Category: refugees

01 May

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The ALP & the politics of anti-immigration (both kinds)

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457-Scabs

Cross-posted from Larvatus Prodeo. Thanks to Mark Bahnisch for convincing me to return to this subject.

I have to confess that I couldn’t bring myself to watch Monday’s Four Corners on the scandal of Australia’s “offshore” asylum seeker processing regime. I’m on the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition email list and read horrifying stories from Manus Island on an almost daily basis. Rather than being numbed by this atrocity exhibition I am scared I will simply lose control of my rage and frustration if I have to actually see the human cost on TV.

What makes me doubly angry is that it is a Labor government doing this. Now, I’m one of those hardened Marxist types who expects the reformists to do bad stuff, but there is something debased in this government’s attempts to surpass Howard’s record in “toughness” on refugees. To hear that Labor is now back-flipping on its policy of keeping children out of mainland detention centres just days after the Four Corners special suggests that their strategy is to plough ahead undeterred by basic questions of human decency. Clearly this government is not for turning; at least not in this race to the bottom. Continue Reading

Filed Under: Adam Bandt, ALP, class, dogwhistling, Featured, immigration, Julia Gillard, population, refugees

10 Mar

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Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

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Golden Dawn’s MPs in the Greek parliament

 

by KEVIN OVENDEN

Below are the points, updated and a little amplified, I made in a contribution to the highly successful Unite Against Fascism conference in London on 2 March. The speech (and I’ve incorporated my summing up) was in a workshop with Petros Constantinou from Greece, Marwan Mohammed from France and Glyn Ford MEP from Britain, who all made extremely clear and thought-provoking contributions.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, democracy, dogwhistling, Europe, fascism, Featured, Greece, immigration, Islamophobia, Left strategy, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, social democracy, state, the Right, War on Terror

04 Sep

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This could take a while: The slow agony of the Gillard government

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Asylum issues behind them, Gillard and Bowen address, er, new asylum issues

When I wrote the Overland blog entry below, it was just before Newspoll showed a big jump for the ALP to a (still disastrous) 35 percent primary and 47 percent 2PP. As usual many in the commentariat saw this brief upward blip as an excess of swallows presaging summer, replaying the familiar tropes about Gillard having “cleared the decks” on asylum seekers and the carbon tax, and now being able to focus on “Labor” issues like disability and education. Suddenly Tony Abbott had to shape up or face losing the next election. And the chances of Kevin Rudd being an option were evaporating (although one would’ve thought that the ritual character assassination of Rudd in February was enough to make him an improbable choice no matter how bad polls got).

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Filed Under: ALP, Featured, Greens, Julia Gillard, population, refugees, Tony Abbott

03 Aug

2 Comments

Asylum seekers, the Left and the case for open borders

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Tears in parliament, but no solution in sight

Left Flank has been away on holiday, but we’re back now. Below is a repost of my response to the sickening asylum seeker “debate” that happened in late June. Since then the issue has been shifted off to an elite “expert” committee which, as The Piping Shrike has pointed out, represents the exhaustion of the Gillard government’s agenda in political terms.

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Filed Under: ALP, dogwhistling, Featured, Greens, immigration, Left strategy, racism, refugees

24 Jun

4 Comments

Paul Howes, foreign workers & the dead-end of union nationalism

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MUA protest against the Enterprise Migration Agreement

I’m reposting a recent piece I wrote for Overland Journal’s blog, in response to the debate over the contentious Enterprise Migration Agreement negotiated between the Gillard government and Gina Rinehart to allow the mining billionaire to import up to 1700 skilled workers from overseas. It was written as an open letter to Paul Howes after an op-ed he wrote. He has indicated he’s interested in responding formally at some point.

For some background on the question of migrant workers in the context of the notorious “British Jobs for British Workers” campaign a few years ago, this excellent essay by UK-based political economist Jane Hardy is highly recommended.

And here is an excerpt from a speech by AMWU Western Australian State Secretary Steve McCartney at a fringe event at the recent ACTU conference.

 

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Filed Under: ALP, Featured, immigration, racism, refugees, state, trade unions

08 Apr

1 Comment

Misdiagnosed anxiety: David Marr and the politics of Panic

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Welcome to the first post of the new Left Flank. We’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, hosted at the lovely http://brellabee.com/ As you can see we’re still working on porting all the old comments from Disqus to the new platform. Time to change your RSS feed or subscribe by email (see the sidebar on the right of the page).

While we’ve been effecting that change, we’ve also started our new fortnightly blog at the Overland Literary Journal website, which has also had a spiffy redesign! My first post went up on 29 March, a review of David Marr’s latest book on the politics of fear, which is reposted below for your pleasure.

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Filed Under: dogwhistling, Featured, Islamophobia, media, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, state, the Right

15 Sep

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Australia’s ‘Left’ in government. Part 2: Greens trapped in a prison of their own making

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Since when did building a climate movement mean cheerleading neoliberal government policies?

In the last post I argued that the deep crisis of the Gillard government is also a crisis of the Greens and the Left more generally. By effectively entering a “Left” government the Greens have replicated the disastrous strategy of Italy’s main party of the Left, Rifondazione Comunista, in joining a centre-Left coalition in the late 2000s.

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Filed Under: ALP, Bob Brown, climate change, Greens, Lee Rhiannon, Left strategy, refugees, Tony Abbott

18 Dec

4 Comments

Which side are you on?

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The horrifying deaths of refugees near Christmas Island this week produced two notable responses. The first, recycled endlessly in recent times, was the call for people to not use the tragedy to gain political advantage, a ridiculous idea given that Australia’s current refugee policy has few reasons for existing except in the service of politics. As Left Flank argued in July:

Unable to promise real improvements in people’s lives, the major parties have turned to nationalism and immigrant-bashing to divert attention from their failures and to find easy scapegoats. The “debate” over asylum seekers and border security is thus about neither. Rather, it is an intervention in domestic politics, displacing economic insecurity into xenophobic insecurity, and thus getting the politicians (temporarily) off the hook.

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Filed Under: Bob Brown, Greens, Iraq, media, refugees, state, the Right, Wikileaks

22 Jul

2 Comments

Never mind the quality, feel the overcrowding

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In 2001 the ALP folded in the face of a populist Liberal Party campaign tying concerns over boat people with fear of terrorism. It was then that the term “dog-whistle politics” came into common usage, referring to a political message sent in coded language so that while it was not overtly xenophobic it would be heard and understood by voters susceptible to such divisive politics as speaking to their prejudices.

In 2010 it has been a Labor PM, Julia Gillard, who has most systematically utilised the dog whistle, first by retreading ground well-established by Howard (the “stifling” of debate by political correctness, “understanding” the anxieties of voters over insecure borders and the need to toughen the state’s assault on “people smugglers”). But now she has decided to broaden the debate to one of “sustainable population”.

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Filed Under: ALP, dogwhistling, Greens, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, population, racism, refugees