The day after politicians united to condemn Katter Party senator Fraser Anning’s “final solution” speech, they ensured that refugees would continue to languish in detention centres. It was an act of irony on a par with Labor prime minister Julia Gillard cutting pensions for single mothers on the day she lectured then opposition leader Tony Abbott about misogyny.
So what was this bipartisan display of cruelty about?
In July, the federal court determined that laws previously passed to keep refugees out of Australia weren’t written for purpose. 
In what sounds like absurdist satire the Liberal government in 2001 removed (“excised”) parts of Australia from Australia (at least for immigration purposes if someone arrived by boat). Anyone arriving by boat to the Australian territories of Ashmore Island, Cartier Islands, Christmas Island or Cocos Islands could no longer claim asylum in Australia.
Not to be outdone, the Australian Labor Party excised the entire Australian mainland from the Australian migration zone in 2013. That meant that anyone arriving by boat to Australia doesn’t, by law, actually reach Australia. The government therefore has no obligation to grant them a visa and can remove them to Manus Island and Nauru.
The federal court found problems with the legislation, paving the way for 1,600 refugees to have their cases heard. Rather than do nothing and allow their human rights, the government abolished the “loophole” (retrospectively). 
The Labor Party lined up to vote for this horrid piece of legislation. Only three politicians in the House of Representatives voted against: the Greens’ Adam Bandt and independent MPs Andrew Wilkie and Cathy McGowan. That a former Liberal Party member and a former intelligence agent have a more progressive attitude toward refugees than the ALP, the supposed party of workers, is telling of Labor’s decades-long rightward drift. 
After decades of the ALP torturing and mistreating refugees, so-called leftists still argue that people should join or vote for this monstrosity above other progressive candidates to create “cracks” in the party. This argument was fundamental in Ged Kearney’s campaign to win the March 2018 Batman by-election. 
As ACTU president, Kearney spoke out to support refugees. But within days of her pre-selection for Batman, she declared that she would accept her party’s appalling policies. Outrage was rife amongst refugee campaigners and constituents in Batman, forcing her to change her tune and say she would try to change ALP refugee policy “from within”. 
Since being elected, however, far from making refugees a big issue, Kearney has used her credibility to silence dissent on Labor’s refugee policy. Kearney and the industrial left faction stopped a debate on refugee policy at the ALP’s Victorian state conference this year. 
In parliament, Kearney voted with all her ALP colleagues to continue to deny human rights to 1,600 refugees, standing against Bandt, Wilkie and McGowan, who presented some defiance in parliament on this issue. 
Rather than expressing her support for these MPs for taking a principled position, she put a video on social media accusing the Greens of not being “respectful” and accusing the party of organising supporters to bully her. That Kearney thinks she and her colleagues on large salaries in Canberra deserve more sympathy than the refugees being brutalised by the bipartisan policies of the Liberals and the ALP shows just how out of touch she is. 
Kearney claimed that if the ALP were elected tomorrow, “there wouldn’t be anyone languishing in indefinite detention”. But official ALP policy, according to the party’s website, continues to be:
“Strong borders, offshore processing, regional resettlement, and [boat] turnbacks … Labor’s resolve on this issue is absolute – the way to Australia through irregular means by boat is closed, and it will remain … As such, bringing people from offshore regional processing centres to Australia is not an option.”
Kearney’s words are as meaningless as Peter Dutton’s claim during the Liberal leadership spill that “I would love to get everybody off there [Nauru and Manus Island] tomorrow – if I could have brought them to Australia in a charter flight overnight I would have.” 
Both the ALP and Liberals have had plenty of opportunity to bring the refugees here.
In sacrificing the refugees today, Kearney claims it will allow her to better have a conversation to change ALP policy at the party conference in December. Like she did at the Victorian state conference? Pull the other one. We can’t trust these “left” faces of Labor.

