Trans rights supporters protested over the weekend against the speaking tour of UK right-wing activist and transphobe Kellie Jay Keen, also known by the pseudonym Posie Parker.
Keen is an opponent of trans healthcare such as hormone replacement therapy and is part of the political movement to ban trans people from using public bathrooms.
She claims to be a “women’s rights activist” but seems perfectly comfortable in the company of misogynists—she has had members of the fascist group the Proud Boys on the mic at her rallies and has praised Donald Trump and British far-right activist Tommy Robinson. Pro-life Christian fundamentalist bigots regularly turn out to her events.
On 11 March, trans rights activists outnumbered Keen’s bigot rally in Sydney’s Victoria Park. Failed Liberal Party candidate Katherine Deves was a guest speaker, as was Kirralie Smith, a founder of the transphobic Binary organisation and former campaigner against marriage equality.
On 12 March, more than 200 people turned out to rally and march against Keen’s presence in Queensland.
At a counter-protest organised by Equal Love Brisbane, speakers included Kristin Perissinotto, activist and organiser, Louisa McCarthy, socialist activist and Sam Watson, Aboriginal activist and socialist.
“Posie Parker is on a warpath against trans rights and she is linking up with the global far right for her crusade”, McCarthy said. “We are protesting today to make sure that these vile ideas do not go unchallenged.
“Freaks like Posie Parker should never want to come back to Brisbane again. We should continue to protest against bigotry and push back against all attempts to wind back our rights.”
Parker is taking her bigotry to Perth on Tuesday 14 March, Adelaide on 16 March and Melbourne on 18 March.
Anti-fascists and supporters of trans rights will again turn out to counter-protests. Coming out in numbers is the best response to the far-right’s hatemongering.
Bigots like Parker should make like dinosaurs and die out.

Sel Dowd

Sydney and Brisbane say no to transphobia

Bigotry had a setback on 11 February with the indefinite shelving of the Religious Discrimination Bill. This is to be celebrated.
Religious organisations have for now been denied their “right” to impose their prejudices on others with impunity, despite the House of Representatives passing an amended version of the bill after an all-night sitting of parliament.
It was because of an amendment, which removed the power of religious schools to expel students because of their gender identity, that some of the bill’s most ardent supporters, including the Australian Christian Lobby, ended up withdrawing their support for it. Their dummy-spit revealed the real agenda: to secure state backing for the loony right in the culture wars, a key battleground of which is trans kids’ right to be treated with dignity and respect.
It ended up an embarrassing fiasco for Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who personally introduced the bill to parliament last November and who promised at the last election that such laws would be in place before the next election. Any hope the debate would provide a much-needed distraction from the government’s disastrous COVID-19 response and help enthuse the Liberal Party’s conservative base have been unceremoniously dashed.
Instead, Labor is congratulating itself for supporting the amendment, moved by Centre Alliance MP Rebekah Sharkie, and the government’s many opponents are rightly celebrating the bill being dropped. This somewhat obscures the fact that it was because of Labor that the bill came so perilously close to being successful. Even with the amendment, religious organisations would have secured wide-ranging powers to discriminate and have their various prejudices protected and legitimised by the state.
Religious organisations, including hospitals, schools and aged care centres, would have had greater latitude to discriminate legally when hiring staff so long as the religious ethos of the workplace was made public. So public hospitals that are also Catholic, for example, would be able to require that doctors oppose abortion and contraception to be employed there. Or LGBTI people or unmarried mothers could be sacked or not hired, regardless of their suitability for the job.
