It seems the #albchoice campaign will be ongoing, as the religious fundamentalistsramp up their picket of Albury’s Fertility Control Clinic, and supporters of women’s rights continue to campaign in it’s defense.
I’ve setup something of an unofficial campaign website (hard to have an official website for a campaign with no formal structure or leadership) at Albury Choice.org. Please share it around.
A report I prepared on yesterday’s action in defence of the Engelhardt St Fertility Control Clinic:
Women’s rights are still under attack in Albury. Once again a group of anti-choice religious demonstrators have picketed the Engelhardt St Fertility Control Clinic in Albury, and attempted to intimidate and harass women seeking to access the clinic.
Today, for the second week in a row, the anti-choice group were met by a small and determined gathering, and their harassment was substantially disrupted.
I arrived at the clinic at ten am to find five of anti-choice set up out the front of the clinic. Three were across the road from the clinic loudly praying, whilst two others were on the foot path out the front of the clinic accosting women who were seeking to access the clinic. I was joined by chief executive officer of Women’s Health Goulburn North East, Susie Reid.
Women’s Health Goulburn North East is the overarching body that includes the Engleheart St clinic. Susie Reid is highly supportive of action to defend women’s rights, and to obstruct anti-choice campaigners seeking to harass women at the clinic. They are keen to see this become an ongoing action in defence of women’s rights to access a clinic free from harassment.
Others arrived over the following hour. Susie Reid demonstrated the art of intercepting and non-physically obstructing anti-choice harassers out the front of the clinic, impressive and highly effective!
The anti-choice group sought to engage us verbally on several occasions, but their inability to get any response frustrated them. We had one drive and stop abuser, who left when he realised he was being totally ignored.
The surveillance camera was back. This week the camera was in a car parked on the clinics side of the road, and it was pointed directly at the entrance of the clinic. The claims of the anti-choice group, that their camera is getting a broad picture of the street in case they are assaulted, are clearly bogus. It’s there to intimidate women seeking to access the clinic.
At 11.30am, having been obstructed from accessing the front of the clinic and harassing women, the anti-choice activists packed up and left. They took their camera with them.
We suspected this was a ruse, and it was. They returned in greater numbers. I still consider this a win. They were also forced to leave in order to get more supporters, and most importantly they did not bring the camera back.
There was one more occasion in which an anti-choice campaigner attempted to accost a woman leaving the clinic, but she was obstructed. The anti-choice group made no more attempts to interact with women coming or going from the clinic.
They then concentrated on praying loudly from across the street. At 3pm they packed up and left.
During the day there was some media interest. Prime News interviewed a number of people in the morning, and a journalist from the Border Mail arrived in the afternoon.
I consider the day a clear win for those of us defending women’s rights at the clinic. The anti-choice group clearly did not expect to be resisted for a second week. We received good support from passing drivers, and a number of people stopped to thank activists defending the clinic.
Three weeks ago we lived in a town where a group of religious fundamentalists could picket a fertility control clinic and harass women seeking help and advice with impunity. This is no longer the case.
This report is just one person’s account, and is no way an official position of any group, or the gathering as a whole! Also, ongoing updates are being posted to twitter using the hashtag #albchoice. Please share widely, no rights reserved.
Kieran Bennett.
Update: Here is Prime coverage of Thursday’s action, and here’s Win TV coverage of Thursday 19th of May’s action. The Border Mail has some articles on the issue here, here, here, here and here.
The Holsworthy base “terrorism”* trial began yesterday. Invariably the people charged in these things are pissed off Muslim men who’ve basically been entrapped by Australia’s security services.
In a 2006 Victoria Police terrorism investigation:
the officer arranged for the group’s alleged leader, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, to accompany him to Mount Disappointment, north of Melbourne, to test explosives in late 2004. The explosives had secretly been supplied by police, who covertly monitored the trip.
It’s too early to judge if that’s the case here, but already it doesn’t look promising:
In one of the calls Fattal tells an undercover officer, “if I find a way to kill the army, I swear to Allah, I’ll do it”.
The obvious question for civil liberties is, to what extent was this information solicited?
In the past, we’ve seen Police informers who have been little better than agents provocateur. Of course, as far as Australian law is concerned, all’s fair in love and terrorism investigations.
But there is a bit of good news, something that will undoubtably be overlooked in the coming News Ltd hysteria:
It’s also alleged the men were unhappy with advice they received from religious clerics in Australia that violence was wrong, so they sought a fatwah from a cleric in Somalia.
Yep, that’s right, you can go cleric shopping all you want in Australia, but the simple fact is that contrary to the claims of the Hun and others, the Australian Muslim community are a decent bunch.
