Bob Gould
Starting at the top with national issues
The current economic crisis is rapidly shaping up to be the greatest economic explosion in the history of the capitalist system. All serious commentators including most governments agree on that.
A film produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, distributed by Warner Bros. In cinemas now
Gran Torino is produced and directed by Clint Eastwood and he is also the star of the film, but this may be the last Clint Eastwood film.
Jenny Haines
A Ron Howard Film for Universal Studios starring Frank Langella as Richard Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost. Now showing, all cinemas
In this film Ron Howard brings to the screen a Broadway play about a series of interviews David Frost did with Richard Nixon after his resignation from the US presidency.
Shane Weaver, Bantam Press, 2003
Reviewed by Jenny Haines
When trendy liberals and avowed socialists talk about the working class, it is often without having any personal experience of working class life. Shane Weaver’s book about growing up in Blacktown in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s is a personal and painful recounting of his working class childhood, in a family that lived with the terror of a drunken stepfather and random domestic violence. The cover of the book recounts just some of the terror the family lived with: “the screen door bangs shut. The silence that follows is like the collective intake of breath between the split second a guillotine falls and when it thuds home…unable to get a clear shot, he rips the bed away from the wall. I scream as the first lick of the electric cord stings my back…”
What is in fact a very old dispute has currently been simmering again in the labour movement, about migration in general, and in particular about unskilled migrant access to Australia. This always-present controversy has now sharpened around a new scheme requested by the governments of small Pacific states, and introduced by the Australian Labor Government for organised and controlled access of seasonal workers from the Pacific nations to Australia to fill specific labour shortages in unskilled jobs in agriculture.
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By Tony Stephens
WHEN a teacher at Fort Street High School recommended that students read the economist John Maynard Keynes, the schoolboy Isadore Wyner suggested Karl Marx. Young Issy was reprimanded. This did not stop him from engaging with the world for another eight decades.
Bob Gould
Anyone who is uneasy with my classification of the DSP political leadership as unprincipled political adventurers should sit back and review the events since the DSP organised the extended exercise in religious bigotry and backwardness known as the NoToPope Coalition, and attempted to pass it off as Marxism.
Jenny Haines
The Secret River, by Kate Grenvill, Text Publishing, Melbourne 2005
Recently Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian Parliament and the people said sorry to the aboriginal people of Australia for the past appalling mistreatment, abuse and massacres. But after reading The Secret River I wonder if saying sorry once is enough or if we should keep saying it again every year for the next 220 years.
Bob Gould
It’s no secret that in the internal battle inside the DSP I have been, broadly speaking, more sympathetic to the minority that has now been expelled from the DSP and started publishing Direct Action. This sympathy was based on my estimate that, taken as a whole, they are a more serious group of people, particularly the younger ones, and more interested in Marxist theory, and to some extent the history of the labour movement.
The winter of our discontent
Bob Gould
This winter is the coldest in NSW for a long time. The practical effect of this is that Saturday morning stalls and protests against electricity privatisation, aren’t affected when it’s sunny, but evening meetings preparing for such activities are affected rather dramatically.
Bob Gould
The withdrawal of the electricity privatisation legislation in NSW until the parliamentary sitting in September is a second victory for the anti-privatisation forces in a protracted war on the question.
Results of the Australian Education Union, Victorian branch, industrial campaign
Peter Curtis
Mary Bluett the president of the Australian Education Union, Victoria, defended a deeply divisive pay deal with gains won for those at the top and bottom of the scale by saying “you are a long time at the top”. It is not unreasonable to suggest that some of the leadership have been too long at the top. Some time at the bottom of the class may bring them back to earth.
Phil Sandford
The people of NSW have been betrayed over the proposed sell-off of the electricity industry, Unions NSW secretary John Robertson told a 60-strong meeting in Parramatta on 3 June.
Bob Gould
During my long political life there have been a number of decisive moments. Among them were the 20th congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Khruschchev’s secret speech on the crimes of Stalin, and the crushing of the Hungrarian revolution in 1956. These events shook me out of the political orbit of Stalinism.
