Visas based on class and hypocrisy

Bill F.

While poor and desperate refugees from war-torn and devastated countries are incarcerated and abused by the Australian government, quick and easy visas are being granted to millionaires from China.

An article by Eryk Bagshaw in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age exposes the hypocrisy of both the Australian and Chinese governments and the class interests they serve. See (https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/millionaire-migrants-pouring-into-australia-20180706-p4zpzm.html )

Quoting Department of Home Affairs data, the article points out that “Visa applications in the Business Innovation and Investment Programme, which includes investors with more than $1 million in business assets, jumped by 74 per cent in 2016-17 up from 5781 to 9051. Of those 7260 were approved, compared to 6484 in 2014-15.”

The figures make a mockery of claims by the Business Council of Australia and its government lackeys that the corporate and top income tax rates need to be cut to attract foreign investment when Australia has brought in more millionaires than any other country, including low-tax Singapore (15%).

Fat-cat millionaires with dollars to invest can get their residency visa inside of two months, without completing the usual immigration and English language tests. A ‘significant investor stream’ further encourages those with $5 million in spare cash. These visas allow the family to move to Australia and their children to attend schools and universities, but only really require the visa holder to spend 40 days actually living in the country.

These special visas have been tailored to satisfy the demands of big business in Australia for more and more capital, much of which has previously benefitted the interests of US and European imperialisms as the dominant economic influences. Yet this influence is now coming increasingly under challenge from Chinese interests and those sections of the local ruling class that are shifting their loyalties.  

China (including Hong Kong) accounts for more than 90 per cent of the high-wealth visa applications, with much smaller numbers from Malaysia, South Africa, and more recently, Vietnam.

Yet China has passed laws nominally restricting individuals from exchanging any more than US$50,000 (in Chinese currency) in a year. Bank and government approval is also required for any single transaction exceeding US$5 million and for investment transfers of larger amounts. None of this seems to deter the new class of Chinese millionaires seeking Australian residency and investing in the corporations and multinational companies that dominate monopoly capitalism here. Presumably much of it just gets ticked off by the Chinese government.

State-supervised capitalism is not socialism

And how did all these Chinese millionaires arise? Why has such massive inequality developed in a ‘socialist’ country and how can you have socialism without collective ownership and control by the working class? 

Could it have something to do with the changes in China since 1983 – the dismantling of the communes and the privatisation of land forcing millions of peasants into the cities to become cheap labour for local and foreign capitalists and so-called ‘entrepreneurs’. Could it have something to do with the privatisation of many government industries and institutions, including healthcare and education? Could it have something to do with the influx of multinational corporations into China’s special economic zones? Have these developments embracing capitalism led to wide-spread corruption and nepotism and the decay of socialist morality?

Australian independence from imperialism

The interests of the Australian people are not served by foreign investors and tax-dodging corporations from either the US or China jostling for control of our industries and resources. The local national bourgeoisie is silent on this, crushed and intimidated by the greedy banks and collaborating politicians. The working class is the only force capable of asserting national independence and mobilising the people to take control of our country. 

South African revolutionaries call Dutton’s bluff

Nick G.

The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania has called on Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to “come to our country and collect all his fellow racists who feel that they cannot live together with normal people and go live where they are accepted in that unbecoming society”.

This follows Dutton’s call to fast-track visa applications by white South African farmers who he said were facing “horrific circumstances” of being murdered and having their land taken away.

He said they deserved to be resettled in a “civilised country”, a clear slur on South Africa.

He said they would be “hard-working and not become dependent on welfare”, a clear slur on non-white refugees accepted into Australia.

He said "They're the sorts of migrants that we want to bring into our country," a clear slur on the unfortunates stranded in Nauru and in Papua New Guinea.

He said all of this after only recently stating that Australia should further reduce the number of migrants coming to Australia.

Dutton’s racially-based sympathy for white South African landowners stands in stark contrast to his indifference to the horrific circumstances of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslin minority, 700,000 of whom have fled to Bangladesh to escape rape and murder

It stands in stark contrast to the horrific circumstances of the continuing murder of unarmed blacks in the USA. 

Data collected by the Washington Post on the use of lethal force by police officers in 2015, 2016, and 2017 indicate that, relative to the portion of the population, Blacks are over-represented among all those killed by police under all circumstances. Blacks made up 13% of the population. However, in 2015 they accounted for 26% of those that were killed by police, in 2016, 24%, and in 2017, 22% of all those killed by police. In other words, Blacks were the victims of the lethal use of force by police at nearly twice their rate in the general population. Whites make up the plurality of victims of police use of lethal force (45% in 2017), BUT they also make the majority of the population (62% in 2015).

