Solidarity meets in cities all around the country. Check here for details of the latest upcoming meetings.

MELBOURNE

Melbourne Solidarity meets 6:30pm every Tuesday at the New International Book Shop at Trades Hall corner Lygon & Victoria Sts Carlton (enter via Victoria St)

Contact Chris on 0403 013 183 for more info

SYDNEY

The revolutionary ideas of Antonio Gramsci

7pm Thursday May 17

Antonio Gramsci’s legacy as a revolutionary is complex and far too often, especially in the academic world, misunderstood. In this meeting, Penny Howard will provide an introduction to Gramsci’s ideas and what they mean for revolutionaries who want to change the world today. All welcome!

Sydney Solidarity meets 7pm every Thursday at the Brown st hall, on Brown st above the Newtown library, just off King st. All welcome.

Contact sydney <at> solidarity.net.au or 0438 718 348 for more info

BRISBANE

For more information contact Mark on 07 3123 8585 or brisbane<at>solidarity.net.au

As opinion polls for Labor keep falling, Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan are trying to recast the government as the friend of working people. But their timidity and mixed messages mean working class voters just aren’t buying it.

Labor has talked up its budget as one for “working families” while The Australian and Tony Abbott have chimed in, screaming that Labor’s budget has declared class war. But no-one is buying that either.

The budget targets cuts at single parents’ benefits and public sector jobs, and there is no serious spending on services (see opposite). University funding per student has also been cut. The Gonski review’s recommendation for an immediate $3.8 billion to boost government schools has been ignored.

Instead, the government is pushing the further marketisation of schools using yearly teacher performance assessments to dictate pay rises. The $1 billion being spent keeping troops in Afghanistan could have gone to public hospitals.

Wayne Swan and Finance Minister Penny Wong have repeated again and again that the government will cut more spending and axe more jobs if it’s necessary to maintain a budget surplus. Meanwhile Labor has already destroyed its credibility on living standards with prices rising even before the introduction of the carbon tax.

If Labor was seriously prepared to wage “class war” against the Liberals and big business, perhaps they could begin to turn things around.

Seventy one per cent of Australians think that business has too much power, and more than half think wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. The Australian Council of Trade Unions is calling for a millionaires tax that would force those on more than $1 million a year to pay at least 30 per cent tax. At the moment they pay less income tax than the average family.

But there is no substance to Swan’s bluster against billionaires Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer.

Wayne Swan told the NSW Chamber of Commerce that, “We will keep working with the business community to deliver more relief…”

If Labor had taken up The Greens’ call to restore the mining tax to its original level, jobs could have been saved and spending on services boosted. But the tax is now expected to raise only $3.5 billion in its second year, down from an original $9 billion. Andrew Forrest says Fortescue Metals will pay almost nothing in the tax’s first five years.

The threat of an Abbott Government is very real. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey made the Liberals’ intentions clear by calling for savage cuts to welfare, denouncing an “entitlement culture”. Abbott is promising to look at slashing $50 billion in public spending, abolish the mining tax and tell the Navy to turn refugee boats around.

There is little enthusiasm for Abbott. A Nielsen poll shows his personal approval rating at minus 17 per cent, while the Coalition’s primary vote rose to 47 per cent. But the budget has done nothing to boost Labor’s polling and it’s not just because most people feel they will be worse off.

Scandal-prone

The scandals surrounding Labor MP Craig Thomson and the Speaker Peter Slipper continue to seriously damage the government’s credibility. Craig Thomson should have been booted out of the party long ago, and Labor’s move to get Peter Slipper to defect to become Speaker was always crass opportunism.

Of course, the Liberals’ hands aren’t clean. When he was one of their own, the Liberals ignored the rumours about Slipper’s abuse of parliamentary privileges like CabCharge. But now that it suits them they are on a great moral crusade against corruption. There are indications the Liberals even encouraged former staffer Peter Ashby to accuse Slipper of sexual harassment.

But it is Labor’s willingness to put hanging onto office before principles that has created the mess they are in. They have protected a questionable union official and defended a dubious Speaker lured from the ranks of the Coalition.

Gillard could have seized Obama’s announcement of his support for same-sex marriage to finally overturn Howard’s same-sex marriage ban. But instead she has repeated the same nauseating arguments against equality.

The government has done nothing as 150 staff were sacked at First Fleet, and Qantas, Alcoa and ANZ prepare mass sackings.

