Above: A familiar sight in today’s Australia. Unemployed workers endure a huge queue outside a Centrelink office. Photo Credit: ABC News/RON EKKEL
FIGHT FOR SECURE JOBS FOR ALL WORKERS: FORCE COMPANIES TO INCREASE HIRING AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR BLOATED PROFITS!
30 October 2020: Bosses are using the pandemic to cut their workforce and force those still employed to toil even harder… all for the same pay. That is why even as corporations are frantically throwing workers out of jobs, their own profits are skyrocketing. They soared by 15% in just three months! Sure, some businesses are doing it hard. But overall, even small business total profits have risen. Yet the Morrison government keeps on doling out public money to the rich capitalist business owners. True, Jobkeeper did help some workers keep their jobs. That is why we demand that it be extended to cover casuals, guest workers and international students. However, the scheme has not saved the jobs of even many workers covered by the program. Moreover, the scheme has helped business owners far, far more than it has helped workers. In the long term, the huge flow of public funds into the hands of rich capitalists will lead to working class people having to pay for the resulting debt. We will be made to cop cuts to public services and welfare. And now, the Liberals’ latest budget is giving still more handouts to its capitalist mates!
However, winning jobs for workers requires not boosting bosses’ profits but the very opposite: forcing business owners to retain a bigger workforce than the level that makes them the greatest profits. We need mass struggle, including industrial action, to stop bosses cutting jobs! Let’s unite employed and unemployed workers to demand:
A ban on job cuts by any firm making a profit, however small.
A ban on job cuts by any company whose CEO has an annual package in excess of $1 million.
A ban on job cuts by any business whose profit over the previous seven years exceeds any current losses.
The forcing of any company making a profit to increase its number of full-time employees by at least twenty-five workers for every one million dollars of quarterly (i.e. three monthly) profit.
A ban on all cuts to wages and shift penalties from pre-pandemic levels.
The granting of permanency to all currently casual workers.
Any business that violates any of these measures to be confiscated and transferred into public ownership.
Instead of such a program, the ALP and Greens “opposition” parties and the pro-ALP leadership of most of our unions have accepted Morrison’s deceitful mantra that workers and their bosses “are all in this together.” They only differ with the government on the details. Additionally, Greens and ALP politicians and Laborite union leaders have long called for promoting jobs through protecting businesses from imports, backing local manufacturing companies and keeping out guest workers. But over the last several months, importing goods has become harder, local businesses have been subsidised and guest workers can’t come in. And still local bosses are throwing workers out of their jobs left, right and centre as they choose to make workers pay for the pandemic! Protectionism fails to save anyone’s job. It only divides local workers from their true allies: all the other workers of the world. Meanwhile, it very mistakenly makes workers believe that they have a common “national interest” with their own local bosses.
That is why we need a new agenda to lead our unions and the broader working class. An agenda based on the understanding that jobs for all workers can only be won through struggle against the capitalist exploiters. Such a program would be guided by the truth that to wage this struggle against the powerful capitalists, the workers movement must unite with all those hurt by the capitalist-dominated “order” – Aboriginal people suffering intense racist oppression, women workers disproportionately copping insecure jobs, guest workers and international students denied the rights of citizenship and Chinese, other Asian, Muslim and African people hit with redneck attacks. And when the capitalist exploiters scream that forcing them to hire more workers than they want will cause economic collapse, we must respond: if your system cannot tolerate the obvious measures needed to ensure secure jobs for all workers then your system has simply got to go! We working class people and our allies will take over the economy and run it based on socialist collective ownership for the benefit of us all.
For those who want to print out this article to distribute to potentially interested work mates, fellow union members and friends, here is a PDF version of this article in leaflet form (one single-sided A4 page):
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Photo Above: Police roughly arrest a mother for attempting to visit her children who are residing in one of Melbourne’s locked down public housing towers.
A Deadly Tale of Nationalist Arrogance,
Capitalist Greed,
Cold War Fear Mongering and Dog Whistling to Racism
Racism, Capitalism and Pandemic in Australia
“First
World” Arrogance and Callous Indifference for the Poor, Ill and Elderly
“Herd
Immunity” Means Culling of the Herd
The
Victorian ALP Government’s Cruelly Implemented Lockdown of Public Housing
Tenants
U.S.,
Britain, Australia and the Inherent Deficiencies of the Capitalist System
The
Politically Motivated Selection of Travel Restrictions Caused the Death of
Scores of Australians
All
the Ugliness Comes Out
For
United Working Class Struggle!
9 July 2020: In just the last week, Australia has had well over a thousand people newly infected with COVID-19. The coronavirus is spreading quickly in Melbourne’s working class suburbs. Migrant workers, in particular, often work in crucial frontline roles – as supermarket workers, cleaners, transport workers, health sector employees etc – where it is harder to protect oneself from catching infectious diseases. Rather than responding to the virus spread in migrant working class areas with compassion and support, the Australian ruling class, from its politicians to its media to its police enforcers, have responded with stigmatisation and cruelty.
Worldwide,
the current pandemic has killed over half a million people. Such infectious
diseases have caused immense suffering to humans since time immemorial. The H1N1
influenza A pandemic that started in the latter months of World War 1 killed
between 21 million and 100 million people! That outbreak “originated” in the
U.S. and was then carried by infected troops to Europe [1]. The virus was
colloquially known as the “Spanish Flu” but this was only because Spain, a
neutral country during the war, did not censor reports on the epidemic.
The emergence of a disease that causes widespread death is a natural disaster that could “originate” anywhere. Naturally, on sheer probability, a disease is more likely to start in one of the countries with the largest populations. However, speaking about “where a disease started” is a misnomer. For new viruses and bacteria are merely mutations of previously existing ones. These organisms are constantly evolving. Some animal-hosted viruses may jump from animal to human in a form already quite adapted to a human host, while others may mutate within humans for long periods before becoming infectious. Therefore, speaking about “where a virus started” depends on how far you want to go back in time.
The outbreak
of an infectious disease is impossible to stop at its source. Before the first
people infected become ill enough to seek treatment they would have likely passed
the disease onto others. Moreover, before there is enough cases for doctors to
notice the new threat, the disease would have spread still further. This is
especially the case for COVID-19, which while being truly deadly for many only
produces mild symptoms in most. Once there is a spread of a new disease, the amount
of suffering that it causes, as with any natural disaster, depends much on the
efforts of humans and our social systems. As a result, the level of suffering
caused by the new virus has varied greatly from country to country.
All the above indicates just how unscientific was the right-wing Australian government’s proposal for an international “inquiry” focused solely on the “origin” of COVID-19. Those issues are of scientific interest. However, thefar more important issue is that part of the pandemic that can actually be controlled: that is once there was an initial spread how effective were the measures taken to contain it. Fortunately, the focus of the government’s proposal was in fair part rejected by most countries [2]. Instead, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution to investigate the overall response to the pandemic rather than on only its origins. The Australian government’s rebuffed emphasis, which had been fully backed by the ALP “opposition,” was not simply a scientific error. It was politically motivated. Their aim was to help themselves and their U.S. allies to score propaganda points against China, the world’s largest socialistic country, where they claim that the virus “originated” from (although recent evidence may suggest otherwise). They had another aim too. By getting everyone obsessed with the “origins” of the virus, Australia’s rulers wanted to divert people from the fact that their own response to the pandemic has been deeply flawed and that of their key allies, the U.S. and Britain, downright catastrophic [3] [4].
Australian authorities endlessly boast about their “successful” response to the coronavirus threat. However, their boast is true only in comparison with the likes of the U.S., Brazil, Britain, Russia, Sweden and India which have had really failed responses. Australia’s death toll per resident from the pandemic is now 30% higher than China’s despite Australia having had the huge advantage of having time to prepare for the arrival of the virus [5] [6]. Furthermore, while China has thus far avoided a large second wave, Australia’s second biggest city is experiencing just such a virus resurgence. Moreover, in comparison with some countries with more difficult circumstances, including many of those that share borders with China and, thus, were more vulnerable to a virus spread from Wuhan, the suffering caused by COVID-19 is far worse in Australia. It is important to note that five of the countries that share borders with China have thus far had no deaths from COVID-19 whatsoever!
Three of these countries sharing borders with China and currently having no COVID-19 deaths are socialistic countries like China itself. Those countries are Vietnam, North Korea and Laos [7] [8] [9]. The socialist system, in which the key means of production are under collective ownership, enables resources to be pooled to respond to natural disasters. Nevertheless, two of the countries bordering China that currently have had no coronavirus deaths – Mongolia and Bhutan [10] [11] – are not socialistic. This shows that, although a country burdened by capitalist rule would not be able to replicate the response that socialistic China made had they been faced with similar circumstances of a previously unknown disease spreading quickly, even a capitalist country could, with correct policies, make an effective response provided they had forewarning that the virus was on its way, as Australia certainly did. Other lower income countries have also responded more successfully to the virus than Australian authorities have. Rwanda has had just three COVID-19 deaths so far compared to the 106 in Australia [12].
That COVID-19 has not, at this time, devastated Australia to the extent that it has the U.S and Britain is more due to this country’s geography rather than good management. Firstly, Australia is an island and islands are a lot easier to implement quarantine measures in. Thus, many island nations have fared comparatively well during this pandemic. Many of Australia’s island neighbours have not had a single death from the coronavirus including Fiji and New Caledonia [13] [14]. The second factor that should have made it relatively easy to deal with a virus threat here is the fact that Australia has one of the world’s lowest population densities. This matters, because when people are living more tightly together diseases naturally spread more quickly. Thus, Thailand faced difficult circumstances because not only was she the second country to report a coronavirus case, Thailand has a population density that is 39 times that of Australia. Yet Thailand has had only slightly over half the number of deaths as in Australia, despite having nearly three times Australia’s population [15].
“First World” Arrogance and Callous
Indifference for the Poor, Ill and Elderly
The
Australian government exaggerated their capacity to deal with the pandemic. On
February 28, Morrison insisted that because his government had “acted quickly”,
“there is no need for us to be moving towards not having mass gatherings of
people” [16]. It took a whole 50 days after Australia had reported its first
case before the government implemented any social distancing measures [17] [18].
As professor at the University of New South Wales, Bill Bowtell said of the
government’s response [19]:
“Let’s cut to the chase, they were warned 12 weeks ago by WHO and others what was coming. They did not accumulate test kits. They did not accumulate the necessary emergency equipment. They did not undertake a public education campaign. They gave no money to science, no money to research, no money to the International Vaccine Institute, no money to WHO. They diligently did not do anything useful.”
So
what drove the leaders of Australia and other “like-minded countries” to be so
tardy in responding to COVID-19? Arrogant over-confidence is part of the story.
On March 11, still four days before any social distancing measures were
implemented, health minister Greg Hunt boasted for the umpteenth time [20] [21]
[22] that “we are as well prepared as any country in the world” [23]. In the
following two months alone, a further 94 people would tragically lose their
lives to the disease in Australia.
The
leaders of the imperialist countries were clouded by a condescending attitude
to the former colonies and semi-colonies that they saw initially affected by
the virus. They saw their own systems as superior. So they thought that they
did not need to quickly implement social distancing and urgently build up
stocks. Moreover, they swallowed their own propaganda about China. They
thought: surely we will be able to respond more effectively than a socialistic
country. History sure did prove them wrong!
However,
there was also something even more sinister than imperial arrogance that held back
the American, Australian and other Western leaders from responding quickly
enough to the pandemic. On February 25, Trump made a tweet whose last sentence
gave the game away [24]:
“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA…. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Trump and his ilk downplayed the virus threat and therefore delayed the implementation of social distancing because they did not want measures that would disrupt business activity and harm the stock market. In short, the U.S. rulers put the profits of capitalists way ahead of the well-being of the masses. This became even more pronounced once it became clear who the virus was especially killing: black and brown people as well as frontline workers who were often from black and migrant communities themselves [25]. Egged on by extreme white supremacists, right-wing politicians demanded the end of lockdowns despite the virus continuing to spread like wildfire. This is what Republican and Democrat state governors have done. As a result, the virus is now spreading even more disastrously in the U.S.
“Herd
Immunity” Means Culling of the Herd
In Britain, the unashamed indifference to the loss of lives caused by COVID-19, which in the U.S. was expressed by far-right lunatics, entirely shaped the policy of authorities there in the early phase of the pandemic. In mid-March, the British regime revealed that its “strategy” was to get 60% of the population infected “to build up some kind of herd immunity so more people are immune…” [26] [27]! This would have resulted in between 400,000 and 1.4 million residents of Britain dying to achieve “herd immunity” so that its economy would not be hurt by second waves of infection! In practice such a pursuit of “herd immunity” actually means a culling of the herd. A culling of those too elderly or ill to any longer pull the cart of the capitalist big wigs. A culling of those working in low-skilled frontline jobs more vulnerable to being infected but whom the exploiting class considers more easily replaceable by other “beasts of burden”. A culling of the poor population living in over-crowded housing where diseases transmit easily and who are thought of as “surplus” herd by a good number of the ruling class.
