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We value your input, as long as you agree with us: “Indigenous leaders have been barred from pursuing constitutional reform within the Morrison government’s new peak advisory group on a voice for First Australians, under leaked rules that restrict their ability to press for change. A briefing to some of Australia’s most respected Indigenous leaders has warned them against making recommendations on constitutional recognition, ruling it out of scope for their group. The terms of reference … also place restrictions on the wider national group of leaders who are being asked to help design the voice to Parliament for Indigenous Australians. In one of the biggest restrictions, the government also prevents the national group making any recommendations on a Makarrata Commission, the forum meant to offer ‘truth-telling’ and conflict resolution with First Australians.” Ironically, this shows exactly why an Indigenous Voice to Parliament must be constitutionally enshrined — as long as it is created by parliament or the executive, it will not be free to express the real and full views of Aboriginal people. It needs to have independent authority, so that it does not depend on White Australia for permission to speak.

Britain’s Industrial Strategy Council is calling for industrial policy to address the twin objectives of environmental sustainability and better employment: “The most important economic challenge confronting contemporary societies is … to ensure that new technologies being developed by the advanced sectors of the economy serve society at large. That in turn requires the active steering by governments of prevailing production and innovation systems in two specific directions: toward green technologies and toward employment-friendly technologies. … The first of these imperatives is perhaps more widely understood in view of climate change and the vast environmental externalities at stake. … The second challenge — ensuring that our economies create a sufficient number of ‘good’ jobs — may be less existential, but it is also of great importance. … [T]he shortfall in good jobs is … a gross economic malfunction that impairs the proper functioning of a society. As recent studies have shown, communities that fail to produce good jobs experience a wide range of social ills… These are all costly externalities. Governments must induce private-sector decision makers engaged in production, investment, and innovation to internalize these somehow.” Sounds like a Green New Deal.

The AWU has been fined $18,000 for asking two scabs to explain why they should be allowed to remain members of the union. In 2015, AWU members at an Orica factory voted to take protected industrial action, but two members refused to participate; the union wrote to them and asked them to explain why they should not be expelled. Justice Snaden explained that of the objects of the Fair Work Act is “the protection of free association”, but in an Orwellian twist he decided AWU members had to be punished for exercising their right not to associate with scabs, because this would “punish them for their [the scabs’] decision to dissociate themselves from the broader AWU collective”. So scabs have a right to dissociate from the union, but union members will be fined for dissociating from scabs? “Fair” Work Act, indeed. (The Fair Work Ombudsman decided this case was worse than serious wage theft. Last year, it let Sunglass Hut off the hook with just a $50,000 “contrition payment” for $2.3 million in underpayments, but here it prosecuted the AWU and sought penalties of “between $77,760 and $87,480” — even Justice Snaden, a former Liberal student politician and barrister for militant employers, said this was “extreme” and “well above what is appropriate”. Priorities!)

Ella Shi expresses the fears of Chinese-Australians: “The announcement that those being evacuated from Wuhan — predominantly Australian citizens of Chinese descent — would be quarantined on Christmas Island struck an uncomfortable chord for many who felt the resonances of our brutal offshore detention regime. We’re asking, would this be the treatment reserved to repatriated people had the virus broken out in the UK?” She explains how old prejudices are bubbling back to the surface, and why: “Whiteness doesn’t inherently exist but was constructed to justify Western European economic exploitation, slavery, colonisation and control. … Because if the ‘Other’ is dangerous and exotic then ‘we’ are the civilised norm. … Today, we don’t recoil at bat soup because it’s ‘barbaric’: it is barbaric because we choose to recoil at it. This isn’t about whether it’s okay or not to eat bat soup, but about recognising the response to the Coronavirus is an expression of a need to feel disgusted by the dirty barbaric Other in order to enable the Anglo-European Australian state to identify itself as civilised and pure to legitimise its sovereignty.” White Australians need to confront this truth and ask themselves what they are doing to change it.

The Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (with the support of 3CR) has published recordings of some sessions of its 2019 conference, on the theme of “Activism, Struggle and Labour History”. The range of topics is very diverse, ranging from specific industrial disputes and radical protest actions, to anti-racism organisations and global campaigns.

