Sean O'G
For a person who projects the image of a simpleton, Bob
Katter is quite a complex person.
He opposes privatisation, the Trans Pacific Partnership
Agreement and other aspects of global finance capital’s neoliberal agenda,
voted to throw out Howard’s persecution police in the construction industry
(the Australian Building and Construction Commission) and opposed the
anti-union WorkChoices legislation. He
has helped bridge the gap between rural conservatives and the union movement
through his invitation to Dean Mighell, militant leader of the Victorian branch
of the Electrical Trades Union to speak at a Katter Party convention, and his
subsequent invitation to Mighell, now retired from the ETU, to draft the Katter
Party’s industrial relations legislation.
He is strongly opposed to the Section 457 visa scheme.
However, he is just as strongly committed to socially
conservative views. He is homophobic,
and his opposition to 457 visas is couched in terms of “jobs for Australians”
rather than the CFMEU’s more balanced opposition to rorts of the system, and
support for overseas workers to migrate and become Australian citizens.
Complex
social and historical base
His electoral base in northern Queensland embraces the
best and the worst of the Australian experience. It has been a stronghold of organised labour,
but also the site of continuing frontier violence against Aboriginal
Australians. Meatworkers and others
still talk about the Bloody Sunday events of June 29, 1919 when citizens
rallying in support of jailed strikers were shot at by police. Sixteen were injured. But it was also the region where, 130 years
ago, the notorious practice of “blackbirding” – the kidnapping and placing into
virtual slavery on the cane fields of South Pacific Islanders – began.
With the monopolised corporation’s print and electronic
media now in election mode, Katter’s new political party is organising and
using Pauline Hanson’s strategy of xenophobia (fear of foreigners) and
chauvinism, e.g., that Anglo and North-East European back-grounded Australians
are culturally ‘superior’ compared to other ethnic and indigenous backgrounded Australians.
This is a dangerous a reactionary trend because it
divides the working class. Katter has
played a positive role in opposing some reactionary laws and policies, but
essentially his support for working people is an investment in securing their
support for his party. He is a temporary
ally on some issues, but has no commitment to the overall unity of the working
class and its leadership of the movement for anti-imperialist independence and
socialism.
Online
petition presents a reactionary viewpoint
Let us look at one specific case, the use of an on-line
petition attacking a “Middle-Easterner,” a shopping mall owner who stopped the
sale of Anzac Day badges on his retail premises. The only outcome of this petition is division
in the community through using fear of cultural difference based on ignorance,
political naivety and racial prejudice.
Mr Katter and party know if they can manipulate some
ignorant, xenophobic voters to support them, they can gain seats in parliament
thus entitling themselves to hundreds of thousands of government taxpayer funds
for future political campaigns, some of which will undoubtedly contain echoes
of Pauline Hanson’s bigoted ‘One Nation’
Party.
Online campaign petitions appealing for support based on
prejudicial stereotypes or perceptions of any particular culture’s differences
assist a tiny minority who already wield enormous power in order to further
damage unity and good-will that exists between most Australians. They must not
succeed in doing this, as it would exacerbate inequality, unrest and economic
misery particularly for poorer taxpayers, who would suffer most, both socially
and financially.
Advocate
for inclusivity and class unity
Advocating for inclusivity and acceptance of cultural
diversity in society and encouraging your friends and contacts to have an
internationalist view is the just and ethical way to advance. Sure, some
individuals are xenophobic, prejudiced, ignorant and intolerant, but this is to
be expected since the two main political liberal-conservative parties in
Queensland and nationally have in the past continuously discounted public
education funding whilst plundering the public purse to turn elite private
schools into virtual club meds for affluent electorates.
However,
revolutionary optimism is required to continually dispel prejudicial myths and
erroneous ideas and consequently practice open-mindedness and advocate for
cultural harmony. Incidentally, the monopolised corporate print and electronic
media’s shock jock sensationalist reporting and bias, in collusion with far
right-wing nationalist agendas has been an influential part of the underbelly
of both Queensland and neo-conservative national political life.
We have mentioned
the Pacific Islander (Kanaka’s) slave trade and the dispossession and
oppression of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands’ peoples from
their land. Queensland also
experienced the undemocratic period of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen regime, when
Australians who opposed the South African Springbok rugby tours were attacked
and arrested. These tours were opposed by Australian anti-apartheid and
anti-racist workers, students and other citizens who fought against the racist
regime in South Africa and its racially selected teams. In addition, examples
of reactionary and racist activities from the 60’s-80’s continued on with
Comalco’s violent dispossession of the Aboriginal inhabitants of Weipa to make
way for bauxite mining and campaigns
opposing Japanese business ventures
in Cairns and the Gold Coast regions that often wrongly took on a racist quality. Queensland was also
the birthplace of Pauline Hanson’s racist One Nation party.
Finally, if as Katter and his party say, the owner of the
Mt. Warren shopping centre made a decision against selling Anzac badges at his
shopping centre, the badge-sellers could have taken their concerns to their
council (Local Government Association), to appropriately put their concerns to
be discussed and arbitrated on, and sold their badges on public property near
the Centre.
In conclusion, rather than stir up tension and racist,
inter-ethnic rivalry as the Katter Party’s online petition suggests (through
its reference to the owner’s non Anglo-European Australian cultural background,
the badge-sellers should have campaigned by:
·
Writing letters to the local press, speakers
on local radio / TV to convince the centre’s patrons to embrace unbiased and not
racially prejudiced ideas. Refer to
justice and equality and not attack the owner’s cultural background
·
contact the suppliers of goods and services
to the centre with the purpose of having a deputation to get the owner to
negotiate a satisfactory response that meets the badge-sellers’ wishes (such as
approving badge-selling between car parks and retail areas)
·
contact union representatives of the centre’s
workers to discuss industrial action
such as strikes, slow-downs, walk-outs, rallies, demonstrations and bans
against the shopping centre management’s decision ( instead of the owner’s cultural background) till
discussions are held with the owner to arrive at a mutually agreeable outcome
or change the owner’s mind.
·
contact other service groups to petition the
local community through fair means (delete the mention of the owner’s ethnic
back ground).
The working class has suffered in the past from so-called
‘patriots’ trying to usurp people’s patriotic sentiment and imposing their own
supposed racial ‘superiority’ to generate support for wars initiated by either
the British, European and United States of American imperial empires.
·
Unite
for a culturally inclusive, independent, non-aligned republic!
·
Recognise
the Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islanders’ and Eureka Southern Cross flags - the
original indigenous and truly Australian symbols from the land rights,
reconciliation and workers’ (miners’) struggles against corporate and
governmental tyranny both past, present and for the future!
·
Demand
and accept cultural diversity and inclusivity to unite the working class!
·
Stand
up for and defend intercultural harmony!
No comments:
Post a Comment