The number of the world’s forcibly displaced people reached a record 68.5 million at the end of 2017, according to a recent UNHCR report. That’s more than the total population of the United Kingdom. 
The rise is greater than global population growth, meaning that the persecution, war and violence that most often causes people to flee are getting worse. Of the 68.5 million, 40 million are internally displaced, 3.1 million are seeking asylum, and 25.4 million are recognised by UNHCR as refugees. Over half are children.
A quarter were newly displaced in 2017 – an average of two people every second – making it the highest annual increase since the UN started keeping records in the mid-1900s. 2017 is also the sixth consecutive year that the total number of displaced people has exceeded the number displaced during World War Two. 
More than half of 2017’s UN-mandated refugees – not including 5.4 million Palestinian refugees – are from three war-ravaged countries: Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. 
Rohingya are the fastest growing refugee population, victims of what the United Nations refers to as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by the Myanmar government. Nearly 700,000 have fled since August last year, almost 70 percent of the total Rohingya population.
A decline in resettlement quotas has meant that only 102,755 refugees worldwide were admitted for resettlement in 2017, a decrease of 54 percent from the previous year. Of that, most (85 percent) were hosted in developing countries. Australia ranked 20th as a host country, offering to settle just 15,115 refugees in 2017 (fewer than 0.076 percent of the total number of people needing protection). When factoring in GDP, Australia ranked 45th.
The global situation is predicted to get worse as a result of Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to border control and the strengthening of right populism in Europe.
The last days of June were the year’s deadliest for refugees attempting to cross the Mediterranean. An estimated 220 people drowned off the coast of Libya, pushing the annual death toll to 1,000. 
One boat sank on the same day as the EU summit in Brussels moved to condemn the provision of humanitarian assistance to refugees at sea as part of a migration deal. “Saving lives at sea is not a crime”, said Médecins Sans Frontières’ head of emergencies, Karline Kleijer. “EU member states are … deliberately condemning vulnerable people to be trapped in Libya or die at sea.”
Meanwhile, both major parties in Australia continue to promote “stopping the boats” as a priority, a policy that has served as a model for similar harsh border policies overseas. A spokesperson for immigration minister Peter Dutton recently told News Corp, “A number of European nations and the European Union have sought advice from the Australian Government on Operation Sovereign Borders”.
Early this year Trump said of his and Turnbull’s approach to national security and border protection, “We are very much of the same mind”.

Viktoria Ivanova

Global displacement at record highs 

Out of 12,706 taxpayers with an income of more than $1 million, 62 paid zero income tax in the 2015-16 financial year, an increase of 30 percent from the previous year.
The data, provided by the Australian Taxation Office, reveal that the majority claimed to have taxable incomes under $6,001. Three claimed between $6,001 and $18,200.
All were below the tax-free threshold, and all avoided the Medicare levy.
Twenty-two reduced their taxable income to zero by claiming an average of $174,201 for the cost of managing their tax affairs. This includes the cost of court appeals, lodging the tax return and getting financial advice.
Fourteen others claimed gifts and donations of $54.9 million, collectively. 
One received $2,500 in a government pension or allowance. Two claimed the cost of purchasing their work uniforms, at $470.
A recent Research Now poll found that two-thirds of Australians want “more public spending on public services and infrastructure, funded by more tax revenue, in particular from wealthy people and profitable companies, and less inequality in Australian society”.
Federal treasurer Scott Morrison, with an annual income of more than $380,000, told ABC reporters that the suggestion was “stupid” and a “numpty of an idea”.

