En Passant

11 November 1953 to 5 April 2020

A man of emotions
Of guesses at life
Watering the strife
To negate the hate
And blossom the love             

excerpt from Understanding by John Passant

Sadly John passed away peacefully on 5 April with Patricia at his side.

Husband to Patricia, father to Michael and Louise and brother of Paul.

Passionate challenger of injustice, radical activist and socialist, prolific and powerful writer and poet.

Touching many lives, loving, helpful and much loved, he leaves a great legacy but a huge hole in the universe and our lives.

Many thanks to his dear friends who so enriched his life.

When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he shall make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

excerpt from Romeo and Juliet

Click here to read and share memories of John

Patricia woke up this morning (Saturday the 11th) with the words of Joe Hill playing in her mind.

I dreamed, I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he
“I never died” says he

And standing there, as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Says Joe “What they can never kill
Went on to organize
Went on to organize”

Click here to view more photos from John’s life

I listened to the discussion on Wednesday from the Press Gallery of the 3 major media outlets in Australia all lamenting the decline of press freedom in Australia. They are right to be worried. There is clearly, to me at least, a decline in our freedoms. This decline has been consistent with the rise of neoliberalism in Australia as the dominant economic story to justify the transfer of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class.  

Yet speaking truth to power does not really seem to be at the heart of the News Corps media, Channel 9 newspapers, (formerly Fairfax media,) or the Australian Broadcasting Commission. Of course there are differences about the way forward for Australian capitalism, but the joint neoliberal project of the main parties and the mainstream media means they are all united in supporting the system of working class exploitation that is capitalism. To quote a Socialist Worker US article from 2011:

‘Exploitation is the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers… Marx argued that the ultimate source of profit, the driving force behind capitalist production, is the unpaid labor of workers. So for Marx, exploitation forms the foundation of the capitalist system.’

Where the major parties differ is over the details of that exploitation – the rate of exploitation, for example over penalty rates, government spending, tax cuts etc etc. The exploitation however continues.

Of course there are exposés of rotten government action. This is done mainly by the press, including of late the less mainstream press. And whistle-blowers! It is no accident that journalists and whistle-blowers are being raided and/or prosecuted for the ‘crime’ of revealing possible government crimes.  

Yet these exposés and whistle-blowing do little to question the exploitation of workers that is the heart of capitalism and from which the bosses’ profit arises. When for example was the last time you read an article in the mainstream media explaining our current economic situation in Marxist terms, or their equivalent made comprehensible? Of course outside a  few academic, student and union circles, you will find few Marxists, and even fewer who understood Marx’s essential message that the liberation of the working class must be the act of the working class.

Let’s focus on speaking truth to power, something you might think should be the role of the media.  In particular let’s talk about Australia’s detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru.

A debate has broken out in the US about the nature of Donald Trump’s detention centres. Some politicians there and one Jewish group at least are calling them what they really are – they are  concentration camps.

This is not to demean the Holocaust but to recognise that the hundreds of concentration camps the Nazis set up preceded the five extermination camps, laid the ground work for them and somehow, with a range of other state actions, readied many German people for the murder of six million Jews.   Not only that, but as David M Perry in Pacific Standard points out, there is a history of concentration camps before the Nazis used them.  He says:

‘Historian Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of
Concentration Camps, defines concentration camps as facilities used for
the “detention of civilians without trial based on group identity.”
She traces the emergence of such camps to those erected by imperial Spain
during the Cuban rebellion of 1896, by the U.S. not long after in the
Philippines, and by the British in South Africa during the Boer War and
beyond. These were not death camps per se, but vast numbers of people died in
each by design, as governments tried to crush, expel, and isolate specific
populations. … The same thing seems to be happening along the American Southern
border.’ 

To that we might add that the same thing seems to be happening in the Australian run camps on Manus Island and Nauru.

Yet a quick google search highlights how few articles there are in the Australian media calling them concentration camps. One exception is retired judge Stephen Charles QC who in a 2016 Fairfax article called Australia’s detention centres concentration camps.  His commentary in the mainstream media stands almost alone.

Never again means never again.  Let’s tell the truth. Manus Island and Nauru detention centres are concentration camps.  Over to you, media, the ALP and the Greens.

