UPDATE: The Australian government on 6 January cancelled Novak Djokovic's visa. The tennis player has since successfully challenged the decision in the courts.
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Is there a bigger flog on the international tennis circuit than Novak Djokovic? Anyone who has less of a sense of social responsibility? Maybe. But it would be very difficult to top this entitled and self-centred twerp. 
We’ve known for a long time that he holds whacky views on science and medicine. It was once easy to dismiss it as harmless eccentricity. For example, in May 2020, just weeks before his notorious European COVID super-spreader tour, Djokovic used Instagram to hold forth on the surprising relationship between water and human emotions.
“I’ve seen people and I know some people that, through that energetical transformation, through the power of prayer, through the power of gratitude, they manage to turn the most toxic food or the most polluted water, into the most healing water”, he said. He wasn’t talking about Jesus. On planet Djokovic, all of us mortals are performing miracles every time we lose our temper near a drinking fountain, because “water reacts and scientists have proven that, that molecules in the water react to our emotions, to what is being said”.
I’d love to know how water reacts when you tell a flog to STFU.
In the days before the pandemic, the person most damaged by Djokovic’s aversion to medical treatment was himself. For instance, in the prime of his career he was reluctant to have surgery to fix an injured elbow. He has a career today only because he finally went under the knife in 2018. But sorting his injury only made him feel sad. “I just cried for two or three days ... after I had the surgery on my elbow. Every time I thought about what I did, I felt like I had failed myself”.
For people like Djokovic, the individual is not merely the centre of the universe, but the universe itself. To them, the individual exists only to be honed into an unstoppable force of accomplishment, both physically and mentally, without any reference to the society that made them. Hence, the medical intervention was seen as a defeat. And, as is so often the case, the tough guy turned into a sook.
This obsessive individualism is also why there’s always been a selfish streak to Djokovic’s views, and his notable lack of concern about the spread of a deadly virus to society’s most vulnerable people fits an established pattern. Take his famous victory celebrations, in which he “gives his heart” to the fans in all four corners of the stadium. (Nick Kyrgios described it as “like, so cringeworthy”.) 
But it’s not just cringy. The victory ritual in fact has little to do with thanking fans. Djokovic reportedly started performing it on advice from his then spiritual guru because they believed the collective energy would give him a mental advantage over his rivals. What seems like an act of reciprocity is actually just a weird ritual where the man on the court believes that he is absorbing everyone else’s energy.
Now, despite all the promises that no-one would get special treatment, Djokovic is coming to Melbourne for the Australian Open courtesy of an official vaccine exemption. 
It is a sick joke. 
Not so long ago they told us that it was almost impossible to get exemptions, that someone would require a genuine medical issue, like a proven history of allergic reaction to a COVID vaccine or impending major surgery. And yet, amid the disaster being deliberately wrought on this country by the let-it-rip politicians and businesses, amid the catastrophe engulfing our hospitals, this most notorious anti-vax nutjob is just strolling on in. 
The authorities have avoided commenting on their rationale, but the grounds for gaining an exemption are publicly available. Being a rich-shit anti-vaxxer is not one of them. It would be one thing for them to just shrug their shoulders and admit they let him in because he’s a million-dollar drawcard for the Australian Open, but the implication seems to be that he suddenly has some legitimate medical issue worthy of an exemption. Maybe he got badly scalded by some of the water he was energising with his words and the expert panel looked with sympathy on his application.
Either way, this is a massive “fuck you” to those of us for whom medical care is genuinely a life-or-death matter, and for all of us who are daily scrambling for tests, for boosters, or for any sign that the state might still be capable of providing public health care as the whole thing seems to fall apart.
None of us believe the much-lauded “independent panels” who granted this exemption have acted correctly, let alone fairly or in the interest of public health. People across Australia are suffering through the worst days of the pandemic this country has yet seen, but multi-millionaire anti-vaxxers get the red carpet rolled out. 
With his vaccine exemption, Djokovic won’t need to quarantine and won’t be bound by any of the relatively trivial and few restrictions still in place for unvaccinated people.
Meanwhile, what do the rest of us get, despite having done the hard yards for two years, despite all the lockdowns and despite the massive vaccine uptake? We get exploding case numbers smashing records every day. We get no genuine account of how many people have contracted the virus since mid-December. We get hundreds of our loved ones sick and dying in barely functioning hospitals. 
We can’t get PCR tested, and even if we do, we are lucky to get results in fewer than three days. We can’t locate RATs anywhere in the major cities, or can’t afford them if we do. We can’t get listed as a close contact unless we live with a confirmed positive case. We can’t buy N95 or P2 masks anywhere. We can’t get a booster, and can’t take time off work because we can’t prove that we’re positive. We can’t get a hospital bed, can’t get into the emergency departments, can’t guarantee an ambulance will come when we call one, can’t find a politician anywhere in the country willing to contemplate reintroducing public health measures. 
And they give Djokovic a free pass? They must think we’re stupid.
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Letting it rip: COVID, crisis &amp; capitalism 
How did it get to this and what can we do? 
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1044106762812588/?acontext=%7B">Join the online meeting, Friday 14 January at 7pm AEST</a>.

