FREEDOM FOR THE REFUGEES! NO TO OFFSHORE OR ONSHORE DETENTION!

BUILD A PRO-WORKING CLASS REFUGEE RIGHTS MOVEMENT

20 March 2014 – Thousands of people have protested in recent weeks against the Abbott regime’s brutal war on refugees. The latest atrocity to spark protest was a rampage against refugees by guards at Australia’s Manus Island detention centre in PNG. On February 17, these guards unleashed murderous violence. Backed up by PNG police – who like other state institutions in Papua New Guinea are largely subservient to Australian imperialism – they attacked the detainees with sticks and machetes, murdering 24 year-old Kurdish asylum seeker, Reza Berati, and injuring 77 other refugees.

The recent large pro-refugee rights rallies have brought out a wide variety of people. Many are youth passionately opposed to racism. Some are small-l liberals who see the cruelty against refugees as a blot on the copybook of an otherwise fair society. Yet the despicable treatment of refugees is actually typical of the record of capitalist Australia – from genocidal terror against this country’s first peoples to the anti-Chinese pogroms of the late 1800s and right through to the 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach. Indeed, just three days before the Manus Island rampage, supporters of slain Aboriginal youth TJ Hickey marked ten years of the cover up of his murder by racist police in Redfern. The previous week, one of the four police officers who were surrounding an Aboriginal woman, Sheila Oakley, in her own home south of Brisbane, barbarically fired a taser straight into her eye and blinded it.

The Coalition’s war on refugees is naked. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott rant hardline refugee bashing speeches. ALP politicians have made some criticisms of Morrison’s lies about the Manus events. But, in case anyone thought that the ALP was considering shifting its own racist policy, ALP immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, made his party’s stance all too clear:

“We cannot afford for the Manus Island detention facility to fall over.”

“It is the cornerstone of Australia’s strategy in terms of reducing the flow of boats from Indonesia.”

Indeed, it was the Keating ALP government that first introduced mandatory detention in 1992. And let’s not forget that the Rudd government Version 2.0 introduced the extreme policy of sending all refugee arrivals to the Manus hellhole. The ALP leaders have as much of the blood of Reza Berati on their hands as does the right wing Coalition!

There are some within Labor ranks that do oppose aspects of the war on refugees. However, the ALP leadership fully embraces anti-refugee racism because that flows naturally from their support for the capitalist order – a system of exploitation that necessarily compels the ruling class to promote racism in order to divide and divert the working class people that they exploit and thus prevent the exploited masses from rising up against them. Today, as the ultra-rich bosses intensify their attacks on workers’ unions and savagely slash jobs – from WesTrac to Holden to Qantas – they and their hounds in government are intensifying the scapegoating of refugees and migrants. That’s why if the working class is going to be able to focus its own against the powerful capitalist enemy then it must actively challenge racist scapegoating of refugees. Mobilise trade union power to demand: Close all the detention centres! Residency with full citizenship rights for all refugees and migrants imprisoned in Manus Island, Christmas Island, Villawood and everywhere else!

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However, the current refugee rights groups like the Refugee Action Coalition (RAC) do not have this perspective. RAC has, indeed, worked tirelessly to expose the crimes against refugees. And the left wing groups that dominate RAC like Solidarity, Socialist Alliance (SA) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) certainly do believe in lobbying unions. However, these groups refuse to make appeals to workers’ class interests part of official rally slogans because they fear alienating pro-capitalist small-l liberals and Greens. And although there are some differences among the leftist groups within RAC – for example, SAlt believe in using the “Fu_k” word in chants while SA are less keen to do so – all these groups ultimately pander to the upper and upper- middle class liberals and Greens by refusing to make RAC actions explicitly pro-working class. They would argue that this is necessary to maintain a “broad” movement. But, in the end, because the interests of the corporate bosses and the working class are in direct opposition, you can only either appeal to one class or the other. By refusing to openly appeal to workers’ class interests, the current refugee rights movement is cutting off the chance of broadening support for refugees amongst the working class. And it is the organised working class and not well-heeled, small-l liberals or two-faced mainstream politicians that has the consistent interest and power to defeat the war on refugees.

