The government has announced changes to Medicare bulk billing, which could result in patients paying up to an additional $62 for diagnostic and pathology tests, including blood tests, X-rays and pap smears.
The changes remove bulk billing “incentives” for private pathology companies. These companies have threatened to cease bulk billing, meaning patients would need to pay the fees up front or the companies would raise prices by charging a gap fee.
This would have a disproportionate impact on the income poor and the chronically ill. And, as the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation has pointed out, it would “further disadvantage Aboriginal peoples” by creating additional barriers to treatment.
These changes once again demonstrate how determined this government is to undermine public funding of healthcare. The changes also indicate the extent to which Australian healthcare has already descended down the path of a for-profit privatised system, when the government can spend $650 million on “incentives” to highly profitable private pathology companies rather than spending the money on actual health care.
Protests will be held across the country on 20 February – demanding an end to the cuts and free and accessible pathology.
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Jo Mettam

Liberals cut more health funding

You’re reminded that history repeats itself when hearing Omar Mehri speak about his brother’s case. In 2005, Omar’s brother, Abdullah Mehri, was one of a group of 12 Muslim men (known as “the Barwon 12”) who were prosecuted for thought crimes.
Omar recently spoke as part of a panel discussion with Kath Larkin, Rail, Tram and Bus Union delegate, at Socialist Alternative’s union conference. At a time of escalating racism towards Muslim Australians, the special session was organised to discuss the responsibility that union militants have to take up the issue.
An organiser in the Electrical Trades Union, Omar is uniquely placed to discuss the topic, having personally witnessed the devastating effects of institutionalised racism towards Muslims. His describes his brother as being “broken” by nearly five years in a high security prison.
Of the 12, Abdullah was one of seven found guilty of belonging to a terrorist organisation. Omar points out that the so-called organisation had “no name, no structure” and was in fact only the men themselves. The evidence offered for the charge was the contents of a few conversations between the young men and their spiritual adviser. 
The Barwon 12 were arrested in theatrical midnight raids that were a precursor to the larger raids carried out at the homes of Muslim families recently. Omar recalled the scene when he got to Abdullah’s home on 8 November 2005: “There was a helicopter … and that many cars … it was just like a movie.”
Then, as now, the raids triggered a wave of racist attacks. “It gave a licence to those people who were racists … to spit on sisters wearing the veil. It was bad then”, he says. “Today it is worse.”
The similarities don’t end there. Both sets of raids coincided with the government of the day contending with rising opposition to unpopular new laws. “We had WorkChoices back then, and that’s when they did the raid on my brother and others”, Omar argues. “Now we’ve got the budget and that’s backfired in Tony Abbott’s face big time.” He says the government is using Islamophobia and national security fear-mongering as “camouflage to cover [its] dirty work behind the scenes”.
Both Omar and Kath Larkin highlighted the importance of speaking out and publicly opposing racism. Crucially, workers should be able to take a stand through their unions. “They have the numbers”, Omar says, along with a duty to improve human rights, not just workplace rights.

CPSU member

Fighting Islamophobia is a union duty

Red Flag’s website was recently shut down for several days by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The registered owner of the site was contacted by someone apparently linked to a known pro-Israel hacktivist group. The individual gloated about the action and revealed details about how it occurred. A comment read, “Factless bias against Israel, siding with peoples who have been brainwashed by the military state – hamas. #down #dead”.
Red Flag has run a number of articles in opposition to Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Members of Socialist Alternative, the organisation that publishes Red Flag, have been involved in organising protests in solidarity with the Palestinians in a number of cities. A member of the organisation has received death threats as a result of this activity.
Red Flag was not the only Australian pro-Palestine site attacked. Jews Against the Occupation – Australia (JAO) has also battled attacks that brought its website down. Those attacks started soon after JAO posted an open letter from Australian Jews protesting the war.
The attacks on Australian websites are not isolated. Since the start of Operation Protective Edge, much has been written about the cyber component of the conflict. It is undeniable, though usually overstated, that the battle for public opinion has played an important role.
As with all aspects of this conflict, there is great inequality in this domain. Israel’s online machine has resources that Palestinians living in the Gaza strip can only dream of. On one side of the Gaza border, access to the internet is sporadic at best. The bombing of the strip’s sole power plant left Gaza capable of supplying only 30 percent of its power needs.
On the other side, Israel’s hasbara machine is well funded and resourced. Hasbara, literally “explaining”, is the term commonly used in Israel for government propaganda. The student union of the Interdisciplinary Centre Herzliya, a prestigious Israeli private university on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, played its part in the war by setting up a “hasbara war room” in which 400 students have volunteered to “deliver a very clear message to people abroad”.
In the battle of ideas, hacktivists operating under the broad umbrella of “Anonymous” have played an offensive role. Anonymous is a broad collective of internet activists rather than a formal organisation. Its members generally deface websites or conduct DDoS attacks, which render the attacked site unreachable. Its targets are those organisations or governments that its members believe are treating global citizens unfairly. Anonymous does not have a formal political line, so pro-Israel and pro-Palestine Anonymous groups operate simultaneously against very different targets.
Under the banner #OpIsraelRetaliate, Israeli hackers targeted the Palestine Report and the Gaza Ministry for Health, among others. Others, operating under #OpSaveGaza, claimed responsibility for briefly shutting down the websites of the Israeli Ministry of Education, the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Israeli postal service.
There is a clear disparity in the ability of either side to cope with cyber attacks. In 2012, Israel announced it would spend US$78 million annually on a National Cyber Directorate. Gaza, by contrast, has an economy strangled by the ongoing effects of the siege. Its entire budget in 2012 was less than US$769 million. Cyber security is not on the top of the list of priorities in an area struggling to rebuild basic infrastructure and feed a population after a massive four-week assault.
Added to this difficulty is the fact that most Palestinian telecommunications infrastructure is routed through Israel in some way. Israel does not need Anonymous to shut down Gazan access to the internet when military bulldozers can cut fibres within Israel and leave Gaza without international landline, mobile phone or internet connections.
Despite Israeli propaganda, and the firm backing that the country receives from Western governments and media organisations, there are signs that public opinion internationally is shifting. There is obviously still a long way to go, but Israel’s actions are becoming harder and harder to defend. In the end, no amount of hacktivism will be able to bury the truth.

