Category: Opinion

  • COMMENTARY: By Pacific Island Times publisher Mar-Vic Cagurangan

    I remember that day — February 25, 1986. I was then a teenager. My family stood outside the iron gates of Malacañang Palace among a massive wave of people armed with yellow ribbons, flowers and rosaries.

    After a four-day uprising, we heard on the radio that the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his family had fled the country.

    Ramming through the gates of the now forlorn presidential palace, people found signs of a hurtled retreat. Hundreds of pairs of shoes, gowns and other evidence of the Marcoses’ profligacy had been abandoned. Documents and bullets were scattered on the floor.

    They’re gone, the Marcoses!

    People burst into song. The poignant “Bayan Ko” (My Country) — the metaphor of a caged bird that yearns to be free — was the anthem of the EDSA revolution: People Power.

    The Marcoses had been obliterated from our lives.

    Or so we thought.

    My generation — we were called “The Martial Laws Babies” — is beginning to realise now that only the glorious part of Philippine history is being obliterated.

    ‘Bongbong’ Marcos the frontrunner
    Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., only son and namesake of the late dictator, is the frontrunner in the Philippines’ upcoming presidential election in May. Polls in January and February show Marcos Jr. ahead in the race with 60 percent of the national vote.

    He was 29 when the family was ousted and sent into exile in Hawai’i. He had since returned to the Philippines, where he served as governor of Ilocos Norte, as congressman and senator.

    Now he is aiming to go back to his childhood playground — the Malacañang Palace.

    "Marcos is not a hero"
    “Marcos is not a hero”. Image: Mar-Vic Cagurangan/Pacific Island Times

    His campaign has revived “Bagong Lipunan” (The New Society), the anthem of martial law. I shudder. It summoned the dark years.

    Now as an adult, watching how North Koreans live now gives me a perspective of how we were brainwashed into subservience during the martial period when the media was controlled by the regime.

    Political opinions had no place in the public sphere. Dissidents disappeared, plucked out of their homes by military men, never to be seen ever again. Those who had heard of these stories of desaparecidos had to zip their mouths. Or else.

    The government slogan “Sa Ikakaunlad ng Bayan Displina Ang Kailangan” (For the Nation’s Progress Discipline is Necessary) was forever stuck in our heads.

    Marcos family’s extravaganzas
    My generation lived through different political eras. We grew up watching the Marcos family’s extravaganzas. They acted like royalty.

    Imelda Marcos paraded in her made-for-the-queen gowns and glittering jewelry, suffocating Filipinos with her absolute vanity amid our dystopian society.

    “People say I’m extravagant because I want to be surrounded by beauty. But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?” she said.

    “Bagong Lipunan” was constantly played on the radio, on TV and in public places. It was inescapable. Its lyrics were planted into our consciousness: “Magbabago ang lahat tungo sa pag-unland” (Eveyone will change toward progress.)

    Marcos created a fiction depicting his purported greatness that fuelled his tyranny.

    During the two decades of media control, the brainwashing propaganda concealed what the regime represented — world-class kleptocrats, murderers and torturers.

    Marcos Jr. gave no apology, showed no remorse and offered no restitution. And why would he? Maybe no one remembers after all. None of the Marcoses or their cronies ever went to jail for their transgressions.

    Marcos rewarded many times
    Marcos Jr. has been rewarded many times, repeatedly elected to various positions. And now as president?

    It’s perplexing. It’s appalling. And for people who were tortured and the families of those killed, it’s revolting.

    Marcos Jr. appeals to a fresh generation that doesn’t hear the shuddering beat of “Bagong Lipunan” the way my generation does.

    The Philippines’ median age is 25. Their lack of a personal link to the martial law experience perhaps explains their historical oblivion.

    But history is still being written. Pre-election polls are just polls. The May 9 ballot will decide a new chapter in history.

    As Filipino journalist Sheila Coronel said, “A Marcos return is inevitable only if we believe it to be.”

    Mar-Vic Cagurangan is editor-in-chief and publisher of the Pacific Island Times in Guam. This article is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    The discovery of many civilian bodies lying dead in the Ukrainian city of Bucha this week has brought out more Western rhetoric of horror, disgust, anger and fury at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and has renewed calls for more sanctions against Russia, more weapons to the Ukrainians and calls for Putin to be put on trial as a war criminal.

    That’s a strong response to war and those responsible for starting a military invasion of a sovereign state.

    Let’s shift the focus to Iraq in 2003 for a moment.

    On the marches to protest against the US-UK-Australian-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 one of the chants used was “Never forget Fallujah!”.

    So, for those that were too young to know, or now too old to remember, here are a few well-referenced paragraphs from Wikipedia about what happened when the US invaders attacked that city as part of an invasion of another sovereign state, Iraq.

    The United States bombardment of Fallujah began in April 2003, one month after the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. In April 2003, United States forces fired on a group of demonstrators who were protesting against the US presence. US forces alleged they were fired at first, but Human Rights Watch, who visited the site of the protests, concluded that physical evidence did not corroborate US allegations and confirmed the residents’ accusations that the US forces fired indiscriminately at the crowd with no provocation.

    Seventeen people were killed and 70 were wounded.

    Further killings
    In a later incident, US soldiers fired on protesters again; Fallujah’s mayor, Taha Bedaiwi al-Alwani, said that two people were killed and 14 wounded. Iraqi insurgents were able to claim the city a year later, before they were ousted by a siege and two assaults by US forces.

    These events caused widespread destruction and a humanitarian crisis in the city and surrounding areas. As of 2004, the city was largely ruined, with 60 percent of buildings damaged or destroyed, and the population at 30–50 percent of pre-war levels.

    At least one US battalion had orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not. In violation of the Geneva Convention, the city’s main hospital was closed by Marines, negating its use, and a US sniper was placed on top of the hospital’s water tower.

    On November 13, 2004, a US Marine with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, was videotaped killing a wounded combatant in a mosque. The incident, which came under investigation, created controversy throughout the world.

    Bucha killings in Ukraine AJ
    A survivor in Bucha says some of his neighbours left their dark, cold houses that had no electricity, running water or natural gas supply to get bread or charge their mobile phones – but never came back. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot APR

    The man was shot at close range after he and several other wounded insurgents had previously been left behind overnight in the mosque by the US Marines. The Marine shooting the man had been mildly injured by insurgents in the same mosque the day before.

    On November 16, 2004, a Red Cross official told Inter Press Service that “at least 800 civilians” had been killed in Fallujah and indicated that “they had received several reports from refugees that the military had dropped cluster bombs in Fallujah, and used a phosphorus weapon that caused severe burns.”

    On 17 May 2011, AFP reported that 21 bodies, in black bodybags marked with letters and numbers in Roman script, had been recovered from a mass grave in al-Maadhidi cemetery in the centre of the city.