John Passant is a member of the Canberra Press Gallery. To republish this article contact John to work out the terms. Roughly they will be pay me if you are mainstream media or an ‘independent’ media outlet whose aims are revenue. Publish it for free if you are not. But check first.

In writing about the Folau saga recently, I showed compassion to those rank and file Christians who felt under threat.  As time goes on however it is becoming clearer (to me anyway) that some of those ordinary Christians have fallen or are falling for a campaign of hate disguised as religious freedom.

As I pointed out then, what is now under threat is not religious freedom but religious dominance. Various Christian leaders are using Folau’s breach of his employment contract as a weapon to attempt to protect their own privileged position and that of their various churches in Australian capitalism.

Before gofundme shut down his money raising legal defence venture, Folau had raised about $565,000 in just a few days. It shows the grip Christian fundamentalism has on sections of Australian society.  The Australian Christian League has now opened a new fundraising account for him and it raised over $1 million in less than one day.  I am sure he will raise his aimed for $3 m easily.

That tells me there is widespread concern among some Christians about religious freedom. It also tells me some of those donating are doing so driven by a fabricated fear campaign run by master manipulators. Some at least of those donating seem to be dutifully following the powerful Church figures and politicians pushing the fake news that this is an ‘attack on religious freedom.’

Some of the people behind this campaign are shrewd political operators. Their aim is to build a reactionary Christian movement through building a unity, incorrectly, around religious freedom.  It has been done before as the Bible Belt in the US shows us. More prosaically it may be their aim is to unite conservative forces behind an identifiable self-described symbol of persecution. Playing the victim wins sympathy and hides the reality of the oppression and the cry against oppression that is religion.

The problem is that freedom to spout religious ideas does not or should not include freedom to promulgate hate speech.  In my opinion what Folau, a well-known rugby union player, said about gay people was hate speech.  He wrote:

WARNING Drunks, Homosexuals, Adulterers, Liars, Fornicators, Thieves, Atheists, Idolaters HELL AWAITS YOU Repent! Only Jesus Saves.

Despite Folau’s claim this is a quote from the Bible, the actual passage from Corinthians 6:9-10 makes no mention of hell.

This fire and brimstone attack on gays and lesbians and others was a warning that they were ‘sinners’ and hell awaited them.  For many gays and lesbians hell is here already and Folau’s words have only made their living hell worse.

How many gay and lesbian kids must die before the hate speech stops?

And the real battle for religious freedom must involve a battle not to be religious and not to be subject to hate speech disguised as religious commentary and broadcast to the millions of non-believers. Christianity will only be free when it is free of its hate mongers and charlatans. Love your neighbour as yourself can then become a reality.

This is a battle between secular forces (including some religious people who believe in the separation of state and church and who view Folau’s speech as hate speech) and a gang of politicised right wing Christian fundamentalists wanting to unite and grow their forces.

The marriage equality plebiscite saw 61% of Australians vote for love. Thirty nine percent voted against. While the result was a shock to the forces of fundamentalism and conservatism, they are regrouping around an issue they are clearly telling porkies about to try and turn their minority into a majority. On top of that at the last election there was a big swing in sections of Australia to the politicians of hate dressed in Christian garb.

We must resist this fundamentalism and fight for a world in which gay and lesbian and other kids and adults are not threatened by Christian fundamentalists.  

Let’s build the resistance now to fundamentalism. We beat them in the fight for marriage equality. We can beat them in our campaign against their hate speech.

Do not donate: Update:

I have just sent this or something similar on 2 July to those supporters who donated money to me to keep my left wing writing going. If you did and have not seen my message below, PM me.

‘Dear XYZ, a week after I posted this [call for donations through gofundme], my health took a bit of an unexpected and sudden down turn. I begin five working days of radiation on Wednesday 3 July until Tuesday 9 July. It means I cannot post as regularly as I would like. This means I think I should refund your contribution because at least in the short term I cannot keep my end of the bargain. John’

_________________

Until Go Fund Me suspended his campaign, Israel Folau had raised about $765,000 in 4 days to support his legal action against Rugby Australia.

