En Passant

Bill shorten has announced a crackdown on 457 visas to protect ‘Australian jobs’ against, shock horror, foreigners.  This is Labor’s attempt to re-engage rhetorically with its working class base after 33 years of neoliberal neglect marrying the fear of the other with workers’ fears about job losses and rotten pay.

First, what are 457 visas?  As the Western Community Legal Centre says in its recently released report Migrant Voices Must Be Heard these are the visas where ‘a person … has been sponsored by their employer to work for up to four years. Only workers with skills listed on the Skills Occupation List are able to access this visa.’

Who gets them? As Uma Patel from the ABC says, there are 94,890 people on these visas, and the number has been falling year one year since2013 when Labor restricted their availability. Patel goes on to say:

‘There are a range of different occupations on the [Skilled Occupations] list from different salary levels and different education backgrounds, including neurologists, midwives, cabinet makers and lift mechanics.

‘In the last financial year, the largest amount of visas were granted to cooks.’

The primary visa holder can also bring their family. These family members can be granted secondary 457 visas with a right to work or study in Australia. In March 2016 there were 79,624 such secondary 457 visa holders.

The Australian ruling class, and the Labor Party, have a long history of othering foreigners. From the White Australia Policy in 1901 to Keating locking up refugees in 1992, and Labor governments and Labor oppositions since then engaged in a race with the conservatives to the bottom of the cess pit on demonising, de-humanising and torturing refugees, Labor’s history is among other things a long slow dance with sometimes crude, sometimes sophisticated, racism, xenophobia and othering.

Labor’s proposed crack down on 457 visa holders is a more sophisticated version of othering. It has down this before. In 2013, before it lost government, and in an attempt to keep some of what it perceived to be its voting base onside, Labor tightened the 457 requirements and this led to a fall in the number of holders over the years since then. Grant Wyeth explained the reasons for Labor’s 457 bashing in the run up to the September 2013 election well when he said:

‘Foreigners are always a great group to bash come election time.

‘Hardheads in political war-rooms think only of votes, and so those without a vote can be routinely abused, regardless of the positive contribution they make to the country.

‘With the Coalition having a firm hold on the vilification of asylum seekers, Labor have had to go looking for a different group of foreigners to disparage. ‘

Nothing has changed. Labor today hopes its crackdown will appeal to two, sometimes overlapping, constituencies – workers worried about jobs and poor pay and racists who blame the other for all the problems of the world, including job losses, falling wages, unsafe work conditions and the like.  It is the strategy of Donald Trump. It is also in capitalist terms economic nonsense.

John Howard introduced 457 visas in 1997 to address specific skills shortages. There are two elements to this. Historically Australian capitalism has been built on the import of capital and labour. For much of its history that importation has been regulated. For foreign capital for example that has been behind tariff barriers and oversight or outright banning of some forms of capital investment like foreign banks setting up here. For ‘foreign’ labour the regulatory framework was the White Australia policy.

The post war reconstruction and nation building program of both Labor and the Liberals saw some loosening of the restrictions to allow immigrants from Southern Europe to emigrate.  The integration of the Australian economy into the global economy, begun under Hawke and Keating, further relaxed both entry rights for foreign capital (including allowing in foreign banks and floating the $A) and ‘foreign’ labour.

Then there is the skills shortage. It has always existed, in part because of Australia’s history as a settler colonial state. Today there are not enough skilled people in Australia in a range of industries. This is in part a result of underfunding of education (including skills training) in Australia. This has been made much worse in recent years by both increased attacks on the Technical and Further Education sector and its quasi-privatisation.

Of course there are major problems with the way 457 visas operate. Giving effective life and death control to employers over workers through linking the visa to employment with that boss is one. So too is the requirement to pay at least $53,900, a seemingly positive measure.  That pay is meant to ensure the skilled worker has enough pay to survive on. However it has not changed since 1 July 2013.  Secondly, and keeping the minimum pay of $53,900 in mind, employers must pay the worker ‘the equivalent to that which would be paid to an Australian worker, performing the same role.’  Evidence of such compliance include awards. The problem is that although enterprise agreements are also evidence, if there is no equivalent Australian employee, or they are not on an enterprise agreement, the award will be lower than the pay rate in the enterprise agreement.

