Aboriginal activist Sam Watson died yesterday at the age of 67. A lifelong fighter and radical much beloved by the Murri community, Sam’s passing also leaves a huge gap on the Brisbane left, of which he was a mainstay for many decades. As a proud Wangerriburra and Birri Gubba man with blood ties to the Jagara, Kalkadoon and Noonuccal Peoples, Sam was a warrior in the fight for Indigenous rights and against racism. 
Growing up in the deeply racist state of Queensland, Sam threw himself into political action at a young age, joining the campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in the 1967 referendum while still a teenager. The campaign was not limited to having Aboriginal people included on the census; it was an historic part of the Indigenous struggle for equal access to healthcare and education and against entrenched inequality, oppression and police violence. That struggle continues.
When he commenced his studies at the University of Queensland in 1971, Sam was the only Aboriginal student on campus. The director of native affairs, the state bureaucrat responsible for overseeing the apartheid conditions Indigenous people were subjected to in Queensland, pulled him into a meeting to warn him off getting involved with the anti-Vietnam war movement. Sam told Green Left Weekly in 2001 that “it only took me about six months to link up with the radicals”. He became a leading activist in the student radicalisation of the time and a key participant in the solidarity campaign against South African apartheid. 
Sam was a stalwart of the campaign against the Bjelke-Petersen government’s offensive against Indigenous rights, civil liberties and the left throughout the 1970s. He was active at the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and was a co-founder, with Denis Walker, of the Australian Black Panther Party – which set up its headquarters in Brisbane in 1971 to demand Indigenous rights and confront racist police harassment. 
Sam was for decades a tireless fighter against black deaths in custody and for justice for the families and communities of Indigenous people murdered by cops. Fittingly, he dubbed the Queensland police system a “stinking swamp of racism”. In 1993, he led big marches in Brisbane demanding justice for the family of Daniel Yock, who was killed by police near Musgrave Park. In 2004, he led the campaign in Brisbane to hold the cops to account for the murder in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee on Palm Island. And in November this year, he spoke at the rally for justice for Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot to death by a cop in his NT community of Yuendumu.
Sam’s commitment to the fight against police brutality was reflected in his work for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service and Murri Watch. He frequently took a stand for Indigenous people locked up for nothing other than being Aboriginal. Just months ago, Sam led protests against the lengthy incarceration of dozens of Aboriginal children, some as young as 10 years old, in the Brisbane watch house.
Sam always challenged the whitewashed history of this blood-soaked country. He told the stories of the massacres but also of the resistance. Every year, he organised a memorial in Brisbane for Dundalli, the Aboriginal resistance fighter hanged in Brisbane in 1855. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the Invasion Day rallies in Brisbane. For many years, Sam called rallies protesting the disgusting ritual that is “Australia Day”. They were attended by only a few hundred and routinely ignored in the media. Today they have become many thousands strong and, with more than 100,000 coming out across the country, have helped to normalise the idea among millions that the national holiday is something to be ashamed of, not celebrated. The job of abolishing this celebration of genocide is not yet done but, as his family writes: “It is his family’s hope that the Invasion Day rallies will continue to grow each year, because we know that he will be there in spirit”.
Sam was a committed and principled fighter for social justice on every front. He lived by the maxim “an injury to one is an injury to all”. His presence could always be counted on at demonstrations big or small, whether for refugee rights or the rights of Palestinians, against Islamophobia and the far right, or speaking out against Donald Trump. Wherever there was injustice, Sam stood against it, giving real meaning to the word solidarity.
Sam was a member of Socialist Alliance and stood for the Alliance in several state and federal elections. He was also a good friend of Socialist Alternative in Brisbane over the years. Many young radicals learnt much of the history of genocide and Aboriginal resistance in Queensland from Sam, whether from his speeches at rallies or in private conversations. Sam was always ready to offer invaluable advice or to lend an ear when we were working out how to handle the kinds of tactical issues that come up in any campaign. He also supported our efforts to build a bigger socialist voice in Brisbane, joining a panel of other 1970s veterans to open our Brisbane centre in 2012, and was a supporter of Red Flag newspaper. All of us are feeling his loss terribly today and convey our sincere condolences to his partner Catherine and all his family.
Vale Sam Watson, a noble and determined fighter against oppression in all its guises, who dedicated his life and self to his community and struggle, and whose example will continue to inspire future generations of radicals and activists.

