On Wednesday night, hundreds of students attended an online meeting of the Australian National University Students’ Association (ANUSA) to vote in defence of pro-Palestine activism.
A week prior, ANU students joined the international Gaza solidarity encampment movement. Hundreds have since stopped by the camp to show their support and to demand that ANU halt investments in weapons companies.
The camp has not been without controversy. Peaceful protest against Israeli genocide has attracted the ire of Zionist students who counter-protest the camp’s regular rallies. But supporters of Palestine have outnumbered them every time. This week, during a snap rally for Rafah of nearly a hundred, only four Zionists appeared.
Every year, ANUSA is required to hold an Annual General Meeting where all students can move motions and vote. Frustrated at their failure to intimidate Palestine supporters, Zionist students and members of the ACT Young Liberals tried to use the meeting to condemn the encampment.
They put up two motions, slandering the encampment as “echo[ing] policies of the Nazi regime”, and claiming there was a “culture within ANUSA activist circles whereby anti-Semitism is normalised”. 
This is outrageous slander against an anti-racist movement that includes people from all backgrounds, including anti-Zionist Jews. 
The right sensed weakness on the part of the ANUSA executive. ANUSA officially withdrew from the camp on Wednesday 1 May, claiming it received legal advice to do so. 
But we weren’t bound to the spinelessness of our elected bureaucrats. We moved our own motion to endorse the global encampment movement. 
When we put the call out for Palestine supporters to attend the meeting, hundreds of students rallied in support. 
Though the meeting was forced online—ANUSA couldn’t find a room big enough for us—the atmosphere on campus was electric. In tents, lecture halls, study rooms, even just gathered in small groups in the centre of campus, we watched as the number of people in the meeting climbed higher. As Palestinian flag emojis began to appear in participant’s names, we knew we had the room.
The meeting ended up going for five hours. At one point, the zoom crashed because of our sheer numbers. The Zionists and Young Liberals became increasingly desperate as they lost vote after vote. Our side romped to victory—although exact numbers weren’t disclosed, we easily and repeatedly carried motions requiring a two-thirds majority.
Hundreds of students voted to endorse the encampment movement, then against the Zionists’ motions to shut us down. One of the Zionist students wailed: “This is the downfall of the democratic system”. In fact, it was one of the most democratic acts of ANU students ever.
Their arguments mainly focused on the “safety of Jewish students”. One Zionist cited a survey she had conducted (of 20 of her friends) that said the camp was terrifying. This was somewhat contradicted by the fact that the Zionists had been running stalls just a few metres away from the camp with the sign: “I am a Zionist, ask me anything”.
But as anti-Zionist Jewish student, Anna D, said while seconding the pro-Palestine motion: 
“I have never felt more supported and welcomed in a community than I have within the pro-Palestine movement. Encampments and the pro-Palestine movement have been accepting of anti-Zionist Jews and are free from anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism has been conflated with anti-Semitism too many times, and Israel is using this as a justification to commit war crimes, ethnic cleansing and colonisation.” 
The victory is a massive boost of confidence for pro-Palestine activists on campus. 
One of the movers of the pro-Palestine motion, Palestinian PhD student Khalid Al Bostanji, told Red Flag:
“We had the strongest possible response we could have presented to the targeted campaign against the encampment movement, across Australia and worldwide. We affirmed that our encampments are fighting against genocide in Gaza, and that they are anti-racist, not a danger to any member of the student body.”
The ANUSA executive may have withdrawn their support for the encampment, but this is rank cowardice and not reflective of the sentiment amongst pro-Palestine students. Many past student movements involved elements that ran afoul of the law—from hiding draft dodgers during the anti-Vietnam War movement to supporting students arrested for protesting South African apartheid. 
“Student unions have a long and proud tradition of standing up against oppression”, said Wren Somerville, ANUSA Environment Officer and socialist activist, to Red Flag. “When the right mobilises against us, we need to fight back, not back down.”