*terrorism is a stupid word.
This ad will not be seen on your TV screens any time soon. Because Australia has some seriously restrictive laws preventing any reasonable discussion of euthanasia.
Australians overwhelmingly support the right of a terminally ill person to end their life. But a narrow religious minority do not, and once again their views are reflected in law, restricting our right to think, discuss and act for ourselves.
Watch it, share it, save it, re-upload it. It’s time for a renewed discussion of euthanasia in Australia, legal or not.
Three dead workers, more injured, all on one site in Adelaide.
In July, worker Brett Fritsch was killed when a steel beam fell from a soft sling on the Adelaide desal plant construction site.
Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union state secretary Martin O’Malley said too many companies used “soft slings” connected to cranes which, wrapped around steel beams, broke too easily, putting workers at risk.
“We’ve been arguing that the slings are not only inappropriate, but downright dangerous, for the past 25 years,” he said.
Mr O’Malley believed workers were instructed to use the slings “because they stop the steel from getting scratched”
It has now come to light that this was not the first death related to the desal site:
Allen O’Neil, 31, died on February 15 after accidentally inhaling diesel on December 12 last year at a site associated with the plant.
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A desal plant insider said the man was siphoning diesel into his tanker, allegedly because he was not provided with the proper siphoning equipment by construction consortium McConnell Dowell Abigroup.
And another worker, a truck driver, was killed on the Lonsdale Highway whilst transporting materials to the site.
Workers are dieing. And a strong union should stand up to prevent these deaths. But in Australia, workers in the most dangerous trade in the country don’t have the same rights as you or me.
Construction workers are subject to the punitive powers of the ABCC. The Australian Building and Construction Commission was established by the Howard government, and retained by the Rudd and Gillard governments, in order to crack down on the power of the construction unions.
When workers strike over safety, projects fall behind schedule. When workers strike over wages and conditions, bosses, developers and banks lose money.
The workers in the building industry went on strike so often because their industry is so dangerous, when a building site is killing people, it needs to be closed down until safety is addressed.
But apparently, our government values profits over lives.
And the results speak for themselves:
This is unacceptable. The ABCC must be abolished, union rights are a matter of life and death.
Related: Ark Tribe is fighting charges for refusing to cooperate with the ABCC. We need to rally behind every single worker singled out by this obscene process.
That’s not a knife, that’s a thousand dollar fine!
And it’s the justification for the most serious erosion of civil liberties the State of Victoria has seen in a hundred years.
Tonight the Victorian govts adverts promoting the new stop and search powers went to air. The ads end in the hilariously tongue in cheek tag line, “We will get you!”.
As experience elsewhere suggests, this attack on our rights is unlikely to get at the (grossly overstated) problem of violence on our streets.
Knives out in Victoria
In March this year Victorian Police got sweeping new powers to deal with knives. The two features of these new powers were the option to issue on the spot fines of $1000, and the power to “designate” entire areas for random searches.
Any “on the spot fine” system is fraught with risk, as Police issue penalties for matters they would have normally dealt with by other less formal means (a stern talking too for instance).
Now it’s a crime: This is no longer just a tool carried by ordinary citizens.
The fact that Police had to announce they intended to conduct random searches in an area was scant protection from the fact that the Police are now engaging in searches without the presence of a warrant or reasonable suspicion.
As Victoria heads into a state election in November this year, the law and order bidding war has only intensified.
The Victorian Government has opened the bidding by undermining a thousand years of English traditional liberty. The concept of a “warrant” has effectively been thrown out the window. All Police need to do is say they are looking for a knife.
According to Vic Police media:
From 22 August 2010
You can be searched for knives in a public place anywhere, anytime, with and without notice.
The Victorian opposition leader Ted Baillieu would go even further and enlist doctors and school principals into the ranks of the police state. This idiot would give school principals search powers, and mandate the reporting of stab wounds by doctors.
Are teachers educators, or police? Increasingly they are little different police. The relationship between educators and students from disadvantaged backgrounds will be further eroded.
As for Doctors, mandatory reporting injury types has always posed a health risk. Doctor patient confidentiality is a cornerstone of our health system. Surely we don’t want anyone not seeking treatment for a knife wound because they fear their doctor will contact the police.
And what justifies all this nonsense? The rate of knife crime in the state of Victoria has remained steady for a decade.
Electoral Enrollment
The 2006 Howard government changes to the federal electoral act have of course been struck down by the High Court. The then conservative government wasn’t too keen on young people voting, and the changes made it less likely they young people would be enrolled to vote in time for an election.
Victoria’s electoral act has recently changed in the opposite direction. Automatic enrollment.