Liam Ward

Imagine being as big of a flog as Novak Djokovic

After protesters waged an extraordinary week of mass defiance across the country, the Thai government on 22 October lifted a state of emergency that had banned all gatherings of five or more people. This is a significant crack in the facade of a military regime with a track record of gunning down pro-democracy activists, driving them into exile and even running death squads to assassinate them abroad. For now, the resurgent democracy movement has stared down the generals, and it has done so in exhilarating fashion. 
In the last ten days, there have been daily mass protests across the country, driven by students and including a few large contingents of organised blue-collar workers. Crowds now swear in unison against Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, and even raise demands against the monarchy—scenes that would have been unimaginable just twelve months ago. 
The regime made the emergency decree a week earlier, banning several critical media outlets and dramatically increasing the number of arrests. This was supposed to contain the wave of pro-democracy protests that have been surging since February and which have reached the scale of genuine mass upheaval since August. At the very least, the government hoped to intimidate enough people so that any future protests would be small enough for cops and soldiers to beat or shoot off the streets. The cops tried that, unleashing pepper-spray-laced water cannons against young student protesters who were the first to defy the decree. 
But the students stood their ground. In fact, they took the fight right up to the riot cops. When images of these scenes flooded social media, it tapped into people’s deep anger, bringing more protesters than ever into the streets. Injured students began turning up at hospitals and, by the next day, hundreds of doctors from hospitals across Bangkok had signed an open letter condemning the government. Day after day since the declaration of emergency, hundreds of thousands of protesters have shut down Bangkok and other cities. After the decree was lifted, the mass protests continued. This is now unquestionably the biggest challenge to the regime since it seized power in the 2014 military coup, and the highest point of the democracy struggle since the Red Shirt uprising of 2010. 
The dramatic escalation of protests on 14 October was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the 1973 mass uprising that overthrew an earlier generation of generals. It’s commonplace for mainstream commentators to make flippant remarks about the number of military coups in the decades since. Following the 2014 coup, <a href="https://time.com/105781/thailand-history-of-military-coups/">a Time article typified the pattern</a>, describing Thailand as “the land of coups” and “the most coup-prone country in the world”. Most such accounts painted ordinary people out of history and ignored the underlying mass struggle that has been a feature of the country—in particular, the mass popular uprisings of 1973, 1992, 2010 and now 2020. In between these explosions, generations of Thais organised in now-open, now-hidden fashion and against incredible odds. They were never really beaten, despite the coups. In fact, that ceaseless struggle for democracy against the military has shaped Thai politics more than anything else. 
The heightened political crisis sparked by the 2006 coup famously played out in the following three years as a colour-coded contest between Red Shirts and Yellow Shirts. Many outside Thailand refused to take a side in this battle, insisting the whole thing was just a battle between two factions of the Thai elite. But the Red Shirt rebellion was a mass popular movement for democratic rights, while the Yellow Shirts were essentially fascist mobs. Liberal observers often refused to acknowledge the primacy of the conscious intervention of the masses in trying to forge their own future, to fight for their own voices to be heard and their votes to be counted. Instead, they considered the whole thing a sideshow to the supposedly “real” political battles played out the halls of power and in various palace intrigues. Predictably, they were in no position to understand the mass pro-democracy uprising of 2010, much less to offer solidarity with Red Shirt protesters when soldiers massacred over a hundred of them in central Bangkok.
When the junta finally allowed elections in 2011, the popular Pheu Thai Party won in a predictable landslide. Once again, fascist Yellow Shirt mobs took to the streets to create a protracted crisis. At one point, they even occupied the international airport without any blowback from the military, the police or the courts. Their aim was to pave the way for the 2014 military coup, which again overturned a democratically elected and popular government. The 2019 election was a sham, rigged from the outset by the junta to lend a veneer of democracy on what is at heart an entrenched military dictatorship. After all, the “elected” Prime Minister Prayut is the general who led the 2014 coup. It’s in this context that the 2020 resurgence of the democracy movement emerged. 
The new movement began in February, after Thai authorities dissolved the opposition Future Forward Party. There is a basic pattern here: an opposition party emerges and gains majority support within the population before the military or the courts declare it illegal and dissolve it. It’s happened so many times since the 2006 coup that it’s easy to lose count. But this one’s different in significant ways. While the Future Forward Party was certainly a bourgeois party, it pitched itself as radical, progressive and for equal rights. While it refused to challenge the rules laid down by the military junta, it did at least declare its opposition to military coups. Significantly, the party won 80 seats in the 2019 election (despite the rigged electoral rules). Within twelve months of its founding, the party had established a mass voter base, particularly among young people. So when the military banned the party, it sparked immediate resistance and large student protests.
From initially declaring support for Future Forward, the protests rapidly evolved into a movement against the regime. It was clear that a storm was coming. The pandemic and new bans on mass gatherings slowed the movement for a time. But on 18 July, mass action returned with a large illegal protest at Bangkok’s Democracy Monument. At the time, it was the largest protests since the 2014 coup. And for the first time, protesters raised their three demands: dissolve the parliament, end the intimidation of the people and draft a new constitution.