The cyber-front in a battle for hearts and minds

Spy agencies the world over like to pretend that they keep the rest of us safe. Recent revelations from the Edward Snowden leaks have shown yet again what a blatant lie that is.
The Intercept and NBC have published a range of presentations by the British spy agency GCHQ, which outline a range of dirty tactics employed by the agency. One of these presentations, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations”, demonstrates that the tactics range from spreading computer viruses to social and sexual manipulation of their targets.
The documents make it clear that the targets are not simply those who our prime minister would describe as “baddies”. The targets are anyone who opposes government policy. One presentation, entitled “Hacktivist groups”, shows how GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) employed distributed denial of service attacks and planted malware to attack the hacktivist collective Anonymous.
The presentation brags that a week after these attacks, 80 percent of the individuals in Anonymous who had been messaged by agents were no longer in Anonymous forums.
“The discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of ‘traditional law enforcement’ against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, ‘hacktivism’, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends”, writes journalist Glenn Greenwald.
In addition to targeting online activists, the documents reveal the ways in which JTRIG attempts to undermine political engagement online and route online political discourse in a way that is favourable to its own interests. It does this firstly by employing classic trolling techniques to undermine and isolate the target.
To discredit a target, JTRIG may “Change their photos on social networking sites, write a blog purporting to be one of their victims [and] email/text their colleagues, neighbours, friends, etc.”
Second, these agencies seek to manipulate online discourse in multiple ways. For example, a presentation entitled “Full Spectrum Cyber Effects” discusses ways to set discussions on social media sites including Facebook and Flickr. This can be done through “propaganda, deception, mass messaging [and] pushing stories”.
According to Greenwald, “[T]hese agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the Internet itself.”
The Snowden leaks have proven an embarrassment to administrations around the world, including the Australian government. But, far from retreating from these tactics, these governments are bunkering down.
This is seen clearly in the recent rhetoric of the Australian government, with at least three senior ministers, including Abbott, branding Snowden a “traitor”.
Similarly, despite promising a few minor cosmetic changes, the Obama administration continues to back the NSA. Indeed, one of Obama’s appointments to the NSA review panel was only a few years ago touting a proposal for the US to “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups”.
This is hardly someone you would trust with your online rights!
We have seen spying agencies use these dirty tactics against their political opponents before, with far-reaching effects. Between 1956 and 1971, the FBI ran a programme called COINTELPRO. It was designed to intimidate, harass and undermine the left and civil rights activists.
In 1964, as part of COINTELPRO, the FBI spliced together recordings it had made of Martin Luther King’s private phone conversations in order to “prove” the civil rights leader was engaged in extramarital affairs. They then sent a letter to King strongly implying that the only way he could stop the release of these recordings was to commit suicide.
Just like these recent revelations about the GCHQ, COINTELPRO had nothing to do with protecting the rights of ordinary people and everything to do with undermining dissent. Both are about trying to neutralise politically those the establishment sees as a political threat.

Big Brother is doing more than just watching

New leaks by Edward Snowden have revealed further details of Australia’s role in the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) international spying operations.
Australia used the 2007 UN Climate Change conference in Indonesia to carry out a joint Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) and NSA operation to spy on Indonesian security officials.
This revelation comes on the heels of news that Australian embassies across South-East Asia were being used as listening posts for the highly secretive DSD. Telecommunications, internet and radio traffic have been intercepted from embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili and high commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.
One unnamed former intelligence official has made it clear that the purpose of this operation, codenamed Stateroom, is to benefit Australia’s imperialist interests in the region, saying “the main focus is political, diplomatic and economic intelligence”.
While outrageous, these revelations are not surprising. The DSD has long spied on Australia’s neighbours, both friend and foe, in order to give the Australian ruling class an advantage, particularly in economic negotiations.
The Australian government has been accused by the East Timorese of spying during negotiations on the future of the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves, in order to improve the Australian bargaining position in negotiations. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were outraged to discover that the US and its allies were spying on them.
News of the NSA and the DSD spying on foreign government officials has placed the Snowden leaks back onto the front pages of newspapers. However, most of the revelations thus far have shown the extent to which our governments are spying on us, not just each other.
Another NSA program that the DSD has recently been linked to is the Special Source Operations branch’s collection of address book data. Through this program, the Australian spy agency harvests address books from Yahoo, Hotmail, Facebook and Gmail accounts. In a single day last year, the program collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from other providers.
Clinton Fernandes, a former intelligence officer now teaching at the Australian Defence Force Academy, said the program provided ‘‘an encyclopaedia of connections to which they can return for as many years as they want’’.
This program proved such a successful breach of the civil liberties of people across the globe, that it has had to be scaled back. It was simply collecting too much data for the DSD and NSA to process. Australian and US spy agencies are collecting more information on you, me and everyone we know than they can possibly deal with.

Liberals cut more health funding

Fighting Islamophobia is a union duty

The cyber-front in a battle for hearts and minds

Big Brother is doing more than just watching

Australia’s role in NSA spying

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