Tom Bramble

Rebecca Barrigos

Sam Watson, a hero of the resistance, will be greatly missed

Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has announced that the Labor government will fast track the outstanding approvals required for Adani’s Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin. The announcement was supposedly a necessary response to Labor’s electoral drubbing in Queensland. The state government is using the widely-accepted narrative that Queensland workers want Labor to approve the mine, so it is just being democratic. 
Rubbish. The ALP has supported the mine and the opening up of the Galilee Basin to more coal projects since well before the election. Queensland Labor promised Adani a $400 million taxpayer subsidised loan, pledged to build a $100 million access road, signed off on a 60-year, unlimited water lease and refused to rule out extinguishing the native title claim of the Wangan and Jagalingou people, who have fought the construction of the mine on their land for years. 
Labor’s self-serving and cynical use of the election result to rush through Adani’s approvals has been met with paralysis by some of the key environment organisations in the anti-Adani campaign. Groups such as Stop Adani Brisbane tied their campaign strategy to the election of a Shorten government, and are now demoralised, angst-ridden about their messaging and immobilised by the dubious proposition that opposition to the Carmichael mine alienates everyone in North Queensland. 
The elect Labor strategy was a mistake because Labor never opposed Adani. But more broadly, the campaign being stunt-driven and electorally focussed meant that it never realised the potential for mass demonstrations. Since Stop Adani was launched, there have been barely any rallies organised by the group under its own steam in Brisbane. In the lead up to 18 May, in place of a large central mobilisation that could have pressured state Labor no matter what the outcome of the federal election, the campaign was preoccupied with small and far flung actions outside LNP electorate offices which were largely invisible, and door knocking to secure a Shorten government. 
The inaction of campaign groups now that the Carmichael mine is on the verge of getting the last green light it needs is a disaster. There are permits for nine other mines in the Galilee Basin. Approval of Adani and its rail line will open the Basin up to these coal projects, which will have an estimated combined output of 600 million tonnes of coal each year. If burned, that amount of coal would increase global carbon emissions by 10 percent. 
The situation calls for urgent action, not passive reflection or anxiety about what exact pitch would win the hearts and minds of voters in regional Queensland. Hand-wringing of this nature as an excuse for stepping away from campaigning is totally irresponsible. Why should the future of the planet be beholden to the backwardness of the most conservative seats in Australia? 
The right wing constituency in regional Queensland is not a new phenomenon. If we accept the logic that we need to abandon the public campaign against the Carmichael mine because regional Queenslanders don’t agree with us, then the left should also have stopped campaigning for Indigenous rights in the 1960s because Queensland was the last state to grant Aboriginal people voting rights. I call bullshit on this approach. 
There is the potential for a protest campaign against Adani. There have been several sizeable climate strikes this year, including a pre-election rally of up to 5,000 people in Brisbane called by the Bob Brown Foundation. These have shown that many people in south-east Queensland want to take action on the climate and could be mobilised against Palaszczuk’s decision to fast track Adani. 
This has been confirmed since the election, with hundreds mobilising in the past week in Brisbane in snap actions called by groups such as Extinction Rebellion. With Queensland Labor using the excuse of the election result to put profit before planet, and a federal government of climate change denialists and coal-adoring degenerates, the time to stop Adani is now. We need protests, more action and more opportunities to publicly mobilise the real opposition to the Adani mine. And we’ve not a minute to spare.

Queensland Labor fast tracks Adani and environment groups go into hiding

Pauline Hanson calls herself an outsider who stands up for “ordinary Australians” against the elite. 
The “Battler Bus” she drove around during the 2017 Queensland election campaign was one expression of this. So was her recent challenge to politicians to forgo their latest pay rise and her comments that Bill Shorten is betraying Labor’s working class base by opposing income tax cuts.
But concern for workers’ rights and living conditions has never been a factor in One Nation’s policy decisions. Last year, the party voted for $24 billion of tax breaks for companies with a turnover of up to $50 million a year. And Hanson initially endorsed Turnbull’s proposal to cut the corporate tax rate from 30 to 25 percent, back-flipping only when it became clear that this would hurt her electorally. 
Even then, One Nation’s opposition to big business tax breaks is limited. The corporations Hanson wants taxed are “non-resident foreign companies”. She is silent about the 350 Australian-owned corporations that pay no tax, according to Taxation Office figures. 
Hanson doesn’t care about all “battlers”. Some of the worst instances of wage theft come from the farming sector, which employs large numbers of migrants, often in slave-like conditions. Hanson has shown zero concern for these workers. 
She supports the government’s $144 billion income tax package, claiming that people earning more than $120,000 are “battlers”. But she has shown no sympathy for debt-ridden uni graduates – their HECS repayment threshold was just lowered to $45,000 with Hanson’s support. University-educated workers who earn as little as $730 a week will be hit by these changes, while Hanson’s six-figure income “battlers” enjoy handouts. 
One Nation’s disregard for low income earners doesn’t stop there. In 2014, Hanson said that penalty rates should be abolished “right across the board”. When the Fair Work Commission cut Sunday penalty rates last year, giving a windfall to hospitality and retail bosses, Hanson welcomed it enthusiastically. 
These bosses are responsible for some of the worst attacks on workers. Research from the hospitality workers’ union, United Voice, shows that up to 76 percent of hospitality bosses underpay their staff. Yet Hanson wants to remove the legal barriers to this underpayment. While she may have changed her position in the face of public outrage, her record as the Liberal government’s most reliable voting partner in the Senate demonstrates where her loyalties lie. 
One Nation has voted for a raft of anti-worker laws, including attacks on apprentices and safety conditions in the building industry. It is also committed to helping the representatives of big business in government by preferencing the Liberal Party in the Western Australian state election last year and in the upcoming Longman by-election. 
It’s not just the Liberal policies One Nation backs, but those it proposes, which show that this party represents more affluent people and bosses. Hanson has introduced a bill to limit government borrowing and promote “prudent” spending. This would limit government spending on health care, education and essential infrastructure, all sorely needed to improve workers’ living conditions. 
Hanson is no friend of workers. She is a fraud who talks about being an outsider while promoting policies that make the rich richer.