James Crafti

Ged Kearney shows we can’t trust Labor

Australia’s minister for Israel, Michael Danby, has announced that he will not contest the next election. 
Australia doesn’t have a minster for Israel, you might be thinking. But for the Labor member for the federal seat of Melbourne Ports, commitment to apartheid Israel came before anything else. In fact, he spoke in defence of Israel in the Australian parliament more than on any other issue. 
In a J-Wire article published the day after his announcement, Danby said, “From an Australian Jewish viewpoint, perhaps my most difficult days in Canberra were with former prime minister Kevin Rudd, when he expelled the Mossad station chief in Canberra after the head of the Mossad Meir Dagan used Australian passports for the targeted [extrajudicial] assassination of the Hamas quartermaster, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, in Dubai”. 
Danby frequently attacked his party’s leadership for not being pro-Israel enough. He even derided Bob Carr, former president of Labor Friends of Israel, for pointing out the obvious: that building more Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land was a bad thing and that the Palestinians should have greater status in the United Nations.
Danby told the ABC, “The best way to a peace settlement – and I’ve tried to explain this to Bob time and time again and to end the issue of the settlements – is a peace settlement”. That is, the Palestinians should surrender all rights and then we will have a “peace settlement”.
It wasn’t just people in his own party who faced Danby’s fury. Even the Liberal Party’s Julia Bishop copped it from Danby over her criticisms of Israel using Australian passports for spying. 
Bishop originally had been unfazed by Australian passports being used by the Israeli secret service, but changed her tune in the wake of a Foreign Correspondent program finding that an Australian citizen, Ben Zygier, died mysteriously in Israel’s most secure jail cell. His “crimes”, like his death, are still a mystery, but believed to be related to Israel’s illegal activities.
Danby often claims to have spent his time in parliament fighting for human rights and free speech, particularly in relation to countries such as China. But his few comments on such issues sound vapid in light of his demand that Melbourne University Press not publish My Israel Question, a book by Jewish Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein. 
Having never read the book, which simply asks why Zionists refuse to engage with even the most moderate of Palestinian voices, Danby wrote to the Australian Jewish News: “If, God forbid, it is published, don’t give them a dollar. Don’t buy the book”. 
His support for boycotts turned out to be fleeting. Some years later, he hosted the launch of Why Boycotting Israel is Wrong, a book attacking everyone who refuses to defend the apartheid state. 
In 2017, Danby spent $4,574 of his parliamentary budget on two half-page advertisements in the Jewish News criticising ABC journalist Sophie McNeill’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict as biased for not treating the stabbing of three Israelis by a lone Palestinian in the same way that she covered the eviction of a Palestinian family by the Israeli state.
In retirement, Danby can be safe knowing that, while his friends and former colleagues may not be as one eyed as him in their support for a tiny racist coloniser on the other side of the world, Israel will continue to hold a special place in the hearts of Australian parliamentarians. As Danby noted in his farewell: 
“Before I was elected to parliament in 1998, there hadn’t been a single MP visit Israel for more than a decade … the atmosphere has totally improved in parliament, with many members and senators having visited Israel, the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group having one of the largest memberships in parliament.” 
And with leaders such as Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews, who opened a trade and investment office in Tel Aviv last year, Danby’s legacy is, sadly, living on.