It also protected expressions of genuinely held religious belief, even if they cause hurt or offence. Which meant that while LGBTI kids might not be able to be expelled from religious schools, they could still be told that their desires are sinful, they are going to hell and could be punished for them with the endorsement of the government. Administrators and teachers could also legally refuse to recognise the names and pronouns of gender-diverse students, and they could be banned from participating fully in sports and other extracurricular activities. This provision could potentially affect many other groups, including women, people with a disability or mental illness and people of minority faiths.
Crucially, this “statements of belief” clause would override existing state and federal anti-discrimination laws. And the special privileges that would be given to religious organisations would be far broader than existing state-based exemptions to anti-discrimination law, both because the bill adopted a much more lenient test to determine when this discrimination is permitted—only requiring that one other person of the same religion could reasonably consider the discrimination to be justified—and because it applies to a much wider range of organisations than other laws, including charities, hospitals, aged care facilities, accommodation providers, disability service providers, camps, conference sites and even some commercial operations. This meant, had the bill been successful, bigots would have had the tacit approval of the state to make demeaning and derogatory comments in almost all areas of public life.
And while it was presented by the government as a measure to protect people of all religious faiths or none, overwhelmingly the key beneficiaries of the measures were the already powerful Christian organisations that employ far more people than other faiths and which are well embedded in the social services, health and education sectors. Indeed, Christian organisations make up a significant proportion of the non-government organisations that today provide an estimated two-thirds of all welfare and social services in Australia. The Catholic Church operates 75 hospitals, (21 of which are public) and more than 500 aged care facilities. In Victoria, 112,000 children—about one in five—attend a Catholic school, while only about 12,000 attend Islamic schools. Minority faiths, which don’t have a comparable network of service providers, therefore couldn’t exercise the discriminatory rights provided for under the bill. They are more likely to have to fight for the right to practise their faith, whether it’s the right to construct mosques or be free to worship without attracting attention from ASIO—issues the bill’s promoters take no apparent interest in.
The shelved bill also would have created a Religious Freedom Commissioner, which was one of several measures aimed at giving religion and religious values more prominence and importance in the state and everyday life. This reflects the Christian right’s broader concern about the waning prominence and influence of religion and by association, traditional values. Religious organisations don’t just want to run a shadow state, they want to be able to use their integration into the state to impose their values and rules on others, and have them legitimised and protected by government.
Despite both major parties being committed to voting for the bill, amended or in its original form, sentiment in Parliament House is not representative of the rest of the country. Polls indicate that more than three-quarters of people oppose the “statements of belief” clause in the bill, and just under two-thirds think it should be against the law for religious schools to expel or exclude LGBTI students. Rallies of mainly young people have been held around the country in opposition to the bill. All this is part of the ongoing legacy of the marriage equality campaign, during which millions of people rallied, campaigned and ultimately voted to make equality law, and who are not willing to stand by while the Christian right fights a rearguard action to undermine that victory.
The bill is dead for now, and it probably won’t rise again. But the highly motivated bigots in the Christian right, and their allies in the Liberal Party, are not about to give up the broader fight, and nor should we.

