En Passant

ANZAC Day is about forgetting. Who remembers that Gallipoli was a defeat? That a number of returning soldiers, scarred by the reality of war and what they had experienced, became socialists and communists to fight for a society where war no longer existed?

Who remembers that revolutions in Russia and then Germany ended the First World War?

Mass working class opposition in Australia to conscription defeated referendums  for it in 1916 and 1917. Why aren’t they remembered? Perhaps because they don’t fit into the ruling class agenda of unity of nation rather than divisions into class?

The referendums or the New South Wales 1917 general strike are more a symbol of our ‘nationhood’ than soldiers on a god forsaken bit of shore invading Turkey.

The Gallipoli nation building myth arose as a consequence of the class divisions in Australia and the outbreak of class struggle globally and in Australia.

The creation of myth and the forgetting go hand in hand. They are part of the ruling class strategy of creating an image of Australia and Australians that bears little relation to the truth.

History tells a very different story about our ruling class and its brutality. That brutality began with Invasion Day, 26 January 1788. The genocide against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders began then.

Terra nullius was a fiction to justify the invasion and brutal dispossession of peoples who had lived here for 65000 years.

This was genocide. Mabo and Wik and Native Title legislation are not about reversing that. They too are about forgetting the remembering.

Henry Reynolds estimates that, between 1788 and 1920, 20,000 Aboriginal people fell defending their land in an ongoing war against the invaders. The Indigenous population dropped from 300,000 at the time of the invasion to 70,000 130 years later.

Many of these people died because of disease, itself a consequence of the invasion, but they also died as a result of the consequences that flow from genocide and dispossession – murder, poverty, alienation, loss of social structure, alcoholism, racism, lack of food, stolen generations to name a few.

Genocide against Aboriginal people is one theme that runs through the history of the last 225 years. The failure to recognise that genocide is another ongoing theme. ANZAC Day, the supposed symbol and celebration of  the ‘nation’ denies this most obvious truth – Australian society was founded on the genocide of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and that genocide continues today.

Aborigines were not passive victims of the white invasion. In and around Sydney, for example, Pemulwuy was a famous freedom fighter defending his land and life. From 1790 to 1802 he waged a sporadic, and then more concerted, guerrilla war against the white invaders.

There are many Indigenous freedom fighters white settler society ignores; fighters who in a less racist society would be honoured for their stance and the courage of their resistance. Where are our monuments to these fallen heroes?

It was Marx who wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the mind of the living. This is true in two senses for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

First the consequences of the invasion continue today. The war against Aborigines, what I have called genocide, has fundamentally alienated many Aboriginal people from their land, their identity, their culture and themselves. For example there is a shocking 17-year gap in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The second aspect of being trapped by the past is that the policies of dispossession and genocide are being implemented even today.

The Howard Government invaded the Northern Territory in 2007 to further the destruction of our Indigenous people’s links to their land and culture. 1788 is being repeated today.

The religious ceremony of forgetting that is ANZAC Day is worshipping at the altar of that genocide.

Disgracefully the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments have continued Howard’s racist Northern Territory intervention, an invasion clearly aimed at further dispossession of Aboriginal people and their complete subjugation to the dictates of white masters around grog, what they can buy, how much they can spend and whose land it really is.

The Stolen Generations represented an attempt to wipe out Aborigines through forced assimilation.

The Intervention and other policies are about removing Aboriginal people from their land, often for the benefit of mining companies.

The ongoing and systematic police brutality against Aboriginal people is not some aberration – it is part of a racist system continuing its genocide against the original inhabitants.

Dispossession, the Stolen generations, deaths in custody, poverty, early morbidity, these are all consequences of a war against the original inhabitants, a war that has never ended.

Like the warriors of old, Aborigines today need to fight for justice. Relying on Gillard and Macklin will not work. Certainly an incoming Abbott government will further Labor’s racist agenda, if we let them.

Now is the time for Aboriginal people and their millions of supporters to mobilise and force the ‘Labor’ Government to recompense the stolen generations, withdraw the troops and other agencies of force from the Northern Territory, introduce land rights that recognise sovereignty and prior ownership and set up a system of compensation for the loss of sovereignty. Negotiate now.

The equal love campaign with its large and vibrant demonstrations has put gay marriage on the agenda. Without that campaign the issue would not even be on the horizon. A campaign by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and their supporters has the potential to do the same.

Demonstrations like the one on January 26 this year marking the 40th anniversary of the Tent Embassy – the one where Gillard lost her first slipper - can bring the issue back into sight and force change on governments if the mobilisations are big enough.

Nothing will be won by petitions, or electing Aboriginal people to Parliament, or relying on Labor.  As the Arab Spring shows, only struggle from below offers the chance of changing the world.

Let’s unite and fight to stop the brutal war against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders now.

I wrote this last year. It is unfortunately still relevant.

Ruling classes around the world have their national myths. These attempt to tie working people to the capitalist class through the false idea of nationhood – a recent historical development.