The millionaires paying no tax 

The Turnbull government has handed an extra $7.1 million to 102 of the richest private schools in the country.
This is the first instalment of a $40 million National Adjustment Assistance Fund created to help “vulnerable and disadvantaged” schools transition to Gonski 2.0 – the cut-price Liberal version of the education funding model implemented by the previous Labor government.
For education minister Simon Birmingham, the “needs-based” bonus will help overfunded schools, mostly in NSW and Victoria, which find it “unreasonably hard to adjust to the reduction of funding”. 
Schools set to benefit include Loreto Kirribilli, which is massively overfunded at 196 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) – the Gonski measure of public funding needed to ensure adequate education is provided. This is on top of the school’s own fundraising initiatives and tuition fees of up to $30,000 per year.
Despite public schools remaining well below the SRS, Birmingham promises an increase in investment into non-government schools of 4.2 percent every year. 
Data from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority show that, in Victoria, capital expenditure by private schools per student is seven times that of public schools. More than $500 million was spent on capital works in 2016. 
Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe argues that public funding needs an injection of $1.9 billion or it will never catch up. She told the Age:
“While public schools wait for new classrooms to cope with growing enrolments, elite private schools are gold-plating pools and gyms and engaging in the educational equivalent of an arms race.”
Victorian Presbyterian Ladies’ College recently announced a $31 million high-capacity performing arts centre equipped with an orchestra lift. Caulfield Grammar plans to spend $47.3 million on an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an adjustable floor to cater for any water sport, including water polo. 
Documents released late last year by the federal Education Department showed that Gonski 2.0 will massively increase the number of private schools above the SRS – from 143 to 531 by the time it is rolled out – while public schools will remain underfunded.

More government handouts for Australia’s richest private schools 

“How tough are youse?”, asks disability pensioner John. His personal CCTV cameras show him hunched over on his front lawn, beaten and pepper-sprayed. The pain comes through in his voice. A cop shoots water at his face with a high-pressure garden hose while five others watch, some laughing, one capturing the moment on their phone for kicks. 
“That’s all youse are good for”, John says.
This evidence of brutality by Victoria Police is one part of a series released by the Age this month.
Another video shows police repeatedly beating a 23-year-old Sudanese man following an attempted robbery of a pharmacy in Preston. When they arrived on the scene, the man had been detained by a customer. Their assault left him with most of his teeth snapped and permanent damage to his back.
Footage from the Bendigo police station shows a detained man being beaten in a corridor and hurled head-first toward a steel door. 
Tamara Hopkins, a lawyer and the founder of the Police Accountability Project, said outside the Victorian Parliament on 4 April, “The officers who are witnessing these events have not complained, so it shows to you we are looking at standard, everyday practice”.
Hopkins led a landmark racial discrimination case in 2013, in which Victoria Police was found guilty of systematic racial profiling and harassment of men of African descent. One officer named was sergeant Nick Konstantinidis. In a move worthy of fiction, assistant commissioner Brett Guerin transferred Konstantinidis to Victoria Police’s ethical standards unit following the accusations.
Guerin resigned in February after he was found posting obscene racist comments on Facebook under a pseudonym.
As in 2013, Victoria Police claims to be concerned with bad behaviour. 
“Our officers make mistakes like anyone else”, reads a written statement following the release of the footage. “We want to be challenged, and we want to be held to account. When police cross the line, we want them to face the consequences of their actions.”
Beating up a defenceless disabled man and laughing about it with five of your fully armed mates is not a mistake.
The conclusion we should be drawing, according to Victoria Police, is that these actions are deviations from the norm. 
But force, excessive or otherwise, is essential for maintaining an unequal system weighted in favour of a rich minority.
It’s why internal investigations of abuse accusations against cops mostly go nowhere, despite there being an average of seven complaints a day.
It’s why the police force last month added military grade semi-automatic weapons to its arsenal, despite Victoria being one of the safest places on the planet to live.
It’s why Victoria Police minister Lisa Neville last year came out strongly to defend harsh sentences for people damaging police cars. An attack on a police car can now get you 20 years’ jail; cops engaged in systematic racial profiling get a spot in ethical standards set aside for them.
For Neville, the clear victims in the videos are not the ones copping the beatings. “We cannot second guess our police”, she told reporters.
Premier Daniel Andrews showed no concern for the behaviour either, telling the Age, “Victoria Police, as the nation’s best police force, conduct themselves with professionalism and in my experience proportionate to the risk they face”.
He is overseeing the biggest recruitment to Victoria Police in its history – 3,135 new officers and an investment of $2 billion. In his words, “The academy is bursting at the seams”.

