The Guardian 4 June, 2008
Culture and Life
by Rob Gowland
Phoney summits and real protests
May I hark back for a moment, to an event that most people have sensibly consigned to the rubbish tip of recent history: the extraordinary anti-climax that was Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit?
Bally-hooed to the skies beforehand to the effect that it would define the aspirations of all Australians, the summit’s decisions and recommendations were neatly put through an expurgating filter before finally being released to a bemused public.
No expense was spared to steer this PR exercise to a safe berth, lest the Labor government be embarrassed by decisions and opinions that ran counter to Rudd’s "New Labor" big business line.
A former top Tasmanian public servant, Linda Hornsey, who resigned from her job in Tassie last year, was hired for 12 weeks to oversee the Summit, at a salary of $11,000 a week. That’s right, $11,000 a week.
Mind you, Ms Hornsey is used to being paid outrageous salaries. As the former head of Tasmania’s Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPAC) she pulled down a whopping $300,000 a year, more actually than the Premier himself received. But what does that matter, eh? It’s just public money after all.
Once again, with Rudd (and his NSW counterpart Morris Iemma) contemptuously abandoning even the pretence of sticking up for the interests of workers, the way has been left open for the Liberal Party, the acknowledged party of big business, to pose as the defender of the poor and other disadvantaged people.
In Linda Hornsley’s home state of Tasmania, the acting Lib leader, Jeremy Rockliff said of her handsome Summit salary: "Certainly most Tasmanians who are struggling to cope and to balance the family budget as a result of increased food and petrol prices would see that as utterly and absolutely excessive."
Of course, Mr Rockliff did not comment on the role of big business in pushing up petrol and food prices, concentrating instead on the scandal of the salary paid to Rudd’s top summiteer.
However, while on the subject of food prices: did you see the recent edition of A Current Affair in which a spokesman for Woolworths tried to explain why prices cannot be uniform across the country? It boiled down to "competition": if there was an Aldi store near the Woolies then prices would be lower. If not, they would be up.
Which was, of course, a backhanded admission that they could be lower, if Woolies would be content with lower profits. But when is the corporate mind ever satisfied with getting less than the maximum they can screw out of the public? That’s right: when Hell freezes over.
For his part, Rudd could be out there rousing the masses against the daylight robbery being pursued by agri-business as it pays farmers peanuts for their crops while charging the poor consumer the maximum the supermarkets can get.
It would be a popular tactic with the voters, but Rudd’s not up for re-election right now so he doesn’t care. Like Iemma in NSW, he is busy laying the foundation for the creeping privatisation of the entire Australian economy.
In NSW, the Labor government is trying to privatise electricity; in NSW and Tasmania, there are ominous signs that water supply will be next. Councils in both states are viewing with alarm proposals from their respective state governments for the "reform" of water and sewerage infrastructure and services.
Meanwhile governments, especially that in NSW, are taking steps to prevent local councils from obstructing such state government "reforms", by removing local government control over planning approvals and by similar manoeuvres.
Changing the subject somewhat, did you see where a former Tasmanian officer in the RAN, Mark Rickards, has denounced Australia’s involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that both wars are unjust and based on furthering the USA’s commercial interests. (He’s not wrong there, of course!)
Rickards, who stood unsuccessfully in the last state election as a Greens candidate, said that while the public recognised that the conflict in Iraq was about oil, "most did not recognise that America’s war in Afghanistan started for similar reasons".
Before the war in Afghanistan, US company UNOCAL had failed to realise its ambition to construct a gas pipeline through the country due to problems with the Taliban and local warlords.
The top negotiator for UNOCAL was an Afghan living in the US named Hummed Karzai, who has since been returned to the country with US assistance and elevated to the position of President. Needless to say, the pipeline is now back on the agenda.
As Mark Rickards says, "Why should soldiers need to die for a cause that is not just and is not supported by the United Nations and is really just for the commercial gain of some American companies?" Why indeed?
Mr Rickards is part of a veterans’ protest group called Stand Fast which aims to support current servicemen and women who speak out against the wars, providing them with access to counselling and legal services. "We are standing fast in the face of the government saying it’s all OK", says Rickards.