From here, the movement exploded. University and high school students across the country have spent most of the last four months organising protests. In one amazing incident in August, 400 high schoolers calling themselves the “Bad Students” besieged the offices of the education minister. When he came out to address them, they unleashed a barrage of heckling, rightly accusing him of being a pathetic flunkey of the military. In a country where school students are still subject to corporal punishment and are expected to defer silently to authority, this was breathtaking! The Bad Students continue to be the heart of the rebellion, touring from school to school in a mural-covered truck, making impromptu speeches at school gates and calling on other students inside to come out and join them.
The youthfulness of this movement has also drawn a range of existing social justice campaigns under its umbrella. For example, at a mass protest on 25 July, thousands of LGBTI activists staged a pro-democracy protest under the rainbow flag. They’ve had contingents at every protest since. This is an important development because in the early years after the 2006 coup, and again after 2014, the junta did make some token efforts to pinkwash itself. As thousands of LGBTI activists call for the government’s downfall, it’s fair to say that the effort was unsuccessful. Likewise, the pro-democracy protests have attracted pro-choice activists pushing for abortion rights. And of course, veterans of the 2010 Red Shirt uprising, many of whom still have bullets and shrapnel in their flesh from the crackdown, are again on the streets.
Since August, the movement has displayed more strident opposition to the monarchy, expressed in ten additional demands including for an end to all interference in politics by the monarchy, the release of all political prisoners, an end to the lèse-majesté laws (which make it illegal to insult or defame the royal family), the end of royal immunity to prosecution and more. In openly attacking the rights and power of the monarchy, the movement is engaging in a profound challenge to the key ideological pillar of the Thai ruling class. The military remains the key barrier to democracy in Thailand, but the military uses the monarchy as weapon to foster nationalism and acquiescence on the one hand, and to silence, imprison and murder any serious opposition activists on the other hand—not least because any opposition to the regime can be painted as an insult to the king.
On 19 September, the anniversary of the 2006 coup, more than 100,000 pro-democracy protesters gathered in Bangkok’s Sanam Luang, the large public park adjacent to the Royal Palace. They stormed through police lines and marched to the palace gates. Many tens of thousands stayed in the square protesting overnight. This was easily the biggest protest Thailand has seen in more than a decade and marked a decisive escalation of the pro-democracy movement. Such was its scale that, in the light of the following morning, police and soldiers had to stand awkwardly by while protesters held a ceremony in which they cemented a bronze plaque into the footpath outside the palace. The inscription was incendiary: “At this place, the people have expressed their will: that this country belongs to the people and is not the property of the monarchy as they have deceived us”. Authorities removed the plaque 24-hours later, after the crowds had well and truly dispersed. Then they arrested some of the young activists who had led the action. But the plaque has joined the iconography of the movement, appearing on t-shirts and posters everywhere. 
But the moment also heralded the beginning of a crackdown, with 81 activists arrested in the following month. Alongside student activists, the arrestees include a number of older pro-democracy figures, including Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, a trade unionist and journalist who spent seven years in jail for lèse-majesté in 2011–18. Police have now charged Somyot with sedition and have denied him bail.
While the arrests are a worrying sign, it’s also true that the movement is winning small but important victories. The same day the regime lifted the emergency decree, courts ordered the release of prominent student activist Patsaravalee “Mind” Tanakitvibulpon, noting that she should be free to sit her exams rather than languishing in a cell. This is a remarkable turn of events, indicating again that the government’s situation is potentially fraught. Reports on social media suggest that at least 78 of the 81 activists have now been released on bail. 
In the apparent or possible absence of some way of derailing the movement or co-opting its leaders, the regime’s main tool remains its guns. At this stage, the pro-democracy movement’s biggest weakness is that Thailand’s working class is mostly unorganised. Notwithstanding the amazing ongoing mass protests, it’s worth noting that the students called for a general strike on 14 October, which didn’t eventuate. They are in no position to organise one, no matter how much they may want it to materialise. To make matters worse, through the long political crisis since 2006, some of the most organised sections of the working class are in white-collar industries whose unions have, disgracefully, been supporters of the military coups and opponents of democratic reform.
This week’s small glimpses of workers’ organised participation in the pro-democracy movement needs to be built on. The socialist movement suffered heavily from the deadly crackdown on radical students in 1976 and has since been either obstructed by years of military rule or swamped by mass movements well beyond its capacity to influence. The pressing need remains the building a revolutionary socialist party.
In terms of the overall movement, pro-democracy activists have laid down a deadline for the regime to meet their demands. Full points for bravado! But it seems there are three possibilities. The movement could win some reforms, hopefully dramatic and radical ones. The regime could stand firm and the protest movement lose momentum. Or the regime could intensify its crackdown. While the struggle has a long road ahead, and the regime has no intention of giving an inch, the 2020 rebellion has ensured that things will never be the same.

