Maurice Blackburn Lawyers prides itself on its connection to the trade union movement. But it’s fighting the union that represents its own staff. 
On 6 March, about 100 lawyers instituted a historic ban on time recording, which means not charging for their work. In response, Maurice Blackburn issued non-payment notices, effectively preventing us from working or being paid for the duration of the ban. Legal assistants, paralegals and other staff stopped work in solidarity for up to three hours, shutting down teams and offices around the country. 
We are fighting for wage increases that keep up with the cost of living and address a 6.4 percent decline in real wages over the life of the last agreement due to high inflation. We are also fighting for ten days of paid reproductive leave for all staff—a condition the firm boasted it helped win for workers in other workplaces, only to turn around and tell its own staff that they do not deserve the same entitlement. 
Maurice Blackburn Lawyers represents many of the biggest trade unions in Australia. Its brand emphasises a commitment to the values of the workers’ movement, but apparently, those values don’t apply internally.
Since December, union members have engaged in three one- to two-hour stop works and other industrial action as part of the campaign, but this latest action was an escalation. 
The ban on time recording is a first for unionised lawyers in Australia. By recording the time they spend performing work for clients, lawyers allow the firm to recover legal fees. Stopping the practice costs the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars per day. 
The lawyers were willing to work—just without recording the time. This is a lawyer’s equivalent of a bus driver refusing to check tickets. The firm responded by saying that if we would not charge for our work, they preferred we didn’t work at all, revealing that they care more about their profits than their clients.
At Thursday’s rally, union members enjoyed the solidarity of various unions (including Maurice Blackburn clients) and others from around the legal industry—including barristers and unionists in community legal centres and other plaintiff firms. 
Meanwhile, management received the solidarity of business lobbyists such as Steve Knott from the notoriously anti-union Australian Resources and Energy Employers Association. Knott was quoted in the Australian Financial Review, revelling in Maurice Blackburn’s use of tactics that are so anti-worker that the ACTU recently called for them to be outlawed. 
A law firm is not just a bunch of lawyers. It requires the work of many support staff, especially legal assistants. These highly skilled professionals work under the pressure of deadlines and deal with traumatised clients every day. Yet most are paid an annual salary of between $55,000 and $70,000. 
Maurice Blackburn also has a gender pay gap problem. This year’s <a href="https://www.wgea.gov.au/">Gender Equality Report</a> notes a 33 percent gap between the median base salary of men and women at the firm. This reflects that 90 percent of the legal assistants are women whose work is grossly undervalued, which is even more of a reason to fight together to win the highest possible wage increases for the next three years. 
The firm is offering 5.5 percent for workers earning less than $100,000 per year in the first year of the agreement, 3.75 percent for those above that, and 3.5 percent and 3.25 percent for everyone during the second and third years. This does not make up for the ground lost during the high inflation over the last three years. 
An explosive leaked email from someone seemingly in the know about last year’s enterprise agreement at Slater and Gordon—another firm that boasts of its representation of unions—alluded to the firm’s CEO squeezing the lowest-paid workers in their recent pay negotiations. 
Maurice Blackburn also claims that it cannot afford higher pay increases. However, managers have repeatedly refused to provide modelling of projected profits over the life of the agreement to substantiate this claim. 
Maurice Blackburn has the strongest union membership of any private firm in Australia. We are the only law firm to take industrial action in recent years and pride ourselves on setting conditions (such as health and wellbeing days) that have then been adopted in other firms. We hope that our campaign will set a new benchmark for pay and conditions for current and future workers, especially with respecting women workers. 
Union members will meet next week to discuss the next steps in their campaign.
Colleen Bolger is an Australian Services Union delegate at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers.