Hanson is no friend of workers

Queensland is considered more conservative and backward than the southern states. Queensland “difference” has been used to explain the long period of conservative National Party rule from the 1950s under the extreme right wing premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, the foul Liberal National Party Islamophobe George Christensen and the careers of populists like Bob Katter and Clive Palmer.
While there is nothing uniquely Queensland about racist and conservative politics in Australia, Queensland is different. It is a state with distinct political traditions flowing from its unique history of economic development.
A key consequence of a regionalised and decentralised economy with low rates of industrialisation has been a weaker Queensland capitalist class. For most of the 20th century, interstate and foreign companies dominated the state’s economy. With less of a big local capitalist class to drive investment and economic expansion, governance and state politics were concerned to promote capitalist development.
Today this impulse is expressed in the slavish and bipartisan commitment to the mining sector and paving the way for corporations like Adani to establish their operations in the state.
Not only this, but the centrality of Queensland’s primary industries and the regionalist nature of its economic development also provided part of the historic basis for intense and enduring racism, with state-sponsored clearing of Aboriginal land, first for grazing and later for large scale mining projects requiring the most vile and brutal dispossession and genocide.
Queensland’s economic development also shaped the establishment parties and politics in marked ways. The regional cities grew up initially around ports to service the primary industries. Cities like Cairns, Townsville and Mackay became the centre of Queensland politics and economy, overshadowing Brisbane.
Despite the capital being larger than any single regional city, Brisbane never became the place where most of the state’s population lived, and it is still the case that most of Queensland’s population, some 51 percent, lives outside it. By comparison, 65 percent of the NSW population lives in greater Sydney, and Melbourne is home to 76 percent of Victoria’s population.
State government policy was written in Brisbane, but with a focus on regional development. This explains why the Country/National parties historically have been stronger than the Liberals in Queensland. It also helps to explain how the Labor Party developed more country, populist sensibilities than its southern equivalents. Its early base was among seasonal and itinerant shearers, meatworkers, sugar workers and transport, port and railways workers, but also among small farmers in the sugar industry.
The working class was not only more regional but also less industrialised, and therefore more monocultural than the southern states, where manufacturing led to higher concentrations of migrant workers. The labour movement was also dominated by the Australian Workers Union, with a union leadership that favoured arbitration over strikes and was preoccupied to keep Labor in government.
Yet concentrations of regional workers, far from Brisbane and the reach of AWU officialdom and parliamentarians, and under the influence of syndicalism and the Industrial Workers of the World, set the scene for vibrant outbreaks of militant trade unionism and resistance, earning the state the moniker of “the Red North” by World War One and bringing workers into conflict with state Labor governments that ruled virtually uninterrupted from 1915 to 1957.
At one time, it would have been laughable to suggest that Queensland workers were conservative, loyal nationalists. Queensland was dubbed a site of “latent rebellion” and Bolshevism by prime minster Hughes, who had been pelted with eggs by workers during his 1917 pro-conscription tour of Queensland.
In the 1930s, Communist Party militants led explosive strikes among AWU-organised sugar workers, which united white and southern European migrant workers. In 1944, Fred Paterson, Australia’s only ever Communist MP, was elected to the seat of Bowen, between Mackay and Townsville.
The regionalised nature of Queensland’s economic development can explain seeming contradictions in the history of state politics – the radical working class traditions alongside a state labour movement dominated by a conservative ALP-AWU alliance, for example.
Another contradiction is that between the longest period of continuous Labor government in Australia into the 1950s, followed by a long period of Country/National Party government, made notorious by Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s social conservatism, concessions to big mining corporations, racism and assaults on land rights and civil liberties.
Since the 1970s, and especially in the last few decades, there have been important economic developments that reshaped electoral politics. The once thriving regional centres are in decline, the long term result of changes to agriculture, of mechanisation and modern mining techniques requiring fewer permanent workers.
These shifts, along with the rise of south-east Queensland, tourism and the Brisbane services sector, have undermined the regional cities, eroding public services and infrastructure. Politicians have campaigned on these themes, which has helped drive a right wing populist vote in former National Party strongholds.
Despite these evolutions, the characteristics that gave Queensland its distinctive political character have to a significant extent endured from colonisation to the present. Regionalism over time helped lay the basis for a more populist ALP, and later consolidated the Nationals’ dominance.
Added to this, Queensland has a long history of racism, derived from voracious measures to clear the land for primary industry, which dominated the economy from colonisation, and a working class that, despite its impressive capacity for militancy and radical political traditions, has been fragmented and has suffered from its decentralised and regional nature.
These factors have laid the basis for more conservative, yet volatile, state politics.