Mass defiance shakes the Thai regime

Racism, like all oppression, survives so long as it facilitates exploitation and domination. It is not just a set of ideas that form for no reason and spread in defiance of all logic; it is rooted in material conditions. Organised and systemic racism first emerged with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and has since been used to justify colonialism and genocide, to cohere people behind imperialist wars, create scapegoats for capitalism’s myriad failings and allow capitalist ruling classes to maximise their exploitation of labour power by dividing workers into hierarchical and hostile categories.
Peter Alexander, writing in 1980s Britain, laid out one of the best brief explanations of racism, identifying not only its historical roots in capitalism, but its evolution with capitalism: “Racism itself took shape in the course of the development of capitalism ... [and] has assumed three successive forms, the racism of slavery, the racism of empire, and anti-immigrant racism”.
In the 19th century Australian colonial context, pervasive racism was not an expression of innate xenophobia, but an expression of agendas being pursued by the colonial ruling class. In his 2006 doctoral thesis, Phil Griffiths articulated a clear analysis of what this means. He focuses on the period 1876-88, when the pre-Federation Australian ruling class was taking significant steps toward what would soon become enshrined as the White Australia policy. Griffiths identified three agendas the ruling class was pursuing.
The first, and perhaps primary, concern was a strategic one. The colonial ruling class was driven by a relentless fear of China’s capacity to threaten British control, and then more loosely “white” or “Australian” control, over this continent that Britain itself was still stealing from its Indigenous owners. The white population was concentrated in isolated pockets, mostly along the south-east coast of this enormous continent, and the ruling class lived in terror that one day a rival colonial power would take the north.
Despite having been occupied and carved up by European powers, China through the 19th century remained the biggest and most militarily advanced power in the Asia Pacific region (at least until the rise of Japan in the 1890s). Australia’s rulers also assumed that even if China’s seizure of the continent couldn’t be accomplished by military force, it could easily be achieved by the slow implantation of enough Chinese people to form a future fifth column.
Articulations of this fear can be seen across centuries in the constant invocation of a “Chinese invasion”. In the 19th century it’s seen in countless newspaper cartoons, but perhaps most brazenly in the comments of politicians. For example, in 1879 when New South Wales premier Henry Parkes introduced a new round of Chinese exclusion laws, he justified them with reference to the Chinese emperor’s alleged plot to colonise Australia. Parkes even ordered customs officials to interrogate all Chinese people they encountered, to gather intel on this mythical invasion plan.
We see the same racist trope expressed today in Clive Hamilton’s fearmongering book Silent Invasion, with its distrust of Chinese students, cleaners and even of those granted refuge here after the Tiananmen Square massacre – who he claims “would become some of the most effective agents of influence in Beijing’s campaign to transform Australia into a tribute state”.
If the ruling class’ first agenda was strategic, the second agenda Griffiths identified was “the minimisation of indentured ‘coloured labour’, so that a modern, industrial economy could be built”. Sections of the ruling class, particularly in Queensland’s pastoral sector, benefited from exploiting indentured workers and “black bird” slave labour on the plantations. This put them at conflict with the rest of the Australian ruling class, which wanted to exclude “coloured” labour:
“A century of anti-slavery agitation meant that such a model represented an economic, social and political threat to those who wanted a society based on free labour capitalism and parliamentary rule. It would also have consigned such societies to economic and social backwardness, producing simple commodities instead of advanced manufactures and other sophisticated products.”
Rather than address this by abolishing slavery and indenture, and giving “foreign” workers equal rights with those already living here, Australia bared its racist teeth by attempting to ban the workers who’d been the victims of these practices. The government even left intact the legal infrastructure for indenture and slavery as a practice despite its supposed abolition in 1901. Indentured Chinese labourers were, for example, common in Melbourne’s hospitality sector in the 1950s, while indentured Asian labour persisted in Australia’s pearl-shelling industry until well into the 1970s. A moment’s reflection on Australia’s 21st century migrant work visas brings to light glaring continuities in the way Australian capitalism exploits migrant workers and bonds them to particular employers.
Griffiths identified the third ruling class agenda behind White Australia as “the construction of an ‘homogeneous’ population, both demographically and culturally”. This refers not to ruling class fears of a potential fifth column, but to the aim of maximising bonds of ideological and cultural cohesion to better discipline the working class:
“Chinese people were the major group regarded as unable to be assimilated into Australia’s British culture. Chinese people were not Christian and could not, it was feared, be disciplined using the ideological methods used on people of British origin. A large Chinese population would threaten existing political structures and techniques for social control.
“Chinese camps were notorious for providing a space for ‘larrikins’ and prostitutes. Chinese people were disciplined by their own secret societies, which raised the prospect of alternative centres of power. To admit large numbers of Chinese to British-Australian nationality would undermine the effect of existing nationalist and racist ideologies on the white population and necessitate the construction of new nationalist and class collaborationist ideologies.”
In other words, a key aim was to forge a national identity that would bind workers ideologically with their exploiters and the state. Other writers do place anti-Chinese racism in the context of fostering a national identity, but tend to trivialise the top-down nature of the process. Instead, they depict an innate hostility to difference that exists independently of the ruling class’ material and ideological agendas.
John Fitzgerald for example, in his 2007 book Big white lie: Chinese Australians in white Australia, rightly dismisses the “clash of cultures” narrative, but explicitly replaces it with a “popular racism”, pointing out that it was Chinese dress and customs, that “marked them out for comment and caricature”. But this misses the point. The creation of an Australian identity hinged on the ruling class’ conscious promotion of racism.
There are two aspects of this. First, it was about consolidating British control of the physical space through excluding Chinese people whose loyalty was suspected to be with a rival state and whose culture allegedly made them impossible to discipline. Second, it was about undermining class consciousness and class identity. Again, most historians get this second aspect wrong, arguing that the White Australia policy represented a gain for the white working class despite it uniting them with their own exploiters.
Perhaps the best illustration of this dynamic comes from the very man who drafted the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, Australia’s first attorney general, Alfred Deakin. In his parliamentary speech supporting the Bill, his references to “they” and “us” should be read as meaning Chinese people and white people respectively, while “sectional differences” obviously mean class conflict:
“It is only necessary to say that they do not and cannot blend with us; that we do not, cannot, and ought not to blend with them. This was the motive power which swayed tens of thousands who take little interest in contemporary politics – this was the note that touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation consequent upon such an endowment – the obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded. A coloured occupation would make a practical diminution of its extent of the most serious kind. It was this aspiration which nerved them to undertake the great labour of conquering the sectional differences that divided us.”
Two years later, during his successful campaign to become prime minister, Deakin made an even more explicit connection between the White Australia policy and the aim of smashing union power: “You probably believe that a white Australia is secure. I hope it is, but it won’t be secure unless a vigilant watch is kept upon proposals to tamper with it ... The next necessity for a white Australia will be to pass the Arbitration Bill, to prevent strikes, and lockouts”.
Deakin understood that class struggle undermined class collaboration and national identity. He defined “strikes and lockouts” as a threat to White Australia. While compulsory arbitration (which forced unions off the picket lines and into the courts) is often lauded as a victory for the union movement, it actually aimed to severely reduce our capacity for action. When Deakin identified this as a “necessity for a white Australia”, he illustrated just how class conscious the white Australian ruling class was.
The ruling class agendas that underpinned White Australia weren’t the only path Australian capitalism could have taken. But for the ruling class in general, notwithstanding a few sectional disagreements, there was a certain horrible logic to Chinese exclusion. This is why the White Australia policy was proudly supported by every political party that ran seriously for parliament. It’s important, and accurate, to point out that the ALP was the party of White Australia. But so too were the Free Trade Party, the Protectionist Party and later the National Party, the Country Party, the United Australia Party and the Liberal Party. Every government and every opposition between 1901 and 1965 declared support for White Australia, and most of those governments were not of the ALP. This is not to excuse the ALP or to deny its role in propagating racism, but to illustrate the unassailable centrality of the White Australia policy to Australian capitalism. The policy was non-negotiable.
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This is an edited extract of “Revisiting the roots of anti-Chinese racism”, published in Marxist Left Review No.18, winter 2019.