RA sacked him from his $4 m employment contract because he breached a term of it. He was to be inclusive, and his post about sinners (like drunks, adulterers, and homosexuals) going to hell if they did no repent was clearly not.

I had been thinking of setting up a similar page to support me and my left wing journalism. Once I saw Folau had done so, I decided to go ahead with my own attempt to raise some money for what seems to me, in this age of manufactured capitalist consent, to be an OK cause. This is what I say on my campaign site:

‘I am a member of the Canberra Press Gallery. I am a socialist opinion writer, critical of the Morrison government and its neoliberal cousin, the Australian Labor Party. 

‘The funds received will help me continue my work in the Press Gallery and my articles on my blog, En Passant with John Passant (https://enpassant.com.au/). The mainstream media have to date not published my contributions. Some of the non-mainstream left-wing media is censorious, and supports patriarchal ‘heroes’ so I do not contribute to them.

‘I do not want my words to remain isolated on my own blog, read by only a few. A contribution from you will not only keep me going, but help spread my words through you (I believe.) 

‘One caveat to this is I am undergoing tablet treatment for lung cancer and a recent MRI shows I may need surgery and/or radiation on some new growths on my spine. This may impact on my capacity to deliver my aim of 3 or 4 reports  a week. I am fine at the moment, waiting for a radiation specialist to talk to me about the MRI results. 

‘Help keep alive an independent voice of the left.’

In two days I have raised $310. In five days, before his fund raising was stopped, Folau raised about $765,000.

That $765,000 tells you a lot about the hold sport AND fundamentalist religion have over Australian society. Folau has a name and a following because of his undoubted skills as a rugby player. I do not (despite my undoubted skills as an opinion writer?)

One reason for this is the decades’ long swing to the right by the Labor Party and the denial and suppression of socialist ideas that the Party’s neoliberal program entails. We need to understand that mainstream media is part of the debate between the two major parties of capitalism – the ALP and the Liberals. Another is the popular uprisings that overthrew the Stalinist state capitalist regimes then falsely parading as ‘socialism.’

My freelance articles are rejected in part because of the ideas and opinions they contain. A free press is really only about freedom within the confines of capitalism and ideas acceptable to it.

It may also be that I write rubbish. I would hope my writing skills after decades as an academic and senior public servant are at least as adequate as some of those who parade as opinion writers in both versions of the mainstream media – Nine Media and not quite Nine Media (aka News Corp.)

Let’s not make Gerard Henderson my journalistic bar. I have higher aspirations than that – the liberation of the working class, by the working class. And articles that will make some readers think about the nature of our society and the way forward.

The hold sport has over working class people is like religion – it is our escape from the reality of exploitation.

If you want to donate to my gofundme campaign and help keep my left wing journalism alive, click here for the link.

Update on 1 July: I have to have radiation treatment for a tumor on my spine. That will be every working day from 3 July to 9 July for about 30 minutes a time. My back pain at the moment means an increase in pain killer strength, which is slowing me down. So I will not in the short term be able to write many articles here. I will contact those who donated to see about refunding their donations.

Adani tells you everything you need to know about politics in Australia.

The decisions by the Queensland and Federal Governments to give Adani various approvals to effectively mine a massive amount of coal is irrational.  It makes no sense economically. It makes no sense environmentally.

But to those involved it makes perfect political sense. Jobs, jobs and more jobs are their mantra.  It is a lie to win working class support. Given the big swings against Labor in the region and to the conservatives and reactionaries, it is working.

Despite initial talk of 10,000 jobs, on oath Adani admitted that in the construction stage there would be 1440 or so jobs. And once construction is finished? It is not clear what the number of ongoing jobs Adani will create is.

Recently, Deputy Nationals leader Bridget McKenzie suggested 100. So destroying land on the Carmichael mine is going to create only 100 jobs at the site. How many tourist jobs will it destroy? As many, if not more, is my guess.  Others have suggested the figure is about 800, although I suspect the figures from McKenzie are likely to be close to the truth.  Briefings, followed by unguarded moments and all that, eh?