The incidents that drive the protests and organization of Black Lives Matter are largely focused on the police use of lethal force on unarmed blacks.

Dutton has ignored non-white victims of horrific circumstances.

Even in South Africa, owing to apartheid’s legacy of poverty amongst the black population, violence and murder is highest amongst blacks.

Last week Gareth Newham at South Africa’s Institute for Social Studies reported “young black males living in poor urban areas” faced a higher risk of being murdered, citing a murder rate in those areas of between 200 and 300 per 100,00 people.

He said the highest estimates of farm murders, regardless of race, stood at 133 per 100,000 people.

Dutton’s racist support for white South African farmers who are resisting an entirely justified and long-overdue redistribution of land has been driven by far-right ideologists and organisations, as revealed in the Guardian.

The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, created in 1959, was the most militant opponent of apartheid.

Kenneth Mokgatlhe, PAC spokesperson said in a statement that the socialist party was not taken aback to hear the remarks made by Dutton that "some or all white people will be rescued from our country to Sydney".

"We are not worried at all," Mokgatlhe said. "We must all remind ourselves that Australia was stolen by Europeans the same way in which our country was dispossessed from us, native owners. We sympathise with the dispossessed people of Australia, the aboriginal owners of that country who are today landless like a majority of African people in this country," he said.

"The PAC invite the Australian Minister to come to our country and collect all his fellow racists who feel that they cannot live together with normal people and go live where they are accepted in that unbecoming society," said Mokgatlhe.

"We uncompromisingly support the Indigenous dispossessed Australians to get their land back without compensation from criminals who went around the world capturing land".

Mokgatlhe however reiterated that "PAC welcomed the call by Australian government to collect the land criminals who are not willing to give land back to its rightful owners to go to Australia which has been declared a haven of racists".

PNG Supreme Court rules Australian “Guantanamo” illegal

Nick G.

By unanimous decision of the Full Bench of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court, the Australian concentration camp for asylum seekers on Manus Island has been declared illegal, unconstitutional and a breach of asylum seekers’ human rights.

The Australia and PNG governments have been ordered to close the camp “forthwith”.

The PNG Supreme Court decision is in marked contrast to the decision by the Australian High Court, delivered in February, which found that offshore detention of asylum seekers was constitutional.

The difference in interpretations lies in the fundamental differences between the constitutions of the two countries.

The Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, to give it its full title, was enacted by the PNG parliament in 1975 and enshrines the rules for the operation of capitalism in PNG. Significantly, it contains a lengthy Division Three (“Basic Rights”) which has provided the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision.

Australia’s Constitution was enacted by an imperial parliament and enshrines the rules for the operation of capitalism in Australia. It assumes the correctness of the seizure of Australia from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by British colonialism and reflects a compromise between the British as colonial masters, the elites and ruling classes of the separate colonies, and the representatives within the ruling class of those who favoured a central power for the newly emerging nation.

Significantly, it made no provision for defining the basic rights of the Australian people. Australia entered nationhood without a Bill of Rights and is still without one.

This means that there is no formal document in Australia upon which a decision like PNG’s Supreme Court decision can be made.

At the beginning of 2015, the Attorney-General of Australia had referred to the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) responsibility for a public Inquiry into the relationship between Commonwealth law and the exercise by Australian citizens of their traditional rights, freedoms and privileges.

In establishing the enquiry, the ALRC noted: “The Australian Constitution does not expressly or impliedly protect most of the rights, freedoms and privileges listed in the ALRC’s Terms of Reference”.

In its submission to the enquiry, the CPA (M-L) noted:

5. The rights, freedoms and privileges of the Australian people are not guaranteed under the principle of legality.  The “sovereignty of Parliament” which our law-makers so jealously guard against a Bill of Rights, allows the Parliament to make laws which encroach on our rights, freedoms and privileges so long as those laws encroach clearly and unambiguously.

6. The same applies to international law.  International treaties, conventions and other instruments provide no guarantees for the rights, freedoms and privileges of the Australian people.  So long as the sovereign Parliament makes its encroachments clearly and unambiguously it may thumb its nose at our international obligations.

We Australians live in a fool’s paradise if we think that our rights and liberties have any legal protection.  The Australian Building Construction Commission, the so-called “trigger” for the July 2 election, is living proof of that. The Australian working class has more than one reason for standing alongside asylum seekers. The future of the working class lies in the defence of the rights of all.