Colleen Bolger

Union law firm attacks union members

The protest encampments for Palestine have once again brought student action to the forefront of the Palestine solidarity movement. One of the most attacked—by the university administration and the pro-Israel Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS)—is the Monash University encampment at Clayton in south-east Melbourne. 
The encampment is probably the most significant action in support of Palestine in the university’s history. When I started at Monash in 2001, it was pretty much impossible to have a public meeting about Palestine because members of AUJS would turn up in such numbers as to overwhelm and derail proceedings. This was in the middle of the second intifada. The best we could do was plaster bollards with posters of the iconic picture of a boy throwing a rock at a tank, transposed with pro-Palestine slogans. They were ripped down within hours.
After big protests in Melbourne and Sydney against Operation Cast Lead in the summer of 2008-09, when Israel invaded and bombed Gaza for 22 days, we wanted to take the campaigning back to the campus. So we set up a group, Students for Palestine. 
Students for Palestine at Monash consisted of members of Socialist Alternative, the Islamic Students Society and some renegade office bearers in the student union who broke with the Labor students. We aimed to get enough support to register a club and hold events. 
When we started doing lunchtime information stalls to advertise our activities, we got push back from Zionist students. Some of the Islamic Society students told us that when they tried to do similar information stalls, they ended up surrounded by Zionist students and packed up. 
But we were determined to establish a presence, so persisted.
The support we got in the first few meetings encouraged us to aim for an ambitious series of events during the week of the Nakba commemoration, which fell late in first semester. We called it Palestine Solidarity Week. 
On the day of the Nakba, AUJS usually held a barbeque for Israeli Independence Day—a celebration of the dispossession and genocide of Palestinians. But in 2009, we kicked off the inaugural Palestine Solidarity Week by hanging the Palestinian flag from the campus centre. 
More than 100 students, or even some hundreds (it’s hard to remember), gathered around the stage to hear speeches. It wasn’t massive, but it was the biggest pro-Palestine event in many, many years at Monash. And it felt significant to plant the Palestinian flag in the most prominent place on the campus. 
It caused a ruckus, of course. The key positions in the student union were held by Labor students aligned with the nominally “left” faction. But one was held by a member of Socialist Alternative. One of the male queer officers and two of the Lots Wife editors also got involved in Students for Palestine. 
The core Labor-aligned students hated being associated with the controversy we caused. Palestine was still seen as “complicated”, and outspoken support for the Palestinians was considered very controversial—just as it is attacked as anti-Semitic today. Hardly any white students, and very few of what passed for a left, would take a stand on the issue.
Palestine Solidarity Week was raised at the following student council meeting and a censure motion was put about Omar Hassan, the education-public affairs officer, for using his position to support the actions of Students for Palestine. 
The council voted to dock his pay for a fortnight. We got lots of Students for Palestine activists to come to the meeting to put the Labor students under pressure. They had the votes to get the motion passed, but we were going to make them answer for it. When they docked Omar’s pay, it just reinforced for everyone what a bunch of spineless bureaucrats they were—more interested in protecting their future career prospects than opposing apartheid in our time.
In second semester, Students for Palestine ran in the student union elections. 
As well as our own events, such as forums and film screenings, we also brought activists to an event the university was holding: a debate on whether Hamas should be recognised by the federal government. Arguing the negative was Danny Lamb, a prominent Zionist spokesperson, and Mark Dreyfus, now federal attorney general. On the affirmative was Malcolm Fraser and an academic specialising in terrorism studies. 
With speakers like that, there was little actual “debate”, and even less talk of Israel’s crimes—until Michael Shaik of Free Palestine Melbourne rose as the final speaker for the affirmative. He was the only speaker to pose the question to Dreyfus (who spoke next): would he condemn the violence of occupation. Shaik spent his time focused on the crimes of Israel, speaking for all of us who supported Palestine present that night. The debate was attended by hundreds of students and there was a lot of interest in it, in no small part because we had succeeded in making Palestine a major issue on the campus throughout the year. 
We had formed a solid core of activists deeply committed to the cause of the Palestinians. Sometimes, the enormity of their oppression could make people feel powerless. But being able to organise on campus and educate and involve students felt like a way we could contribute in some small way to an international movement. Some of those core people are still organising together in the Free Palestine Melbourne group. 
The nature of organising on campus is that there’s always change in the personnel on the ground. Students for Palestine activity has ebbed and flowed depending primarily on Israel’s aggression, sometimes on the university or the student association’s hostility. It has also depended on what other activities people are focussing on. But it has been able to maintain a presence to be able to respond whenever Israel launches a new attack. 
There is no doubt that the night people came to Monash to defend the encampment against the threat of attack from ex-IDF soldiers and their supporters has been the high point of Palestinian solidarity action so far at the campus in the last 25 years—probably much longer. Those of us who had been part of the earlier iterations of Students for Palestine couldn’t have been prouder to see it.

The high point of Palestine solidarity at Monash University

Daniel Andrews, in one of his last acts as Victorian premier, announced that Melbourne’s 44 public housing towers will be demolished. In an audacious giveaway to developers, the sites will be opened up to private development. 
The towers stand on prime land in the inner city in South Melbourne, Prahran, St Kilda, Williamstown, Footscray, Kensington, Flemington, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Brunswick and Richmond. When they were built in the 1950s-1970s, these were areas in which working-class and poor people lived. But in the last twenty years they have rapidly gentrified. The housing block towers are now tiny islands of government land, “locked up” for the enjoyment of people who could not otherwise afford to rent in the area. That’s seen by policymakers as a waste. 
Razing the towers will likely scatter the residents to the outer suburbs of Melbourne, out of sight. For now, the visually prominent towers might sustain a memory that the government provided cheap housing to people who, for a variety of reasons, cannot afford a home on the private market. Once they’re demolished, that can be forgotten. 
The day after the announcement, government workers distributed flyers and chocolates at the Flemington estate to inform residents that their homes would be some of the first to go. But there’s no sugar coating it: this is the destruction of public housing as we know it and a bonanza for the developers. 
The towers will be demolished and rebuilt one by one. The government says they are beyond repair and that the rebuilt towers will meet modern design standards and offer an extra 10 percent “social housing”. The land will also be redeveloped for private and “affordable” housing. To the 10,000 residents of public housing plus the additional 10 percent social housing, an additional 20,000 people will move into apartments built for the private market. 
This is the crux of it—instead of redeveloping the sites to improve public housing and expand it to meet the need of the 55,800 people currently on the waiting list, the additional social housing dwellings are tokens to justify giving away the land to the private market. 
The waiting list for social housing in Victoria has grown from about 35,000 since 2017: an increase of more than 60 percent in six years. The proposed 10 percent increase in social housing dwellings will not keep up with the growth in demand, let alone reduce the waiting list. The waiting time for people who need social housing because of domestic violence is almost two years, and they are prioritised above all other applicants. Others wait years or more than a decade. 
What the property boom has shown over the last twenty years is that apartments can be built quickly. The building companies and property developers who have made a fortune during the boom in property prices over the last two decades should fund public housing. 
A proposal to impose a meagre 1.75 percent levy on developers’ profits to raise $800 million to fund social housing was dropped within weeks in February 2022 because of the outcry from developers. It would have increased social housing by two-thirds to 4.5 percent of all housing by 2036, not the marginal 10 percent on existing sites. 
Andrews dubiously described the demolition proposal as “the biggest urban renewal project Australia has ever seen”. By what measure? Victoria has the lowest proportion of social housing of any state—2.9 percent. Across Australia, the proportion of housing stock available for public housing has fallen steadily since 2011, from 4.8 percent to 4.1 percent in 2022. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2023/jun/01/the-solutions-to-australias-housing-crisis-are-actually-quite-obvious">Guardian column</a>ist Greg Jericho noted recently that in 1983, fourteen public-sector residential buildings were approved for every 100 private-sector ones. Now it is 1.7 per 100. Go figure. 
“The towers have been purposefully neglected for years in order to justify their destruction”, Louisa Bassini, a tenancy lawyer working with public and community housing tenants, told Red Flag. Housing experts have questioned why alternatives to demolition were not explored site by site. A study by a not-for-profit architect and research firm, OFFICE, of the Barak Beacon site in Port Melbourne argued that the government could have saved $88 million if it had repaired rather than demolished the low-rise housing at that site. They say that the government should study the viability of redeveloping each site rather than opting to raze them all. 
Urban geographer Dr Kate Shaw says that the recent redevelopment of the Atherton Gardens estate in Fitzroy is an alternative: “That was a clear and substantial increase in social housing on a public housing estate. Nobody had to move out, and it hasn’t disrupted the lovely open feel of the estate because it was built in a well-serviced corner right on the tram line. Why we are not pursuing that model leaves me gobsmacked”. 
Bassini says that this highlights what the policy is really about. “To replace them with mostly private and community housing underlines why this is about dismantling public housing more broadly”, she said. “It’s a plan made in the interests of property developers and government economists, and it signals the reality that the government intends to move away from its role of providing housing for people who need it.” 
Housing advocates are concerned that the dislocation of communities inside the towers will mean many never return. This was the case at the walk-ups on the Rathdowne and Lygon Street sites in Carlton in 2011. One study showed that 80 percent of residents never returned. 
The Carlton sites are an example of the mixed model of privately owned and social housing. A 1.8 metre high wall keeps the public housing tenants out of the community garden built for the private tenants. 
It is a portent of what is to come: the ovals, playgrounds and gardens that are a gathering space and some respite from the cramped conditions of the apartments are too good for the poor and will now be sold to those who can afford to pay for the privilege of inner-city living, with the developers pocketing the profit.