Why Queensland is different

The recent toppling of confederate statues in the US should inspire us to tear down some racist statues of our own.
A statue of Lachlan Macquarie in Sydney’s Hyde Park has for years attracted rightful attention and contempt from Indigenous activists and historians. As governor of NSW, 1810-21, Macquarie stole Aboriginal children from their families to assimilate them culturally. In response to Aboriginal resistance, Macquarie ordered punitive massacres and instructed colonial troops to hang the bodies of Aboriginal people from trees, to “strike the greater terror into the survivors”. A plaque near the statue’s base describes this murderer as “a perfect gentleman, a Christian and supreme legislator of the human heart”.
Macquarie’s statue testifies to and celebrates the fact that Australia was founded on dispossession and genocide. This history is reinforced by another prominent statue in Hyde Park, that of Captain Cook. It bears the inscription, “Discovered this territory 1770” – promoting the lie of terra nullius, which was used for so long to justify the British colonial invasion and the racist society constructed after it.
Australian capitalism was built on stolen land and the blood and broken lives of Aboriginal people, and also of Torres Strait and South Sea Islanders. Queensland’s sugar industry was built through the slave labour of at least 62,000 men and women – kidnapped from up to 80 different Pacific islands and brought to Australia in irons to make the fortunes of some of the industry’s most iconic corporations, such as CSR.
A statue of Robert Towns stands just off the main street in Townsville, the city named after this early “entrepreneur”. Towns made his wealth as a slave trader, supplying thousands of trafficked Islanders for indentured labour in the cane fields and maritime industry in the 1860s and ’70s.
Towns later used the spoils of this foul trade to establish a cotton plantation, worked by slaves. For years, the local Islander community in Townsville has been protesting the bronze monument to a grotesque chapter in Australia’s colonial history. It’s a history that extended into the first days of federation. With the establishment of the White Australia policy, thousands of Islander slaves were forcibly deported, separated from their families and dumped, many on islands that weren’t even the ones they or their parents had been abducted from.
The pastoral industry, another cornerstone of Australian capitalism, was made possible by land surveys carried out by men such as Alfred Canning. A monument to him sits by a well on the Canning stock route in Western Australia, which was used to drive cattle until the 1950s.
The state government commissioned Canning to lead an expedition to establish wells across 1,500 kilometres from the Kimberley to the Kalgoorlie gold fields. When the Canning expedition party returned, its cook blew the whistle on the barbaric methods Canning had used to find water. The abuse Canning and his men meted out to the Aboriginal people they encountered was so horrific that it led to a royal commission in 1908.
During the commission, Canning admitted to tying Martu men to trees with rope and chains around their necks, feeding them salt and leaving them in the sweltering heat until they were dying of thirst. At this point they were released and followed until they led the expedition to water. Canning was exonerated of this crime, and also of charges that he raped Aboriginal women, by the testimony of another esteemed “founder” of this country, and Western Australia’s first premier, John Forrest. Forrest, a fellow explorer, claimed that such use of force by Canning was, in Forrest’s experience, common and necessary.
Of course, Forrest has his own imposing statue towering over Kings Park in the centre of Perth. But his legacy lives on in his direct descendant, mining magnate Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest. Not only does Andrew Forrest profit off stolen land, but he is also the architect of the noxious basics card, introduced by the Howard government in 2007, which imposes what is essentially a rations-card system to police Aboriginal people’s incomes.
It’s not just statues that offend. Most place names and street names around the country are a reflection of a racist system.
Logan, one of the first urban areas to have the basics card introduced, is a case in point. Located on the south side of Brisbane and with a high Aboriginal and immigrant population, it is named after Patrick Logan, the commander of the Moreton Bay Penal Colony. Hated by convicts and the Aboriginal population alike for his violence, Logan met a just end when, on an expedition to survey the Brisbane River in 1830, he was killed by Indigenous people. Upon his death, the jailed convicts celebrated with joyful singing for days.
Just as US Confederate statues erected in the 1920s and ’30s not only speak to a racist history but also tell us of the time in which they were put up, a time of racial segregation known as Jim Crow, Australia’s monuments are reflections of a deeply racist present. Macquarie’s statue was commissioned by the NSW government and unveiled with a public ceremony in 2013. The statue of Towns was erected in 2005.
From the closure of Aboriginal communities for mining profits to the NT Intervention, to income quarantining, Black deaths in custody and systematic violence at the hands of police: Australian capitalism continues to be noxiously racist.
We should not only tear down all the racist monuments, but end the racist policies as well.