‘That’s all youse are good for’: footage shows real role of Victoria Police

The tide has turned. January 26 is becoming established as Invasion Day. Tens of thousands marched in Melbourne, 15,000 in Sydney and up to 10,000 in Brisbane to support Indigenous rights.
“Let’s have a deadly day!”, Wurundjeri man Bill Nicholson said, ending his welcome to country and kicking off the rally in Melbourne.
“I haven’t seen a crowd like this since the 1970s”, said Gary Foley.
The turnout was a long time coming.
Creative placards read, “Not happy Jan26”, “Australia Day equals Invasion Day”, “Change the date, we still won’t celebrate”. The most popular matched the most popular chant: “No pride in genocide!”
Aboriginal storyteller Larry Walsh began with a soft voice but raised it at racial profiling. “For over 250 years it’s been happening to the first peoples of this country. Two hundred and fifty years later, it’s happening to the African community.”
“It is time to say enough of your profiling crap. We want Justice!”, he roared.
Tony Birch spoke of failed attempts by Australian governments to wipe out the Indigenous population. “The absolute defiance of that stupidity and that violence is on evidence here today”, he said.
Two years ago, the Invasion Day protest had to push through police lines to march to Flinders Street Station. This year, the march moved smoothly and surely. When it reached Flinders Street, a vast billboard bearing the words “raw power” greeted us. The reference was to tennis champion Roger Federer, but the message was apt.
The other event was the official Australia Day parade. Just before 11am, bored children were jamming their heads between the temporary railings erected along Swanston Street, waiting for the parade to begin.
There was plenty of room and no need for their parents to get them there early. Past Federation Square, only handfuls of people lined the march route. At first, the only entertainment was a grown woman dressed as a cockatoo, squawking up and down the street on a bicycle.
Two men in safari suits were preparing for their march. A mutton-chopped gentleman in a spiked helmet accompanied them. He wouldn’t have looked out of place in Rhodesia.
The left of the movement demanded to scrap Australia Day altogether. Meriki Onus, co-founder of Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance, receiving the loudest applause when she said, “This country does not deserve a day of celebration”.
There was plenty of sympathy in the crowd.
The “change the date” debate has proven to be a dividing line in the revived culture wars. Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy has promised, if elected, to sack any council refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January.
But the right, as with marriage equality, looks to be on the losing side of this one.
“I feel like maybe the time is coming”, 59-year-old Judy told Red Flag. “I would warn [Matthew Guy] that he probably would be getting more than he bargained for if he tried to do it. A political move like that is more likely to backfire and cause people to dig in and fight harder.”

‘A deadly day’ in Melbourne as tide turns on Invasion Day

Countless articles, with “African gangs” or similar in their headlines, state that Victoria’s Sudanese population is over-represented in crime statistics. According to the latest data by Victoria’s Crime Statistics Agency (CSA), Sudanese-born migrants make up 0.1 percent of the general population but account for 1.4 percent of alleged offenders.
We should be cautious about these numbers.
The CSA relies solely on information provided by Victoria Police through its reporting database, the Law Enforcement Assistance Program (LEAP). It does not include data from the courts, which means the numbers do not reflect convictions, but suspected criminal activity.
Anthony Kelly, from the Fitzroy Kensington Community Legal Centre, told the Guardian early in January that over-representation is a “misconception”:
“A young African person who has committed no crime, who has done no wrong, is far more likely to be targeted and threatened and seen like a criminal by police and by shopkeepers.”
The media hysteria around “violent African youths” and the formation of the African-Australian community task force will likely further increase racial tensions and harassment of African communities.
In Victoria, police do not require reasonable grounds to stop pedestrians and vehicles. There are no measures in place to ensure they do not target suspects based on their race or ethnicity; it is entirely left to their discretion.
LEAP data are not available for independent analysis.
When the database was opened for investigation by a Federal Court order in 2013, specifically for the Flemington and North Melbourne area for the years 2006-08, there was clear evidence of racial profiling. Not only were the police diary notes full of racist language, but while African and Middle Eastern youth were 18 percent of the region’s population, they made up almost half of all police stops.
Following the investigation, Victoria Police came under pressure to implement measures against racial profiling. This included providing receipts for all stop and searches, with the perceived race of every suspect noted down. The reluctance of the police to take up these measures is unsurprising.
It is not a stretch to imagine that Sudanese migrants are over-represented in crime statistics because many officers presume them to be criminals.