Australia’s minister for Israel resigns

“Every year several hundred children are expelled from government schools [in Victoria] … A disproportionate number of expelled children have a disability, are in out of home care, or identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Some come from backgrounds of significant trauma. Some are only five or six years old.”
The opening lines of Victorian ombudsman Deborah Glass’ report into government school expulsions is cause for concern.
The report, released in August, goes on to note a number of disturbing yet sadly predictable statistics. Aboriginal children and children from foster care backgrounds are two to three times more likely to be expelled than other students. Roughly 30 percent of expelled students have some form of disability or mental illness.
While 278 students were formally expelled in 2016, the report states that there were potentially thousands more students who were “informally expelled” – i.e., they felt compelled to leave through pressure or systematic disengagement.
At some schools, students are expelled for minor things such as smoking pot during a lunch break. In some cases, schools fail to take into consideration a student’s circumstances. The report cites an “early primary school student who was expelled for hitting an assistant principal. At the time of this incident, the school was aware of significant upheaval in the child’s life including Department of Health and Human Services’ involvement after her mother tried to relinquish care to her grandmother”.
Expulsions were frequently used to deal with children “put in the too hard basket”, such as one child who was expelled from her primary school after having been there only two weeks. The school simply decided it could not help the student because “she has demonstrated that … her distrust of adults will prevent establishing a workable relationship”.
Expelling a kid isn’t going to increase their trust in adults; it is more likely to leave them increasingly marginalised and alienated. There is a reason why the majority of people in the juvenile justice system have either been suspended or expelled at some point during their schooling.
Once expelled, students often spend a long time out of school before returning to another, only to be further behind in and more alienated from their education then they were at their previous school.
Systemic disadvantage needs to be combated, greater resources need to be provided to assist young people with trauma, and class sizes need to be reduced in order to enable teachers to handle situations as they occur. Given the enormous pressures on teachers, it is hardly surprising that they often resort to discipline and remove students from school rather than find the time to help the young people involved.
The way marginalised young people are treated as emerging criminals rather than kids needing help lays out a path for them for the rest of their lives. As the mother of an expelled six-year-old noted after having bent over backwards to get her kid back into a school: “He’s got us in his corner but other kids don’t have that and where do they end up? Where are those kids? I know where they are, they’re not at school, they slip through the cracks, they end up in the justice system”.

School expulsions report highlights plight of disadvantaged youth

Deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli “defence” forces are all too frequent. Israeli soldiers continue to murder Palestinians (including non-violent resistance activists) with impunity. Any attempt to fight back on the part of the occupied Palestinian population is dealt with swiftly, severely and collectively by the Israeli state.
In the wake of a Palestinian attack on two Israeli police officers, which also resulted in the deaths of the Palestinians, Israel attempted to exert greater control over Haram al Sharif (also known as the Temple Mount), which houses the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third most holy site of the Islamic faith, by installing metal detectors at the entrance.
Rather than be humiliated by Israel’s searches, mosque custodians the Waqf chose to close the site. In an act of defiance, prayers took place in front of where the metal detectors stood.
The metal detectors have nothing to do with security and are the latest in an extensive line of attempts by Israeli authorities to claim Haram al Sharif. The most notorious incident occurred in 2000, when soon to be Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon entered the compound with hundreds of Israeli riot police.
This year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) voted to reject Israel’s claim to the site. Israel responded to the vote by cutting a million dollars in funding to the international body.
Amid international outrage against the thinly veiled attempt to seize control, Israel has since dismantled the metal detectors, vowing to replace the devices with CCTV cameras. Despite this partial backdown, protests have continued internationally.
On 26 July, 200 people gathered in the rain on the streets of Melbourne in support of the Palestinians and their resistance to the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.
The rally, chaired by Palestinian refugee Nasser Mashni, included speakers from the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network, Australians for Palestine, Al Quds Melbourne and Casey Friends of Palestine. Many speakers spoke about the importance of the mosque as a symbol of occupied Palestine and the need to continue the resistance to Israel’s colonialism.
A group of 20 Israel supporters rallied nearby, attempting to confront the demonstration. The group included Avi Yemini, a former Israeli soldier and outspoken Islamophobe who invited senator Pauline Hanson to speak in Melbourne, and Steven Skinner from the Patriotic Defence League, a local fascist group.
The significantly larger Palestine action chose to turn their backs on these far right bigots. Palestinian rally organisers were quick to point out that it said a lot that people advocating for racism in Australia were also keen to back the racist Israeli state.
Since the removal of the metal detectors, Israel has tried several other methods of retaining control over Al-Aqsa – including announcing its intention to ban all men under the age of 50 from entering the site.
However, with protests continuing, including a protest in Jerusalem in which at least 113 people were injured, such measures were not able to be implemented. While it is unclear what comes next, the Palestinians will continue to resist any further attempts by their occupier to hinder access to their holy sites.
Sheikh Raed Dana from the Waqf told the Guardian: “This movement is a movement of the street … if the street says no to the measures, we will say no”.

