The Productivity Commission’s interim report into Australian schools confirms what those of us working in the system have known for years: the education gap is widening for students from disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds, students are falling behind their international peers, and teachers are overworked and underpaid.
Yet while the report acknowledges genuine problems, its solutions at best tinker at the edges and in many cases will only make the problems worse. The report’s recommendations fall into four areas: supporting all students to achieve national minimum standards, addressing inequality, supporting student wellbeing and enabling quality teaching.
For all students to achieve national minimum standards and for inequality in education to be addressed, schools must be resourced to do so. The commission claims that “despite the large increase in public funding since 2018, student outcomes have stagnated”. This is obfuscation. Many public schools are still not fully funded. At the same time, billions of tax dollars have poured into private schools, making Australia’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/education/if-we-tried-to-plan-a-less-fair-school-system-we-couldn-t-have-done-a-better-job-20220915-p5bih1.html?fbclid=IwAR1Ib0zV5vr85631AQfs8oS_a8lpacQV3Bkn1BHBg9fAwme5pSV0KE7E6GY">one of the most segregated and unequal school systems in the OECD</a>. In the past decade, government funding for private schools has increased at <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/feb/16/private-school-funding-has-increased-at-five-times-rate-of-public-schools-analysis-shows">five times</a> the rate of public schools. 
The commission’s report proposes some superficial fixes to address the inequality in outcomes for students from disadvantaged backgrounds and for those with English as an additional language, such as more individualised instruction and tutoring. Teachers already do their best to support this; proposing it as the only solution would only add to the significant workload teachers already have, which the report acknowledges. What is required is a massive funding boost to increase the number of teachers to better provide individualised support. 
The report highlights some alarming statistics regarding student wellbeing. One in five high-school-aged students have high levels of psychological distress, and one in seven students aged between 4 and 17 experienced an episode of mental illness within the last twelve months. Yet the report falls extremely short in proposed solutions. Like some corporate wellness program, the commission never acknowledges that the structure of Australia's education system, with its frequent high-stakes assessment and the lack of genuine safety measures to reduce COVID-19 transmission is itself contributing to poor student safety and wellbeing. 
A study of 20,000 NSW students found that year 12 results could be predicted in year 11 with 93 percent accuracy—evidence that that extremely stressful final year assessment could be done away with. The top performing school systems in the world, Estonia and Finland, have abolished most of their summative assessment pieces for students throughout their school lives. But it appears that Australian state governments are ignoring the latest research, as well as the success of international systems. Instead, they are implementing more system-wide assessments, from the Victorian government introducing phonics testing in year 1, to Queensland’s new high-stakes, final year 12 exams. Education ministers throughout the country are doubling down on the hated NAPLAN tests, despite their uselessness to teachers and to instruction.
The report highlights the challenges posed by the pandemic, but again, falls short on solutions. There are no calls for system-wide ventilation systems, CO2 monitoring and air filtration—strategies that have proven to significantly reduce the transmission of airborne diseases including COVID-19. 
The report recognises the massive workload burden that successive Labor and Liberal state governments have forced onto the shoulders of teachers. According to the commission, Australian teachers work more than the OECD average. Some of the proposals to address this are desperately needed—such as taking low-level administrative tasks like data entry and playground duty from teachers and teacher aides. But investments in teacher aides have already been increasing, yet our workloads haven’t decreased. That’s partly because schools often hiring teacher aides as personal assistants to principals and deputies rather than to provide support in classrooms or to relive teachers of playground duty. 
The greater workload for teachers has also coincided with greater and more complex workloads for teacher aides as well. To genuinely address this, governments must dramatically increase funding for more teachers and teacher aides. Yet the Productivity Commission explicitly rules out changes that would actually help, by seeking feedback on how to implement changes “cost-effectively”.
Other recommendations to enable “quality teaching” will actually add to teachers’ workloads. More meetings, more professional development and more promotional positions. Teachers need to be trusted to do the job we are qualified to do and given the time to plan and collaborate with colleagues.
“System-wide benefits of trusting teachers and children by giving them more ownership and leadership regarding teaching and learning in schools would unleash these human capacities and lead to much-needed renewal in both excellence and equity in Australian education”, Finnish education expert and Australian academic Pasi Sahlberg told the Educator magazine in September.
Yet the commission recommends the opposite—for teachers to be given additional tasks to “improve” their teaching. 
A root cause of the current teacher shortage is the low pay relative to other, similarly qualified professions. Yet successive enterprise agreements across the country, agreed to by education unions, are increasing the gap. The Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union pushed its members to agree to an offer from the Labor state government, which caps pay rises at 1.5 percent per year. Even the much-lauded Queensland government’s pay offer of 11 percent across three years (a pay cut in real terms) will result in our pay falling behind those of other professions. NSW teachers are in their second year of a dispute with the Perrottet Liberal government, pushing to raise a public service salary cap that is well below inflation.
Teaching conditions are learning conditions. The teacher shortage is resulting in many teachers providing instruction in areas that they are not trained in, increasing their workload and reducing students’ opportunities, as the report acknowledges.
As Sahlberg told the Educator, the commission’s report, as well as state and federal governments, doesn’t properly deal with “the root causes of teacher shortages”, which are “unproductive working conditions and non-competitive pay”. 
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, or a maths teacher, to figure that out. But the obvious solution is unpalatable to politicians who, decade after decade, have trashed our education system and teachers’ conditions.
Tim Arnot is a Queensland teacher.