Labor’s critical condition and the hideous spectre of Tony Abbott points to the urgency of building the movements and workplace struggles.

Students at Sydney University are showing how it’s done. Their Vice-Chancellor is on the back foot and they have already saved 54 academic jobs.

Labor is not about to wage a class war, we’ll have to do that ourselves.

Wayne Swan has been accused by the media and Tony Abbott of waging class warfare with the budget. We wish. Labor’s obsession with achieving a budget surplus has delivered more cuts and continued their failure to adequately fund our public services.

Despite the talk, there is only peanuts for spending on schools, dental and disability care in this budget. Instead Swan has opted for a series of cash handouts to calm concern over the carbon tax and the cost of living.

While there have been some cuts to defence spending and some reduction in tax concessions for the rich, this is not a budget for workers and the poor.

Shamefully, single parents have been targeted for cuts. They will now lose the parenting payment, $120 a fortnight, when their youngest child turns eight, and be forced onto Newstart allowance and the job search queues. The Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) slammed the decision, saying: “The major blight on this year’s budget is the unnecessary attack on 100,000 single parents… leaving some of the most disadvantaged families and their children in deficit.”

Although the government expects unemployment to increase, there is only a token payment of $210 a year to those on Newstart and Youth Allowance. At the current rate, Newstart does not even pay the cost of average fortnightly rent in Sydney.

Public sector workers have also been attacked. More than 4200 jobs will go over the next year, including over 1000 in the Australian Tax Office.

Worse still, spending figures for future years indicate plans for further cuts, with $164 million to be shaved from the government’s wages bill in 2013-14. This means either wage cuts or axing a further 5400 jobs.

Amazingly, while the Bureau of Metereology budget will be cut by $13 million, Labor is opening the web site to commercial advertising.

The promise to increase foreign aid has also been broken.

Hitting the rich?

Big business is up in arms over Labor’s decision to postpone the reduction in corporate tax from 30 to 29 per cent. But this was actually forced on the government by the refusal of The Greens and the Liberals to support it in the Senate. Gillard still says she is “very determined” to deliver the tax cut in the future and Wayne Swan has already pledge “more relief” for business in future.

The government is spending the $4.75 billion this saves on cash handouts to families, designed to send the message the government is acting to relieve cost of living pressures and take some of the sting out of the carbon tax.

Wayne Swan says the budget is “Labor to its bootstraps” but John Howard was also willing to hand out one-off cash payments to try and win votes.

The decision to deliver cash handouts comes at the expense of any serious spending on services. Labor has talked up funding for a National Disability Insurance Scheme. But it gets next to nothing: $250 million a year over the next four years. That’s a long way short of the $8 billion a year needed for the full scheme.

There is some money for dental care but it averages just $156 million a year over the next three years, and just $60 million a year is new money, with the rest redirected from another dental program. The government’s report on dental care said it needs $1.8 billion a year just to provide proper dental care for those who can’t afford it.

Add in the $4 billion in annual subsidies that the Australia Institute calculates the government already gives the mining industry—which went untouched in the budget—and the timidity of Labor’s supposed attack on business becomes clear.

Rose-coloured glasses

Ignore Tony Abbott and squeals from the big business. Labor is running a pro-business neo-liberal government. This budget is not a break from that.

And the cuts would be even more savage if not for the rosy projections of economic growth and government income over the next year.

Treasury is banking on a revenue increase of 11.8 per cent in 2012-13. If that doesn’t come off, Labor’s fetish for a budget surplus will force it to wield the axe again next year.

The budget sums rest on the hope that growth in Australia’s economy will speed up to 3.25 per cent next year. But the economic crisis across the globe makes this doubtful. Growth is faltering in the US and China. Europe is spiralling downward to the point where the Economist says it is, “walking, eyes wide open, into depression”.

The Reserve Bank’s decision to cut interest rates by 0.5 per cent a week before the budget shows that the Australian economy is not so strong either. Labor’s push to create a surplus could easily backfire and end up helping drag the economy back into recession.

And for all the spin, it’s clear from this budget that big business wouldn’t be the ones forced to pay for it.

James Supple and Ian Rintoul

Several thousand unionists and students rallied outside the office of Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu, on May 10 in protest at a $160 million cut to TAFE education.

The bulk of the rally was made up of TAFE teachers, members of the Australian Education Union, and members of the National Tertiary Education Union, which covers admin workers in TAFEs.

