Daniel Lopez on Labor’s Coal Grouper rats: “When it boils down to it, the Otis Group want to cut taxes on an industry that already pays virtually none. And they want to give that industry more money, even though it already receives billions in subsidies every year. None of this will go to workers. And as the long decline of Australian car manufacturing shows, corporations won’t think twice about abandoning workers who have given decades of their life when profits dry up, subsidies or not. Farrell, Fitzgibbon, and the other Coal Groupers have committed the political equivalent of crossing a picket line. There can be no common ground between Gina Rinehart, a woman who writes poetry about mining, and a rural Queenslander dying of black lung, a disease caused solely by coal mining. There is no common ground between Gautam Adani, a vicious Hindu supremacist who has employed child labor, and a power plant worker who will, if not today, then tomorrow, be jobless and broke. … The Otis Group… have organized in secret to advance the interests of the class enemy. But they won’t be expelled. … Caucus discipline has been used for decades, but only to discipline the Left. … The ALP today is so far from class politics that rats congratulate each other’s cleverness over dinner while the optimists of the Left do their bidding.”
26 February 2020