Palestinians stand up to Israel’s attempt to control Al-Aqsa

Refugee rights activists have helped to prevent the deportation of a 60-year-old man to Iraq. “Saeed” (not his real name) is from a religious minority that faces ongoing persecution. The head of his village was murdered in 2015 in a suicide attack. His family reside in Iraq but are stateless.
Saeed and his brother fled to Australia in 2012. They were on the same boat and shared the same set of circumstances. His brother was given asylum but Saeed was not. The Federal Court refused to hear an appeal of Saeed’s asylum status, ruling that he took too long to make his application. Saeed does not speak English and was never told that he had the right to appeal his original, flawed refugee determination.
After more than two weeks on hunger strike, Saeed was threatened with deportation on 22 March. Activists from the Refugee Action Collective, Love Makes a Way, Grandmothers for Refugees, and a variety of anarchists, socialists and faith-based groups responded by blockading the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation Detention Centre in Broadmeadows.
The blockade, which started the evening before Saeed was to be deported, prevented the government from moving him to the airport. Vehicles heading out of the detention centre were searched by activists to make sure Border Force officers did not smuggle him out.
While the blockade was successful in stalling Saeed’s deportation, lawyers struggled to negotiate on his behalf. They were stonewalled by Department of Immigration officials. Saeed’s lawyers report, however, that the Iraqi embassy stated that it is opposed to stateless refugees being deported to Iraq, particularly against their will.
Saeed was transported to Melbourne’s Northern Hospital by ambulance on the day he was set to be deported.
Refugee activists are calling on hospital staff to not release Saeed into Border Force custody and are in discussions with members of the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation. The union issued a statement on 20 March, calling on the Turnbull government to “stop the impending deportation”.
The fight to stop the forced removal of Saeed is far from over. Refugee rights activists will need to be ready to mobilise in the coming days to ensure he is not deported.

Activists stave off the deportation of refugee

The case of nine Australians detained in Malaysia for stripping down to bathers emblazoned with the Malaysian flag has received a lot of coverage. The men violated the country’s conservative laws and were seen as disrespectful to the nation’s modest sensibility and patriotism.
While Malaysia’s laws are reactionary, the men’s actions were those of privileged Westerners who showed no regard for local customs and an idiotic disregard for the views of the people around them.
In contrast to Australian hype around Malaysia, politicians and media outlets have been awfully quiet about Israel detaining 13 women for attempting to break the siege of Gaza. This is despite the fact that the boat’s captain is an Australian citizen and other women on board included a Nobel peace laureate, New Zealand, Swedish and Algerian parliamentarians, an Olympic volleyball player and a US ex-diplomat.
The main reason why “the nine” are so much more popular is because they fit the narrative of men standing up to reactionary/conservative Islam.
The men in Malaysia were detained for a stupid illegal act. By contrast, the women were detained by the Israeli army in an illegal act of piracy and kidnapping in international waters.
So why is there no spotlight on Israel’s actions and a lot of focus on Malaysia detaining idiots? Simple racism is no doubt one factor. The fact that the men are all white with Western-sounding last names no doubt made their story easier to sell than the story of a woman whose family is Egyptian and who carries the last name Habib. The fact that one of the men involved was a staffer for Liberal minister Christopher Pyne also probably helped.
But the main reason why “the nine” are so much more popular is because they fit the narrative of men standing up to reactionary/conservative Islam. By contrast, the story of the women’s boat to Gaza is the story of women standing up to the apartheid Israeli government, which has received bipartisan support from Australian governments and “oppositions” since it was founded in 1948.
Since withdrawing settlers in 2005 (relocating many of them to illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank), the Israeli government has tried to claim that Gaza is no longer occupied. This is despite the fact that Israel (with Egypt) controls Gaza’s borders (land, sea and air), making it a giant open air prison.
The fact that it is impossible to enter Gaza via international waters without being arrested by Israel shows that Gaza remains occupied.
 As New Zealand prime minister John Key pointed out, “This isn’t the first flotilla that has gone into Gaza, and they have all ended pretty much the same way”. While Key had his facts wrong (the boat didn’t make it to Gaza), the right wing leader was right to point out that the continued arrests were a “less than perfect look” for countries that want to maintain relations with Israel. No wonder some Australians would rather ignore it.