    Blindfolded, legs tied
    Fallujah police chief Brigadier General Mahmud al-Essawi said that they had been blindfolded, their legs had been tied and they had suffered gunshot wounds. The Mayor, Adnan Husseini said that the manner of their killing, as well as the body bags, indicated that US forces had been responsible.

    Both al-Essawi and Husseini agreed that the dead had been killed in 2004. The US Military declined to comment.

    There were no sanctions against the US, UK and Australia, there were no US soldiers, military leaders or politicians held to account. There were no arms sent to help the Iraqis facing overwhelming odds in their fight against the US and its allies.

    There were no moves to charge George Bush (US President), Tony Blair (UK Prime Minister) or John Howard (Australian Prime Minister) for war crimes before the International Criminal Court.

    Yes Vladimir Putin should be on trial at the International Criminal Court, but before he appears we should have seen George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard face the same charges first.

    We should never forget Bucha — but we must never forget Fallujah either. The people of both cities deserve justice at the ICC. Let’s do all we can to hold them to account.

    Incidentally, US President Joe Biden was pushing hard for the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. His hypocrisy now in condemning Putin is the stuff of legends.

    Republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Thanks to useless lockdowns without a shred of science to support them, about 10,000 additional children are dying each and every month from hunger.

    Here it comes…

    Deadly treatment protocols designed to enrich the elites were imposed upon hospitals and thus, patients — causing nearly one million deaths in the U.S. falsely attributed to Covid-19.

    Wait for it…

    In 2020, workers lost $3.7 trillion while billionaires gained $3.9 trillion. Some 493 individuals became new billionaires, and an additional 8 million Americans dropped below the poverty line. This is the largest upward transfer of wealth in the known history of the world.

    We’re almost there…

    A few companies like BlackRock and Vanguard are gaining control of virtually every industry while Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum openly implement a plan to enslave the vast majority of humans on earth.

    Here it is: What an incredible time to be alive!

    No, I’m not being cynical. I’m simply listening to the sound of opportunity knocking — kicking down the damn door, you might say.

    When else in all of human history has there been a time when we were in a better position to shape the future? What we do (or don’t do) in the next few months and years could quite possibly tilt us all toward either the point of no return or a far more sane form of society.

    In other words, each and every one of us can take part — right now — in creating the most important social changes ever imagined.

    This isn’t about skin color, gender, or what parcel of geography you happen to have been born on. I’m not talking about party affiliations, incremental reform, or what sky-god you’ve chosen to worship. It’s all about recognizing a crisis and taking the appropriate measures.

    We’re on the brink of economic, social, and environmental collapse. What an extraordinary time to be alive. How lucky are we? We’ve been trusted with the most vital mission of all time: survival.

    What will YOU do differently from now on?

    The post What a time to be alive! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The #MeToo movement has powered an insurgency against sexism and sexual violence in Australia. From once-isolated survivors to political staffers, women everywhere are refusing to keep men’s secrets. 

    In an electrifying Quarterly Essay, journalist and author Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo and tells the stories of women who – often at great personal cost – found themselves at the centre of this movement.

    Jess recently joined Virginia Haussegger, Founder of the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation, “In Conversation” live at the ANU to talk about this work.

    The “weather event”

    The Australian #MeToo movement may only be five years old, but the build-up to it was decades in the making.

    In her hard-hitting Quarterly Essay, journalist and author, Jess Hill deftly traces the confluence of events in recent history that led to the seismic shift in how we talk about sexual violence.

    From Anita Hill’s sexual harassment allegations against the U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” child sexual abuse investigations, the child abuse allegations against Rolf Harris in 2013, Elliot Rodger’s Isla Vista killings and Rosie Batty being named Australian of the Year in 2015 – the list of sordid tragedies is longer than anyone cares to imagine. And it begs the question: why now? What was different in 2017 than in all those years before?

    In her Quarterly Essay, Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo.

    In her Quarterly Essay, Jess Hill traces the conditions that gave birth to #MeToo.

    Jess Hill refers to this as the “weather event”.

    “Sometimes with these types of cultural phenomenon, we tend to think in terms of linear progress, when in fact, actually what’s happening is multiple feedback loops.”

    “What I was trying to understand is: What is it that fundamentally lodged in the public mind that was not lodged there before? And how was our public mind ready to hear that?”

    Since the global social media traction in 2017, the #MeToo movement has spawned thousands of articles, events, scholarly investigations – and of course, legal action – a fact that did not escape Ms Hill’s notice.

    “When I first got invited to write this essay, I thought to myself, ‘What more there is to say that we don’t already know? … It’s been written about so much, what am I even going to add?’”

    “Partly what I decided to do with this essay was to go, ‘Let’s just like take it from the beginning.’ In four years, a lot of preconceptions can build up. So, let’s like try to take apart those preconceptions [and] get them back to their original components and analyse them. Is what we think about the #MeToo movement accurate?

    “What’s amazing about writing this essay is realising what a different culture we live in to the one we lived in in 2017, when sexual harassment was barely ever talked about…when it was presumed… that sort of stuff just doesn’t happen here [compared to the US].”

    “But the progress that we are making year on year…is quite seismic.”

    The cultural shift

    Jess Hill’s essay starts with the moment when, in the wake of Brittany Higgins’ rape allegations, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s is holding a press conference supposedly showing the world he cares for and understands women.

    He tells the press pack that violence and abuse of women “must be acknowledge and it must be stopped”.

    Just moments later, however, in response to a Sky News reporter’s question, he changes tact and warns those in the room that people in “glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. He goes on to erroneously claim that there has been a harassment complaint inside News Corp about a specific journalist.

    “The prime minister is not just making a veiled threat to the gathered reporters…he is sending a chilling coded message to one woman in the room: the journalist who broke the story of Brittany Higgins being allegedly raped in parliament house, News Corp’s political editor, Samantha Maiden,” Ms Hill writes.

    In front of the ANU crowd, Virginia asks her what this says about the Prime Minister.

    Jess Hill with Virginia Hausseger. Picture: Mary Kenny

    Jess Hill with Virginia Hausseger. Picture: Mary Kenny

    “That he is a machine,” she replies without hesitation. “He’s just all about utility. Like, ‘What will keep me in a position of power?’”

    At its heart, #MeToo is all about the power. The Harvey Weinstein allegations had laid bare the sinister reality of the patriarchal structures of the workplaces around the world. As Hill writes in her essay:

    “This was a rare moment of structural weakness in patriarchy: a vulner­able piece of flesh had been exposed, and it was as though women all over the world received a subliminal message that now was the time to draw back their arrows and shoot.”