Tear down Australia’s racist statues

September marks 15 years since the US state turned the tragedy of the World Trade Centre attacks into a justification for years of brutality and horror inflicted on the population of the Middle East.
The “war on terror”, launched by the administration of president George W. Bush in the weeks following 9/11, revealed the naked barbarity of US imperialism. It extended far beyond the borders of Afghanistan, where the US first invaded, to subject the populations of Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan and beyond to sickening violence.
This war was never about delivering democracy or protecting human rights; it was always about expanding US power. The US state saw an opportunity to occupy and reshape the Middle East in order to control its oil reserves, thereby obtaining leverage against economic rivals and ensuring the future profitability and dominance of the US economy.
The Iraqi city of Fallujah is testament to the human toll of the project. It has been razed three times since the US first occupied in 2003. Once home to a bustling population of 300,000, it was reduced to rubble in 2004, when US troops twice laid siege to the city, unleashing a wave of brutal repression on its civilians. Troops indiscriminately shot and killed protesters, conducted weeks of aerial bombardment and bathed the city in white phosphorus.
Since the global financial crisis of 2007-08, US workers have been bearing the brunt of the crisis, even as the Wall Street bankers were being bailed out.
Exposure to the depleted uranium employed in US weapons resulted in a fourfold increase in the cancer rate in the years between 2004 and 2010, and a 12-fold increase in cancer for children, according to a study by doctor Chris Busby entitled Cancer, infant mortality and birth sex-ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009. Busby’s extensive research led him to conclude that the toxic fallout of the US assault on the city is worse than that suffered by the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (another crime of US imperialism).
In 2013, paediatricians at the Fallujah General Hospital told Al Jazeera journalists that, frequently, children were born with birth defects so numerous, rare and extreme that doctors do not even have a medical name for the conditions they cause.
The atrocities once committed by US troops in Fallujah are now being carried out by the client regime it installed after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In June, Fallujah again became the scene of mass devastation, this time stormed by Iraqi government forces and the militias it commands. This time it was in the name of saving civilians from ISIS, a force that arose out of the sectarian divisions stoked by years of US intervention in the region.
Five years after Obama declared the US occupation of Iraq over and troops were “officially withdrawn”, Human Rights Watch reports that Fallujah’s remaining population is currently starving and barely subsisting on date-seed bread and grass soup. Most of its residents have been forced to flee and now languish in refugee camps. In the commemorations for the victims of 9/11, it is unlikely that the victims of Fallujah will be asked to give their account of the war. Sabah Hassan, an elderly refugee from Fallujah in a refugee camp outside Baghdad, recently told Al Jazeera: “Civilians are the only ones who pay the price of the conflict. What is happening to us is unfair, we have done nothing”.
It has not been enough to kill and maim; the US also tried to break a population besieged and terrorise them into subordination. It sought to crush resistance to the occupation by torturing thousands in prisons such as the now notorious Abu Ghraib.
The death toll
In March 2015, Physicians for Social Responsibility calculated that the war on terror has, directly or indirectly, murdered around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan – a total death count of 1.3 million. That is a conservative estimate; the researchers concluded that the real casualty rate is probably much closer to 2 million.
Obama’s election in 2008 was promoted as bringing an end to US wars in the Middle East. Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize winning president has overseen a troop influx into Afghanistan and authorised further military operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria and Libya, extending the theatre of war and escalating the use of drone warfare.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, since 2002, drone strikes have killed more than 7,000 people. This doesn’t take into account drone strikes in Iraq and Syria – which are on the rise as the US seeks to maintain its military presence in the region without the further deployment of troops on the ground.
Despite this expansion, the US has not been able to accomplish its objectives. In fact, after 15 years of war, the US global position is weakened.
Worldwide offensive against civil liberties
Justifying these crimes against humanity required the creation of a hysterical climate of fear. The stoking of Islamophobia and demonising and criminalising of Muslims have become the key means by which the US and its Western allies excuse both imperialist interventions and a mass offensive against civil liberties.
Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where the US has detained and tortured accused terror suspects, is the embodiment of this. Within its walls, almost 800 people have been incarcerated. Of these, 674 have never been charged. These people are victims of the war on terror, their lives destroyed by US imperialism.
The Bush administration introduced draconian anti-terror laws such as the Patriot Act – passed in 2001 in part to intimidate domestic opposition to war. Governments around the world followed suit, seizing on an opportunity to increase state powers and further spy on and repress their own citizens under the guise of “fighting terrorism”. The Obama administration has expanded the domestic US security state, and rabidly pursues whistleblowers, such as Chelsea Manning, who have heroically exposed the depravity of US imperialism.
Inside the belly of the beast
Capitalism’s wars have always gone hand in hand with class war against workers in the belligerent countries. The war on terror is a case in point. A partial costing by Neta C. Crawford, a professor of political science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War project, suggests that to date, the war on terror has cost a whopping US$1.8 trillion to prosecute.
Meanwhile, since the global financial crisis of 2007-08, US workers have been bearing the brunt of the crisis, even as the Wall Street bankers were being bailed out. As the populations of cities such as Detroit, beset by mass unemployment, are left to rot, and funding for public schools and infrastructure is cut, the US military budget expands. There is always money for imperial slaughter.
Resistance to war
No retrospective of the past 15 years would be complete without also remembering that the war on terror has provoked unprecedented protest. The world’s largest single day of anti-war protest that has ever occurred took place in February 2003, before the bombs started to fall on Iraq. All over the world, millions saw through the rhetoric and lies of their pro-war leaders and took to the streets to demand “No blood for oil!”
The largest rallies took place in Europe. In Australia, 250,000 marched in Melbourne, and half a million rallied in Sydney’s Hyde Park, with protests also held in almost every other city in the country. These mobilisations were larger than the famed anti-Vietnam War moratoriums of the 1970s.
Despite their size, a few mass protests were never on their own going to stop an empire hell bent on war to enforce its rule around the globe. Bush and his Western cronies were able to dismiss the global opposition to war and bomb and invade Iraq anyway. Nonetheless, the protests indicated the immense capacity of people to show international solidarity in spite of the considerable divide and rule efforts of our governments. They also demonstrate that, for all the horrors capitalism inflicts, people are more than capable of resisting the system. Our rulers can lie, scapegoat and repress, but inevitably the brutality of capitalism, always made most concrete at times of war, inspires rebellion.
More than anything, what the last 15 years of war have demonstrated is that imperialism has to be resisted.