Many of the workers do not speak English or have poor English skills, do not know of their legal rights and have no access to advice or to unions.

There is more open rorting going on, with one worker describing the conditions as being like forced labour camps, like slave labour.  Underpayment, long hours with no overtime, renting hovels and paying for food from the employer at exorbitant rates, sexual harassment if not abuse, getting sacked for raising questions about pay or hours or rotten living conditions … The list goes on.  Getting sacked, or the threat of it, keeps many workers in line since they lose the 457 visa if they are not working for the employer who sponsored them to come to Australia.  If they do leave the job or are sacked many become undocumented workers on low pay and rotten conditions.

This image from a great Fairfax report by Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker on the abuses in the fruit picking industry captures the reality for many migrant workers.

L-NP MP George Christensen, a speaker at a Reclaim (white) Australia rally, has, in between criticising Shorten for hypocrisy, called for an end to 457 visa holders working in the Central and North Queensland regions, to ‘create’ Aussie jobs.  Pauline Hanson has claimed Labor’s crackdown on 457 visas has been inspired by One Nation.

None of this should surprise us. Nationalism and racism are bedfellows.

Of course Labor says its 457 visa crackdown does not discriminate against anyone. But what they are doing is setting ‘Australian’ workers against foreign workers.  And some Australians will see Labor’s crackdown in black and white terms. Inspired by Trump’s success, but unlike his fog horn, Labor is dog whistling.

Most 457 visa workers for example come from China or India.  Australia’s cruel refugee policies are not discriminatory either. Except of course white tourists who come by plane and overstay their visas aren’t locked up in concentration camps like boat people are.

A few years ago the building union, the CFMEU, held a community picket of a site to support poorly paid Korean workers on 457 visas in Canberra.  They have employed people with various language skills to relate to workers on building sites.

Labor thinks it is on a winner with its Australia First propaganda. Expect to see much more Aussie jobs rhetoric and dog whistling from the ALP. Of course, like Trump, most of this will be verbiage without action.  Where was Labor for example when the car industry was shutting down? Nationalisation anyone? Workers taking them over anyone?

Labor, rather than dog whistling about foreign workers, could make some real changes to industrial relations law in Australia. The first one would be to enshrine the right to strike at any time in legislation. The second would be to allow unions access to all workers to explain pay and conditions, and in the building industry and other dangerous workplaces, to enforce safety standards. Third they could develop a vision for a green and jobs creating revolution across Australia, committing to move to a fully renewable energy society by 2016, along the lines for example of something Beyond Zero Emissions Stationary Energy Plan proposed – $400 bn over ten eyars to make Australia a totally renewable society.  Finally how about Labor propose taking over major industries collapsing and urge workers to take over those car and other plants and turn them into areas that produce socially useful products like solar plants, solar panels, wind towers, buses, trains and the like as part of a vision for Australia for jobs for all who want to live here and protect the environment at the same time.

We must wear a poppy

We must wear a poppy
Today
That is the new way
Of freedom, evidently
Where men and women died
For that lie
And the rich victors
Retain their property
To spread their wealth
Footnoted democracy
And freedom

We join in
To beat them,
The enemy, just like us
Hard working
In God we trust
And our leaders
We are their bleeders
The bled, the maimed
The dead (of our side of course)

We worship a man
With a horse
A pacifist,
Wobbly against war
The whore of the system,
Broken, bespoken,
It fits amid the mud and blood
Of profits’ shore
We cry, no more,
The soldiers rebel
Send the generals
To their hell
And the warmongers to perfidy
We cannot be free
In their chains

Our aims must be
New, a new society
Where war is memory
For its past
Not the last but one
But none
None at all
Join before we fall
To the khaki call
Of rich men past and present
Intent on our descent
Into the fields of death
Where poppies die
And lie amid the ruins
Ruined,
Like young men with arms
Killing young men with arms
Presented as charms
What sick society is this?
Give it the kiss
Of death.