    Speaking to Ms Haussegger, Hill draws links to the increasing media attention to child sexual abuse in the church: “This is starting to lay the groundwork to overturn…a presumption that people in power, particularly men in power, would never do what we consider to be depraved behaviour.

    “There was a whole institution of silence and cover up that permitted them to go on and do it again and again.”

    Reflecting on the many #MeToo stories that resulted in the victim getting attacked in popular discourse – including that of Tessa Sullivan – Ms Hill critiques Australia’s culture of mates protecting mates.

    “Don’t let the law get in the way. Don’t let those bitches get in the way. You know, you’ve got to step in for your mates, it doesn’t matter what they’ve done.”

    The unfolding of #MeToo in Australia

    Australian television presenter, author and horticulturist Don Burke was the first target of Australia’s #MeToo movement. The story was uncovered injoint ABC/Fairfax investigation, and detailed claims from a number of women who worked with Burke in the late 1980s and 1990s.

    Quoted in the essay, lawyer Michael Bradley explains: “The textbook example of how to do it was the Don Burke one, which was really a replication of the Weinstein approach: bury him in volume, so he knows that there’s no point – he’s done. There’s a tipping point, and it’s a game of bluff, right? [By contrast, actor] Craig McLachlan took the other course: call the bluff. He went after them and sued one of the victims.”

    New Corp journalists hoped to deal a similar blow against actor Geoffrey Rush, when they published allegations against him in November 2017. Instead, Rush won a defamation case against the publisher.

    Michael Bradley further explains: “It was the [Geoffrey] Rush case specifically that “scared the shit out of everyone. It was just such a game-changer,” Bradley says. “If that hadn’t happened, if they’d done their homework properly . . . I know that Fairfax and ABC had a queue of stories lining up they were going to run. Everyone just ran for the exit. It stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks.”

    Ms Hill is scathing about how this unfolded. She writes: “Let’s be clear: The Telegraph’s story on Rush was an epic failure of journalistic ethics – by far the most egregious example of ‘trial by media’ in Australia’s #MeToo era.”

    She further explained at the ANU event: “They were just desperate, because they didn’t have a #metoo story. And it was the biggest story going.”

    “They’d heard second-hand that Eryn Jean Norvill had made this complaint, but they did not go to her [for comment] and she had expressly said she did not want to go public with it.”

    The Telegraph, Ms Hill says, then published front page story: “[W]e can say what we like about defamation laws, but it was very clear that what it was saying about Geoffrey Rush, and did not substantiate it.”

    In her essay Hill describes this as “sloppy ‘gotcha’ journalism’. Recounting the advice of Michael Bradley to the ANU audience, she argues: “You have to prepare these stories and the people who are the victims, survivors, like they are witnesses going to trial.”

    “You need to do that not just because of defamation laws, but because that’s actually what good investigative journalism does.”

    “There’s a real question mark around whether Australia’s defamation laws would have crushed the #MeToo movement, had it not been for this catastrophic error that News Limited made.”

    “Anyone who has allegations against them…when you launch a defamation case, all of that evidence is going to be brought to bear. Do you want that? And they know how many potential accusers there are. So, it’s a game of bluff.”

     

    Feature image: Supplied.

     

     

     

    The post The “weather event”: Australia’s stormy #MeToo movement appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • ANALYSIS: By Transform Aqorau in Honiara

    It has been an interesting couple of weeks for Solomon Islands, with stories of policing, weapons, replica weapons and a security agreement with China dominating the local and regional media.

    Let’s start with the issue of arming the police. After the tensions, for a long time Solomon police did not carry arms but this is an exception in our history.

    Indeed, the precursor of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) created during the early colonial era was known as the “BSIP Armed Constabulary”.

    For as long as I can remember, our police have had access to some form of arms stored in the armoury. Their use traditionally was ceremonial, mostly during parades.

    In fact, many of us who used to watch their parades loved to hear the sound made when the police and marine units lifted the guns as they responded to the orders of the parade commander.

    The only time the weapons were used in my lifetime was during the Bougainville crisis and during the ethnic tensions.

    The Bougainville crisis necessitated the importation by the Solomon Islands government of high-powered guns because of incursions by armed Papua New Guinean soldiers across the border and their use against Solomon Islands citizens at the PNG-Solomon Islands border.

    Weapons bought via US broker
    I recall that importation as at that time I was a legal adviser in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The weapons were purchased from the US via a broker in Singapore.

    Some questions were asked but, given the circumstances, their importation was justifiable.

    A diplomatic request was made for their temporary storage in Australia before they were shipped to Honiara. These were government-procured arms and the procurement procedures for their acquisition duly complied with government procurement processes.

    I have been advocating for some time the rearmament of the RSIPF and I am also supportive of the RSIPF to be trained by whoever can provide it. Many police officers have been trained in the US, Taiwan, Australia, UK, Singapore, New Zealand and Fiji.

    Thus, I have no particular issues with them being trained by Chinese advisers as was the case recently.

    However, I do have issues if the RSIPF is going to equip itself with high-powered guns, whether real ones (as supplied by Australia) or fake ones (as supplied by China). These concerns are exacerbated by the current level of secrecy and confusion around the security arrangements.

    Firstly, it is questionable whether it is necessary for the RSIPF to be armed with high-powered weapons. Perhaps there are still a number of guns that were taken from the armoury that are still in the hands of former MEF (Malaitan Eagle Force) militants.

    Moreover, this information might be known by a key member of the current political coalition who is a former MEF commander. Perhaps the police just want to be prepared.

    Memories of the ethnic tensions
    However, we also should not forget what happened 22 years ago during the ethnic tensions, when the armoury was compromised by police giving weapons to militants and militants raiding the armoury for weapons — weapons which were then used by Solomon Islanders to intimidate and kill their fellow citizens.

    Members of the public are also genuinely concerned about the manner in which the Chinese fake guns were imported into the country — via a logging vessel which is, to say the least, an unusual means of transporting official government goods.

    The shifting narratives from the Police Commissioner about this incident have raised more questions than they have answered.

    There are also broader questions. Is security created through arming the police? Or should we instead focus on an approach to security whereby the community is recognised as a partner in building and maintaining peace, and build on the long history Solomon Islanders have of brokering conflict among themselves?

    While, as I said, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with arming the police, the focus needs to be on using community policing, chiefs, and youth leaders to broker conflicts. It is unfortunate when the ordinary citizens of the country are viewed not as partners in development, but as threat to the hegemony and hold on power by some people.

    Last year’s riots and covid-19 have revealed many underlying governance weaknesses. As I have argued earlier, they are symptomatic of a society that has become increasingly less pluralistic, and of political and economic institutions that have become less inclusive.

    Then there is the leaked security agreement with China, which has exacerbated existing unease among the public about China. The increasing engagement with China is explained by the Prime Minister as an attempt by the government to diversify its engagement on security.