International opinion, from the United Nations to the New York Times, has labelled Manus Island “Australia’s ‘Guantanamo’”.

We say that the 850 men imprisoned by private company Broadspectrum (formerly Transfield) on behalf of the Australian government must be released immediately and flown to Australia to have their refugee status processed expeditiously.  As it is, around half have already been granted refugee status, yet they remain within the concentration camp as prisoners.

All asylum seekers and refugees are in one way or another, victims of capitalism and imperialism.

Responsibility for the inhuman response to their plight is shared equally between Labor and Liberal.

The people and not the politicians have morality on their side.

End the indefinite detention of asylum seekers!

Inspiring and courageous action in support of refugee children

Bill F.

Doctors, nurses, medical professionals and support and administration workers at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne have sent a sharp message to the federal government that the inhuman imprisonment of refugee children in off-shore detention centres must come to an end.

At the end of August there were 1382 men, 114 women and 93 children held on New Guinea’s Manus Island and on the small Pacific island nation of Nauru. A further 104 children are in detention on the Australian mainland, with 405 more living in community detention.

Many of these wretched people are fleeing from ethnic and religious conflicts, from corruption, poverty and violence in countries broken by imperialist greed, subversion and invasion, from countries with shattered infrastructure and dysfunctional government services.   

Hundreds of health workers at the hospital have united in a campaign to demand the release of traumatised children in immigration detention centres in Australia, Manus Island and Nauru. They have asserted their right as medical carers to refuse to release children from hospital to go back into the cruel detention centres that had traumatised them originally.

Many were dismayed and infuriated at the stationing of Border Force guards in hospital wards where children were recovering from the physical and mental abuse they had suffered in the centres.

Their anger became even greater when it was learned that the government had passed laws forbidding their fellow medical workers in the detention centres from public criticism, and a law that threatens up to two years jail for refusal to cooperate with immigration authorities.

On International Mental Health Day on October 10th a mass rally of more than 1000 health workers stood together outside the hospital and pledged to resist the government’s attempts at intimidation and harassment. 

Leading medical professionals have spoken out strongly in the media against this inhumane policy which has been endorsed and continued by both Labor and now Liberal-National coalition governments.

Dr Tom Connell, head of general medicine at the hospital, stated “In children from detention, our team see children with nightmares, bed wetting, and severe behaviour problems, children from detention develop anxiety and depression. It’s become so common that it’s almost normal in children from detention to have these symptoms. At the Children’s Hospital, our team find it’s almost impossible to treat these children effectively while they remain detained.”

Children’s Hospital paediatrician Prof Paul Monagle was also quoted: “What we see from children in detention is a whole range of physical, mental, emotional and social disturbances that are really severe, and we have no hope of improving things if we’re sending those children back to detention. Many of the children we’re seeing have spent more than half their life in detention. This is all they know and it is not what children should know. Children should be safe in a community with their family, not in detention.”

Another concerned paediatrician was Dr Kate Thomson-Bowe who said, “The emotional development of children is affected, their speech and learning can be affected and the anxiety and mental health consequences can start from very early childhood and we see that has an impact on their development long term. Children need a lot of security and opportunity to play in order to develop normally. The environment of a detention centre is so far from what develops normal opportunity, the families don’t have the opportunity to play together, the children are subject to rules and regulations that no typical child is subjected to.”

The Australian Medical association added its criticism of the government. President Brian Owler endorsed the stand of the medical workers at the hospital and stated, “The detention centres are not suitable environments for the health of all detainees, but the effects on children are far worse.”

Others to speak out included Prof Louise Newman, director of mental health at the Royal Women’s Hospital and paediatrician David Isaacs from Westmead Hospital in Sydney.

Even the chairman of the Royal Children’s Hospital, Rob Knowles, supported the stand of the medical workers at the hospital.

And, to her credit, the Victorian Health Minister Jill Hennessy challenged the federal government, “I’m extremely proud to be the health minister in a state where its doctors and nurses are putting the interest of children first. If the staff of the Royal Children’s Hospital come to the clinical view that it is not in the interests of those children to go back into detention, then we will support them.”

Needless to say, all the passion and concern was brushed aside by federal Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, an ex-copper who intends to expand the reviled detention system into the Philippines, another country struggling with extreme poverty, and dominated by a corrupt political clique who use violent gangs and military repression to keep the masses in check.

However, in the general community there was widespread support for the medical workers at the Royal Children’s Hospital. This was reflected the following day when thousands rallied across the country calling for an end to the cruel refugee detention scheme.