John/Togs Tognolini
In October 2006 I set up Togs's Place.Com http://togsplace.blogspot.com/
The name Togs comes from the Cobb and Co way station, Tog’s Place, my Italian grandfather Antonio Tognolini and grandmother Annie, native born of English and Irish convicts used to work and live with their 13 children, from the Victorian Gold Rush to it becoming the family farm in Yandoit, near Castlemaine in Victoria.
I originally set this up to display my work in radio over the past twenty eight years but I’ve also made it an alternative news and culture service. I draw on Green Left Weekly, CounterPunch, Common Dreams, TruthDig, The Nation, New Left Review, and John Pilger’s websites. I also write regular articles on politics and history. There’s also an extensive list of over a 170 links to journalists, journals, historians, scientists, teachers, writers, poets, musicians, actors and comedians.
I have always been for the Battlers. Those people who are not the winners of Marketplace Capitalism. They are the people who battle to survive in a society, where if you don’t make the dollar sign, you don’t count. Since the early 1990’s we have had a new class of Battler emerge, the Working Poor. Australia has become one of the largest casual labour markets in the Developed World, with low wages and high social insecurity.
Battlers is a term that should be set in its proper meaning. It has of late become a propaganda spin for John Howard with the term Howard’s Battlers. I stand by what the great Writer Frank Hardy, said of the term Battlers in his 1990 book Retreat Australia Fair,”……..a conscientious person working against many odds to make a living; one whose life is a constant struggle.’ Battlers maybe men or women; black or white. They rarely deal with racism (the negative side of our tradition) because they sympathise with anyone facing adversity or unfair criticism. The term ‘battler’ is a state of mind-a traditional attitude which goes back to the convict era, when the battler was on a flogging to nothing but fiddled around the rules and held his masters in contempt. The battlers are aware that they are being lied to by....politicians..."
[Frank Hardy 1917-1994]
Frank died in 1994. He didn’t live to see John Howard become prime minister or twist the political landscape with racism and scapegoating against refugees, Indigenous Australians and Muslims, policies he took from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. And since then, 9/11 and the War on Terrorism.
From WorkChoices, we have had the political battle of Howard’s attempts to criminalise Unionism and the attempted destruction of our civil liberties.
Who won the 2007 election? The ALP or Your Rights At Work? Or did Howard just blow it with WorkChoices? I thought about this when I was listening to ABC Radio National after the election and Fran Kelly introduced the ALP’s Campaign Director Tim Gartrell as the mastermind behind the ALP’s victory. And I immediately thought what bullshit. It’s been said that journalism is the first draft of history, well this fiction at its best.
Howard and the Liberal/Nationals own born to rule arrogant conceit with WorkChoices was the major reason that cost them the election. There were a few other major issues such as Climate Change, but it was WorkChoices. Historically you don’t see to many politicians make their own coffin and help arrange their funeral like Howard did.
I was against dumped prime minister Kevin Rudd and the ALP’s attack on the right to strike and their watered down version of Howard’s Work Choices-Fair work Australia. Rudd broke his promise to bring Australian troops home. The Australian SAS has stayed and protected the Green Zone, where the American Command Headquarters is. It's a significant presence to be kept in Iraq. On Afghanistan he believed that’s a "good war" and put forward the basic Washington line to keep Australian troops there.
Rudd supported privatising New South Wale's power industry, by former ALP premier Maurice Iemma and "economic rationalist" vandal Mick Costa. The current ALP hack premier Kristina Keneally is just as antiworker as those that went before her and she's joined by one time Unions NSW leader John 'Robo/Judas' Robertson.
On our new prime minister Julia Gillard, she’s loyal to these bullshit wars and union bashing. Tim Gooden, Secretary Geelong Trades Hall Council and fellow Socialist Alliance member sums her up well:
"The new leadership of the Labor government has an opportunity now to introduce a real response to climate change, to undo the damage done to refugees by the Howard government and under Rudd, and to resolve the outstanding issues with the trade union movement, including abolishing the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC).
"Gillard has already begun to sell out to the mining companies on the RSPT- no wonder the mining stocks shot up!
"She's already sold her soul to the right wing of the ALP. This is a re-run on her performance on workplace laws. How many meetings did she have with the bosses over them?"
"We saw how arrogant she was with the teachers. She's not called Guillotine Gillard for nothing and she has the best poker face.
"The ALP leadership is looking to gain some votes for putting in a woman PM but sisters should not expect any favours. Remember Margaret Thatcher was a woman.
