Category: refugees

25 Sep

2 Comments

Declaration Antifascist Meeting 2013, 5-6 Oct Athens

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new photo

From ΚΕΕΡΦΑ / KEERFA- Movement United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat. The cold-blooded murder of 34 year old artist Pavlos Fyssas in Keratsini by thugs of the Golden Dawn in a Nazi ambush has sent shockwaves through millions of people, not only in Greece but around the whole world. Eight months ago, it was a [...]

31 Jul

2 Comments

Opinion polls, asylum seekers and Rudd’s strategy

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Rudd in charge

My latest piece at The Guardian, on how polls and public opinion have little to do with Rudd’s quest to establish political dominance: Again, the refugee issue clarifies Rudd’s approach. Central to his strategy is the use of regional (international) statecraft to establish authority. By having Indonesia expose Abbott’s plan to “turn back the boats” as a dangerous [...]

22 Jul

7 Comments

Making things happen: race, borders & the state

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QLD_CM_NEWS_RUDD_19JUL13_

One of the most striking things about the mainstream media coverage of Kevin Rudd’s “PNG solution” is how the discussion is mostly framed by ideas, policies and language that are increasingly relics of a past phase of the interminable “border security” debate. By outmanoeuvring opponents to both his Right and Left on this issue, Rudd [...]

20 Jul

29 Comments

Turning point: Asylum, Rudd’s realpolitik & the Left

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Because all aspiring boat people have the Fairfax newspapers home-delivered

Some moments have “turning point” written all over them. So it was when Liz and I started Left Flank three years and two weeks ago, when we highlighted a speech by Julia Gillard justifying her “lurch to the Right” on border security, and compared her language with that of John Howard — defending Hansonism — from 1996. [...]

01 May

3 Comments

The ALP & the politics of anti-immigration (both kinds)

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457-Scabs

Cross-posted from Larvatus Prodeo. Thanks to Mark Bahnisch for convincing me to return to this subject. I have to confess that I couldn’t bring myself to watch Monday’s Four Corners on the scandal of Australia’s “offshore” asylum seeker processing regime. I’m on the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition email list and read horrifying stories from Manus [...]

10 Mar

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Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

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Golden Dawn's MPs in the Greek parliament

  by KEVIN OVENDEN Below are the points, updated and a little amplified, I made in a contribution to the highly successful Unite Against Fascism conference in London on 2 March. The speech (and I’ve incorporated my summing up) was in a workshop with Petros Constantinou from Greece, Marwan Mohammed from France and Glyn Ford [...]

03 Aug

2 Comments

Asylum seekers, the Left and the case for open borders

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1974761

Left Flank has been away on holiday, but we’re back now. Below is a repost of my response to the sickening asylum seeker “debate” that happened in late June. Since then the issue has been shifted off to an elite “expert” committee which, as The Piping Shrike has pointed out, represents the exhaustion of the [...]

24 Jun

4 Comments

Paul Howes, foreign workers & the dead-end of union nationalism

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MUA protest against the Enterprise Migration Agreement

I’m reposting a recent piece I wrote for Overland Journal’s blog, in response to the debate over the contentious Enterprise Migration Agreement negotiated between the Gillard government and Gina Rinehart to allow the mining billionaire to import up to 1700 skilled workers from overseas. It was written as an open letter to Paul Howes after [...]

08 Apr

1 Comment

Misdiagnosed anxiety: David Marr and the politics of Panic

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invasion

Welcome to the first post of the new Left Flank. We’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, hosted at the lovely http://brellabee.com/ As you can see we’re still working on porting all the old comments from Disqus to the new platform. Time to change your RSS feed or subscribe by email (see the sidebar on the [...]