Category: refugees

01 May

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

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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 […]

10 Mar

Comments Off on Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

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  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 […]

24 Jun

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

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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 […]

08 Apr

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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://nuttify.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 […]

15 Sep

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

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 […]

18 Dec

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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 […]