Socialist Equality Party candidates for the September 7 Australian federal election will address public meetings this month in Sri Lanka and New Zealand. The meetings will raise the central aim of the SEP’s election campaign: to mobilise the working class and young people throughout the Asia-Pacific region and internationally in a unified political movement against the growing danger of a US-led war against China.
Amid the worst global crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, the Obama administration is attempting to offset the historic decline of American imperialism by utilising military force against its rivals. Obama’s “pivot” to Asia has already involved reckless diplomatic provocations and a US military build-up throughout the Indo-Pacific, heightening tensions and inflaming dangerous flashpoints, such as the Korean Peninsula. Every country in the region, including Sri Lanka and New Zealand, is being drawn into the maelstrom of geo-political rivalries that can rapidly spiral into open war.
Through its intervention into the 2013 Australian federal election campaign, the SEP is fighting to break the conspiracy of silence surrounding these advanced war preparations. In Australia, the Labor government has unconditionally aligned itself with Obama’s pivot, rapidly expanding the use of Australian military bases by American forces, including the stationing of a US Marine task force in Darwin. Spy bases such as Pine Gap in Central Australia are already being used by the Obama administration in its drone assassinations in the Middle East and Central Asia.
The SEP (Australia), along with its sister parties in Sri Lanka and around the world, insists that the international working class is the only social force capable of preventing the descent into a new era of militarist barbarism, through the fight to abolish capitalism and its reactionary nation-state system, which is the source of war. At the meetings in Sri Lanka and New Zealand, SEP candidates will discuss the socialist and internationalist perspective on which the working class must build a new anti-war movement. We urge workers, youth and students to attend.
Sri Lanka
Colombo
Thursday August 15, 4.30 p.m.
New Town Hall, Green Path, Colombo
Galle
Saturday August 17, 3.00 p.m.
Upper Floor, Sports Pavilion
Galle
New Zealand
Wellington
Saturday August 24, 1.30 p.m.
MacKenzie Room
St. John’s in the City, Conference Venue
Corner of Willis and Dixon Streets, Wellington
Tickets: $3 or $2 concession
Authorised by Nick Beams, 113/55 Flemington Rd, North Melbourne VIC 3051