Did American workers fall for a False Messiah? (Image via https://billmuehlenberg.com/)

American workers have been sold a pup, says John Passant in Independent Australia. As the Great Recession morphs into the Long Depression, their False Messiah will throw them under the bus.

To read the whole article click here. Trump the False Messiah: Will he become the workers’ anti-Christ?

No one expected Donald Trump to become the Republican nominee, and his election victory is a bigger shock–but the first step is to understand why and face it squarely write the editors of Socialist Worker US.
 

AN ENDLESS, miserable presidential campaign is over–with the most miserable result imaginable.

Several readers of Socialist Worker with young children commented late last night on social media that they put their kids to bed with assurances that the monster wouldn’t win–and they dreaded explaining how “It” could happen. We all know how they feel.

Donald Trump’s victory exposes how decrepit the U.S. political system has become after decades of two-party oligarchical rule. This is a man with ties to the racist far right, a pathological narcissist who entered the race intending to boost his media brand, and who horrifies and disgusts not just millions of working people, but a majority of the American ruling class.

And still he won the election for president of the United States. What a testimonial for the “world’s greatest democracy.”

It will take days and weeks to process the full implications of Donald Trump being elected the next president of the United States. No one expected Trump to win the Republican nomination, and the same is true about the presidency. For sure, his victory will upend politics in the U.S. and internationally in ways we can’t predict.

There will be a lot of talk in the next weeks about how the election proves the U.S. is irretrievably right wing and backward. Trump’s victory is certainly due in part to his appeals to nationalism, immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia. The far right has been emboldened by Trump’s campaign, and the left will have to figure out how to confront it.

But if we’re going to succeed in that challenge and build a stronger left, we have to have some clarity about what led to this terrible result. Socialist Worker will try to take up these questions with all the depth they require in the coming days–but some initial conclusions are clear.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

HAVING ABANDONED even rhetorical appeals to give confidence to the Democratic Party’s more liberal base so she could chase the votes of moderates and even dyed-in-the-wool, conservatives, Clinton left the field open to Trump to claim that his reactionary program would benefit the majority of people who have seen their living standards stagnate and decline, even in the period of “recovery” from the Great Recession.

The liberal base of the Democratic Party came through for Clinton. According to exit poll data, she won 88 percent of the Black vote and 65 percent from Latinos. It was the swing voters who Clinton courted that stuck with Trump.

Trump may well end up losing the popular vote–his victory was assured by the undemocratic Electoral College, enshrined in the Constitution by slave owners, that gives outsized influence to traditionally conservative rural states.

Still, with everything we know about him after this campaign, how could so many people vote for Trump?

His promises to stand up for the “little guy” are blatant lies to camouflage an agenda that will help the 1 Percent with gigantic tax giveaways and the like. But Clinton’s promise of continuing an intolerable status quo didn’t sound like a real alternative to people at the end of their rope.

Bernie Sanders’ left-wing campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination nearly upset Clinton by making an appeal to workers to challenge what he called the “billionaire class.” Clinton, who has spent her political career ingratiating herself to that class, managed to bury Sanders’ message–and rather than continue his “political revolution,” Sanders abandoned his opposition to whip up support for Clinton.

Clinton and Sanders and much of the rest of the political establishment, some Republicans included, criticized Trump’s ugly outrages. But because they never acknowledged the real economic grievances that he built his campaign around, they left the way clear for Trump to channel legitimate bitterness into scapegoating and scaremongering.