The Australian version of this national myth is ANZAC day. It is supposedly the day Australia became a nation. It celebrates the defeat of Australia’s invading troops at Gallipoli in 1915.

It is important to understand the historical context around the establishment of this day. The first ANZAC Day was held in 1916. The war to end all wars was bogged down in bloody slaughter. In Australia support for the imperialist adventure was split.

Many workers remembered the bitter class battles of the 1890s and the depression that drove large numbers into poverty.

Workers had ignored Federation, despite the cheer squads of Australian capitalism attempting to use that event to glue workers to the system and the exploitation that arises from it. For many workers class was the most important determinant of loyalty.

The war further exacerbated class divisions.

Many rejected outright participation in the battle between two competing imperialisms. Others, influenced by the Labor Party, supported it but opposed conscription.

The class still had a memory of internationalism, and the impending outbreak of revolutions across Europe (including the German revolution, which ended Germany’s war) would only further reinforce this sense of class solidarity across borders and against the common enemy – capital.

An IWW 'recruitment' poster

Here in Australia the divisions were highlighted by the rapid growth of the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary group committed to a democratic society without bosses. Indeed the “Wobblies” were such a threat that the police and security forces framed leading members for arson, and the state made being a member illegal, closed down their press and finally outlawed the organisation itself.

Conscription was the issue that saw class divisions come out most starkly in Australia. Working people and their parties opposed conscription, and defeated both referendums on the issue. The ALP split, with the forces around Billy Hughes going over to join the Conservatives and form a Government.

In 1917 there was a general strike in Australia. Overseas the Tsar’s regime in Russia collapsed after a five-day strike begun by women workers on International Working Women’s Day.

The first ANZAC Day in 1916 was an attempt to divert anger away from the capitalist class to those who were “disloyal”. It was also an important part of the pro-conscription propaganda.

An immediate concern the ruling class had was that disaffected soldiers – and there were many, having witnessed the reality of war – would link up with the radical sections of society. ANZAC Day deliberately offered them an alternative, an alternative that celebrated their role and remembered those who died rather than questioning why war occurred and why workers died for profits.

In fact, class polarisation (which reached its apogee in 1917 in Russia with the working class taking power on 7 November) continued in Australia and elsewhere for a number of years after 1916 and 1917. This saw ANZAC Day almost disappear in the early 1920s.

It revived after that as the revolutionary tide ebbed (exemplified by the rise of Stalin in Russia and Stalinism elsewhere). The forerunner of the RSL rebuilt itself by setting up clubs and pubs and helping returned servicemen and women (especially during the Depression).

World War II saw the idea of Australia, as a nation, “arrive” (and also boosted the popularity of ANZAC day).

The sense of class and internationalism lost its way under Stalinism and in Australia the Communist Party wrapped itself in the flag of patriotism to fight the fascists. In fact World War II was among other things a repeat of World War I – the clash of two blocs of imperialism.

Australia has always had an imperialist “protector”. This used to be Britain and is now the US. As part of our ruling class’s desire to be the major imperialist power in the region, we have attached ourselves to a powerful ally which will enable us to carry out that role and to ‘protect’ the Australian ruling class from invaders who don’t.

To do that we must pay our dues. That is why we have a long history of following our ally into imperialist adventures around the world.

From Sudan in 1885 to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003 we have participated in a large number of foreign wars to help keep the UK and the US on side with our own expansionist project.

So even though Kevin Rudd pulled Australia out of Iraq he and now Gillard continued our military role in Afghanistan to show to the US their commitment to the alliance and to allow our own role in the region – East Timor, the Solomon islands, PNG for example – to continue.

The disguised defeat that is Afghanistan means the Australian ruling class are withdrawing almost all troops from there by the end of the year.  They be home before Christmas.

Gallipoli itself is an example of our ongoing imperialist view of the world. We were part of a force that invaded a country that we had no quarrel with and which did not threaten us.

ANZAC Day also performs another function.

War is an integral part of capitalism and imperialism. Most people’s initial reaction is to recoil from war and all the horror it brings. ANZAC Day downplays that horror and makes war acceptable.

It is propaganda to allow the ruling class to call on the next generation of workers to join the war effort if needed.

And it may divert people’s attention away from immediate economic concerns - I may be losing my house or job but at least we diggers are good fighters and I am so proud my son or daughter was in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or East Timor. Or the Solomon Islands.

Right now there is war going on around the world. It’s the war of the bosses against workers. The dead are many.

According to the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union around the world ‘work is more deadly than war, causing up to 2.3 million fatalities a year through related injuries and disease.’

International Workers’ Memorial Day is this Sunday 28 April.

These are notes by Ian Angus on his blog Climate and Capitalism of a talk his co-author Simon Butler gave in November 2012 at a panel discussion of overpopulation. With Australia’s population set to reach 23 million, the talk is worth republishing to counter the sewer of shit spewing forth from the ogres of overpopulation. Ian writes:

At the local elections in the Australian Capital Territory in October last year the Greens were decimated, losing 4.9% of their vote and 3 of their 4 seats.  Their conservatism in the previous 4 years, when they supported a minority ALP government and wrung few concessions from them, saw those looking for real change desert the Greens.

