the Banner Bright

The shocking police raids on media organisations demand two responses. First, a thorough review of Australia’s so-called ‘national security’ legislation, which makes it too easy for the government to intimidate and embarrass innocent people, be they journalists, unions, or brown people. This cannot be limited to carve-outs for the media, as Waleed Aly explains: “the question isn’t simply ‘how useful will police find these powers?’. It’s also, ‘In what way is it possible for these powers to be abused?’ It’s true, the media will occasionally ask such questions, but mostly when it sees the potential for that power to be used against itself. If, instead, the power in question falls upon a terrorism suspect barely a ripple of dissent is visible until at least after the fact, no matter how many Mohamed Haneef or Kamer Nizamdeen stories we hear of people wrongly arrested.” Second, the Department of Home Affairs must be dismantled. Its purpose is to take the aggressive, militarised and secretive culture that oversees our Pacific concentration camps and spread it across a huge proportion of the government. It is destroying our civil government, as its two champions did to the Immigration Department first.

The former Fair Work Ombudsman has suddenly noticed that big businesses have been ripping off their workers for years — something that went largely unnoticed while she was the regulator charged with enforcing wage laws. Meanwhile her replacement as FWO has announced a new approach for 2019-20, to be built around the radical idea that the regulator should actually use its power to issue compliance notices! The Compliance and Enforcement Policy will be updated in light of the Migrant Workers Taskforce and the Hayne Royal Commission. While this new rhetoric is welcome, it would be wrong to pin our hopes on FWO to tackle wage theft. Its primary function is educating and collaborating with bosses as “customers”, not regulating them — in fact its KPIs set a ten per cent limit on the number of cases where compliance powers are used. (I’ll believe FWO is taking a tougher approach when we see criminal charges for providing fraudulent documents to wage inspectors — it must be the only regulatory agency that treats that kind of blatant crookedness as a civil law issue.)

As another tedious round of Labor-Greens bickering gets under way, those who think the parties should work more closely need to work outside the parliament and party structures to make an alliance feasible. The most promising avenue would seem to be developing a grassroots campaign along the lines of the American Green New Deal or British Green Industrial Revolution. To that end, a Melbourne chapter of the Climate Justice Collective launched last month, committed to “organise around a Green New Deal for Australia built on the foundational principles of climate justice, decolonisation, decommodification, democratisation, decarbonisation, international solidarity, anti-capitalism and resisting ecofascism with the aim of making a Green New Deal a household name with majority support in opinion polling by the 2022 federal election”. Their fortnightly newsletter (here’s the first issue) looks like a must-read for information about environmental and industrial campaign ideas and actions.

Western Australia’s police commissioner, Chris Dawson, has called for a dramatic expansion of community justice programs. A pilot restorative justice program at Bidyadanga involves diverting minor matters to be dealt with by Indigenous elders under the community’s ‘Lore Tree’. While locals do not see it as a panacea, police say it has had an impact by keeping young people out of the court system. While denying systemic racism exists in the WA justice system, Dawson says, “I strongly support these approaches, rather than truck or fly a young person to be remanded in custody some 2,000km south, taken off country, taken away from their parents and carers and their community, and expect that they’re going to come back better people for it… [T]here’s a vast volume of them where it does not make any sense to take them away from country, but that doesn’t mean taking away justice.” Meanwhile, Social Reinvestment WA has launched a podcast sharing the impact of the corrections system on young people, to highlight the flaws in the incarceration model and encourage government to seek more humane (and more effective) alternatives.

The National Union of Workers’ Godfrey Moase hopes his union’s proposed merger with United Voice will be more than an administrative paper shuffle, and will instead create new opportunities for organising and community solidarity: “The proposal represents more than a traditional merger between two unions but a radical and transformative proposal that reimagines union structures to be fit for purpose in the precarious world of late capitalism. … Most unions operate on a federated basis with different branches of the same union often having different membership eligibility, demographics of membership and organising capacity. Instead, United Workers Union will be one national union with a single leadership team exercising responsibility over different industry and campaigning teams with a national scope. … Rank-and-file leaders will be elected from organic communities at a scale that reinforces human connections. Moreover, its rules make provision for non-industrial forms of membership, including on a community and political basis.  Contained within the very DNA of the new union are the structures that can make real the new union’s declared aim of putting ‘the voice of the people back at the heart of our economic and political system’.” The risk that ordinary members will be disempowered by the merger of unions into a large, bureaucratic organisation is significant, so it is good to see that efforts are being made to design better structures for the new union.