The New South Wales government has quietly amended its public health restrictions, lifting the ban on protests in the state. There was no official announcement—they didn’t want to admit it—but we had won.
The victory came a week after 300 students and staff mobilised at Sydney University, once again facing down the police. Scenes of University of NSW education officer Shovan Bhattarai being thrown through the air and injured by riot police, and even a professor of law, Simon Rice, in his suit, being tripped and shoved to the ground and arrested, made headlines. Videos of the police violence and student defiance were viewed nearly 100,000 times. Outrage at the heavy-handedness was widespread, and the pressure on the government was mounting.
These incidents came after another brilliant show of defiance in early October, when 500 protesters stormed into Sydney’s Taylor Square before running past police lines to march down Oxford Street, the symbolic site of Sydney’s Mardi Gras, to oppose transphobia and homophobia. This was despite the state Supreme Court ruling the rally “unauthorised” the day before. The police shoved, kettled, arrested and fined protesters, but the overall mood was of joyous rebellion and victory as people showed they would not be cowed. The rally drew an outpouring of support.
On the same day Victorians were celebrating Premier Daniel Andrews’ announcement of the easing of the 112-day COVID-19 lockdown, the state government oversaw the felling of a 350-year-old tree sacred to the Djab Wurrung people in central Victoria. The tree was destroyed to make way for a multi-million-dollar highway upgrade.
More than 50 protesters were attacked and arrested by Victoria Police, who weaponised COVID-19 laws by fining at least 40 protesters for failing to comply with COVID-19 measures. A further ten protesters were arrested for obstructing police.
The $672 million Western Highway upgrade between Ballarat and Stawell began in 2013, but work on the Buangor to Ararat section did not begin until June 2018. Work in this section will result in the destruction of more than 3,000 trees, including at least 200 which hold cultural significance to the Djab Wurrung people. Among the trees are traditional birthing trees, to which Aboriginal women have come to give birth for hundreds of generations. The area holds “a deep intimate connection for Djab Wurrung women”, wrote Djab Wurrung woman and recently resigned member of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, Sissy Eileen Austin, in the Guardian.
With 8 pages of analysis on the results of the US election, and the prospects for workers and the oppressed, both in the US and internationally, under Democratic Party rule. One thing we know: without resistance, nothing is going to change for the better.
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“If the order is given to fire, don’t let me see any rifle pointed in the air; fire low and lay them out”, Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Price told his troops the day before confronting striking maritime workers in 1890. While no-one was shot, the action against workers continued a tradition of using troops to put down Indigenous and convict resistance and unrest in colonial Australia.
Fast forward to last month, when Prime Minister Scott Morrison refused to rule out the use of the armed forces on the wharves against workers who, he said, were “holding the country to ransom” with “straight-out extortion”. Striking workers in Australia have often been threatened with military force.
Troops were first used at the Lambton Colliery in the Hunter Valley in 1888, but their most notorious use was in the deep recession several years later, when the military was used against striking waterfront workers and shearers.
Many scientists today agree we are living through a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. It is an age defined by human activity, characterised by a reduction in biodiversity, an increase in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the use of nuclear weapons, the impact of industrial processes and changes to the Earth’s surface as a result of mining, construction and erosion. One of the most disastrous features of this activity is the massive and increasing production of plastic, a material once synonymous with progress and innovation but which is now threatening the viability of the planet on which we all depend.
A glimpse at the world’s oceans reveals the dimensions of the problem. A 2017 study from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that by 2050, Earth’s oceans will contain more plastic than fish. Already, there are huge, submerged, moving concentrations of waste in every one of the planet’s oceans, known as garbage patches. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which lies between Japan and California, for example, is twice the size of Texas and continually growing. It acts like a vortex, pulling ever more rubbish into its centre.
Diplomatic relations between Canberra and Beijing have never been worse. In early October, Foreign Minister Marise Payne visited Tokyo to attend a meeting of the “Quad”—the four countries most concerned with the rise of China in the Asia Pacific: Japan, the US, Australia and India. The meeting discussed how the four nations might reduce their dependence on China for the supply of certain minerals and technologies, as well as how they might combat disinformation campaigns from authoritarian governments. China’s vice foreign minister denounced the meeting as “an anti-China front-line” or “mini-Nato” which reflected a “cold war mentality”.
