De-Democratising to perfidy

From the Introduction:

The Kremlin was the central focus of a vast political and economic Communist system in Russia and its then satellite republics. The character was autocratic and repressive, though gradually relaxed up to the removal of the Berlin Wall and Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. 

It featured:

• The absence of overt political parties

• Vigorous crypto-political action* through bureaucratic, factional manoeuvring

• Forced taxation and appropriation of property and production

• Suppression of any sign of free press

• Illicit circulation of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and other manuscripts, through “samizdat”, reflecting “Groupthink’s” loss of sense of reality by factions

• Clunky infrastructure and cranky cars, famous as being well behind the West’s technologies

• State monopolies over the means of production, distribution and exchange

• Interventions in other countries. 

• Documented brilliantly by the Australian legend, Arthur Lee Burns

The reason why “Kremlin” features in this book is because there has been a pernicious return to many of those characteristics, and a growing alarm over consequential poor outcomes in areas where “repair” had been promised. 

In particular, Parties and the media have accepted falling standards through incremental de-democratisation. In effect, Australia is reverse-cycling through to that Cold War culture.

This includes forced interventions into communities and forced taxation, suppression of overt political “checks and balances” including greying-out debate between the two major Parties, sequestration by state agencies of private property, secret deals between counties and through the levels of national institutions – taking democracy “off Balance Sheet” and “under the table” - and lies and propaganda dominating the dissemination of official information.

The “Inc” comes from the sad experience of previous “WA Inc” and “Vic Inc”. That compares with the Unsworth Government’s “NSW Investment Corporation” which was a model of corruption avoidance – the opposite of Berejiklian’s shenanigans.

There is the mixed-economy nature of “Bairdijiklian Malenomics”, replete with 

• a centralisation of property-dealing under Berejiklian within her Department, 
• the breaking of accepted planning and project “due diligence” through a corrupted form of “city deals” and expulsion of reforming former Premier, Nick Greiner, 
• an incredible subsidisation of the PRC’s Hong Kong Metro without them making capital contributions as they take over our world-famous and precious “Bradfield CityRail system”, and 
• a state-supported monopoly in port and freight operations which explicitly harms “Morrison’s Backyard”, Newcastle and Wollongong.

That is apart from the elevation of corporate internal values over the top of community aspirations and concerns. That is a blend of Kremlin and “Inc” inter-connections.