    Chinese naval base unlikely
    It is unlikely that China will build a naval base in Solomon Islands. The agreement does not specify that it will and, although it could be construed that way, the reality is that it is not going to happen.

    Australia is already building a patrol base in Lofung, in the Shortland Islands which borders Papua New Guinea, and has announced that they will build another one in the eastern Solomon Islands. I would venture to suggest that the capacity of these investments should cater for a naval base if the need ever arises in the future.

    What is unprecedented about this security arrangement is that it allows China, with the consent of the Solomon Islands government, to send armed personnel to protect its citizens and assets.

    It also prohibits any publicity around these arrangements. It is ironic that a prime minister who invariably extols the virtues of national sovereignty should agree to cede a fundamental sovereign function — the protection of lives and property — to a foreign force.

    It is not clear if this is inadvertent, but it would seem that its ramifications have not been thought through.

    The security arrangement has also raised concerns in the region. The President of the Federated States of Micronesia has written to Prime Minister Sogavare requesting that he reconsider it.

    There is perhaps nothing intrinsically wrong with Solomon Islands signing a security agreement with China. There should, however, be coherence with similar arrangements with other countries, which focus on the capacity of the Solomon Islands Police Force to deal with internal security uprisings, and preferably all assistance should be within a regional framework supported by the Pacific Islands Forum.

    Cannot choose neighbours
    While a country may choose its friends, it cannot choose its neighbours.

    In Solomon Islands today, there is no opportunity for policy debate by the public except on Facebook. The public and constituents do not have the same ease of access to our ministers and prime minister as embassy officials, and mining and logging CEOs.

    Such is the current degree of polarisation that any criticism or comment is viewed by the current political coalition as “anti-government”. There does not seem to be any scope for dissenting views, or even constructive ideas from outside the inner circle, to be accommodated.

    Unless a more pluralistic society is promoted where people’s views are welcomed, and there are more inclusive political and economic institutions, the government will be forced to depend on regional troops to support it.

    At some stage, regional partners must hold Solomon Islands politicians to account for the economic and political situation they have created and the resulting violence such as the rioting last year.

    The current focus on arms, without attention to rights and responsibilities, cannot and should not be sustained.

    Dr Transform Aqorau is CEO of iTuna Intel and founding director, Pacific Catalyst, and a legal adviser to the Marshall Islands. He is the former CEO of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement Office. This article was first published by Devpolicy Blog from the Development Policy Centre at The Australian National University and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • After two years of inaction and incompetence, the government has finally changed the list of coronavirus (Covid-19) symptoms that the public should look out for. The NHS now lists twelve possible symptoms on its website. At the beginning of the pandemic, it listed just two symptoms, which it then updated to three symptoms. This makes it one of the most woefully incomplete symptom lists of any country in the world.

    Back in April 2020, I questioned the government’s motives for failing to provide the public with an accurate list of Covid-19 symptoms. In July 2021 I questioned why the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) still refused to update the list.

    It’s all about timing

    It’s likely to be no coincidence that the government changed the list just days after ditching free coronavirus testing for the public, and after it announced that people no longer need to self-isolate. It is a political decision to consistently ignore two years of advice from prominent scientists.

    If the NHS advice had been this extensive over the last two years, more of the public would have been eligible for a free PCR test. More people wouldn’t have dismissed their symptoms as “just a cold”. This would, most likely, have increased the official coronavirus figures in the country. According to the latest figures, our small island has had the fifth highest number of coronavirus cases in the world so far, despite being the 21st most populated. Imagine if the government had given us the proper advice: our rates would probably have shot up even further. This would, of course, have looked like a massive failing for Boris Johnson. And it would have been even more proof of what we already know: he has blundered at every step of the pandemic.

    It would also have ground a number of businesses to a halt, as more people would have had to take time off work, and forced corporations to grant more sick leave. But the Tory government’s priority is profit, no matter the cost. To keep the economy running, you need workers. And it seems that in order to keep workers working, the government withheld information on symptoms. This comes on top of the fact that the government flouted WHO guidelines on how long to quarantine for.

    Now, even though more people will fit the NHS’s symptom-checker, it’s unlikely to affect our confirmed coronavirus figures. Because at a time when people are struggling to pay to heat their house or to boil their potatoes, they’re not likely to pay for a coronavirus test.

    Now that nobody is legally obliged to self-isolate, the NHS is advising the public that:

    You can go back to your normal activities when you feel better or do not have a high temperature.

    This vague advice is likely to see corporations cracking down on employees who need to take more than a few days off work. It’s also likely to see unfair – but perfectly legal – dismissals.

    The Canary contacted the DHSC for comment, but the government department told us to contact the UK Health Security Agency. At the time of publishing, we’d received no reply.

    At a time when coronavirus rates are at a record high, and when ICU admissions are rising once again, the government continues to act irresponsibly. It continues to prioritise the economy and corporate wealth over the country’s most vulnerable people. This comes as absolutely no surprise. With the impending Covid-19 Inquiry, some might be hopeful that the government will be held accountable for the way it has handled the pandemic. But don’t hold your breath.

    Featured image via via Alan Santos/PR under Creative Commons 2.0 license, resized to 770 x 403 px

    By Eliza Egret

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • In March 2021, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill crashed into our lives. A mammoth and draconian piece of legislation, the bill attacks protesters, criminalises the lives of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) communities, and entrenches racist policing strategies with measures such as Serious Violence Reduction Orders.

    A mass movement was born, aided and abetted by vicious police attacks on the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common and at Kill the Bill protests in Bristol. The message was, and is, clear. The police abuse the powers they already have.

    Over a year has passed, and the bill has not yet become law. So what’s happening in parliament and on the streets?

    It’s a game of ping pong

    In parliament, the bill is currently ping-ponging between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Yes, it sounds trivial, but it’s the official term our democracy uses to describe the process when legislation bounces between the Commons and the Lords. Our rights are reduced to a game of table tennis.

    While the majority of the bill has now been accepted by both houses, the Lords are fighting over the provision to give police the power to impose conditions on protests deemed too noisy. The last reading was on 31 March in the House of Lords; it was the third time the Lords rejected the bill.

    Because parliament takes more holidays than the rest of us could dream of, the House of Commons is now on its Easter break and won’t return until 19 April. So the bill is in limbo until then.

    Along the way, there have been several victories. Not least getting the majority of the more draconian protest amendments chucked out in the first reading in the Lords. As these amendments originated in the Lords, the House of Commons couldn’t add them back in.