Race, class and the creation of White Australia

On the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, Australian politicians and commentators affirmed the importance of various freedoms. Given the Chinese government’s well-known attempts to censor all mention of the 1989 uprising and the massacre that crushed it, much of this commentary focused on freedom of the press.
On the very same day, Australian Federal Police raided a Daily Telegraph journalist’s home ostensibly in response to an article written a year earlier revealing plans to allow Australian spies warrantless access to all our communications. The AFP later said the journalist wasn’t the target, hinting that the real purpose was to intimidate and silence other potential whistle-blowers. When asked about the raid, the prime minister smirked: “It’s always good to see our laws being upheld”.
Meanwhile, headlines were exploding with news first reported on Media Watch. ABC senior management had pulled a critical story about Adani after a complaint from the mining company. The story, researched and prepared by one of the ABC’s award-winning young journalists, was apparently dumped within an hour of Adani’s PR team contacting the ABC’s director of news. The network’s senior management deny the accusation despite Adani confirming it.
By midday on 4 June, all the talk about “freedom of the press” was ringing hollow. But in an even more scandalous development, the AFP launched another raid the following day, this time on the ABC’s national office in Sydney. The raid reportedly relates to documents obtained in the network’s coverage of alleged war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. You have to ask why the cops waited until after the re-election of the Morrison government to launch these attacks.
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In its 2019 World Press Freedom Index, Reporters Without Borders notes of Australia that investigative journalism is under threat, draconian legislation punishes whistle-blowers and “laws on terrorism and national security make covering these issues almost impossible”. And this was the case before this week’s events, in which the Australian government and the AFP seem to be declaring war on the very idea of press freedom. The raid on the ABC is particularly revealing. It comes despite the ABC being a tame organisation by global, and even Australian historical, standards. Take the media union’s evaluation of the current board, for example: “Almost all the directors of the ABC’s eight-member board were appointed directly by the minister for communications Mitch Fifield and some were appointed after being rejected by the merit-based nominations panel”.
Fifield, who last month was replaced by Paul Fletcher, former chief of staff to another ABC-bashing communications minister, Richard Alston, is a well-known member of the right wing Institute of Public Affairs. During his tenure as minister, there were relentless attacks on the ABC, both in funding cuts and against the broadcaster’s content. The minister wanted to break the ABC in preparation for privatising it – an aim he put on the record as far back as 2008, and which the IPA published a book about last year. 
But it wasn’t just about privatisation. It was about beating all possible dissent out of the organisation and turning it into a mouthpiece for the government. Several cornerstone news and current affairs programs, most notably Lateline, were victims of the funding cuts. It’s true the role Lateline played in instigating and justifying the racist Northern Territory Intervention stands as an eternal shame on the show – and there were other disgraces along the way. But even this level of complicity in the rotten plans of Liberal governments couldn’t save the show. 
A thousand racist interventions couldn’t make up for the occasional genuinely critical interview or, more important, for the gnawing sense that the show’s reporters and producers were proud of being independent of the government. This is even more the case with the Daily Telegraph, which far from being critical of the government, is a staple pro-Liberal rag of the Murdoch press (notwithstanding the critical article that triggered the AFP raid). We can acknowledge all this and still step up to defend the ABC and the Daily Telegraph from the government and the AFP.
Fifield regularly attacked Lateline, ABC News, Insiders and 7:30, and seemed obsessed with lodging formal complaints about chief economics correspondent Emma Alberici. Imagine a cranky right wing letter writer on the opinion pages of the Murdoch press, but then make him the minister in charge. That’s Fifield. But in a sign of how seriously the Liberals take the task of silencing genuinely critical media voices, Fifield also led the charge for the ABC to sack Australia Wide presenter Yassmin Abdel-Magied after her famous Anzac Day tweet: “Lest. We. Forget. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)”. 
The attacks on the ABC have been so relentless, and with the AFP raids still fresh in our minds, it’s tempting to overstate the critical nature of the ABC. There is, for example, a whole genre of social media posts spruiking the glory of “our ABC”. But it’s not as though the ABC is just a plucky band of hard-boiled investigative journalists putting their lives on the line to speak truth to power. There are no doubt ABC journos who’d like to be that, but the ABC as a body resembles every other publicly funded institution in 21st century Australia: budget-driven, heavily bureaucratised and with layers of senior management closely tied to the government. 
The loyalties of ABC management are to the national interest, which is exactly what the government and the AFP also claim to stand for. But the “national interest” is only the interests of the national ruling class, and so it often runs counter to any notion of genuine transparency and freedom of information. Hence in 2018, when ABC reporters stumbled across a collection of classified government documents in a second-hand filing cabinet, not only did ABC senior management refuse to publish anything – even in a redacted form – they also refused to reveal the nature of the documents. Worse, they proudly handed them to ASIO. The state’s interests were put ahead of the public interest. But what has all this blind loyalty bought the ABC? Funding cuts, a board stacked with party hacks, endless censorship and police raids.
The outrage that erupted during and after the ABC raid, and the signs that this outrage will soon be manifest in public protest, is an important response to a disturbing escalation in Australia’s authoritarian path. Since 2013, the Coalition has launched a series of attacks on journalists and whistle-blowers, most notably against those who have tried to expose the truth about Manus Island and Nauru refugee prisons. The repressive pattern is becoming a disturbing new normal. Whistle-blowers from the Tax Office to the Immigration Department have also been targeted. We see it too with the AFP raids on the Australian Workers Union, the extraordinary powers of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the heavily-armed AFP carrying out raids on Muslim households.
The war on press freedom is only one aspect of a global shift towards increasingly authoritarian practices. It doesn’t start or end in Beijing, but it extends to all the hypocrites in Canberra who spent this week solemnly lecturing on the lessons of Tiananmen Square, while sending their own forces to intimidate critical voices right here.

