‘…The Government says this Budget is just the beginning. And it is. The beginning of extreme policies with an extreme impact on the Australian people. This is just the beginning, turning Australia into a place most of us won’t recognise – a colder, meaner, narrower place. Losing our sense of fairness and our sense of community. I believe in a different Australia. An Australia where your destiny is not pre-determined by your parents’ wealth or your postcode.

A fair and prosperous nation populated by a creative and productive people…

The Government forgot you in its Budget – and it forgot what makes our country great.

It forgot opportunity. It forgot reward for effort. It forgot the fair go.

Well, Labor hasn’t forgotten. We still believe in fairness.

We still believe in an Australia that includes everyone, that helps everyone, that lets everyone be their best, that leaves no-one behind.  

This is the Australia that the Prime Minister has forgotten. And it is the Australia that Labor will always fight for…’

The terrible war in Syria provides a new window giving us a view out of the illusion that we still have a functioning Western democracy.

Following the Snowden revelations which showed us that our Governments have turned us all into potential enemies of the state while building walls of secrecy between us and reality. The war in Syria stretches the gap between reality and fiction, to the extent that tears in the fabric are exposing the deception visited upon us by our governments and the mass media.

Here in Australia the Abbott Government which was carried to an election victory by the cash of a coal and tobacco alliance and the fervent barracking of the monopolistic Murdoch media has exposed Australians to the worst possible outcomes of global climate change.They have diverted the populations gaze from nationwide droughts and wildfires by a xenophobic vilification and military led oppression of asylum seekers.

The refuge seekers are being locked up in appalling gulags on islands outside Australia to prevent them access to appeal, and to so demoralise the refugees, that they will stop seeking refuge in the country of “a fair go”.

All of this Guantanamo like torture is being done under the strictest secrecy using the military inspired excuse that it is an operational matter. Any questioning of this lunacy is branded un-Australian by the Prime Minister

What is missing in the media stories on Syria, the elephant in the room, is the Russian naval base at Tartus on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. This is the real reason for the conflict.

For some reason the mainstream Western media is loath to reveal the real story behind this terrible conflict. Perhaps they self censor because they do not want to show the US in a bad light, but there can be no end to the war until this cause is acknowledged and  factored into the solution. Russia has too much at stake to back down on its support for Assad while the Americans who pose as the good guys who just wants to help, will push Russia as far as they can despite the casualties.

While some smaller websites like the Interpretor have noted the strategic implications of the naval base and the likely US involvement in the early demonstrations, it is the website RT nails the story in an interview with former Reagan Administration official Dr Paul Craig Roberts who expressed his view that:

“The United States is bold in stirring up the opposition and in arming it. They used the cover of the Arab Spring and Arab protests as they did in Libya,” he said. “These are not spontaneous protests, and certainly in an authoritarian state like Syria you wouldn’t find people in opposition able to readily supply themselves with arms, with military weapons.”

“What’s involved here is that the Russians have a naval base in Syria, and the Americans don’t want a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean. And, just as in Libya, the problem was the Chinese oil investments. If Syria goes, Iran is in the target sights, and Lebanon,” he concluded.

What we in the West have to understand is that the avaricious nature of our societies has driven a psychotic desire for control of everything and everyone on the planet. The US with our meek compliance, is violently imposing its will on other countries at the same time that it spies on its own people and its allies in order to control and manipulate us all.

It is not the violence of Syrians or the Egyptians or even the Afghanis who test our resolve. The real challenge is for us in the West, and especially the US, is to take back the control of our countries from the backroom manipulation of the US Administration, the CIA, the corporate media and the Fortune 500 who are trashing our democracies for their own sick addiction to wealth and control.

What has happened to the movement towards world peace that began during the Vietnam War but disappeared under a blanket of consumption and competitiveness? I contend that most of us would still like to live in an empathetic world that is signified by awareness, openness and cooperation. Unfortunately we are heading in the opposite direction where ignorance, competition, distrust and conflict hold sway.

Unless we loosen the fierce grip of the establishment and take back our power as citizens we will be destined to live consumptive empty half-lives on a planet heading towards more conflict and eventual extinction. The first step out of this miasma is to wake up from our dream world and get engaged ln our own revolution.

