Sunday, May 11, 2014

Sally McManus - 2014 May Day Speech

This May Day, we are facing off against a militant conservative government which holds Australians and Australia in deep contempt.

And we are facing off against a militant conservative Prime Minister, which holds Australians and Australia in a deep and lasting contempt.

If we needed any further proof, it came in this week’s Commission of Audit, which represents – and let’s not mince words — the most comprehensive and savage attack on Australian workers, their living standards, their health care, their services, and the wages ever dared by a conservative government.

The contempt this government has for working Australians, springs from the Prime Minister’s own deep belief in his own superiority and the superiority of those like him.

Superiority over working people.  Over women. Over our indigenous people. Gays and lesbians. Over refugees. Over anyone not part of Australia’s elite 1%.

Everything built by working people in this country – everything — Mr Tony Abbott holds in contempt.

Our union movement. Our public institutions, our hospitals, our schools, our universities, even our childcare centres. Medicare. The pension, and now the minimum wage.

Gains made by working people through their unions.

Tony Abbott does not even believe in the weekend for working people, which is why he is planning the aggressive abolition of penalty rates.

It is the same deep contempt that makes the Prime Minister Lord Abbott the Wrecker.

Mr Abbott sees it as his right — his privilege and his duty — to wreck everything not fashioned in the name of the people he represents.

Even more than John Howard, Abbott wants to use his privilege and political might as a wrecking ball to crash through the institutions of modern Australia, to return it to a darker past.

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