The destruction of Victoria’s public housing

Silica is often called “the new asbestos”. But Ryan Hoy, a respiratory specialist with a practice in occupational lung disease, doesn’t like the comparison. He points out, in a joint investigation by 9News and the Sydney Morning Herald into the new wave of silicosis, that the disease is not new. It’s one of the oldest occupational lung diseases in the world. 
Ominously, sufferers of silicosis are younger than most people who succumb to mesothelioma, the form of cancer caused by asbestos exposure. People in their prime quickly progress from getting breathless going up stairs to being unable to play sport or play with their kids. Some are given just months or a few short years to live. Others eligible for a lung transplant may have their life extended by a decade or more, but it is not curative. 
The comparison with asbestos is compelling in other ways. Workers who cut through asbestos products in decades past describe how it generated clouds of dust, similar to today’s masons dry-cutting and polishing engineered stone in small workshops.
Back then, the knowledge that asbestos was dangerous was only just starting to get out to the community. In large measure, that was thanks to unions. First, they demanded extra payment for workers handling it, and through the 1970s there were more questions about its safety and demands for respirators and training. The bosses fobbed them off.
Union campaigning is the reason so many now know that asbestos is dangerous—even if they don’t fully understand how even small exposures pose a risk. In 2002, James Hardie, Australia’s largest manufacturer of asbestos-containing materials, tried to move its business to the Netherlands to avoid its full liabilities to asbestos-disease sufferers. The Australian Council of Trade Unions and Bernie Banton, a former shop steward at James Hardie’s Camelia plant in western Sydney, who developed asbestosis and then mesothelioma, launched a campaign to force the federal and state governments to intervene to ensure there would be sufficient funds to satisfy asbestos claims in the future. 
Today, unions are calling for a ban on the importation of engineered stone, the product used to make a popular type of kitchen benchtop that can contain up to 95 percent silica, which exposes so many stonemasons to disease. Unions have taken up the fight over the last few years, running awareness campaigns among members and in the media. The media spotlight on the issue dovetails with their efforts to pressure the new Labor government to accelerate action on the issue as it considers the recommendations of a Safe Work Australia report.
In response, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke convened a meeting with state health ministers. After Burke saying, “I am not willing to wait” to alter the workplace protections for workers exposed to silica dust, the meeting agreed to wait another six months to decide whether a ban on the importation of engineered stone products was necessary to allow Safe Work to prepare another report. This is a small acceleration of the timeline adopted by the previous Liberal government, based on a 2018 Safe Work report that recommended a ban be considered in July 2024 if there were not improvements to safety in workplaces using the product in the meantime. 
Anthony Albanese justified the delay based on the need to avoid “unintended consequences”, which we can presume means a hit to business profits. The Business Council of Australia complains that banning engineered stone will stifle innovation, baulking at safety concerns it considers to be a constraint on the development of new and potentially profitable products. 
The report also recommends that the permitted level of exposure to silica dust be halved in jurisdictions that have not done so already. This would still be double the levels allowed in the United States and recommended by the Cancer Council and the Lung Foundation. There is no known safe level of exposure. 
Ultimately, for workplace health and safety laws to be effective, they must be enforced. Enforcement is particularly important in the stone benchtop industry, which is full of small businesses that employ a handful of workers each and rely on them not understanding either their workplace rights or the dangers of silica exposure. One of the most alarming revelations in the recent media investigation was that WorkSafe NSW and WorkSafe Victoria did not send inspectors to some sites when they received tip-offs. Instead, they sent a letter to the employer informing them that they received a tip-off but had decided no-one would attend. 
Even where there are requirements to monitor dust levels, the report highlighted examples of large employers like John Holland manipulating the system by sending workers to the least dusty parts of the site to record measurements, and obstructing union officials attending the site to take their own measurements. This problem is made worse by restrictions on unions entering workplaces. Self-monitoring of dust levels is notoriously unreliable. Even James Hardie and Wunderlich agreed to dust monitoring at their asbestos factories. 
Facing the prospect of a total ban on the importation of their products, Caesarstone and Cosentino are advocating for a limit of 40 percent silica content in engineered stone. Lowering the silica content would lengthen the period over which a worker would need to be exposed to breathe in concentrations of silica capable of causing disease, but there is an absence of research confirming what is a safe level of exposure. A spokesperson for Cosentino reportedly gave an assurance, however, that there would be no price increase for the new product, so no change to operators’ profit margins. 
Here there are also parallels with the response of big business to the dangers of asbestos: deny, then minimise and manipulate public health authorities to stave off change for as long as possible. 
The companies that manufactured asbestos products had known about the dangers for decades before phasing out asbestos products in the 1980s. When it was clear that there would be strengthened regulations, the companies ensured that their representatives participated in public health authorities to attempt to shape the response and assure governments that they had already implemented adequate changes in their industry.