What have they done to the earth? 
What have they done to our fair sister? 
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her 
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn 
And tied her with fences and dragged her down 

                                            Jim Morrison

Australia is in flames from coast to coast and judging from online posts someone is to blame. Placing blame for these Australia wide fires on individual shires or a lack of precautionary burns is a futile exercise .

We as a nation and a world have allowed organizations set up by an ignorant greedy lot of billionaires to distract us from the truth. Our collective arse is on fire but most of us have not yet realized it.

Money power and consumption has dazzled us into thinking we are in charge of the earth and its ecosystems even as our houses burn down in front of our eyes or are swept away by raging torrents.

We ignore the spreading deserts and the great rivers reduced to a dirty trickle, the foul air that gives us cancer and focus our eyes on baubles and beads. Indeed we are the age of ignorance, the deniers of science and truth.

Hallelujah to the great great billionaires for they will bring us wealth beyond our dreams. The golden crumbs will trickle from their tables and make us all whole. Blessed are the rich for they are Gods among men.

These giants of industry and commerce who have bought our democracy and direct our governments, listen to our conversations, track our mail, investigate our habits and purchases. They gauge and direct our thoughts to design fantasy worlds that we can buy with our future..

So what is this truth we ignore and the science from which, we avert our gaze?   It is that we have traded our children’s future for potato crisps, polar bears for a bigger car, gorilla’s for palm oil, bees for a quick buck.

We have untangled the web of life and found ourselves on the edge of extinction. But we have averted our eyes to the precipice we walk along because we are distracted by our new gizmo, we do not hear because we are on our mobile phones. Masters of the universe lost in a miasma of self- delusion.

We are to blame, we elected these lying deluding and secretive fools who sell us to the highest bidder.  We have listened to their baying for war while praying for peace. We allowed them to create a world of division and conflict instead of friendship and cooperation. We allowed them to plunder the earth and poison our air. We are the ones to blame and we are the only ones who can repair the damage.

We recently reported that “the revelations by Edward Snowden that the Australian Government is spying on the Indonesian Government, was a hammer blow for the Abbott Government and for the mass surveillance program carried out by the USA”. What has now become evident is that the damage goes further.

Most importantly Abbott through his arrogant and aggressive response combined with his simplistic and militaristic “turn back the boats” mania ,  has stupidly all but destroyed our most important regional defence alliance.

Ironically it was the Labor Government who had entered into this spying venture with the USA but it is the incompetent Abbott who will pay the price. That Abbott did not have the sense to apologise to the Indonesian President has meant that in the long term the Coalitions main platform, “Stopping the Boats” is in shreds because Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa aka, Filipino porn star responded to Abbott  by saying all cooperation with Australia is off including on the issue of returning refugee boats to Indonesia.

This followed the arrogant and diplomatically stupid statement from Foreign Minister Julie Bishop that (in regard to turning refugee boats back to Indonesia) “Were not asking Indonesia for permission, were asking for their understanding”

Indonesia must now understands that despite the Abbott Government parroting that Indonesia is our most important neighbour, it is well down the list of our real friends like the Americans.

They will also notice that Abbott is fixated with two issues that are at odds with Indonesia’s best interest. They are preventing refugees passing through the region to Australia, and Abbott’s climate change denial, which will result in rising sea levels and more typhoons and sea surges that will be devastating, particularly for Indonesia’s smaller islands.

Indonesia at some risk has pursued a regional strategy that stands out from most of its neighbours. It has allied itself militarily with the West. Indonesia must be now re-assessing its alliance with Australia and the USA as a counter to the growing influence of China in the region.                                                                    

Indonesia and other regional states might well consider that Australia is not a credible or trusted ally and hitch itself militarily to the regions other superpower, China.

This would be a disaster for Australia and bad news for the USA, who would have to massively increase its troop numbers in South East Asia.

Abbott may gloat about preventing asylum seekers getting refuge in Australia for a month or two, but the cost of his foreign policy like his climate policy, could be catastrophic.