It
was not until late March that the conservative British government led by Boris
Johnson changed their strategy and began implementing social distancing. It
seems that the ruling class realised that although it was low-paid workers,
Britain’s black population and working-class Asian communities that were being
hit hardest, even some members of the ruling class were also being affected.
Yet by the time that the British regime instituted restrictions on gatherings, over
11,000 people in England alone had already been infected [28]. It was way too
late. The disease had already spread rampantly and could no longer be contained
easily. That is why, other than for a couple of tiny countries, Britain has the
second highest number of deaths per person in the world from the coronavirus [29].
It has been not only countries with conservative governments that implemented callous “herd immunity” strategies. So did the social democrat-run, capitalist state in Sweden. The result was disastrous [30]! The Australian government also seriously flirted with a “herd immunity” policy three months ago. In mid-March, Morrison mentioned “herd immunity” was a reason for keeping schools open [31]. Later, the government pulled back after condemnation from health experts. It seems that the Liberal government’s widely denounced response to last summer’s bushfires has made them concerned to appear like they are showing more support for those who could be impacted by the pandemic. Moreover, with the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) already having taken an approach that put their population health’s ahead of business profits, the Australian regime, obsessed as it is with scoring propaganda points against its socialistic adversary, felt constrained to put a greater weight on curbing the virus than they otherwise would have in order to not to appear callous in comparison. Yet, in capitalist societies the masses face a double-edged sword during a pandemic. On the one hand, governments could delay introducing preventative measures leading to enormous loss of life. Yet if governments do implement social distancing, given that bosses in capitalist states have the unrestricted right to lay off workers, huge numbers of workers lose their jobs or have their number of shifts slashed.
After Australian authorities belatedly implemented some of the necessary measures to curb the pandemic and maintained them for a period, as lockdowns ate into business profits, capitalists, big and small, clamoured for a rapid re-opening. As a result the federal government and state Liberal and ALP governments alike, who ultimately all serve the capitalist class, engaged in a risky rollback of measures even while significant levels of infections remain in the community. In the two weeks prior to most of Australia beginning major re-opening on June 1, this country with a population of 25 million had 144 new cases [32] [33]. By contrast, in the two weeks prior to China’s significant re-opening of the worst affected city of Wuhan on April 8, that country had 580 new cases [5] in a country with a population 57 times larger than Australia’s. That means that Australian governments attempted a rollback of social distancing when the virus was spreading 14 times more intensely than it was in China when she implemented similar re-openings. This recklessly quick re-opening is the primary cause of Melbourne’s second wave of infections.
The Victorian ALP Government’s Cruelly Implemented Lockdown of Public Housing Tenants
Among those hardest hit by the virus second wave are public housing tenants living in tower blocks. This is due to the negligence of the Daniel Andrews-led, Victorian Labor government. Victorian authorities failed to ensure adequate disinfection of common areas in these towers. Even regular cleaning of such common areas is minimal as governments across Australia cut down spending on public housing maintenance in order to help fund tax cuts for the rich and ever increasing budgets for police, ASIO and the military. Since COVID-19 struck, large public housing blocks have only been provided with one hand sanitiser dispenser per tower, if at all, and these are often left empty [34]. What has also made tenants especially vulnerable to virus transmission is that they have often been made to stay in over-crowded units because successive Labor and Liberal governments across the country have sold off so much public housing that those able to access it have had to accept being squeezed into tiny apartments.
After residents in public housing blocks were inevitably hit with the consequences of such negligence, the Andrews government responded by banning thousands of residents in public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne from leaving their units. The harsh manner in which authorities have implemented the hard lockdown indicates that this measure is not mainly about trying to genuinely protect the low income public housing tenants, many of whom are from African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Islander backgrounds. Public health workers were not sent in to explain the decision or to inform tenants of what needed to be done to protect their lives. Instead, residents first knew that they were being locked in when large hordes of police appeared at their buildings and started stopping residents from leaving. Given that many of the tenants have previously suffered racist harassment from Australian cops – and some earlier from refugee detention centre guards – the presence of massive numbers of police keeping them locked up has been very frightening for many of the locked down tenants. These police have been rude and harsh. Over the first two days of the lockdown, they even prevented volunteers and friends from leaving food, medicine and other supplies for hungry tenants to pick up [35]. Most despicably, police brutally arrested a member of a charity trying to leave food for residents. It was only after loud protests from social workers that police released their hold on the arrested charity worker as the terrified dark skinned man cried out desperately, “I can’t breathe.” Police have also arrested frustrated tenants trying to hold impromptu protests against the cruelty of lockdown conditions.
Victorian police arrest a charity worker who was attempting to leave behind food for tenants in a locked down Melbourne public housing tower. During the arrest, as the police subjected him to brutal force, the dark-skinned man cried out desperately, “I can’t breathe.” Thanks to the protests of a social worker who was videoing the incident and others, the police finally eased their dangerous hold on the charity worker. Photo Credit: Tigist Kebede – Instagram
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Tenants
have been left hungry and scared after the supplies of food and other
essentials promised by the government did not even start to be provided until
some 36 to 48 hours after the start of the lockdown. When supplies finally
arrived they were often grossly inadequate to feed families in the apartments.
The food deliveries typically consisted of tins of out of date food. Fresh food
and vegetables were not provided. The only decent meals that some locked down
residents were finally able to receive came through the generous efforts of
volunteer social organisations and trade unions.
A photo taken by a locked down tenant of the food deliveries given by the Victorian government to public housing tenants subjected to a hard lockdown. The authorities provided no fresh food. Weetbix was given but there was no milk. A can of tuna was provided but there was no bread. As well as being of poor quality, not very healthy at all and often out of date, the food provided was often woefully inadequate for families.
In the midst of a pandemic we support restrictions genuinely made to protect people from being infected. However, aside from the incredible cruelty at the way that this lockdown has been implemented and the stigmatisation involved with only applying a hard lockdown to low-income tenants who are overwhelmingly people of colour, its actual value in terms of protecting residents is questionable. With the coronavirus likely to spread through aerosol droplets and with low-income tenants unable to afford the heating expenses that would arise from keeping their windows open to let infected air disperse, having COVID positive and negative cases alike locked into cramped tiny apartments in a packed tower block is a recipe for virus spread both within households and through airflow under and around doors from room to room. If authorities were actually serious about protecting Melbourne public housing residents they would ensure that infected people could be moved into safer quarantine at hospitals or hotels. It seems that this lockdown is not about protecting the interests of tenants but has more than a whiff of being a measured aimed at sacrificing the well-being of low-income, overwhelmingly non-white skinned residents in order to stop the virus spreading to wealthier neighbourhoods.
The contrast between this Melbourne hard lockdown of public housing and the earlier lockdown in China’s hard-hit Wuhan could not be more different. Firstly, that lockdown in Wuhan did not single out low-income people but applied equally to everyone regardless of how wealthy they were. Moreover, the success of that lock down was achieved because, after Chinese health experts realised how easily the virus spreads among family members and among residents in the same apartment blocks, PRC authorities moved all COVID positive people into hospitals both to give them proper care and to ensure that they did not unwittingly transmit the virus onto others. Thirdly, rather than being implemented through police repression, the Wuhan lockdown was based on grass-roots mobilisation. Teams consisting of volunteers, neighbourhood collective representatives and community workers went door to door to explain pandemic measures and ascertain residents’ needs. As a result the overwhelming majority of people complied with measures. In the tiny percentage of cases where a person tried to violate lockdowns it was primarily these grassroots forces rather than police who would enforce measures. Therefore, those who tried to violate Wuhan’s lockdown were, for the most part, not arrested but usually escorted – and in a very small number of cases literally dragged – back to their homes by grassroots activists who were often their very own neighbours. Harsh police repression in China was really only meted out – and rightly so – to business owners trying to profiteer from the crisis by jacking up prices. Fourthly, the PRC government and local Communist Party branches ensured that Wuhan residents were actually given the supplies promised including fresh fruit and vegetables. Social media photos show many people there eating famously tasty Chinese meals during their lockdown.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the hard lockdown of certain public housing towers in Melbourne and the earlier lockdown in Wuhan is in the differing attitudes of the ruling establishments in the two countries to the locked down residents. Here, locked down tenants have been subjected to despicable racist and anti-working class insults by white supremacist politicians like Pauline Hanson and by right-wing mainstream media outlets. In contrast, China’s state media heaped praise on the residents of Wuhan for enduring a lockdown that would reduce the spread of the virus to other parts of China and would buy time for the rest of the world to respond to the virus threat. Iconic Chinese landmarks in major cities were lit up with signs expressing solidarity with the people of Wuhan [36]. China’s president repeatedly praised Wuhan’s people as “heroic” [37]. We suggest that people don’t hold their breadth waiting for Scott Morrison to praise the locked down public housing residents of Melbourne as “heroic” or for the Sydney Opera House to light up with a solidarity message for these tenants!
U.S.,
Britain, Australia and the Inherent Deficiencies of the Capitalist System
Even if governments in the U.S.A, Australia and other Western countries hypothetically set aside their disdain for the interests of working class people and their racial bias and truly sought to implement all the policies necessary to suppress the coronavirus threat, the amount that they could actually achieve is hampered by the structure of their societies. In capitalist societies the key means of production are owned by wealthy individual capitalists with total “freedom” to determine production. In the manufacturing sector, these capitalist bosses largely calculated that it was not profitable enough for them to quickly switch over their production to make vitally needed pandemic relief goods. The few that did mostly did so too slowly. As a result, in the crucial early period of the pandemic here, health workers were bitterly complaining about the shortage of masks and other PPE (personal protective equipment). Ironically, given the Morrison regime’s attacks on China over the pandemic, the medical mask shortage was only relieved after the Australian government procured a big quantity of masks from China in mid-April [38]. However, there remains an inadequate amount of protective suits here. Therefore, Australian health workers and others working in areas of high risk of contracting, or passing on, COVID-19 have often not been able to wear the highly effective head-to-toe, spacesuit-style protective gear that nurses, doctors and sanitation workers in socialistic China were equipped with. This is a major cause of the deadly virus spread centered around Tasmania’s North West Regional Hospital three months ago and the later outbreak at Anglicare Sydney’s nursing home in Penrith. It is also the key reason for the clusters of cases that originated when the virus jumped from returned travelers quarantined at Melbourne’s Stamford Plaza onto contractors working at the hotel.
Similarly, in the crucial earlier period of the pandemic, there were not enough testing kits available. Even people with symptoms could not get tested unless they had recently returned from overseas or if they had contact with a known case. As a result the virus spread here in that period partly undetected.
The Politically Motivated Selection of Travel Restrictions Caused the Death of Scores of Australians
On February 1, Canberra banned non-citizens and non-permanent residents from any part of China from entering Australia. This is despite China having already quarantined off Wuhan and other hard hit cities in Hubei Province, meaning that people from the part of China where the virus was concentrated could not enter Australia anyway. At the end of February, the Australian government continued to maintain this travel ban specifically only on all of China. Yet by then, the coronavirus was spreading much more quickly in South Korea [39] and Italy [40] than in China outside of quarantined-off Hubei. One did not even need to look at China’s data to know this. At the end of February, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, informed that of the 40,000 people re-entering Australia from China in February not one single person had tested positive for COVID-19 [41].
Now we do not seek the “evening out” of xenophobic measures by having travel bans introduced more uniformly! We are opposed to outright bans on foreign nationals from any country. We note that, despite the virus being far better contained in China today than in almost every other large country, China itself has not imposed an outright ban on arrivals from any country. However, in cases of a pandemic where there is a significantly higher prevalence of a disease in an overseas country then it is reasonable for measures to be taken to screen arrivals from that country and place them into quarantine for a period.
It was not until March 1 that the Australian government introduced restrictions on arrivals from another country other than China. But that country was again a state whom the Australian government saw as an adversary (although in this case not a socialistic country)! That country was Iran, the country whom the Australian government sought to intimidate in January by joining a threatening U.S. naval operation in waters nearby to Iran. The Australian state’s selective adoption of Iran as the second country from whom arrivals would face special restrictions seemed to be motivated, at least in part, by an effort to create fear of Iran. After all, while Iran had 733 cases in the three days prior to the ban [42], South Korea and Italy which both have smaller populations had, respectively, 1,970 cases [39] and 1,047 cases [40] in that same period.
Finally on March 5, the Australian government imposed a travel ban on a country that was not an adversary: that is, South Korea. However, while capitalist South Korea is certainly an ally of Australian imperialism, nevertheless as a rule Koreans are still not white. So for a regime cynically selecting the countries that it imposes travel bans on out of political considerations, they no doubt saw listing South Korea as at least subtly contributing to a fear of Asians. The Morrison government sees such underhanded fear-mongering as “useful” in order to divert people’s frustrations at the lack of secure jobs, the shortage of affordable rental accommodation and other hardships caused by their system onto a soft target.
