Archives: Letters to the Editor

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Gregory Clark’s article and would like to circulate it to my friends. Unfortunately, his assertion that “Wen Wei Po was a weak Hong Kong newspaper known at the time for extreme anti-Beijing positions”. Everyone in Hong Kong knows that, while it is not exactly a top selling daily, it’s always been a diehard pro-Beijing paper.

Like all newspapers at the time, without independent verification of the various stories bandied around, the Wen Wei Po just parroted the Tiananmen Massare stories. After all, there were a few fake eyewitness accounts doing the rounds at the time. The chief editor of the Wen Wei Po definitely believed in the fake stories at the time and he simply put a four-word Chinese proverb as its editorial which says: “Deplore greatly with a broken heart!”.

Kevin Rudd has tackled the issues well in his book The Avoidable War, while fully cognisant of defects on both sides of the US China divide. He proposes the need for agreed guardrails to minimise escalation of incidents, while accepting strategic competition. China talks of its redlines. We need Australian institutions which are involved in collective security discussions which include not just military but economic aspects and representation which includes China.
The democratic deficit is clearly on show, after the gross deception of the Australian public, by DFAT and Defence, in September 2021 after the Paris 2+2 meeting, a deception in which Labor was fully complicit. The deficit continues with the report of JCFADT on war powers reform, despite a large majority of submissions in favour of “before the event” reform.
We need to be careful in our selection of military contractors as one was recently alleged by former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich to be a contributor to Trumpista candidates, who if elected can influence the US electoral college.
So the election of a US government with Putinesque views on democracy in 2024 may be a wake-up call for our government, as pundit Bruce Wolpe is currently suggesting.

In answer to Alan Patience’s “Anticipating a Post-Capitalist World”, one of the obvious solutions is to do away with ‘workers’ and ‘bosses’ by forming as many work places as possible into cooperatives.
In this way workers become the owners and elect the ‘bosses’ thus forming a truly democratic workplace.
Corbyn was going to encourage that in the UK had he got in. It could only be sponsored from a labour-socialist party which unfortunately Australia has no longer got. Maybe the Greens will get powerful enough to subsidise/encourage a big push to cooperatives. Its one of the few hopes we have.