"Law and Order" Frenzy Threatens Workers, Minorities

Down With Racist Campaign Targeting African Youth!

For well over a year, the Sudanese population living in a few small suburban pockets of Melbourne have been under siege from a government and media-driven campaign of racist hysteria. A stream of articles in the bourgeois press inventing “rioting” African youth “gangs” have been seized upon and embellished by the federal Liberal/National Coalition government.

The stone-cold racist federal Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton, has been at the forefront of this scurrilous campaign against “African gang violence.” Notorious for overseeing the brutal incarceration of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, Dutton took his fear-mongering to ludicrous levels in January, when he declared that people living in Melbourne are “scared to go out to restaurants of a night time because they are followed home by these gangs.” Dutton was backed by Prime Minister Turnbull, who claimed there was “growing gang violence and lawlessness in Victoria.”

Seeking to wedge the Victorian state Labor government of Daniel Andrews on “law and order” in the lead-up to the state elections, Dutton has railed that the Victorian judiciary is full of politically correct “civil libertarians” who impose “jokes of sentences” on African youth offenders. Dutton’s answer is to “deport them where we can” because “they don’t belong in Australian society.” Subsequently, and without a hint of irony, Dutton said he would apply “special attention” to help white South African farmers facing “horrific circumstances” migrate to a “civilised country like ours.” According to Dutton, these white South African farmers, as opposed to unnamed others, are worthy prospects because they will “abide by our laws, integrate into our society, work hard [and] not lead a life on welfare.” Backing Dutton, former Liberal Party prime minister, Tony Abbott, has since questioned whether there should be any black African migration to this “civilised country.”

In January the then-acting Victorian state premier responded to the federal Liberal/National Coalition’s demonisation of African youth by assuring the public that, “We are going to tackle these crimes where they occur, we are going to tackle these gangs where they occur, we are going to throw the book at them.” Before the latest scare campaign, the Andrews government had already committed $2 billion in additional funding for police, expanding their number by more than 3,000. It has instituted some of the toughest bail laws in the country and is now building a new high security youth prison in Werribee South at the cost of $288 million. In July, it introduced legislation forcing 16-year-old parolees to wear GPS tracking devices and extended “anti-association” laws to include 14-year-olds. These laws are modelled on Queensland’s draconian “anti-bikie” laws, which were passed with bi-partisan support in 2013.

Anti-association laws introduced in New South Wales in 2012 have especially targeted Aboriginal women and youth, as well as the jobless and homeless. The first person sentenced under the NSW laws was a homeless man with terminal cancer. He was picked up for speaking to three people on a park bench on the Manly foreshore in Sydney. Anti-association laws add to the scores of other repressive laws that have been introduced under the bourgeoisie’s bogus “war on terror.” While shredding the individual’s democratic right to associate with others, these sinister laws can, and will be, used to try to shut down protests by the oppressed and left and labour movement.

Racist Gang in Blue

The latest round of scare-mongering began soon after a multiracial crowd, including African youth and leftists, clashed with fascists outside an event in December at which right-wing British provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was speaking. For hours that night, the police rampaged in the nearby, largely immigrant, public housing block. They attacked residents with pepper spray and batons causing numerous injuries. Weeks later, when the community organised a “Black Lives Matter” protest, the police carried out a systematic campaign of intimidation in the local schools and on the streets to try to stop the protest. Despite police threats, the rally went ahead. In the wake of the Yiannopoulos event, police have charged numerous African youth and anti-fascist protesters. We demand: Drop the charges now!

While the Victorian Police Commissioner called Dutton’s comments about dangerous African youth gangs in Melbourne “complete and utter garbage,” there should be no illusions that the cops can be friends of any workers or oppressed. The police, like the military and the prisons, form the core of the bourgeois state, which exists to defend the interests of the capitalist rulers and suppress the struggles of workers and the oppressed. The police force is a culture medium for anti-woman, homophobic and racist backwardness. This was exemplified in February when it was revealed that Victoria’s then-assistant police commissioner and head of the police’s “ethical standards body” had been using a pseudonym to engage in white supremacist and sexist rants on the internet.

Reports of racial profiling by Victorian police are legion. A 2010 report on police harassment and violence against African youth revealed that they were regularly taunted by police with calls of “monkey.” In suburban Melbourne, members of a police unit focussed on African youth were given stubby holders emblazoned with the words “Welcome to the jungle!” Sudanese youth experiences of violence at the hands of police ranged from being roughed up to being beaten up and left stranded far from home without cash or shoes. This mirrors the experiences of many Aboriginal youth. A National Inquiry into Racist Violence reported that 85 percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth interviewed had been physically attacked by police. From Elijah Doughty to David Dungay, racist killings of Aboriginal people on the streets, and in the lock-ups, continue unabated.