Carter Chryse

ANU Students' Association mass meeting defeats Zionists

When Kennedy, an elderly blind woman, fled a domestic violence situation, she asked the National Disability Insurance Agency to review the amount of funding she was receiving.
“I was basically going to be left in a situation where I was looking at running out of funds and no longer having a live-in carer”, she testified in a submission to the <a href="https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/final-report">Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability</a>. “I was in a situation where I can’t even leave the house on my own let alone get ... my shopping [or] anything that I need to live.”
The NDIA told her that, until she was down to $500, they wouldn’t consider her to be in an emergency situation.
Kennedy’s story is one of hundreds outlined in the first volume of the commission’s findings, released last month. In twelve volumes, thousands of pages, and hundreds of testimonies, it demonstrates rampant abuse and neglect of people with a disability. Over and over, the pattern is clear. The systematic underfunding of welfare systems in Australia has resulted in dehumanisation and impoverishment. 
Testimonies include that of Emani, a woman in her mid-30s with chronic fatigue syndrome, who was forced by limited funding from the National Disability Insurance Scheme to live in the dementia ward of an aged care facility. And there’s Zaria, an Indigenous woman in her late 60s who had her NDIS funding revoked “out of nowhere” after she moved into a residential facility after suffering a stroke.
It is clear that there are systemic and fundamental problems in the provision of services. Yet most of the commission’s 222 recommendations amount to symbolic gestures and proposals for administrative tinkering. The headline recommendation is for the creation of a Disability Rights Act, in line with the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—which Australia is already a signatory to. Most reported on has been the advice to abolish segregated education and employment for people with disabilities, which is a worthwhile goal, but sketched out only in very vague terms.
The elephant in the room is that the source of the issue for people with disabilities in Australia is not the language that government bodies use, or their reporting methods. It is the fact that welfare, health care, education, public housing and disability support services have been critically underfunded for years, and that the NDIS itself is a privatised nightmare.
People with disabilities feel the effects of the lack of public services most keenly, on top of the specific inhumanity of the NDIS. When it was introduced under the federal Labor government in 2013, its stated goal was to privatise disability services, replacing public services or those administered by charities with state funding for private businesses, which run them for profit. The result is that those running NDIS businesses reap the rewards of state funding, while delivering the bare minimum of service to people with disabilities. 
Included in the royal commission are stories of disability care workers in NDIS businesses. Katina is one. Her facility took on a new client who required two-to-one support, but only two staff members were rostered on for the entire workplace at any one time. She later discovered that the provider “not only received the NDIS funding, but the state government paid an additional $1.2 million to the provider to place this young man somewhere”. 
That’s more than $1 million allocated for specialised care that instead went as a handout to the business owner.
At no stage is this reality—the contradiction between the need for care and the need to make profits—confronted by the commission. Only a single recommendation of the 222 has a dollar figure increase in funding attached to it. Cruelly, it advises a few extra million per year be allocated for the appeals and advocacy programs of the NDIS—money for the handling of outraged and despairing NDIS participants, rather than to fund them directly.
The commissioners couldn’t even bring themselves to recommend immediate equality of the minimum wage for people with disability. People with disability can currently be paid as little as <a href="https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages/employees-with-disability-pay-rates">$2.90 an hour</a>—but the commission recommends a rise to only half the minimum wage, and to “aim” for 100 percent in the next decade.
It’s possible that many of these recommendations will be adopted, though thus far there has been no official response from the Labor government. It costs governments very little to promise things like “embedding human rights in the design and delivery of disability services”.
In reality, the NDIS itself must be abolished and replaced with a publicly funded scheme free, at the point of service, for those with disabilities.

