The ABC collective's little commissar
Gerard Jackson
About the middle of last May David Marr used Media Watch to provide a bully pulpit for Ramona Koval, a staff-elected director of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). That using ABC resources, meaning taxpayers' money, to promote the interests of the ABC's kindergarten Marxist collective might be just a tad unethical never occurred to the ever so ethical lefty Mr Marr.
What sent commissar Koval and David Marr and his Media Watch into a tizzy was increased monitoring of the ABC . This pair and their fellow comrades think it's outrageous that their activities at the ABC should be monitored by the management. Doesn't the management realise that this is a Soviet? Evidently not.
So who is this Koval who thinks she has the right to use the ABC to promote her Marxist beliefs? Well this is the same woman who did her best to rationalise the leftwing MUA's (Maritime Union Australia) thuggery by enlisting the support of Thomas Paine.
She had the gall to claim that Paine would be on the side of a pack of left-wing thugs who call themselves wharfies and that his condemnation of eighteenth century despotism applied equally to Prime Minister Howard because he fits Paine's description of despotic rule. (She didn't say where Lenin and Stalin fitted in).
I too have read Paine, and I challenge anyone, particularly Koval, to honestly assert that they would have supported the maritime union's thuggish actions. Now let's take a quick look at what the self-righteous Ramona Koval defended.
By threatening violence, this union literally assumed the right to decide who should work on the wharves and who should not. It brazenly and callously threatened to destroy any company that was rash enough to resist its thuggish demands. It threatened with violence ordinary working people who dare offer their services in competition with the union's overpaid members.
It physically blocked access to others' property and employed physical intimidation against other employees. (A fact that Rupert Murdoch's Australian's left-wing national affairs editor publicly admitted). It blocked public highways, violated the right of free association, attacked the rule of law and endangered the lives of others.
Can the reader imagine the howls of outrage from socialists like Koval if any company engaged in this kind of thuggery? And she had the damned nerve to call Howard and Reith cruel. Yet this socialist argued that this anti-social behaviour is nothing more than "civil disobedience" (sic). Humbug — ain't the Left full of it.
This is the same union that committed treason. Yes, treason. On orders from Stalin, this union sabotaged the Australian war effort. While under the control of Ted Roach and the other Stalinist toadies this union supported the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, Stalin’s attack on Finland, his invasion of the Baltic states, his blockade of Berlin and the invasion of South Korea by the communist North.
It then went on to support the communist conquest of South East Asia, just as our left-wing journalists did — still do. This was the same union that callously looted troops personal supplies, went on strike, refused to load ammunition onto warships, deliberately delayed warships, constantly held up war materiel, even deliberately damaging fighter planes desperately needed against the Japanese, and who even hurled personal abuse at our servicemen.
And while this treason was going on Australian POWs were dying in their thousands in Japanese camps. (And yet Mike Steketee, The Australian's national affairs editor, called this union heroic.)
You have to be ideologically sick to believe that a man like Paine would not have anything but bitter contempt for these creatures, including their media mates.
To try and strengthen support for her defence of the MUA she called on the Marxist-Lenist historian Stuart MacIntyre who, she said, reminded us that this is the third government conflict with the wharfies. The first was in 1890 and the second in 1928.
The 1890 struggle was over the wharfies demands that only members of their union should be employed on the docks. This was a clear violation of the right of free association. But as a Marxist-Leninist, that probably wouldn't have bothered MacIntyre too much.
The second one was also about who was going to control the docks. Once again, men who offered their services in competition with the union were abused, intimidated and beaten. (I sometimes wonder if the likes of Koval and MacIntyre get a vicarious thrill from this type of vicious behaviour.)
As for MacIntyre's opinion, this is the same man who wrote in The Age (13 December 1994) that communism was a "doctrine of freedom, that Soviet communists and their subjects enjoyed a "lost ideal of equality and that it was the "anti-anti-communists" who achieved victory. (How's that for a piece of foul left-wing revisionism?)
MacIntyre also wrote: "The working class will only be won by a Communist Party with deep roots in the labour movement which can consolidate the movement's strength. Show in practice the limitations of reformist methods, explain to them the Marxist alternative, and draw them into a revolutionary programme." (Wow! no wonder Koval likes him.)
MacIntyre's attitude to the free press can be gauged from his support for the Bias is Bad News Committee, set up by left-wingers to try and punish (or was it censor) the Herald Sun for its alleged anti-union policies.
Koval finished her propaganda tirade with the lie that the industrial laws prevent workers from withdrawing their labour. Workers are free at anytime to cancel their labour contracts. What the law is supposed to is severely hinder union efforts to force workers to withhold their labour or engage in intimidation. And that, I believe, is the why these laws are detested by the likes of Koval.
Without a doubt, the MUAhas done considerable damage to this country. When it comes to supporting civilised behaviour, respecting the rule of law and each person's inalienable rights, Koval and her ilk have made it abundantly clear where they stand. And it is not with Thomas Paine, a man who despised humbug, loved liberty and detested hypocrites.
Like all fanatical leftists Koval has to politicise everything. She even managed to turn the tragic death of four young seamen on HMAS Westralia into an attack on free market economics and the mining industry (The Australian 30 May 1998). That she was politicising the grief of these young men's relatives caused her no discomfort whatsoever.
Harry Wu, who spent 20 years in China's Gulag for defending democracy, had his stories of oppression under the Beijing regime sneeringly dismissed by Koval as "Reaganite sloganeering" (The Australian 22 August 1998). She then urged readers not to "listen uncritically to his political opinions." What a sweetheart.
However, the following year Koval wrote a grovelling tribute to 'former' terrorist and declared socialist Gerry Adams (The Australian 8 March 1999).
Howard and Harry Wu have their faults but they never ordered anyone to be murdered; they never ordered car or letter bombings and they never had anyone kneecapped with a Black and Decker.
Note: In early 1999 IRA revealed the locations of the unmarked graves of 9 people that it admits to kidnapping and then murdering. One of the victims was Mrs Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10.
Her crime was to have attended a dying soldier shot by an IRA sniper. IRA thugs dragged her from her flat in 1972, forced (read tortured) her to confess to being a British agent and then sadistically murdered her. For 17 years her orphaned children, son-in-law and other relatives and friends wondered what the IRA had done to her — now they know.
And who was responsible for overseeing these atrocities? Why Koval's charismatic Gerry Adams.
Moreover, the IRA not only had the gall to demand that the relatives of those it kidnapped tortured, murdered and then secretly buried bar the media from funeral services. It also objected to some relatives calling for autopsies that would reveal the cause of death and perhaps even evidence of torture.
These are facts that the sensitive, caring and compassionate Koval chose not to write about. Nevertheless, Ms Koval should be thanked for reminding us of just how morally depraved the Left really is.
Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 21 June 2004