Meanwhile, by the time that the travel ban on South Korea was imposed, the virus was spreading more than a hundred times faster per person in Italy than in China [5] [40]. Yet the Australian government was delaying introducing any quarantine requirements on arrivals from Italy while maintaining a travel ban on arrivals from China. On March 9, Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, struggled to answer reporters’ questions on why the ban was imposed on China but not Italy [43]. Murphy stated that, “… we know we can’t really just put bans in place for an increasing number of countries.” But why choose to have the ban on China and not other countries when the virus was actually spreading massively faster in those other countries – arrivals from which Australia did not even then require to self-quarantine? Perhaps Murphy struggled with the question because it was the Morrison government that pressured the health bureaucrats to “advise” such a politically-motivated choice of countries to impose travel bans on. On the other hand, it could simply be that these highly paid bureaucrats see the world through the same lens as the rich people’s government they serve under.
It was only on March 11 as the death rate in Italy soared even more alarmingly that the government imposed the same measures on arrivals from Italy that were imposed on those from China. In the meantime, the coronavirus was also now spreading much faster in other European countries and in the U.S. than it was in China. In the three days up to March 15, for example, Germany, which has a population 17 times smaller than China’s, had 3068 new cases [44] as opposed to just 47 in all of China. Meanwhile, in Spain the number of new cases in the previous three days was 3,200 times higher per person than in China [45] [5]. Yet it was not until March 20 that the Morrison government placed the same restrictions on entrants from other countries that it had imposed on arrivals from China seven weeks previously.
The delay by the government in introducing any quarantining of people entering from the virus-ravaged United States and Europe, even while maintaining a China travel ban, led to some spectacular instances of “First World” arrivals spreading the virus here. Many cases can be traced back to a high-society party in the U.S. luxury resort of Aspen hosted by Australian tycoon and Liberal Party powerbroker, Andrew Abercrombie [46]. Around a dozen of the rich attendees, many of whom were Victorians, contracted the virus there. The infected Australians then returned in March and spread the virus to dozens upon dozens of others. One couple, confirmed as being infected at the high-society event, defied directions and visited shops in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, likely causing the sudden outbreak of 35 cases in the area. Another person from the U.S. resort cluster infected many others after attending a 21st birthday party in a wealthy Melbourne suburb [47]. However, she was merely following the health advice at the time, which did not require arrivals from the U.S. to even self-isolate. Earlier, in events un-connected to the Aspen party, a doctor returning to Melbourne from the U.S. with a runny nose then treated 70 patients before being diagnosed with COVID-19 a week after his arrival [48]. However, it is not the doctor who was only at fault here. Well into March, the Australian government was still asking only people who arrived from certain “high-risk countries” (which they then deemed to be only China, Iran and South Korea) to get tested should they have symptoms.
Prior to the implementation of quarantining of arrivals from all countries, Australian passengers from cruise ships, which had already proven to be petri dishes of disease growth, were also often not tested upon arrival. On March 19, Australian authorities failed to screen 2,700 passengers, many of whom were ill, who disembarked from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. The hapless passengers then infected others when they travelled home on trains, buses and flights. At least twenty-two passengers ended up dying from COVID-19. People infected aboard the ship also unwittingly passed the virus onto staff at Tasmania’s North West Hospital, starting a massive outbreak in the region.
Passengers walk away after getting off the Ruby Princess cruise ship docked at Sydney’s Circular Quay. Although many passengers were known to be sick aboard the ship, Australian authorities did not apply any screening, testing or quarantine to any passengers when they alighted from the ship on March 19. As a result, infected passengers unwittingly transmitted the disease onto others – including triggering the North-West Tasmania outbreak that tragically took eleven lives. In order to single out and demonise socialistic China, the Australian government delayed introducing the quarantine restrictions applied to travellers from China onto arrivals from cruise ships, Europe and America, even after it became very obvious that the rate of virus spread in these regions was hundreds of times faster than it was in China by then. On the day that passengers left the Ruby Princess, arrivals from cruise ships, Europe and America were not subject to the same restrictions as arrivals from China. This distortion of health policy to meet Cold War agendas led to travellers from Europe, America and cruise ships unwittingly spreading the virus in large amounts within Australia, unnecessarily causing the deaths of dozens and dozens of people and greatly increasing the level of job losses caused by the pandemic.
The fact is that a large proportion of cases came into Australia from America, Europe or cruise ships. Just how large? Up to April 30, the last day that Australian authorities published the chart “confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas by region”[49], a whopping 85% of all overseas acquired cases entered from the Americas, Europe or cruise ships! Given that Australian Department of Health data showed that up to April 30 there were in total 4,295 overseas acquired cases [50], this meant that 3,651 coronavirus-infected people entered Australia from Europe, America or cruise ships up to April 30. By contrast, the department’s infographic [49] showed that just 36 cases (a tiny 0.83% of all overseas acquired cases) entered from the entire North-East Asian region that includes China as well as South Korea and Japan! It is worth noting too that since arrivals from China had been carefully screened from the very start of the pandemic and that those still able to enter after the travel ban were forced to quarantine, arrivals from China did not cause any of the virus spread within Australia at all. The opposite was true, however, for arrivals from Europe and America. This is especially the case for the nearly two thousand infected people who arrived from these regions prior to the implementation of concentrated quarantining on March 29. Not only were they not required to even undergo home quarantining until mid-March (unlike arrivals from China, Iran and later South Korea), authorities did not even tell them to get tested until well into March even if they had symptoms! As a result many did not even know that they were infected until much later and, thus, passed the virus onto others. Other than for the likes of the upper class snobs returning from the high society Aspen party who refused directions to self-quarantine, this was of course not their fault at all. These people, just like the Ruby Princess passengers, were themselves victims of government policy. Not knowing that they were at high risk meant that they did not seek out early treatment meaning that their symptoms often became worse than they should have. Nevertheless, it was these thousands of COVID-19 cases arriving from Europe and America, along with infections caused by the Ruby Princess that became the source of most of the community transmission within Australia in its first wave.
The Australian government’s own data showed that the overwhelming majority of overseas acquired coronavirus cases entered Australia from Europe, America or cruise ships. By the end of April 2020, just a tiny 0.8% of cases entered Australia from the entire North-East Asian region that includes China and also South Korea & Japan. This proportion is even lower today.
Australian authorities were well aware that COVID-19 was mostly entering from Europe and America. Why then did they not move to stop the importation of cases from these regions much sooner even as they maintained a travel ban on China well after she had almost completely suppressed the virus threat? Certainly there must have been some First World chauvinism – and a degree of underlying racial prejudice – at play. But that cannot fully explain a policy so at variance with the science. There was a factor still more sinister. For in order to achieve their goal of portraying Red China negatively, the Australian regime had to maintain their specific travel ban on only China for as long as possible. And then when they were compelled to have to bring in quarantining measures on other countries, they needed to ensure that this was implemented on as few countries as possible so that as much suspicious focus could still be maintained on China. Australia’s capitalist exploiting class are obsessed with demonising socialistic China because they want to make the Australian masses acquiesce to the Australian regime’s authoritarian moves to increase the powers of the ASIO secret police, further increase funding for spy agencies and arm their military with $270 billion of new long-range missiles.
In a major speech three weeks ago, foreign minister Marise Payne, stung by China calling out rampant racism within Australia, said that “disinformation” during the pandemic “will cost lives.” She was right! Except that disinformation is coming not from China but from the Australian regime – most notably through using the skewed application of country-specific quarantine measures – and is aimed at misleading people into thinking that the main danger of virus importation was from China. This distortion of pandemic policy to meet Cold War disinformation agendas cost the lives of dozens of Australians who would not have caught the disease from community transmission had authorities taken the scientifically mandated course of introducing earlier testing and quarantining of arrivals from the U.S., Italy, Germany, Britain etc. Let’s not forget, however, that it is not only the Morrison government that is culpable here.As Anthony Albanese has often remarked, “the Labor Party was at one with the government on this one.”
All the
Ugliness Comes Out
Assisted by the daily negative stories about socialistic China spread by the tycoon and government-owned media, the false impression that the Morrison regime created that COVID-19 was introduced into Australia by arrivals from China was a shot in the arm for those already filled with white supremacist prejudice. These boosted-up racists then proceeded to unleash a horrific wave of physical attacks, abuse and threats of violence against ethnic Chinese people throughout Australia. Other people of Asian background have inevitably also been targeted.
In the face of the Chinese government warning its tourists and international students of the danger of racist attack in Australia, the Morrison government has tried to greatly downplay the threat to Asian people posed by racist violence. For those living in fear of copping such attacks this is infuriating to even be denied recognition of what they are going through. Of course, the government, the ALP opposition and top bureaucrats earlier did manage to on a rare occasion state that they were “appalled” by reports of racist assaults. However, the government and the opposition knew full well that such attacks would be the inevitable result of their earlier insistence on singling out China in the application of travel restrictions and of their later crude attempts to join hard right bigot Trump in blaming China for the pandemic. Their behaviour can be compared to that of state governments throughout this country who help throw tens of thousands of people into homelessness by selling off low-rent public housing … but then try to look good by providing some modest funding for homelessness services!
If the powers that be wanted to they could let the tyres out of the far-right drive to incite hatred against Asian people. They could simply explain to people the facts about where COVID-19 actually entered this country from. However, although Morrison did on one day casually drop the truth that a lot of cases were coming from the U.S., politicians from all the parliamentary parties refused to inform the public what a tiny proportion of overseas-acquired cases originated from China. Of course, it should not matter what country a disease is transmitted from. Viruses do not carry passports! To blame any country or people for the entry of a virus is no more valid than blaming the people of a country through which a cyclone that entered Australia had previously passed. However, in the context of there being a terrifying level of racist violence against people of Chinese appearance and the prior existence of widespread bigotry in Australia against Asian people, explaining the truth that arrivals from China did not spread the virus into the community at all is vitally needed. Instead, Australian authorities moved to actually censor their own infographic that proved this fact. From the beginning of May, the Department of Health, without explanation, suddenly stopped showing on its website the pie chart, “confirmed cases who acquired COVID-19 overseas by region.” Although largely ignored by most of the mainstream media, the department had been publishing the chart daily up to that time. Moreover, a few days after they stopped showing the chart, the department obliterated the chart from its own archives so that it could no longer be found unless someone had earlier saved the exact web address of the infographic! It is very likely that the Australian regime censored its own previously published data because it undermined their attempts to blame China for the virus spread here (see: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/australian-data-proves-chinas-pandemic-response-success/). An inevitable by-product of that censorship is that it helped extreme racists to fill the vacuum of facts with divisive lies.
Now more than ever, people need to be told the facts that stand out from the Australian regime’s censored infographic: that just 0.7% of all overseas acquired cases in Australia arrived from Sub-Saharan Africa, just over 2% from North Africa and the Middle East and just 7.5% from all of Asia, whereas seventeen out of every twenty cases entered from Europe, America or cruise ships. These facts need to be known because racist politicians, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News and right-wing shock jobs have been disgustingly blaming Asian, African, Muslim and Middle Eastern communities for the renewed virus spread in Melbourne. The entire mainstream media have fed into this racist upsurge by selectively choosing to report on the source country of an infected returned traveller almost exclusively only when that person happens to arrive from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, which is only where a small minority of cases have arrived from. Victoria’s Labor health minister, Jenny Mikakos, was guilty of the same thing last month when she stated that many of the COVID-infected returned travellers had arrived from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh [51]. Had she ever bothered to inform us earlier that the overwhelming majority of returned travellers infected with the virus then were arriving from Europe and America?! And although the Victorian ALP premier, in deference to his party’s working class base, has framed his hard lockdown of public housing residents in heavily migrant areas as a measure aimed to protect tenants, the brutally repressive manner in which it was implemented was an obvious play to redneck elements and will surely encourage white supremacist sentiments. The reality of all of these coded and open appeals to racist prejudices is that the horrific violence and abuse that rednecks have unleashed against Chinese and other East Asian people throughout this pandemic is likely to now also be turned against people of African, Muslim, South Asian, Pacific Islander and Middle Eastern backgrounds.
Meanwhile, two weeks ago, the Australian ruling class focussed on attacking yet another scapegoat for the spike in COVID-19 infections. Health minister Hunt ridiculously claimed that the mass anti-racist protests held last month were to blame [52]. This despite his own top health official saying the very opposite [53]. It is not surprising that the Australian government would make this accusation. After all, despite Hunt’s devious claim that he thought the “subject matter” of the protests “noble”, these very necessary protests were aimed not only against killer cops but against his racist, right-wing government and against racist state governments of all stripes. The truth is that not only have just four people who attended the Black Lives Matter rallies been found to have COVID-19, none of these people actually picked up the virus at the protests. The Black Lives Matter marches were outdoor events where dispersal of droplets into open air reduces the probability of virus spread. Far more dangerous is the crowding of people into indoor shops, bars and restaurants. Yet while Liberal and ALP federal and state governments tried desperately to quell the anti-racist protests aimed against them, they have been cavalier in allowing people to again crowd into dangerous, virus-spreading indoor environments.