Australian media and politicians talk selectively about citizens abroad

Melbourne council workers are stepping up their industrial campaign against plans to undermine their conditions.
Parking inspectors have announced that they will not issue parking tickets over the AFL grand final long weekend, when tens of thousands of visitors are expected to flock to the city. Their union claims the move will cost the city of Melbourne up to $300,000 a day in lost revenue.
This will be the second three-day stretch during which inspectors refuse to issue fines as part of their dispute with the council. Last financial year, Melbourne council collected more than $42 million in parking fines. 
The Australian Services Union, which represents council workers, has been bargaining for a new enterprise agreement with the council for six months. A draft of the deal offered by the council was voted down by around two-thirds of the workforce in July.
Fed up with what the union describes as a lack of good faith from council’s negotiators, union members held a two-hour stop-work on 6 September. The strike involved library staff, town hall workers and parking officers. Around 100 striking workers rallied outside Melbourne town hall.
Central to the dispute is the council’s attempt to abolish pay scales that provide automatic pay increases as workers acquire experience. Instead, Melbourne council wants workers’ pay set at management discretion, with the only limit being broad pay brackets. The change could mean workers getting paid different wages for doing the same job. Council also wants to cut redundancy entitlements.
On top of these attacks, management want to make it impossible for workers to appeal disciplinary findings made against them by their supervisors.
At the 6 September rally, amid chants of “The workers, united, will never be defeated”, one parking officer told Red Flag why they were fighting the council’s plans: “I’m a little ant and I don’t want to be squashed”.

Melbourne council workers step up fight

Derryn Hinch appears set to win a Senate seat in Victoria. The law-and-order candidate wants to erode the rights of people who have committed a crime and those who have allegedly committed a crime.
According to his party’s website, bail should not be granted to anyone facing trial for a violent crime. It says that it is “owed” to the public to keep alleged criminals off the streets by removing the ability of judges to weigh up the potential threat posed by someone compared to the serious issue of denying them liberty.
He supports greater police powers and tougher sentencing, not tempered by precedent. Furthermore, he wants to set up a public register of anyone convicted of a sexual offence. Such a register would essentially mark anyone on that list for life, making it nearly impossible for them to work or study or live without constant fear of being targeted by vigilantes.
In reality, people from a low socioeconomic background and non-whites are disproportionately likely to be incarcerated. This is because a lack of social services contributes to the incidence of crime and because of the bias of the “justice” system, which advantages the wealthy and privileged. Perhaps the greatest proof of this is Hinch himself, who admitted, in his book The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch, to having sex with a 15-year-old when he was in his 30s. That fits the definition of statutory rape in Victoria. He claimed that he “thought she was about 25”. Andrew Bolt called for Hinch to be prosecuted. He wasn’t, and years later said that he found out that she was actually 17.
He has been charged for violating the privacy of several alleged sexual predators. Having a man in parliament who sees himself as a real-life Batman, happy to act as judge and jury, is not a good outcome.
Given the likely make-up of the new Senate, the government might need to negotiate with Hinch to get legislation passed. Punishing convicted or alleged criminals is often a very easy and popular thing to offer, even if the cost is a dramatic erosion of civil liberties.