Fifteen years of the war on terror

Since the Senate results were announced, one new senator in particular has received a lot of media attention. Malcolm Roberts of One Nation, who scraped into the last Queensland spot, has been hotly solicited for interviews, appearing on several current affairs shows, and has been extensively profiled in the press. 
By his own admission to Triple J radio’s Hack program, Roberts would not have been elected to parliament had it not been for the lowered quota required to get elected in a double dissolution and undemocratic changes to Senate voting rules introduced this year. But as a crank of the highest order, he certainly makes for entertaining viewing. 
A self-described “consultant” who has spent more than 30 years in senior management roles at many of Australia’s mining companies, Roberts is an emphatic climate change denier, who claims that “there is no evidence anywhere in the world” that human production of carbon dioxide is affecting the climate. 
For the past nine years, Roberts has worked to expose what he terms the “corruption of climate science”. He is the volunteer project manager for the Galileo Movement (which boasts right wing shock jock Alan Jones as official patron), which has published hundreds of documents describing climate change as an elaborate conspiracy of the UN and international bankers to rake in profits from trading carbon credits and to undermine the sovereignty of nation states. 
There is evidence to suggest that Roberts is a member of the far right sovereign citizen movement. Adherents of this movement purport to live outside the law and governmental system, are exceedingly preoccupied with avoiding paying taxes and think governments employ grammar to control us and deceive us into signing illegitimate contracts. 
Roberts denies any association with these bizarre conspiracists. But the Sydney Morning Herald republished a letter he wrote in 2011 to the then prime minister, Julia Gillard, demanding that he be exempted from the carbon tax, which used weird punctuation consistent with sovereign citizens’ beliefs that the insertion of commas and hyphens into text and proper nouns is an aid to evading government power. 
On his own website, Roberts claims that his verbose and obtuse diatribes describing climate change as a myth and countless letters harassing climate scientists and their institutions are actually about “protecting freedom by understanding climate, science and sovereignty”.
Apart from promoting climate change scepticism, Roberts has outlined other key priorities for his term in the Senate: reform to the Family Law Court in order to preserve the security of the family, and an overhaul of the tax system, because “tax is in everything that is wrecking this country”. Importantly, he has also made it clear that he is for the removal of section 18C from the Racial Discrimination Act – the section which makes it illegal to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” a person because of their race or ethnicity. 
Although Roberts appears confused about the origins of the 1975 legislation, telling the ABC’s Insiders program that he believed Gillard had introduced it as a way of “nobbling” Andrew Bolt, his stupidity should not get in the way of us seeing his comments as part of One Nation’s racist offensive against Muslims and refugees. 
Roberts made clear to Hack presenters that he is a rampant Islamophobe, repeating Hanson’s call for a ban on all Muslim migration and stating that he believes Australia is in danger of becoming subject to sharia law. His insistence that 18C is “suppressing free speech” and his exhortation that we “need to dismantle political correction [sic] by speaking the truth” echo the racist backlash of the Howard years, when One Nation dragged the political climate to the right and legitimised racist hate.