So as you can see, the oft-repeated assertion by governments and media that “Australians have come together at this time of crisis” is simply not true. To be sure, many working class people, especially trade unionists shaped by an understanding of the need for collective action and solidarity, have responded to the crisis by upholding pandemic suppression regulations and by volunteering their time to help neighbours in need. However, many a capitalist boss has failed to provide adequate PPE for their workers or otherwise ensure COVID-safe workplace environments. Moreover, as soon as business owners were hit with any loss in revenue, these bosses did not hesitate to lay off or cut the shifts of the very workers whose toil over the years made these capitalists their fortunes. Meanwhile, some self-employed tradies, imbued with the individualistic spirit of small business owners, have continued to do jobs when pandemic restrictions have been in place and have done so in a way that recklessly ignores social distancing directives.
The dog-eat-dog nature of the capitalist economic system has created a self-centred culture that shows its most harmful side at times like these. Many people in Australia violated coronavirus social-distancing rules. This included not only beach goers but often people of wealth and power. There were not only the super-rich people returning to Victoria infected from the U.S. Aspen high society party but also Australian defence soldiers [54] and officers and recruits of the Australian Federal Police [55] who grossly violated pandemic response measures. Of course, the media and parliamentarians never highlighted that most of those violators happened to be white-skinned. Nor should they. However, when they then only focus on the ethnicity of a person who breaches social distancing guidelines when that person happens to be a person of colour, then these influencers of public opinion are consciously acting to foment racist hostility to already victimized communities.
For United Working Class Struggle!
All the prejudice and selfishness within capitalist Australian society has certainly come to the fore during this pandemic. However, something very different has been on display too. This has been evident over the last few days in the way that our trade unions, the Australian Muslim Social Services Agency, the Sikh Volunteers Australia and other community groups have organised food and supplies for locked down public housing residents in Melbourne. Such mutual aid amongst working class people and victimised ethnic groups points to the possibility of something much more powerful: working class people and all the oppressed uniting in action to oppose the racist scapegoating, fight for the measures actually needed to curb the virus spread and struggle to ensure that working class people are not made to carry the economic burden of the pandemic.
Trade unionists work with the Australian Muslim Social Services Agency to deliver food and supplies to locked down Melbourne public housing tenants. Such mutual aid amongst working class people and victimised ethnic groups points to the possibility of something much more powerful: working class people and all the oppressed uniting in action to oppose racist scapegoating, fight for the measures actually needed to curb the virus spread and struggle to ensure that working class people are not made to carry the economic burden of the pandemic. Photo credit: Victoran Trades Hall Council Facebook page
Right now we must especially stand by our sisters and brothers locked down in Melbourne public housing towers by demanding:
Police out of the public housing neighbourhoods! Send in public health and community workers instead!
The same quality food for locked down public housing tenants as those given to the more affluent returned travellers who had been quarantined in five-star hotels.
For all locked down public housing tenants to be given the option of serving their quarantine in luxury five-star hotels with all expenses provided. Let them stay in more spacious, safer rooms! Let those forced into a hard lockdown enjoy good conditions instead of being stigmatised and forced to endure further hardship!
For all electricity and gas charges to be removed until the end of winter. Let tenants turn on their heaters in full so that they can open the windows and let infected air disperse safely.
No to discriminatory imposition of hard lockdowns on public housing tenants!
More broadly the workers movement and all our allies need to fight for:
Mandatory temperature testing of everyone attending workplaces of more than two people.
Paid pandemic sick leave for all workers (including those currently casuals) and the immediate conversion to permanency of all those currently employed as casuals.
Secure jobs for all workers. That means demanding firstly that those companies still profitable – including supermarkets, construction firms and manufacturers – be forced to increase hiring at the expense of their profits; and secondly that the owners of previously profitable companies that are experiencing reduced operations be forced to pay their workers in full out of the massive profits that they have leached from these workers over the years.
Such a program can only be won through mass struggle against the capitalist exploiters and their governments. To advance this struggle it is vital that we discredit the capitalist regime by exposing just how flawed and anti-working class has been their response to the pandemic. The fact is that especially given that this land is both an island and a country with a low population density, other than for those who caught the virus abroad and could not be saved once they entered here, there should have either been just a tiny handful of COVID-19 deaths here or none at all. That people are now dying in a virus second wave is caused by Australian governments winding back social distancing measures too quickly, in deference to their capitalist masters, by their all-round neglect of the health and housing needs of public housing tenants and by the inability of the profit-driven system to ensure sufficient PPE for frontline workers. The first wave, on the other hand, was mainly caused by the Australian regime delaying introduction of mandatory testing and quarantining of arrivals from Europe, America and cruise ships and they did this in order to ensure that, for as long as possible, the focus of travel bans would be on China.As a result of this manoeuvre to create fear of socialistic China amongst the population, the virus was allowed to be brought into the community from Europe, America and cruise ships in large doses in late February and March and spread dangerously from there on in. Australia’s capitalist rulers caused dozens of people to die who otherwise would have been alive today – including the nineteen residents who tragically died at the Anglicare nursing home in Western Sydney and the eleven people who perished from the Ruby Princess-triggered North-West Tasmanian outbreak. Those close to the people who died should be furious that their precious family members and friends perished because the Australian regime distorted health policy to meet its Cold War agenda. So should all the workers who have been retrenched or lost shifts because the pandemic has been allowed to spread into the community far more widely than it should have.
References
John M Barry, The site of origin of
the 1918 influenza pandemic and its public health implications, Journal of Translational Medicine, Vol. 2,
20 January 2004, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC340389/#
Photo Above: Shaoquett Moselmane with students and teachers from a Riverwood language school
Condemn the Witch-Hunt of NSW Upper House MP Shaoquett Moselmane
Cold War Repression in Australia Gets Even More Vicious
26 June 2020: Today, Cold War repression in Australia dramatically escalated. Around a dozen officers of Australia’s ASIO secret police and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) made an hours-long raid on the home of NSW Labor Party upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane. The raid was made under the ridiculous claim that “Chinese government agents” had infiltrated his office and were using him as part of a “foreign interference” operation. Moselmane has not been charged and the claims against him are completely fabricated. Moselmane is being witch-hunted because he has had the temerity to praise China’s achievements in poverty alleviation and because he more recently dared to speak positively about China’s successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to rightly call out the Australian media for inciting racist attacks on people of Chinese background.
Sources say that today’s terrifying raid took place with Moselmane’s wife and son at home in the residence. The duration of the ASIO/AFP attack went over a period of some 12 to 16 hours. Today’s raids are a despicable attack on democratic rights and a further constriction of the right to progressive dissent in Australia. These raids, made with the assistance of draconian “foreign interference” laws imposed two years ago with bi-partisan support, are designed to intimidate anyone from speaking positively about socialistic China or to advocate socialist solutions to the grave problems faced by the working class masses and oppressed Aboriginal and other non-white communities in Australia.
All trade unionists, supporters of workers rights, defenders of civil liberties and opponents of racism and all genuine leftists must condemn these raids! We must cry: down with the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane!
Outrageously, NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay wasted no time in joining the attack on Moselmane. She has suspended him from the ALP.
The mainstream media and right-wing politicians, with the acquiescence of Moselmane’s Labor colleagues, had been building up towards today’s authoritarian attack. Several weeks ago there was a hysterical witch-hunt against Moselmane that saw him driven from his post as the deputy president of the NSW upper house. Below is the article that we wrote in response to that witch-hunt. Given today’s raid, all the conclusions made in this article are magnified many times over in their urgency.
6 June 2020: The ruling classes in the capitalist world are rather nervous at how much dissatisfaction there is within their own countries. Working class youth are frustrated that they are likely to only get insecure, casual jobs where they are often arrogantly bullied by their bosses. Lower income people are angry that affordable rental accommodation is so hard to find. After COVID-19 hit, huge numbers of workers are seething that they have lost their jobs after the very company owners who had made fortunes out of their workers’ labour did not hesitate to retrench these workers as soon as there was any drop in business revenue. Now, the brutal police murder of an unarmed black man in America, George Floyd, has ignited explosive anger amongst black people and other people of colour throughout the Western world at the all-sided racist oppression that they endure. In the U.S., there have been huge, sometimes militant, protests with elements of an uprising. Today in Australia, there were massive solidarity protests with America’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. These marches focused on opposition to the horrific killings of Aboriginal people by racist police and prison guards.
At least until the recent Black Lives Matter protests, mass grievances have not led to a left-wing radicalisation within Western countries. Instead, in Australia for example, the capitalist rulers have to some degree succeeded in shifting mass frustrations into blaming immigration, guest workers, Aboriginal people, Asians, African youth, Muslims, refugees, unemployed people, climate change concerns and militant unions. Yet the capitalist exploiters remain worried that eventually sizable sections of the working class masses will again look to communism as an alternative to their current predicament. Compounding these fears is the reality that while their own economies have barely been treading water since the late noughties global recession, the world’s biggest socialistic country – the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) – relentlessly grows in economic strength, continues to lift her own people out of the poverty of China’s pre-1949 capitalist days and steadily gains greater prestige and diplomatic clout in the former colonial countries of Africa, South America, the Middle East, Asia and the South Pacific. The richer capitalist powers are not only worried that this is “interfering” with their “right” to “freely” super-exploit their former colonies. They are terrified that some of their “own” masses will start to look favourably upon socialistic China and thus conclude that capitalist rule in their own countries needs to be deposed. As a result, across the capitalist world the rulers and their media have been churning out an anti-communist, China-bashing propaganda campaign.
In the U.S. and Australia, this new Cold War campaign has also involved intimidation and even repression. In Australia, this often takes the form of the witch-hunting of any public figure, and increasingly anyone else, who has any contact with social organisations with even the vaguest links to the PRC; or who dares to make any comment praising the PRC. Such witch-hunting has intensified over the last few years and has reached new levels of hysteria since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The latest victim is NSW Labor upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane. Now Moselmane is no communist. He is, after all, a member of the anticommunist, social democratic ALP. However, Moselmane was witch-hunted for pointing out what is demonstrably true: PRC authorities and her people had taken “timely and effective countermeasures” that had “fought and contained” the COVID-19 threat. For having the temerity to state these plain facts, Moselmane was subjected to a shrill campaign of denunciations and insults from the mainstream media, right-wing politicians and leaders of his own Labor Party. Media shock jocks branded Moselmane a “jerk”, “a train wreck”’, “a lunatic”, “a low filthy bludger” and more. They even made despicable slanders about his wife, lying that she has a material interest in him making positive comments about China. Encouraged by all these insults, rednecks and far right idiots made chilling threats against Moselmane on social media. To his credit, however, in the face of all this intimidation and demands that he resign from parliament, Moselmane has thus far refused to “apologise” for saying what he knows to be completely true. As a result, on April 6, he was forced to step down from his position as assistant president of the NSW Legislative Council. Moselmane had been elected to this position, signifying that he was the highest-ranked ALP upper house MP in NSW, less than a year earlier.
A team of Chinese medical experts and Bangladeshi officials take a group photo upon the team’s arrival in Bangladesh. Even as the Peoples Republic of China was still completing her own initial battle against the pandemic, she sent experts with experience in responding to COVID-19 to many other countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Southern and Eastern Europe to assist with their struggles against the pandemic.
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Pilloried
for Telling the Truth
So what did Shaoquett Moselmane exactly
say that so infuriated Australia’s ruling class establishment? The campaign
against him cranked into high gear after the 30 March issue of the Sydney Morning Herald attacked him for writing
on his personal website that China had made an “emphatic” and “decisive”
response to the COVID-19 threat. Moselmane pointed out that China needed
“tough, unswerving leadership, focused on the mammoth task ahead” in
order to contain the virus’ spread. The Labor MP explained that: “For the
Peoples Republic of China, President Xi stepped up and provided that
leadership. He mustered the resources of the nation and together with the great
people of China – fought it and contained it…. The combined phenomenal effort
of the state and the people in the fight to contain the virus was breath
taking.” Moselmane also contrasted China’s effective response to “the
slow, and at times baffling and confused messaging by the Morrison federal
government.”
What Moselmane said was simply fact. Despite being the first country in the world to detect the new virus and despite having a rapid spread of the deadly virus in Wuhan before their own scientists or any other country in the world understood the coronavirus or could ascertain just how deadly it was, the PRC so effectively responded to the threat that the proportion of China’s huge population that have died from the virus is significantly lower than Australia’s. Moreover, while Australia is just starting to open up again following stay-at-home measures and now faces the risk of a second-wave, the PRC so effectively suppressed the virus and reduced new cases to such tiny levels that for the last two months her tourist spots, cafes and restaurants have been gradually filling up with people and her streets and public transport networks are again buzzing with lively crowds.