But there were also delegations from the construction workers’ CFMEU, the Australian Nursing Federation, the manufacturing workers’ AMWU and the Independent Education Union.

The cuts will not just lead to hundreds of job losses across the state, and higher fees for students in many of the remaining courses, but will dramatically deepen the privatisation of TAFE begun under the previous Victorian Labor government.

Labor’s “reform” was to allow private colleges access to the same funding per student as public TAFEs (which include sections of four universities—Victoria University, RMIT, Ballarat and Swinburne).

Brian MacDonald, former head of Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE, told The Age: “A year ago there were 200 private providers, now there are about 450.

“Courses in TAFE that might take 400 hours are being delivered in 30. This private sector is really poorly regulated. Some of these bits of paper are worthless to employers … yet the providers are getting government funding.”

The Liberals are making cuts in three ways. They are refusing to provide the money promised by Labor to cover AEU members’ pay rises in 2013. This will, for example, hack $11 million from RMIT’s budget.

They are increasing funding for some courses, but slashing it for many others, to about $2 per student for an hour of teaching. And they are simply discontinuing maintenance grants for state-owned TAFE properties.

TAFEs offer better facilities and better teaching, but in many cases will not be able to compete with dodgy private colleges on price. The public courses that survive will be those in high enough demand for TAFEs and universities to be able to increase fees. Either way, students will suffer, many of them refugees or new migrants.

Officials told the protest on May 10 that there would be more rallies. But we need to go further, laying the basis for strikes alongside AEU members in schools and NTEU members in universities, who are all moving into bargaining mode.

An NTEU member

Management at Sydney University has resorted to riot police, threats of student suspension and a ludicrous PR campaign to try and contain the anti-cuts campaign. But the campaign has put the Vice-Chancellor, Michael Spence, on the back foot.

On Monday May 7, over 600 students and staff marched up City Road to protest outside the Senate meeting. The protest coincided with 43 final letters being sent to staff—23 face forced redundancy, 20 face teaching-focused positions. When students moved to occupy the building, riot police summoned by the Vice-Chancellor ran amok—brutally head locking, dragging and throwing students to the ground. The Senate meeting was moved, but 150 students blockaded the re-convened meeting for over three hours.

The next day, 62 students attended the biggest ever Education Action Group (EAG) organising meeting. But some groups argued against a continuation of the militant tactics that have built the campaign so far, in favour of a festival. After a vigorous discussion, the meeting ended with a confused decision to hold both a partial strike and speak out and a festival on the same day. This compromise diluted the political importance of arguing clearly for a strike as the next step in the campaign.

Another EAG, two days later, agreed to build the two events separately, with the speak out and sit-in to be held on Wednesday May 23.

Victories

Mass actions and militant tactics have won concessions from the University. The number of academic redundancies has been drastically reduced, from 100 to 55, and teaching-focused positions have been reduced from 64 to 55. So much for management’s claims that their hands are tied!

But the fight is far from over. The 23 academics facing forced redundancies can lodge a claim to have their case reviewed. The campaign’s demand is that all the letters be rescinded.

The university still plans to cut 190 general staff jobs and $28 million of “non-staff expenditure”. Along with these cuts, the university’s plans include “curriculum reform, including withdrawing units of study”, i.e. course and subject cuts.

Crisis

The anti-cuts campaign has created a minor crisis for the university management. Michael Spence called Student Representative Council (SRC) officers to tell them that the university’s security budget is exhausted, and threatened to invoice the SRC for further security costs. He’s also threatening to suspend students.

He took the time to be interviewed for a fluff piece in the Sydney Morning Herald to bleat that he is not a “managerialist bastard”—but the facts speak for themselves.

Even the Dean of Arts Duncan Ivison (who defends the cuts), admitted to a Faculty of Arts Board meeting that, “The change-management process has had a negative effect on staff morale and a negative effect on the reputation of the University.” The cracks between the university management should give us encouragement to keep up the campaign.

From walkouts to strikes

Momentum has been building over the past weeks. On April 24, around 250 students walked out of their lectures to descend on management offices. But divisions over strategy have meant that, despite a unanimous EAG vote, only a small section of the EAG has been actively building to step up the action for some classes to actually strike.

Some people have argued not to call a strike unless we know the entire student body will participate. But smaller, partial strikes can lay the ground for department-wide or a campus-wide action. A department like English, which has vigorously fought the cuts and won substantial victories, could lead the way. Student action can also encourage staff to take industrial action.

