The Albanese government has yet to go beyond statements of concern and requests for restraint regarding Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, despite the clear expression of people’s concern by the Sydney Harbour Bridge walk last Sunday. Crikey has conjectured, very plausibly, that the reason is the government does not want to upset President Trump and further endanger the tenuous existence of the AUKUS submarine proposal.

So the government puts the delusional and dangerous nuclear submarine proposal ahead of preventing the deaths by induced famine of millions of innocents in Gaza.

The government mouths words and supports some clean energy programs but continues to approve fossil fuel extraction projects that will make all the good works moot if, as is plausibly likely, the climate system is on the brink of tipping into runaway global warming.

The government has again explicitly refused to address the tax breaks that fuel the speculative inflation of housing prices. Likewise problem gambling, employment security, university funding, and so on.

It is by now widely understood that our governments, of both sides, have been captured by the fossil fuel industry. What does this mean? It means the government bends to the wishes of the fossil fuel industry against the wishes of voters, and against the interests of every person on the planet. The industry donates generously to the old political parties and expects a return on its investment. It also holds in reserve the threat to campaign against a government that displeases it, as was demonstrated by the overthrow of Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister.

Our governments are also clearly captive to the gambling industry, to the banks and to the housing and construction industries, the latter of which ardently support Australia’s unsustainably high immigration rate, which Australians do not want.

Perhaps the strongest hold on our governments is exerted by the United States’ military-industrial-paranoid complex, which pushes the claim that China is about to attack us. Although the strangle-hold on our ‘national security’ institutions has intensified lately, resulting in the openly-stated intention to fully integrate our forces with those of the US, this particular capture has a long history.

Our governments have never out-grown the colonial mentality, though many Australians are quite over forelock-tugging towards our masters, and indeed many more recent arrivals have no connection at all with our colonial times. Anyone who gains some power in Australia has been assiduously courted, duchessed and, if necessary, intimidated, first by Britain then by the US. Their rise to power and hold on it is assisted by foreign interests.

The only leader to seriously resist this surrender was Gough Whitlam, and he was removed by a coup supported by the US and enabled by British royalty. Bob Hawke was supplying intelligence about labour unions to the US both before and after his ascension to Prime Minister. Many Australian politicians indulge in the American Australian Association, obviously lavishly funded by American interests, which continues the practice of duchessing and loudly proclaims the alleged ‘shared values’ of the two nations, though the two societies have many glaring differences.

Many have warned against the folly of becoming involved in a war between the US and China, including former Coalition prime minister the late Malcolm Fraser. With the rapidly increasing use of northern Australia as a staging ground for US forces, that concern is becoming urgent.

The folly of involvement with the US ought to be obvious given the US’ track record of losing destructive and counter-productive wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. The US habit of intervening in other countries’ politics has also been highly counter-productive, a notable example being the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government of Iran in 1953.

So, our old political parties and many of our members of Parliament put the interests of big money ahead of the interests of most Australians. They accede to threats. They enable the involvement of a foreign nation in our most sensitive security issues, while conspicuously failing to keep voters informed of what is going on behind closed doors.

Should we not drop the euphemism ‘influence’ and name these people for what they are? The correct terms seem to be rather obvious. Offering political favours in return for money is corruption. Bending to intimidation is facilitating extortion. Secretly serving foreign interests at the expense of Australia’s interests is subversion, sedition or betrayal: they are traitors.