There will be a gathering at the
Maribyrnong Detention Centre
53 Hampstead St, Maidstone in Melbourne
Aug 26, 2pm.
(Anyone wishing to endorse the action, please contact Xborder. Anyone
wanting to circulate their own statement along with a call to action for
the gathering at the Maribyrnong internment centre, please do so, and
forward a copy to Xborder.)
Our Struggles Are As Global As Capital
Our Movements Cross Borders
- making the connections in the run up to S11
Ruddock weeps crocodile tears
As hundreds of refugees took courageous action to highlight their plight by
going over and under the barbed wire on June 12/13, Ruddock reached first
for the racist slander of depicting asylum seekers as carriers of disease
and criminals and, when that failed, for the theatrics of crocodile tears.
'People-smugglers', we were told, were responsible not only for people
seeking asylum in the first place, but also for the prospect of being caged
up for months if not years in the refugee internment camps. How terrible,
Ruddock lamented, that these 'organised criminal syndicates' were
exploiting human misery? In this way, the Government sought to shift
responsibility for its own treatment of refugees to shadowy otherworld figures.
The prohibition industry of 'people smuggling' would not, however, exist if
it were not for the barriers that have been erected against refugees by all
western countries in the last 10 years. But not even the profits made from
exploiting the needs of people to flee can compare with the profits being
made legally and with Government encouragement.
Ruddock is concealing the transfer of millions of public money into the
coffers of the global incarceration giant, Australian Correctional
Management/Wackenhut that runs all the refugee internment camps and carries
out deportations and deterrence. Who stands to gain the most from ensuring
that such misery continues?
Internment Camps
Today in Australia, there are thousands of people who are imprisoned, often
for months, always for indefinite periods, without charge and without
trial, who are not able to access the courts to review either the merit of
their imprisonment or its duration, and whom the Federal Attorney-General,
Daryl Williams, has said do not have a right to be informed of any of their
remaining rights, including the right to seek legal advice upon their
imprisonment. The Government and Opposition refer to these people as
'illegal immigrants'. This is a calculated lie. As a 'Parliamentary Joint
Standing Committee on Migration' Report explicitly says, the incarceration
of asylum seekers is "the deprivation of liberty other than as the result
of a conviction for an offence."
We Are Confined So That Capital Can Move Against Us
As capital moves ever more freely around the world; we are locked up,
confined, enclosed. In the last decade of the 20th century, as trade and
financial movements were deregulated, as the rules governing the actions of
bosses, merchants and bankers were eased or abolished altogether; it became
almost impossible�more often than not illegal�to flee the impoverishment
brought about by austerity programmes, to escape the wars, the economic and
environmental devastation brought about by IMF and World Bank-sponsored
'development' and debt-induced conflicts.
Borders
So that capital can incite the kind of competition that would compel us to
work for as next to nothing as possible�the underbidding wars that go by
the name of 'the race to the bottom'�workers have to be territorially
divided by region, city, and country, divided again by firm through
'enterprise bargaining', and divided in turn through individual contracts
and the like. Borders between workers�including the border between
documented and undocumented workers, the borders assembled by ethnicism,
racism and nationalism�are the key ingredients in the power of global capital.
Pass Laws, Prisons And Reserves
Much like centuries ago, as australia was colonised by the british crown
for use as a penal colony, so today incarceration and pass laws have become
the favoured means for controlling and criminalising the attempts of those
in the most wretched of circumstances to escape their impoverishment. The
regimes of 'mandatory sentencing' that have targeted indigenous peoples,
the system of 'mandatory and non-reviewable detention' of asylum seekers
who arrive without papers, the criminalisation of strikes and industrial
action, the privatisation of public spaces, the return of forced labour in
the form of work-for-the-dole, and not least the new round of 'development'
which has forced millions of lands in many third world countries� These
are the latest version of the procedures that accompanied the so-called
'free trade' capitalism of previous times: the tossing off of indigenous
peoples from their lands so that they have no option other than to work for
the profit of others or live by the charity of the missionaries, the pass
laws that restricted their movements to reserves, these local systems of
enclosure were the vicious corollary of the poorhouses, workhouses, and the
enclosures of the commons that provoked the creation of this continent as
the prisonhouse of those declared to be 'surplus populations' and 'the
dangerous classes' ousted from the heart of the Empire�
CLOSE THE INTERNMENT CAMPS - GRANT ASYLUM SEEKERS THE SAME RIGHTS AS
EVERYONE ELSE - OPEN THE BORDERS
Xborder - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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