    But these were minor victories. The majority of the bill is still unchanged from the original legislation proposed a year ago. And the one amendment that did get through in the Lords made things even worse –  changing the penalty for highway obstruction from a fine to a six-month prison sentence. Meanwhile, neither house challenged the provision to criminalise trespass with intent to reside in a vehicle – a provision that could see homes seized from GRT people and their lives outlawed.

    Credit is due to Green peer Jenny Jones, amongst others, who’ve worked tirelessly to oppose the bill in the Lords. But the fact that the Lords is now only arguing about one small part of the bill – the power to impose conditions on noisy protests – shows that we cannot rely on parliament to safeguard our rights.

    On the streets and in our communities

    The real resistance to this bill has come from the grassroots – on the streets and in our communities. This started with mass protests that saw thousands demonstrating in every corner of the country. As the bill has progressed through parliament, the conversation has changed to how we respond when it becomes law; how do we act in solidarity with each other, and how do we become ungovernable?

    Sisters Uncut, who led the way in the original opposition, have been setting up CopWatch groups across the country to monitor the police. As the group told The Canary:

    This training is vital right now because the government is planning to increase police powers. As we saw in the case of Sarah Everard (Wayne Couzens arrested Sarah using new COVID regulations), increased police powers mean increased, unaccountable police violence.

    If passed, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will make all marginalised communities – Gypsy, Roma and Travellers, sex workers, Black and brown people, women and anyone protesting – less safe.

    Every stop and search must be treated as a kidnapping, which in turn could become another death in custody.

    We must resist together. The police are the perpetrators and we must keep each other safe. Sisters Uncut is holding training sessions on police intervention, and the launch of a nationwide network of CopWatch patrols.

    It’s time to withdraw consent

    Meanwhile, the coalition of groups that came together to oppose the bill is now working on what that opposition will look like once it becomes law. These are exactly the conversations we need to be having. How do we take power away from the police and the government? How do we empower our communities? Moreover, how do we withdraw consent, and what will this look like in practice? Initiatives like CopWatch are a great starting point and a practical way to do this.

    The class war is raging. The cost of living crisis is biting. More and more people will be taking to the streets. We cannot continue living in a system where the rich get richer and profit from the misery the rest of us are facing. It’s no wonder the Tories want to give the police so many new powers; they know the dissent they’ll be facing.

    Unfortunately for the Tories, the less people have to lose, the more risks they’ll be willing to take. It’s time for all of us to withdraw our consent before it’s too late.

    Featured image via Eliza Egret

    By Emily Apple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • 1 April saw energy companies hike their prices by 54% while the government stood by and watched. However, a think tank’s analysis has helped to expose the real issue here. It’s not a cost of living crisis. The issue is that the richest people are waging a class war on the rest of us – and energy prices are their latest weapon.

    Shocking levels of fuel poverty

    The Resolution Foundation, a living standards think tank, has done research into the effect of rising energy costs. It calls struggling to pay energy bills “fuel stress”. This is when households spend 10% or more of their budgets on energy. This used to be what the definition of fuel poverty was. But the government moved the goalposts to make it look like fewer people were in fuel poverty.

    In short, the Resolution Foundation found that 1 April’s 54% rise will hit the poorest households the hardest. In 2021, it said that 37% of the very poorest families were in fuel stress. As of 1 April, that figure shot up by 67.6%. This means that 62%, or nearly two-thirds, of the poorest households are in fuel stress right now.

    The Resolution Foundation says things will only get worse. Energy companies look set to increase their prices again in October. If this goes how the Resolution Foundation think it will, then 80% of the poorest households will end up in fuel stress.

    The rich/poor energy divide

    The think tank’s research also showed the bigger picture. In one graph, it’s very clear that the richest households are barely going to notice rising energy prices:

    A graph from the Resolution Foundation showing the extent of fuel poverty for rich and poor

    The Resolution Foundation summed this up:

    As ever, it is lower-income households who are disproportionately impacted by high energy costs, with four-in-five of England’s poorest families set to be facing fuel stress come October, compared with just one-in-fifty of those in the top income decile

    So, what can be done about this? Well, if you’re the Labour Party or corporate media, then you won’t do anything.

    Protecting the powerful

    Labour leader Keir Starmer said that energy companies increasing their prices by 54% was due to “Tory incompetence” – like the government made a silly mistake that led to this situation. He then said:

    People don’t want a revolution, they do want to know how to pay their energy bills.

    Talk about not reading the room. A revolution of some kind would be better than a continuation of this shit – which is exactly what Starmer is propping-up. Moreover, his comments whitewash the chaos. Then, BBC News did similar.

    BBC: ‘think your poverty better’

    It ran an article where four “experts” told the rest of us how to “protect” our finances and “soften the blow of rising bills“. The four top tips were essentially:

    • Cut back elsewhere.
    • Cut back elsewhere again, after you’ve already cut back.
    • Claim benefits (which the government are cutting by £10bn in real terms anyway).
    • Look after your mental health – or, ‘think your poverty better’.

    Much like Starmer, the BBC whitewashed the chaos. It’s also saying that it’s up to poor people to sort this mess out themselves. Further, both it and the Labour leader are ignoring the fact that companies are taking the piss with their price rises – and that the government is allowing them to do so.

    ‘Money Saving Expert’ Martin Lewis seems to get it. But as soon as he put his neck on the line to help people, energy provider E.ON promptly took to Twitter – blaming him for “bringing Britain down“. Little wonder Starmer and the BBC won’t rock the boat.

    Energy price rises are class war

    The level of difference between how hard energy companies are hitting the richest and poorest, coupled with the fact the government knows this and is barely acting is class war. That is, the rich and powerful are knowingly doing things that will suppress the poorest people and keep them in their poverty-stricken place. Shills like the BBC and Starmer are helping them out.

    Decisions made by those at the top of society that will plunge 7.5 million families at the bottom into further poverty is class war. To say it’s anything else is just propping up those enacting this on the rest of us.

    Featured image via Осадчая Екатерина – Wikimedia, resized to 770×403 under licence CC BY-SA 4.0, pxfuel and the Evening Standard – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Last month, feminist editor and writer Zoya Patel delivered a speech at the Canberra Labor Club that blew the crowd away. Through the lens of her own family, Zoya reflected on how gender bias impacted the women she loves. How might life have been different, if those women had had equal opportunities? The text has been lightly edited for readability.

    According to Our Watch, First Nations women in Australia are nearly 11 times more likely to die due to assault and twice as likely to die due to domestic and family violence compared to non-Indigenous women.

    The average life expectancy for First Nations women is more than eight years less than non-indigenous women.

    I want to note that any Australian movement for gender equality that is not led by First Nations women, grounded in a commitment to reconciliation, and that doesn’t prioritise closing the gap between First Nations women and non-Indigenous women, is not a true movement for equality.

    I want to ponder what would have changed for the women in my life had they not had to contend with gender bias.