Adani was never about jobs. Mining is one of the most mechanised industries in the world. In Australia for example mining contributes about 8.5% to GDP, but employs only 2% of the workforce (or around 220,000 jobs), As the industry automates even further, that employment figure will fall even lower.

Adani is a good example. The estimated investment cost is $16 bn. All that for 100 ongoing jobs, or to be optimistic 800 ongoing jobs.  Plus the destruction of the Galilee Basin, and associated land and waterways.  How much is the Great Barrier Reef worth anyway? See it before it dies.

Surely that $16 bn would be better invested in sun, wind and other renewable energy plus batteries? Not if you are, like the Coalition Government, (now joined by the Queensland Labor government) married to coal.  The decision to support Adani was political. This is a government of climate change deniers and climate change sceptics. Its first rule is to support big capital.

The ALP knew before the election it risked losing workers’ votes in Queensland by not being openly for the mine. It also knew it could lose votes in suburban seats if it openly supported Adani. Hence its equivocation, its nudge nudge, yes, after legal requirements are met, to the mine.

The other side of this means the Government had to lie to workers about the things that we hold dear – jobs, and living costs. And lie they did. Vague suggestions of thousands of jobs, plus a ‘commitment’ to lower power prices should be seen for what they are – bullshit of the highest order. All designed to swing workers behind the lie that is Adani.

It worked. Some workers, especially in the mining regions, fell for the lies. Our response should not be to abuse them but to develop policies that do address their and our jobs and living cost concerns.  Renewable energy offers that.

We can, and we must, make the arguments that our future has to be totally renewable. Such a shift will take a lot of money – about $370 bn over ten years under the BZE plan  for example – but it will help save our planet.

That altruism won’t win votes. But a comparison of jobs in reliable energy construction and then operation would suggest a much larger number of jobs in the renewable energy sector than the mining sector.  Much more. And prices will fall as a result. If they do not then impose price controls on the energy suppliers.

These are arguments that must be made.  The ALP will not make them. It is part of the coal bubble.  The Government will not make them. It will be up to us and our unions to make the obvious point – an injury to our one earth is an injury to all workers. The destruction of our planet is the destruction of the working class.

Hong Kong socialist Lam Chi Leung in Socialist Worker UK says the current protests sweeping the country show the politicisation of ordinary people

The government in Hong Kong has suspended a planned bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China. The climbdown follows huge demonstrations.

On the morning of 12 June, forty thousand Hong Kong citizens occupied the streets near Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and the government headquarters.

Most protesters were aged between 18 and 24.

Previously, on Sunday 9 June, an astonishing 1.03 million citizens joined the “No China extraction” mass demonstration. That was the biggest demonstration since Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997. On average, one in seven Hong Kong people joined the demonstration!

The official mainland China media said that demonstrations were surreptitiously engineered by Western powers. That is absolute nonsense.

The 12 June protest forced the delay of the Second Reading of the draft amendment to the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Bill – the extradition bill.

Currently Hong Kong is allowed to sign long-term fugitive extradition arrangement with all regions in the world except China. Hong Kong’s government wants to amend this bill so that the mainland authorities can extract suspects from Hong Kong.

The amendment would severely reduce Hong Kong’s autonomy. Due to the authoritarian regime of one-party rule in China, people lack protection from the law.

This would affect especially those who criticise the China government and leadership openly and those who organise the remembrance of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident every year, and Hong Kong citizens who have helped Chinese democratic activists to escape. All of these citizens would be in serious danger.

Pretext

Hong Kong activists who have provided practical assistance to China’s labor, human rights, and social movement NGOs could also be extracted by the China government under the pretext of “endangering national security”.

The amendment would make Hong Kong citizens live in fear of “the consequence” of criticising the system and policies.

The police responded to the protests with violence. They not only employed tear gas and pepper spray but also fired bean bag shot and rubber bullets without warning. This resulted in 79 injuries, two of them very serious.

Both the Commissioner of Police and Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam described the protest as a “riot”.

The protests against the Extradition Bill took place five years after the Umbrella Movement. The 81-day-long roads occupation for democratic elections in September 2014 ended in failure. This time, the protests have revived the morale of the masses to some degree.

People called for a workers’ and students’ strike last week.The Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union and the Hong Kong Social Workers’ General Union showed support for it.