Malcolm Roberts: confused but dangerous right wing crank

The Turnbull government wants to slash university funding by at least 20 percent and to introduce a revamped version of Christopher Pyne’s notorious 2014 plan to deregulate university fees.
The full extent of the Liberals’ education cuts won’t be known until the May budget is released, but we do know that the government intends to shift the cost of education further on to students.
Education minister Simon Birmingham has stated that deregulation was never off the table, only deferred. The government is also considering ways to recover student debt sooner by lowering – from around $54,000 to $42,000 – the amount a student needs to earn before they must begin repayments. It has also floated the idea of recovering student debt from deceased estates.
While these suggestions indicate the cravenness of the Liberals’ assault on education and their commitment to making students pay, neither will deliver the government its ultimate aim: a rapid privatisation of higher education and a US-style university system.
Recovering HELP-HECS debt from the dead would net the government around $800 million a year. But deregulation – lifting the caps on what universities are allowed to charge for their degrees – would generate billions of dollars for those institutions.
For students, deregulation will mean fee increases, a debt plague and reduced access to university for those from working class families.
For years, Australian universities have been underfunded. Despite Birmingham’s rhetoric about unsustainable growth in government spending on education, which he claims has outpaced economic growth over the past 20 years, the fact is that student numbers have grown over the past few decades without any attendant increase in government funding per student place.
Commonwealth funding per student has actually decreased by more than 10 percent since the late 1990s. The growth in total government expenditure on education that Birmingham bemoans is a result of higher student numbers, encouraged by successive governments’ drive to boost productivity and profits by increasing the number of skilled graduates on offer to employers.
In the 1980s, direct government funding, or “base funding”, constituted 90 percent of all university revenue. Today, after years of neoliberal economic restructuring of higher education, government funding makes up around 40 percent.
The funding shortfall has been made up by university administrations charging international students exorbitant fees and through HELP-HECS hikes for domestic students. As the OECD pointed out in its 2015 “Education at a glance” report, Australian students already pay some of the highest fees in the world. Only in places such as the United States and the UK, where government attacks similar to the ones being proposed by the Liberal government have already been carried out, are fees higher.
National Tertiary Education Union research on the expected cost of deregulated degrees estimates fee increases of 27.5 percent on average just to maintain current funding levels for course delivery – $100,000 degrees for some disciplines and at the more prestigious universities would be a reality.
Fee deregulation would entrench the trend towards a two-tier education system. In a deregulated fee system, the “sandstone” universities would justify increases with reference to their high international rankings and the promise of the social status a qualification from their institution would confer on graduates.
This would make places at Melbourne University or the University of Sydney even more the preserve of the rich, just like the Ivy League colleges in the United States, with poorer students increasingly limited to courses offered by less resourced institutions.
The overall result of deregulation would be fewer choices and a substandard education for the majority. The added impact of government defunding will mean greater staff and course cuts as institutions, especially the second tier ones, scramble to compete for revenue.
In an increasingly deregulated, for-profit system, universities have an interest in offering only the courses with the highest demand and low running costs. This tendency is already reflected in moves by universities over the past decade to cut humanities programs in preference for money-spinning degrees sold to international students, such as commerce and business.
If the Liberals have their way, students can also expect to be locked into a lifetime of crippling debt. This month, the Parliamentary Budget Office released projections showing that the total value of HELP loans, or student debt owed to the government, would soar from the current $42.3 billion to $185.2 billion by 2026.
Birmingham has cynically seized on these statistics as proof that there is a dire need for budget cuts to rein in an education spending “blowout”. He told the media: “There is no point believing that just by racking up ever increasing debts today, that somehow Australians down the track will miraculously be able to pay for them”.
However, the report highlighted that, other than increased student numbers, the greatest contributing factor for rising student debt would be the planned cuts to university funding first floated in Tony Abbott’s 2014 budget and the deregulation of course fees leading to students needing to take out bigger loans that would take even longer to pay off.
For two years, only strident student opposition and protest, backed by the unpopularity of federal budget cuts, have held deregulation at bay. With deregulated fees the centrepiece of the privatised, user-pays higher education industry the Liberals dream of, only a concerted fightback can defeat their agenda.