The disability royal commission will change little

Addressing the Institute of Public Affairs earlier this year, Peter Dutton proclaimed, “The time has come for a sensible and sober conversation on nuclear power in Australia”.
Let’s have a sensible and sober conversation about the most dangerous form of power in the world. With AUKUS, Australia is experiencing the most serious expansion of domestic nuclear technology on our shores in decades. It’s not just rabid advocates for capitalism like Peter Dutton calling for nuclear power. As the anti-nuclear movements of the ’70s and ’90s fade into the rear-view, nuclear energy is being revived as a silver bullet of green power generation.
Across the world, we’re in somewhat of a “nuclear renaissance”, with more new reactors under construction now than at any time since the end of the Cold War. It’s no coincidence this comes at a time of increasing imperialist tensions across the world, with sabres rattling between the US and China.
Nuclear power should have no place in the transition to renewable energy. To quote Manhattan Project scientists writing in a 1946 US State Department report, “The development of atomic energy for peaceful purposes and the development of atomic energy for bombs are in much of their course interchangeable and interdependent”.
Nuclear fission bombs, such as those dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, work by splitting the atom, and require specific radioactive material to work. This material, mostly uranium-235 and different types of plutonium, are found either in trace quantities on earth, or aren’t naturally occurring at all. The first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world—Y-12 at Oak Ridge, Tennessee—was created specifically to enrich weapons-grade uranium for the Manhattan Project.
After the demonstration of the US’s nuclear capacity in Japan, and with the start of the Cold War, there was a mad scramble across the world for other imperialist countries to acquire rival technology. Without an ongoing hot war, however, governments had to find other justifications for constructing billions of dollars worth of nuclear capability.
Thus the first nuclear power plants were born, at Calder Hall and Chapelcross in the UK. They were commissioned explicitly for the production of plutonium, but justified to the public as a new form of electricity generation. Nuclear power became then, and still is today, the most expensive form of power generation in the world. Calder Hall would later become the site of the world’s first nuclear disaster: the Windscale fire in 1957, leading to hundreds of deaths by cancer in the years following.
Today, each of the seven countries that have serious stockpiles of nuclear weaponry also has a considerable network of domestic nuclear power plants—a necessary component for weapons construction. Four of these states also have undeclared numbers of nuclear weapons developed from civil programs: Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea, some of the most volatile and militarised places on earth.
Further, every country that has nuclear power capacity has a “bomb in the basement”: a large quantity of fissile material available should they ever want to develop nuclear weaponry.
This is on top of the fact that nuclear power is not safe, clean, or renewable.
The disaster at Chernobyl is often written off as the result of a lack of “safety culture” in the USSR, as if the same drive to profit to the detriment of safety isn’t present in every nuclear-capable state today. A 2016 Greenpeace report found that in US reactors alone, 166 “near miss” incidents were recorded in the preceding decade—a rate of one or two a month. A quarter of operational reactors in the US today, including those built just kilometres from fault lines, were built on the same ’60s design as the reactor at Fukushima. The manufacturer of those reactors, General Electric, is still one of the largest constructors of nuclear power plants today.
There is also no solution to the problem of nuclear waste. More than a quarter million tonnes of highly radioactive waste are currently sitting in storage near nuclear power plants and weapons production facilities worldwide. Much of it is decades old, radioactive for tens of thousands of years to come, generated on the promise that a permanent nuclear dump was imminent. Nearly 80 years after the dawn of the “atomic age”, there is still no long-term nuclear waste dump on Earth today. AUKUS has again raised the question of such a wasteland on Australian soil—and inevitably, it is Indigenous land under consideration.
Lastly, nuclear power is a finite resource. A 2011 study by researchers at the National University of Singapore found that “even on optimistic assumptions of fuel availability, global reserves of uranium will only support a growth in nuclear power of 2% and only be available for 70 years.” Reprocessing of waste for nuclear fuel use, often offered as a solution, is exactly the same reprocessing required for its use in nuclear weaponry, and so is banned in the US on non-proliferation grounds. Regardless, squeezing a bit more usage out of fuel rods doesn’t make it renewable, as less viable material is acquired each time.
The push for nuclear power today has nothing to do with solving the climate crisis. The Australian Minerals Council, which Dutton is so often the mouthpiece for, has another interest: South Australia is the site of the largest single uranium ore body in the world. As long as it remains in the ground, the rich and powerful of Australia will try to convince us we should dig it up.

ANU Students' Association mass meeting defeats Zionists

The disability royal commission will change little

Nuclear power is no alternative

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