‘Private credit’ risk another public bank argument
• Majdal Shams: lies, law and war
• America’s Titanic economy
• A bankers’ dictatorship is not in the ‘public interest’!
• The ideological divide falls apart
• ALMANAC: Laws to uphold the People’s Bank

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