En Passant

I have just sent this to the Canberra Times:

I enjoyed Anthony Ricketts’ article on the rise of left-wing politics in countries like the UK, the US and Canada. (‘Voters given stark choices’ Times2 The Canberra Times 7 September 2015 page 1.)

I agree with his view that this left-wing alternative is not on offer in Australia. It is one of the reasons I am considering standing at the next federal election under the rallying cry: ‘Put a socialist in the Senate.’

However, as the rise and fall of SYRIZA in Greece as a left-wing party shows, the reality is more complex than just putting out different policies and explaining them clearly to people and winning support. In government SYRIZA proved itself a more successful tool of capital and implementer of austerity than the Conservatives were.

The same is true of the Labor Party here in Australia. The first and ‘best’ neoliberal government Australia has had was the Hawke-Keating duumvirate. Their neoliberal reasoning, policies and actions paved the way for Howard just as the neoliberalism of Rudd/Gillard/Rudd paved the way for Abbott.

One of the reasons for this capitulation of social democracy is that parties like the UK Labour Party, SYRIZA, and the Australian Labor Party are about managing capitalism, not challenging it. This means their options for action are limited by the health of the capitalist system.

In times of economic crises, the social democratic parties have again and again proven themselves to be just as adept at attacking workers and shifting the burden of the crisis of profitability on to the working class as their conservative counterparts. In fact, as the Accord in the 80s and 90s in Australia shows, they are sometimes better at it because they can convince the ‘leadership’ of the working class to accept their neoliberal prescriptions, with disastrous results for our class and for the trade union bureaucrats (or their sons and daughters) who sold us out.

While I think it is fantastic that the likes of Jeremy Corbyn are raising a whole range of issues from taxing the rich to re-nationalising public goods, from cutting billion from defence spending to supporting refugees and recognising Palestine, and by doing that giving hope to the millions disenfranchised by the tweedledee and tweedledum of neoliberal politics, we need to be clear that the real problem is capitalism, not just who manages it and how they do so.

In the long term the only way we can win a better society is by us, the vast majority, uniting to overthrow capitalism and organising production democratically to satisfy human need.

This is a good analysis with, you know, FACTS, not Tony Abbott lies, about Australia’s pathetic response to refugees. It is from the Refugee Council of Australia.

Tony Abbott claims we are number one per capita in taking in refugees. According to news.com.au ‘[The Prime Minister] also stressed numerous times that Australia takes in more refugees per capita than any other nation in the world.’ We are not.  We are not number one but number 27 per capita.

Here is what the Refugee Council said in July this year:

Does Australia, as is sometimes claimed, have the world’s most generous refugee program or is Australia’s response mean? What do global statistics tell us?

Australia’s annual Refugee and Humanitarian Program

In 2013-14, the Australian Government issued 13,768 Refugee and Humanitarian visas. Of these, 11,016 were offshore Refugee and Special Humanitarian Program visas and 2,752 were permanent Onshore Protection visas.[1] In 2014-15 and 2015-16, the total annual program remains at 13,750. The Australian Government expects to issue about 11,000 offshore resettlement visas (Refugee and Special Humanitarian) and 2,750 onshore permanent protection visas. In recent years, Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Program peaked at 20,015 places in 2012-13 but was cut back by 6,250 places in 2013. The Abbott Government has pledged to partially reverse its cut by increasing the program to 16,250 places in 2017-18 and 18,250 in 2018-19.

UNHCR’s global statistics for 2014

In June each year, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) releases its global statistics for the previous calendar year. The most recent statistics showed that, as at 31 December 2014, there were 19.5 million refugees around the world – 5.1 million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East under the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency and 14.38 million refugees around the world under the mandate of UNHCR. Of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, 3,262,960 were recognised as refugees in 2014 and 105,197 refugees were resettled from one country to another. In total, 3,368,157 refugees received initial protection through asylum processes or further protection through resettlement. The largest numbers given protection or resettlement were in Turkey (1,027,137), Lebanon (364,129), Afghanistan (283,575), Russian Federation (250,307), Ethiopia (235,833), Uganda (159,046), Cameroon (149,670), Jordan (133,924), Sudan (122,699) and United States of America (96,459).

Australian statistics for 2014

According to UNHCR statistics, in the 2014 calendar year (rather than the financial year), Australia recognised 2,780 asylum seekers as refugees. This was 0.09% of the global total, leaving Australia ranked 37^th overall, 46^th on a per capita basis and 62^nd relative to total national GDP. In refugee resettlement, Australia did much better. The arrival of 11,750 resettled refugees to Australia during 2014 accounted for 11.0% of the global total (third overall and first on a per capita basis and relative to total national GDP). In 2014, only 0.7% of UNHCR-mandated refugees were resettled.