The lack of clarity in the EAG has meant that we are now looking to build for a student walk out and possible strike early in second semester.

To keep up the pressure this semester, and build support for a possible strike, the EAG is holding a speak-out and sit-in on May 23. We can draw inspiration from the three-month long student strike in Quebec.  At Sydney University in the 1970s, occupations and strikes won a Political Economy department.

We can make common cause with the staff and student fight at Australian National University (ANU) where 26 Music School staff have been sacked and told to re-apply for just 13 jobs.

With management on the back foot, we need to show them that we are in this fight to win.

Erima Dall

A surgical dresser earns about $24 an hour. A cook or a gardener gets a little less, an experienced cardiac technician a little more. These are the kinds of workers who rely on the Health Services Union to negotiate their wages and conditions and to police their enforcement. And these are the workers betrayed by former HSU leader Craig Thomson, who used his union credit card to spend $74,000 on dining and entertainment, while drawing out $103,000 in cash and directing more than $250,000 of members’ money towards being elected an MP.

The media’s focus has been on the problems that Thomson has caused the Gillard government, which looked the other way until recently to hold on to his vote.

If Labor had a solid majority, it’s likely that Thomson would have been kicked out of the ALP when the scandal first broke. After all, Dean Mighell, left-wing secretary of the Electrical Trades Union in Victoria, was promptly expelled by then leader Kevin Rudd for… swearing.

But Gillard tolerated Thomson until the delayed Fair Work Australia report was released in early May. The price of continued survival has been to deepen the sense of corruption and desperation that surrounds the government.

Rank and file response

The real victims of the scandal, however, are health workers themselves. They have responded in one of three ways.

According to reports, many are simply walking away from the union in disgust. Their anger is understandable, but resigning from the union leaves the existing leadership in place and strengthens the hands of hospital managements.

Others are backing Labor’s proposals for tougher accountability laws for unions (and employer organisations). This follows the government’s announcement that it would appoint an administrator to take over the HSU East branch, replacing its current officials until fresh elections are held.

Supporting these moves would be a mistake. Governments do not intervene into the life of unions to make them more effective, fighting organisations.

If Labor were really concerned about healthy unionism, it would take a stand against the reactionary leaders of the shopworkers’ SDA, who use the union as a platform to attack abortion rights, or it would criticise union leaders who hide behind the law to avoid calling action.

Of course, it does nothing of the sort. Rather Labor governments have usually preferred to take on militant unions, sending in troops to break the coalminers’ strike in 1949, deregistering the Builders Labourers Federation in 1986 or using the RAAF against the pilots in 1989.

Kathy Jackson, Thomson’s factional rival within the HSU who portrays herself as a clean pair of hands, has taken the logic of government intervention to its logical conclusion, saying unions should be treated like corporations.

She told 7.30 on ABC TV: “I think we need to have a different regulatory body that’s not part of Fair Work Australia … my personal view is that how [unions are] currently regulated isn’t enough and we do need to go to a model more like the ASIC model.”

She is wrong. The principle is simple: unions belong to their members and however bad the mess is, it’s for the members to clear up. The best antidote to corruption, or just self-serving inactivity, by union officials is more democracy and more involvement.

It’s not easy, but it can be done. There’s an inspiring account of one such turnaround in the book, The Last Battle, by Lindsay Tanner. Tanner is best known as Finance Minister under Rudd. But 30 years ago he was a young left activist in the Federated Clerks Union, now part of the Australian Services Union.

The FCU’s Victorian branch was the bastion of the Groupers, anti-communist Catholics, many of whom were in the Democratic Labor Party. Tanner and other activists founded a reform group to challenge the reactionary leadership.

It took several years to break through, but the reform group did so by focusing on the members’ concerns and steady and determined campaigning—leafleting and visiting workplaces, making contact with isolated shop stewards, creating rank-and-file networks.

These are the kind of steps needed for HSU members to reclaim their union. The motion passed by HSU East members at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, declaring no confidence in their officials and calling for fresh elections, is a healthy first step.

The joint parliamentary inquiry into detention brought down its report on March 30—but it was remarkable only for its timidity. Its recommendations leave mandatory detention in place.

In many ways, the report covers the same ground and offers similar recommendations as the 2001 parliamentary detention report that proposed detention be limited to 14 weeks (98 days). This report recommends 90 days.