Some voters returned to Labor. Some went to the Liberals, and some went to the Bullet Train for Canberra Group, which won 4% of the vote.

Shane Rattenbury is the sole remaining Green in the ACT Legislative Assembly. As I wrote last year after the election and the formation of a minority Labor government with a ministry for Rattenbury:

Although he won’t be bound by Cabinet solidarity, the decision to accept a ministry condemns the Greens to further play the parliamentary game at the expense of mobilising their base and challenging the essential conservatism and neoliberalism of Labor and the Liberals in the Territory.

Instead of being outside the tent, Rattenbury will be in it up to his armpits. His attention will not be focused on his base and his constituency voters but often narrow issues.

In other words instead of re-focusing on his supporters he will abandon them for power, a power constrained by a conservative Labor Party and pretend progressive government.

Nowhere is this clearer than gay marriage. The New Zealand decision to legalise gay marriage puts the question into play in the ACT.

In its agreement with Rattenbury, ACT Labor agreed to support or implement legislation for marriage equality.

In the six months since then there has been no movement. Rattenbury could have made it his first task to introduce a wide ranging Equal Marriage Bill. He could still do so and put the acid on Labor now, not 3 years down the track. Equality cannot wait.

Instead of waiting for Labor to concoct some rotten compromise Rattenbury could move an equal marriage Bill in the assembly at its next sitting. He won’t do so. Why? Has the Labor Party government host taken over the Greens’ ministerial parasite?

There is no legal or constitutional impediment to the ACT Assembly pass gay marriage laws tomorrow.

Labor will try to restrict it with, perhaps, arguments about residency requirements and the like, and the Gillard Labor Government may try to overturn the ACT law in the Federal Parliament.

However Gillard would require majority support from both houses to do that and given more than 60% of Australians support equal love, my guess is not even Gillard would risk the backlash from the public and from some of her own colleagues.

Then again this is the Prime Minister who accepted an invitation to speak at the Australian Christian Lobby’s annual conference last year before Jim foot in mouth Wallace sprouted more of his bigotry against gays.

The task for the equal marriage campaigns is now to get a commitment from Rattenbury to move quickly and not accept any watered down proposals from Labor.

Before the last election the Greens accepted a compromise civil unions Bill, to appease the homophobes in the ACT Labor Party and to prevent any embarrassment for Gillard. Pathetic really. The time for equality is now, Shane. Don’t get fooled again.

I suspect there is some real double dealing going on. Gillard doesn’t want the embarrassment of one jurisdiction in Australia legislating for equal love in the run up to the 14 September election. She wants it off the agenda. Her acolytes in the ACT Labor government are complying.

Second, as is the case in the rest of the ALP, a group of homophobes hold a significant numbers of votes.

If the ACT Labor government can postpone any vote on equal love till after the federal election on 14 September, not only will they save Gillard from embarrassment over her reactionary position – her leadership depends on the support of some right wing unions run by homophobes – they will perhaps provoke Abbott to amend the ACT self-Government Act to take away the ability to legislate on gay marriage. That is what Labor’s ant-gay marriage group in the ACT want.

Wake up Shane Rattenbury. Introduce equal love legislation into the ACT Legislative Assembly immediately.

If New Zealand can do it, so can Canberra. Even then, while a great step forward, it won’t be enough for real equality because many of the rights that attach to straight marriage are enshrined in Commonwealth, not State and Territory, legislation.

The fight for marriage equality will have to continue until same sex couples have the same marriage and other rights as straight Australians.  Having gay marriage in the ACT will contribute to that but true marriage equality can only be won by a massive struggle from below to force Gillard Labor to legislate for it .

Continue the fight for equal marriage. Equal love now; not in the mists of time but now.

Over to you Shane Rattenbury, the one remaining Greens’ member of the ACT Legislative Assembly.

After first studiously avoiding the word, 5 days ago US President Barack Obama labelled the Boston bombing an act of terrorism. Maybe it is, but how can he tell?

At the Electronic Intifada Ali Abunima calls it a rush to judgement. Certainly there is no evidence yet this bombing was motivated by political concerns, for example around Chechnya or Islam.

Indeed it may be the expression of young immigrant men unable to fit in. So it is too early to call it a terrorist attack and all Obama’s talk does is feed the anti-Muslim paranoia, racism and Islamophobia.

Indeed it may be that Obama’s comments are both a response to that mood sweeping across America and an attempt to harness it.

The white Muslims presented a problem for the usual ‘Muslims are terrorists, white mass murderers are lone wolves’ narrative, but the emphasis on the brothers’ Muslim background seems to have overcome that little problem for the media and politicians.

It appears that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not be read his Miranda rights – the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer. This is being done on the basis that he is a terrorist. So point proved evidently, and this denial of rights might explain Obama’s change of tone and his labelling of the bombing as a terrorist incident. Guantanamo has reached Boston Harbor.