The fairest comparison is to look at how the refugee recognition and resettlement within Australia’s total Refugee and Humanitarian Program compares on a global basis. By this measure, the 14,350 refugees recognised or resettled in Australia during 2014 made up 0.43% of the global total, with Australia ranked 22^nd overall, 27^th on a per capita basis and 46^th relative to  total national GDP.

The 2014 statistics are similar to those of the previous decade. In the 10 years to 31 December 2014, the 141,047 refugees recognised or resettled by Australia accounted 1.16% of the global total of 12,107,623) – with Australia ranked 23^rd overall, 27^th per capita and 46^th relative to national GDP. 

[1] Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Australia’s Offshore Humanitarian Program: 2013-14

STATISTICAL TABLES

TABLE 1:

Recognition and resettlement of refugees 2014

Recognition and resettlement of refugees 2014, by receiving country (ranked on a per capita basis)

Source: UNHCR 2014 Global Trends statistical annexes (Table 3).

TABLE 2:

Refugees recognised and resettled, 2005-14

Refugees recognised and resettled, 2005-14, by receiving country (ranked on a per capita basis)

Source: UNHCR 2014 Global Trends statistical annexes (Table 3).

This is a joint statement by revolutionary socialists from Turkey & Syria in Turkish, Arabic, and English (the latter pasted here).

No to AKP-US intervention, victory to the Syrian revolution!

Joining the imperialist coalition against ISIS, the Turkish state has begun to bomb Syria following its compromise with the US to open up the Incirlik airbase in return for bombing the PKK in Kandil.

As part of this agreement of joint action between the Ak Party and the US, by giving air support to some groups in the region they are working towards forming an “ISIS-free zone” in northern Syria.

We, socialists of Turkey and Syria, reject all political and military intervention of foreign powers to Syria; whether it is claimed against ISIS, Assad or the PKK.

For over a century the US leadership of western imperialism has turned the Middle East into a blood bath. The US and its allies aren’t the friends of the people of Syria, the Arab Spring uprising or the Kurds fighting for national rights.

They are the friends of reactionary regimes in the region, dictators and Israel.

The Ak Party is one of the political actors that paved the way for turning the Syrian Revolution into a sectarian civil war by supporting sectarian reactionary forces against democratic movements by both Arabs and Kurds in Syria.
Everyone who wants to see the end of ISIS should follow the way of Arab revolutions.

Meanwhile, before the catastrophical situation of Syrian refugees throughout the region and Europe, it is important to remind that the reasons of the internal and external exodus of the Syrian people are the war and destructions led by the Assad regime firstly and then the reactionary Takfiri fundamentalist forces as ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra, Ahrar Alsham and others, while reactionary Gulf petro-monarchies and Arab States have done nothing to welcome Syrian refugees on the opposite rejecting them despite their “rhetoric support”. An AKP-US intervention in Syria will only exacerbate this dramatical situation in Syria.

Therefore, we have no faith in the coalition of murderers. We believe in the ordinary people from Beirut to Baghdad who have taken to the streets for freedom against sectarian divisions and their rulers.

For real change in the Middle East, we are working for unity of those struggling for freedom from Aleppo to Kobane, those who defeated the government at Gezi and those who overthrew Mubarak at Tahrir.

While continuing to work together for this, we will do whatever we can to stop the Turkish and Syrian governments working in favour of the ruling classes.

No to Assad, Erdoğan, Obama and Baghdadi!
Victory to the Syrian Revolution!
Long live the unity of the international working class!
Revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (DSIP) of Turkey
Revolutionary Left Current of Syria

Take my hand

I cannot take your hand
Boy in the sand and surf
I cannot take your hand
And bring you to my earth

Power had the chance,
And did nothing but its dance
To the song of race
Know your place they yelled

Their helled shouts rise below
The waves that hold humanity
We all flee
The bombed city

Where the civilised
Rain freedom
Dressed in death
Nothing is left

But the dead
Upon our shores
Where walk the whores of power
Now is the hour

To rise, rise against
Their armies, of defence,
And the order that destroys
Children and their toys

And you and me
Our cause is free, to be,
The freedom you now have
We cannot grant to them

Our wishes
Cannot breath your kisses
Take my hand, here is my land
The casket of your dreams

(c) John Passant 4 September 2015

Will you walk with me?

Will you walk with me
Through the gentle hello
Where quiet duvet
Meets screamed pillow

Where the sun of evil
Wrestles the night of calm
And lock-stepped presence
Oils its balm?

