Is there any other proper response than utter revulsion at the Coalition government led by Malcolm Turnbull?

When he replaced Tony Abbott as PM, Turnbull’s apologists tried to give him a liberal veneer. While he may have been a multimillionaire merchant banker, he represented, we were told, a sharp break from the Neanderthal conservatism of his predecessor.

And yet what do we get? Pretty much a carbon copy of Tony Abbott.

Ongoing attacks on trade unions? Check.

Persecution of asylum seekers? Check.

Opposition to dealing with climate change? Check.

Continued ratcheting up of “national security” paranoia? Check.

Continued targeting of welfare for the income poor and Indigenous communities? Check.

Erosion of Medicare and the public health system? Check.

Opposition to the prompt overturning of the ban on marriage equality? Check again.

For them it’s jam today and jam tomorrow: tax breaks, private schools and hospitals, private pensions – all heavily subsidised by the public purse.

And then there’s stuff you have to pinch yourself to be sure it’s not just a bad dream – the appointment of Philip Ruddock, who was responsible for tormenting refugees while immigration minister in the Howard government, as special envoy for human rights!

This from a government that thinks nothing about the prospect of deporting dozens of babies and children, not to mention their parents and guardians, to the hell-holes of Nauru and Manus Island. It all makes perfect sense if you are a bunch of immoral sadists. Which is what the Turnbull government is.

Yet what are we to make of the “opposition” led by Bill Shorten? The very name is a misnomer when it comes to these clowns. They’d rather agree with the Coalition than oppose it when it comes to asylum seekers and national security. Not a cigarette paper separates them, Shorten proudly boasts.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the thugs from the Coalition, as refugees are raped and bashed in the detention centres, as Muslim families are raided at dawn by tooled-up police in the full glare of the media. No presumption of innocence for these people in the eyes of the ALP: guilty until proven innocent is their watchword. When deputy leader Tanya Plibersek complains that the “debate” around asylum seekers has been “toxic” since 2001, the ALP has been just as culpable as the Coalition in making it so.

And while the ALP has opposed some of the Coalition’s attacks on social welfare, they’ve gone along with others. And they’re still committed to the same basic neoliberal framework. The profits of the corporations must come first. Services for the disadvantaged take second place.

It shouldn’t be like this. Australia is a wealthy country. In fact, it’s one of the wealthiest in the world. We have immense resources, fertile land and an educated population. So providing a decent life for all should be a simple job.

There is no need for more than 100,000 people to be homeless when we have a big and skilled construction workforce.

There is no need for health care to be run down, with people left waiting on trolleys in hospital corridors, when we have the nurses and doctors to get things running properly.

There is no need for one-third of age pensioners to live below the poverty line, three times the OECD average, when the workforce produces more goods and services than ever before.

There is no need for asylum seekers to be shunned and imprisoned when for every mouth to feed they bring a pair of hands to work.

There is no need for Aboriginal people to suffer Third World diseases and medical afflictions when we have some of the most advanced medical research in the world taking place in our universities.

And there is no need for anyone to dread the prospect of unemployment when there are so many basic jobs to be done.

You and I, and every reader of Red Flag, if we were given the chance, could make a decent fist of matching the resources at our disposal to the needs of the majority of the population. Yet this doesn’t happen.

This is because the world is run on the basis of the demands of the fat cats, Australia’s 1 percent – the CEOs, the public service chiefs, the bankers and the stock market spivs, the media bosses, the useless rich idling away their lives in the Tooraks, the Double Bays, the Peppermint Groves and the Ascots of this country. These people are the problem.

Not for them the fear of unemployment or homelessness. Not for them the concern that their children won’t get proper medical treatment. For them it’s jam today and jam tomorrow: tax breaks, private schools and hospitals, private pensions – all heavily subsidised by the public purse to which they themselves contribute little or nothing.

And all the while they are praised in the media and universities as “wealth creators”, when all they do is sponge off the rest of us – every dollar they get is robbed from the working class.

These people, the capitalists, dominate the political processes of this country. That’s why there’s “no money” for essential public needs, and yet plenty for corporate handouts. That’s why we wake every morning to see still more hysterical headlines demonising Muslims and refugees. The capitalists have worked out that they’ve got to divide us if they are to sleep safely at night – there are millions of us and only a few tens of thousands of them.

Who can doubt that this country needs shaking up from top to bottom? Let’s put the needs of the many above the luxuries of the few.