Socialist Equality Party

In Victoria, the SEP’s Senate team is Patrick O’Connor and Keo Vongvixay. O’Connor, 30, who joined the party in 2003, is a national committee member who has written extensively for the WSWS on international and Australian politics, including Canberra’s neo-colonial operations in the Asia-Pacific region. Vongvixay is a 39-year-old health worker who came to Australia as a young boy with his family from Laos in 1981. He first became attracted to the SEP during its 1996 federal election campaign because of the party’s internationalist perspective.

Australian Labor Party’s campaign “launch”: Gillard pitches her right-wing credentials to corporate elite

By Patrick O’Connor
17 August 2010

The Australian Labor Party formally launched its federal election campaign yesterday, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard using the occasion to pitch her pro-business credentials against those of opposition leader Tony Abbott.

In keeping with the official campaign itself, an air of unreality hung over the event. Labor’s “launch”, staged in the final week of a five-week campaign, featured an austere backdrop, with little of the usual hoopla accompanying such affairs. The absence of blaring pop music, balloons, and so on, was intended to signal the government’s commitment to “responsible” economic management. The overarching theme of the event was the Gillard government’s public spending “restraint” and commitment to eliminate the budget deficit in line with the demands of big business and finance capital.

Australian government resumes vendetta against Julian Moti after appeals court reinstates charges

By Patrick O’Connor
14 August 2010

Former Solomon Islands’ Attorney General Julian Moti is once again threatened with trial on politically motivated statutory rape allegations, following a decision last month by the Queensland Supreme Court of Appeal to overturn an earlier court ruling that the charges be dismissed. The ruling marks the resumption of an extraordinary vendetta, waged by the Australian government against an individual regarded as a threat to its financial and strategic interests in the South Pacific.

Greens manoeuvre for de facto coalition with Labor

By Patrick O’Connor
6 August 2010

The Greens 2010 election campaign has been dominated by preparations for a de facto, if not direct and explicit, ruling coalition with the Labor Party. As Labor and Liberal lurch ever further to the right, in bipartisan agreement on virtually every significant issue, the Greens are playing a key role as a safety valve for the official parliamentary apparatus—winning support from those hostile to the major parties, especially young people, while at the same time striving to keep them trapped within the official political establishment and the current social order.

Socialist Equality Party candidate interviewed on Melbourne radio

Socialist Equality Party candidate for the Senate in Victoria, Patrick O’Connor, was interviewed on Melbourne Talkback Radio (MTR) last Tuesday evening. Presenters Luke Grant and Peter Faris spoke with O’Connor alongside another senate candidate, Fiona Patten of the Australian Sex Party. A lively discussion ensued as the right wing presenters attempted to belittle the SEP and socialism and were solidly rebutted by O’Connor.

Gillard and Abbott stage sham election debate

By Patrick O’Connor
26 July 2010

The sole election campaign debate on 25 July between Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and opposition Liberal leader Tony Abbott comprised lengthy diatribes by both leaders against refugees and immigrants, and a series of lies and evasions on the world economic crisis, the war in Afghanistan, mounting social hardship, and climate change.

Gillard’s climate change speech—another admission of bankruptcy on the environment

By Patrick O’Connor
24 July 2010

Yesterday’s speech on climate change by Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard at the University of Queensland was a conscious fraud, combining a series of lies on the science of global warming with new sound-bite driven measures pitched towards business which do nothing to adequately address the environmental crisis. The affair again demonstrated the degree to which the unfolding official election campaign bears no real relation to the pressing issues confronting ordinary people.