Where the battles that challenge
The rattles within
Portend no end
Only next of kin

And the rising each day
Gives its way
To the penalty rates
That are life’s astray

Then will you walk with me
Through the gentle goodbye
Always questioning,
Never asking why?

(c John Passant 4 September 2015

The tears have stopped. They will start again.

Whether the drownings be in Australia’s seas or those near us, or in the waters off Europe or North America, there will be more, and more, and more.

There are, according to the UN Human Rights Agency, the UNHCR, almost 60 million people around the globe who are forcibly displaced.

The increase over the last few years is because of the civil war in Syria. Assad’s military attacks on his own people to destroy the revolution has driven millions out of their homes and their country.  Those thousands now fleeing Turkey for Europe every day are the result of those attacks.

The US led invasion of Iraq in 2003 killed over 1 million Iraqis and saw millions displaced or flee the country. It also set in train a series of events which led to the rise of ISIS.

Most refugees are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, all the result of Western intervention, imperialism and interference.

Key American allies in Europe are part of the US axis of imperialism. There is a responsibility on them to accept the refugees they have created.  Many of the European ruling class will try to bring down the shutters and stop the refugees.

There is an alternative to end this misery immediately. Europe’s ruling class could open its borders. It could commit to accept the ten million refugees currently in the Middle East. It could send processing teams to refugee camps there to quickly process them for re-settlement in Europe. It could send its navies and air forces to transport the millions to Europe. It won’t.

There is no migrant crisis. There is a crisis of imperialism, of intervention, of capitalism.

End the cycle of death and tears. Stop invading countries, bombing them and supporting dictators.Open the borders everywhere.

I looked into your eyes

I looked into your eyes
The other day
Perhaps for the first time
In all those years
Since I caressed your wine
I have not remembered
Your soul
Not been able to
Or your laugh
A sad laugh
The other day
Nervous, in a way
Like your talking
You were mourning
Life given, life torn
Mother taken
Borne aloft
This is the cost
Of life
I looked into your eyes
The other day
Was it for
The last time?

(c) John Passant 3 September 2015

City Limits 3 CR Interview

‘On this episode we talk to Dr Phil Griffiths from the University of Southern Queensland about what the environmental consequences of a worldwide minimum wage of US $15 an hour would be. Then we discuss the latest proposed federal tax changes with John Passant.’

To listen to our 30 minute interviews, click here.

The 7-Eleven business model is now obvious. Employ vulnerable people who are for example on student visas and get them to work say eight hours and only pay them for four. You judge they won’t complain for fear of losing their jobs and their student visas.

Maybe this model, under which the franchise owners get 57% of the gross profits from each store, and each individual franchisee 43%, helps explain quite a lot. For a start, one analysis of the situation shows that if proper wage payments were made then in a typical 7-Eleven situation the franchisee’s net profit would fall from $90,000 to $40,000. Who else benefits from these arrangements?

Australia has this Fair Work (FW) bureaucracy to regulate unions and workers and ostensibly to keep an eye on rogue employers. One of the two Fair Work bodies has the infamous building and construction group in it.

So where was this FW bureaucracy when the 7-Eleven workers needed them? Nowhere to be seen.

Now some of you might object that they can’t police everyone, but just how many rotten employers has this union and worker strangling bureaucracy actually caught and successfully prosecuted? How many building bosses for example are in jail for killing or maiming their workers by taking short cuts to save costs? None.

If the FW head kickers did any risk assessment, shouldn’t companies that employ many many foreign workers and students, and which operate 24 hours a day, be at the top of their list for checking? Rather than only reacting when Fairfax and ABC expose the 7-Eleven scandal – the FW Ombudsman is now looking into the abuses – why not be proactive?

Certainly the infamous Border Force uses foreign worker numbers as a criteria in raiding brothels, so why not FW in looking, not for visa violators, but for abusive employers ripping off their workers? I will tell you why. Fair Work is not about policing bosses. It is about policing workers and unions.

That is why one arm of the FW bureaucracy – the Fair Work Building Commission – is suing an organiser with the building union, the CFMEU. His crime? Helping a suicidal worker. Here is what the union says:

‘The Abbott Government – through its partisan building industry watchdog, the FWBC – is pursuing the CFMEU at a four day trial starting in Adelaide today, for going onto a work site to conduct an EBA ballot and assist a worker at risk of suicide.’

It is all about priorities, and making sure that bosses don’t rip off their workers isn’t a priority for the Abbott government in Australia. Destroying the CMFEU, one of the few unions that fights to defend its members, is. If the government can do that it makes the climate even better to drive down wages and cut conditions in other industries across Australia.

