Thursday 28th of March 2024

a real dual citizen .....

a real dual citizen .....

from John Passant ….

It says much about Australian politics that an Australian Prime Minister can refuse to confirm what appears on the latest reports from the Indonesians and the UN to be the obvious – that his government paid those transporting asylum seekers to Australian waters to run back.

The current crew in charge of the sinking bourgeois democracy that is Australia refuse to answer basic questions about asylum seekers with a glib operational matters line and repetition of the lie that they have stopped the boats. They haven’t. And they haven’t stopped deaths at sea either. They have outsourced those deaths.

This is the same government that wants to give a Minister the power to strip a person of their Australian citizenship based on untested ‘evidence’ and without any criminal convictions to support the action.  The concentration of power in the hands of officials is authoritarian and another example of the chipping way of bourgeois democratic ideals both sides have undertaken in the last few decades.

The other depressing fact is that many Australians, including working class Australians, don’t care. Worse, they probably support the government doing ‘whatever it takes to stop the boats,’ including paying the people smugglers. By hook or by crook may well resonate with them.

As an aside, I support people smugglers. They have a long and honourable place in history, including saving the lives of many Jews fleeing the Nazis. Of course if we really wanted to save lives at sea we’d send chartered planes to Indonesia and Malaysia, with their agreement, to pick up the 100,000 or so asylum seekers in these countries and process them quickly here in Australia without locking them up.

This is the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta. One of its famous proclamations still resonates today:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.

Our treatment of asylum seekers, of suspected ISIS fighters, of Aborigines dying as the dispossessed or in custody or both, breaches these ideals. Such is the degeneration of Australian capitalism and its politics that we are fighting today to restore the letter and the spirit of an 800 year old document.

However such is the alienation of sections of the Australian working class after 3 decades of neoliberal rule and policy from its traditional party, the Labor Party, that the only hope many workers have is in the false sense of superiority that attacking refugees (among other groups) apparently gives.  

No matter how badly Abbott and co treat asylum seekers, many workers will still have insecure, poorly paid unfulfilling jobs.  Joining in the demonisation of refugees won’t change that and only reinforces and assists the very people who create the rotten system that gives us rotten jobs and enables them to worsen our conditions.

The abject class collaboration of the trade union bureaucrats over the last 3 decades has left us in this position. It is time to fight back for better wages and conditions, for jobs and for safe workplaces. That will give workers a sense of their own worth and strength. When the class finally moves, the shit of ages – the racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia – will disappear in a unity of struggle. Ultimately that will be the way to win the case for asylum seekers.

While the one sided class war the bosses have waged successfully against us cannot go on for ever, mass class struggle isn’t going to break out in the immediate future. Instead we may well see Captain Crook and his listing ship Team Australia win the next election on the back of demonising asylum seekers, MUSLIM!!!!! terrorists and lifestyle choice Aborigines while a pathetic Opposition cheers them on and a cowed labour movement continues its surrender.

Is Tony Abbott Captain Hook or Captain Crook?

 

turdy uses the magna carta as a door mat...

For those who care about such things it's worth considering just how much the Kipling concept of 'the lesser breeds without the law' infuses and governs Tony Abbott's thinking and much of his public utterance.

He says he won't – and mustn't – reveal if he is bribing people smugglers or not, because this would be telling the enemy what he is up to, and they, the enemy, mustn't know what he is up to.

In this, he proclaims his belief that the smugglers won't talk to anybody. That they don't have mobile phones, or iPads, or access to Facebook, or to a public phone, or a post office, and they wouldn't, without his permission, without his express imperial permission, pass on to their cousins, and uncles, and high school friends the glad fresh news of how to make money safely in the people smuggling business and not go to gaol for it.

This belief, I believe, is racist, or "otherist", or "heathenist", as I like to call it — the belief that obedient darkies lack the power of speech. They are mere chittering jungle animals who know little and learn little, and rarely talk about it.

It presumes the same lack of speech in the asylum seekers also. Though many of them have a tertiary education, a mobile phone, a degree in computer science and relatives in Australia or their home countries they are in touch with, it is thought they will keep his on-water methods secret if he wishes them to. These are the methods – piracy, kidnap, bribery – which have ruined their lives thus far. Of course they would. Why wouldn't they?

This attitude goes beyond the bizarre and approaches the insane.

Abbott continues to say he has "stopped the boats" while six thousand people in boats mass around Malaysia. How is it they are stopped? They are still coming.

 

He certainly turned back one boat, by bribing its captain and crew, but it was going to New Zealand, which would have welcomed, we are told, the people on it.

He kidnapped or assisted in the kidnapping of people bound for New Zealand, which wanted them, and sent them to Indonesia, which most emphatically did not want them. Indonesia would have to spend $4 million a year looking after them, for the next 30 years perhaps and most emphatically did not want them.

It is pretty clear that piracy and kidnap, including the kidnap of children and pregnant women, is against the law in most countries (except, one imagines, Islamic State) and, in the cold clear light of Magna Carta, requires any public official, however highly placed, to go on trial for it, and, if convicted, go to gaol for it. Bribery is also a crime in most jurisdictions and in China is punished by a single bullet to the back of the head, and attracts imprisonment in 180 countries.

But the racist attitude of Abbott and Bishop and Morrison and Dutton proclaims, insanely, that this law does not apply to them.

It is as near to the cry of "I am Napoleon!" from an old-fashioned madman as any we have lately heard.


https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/tony-abbott-and-the-lesser-breeds,7828