Three scum bags behind the royal commission push

Over the Christmas break, while most people were enjoying big lunches, long walks and engaging in general merriment, every ghoul and ghastly figure from the last five decades of Australian political, sporting and business history came out of the woodwork to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement.

In print and on the airwaves, in a wall-to-wall media campaign, was a coordinated call for a royal commission following the terrible Bondi massacre. This was not motivated by a desire for “justice” for the victims of the attack. The political right and the Australian ruling class sniffed an opportunity to crack down on civil liberties, reduce the space for democratic protest and shift society further to the right.

It would take up too much space to list all the has-beens, freaks and opponents of anti-racist activists who were behind this campaign. So I have chosen just three of the more prominent ones.

Dawn Fraser

Dawn Fraser today is more known for her racism than her sports acumen. She has been an opponent of immigration for decades, and once told the ABC, “I mean I wish I could be as outspoken, I suppose, as Pauline Hanson and say, ‘Look, I'm sick and tired of the immigrants that are coming into my country’”.

During one press conference—standing alongside Nova Peris, a fellow Olympian who once shared posts describing Muslims as "Satan worshipping cockroaches [that] need to be eradicated”—Fraser said she had been "accused many times of being a racist”. Well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. In 2015, she went on a racist rant targeting tennis stars Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic, saying, "If they don't like it [Australia], go back to where their parents came from. We don't need them here in this country if they act like that”.

The idea that this bigot has any authority to lecture us about racism or antisemitism is laughable.

Janet Albrechtsen

After the Bondi massacre, Janet Albrechtsen penned no fewer than eleven articles attacking the Labor Party and calling for a royal commission. She attempted to appeal to good old Aussie larrikinism with a piece in the Australian, “Call a fair-dinkum royal commission, Albo, or be forever damned”. Albrechtsen blamed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong for the massacre because the federal government recognised a Palestinian state.

“But the Australian public needs to know whether, when she [Wong] adopted the hugely performative but completely useless decision to recognise a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist, she was advised this could lead or contribute to blood on Sydney’s streets”, Albrechtsen wrote. She continued: “Neither could Albanese use the old ‘conflate anti-Semitism with Islamophobia routine’ to confuse any royal commission or muddy its terms of reference”.

Albrechtsen wouldn’t want a royal commission into Islamophobia, as she’d be sitting on the “accused” bench. Back in 2001, she wrote: “Pack rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youths”. She claimed that French psychotherapist Jean-Jacques Rassial had shown this to be true. But, as the Saturday Paper later noted, this was bullshit.

Albrechtsen has nothing useful to offer on the question of anti-racism, except perhaps as an example of how not to conduct yourself.

BHP chair Ross McEwan

Ross McEwan is not a household name, but he is the chair of BHP, the Melbourne-based multinational mining company. He’s one of many capitalists who came out in support of a royal commission, illustrating the high level of ruling class support for this anti-Labor, anti-Palestine mobilisation. I could have chosen any number of the 130 “business leaders” who signed an open letter calling for a commission, but Ross chairs a particularly odious company board.

BHP is renowned for riding roughshod over Indigenous peoples, from Australia to Brazil, Bougainville to Colombia and beyond. In Colombia, a BHP mine was using 24 million litres of water a day and contaminated the drinking water. In Brazil, a mine co-owned by the company collapsed and released toxic mud and waste more than 700km beyond the mine. This led to the death of nineteen people and the contamination of land and rivers. In Australia, BHP has shown disregard for the Indigenous people and their land, recently destroying significant cultural sites in the Pilbara. The company has also underpaid its employees in Australia. In 2023, BHP was ordered to pay almost 30,000 employees backpay totalling $430 million dollars.

So, again, what does a company responsible for human rights abuses, environmental destruction and exploitation have to tell us about the need or otherwise for a royal commission?

The royal commission is part of a coordinated campaign led by the Australian ruling class, which has no business lecturing people about anything.