Sudanese youth: over-represented or over-policed?

If we are to believe politicians and the press, Victoria is in a crime apocalypse.
Headlines read: “State of fear”, “State of disorder”, “Calls for action against rioting African mobs” and “Trauma of crime lingers in wake of African gang rampage”.
The federal minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, spoke out for restaurant-goers “scared to go out at night”.
The Victorian shadow minister for community safety, Edward O’Donohue, and opposition leader Mathew Guy, daily post on Twitter about the “crime tsunami” and the definitely-not-made-up “Apex gang” causing untold havoc on our streets.
One problem with this doomsday narrative is that even police commissioner Graham Ashton has called bullshit on it – albeit with announcing the formation of a taskforce specifically designed to target people of African background.
Another problem is that the latest Crime Statistics Agency data indicate a 6.2 percent decrease in overall crime last year. Theft, particularly car theft, property damage and burglaries were down from previous years.
This is despite Victoria’s rapid population growth.
Then there’s the filth working for the Daily Mail who walked into a Tarneit shopping centre on 3 January and targeted teenagers of African appearance to photograph and provoke into a scuffle. The kids didn’t let it go quietly.
Three were arrested in this disgusting piece of entrapment journalism, which the Mail described as the “latest gang flare up” by the so-called Menace to Society.
Finally, there’s Nelly Yoa.
When the attention-seeking Sudanese self-proclaimed professional footballer-cum -community hero went to Fairfax with a heavily plagiarised article, there was no-one who said, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
Perhaps in the latest round of media job cuts, one too many fact-checkers were replaced with Homer Simpson-inspired drinking birds, tapping through approvals for any story coming their way.
The now discredited opinion piece, first published on 2 January in the Age and quoted by multiple media outlets, read like a Liberal MP rant. “Gangs do exist”, he wrote, “yet nothing has been done by the government, Victorian police or Sudanese community leaders … Young Sudanese people need to adapt and contribute to the Australian way of life immediately”.
You could assume at this point that if young men of Sudanese background unleashed violence against Aboriginal communities and refugees they would be considered more in step with “the Australian way of life”.
The intensity of the moral hysteria, combined with years of law and order campaigning have had an impact.
The justice section of the 2017 Report on Government Services shows that half of all Victorians feel unsafe walking alone at night. This is despite Victoria being one of the safest places in the world to live.
Astonishingly, only one-quarter feel safe on public transport. To be fair, some of us do fear being left for dead on a train station platform – but not because of a potential knife attack at the hands of a gang of African youths. It’s the regular Metro meltdowns, leaving commuters stranded in the summer swelter, that keep us up at night.
Backlash against migrants
The racist beat-up has, predictably, resulted in attacks on African migrants.
Red Flag spoke to a member of the Sudanese community in Melbourne who described an attack in the streets on a friend visiting from Adelaide. “They called her ‘n*gger’ and told her to ‘go back where you came from you thief’”, he said.
“Parents are worried about letting their kids out”, he added. “They think if they get into trouble they’ll get deported. People in the [Sudanese] community are scared to go out at night because they think they'll be attacked.”
Unsurprisingly, Dutton has had nothing to say about this state of fear.
The backlash is reminiscent of Kevin Andrews’ 2007 anti-African-migrant campaign, when he cited “concerns by the community” that never existed.
At the time immigration minister in the federal Liberal government, he called for a cut in the refugee intake from Sudan because “some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life”. A week later, Sudanese teenager Liep Gony was bashed to death in south-east Melbourne and 17-year-old Ajang Gor was brutally beaten in the western suburb of Melton.
Underlying this latest hysterical campaign is the oppression faced by African migrants. To be young and Black in Victoria is to be well acquainted with the one big, bad gang in town: Victoria Police. It has a history of racial profiling.
In 2013, six men took police to court for the constant harassment they had experienced growing up in Flemington and North Melbourne. They won the case, largely due to data from the Law Enforcement Assistance Program, which showed that cops were two and half times more likely to stop and search African men compared with the general population.
Police diary notes released at the time revealed how African migrants were viewed. Many notes read, “criminals loitering in the area”, with “criminals” being shorthand for “suspects”, which itself was shorthand for “Blacks”.
Reject the law and order agenda
It is not unusual for the Liberals to whip up fear and race hate.
They have an interest to push society further to the right. Creating moral panics to build support increased police powers and a more punitive judiciary serve only to strengthen those at the top of society while pitting the rest of us against each other.
The demands are always the same: tougher bail laws, more police, harsher sentences and greater surveillance. Red Flag has regularly reported how the law and order climate has served only to further oppress working class people, persecute minorities, pacify the left and fill the prisons.
Indeed, Victoria is undergoing a prison population boom. Prison numbers grew by 10 percent last year, the highest increase in the country.
Daniel Andrews has responded to the pressure not by calling out racism, but by embracing the “tough-on-crime” agenda.
If we are to take on the Liberals and the right, we must reject the law and order hysteria, and uncompromisingly stand against racist scapegoating.