The meeting came towards the end of a year marked by a tit-for-tat struggle between Australia and China. In May, China put up tariffs on Australian barley and suspended beef imports after Prime Minister Scott Morrison backed an inquiry into the origins of COVID-19 that was widely seen as an attempt to blame China for the pandemic.
On 30 July, Melbourne recorded 721 cases of coronavirus. The growing crisis pushed Premier Daniel Andrews into implementing a statewide lockdown that involved shutting down non-essential industries and curtailing a range of social activities. Now, as much of the world grapples with a second wave of the deadly virus, Melbourne has recorded zero daily cases for nearly two weeks.
Most Victorians are celebrating the easing of restrictions, pleased that their sacrifices have paid off. That they overwhelmingly abided by the restrictions reflects a strong sense of social solidarity, and countless lives have been saved as a result. So while it is true that the second wave was a product of the Andrews’ government’s neoliberal approach to managing the quarantine program, it must now be judged by its response to that wave. On the whole, the government has been overwhelmingly effective.
Despite this, Andrews has for months now been the target of vicious attacks. In the topsy-turvy world inhabited by the political class, the true calamity of 2020 is not the deadly virus that has killed more than a million people globally, but the measures that have successfully prevented that from happening here in Australia.
Reality television is bad enough at the best of times. Channel Seven’s bizarre new show SAS Australia, however, really plumbs the depths. Those behind the show are apparently unconcerned that their celebration of the culture of the Australian Special Air Service (SAS) comes hot on the heels of a string of revelations about war crimes committed by the SAS in Afghanistan. It’s as if a US network had launched a program during the Vietnam War in which B-grade celebrities were trained in the use of napalm.
A four-year inquiry into the SAS’s crimes in Afghanistan is nearing completion. It’s likely limited findings will be released to the public, but several disturbing accounts have already come to light. The incidents vary in their details, but reports of torture, execution and cover-up surface again and again, with one special forces insider telling the Age of a culture of “sanctioned psychopathic behaviour”.
A confidential 2016 report by defence consultant Samantha Crompvoets, leaked to the media in 2018, is the source of many of the revelations. Crompvoets related countless stories of human rights abuses carried out by SAS troops.
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The 1970s promised so much—gay liberation had broken through homophobic hate, and life for LGBTI people was being transformed. As the 1980s arrived, so too did homosexual law reform, anti-discrimination laws, gay media and a thriving gay culture. But then came a mysterious disease that seemed to target gay men, its cause and mode of transmission unknown. Suddenly, gay sexuality was stigmatised all over again, with panicky headlines referencing a “gay plague” or, in the case of Melbourne’s Truth newspaper, the overtly homophobic “Die, you deviate”. Talk of forced quarantining, compulsory testing and surveillance of gay men was everywhere.
In the US, President Ronald Reagan refused to utter the word AIDS in the first four years of the crisis, despite 60,000 being infected and 28,000 dying. As late as 1987, the US Congress banned the use of federal funds for AIDS prevention or for education that was in any way supportive of homosexuality. “Nobody left those years untouched”, wrote journalist David France, “not only the mass deaths—100,000 in New York alone—but also the foul truths that a microscopic virus had revealed about American culture: politicians who welcomed the plague as proof of God’s will, doctors who refused the victims medical care, ministers and often parents who withheld all but the barest shudder of grief”.
But LGBTI people were coming out of a period of activism and, despite the initial shock, were prepared publicly and defiantly to fight any attempt to take away what they had won.
We have been constantly told during the COVID-19 pandemic that we must follow the advice of the experts. As health experts are guided by what we believe to be objective data and science, many feel no need, or don’t feel confident to be critical of expert opinion. For the most part, this is a good thing. But what happens when different groups of experts have wildly divergent views?
Such is the case with expert advice on the best ways to deal with COVID-19 pandemic. In the early months of the pandemic, some health advisors—such as Sweden’s chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell—championed herd immunity, while those in Australia and New Zealand advocated for widespread restrictions to suppress transmission. Individual health experts have, in addition, been inconsistent in their advice. Victoria’s Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton, for example, has shifted his opinion around masks, the safety of schools and who should be tested on what sometimes feels like a weekly basis. Clearly, there is more to expert opinion than the objective truth, and we must consider the influence that capitalist ideology has in shaping the advice health experts are providing about COVID-19.
The Great Barrington Declaration is one of the most recent cases that has provoked major controversy among health experts. Authored by three professors in infectious disease and epidemiology from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities, the Declaration claims that lockdowns are devastating for public health and proposes an alternative “focused protection” strategy.
