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?