The Victorian Electoral Commission will now automatically enroll high school students to vote on their eighteenth birthday. It will use information at the disposal of the education department to do this.
If voting is to be compulsory in Australia, this seems rational enough. But I am, as always, concerned when information gathered by the government for one purpose is used for another.
In good news:
The filter is looking pretty dead. Especially when after July 1 2011, the Greens will hold a solid balance of power in the Senate.
Sydney Morning Herald 1987, via Gary Foley
He was cooked to death in the back of a prison van. Neither the negligent white prison guards, nor the cost cutting private prison company responsible for his death will have to answer for it.
From the ABC:
No charges to be laid over prison van death
Western Australia’s Director of Public Prosecutions has informed the widow of an Aboriginal elder who died in a scorching prison van in 2008 that the officers involved in his death will not be charged.
In 1992 the Australian crime thriller Deadly told the story of a white cop sent to cover up the death of a black man in an outback community. In that delightful piece of utter fiction, the copper gave a damn, and set about finding out ‘the truth’.
In 2010, we just throw money at the widow and tell her where to shove justice.
Ngaanyatjarraku Shire president Damien McLean says the DPP told Mrs Ward in person that the prospect of a conviction – given all of the facts – was non-existent.
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The Ward family received a $200,000 interim ex-gratia payment from the State Government following Mr Ward’s death.
By way of comparison, when a white man is wrongfully locked up, he’s a good shot at a few million dollars.
At least there was a coronial inquest. I suspect the heroic actions of a few people of Palm Island contributed to that.
Palm Islander's worked together to deter future black deaths in custody.
If there was such a thing as justice, the charge for those who killed Mr Ward would be criminally negligent manslaughter.
“In order to establish manslaughter by criminal negligence, it is sufficient if the prosecution shows that the act which caused the death was done by the accused consciously and voluntarily, without any intention of causing death or grievous bodily harm but in circumstances which involved such a great falling short of the standard of care which a reasonable man would have exercised and which involved such a high risk that death or grievous bodily harm would follow that the doing of the act merited criminal punishment.”
Hows this for a possible manslaughter by criminal negligence prosecution?
In a small community in the Western Australian desert, on a day where temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius, two white prison guards working for a private prison contractor, locked an over weight 36 year old aboriginal man in a tin can for four hours.
They knew that the required air conditioning was not working, and that the monitoring camera was not working.
They did not perform required checks, allow required stops, or provide required water. He sustained third degree burns as the temperature of the metal exceeded 56 degrees, and died.
Of course, in this country a white jury would never convict. Townsville confirmed that.
In such circumstances, the Palm Island example seems perfectly legitimate. Perhaps there’s a private prison company who should double check the sprinkler system at their corporate offices? We can only hope.
Welcome to Police State Blues, a monthly digest focusing on the erosion of civil liberties and the criminalization of dissent in Australia.
Net filter
Gizmodo Australia has launched a campaign calling on new Prime Minister Julia Gillard to replace Communications minister Stephen Conroy with Kate Lundy in her expected cabinet reshuffle.
Gizmodo like Lundy because of her previous work as shadow Minister for IT, and because she has spoken out against a compulsory filtering regime.
But don’t get your hopes up. In her first round of interviews, Gillard said she wanted to “combat the alarming emergence of raunch culture”. She may see continuing Rudd’s war on the Internet as a way of pursuing this aim.
War on the Poor
Queensland’s Premier has announced a new “on the spot fine” regime for “public nuisance”. QUT law lecturer Peter Black initially supported the move, it would free up the QLD magistrates court, but then realised his mistake:
I was looking at it from my privileged point of view – if I was to be charged with a public nuisance offence – instead of from the perspective of the least privileged members of society. I now think it could be easily abused by police who could issue on the spot fines to members of the community who may not necessarily be aware of their legal rights to challenge the fine in the Magistrates Court.
And what is “public nuisance” exactly? Well that’s the astounding criminal activity of swearing in public, or otherwise annoying the police.
Bye bye Freedom of Association
It seems increasingly likely that South Australia’s “anti bikie” Serious and Organised Crime (Control) Act will be emasculated or even overturned in a coming High Court decision.
The High Court is hearing a challenge to a control order imposed on Sandro Totani, a member of the Finks Motocycle Club. New Chief Justice Robert French has described the control order regime as “draconian”.
…
It’s amazing the unity that external oppression can bring to a sub-culture. The fractious “outlaw” motorcycle clubs continue to campaign under the banner of their united front, the United Motorcycle Councils of Australia.