Tim Arnot

The PC has gone mad in public education

One of the few pleasing by-products of the COVID-19 pandemic was the cancellation of the annual NAPLAN examinations across Australia. Lockdown measures and school closures ensured the test would not go ahead. But why did it require a public health crisis for politicians to consider abandoning the sacred cow that is NAPLAN testing?
The most prominent injustice of the NAPLAN examination is the publication of its data on the My School website. The Murdoch press, quick to profit from the standardised test results of students as young as seven, formulates NAPLAN “league tables” each year in seemingly record time. These rankings, created using only the most superficial My School data, supposedly tell parents which schools are good and which are bad. But they highlight only what is widely known: schools in high socioeconomic areas outperform, for the most part, those in low socioeconomic areas. 
To say that the dull thud of the Courier Mail landing on the staff room table in the days following the release of NAPLAN results each year causes anxiety among our colleagues would be a gross understatement. This supposedly “low-stakes” examination has evolved into anything but for teachers, parents and students alike. A 2014 University of Melbourne study found that NAPLAN was causing high levels of anxiety among some students. Pressure from school administrators, parents and high schools requesting copies of NAPLAN results prior to letters of offer all contribute to stress among children sitting the test. 
Alongside this burden to perform in national tests, which is carried by students from the age of seven, comes the associated pollution of their weekly timetable with NAPLAN-related preparation activities. The NAPLAN exams are entirely unfamiliar modes of external examination, so students engage in pedantic tasks ranging from learning how to shade a multiple-choice box to the monotonous, formulaic retelling of a story. The already overcrowded Australian curriculum is hijacked by “teaching to the test” lessons, and in some cases entire units of persuasive and narrative writing are rearranged across the school year to coincide with NAPLAN. 
If students are anxious about the usurping of their day-to-day timetable by the pressure of an impending NAPLAN exam, what can be said for the teachers instructing them? Our workload is already so high that attrition rates among those in their first five years of the profession are 30-50 percent. One of the greatest joys of being an educator is taking the prescribed curriculum and moulding and transforming it to fit the diverse range of needs in any given group of students. Where is the consideration for diversity in NAPLAN? Of course, there is no room for it. 
The data itself does not tell us anything we don’t already know about our students, but it is routinely altered by school administrators to improve average scores. Principals have the power to withdraw students with additional needs from participating in the exam. Schools run additional programs that take some students out of their regular classrooms and put them into separate NAPLAN-focused training. They miss out on hours of classroom content.
While state and federal governments plan to maintain and extend NAPLAN, state school teachers in Queensland will be taking industrial action to put a halt to the whole testing regime. Queensland Teachers Union members have voted overwhelmingly to boycott administering the NAPLAN test and all associated planning in 2021. 
The QTU, while dominant in state schools, has not taken statewide industrial action for more than a decade, protected or otherwise. This will be a crucial step in building member confidence. And fighting this hated, competitive test puts us on favourable ground with parents and students, as well as encouraging other teacher unions to do the same. 
While popular with the community, our action will involve a stoush, as both the Labor and Liberal parties are heavily invested in the nationwide standardised testing. In response to the announcement from the QTU, state Labor Education Minister Grace Grace said that our proposed action is “to the detriment of Queensland students”. But NAPLAN is itself detrimental to students, while direct action raises the possibility of making meaningful improvements to student wellbeing and staff workloads. 
Our union leaders must show resolve and not buckle to threats of legal injunctions against what will be unprotected action. Countless union battles, as recently as 2012, when Victorian nurses defended patient ratios, demonstrate that workers can win by defying the rulings of courts and governments, as long as they maintain their action and resolve.
Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan said, “The Queensland Teachers Union don’t run the schools in Queensland”. But we are the ones who make the schools run every day, so why shouldn’t we run the schools?

