Tag: auspol

theauspolchronicles:

“I could be PM again,” says Tony Abbott.

“I’m a well known back bencher. It’s logical therefore that I could be leader again,” he said with a tone that wasn’t threatening, and yet somehow it was…

He said this two days ago. The Liberals today then had an unscheduled party room meeting on the matter of making it more difficult for leadership spills to remove sitting Prime Ministers.

“Just hear me out…” he said as everyone filed into the party room. “Think about how good I was… imagine me being leader again and running the country like the good old times.” Everyone started shuffling into the room faster with a new found sense of urgency.

the house with annabel crabb only came out last year and it’s already a time capsule. turnbull is the pm with a majority government. julie bishop is foreign minister. nick xenophon is important. it’s pre-section 44.

class-struggle-anarchism:

dagwolf:

ffs

ugh.I hate this so much… leaving aside the fact that “the centre” is a statistical fiction and not an actual position, say you just want to argue that compulsory voting makes political parties reflect the majority views of Australians (a common assumption) – there’s really no evidence for it.

For example – Australia is one of the most pro-choice countries on earth, has been for ages, massive support for legal abortions from voters of all parties. In New South Wales abortion is illegal unless a doctor says there’s a threat to the mother’s life – and that’s Australia’s most populous state, 7 and a half million people. Abortion has literally just been decriminalised in Queensland, comes into effect in December.

The majority of Australians supported marriage equality in every poll since 2007, compulsory voting didn’t stop politicians ignoring “the centre” for ten full years on that one.

The majority of Australians are opposed to privatisation, has compulsory voting stopped every single government, regardless which party is in power, pushing it through? Nope. Australians are actually in favour of re-nationalising a lot of things, and it’s not even a lefty thing, the majority of Liberal-National voters (the mainstream right wing party, current government) actually want to re-nationalise Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia. Has compulsory voting made this prime patch of centre-ground real estate attractive to any party? Has it fuck

The average Australian is pro-euthanasia, they’d like the public transport system to be good (they’re all shite) they’re not up for massively subsidising the mining industry or bailing out banks. They believe in climate change – up until 2015 we had a prime minister who thought climate change is “probably doing good” for the planet – did compulsory voting save us from that wanker? nope

All compulsory voting does is allow them to manufacture a larger mandate for whatever shit they were going to do anyway. 

No amount of voting will ever make public opinion matter more than the various vested interests of the powerful, because politicians only need your support on election day – every other day they need the support of a bunch of rich and powerful scumbags and the institutional forces they command…which suits politicians fine, because they understand rich and powerful scumbags, that’s their mates, their colleagues, their school friends… they don’t need to do an opinion poll to know what plays well in that, their true and only constituency. They are fundamentally, permanently, constitutionally unable to actually give a fuck what you think – and compulsory voting makes that easier for them, not harder.

quoms:

The thing about baseline nationalism – not even “radical” nationalism, just that sort of normal set of underlying nationalist principles that everyone adheres to who believes in the legitimacy of nation-states, which is most people – is that you don’t even need to say, for instance, “it’s okay for the government to put people in camps and torture them because they’re not Australian.” You don’t even need to formulate that as a coherent thought in a way that might result in you dealing with it, because it’s simply taken for granted as a fundamental truth. Your brain does you the favor of gliding right over it so you can get on with writing your internet screed about how the conditions “probably aren’t that bad” and people are only attempting suicide and children are only falling comatose as a trick to be allowed into Australian hospitals, which just proves even more they shouldn’t be allowed to come here, on and on, etc. etc.

