Bradbury-Garrett-Rudd; Hidden Agendas and Alegiences : Melbourne Indymedia

appear on the Sunday evening news holding hands and doing the water tank and solar energy tango.

Yes the same Garrett who would have waltzed into a senate seat as a Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate in 1984 if the same ALP had not directed their preferences against him. How do you explain Garrett? How did he end up in the Labor Party, weren't the Greens the more obvious choice? Forget ideology, think ambition! Whatever the dance moves and the lyrics this is an elite private school boy who believes he can be Prime Minister one day. A soft left version of Alan Jones. Instead of Rugby and Talk Back he has used Rock ' Roll to lift his profile and brand recognition.

What is a concern for those serious about resisting the war and the nuclear industry is the role of Garrett's long time buddy David Bradbury.

Bradbury's ambitions are less garndiose - presently moving DVD sales while bedding peace activists half his age; but most significantly not alienating Garrett or those who will be handing out the funding in a new Rudd Labor Government. Bradbury is sychophantic to Garrett and will do nothing to alienate his old private school buddy, Garrett is subservient to Rudd and will do nothing to alienate him, Rudd has just been to the future PM check up with Rupert Murdoch and got the all clear, Rudd will do nothing to alienate Murdoch or the U.S.

If Labor wins the election, Rudd may follow Blair in withdrawing Australian forces from Iraq. No big deal, the significance of the small Australian deployment was always symbolic and essential in the early stages of the invasion when cheerleading and internationalising the coalition were most important. Rudd and an ALP government will ask no questions of Pine Gap and its more essential role of targetting U.S. air strikes.

A concern for the movement is the role of Bradbury and his groupies in the present organising around the forthcoming protests at Operation Talisman Sabre. If you are militant and serious abourt resisting the war & exercises and planning to travel to Talisman Sabre WATCH YOUR BACK! There are all sorts of hidden agendas and alliances at play. Don't be a patsy, Bradbury-Garrett-Rudd are not to be trusted. They will use all their influence to reduce the protests at Operation Talisman Sabre to the celebrity tokenism, brand enhancment and moral grandstanding of Garretts behavior this past weekend.

When you go to the website promoting the protests at Operation Talisman Sabre http://www.peaceconvergeance.com you're left asking the question who was sleeping with who when this one was set up? The site has worked for the past 12 months as a Bradbury fanzine trying to motivate people on the basis of David's tired old intimacy with the once late great "Midnight Oil". Dave is of the Clinton baby boomer generation. He not only shares a Clintonesque taste in movement women young enough to be his children but an unshakeable belief in the power of rock 'n roll.

The site layout is instructive on a number of levels. Only in a culture -and here what's worse an "oppositional culture" - obssessed with celebrity and devoid of authenticity, could Garrett and Bradbury be presented
as the Lone Ranger and Tonto in terms of opposition to nuclear power and warmaking in Australia.

"Midnight Oil" is a sad terms of reference to be tring to evoke dissent on your website. With Garrett's careerist trajectory and his renunciation of former anti-imperialist positions many of us can no longer bring ourselves to spin our old "Oils" discs. "Midnight Oil" no longer evokes a radical tradition in Australia. To "do a Midnight Oil" is likely to enter Australian coloquilism as a metaphor "to sell out", the "predictable transition of a radical youth to an establishment middle age". Or if Garrett manages to go all the way it maybe a metaphor for "an elitest kid making money, hay and power from a dissenting youth before settling down abandoning principle and reaping in an old age". I kid you not, Garrett is serious about being PM.

Last weekend's spectacle in Sydney evokes books like 1984 and Ben Elton's "The Second Eden" where the state is so persuasive it also occupies the positions of opposition. What will Bradbury-Garrett-Rudd's response be if/when Iran is bombed during the opening term of a Rudd Labor Government. A little hand wringing, a little tokenism and the use of Pine Gap in the U.S. air war over Iran.

Rudd was on national television last week encouraging the government to arrest the Mufti for stating in response to the likelihood that Muslims should "stand together" and one would think not support such an illegal attack. Not all that different from Cardinal Mannix oppostion to conscription in Australia in WW1 in relation to British aggression on Irish Catholics. Mannix was treated as national security threat by the British who arrested him at sea denying a stopover in Liverpool. And here you have Rudd comfortable with the assumption that Iran should be bombed and comfortable with all the authoritarian anti-terror legislation Howard has introduced to squash antiwar dissent.