Many refugee rights activists have illusions in the Greens who, after all, are the one parliamentary party that at least speaks out against aspects of the war on refugees. However, the flakiness of the Greens’ commitment to refugee   rights was demonstrated all too clearly when it jumped into a coalition with the Gillard ALP government without demanding even the slightest commitment from that government to ease its war on refugees. The Greens’ inability to offer real solutions flows from their middle class refusal to stand unequivocally for workers class interests against those of the capitalist bosses. Thus, in Tasmania, as part of the recently deposed governing coalition with the ALP, the Greens openly supported the anti-worker privatisation of electricity distribution. This refusal to stand for class struggle solutions leaves the Greens coughing up divisive nationalist “solutions” instead. In fact, the Greens are the most hardline of all major parties in whipping up hysteria over foreign ownership of land (see http://www.greens.org.au/land-ownership). Although such Greens jingoism is not directly aimed against asylum seekers, it definitely feeds into the poisonous national chauvinism that inevitably rebounds against asylum seekers who are, after all, in essence the most vulnerable section of migrant Australia.

MOBILISE TRADE UNION POWER IN DEFENCE OF REFUGEES

The struggle to mobilise the workers movement behind refugees depends not only on what the refugee rights movement does. It also depends, crucially, on there being a union leadership that is prepared to stand strongly against racism. Some union officials have come out in support of refugee rights but this is undercut by the overall union leadership’s subordination to the refugee-bashing ALP. Like their ALP mates in parliament, most of the union bureaucracy bows down to the capitalist order. They reject militant industrial action. In response to job slashing, they call for government assistance for local corporations and protectionist measures against overseas producers. In response to the bosses’ exploitation of 457 Visa workers, our union leaders – instead of fighting to win our guest worker sisters and brothers the same conditions as local workers and full citizenship rights – divisively call for local workers to be put ahead of their 457 Visa comrades.

Not only do such policies fuel xenophobic nationalism, they damage the workers’ unity that is needed to fight for workers rights. What the working class so badly needs is a leadership that’s prepared to unleash union power to force greedy bosses to retain jobs at the expense of their profits, all as part of a broader workers’ fightback against the capitalist exploiters. And any union activist who is serious about mobilising industrial action knows that a successful strike depends, above all, on workers’ unity and a clear understanding of who the enemy is (the bosses and their hacks in government) and who the enemy definitely is not (migrant workers and refugees). That is why we communists insist that the fight against racism is crucial to the struggle for workers’ rights. Indeed, with the ruling class on an anti-union offensive – highlighted by the Abbott government’s Royal Commission against the unions – opposing the ruling class’ strategy to divert the masses frustrations onto asylum seekers and 457 Visa workers is actually a life and death question for the union movement itself.

Despite being concerned for the welfare of asylum seekers, bourgeois liberal elements in the refugee rights movement know (while middle class elements think) that they have too much to gain living under a capitalist system. Too much to ever commit to a full frontal attack against the very system that transports asylum seekers to hellhole camps on Nauru and Manus Island. On the other hand, workers have long had an axe to grind with the Australian capitalist state. For the system has been set up to ensure that the yoke of exploitation remains permanently fixed around the broad, many coloured shoulders of the Australian working class. A powerful, united, multi-ethnic workers’ front is what’s needed to finally shake this yoke off. But first the insidious, divisive racism that pits worker against worker, all in the name of profits and dividends for the greedy bosses and shareholders, must be well and truly cast off. The refugee rights movement can assist in the formation of an anti-racist, class-struggle union leadership by ensuring that its slogans appeal directly to the interests that workers have in defending asylum seekers. In turn, the refugee rights struggle urgently needs union power behind it. Otherwise the spirited refugee rights rallies that are taking place, while useful in energising new layers of support, will not be able to stop a determined and rampaging ruling class. So let’s ensure that the refugee rights movement unashamedly proclaims its solidarity with the working class by saying: “Don’t let the bosses and politicians divide and divert workers with racism! Make our unions stronger – Build workers unity – Fight for refugee rights!”