But even the cautious Refugee Council of Australia argues that asylum seekers should be detained for no longer than 30 days. Worse, rather than requiring the immediate release of people after 90 days, the report only proposes that the government then make public their reasons for prolonged detention. It does not propose any legal requirement to release asylum seekers.

This is despite the report’s own admission that “acute mental illness is widespread across the detention network” and witness statements such as that of one pscyhologist who said, “immigration detention … is not a psychiatric hospital, but has some of the characteristics of one.”

This May marks 20 years of mandatory detention—before 1992, mandatory detention was not law. The big numbers of Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s were not detained.
But in this report there is not even a proposal to legislate to ensure families and children are kept out of detention.

Too many of the recommendations are simply posed as considerations for the Department of Immigration, rather than legislative changes.

Rather than proposing the notorious remote detention facilities be closed, the report suggests detainees be accommodated in metropolitan centres “wherever possible.” If it was not going to go as far as demand that all detention centres be closed, why not insist that Christmas Island, Curtin and Scherger be closed?

It fails to address the excision of territories from the Migration Act that allows offshore processing. And astonishingly, there is no recommendation for the immediate release of so many long term detainees—the Iranians, Iraqis and stateless asylum seekers (such as the Faili Kurds and Bidoons). Rather than humanitarian visas, it suggests control orders for those in indefinite detention.

One positive note is that the report addresses those condemned to indefinite detention because of negative ASIO security findings, and proposes that a system of review be introduced (see here).
The report suggests Immigration Minister Chris Bowen consider the proposals by September—not exactly a hurry!

The government’s announcement that it will fund a “homestay” program for asylum seekers released from detention on bridging visas points to the alternative.

Sadly, the plan does not indicate a shift in policy or rhetoric from Labor, but that the government is looking for a solution to the numbers in detention, boosted by their slow and arbitrary determination system. Bowen would certainly prefer to have the Malaysia solution in place.

But the plan shows that an alternative to detention is easily possible and would be welcomed. Nearly 1000 people volunteered to host refugees in the 24 hours after the media announced the plan. We could house all asylum seekers this way while their claims are processed.

The long-hidden issue of the indefinite detention of refugees with adverse ASIO security assessments is finally getting some attention.

The sudden detention of Tamil refugee Ranjini and her two sons who had been living in community detention has prompted GetUp! to begin a petition campaign for 50,000 signatures.

There are now four Tamil families affected by adverse security assessments in Villawood detention centre, with some or all of the family now locked up indefinitely.

The attempted suicides of three ASIO negative Tamil refugees at the Melbourne Interim Transit Accommodation have also highlighted what the ASIO assessments mean. All three have been in detention for almost three years, despairing that there will ever be answers for them or their families.

The Tamils are part of a group of almost 60 people held in detention on security grounds. The list also includes Rohingyas (a persecuted ethnic minority from Burma and Bangladesh) as well as an Iranian and an Afghan refugee.

As the last issue of Solidarity explained, ASIO does not give refugees reasons for the negative assessments and the courts cannot make them give reasons. Nor do they have any idea what evidence ASIO has against them.

The Immigration Department is given the reasons—but they will not release that information. Even the head of the Human Rights Commission, Catherine Branson, who is expected to deal with complaints from the refugees, is not able to see ASIO’s reasons for a negative assessment because she does not have a security clearance.

There are serious reasons to doubt ASIO’s assessments. It is not known where ASIO sources its information or on what basis it decides whether or not someone is a risk. Does the Sri Lankan government provide any information to ASIO about Tamil refugees? How reliable is information from alleged war criminals likely to be? Why would someone who fought for the Tamil Tigers be considered a security risk in Australia?

It is also possible for someone to be deemed a security risk simply because a relative was involved in people smuggling, even in another country.

Muhammed Faisal was one of two Iraqis kept in detention on Nauru for five years because of an adverse ASIO assessment. But after suffering severe depression and requiring attention in a private clinic for months in Brisbane, ASIO made another assessment and mysteriously declared that he was no risk. And remember Scott Parkin—the American peace activist whose visa was cancelled in 2005 because of an adverse ASIO assessment while he was touring Australia to talk about Halliburton’s role in the Iraq war?

ASIO cannot be trusted.

In any case, the Immigration Minister Chris Bowen has the power to issue visas regardless of any ASIO assessment. But he would rather sacrifice the ASIO negative refugees in his sinister game on refugee policy with the Coalition.

