This is Why the COALition is Victorious (Updated).

There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning -- Warren Buffett.

As reported here over a week ago, the Morrison government is again launching an offensive against the organised trade union movement. John Setka and the CFMEU are the pretext du jour chosen to justify their eternal class war on workers on behalf of capitalists.

Just today the alliance of coal-mining big business and their political cheerleaders achieved another victory against workers

(source)

Predictably, members of the Palaszczuk coal-loving Labor State Government and of coal-mining employers associations shed crocodile tears over this latest death.

Dear Queensland mining industry workers: I told you so. I told you your boss is not your friend. I told you those jobs are crap and the best one can say about them is that the pay isn’t bad.

I also told you, CFMEU-QLD Mining Division comrades. You must hang your heads in shame.

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Michele O’Neil, ACTU President, writes

Scott Morrison’s IR Minister Christian Porter has just introduced two bills to attack working people – the Ensuring Integrity Bill that I wrote to you about last week – that would give Scott Morrison, big business and their lobbyists power to interfere with how unions are run, to disqualify union officers, to shut down unions, and stop unions from merging.

They have also introduced another bill the Proper Use of Workers Benefits Bill that would make it illegal for workers to run funds for things like insurance cover, redundancy protection, and training, just to name a few.

This is a serious attack on working people and the trade union movement.
…
Because working people and unions have made contact with Senators about this, crossbench Senators have pushed for a Senate inquiry. That Senate inquiry is expected to report back in October, so the government can’t simply ram these laws through right now.

The inquiry buys us some time to build our campaign, but it’s not a lot of time.

I need you to join the campaign to stop Scott Morrison’s anti-union laws.

I too beg readers to join us.

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The COALition just denied any tax relief to 4 out of every 10 Australians, while Labor, out of cowardice, stood idly by and reneged on their promise to oppose that. As usual, those left behind included another group eternally victimised and slandered with impunity by the COALition (often, with Labor bipartisan support): NewStart Allowance recipients.

Not satisfied with that or with the Robo-Debt extortion, the COALition decided to further launch yet another series of punitive actions against those unlucky Australians:

Government committed to ‘brutal’ plan to dock welfare for non-payment of fines

May also proceed with cuts to student payments claimed by unemployed, disabled and sole parents

Luke Henriques-Gomes, July 7, 08.00 AEST

Note carefully: these attacks on welfare payment recipients are not new. Just like the Ensuring Integrity and the Proper Use of Workers Benefits bills, they were attempted last year, but found no support in Parliament.

Faced with parliamentary opposition, the COALition never abandoned their plans, they only put them in the freezer for a while. Now is the time to “resurrect” them and once again screw those people.

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In less than two months since the elections, unions, income support recipients, investigative journalists (especially ABC ones) and whistle blowers have been targeted by the re-energised COALition government.

Everybody in Australia knows -- or so one should think -- they are usual targets of the COALition. In fact, they are so frequent targets that some even have their own customary term of “endearment” in the COALition terminology: unionists are “thugs”, NewStart Allowance recipients are “dole bludgers”.

But if everybody knows who the COALittion is against, everybody also knows whose side the COALition is on. One example as reminder: against increasing popular clamour, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison stubbornly refused a royal commission on banking: they rejected it 26 times (yes, that’s no typo). It took one letter, last year, from the big 4 banks to change that.

Turnbull knew that was embarrassing, a very bad look. He, however, never turned on his masters. Instead, he made sure the whole exercise would be pointless.

Exactly the same applies to the mining industry, to irrigators, to broadcasters, to real estate.

By way of comparison with unions and the unemployed, has anyone heard a COALition politician (or any other party’s politicians, for that matter) ever -- ever! -- calling swindling bankers “banksters” or even … swindlers? How about “tax cheats”?

The COALition’s loyalties are unwavering. Their defeats, few and far between, are never definitive and they never truly surrender. Every defeat -- as their IR policies illustrate -- is only the preamble for a renewed attack. Likewise, NewStart Allowance shows that no victory is satisfactory: there’s always a new indignity to impose on “dole bludgers”. A new restriction to freedom of speech and press and association, a new power for police. A new cut in ABC’s budget or in health or in education.

That insatiable hunger for victory and domination goes a long way into explaining the ratchet-like shift towards the right of the Overton window: one step back, two steps forward.

And they are as relentless in opposition as they are in government.

The COALition, that is, is everything Left parties are not: ruthless, astute, determined, self-confident, strong. In one word, ideological. That’s what makes them victorious.

The Left has much to learn from the COALition. Instead it’s inanities like this that “thinking” Leftists advance as wisdom.

UPDATE:

09/07/2019. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is back in the news. This time, an ABC Four Corners investigative report (and here) contains serious allegations of mismanagement and rort: up to $4 billion invested in promoting water use efficiency may have been given away to agriculturalists who didn’t need the money and instead increased their overall water usage, by expanding the area under cultivation to include marginal land where nuts (an intensive water user) were planted.

On top, large amounts ended up in the hands of foreign firms and speculators. That explains why the COALition fight tooth and nail to protect the MDBP and why no assessments of the alleged water savings achieved with that “investment” are made. (You can see how this case fits the pattern of the COALition’s actions.)

The Nature Conservation Council is promoting a petition (here). If readers agree, their support by signing the petition would be appreciated.