Shocking but not surprising: “Senior police in Western Australia were warned 12 months ago of a ‘clearly disturbing’ trend of Aboriginal drivers being overrepresented in police-initiated traffic stops. The briefing note from the mothballed evidence-based policing unit, obtained under freedom of information laws by Guardian Australia, found that Aboriginal drivers received 3.2 times more fines from being pulled over by police than non-Aboriginal drivers. But when tickets were issued by traffic cameras, Aboriginal drivers received slightly fewer penalties on average than non-Aboriginal drivers. … Aboriginal drivers in WA receive 1.75 times more penalty units over their lifetime of driving than non-Aboriginal drivers. That is about $1,260 more in fines for Aboriginal drivers, ‘almost entirely driven by police-initiated, on-the-spot infringements’. It also found Aboriginal drivers were carrying 6.2 times more unpaid fines — amounting to a debt of $2,327.” The police did nothing about it, and the evidence-based policing unit was starved of resources. This has potentially disastrous consequences for the people affected — Ms Dhu died after being abused in WA police custody, after being arrested for unpaid fines.

With Richard Di Natale retiring — good riddance — the Greens have turned to Adam Bandt for leadership. Contrary to Anthony Albanese’s strange (but telling) criticism, I think “strong rhetoric that has people who agree with you agreeing with you even stronger” will be good for the Greens, and I think Bandt’s so-called “watermelon” background means he will be better able to grapple with the issues facing working people — including the industrial issues facing communities on the front line of the climate transition we need to make. Bandt’s priorities of free education and a manufacturing renaissance show he has plans to address this vulnerability. (My only concern is that the concept of a Green New Deal is being turned into a generic Greens election slogan — for example, while expanding Medicare to cover dental services is unequivocally good policy, I can’t see why it is a pillar of Bandt’s version of a Green New Deal.)

Marjorie Kelly: “It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete. In the perilous moment we face, with the crises of the climate emergency and spiralling inequality, the time is up on corporations acting as though serving financial shareholders is their highest duty. … What must change is the structural design and ownership of the corporation itself. We need to envisage and create an entirely new concept of the company — a just firm — designed from the inside out for a new mandate: to serve broad wellbeing and the public good. The just firm is the only kind that should ultimately be permitted to exist. The time is coming when society must end the corporation as we know it. … Control by capital is what pulls companies away from the living mission for which they exist… The purpose of economies is to meet human needs. When companies instead exist simply to spin off gains for capital, society is in peril.” Her proposal is for a shift away from the dominance of corporations towards “a rich diversity of designs”, including co-ops, credit unions, social enterprises, and state-owned companies.

Harvard Law School has published a major report on US employment law,  Clean Slate for Worker Power: Building a Just Democracy and Economy. Based on consultation with workers, organisers, economists, sociologists and political scientists around the world, it makes detailed recommendations for wholesale reform of labour law — and although some of it is US-centric, a lot of it has value for Australia. Here are some of the recommendations I find most interesting:

• Provide a works council in any workplace where at least three workers request one;
• Allow union organizers access to workplaces and email systems upon showing of 25 percent support;
• Allow workers to strategically choose whom to strike based on which companies have power over their working conditions, not who signs their paychecks;
• Expand the range of collective bargaining subjects to include any subjects that are important to workers and over which employers have control, including decisions about the basic direction of the firm and employers’ impact on communities and our shared environment;
• Expand corporations’ fiduciary duties to include a duty to workers;
• Give worker organisations a formal advisory role informing enforcement agencies’ operations and strategic priorities; and
• Prohibit employers who have a record of noncompliance with labor laws from receiving federal funds.

There’s a lot in this report, and it’s well worth digging into.

Lidia Thorpe: “One of the first things you notice about the ‘Change the Date’ debate is a glaring absence of Aboriginal voices. This is in keeping with the obsession that Australia (progressive Australia included) has with fretting about the so-called ‘Aboriginal problem.’ For all the talk, this never seems to involve opening the conversation to perspectives, solutions, and leadership by First Peoples themselves. We are also absent from the debate because — unsurprisingly — many of us aren’t interested in helping to alleviate white guilt by moving the date of Australia Day. Given worsening and horrific deaths in custody and a gap in the life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous men of up to fifteen years, it’s not a pressing concern. In fact, it’s a dangerous distraction from the conversation we should be having, about signing a treaty between black and white Australia. … Without a treaty, the trauma and bloodshed that stretches from our past into the present cannot be confronted; lasting and meaningful reconciliation will be impossible. Indeed, the absence of a treaty is the single biggest roadblock to Australia growing up as a nation. … [A]t its core, a treaty is an agreement between sovereigns that recognizes the existence and inalienability of the rights of all parties. Other forms of ‘recognition,’ even if well intentioned, don’t cut it because they do not resolve this fundamental injustice.”