En Passant

So why hasn’t ASIO been all over those Australian Defence League idiots who have been in court a couple of times in the last week?

The kids of radical leftists will now be able to say that ASIO ate their homework. Any attempt by teachers to elicit information could then be met with the claim that to reveal more would render the children liable for prosecution under section 35P of the ASIO Act which makes it a crime punishable by ten years in jail to reveal details of ASIO operations. There is one small silver lining to these profound attacks on our freedoms.

ASIO, one of Australia’s secret police agencies, has raided the Canberra offices of Bernard Collaery, a lawyer for East Timor in its spying case against Australia. They have also arrested a whistle blower. Secret police – keeping Australian capital safe from all threats – East Timor, workers, Indonesia, Edward Snowden. Secret police – trampling over human rights, acting illegally. Abolish Australia’s secret police, the Australian equivalent of the Stasi.

Claims that ‘a convicted murderer’ has been held in low security immigration facilities are simply not true. This asylum seeker has never been convicted of murder or any specific terrorism charges. That much is clear from transcripts of the original trial. The only charge that is still outstanding against him is that he was a member of a jihadist organisation, and that charge is the subject of appeal.

A hunger strike is underway at the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation detention centre. More than two dozen asylum seekers have been granted refugee status but are being held indefinitely due to negative ASIO reports. The refugees say they will refuse food until a solution is reached. Most of these people have been incarcerated for between two and three years. Here are details of a vigil in support.

The refugees sent the following message to the media on Monday via the Tamil Refugee Council.

Hate speech is an important part of the armoury of control of the ruling class.

Youth unemployment might be 50% in inner Western Sydney suburbs but all is well because we can vilify refugees. In fact it isn’t, but the externalisation of hate diverts inchoate anger with the system towards the most powerless in society, people such as refugees.

The ASIO security checks are designed to create hysteria writes Benjamin Solah in Socialist Alternative. The government wants us to believe that those coming to our shores to seek protection are a threat. We should be clear that refugees are the ones under threat – not just from the countries that they flee, but from our government.

The only solution is to demand a complete scrapping of these checks and to demand that refugees inside detention are released into the community.

Forget about climate change. Forget about colossal storms, devastating droughts, and disappearing ice. Forget about the threat that huge swathes of the planet might be made permanently uninhabitable. Forget, too, about the industrial processes driving this change, and the companies and executives that profit from them. Forget about all that. Because according to our federal Labor government, there is a much greater threat – one that deserves to be investigated, spied on, infiltrated and prosecuted. The real threat, apparently, is a few dozen activists who are trying to steer society onto a more sustainable path.

The fight against the encroaching extremism of the right and the cloak of respectability the mainstream parties here and across the world give it is the fight specifically against the fascists and their ‘respectable’ legitimisers but more generally to build a genuine socialist alternative.

That means as a first step building an organisation of thousands of workers and others committed to a new society in which the threat of fascism is wiped from the earth for good. Only overthrowing the system that breeds fascism can do that. Only the working class as working class, the millions for example in Australia who produce the wealth of Australian society, have that power.

We socialists want to build an organisation of the most class conscious elements to win a new world. The first step to doing that is to build an organisation that doesn’t sink into the sewer of racism and Islamophobia but which challenges at every step of the way the creeping extremism of the right and becomes strong enough to smash this violent and abhorrent expression of capitalism now and into the future.

Abolish our Stasi. De-fund defence and intelligence agencies and spend the money on health and education.