The scourge of silicosis 

In the November Victorian state election, the Victorian Socialists have set their sights on propelling one, if not two, of their candidates into the upper house. If successful, they’d be the first non-Labor socialists elected to an Australian parliament in more than 70 years. 
There are plenty of models of what not to do if elected to parliament. “Overpaid and out of touch” is how politicians are perceived. So how would socialists be different, and how would only one or two socialist voices be heard, let alone make a difference? 
First, socialists lead by example. Our candidates have pledged to live on the wage of a skilled worker and donate the rest of their salary to community campaigns—because political representatives should live like the people they represent. That was axiomatic for Victorian Socialists as soon as we decided to run candidates. 
Second, our lead candidates—Liz Walsh for the Western Metro and Jerome Small for the Northern Metro—have been rabble-rousers their whole adult lives. They’ve stood in the rain for hours on community picket lines and blockades, they’ve been dragged away by police and pepper sprayed, they’ve marched every time Israel has committed atrocities in Palestine, they’ve done the behind the scenes work in countless campaigns as well as speaking at rallies and forums. They would put that experience and tenacity to work to draw people into campaigning on all the key issues that arise. 
Having socialist MPs could introduce a wider layer of workers and young people to what socialists think on a range of questions. It would mean that people who thought socialism was high theory from 150 years ago get to see how it relates to everything from the climate crisis to housing today. 
A socialist standpoint injected into contemporary debates would also help shift politics to the left. For example, we advocate reversing privatisation of the energy sector, which would enable governments both to set caps on rising electricity and gas costs and more rapidly end reliance on coal and gas and redirect resources toward renewable energy sources. 
Look at how a few far-right nut jobs like Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer (with a few million dollars to pay for advertisements) elevated fringe ideas about COVID-19 vaccinations into the media for months. The media will always be more willing to promote more reactionary ideas when they do not challenge “common sense” ideas about society than discuss left-wing ideas that seek to challenge them. Nonetheless, the profile of parliamentarians would make socialist ideas harder to ignore. 
The excuse Labor MPs and many Greens representatives use for dropping left-wing positions is that they will be attacked for holding them, or that it’s more important to find a “middle ground”—which generally means capitulating to the right or business interests. 
Our potential MPs, on the other hand, are not strangers to being attacked by the mainstream media. They have spoken out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine countless times, defended raising the slogan “defund the police” and took a stand against the war in Afghanistan in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. 
Socialists don’t mind being denounced by newspaper columnists. In fact, if Andrew Bolt and Neil Mitchell weren’t inveighing against our elected MPs, we’d wonder what they were doing wrong. Rather than shirking controversy, socialists know that when a minority of people stand up for their beliefs, the debate that ensues can shift people’s attitudes. 
We hope that the profile of the MPs could also mean people searching out Marxism or people who want to take action about a particular issue knowing that if they get in touch with the VS MP, they’ll be able to connect with a network of socialists fighting for change. In this way, there would be a great opportunity for the socialist left to grow. The voice of one or two socialist MPs will be amplified by hundreds, if not thousands, of activists campaigning about the issues they take up. 
One of the most important things that a socialist MP would do is build solidarity with workers and oppressed groups organising to defend their rights. When pickets go up outside a workplace, they’d be among the first down there to lend support and find out how they can help get others to support them. When the media ignore or misconstrue a protest, they’d use their platform to highlight the cause. 
And with the Andrews government enacting harsher penalties against climate protesters, we need MPs who can rally people to their defence when charged under these draconian laws. 
One thing our MPs wouldn’t do is play by the rules. They would not go along with conventions about keeping parliamentary briefings or negotiations secret. We want to expose the workings of power at every opportunity. 
There would be so many more ways a socialist MP could shake up politics—we just have to win to have the chance to do it.
Colleen Bolger is the Victorian Socialists candidate for the seat of Melbourne.

What would a socialist do in parliament?

Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most decorated veteran of the war in Afghanistan, isn’t just embroiled in a defamation case. By launching legal action against journalists, he's effectively put himself on trial for war crimes. At the heart of the case is whether he murdered six Afghan prisoners of war in 2009 and 2012—and revelled in their killing. If that were true, it would be the act of “an ostentatious psychopath”, his barrister, Bruce McClintock SC, declared in his opening address in court this week. Indeed.
This man should be in the dock of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Instead, for a cost that must be $20,000 per day or more, he’s taking his enemies to court, bringing defamation proceedings against the outlets that published investigative articles by Nick McKenzie, David Wroe and Chris Masters that revealed the accusations.
If Ben Roberts-Smith loses, he won’t go to jail. If he wins, he’ll seek the largest payout of aggravated damages ever in an Australian case, potentially pocketing millions of dollars. An outcome like that would send a message: report on war crimes at your peril.
Defamation proceedings are a weapon in the arsenal of the rich and powerful. Lawsuits and threats of lawsuits are wielded to intimidate journalists and their publishers. But in this case, the publishers’ decision to run a “truth defence”—which means that they’ll argue that the articles weren’t defamatory because they were true—will make this trial more like the public truth commissions of past wars. Of course, it will be run by elite barristers instead of dissident veterans and anti-war activists. Nonetheless, the testimony from 21 former or serving soldiers about what happened in these six incidents has the potential to further expose the myth that the war in Afghanistan was to liberate women and bring democracy. 
McClintock has drawn the battle lines in the courtroom over class. The allegations, he says, are motivated by jealousy. It’s a trope that Liberal and Labour politicians sometimes employ: “the politics of class envy”, they call it. But revealing the despicable behaviour of our so-called superiors, who are usually protected by networks of powerful people with ways of making people fall into line, isn’t a sin: it’s laudable behaviour.
Most ex-soldiers don’t lead the lifestyle of Roberts-Smith. Upon retiring from full-time service in 2013, he was offered a scholarship to study business at the University of Queensland. Rarer still for any undergraduate, he was offered a job as a general manager of Seven Media Queensland outfit twenty months before he graduated.
Roberts-Smith is no rank-and-file grunt: he’s the son of Major General Len Roberts-Smith, also a former justice of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. Like so many scions of the ruling class in Western Australia, he attended Hale, recently famous for its debating team champions who later entered politics. Coincidentally, his father was appointed judge advocate general for the defence force in 2002, making him responsible for reporting on disciplinary action against service personnel. Nowadays, Roberts-Smith junior is the protege of Seven Media chief Kerry Stokes, who hired him to a management position and is bankrolling the trial. 
The testimony of the 21 soldiers who are willing to subject themselves to cross-examination and tell their stories is an important event. It can lay bare the horrors of Australia’s crimes in Afghanistan. But even here, access is restricted: if you can’t stay in the courtroom all day, transcripts cost $2,000 for a day’s worth of material. So much for open court.
McClintock’s opening notably quoted a line attributed to Winston Churchill: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those would do us harm”. It’s the classic defence of killing as the moral price brave soldiers pay so that we yellow-bellied, civil rights-loving civilians have the luxury of asking questions like “Were unarmed Afghans murdered?” The message is that soldiers—and, by extension, war—should be above question. 
In this case, the rumours of atrocities committed by a group of SAS soldiers in Afghanistan were so compelling, they prompted an internal Defence investigation led by Major General Paul Brereton, a former judge of the NSW Court of Appeal. Brereton’s report found that 25 soldiers committed war crimes, resulting in the deaths of 39 Afghans. (It’s during this investigation that Roberts-Smith allegedly obtained disposable “burner phones” to communicate with witnesses, and sent threatening letters to others.)
The crimes seemed so widespread that the military hierarchy intervened to strip the unit of its honours. Yet Peter Dutton as defence minister intervened to reverse the Army’s decision. The message is clear: Dutton will make sure that the government throws its weight behind the perpetrators of systematic, sadistic murder in war. 
The defence of Roberts-Smith and the murderous SAS goes hand in hand with whitewashing and rehabilitating the very concept of imperialist war. Take another strong supporter of Roberts-Smith: Brendan Nelson, John Howard’s old defence minister, who is now tasked with redeveloping the War Memorial in Canberra. War memorials are contradictory places. The long list of names brings home the horror of the slaughter of so many working class people for the imperial ambitions of the rich. That horror is manipulated into a “national spirit” that papers over the class division at the heart of war. A name on a wall is a consolation that the sacrifice will be remembered—and was worth it after all.
War museums can be places where people learn the history of savagery that our rulers are prepared to carry out to assert dominance in a region that matters for their position in the global market. The war museum in Ho Chi Minh City is full of photographs of US atrocities committed in the Vietnam War. It’s impossible to leave without thinking that the US military should never be allowed to deploy its troops ever again.
But Brendan Nelson has a different vision for our war memorial: he plans to install a museum of all our biggest, coolest military hardware. Where war is presented as a set of technical considerations of battle tactics and technology, it means we don’t see it for what it is: an atrocity perpetrated by our ruling class and their political servants. Just as key figures in the ruling class recognise that the outcome of the Roberts-Smith trial is another iteration in the battle to legitimise war, it should be of interest to all those who work to expose its true imperialist nature.

