En Passant

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 […]

It is a necessary part of the duty we owe to history to call Australia’s immigration detention centres what they in fact are – concentration camps.

Refugee advocates have called on the parliamentary Labor Party not to support any Coalition legislation aimed at saving offshore processing from a successful High Court challenge. The Human Rights Legal Centre’s challenge seems to have exposed what so many felt for a long time – that offshore processing is illegal. It certainly has exploded the lie that offshore processing is the responsibility of Nauru and PNG.

Australia’s detention centres are concentration camps.

SYRIZA, the new radical left wing government in Greece ‘pledged on Saturday to close down detention centres for [refugees] that have long been criticised by rights groups as inhumane.’ If Greece can do it, why not Australia? Ah, unlike Greece, we don’t have a radical left wing party here, built on strikes and demonstrations against austerity. Maybe it is time we built one and built strikes and demonstrations against Abbott’s austerity?

  Refugee Rights Action Network WA (RRAN) activists writing in Red Flag have pieced together the following harrowing account of events taking place on Manus Island. REFUGEE RIGHTS ACTION NETWORK – SYNTHESISED ACCOUNT OF THE ATTACKS ON MANUS The following account has been put together from multiple sources that various Refugee Rights Action Network activists […]

Immigration minister Scott Morrison has attempted to erect a wall of silence around the government’s treatment of refugees writes Ben Hillier in Red Flag. But the awful truth is the government’s worst kept secret: the Manus Island and Nauru concentration camps are hellholes.

Our task is great. Our struggle is important. To end the criminal refugee policies of our one percent we must build bigger and bigger demonstrations to force Labor to treat asylum seekers humanely and end the death trip it forces them into. While there are the various magnificent refugee groups working brilliantly for asylum seekers there is no significant revolutionary left in Australia that could defend refugees as part of its more general defence of workers and the oppressed.

Now more than ever we need a socialist alternative to give hope to refugees and those who support them and lead a real fight with a long term goal of having tens of thousands of people shutting down the centres of the major cities or striking to close down Australia’s concentration camps.

The first asylum seekers arriving after the Malaysian ‘solution’ have been picked up off Scott Reef. They will be transferred to Christmas Island and then sent to Malaysia.

As part of their anti-asylum seeker campaigns Labor and the Liberals, the two parties of the Australian ruling class, have appealed to and reinforced the racism the colonial settler state and outpost of Western imperialism developed and amplified to justify the genocide of indigenous people here and the invasions of foreign lands.

Two people in front of me reeled back, clutching their eyes. The cops had used capsicum spray on them. One was a photographer. Maybe taking photos is a threat to democracy too like tying ribbons on a fence.

Five people helped the other protester as he staggered about, blinded and in pain for the crime of attending a demonstration.