The Guardian 6 February, 2008
Editorial
A new right-wing guru on the block
It did not take Paul Howes, the new National Secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, long to show his right-wing credentials and to be given a tick of approval by the media with publicity in various daily papers and by an address to the National Press Club.
At 26 years of age he would only have been appointed to that position if his patrons were thoroughly convinced of the reliability of his right-wing convictions.
He has made no secret of his former membership of Resistance and the Trotskyist Democratic Socialist Party. This apprenticeship is regarded as a useful part of political experience by some ambitious right-wingers who never had any genuine left-wing convictions but needed to get a grounding in the anti-communist policies and ideology to better equip them for their right-wing role.
Paul Howes went to Cuba to the World Festival of Youth and Students 10 years ago. The Melbourne Age reports him as having "suddenly discovered" he wasn’t a socialist after all, but a believer in a capitalist democratic system. He blames Cuba for making this "discovery". It would be nearer the truth to say that he was never a socialist and that he knows nothing of the consequences of the decades of occupation by the Spanish and United States colonialists of Cuba.
It will come as no surprise that in his speech on becoming National Secretary of the AWU he said, "I can assure you that the AWU, under my leadership, will work hard to build co-operative relationships with Rudd Labor and the business community."
At a conference of trade union leaders held last week Mr Howes took the floor early to tell the gathering that Australia should "consider" use of nuclear power — Howard’s preferred option — to deal with global warming. Given the strong opposition in Australia to nuclear power, not to mention nuclear weapons, are those who actually want to get a nuclear power industry going to limit themselves to a "discussion". No one should be fooled about their real objective, which is to change public opinion and garner support for the nuclear option. Paul Howes does not seem to have made any strong representations for renewable energy sources as a better way to combat global warming.
The meeting of trade union leaders did not support his nuclear gambit.
He proposed "wage restraint" and that a part of the tax cuts that the Rudd government has promised should be put into superannuation funds. This might seem attractive to some but, in fact, it puts the blame for inflation on the backs of the working people which the federal government and employers are doing.
It ignores the fact that the steep increase in prices in the recent period is the direct responsibility of the corporations. It is the oil companies who are jacking up petrol prices, the big trading companies that are putting up the prices of groceries and other foodstuffs, it is the banks and financial institutions that have benefited from the repeated increases in interest rates in the last two or three years.
Workers are forever playing catch-up when making demands for wage increases.
The proposed tax cuts may assist to a small extent to increase the money in the pockets of workers’ families but to put a part into super funds means that wage workers and their families will have less to meet the spiralling increase in costs.
Furthermore, it ignores the fact that the huge amount of workers’ money in super schemes are a source of capital for the corporations and big capital both in Australia and overseas. In the current period of capitalist economic crisis in which the banks are writing off huge debts, those super fund investments are in jeopardy in the same way as many shareholders have already found when a company goes belly up.
Last week’s meeting of trade union leaders does not seem to have supported any of Paul Howes’ ideas. Far from blaming wages for inflation and calling for restraint it said that "incomes of working Australians [should] keep pace with the cost of living and that workers receive a fair share of the benefits of economic growth while also recognising the need to boost productivity … and ensure a balanced approach to fighting inflation."