Imperialism is on trial in Ben Roberts-Smith's case

More than exposing yet another presidential transgression, Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky reveals what passes as normal in politics. We all know that influence and wealth cleave to those in high elected office. Just ask Hunter Biden. His name is worth a lifetime of wealth and security, no matter how often he fucks up. The consensus among commentators is that his dad Joe, former vice president in the Obama administration and front runner in the Democrats’ presidential primaries race, did nothing wrong.
According to the Washington Post, Hunter travelled with Joe to China in 2013, where he met with a partner of BHR, a state-backed Chinese private equity fund. Several days later, Hunter joined the board of directors. But we’re assured that it had nothing to do with Dad. He later acquired a US$430,000 stake in the operation.
Hunter was also appointed to the board of Burisma, the Ukraine’s largest private gas company during Biden Snr’s tenure as vice president and one month after the pro-US government was installed in power. “The younger Mr. Biden collected roughly $50,000 a month for serving on the board of [Burisma] at a time when his father was helping to shape the Obama administration’s foreign policy toward Ukraine”, Sharon LaFraniere and Michael Forsythe write in the New York Times. It was his first job after being administratively discharged (in effect, expelled) from the Navy Reserve for cocaine use. He had no industry experience. Again, nothing to do with Dad.
There is nothing abnormal about the US president using the position to bully, buy or cajole heads of state into acting in the interests of the United States. Ukraine is an example. In 2014, the US backed the pro-NATO opposition to the government of Viktor Yanukovych, which had friendly relations with Russia. It receives US military aid because it is a bulwark against Russian encroachment into an area bordering the European Union.
Trump understands at least that much. According to a report in the Washington Post, he told Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and then Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in 2017 that he wasn’t concerned about purported Russian election interference because the US also interferes in other countries’ elections.
Most of those outraged by Trump’s appeal to the Ukraine president accept the legitimacy of US presidents exploiting their power when pursuing the interests of US imperialism. From backing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua to bring down the elected left wing Sandinista government to funding right wing NGOs in Venezuela, that’s seen as good foreign policy.
There’s no need to hide it. When Yemen was the only state in the Middle East to vote against the resolution to launch the 1991 Gulf War, the then US ambassador to the UN, James Baker, declared that it was “the most expensive ‘no’ vote ever cast”. Investigative journalist John Pilger, <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/node/192550">in a 2002 New Statesman article</a>, documented how other countries were brought – or bought – into line: Egypt and Zaire were promised debt forgiveness, Syria given arms to use against Lebanese-backed militias, and Ecuador and Zimbabwe were threatened with more unfavourable terms on their World Bank loans.
Trump has crossed the line by trying to undermine a potential political rival, rather than a foreign state. Former US president Richard Nixon also crossed the line when he ordered the cover-up of his associates’ break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington, DC.
Trump has normalised political crisis in US politics. In response to each crisis, a section of the Democrats has demanded impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, the most senior Democrat in Congress, has acceded. There is a risk for the Democrats that the impeachment proceeding will fuel Trump’s “outsider” persona – that the president is the victim of the Washington elites for shining a torch on some untoward buying of influence by the Bidens.
But the Democrats want to make sure that Trump is portrayed as exceptional. The reality is far worse: the entire political establishment is crooked. It collectively enriches itself – and the US ruling class – at the expense of workers everywhere by interfering in the affairs of the whole world. As Council on Foreign relations senior fellow Mira Rapp-Hooper noted this month:
“Power is the organizing principle of international politics. That endows the United States with an extraordinary ability to coerce others – that is, to make them follow its lead through a mix of inducements and penalties. As a result, Washington has had a unique ability to promote its political and economic agenda abroad. Being in this position is a privilege – one that allows Washington to shape a world favorable to American interests.”
This is probably the worst crime of US politicians. But they will never be impeached for it.

Biden is crooked and US imperialism is a perpetual quid pro quo

Triple j’s hack tv special on the little Aussie Fuhrer Blair Cottrell was exactly what commentators grappling with the rise of Pauline Hanson have been calling for: a conversation.
In response to breakfast television host Sonia Kruger’s call to ban Muslim immigration, Waleed Aly called on people who might have choked on their Weet-Bix to instead empathise with her fear and exercise restraint. If only we could all just get along the bigots would … well, it’s not clear what would happen, as even Aly acknowledges that the likes of One Nation or the tiny groups of Hitlerites are highly unlikely to change.
In a column criticising the Greens for walking out during Hanson’s maiden speech in the Senate, Aly pressed further, arguing that “we don’t engage anymore”, decrying the hardening of the lines of debate.
Hack’s panel on patriotism set up two Muslim women, an academic, an Indigenous artist and an ex-soldier to take on a One Nation voter and Cottrell, leader of the United Patriots Front, a tiny group of unreconstructed fascists. At best, through reasoned debate, this was designed to expose the fallacies on which the racist arguments rest. At worst, it was the exercise in empathy proposed by Aly.
What ensued was an hour of monologues from Cottrell, including stupendous slurs about Muslims and Indigenous people, and a mini biopic shot at flattering angles while he explained his modest aim “of getting the most power possible”.
This level of media attention is out of all proportion to what he represents. Cottrell’s group numbers no more than 30, and mobilises no more than 100 nutters at its protests.
Groups who organise counter-demonstrations are chastised for bringing them greater attention. But between the TV news leading with their demonstrations, counter-protest or no counter-protest, and current affairs producers sticking them in an armchair in front of a camera, the media are intent on thrusting fascists into our lounge rooms.
The question is whether viewers will also see people taking them on and calling them out for what they are.