Ian Rintoul

Sign the GetUp! Petition

On May 10, over 1000 Hazara-Australians converged on Canberra from across the country to protest the recent wave of killing of Hazaras in Quetta, Pakistan and the Australian government’s failure to publicly condemn the killings.

Over 700 Hazara civilians have been killed in and around Quetta in the last ten years. But the killings are escalating, with 150 killed in the last two months. Hazaras are Shia Muslims while Afghanistan and Pakistan are predominately Sunni Muslim.

Sunni extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Sipa-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), that issued a fatwa against Shia Muslims in 2004, have claimed responsibility for many of the attacks. But while the Pakistani government ostensibly bans such organisations, not a single person has been charged. It’s obvious that they receive tacit support and protection from elements of the Pakistani establishment.

Laurie Ferguson, Labor MP for Werriwa in Sydney’s Western suburbs, addressed the protest. While he was cheered for saying he would bring the “reign of terror conducted against Hazaras” to the attention of Foreign Minister Bob Carr (mind you, Carr had been invited to speak), Ferguson was silent about the abuses of the Gillard government which has demonised their arrival by boat, incarcerating thousands in detention centres and now threatens to deport them.

Two years ago the Labor Government suspended the processing of Afghan asylum seekers, and in 2011 it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Afghanistan’s Karzai government to allow forcible deportations of “failed” Afghan asylum seekers. But contrary to Australian government claims, the situation for Hazaras in Afghanistan hasn’t improved, and in Pakistan has deteriorated sharply.

In December 2011, over 100 mostly Hazaras were killed when a suicide bomber struck Shia mosques in Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif.

A pending High Court decision will soon determine whether the government can deport asylum seekers deemed to be “out of process”, including Ismail Mirza Jan, who the government moved to deport in November last year.

Last September, the government did deport Afghan asylum seeker Mohammed Ashraf to Quetta the day after his father was killed and five months after his son was shot and wounded in the Quetta cemetery. If the High Court goes in favour of the the government, many more face the same fate in the weeks ahead.

With chants of “Stop, stop killing Hazaras” and “Hazara rights are human rights”, the protest moved to the United Nations Information Office, before ending outside the Pakistan Embassy—the site of a ten day sit-in leading up to the protest. The turnout in Canberra was an enormous success, but more action like this will be needed to force the Gillard government to provide Hazaras with the protection they need. Hazara contingents at the World Refugee Day rallies in June could help forge links between the Hazara community and the refugee campaign and send a strong message.

Mark Goudkamp

The only regret from the New South Wales police over the Kings Cross shooting scandal seems to be that the incident was caught on camera.

NSW Police Union Chief Scott Weber complained to a Police Association meeting in May that, “It’s so easy to take a snippet and look at it in hindsight”. He complained police are “losing respect” on the street.

The now-famous footage shows police shooting at a car of unarmed Aboriginal joyriders on a street in Kings Cross, Sydney, and then beating them after the car stopped, issuing a series of savage blows to the head of one of the defenseless teenagers, whose blood covers the pavement.

After the footage made its way onto newspaper web sites around the world in April, the police went into damage control, leaking information to the media designed to smear the victims, saying one of the boys—at the time in a coma in hospital—had, “been in trouble with the police since he was eight.”

It’s not the first time the police in Australia have been rocked by a racist scandal. As we go to press, scenes of police violently breaking up the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Musgrave Park, Brisbane, are all over the news. Racist and violent behaviour is perfectly ordinary in the police force.

Trained racists

Crime shows like NCIS, Law and Order or even Underbelly would have us believe the coppers are a benevolent force solving murders and keeping us safe.

Many rightly critical of police violence or racism see incidents like the Kings Cross shootings as an aberration, or the product of a few rotten apples. But these incidents happen all the time and police at every level are responsible. The only unique thing was that it was so widely publicised.

The primary role of police in society is to protect the property, power and privilege of those at the top of society from those at the bottom. Police are trained to defend the hierarchy of the class society we live in, and keep the young, working class, unemployed and in particular, those with black skin, at the bottom of it. Some of the most racist, sexist and homophobic ideas in society are found in concentrated form amongst police.

These ideas are used to justify inequality. There are higher levels of property crime among poor and marginalised communities, caused by poverty and desperation. But the job of the police is not to remedy the class inequality in society and begin to solve social problems. It is simply to repress and punish people. To justify this it suits them to believe the right-wing stereotypes that Aboriginal people, Arabs or Africans are “naturally” more likely to be involved in crime and go out of their way to racially target them and keep them “in their place”.