Obama, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, has killed 176 children with his drone attacks. That makes him in my eyes a terrorist

Obama runs the biggest terrorist organisation in the world, the US military. It has bases in 132 countries with more than 350,000 troops stationed overseas.

Its turn to the Asia and the Pacific is a response to the growth of China and US imperialism’s aim to contain China. To that end, the Australian ruling class, with its own imperialist interests in the region and fear of attack from Asia usurping ‘its’ land and property, has a close alliance with the US.  That alliance involves not only Australia marching with the Americans into whatever country the US has invaded and giving the fig leaf of ‘international’ support for US imperialism’s actions; it also involves a new base in Darwin with 2500 US marines to help contain China.

On top of that US spy bases in Australia provide vital information for US imperialism in its containment strategy against China.

The war US capital is waging against the peoples of the world it is also waging against its own people through unemployment, wage cuts and social security cuts.  And unsafe, unregulated workplaces in which the lives of workers and the community count for nothing in the mad drive for profit.

And so it was with the explosion at the fertiliser plant on the outskirts of the small Texas town of Texas. 14 people are confirmed dead; 60 remain missing; houses, a nursing home and a block of flats have been razed to the ground.

The main stream media re describing it as an accident. So Boston is an act of terror nd West is an accident.

However stories are beginning to surface that the fertiliser plant had had no safety inspections since 1985 and that it had stockpiled dangerous levels of explosive material and misled authorities about it.

If so, then shouldn’t those responsible be in jail?

When profit is involved, the state and main stream media cannot speak the truth – that lax safety standards, regulations and enforcement mean that they died in the name of profit.

Here in Australia when the building union, the CFMEU, tried to close down Grocon’s Myer Emporium site in Melbourne over safety issues, in particular the right to have union safety officers on site, the Victorian state sent in 1000 police to shepherd scabs through. A few weeks later a worker on site, Bob Ramsey, died on site in a workplace accident.

A few weeks ago 3 pedestrians were killed when a Grocon site retaining wall on Swanston Street in Melbourne collapsed.   Safety requirements appear not to have been met.

There are no police with guns arresting the owners of companies whose workers are killed on the job. There are no cries of workplace terrorism when another worker dies at work because profit is more important than people. Terrorism at work is acceptable in the name of making a buck. That is the bloody logic of capitalism.

According to Unions ACT:

In Australia

• every year arround 440 workers are killed in work-related accidents (that equate to more than 8 per week). Diseases such as cancer and asbestos related illnesses cause an estimated 2,300 additional deaths per year (or 44 a week). Road accidents in Australia claim about 30 lives per week;
• According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more that 15 serious injuries occur every hour (or 1 injury every 4 minutes)

On April 28 each year, unions, workers and their families and friends, in over 100 countries gather to remember the men, women and children who:

• were killed or injured at work, or became sick from exposure to hazardous substances
• were tortured, imprisoned, murdered or opressed because of their trade union activities
• suffered degradation, pollution or destruction of their communities due to unsustainable work practices.

The time has come to end the terrorism in our workplaces. Giving unions work safety inspection and enforcement rights can make workplaces much safer.

As I write it looks as if the Boston bombers were Chechnians who had been living in the US for some time. The story will unfold over time, and the picture as it becomes clearer may involve the Chechen struggle for independence from Russia, the Russians’ brutal wars and the Muslim faith of the bombers. The fight for independence started off as a secular one but has become more and more entwined with the quest for an Islamic state.

Or maybe they were alienated from American society, taking out their anger and frustration by bombing a wholesome and nearby symbol of their adopted homeland.

The white Muslims presented a problem for the usual ‘Muslims are terrorists, white mass murderers are lone wolves’ narrative, but the emphasis on the brothers’ Muslim background seems to have overcome that little problem for the media and politicians.

Certainly, killing innocent people at the Boston marathon furthers neither Chechen independence nor Islamism and will only allow the state (US, Russia, let’s see how far the repression spreads) to tighten their anti-terrorist activities and actions. The mainstream media will reinforce the Islamophobia of some of the American people.

Killing an innocent 8 year old boy will not win Chechen independence or extract real revenge for US terrorism against many nations of the world, including many Muslim countries. What it will do is strengthen the US state, the biggest terrorist in the world, in its ongoing brutalisation of people from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Middle East to Asia and South America.

This strengthening of the US state is not just in its legislative and administrative powers. It will be in the support ordinary working Americans give it in expressing their revulsion at the slaughter of innocents.

In other countries it is the US slaughter of innocents that drives some to want to slaughter US innocents. The fact they have a common enemy – the US state and behind it US capital – is lost in the anger and grief of death on both sides. For US workers the Boston bombings will only further strengthen their support for the US state.

The targets are not even representatives of the US state but ordinary people. This is the nature of individualism, of change flowing from the enlightened few, of reformism with a bomb, of substituting the action of an individual for that of the masses.

One final comment. These sorts of atrocities occur every day around the globe either as internal conflicts or the result of US bombing, drone bombing being an example. The western-centric views of our rulers and media blind us to this global reality. They can also reinforce the ideology of US imperialism as victim.