Press freedom under attack

Ten weeks after we started the balloting process, staff at RMIT University will soon learn whether we’ve been granted the right to take industrial action. The lengthy delay was caused by our employer, three times in a row, objecting to the ballot. By the time we win our legal right to take protected action, the semester will be over and our industrial clout significantly diminished.
RMIT’s blocking tactics illustrate one of the sneakiest ways Australia’s industrial laws are stacked in favour of the bosses. Under the law, workers are allowed to take industrial action, even during a bargaining period, only after a successful ballot of all union members in the workplace. “Successful” means clearing multiple hurdles.
First, a majority must participate in the vote for any result to be valid. This is not a requirement applied to other ballots, including for instance, local council elections, where turnout occasionally dips below 50 percent (as it did in Melbourne’s Port Phillip council election in 2016).
Second, a majority of voters must vote “yes” to each type of potential industrial action listed separately on the ballot.
Third, after both of those hurdles have been cleared, each type of industrial action on the ballot must be initiated by at least one employee within a set time limit. Any action not taken within that time limit is then no longer legally available.
The legal maze through which unions and workers have to navigate to get to industrial action is one of the reasons Australia’s strike laws are regarded as some of the harshest in the world. Speaking to the ABC, labour law professor Andrew Stewart said, “Not only are we flagrantly in breach [of international laws] but our laws are also so restrictive on the right to strike that they are way out of step with the laws of just about every other developed country”.
RMIT has demonstrated that all an employer needs to do is object to the first step in the balloting to hold up industrial action indefinitely. First, in late August, it objected, on a technicality, to a particular clause. The commissioner ordered us back to the drawing board. The second time it objected with no reason given. Still, we were dragged back to the commission.
The third time, in a clear case of outright interference, RMIT directly contacted the Australian Electoral Commission to demand it stop the ballot mail-out. The university had no right to do this, but muddied the water enough that the AEC complied, and we were in the commission for a third time. Only in late October did union members finally begin to receive their ballots.
Since negotiations started in July, RMIT has made no pay offer, nor responded to a single union claim for improved working conditions. The only power that union members have to get things moving is the protected action process. But while refusing to bargain with us, RMIT has instead used its power as an employer, privileged under the law, to block us from taking this path.
This system is a farce. It’s time to get serious about smashing these disgraceful anti-union laws – not with a hash tag and meme but with a determined campaign centred on industrial action.

RMIT tries blocking industrial action vote

Refugees in the Manus Island detention centre stopped protesting on Monday, 2 October, after having marched and chanted in the tropical sun for 62 days continuously. But they weren’t celebrating victory or suffering a decisive defeat. For one day, they paused to mourn the death of one of their own.
Earlier that day, Rajeev Rajendran, a 32-year-old Tamil refugee, was found dead – yet another death at the hands of the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
Rajeev had survived the brutal last days of the genocidal war under Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa regime in 2009 and made his way almost to Australia, but was seized and transferred to Manus Island in 2013. There he stayed for four years, despite being granted official refugee status.
Rajeev endured the constant repression and torture of permanent mandatory detention in a squalid concentration camp.
The night Rajeev died, refugees held a memorial service. The following day, for the 63rd time, dozens of the remaining refugees in the Manus Island camp gathered their hand-drawn placards, raised their voices and marched.
They began their daily protests in late July, amid the drawn-out farce of the US “refugee swap”. The protests have been met with cruel retaliation. Authorities turned off the power and restricted access to food and water, but the protests continue.
While their demands target the jailers and murderers in the Australian government, they also challenge the rest of us to deliver genuine solidarity. One placard sums it up: “We lost another brother. How many more do you want Dutton? Australian people, are you happy with that?”