‘African gangs’ hysteria is a stinking pile of racist BS

A mass meeting and rally of up to 1,000 kindergarten teachers and educators took place in Melbourne on Wednesday 22 October. Preschool staff – members of the Australian Education Union – took action as part of a 24-hour stop-work. Their aim is to achieve pay equality with their colleagues in primary schools.
The action came after two years of fruitless negotiations between the union and employer associations, which include the Municipal Association of Victoria as well as representatives of private and community-run preschools.
Despite wages for kindergarten teachers (who graduate with the same qualifications as primary school teachers) falling up to 9 percent behind primary teachers in some cases, employers have so far refused anything more than a 2.25 percent wage rise. This offer was resoundingly rejected by the mass meeting.
It’s never just about pay, though – especially for teachers. The meeting heard that, with ever increasing demands and regulations, a teacher employed for the usual 28 hours a week was doing an average of 14 hours a week of unpaid work. That’s 20 weeks of work that teachers are donating to their bosses, every year. And the situation for educators (kinder staff who have a diploma or Certificate III instead of a degree) is even worse.
When pay and conditions fall so far behind, it’s no wonder that kinder teachers are in short supply. If you can earn just that little bit more teaching prep than teaching kinder, it’s easy to see that new graduates face a difficult choice.
The future of the teachers’ pay campaign is uncertain. Although a motion condemning the Napthine government and the employers and foreshadowing a continuing campaign was passed unanimously, no date for any further industrial action was proposed by the AEU, and no questions were raised from the floor about the direction of the campaign.
Nevertheless, there is clearly a mood for action among preschool teachers. The ballot to take protected action – the first strike action from preschool teachers in 10 years – was voted for by 93 percent of union members. The union reported that, in the month leading up to the strike, 150 new members had been recruited. And the hundreds who marched, chanting loudly, from the mass meeting to state parliament were joined in spirit by members in Mildura, who had succeeded in shutting every non-council kinder in that town, and by council-run preschool members in Warrnambool, who gathered for an after-work rally outside the premier’s electoral office.
Neta, a teacher from Merrigum Kindergarten near Shepparton, told Red Flag: “We’ve had enough. The Napthine government [and the employer groups] have not listened to us. We want them to invest in our preschools, to look after the teachers, look after the conditions, and they’re just not doing that.”
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For more information about the campaign, visit <a href="http://www.protectourpreschools.com.au">www.protectourpreschools.com.au</a>