There are no easy solutions to the horrors capitalism unleashes every day but our task must be to build mass revolutionary socialist parties in country after country to enable workers to challenge the system that terrorises them daily in their workplace and terrorises the globe. That won’t happen overnight but it is an historic necessity, needed right now.

In Venezuela the Chavismo candidate Nicolas Maduro won the presidential election, just. The margin was 1.5%.  This is much less than the ten percent margin Chavez won by.

The right wing loser, Henrique Capriles, launched a series of demonstrations and attacks in what look like they could be leading to a coup attempt. I doubt Capriles has enough army support to sustain a coup, and the response of the populace to the previous coup attempt in 2002 against Chavez, when the masses rose up to defend their President, must be playing on the minds of the right wing.

The narrowness of the victory seems to give the lie to ‘Socialism in the 21st Century’ and other fatuousness about the radical reform program of Chavez and now Maduro.

In Australia, the Gillard Labor government has decided to improve education spending by cutting it. It is proposing to spend a little bit more on schools, and impose more rote learning, by cutting $2.8 bn from universities, staff and students.  The response of the main union, the National Tertiary Education Union, has been lacklustre so far.

The lack of a real fight from the union means the cuts will go through unless students and union members push the struggle forward. The Australian National University Students’ Association has for example called a demonstration on 1 May against the cuts and will march to the office of Andrew Leigh, the local Labor Party member and former professor of economics at the ANU.

The Labor Government has also sent back 38 of 66 asylum seekers to Sri Lanka without proper process. It is unknown how many will meet rotten fates at the hands of the murderous regime in charge in Sri Lanka. My contempt for the Gillard Labor government has reached new lows

In a related development Julia Gillard declared herself not for turning after Tamil refugees went on hunger strike over their continued detention. That pit of reaction, the Australian Security and Intelligence organisation, had declared them to be security risks and so these genuine refugees are held in indefinite detention. All on the unchallengeable say so of some right wing Inspector Clouseau in ASIO.

Gillard’s comment that she would not be moved by the hunger strikes (since lifted) reeks of Margaret Thatcher and her refusal to change her policies when Irish Republican prisoners went on hunger strike for political status.

Gillard said: “You do not change your circumstance as an asylum seeker or a refugee with an adverse security assessment through hunger striking.”

This is not the only whiff of Thatcherism from Gillard. $1.2 billion of the $2.8 billion higher education funding cuts for example fall on students on Austudy – the poorest students. Her attack on single parent payments has consigned perhaps 100,000 of them – 90% women – to deeper poverty.

Her Thatcher-like warmongering is obvious too. Australian troops under Gillard have been an integral propaganda prop for the US led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. The US base at Darwin is part of the military containment of China.

Thatcher’s racism finds expression in Gillard with both the continuation of the Northern Territory intervention and the vilification and demonisation of refugees, people with different coloured skins to the majority of Australians.

And the market as the best solution to climate change has proved a real winner, for both Labor and the Greens. Assuming the Liberals can’t abolish it after they win office, the carbon tax (currently $23 a tonne and set too rise over the next 2 years by a few dollars) will become an Emissions Trading Scheme in 2015.

It will be linked to the European trading scheme which will set the price for the trading of permits and hence the cost of polluting in Australia under the ETS. The current price is about $4 a tonne in Europe. Instead of a predicted price on $29 a tonne in 2015 it could be $4! That will destroy the carbon tax as any sort of tool in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and see government not collect billions in anticipated revenue.

As I have written on this blog and for the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation the carbon tax and ETS was always a crock.

He who lives by the market dies by the market. Labor’s death awaits it.

In another in the long line of ALP promises on the never never, there has been talk about a Very Fast train. Again. It will not happen. The road transport king capitalists will not allow it, unless they control and profit from it.

Neither major party is prepared to take on these or any vested interests of capital. The plutocracy rules.

To have your say on these or other issues hit the comments link under the heading. Like all posts on this blog comments close after 7 days.

Finally, after two years of campaigning and a series of record-breaking strikes, the Australian Education Union and the Victorian Government have struck a deal. There’s some good news, and plenty of bad writes AEU delegate Manolya Moustafa in Socialist Alernative.

I’ll start with the good: we beat back performance pay! So called “performance pay” is nothing to do with “performance” and all about dividing teachers and increasing the amount of unproductive testing. Thousands of teachers and education support staff voiced overwhelming opposition to these schemes. This showed the Government that introducing, let alone implementing, any “performance pay” scheme would have faced enormous obstacles from rank and file teachers.

So it is a significant win to have “performance pay” off the table. However, this doesn’t mean we’ve beaten it back for good. As Victorian Premier Denis Napthine says: “We believe that performance-based pay has merit, but we need to work more with the teachers to convince them of the validity of that.” So the AEU will have to be ready to respond when the Government tries to introduce “performance pay” outside of the enterprise agreement process.

It’s worth saying another positive to come out of all this is that teachers and education support staff are for the first time under the same agreement. This gives us strength in unity for future fightbacks.