In addition, some young people established a picket line in the commercial district. Some suggested political strikes and this led to discussions on the internet. All these signs show that this movement has advanced in political consciousness compared to the Umbrella Movement.

It is not easy to mobilise a powerful strike in a short time. The socialist left of Hong Kong can push the discussions about political strikes toward a strategic conclusion that we need to establish mass self-organisation. It can also explain why the struggle for civil liberty is inseparable to the struggle for political democracy and economic equality.

Lam Chi Leung is a revolutionary socialist based in Hong Kong. This article first appeared in Socialist Worker UK (https://socialistworker.co.uk/art/48494/Eyewitness+from+Hong+Kong+as+protests+force+a+retreat+on+extradition+bill).

The Australian and other Murdoch outlets have been running a faux University freedom campaign for years now. As they lose more and more ‘sensible centre’ journalists – how much longer can Peter van Onselen stay there more or less on his own? – they seem to have become more strident in their condemnation of cultural Marxism, our takeover of Universities, education, and the like.

Apparently our Gramscian march through the Universities continues unabated. Let me interrupt their wet dreams with some personal reality of my march through the universities.

Recently I was looking back at the many Bills that became law when I was the Assistant Commissioner in charge of international tax reform. My team worked closely with Treasury on developing those Bills. We were, according to the relevant General Manager in Treasury at the time, the best ATO team, among the dozens, to work with, from their point of view.

I, along with one other senior ATO Officer, was the major ATO contributor to the 2002 Treasury discussion paper entitled The Review of International Tax Arrangements (RITA). See http://www.taxboard.gov.au/content/int_tax/int_tax.asp

Then there were the reforms made during the period I was in charge of the ATO contribution to RITA (both to the law and to getting the rest of the ATO ready for the particular reform). They include:

• New International Tax Arrangements Act 2003, which among other things amended the Foreign Investment Funds (FIFs) and Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) regimes and made changes to Interest Withholding Tax and unit trusts.

• New International Tax Arrangements Act 2004, which modified certain foreign investment fund rules; provided an interest withholding tax exemption for interest paid on certain debentures issued by eligible unit trusts; removed the need for certain income of a controlled foreign country resident to be included as notional assessable income; and prevented double taxation of royalties subject to withholding tax.

• New International Tax Arrangements (Participation Exemption and Other Measures) Act 2004 which among other things reduced the amount of the capital gain or capital loss that will be subject to capital gains tax rules where Australian companies and controlled foreign companies sell shares in a foreign company with an underlying active business; extended the current exemptions for foreign branch profits and foreign dividends to all countries from 1 July 2004; and reduced the scope of tainted services income.

• New International Tax Arrangements (Managed Funds And Other Measures) Bill 2004

• New International Tax Arrangements (Foreign-owned Branches and Other Measures) Act 2005

• Various Double Tax Agreements implementing policy from RITA, and the review of the anti- CFC and FIF rules leading to Foreign Accumulation Fund (FAF) rules. The anti-deferral rules review which produced the change from FIFs to FAFs (well after I had retired). 

The Board of Tax has estimated that these various international tax reforms have had roughly the same impact as tariff reductions for the economy about a 0.024% annual GDP increase.

I look back on my team’s achievements with pride.  Interestingly not one tax academic has approached me about these groundbreaking reforms. Not one.

From 1989 to January 1997 I was a tax lecturer in the law school at the ANU. I left in early 1997 after the promotion round saw five of six academics promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer. My crime had to been lead those 50% of Law School staff who had opposed the introduction of $9000 fees for the Legal Workshop, the almost year long course to enable those who had earned their law degrees to practise as lawyers. This mad me never to be promoted among the powerful conservative and soft left factions in the School.

I was a great teacher. I got rave reviews from students, year after year. My research was certainly unique, marrying left wing and Marxist ideas with tax law.  It was also regular enough, according to the creeping neoliberal standards Universities were then beginning to apply.

So I left the ANU and eventually, after ten months with the Welfare Rights and Legl Centre, rejoined the ATO.  I retired from the ATO in 2008 and began looking for a job with academia. After all, I had 8 years tax law teaching experience and a successful career as a tax administrator behind me.  My two years in 2010 and 2011 at the University of Canberra should have forewarned me, but it did not.