7-Eleven is a microcosm of Australia’s industrial relations. What Abbott and his hired anti-CFMEU puppets in the Fair Work industry want is a cowered and compliant building workforce a la 7-Eleven. They want workers to work longer for less, just like the 7-Eleven bosses have been doing, with the same result – more profit for the bosses.

One of the reasons this 7-Eleven criminality could exist and prosper is that the union which has coverage, the SDA, is a bosses’ union and doesn’t organise let alone fight for workers. Only after the event has the union spoken up, to argue, appropriately, for an amnesty for those workers who did speak out. We don’t want these people deported for visa violations for example. They are heroes.

There is another reason the Ombudsman section of the FW panopticon only intervenes once the media expose the problems. 7-Eleven keeps downward pressure on wages in competing stores, and coupled with the complicity of the SDA leadership, delivers wonderful results for the bosses there. Low pay and long hours in the supermarket and corner store industry also puts downward pressure on wages in other industries.

As the witch hunt into unions continues its biased and political Inquisition, when will the union movement start to organise the industrial fight-back?

Another day, another idiot Minister. On Tuesday it was the turn of Peter Dutton, the Immigration Minister in charge of torturing children, women and men on Nauru and Manus Island.

As an aside do Ministers have a competition going to see who can stuff things up the best each day? After the border farce that was operation fartitude, I would have thought Dutton was the Brownlow medal favourite for the year. There was no need for him to go for a second attempt. But he did.

Dutton said in an interview: “The reality is that there is a bit of a jihad being conducted by Fairfax at the moment, [it’s] hard to get a good story up in Fairfax, [they’re] publishing stories without checking with my office, stories that are factually incorrect.” Poor diddums.

Not only that but the ABC and Fairfax media were in some grand conspiracy to ‘bring the government down.’

The only collaboration I can see between Fairfax and the ABC is in exposing the criminals from 7-Eleven who have ripped off vulnerable students and other workers by paying them about half the proper rate. It is so bad that, as one of their employees told ABC, “The business is very proud of itself and the achievements and the money it’s made and the success it’s had, but the reality is it’s built on something not much different from slavery.”

Maybe that is why Dutton is upset. The ABC and Fairfax have exposed the secretly desired future industrial relations agenda of the Abbott government, something that free trade agreements are now attempting by subterfuge to introduce.

If you want real evidence of a media jihad aimed at bringing down a government, then the Murdoch Empire’s attacks on the former Gillard and Rudd Labor governments are a pretty good example.

Here are some of the front pages from Murdoch’s rags.

When Labor complained about these attacks, the response of Abbott, the then Opposition leader, was classic.  ‘If you want better coverage, be a better government.’

Yes, that seems too to be true of this incompetent, authoritarian and thoroughly anti-worker Abbott government. The problem is that ‘good government’ in the age of global recession and falling profit rates requires capitalist governments to be ‘bad’, i.e. to attack workers and their jobs, wages and conditions, to cut public services and to undermine unions as the last bastion able to resist governments of austerity and reaction.

The basic social democratic wishes of workers for a better world, born of the iron law of capitalism that to survive workers have to sell their ability to work,  conflict with the needs of capital for less and less social democratic spending and the return of that surplus value not to the working class via the state but to capital itself.

Some of the anger against Labor and now the Liberals was driven by changes in the economy and the threat this poses to both the middle classes and the working class. Some of it is driven by cuts to public health, public education, public transport and other public goods and support. Some of it too is a reaction against incompetence. Tony Abbott is giving Billy McMahon a run for his money.

All of this means that even if Fairfax and the ABC were running a jihad against the Abbott government, if the Abbott government were actually reducing unemployment, improving public services,  and seeing real living standards improve, it wouldn’t influence voters. They’d still vote for a good government.

Of course they aren’t reducing unemployment, improving public services,  and helping real living standards improve. The crisis of global capitalism, now working its way through the Chinese and Australian economies, means we are doomed to have a cycle of bad governments.

In other countries this has seen a turn to alternative political expression of anti-austerity politics, sometimes built on or at least coming out of social struggles. SYRZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, the seemingly inexorable rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour Party, the strong position of Sinn Fein in Ireland, the support Bernie Sanders is getting in the US, are a few examples of this social democratic desire coming out.

There is no indication that any such outbreak will occur in Australia through the current major political currents, especially not through the ALP.  Labor  in Australia is in what some British might d call the death grip of Blairism. It might occur through mass struggles, but again none at this stage look like breaking out. The union movement, for example, continues to capitulate to the bosses over most attacks and is responding not with industrial action but once again with a tepid vote Labor campaign.

Until an anti-austerity mass movement and its political expression arise we will continue to have bad government after bad government in Australia. That new formation will I suspect only happen when we decide to take action as the working class against whoever is in power, the Liberals or Labor.