Author: lizhumphrys

This blog post first appeared on LEFT FLANK @ Overland Journal.

For the last post of 2012 we were asked to reflect on politics over the last year. In thinking on this for the last week I’ve drafted about ten first paragraphs. The writer’s block arises not from nothing to say, but from a place that wonders how many ways there are to describe how awful the Gillard government is.

How many ways there are to verbalise that the political crisis of the Australian elites is playing out in increasingly cruel ways: from the demonising of asylum seekers and placing them in harms way to the smearing of Indigenous communities and the implementation of policies that stigmatise. From cutting single parents benefits to forcing people living with disabilities onto Newstart, to the rollout of the Basics Card to the poor who are supposedly incapable of managing their government benefits in Bankstown. All these are policies roundly condemned by non-government bodies and many international welfare agencies. Some, like the Basics Card, are even condemned by the government’s own research. At times I’ve felt there is little left to say other than to verbalise despair.

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This blog post first appeared at Overland Journal.

Govt confirms they have sent women and children refugees overnight to the detention camps in Manus Island indefinitely. Shameful. – Senator Sarah-Hanson Young on Twitter, 21 November 2012

In 2001 Four Corners aired a watershed episode on the mandatory detention of children in Australian refugee detention centers. The pain and suffering of six-year-old Shayan Badraie, a focus of the episode, moved many people to action. The campaign that followed over many years contributed to the release of all children from ‘secure detention facilities’ following a report from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. As ChilOut asked, ‘Who are these children?’:

They are aged zero to eighteen, they have fled war zones, watched family members killed or persecuted, or who have been subject to persecution and harm themselves. Many are alone, they are frightened, they are traumatised. They are incarcerated by Australia.

In 2008 the Rudd government’s Key Immigration Detention Values Statement was released, and with it the ALP determined that ‘children, including juvenile foreign fishers and, where possible, their families, will not be detained in an immigration detention centre’ and that ‘detention in immigration detention centres is only to be used as a last resort and for the shortest practicable time’.

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He Kills Me (1987), Donald Murphy, Poster, offset lithography (also used as a placard)

At this time of World Aids Day, I wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate the success and wonder that was ACT UP (in particular the NYC chapter). ACT UP turned 25 in March this year, and has long been a core inspiration in my own activism.

It is worth taking a look at this wonderful news piece from Amy Goodman on their strategy and campaign, from Democracy Now earlier this year. It’s a timely reminder of what long-term political protest can achieve. I’ve not seen ‘How to Survive a Plague’, but in other documentaries I’ve watched two things have always struck me: On the one hand the wonderful activists, but on the other how few survived the 1980s/1990s period. There is such heartbreak in the devastation that AIDS wreaked on the activist GLBTIQ community, but at the same time I find so much inspiration.

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This blog post first appeared at Overland Journal.

On 16 May 2012 there was a reunion at the Australian Council of Trade Unions congress gala dinner. The crucial players involved in the development of the ACTU and ALP Prices and Incomes Accord of the 1980s – Bill Kelty, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Laurie Carmichael – were all there. The keynote addresses were from Kelty and Keating, with the latter asked to commemorate the former’s work in the labour movement. While Hawke was the only one to literally lend his voice to the crowd, leading a rendition of ‘Solidarity Forever’, all were singing the praises of the 1983–96 federal Labor government and urging renewed collaboration between the Gillard government and the ACTU. A new collaboration was necessary, it was argued, in an effort to deal with the present ‘testing times for the labour movement and unions’.

Kelty is revered in the labour movement, no question. That night high-profile union leaders in the crowd took to Twitter expressing their deep admiration for him. ACTU Assistant Secretary Tim Lyons noted: ‘without question [Kelty is the] public figure I most admire. Proud I occupy a job he (& Carmichael) once had.’ Linda White, Assistant National Secretary for the Australian Services Union, said she ‘could hardly breathe’ at their first meeting, as she was ‘so much in awe of him’. Not one for muted praise, Paul Howes of the Australian Worker’s Union tweeted: ‘Just quietly – I love Bill Kelty – the greatest Australian unionist that ever lived’, and then, ‘If it wasn’t inappropriate I’d dry hump Kelty right now.’ The praise for Kelty was particularly focussed on his role in developing and implementing the Accord.

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Remember when Tad Tietze, Guy Rundle and I edited that book ‘On Utoya’? Well, amongst other things, it inspired the critically acclaimed play ‘The Economist’ written by Tobias Manderson-Galvin and directed by Van Badham.

The people who produced the play, Australian based MKA Theatre of New Writing, in particular their less-than-flush-with-cash actors, need to get to Edinburgh as the play is set to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival. You can help make this possible by contributing to their crowd sourcing funding plans. Donations are tax deductible, and you will be assisting to bring a fantastic and political play to an international audience.

As I have stated on Facebook: I can promise my extreme gratitude, Tad’s public praise for your worthiness, and possibly a big kiss from GRundle on his next visit back home.

And a little about the play:

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This post appeared first at Overland Journal.

Slavery. It was a bad thing that happened somewhere else, in the United States or elsewhere. Or so we are told. We don’t often think of Australia as being similarly constructed on the exploitation of unfree labour, and yet the history of the development of local capitalism is exactly that. In their history of Australia, No Paradise for Workers, Ken Buckley and Ted Wheelright rightly call convict labour a ‘second cousin’ of slavery. The early years of the colonies were dominated by our version of slavery, as well as indentured labour. Australia was not just a gaol, but a land where modern development had at its core coerced work.

While wage labour emerged soon after invasion, it was not predominant over convict labour until the mid 1800s. Convicts, along with indentured labourers from India, China and, most particularly, the South Pacific, remained important to capitalist development until the latter part of the nineteenth century. The unfree labour of people from the South Pacific was particularly important in rural Queensland, where other forms of labour were scarce.

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