VANGUARD - Expressing the viewpoint of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)
For National Independence and Socialism • www.cpaml.org
(Supplied)
What a difference five years make.
When Grace Tame became 2021 Australian of the Year, it was on the back of giant struggles against child sexual abuse. She was not tame. She showed the strength and intelligence that allowed her to stand against the patriarchy as a teenager, had educated her on other forms of oppression.
On International Working Women’s Day, we honour those ‘difficult women’ like Tame, who are anything but grateful to the ruling class for oppression. We honour those women who stand with the people, who understand their collective power, who fight for justice.
Above all we honour the masses of women who struggle day to day to survive to create justice and hope in a world where US imperialism and Zionism rampage, and here, where Australian parliaments and the monopoly capitalist state apparatus of violent suppression are under US domination.
Despite her intelligence, this year’s Australian of the Year, Katherine Bennell-Pegg, is almost Tame’s opposite. She serves the US war machine. She stands for US imperialism. Her appointment shows US imperialist demands that all cracks of possible resistance be blocked.
Many have pointed out this contrast.
Nick G wrote on January 26, with space ‘the new military frontier’, that Bennell-Pegg is part of the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue alongside Raytheon, BHP, Lockhead Martin, Microsoft, Thales and the Australian Government. She declares she’ll promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in schools and universities.
Nick G suggests she’ll encourage other states to follow South Australia’s transformation of “a working-class high school into a ‘Secondary College’ with an attached ‘Space Academy’”. An expensive photo shoot shows beaming young people, with school uniforms displaying both the US and colonial Australian flags.
The military has run some US schools for decades, syphoning young people into its war machine, its brutality, trauma and body bags. Young African Americans often chose the military, saying Afghanistan and Iraq were safer than the USA. Their life expectancy was longer and at least the military would pay for their burial. Young Hawaiians also joined the military because their economic prospects were so low in this US state.
Bennell-Pegg will make women’s work harder. She will target children. She will target their education.
Facing outwards, towards the masses
Against this, women are life givers, care givers. Overwhelmingly they nourish life. They are educators.
The richest private schools have major STEM programmes housed in high end architecture, and trips overseas. But they also have music and drama centres, sporting fields, swimming pools with cameras, and everything to create a rich and well-rounded education (undermined by propaganda and lies) for the future managers and CEOs. All with massive public funding and huge fees.
State schools will get none of that. Staff – mostly female – hold the system together, just as they do in public hospitals, facing crushing workloads.
“Care” of the mentally ill, including children, is a revolving emergency department door. In NSW mentally ill people who say they’ll harm themselves and others, can wait days in emergency departments, and leave without treatment. One waited 72 hours. There are just four public beds in drug treatment programs in Sydney!
Care falls upon families, especially women.
We celebrate First Peoples' women and women standing against all aspects of oppression. We know many of us carry the double load of oppression, paid and unpaid work, without which capitalism would sink into its stinking swamp of lies, theft and war.
But much has changed in 50 years too.
In the 1970s Glen Tomasetti sang, ‘Don’t be too polite girls’. Today Australian women take our place in the world. We demand it. But oppression continues. We refuse to be silent to do as we’re told.
From Knitting Nana’s to girls wearing keffiyehs to school day in day out, refusing to be compliant, we’ll make mistakes and learn from them. Facing outwards towards the masses, chains still bind us.
But we refuse to comply to US monopoly capitalism and its wars. We will never give up. United, we have always been dangerous.