"The ALP leadership is simply cynically responding to the polls. They have proved over and over again that they have no respect for their party's rank and file's attempts to determine policy.
"They have shown no leadership on the refugee issue. Real leadership means having the guts to demolish the lies about refugee numbers and tell the public that it would take 30 years to fill the MCG with refugees on current arrival numbers."
After Reading Naomi Kline's Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism a few years ago, it has made me fight even harder for democracy and socialism. We live in oligarchy-rule by the wealthy few, the Gilded Rich, were not a democracy in Oz. Tim Anderson, activist, writer and lecturer at Sydney University School of Political Economy is spot on when he said:
"After the excitement of a Rudd-Gillard ‘transition’ dies down we should remember that all power plays in Australian politics have to do with the Australian oligarchy - that peculiar mixture of banking, mining, investment conglomerates and media.”
I first became involved in Volunteer Public Radio at Sydney’s Radio Skid Row in 1987, when I was working on the radio shows, The Rank and File Show and Radio Solidarity.. It was in August 1987 that I walked in Skid Row’s studios in the basement floor Sydney University’s Wenthworth Building. In 1988 we were evicted from these premises by the university.
We were taken off the streets by the Aborigines/Kooris at Radio Redfern, who now broadcast across Sydney through Koori Radio, till we built and opened the Radio Skid Row studios in Marrickville, in 1990. When I moved west of Sydney in 1992 to the Blue Mountains, I became involved in Katoomba’s BLUFM and since December 1999 I’ve been broadcasting The Katoomba Surf Club. I’ve also produced four radio documentaries for ABC Radio National’s Radio Eye;, Bush Fires 1996, Ups ad Downs of Scaffolding and The Last Ship Built in the Dockyard [HMAS Success in Cockatoo Island Dockyard, the Navy gave a sea ride on it from Hobart to Sydney]1998 and Underground about Lithgow Mine Rescue and the Western Coal field in 2000 and Triple J’s World Environment Day Special in 1991.
In 2003 I started working with Shane Elson’s Alternate Radio (Australia) which collaborates closely with David Barsamian’s Alternate Radio in the United States. Through them I have been able to broadcast talks and interviews by and with Noam Chomsky, Arundti Roy, Studs Turkel, John Pilger, Michael Moore, Naomi Kline, Scott Ritter, Laura Flanders, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Humphrey McQueen, Andrew Wilkie and many other voices marginalised by Australia’s highly monopolised mainstream media.
My novel The Mountain City Murders was published by Adelaide’s Ginninderra Press in 2010 It can be described as Underbelly meets pub trivia along with generous amounts of Shakespeare, Latin, satire and extreme violence involving murder and football training. The Mountain City Murders is a roller-coaster ride of a story involving not just murder in a World Heritage Area but corruption, drugs, misuse of police power, political protest, dissent and how not to run a pub in the small tourist/commuter town of Mountain City. The Mountain City Murders is set amidst untouched bush and national parks: two-hundred-metre-high cliffs, subtemperate rainforests, mountain valleys, swamp-necked wallabies, copperhead snakes and owls.
Before teaching, I worked blue collar as a labourer, scaffolder, rigger, dogman, railway fettler/ganger and ship's painter and docker.
I’ve been a political activist for over thirty years in the Union movement and I’m a member of Socialist Alliance. I have been a High School Teacher for the past ten years in Western Sydney, Blue Mountains and Central West.
In 2008 I moved to Wellington in Central West NSW where I'm secretary of the Wellington NSW Teachers Federation Association. I’ve been a NSWTF Delegate to Unions NSW, and I’m was a NSWTF Representative to the NSW Board of Studies for the Ancient History and Modern History Curriculum Committees in 2003and served on NSWTF State Council for nearly five years.
I’m a Life member of the Federated Ship Painters & Dockers Union and was a Builders Labourers Federation Organiser in the late 1980's during the Deregistration.
John Pilger best summed up Australia as," the world’s first murdochracy. What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?”
If you want to be able to click on to a site that has regular postings and articles about defending Civil Liberties, Workers Rights, the deceitful, depraved and corrupt Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and defending the Environment. Then Bookmark my site, if you have a blog or website feel free to put in a link and I’ll do like wise (if I haven’t already) you can contact me at johntogs@Gmail.com
Cheers
John/Togs Tognolini
Wellington, Central West New South Wales, Australia, 21-8-2011.
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