Even when Clinton did counter Trump’s racism, woman-hating, immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia, it rang hollow. As a personification of the insider Washington political establishment, Clinton bears responsibility–often directly–for policies that led to the mass incarceration of African American men, the sweeping deportation of immigrants and endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that have fueled anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

RACISM HAS been central to the Trump campaign since his speech announcing his candidacy, when he referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists. But while the open bigots of the so-called alt-right have been a notable element of Trump’s supporters, racism alone can’t explain why states and counties that voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012 turned away from the Democrats this time.

Some of those voters were in states that Hillary Clinton was expected to win, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where Trump scored points with his argument that U.S. workers lost jobs due to free trade deals and rising immigration. It was another grotesque lie. But the truth–that growing economic hardship is due to rising inequality that benefits the 1 Percent–wasn’t something that Hillary Clinton wanted to talk about.

The stomach-turning irony of this outcome is that Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic establishment figured Trump would be their ideal opponent. He’s a buffoon and too extreme to be elected, they told themselves. All Clinton would have to do to beat Trump is “appear presidential” and tout her “preparedness” and “experience.”

But the Democratic Party brain trust didn’t understand what happened during the eight years of the Obama presidency, when they responded to the Great Recession by bailing out the banksters while doubling down on their commitment to neoliberalism and austerity cutbacks that balanced budgets on workers’ backs.

The living conditions of many millions of everyday people in the U.S. have deteriorated or stagnated. So when Trump decried the loss of decent-paying jobs and accused Clinton and the Democratic Party of throwing people to the wolves, some segment of the population believed–wrongly in fact, but with a feeling of urgency–that someone understood their pain.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton’s response to Trump’s pledge to make America great again was: “But wait, America is already great.”

When it came time to cast their ballots, enough people in the right states begged to differ. They decided to punish the establishment politician in favor of the outsider.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

THE CONVENTIONAL media wisdom was stunned by this outcome, and so there will be a scramble for simple answers to explain away Election 2016: a fundamentally conservative population; the irretrievable racism of all white workers; even the impact of the Green Party’s Jill Stein, whose “crime” was to rightly insist that the greater evil can’t be stopped by championing the lesser evil.

We should refuse to accept those simple answers. One of the first challenges for the left will be to explain what happened in all its complexity. But there are many more challenges to come.

As the radical left warned, in defiance of calls for moderation from liberals, the right wing has been emboldened by Trumpism and needs to be confronted. But we can’t let the people most responsible for this mess point the finger at the most reactionary bigots. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party need to answer for why they had nothing to offer as an alternative to Trump’s scapegoating.

We have a lot of work to do, starting today, to build a real left alternative that recognizes the misery and suffering so many people endure; that confronts these conditions politically and practically; and that builds organization capable of turning the tide.

Large numbers of people are already horrified by Trump and will be determined to take action to show their opposition. More will be spurred to act by the inevitable outrages of an arrogant right wing that oversteps–that’s a lesson from all of the right’s victories in recent elections. In the end, at least some of those who voted for Trump will come to understand that they abhor what he stands for.

But for now, we need to start building that resistance from the ground up. The first step is to understand the lessons and implications of this election and face them squarely–and then we move on from there.

Image via woroni.com.au

In Independent Australia I discuss freedom of speech amid calls from right-wing politicians and the Murdoch media for the Turnbull Government to repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. To read the article click here. Abolishing Section 18C: AKA free speech for the few

There are a couple of extra points that I couldn’t address for space reasons or because Triggs hadn’t yet rebutted Turnbull’s lies about the role of the Human Rights Commission on Monday. She has now done so. Here is the link to Triggs telling the truth about the PM misleading the public about what role the Human Rights Commission played. The report says, among other things:

Professor Triggs said the commission had no power to instigate court proceedings and revealed she had been urging the government to introduce a higher threshold before the commission was obliged to investigate hate speech complaints.

“The Prime Minister was deeply misleading in suggesting that we had brought the case. We never bring cases and we are purely passive in that sense. We don’t prosecute, we don’t pursue, we don’t instigate proceedings,” she told Fairfax Media.