    First, a little about me. I’m 32 years old – and I say this because I know appearances can be deceiving. I was once asked by religious doorknockers if my parents were home, when I was 27.

    So, I’m 32, and I’m Fijian-Indian. I have lived in Australia since I was three years old, and have called Canberra home for most of my life. My ancestors span numerous countries and continents, starting in India, and ending all over the world.

    My maternal grandmother was a nurse in Fiji. She came from a family of few means, the eldest of 13 children. Her own mother had her first child in her early teens, from the marriage that was arranged for her when she was just a girl.

    My grandmother was an incredibly intelligent woman. The cultural norms that dictated her coming of age did not value intelligence in women, but she was lucky in that her family supported her to study and qualify as a nurse. At that time, the thought of an unmarried woman studying to become a doctor was very uncommon. So, she was a nurse, she married, she had three children.

    She lived a humble life and was widowed young. She died in her early 70s.

    If my grandmother had not contended with the gender bias that saw women’s first priority as being the home, perhaps she would have been a doctor. The bias against women-dominated jobs meant her pay as a nurse was meagre, although it still contributed considerably to the household, where my grandfather was a taxi driver. If this bias didn’t exist, perhaps my mother’s experiences of childhood would have been less defined by poverty, and she and her brothers would have been able to access a higher standard of living than their parents.

    My mother, like her mother before her, is very intelligent. She studied to be a teacher, but when we moved to Australia when I was a child, she left her teaching career behind in Fiji.

    Her reasoning was that, given the systemic racism that permeated so many parts of Australian society, she was afraid of the students she encountered not respecting her or other teachers presenting an issue, possibly being prejudiced.

    Here, mum was responding to what she saw around her. We arrived in Australia in the early 90s, when racism in politics was rife, led by Pauline Hanson, the founder and leader of the right-wing populist political party, One Nation. We were living in a country town, and faced racism regularly – at my parents work, at our schools, on the street.

    If this racist bias didn’t exist, perhaps my mother would have requalified as a teacher in Australia and pursued her passion for knowledge further. But instead, she worked in supermarkets for years, before my parents eventually bought their first business.

    Mum also had to navigate the gender biases and norms of both our Fijian Indian culture, and Australian culture.

    This meant she prioritised the needs of her children, her husband and her community over her own. It means that she ignored the growing aches and pains in her body for years, not realising they were the early signs of the debilitating autoimmune condition that now defines her life. Had she been treated earlier, perhaps she would have been able to go into remission, instead of being nearly crippled by the disease.

    In fact, mum did visit a doctor in her thirties to complain about the swelling in her joints. The doctor told her she was imagining it, that she was bored or anxious now that all four of her kids were in school. He suggested she get a hobby, didn’t run tests, and it wasn’t until a decade later that she was diagnosed.

    If women’s bodies weren’t seen as public property, and women’s experiences of health not dismissed as hysteria, would my mother have a better quality of life now?

    I have two older sisters, a blessing which I am very grateful for.

    When my sisters and I were growing up, we were trapped between the conflicting expectations of women in Australia in the early 2000s and in our Indian Muslim culture at home.

    On one hand, contemporary culture sexualised women and objectified our bodies in the media, advertising and music industries. On the other hand, we were expected to be modest and chaste in our religion and culture.

    We watched Spice Girls music videos on the weekend, where girl power was defined as  a sort of aggressive sexuality, and then heard sermons at the mosque about the importance of female modesty, as a form of protection against male urges.

    One community saw the other as oppressed, and the other saw the first as immoral. This is an oversimplification, but the contradiction felt very real to us, and it was both confusing and frustrating because both views relied on a rigid set of expectations about women and femininity.

    I watched most of the girls around me at school obsess over their appearance – particularly their weight – and place a very high value on male attention and approval. Those among us who weren’t heterosexual or cisgendered suffered ostracism, judgement and bullying.

    I wasn’t immune either – I hated the way I looked, I was insecure about how others perceived me, and despite my outward feminist persona, I was desperate to be liked and accepted, like most adolescents.

    But imagine if our culture didn’t perpetuate the objectification of women’s bodies. Imagine if myself, and the young women I grew up with, were encouraged to pursue the growth of our intellects and creativity over our sexual capital. Imagine if, instead of being pitted against other women in competition for male attention, we were enabled to collaborate and come together in the pursuit of our shared goals.

    It’s hard to envision what that world, free of bias, could have looked like, and partly that’s because our reality today isn’t that different to the past.

    The same biases that have influenced three generations of the women in my family, persist to this day.

    The expectation that women must prioritise the home, children and their families to a greater extent than male partners or family members; the trivialisation of female-dominated industries, women’s health, and the contributions that women make to our communities; and the obsession with women’s appearances, the objectification of our bodies, and the equation of our worth with male approval.

    The cover of Zoya Patel's book, No Country Woman: A memoir of not belonging

    The cover of Zoya Patel’s book, No Country Woman: A memoir of not belonging

    Every year, we make progress, but every year we also uncover yet more examples of how gender inequality persists in our communities. Remember – for every Grace Tame, or Brittany Higgins, there are thousands of unknown and unnamed women who have suffered abuse and assault with no attention and no consequence for their perpetrators.

    Among these women are the many Indigenous women, women of colour, queer women, trans women, disabled women, and other women who don’t fit the criteria of acceptable victimhood, who have not only been ignored, but often who have faced discrimination and been retraumatised by the systems that are meant to protect them.

    Biases don’t have to be bad things. There is such a thing as a positive bias. We could, as a society, be more inclined towards believing victim survivors of assault and violence, for example, than disbelieving them when the evidence lies in their favour.

    We could be more inclined towards celebrating the diversity of women’s contributions, instead of trivialising or dismissing them.

    We could be more inclined to supporting policies and programs that seek to accelerate gender equality, than to reinforcing patriarchal systems of inequality.

    I have four nieces and a nephew, and watching them grow up has shown me that every generation starts with a foundation that is more solid than the generation preceding them. Already, my nieces and nephew are proving to be more emotionally intelligent, empathetic, and  fierce than we were, and it excites me to think of the futures they have ahead of them.

    I know that their parents, and their aunts and uncles are determined to break as many biases that they may face as possible. After all, if we all dedicate ourselves to changing the corner of the world that we’re in, eventually, those corners will meet up and form a whole.

    • The Labor Club event where Zoya gave this speech was in support of the Canberra-based service, Toora Women Inc, which supports vulnerable women in the region. Find out more about Toora here.

    Feature image: Supplied

    The post How gender bias can impact a life appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • When Israel steals Palestinian land … Image: imgflip.com

    COMMENTARY: By John Minto

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed so much hypocrisy in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the Western world that’s it’s hard to keep track.