Manus Island refugee protests continue

Management at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne’s western suburbs have taken the gloves off in their drawn-out effort to slash jobs, cut costs and smash the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).
With the current enterprise agreement set to expire in December, the university has announced a round of forced redundancies. Among those sacked are three of the four elected NTEU branch officers: branch president Paul Adams, the branch vice president (professional staff) and the branch secretary. Other prominent branch committee members have also been targeted. This comes hot on the heels of the redundancy of the branch vice president (academic) some months ago.
The university has deliberately removed the union leadership, its key activists and the individuals who would have been the union’s bargaining team in upcoming negotiations. Victoria University is now ground zero for the assault on university employees across the country, following September’s scandalous Fair Work decision that allowed Murdoch University to tear up its agreement with staff.
Victoria University has been crying poor for several years, arguing that the union’s collective agreement imposes too high a cost for a university catering to working class and migrant students. In June, after months of union-led protests, vice chancellor Peter Dawkins justified sweeping cuts, arguing, “VU has been at the forefront of the national agenda to increase participation among students from poorer backgrounds, many of whom need additional support to succeed. This requires substantial investments”.
Dawkins presumably thinks “additional support” for students means slashing staff and cutting courses. As for “substantial investment”, Dawkins’ salary is currently $795,000.
In a revealing move, the university recently hired notorious union-busters from Patrick Stevedores, one of whom was overheard bragging that they are “here to smash the union”. This came as no surprise to VU staff. The latest sackings are part of an unrelenting war on the union branch.
The corporate profiteers at the top of the institution want to drive down costs and increase exploitation. But to do so, they know they need to smash the union before the next round of negotiations – and Murdoch University has given them a shot of confidence. It’s as simple as that. Our side needs to respond with as much force as we can muster.

The war on uni employees hits Victoria University

It’s a chilly Thursday morning in Melbourne, and more than 100 Rohingyas and their supporters are protesting in the so-called Paris End of Collins Street. Our aim is to highlight the rapidly escalating genocide of Rohingyas in Myanmar (formerly Burma). 
Across the street, the cloudy protest-proof plastic windows of the elite Melbourne Club still reflect the slogans on our placards: “Stop the genocide of Rohingya in Burma now!”, and “We are not allowed to live because we are Rohingya Muslim”.
Our chants blast through the imposing foyer of Collins Place:
“Stop killing Rohingya – right now, right now!”
“Stop killing our parents – right now, right now!”
“We want justice – right now, right now!”
But one of the most popular chants is surprising:
“When I say union, you say power: Union – Power! Union – Power!”
The Rohingya workers chant this with such force it seems the Melbourne Club could be blown away like a house of straw. Alongside our banners, and taking pride of place, a slogan on a red flag: “NUW – every worker counts”.
It’s a testament to the efforts of organisers from the National Union of Workers. Their commitment to organising migrant workers in the farms around the city’s south-east is demonstrating to the Rohingyas of Melbourne that the workers’ movement is the way forward, not just for winning improved pay and working conditions, but for forging solidarity across racial divides, fighting oppression and even resisting genocide.
The activist leading our protest is Shawfikul Islam. He is the chairperson of the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organisation, and part of the NUW’s farm worker organising team. A few days earlier, Shawfikul spoke with Red Flag about the issues facing Rohingyas and the positive role played by the union.
“I left Burma in 2012, and arrived here in Australia”, he said. “We moved to escape the systematic, ongoing ethnic cleansing that began in 1962. Hundreds of thousands have fled the country over five decades.”
The situation worsened dramatically on 25 August, when hundreds of government troops were airlifted into Rakhine state, the centre of the Rohingya territory.
“In the one week since then”, Shawfikul explained, “more than 20,000 people have fled to Bangladesh, and more than 30,000 people have been internally displaced. At least 52 villages have been burned down, and thousands of people have died.” 
I ask Shawfikul what the Rohingya protesters are demanding of the Australian government. Without hesitating, he raises a central theme in this country’s history: “We’ve never seen the Australian government push in the interests of oppressed minorities. 
“They say, ‘We don’t welcome refugees’. We put our lives at risk, and we came here, and after we arrive it’s the same – we’re still struggling. The Australian government is not standing with us … they’re not pushing the Burmese government, or telling the facts about the people coming here as refugees.”
In fact, at a subsequent rally for Rohingyas organised by the Islamic Council of Victoria, the Liberal Party apparently sent a statement blaming “Islamic extremism” in Rakhine. Organisers rightly refused to read it out.
In contrast to the lies of the Australian government, the NUW has offered Rohingyas solidarity and strength. Shawfikul explains this has been electrifying: 
“In the Rohingya communities, most of us have never been to school or had a proper education in our lives, and we have a lot of difficulties finding jobs. Sometimes our bridging visa limits or totally denies our right to work, which forces us to work cash in hand.
“One large group of Rohingya worked for a contractor as cash in hand workers, but after one and a half months they still hadn’t been paid. It was about $40,000 in total. The contractors understand all these visa restrictions and take advantage of them. But the union pushed really hard, we spent a lot of hours doing it, and finally the contractor had to give them back pay.”
Shawfikul points to the example of Coolibah Farms, where last year migrant workers, including about 30 Rohingyas, were being paid just $12 per hour until the union intervened and forced their hourly rate up to $19.60, converting many from casual into full time jobs in the process. “Now they have a really good union power in the workplace”, he says.
Shawfikul concludes our interview with a call to all unionists:
“We shouldn’t be treated differently because of our race, our religion, our identity. The union is a big tradition in Australia, and they’re powerful in a collective way. I’ve found that myself in nine months with the union now. We can raise issues, and if the union gets involved with us, we feel very strong. The refugees here in Australia are still facing a lot of difficulties … and every organisation, every Australian, should involve themselves as the unions do in helping refugees. And in that way, we can all stand proud in the world.”