In 2010, the ABC revealed that Victorian police had been trained to racially profile African men. A PowerPoint slideshow used in police training stated that Sudanese youths were likely to be involved in, “anti-social behavior, armed robberies, alcohol, drugs and sexual assaults.”

Then, in 2010 a Victorian legal centre reported that when African youth had complained of police repeatedly stopping and searching them—and one group of young African men refused to submit to it—police returned later in plainclothes and beat them savagely.

The Age reported on May 4 that the practice of police bashings is extremely widespread. They revealed thousands of dollars has been paid out to immigrant youths to keep quiet about racist attacks on them by police.

The statistics reveal what the targeting of minority groups means. Aboriginal people are 14 times more likely to be locked up than non-Aboriginal people, and make up 24 per cent of the Australian prison population at the same time as constituting only 2 per cent of the population.

The rot starts at the top of the police force. What proves this decisively is the way police deal with accusations of racism—by protecting their own and sometimes, even rewarding them.

In 2010, police in Western Australia were caught on camera tasering an Aboriginal man, Kevin Spratt, 14 times. The officers involved were later promoted.

During 2006-2009, 20 young African men complained to the Victorian police about racist mistreatment. Only one investigation resulted—but the police subsequently charged several of the complaintants in what lawyers called “cover charges”.

Even the murderer of Mulrunji Doomadgee, Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, was defended by his colleagues, who have admitted they lied to protect him. They nevertheless received bravery awards from the Queensland government for cracking down on protests demanding justice for Mulrunji. Hurley was promoted, awarded a $100,000 payout and now lives on the Gold Coast.

These racist attitudes mean police are worse than useless in preventing racism in society. When Indian students protested against a wave of racist attacks in 2009, the top cops of the Victorian Police force publicly blamed them for their situation. Victorian Deputy Police Commissioner Simon Overland encouraged students to “look as poor as you can” to avoid attacks, while the Deputy Police Commissioner said that Indian students were, “being attacked because they were by nature quiet and passive people, they travelled late at night, often alone, and carried expensive gadgets.”

The attitude of the police was starkly revealed at the time by an email, distributed to over 100 police, and leaked to the press. It showed a picture of an Indian person being electrocuted on a train with the caption, “This could be a way to solve the Indian student problem.”

The experience of implementing racist and unjust laws also strengthens bigoted ideas amongst police. For example, police in the Northern Territory implement alcohol prohibition laws against Aboriginal people which criminalise and stereotype Aboriginal drinkers.

In most workplaces, the experience of exploitation by management has the potential to draw workers into struggle against it and to challenge the racist ideas that divide people. But the police’s experience does not lead them into conflict with the boss, but with some of the poorest and most oppressed sections of society, who they must punish and blame for their situation.

Workers in uniform?

Some people refer to the police as “workers in uniform”, suggesting they are just like the rest of us. But no other workers have guns, tasers and the right to use violence. More than that, the police force is specifically used against all other workers.

The modern day police force came into existence in the UK during the struggle of the Chartists in the 19th century, a movement for working class rights and suffrage. The new ruling elite needed a force that could crack down on the Chartists and be relied upon to repress working class movements and dissent.

Police still play this role in society. Last year, the 14-day picket at the Baiada poultry factory in Melbourne was repeatedly attacked by police. Ever major strike has to face police breaking picket lines and bringing in strike-breakers.

Police are often rewarded for these actions to buy their loyalty. Just weeks after violently cracking down on Occupy Melbourne protests last year, police received a generous 4.7 per cent a year pay rise from Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu. Yet the nurses had to fight tooth and nail to the beat the 2.5 per cent pay cap imposed on everyone else in the public sector.

Police are the guard dogs a system based on racism and inequality. They are not neutral—they don’t investigate crimes of corporate greed, environmental destruction or hyper-exploitation at work. They crack down on those fighting it, and the poorest and most disadvantaged who suffer from it.

While an Aboriginal teenager lay in a coma for stealing a car, there is no compensation for generations of stolen land, stolen wages, or stolen children. The so-called New South Wales Police Integrity Commission won’t even investigate the Kings Cross shooting because, “they do not have the resources”.The whole incident should show one thing decisively—the real criminals wear uniforms.

Amy Thomas