$100,000 degrees still on the Liberal agenda

For decades, Australian politicians and university administrations have championed policies to corporatise Australian universities and generate ever more profit from tertiary education.
In 2014, university revenues totalled more than $25 billion. Vice-chancellors have boosted these by treating international students as cash cows, increasing the burden domestic students bear for the cost of their education and by finding ways to cut costs.
Traditionally, this drive for profit has led to course cuts, larger student-staff ratios, an increasingly overworked and casualised workforce and fee increases.
Fee deregulation was the centre of Liberal government policy, and would have allowed universities to charge whatever they liked. Fortunately, deregulation has been forced off the agenda for the time being.
But rather than demand more public funding, vice-chancellors have become fixated on implementing structural changes to improve the “efficiency” of their institutions. University managements are looking to push more students, now seen as customers, through their degree factories at a faster rate to increase profits.
One way of doing this is to change the way courses are delivered – the introduction of video lectures, or the abolition of lectures altogether, for example. Administrations have cynically pitched these measures as attempts to be responsive to students’ needs and to overhaul outdated and boring teaching methods.
In reality, replacing in-person lectures with online classes, seminars or some other system is all about the bottom line. A quick glance at current pay scales for staff at Melbourne University reveals that casuals, who now make up more than 50 percent of the workforce, are paid 30 percent less to teach tutorials than large lectures.
The example of Adelaide University, where lectures began to be phased out in 2015, followed by the abolition of paid academic consultation hours, shows how scrapping lectures can be the opening shot in further attacks on jobs and the quality of education, as students have fewer opportunities for contact with their lecturers than ever before.
Then there is the proliferation of online degrees. Not only are these courses cheaper to provide, but once the infrastructure for them has been established, they pave the way for universities to make mega-profits.
Swinburne Online, established as a joint venture by Swinburne University and the education and training company SEEK in 2014, is a good example. With no limit to how many students can be crammed into a virtual classroom, online courses give universities the ability to enrol huge numbers of students and maximise the financial gain. In the first semester of Swinburne Online’s operations, for example, SEEK’s profits grew 47 percent to $78.7 million.
But what has been the impact of online degrees for students? Last year, the Australian Financial Review reported that the “dropout rate for first-year bachelor students for Swinburne University as a whole has risen sharply” – a predictable outcome of the lack of student support and access to staff.
Many universities have introduced trimesters, or have even moved to divide the academic year into quarters – pushing more students more quickly through their institutions. In the eyes of the administrations, trimesters promote “efficient” use of university resources and buildings. Why have three-month summer breaks when you could operate and charge fees for the whole year?
Of course, increased teaching periods also inevitably mean increased staff teaching hours. Where trimesters have been introduced, at 10 Australian universities so far, the result has generally been a larger workload for staff, shorter time frames in which to deliver the same material and increased student numbers. With overburdened staff comes worse quality education for students. This is without even mentioning the more intense exam periods with less time for students to complete assessment, as well as the trend towards night and weekend exams.
Trimesters also restrict access to education. With government funding for student support at historically low levels and maximum payments set at a measly 42 percent of the poverty line, and with Austudy and youth allowance harder to qualify for than ever before, many students badly require the holiday periods in order to work and save money to support their study.
Corporatisation has also given rise to vertical degrees, sometimes described as a US-style system, with many universities introducing generalised undergraduate courses, requiring students to undertake additional and costly postgraduate degrees. Melbourne University pioneered this kind of “reform” with its notorious “Melbourne Model”, which transformed dozens of undergraduate courses into postgraduate-only degrees, trapping students into paying more and studying longer for the same qualifications.
Most structural changes at universities, including faculty mergers, have led to huge job losses in both administration and teaching. This is because one of the tried and true formulas to increase profitability is getting fewer staff to do more work for less pay. Staff cuts have been pursued regardless of the huge annual profits posted by most universities. For example, in December, the University of Western Australia announced that it would be sacking 300 staff to “cut costs”, despite posting a $90 million surplus.
For the last 30 years, successive governments have defunded university education, but it is hardly as if the university managers are pauperised and helpless. Despite their claims, vice-chancellors do not need to undertake structural changes to stay afloat. In fact, vice-chancellors have been the beneficiaries of the profits flowing from an increasingly corporatised and “for profit” higher education system. Michael Spence, the head of Sydney University, increased his pay by $120,000 in 2015, to $1.3 million a year.
Structural changes won’t solve the problems created by decades of neoliberal economic policy that have turned universities into profit-driven businesses and resulted in lower quality education at a much higher price. Restructures do, however, bring university managers one step closer to their dream of a fully deregulated and privatised education system. Students and staff don’t need structural changes; they need a fully funded public education system that isn’t run for profit.

Admins turn universities into profit factories

In many ways Martin Shkreli, the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, and the disease-causing Toxoplasma gondii share a lot in common. They thrive off the vulnerability of the sick and weak, create nothing of value themselves and are both parasites born of a shitty environment.
Recently Shkreli bought the rights to manufacture and distribute a 62-year-old drug called Daraprim. Shkreli then raised the price from US$13.50 to $750 per pill.
Daraprim is used to treat an infection called taxoplasmosis, which is caused by the parasite T. gondii and commonly contracted via the consumption of undercooked meat or exposure to cat faeces. It is a required drug in the treatment plans of many patients suffering from HIV/AIDS or who are undergoing intensive chemotherapy because taxoplasmosis is deadly when caught by those with weakened immune systems.
This despicable 5,455 percent price hike for a tablet that by Shkreli’s own admission costs around US$1 to make, has understandably raised the ire of thousands and earned him the moniker of the “most hated man in America”.
Multiple TV appearances in which the CEO tried to justify his actions have done nothing but fuel the outrage. He told one Bloomberg TV interviewer that he needed to “turn a profit” and that his actions were reasonable given that previously patients were paying “only” around $1,000 for a course of life-saving treatment – a piddling amount according to him, when compared to the hundreds of thousands some cancer patients are forced to pay for their treatments.
In a similarly candid interview with CBS News, Shkreli said, “There’s no doubt I’m a capitalist. I’m trying to create a big drug company, a successful drug company, a profitable drug company”.
This is not the first time Shkreli has sought to “turn a profit” in this disgusting way. In 2011, at another company that he founded, Retrophin, he jacked up by 2,000 percent the price of a drug used to treat children suffering a rare form of kidney disease.
But Shkreli is only one such capitalist benefitting from what amounts to a common business practice in the pharmaceutical industry. He is just more open about his motives than most. Shkreli’s media statements reveal a fundamental fact about the health care market: all pharmaceutical companies profit from sickness.
And they can do so all the more effectively if, like Shkreli, they can acquire exclusive control over the supply of a drug. By doing so, the companies gain control over distribution, forcing up the price of treatments, as well as restricting the ability of other labs to access the drugs and produce cheaper generic medicines.
After a week of public condemnation, Shkreli has announced he will be lowering the price of Daraprim – but not back to $13.50. Meanwhile, the HIV Medicine Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America report that low income patients are already suffering from decreased hospital access to Daraprim at its hiked price.

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