Now for the bad news.

If you believe the media hype, teachers will be getting pay rises of between 16.1% and 20.5%. – sounds good doesn’t it? But according to Napthine, the salary increases will total 3% in 2013, 2.75% in 2014 and 2.75% in 2015. This discrepancy in figures is visible in the pay scales provided by the union. For instance, the starting salary for graduate teachers will only be 10% higher at the end of 2016, compared with today – hardly the groundbreaking deal being touted by the union leadership. For some Education Support staff, the pay rise works out as slightly less than the 2.5% annual pay rise being offered by the Government!

The union is talking up the pay rise, apparently by taking into account the increase in pay increments, as teachers move up the pay scale over the years. But this is misleading as it takes into account increased pay that we would have achieved regardless of the dispute. Even worse, it seems that under the new deal, there are actually no guarantees that teachers will move up the expected pay scale more or less automatically, as has been common practice until now. Exact details on what we need to do to prove we are eligible are yet to be announced. But taking this into consideration, the deal is starting to sound more like a sell-out.

The feeling is confirmed when we look at conditions. For most teachers, it was our conditions that motivated us to sacrifice wages and go on strike – and yet there have been NO improvements. Class sizes and working hours remain the same. The union calls this a “win” – in reality it is maintenance of the degradation of conditions over the years.

Casual relief teachers (CRTs) play a crucial role in covering short-term absences in schools, but they are not covered by this agreement, and therefore will receive no pay rise or improvements in conditions. Although they could not strike, many CRTs honourably heeded the union’s call not to take work on strike days, which involved considerable sacrifice on their part. They have every right to feel aggrieved.

But the worst sell-out appears to be for the conditions of teachers declared “in excess”. Teachers who have ongoing status but are employed in a school that no longer needs them can be put in excess for various reasons – like reduced enrolments for example. Currently these teachers have priority status when applying for jobs. With the new proposed agreement this priority status is gone. Call me cynical, but I think it has something to do with the fact that teachers in excess tend to be classified as expert teachers, and they cost more money for schools. So if they don’t have priority status, a school can employ a much cheaper graduate teacher.

What about contract teachers? The union was asking for a 50% reduction in numbers of teachers on contracts. We haven’t won anything like that. Instead, the new agreement includes a new process to “monitor” the numbers of contracts, but again details of this are yet to be released. It could mean no gain at all for the close to 20% of teachers on short-term contracts with no job security.

AEU members should vote against accepting this agreement. Already the AEU Facebook page is flooded with criticisms from members who feel they have been duped by the union leadership. Some teachers are talking about resigning from the union. This is not the answer: we need to stay in the union and fight to improve it. We need to argue that set piece strikes twice a year are not going to win us real gains. We need to continue to argue that sustained industrial action that shuts down schools and causes a political crisis for the government (like the history-making nine-day strike by Chicago teachers last year), is the way to force them to give us what we deserve.

These deals are not “won” at the negotiation table, they are won on the streets and in the workplaces. And we can’t do that without a strong union membership. We need to stay on and argue for rank and file union activity: relying on the officials only leads to sell-outs like these.

Manolya is an AEU delegate.

Here is what Obama said in part about the Boston bombing.

This was a heinous and cowardly act. And given what we now know about what took place, the FBI is investigating it as an act of terrorism. Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror. What we don’t yet know, however, is who carried out this attack, or why; whether it was planned and executed by a terrorist organization, foreign or domestic, or was the act of a malevolent individual. That’s what we don’t yet know. And clearly, we’re at the beginning of our investigation.

It will take time to follow every lead and determine what happened. But we will find out. We will find whoever harmed our citizens and we will bring them to justice.

He has said nothing about the April 6 attack in Afghanistan which killed 17 civilians, including 12 children. We know who is ultimately responsible – Barack Obama, the US commander in chief of terrorism.

The biggest terrorist sits in Washington and kills women and kids every day. Why isn’t Barack Obama on trial for his terrorism?

Khury Petersen-Smith and Sofia Arias attended the Boston Marathon as spectators. They had left the finish line area only an hour before two explosions ripped through the crowd. Today, the death toll stands at three, with more than 100 people injured, a number of them very seriously. Khury and Sofia talk about their response to the nightmare in Socialist Worker US – and the consequences of the witch-hunt to find a culprit to blame.

Aftermath of the explosions at the Boston Marathon

THERE ARE many feelings caused by the bombings that took place yesterday at the Boston Marathon: fear, disbelief, tremendous sadness. But as we write this, horror is at the top of that list.

As this commentary was written, three people were dead and more than 130 injured by the explosions that took place yesterday afternoon near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Among those killed is an 8-year-old boy–10 children are among the wounded.

As people who attended the Marathon, we were shocked to see such a lovely day turn into an unexpected disaster.

It is hard to describe how big a deal the Marathon is here. More than 20,000 registered athletes run in it, and 500,000 people come out to watch.