Emma Birtwhistle

Time to bury NAPLAN for good

Queensland public servants have had their wages frozen for 18 months as part of the government’s efforts to force them to pay for the looming economic crisis.
The Labor government claims they are short of money and the freeze is necessary to reduce unemployment. “We are committing to job security, while recognising a freeze is needed to help Queenslanders get back to work,” premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told the media in June. This is a lie.
The savings made by the public sector pay freeze is set to amount to $500 million. However, the Queensland government pays over $1 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel companies every year and continues to do so during the pandemic. In recent weeks, the Queensland parliament also passed a $50 million hand out to the gambling industry. When it comes to funding destructive, multi-million-dollar corporations, the government has money to burn.
Nor has the pain been felt equally by all government employees. There has been no wage freeze imposed on Queensland’s politicians, for example, including on the more than $400,000 salary of the premier.
Palaszczuk has also given the police two weeks extra leave and a bonus of $1,250, while nothing comparable has been offered to the hundreds of thousands of other public sector workers subject to the pay freeze. This is during a time when, thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, bloated police budgets are under extra scrutiny. Last year it was revealed that police in Queensland were holding children in the Brisbane watchhouse – a maximum-security adult facility. And despite the outcry, young people continue to be locked up there, at a rate of more than 100 per month. By contrast front-line healthcare workers, hospital orderlies and cleaners, whose work is central to protecting the public and is done at considerable personal risk, have been offered no extra leave or bonus pay.
Worse still, the Labor government has set a precedent with the pay freeze of overriding enterprise agreements when it suits them. Should the Liberals take power in October, they’ll have the road paved for them to further trash wages and conditions.
In response, it has been heartening to see some union action led by Australian Workers Union members in hospitals across the state. These workers haven’t had a pay rise since 2018. Shamefully though, this is the exception rather than the rule.
The United Workers Union, which covers paramedics, school cleaners and teacher-aides, has come out supporting the pay freeze. The Queensland Teachers’ Union leadership nominally opposes the freeze, but has called no industrial action. The commitment of union leaders to defending a Labor government over their own members’ wages and conditions, and refusal to call industrial action, is no strategy to defend our rights.
We need unions prepared to fight government attacks, whether Labor or Liberal. The coming crisis will see governments and bosses prepared to go to great lengths to force workers to pay. The current pay freeze is just the start.

Queensland cops get hand-outs, public servants get sold out

Most of the world is closing schools to limit the spread of COVID-19. Scott Morrison has banned indoor gatherings of more than 100, and state governments and medical experts are calling for extreme social distancing to limit the spread of the disease. Yet Australia’s schools remain open, bringing together hundreds, if not thousands, of students as well as tens and hundreds of teachers for six hours a day.
Classrooms and public transport are packed with kids, where it is impossible for them all to be the recommended 1.5 metres from each other.
Students, we are told, are asymptomatic, and severe cases are rare in their demographic. But this ignores the potential spread throughout the community as children can carry the virus into their families. Schools remaining open also poses a significant threat to the health and wellbeing of teachers, many of whom are at-risk. Like some vaudeville villain, Morrison has effectively told teachers, “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.” His negligence would be laughable if it wasn’t so criminal.
The real reason schools aren’t being closed, of course, is the threat it poses to the economy. The federal Department of Health’s “Management Plan for Pandemic Influenza” advice against closures is purely focused on ensuring parents stay at work, saying, “The level of disruption is likely to outweigh the benefits”. Secondary costs are considered “extreme” due to the “workplace absenteeism of parents and carers who need to provide care and supervision to school children”. The same document admits that proactive school closures would reduce transmission by up to 50 percent and slow the spread by up to two weeks. When the number of cases can increase from 155 to more than 7,000 within two weeks, as it did in Italy, doing everything we can now will prevent people dying.
Morrison and the states are so far doing the opposite: nothing. This makes it clear – Morrison, state premiers and chief ministers are prepared to jeopardise our health and our lives for the sake of the economy.
While public schools remain open, many private schools have the privilege to close their doors and protect the offspring of the wealthy from the virus. The question of unequal access to online learning resources between wealthy families and lower income families is real, given those in public schools are less likely to have a computer or the internet at home. And the inequality is institutional. State schools have made no real preparations to deliver online learning, while private schools flush with cash have more IT resources.
If the government cares about reducing the gap in access to quality education between working class and migrant students and those in the private sector, why has Morrison massively increased funding for private and Catholic schools, while cutting funding marked for public schools? The millions of tax dollars currently poured into private schools every year should be redirected to ensure every student has access to educational resources from home with the provision of a computer and internet.One attempt to justify schools remaining open is the pressure closures will put on our health system as hospital workers take time out to look after their kids. This is a cynical argument. Childcare and specialised educational facilities can and should be provided for the children of workers in essential industries (as in South Korea), at no cost. But more importantly, the argument comes from the mouths of the people and political parties that have eroded our healthcare system for decades, reducing it to one that barely has enough beds available even when it is “business as usual”.
While the PM and state leaders, both Labor and Liberal, declare that schools are to remain open, there is a growing chorus across the country to shut them. More than 2,500 doctors (led by Perth GP Hermant Garg) have signed an open letter urging drastic and immediate action to prevent the spread of the virus, including an immediate 3-4 week closure of schools. Tens of thousands have signed multiple petitions calling for schools to shut down. Across the country teachers have been rightly concerned at the threat to public safety, passing motions in union meetings calling for the closure of schools. Internationally, unions are calling for the closure of education systems to stop the pandemic. It’s time our unions followed suit.