Over the last six months, university students and workers have experienced a massive onslaught of cuts to funding, jobs and courses. Many have responded by organising serious, and sometimes militant, campaign actions to defend higher education. And yet the National Union of Students has been almost entirely absent from the campaign.
Now, more than ever, we need national student representation which is willing to organise and lead wide scale resistance. This means electing a socialist to the position of national education officer.
The National Union of Students (NUS) is a national campaign body for students. As the only recognised national representative body for university students, it is best placed to call actions and coordinate campaigns across states. The union has a role dedicated specifically to this job: the NUS national education officer, whose main job is defending students’ rights and access to education.
This year, as students and staff have begun to fight back against one of history’s most significant attacks on universities, the NUS education officer has been entirely absent.
For most of the twentieth century, left-wing politics in Australia was dominated by the Stalinist politics of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and its various offshoots. While never in a position to challenge the ALP as the leading force in the working-class movement, the CPA – which per head of population became the largest Communist party in the English-speaking world—built a powerful presence in the trade unions.
For decades, committed Communist activists played leading roles in innumerable workplace struggles and community campaigns. Consequently, the party built an influence that went well beyond the ranks of its formal membership.
It had enormous influence on the outlook of the Labor Party left. That influence was reflected in the fact that, when pro-Moscow loyalists split from the CPA in the early 1970s, the NSW Labor left split along similar lines. The party also had a powerful impact on intellectual, artistic and small-l liberal circles.
Though worker Communists played a positive role in many struggles, the overall impact of the CPA’s Stalinist politics on the workers’ movement was disastrous. The CPA’s championing of the murderous regimes in Russia, Eastern European and China as workers’ paradises discredited the very idea of socialism.
Australia’s preferential voting system explained… IN FULL COLOUR
Australia is saturated in media from the USA and the UK. Through entertainment, current affairs, and social media, we hear things like:
“There’s no point voting for [Independent Candidate] because they’ll never get in — it’s a wasted vote!”
“Sure, [Good Minor Party] has good policies, but all they do is take votes away from [Bad Major Party]. We must vote for [Bad Major Party] to keep [Worse Major Party] out!”
Many Australians absorb these messages and assume they apply to our elections too — and our two major parties benefit from the misconception.
But whereas both the USA and the UK use ‘first-past-the-post’ voting systems for their national elections, Australia’s system is more elegant than that. In elections for the House of Representatives, we use preferential voting — also known as instant-runoff voting, ranked choice voting, or ‘the alternative vote’ in the UK.
So here’s Dennis the Election Koala to give Ken the Voting Dingo an important lesson in civics!
If you find value in this comic — and many have, over the past five-and-a-half years — please consider supporting my projects via Ko-fi. I’m hoping to be able to make the much-requested Senate voting comic next, in time for the election in May! But I need your help. Thank you!
Members of the government set out plans to relitigate the case. In a speech to the Samuel Griffith Society, a conservative legal organisation, Stoker noted that the High Court bench was about to change. Two members of the Love majority were due to retire – justice Geoffrey Nettle at the end of 2020 and justice Virginia Bell at the beginning of 2021. “There is a significant possibility,” said Stoker, “that a reconstituted bench would reconsider the decision in the event of challenge.”
Coalition politicians also raised the spectre of American-style ideological vetting of judicial appointments. Senator James Paterson described Love as “a reminder of the importance of considering the judicial philosophy of candidates for appointment to the High Court”. Stoker even called for an Australian equivalent to the United States’ Federalist Society, which has been influential in grooming conservative law students and lawyers and aiding their judicial ascent.
Great. The Australian right is so influenced by American culture war that they’re now trying to import America’s decaying institutions.
I know security and foreign policy are complicated issues but it does sound a bit odd to hear Sogavare say he’s standing up against the liberal hegemony of Australia not building military bases in the Solomon Islands. His whole grievance is that Australia wasn’t occupying SI, and someone has to do it, so he’s going with China.
I’m struggling to relax but I’m so tired. Tonight was amazing. I can’t believe Monique Ryan won, I really didn’t see that happening. She’s amazing. I CAN believe Labor won cos Scotty is a shit cunt but still. Wonderful.
I was at Monique Ryan’s party. Mum got a good vid of the vibe. Love a teal independent