Fleur Taylor

Invest in preschool teachers – it’s ABC

“Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization,” wrote the late US historian William Durant. “Economic development specialises functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.”
It is common sense that inequality is inescapable. We’re told that there have always been rich and poor; there will always be haves and have-nots.
Yet history presents a different picture. For more than 150,000 years, 95 percent of human history, egalitarian societies were the norm.
“People lived for millennia in small-scale kin-based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, [and] generalised reciprocity in the distribution of food,” writes Richard Lee, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Lee observed the hunter-gatherer Ju/’hoansi/!Kung people of the Kalahari Desert and found that everything is shared, from food to weapons to land. To ensure everyone consumes an equal amount, the most successful hunters are never in charge of handing out the spoils of the hunt.
Similar measures to enforce equal distribution have been observed by anthropologists in most hunter-gatherer societies that remain today.
This in itself challenges the idea of inequality as a natural phenomenon.
The complex history of how humans organised themselves in relation to their changing environment further proves this.
New research by Brian Hayden, professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University, shows that an ancient hunter-gatherer society in Canada’s northwest shifted between equality and inequality depending on the level of abundance.
When food was in good supply, the groups closer to resource-rich areas enjoyed surpluses, ate better and held feasts to showcase their success. When scarcity crept in, “the majority simply [took] what they need,” writes Hayden. “Scarcity breeds revolts and demands for more equality.”
With the development of new tools and climatic changes, new ways of living began to emerge about 10,000 years ago. Crop cultivation and domestication of animals marked the beginning of human domination over the environment. Societies grew from tens to hundreds to thousands. They began to establish small villages.
This led to radical changes in how people planned and socialised, but did not mean they immediately abandoned egalitarianism.
Anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard observed the Nuer people of South Sudan combining agriculture and accumulation of cattle with equal sharing of food and resources.
“The whole community is seen to be partaking of a joint supply,” he wrote. “Rules of hospitality and conventions about the division of meat and fish lead to a far wider sharing of food than a bare statement of the principles of ownership would suggest.
“In general it can be said that no one in a Nuer village starves unless all are starving.”
Over thousands of years, agriculture advanced and expanded, producing for the first time a differentiation in social status. Leaders emerged who gained greater prestige in the community and hereditary lineages were established. Still, egalitarianism proved hard to shake.
Unlike today, the leaders did not enjoy the surplus while others worked creating it. Instead, it was their responsibility to ensure that the community thrived. This meant they were held accountable by those below them.
Studying the Nambikwara of South Africa, Lee observed: “Generosity is … an essential attribute of power.” The chief was expected to allocate the surplus under his control to every individual and family according to their needs.
Lee rejects the idea that different abilities and leadership coincide with inequality: “Much of what tribute the chiefs receive is redistributed to subjects, and the chiefs’ powers are subject to checks and balances by the forces of popular opinion and institutions.”
Societies arranged around similar customs continued to exist for 5,000 years until the creation of the first cities.
What is now known as the “urban revolution” came about through advances in technology that greatly increased agricultural output and the capacity for long-term food storage. Sudden famines and environmental disasters, which previously could wipe out villages in an instant, were now far less common.
British Marxist Chris Harman explained the impact of these advancements on social relations in A people’s history of the world. “The storehouses and their controllers came to seem like powers over and above society, the key to its success, which demanded obedience and praise from the mass of people.”
Previously, there was scarcely time to focus on anything but survival. But this new layer had a space opened to cultivate language and culture while living off the labour of the majority. In such a way, the basis for inequality was established.
Most history books will end the story here. But if inequality is not natural or inevitable, the most important point is that it doesn’t have to exist. It can be challenged. That’s precisely what we see throughout history: the rise of civilisations and inequality has always coincided with resistance – from slave revolts in the Roman Republic, to feudal peasant uprisings, to the strikes and sabotage of the early workers’ movement.
Today, capitalism has created abundance, yet there is scarcity for so many. It isn’t natural. If we build a new movement to create a socialist society, we can end it. We have nothing to lose, and a world to win.

