Comment and analysis

It can seem like there is nothing but bad news in this country sometimes. Corporations are shedding jobs, governments are slashing spending and Essendon went down to Collingwood by one fucking point on ANZAC Day.

So, it gives me great pleasure to be able to welcome a positive step to finally bring some honesty into the bastard world of Australian politics.

Yes, billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer has announced he will seek Liberal National Party pre-selection to challenge Treasurer Wayne Swan for the Queensland seat of Lilley.

Socialist Alliance gay and lesbian rights spokesperson Rachel Evans spoke in Sydney on April 24 at a rally calling to free accused WikiLeaks’ source Private Bradley Manning from prison in the US, where he is being held in solitary confinement. The protest was part of an international day of protest for Manning, who faces a court martial and possible life in prison if convicted. Evans’ speech is below.

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In his excellent discussion piece in the lead up to the recent Climate Action Summit in Sydney, climate activist David Spratt concluded: “The problem is now so big, and the scale and urgency of the solutions required so great, that it is impossible to talk about them within the current public policy frame.

“The business and political spheres have horizons too narrow and too limited in time to be able to deal with the challenges and complexities of global warming.”

The Victorian Coalition government has taken to the state with a razor and announced huge cuts in the 2012 budget. These are the biggest cuts since the Jeff Kennett-led Coalition government that ruled Victoria from 1992-1999.

Victorian TAFE institutes in particular will be hard hit. The level of cuts was so severe that higher education minister Peter Hall sent a letter to TAFE heads on April 29 indicating that he had considered resigning from the ministry.

The Victorian Liberal government has taken to the state’s public sector with a razor blade and announced huge cuts in the 2012 budget.

Victorian TAFE institutes in particular will be hard hit. GippsTAFE chief executive officer Peter Whitely told ABC Radio that his institute faces a loss of 10% of its operating budget. TAFE courses that are not in high demand are expected to be slashed.

The Yolngu Nations Assembly, which represents 8000 Aboriginal people in the western, central and east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, released the statement below on May 2.

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To the Leaders of the Australian federal and Northern Territory parliaments:

1. The Yolŋu Nations reject the Stronger Futures Bill (and those associated) and call on the Senate to discard these bills in full. We have clearly informed you that we do not support the legislation.

A case of the unspeakable, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, in pursuit of the unsinkable? It is actually rather fitting that the multi-billionaire mining “magnate” Clive Palmer should be drawn to the idea of recreating the ghastly Titanic experience.

On the eve of Julian Assange's 500th day under house arrest, Sam from the WikiLeaks Australian Citizen's Alliance sat down with author, political commentator and Crikey's Canberra correspondent, Bernard Keane to talk about Wikileaks, Julian Assange and the rise of the surveillance state.

People seem to know about May Day everywhere except where it began, here in the United States of America. That’s because those in power have done everything they can to erase its real meaning. For example, Ronald Reagan designated what he called, “Law Day” — a day of jingoist fanaticism, like an extra twist of the knife in the labour movement. Today, there is a renewed awareness, energised by the Occupy movement’s organising, around May Day, and its relevance for reform and perhaps eventual revolution.

The start of a major campaign. Instead of cutting jobs, create a million new ones to lower carbon emissions and kick start the economy. The full 33 minute version, plus seven more films, are on Reel News 27 - available at www.reelnews.co.uk

A letter written by a 10-year-old girl in detention in Darwin drew national attention on April 24 and voiced the “sad, depressing and hopeless” lives children and young people experience in detention.

The note, hand-written in Vietnamese, was given to a local community visitor from the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network.

It said: “As each day passes, we feel heavy-hearted and lacking any sense of hope. We have no way of knowing what our future holds for us.”

Nineteen Palestine solidarity protesters face court on May 1 for their involvement in a protest on July 1 last year in support of Palestine.

At the July 1 protest outside a Max Brenner chocolate store, the police ran wild, viciously attacking peaceful protesters.

Max Brenner is owned by Israeli conglomerate the Strauss Group, a company that provides “care rations” for the Israeli military forces in occupied Palestine, including the Golani and Givati brigades.

The immigration department ordered 22 asylum seekers be taken to Sydney’s Silverwater jail after protests in Villawood detention centre last Easter. But the department did not keep a complete record and failed to follow its own procedures or visit the detainees within the 24 hours required.

On the advice of federal police, the Iranian and Kurdish asylum seekers were forced out of Villawood in the early hours of April 22 last year, accused of being the “ring leaders” of the spate of protests that took place over the Easter weekend.

The article below is based on a speech by Socialist Alliance national co-convenor Peter Boyle at the April 24 emergency rally called by the Indigenous Social Justice Association to protest the recent police shooting and bashing of two unarmed Aboriginal teenagers in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

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This article is republished from Overland magazine.

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Anzac Day celebrates forgetting.

Its revival, the transformation of a ceremony nearly extinct in the 1980s into today’s turbocharged festival, coincides with the excision from national consciousness of the most important aspects of the Great War.

The Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network released the statement below on April 24.

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A 10-year-old year old Vietnamese asylum seeker has provided a community visitor from the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN) with a letter pleading for help.

The 10-year-old girl arrived in Australia by boat in March 2011 and has been detained in three different centres located in three different states since arriving in Australia.

Another week, another atrocity committed by occupying forces in Afghanistan kindly captured on camera by the perpetrators.

Isn't technology fantastic? Back in the bad old days of the Vietnam War, intrepid war reporters had to risk their lives in the middle of war zones to get images of terrible crimes committed by the occupying force. Now, with these wonderful smart phones and cheap, easy to use digital cameras, the bastards can do it themselves.

In recent weeks, a boat with more than 120 refugees was forced back to Indonesia under Australian orders, 10 Falun Gong members from China docked at Darwin’s wharves and another boat made several distress calls to Australia before vanishing.

The first boat was on its way to Christmas Island when it began taking on water. A Singapore-flagged ship rescued the 120 Afghan and Iranian refugees onboard and took them back to Merak, Indonesia.

Green Left Weekly's Rachel Evans spoke to Damien Cahill, vice-president of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at the University of Sydney about the campaign against staff and other cuts. Cahill is a senior lecturer in the Political Economy department at the university.

What level of cuts to teaching staff is Sydney University trying to make?

In his notorious April 11 speech, “The End of the Age of Entitlement”, shadow treasurer Joe Hockey said that if the Liberal-Nationals were elected to federal government they would slash Australia's already battered welfare system.

“The Age of Entitlement is over,” Hockey said with a sly smirk.

“We should not take this as cause for despair. What we have seen is that the market is mandating policy changes that common sense and years of lectures from small government advocates have failed to achieve.”

Tasmania is facing a series of big, interlinked problems. These include:

• a health system in crisis,
• job losses in other public services causing big service inadequacies and unacceptable workloads and stress on frontline staff,
• bleeding of skilled professionals and new graduates to other states,
• the highest unemployment rate in the nation,
• an economic recession, and
• a rising cost of living.

The decision by the organisers of the three-day Marxism 2012 to invite a broader range of international speakers and allow other socialist groups to set up stalls at its three-day Marxism 2012 conference in Melbourne over the Easter long weekend was a welcome and positive step.

The conference is organised each year by Socialist Alternative and its sister organisation, the International Socialist Organisation of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

So it has been reported that Clive “Stop Taxing Me” Palmer's main private company, Mineralogy, hasn't paid tax for three years. He really is pulling out all stops to be the best cardboard cutout evil capitalist he can.

You have to wonder what he'll do next. My guess is call a press conference to announce he's established a paramilitary organisation of Nazi kittens dedicated to wiping out what's left of Australia's native fauna.

Activist Marlene Carrasco says some organisations visit refugees in Sydney’s Villawood detention centre in the same way they might make a trip to the zoo.

“You know, [some of the big NGOs], they just come in, say hello, then the zoo visit’s over and they leave,” Carrasco told Green Left Weekly outside Villawood on a gloomy Easter Sunday.

The 42-year-old Muslim woman makes the short trip to Villawood every Sunday from Merrylands, the western Sydney suburb to which she migrated in the 1970s. She said visitors needed to do more than just visit refugees — and she should know.

The nuclear industry has been responsible for some of the crudest racism in Australia's history. This racism dates from the British nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s but it can still be seen today.

The British government conducted 12 nuclear bomb tests in Australia in the 1950s, most of them at Maralinga in South Australia. Permission was not sought from affected Aboriginal groups such as the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Tjarutja and Kokatha. Thousands of people were adversely affected and the impact on Aboriginal people was particularly profound.

“You have to put more pressure on your government to allow Afghans to decide their own future,” Afghan democracy activist and former MP Malalai Joya told a 150-strong public forum on April 11.

“No nation can liberate another nation,” Joya said. “Ten years of war should have made this clear. It's better the troops leave.”

Sam Castro from the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens Alliance recently sat down with Christine Assange to talk about her son Julian, WikiLeaks' editor-in-chief, his fight against extradition to Sweden and why fighting for Julian’s freedom is actually part of a much bigger fight to defend democracy in Australia.

In article after article, book after book, scientists and environmentalists have exposed the devastating effects of constant economic expansion on the global environment. The drive to produce ever more “stuff” is filling our rivers with poison and our air with climate-changing gases. The oceans are dying, species are dying out at unprecedented rates, water is running short, and soil is eroding much faster than it can be replaced.

But the growth machine pushes on.

Ismail Mirza Jan is a 27-year-old Hazara Afghan locked up in Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre. After the Taliban killed his father in 1998, Jan fled to Britain and then Ireland in 2001.

Eventually refused asylum, Jan came to Sydney by plane in February 2010 in the hope he could find refuge. Instead, Jan had to fight off a deportation attempt in November last year. He says this saved him from retaliation and probable death in Afghanistan.