Shame shame, Derryn Hinch set for the Senate

With the US throwing its military might around the world, film maker Michael Moore’s Where to Invade Next (WIN) asks: amid the war profiting, is there something positive his country could gain from invading the rest of the world.
What follows is a travelogue of things that could be taken other than oil. These include Italy’s “generous” leave entitlements; France’s gourmet and healthy school lunches; Finland’s well-funded school system; Slovenia’s free tertiary education system; Germany’s remembrance of its darker past; Portugal’s decriminalisation of drugs; Norway’s more lenient prison system; Tunisia’s reproductive rights; and Iceland’s jailing of bankers.
If you think that is a lot to cover in one film, it is. WIN is a mess of random feel good facts. There is a lot to enjoy in this film, but the chaos of Moore’s trip sees him simultaneously supporting working class struggle and advocating nicer capitalists, politicians and police.
One minute he is interviewing union leaders talking about struggle against the bosses and the next he is talking to friendly capitalists about the importance of happy employees to company efficiency and profits. Most of the examples of nice corporations are factories that sell boutique goods such as expensive suits, motorbikes, artistic pencils etc. that aren’t for mass consumption. Nor are they subject to a lot of competition.
Moore admits to cherry picking the good from Europe (and North Africa). But in doing so, he glorifies a variety of countries simply by comparing them to the United States. Early on in the film, he admits to this. But in surveying so many countries and so many issues, the film comes across as superficial.
This superficiality is particularly stark when compared to his past films. For example, Sicko dedicated itself to the issue of private health insurance and made the point of focusing not only on the issue of insurance, but on the rejected claims of those who already have insurance, mentioning only in passing he wasn’t focusing on the tens of millions of people living in the US without it.
In this latest film, Moore covers way too much and he doesn’t tie the issues together with any particular strategy for change. He points to the protests in Europe and Canada for affordable and free education one minute and then the next he advocates that we would live in a much nicer world if we had more women on the boards of corporations and running governments. As though Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton are the way forward.
When Moore produced his first film Roger and Me in 1990, you could understand and relate to his on-screen naivety. More than a quarter of a century later, his air of “What, you mean you have paid holidays?” just feels fake and insincere, as though he hasn’t been told that by foreigners repeatedly in his previous films.
This is a film which mirrors the Bernie Sanders phenomenon, which is less an expression of something truly radical, and more an indication of just how far the US is behind the rest of the world.

'Where to invade next' disappoints

The High Court ruling against 267 refugees – allowing them to be deported to Australia’s detention centre on Nauru – has sparked protests around the country.
In Melbourne, a rally organised by the Refugee Action Collective on 4 February attracted 5,000 and occupied city intersections on a march to the Department of Immigration. That rally, called within hours of the decision, had a militant tone. Dozens of churches and Victorian Trades Hall Council declared their buildings would be refuges for those at risk of deportation. 
In the days afterwards, angry sentiment about the prospect of refugees – including around 70 children – being deported by the federal government, resulted in most state premiers and the ACT’s chief minister offering to have them reside within their territory.
A Melbourne vigil called by GetUp! mobilised 6,000 on 8 February. Victorian Trades Hall secretary, Luke Hilakari, told the crowd that the unions built the Labor party but went on to urge opposition to Bill Shorten’s support for the policy of mandatory indefinite offshore detention. “[You] expect this from the Liberals not Labor”, he said.
Mohammad Ali Baqiri, a refugee from Afghanistan, who spent three years on Nauru as a child, told the crowd his story. He said he will keep telling it, and will tell anyone who will listen until the torture that he endured and others continue to endure in Australia’s detention camps ends.
Malcolm Turnbull and immigration minister Peter Dutton have not flinched at the growing pressure to let the refugees stay. Turnbull has said that the government’s resolve should not be doubted.

Ged Kearney shows we can’t trust Labor

Australia’s minister for Israel resigns

School expulsions report highlights plight of disadvantaged youth

Palestinians stand up to Israel’s attempt to control Al-Aqsa

Activists stave off the deportation of refugee

Australian media and politicians talk selectively about citizens abroad

Melbourne council workers step up fight

Shame shame, Derryn Hinch set for the Senate

'Where to invade next' disappoints

Pressure mounts over refugee deportations

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