Rudy joins Roxy Hall and Giacomo Bianchino for a discussion on the past, present and future of the Australian state. We talk about the history of Australian colonization with its differences and similarities with US and Canada, the squatter vanguard of settler-colonialism, the failed attempt at a bourgeois revolution that was the Eureka Stockade and the process of Federation. We then turn to the formation and pivotal role of the Australian Labor Party in Australian politics, outlining the broad pacts between labor and capital which included White Australia, the Whitlam government and the New Left period, and finish off by discussion the present prospects for struggle around the AUKUS military pact, migrant workers, housing and the environmental and indigenous struggles.
Check out Giacomo’s article on Agricultural Labor in Australia.
Further reading:
J. Roberts – “Massacres to Mining: the Colonisation of Aboriginal Australia”
H. McQueen- “A New Britannia: An Argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism”
R. W. Connell and T. H. Irving – “Class Structure in Australian History”
E. Humphrys – “How Labour Built Neoliberalism: Australia’s Accord, the Labour Movement and the Neoliberal Project”
Erratum: Harold Holt was the Prime Minister that enfranchised indigenous peoples.