Keeping schools open sacrifices teachers to the economy

Rank and file members of the Queensland Teachers’ Union have been engaged in a month-long campaign against an inadequate government pay offer. 
It was always going to be an uphill slog to defeat the deal, especially given the union executive’s backing for the state Labor government’s offer. Yet when the final vote was announced, a full 19 percent of members had voted to reject the offer. Thousands of unionists defied the recommendation from the union executive, something unheard of in the union’s recent memory. 
By comparison, during the last round of bargaining in 2016, the union-endorsed deal passed with 95 percent in favour. Starting from nothing, the grassroots campaign to reject the 2019 offer was organised primarily through Facebook. The campaign has elicited the greatest level of engagement in the bargaining process in the union’s history, with 30,000, or 74 percent of eligible members, casting a vote.
The next step for these teachers, many of whom have been newly energised by the campaign, is to ensure workload is adequately reduced in the coming period. The government’s offer includes a commitment to form a Workload Advisory Council. Workload has been a key issue for union members for the last decade of pay campaigns, so we’ll now be fighting to make sure this new body doesn’t become another useless talk shop.

Significant opposition to teacher pay deal in Queensland

In late June, Queensland teachers received their first offer from the government as part of negotiations for a new agreement. A week earlier, a record-breaking 94 percent of Queensland Teachers’ Union members had voted in favour of industrial action if their key demands – a reduction in workloads, a pay rise to achieve parity with interstate pay rates, provisions to address the gender pay gap and pay rises for heads of department and school administration staff – were not met. The offer doesn’t come close to addressing these four demands satisfactorily and has provoked a significant backlash among rank-and-file teachers.
A <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/355226568751420/">Facebook group hostile to the offer</a> attracted more than 2,000 members in less than two weeks. It shows teachers, old and young, at breaking point. For them, the government’s offer is an insult to the hard work teachers put in to educate the next generation. Posts describe in harrowing detail the toll high workloads in particular are taking. 
“The other weekend I couldn’t stop crying”, one Brisbane high school teacher describes. “I had been at my desk marking from 4pm Friday and had to keep going until 1am Monday with a few short breaks for food, and I still hadn’t finished what I needed to ... It wasn’t like this when I started teaching a decade ago. I used to have hobbies and time to sleep ... As things got worse over the years I kept thinking surely there has to be a limit to our workload? Surely something has to give?”
One of the few concrete improvements proposed by the department is a small increase in non-contact time for primary school teachers, to be implemented only at the very end of the agreement period. Currently, primary school teachers get only two paid hours a week for marking and lesson preparation, an amount that hasn’t increased in over two decades. 
One primary school teacher wrote, “I’m concerned about the offer of only 30 extra minutes non-contact time for primary teachers, and even that doesn’t start until 2022!! Why??!! ... start the 30 minutes extra now, and reduce the assessments required so we can plan great lessons and actually teach again”.
The pay offer from the government remains at 2.5 percent for classroom teachers, with a one-off $1,250 payment that will not count towards superannuation or future pay increases. This is a long way from the 4.5 percent needed to achieve parity with teachers in other states. 
Teachers are quick to point out that while the education minister claims she “rewards the work that teachers do every day”, quite often it’s teachers who are expected to pay for classroom resources. “Who pays for the resources to craft with, cook with, complete science experiments with?” asks one on the page. “We do! My hard-earned wage pays for these things. … Our kind hearted, dedicated role as teachers is the very reason we often say ‘yes’ to benefiting ‘our kids’ but to the detriment of our own financial status and health. And yet we are still fighting for fair remuneration for our job ... which as we know is not ‘just teaching’.”
While thousands are angry that the offer fails to address the four key demands teachers voted to prioritise, the leadership of the union has entered into an in-principle agreement with the government and is recommending members vote to accept the offer. 
This has sparked outrage from members. “Such a disappointment!” wrote one teacher. “I’m a big advocate for union membership, but this time you’ve missed the mark.” Another described it as a “joke”, arguing, “Which of the four key points have been addressed? Certainly not workload or wage increase. 2.5 percent a long way off.”
A similar offer was turned down by Queensland teachers during the last round of enterprise bargaining in 2016. This prompted the government to improve the offer, even without the threat of industrial action. This time around, and in the context of a state-wide teacher shortage, teachers are in a position of even greater strength. It would be a wasted opportunity not to push for more. 
As one teacher put it, “It’s a fact that 50 percent of teachers are leaving the profession in the first five years. My question is how will this [offer] change this very scary statistic? …A one-off payment (heavily taxed), a 2.5 percent pay rise each year (far less than we asked for), and some extra non-contact time in two or three years. My concern in accepting this ... is that the statistic will remain the same or worsen before the next [negotiations]”.
Dissenting teachers are vowing to campaign strongly for a “no” vote when the offer is put to teachers in the next few weeks.

Queensland teachers angry over government pay offer

Two reports released this month indicate widespread neglect and denial of basic human rights of refugees and people seeking asylum. 
The UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR, conducted a monitoring mission in Australia’s detention centres on Manus Island in June. The mission revealed a lack of support services for the 750 men who remain there.
UNHCR inspectors reported a “high level of tension and further deterioration in the mental health” of those detained, with deep-seated fear of abandonment by the Australian government a significant contributing factor. 
The ongoing lack of support will likely result in serious health problems that are “clearly foreseeable and preventable”. There are no processes in place to assess those at low, medium or high risk. Those with the most significant needs have not been monitored regularly since October.
The closure of the Regional Processing Centre last year and the forced removal of detainees to facilities with even fewer services coincided with the health care provider, IHMS, scaling down its services. This has placed significant strain on the Lorengau hospital and resulted in the removal of trauma and torture counselling services. 
Accommodation is also woefully inadequate, below the minimum required by the International Standard of the Red Cross. Some rooms are polluted by leaking waste-water pipes. The ceiling of one is black with mould. The rooms are not fitted with smoke alarms, and refugees can’t access fire extinguishers. 
A second report, “States of Refuge”, released by Liberty Victoria, analyses health, housing and education services available to refugees and asylum seekers on various bridging and temporary visas. 
Tasmania is rated the worst for the provision of social housing for refugees and people seeking asylum. The only eligible people are Australian citizens or permanent residents. Even if a refugee gains permanent residency, they are eligible only if they have an independent income and a Commonwealth health care card.
The report says that the inadequate provision of essential services – and the strict regulations around work and study for those on or applying for temporary visas – forces people to rely on charity and not-for-profit organisations to survive. 
One case study in the report describes an asylum seeker with no education or employment rights expressing frustration. “I am not angry I do not have visa, but I am angry I cannot study, I don’t have income, I have [no] Medicare, [and] I can’t work”, he said.

