On the global impact of the Russian Revolution

Ian Hunt writes: Re. “The revolution we had to have“(Tuesday) 

We can hardly speculate about what might have happened, can we Guy? We can say our world is very bad, due to the rise of neo-liberalism in the eighties. There are signs it is crumbling now but we won’t have a good indication of its fall in Australia until the Australia Labor Party firmly announces that Newstart should get a substantial increase and a reversal of the dismantling of the Disability pension, so that people with diabetes and heart problems are not forced onto the pittance of Newstart and threatened with the absurdity of the processes by which they will seek and fail to find jobs. I wait with baited breath for a politician to feel they can’t smartly say that the best thing is to get a job when there are more seeking jobs than jobs available and when some simply are too damaged to seek or hold jobs.

We can say, too, that the October revolution was a an experiment in working class rule that quickly became a Utopian socialist experiment. What would the world have been like without it? Who can say, but it certainly led to great upheaval, much of which has been an advance for common people. Still, we could do better without capitalism. 

On the crisis in the Coalition

Wayne Robinson writes: Re. “When Coalition crisis degenerates into internal warfare, who will be left with the pieces?“(Tuesday)

Josh Frydenberg is safe. For him to be a dual citizen, his mother would have to have applied for citizenship lost by emigrating between 1947 and 1990 and then he would have had to apply for dual citizenship by descent. It’s unlikely he would have forgotten doing that if he did.

The easiest way of solving this imbroglio is to have a fresh election for the House and half the Senate (any dual-citizenship 6 year senators could be replaced in the usual manner) — how about December 16?