Triple J and the Aussie Fuhrer

“A new phase of the Syriza era” is how one activist characterised the political situation in Greece since the re-election of the post-bailout Syriza government in September.
In the last months of 2015, teachers, students, seamen, metro workers, municipal workers and pensioners protested or struck against the government’s austerity measures. On 12 November, the first general strike under the Syriza government took place, against pension cuts.
The struggle then exploded in January. Lawyers launched an indefinite strike. Seamen have held two 48-hour strikes, and a third is planned in the coming weeks. On 21 January, doctors, engineers, lawyers and seamen all struck and came together for a rally of more than 15,000. As the strikes broke out around the cities, farmers blockaded major highways with tractors.
All this set the stage for a strike on 4 February, called by both the public and private unions. This action was solidly observed across the country, from small towns to the giant march in Syntagma square, Athens.
It seems very likely that sooner or later the Tsipras government will pay the same price that all governments that pushed through austerity have paid in the past five years.
Panos Petrou of the Internationalist Workers Left (DEA by its Greek acronym) told Red Flag: “What was most impressive in this general strike was its national character. There were big demonstrations not just in big cities, but also in small towns and even villages. Some of these demonstrations in the rest of Greece were actually bigger than the mobilisations in 2010-12.
 “Until now, the struggle of the professionals (lawyers, engineers) and the farmers were setting the tone. Blocs of these sectors were present in the general strike, but the importance of the general strike was the reappearance of wage earners and workers’ unions on the scene. This was a very significant aspect of the general strike.
“We stand firmly against a sectarian/purist attitude that dismisses all professionals and farmers as ‘middle-class reactionaries defending their privileges’ (this is coming from small parts of the left, but it is also the government’s propaganda), and we support their struggle. But we are aware of the class distinctions inside these sectors, the efforts of the upper layers to hegemonise these movements, the connections of the leaderships of some of the unions and associations of these sectors with the bourgeois parties.”
Since the general strike, the seamen called another 48-hour strike and the lawyers extended their indefinite strike to 15 February under the leadership of their strike committee. The farmers have escalated their blockades and converged on Syntagma on 11 February. They joined municipal workers who set up camp outside the Ministry of Labour, protesting against five-month contracts. A government official warned that farming vehicles will not be permitted to enter, creating the potential for a stand-off.
This is the confrontation Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras feared when he persuaded the country’s creditors to let him postpone pension cuts and increase taxes on farmers so that the third memorandum would pass the parliament with minimum protest back in July.
These attacks bite hard into living standards. The tax hike affecting farmers has provoked a normally quiescent social layer into protest. The pension cuts are twofold – lowering the rate new pensioners will receive and increasing contributions from most workers.
Tsipras has offered concessions to lower paid workers, lowering the contributions from them. However, where people are so badly paid they cannot afford any contribution, it matters little whether the contribution is €1000 or €10,000 – their contribution will still be nil. Tsipras has also said that the reduction will not be imposed on existing pensioners, but the creditors have not yet agreed to this proposal. The governor of the Bank of Greece, Yannis Stournaras, is still demanding pensions be slashed further.
Tsipras has no strategy to deal with the unrest. According to Panos, the government “is moving constantly from denouncing the protesters as ‘privileged layers’ or ‘reactionaries’ to trying to appease them and claim that ‘at heart’ the government is on their side and is trying to do its best in the negotiations with the creditors”.
On the eve of the general strikes in November and February, Tsipras came out in support of strikers, claiming they were acting against the creditors. Nonetheless, no minister was game to attend the strike rallies. Syriza still enjoys passive support while people are sceptical that the left can deliver anything better. Polls indicate support for Popular Unity, a left split from Syriza, is about the same as at the elections, when it polled 2.9 percent. In this sense this period is a continuation rather than a break with the Syriza experiment. Yet people are prepared to take a stand against drastic cuts to their living standards. Panos said, “We have been witnessing the growing dissatisfaction of the electoral base of support of Syriza towards the Tsipras government, but in terms of disappointment or silent rage”.
Since the pension cuts were tabled, one Syriza parliamentarian has resigned, reducing the Syriza-ANEL parliamentary coalition to 154. This has pushed Syriza to attempt to ally with Pasok, Potami or lunatic TV personality Vasilis Leventis in order to broaden its parliamentary support.
The government continues to defer the vote on the pensions. The peak public sector union, ADEDY, is expected to call another general strike the day the vote is taken. The national strikes are exacerbating the instability in the government. Panos reports, “There is an open discussion in the media and widespread rumours about all possible scenarios: from a ‘national unity’ government to early elections (again!). It seems very likely that sooner or later the Tsipras government will pay the same price that all governments that pushed through austerity have paid in the past five years”.