Gross neglect at the heart of refugee service provision

Thousands of asylum seekers on bridging visas are being forced off the meagre assistance provided by the government and told to “support themselves”.
The Status Resolution Support Service (SRSS), which provides a small allowance and casework, residence and counselling support to 12,500 asylum seekers, is being slashed by Peter Dutton’s Home Affairs Department. 
Individuals on the SRSS receive 89 percent of the Newstart allowance, or $247 per week, which is itself criminally low and 40 percent below the poverty line. Now Dutton is grinding refugees further into penury.
The department is expected to “save” $90 million a year – 2 percent of the cost of running the offshore detention regime. 
Those on the SRSS deemed to be “work ready” are to be stripped of their payments even if they are studying for work. It is expected that 7,000 people seeking asylum will be denied all support by June. 
These are people who have fled war, torture and trauma, and survived dangerous sea voyages and months and years in Australian detention centres, suffering significant mental and physical health issues. The move will make finding work extremely difficult. 
Ninety-five organisations, including the Refugee Council of Australia (RCA), are calling on the government to urgently reverse this decision.
“We are already hearing of people self-harming; we’re hearing of people losing housing, of huge levels of depression and anxiety”, Joyce Chia from the RCA told the Guardian. “This is a crisis in the making and of the government’s own making. They are going to punish these people – and some will be driven over the edge.”
In a cruel Kafkaesque turn, asylum seekers studying English will be denied support just as Peter Dutton is renewing plans to make the English component of the citizenship test more difficult. 
Some have labelled this plan “short sighted”. But it is clear the Liberal government has no commitment to settling asylum seekers permanently, and instead plans to drive people to return to danger or force them to take low paid work with terrible conditions, exposing them to super-exploitation at the hands of employers. 
As Sarah Dale, principal solicitor with the Refugee Advice and Casework Service, reported to the Guardian, “It’s just further perpetuating this second class of refugees in this country”.