    Israel has racism down to a fine art.

    While the world was putting their hand up for Ukrainian refugees — Israel put its hand up only for Jewish Ukrainian refugees (at least one grandparent must be Jewish).

    As early as January 2022, Israel began planning to transfer Ukrainian Jews to become colonists in the land of the Palestinians. Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption proclaimed: “We call on the Jews of Ukraine to immigrate to Israel – your home.”

    The refugees/colonists began to arrive in early March, receiving preferential treatment, while Ukrainians who could not prove their Jewishness according to Israel’s racist criteria for refugees face myriad difficulties.

    Meanwhile, the World Zionist Organisation’s Settlement Division has begun preparing 1000 housing units for Ukrainian Jews on stolen and occupied Palestinian and Syrian land in the occupied West Bank and the occupied Golan Heights.

    When there was an outcry from Israeli liberals saying, quite rightly, that this was not a reflection of Jewish values, the government said they would take non-Jewish refugees as well.

    Predictable reaction
    The predictable reaction from racist Israelis was “We are a Jewish state — why are we taking in these gentiles?”

    The government, however, says the non-Jewish refugees won’t be able to claim Israeli citizenship — they will have to leave when the fighting stops.

    Important to point out here that Israel is NOT a Jewish state. Twenty percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians. Israel is a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural state dominated by a racist regime which has made indigenous Palestinians second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth class inhabitants in the land of their birth and the land of their ancestors, Palestine.

    This is well described in Amnesty International’s short video on Israeli apartheid.


    The Amnesty International video.

    Jewish Ukrainian refugees are being welcomed because it helps Israel maintain a majority Jewish population. It’s a country obsessed with demographics and determined to maintain what Israel’s largest and most respected Human Right Group, B’Tselem, calls “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.

    It is proposed that most of the Jewish Ukrainian refuges will be settled in illegal Jewish-only settlements on stolen Palestinian land while Israel’s apartheid government continues its refusal to allow Palestinians to return to their homes and land after around 800,000 were ethnically cleansed from vast swathes of Historic Palestine by Israeli militias in 1948 — a process which continues to this day.

    And Jewish Ukrainian refugees will qualify for automatic Israeli citizenship — something denied the big majority of Palestinians in their homeland Palestine – all of which has been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.

    Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali — “I’ve killed a lot of Arabs in my time and there’s nothing wrong with that” — Bennett has been promoting himself as an international mediator.

    International condemnation
    Israel didn’t join the international condemnation of Russia and has repeatedly refused Ukrainian appeals for military assistance, but Bennet flew to Moscow for a three-hour meeting with Putin and was then on the phone to Zelensky suggesting to him he should think about the cost in death and destruction in Ukraine and agree to Russian terms.

    Bennett followed up by trying to get the parties together for a mediation meeting in Jerusalem.

    This is the same Israeli leader who refuses to meet with Palestinian leaders, refuses to negotiate any peace deal with Palestinians and says he will never agree to a Palestinian state being established on his watch. Not the credentials for an international mediator.

    And in case readers missed the recent news a further two high-profile groups have joined the international human rights condemnation of Israel as an apartheid state.

    A short summary of the highest profile groups that have described Israel in this way over the past 18 months is here:

    Racism on steroids
    It’s racism on steroids in Israel just as it was in apartheid South Africa. And increasingly Jews around the world are seeing it as such. From an opinion poll last year 25 percent of American Jews already regard Israel as an apartheid state and 38 percent of young American Jews say the same thing.

    We need regime change in Israel and everyone living in historic Palestine enjoying equal rights.

    John Minto is a political activist and commentator, and spokesperson for Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa. This article was first published by The Daily Blog and is republished with the author’s permission.

  • Laura Kuenssberg will replace Andrew Marr on the BBC’s flagship Sunday politics show. Curtis Daly explains why this is really bad news.

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Post-Courier newspaper today compared Papua New Guinean Prime Minister James Marape to the infamous emperor Nero who fiddled while Rome burned over his controversial one-day Indonesian visit while facing an election in June.

    “And [he] was clearly despised by his people,” the paper said in a scathing editorial headlined “Tari burns while Marape fiddles”.

    “The frivolities of life abounded in his rule and perhaps, in his greatest haste, when his Rome roared into flames, the adage, ‘Nero fiddles while Rome burns’ has stuck to this day to depict his indifference to the suffering of his people.”

    Often used in a critical way, the paper said, the phrase had been applied colloquially to a leader who was “simply irresponsible in the face of responsibility”.

    The Post-Courier said there were many examples of this in Papua New Guinea, “none more morbid and clarified as the disappearing act of our Prime Minister James Marape yesterday”.

    The newspaper was criticising Marape for taking an entourage of 71 musicians on a sightseeing tour of Jakarta across the border while his “restive electorate of Tari, significant to Papua New Guinea for its oil and gas fields, sparked and is still burning today”.

    Pai police barracks torched, 1 dead
    One police reservist was reported dead and three houses were torched in an attack by gunmen on the Pai Police Barracks in Tari.

    “How irresponsible is that? How can a Prime Minister ignore his own scorching electorate and simply fiddle his way on an overseas trip in the face of a tough upcoming national election?” the Post-Courier asked.

    “His political opponents must be fiddling in glee at the very thought of political suicide.

    “But the notion of our PM ignoring a serious matter such as Tuesday’s killings and injuring of policemen in his home town of Tari by angry armed locals, and the torching of a police barracks and a settlement, is tantamount to sacrilege of the code of leadership.

    “Electing instead to go on a trip is akin to the ancient testament of Nero.

    “Simply foolish pride and deserting one’s responsibilities in a time of grave danger is unforgivable.”

    The problem with PNG leaders was that only a handful knew and practised their responsibilities with “faithful commitment”.

    Marape criticises Post-Courier
    Marape retorted with a statement carried by the Sunday Bulletin Facebook page denying that he had “run away from electoral duties”. He criticised the paper for stooping “low” and comparing the “once respected” Post-Courier unflatteringly with past versions.

    The prime minister said the Indonesian visit had been long planned and the violence in his Tari-Pori electorate the night before the state visit was coincidental.

    “The Post-Courier of today is nowhere like in the past where it had respected editors like Luke Sela, Oseah Philemon and the likes, and equally distinguished reporters,” Marape said.

    “The people of PNG yearn for the once-great newspaper of old.

    “I do not dictate [to] the newspapers, nor give inducements to reporters and editors, like my predecessor [as prime minister] Peter O’Neill was known for.” I did not run away from responsibilities, far from it.

    “Police, and other agencies of government, have been tasked to handle Tari-Pori and other national issues.

    “Tari is not burning, as [the] Post-Courier claims.