When you are the Only Democracy in the Middle East^TM you don’t need to worry about petty little things such as human rights. And so ABC Online reported on March 27 that Israel has severed all ties with the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

The final outrage that forced Israel to cut ties was a UNHRC vote in favour of investigating whether illegal Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank were, in fact, infringing the rights of Palestinians.

The Cocos (Keeling) Islands is a tiny group of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean 2800 kilometres north-west of Perth and 900 kilometres from Java. It has a population of about 600.

These islands were nominally a British territory between 1858 and 1955, when they were transferred by a British act of parliament to Australia. Yet for the next 17 years, the Australian government allowed the islands to operate as a private fiefdom of the Clunies-Ross family — just as the British had for 100 years before then.

The death of 21-year-old Brazilian student Roberto Laudisio Curti in a central Sydney street, after six police tasered him at least three times, has highlighted the rising use of Tasers by police and security in Australia and worldwide.

The deadly confrontation with Curti on March 18 has now been revealed as a case of “mistaken identity” over the theft of a packet of biscuits. Curti was also capsicum sprayed, and was running from police when he was tasered multiple times in the back.

This article first appeared in Tracker magazine on March 19.

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Aboriginal leaders in the Northern Territory have issued a strong warning that the Australian government’s new land grab in the form of the proposed 10-year extension of the intervention will send many communities into a dangerous downward spiral with still more death and misery.

The Australian system of mandatory detention for refugees is not, contrary to official government rhetoric, based on a policy of security. Rather, it is based on an age-old policy of demeaning and scapegoating foreigners.

Under international law, Australia is obliged to respect the right of refugees and settle them if they face genuine persecution, regardless of how they arrive in Australia or whether they have identification. But the policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers subverts these rights.

The day after the Queensland election was a very dark day for the state. The unprecedented swing to the Liberal National Party (LNP) will mean huge cuts to the public sector and brutal attacks on unions.

It will mean increased environmental degradation and unnecessary, destructive development. It will mean dangerous coal seam gas will spread further across the state and coal production will rise even though Australia is already the biggest exporter in the world.

It will mean the ruin of Gladstone harbour due to dredging carried out to benefit the fossil fuel industry.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) in Queensland is in its deepest crisis in its 120-year history following the disastrous defeat in the state elections on March 24. A swing of more than 15% to the Liberal-National Party (LNP) has resulted in the Queensland ALP's record lowest primary vote of 26.5%.

Labor is likely to win seven, or at most eight, seats in Queensland’s parliament of 89. The LNP will take 77 or 78. This is a worse position for the ALP than the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime's high point in 1974, when Queensland Labor was reduced to 11 seats.

Like many single parents, Helen Said and Ewen Kloas have spent years fighting their way out of the casual labour poverty trap to rebuild their lives and provide for their families.

The United Nations Committee Against Torture said in 2007 that “TASER electronic
stun guns are a form of torture that can kill”.

These deadly “forms of torture”, which are now part of policing in every Australian state, killed again on March 18.

Twenty-one year old Brazilian student Roberto Laudisio Curti died after six police officers chased him down a Sydney street, capsicum-sprayed him, and then tasered him in the back.

Police say Curti, who was unarmed, “may” have been involved in a robbery of “a packet

Activists campaigning for stronger action to stop climate change often come up against pseudo-scientific arguments from climate change deniers.

Arguments put forward by misusers and abusers of the science such as Ian Plimer or “Lord” Christopher Monckton have become mainstays of the deniers’ argument arsenal.

Below are three of the most common violations of science that are touted as evidence disproving the “theory” of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change, and response to these arguments.

Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan said on March 20 that his government’s Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) was “central to the government’s plan to spread the benefits of the mining boom to more Australians for generations to come”.

Lauding the tax, which had passed through parliament the day before, he said the MRRT was about “ensuring all Australians share in the benefits of the mining boom, not just a fortunate few”.

Of all the people infuriated by billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer’s March 20 claim that the Greens are funded by the CIA, it is not hard to imagine the angriest were heads of the Murdoch media.

Having declared in an Australian editorial in 2010 its intention to “destroy the Greens”, the Murdoch press has worked hard to relentlessly spin a tale of the political party as far left lunatics — old-style commies in green T-shirts.

About 120 unionists and supporters rallied outside the New Zealand Consulate in Sydney on March 19 in solidarity with 292 Auckland wharfies who were sacked for being members of the Maritime Union of New Zealand.

The rally was organised by the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). It called on the NZ government to pressure the Auckland Council, which owns Auckland port, to immediately reinstate the workers.

"This is a bittersweet victory for nurses and midwives after an unprecedented industrial marathon with the Baillieu Government to protect patient care and secure a fair pay rise.” — Lisa Fitzpatrick, State Secretary, Australian Nursing Federation (Victoria).

The Australian Nursing Federation (ANF) of Victoria has had a good win. At a time when the employers are on the march, the Victorian ANF ran a campaign that involved two periods of industrial action, including bed closures, elective surgery cancellations and four hour rolling stoppages twice a day.