For federal politicians, 1 July is going to be a good day for the bank balance. The misnamed Independent Remuneration Tribunal has found it fitting to increase their salaries by 2 percent, meaning that Scott Morrison will get an $11,000 pay rise – his third pay rise in a year – bringing his annual salary to $549,229. The pay of Peter Dutton, the special minister for raiding media offices, will go up by $7,000, to $364,247. Other MPs, on a baseline salary of $207,100, will land an increase of $4,000.
Of course, official salaries remain the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the parliamentary gravy train. A key perk of the job is access to entitlements. Although ostensibly for “official parliamentary business”, a loose definition of the concept “official parliamentary business” is culturally entrenched amongst Australia’s parliamentarians.
This gives them access to unlimited domestic travel, including chartering a plane if commercial flights are not available; accommodation, meals and other incidentals while travelling; cost of spouse travel; costs of one privately owned vehicle; and use of a COMCAR. Parliamentarians can also claim expenses related to the upkeep of their offices: postage, stationery, printing costs, computers, laptops, TVs, office furniture, phones. In 2016 while opposition leader, Bill Shorten spent $237,775 on office facilities and admin. 
Parliamentary entitlements have supposedly come under increased scrutiny since “Choppergate”, the 2016 incident involving then speaker Bronwyn Bishop chartering a helicopter on the public dollar to fly from Melbourne to Geelong to attend a Liberal Party fundraiser. However, the ensuing review seemed more focused on restoring public confidence in MPs than it did on ending such rorts. 
Visit the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) website, and you will see hundreds of thousands of dollars spent every quarter on all sorts of activities with only marginal relevance to needs of the mass of the population. You will find, for example, that then Liberal MP Jane Prentice spent $13,059 on a week-long trip to Belgium as part of a parliamentary delegation. Or that Anthony Albanese between October and December 2018 spent $14,665.74 on “other car costs”.
The Independent Remuneration Tribunal itself is a gravy train for the already wealthy who spend their days sitting on corporate boards. It is independent, it seems, only from anyone outside the ruling elite. The tribunal’s current president, John Conde (AO, no less), takes home $128,922 per year (exclusive of travel allowances) for his part-time role, and has enjoyed this nice little earner for the past 25 years.
While “independent” bodies like the IRT and the IPEA continue to promote a culture of entitlement amongst Australia’s political class, another “independent” body – the Fair Work Commission – has been cutting entitlements for workers. Those dependent on penalty rates have been hardest hit, with further cuts kicking in on 1 July. Over the next three years, workers in the hospitality, pharmacy, fast food and retail sector will collectively lose $2.87 billion from the penalty rate cuts.
So while politicians’ salaries get fatter and fatter and their jaunts to Belgium continue, further declines to workers’ living standards proceed with a dull regularity.

Robert Callan

Pay day for politicians while penalty rates cut

A decade after move-on laws were introduced in Western Australia, one man is engaging in a public campaign to protest their use as a means of social control.
It was Labor’s then Attorney General Jim McGinty who pushed for the laws in 2004. At the time, it was said that police needed extra powers to prevent alcohol-fuelled anti-social behaviour outside nightclubs and parties.
Under WA’s laws, police can issue a person with a move-on notice requiring that they leave a specified area for up to 24 hours. The police need only record that they “reasonably suspect” that an offence is “about” to be committed in order to issue a notice. If a person subject to a move-on notice returns to the proscribed area, they can be arrested and fined or imprisoned. 
Despite making up only 4 percent of the state’s population, in 2009 Aboriginal people received 34 percent of the 20,300 move-on notices issued. By 2013 that number had risen to 40 percent. 
One homeless Aboriginal man, Ricky Louis Indich, has received 463 move-on notices since the law came into effect, including one at a city park where a charity was operating a soup kitchen in June last year.
Herbert Bropho, a Noongar man and local political activist, has been sticking up posters around inner-city parks in protest. Red Flag spoke to him about move-on notices and how they echo WA’s racist history. 
“Well the posters are in response to the homeless mob … Why they say ‛‘Blacks Banned’ is that we need to educate our kids that the blue line hasn’t left. Why they are giving these fines, it goes back to the days of the old passport, where you had to get permission to come in town, from the government or the police … The blue line is still here, and the kids of Western Australia, white and black, need to be educated about the blue line.”
Under the Aborigines Act 1905, designated areas could be declared prohibited to Aboriginal people unless they could show they were in “lawful employment”. A 1927 amendment made it an offence for Aboriginal people to come within five kilometres of the city centre after 6 pm. 
“Mainly all the homeless mob are the ones being picked on, and young Ricky Garlett has got over nearly a hundred and something move-on notices, and he lives and stays in the city, where they go through to Beaufort for their 5 o’clock meal.
“At the end of the day, when they go to get their 5 o’clock meal, some of them don’t make it. Manaj [police] pull them up and give them a move-on notice. They know who they are, they target them 24 hours a day.”
This aspect of the issue is particularly important to Herbert. Many of his family members were made homeless in 2003 when Lockridge Campsite – the Swan Valley community that Herbert’s father Robert Bropho and others had fought for and won in the late 1970s – was shut down by the government in circumstances similar to the NT intervention.
“There’s a lot of people homeless, of my family members. Where we are, fighting for our community back – it’s been closed down for so many years – if we could have that back, they wouldn’t have this problem of vagrancy. It’s all political.”
Herbert’s poster campaign has already attracted the attention of the WA police, but he is not one to be intimidated.
“When I put up these ‛‘Blacks Banned’ [posters] I got a lot of people talking. A lot of people thought it was wadjelas [white people], but they didn’t know it was a Noongar person until I came out of the woodwork, and I said that I was the man that put the posters up. Then, a couple of days after that I got a visit from the police, and they said if you put these posters up again, we’re going to charge you.
“I said I’m allowed to do it, I’m telling what’s happening to my people, and to my family.
“They say now it’s a time of healing, and moving on – where are we moving to? Are we moving forward in going back? The move-on notice needs to be abolished.”

