Kevin Rudd, ALP national conference and uranium mining

Kevin Rudd is gearing up for his first ALP national conference as party leader. Labor loves a winner and the boy from the back blocks of rural Queensland seems to be the party's best hope to take the required 16 seats from the coalition at year's end.

 
 
 
 
 

Jack Conrad questions the romantic image of prehistory presented by green thinkers

Almost without exception, greens of virtually every stripe, variety and hue display a half-dreamy, half-atavistic tenderness for the pre-capitalist past. They did things better then.

Feudal greens such as Edward Goldsmith imagine England returned to the social stability and ecology of contented serfs, loyal vassals, chaste damsels, gallant knights, christian alms-giving and strong monarchs. Essentially, a dull-witted repetition of Young England in the 19th century: “The greatest owned connexion with the least; from rank to rank the generous feeling ran, and linked society as man to man” (Lord Manners England’s trust 1841). Everyone has their place and everyone is in their place

 
 
 
 
 

The NZ Green conference on June 3 elected a new male co-leader, Russel Norman, to fill the vacuum left by the death of Rod Donald.

It also saw a jump to the right under the tutelage of David McKnight, author of Beyond Right and Left. We republish this review of the conference by Scott Hamilton from NZ political blog, Reading the Maps.

 
 
 
 
 

The ALP's three-mine policy is an out-of-date compromise that still lives.

Twenty years after Chernobyl, Labor activists should call for an end to all commercial uranium mining with guaranteed training and jobs for miners.

As Kim Beazley and the Martin Ferguson Labor left 'realists' talk up exanding Australia's uranium exports, Anthony Albanese, federal Labor's environment spokesperson, takes aim at the nuclear industry.

 
 
 
 
 

Neocolonialism and Fraud

by Larry Lohmann - The Corner House

For much of the left, John Howard's failure to implement the Kyoto protocols is one of his greatest crimes. And while Howard's failure to act on this displays his utter comtempt for the environment, it means that progressives have been cornered into hailing Kyoto as essential in humanity's struggle to cope and manage climate change.

However Kyoto is in fact a big-business con job. Labor Tribune is carrying this article from the Cornerhouse as it strips away the myths inherent in the the Kyoto protocol, exposing it as a market-based swindle that enormously benefits existing polluters, while locking the developing world out of the benefits of industrial development.

 
 
 
 
 

The book Marx’s ecology - materialism and nature by John Bellamy Foster does much to reclaim a lost tradition of ecological thinking in Marxism. Mark Fischer spoke to the author about the relationship of red and green politics, ideas and traditions.


(MF) The question of how Marxists relate to environmental issues - as Marxists rather than as born-again greens - is clearly a controversial one.

(JBF) The answer to your question is complicated. There definitely is a danger in the sense that at least some of the views of the Greens - as a party-movement - are hardly progressive. There are some definite reactionary views mixed in there. So Marxists have to address them critically, like anything else.