We love the Marathon. It’s an annual celebration of people doing something amazing: running more than 26 miles. But what we love most about the Marathon is that, in a city not known for kindness, hundreds of thousands of people come out and line the route to cheer on strangers. In a city known for its racism, crowds of overwhelmingly white people come to cheer on Africans, who invariably win the Marathon.

We were excited to go to the Marathon this year. We joined the crowds of people in Kenmore Square, near Fenway Park, one mile away from the finish line. We got teary-eyed when the first para-athletes rolled through in their wheelchairs, and again when the first wave of women pounded down the hill. We clapped and cheered with thousands of others, and then we made our way down Commonwealth Avenue toward the finish line.

When we got to the end of the route at Copley Square after pushing through the increasingly thick crowds, we were surrounded by people waiting for their loved ones to finish the race. Many had signs with their friends’ and family members’ names written on them. We tried to get closer to the finish line, but barricades kept us at a distance.

We decided to leave and get lunch. After lamenting that “there’s no place good to get food around here,” we walked about seven blocks to Chinatown. No more than an hour later, the bombs exploded right near where we were.

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OUR THOUGHTS went first to the runners, who had trained with dedication and excitement for weeks and months to do this incredible thing–some of them are maimed for life. And the thousands of family members gathered at the finish line. And also to the Arabs, Muslims and South Asians who would inevitably be blamed for this nightmare.

Sure enough, within hours of the explosions, the New York Post was reporting that “a Saudi national” was suspected of the bombing and in custody. This turned out to be false, but facts didn’t get in the way of the Post accusing Arab Muslims of the attack before the blood had dried. Likewise, right-wing fanatic and Fox News commentator Erik Rush tweeted that Muslims are “evil. Let’s kill them all.” It was a genocidal remark that Rush Limbaugh later downplayed as “sarcasm.”

The state’s response doesn’t bode well for those targeted groups, nor for our civil liberties. The Boston police were mobilized in full force, along with the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). Special Forces units and 1,500 National Guard troops were activated as well, and apparently, they are here to stay for an indefinite period. According to the Boston Globe, “The scores of rifle-wielding state troopers, National Guard members in fatigues, and municipal SWAT teams who descended on the city Monday will continue to patrol on Tuesday, particularly around the finish line of the marathon in the Back Bay.”

Gov. Deval Patrick announced that Boston will have a “heightened law enforcement presence” in the city, with “random” bag searches in the mass transit system. And as the media have begun their racial profiling, law enforcement has as well. CNN reported that investigators were searching for a “darker-skinned or black male with a possible foreign accent in connection with the attack.”

But as the state responds with fear, force and racism, we have seen heartening responses as well. Many people flocked to hospitals to donate blood for the victims of the explosions. Businesses opened their doors to people who wanted to gather, rest and charge their phones. Many people reflected on social media about how experiencing this violence so close to home gives them a new understanding of the bombings that Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Palestinians and others–so much of which is caused and supported by the U.S. government–deal with on a regular basis.

And, of course, there were the first responders who rushed to the carnage in Copley Square to save lives and help the wounded. Among these was our friend Carlos.

Carlos and Melida Arredondo are well known to antiwar activists, participants in Occupy Boston and countless others who have been blessed to work with them. The Arredondos lost both of their sons–Alex, a U.S. Marine, to the occupation of Iraq, and Brian to suicide. The Arredondos carry their grief from these losses alongside their hope for a better world and their tireless activism to fight for it. Carlos can be seen in news photos from yesterday, helping the wounded, when he was wounded from shrapnel himself.

We hope that this is the example that inspires Bostonians–that people will reject more policing in the name of “security,” reject racist fear of Arabs, Muslims, South Asians and immigrants, and instead, face this tragedy with courage, compassion and a resolve to work for a world free of violence and oppression.

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On Sunday the Gillard government finally announced their plans to fund education writes Heidi Claus in Socialist Alternative. The ALP is promising only $2.4 billion a year, over six years. The money is not coming from higher taxes on the mining companies or the banks or the business executives; it’s coming from the universities. The federal government has announced “savings” from higher education of $2.8 billion dollars. Broken down this involves:

Federal Minister for School Education Peter Garrett

• The conversion of the student start-up scholarship to a HECS loan (a cut of $1.2 b) – this is the approximately $1,000 given to uni students each semester if they are on AUSTUDY (i.e. are poor). It is supposed to pay for start-up costs like text books, but most students just use it to live on as they can’t afford to buy text books when they are living on mi-goreng noodles.
• The removal of the 10 percent up-front payment HECS discount ($228.5 m) – this is almost supportable as it’s generally only the rich who can afford to pay their HECS fees up front, but it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the start-up scholarship cuts that affect the poor.
• “Efficiency dividend” (i.e. cuts) of 2 percent for 2014 and 1.25 per cent for 2015 ($900 m) – this is actually a gift to all the university Vice-Chancellors who, like at Sydney University, are in or about to go into enterprise bargaining negotiations, and are driving down the conditions of university workers in the process. This cut enables them to cry poor and argue that they can’t afford wage rises or to put workers on permanent contracts instead of ever increasing the numbers of casual staff.