Although Moselmane focuses a fair bit on Xi Jinping’s leadership, we understand that the main factor behind the PRC’s breath taking response to the virus was the country’s socialistic system. It was this system in which public ownership plays the backbone role and in which the economy is controlled by a state under workers rule that enabled the PRC to concentrate resources so effectively for the pandemic response. Thus, the PRC was able to, in a matter of days, both build brand new infectious disease hospitals and to convert other facilities into makeshift hospitals. It was also this people’s control of the economy that enabled the PRC to provide space suit style protective gear for her medical workers and janitors as well as large quantities of urgently needed ventilators, testing kits, infra-red thermometers and masks. Meanwhile, the PRC’s economic system – in which collective ownership and control plays the basic role – has created a more collectivist outlook in the Chinese masses that led them to, on the one hand, be overall more willing to comply with pandemic response restrictions than their counterparts in, say, the U.S. and Australia and, on the other hand, be more motivated to mobilise in grassroots campaigns to conduct pandemic response measures.
Nevertheless, leadership was also a factor in determining how countries responded to the COVID-19 threat. Just as the likes of Scott Morrison, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin are shaped by their role at the head of states designed to serve the capitalist big end of town, Xi Jinping’s actions are shaped and, indeed, constrained by his role at the head of a workers state that was created to ensure the interests of working class people. That meant that while the leaders of the capitalist countries put the fate of their stock markets and corporate profits first, China’s president Xi, for all his faults, did put the interests of people first in responding to the virus outbreak. So Moselmane is quite factually correct when he stated that “President Xi stepped up.” Within hours of Chinese scientists confirming that human to human transmission of the virus can occur, Xi made a high profile order on January 20 for Communist Party of China (CPC) committees and governments at all levels to put people’s safety and health as the top priority and take effective measures to curb the spread of the virus. Chinese state media reported on the same day that:
“Xi ordered all-out efforts to treat patients, identify the causes of the virus infection and spread at an earlier date, strengthen monitoring and standardize treatment procedures.
“Xi spoke of the need for the timely release of information and the deepening of international cooperation.”
The PRC acted early. At the time Xi made this announcement, just three people had died of the virus in a country with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people. Overseas countries then reported just a total of four cases, two in Thailand, one in South Korea and one in Japan. Just two days after Xi’s orders were broadcast, Wuhan took the unprecedented step of announcing that from the following morning all public transportation in the city of 11 million people would be suspended, all movement out of the city through airports and railway stations would be temporarily cut off, all large-scale activities were suspended and everyone was ordered to wear masks in public. These and additional decisive measures taken by the PRC in the ensuing days became a template for the social distancing measures that many other countries, albeit often very belatedly, took.
Medical staff in China’s Wuhan celebrate on March 9 after all COVID-19 patients at the temporary hospital that they worked at were cured and discharged from hospital.
At the time that the PRC shut down Wuhan, Australia had not confirmed one single case of the new virus. Yet, by contrast to the PRC’s quick response, it took the Australian government a whole 50 days from the time that the first coronavirus case in this country was detected on January 25 until the first – and rather limited – social distancing measures were implemented on March 15. This despite having already seen how deadly the virus had been in other countries. The only early “measure” that the Morrison government took was to enact a travel ban on non-residents entering from China – which had more to do with encouraging fears of Red China than being a genuine health measure – and then enacting later bans on arrivals from Iran and then South Korea. Yet, even after China had effectively suppressed the virus, the Morrison regime maintained its politically-motivated, China-specific travel ban while for several weeks enabling people from the U.S., Italy, Spain, France, Germany and cruise ships to enter without proper testing and quarantining even after the pandemic had spread like wildfire in those places. As a result, not only was the virus allowed to spread within Australia through infections brought in overwhelmingly from the U.S., Europe and cruise ships but those infected people from these regions were not given the timely diagnosis and treatment that they needed.
Indeed, Moselmane’s comparison of the PRC’s excellent response to the new virus with “the slow, and at times baffling and confused messaging by the Morrison federal government” is actually rather understated. That has not stopped the Morrison government and this country’s top health bureaucrats from endlessly praising themselves. They have only been able to get away with this because the “response” in the likes of Trump’s America, Johnson’s Britain and Bolsonaro’s Brazil have been so frighteningly disastrous and because the mainstream media have done their best to hide and distort the successful response by the PRC and to minimize coverage of the successes of other countries that have taken effective measures to curb the virus spread, like socialistic Vietnam.
Peter Costello’s Sydney Morning Herald Leads the Charge, Hard-Right Shock Jocks Follow
It is little surprise that it was the Sydney Morning Herald that cast the first stone in the attack against Moslemane. This paper had been targeting Moslemane ever since he made a 2018 speech hailing China’s lifting of 800 million people out of poverty. In that speech, Moselmane spoke of the need for China to gain greater influence in the global media given that this media is currently in the hands of China’s Western opponents. Moslemane pointed out how the Arab world has seen the power of Western propaganda in manipulating the public, leading to death and destruction. Alarmed that a mainstream politician had the audacity to so openly challenge the Cold War drive against the PRC and to so bluntly call out the pernicious role of Western mainstream media, the SMH looked for a way to discredit Moselmane. The best exposé that they could come up with was one seven months ago that in classic Cold War McCarthyist shock-horror fashion “exposed” how a staffer who works one day a week for Moslemane’s office once attended a training course at the Chinese Academy of Governance which the SMH says also “trains senior cadres of the Chinese Communist Party.” Big deal! What are they going to dig up next: that one of Moslemane’s staffers once ate at a Chinese restaurant where a member of the Chinese community, who had once met with a visiting Chinese Communist Party leader, once also ate at?
Led by its fanatically anti-communist Political and International editor, Peter Hartcher, the SMH has, in fact, been spearheading the Cold War fear campaign against socialistic China. It is ably assisted in this by its sister media organisations like Channel 9 and the hard right radio “news” station 2GB, all of which are part of the very same corporation that owns the SMH: Nine Entertainment Limited. The biggest stake in Nine Entertainment is held by filthy rich media mogul Bruce Gordon, with other major shareholdings owned by various wealth management funds and private equity groups. Needless to say, a media organisation owned by ultra-rich capitalists is inevitably going to produce content favourable to the political interests of the capitalist exploiting class and, thus, hostile to socialistic China. And in case anyone falls for the “balanced”, “independent” pretensions of the SMH, it is worth pointing out who the chairman of this corporation that runs it is: none other than the Treasurer in the right wing, former Howard government, Peter Costello!
The SMH journalists working under editor Peter Hartcher delight in buttressing their China-bashing propaganda by “unofficially” quoting as “sources” their mates in ASIO and other sinister Australian spy agencies. Meanwhile, Hartcher works closely in promoting anti-China hostility with Beverley O’Connor’s The World program on the ABC News channel. Peter Costello’s boy, Peter Hartcher, is also a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute, the right-wing think tank that has a major influence in shaping Australian public opinion. Formed and led by Australian billionaire, Frank Lowy, and with a Board of Directors dominated by Lowy and his sons, as well as other capitalists like the chairman of the ANZ bank, the Lowy institute naturally promotes the interests of Australia’s big end of town exploiting class and, thus, is known for aggressively promoting an anti-China and broadly war-mongering agenda.
With the Lowy Institute providing the academic “expertise” and the likes of Peter Hartcher’s SMH and Beverley O’Connor’s The World providing overall political direction and a “centrist”, “liberal” cover, right-wing politicians, the Murdoch media and 2GB shock jocks are then all stocked up to sell the masses the anti-PRC agenda in sensationalist and extremist forms. And so it was with the campaign against Moselmane. In the days following the SMH’s exposé, the anticommunist uproar against Moselmane that Peter Hartcher and Co. had hoped for duly erupted. Egged on by rabid right-wing presenters Alan Jones and Ray Hadley from 2GB and Peta Credlin from Sky News, extreme right wing politicians queued up to denounce Moselmane. Federal Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton demanded Moselmane’s removal from parliament. NSW leader of the far right One Nation party, Mark Latham, attacked Moselmane’s stance as “disgusting and indefensible.” Credlin and Hadley basically accused Moselmane of treason for simply praising another country’s response to the virus threat and for criticizing the Australian prime minister’s response. The Murdoch print media and the Daily Mail soon joined the witch-hunt too, of course. So too did hardline supporters of Israel’s genocidal oppression of Palestinian people who saw an opportunity to go after an MP known for his sympathy for the Palestinian liberation struggle. Moselmane was born in South Lebanon, the part of the Lebanon that has suffered most from the Israeli regime’s expansionist aggression.
However, it was not just the hard conservatives who went after Moselmane. The most extreme attack on him came from a minister in the former Rudd government, Stephen Conroy. Speaking on Peta Credlin’s Sky News program, Conroy branded Moselmane “an absolute disgrace to the Labor Party,” adding that it is “astonishing he’s still in parliament.” Meanwhile, NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay stabbed her upper house colleague in the back by not only refusing to defend Moselmane from the witch-hunt but, instead, fully joining in. In an interview with 2GB’s Ray Hadley, McKay viciously attacked Moselmane:
“I can assure you… he will never be in the shadow cabinet….
“His actions have been appalling, I can’t say that to you enough.”
Moselmane’s factional ally in the ALP, shadow minister for transport and corrections, Chris Minns, and Labor shadow treasurer, Walt Secord, also both joined in the attacks, respectively branding Moselmane’s comments as “inappropriate” and “extremely stupid.”
Top Scientists and Public Health Officials Sing the Same Tune as Moselmane on China’s Response
The way that the “centrist” SMH set up Moselmane to be savaged by the Hard Right can be compared to that of the villain in an action movie who inflicts a wound on a captive and then leaves them to bleed in shark-infested waters knowing that the victim’s blood will attract killer sharks. While their sharks did their expected savaging, the SMH pretended to be serious in their coverage. To try and give authority to their attacks on Moselmane, they claimed that, “China has been widely criticised by academics and health experts for downplaying the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan.” Of course, academics and health experts are like everyone else subject to political influences. Being a middle class layer, scientists, doctors and top level academics, like other middle class layers in these reactionary times, can be quite conservative and many identify their interests with those of the ruling capitalist class. Thus, mainstream media seeking to attack Red China would no doubt always be able to find a few health experts willing to sing the tune that they would like to see amplified. Yet many serious scientists are driven by dedication to their work and to their areas of research. As a result, contrary to the misleading assertions of the SMH, the truth is that, in the face of anticommunist pressure, the majority of top Western infectious disease scientists and public health specialists have actually praised China’s response to the virus outbreak. On 19 February, 27 eminent scientists, academics, infectious disease specialists and public health officials from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands and other regions published a “Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19” in the prestigious, peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet [1]. The statement lauded China’s efforts to suppress the COVID-19 threat:
“We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable.”
This, too, was the finding of a WHO investigation into China’s response to COVID-19 led by Canadian epidemiologist, Bruce Aylward, and consisting of 25 international experts from the U.S., Germany, Japan, Singapore, Nigeria, China, South Korea and Russia. The report by the investigative mission found that [2]:
“In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history.
“Achieving China’s exceptional coverage with and adherence to these containment measures has only been possible due to the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action in the face of this common threat. At a community level this is reflected in the remarkable solidarity of provinces and cities in support of the most vulnerable populations and communities. Despite ongoing outbreaks in their own areas, Governors and Mayors have continued to send thousands of health care workers and tons of vital PPE supplies into Hubei province and Wuhan city.”
Indeed, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, ABC News reporters were constantly disappointed as they posed leading questions to infectious disease specialists inviting them to attack China’s response only for the experts to respond with praise for China’s pandemic suppression efforts. Thus, the Australian government-funded broadcaster was forced to hop from interviewing one medical expert to the next in search of someone who would feed into their Cold War agenda. Yet the Australian government’s own top health bureaucrats also lauded China’s efforts. And let’s note that these are highly-paid government bureaucrats who have worked closely with the right wing Morrison government and have supported most of the Liberal government’s pandemic response strategies – including its initial politically-directed travel bans specifically focused on – and restricted to – the Australian regime’s adversaries. So they are hardly communist sympathizers! Yet, in a media conference on January 30 alongside health minister Greg Hunt, Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Professor Paul Kelly, responded to a journalist’s question about whether Australia’s case numbers would stay at the then low level by saying [3]:
“It depends a lot on what happens in relation to China getting this under control, and they are doing a marvellous job at the moment and it’s a very different approach to what we experienced with SARS some years ago.”
Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, also hailed China’s efforts to stem the virus spread in an interview the following day [4]:
“Clearly, it is not yet contained in China. But they are making Herculean efforts to do so.”
Of course, Australia’s capitalist media ensured that the live interviews where these comments were made were the first and last time that these statements were aired. And they sure weren’t going to report on these comments praising China from Australia’s top public health officials! Yet it was not just senior public health officials and infectious disease specialists who were saying the same things that Moselmane would later say about China’s response to the coronavirus. None other than U.S. president, Donald Trump, the person who has most viciously been trying to blame China for the pandemic over the last few weeks and the man who is the talisman of the extreme right-wing shock jobs who savagely attacked Moselmane, heaped praise on China in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. Thus, in a tweet on January 24, Trump said [5]:
China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!