Thousands of asylum seekers to be stripped of income

The ALP narrowly retained office in the recent Queensland election after saying it would veto Adani’s application for a Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) loan of $1 billion to construct a rail line from its port in Bowen to the Galilee Basin.
Many believed that the giant Adani coal mine proposal was finished and that the ALP is opposed to it or any other mine in the Galilee Basin.
It’s not true.
The Adani Carmichael mine project has secured a 60-year free endless groundwater agreement from the state government. If operational, the mine would draw more than 12,000 megalitres of groundwater from the Great Artesian Basin every year – 40 percent of the artesian water used for irrigation in Queensland. And a deal approved by the state cabinet in May will deliver infrastructure funding and a royalty holiday for Adani, worth close to $500 million.
<a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/program/blackout-coal-and-big-business-in-australia/"><img alt="Featured at Marxism 2018" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/RF%20articles_1_3.jpg" /></a>
Despite the company’s apparent financial squeeze, the environmental and corporate vandal is yet to sell any of its assets, such as the Adani Abbot Point Coal Terminal port just north of Bowen, to keep afloat the prospective mine.
While premier Annastacia Palaszczuk vetoed Adani’s application for a NAIF loan, her cabinet is still considering an application from Aurizon, a commercial rail company, for a similar project to open up the Galilee Basin and enable Adani and other companies with leases in the region, such as Gina Rinehart’s GVK Hancock and Clive Palmer’s Waratah Coal, to operate with even fewer risks and overheads.
This is why Frontline Action on Coal started 2018 with actions targeting not only Adani, but also Aurizon and the Queensland Labor government. The campaign has continued in the face of intense media and government hysteria.
On 7 January, ALP councillor for the Whitsundays Mike Brunker told the media that protesters “are going to get a clipping”. The Murdoch media also published the address of the camp, and the address of one of the protest leaders, in what appeared an incitement for people to take matters into their own hands against peaceful protesters.
The responses are a testament to the effectiveness and seriousness of FLAC’s actions against Adani and Aurizon. As one camp attendee, Phillip from Melbourne tells Red Flag, “It sounds like that’s bad, but it shows that they’re obviously scared of what we’re doing [and] perceive us as effective”.
The camp
The camp is operated and maintained collectively, and everyone is encouraged to participate in various aspects of its running. Daily agendas are organised through general meetings, and an extensive array of groups allocated tasks organising the camp, ranging from preparations for actions to maintenance of the camp’s amenities.
The camp is well developed, with an open kitchen, working and media spaces, locations suitable for organising anti-coal actions, gardens and various other amenities required for a long campaign.
“You don’t need to be in some type of exclusive activist club”, says Lilli, a student from Sydney. “There is a lot of community building to be done at the camp itself. If you want to come and support the movement, but you’re not in a position to participate in actions for whatever reason, you can just come and help us build infrastructure to make sure that the camp still runs.”
“It’s my first time up here”, Phillip says. “I’ve done some stuff with Stop Adani and GetUp in Melbourne; we’ve done some protests outside the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac when they were talking about the possibility of funding Adani.”
The camp’s participants have a wide range of experience, from first-time participants to activists with a long history of taking action against fossil fuels. Some activists have participated in other direct action campaigns, including anti-coal campaigns in Newcastle, Bentley and the Laird State Forest of New South Wales, allowing them to draw from their extensive experience to aid in the organisation of the camp.
Tess Newport, a 22-year-old student from Melbourne, has participated in some of the direct actions. “I grew up in a small rural community in Victoria”, she says. “I’ve seen first hand the way in which the mining industry rips off workers, communities and the environment. We don’t want jobs in a dying industry – we need jobs for the future.”
Action