It all makes perfect sense: take money out of universities to provide better primary and secondary education so that students can make it to university… oh wait, hang on…

On top of the cuts to higher education, the government will fund the Gonski spending through other cuts, like reducing the threshold of self-education expenses students can claim on their tax return and also by ending funding to things like the Building Education Revolution and the Laptops in Schools program.

The Gonski review that everyone’s referring to now was released in February last year. It recommended that every student, regardless of the system of education they are in (including the richest private schools!), should be funded at a base level – the School Resource Standard (SRS). On top of the base SRS funding, schools would receive a “loading” if they teach students from poor and disadvantaged backgrounds, for Indigenous students, students from language backgrounds other than English (LBOTE) and students with special needs and disabilities.

In 2009 when the Gonski report was first calculated, the amount of extra funding that would be required to bring all schools in Australia up to this standard was $5 billion a year. In today’s terms, that figure is $6.5 billion a year. It is clear that Gillard’s announcement comes nowhere near the Gonski recommendations.

What is also clear is that there will be even more spending on elite private schools (as Gonski recommended), which will receive $1 billion out of the $14.5 billion, in order to ensure that “funding [is] maintained” to the nation’s wealthiest families. Catholic schools will also receive $1.5 billion, leaving $13 billion for public schools. Richard Teese, director of the Centre for Research on Education Systems at Melbourne University,argues that we “risk emerging from the most thorough review of national school funding with an architecture of advantage and disadvantage that is even stronger than when we began.” Not a glowing endorsement for what others claim is an historic moment in the way education is funded.

The federal funding announcement is paltry compared to what is needed. So you would imagine the Australian Education Union (AEU) would be jumping up and down in rage After all, they have put all their eggs in the Gonski basket, spending millions of dollars on the “I give a gonski” campaign, and the government has given us less than half what we expected.

You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

In response to the announcement in Canberra on Sunday, AEU president Angelo Gavrielatos had only praise for Gillard’s plan. “It’s a historic announcement… [P]ublic schools are the big winners.” When asked about the fact that the funding is “considerably lower” than the Gonski recommendation, Gavrielatos clarified that he hadn’t actually looked at the numbers, and then reiterated how great Gillard’s announcement was. Gavrielatos put on a show though: he had small school children in Gonski t-shirts lined up to greet the PM and the Education Minister for the announcement.

If Gillard’s Gonski is not looking so great for public school students, it gets worse for teachers. In order to get the federal funding, state governments have to sign onto the National Plan for School Improvement, the details of which can be found at betterschools.gov.au. Under this plan:

• Teachers will have to jump through more and more hoops to qualify and maintain qualifications as teachers.
• We will be assessed annually by our principals and have to demonstrate our improvement with student test results and parent and student feedback among other things, none of which are an accurate reflection of “teacher performance”.
• Our schools will need to become more “devolved” with principals having more power to hire and fire (removing workers’ rights and making it harder to be a union activist) and being expected to balance the books, i.e. become managers rather than educators.
• More students should expect to have individual learning plans and individual feedback. These are things we would like to be able to do now, but there is no indication that teachers will be given any relief from face to face teaching or given the smaller class sizes that we would need to be able to provide greater support.
• Nothing is said about reversing the casualisation of teachers and the lack of permanency, which is a pre-requisite for the kinds of performance gains suggested by Gillard’s plan.
• There will be bonuses for high performing teachers – based on NAPLAN results perhaps? – encouraging teaching to the test, and disadvantaging teachers in schools with disadvantaged students.

The trajectory is everything teachers’ unions have been arguing against: a move toward performance pay, increased workloads with no increase to wages, and the devolution of Local Schools, Local Decisions in NSW and as already implemented in other states like Victoria and WA, all these things are part and parcel of Gillard’s plan.

I am a public high school teacher in NSW. I’m a temporary teacher and am about to start working at my fourth school since I started teaching in 2012. My working conditions are poor, which means my students’ learning conditions are also poor. These announcements tell me that my job is going to get harder, and the resources to do it are not going to be there, despite the sloganeering. So enraged was I by the announcement that I did something I’ve never done before: I defaced a union campaign t-shirt. I changed “I give a gonski” to read “I don’t give a gonski, we need to fight for public education.”

My union needs to stop praying for politicians to “do the right thing”. Instead, we need to start campaigning where it’s going to have some impact. I’m sick of standing at railway stations asking random passers-by to sign a petition calling on the state government to “fund Gonski”, wearing this stupid lurid green t-shirt. I want to go back to wearing my red t-shirt that says “NSW Teachers Federation, fighting for public education”, and I want to be out on the streets with my co-workers and my students, demanding decent funding for public education. I can’t go through another election campaign with my union being a suck for the ALP. We need to fight Gillard now if we are going to stand a chance against Abbott in power.

Our message to Gillard should be “Too little, too late. Now tax the miners to fund public education.” And to our own union leaders, “Stop being sucks for Labor. They’ve screwed us yet again.