“The judge did not make any comment on the Human Rights Commission and made no such extreme, provocative statement.”

Two other matters might be of interest. Three cases went to Court. The others were settled. It appears those accused of breaching section 18C (apart from the 3 who went to the Federal Court because their cases could not be conciliated) made payments to the complainant to settle the case.

Second, in the same edition of the Australian crowing about the ‘failure’ of section 18C and calling for it to be abolished or gutted, Chris Merritt reported that The Australian had successfully defended a permanent stay of defamation proceedings bought against the newspaper by alleged anti-Semite and alleged Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben. The Court accepted that the only reason for Toben bringing the case was to give himself a platform for airing his views. So, the Australian believes, rightly in my opinion, it is appropriate not to give air time or space to an alleged anti-Semite and alleged Holocaust denier. The Australian is not alone. As Jeff Sparrow points out in relation to Andrew Bolt

Remember, back in 2014, Bolt repeatedly denounced Fairfax for publishing a Glen Le Lievre drawing about the Gaza war, an image widely criticised (in my view, correctly) for employing, wait for it, racial stereotypes. So was Bolt part of the anti-cartoon Illumanati only three years ago? If it was wrong to publish illustrations of hook-nosed, conspiratorial Jews back then (and it was), what makes Leak’s drawings of thick-lipped, low-browed Aboriginal men clutching cans of VB acceptable?

Why then does the Australian support gutting section 18C? My article in Independent Australia (linked above) sets out some of the reasons.

There are others. Could it be because Leak is one of theirs and there are acceptable levels of racism the ruling class can and will use but that anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are not part of the armory of the ruling class? At least not yet.

I think the answer is that the new ‘anti-Semitism’ for the ruling class is Islamophobia. The new cudgel of fear and hate and division, is, apart from always bashing Aboriginal people, bashing Muslims, and that is likely to get a more receptive response from large numbers of Australians than, given its horrific history, straight out anti-Semitism.

There is something else in all of this that I did not have space to cover – it is its own article – but which Jeff Sparrow (linked above) highlights. He said in part:

For what it’s worth, I don’t see the Racial Discrimination Act as a particularly great tool in the fight against racism, for all sorts of reasons – not least that it focuses attention away from deeper structural problems.

……

Yet a reliance on section 18 for redress means that anti-racists look to the courts for solutions, instead of, say, taking to the streets or organising a picket. To put it another way, legalistic solutions are demobilising, counterposed to the sorts of social movements that have won real change in the past.

I allude to that in my article. I finish off by saying:

Let’s be clear. When the ruling class talks about free speech it means free speech for themselves and for those who echo reinforce their agenda and their system. We ordinary people have won free speech in the past. With the ongoing systemic denial of our voice and the increasing encroachment of rights for workers, we will have to begin the fight all over again.  

Free speech for all, not just the one per cent.

Warning! This is a paid poetical ad. If anyone wants a signed copy of my first recently published book of poetry, Songs for the Band Unformed, published a month ago, personal message me on Facebook for details or email me at en.passant@bigpond.com

 
‘It’s rare to receive a collection of poems that explore the possibility of rhymes in their form. These poems wear their rhymes lightly, and with grace, as they make their way through moods and movements, through the passions and anxieties of contemporary life.’ – Jen Webb

‘Here is a sublime collection of poetry, allowing us to reflect on humanity, in its nakedness, tenderness and brutality, carrying us from elegy, dirge, lament to triumphant symphony, from the minor fall to the major lift, with the well tuned dissonances and harmonies of the pen of John Passant.’ – Mili Cifali, songwriter, composer, performer from the duo The Awesome

‘This is a collection of work for our times, sometimes bleak, hard, gritty; but indignant, mobilising and marching against the bombs and profits of injustice. With politically charged insight and humanity, these poems reflect on what is, and softly invoke reflections on what could be, shedding light on the unformed future that we make.’ – Tom Griffiths, Associate Professor of Comparative and Critical Education, University of Newcastle

You can also buy a hard copy or Kindle version through Amazon and other outlets, including the publisher Ginninderra Press.

images.theage.com.au

Some progressive and left-wing people have been bagging out the Melbourne Cup.

