kerrvert83 wrote:

 Peter,
I think there are two things that you don't understand when it comes
to Australian politics...

Yes, and another terrible failing I have is that I just don't have enough RESPECT for the ALP. I just can't get it into my head that the Socialist Alliance is just a GNAT compared to the mass workers party of the ALP. I just don't understand that the Stop the War Coalition should not warmly invite ALP MOs who speak out against the occupation/Bush visit on to come onto to platforms but that it should BEG and GROVEL and say please, please o mighty representatives of the working class, please grace us with oyour presence on our humble gnat platforms. I can't get it into my ignorant skull that the united front approach is to to beg that the Laborites who split the anti-war coalition in Sydney to reunite at any cost, perhaps even at the coast of the movement opposing the increasingly brutal occupation of Iraq, but certainly at the cost of democracy in the movement as we know that they womn't come in unless they are guaranteed the final say in everything. I can't get it into my head (hopelessly mired as it is in another planet) that it is the RIGHT of the Laborites to run any movement committee autocratically because they ARE the representatives of the working class. (Peter Murphy has tried his best to explain the "correct way of working with the Labor movement" to the "Trots" but some of us don't get it!)

I am a hopeless case. My stupid-dumb-brainwashed head cannot get itself around the awe-inspiring FACT that the ALP has "chronically" obtained between 38-40% of the vote in elections. I keep seeking solace in the word of the likes of Alan Ramsey in today's Sydney Morning Herald that:

"Labor's primary vote is wallowing something around a quarter of a million votes below the 2001 election outcome, which in turn was its worst popular vote since 1931."

"federal Labor's standing with voters is more diminished than in 72 years under 10 previous leaders"

<http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/18/1069027116956.html>

I keep kidding myself that many of these people who vote for the ALP only do it because it is the slightly lesser evil of two capitalist parties essentially sharing the same neo-liberal, pro-imperialist policy. But what else do you expect who a ignorant, brainwashed, Cannonite-Zinovievist robot???

Silly me, I keep rejoicing when the workers vote against great ALP leaders in the trade unions, like Doug Cameron of the AMWU, for a more militant alternative, such as the latest news from the Qld election that Workers Unity member and Socialist Alliance supporter Danny Doherty has won the election for Qld secretary of the printing division of the AMWU in QLD -- the first member of Workers Unity to be elected to a position in the union.

Danny won the postal ballot of around 1,200 members comfortably, with 62% of the vote in a two-horse race against his opponent, an incumbent bureaucrat and Doug Cameron supporter. There was a high turnout to vote: 50%, compared with the typical 20-25% in the QLD AMWU.

But this is just typical arrogant and triumphalist carry on that TOTALLY EXCUSES the supporters of Doug Cameron for their Grouper-style red-baiting of the Workers Unity candidates.

And even more idiotically I hang on to the pathetic illusion that through discussion and collective experience the various political tendencies in the Socialist Alliance can come to a common working position on how socialists should relate to the ALP.

Enough said. I apologise for my profound ignorance and foolhardiness and promise to learn better from certain elders with longer and more profound experience in politics.

Peter the Humbled Socialist Gnat Boyle