The land which each one of us stands on is enriched with resources that the average person sees no benefit from. Hundreds of billions of dollar's worth of iron, oil, gas & rare earth minerals are exported overseas to be processed by exploited lower waged workers in countries like China, Japan, Singapore & Korea, while multi-national corporations pay little to nothing in federal tax as they lay off manufacturing workers in Australia. Our liquefied natural gas is abundant, yet the gas industry in this country (which is controlled by multi-national corporations such as Chevron, Exxon, Woodside and Shell) pay no royalties on more than half the gas exported, totaling up to $149 billion. This is a robbery of the workers & First Nations of our country by mainly British & American owned corporations.

The state of education has been a matter of persistent debate in Australia. With education standards falling and working and learning conditions worsening, political pundits from across the political divide have been clamouring to assign blame. From "lazy" teachers to "horrible" children and "weak-willed" parents, there is no shortage of finger-pointing in our current climate. Many solutions have been put forward, with everything from the reintroduction of the cane to the public shaming of terrible teachers being put on the table. Each of these solutions misses the fundamental problem in the Australian education system: the economic structure that has built and developed it, a system that treats our children as cogs in a machine with only one purpose, to make the bosses rich at the expense of our future.

At two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of July, the workers who run the largest iron ore terminal on earth put down their tools and walked to the gate. Their families came with them. For eight hours the busiest wharf in the country went quiet, and for the first time in twenty six years the ore stopped moving through Port Hedland.

By the evening, some of the most powerful people in the country were calling it a threat to the nation. They were half right; something was being threatened that afternoon. But it was not the nation.

The case for building outside Labor does not rest on the idea that Labor has drifted, or sold out, or lost its way, or fallen into the wrong hands. All of those stories imply there was once a golden age, a true Labor Party that could be restored by better people with better values. The history does not support that. The claim made here is harder and more useful, from its first decade, the Labor Party's actual function has been to take the energy of the organised working class and channel it into forms the existing system can absorb. It does not fail at representing workers. It succeeds at managing them. Once you see this, a century of apparent betrayals stops looking like a series of accidents and starts looking like a machine doing its job.

Ask most Australians what a Republic means and they will tell you it means getting rid of the King. That is part of it, but it is the smallest part. If that was all a republic meant, it would barely be worth the effort. Swapping a king for a president and changing the letterhead on government buildings would not change a single thing about how this country actually works, who owns it, or who gets a say in running it.