Two activists locked themselves onto a barrel full of concrete placed on the Aurizon railway line. This blocked Aurizon coal trains for close to six hours. “You can write letters forever, but at the end of the day, corporate interests are going to win against writing letters to your MP”, Lilli Barto, one protester involved, says. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but I think that front line action has a really important role to play in providing that urgency and that kind of acute pressure that campaigns like this really need.”
The protest was timed to coincide with a meeting of the state cabinet as it deliberated on providing a NAIF loan to Aurizon. The Queensland government says that the mine will create jobs, despite Adani’s representative in the Queensland Land Court stating under oath that there will be only 1,464 jobs created through the life of the project.
Lilli’s message to the ALP? “Stop pretending that fossil fuel projects are the only way to create regional jobs. I think the regions deserve to be treated better than that. They don’t deserve to get the shitty jobs just because they’re desperate. They deserve to have jobs that are sustainable, that are going to stick around, and that are investing in industries that are going to grow over time.”
FLAC activists escalated the actions, disrupting both Aurizon and Adani collectively for 15 hours, and held up a coal tanker for half a day.
Five FLAC campaigners shut down the Adani Abbot Point Coal Terminal by pulling the safety cord and locking themselves onto the conveyor belt transporting coal to a freighter ship. Despite howls from Adani’s CEO of operations that the protesters were endangering workers’ lives and engaging in violent behaviour, their actions were peaceful.
The port is heavily automated, and only six or seven workers maintain and operate the machinery. There were no workers in that section of the port.
One activist who locked on is Nic Avery from Sydney. “Because the port is owned by Adani, and because it is such a strategic piece of infrastructure for extraction in the Bowen and Galilee Basin, it is particularly significant that we show that people are prepared to take direct action there”, he says.
“These actions cause very large disruption to Adani’s operations, and are extremely effective in derailing their attempt to profit from environmental destruction. I can only imagine that this sort of thing will continue until mining is ruled out in the Galilee Basin.”
The activists lock on by placing their forearms into large metal cylinders and chaining their hands together inside. It takes police hours to remove each protester.
“To know that we had shut down a process of extraction which stretches hundreds of kilometres into the coal mines in the Bowen Basin was a phenomenal feeling. It’s difficult to express it in words. I won’t lie, though: being locked on was also very difficult, physically uncomfortable and mentally challenging.
“We oppose the government and the coal industry’s joint push to extinguish Indigenous land rights. Adani’s dirty coal project has no consent. The traditional owners have said no, climate scientists have said no, and we are here on the front lines to say no.”
Just as the last protester was taken away by police from Abbot Point at 5:30am, Aurizon received a phone call that another action was in place and they had best shut down the trains again. Natalie Berry, a 20-year-old student from Sydney, was in a cot suspended from a tree, the only rope supporting her tied to the tracks 20 metres below. It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that she was taken down; as the only crew qualified to bring her down safely had to be flown up from Brisbane.
Where to next?
The FLAC camp is determined to continue the fight against any new coal. Anyone interested in attending will find a camp full of people, young and the young-at-heart, new activists and old hands, all dedicated to stopping Adani and doing what they can to prevent further climate change.
One of the significant challenges for the activists directly involved in the protests is fines, which can total several thousand dollars. Those who support the actions of FLAC but cannot attend the camp can find fundraiser pages at Chuffed.org.
As in any significant campaign, protests in the capital cities are also important. The Franklin Dam dispute in 1983 had dozens of people engaging in direct action at the site while thousands of people rallied in Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart.
If we are to put a halt to Adani and any new coal projects, it will take a serious effort by thousands of people across the country prepared to get organised, take action and mobilise. If the passion and determination found at the FLAC camp are anything to go by, we’re well on the way.

