En Passant

While Malcolm Turnbull was telling the UN how wonderful our offshore gulags are, 49% of Australians wanted to ban Muslim immigration. In Independent Australia I look at Australia’s structural racism.

Tony Abbott claims we are number one per capita in taking in refugees. We are not. We are not number one but number 27 per capita. 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.

Christmas and the New Year is a time of hope. Yet all this Abbott government and its media spruikers offers is fear – fear of terorism; fear of asylum seekers and fear of the unemployed are its current playthings. The best way to counter the ruling class climate of fear is to resist their attacks, not fall for their racist, xenophobic and anti-working class rantings and actions.

Why was this siege any different to all the other sieges that happen? Why did this dominate the Australian media to the exclusion of almost everything else for 24 hours? Why? Because it fed our fears. Or perhaps because it fed what the media and ruling class hope are our fears. If Man Haron Monis had been a white Christian barricaded in his home holding his wife hostage, it would have rated at best a few minutes on local television, and no or little comment in our newspapers. Of course Man Haron Monis wasn’t a white Christian.

Both the Liberals and Labor have embraced the racist Northern Territory intervention and attacked asylum seekers, although they sometimes differ a little on the detail. They are both on the right. They are both bigoted.

Our tasks are twofold – to build a movement to resist the racists and to build an organisation of the revolutionary left capable of organising with workers to challenge the system that produces bigotry and racism.

As the Australian economy worsens, the turn to more and more vicious forms of racism, including attacks on Muslims, will proceed apace and the cacophony of lies about Islamification will reach a crescendo.

This will distract and weaken the working class and make them more and more at risk from their real enemy – capital and its attacks on living standards and jobs.

It remains the task of the left to build the fight against both overt and covert racism, against the vilification of the other that is the hallmark of both major parties, against the systemic racism that pervades our society and against the system that breeds racism.

Taxing foreign residents on their currently exempt capital gains will have little or no impact on foreign investment given that the gains are supposedly taxed in comparable tax jurisdictions. It will however bring revenue onshore that is currently going into the coffers of, for example, the US and European Treasuries, or being hidden in places like the Cayman Islands.