En Passant

The Australian flag on Invasion Day: To burn or not to burn?

Despite burning the Australian flag not being a crime, a heavy-handed police reaction has helped the authorities and the media to vilify and prosecute peaceful Australia Day protesters in Sydney, I write in Independent Australia​. To read the article click here. The Australian Flag on Invasion Day: To burn or not to burn?

Here was a great opportunity to build a united mass movement against the oppression of women and indigenous Australians. Instead the focus was on getting the state to take top down action that does absolutely nothing to address domestic violence, anti-abortion bigotry, racism or women’s oppression. This is the very state which drives and reinforces that racism and oppression. There is nothing to cheer about in banning Brown and Newman.

It says much about the state of Australian society today that we have a great footballer very possibly being hounded out of his job because he is black while a sleazy untrustworthy and biased politician who has allegedly abused entitlements for decades will in all probability keep her job of throwing Labor politicians out of Parliament.

‘The Australian Government plan to Shut Down Aboriginal Peoples Communities and Homelands so on June 1st access to Parliament House will be Shut. Commonwealth Avenue Bridge will be closed.’

Paddy Gibson in Solidarity magazine looks at the renewed push to close remote Aboriginal communities and how it began with the NT Intervention from 2007. He argues: It took mass mobilisation and the militant black politics of the late 1960s and 1970s to turn back assimilation and put self-determination and liberation on the agenda. The […]

We should be threatening and building more and bigger protests and city centre sit-ins against the closure of Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. Let’s give the one percent a taste of their own medicine. Shut down their cities.

Meriki Onus, protest organiser from the youth group Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, spoke to Solidarity about the need to resist these community closures and the broader agenda of assimilation.