Jehiel Lomaz

On the Front Line against Adani

The Australian government’s barbaric refugee policies have claimed another life. Hamed Shamshiripour, a 31 year old who fled Iran, was found dead on 8 August near the East Lorengau Transit Centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.
His mental health had deteriorated significantly in the past 12 months, but he had been neglected by the run-down health system provided to detainees in the Australian-run detention centre. He had also been terrorised by the local police. In one instance, Hamed was arrested, beaten and jailed for a month.
The circumstances surrounding Hamed’s death are unclear; while the government has announced it as a suicide, Hamed’s family is demanding an inquest. Detainee and journalist Behrouz Boochani said, “This is a very sad moment for all of us, and refugees believe that Hamed’s death was suspicious and needs an independent investigation”.
Hamed was the fifth refugee to have died on Manus since the detention centre was reopened by the Rudd Labor government in 2013.
Fellow detainees held a vigil for Hamed, remembering their friend. One of the attendees, Walid, addressed a Brisbane refugee rally via telephone on 11 August. “No one has enough patience, strength and energy to fight with the cruel policies inflicted upon us”, he said. “We lost another kind and caring friend. His parents lost their son to unjust policies, and Australia got more blood on their hands.
“Hamed’s death is not the only one to remember. It is with constant grief and anger at injustice that we also remember Reza Barati, Hamid Kehazaei, Kamil Hussain and Faysal Ishak Ahmed. We won’t forget them.”
Hamed’s death occurred in the context of the Immigration Department attempting to shut down compounds of the Manus Island centre to force detainees to the East Lorengau Transit Centre, which does not have a medical centre and is less secure.
This process began on 1 August, as power and water were cut off from the Foxtrot compound, which houses 100 people. Boochani, speaking to Ben Doherty of the Guardian, said, “I think in any culture in the world it’s so immoral to cut the power and water on innocent people who have committed no crime. We want to let every person in Australia know that your government is doing this immoral act to us”.
The Australian government has helped create an atmosphere that has encouraged violence against refugees. At Easter, Peter Dutton insinuated that shots fired by PNG sailors into the Manus Island compound were justified by suggesting that the refugees were paedophiles.
Detainees are fearful of violence from the locals, as dozens of assaults have occurred in the last few months with no repercussions. Boochani reported in a series of tweets on 8 August:
“A refugee has been beaten and is in critical condition in Pom hospital. They transferred him from Manus yesterday … [He] must be taken to Australia now. He has been vomiting blood for two days. Why wasn’t he sent urgently? The refugee in critical condition has a fractured skull. He probably has brain damage. He must be sent to Australia now.”
During this ordeal, the transcript of the conversation between Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump regarding the US refugee deal was leaked. In one line, Turnbull revealed the full extent of the cynical and calculated deceit that the deal represented. “The agreement … does not require you to take 2,000 people. It does not require you to take any”. Detainee Imran Mohammad, speaking to the Human Rights Law Centre, spoke of his despair after four years on Manus:
“I just cried as I was reading the transcripts of the most two powerful leaders in this world. Their words made me feel like I am just a product to them and I can be traded for anything. I am just a human being and there is no need to play with my life.”
Heroically, refugees have been resisting the shutting down of essential services in the detention centre, asserting their right to adequate facilities, as well as rejecting the notion that they must accept refugee status in PNG rather than Australia. Writing for Fairfax, Boochani reported on 8 August:
“The situation in Manus prison camp is critical right now. As I write, immigration officers and PNG police are attempting to enter the detention centre for the third time this morning … [The refugees] have started to peacefully protest every day, calling on immigration to restore power to the largest compound in Manus prison camp. Power, water, sanitation and cleaning services have all been cut, a terrible experience in crowded conditions and tropical heat.”
Detainees creatively reconnected Foxtrot compound by rewiring it from a neighbouring compound. Walid told Red Flag, “They cut the power to Foxtrot compound, but the guys got connection from Mike compound. Then Immigration came back with police to cut it again but the guys lay down in front of them and told them, ‘We will not let you to cut it down. You should provide us with a safe place, we can’t go to town, we can’t go to the transit centre’.
“Then Immigration told us, ‘You are violating PNG law’, and we told them we are not, that we are peaceful.”
In his speech in Brisbane, Walid appealed for action:
“Please talk to your friends in your office, universities and schools about our lives. Tell your friends and family. Tell everyone you meet about our situation … Our friends have been beaten, robbed and only on Monday we found one dead. Our lives are in the Australian government’s hands. Please stand for us. Yell for us.”

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