So why did Trump praise China and President Xi’s response to the coronavirus in late January and why was Moselmane witch-hunted for giving similar credit to China and Xi just two months later? Well, when Trump was commending China’s response, not only he but nearly the entire capitalist ruling classes in the U.S., Europe and Australia believed their own propaganda that their social system was superior to China’s and, thus, they would be little affected by the virus then ravaging China. They expected that the damage caused by the coronavirus in China would hurt her prestige, undermine the credibility of her socialist system and weaken her economy. Trump believed that he would be facing a weakened PRC opponent in political conflicts and trade disputes and it would, therefore, pay him to sound magnanimous. Two months later the reality turned out very different. The virus caused far more death and economic damage per capita to the U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Australia than it did to China. China, on the other hand, had been able to suppress the virus spread so effectively that she was now giving huge amounts of aid to developing countries to assist them with their pandemic response. This infuriated the rulers of imperialist countries like the U.S. and Australia. For it reinforced a trend where China’s mutually beneficial relations with countries in the South Pacific, Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the Middle East was enabling these countries to eke out some greater independence from the plundering Western powers. Moreover, far from showing the relative weaknesses in the PRC’s system, the much more successful response of China to the virus threat in comparison with the capitalist countries has shown the superiority of her socialistic system. As far as the capitalist elite in the West are concerned, for anyone to point this out is taboo. For one it would make it harder to sell to their own masses their Cold War drive to “contain” and strangle socialistic rule in China. Furthermore, for anyone to highlight China’s superior response to the pandemic touches off the greatest of all fears of the rulers of Australia and other capitalist countries: that the masses in their own countries will draw the conclusion from this that they need to get rid of the capitalist system and bring socialism to their own countries. Thus, by late March, for Shaoquett Moselmane or any other high-profile person to praise China’s response to the pandemic simply became intolerable for the capitalist ruling classes. Just as significantly, those who sought to score political points against China over the pandemic hoped that by late March, the population would have forgotten all the praise heaped upon China’s response two months earlier by scientists, Australia’s top public health officials and, of all people, Donald Trump.
Some of the medical experts who, in the early days of the pandemic, praised China’s response to the coronavirus. Left: Australia’s then Deputy Chief Medical Officer (now Acting Chief Medical Officer) Paul Kelly. On January 30, he responded to a question about Australia’s future case numbers by saying that, “it depends a lot on what happens in relation to China getting this under control, and they are doing a marvellous job at the moment ….” Centre: Australia’s then Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy. On January 31, Murphy stated in an interview about the epidemic that, “clearly, it is not yet contained in China. But they are making Herculean efforts to do so.” Right: Canadian epidemiologist, Bruce Aylward, who led a team of 25 international experts in a WHO investigation into China’s response to COVID-19. In a 24 February 2020 press conference reporting on the mission, Aylward informed that: “In the face of a previously unknown disease, China has taken one of the most ancient approaches for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious, and I would say, agile and aggressive disease containment efforts in history. China took old-fashioned measures, like the national approach to hand-washing, the mask-wearing, the social distancing, the universal temperature monitoring. But then very quickly, as it started to evolve, the response started to change. And it moved from this sort of one-size-fits-all approach to a science-and-risk-based approach, which was really tailored to allow it to use different containment approaches and measures, depending on the context, the capacity and really the nature of the coronavirus circulation…. they took this old approach and then turbo-charged it with modern science and modern technology in a way that was unimaginable even a few years ago…. What they’ve done has only been possible because of tremendous collective commitment and will of the Chinese people from the most bottom-level community leaders we met and talked to, to the governors at the top. It was an extraordinary, what we call all-of-government, all-of-society approach ….” However, as Moselmane found out, by late March, once it became clear just how poorly the capitalist countries had responded to the pandemic compared to China, any doctor, politician or other public figure praising China’s response was likely to be demonised and pilloried by Western ruling classes and their media hounds.
“Revelations” of Moselmane’s Calling Out of White Australia Racism Takes Witch-Hunt to White Heat
A week after their original exposé of Moselmane’s statements lauding China’s effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the SMH had a new revelation. They reported that in a February 5 opinion piece for the East China Normal University, Moselmane had attacked the Australian mainstream media for having “publicly played racist cards, offending and insulting many Australian citizens, especially Chinese residents” in actions that “further deepened the already great suffering of the victim.”
“Today,
the obsolete scum of ‘white Australia’ is once again flooding, and the theory
of yellow fever has once again surfaced,” Moselmane wrote.
“Some
mainstream media have bred and spread these racial viruses in our multicultural
community with the purpose of inciting hatred.
“Today,
media xenophobia and full-scale war against China have become the norm.”
Again Moselmane’s statements are a rather accurate description of what is happening on the ground. One has to be blind to reality or in complete denial to not know that Chinese and other East Asian background people in Australia have been subjected to numerous horrific racist attacks by “the obsolete scum of ‘white Australia’” over the last few months. People of Chinese appearance have been bashed in the streets, at supermarkets and on public transport. They have had threatening racist graffiti scrawled on their homes, had rocks thrown through their house and shop windows, been verbally abused, spat and coughed on and been ordered out of shops and other public places [6] [7] [8]. Racist scum have even abused nurses, doctors and other essential service workers (like bus drivers) of East Asian background and in some cases stalked them in a threatening manner [9] [10] [11]. It is therefore very understandable – and indeed completely necessary – that China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism last night issued an urgent alert warning Chinese tourists not to travel to Australia. The alert correctly informed that “racial discrimination and acts of violence against Chinese and Asians in Australia have increased significantly.”
Resist the Despicable Racist Attacks against Ethnic Chinese People!
Horrific racist graffiti and death threat sprayed on the home of a Chinese-Australian family in the Melbourne suburb of Knoxfield. On another night, racist scum also threw a large rock smashing the family home’s window. As Moselmane correctly pointed out, some mainstream media have incited racial hatred by breeding and spreading racial viruses.
It is undoubtedly true that the attacks on Chinese and other Asian people have been fueled by the mainstream media and by the anti-China rants of the likes of Peter Dutton, Pauline Hanson, far right Coalition MPs George Christensen and Andrew Hastie (both of whom have previously spoken at racist rallies infested by Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists and anti-Semites) and rabid anti-PRC Labor MP, Anthony Byrne. This is proven by the fact that many of those committing racist attacks on the streets have done so while repeating the same anti-Chinese and anti-China diatribes as the right wing shock jocks and the rabid anti-China politicians [12] [13] [14].
Yet it is not only the most rabidly anti-China politicians and the most openly racist-inciting media presenters that bear responsibility for the renewed escalation of racist attacks on Asian background people over the last few months. The more “moderate” politicians in the Liberal Party and the ALP, who largely all support the Cold War drive against the PRC, and the “centrist”, liberal media who promote hostility to Red China, like the SMH and the ABC, are also guilty of breeding and spreading racial viruses. There have always been broadly two types of white supremacists in Australia. The first type are the openly rabid ones that can scarcely hide their hostility to all non-white skinned people. The second type are the more disguised types. They claim to be, or even consider themselves, non-racist and describe themselves as “centre-right”, “liberal” or even “progressive.” Many of them even like to make themselves feel good by expressing sympathy for people of colour when the latter are victims of racism. Yet, when a non-white people organise themselves into a militant anti-racist resistance force or into a powerful country, like the PRC, that challenges Western domination of the world then they think that this is absolutely unacceptable and you see all their latent prejudice oozing out. The “liberal” and “centrist” Australian media and the mainstream Australian politicians are of this second type of white supremacist. Of course, the mainstream media and politicians attacking China are not simply driven by racism. An even bigger factor is their hostility to socialistic states. Yet ever since the 1949 Chinese Revolution brought the toiling masses to power, hostility to China in the U.S. and Australia has combined anti-communist Red Peril fears with racist Yellow Peril xenophobia.
ABC and SMH journalists nevertheless insist that being anti-PRC does not mean that one is anti-Chinese. They are fond of claiming the authority of “experts” to push their Cold War agenda against the PRC. Yet many of the world’s leading scientists have drawn a direct link between the recent political attacks on China over the coronavirus and the racist attacks on Chinese people on the streets. Thus, a strongly worded editorial titled, “Stop the coronavirus stigma now” in the 7 April issue of the British scientific journal, Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, stated [15]:
“US President Donald Trump has repeatedly associated the virus with China. Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro — the son of President Jair Bolsonaro — has called it `China’s fault’. Politicians elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom, are also saying that China bears responsibility.
“Continuing to associate a virus and the disease it causes with a specific place is irresponsible and needs to stop….
“Failing to do so has consequences. It’s clear that since the outbreak was first reported, people of Asian descent around the world have been subjected to racist attacks, with untold human costs — for example, on their health and livelihoods.”
Scott Morrison, Anthony Albanese and the “centrist”/liberal SMH and ABC have been just as guilty as Trump, Bolsonaro and many British politicians in promoting the “China’s fault” theory. They are, thus, just as guilty for inciting racist attacks on people of Asian descent. Of course these politicians and journalists would react with outraged denial if they were confronted with this truth. Yet they know full well that when they incite hostility to socialistic China they are doing it in a way that appeals to – and hence breeds – Yellow Peril racist fears. Afterwards they rub their sullied hands thoroughly with liberal doses of hand sanitiser and then, with all the “honesty” of Donald Trump, smugly express “shock” and “anger” when the rabid rednecks that they have just incited carry out racist attacks. But let us not be fooled by the “moderate” pretensions of the likes of SMH’s Peter Hartcher or the ABC’s Beverley O’Connor. Alongside their shock jock counterparts, the ruling class Australian politicians and the inherently divisive, dog-eat-dog nature of the capitalist system, these liberal media commentators share much responsibility for the terrifying rise in racist attacks on people of Chinese appearance over the last few months. Individually each of them may be personally responsible for just one or two percent of the racist attacks that have taken place. Yet given that there have been literally thousands of such attacks (most racist assaults and verbal threats are never reported but one Asian-Australian site collected details of over 300 separate attacks in just 5 weeks), each anti-China journalist or politician can be personally blamed for causing many individual attacks that would not have occurred had they not made their own contribution to the total dose of Red Peril and Yellow Peril hysteria. Put another way, several racist attacks would not have taken place had, say Peter Hartcher, not added to the incessant anti-PRC, “China is to blame” propaganda. We should keep this in mind when determining the methods by which we must resist these filthy, anti-China scum in the mainstream media.
Left: Political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher, speaks at a forum of the right wing think tank, The Sydney Institute. With his fanatical anti-communist attacks on Red China, Hartcher has done as much as anyone in the media to incite anti-Asian violence in Australia. Right: One example of the result of the “blame China for the pandemic” propaganda spewed by the likes of Hartcher, the Murdoch media, 2GB and the Australian government and ALP “opposition”. One of the two white racist rednecks, screaming that Asians brought “corona here,” in the process of abusing, kicking and spitting on two Asian sisters in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville on 30 March 2020. Of course, the oh-so-“respectable” “centrist”, Hartcher, claims that he is only attacking the Communist Party of China and actually “abhors” racist violence. However, the truth is that he and his ilk know full well that when they incite hostility to socialistic China they are doing it in a manner that harnesses – and hence encourages – Yellow Peril racist prejudices.
Yet when Moselmane exposed media xenophobia against China and how Australia’s mainstream media “have publicly played racist cards”, he put his finger on a really raw, infected wound. Although capitalist rule in Australia has created one of the most racist societies on the planet, the ruling class insists on denying this. One reason is that they are well aware that their rule over this land was established through genocidal dispossession of this country’s first peoples, the Aboriginal people. They know that this truth is recalled whenever people like Moslemane, regardless of the context, speak too starkly about the reality of racism in Australia. They know that recalling this truth in turn damages the “legitimacy” of the Australian nationalist myths that they so depend on to bind the working class masses that they exploit to their self-seeking, ruling class agenda. Secondly, unlike their Western European counterparts, the immediate overseas neighbours of Australia’s ruling class are hundreds and hundreds of millions of non-white skinned peoples in the Pacific and Asia. These are the people that Australia’s imperialist rulers need for both trade and for labour to be exploited by Australian-owned multinational corporations. Any exposure of racist xenophobia within Australia damages the corporate elite’s lucrative business operations in the Asia-Pacific and their imperialist meddling in this region. For these reasons, the ruling class considers it almost as much an act of “treason” for a mainstream politician to bluntly call out White Australia racism as it is for a politician to make comments favourable to the PRC workers state. So when Moselmane’s comments attacking the mainstream media’s role in inciting racial hatred were publicised, the witch-hunt against him reached white heat. Within hours, Moslemane was forced to step down from his position as deputy president of the NSW upper house. He remains a seated member of the upper house.