In this youtube video they compare the actions of Australian state governments to those of early Nazi germany and apartheid South Africa:
Normally I would call Godwin’s law, but at least the apartheid comparison is apt. The similarities between the South Australia and New South Wales anti-bikie laws bear striking resemblance to apartheids infamous “ban” laws.
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A key aspect of the Bikie laws has been the notion of “criminal intelligence”, or secret evidence. “Criminal intelligence” as a concept started to creep into Australian law in 2004, through so-called “anti-terror” legislation. Now you can find it everywhere, even in liquor licensing!
Many of the laws hinge on so-called criminal intelligence: material that can be relied on by police and government but kept secret from the people it’s used against on the grounds that its disclosure may jeopardise an operation or expose an informer.
…
What they call criminal intelligence can be notes by an officer, their personal views, speculation, or it can be information from an unidentified informant [who] might have an interest in saying something damaging about another person.“It’s the most unreliable information you can have. It’s the kind of information that would never usually be allowed in court.”
Sally Neighbour has the story. Unfortunately the High Court is unlikely to completely reject the notion of secret evidence, in light of previous decisions upholding various pieces of “anti-terror” legislation.
Snippets
There’s now a CrimeStoppers iPhone app, reminds me of this piece of graffiti for some reason.
Four peace activists arrested for trespass at the Swan Island base have been freed. Nine more have been arrested.
Ark Tribe’s case has been adjourned again, and is due to resume on the 22nd of July. The CFMEU are threatening nationwide strike action if Tribe is convicted. I suggest locating your nearest CFMEU active site, and heading on down to support any strike action if and when Tribe is convicted.
Melbourne Black has published an interesting history of squat campaigns in Melbourne.
Next Issue
The next issue is due to be posted on the 25th of July. Get your submissions in early!
When I graduate, I can expect to earn $16 an hour (Vic Award).
I am studying a Diploma of Community Services Work (formerly the Diploma of Welfare Work), and everywhere I go, people who work in the field tell me the pay sucks.
“We don’t do it for the money”. Crap pay seems to be the defining attribute of the Social and Community Services (SACS) sector.
SACS are outsourced government services. Small non-government organisations tender for grants, to provide everything from foster care to drug and alcohol support.
If you’re poor, odds are you or your family have received or will receive support from the Social and Community Services sector.
The people who work in the field are tertiary educated (well, we hope). They are in positions of immense importance for the lives of the people they work with. As a society we entrust them with the task of addressing the needs of societies most vulnerable people.
And they’re paid peanuts.
You are honestly better off pursuing a “career” in retail than training to enter the SACS sector.
And most of the people in the field, are planning to leave.
80% of SACS workers are female. The low pay might have something to do with this. SACS work is considered “womans work”, and the work of women is underpaid and undervalued in this misogynistic society.
That’s certainly what the Australia Services Union is campaigning on.
But I think the problem is more fundamental. The entire field is organised in order to maximize the exploitation of workers.
The trend towards government outsourcing over the past twenty years has given birth to modern the SACS sector. The argument embraced by government was that the private and NGO sector was more efficient than government. Greater results could be achieved for less cost, if the government “steered” funding towards the most competitive programs rather than engaging in direct service provision.
And it worked. The NGO sector “services” more people for less money.
NGOs engage in competitive tendering, competing for government grants to provide programs and services. They promise to help more people for less dollars.
And they do this by paying workers less.
When I speak to workers in the SACS field and ask about the pay, many see it as a fact of life. They work for non-profits, these non-profits rely on government funding, and the government never provides enough funding.
Dare I suggest it is because of the tendering process?
SACS workers seem loath to contemplate industrial action. If they achieved higher wages, fewer people would be helped, and what can their little organisation do to pay them more wages?
Everything about the organisation of SACS work undermines the pay of SACS workers.
1. Workers try and do more with less, help all the people they can, see more people than they are funded for, and worker longer than they are paid. They are trapped by their caring.
2. Organisations capitalize on this “efficiency” in the tendering process. If workers are making do with less, they can lower their bids. Their concern is securing the next round of funding, and that means bidding less than everyone else in the field.
3. The government sits back and reaps the rewards of all this “efficiency”. More people are being serviced (on paper) for less than ever before.
And the end result?
a. Most SACS workers are preparing their exit plan.
b. The skill level of the field lowers as organisations seek to fill low paid positions.
c. The service quality falls as workers are pushed to see more clients in less time for less money.
So the questions has to be asked, why the hell am I studying to enter this field? Well, I can only repeat the despondent words of everyone else I meet in the field, it’s not for the money…
What’s the solution? I don’t think it’s sending a few kisses to Julia Gillard as the ASU proposes. Only industry wide industrial action will send the kind of message that will have to be taken seriously.