En Passant

The government’s racist and xenophobic attacks not only allow the respectable racists to come forth. They encourage the fascists and hard racists to not only air their filth but to attempt to mobilise around racism. The most recent example was the ‘United Patriots’ demonstration on Sunday in Melbourne which was an attempt to shut down socialist councillor Stephen Jolly. The left mobilised against the fascists and stopped them silencing Jolly. This is a victory for democracy.

The respectable racists have crawled out from under their rocks (often padded with copies of mainstream newspapers) to condemn the anti-fascist protestors. We have to confront not just the fascists but expose the respectable racists and the government which nurtures and provokes their racism too. We have to oppose the racists whenever they organise their Reclaim White Australia rallies. Just as importantly we have to challenge the governments which demonise asylum seekers, which attack Aborigines and point the finger accusingly at Muslims and which attack our jobs, or wages and our services.

This fascist is the real face of Reclaim Australia, photographed today at the ‘United Patriot Front’ storm trooper protest in Melbourne where 400 anti-fascists confronted the 70 Nazis. It is a consequence of Tony Abbott’s state inflamed racism, Islamophobia and anti-asylum seeker rhetoric and action.

The declining Australian economy means that whoever is in government in Australia will adopt and ratchet up attacks on wages, jobs, conditions, and social spending. To try to hide this reality the attacks on the manufactured ‘enemy within’ will intensify and broaden to more welfare recipients and perhaps on to the left. The terrorist threat will dominate our news when the biggest terrorists sit in Canberra and Washington.

The mainstream media will cheer on the multitude of attacks on the working class. Nowhere among the reams and reams of ’analysis’ of the economic issues facing ‘the nation’ will there be published alternative voices that identify capitalism as the problem and production organised democratically to satisfy human need rather than make a profit as the solution. This article will never see the light of day in the mainstream media.

Allegations of bribery have long plagued FIFA, especially since its controversial decision to grant Qatar the 2022 World Cup. But much worse is the plight of South Asian migrant workers brought in to build the stadium infrastructure there: Since 2010, more than 1,200 migrant workers have died in Qatar under hazardous working conditions, and a 2013 Guardian investigation found that at least 4,000 total are projected to die before the 2022 World Cup even starts.

Louise O’Shea in Red Flag writes that the powerful are protected no matter what they do. Child abuse, whether it be in religious institutions, orphanages, through forced poverty or in immigration detention centres, is acceptable so long as it is carried out by the powerful. Seen in this context, moral panics about protecting children have nothing to do with concern for children. They are rather a cynical pretext for attacks on people’s rights and the demonising of minorities.

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 […]

The terrorism hype and changes to our immigration laws throw away basic rights to a trial and give incredible powers to the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. They undermine our freedoms here and now. They set a dangerous precedent. They prepare the way for further criminalising dissent in Australia.

  Writing in Solidarity magazine about anti-politics and the left James Supple, among other things, says: What these examples show is that the mood of disillusionment with the political system is not coherently anti-capitalist or anti-system, and can be drawn behind left reformist political parties or movements. This is because the mood is not simply […]

Let’s keep the pressure up on Australian politicians to force them to vote for same-sex marriage today. How about mass rallies across Australia to celebrate the success in Ireland and to call on the Australian Parliament to amend the Marriage Act so that, in the words of the Irish amendment to the Constitution, ‘marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex’?

A local Illawarra group called ‘A Community for Peace & Justice’ has called for a public show of community support for the 677 survivors and a vigil for the hundreds who drowned from that boat. The community support will be held this Friday 22 May from 5pm to 6 pm in Crown Street mall, near the corner with Kembla Street (close to the Church).