The Years-Long
Re-Emergence of Cold War McCarthyism
Today’s anti-China witch-hunt is, if anything, even broader in who it targets than the 1950s McCarthyist witch-hunt in the U.S. and Australia against anyone suspected of pro-communist sympathies. One does not even have to be branded a communist to be attacked today, as Moselmane found out. One has only to be a public figure who says anything positive about socialistic China. Two and a half years ago, former Labor federal senator Sam Dastyari was driven out of parliament following a 17 month-long witch-hunt for simply once saying that the South China Sea issue is an internal issue for China. However, whereas Moselmane has, to date, courageously stood by his factually correct statements applauding China’s pandemic response success, Dastyari apologised for saying what is true about the South China Sea issue and today cravenly condemns his past actions as he seeks to climb his way back into the political establishment. Yet Dastyari’s apologies at the time were not enough to stop the rabid anti-communists from howling him out of his senate seat.
Last year, there was an even more bizarre witch-hunt. The target, Gladys Liu, a Hong Kong Chinese woman is someone who is not only not a communist but actually a member of the conservative Liberal-National federal government; and a person with some pretty reprehensible right wing views to boot. Liu’s supposed “crime” is that she had once been a member of Chinese community organisations in Australia which apparently have members who are also members of other organisations that have loose ties to the Communist Party of China. For this she was viciously attacked by the media and by the ALP – the very same party that stabbed Moselmane in the back. Indeed ,the witch-hunt became so intense that members of the right wing, rabidly anti-communist Morrison government, eager to preserve their thin parliamentary majority, were able to correctly brand the ALP’s attacks on Liu as being racially-motivated and even McCarthyist.
In this stultifying anti-PRC atmosphere it is hardly just politicians who are being targeted. The capitalist media and politicians have been attacking any Chinese social organisation perceived as being sympathetic to the PRC or, otherwise, including members who are fond of Red China. In reality this means that just about any community organisation consisting of immigrants from mainland China could be targeted since the majority of migrants from mainland China are sympathetic to the PRC.
Last year, Cold War witch-hunting increasingly targeted international students from the PRC. Especially attacked were those Chinese students who dared to express their sympathies for Red China, especially in regards to the Hong Kong events. These brave students were slandered by the mainstream media. Rabidly anti-communist academics even called for those international students that too strongly promote solidarity with China to face academic disciplinary proceedings. Then, last spring, in a move squarely aimed at silencing through repression the voice of pro-Red China international students, the Australian government announced the creation of a new taskforce to look into “foreign interference” on Australian campuses.
What do all these attacks on Australian-Chinese community organisations, pro-Red China international students and the likes of Moselmane say about the supposed “right to free speech in Australia”? Actually, attacks on dissent and whistleblowers in Australia extend beyond the persecution of those accused of being soft on socialistic China. Today, a former Australian spy, known only as “Witness K,” is facing imprisonment for having revealed that Australia had planted huge numbers of listening devices in East Timorese government buildings in order to give the Australian government the advantage in a dispute with East Timor over gas resources [16]. The Australian regime is also prosecuting Witness K’s lawyer, Bernard Collaery, and two weeks ago Collaery faced a sinister, secret pre-trial hearing [17]. Yet another whistleblower that the Australian regime is persecuting is former military lawyer, David McBride [18]. McBride faces up to 50 years in prison for leaking to the ABC details of horrific war crimes by Australian troops in Afghanistan – including the murder of unarmed civilians and children. Last June, the Australian Federal Police even raided the offices of the tame, government-funded media channel, the ABC, simply because the ABC had publicised the information from McBride [19]. It is clear that the “right to free-speech” in Australia exists in name only!
Ironically, the extreme right wing media commentators who attacked Moselmane most savagely claim to be the most strident defenders of “free speech,” especially whenever the Racial Discrimination Act is brought up. Yet the “free speech” that these people want is only the “freedom” to vilify Aboriginal people, Africans, Muslims, Asians, LGBTI communities and women’s rights activists. They want the “freedom” to incite racist riots the way that Alan Jones incited the horrific December 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach. At the same time these shock jocks want to completely silence anyone who dares to say anything positive about socialistic China.
The truth is that the “right to free speech” in Australia has become more like the “right” to say what is tolerable to the capitalist ruling class. True, theoretically one can say what one wants… as long as one is not a whistle blower! And for people whose voice is not heard by too many people, this right can even sometimes exist in practice. But for people with a high enough profile that their voice will be heard by many, anything that they say that cuts against the exploiting class’ interests too sharply – for example, by praising socialistic China or calling out White Australia racism too bluntly – will see them vilified, threatened, hounded and ultimately driven out of their positions. Look at the way that not only Moslemane has been witch hunted but the way that Sudanese Australian media presenter, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, was abused and hounded out of this country three years ago after she made an ANZAC Day post linking the phrase “Lest we forget” to the horrific oppression of refugees in Australian detention camps at Nauru and Manus and to the brutal oppression of Palestinian people.
In many ways, the “right to free speech” in this country exists in much the same way as “democratic rights for all” does. Theoretically, everyone has an equal vote and say in “democratic Australia.” Yet in practice, under this country’s capitalist system, it is the ultra-rich big business owners who are able to mould “public opinion” and control society through their ownership of the media, through their ability to disproportionately fund political parties, pay for political advertising, finance think tanks and hire lobbyists and through their numerous ties to the upper echelons of all key state and bureaucratic institutions. And whenever their domination meets a significant challenge, they don’t hesitate to throw out any coverings of “democracy” and rely on naked state repression. This is just like how their American capitalist counterparts are today unleashing riot cops and the National Guards to viciously attack those taking part in the ongoing anti-racist resistance there.
At the same time, in a society where workers are exploited and Aboriginal people, ethnic minorities, women and LGBTI communities face such oppression, it is vital that we defend whatever limited democratic rights that we do actually have. For it is the working class masses united with all the downtrodden that is the only force that can fight against exploitation and oppression in this country. That is why it is high time that we confront the growing McCarthyist madness and rebuff the attacks on basic democratic rights. Let us say: Down with the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane! No to the targeting of Australian-Chinese community organisations! Stop the persecution of pro-PRC Chinese international students! The right to free speech must include the right to praise – and indeed support – socialistic countries like the PRC! Drop all charges against whistle blowers David McBride, Witness K and Bernard Collaery!
Racism and Anti-PRC
Witch-hunting
As with almost everything else that is negative in Australian society, anti-Red China witch-hunting feeds off and accentuates White Australia racism: that very same racial virus infecting Australia that Moselmane dared to identify. So how did this racial virus spread? For starters, one should understand that the disease of racism is actually widespread within most capitalist societies. Exploiting classes breed racism to divide multiracial working classes. They also inflame racism in order to divert mass frustrations onto racial minorities and, thus, away from the capitalist rulers themselves. Moreover, in imperialist countries like Australia, a racial superiority mentality is transmitted in order to enlist the population behind ruling class acts of military intervention, plunder and paternalism in the poorer “Third World” countries. In Australia there is also a big additional factor spawning racism. That is the fact that capitalist rule here was founded on the genocidal dispossession of this country’s indigenous first peoples, a crime that could only be organised and “justified” by spreading the most extreme form of white supremacist prejudice imaginable.
Today, it is telling that the three politicians who have been most intensely witch-hunted in recent times for supposedly being soft on China – Shaoquett Moselmane, Gladys Liu and Sam Dastyari – are all among the very few politicians in this country from people of colour backgrounds. People who are not white simply have less leeway in this racist society. While hardcore white supremacists are opposed to all people of colour all the time, the more insidious, mainstream form of white supremacy embraced by the bulk of the ruling elite sees non-white people as acceptable until they do something which is deemed “wrong”, in which case all the prejudice gushes out and they will be attacked far more severely than a white person doing the same thing. Yassmin Abdel-Magied certainly copped that when she was cruelly driven out of the country in a barely disguised, racist and misogynist witch-hunt.
All this shows the limits of “multiculturalism” as it is practiced by the ruling class. In their warped version, people from non-Anglo backgrounds are free to practice their own cultures as long as they all accept Western domination of the world and the current social order in Australia where the capitalist big end of town rules and Aboriginal people remain dispossessed. Any non-white person who does, or even says, anything even slightly contradicting this status quo is deemed disloyal and “ungrateful.” We let you into the country so the least you could do is to… such is the attitude of ruling class-created “public opinion” towards people of colour who dare question, in even the most minimal way, the myths of the current social order. All the while this mainstream still claims to stand by “multiculturalism.” This shows that, in practice, the official form of Australian “multiculturalism” sees people of colour confined to a second class status. It is far, far from a genuinely egalitarian and anti-racist multi-racialism.
The same implicit, underlying racism that added to the severity of the campaign against Moslemane has also been evident in a vicious campaign against WHO leader Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, again for having the temerity to praise China’s effective response to the coronavirus outbreak. Dr Ghebreyesus, a microbiologist of Ethiopian background, is the first WHO chief from Africa. As far as unashamed racists are concerned, Africans are not meant to hold such senior positions in international organisations. More liberal, mainstream racists could tolerate Dr Ghebreyesus in this role as long as he did not do anything that contradicted Western imperialist agendas. When Dr Ghebreyesus simply stated the facts by praising the PRC’s response to the virus, all the underlying racism gushed out and he was subjected to incredible abuse and death threats. Although the WHO is an agency under the imperialist dominated UN, Dr Ghebreyesus has shown considerable courage to stand up to racism and colonialist attitudes. When two of France’s most senior doctors despicably called on national TV for testing COVID-19 treatments on Africans [20], Dr Ghebreyesus rightly slammed the remarks as “racist” and a “hangover from a colonial mentality” [21]. Just like when it was revealed that Moselmane had called out White Australia racism, Dr Ghebreyesus’ strong stand against racism only intensified the attacks against him. Yet he stood firm against these racist attacks too and called them out:
“I can tell you personal attacks that have been going on for more than two, three months. Abuses, or racist comments, giving me names, black or Negro. I’m proud of being black, proud of being Negro.
“I don’t care, to be honest … even death threats. I don’t give a damn.
Dr Ghebreyesus also called out that many of the attacks had been associated with supporters of Donald Trump’s favourite regime, Taiwan [22]:
“Three months ago, this attack came from Taiwan. We need to be honest. I will be straight today. From Taiwan.
“And Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry also, they know the campaign. They didn’t disassociate themselves. They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur, but I didn’t care.”
Angered
by all the attacks on Dr Ghebreyesus, the African Union came to his defence
[23]. A statement released by the African Union on the very same day that Dr
Ghebreyesus called out Taiwanese racism, emphasised that:
“… the Chairperson of the African Union and President of the Republic of South Africa, HE Cyril Ramaphosa reaffirms his appreciation for the exceptional leadership of the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, from the very earliest stages of this unprecedented global health crisis.
“The African Union has also commended the management of Dr Tedros in leading the global response to the pandemic.”
As an aside, we must note that it should be little surprise that many of the racist attacks on Dr Ghebreyesus should come from supporters of the Taiwanese regime, with the implicit support of the regime itself. Taiwan was created as a de facto state when leaders of the right-wing former Kuomintang regime and members of the deposed landlord-capitalist exploiting class of China fled that country’s 1949 anti-capitalist revolution and set up base in Taiwan. Since then, the Taiwanese regime has been a stalwart of support for reactionary causes. Taiwan was one of the strongest supporters of the former Apartheid regime in South Africa. Backing the Apartheid regime against those fighting for black liberation, Taiwanese ambassador to Apartheid South Africa, H. K. Yang, stated that: “South Africa and my country are joined in the fight against communism. We are in favour of free enterprise, democracy and freedom” [24]. Taiwan, the former Apartheid rulers of South Africa and the murderously racist Israeli regime established a triangular axis of collaboration on developing nuclear weapons [25]. Taiwan was instrumental in enabling the former Apartheid regime to acquire nuclear weapons.
Cold War Witch-hunting Will Lead to Greater Repression of All Progressive Forces
The Australian ruling class has already harnessed its drive against those accused of being “soft” on Red China to power its push to constrict the rights of broader sections of society. Thus, two years ago, under the cover of contrived fears about “Chinese interference” and the supposed “threat” posed by the activities of pro-PRC members of Australia’s Chinese community, the Liberal government, with ALP support, rammed through two new laws targeting “foreign interference” that will provide pretexts for Australian regime crackdowns on protest movements and media reporting. Then, in the midst of the Australian ruling class spearheading outrageous attacks on China over the virus outbreak, last month Peter Dutton introduced into parliament the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment Bill 2020. The proposed new laws will give the regime the “right” to prevent a person under ASIO investigation from contacting their lawyer, allow ASIO to expel an interrogated person’s lawyer if they deem the lawyer to be “interrupting questioning”, gives ASIO the power to question 14 year-old children and grants them the “right” to track people without the need for a warrant [26].