‘We can all stand proud in the world’: interview with Rohingya activist Shawfikul Islam

Sudanese refugee Faysal Ahmed died on Christmas Eve at the age of 27. Responsibility for his death lies at the feet of the Australian government, which had detained him in a concentration camp on Manus Island for more than three years, and the jailers in that camp who ignored his repeated requests for medical attention.
Refugee rights activists gathered on Melbourne’s Princes Bridge on 3 January to hold a candlelight vigil, which spontaneously turned into a remarkable blockade. It took what had been a moment of grief and despair, and transformed it into an uplifting act of defiance and solidarity. This was an important step for the campaign.
At the end of the formal proceedings, following an aching minute of silence and prayer, a group of protesters stepped out into the traffic. A number of us quickly joined them, and for a moment everything was paused in confusion. Two young women, both People of Colour and on their first protest, became exasperated as our first attempt to occupy the road appeared to be fizzling out: “Is that it? Why are we leaving?” But I saw them again minutes later, linking arms and beaming at each other as the blockade finally took a firm hold. Dozens of us were there now, and with a clear purpose.
We held our ground for more than an hour, sustained by ceaseless chanting and donations of food and water from passers-by, some of whom even joined in. Standing right by my shoulder for the duration was a middle-aged Sudanese man carrying a tiny baby in one hand, his other hand raised in a clenched fist. He and I chanted together, laughed at the slow-witted cops, and linked arms despite the obvious lack of any impending police violence.
At one point, a passing trio of young skaters joined our ranks, handing out packets of chips and placing their skateboards in front of an aggressive and freshly polished white jeep, whose wealthy owner could only shoot exasperated glares at the police who’d allowed Princes Bridge to get so outrageously egalitarian.
At its height, there were well over 100 of us blockading the road, and in the blazing sun one of the city’s central thoroughfares stood frozen. Among the blockaders were whole families from the Sudanese community, elderly people from Grandmothers Against Detention, and a number of young people utterly fed-up with the never-ending horror being inflicted on refugees.
When we finally marched off, it was in high spirits and with a sense of achievement. This matters a great deal. It indicates that people outside the far left are prepared to take more dramatic action. The campaign needs to engage with this sentiment and organise those people. The days of passively bearing moral witness to the crimes and brutality of the Australian immigration department must give way to a focus on civil disobedience and disruption.
Such action can electrify and invigorate the campaign, drawing in new people and creating new activists – and it is the sort of solidarity that people resisting inside the camps need.
In response to Faysal’s obvious medical crisis and the neglect from staff, more than 60 detainees signed a petition demanding authorities provide him with proper care. Their petition was ignored, and when he finally died three days later, they rioted. Their resistance should be a lesson to all of us, inside and outside the camps.
It’s the sort of defiance we need if we’re to have any hope of battling the government’s unconscionable detention regime and the forward march of Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump, and the rest of the confident and ascendant hard right.

Refugee solidarity action blocks traffic

Flanked by union flags and a few dozen exuberant supporters, Roz Ward marched into La Trobe University’s city campus, the headquarters of the Safe Schools coalition on 6 June. Rarely has a worker appeared so happy to be arriving at work at 9am on a cold and wet Melbourne Monday. 
The guard of honour was a celebration of a victory, when our victories of late have been precious few. In an embarrassing backdown, late on Friday, vice chancellor John Dewar announced that the University was dropping all charges against Roz and immediately lifting its suspension of her. 
Her alleged crimes, according to a letter sent by the University, included “disparaging the Australian flag” and “requiring Victorian government figures to spend time defending the Safe Schools Program”. It was crazy, but it was also grim. 
For many months, the Murdoch press has campaigned relentlessly to get Roz fired. Those openly calling for her sacking included federal education minister Simon Birmingham and former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett. They had the support of La Trobe’s vice chancellor. All three are men who are not used to losing. 
Clearly, La Trobe management had expected to be able to sleep walk through a mock disciplinary process before finding the charges against Roz proven and pushing her out the door. The campaign to defend Roz showed that when we stand together and refuse to submit meekly, we can force the most powerful people in the country to buckle and bend. 
Roz’s comrades in Socialist Alternative include a number of fellow National Tertiary and Education Union activists and delegates. Even before her suspension was finalised we were drafting motions of support, distributing a petition and garnering support from our workmates. 
However, after her suspension was announced, it was the strong and angry statement issued quickly from the state office of the union which galvanised the campaign against La Trobe’s attack. In the statement state secretary, Colin Long characterised Roz’s suspension as part of an “anti-intellectual, anti-democratic attack” and vowed the union would fight it. 
The NTEU then called on all branches to pass motions in support of Roz. A protest was called and Long emailed every NTEU member in the state to explain the significance of the case and urge them to join in. 
The union’s lead was taken up on social media. A facebook page in support of Roz grew to more than 6,000 likes in around 48 hours. This sudden blip on the radar attracted the attention of the mainstream media, which helped tighten the squeeze on La Trobe management.
The campaign to sack Roz was part of a red-baiting campaign against the whole Safe Schools program. Determined to shift society to the right, influential sections of the ruling class are gunning for progressive social programs. 
The success of the campaign to defend Roz shows how we have to respond – with solidarity, disobedience and a determination to fight tooth and nail against every attempt to attack our side.

Imagine being as big of a flog as Novak Djokovic

Mass defiance shakes the Thai regime

Race, class and the creation of White Australia

Press freedom under attack

RMIT tries blocking industrial action vote

Manus Island refugee protests continue

The war on uni employees hits Victoria University

‘We can all stand proud in the world’: interview with Rohingya activist Shawfikul Islam

Refugee solidarity action blocks traffic

When we fight, we can win

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