Fraser's attacks trigger off workers' resistance

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After his spectacular performance at the Lusaka conference, Malcolm Fraser has returned from these heady delights and diplomatic triumphs to hard and dreary reality as prime minister of Australia.

Fraser's strenuous efforts to hog the limelight at Lusaka have not halted the growing hostility to the coalition of the Liberal and National Country parties still less reversed his own even greater personal unpopularity.

The root of this opposition lies in the deepening and totally predictable failure to resolve the manifestation in Australia of the international economic capitalism.

While struggling to attack the strength of the working class the bourgeois coalition has pressed ahead with 'free market' policies akin to those proclaimed by the Tories in Britain.

Recently these have included a decision to sell off state holdings in the uranium mining sector, and draft proposals to revise the measures designed to protect the textiles industry.

Aimed at increasing "efficiency' and "competitiveness" these measures-like those of Thatcher in Britainwould not only accelerate the drive to speed-up and generate new unemployment, but also force sections of the industry out of business altogether.

Moves to weaken the working class (by bans on demonstrations, and drastic penalties on strikers in the public sector) have not succeeded in blocking the resurgent militancy of Australian workers.

With unemployment already over 6% and still rising, the movement on wages in particular has reached a pitch that threatens to overturn the The failure of the coalition to smash the strike wave has disillusioned many of its supporters in the petty bour. geoisie.

At the sarne time, the Labour Party nas sought to exploit the tuation, and present itself as the only force which can cure the economic and social ills of Australia.

The social democrats of course offer no solution to the working class; reformist to the rotten core, they will simply attempt to defend capitalism with different (but scarcely less pernicious) methods than the parties of the bourgeoisie.

The construction of a genuinely revolutionary party, section of a reconstructed Fourth International, is the only road which can lead Australian workers to break through the prison of bourgeois democracy and establish the basis for social. ism with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

International Campaign Against Repression Flat 1, 1 Maberley Crescent, London SE19 Dear Comrades, This letter is to draw your attention to the forthcoming picket and lobby of the East German Embassy planned for September 5.

This is part of a campaign launched by the International Campaign Against Repression in order to secure the freedom of Cologne SPD member -Annette Bahner, who was arrested in East Berlin for her enquiries into the infringement of democratic rights in that area.

Campaign

This was part of her work for the Committee for the Defence of Democratic Liberties