Analysis

The so-called riot that burned down much of the Nauru detention camp began as a peaceful protest by refugees wanting their asylum processing to begin. The July 19 protests by almost all of the 500 men held in the compound “was not borne out of malice,” the Salvation Army said in a statement on July 23. “It was a build up of pressure and anxiety over 10 months of degrading treatment, and a planned peaceful protest that degenerated. It was a reaction to a refugee processing system that is devoid of logic and fairness.”

This month, Tamils around the world are commemorating the 30th anniversary of a massacre in which an estimated 3000 people were killed. In a week beginning July 24, 1983, Tamils across the island of Sri Lanka were attacked by Sinhalese mobs, while the army and police looked on, or even joined in the attacks. In some cases the mobs were led by government ministers. The July 1983 massacre was the culmination of a series of anti-Tamil riots, beginning in 1956.

Doug Lorimer, a life-long committed revolutionary, died on July 21 in Sydney after a year of fighting deteriorating ill health and long term hospitalisation. Lorimer was born April 17, 1953 in Dundee in Scotland and migrated to Australia with his parents Connie and Bill when he was four years old to settle in the South Australian steel town of Whyalla. Lorimer radicalised as a high school student. He first became involved in left politics through the Australian movement against the imperialist war in Vietnam, when he and his mother joined the moratorium marches in Adelaide in 1970.

Julia Hocken interviewed 25-year-old Liam Flenady who is running as the Socialist Alliance candidate in the seat of Griffith, held by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. *** When did you first decide to become an activist and to join Socialist Alliance? I became politically active around 2010, so not very long ago. Prior to that I had followed political issues, and like many people pricked up my ears around election time.

Foreign Minister Bob Carr said recently that the rising number of Iranian asylum seekers coming to Australia are “economic migrants”. The overall rate of asylum seekers has increased this year and Iranians have become the largest group of people arriving by boat, making up about one third of the total.

In their relentless race to the bottom on refugee policy, the two big parties in Australia try their best to focus the public's attention on a so-called battle to stop the “people smugglers”. This is supposed to justify the policy of indefinitely detaining, torturing and expelling the few thousand desperate refugees who try to get to Australia on leaky boats from Indonesia. But what about targeting the real criminals, the refugee makers?

Anyone with even superficial experience with how aged people are treated would be disgusted and outraged by the standards of most nursing homes, a result of neoliberal policies in Australia. An investigation by ABC TV’s Lateline on July 15 found many elderly people living in aged care facilities are grossly neglected. Advocacy groups have called it “a national human rights emergency”. The issue typically gets mentioned in the media only when a spectacle is involved, like a fire in a nursing home that costs lives.

Access to affordable housing should be recognised as a basic human right. In a wealthy country such as Australia it should be supported by government policy at all levels, with the planning systems and infrastructure to deliver it. For decades, Australia’s minerals and energy export boom has delivered huge profits. But this wealth has not been distributed equally or fairly. For example, in Western Australia, in the heart of the mining boom, people on lower incomes have been squeezed out of the housing market altogether, and have suffered from reduced access to other services.

“In God we trust, all others we monitor” — Interceptor Operators motto, NSA study, Deadly Transmissions, December 1970. This chilling quote perfectly summarises the model from which the United States founded their Big Brother approach to intelligence, as more documents leaked by National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden show Australia plays a crucial role in the United States global surveillance operations.

At time of writing, the new date for the federal election had not yet been set, but we already know who won: Pauline Fucking Hanson. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced a policy so driven by irrational racism that even Hanson could only have fantasised about it ever coming true: no asylum seekers who arrive by boat will ever be resettled in Australia, instead dumped in Papua New Guinea. You know, some people knock Rudd's achievements, but he's just made Philip Ruddock look like a great humanitarian, and that takes real skill. Read More:

Kuwaiti-born doctor Ghaleb Jaber is prepared to follow in the footsteps of overseas-trained doctors (OTDs) who went on hunger strike in 1997 in Sydney and Melbourne to fight for their rights. Jaber set up the Overseas Trained Doctors Network of Victoria five years ago. This network is organising a conference on July 26 to raise the issues facing overseas-trained doctors in the lead up to the federal election. “We want them to listen to us this time,” Jaber told Green Left Weekly.

The election of the United States’ first black president was one of those moments. Most of us remember where we were when we first heard about it. I happened to be on Palm Island, a small community off the coast of Townsville, now home to more than 3000 Aboriginal people from different corners of Queensland. "Palm" is a former black penal colony, and to get sent there you had to commit such heinous crimes as refusing to stop speaking your native tongue, or getting caught hanging around a white Queensland town.