Despite the hysterical media and government beat-up, even Victoria Police say that less than one percent of crime statistics are generated by Sudanese. More importantly, most of these “statistics” do not reflect actual crimes or prosecutions but can include what is officially known as “routine intercepts” where Sudanese are often picked up for nothing other than the way they look! This is colloquially known as “driving while black.” The truth is there is no African crime wave! It is a lie. What does exist is systemic racist discrimination. Alongside unrelenting police harassment, Sudanese youth face racism in the schools forcing many to drop out. Those who get a tertiary qualification are in the main shunned by employers. This has resulted in levels of unemployment up to five times the national average.

For more than a decade the bourgeois rulers have consciously and intermittently whipped up a racist war against this small population of immigrants. This took off in 2007 following the brutal murder of a Sudanese youth, Liep Gony, by white racists in Melbourne. Facing a federal electoral wipe-out, then-Liberal/National Coalition immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, played the race card. He decreed that Sudanese could not successfully “integrate” into Australian society and slashed the black African refugee intake, which is now reduced to a trickle. Of the almost 28,000 Sudanese who have migrated to Australia since the mid-1990s, only about 3,000 have resettled in the last ten years.

The vile racism now at saturation levels has been fuelled by successive Liberal/National Coalition and Labor governments, not least through the “war on terror,” which has particularly targeted darker-skinned people while shredding the democratic rights of everyone. In 2009, a massive police operation terrorised the Somali and Lebanese populations across neighbourhoods in Melbourne and Colac. Following similar police raids in 2005 the racist frenzy whipped up by the capitalist media sparked a wave of attacks on Muslims, leading to the thousands-strong fascist-infested riot at Sydney’s Cronulla beach in December that year, where anyone of non-white appearance was attacked.

For Union/Minority Mobilisations to Stop the Fascists

The current state and media campaign targeting African youth has further emboldened the extreme right and fascists. Earlier this year the fascist True Blue Crew and United Patriots Front (UPF) held a meeting in Melbourne to organise for terror against African youth. The reporting of this event by national broadcaster Channel 7 whitewashed the fascists’ agenda, describing the event as a “community gathering” of a group hoping to “create a kind of neighbourhood watch.” Channel 7 interviewed UPF head Blair Cottrell without any indication that he is an open admirer of Adolf Hitler. The legitimising of the extreme right and its fascist fringe is becoming commonplace. Over the last several months Cottrell has been given a platform on various news outlets.

It is notable that while young African immigrants are targeted with all-sided reaction, a long-time fascist like Jim Saleam, who was jailed in 1991 for a shotgun attack on the Sydney home of a black African National Congress representative, could posture as a “respectable” bourgeois politician in the recent Longman by-election in Queensland. Outrageously, the Queensland Council of Unions (QCU) helped bolster Saleam’s credibility by telling workers to preference him ahead of the ALP’s main rival, the Liberal National Party.

The QCU’s ALP parliamentary cretinism is deadly dangerous. Fascists such as Saleam are race-hate terrorists who seek to recruit, through racist violence on the streets, to their deadly program of genocide and ultimately the destruction of the left, trade unions and workers’ organisations. The decaying capitalist order, with its poverty-level wages, mass unemployment, homelessness and crumbling infrastructure, creates conditions in which the fascists thrive. The crucial task of sweeping the fascists off the streets requires a program for mass united-front mobilisations centred on the organised workers movement and uniting behind them all the fascists’ intended victims: immigrants, Aborigines, Muslims, Jews and gays.

The fascists are held in reserve by the capitalist class—a tiny minority of fabulously wealthy exploiters who own the banks, industry and mines—to be unleashed in times of crisis as shock troops against the working class. The fight against fascism is therefore inseparable from the fight to overthrow the capitalist system. Mobilising the unions to defend workers and minorities requires a political fight against the trade-union bureaucracy, which is wedded to class collaboration and nationalism and thus incapable of leading an effective fight to defend its own members, let alone minorities under attack. The Spartacist League’s perspective to mobilise union power to stop the fascists also aims to imbue the working class with consciousness of its social power and revolutionary potential. Such actions would be a step towards forging a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class to overthrow this barbaric capitalist system.

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Marxist Party

Australia was founded as a British penal colony, a colonial settler state built on the mass murder and dispossession of the Indigenous people, pogroms against Chinese, and a racist colour bar to keep out non-white people. For generation after generation, and with each new influx of migrants, the capitalist rulers have whipped up racism in order to keep the working class divided and thus maximise the profits they obtain from the exploitation of workers’ labour power.

To be rid of this racist capitalist system demands the construction of a multiracial revolutionary workers party. Such a party would organise the most advanced layers of the working class to take a stand against every instance of capitalist oppression on the road to overthrowing this sick capitalist system. This is what the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky achieved in October 1917. Fighting for socialist revolution on a world scale, we in the Spartacist League of Australia, section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) fight to infuse the working class with the consciousness that it has the class interest and social power to eradicate the capitalist system of racist terror, exploitation and war through proletarian revolution.