I resigned in disgust from there in November 2011 and over the next six or so years applied for tax law academic jobs. Of the 38 applications I lodged, I had one interview (because I knew one of the professors well.) I was doing a PhD, the new neoliberal apprenticeship requirement evidently.

I merely note that a number of my ATO colleagues from that time, without PhDs, have been employed by academic institutions. I should also add that a number of my tax teaching colleagues would, in my view, be less than ideal employees as tax administrators. They are OK gatekeepers for conservatism but not good educators.

So why am I unemployable? The excuse is often my lack of a PhD. Given my life experience, I doubt this would be a problem, if I were a conservative. There’s the rub.

Tax and legal academia is, by and large, conservative. It employs like minded people. For a socialist and Marxist like me who organised and took action against the neoliberalisation of Universities, this is a death sentence.

Is there a lesson from all of this? Tax academia is a bastion of reaction and conservatism. Lefties have to try to survive in this all-encompassing environment. For leftists and socialists, if you want a job in tax academia or want to keep it, do not put your beliefs into action.   

John Passant is a member of the Canberra Press Gallery and an adjunct member of the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University.

I have been a long-time supporter of the Construction, Forestry, Mining, Maritime and Energy Union or its various earlier incarnations.

I remember joining with BLF members in 1985 and 1986 to fight the Hawke government’s de-registration of the union. In the short term they lost. However, their commitment to class struggle remained and so did the brutal reality of working in the building industry. As a consequence, the union remained alive and does so today, in the form of the construction branch of the CFMMEU.

In these times of class collaboration and surrender by many union leaders, and their Labor Party leaders, it is an absolute necessity to have a fighting union that uses strikes and other action to defend and increase wages, jobs and impose some safety responsibilities on the bosses. The CFMMEU are even prepared occasionally to break bad industrial laws, something Australian Council of Trade Union Secretary Sally McManus has so far only talked about.

It is why the bosses, and their political parties, hate them. It is why we must defend the union. That does not mean we must protect the leadership on all occasions.

Of course the government and the ALP will use this in different ways to divorce themselves from the union, in the case of the ALP, or smash it, in the case of the Coalition government.

Already the Government has signalled it will reintroduce its Ensuring Integrity Bill (or CFMMEU deregistration Bill,) a piece of proposed legislation defeated previously. There was no mention of resurrecting this legislation during the election campaign we just had. The government is trying to use the accusations against John Setka, the elected leader of the Victorian branch of the CFMMEU.

What are those accusations? The latest one is that he denigrated anti-domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty for reducing the freedom of men. Setka calls it lies. Maritime Union leader Christie Cain says Setka’s comments have been taken out of context.  It is possible for something to be taken out of context, and to also be a lie, I guess. For me it seems far too convenient that this accusation comes out at a time when the ALP under fake left leader Anthony Albanese wants to expel Setka from the ALP.

If this was all, then there would be nothing to the attacks on Setka other than the forces of reaction opposing a militant union that keeps alive the idea of class struggle, and sometimes its practice.

It is unfortunately not all.  Setka has said he will plead guilty to charges of harassing a woman and breaching a court order.  If so, he should resign as secretary of the Victorian branch of the CFMMEU.

There are two reasons for doing so. Women make up 46.9 percent of the workforce.  We cannot have a senior union leader who is guilty of crimes against them, as ACTU secretary Sally McManus understands.  On Thursday she called on Setka to resign, in the best interests of the union movement.

There is a second reason. To keep alive the idea and the reality of union militancy in these times of general union and worker passivity, he should resign. Setka has given the class enemy too much ammunition to allow him to continue in the role of the main union leader in Australia prepared to break the law and urge his members to take industrial action.

John Setka, it is time to go.

John Passant is a member of the Canberra Press Gallery. Mainstream and other for profit media should approach him for payment rates if they want to republish this article.

I lodged my FoI request with the AFP to find details of any advice they had about the legality and constitutionality of the recent raids on the press. This is their acknowledgement of my FoI request.

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