En Passant

There’s a new reporter in the House! IA’s Canberra correspondent John Passant delivers his first report as an official (and IA’s second) Press Gallery member, just as Turnbull ditches his signature NEG policy over #libspill speculation

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is Australia’s Donald Trump, I write in Independent Australia.

  Facing defeat at the next election and with a record of failure, Dutton and the Coalition are conjuring up African gangs in a desperate attempt to enlist fear-based support, writes John Passant in Independent Australia

Dutton’s new “super ministry” signals the need to ramp up the fight and defeat the Turnbull Government in true Doctor Who style, I write in Independent Australia.

Apparently, it is Australian values to blatantly lie and incite hatred towards asylum seekers, I write in Independent Australia

The Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, has once again shamed himself and disgraced his office with unsubstantiated, ill-considered and offensive claims about refugees says the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney.

The real enemy is Peter Dutton and all he represents, not asylum seekers and refugees.

All the members of the Turnbull government share the antediluvian delusion that austerity – cutting government spending on workers and the poor, cutting wages, sacking workers for example – will solve the economic problems of capitalism. This is their bedrock and the sexism, racism and homophobia of this government (and in varying degrees of the Labor Opposition) flow from this deep well of ruling class essentialism. The sexism, racism and homophobia, by distracting and dividing workers, help reinforce the government’s capacity to achieve its economic agenda of shifting more and more wealth and income from labour to capital. It is no accident that the government which attacks unions attacks women, Aborigines, refugees and gays.

Just another case of a male authority figure not believing a raped woman. Unusual eh?

The one tactic the refugee movement hasn’t tried to date, apart from activists undertaking essentially stand alone actions, is arguing for and then trying to mobilise the thousands who turn out to rallies around a specific call for civil disobedience. My suggestion is that the left begin agitating to occupy the centre of the capital cities until Abyan is bought back to Australia for medical treatment and try to build just such a movement in the next week.