‘Blacks banned’ in WA

A story of racist double standards is unfolding a few hours north of Perth, in Geraldton.
On 5 October, two Yamitji people – Horace Bynder and Christine Ryan – are walking along one side of a road. A 27-year-old white man, Desmond Peterson, is driving his ute – drunk – along the other side.
He veers onto the wrong side of the road, hitting and killing both of them. He promptly flees the scene. Several hours later, he turns himself in at the police station. He is released – without charge – and heads home to await a court summons.
Eleven days pass before any charges are laid, and then only after regular protests at the police station by family and friends of the victims. But the charges are so minor – failing to stop, failing to render assistance and driving under the influence – that it only inflames the situation.
Similar leniency is unthinkable had the offender been black.
On 31 October, the Indigenous community of Perth holds its own gathering, part protest, part public mourning. Local Indigenous activist Marianne Mackay (a cousin of one of the victims) leads a march around the Perth CBD, telling the tragic story over a megaphone (the West Australian saw fit to give it only a few centimetres). Perth police trail after us, sheepishly.
I spoke to Marianne after the protest, and she explained why people are angry: “If this was the other way around and an Aboriginal person had run down two white people, we know – from history and statistics – that he’d be sitting in prison right now, and he wouldn’t be out on bail. And that’s just the unfair thing, and what we want is justice, not racism.”
On the day of Peterson’s first court appearance, 7 November, more than 250 people rally outside the Geraldton Magistrates Court. Their demand is that the defendant be charged with the more serious offence of dangerous driving causing death.
After Peterson is granted bail with just a few thousand dollars as surety, protesters attempt to get into the building. They are blocked by police, and in the ensuing struggle a door is broken and a window smashed. Police subsequently arrest a man and announce a full investigation into this act of violence committed on a building.
Australia’s “justice” system usually reveals its racism by targeting and over-policing Indigenous people. It fills its prisons with them or kills them in police holding cells. This time the racism appears in the leniency shown a white man responsible for their deaths.
Either way, Aboriginal lives mean little to it.

WA deaths: what price Aboriginal lives?

Just off the coast of West Papua, away from the suspicious glare of the Indonesian Navy, two small boats met on 12 September to complete the delivery of ceremonial items – water from Lake Eyre in South Australia and ash from the fires of Aboriginal tent embassies across Australia.
This was the end of long journey for participants in the West Papua Freedom Flotilla.
The territory has been occupied by Indonesia since 1962. Up to 100,000 West Papuans have been killed in that time. This slow burning genocide has been obscured from view in Australia due to a nearly total ban on foreign journalists and NGOs.
The Freedom Flotilla aimed to reconnect the ancient ties between the people of West Papua and the Indigenous people of Australia, ties which have been severed under the combined weight of colonial oppression and military occupation.
Beginning at Lake Eyre, a convoy of artists, musicians, activists and Indigenous ambassadors made its way to Cairns before boarding a flotilla of boats bound for West Papua.
Indonesia recognised early the threat this peaceful and largely symbolic action would be.
Intimidation began well before the scheduled arrival of the Flotilla, with the Indonesian military massing troops and arms on the streets of Manokwari, the West Papuan capital.
In scenes reminiscent of the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla (which aimed to break the economic blockade of Gaza by Israel), the boats were met by threats of violence from the Indonesian Navy.
Rather than attempt a direct confrontation, the Freedom Flotilla activists ran a decoy manoeuvre, which they pulled off brilliantly.
While the main vessel, the Pog, continued to sail along the maritime boundary, attracting all the attention of the Indonesian Navy, the ceremonial cargo was loaded onto a much smaller boat, which slipped through the defences to make the delivery.
On the following day hundreds of people took to the streets of Manokwari for a welcoming ceremony, which took place without the usual police intimidation.
Subsequently, however, those West Papuans who received the ceremonial offerings went into hiding after receiving threatening phone calls and visits from the Indonesian military and police intelligence officers.
Four community leaders on Biak Island (off the north coast of West Papua) have been arrested after sending a letter to the Biak police informing them of a procession planned to welcome the sacred water and ashes.
The four men remain in custody and may be charged with treason, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Pay day for politicians while penalty rates cut

‘Blacks banned’ in WA

WA deaths: what price Aboriginal lives?

Freedom Flotilla fulfils aim

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