Greek government under increasing pressure

From the vantage point of the Swiss Alps, world leaders and their wealthy friends who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos cast an eye over the potential threats to their order. This year they identified “large scale involuntary migration” as the biggest “risk” in 2016.
As they talked about how to address the risk posed by the 1.1 million refugees who had arrived in Europe in 2015, another 45 bodies were pulled from the Aegean Sea. In January, an estimated 187 refugees drowned crossing between Turkey and Greece. Four thousand drowned last year. Debate about the refugee crisis has dominated European politics for months.
The Dublin Treaty, which specifies that refugees must seek asylum in the first country in which they arrive, has proved unworkable. Most refugees have come through Greece and Italy, which do not have the infrastructure to process the high volume of claims, and most refugees want to make the onward journey to western or northern Europe. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, in effect suspended the treaty in August when she declared refugees were welcome in Germany.
The ensuing debate has been characterised as one between liberal-minded, compassionate Germany and the reactionary nationalism of eastern European countries that called for the reimposition of border controls. Merkel was even touted as a potential recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
These accolades were misplaced. Merkel’s celebrated “welcome culture” was predicated on fortifying Europe’s borders. On the eve of the Christian Democrats’ (CDU) conference in December, she proclaimed her aim was to “drastically reduce” the number of refugees reaching Europe.
Germany had vigorously pursued this strategy at the last European leaders’ summit and the Malta conference at the end of November, proposing to strengthen the powers of a European “coast guard”. However, European governments were reluctant to cede more power over their borders.
Tacit in Merkel’s declaration that “We can do it”, is the implication “and so should you” in relation to the rest of Europe accepting more refugees. This part of Merkel’s strategy – the establishment of quotas – has gone nowhere. Talk of resettling up to 180,000 refugees from Turkey has been scaled back to 50-80,000. The reluctance of the eastern European governments to allocate funds to the resettlement of refugees reflects the disparity between their struggling economies and Germany’s, which has a current account surplus of 8 percent of GDP.
Merkel also negotiated a €3 billion deal with Turkey to lock down the eastern border. Turkey’s repressive president, Recep Erdogan, is seen as the right man for the job – more reliable than Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, who is churlish about building detention centres. Now EU leaders are reportedly exploring suspending Greece from the Schengen zone and locking down its northern borders, which would add another humanitarian disaster on top of the economic crisis in Greece.
Since news surfaced that groups of men of North African descent had carried out a high number of sexual assaults and thefts in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, the debate has shifted drastically to the right.
Far from there being a conspiracy of silence as claimed by the right, initial reports claiming 1,000 men had been involved were a great exaggeration. Four weeks later, 32 have been charged, of whom 22 are asylum seekers.
Predictably, this has emboldened the far right. Already buoyed by the strong result of the National Front in the French regional elections in December, it has seized on the attacks in Cologne to mainstream its racist bile while simultaneously escalating street violence. The anti-Islam far right group Pegida held rallies of thousands in Cologne and Stuttgart. In Leipzig hundreds rampaged through an enclave of the left, smashing up kebab stores and anything associated with Arab culture.
The far right in Germany should not be underestimated. The main party, Alternative for Germany, is polling around 10 percent, an increase of about 5 percent since September.
However, the most significant shift has been in Europe’s governing parties, which have outdone the fascists in finding ways to single out and demean refugees.
British PM David Cameron has called for migrants who do not earn above £35,000 per year to be deported. Their spouses must pass an English test to ensure they “integrate”. Denmark and Bavaria have passed legislation giving police power to search and seize refugees’ valuables. Sweden announced on 28 January it would deport 80,000 people whose refugee applications have been rejected. Refugees in Calais had to fight for their makeshift tents against police encroaching on the camp established in north-western France.
If smashing up shops in Leipzig could be compared to Kristallnacht, a state policy of painting red the front doors of houses accommodating refugees and confiscating wedding rings conjures a frightening vision of the Third Reich.
If smashing up shops in Leipzig could be compared to Kristallnacht, a state policy of painting red the front doors of houses accommodating refugees and confiscating wedding rings conjures a frightening vision of the Third Reich.
Domestically, Merkel has shifted to appease the voices on her right. She has vowed to deport refugees convicted of a criminal offence. She has also said that she will expand the list of safe countries of origin to include Morocco and Algeria, which will make it much harder for people fleeing these countries to be accepted as refugees, and further entrench the idea that hunger is a spurious danger. Deportations have increased from 40 to 100 per day.
In almost every report of these attacks, Cologne is the reference. In her statement, Merkel said, “We are vulnerable. We do not yet have the order, the control, we would like”. The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, said there was a danger Europe would be “overwhelmed” – language just close enough to “overrun” to excite the racists. They had been ever so generous, but Arab men just don’t appreciate “Western values”, especially when it comes to women, was the message of most of the statements by German and European leaders.
Cologne is a narrative to justify a shift that in reality has taken place because Germany is isolated. Unlike the Greek crisis in June 2015, in which Merkel called the shots, her promises to European countries have not stopped the arrival of refugees.
When she and German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble declare there can be no euro without the Schengen zone, it is a threat. Defy us, and we will use our economic clout to punish you.
However, underlying the threat of a bully is usually insecurity. In this case, it’s that if countries start taking back control of their borders, it sets a precedent that governments can reassert their sovereignty over anything when the policy of the European Union doesn’t suit.
Understanding the realpolitik should not mean dismissing the importance of challenging the narrative. As Dr Martin Luther King Jnr said, “Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior”. The commentary about Cologne stirs up the old trope of the virile, brown man chasing after the pure, white woman.
Many columnists who would reject this crude stereotype nonetheless reinforce it with calls for refugees to be educated in the ways of Europe. Charity workers extol the teaching of courses in refugee shelters that cover homosexuality and explain that the equality of women is enshrined in Germany’s constitution.
It does not occur to them that a culture that is responsible for the mass bombing of women and children may have nothing worthy to teach about the rights of women. They unabashedly list ideas to help “integrate” refugees, giving “assimilation” a benevolent gloss.
 The more leftish sounding version of this argument is that the feminist movement in the Middle East has not yet made the gains it has in the West. But in the current context this feeds the same stereotype that the Arab and Muslim men seeking asylum are not as enlightened as their Western counterparts.
After Cologne, there was a lot of consternation about the left “asking the hard questions”. It’s only hard if your instinct is to agree with the premise of the right that there is a problem with refugees but you are trying to maintain the pretence of supporting them.
The real question the left needs to address is how it will stand up to the vicious attacks on refugee rights that have been announced almost daily in the past month.
So far, the response has been encouraging. Solidarity actions were organised on the weekend of 23-24 January. Hundreds of activists converged on Evros in north-east Greece to protest the wall built on the border with Turkey and policed by the private security firm Frontex. Blocking the only safe passage between Turkey and Europe, the wall forces refugees to risk their lives crossing the Aegean Sea in dinghies.
On the other side of the continent in Calais, 2,000 people demonstrated – activists from across Europe together with residents of the refugee camp. Five hundred broke through police lines and shut down the passenger ports. Later, 300 refugees fought through tear gas and water cannon as police tried to evict them from a stretch of the camp.
The right is using the events in Cologne to undermine the outpouring of solidarity in the latter part of last year, when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people donated or delivered goods to refugees. The right knows that this is a barrier to its plan to deter refugees from coming to Europe by making their lives sheer misery.
With the combination of dramatic acts of civil disobedience, confrontations with the fascists, mass protests and the resistance of refugees, the battle to dismantle Fortress Europe enters 2016.

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