By Lionel Bopage –

Dr. Lionel Bopage

Good Afternoon, Distinguished guests, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Friends,

Let me also acknowledge the custodians, the Aboriginal Traditional Owners of this land upon which we are gathered here today. I pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. Thank you very much for inviting me to this important occasion, the launch of the biography of Mr Jude Perera.

Jude’s trajectory as a migrant from Sri Lanka to the halls of the Victorian Parliament, and his subsequent career is truly awesome. Going on to win four consecutive terms has been much discussed. What has been less remarked on is what made Jude the exemplary parliamentarian he was. This is what I will discuss in my talk, in particular, Jude’s political and economic philosophies and our respective allegiances to two rival left wing groups.

Jude’s political  apprenticeship started with the Lanka Sama Samaja Party led by Dr N M Perera, and he stayed the course with it right through. I started my political journey with the Ceylon Community Party led by Dr S A Wickremasinghe, moved through to the Communist Party of Ceylon led by comrade N Shanmugathasan and then joined the politics of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the JVP. I remained with the JVP until July 1983 and officially left them in February 1984.

Jude came from the more established left; I was from a left formation that was new at the time. As you may observe, we were competing with each other, not only politically but also militarily and otherwise. Yet, both of us had a burning desire and still do, for a just, sustainable and viable economy, and a harmonious society.

You may have heard of the concept of “Just Transitions”. The roots of Just Transitions lie in the activities of trade unions and environmental justice initiatives. Low-income communities from discriminated backgrounds the world over have been looking for just pathways in transitioning towards jobs that lie outside polluting industries, which harm our health, and burden our communities.

“Just Transitions” offer a pathway to a healthy economy and a clean environment. The process of transition from where we are, to the better society we wish for, in the future, needs to be fair. It should neither cost people their health nor destroy the environment, jobs, or economic assets. Any losses to the people need to be fairly compensated for. Such a situation necessitates universal social protections such as a Universal Basic Income, which assures each citizen access to a package of minimum protection.

A daunting task we need to look at very seriously.

I met Jude after we moved to Victoria in 2004. It happened during our activities to reconcile the diverse Sri Lankan Australian communities to work together in a collaborative manner. In crisis situations like the one that Sri Lanka is experiencing today, it is mostly the people at the lower end of society that pay the price of the excesses and incompetence of the elite. So, our collaboration and our unitedness will increase our capacity to react and positively respond to such crisis situations.

Despite our differences, all of us from diverse left streams believed in state monopolies. Nationalising large enterprises that were engaged in production and involved in providing services to satisfy social needs and centralised planning were thought to be essential to address the injustices and inequalities in society. That was a popular political ethos in another era and time.

The globalised economy we live in, is based on capitalism. It has led us to the verge of ecological collapse and vast disparities in incomes within societies and countries. In the process, countries and regions that have not yet undergone capitalist transformation have been brutally brought into its orbit.

This occurs via the extraction of their natural resources and cheap labour with little or no recompense for the Indigenous populations. Capitalism has co-opted traditional vectors of social organisation and power networks like caste, language, colour, ethnicity and religion to fragment societies and push its agenda. In doing so scapegoats like minorities are blamed for its ills.

In contrast, small open economies such as those in Scandinavia display a governance system based on high-level work effort, small wage differences, higher productivity, and generous welfare. This equilibrium is made possible by combining models of collective wage bargaining, creative job destruction, and welfare spending.

In the process, also enhancing average productivity and boosting the average wage. Welfare spending is driven by means of the higher average wage and a lower wage dispersion. These countries are well-known for their broad social safety nets and public funding of services such as universal health care, education, parental leave, and child and elderly care. High levels of public spending are made possible through high levels of taxation.

In and around 2015, our circles of friends with Jude as an initiator, started discussing fairer ways of organising production and distribution through cooperatives. Some of us met at Jude’s Office in Cranbourne and in Trades Hall premises. Jude had visited worker cooperatives such as Emilia Romagna in Italy and studied the Mondragon Cooperation in Spain, one of the largest worker cooperatives in the world. In his farewell address to the Victorian Parliament, Jude made a case for working towards a fairer economy based on worker cooperatives.

In a way, it was going back to our political roots.

The book “Challenging Incomplete Democracy” highlights different types of cooperatives in existence.

Worker cooperatives differ due to their mandatory attributes, such as commitment to solidarity, democratic methods of decision making based on the principle – one member only one vote, encouraging participation, integration of management, profits and ownership and creating harmonious projects for social, business and personal development in an equitable and consensual manner.

The Just Transitions team of the Victorian Trades Hall, and also people like Jude and I advocate the Worker Cooperative Model. I also work with the Earthworker Cooperative in Victoria. Worker cooperatives will provide a better pathway for doing business in future.

We have been advocating for political and social democracy, but economic democracy did not receive the attention it deserved.

We have been engaged in a game for capturing political power using any means, without giving necessary and essential consideration for the necessity of building a fairer, equitable and democratised economy.

Jude continually express the view that without economic democracy, political democracy cannot and will not be possible. Such a system will not lead to a true democratic society. Seen in that light, the societies we live in today are incomplete democracies and we need to challenge them.

Cooperatives are found in almost all sectors of the world economy. They are commercial enterprises that operate within a broader set of values and principles, whose aim is not solely generating profits. We believe worker cooperatives will provide a pathway to a workable model of economic democracy.

Jude’s biography “Challenging Incomplete Democracy” encompasses his experiences and investigations on the cooperative movements in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic and Sri Lanka. Also, there is information about worker cooperatives in Australia, and a detailed account of the famous Mondragon Corporation.

The cooperative model and Jude’s political advocacy and activism challenge us to think beyond the old paradigm – the market versus the state model. We are compelled to think beyond the distinctions between owners and customers in the traditional sense, and thus to think in terms of new cooperative ownership and management models.

There is a lot to explore and discuss.

The biography “Challenging Incomplete Democracy” provides an insight in to achieving complete democracy, that is political plus economic. For anyone interested in understanding the need for complete democracy for human development, I would recommend reading Mr Jude Perera’s biography “Challenging Incomplete Democracy”.

Thank you very much

*Speech at the launch of the biography of the Sri Lankan-born and educated former Victorian State Member of Parliament, Jude Perera.