Some of this is elitist nonsense, the usual ‘bogans are bad’ bullshit. So called bogans are working class people. Their response to capitalism is to enjoy themselves in whatever way they can, including getting pissed and being noisy. Some might even bonk in ‘inappropriate’ places.

The Melbourne Cup is one of those days where the Australian working class outside Melbourne lets its hair down for the afternoon. In Melbourne the whole day is a holiday.

Historically the ruling class has cracked down ideologically and sometimes physically on working class drunkenness and lewdness because those ‘sins’ interfere with production and hence profits. No doubt across the front pages of the press on Wednesday there will be picture after picture showing the ‘debauchery’ at the Cup. This tut tutting has a purpose. Get back to work. Take lower pay. Work longer unpaid hours. Make profit for us.

For workers however days like Melbourne Cup are a time for less or no work and for dressing up, catching up with friends around a TV, maybe having a flutter on the race or going in a sweep. For some it is also about getting pissed.

It is their way of escaping for a few hours from the alienation that is capitalism. Certainly it is an alienated way of escaping alienation but short of a democratic, socialist revolution there is no solution to systemic alienation. The exploitation of workers (through the bosses expropriating unpaid labour in a normal working day) is at the heart of capitalism and that exploitation both creates profits and alienation.

Gambling is an important part of the day. This is the nonsensical idea that by putting a small stake on a  horse, or a greyhound, or football teams, or politicians, or whatever the gambling industry is pushing, will provide enough to escape from the necessity to sell our labour power to survive.

Gambling itself is a warped reflection of capitalism. With some variations on how it is done, a bookie or a betting agency takes  a slice of the money wagered for themselves and redistributes what is left to the ‘winners’.  That means the winners overall are the bookies and betting agencies, not the mug punters.

Some critics complain about the cruelty that is horseracing. That is true. Like greyhound racing, most horses do not survive for long. Many of the slow ones are sold to a knackery.  The fast ones are whipped, and often end up with problems like blood in their lungs, a common problem. When they finish racing many end up as dog food.

The problem is that those who complain about this cruelty do so generally without offering any alternative for those employed in the industry, or for the working class which enjoys horse racing. Least of all does looking down our noses and sneering at ‘the Melbourne Cup bogans’ help us win them to the side of human liberation and through that to the liberation of animals.  In fact it exposes an elitism that is not revolutionary but dismissive of workers and their ability as a class to change the world.

And yes, the bosses in the industry are often big business interests totally unscrupulous in their dealings with and treatment of workers in the industry and the public. A strong union with committed members could challenge that. A campaign by animal activists for better conditions for the humans in the industry offers a chance to win better conditions for the horses.

One of the joys of Melbourne Cup is the sense of community, of togetherness, of conviviality. We meet in pubs and clubs and workplaces across Australia to natter and chatter about inconsequential horse racing things and to whinge about work. We are together.

The real enemy is not workers letting their hair down for the Melbourne Cup. The real enemy is the government locking up innocent people on Nauru and Manus Island and attempting to ban refugees from ever coming to Australia. The real enemy is the bosses whose lack of safety concerns kills thousands a year at work, or who underpay us or cut our wages or sack us.

Raise a glass to the Melbourne Cup. Let’s work together to help create a society where every day is a holiday and a celebration, free from exploitation and alienation.

I backed the quinella using my tried and true form guide, connections to France no matter how obscure and anything even vaguely leftish.  That is analysis for you. And I drank cups of tea during the day, having in a previous life been a daily victim of temporarily escaping alienation. 

The Dreamworld deaths have shone a spotlight on systemic corporate negligence of safety issues, set to worsen if the ABCC Bill passes, I write in Independent Australia.

To read the full article click here. Unions, corporate self-regulation and safety: Is it a Dreamworld?