It is a mistake to think that only extreme nationalists, only violent nationalists, are the problem. The normal everyday nationalism that is so commonplace we often don’t even register it as being nationalism is – perhaps after gender – the most widespread and deeply entrenched system on this planet for licensing violence done by others, for turning violence into something sanitary and bureaucratic and amoral, for allowing people who are not fundamentally indecent to nevertheless avert their eyes from damning evidence of human suffering. It is a social pathology. A disease.

it seems like the pm doesn’t want to outlaw conversion therapy because he doesn’t want to take the option away from gay adults. he’s really convinced it’s entirely grown ass adults making this decision for themselves. and there’s no outside coercion there whatsoever. as if it’s a human right to get yourself tortured if you really want to. sure m8

fandomsandfeminism:

rootiepatootie:

fandomsandfeminism:

Nestle says slavery reporting requirements could cost customers

Fuckers

This, I can believe, Nestle’s is a scum bag company ………. (I avoid buying any product from them, when at all possible)

The problem, of course, is that nestle owns a huge number of brands on the market . Over 2,000 in fact. So without extensive time to research every product in your basket, its very hard to be sure you havent bought a nestle product, and most of their competitors are also morally dubious at best, if on a smaller scale for the most part.

So yes, nestle is evil. The underlying problem is our poorly regulated economic system that facilitates this evil.

Child Refugees Sent To A Tiny Pacific Island Are Becoming Unconscious From Their Trauma

quoms:

iamoutofideas:

realmoths:

Sorry to link to buzzfeed but i want peter dutton’s head on a pike

should note that nauru banned facebook because refugees were using it m to spread awareness

Dr Nick Kowalenko, who chairs the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry international relations subcommittee at the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Child Psychiatrists, said that environmental features of pervasive refusal syndrome – including trauma, parental mental illness, and a pervading sense of hopelessness – have been the reality for years for the kids on Nauru.

“People can endure difficulties if there’s an anticipated hopeful outcome, a light at the end of the tunnel,” Kowalenko said. “But the dawning experience on a lot of those families and kids is that’s not the case.”

the explicit point of australia’s immigration policy, the explicit point of the way the detention centers on nauru and manus island have been run, is to provoke a sense of hopelessness. the trauma being done to these children is not even an accidental byproduct of conditions at the camps: it is an intended and inevitable consequence of the way the system is run, because it is a system designed to traumatise, regardless of the number of euphemisms deployed to design that fact

the stories in this article are proof positive that the people running australia’s immigration system are doing so competently and effectively

Child Refugees Sent To A Tiny Pacific Island Are Becoming Unconscious From Their Trauma

theauspolchronicles:

New espionage laws have passed thanks to the support of both major parties, which could lead to peaceful protesters arrested and journalists jailed for 15 to 20 years.

The new laws make it an offence to report anything that “harms Australia’s international reputation” which could include criticising their breaches of [redacted] on [redacted] and [redacted] island.

Peaceful protesters could be jailed for “damaging public infrastructure” which includes merely limiting access to entrances and which is [redacted]ing ridiculous.

The government is [redacted] good and everything is [redacted] OK. This is not [redacted]

[redacted]

[redacted] at all [redacted]

[redacted] evil.

Source: theauspolchronicles

theauspolchronicles:

nerdtasticami:

theauspolchronicles:

Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.

…what’s going on in Australia?

Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:

  1. The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
  2. The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!

Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”

BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!

Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.

OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”

Well Scott Morrison decided once to tell the Senate that he could release a few kids from detention centres but only if they voted for a bill that increased his powers to send refugees back to where they would suffer persecution and basically told them if they don’t vote for it the kids will continue to suffer. He held children as ransom for his own political power. Our Human Rights Commissioner slammed it as terrible to use kids as bargaining chips. You know what the government did? Personally attack her and ask her to resign over his bias. Our Prime Minister at the time complained that Australia was “sick of being lectured” by the UN over how we keep torturing refugees.

The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!

Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?

Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.

Oh and the government super doesn’t them to come here. The Abbott government spent $4.1 million on a propaganda movie to be shown overseas to deter refugees.

We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.

(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).

Papa New Guinea (Manus Island isn’t Australian, we just have a deal to pay another government to let us keep a torture prison on their land… hmm I feel like there’s a US equivalent somewhere too…) decided a while back “hang on, this is unconstitutional and horrible. You need to close down the detention centre on Manus.” So we “did.” And then made a new building on the same island to keep them in and forced them to go into it despite it not being finished. This was after guards physically beat the refugees to make them go to this new prison.

I could go on but you get the idea.

So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”

Let that sink in.

And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.

The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.