The origins of inequality

Prisoner numbers are increasing at a rate almost three times faster than the general population, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.
“You can’t build prisons fast enough at the moment to deal with the incoming prisoners”, says Don Weatherburn, director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics.
Prisons in almost all states are understaffed and over capacity. Basic human rights and safety standards have been sacrificed. Health services and support programs have been starved and are unable to keep up with demand. Predictably, there has been an increase in violent attacks within prisons.
The overcrowding is a result of the nationwide strengthening of sentencing laws.
In Victoria, sweeping law and order “reforms” have resulted in the prisoner population increasing 14 percent over the last year – that’s the highest increase in the country.
“The Victorian government’s change in policy”, wrote ABC journalist Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop in July, “can be traced back to the public outcry over the brutal murder of Jill Meagher in 2012, which sparked a tightening of parole, sentencing and bail laws”.
Announcing the changes last year, corrections minister Edward O’Donohue stated in a departmental media release: “These sweeping changes to Victoria’s parole system form part of the strengthening of law and order.”
Police have also been given more power to enforce the new laws. O’Donohue added that the reforms would include an additional 1,700 police and 940 protective service officers to patrol railway stations and “the introduction of tougher sentencing”.
Various short term measures have been implemented by the Victorian government to deal with the increase in prisoner numbers, including double bunking, which has resulted in 22 percent more beds than infrastructure can currently support. One measure in particular has attracted widespread criticism – the use of shipping containers to house inmates.
Emma King from the Victorian Council of Social Services comments, “Forty-six per cent of people discharged from prison report that they’ve been diagnosed with a mental health issue. I would really question what impact putting three people within a shipping container might do to exacerbate those issues.”
Similarly in New South Wales, public moral outrage about street violence was stoked prior to the implementation of stricter bail conditions and mandatory sentencing laws. Despite the overall crime rate going down, police are looking to arrest more people on minor charges and to keep them in prison for longer.
“The pressure is on to try and look tough, and that results generally in tougher policies”, Weatherburn told the ABC last month. “That’s what the public want, that’s what the shock jocks want, that’s what the tabloid media tends to expect.”
Panic about street crime, often racially coded, and the law and order agenda have been staples of the conservative playbook. The political right cynically uses any opportunity to shore up its voting base and provide cover for furthering its neoliberal agenda.
As the situation in Victoria shows, the Jill Meagher case was particularly effective. Socialist Alternative’s Louise O’Shea made this point at the time: “Moral panics about crime or violence between individuals, in particular the need to protect white women and children from harm, are almost always used by governments to promote reactionary ideas and to justify attacks on people’s rights.”
Her point, unfortunately, has been vindicated. Ironically, women – particularly Aboriginal women – are now the fastest growing group of prisoners in Australia.
The importance of recognising and rejecting the law and order agenda has never been so clear.

Global displacement at record highs

The millionaires paying no tax

More government handouts for Australia’s richest private schools

‘That’s all youse are good for’: footage shows real role of Victoria Police

‘A deadly day’ in Melbourne as tide turns on Invasion Day

Sudanese youth: over-represented or over-policed?

‘African gangs’ hysteria is a stinking pile of racist BS

Invest in preschool teachers – it’s ABC

The origins of inequality

Bitter fruit of law and order agenda

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