The Australian regime’s drive against Red China and those deemed to be sympathetic to her at home has fuelled a “national security” obsession that has in turn made it easier for the Australian regime to target dissenters who have no direct connection with Cold War issues. It is telling that although those who blew the whistle on the Australian state’s spying in East Timor were first raided in 2013, the Australian regime did not feel that it could get away with actually laying charges on the two whistle blowers – Witness K and Bernard Collaery – until a whole five years later. Although the anti-China crusade and the suppression of those exposing the crimes of the Australian regime in East Timor are not directly connected, it is undoubted that the “national security” fixation created by the escalation of anti-PRC witch-hunting over the last few years made the government feel more confident to pursue the prosecution of whistle blowers in 2018 than they did in 2013. It is notable too that the very same Peter Dutton who demanded Moselmane’s removal from parliament was just weeks later demanding the sacking of Victoria’s Deputy Chief Health Officer, Dr Annaliese van Diemen, for merely making a very insightful tweet comparing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to the suffering of Aboriginal people caused by colonial invasion [27]:
“Sudden arrival of an invader from another land, decimating populations, creating terror. Forces the population to make enormous sacrifices & completely change how they live in order to survive. COVID19 or Cook 1770?”
The obsession with “protecting national interests” that the Australian ruling class have whipped up through their Cold War drive is also being used by them to justify repressive measures and laws targeting workers’ industrial action and more militant unions, both of which are branded as harmful to “national interests.”
Bottom: Some of the Trotskyist Platform placards at the 17 August 2019 demonstration in Sydney against the pro-colonial rioters in Hong Kong included messages warning that the Australian ruling class’ campaign against socialistic China is fuelling a “national security” obsession that would be used to attack people and movements not even directly connected to the Cold War drive. Top: 18 July 2019, Canberra: David McBride, the whistleblower who revealed to the media details of horrific war crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan speaks at a rally in his defence. The Australian regime is prosecuting McBride with charges that could see him jailed for 50 years for his brave exposure of “the Australian Defence Force’s unethical, harmful and highly politicised leadership.” There is no doubt that McBride as well as other persecuted whistleblowers, dissident lawyers and investigative journalists are victims of the “national security” hysteria largely created by the Cold War McCarthyist witchhunt against anyone deemed to be a supporter of Red China.
More insightful people, even those who do not necessarily have sympathy for socialistic China are starting to see the threat of broader repression posed by Cold War witch-hunting. Thus, although no mainstream politician from any party and not a single journalist, that we know of, from the main media outlets have had the courage to publicly defend Moselmane, there were prominent community voices that did protest against his witch-hunt. Prominent left-liberal Stuart Rees, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney and the founder director of the Sydney Peace Foundation issued a statement condemning the witch-hunt [28]. In it, Rees insisted that:
“Mosselmane was the victim of character assassination for questioning anti-Chinese sentiment and for praising Chinese leadership’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan.”
An
article in the April 10 issue of the Australian
Muslim Times newspaper also condemned the witch-hunt of Moselmane [29],
noting that:
“The weak-kneed response of this onslaught against a colleague by the NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay MP is highly disappointing and shown to be a leader incapable of standing up for her colleagues and for what’s right.”
The article also quoted a protest letter to the NSW ALP leader by Chinese Community Council of Australia’s Dr Anthony Pun, where Pun stated that:
“…we are indebted to the Hon Shaoquett Moselmane MLC, who have shown empathy and compassion to our difficulties, particularly to racists taunts, racially vilification and hate speech…. We are aware of the recent media attempting to discredit him and saying that his remarks on China was inappropriate was unwarranted and simply wrong.”
The
Australian Muslim Times article also
reported on the statements of others who opposed the witch-hunt of Moselmane:
“Mr Bashir Sawalha, President of United Australian Palestinian Workers Association (UAPWA) has condemned the spiteful media attacks on Mr Moselmane and has also criticised the lack of support for him by Ms McKay.”
We welcome the fact that such a broad range of voices have condemned this McCarthyist witch-hunt. There needs to the broadest possible united-front push back against the Cold War persecution of people who make positive comments about the PRC or express support for her. And we need to the resist the broader attacks on democratic rights that such McCarthyist persecution is driving.
Ditch the ALP – Let’s Build a Workers Party That Will Actually Stand Up to the Capitalists and their Media
Despite being stabbed in the back multiple times by his own ALP colleagues, Shaoquett Moselmane has reaffirmed his commitment to the Labor Party. He released a statement that, while expressing deepest gratitude to those who offered solidarity with him against the recent attacks, asserted that “it is through the Australian Labor Party that we can advance the wellbeing and welfare of all Australians” [30]. Yet many of the supporters of Moselmane, who is rather popular amongst working class communities of Middle Eastern, African, Asian and South American origins, may have other thoughts. They would have been horrified at how the ALP leadership joined in the witch-hunt of the person they see as the spokesman for their concerns and would have noted how few – perhaps none (!) – of his Labor parliamentary colleagues actually publicly came to his defence in a forceful, high-profile manner.
Some of Moselmane’s supporters are likely amongst the many working class people who support the ALP through gritted teeth. Such people have long ago lost faith in the Labor Party’s commitment, let alone ability, to deliver meaningful social change. Many of these people have seen Labor Party leaders time and again betray promises privately made to them to make greater efforts to reduce inequality, ease the shortage of affordable rental accommodation and genuinely oppose racist attacks on non-white communities. Nevertheless these people, many from migrant backgrounds or lower-paid workers, cling on to the ALP because they hope that a few good people there can at least make some headway in changing the ALP’s stance, however minimally, on a few issues: perhaps make the ALP take a stronger stand on opposing job slashing by bosses, more truly stand for genuine multiculturalism, curb its strident support for Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine and wind back its fulsome adherence to the U.S.-led Cold War drive against China. Yet, as the witch-hunt of Moselmane again confirms, these have proven to be false hopes. Despite the sincerity of rank and file ALP supporters who hold these illusions, the truth is that the ALP has never sought to curb the “right” of even profitable companies to slash jobs whenever that is what it takes to further boost their own filthy profits. And the Labor Party is just as rabid in supporting Israel’s murderous oppression of Palestinian people as the Tories are and just as fervent in lining up behind the Cold War drive against socialistic China. And as for the type of “multiculturalism” envisaged by the ALP, one has only to look at the actions of the previous two leaders of the NSW ALP. At a meeting in the Blue Mountains in September 2018, former ALP leader Michael Daley incited racial prejudice when he disgustingly blamed migrants – especially from Asia – for taking local jobs and pushing young people out of Sydney [31]. Four months earlier, Daley’s predecessor Luke Foley also inflamed hostility to people of colour by despicably claiming that refugees are swamping Western Sydney leading to a “white flight” of Anglo families from these suburbs [32]. Meanwhile, just last month, the last ALP NSW premier, Kristina Keneally, now a senior member of federal Labor’s shadow ministry, was blowing out of the same dog whistle to racism as Daley and Foley as she called for a cut to migration and for local workers to get a “first go at jobs” [33].
To all those disillusioned with the ALP because it fails to actually stand up to the big end of town and refuses to fully shed its own white nationalist prejudices let alone challenge these notions, we say that it is high time to throw the ALP into the non-recyclable bin. The ALP is useless as an instrument for progressive change. And the problem is not merely that the ALP has lost its way. The bitter truth is that the ALP was never on the right track. Let’s remember that the Labor Party was founded on the principle of the White Australia Policy exclusion of Asian and other non-white immigrants. It is true that in certain periods – like the Whitlam years – the ALP oversaw some progressive reforms. But these were only ceded because the ruling class was in a weakened position –it was losing the Vietnam War to the heroic Vietnamese communists during the Whitlam period and facing a resurgent left and workers movement – and needed to grant the masses some concessions. These measures were taken by the ALP in order to stave off a much more deep-going working class radicalisation that could have conquered still greater gains for the masses. Yet, even at the best of times, the ALP’s approach has always been to try and make some piecemeal reforms for workers while retaining the acceptance of the capitalist bigwigs. This program has been a failure because the interests of the working class and those of the capitalist business owners are completely counter-posed. Every time that ALP leaders kowtow before the capitalist class and their media, they make this ruling class stronger, which in turn puts the ALP under even greater pressure to prostrate before these bigwigs. Such is logic of the ALP’s irreversible spiral downwards. For example, by pandering to the Murdoch and Fairfax media and the likes of Hadley and Credlin in their attacks on Moselmane, NSW ALP leader Jodi McKay strengthened the authority of these capitalist media outfits. So when the Murdoch media went on a crusade against today’s Black Lives Matter protests, McKay was under more pressure to bow to the wishes of Murdoch’s media than she otherwise would have been. This she duly did. Yesterday, Jodi McKay attacked Liberal premier Gladys Berejiklian from the right for not having then banned the planned protest. “Is (Premier Berejiklian) really giving her approval for a mass rally with potentially thousands of participants, when the maximum number of people allowed to visit a private home remains just five,” McKay told Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph [34]. It was this white supremacist-pandering attack by the NSW Labor leader on Berejiklian’s supposed softness on the protest that then pushed the conservative premier to move to ban today’s antiracist demonstration.
What we need is a workers party that in direct contrast to the ALP is not interested in gaining the approval or even the tolerance of any section of the capitalist class. Such a party would be based on the understanding that the interests of the working class masses can only be advanced through consistent opposition to the entire capitalist class. It would fight to restrict the “right” of capitalist bosses to slash jobs and fight for laws that would force company owners to increase their hiring of permanent workers at the expense of their profits. The workers party that we need would understand that advancing the masses interests can only come through building genuine workers unity. That means replacing the ALP’s hypocritical platitudes to “multiculturalism” and “reconciliation” with a merciless war against all outbreaks of white supremacy. It would fight for mass union/Aboriginal/Asian/Muslim/African mobilisations to crush violent redneck attacks, for the immediate jailing of all police and prison guards responsible for the deaths of Aboriginal people in custody and for the granting of all the rights of citizenship to all refugees, guest workers and international students. Such a party would also stand by all the peoples of the world subjugated by the same Australian capitalist class that exploits workers here at home, by the peoples subjugated by Canberra’s Washington big brother ally and by all those downtrodden by the reactionary regimes supported by these U.S. and Australian imperialists. That means it would oppose Australian imperialist plunder and paternalist bullying in the South Pacific and would demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and Australian troops from Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf and all of the Middle East. It would also oppose all U.N. and U.S. economic sanctions on the peoples of North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Iran. A true workers party would also demand the removal of all Israeli troops and settlers from all of the West Bank and Gaza and fight for the destruction of the racial-supremacist Israeli state and its replacement by a bi-national, secular workers state where Jews and Palestinians will live together in socialist harmony. Most crucially, the international policy of a party that truly defends workers interests would emphasise the unconditional defence of socialistic rule in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos against imperialist military pressure, lying propaganda campaigns and Western-backed anti-communist forces. This policy is essential despite the bureaucratic deformations and capitalist intrusions that distort socialistic rule in these countries. In short, what we need is a party that will defend the states where workers have achieved power abroad while fighting for workers rule here in Australia.
From causing a growing gap between rich and poor to its inability to provide secure, permanent jobs to its flawed response to the pandemic to the racist state brutality that it administers, capitalist rule is every day making life more miserable for the masses. The widespread revelations of racist state terror against black people and the brutal response of police to Black Lives Matter protests not only shows the true nature of capitalist “democracy” but exposes the blatant hypocrisy of capitalist regimes when they make allegations against the PRC, DPRK and other socialistic states over “human rights”. Now in the U.S., many working class people are questioning their faith in capitalist “democracy” and for the first time in a long while have begun to take the political offensive. Here in Australia, today’s mass anti-racist protests are a sign of the potential to turn around the ruling class’ decades-long offensive against Aboriginal people, other people of colour and the broader working class masses. Yet, as we look to possibly move onto the front foot, we need to guard our rear against attack. The more that we resist, the more that the exploiting class will fear the spectre of communism and, thus, the more that they will resort to Cold War witch-hunting and propaganda campaigns. That makes it doubly important to resist the Cold War attacks on those who sympathise with, or praise, the PRC and other socialistic countries. Let us condemn the witch-hunt of Shaoquett Moselmane and demand: No to the targeting of Australian-Chinese community organisations! Stop the persecution of pro-PRC Chinese international students! Rebuff the all-sided attacks on democratic rights that the McCarthyist anti-PRC witch-hunt is fuelling!
References
Charles Calisher, Dennis Carroll, Rita Colwell, Ronald B Corley, Peter Daszak, Christian Drosten, Luis Enjuanes, Jeremy Farrar, Hume Field, Josie Golding, Alexander Gorbalenya, Bart Haagmans, James M Hughes, William B Karesh, Gerald T Keusch, Sai Kit Lam, Juan Lubroth, John S Mackenzie, Larry Madoff, Jonna Mazet, Peter Palese, Stanley Perlman, Leo Poon, Bernard Roizman, Linda Saif, Kanta Subbarao and Mike Turner, Statement in support of the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China combatting COVID-19 (published 19 February 2020), The Lancet, Volume 395, Issue 10226, E42-E43, 7 March 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9