Louise O'Shea

Good riddance to the bigot bill

Despite decades of warnings from scientists about the urgent need to curb greenhouse gas emissions to avoid catastrophic global warming, we’re in a worse situation today than ever. Global emissions hit a new high in 2019, and even this year’s economic shutdowns have barely dented the upwards trajectory. 
In the face of impending catastrophe, only the most sober assessment of our situation will do. We should, for a start, reflect on whether the approach of the environment movement over the past three decades—which has centred on trying to explain things more clearly to politicians and other “decision-makers”, with a bit of polite protest here and there—is something we should press on with.
Unfortunately, all indications are that many in the climate movement are not going to draw any lessons from this failed approach but are simply going to continue with it. In Australia, the organisation responsible for calling the largest climate justice demonstrations in the country’s history—School Strike 4 Climate Australia—has declared that it is not interested in engaging with any serious alternatives to the status quo.
In a 4 September tweet, the group explained, “SS4C does not support socialism, capitalism, or any political ideology. We simply want leaders to listen to science and take actual action on climate change. That’s it. Climate justice is not political—politicians have made it political”.
To say this is a shallow and misguided perspective is overly generous. If you can look at the past three decades of failures of the climate movement and conclude that the problem is “politics”, and that the whole thing will be fixed if politicians just “listen to science”, then you’ve given up on critical reason. 
Our leaders have ears. Scott Morrison has hundreds of advisers at his disposal to brief him on the latest climate science or any other issue he might want to get his head around. He, like the rest of us, saw what happened to the forests of eastern Australia last summer. The problem isn’t that he hasn’t, or won’t, “listen to science”. It beggars belief that Morrison and his colleagues are somehow unaware of the dangers of climate change. The reality is that they’re aware, they can see its devastating impacts already unfolding around them, and yet they push on with the status quo of Australia’s fossil fuel economy regardless. 
Why he and the political establishment continue to ignore science is what needs to be explained. But this question is what SS4C appears determined not to engage with—when you begin to answer the question, you are confronted with the reality that climate change, and every other environmental issue with which our society is afflicted, is inherently political and can’t be understood otherwise. 
Politics is concerned with the way we choose to organise our economy and society. The dominant politics of the past 200 years is that of capitalism, a system in which society is divided into classes and in which a tiny minority own and control the land and the productive resources we depend on. 
The capitalist ruling class decides what gets made, what it’s made of, how much is made, where it goes and how it is disposed of. And as Andreas Malm explains in his book Fossil Capital, it was the capitalist ruling class that decided, in the early 19th century, to centre its system on the consumption of massive quantities of fossil fuels. It did this, and continues to this day to do this, because it was the thing that generated the biggest profits in the shortest time.
Capitalist states such as Australia’s aren’t independent of the system over which they preside. In the early years of capitalism, the politicians who ran the state didn’t even pretend to govern on behalf of everyone in society. These days, a façade of democracy is maintained, but the core function of the state remains to advance the interests of the capitalist class.
For Morrison and his colleagues (and we can include Anthony Albanese and other Labor Party leaders in this too), “good governance” means governing in a way that protects and advances big business profits. And Australia is a country in which the fortunes of almost the entire capitalist class are tied, more or less directly, to the fossil fuel economy. 
It should be no surprise, then, that Australian politicians of all stripes have been so backwards on climate change. The tens of billions in annual profits flowing into the hands of Australia’s fossil fuel barons speak much louder than the politely worded reports of scientists warning about the possible dangers of climate change in the long term.
If you can’t or won’t recognise this reality, you’re going to keep banging your head against the wall. The climate movement will never win if it attempts to counter the entrenched economic and political power of the fossil fuel industry with the (however clearly argued) words of scientists. Our focus, rather, has to be on how to build a force that can challenge the entire profit-driven system of capitalism, and force politicians to act whether they “listen to the science” or not.
We won’t get to this point, however, if we persist with the perspective outlined in SS4C’s tweet. Its “apolitical” orientation may, at best, result in minor tweaks to the status quo. But minor tweaks won’t be enough in the context of a system that is rapidly driving us towards a global climate catastrophe. Only mass action to force a radical change of direction will suffice. 
Pruning the poisonous, invasive weed of capitalism is not sufficient—we need to destroy it at the root. Only a system built on human need, collectively organised by workers and freed from the destructive pursuit of profit, can save the planet.

When climate strikers deny politics, they support the status quo

More than 100 people gathered at Picnic Point in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, on Saturday 2 February, to protest the auction of 37 houses against the wishes of their decades-long residents.
The homes used to be social housing, but the company that owned them collapsed last year. More than 100 Indigenous residents are at risk of homelessness.
“We weren’t given a chance to appeal or fight what’s happening”, Bernadette Gibbs, a Kooma woman of the area, told Red Flag. “We just got a letter. No one’s taking any responsibility. We rallied to get the housing in the first place, but now the government’s not worried about 37 families – we’re at the bottom of the line. We are having our lives taken away.”
Patricia Conlon, a traditional owner of the country on which the houses were built, is helping the tenants in their campaign to win housing justice. 
“My biggest concern is, why doesn’t the government step in?”, she said. “Why can’t they purchase these houses to give these people an opportunity to live? They say they want to help. Thirty-three other houses from this block have already been sold. The government was part of lifting those caveats that allowed these houses to be mortgaged and sold … It should be rent to buy, it shouldn’t be rent and rent and rent for years.”
The tenants have been told that they will receive help in the private rental market, but the Palaszczuk Labor government could immediately intervene and return their homes to social housing. The only parliamentarian pushing the residents’ case is Greens MP Michael Berkman. He noted in a media release:
“If [the state government] doesn’t intervene this will be another episode in the long history of mistreatment and dispossession of Aboriginal people in this country.”
Conlon also said that residents have faced intimidation: “These families believe there is no hope. They were told their houses were going under the hammer and if they don’t let it happen, they’ll be arrested”.

Sydney and Brisbane say no to transphobia

Good riddance to the bigot bill

When climate strikers deny politics, they support the status quo

‘You can’t sell stolen land’: Mass eviction looming for Aboriginal tenants

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