    “Three police houses were torched due to a tribal conflict that had police caught in the crossfire.

    “I may be MP for Tari-Pori, but I am Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, I have a country to run.”

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • COMMENTARY: By Yamin Kogoya

    Papuan Governor Lukas Enembe had an hour-long meeting with Russian Ambassador Lyudmila Vorobyeva, accompanied by the director of the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Jakarta this week. On the table, an invitation for President Vladimir Putin to visit Papua later this year.

    The governor also had his small team with him — Samuel Tabuni (CEO of Papua Language Institute), Alex Kapisa (Head of the Papua Provincial Liaison Agency in Jakarta) and Muhammad Rifai Darus (Spokesman for the Governor of Papua).

    As a result of this meeting, social media is likely to run hot with heated debate.

    This isn’t surprising, considering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, hotly condemned in the West.

    Speculation is rife whether Indonesia — as chair of the G20 group of nations — will invite President Putin to attend the global forum in Bali later this year.

    Governor Enembe is not just another governor of another province of Indonesia — he represents one of the biggest settler-colonial provinces actively seeking independence.

    Considering Enembe’s previous rhetoric condemning harmful policies of the central government, such as the failed Special Autonomy Law No.21/2021, this meeting has only added confusion, leaving both Indonesians and Papuans wondering about the motives for the governor’s actions.

    Also, the governor has invited President Putin to visit Papua after attending the G20 meeting in Bali.

    Whether President Putin would actually visit Papua is another story, but this news is likely to cause great anxiety for Papuans and Indonesians alike.

    So, what was Monday’s meeting all about?

    Governor Lukas Enembe
    Papuan Governor Lukas Enembe … “The old stories are dying, and we need new stories for our future.” Image: West Papua Today

    Papuan students in Russia
    Spokesperson Muhammad Rifai said Governor Enembe had expressed deep gratitude to the government of the Russian Federation for providing a sense of security to indigenous Papuan students studying higher education in Russia.

    He thanked the ambassador for taking good care of those who received scholarships from the Russian government as well as those who received scholarships from the Papua provincial government.

    The scholarships were offered to Papuan students through the Russian Centre for Science and Culture, which began in 2016 and is repeated annually.

    Under this scheme, Governor Enembe sent 26 indigenous Papuans to the Russian Federation on September 27, 2019, for undergraduate and postgraduate studies.

    As of last year, Russia offered 163 places for Papuan students, but this number cannot be verified due to the high number of Indonesian students seeking education in Russia.

    The ambassador also discussed the possibility of increasing the number of scholarships available to Papuan students who want to study in Russia. Governor Enembe appreciates  this development as education is a foundation for the land of Papua to grow and move forward.

    The governor also said Russia was the only country in the world that would be willing to meet Papua halfway by offering students a free scholarship for their tuition fees.

    Along with these education and scholarship discussions, Rifai said the governor wanted to talk about the construction of a space airport in Biak Island, in Cenderawasih Bay on the northern coast of Papua.

    The governor was also interested in the world’s largest spaceport, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which is still operating today and he hoped to gain insight from the Russian government.

    Building a Russian cultural museum in Papua
    As part of strengthening the Russia-Papua relationship, Governor Enembe asked the Russian government to not only accept indigenous Papuan students, but to also transfer knowledge from the best teachers in Russia to students in Papua.

    As part of the initiative, the governor invited Victoria from the Russian Centre for Science and Culture to Papua in order to inaugurate a Russian Cultural Centre at one of the local universities.

    However, Governor Enembe’s desire to establish this relationship is not only due to Russian benevolence toward his Papuan students studying in Russia.

    The Monday meeting with the Russian ambassador in Jakarta and his invitation to President Putin to visit Papua were inspired by deeper inspiration stories.

    The story originated more than 150 years ago.

    Governor Enembe was touched by the story he had heard of a Russian anthropologist who lived on New Guinea soil, and who had tried to save New Guinean people during one of the cruellest and darkest periods of European savagery in the Pacific.

    Indigenous hero

    Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay
    Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay pictured with a Papuan boy named Ahmad in this image taken c. 1873. Image: File

    His name was Nikolai Nikolaevich Miklouho-Maclay (1846 –1888) — a long forgotten Russian messianic anthropologist, who fought to defend indigenous New Guineans against German, Dutch, British, and Australian forces on New Guinea island.

    His travels and adventures around the world — including the Canary Islands, North Africa, Easter Island, China, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, the Philippines, and New Guinea — not only expanded his knowledge of the world’s geography, but most importantly his consciousness. This made him realise that all men are equal.

    For a European and a scientist during this time, it was risky to even consider, let alone speak or write about such claims. Yet he dared to stand in opposition to the dominant worldview of the time — a hegemony so destructive that it set the stage for future exploitation of islanders in all forms: information, culture, and natural resources.

    West Papua still bleeds as a result.

    His campaign against Australian slavery of black islanders — known as blackbirding — in the Pacific between the 1840s and 1930s, and for the rights of indigenous people in New Guinea was driven by a spirit of human equality.

    On Sunday, September 15, 2013, ABC radio broadcast the following statement about Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay:

    He was handsome, he was idealistic and a mass of disturbing contradictions. He died young. That should have been enough to ensure his story’s survival – and it was in Russia, where he became a Soviet culture hero, not in the Australian colonies where he fought for the rights of colonised peoples and ultimately lost.

    ironic and tragic
    The term Melanesia emerged out of such colonial enterprise, fuelled by white supremacy attitudes. As ironic and tragic as it seems, Papuans in West Papua reclaimed the term and used it in their cultural war against what they consider as Asian-Indonesian colonisation.

    It is likely that Miklouho-Maclay would have renamed and redescribed this region differently if he had been the first to name it, instead of French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville (the man credited with coining the term). He arrived too late, and the region had already been named, divided, and colonised.

    In September 1871, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay landed at Garagassi Point and established himself in Gorendu village in Madang Province. Here he built a strong relationship with the locals and his anthropological work, including his diaries, became well known in Russia. The village where he lived has erected a monument in his name.

    Miklouho-Maclay’s diaries of his accounts of Papuans in New Guinea during his time there have already been published in the millions and read by generations of Russians. The translation of his dairies from Russian to English, titled Miklouho-Maclay – New Guinea Diaries 1871-1883 can be read here.

    C.L. Sentinella, the translator of the diaries, wrote the following in the introduction:

    The diaries give us a day-to-day account of a prolonged period of collaborative contact with these people by an objective scientific observer with an innate respect for the natives as human beings, and with no desire to exploit them in any way or to impose his ideas upon them. Because of Maclay’s innate respect, this recognition on his part that they shared a common humanity, his reports and descriptions are not distorted to any extent by inbuilt prejudices and moral judgements derived from a different set of values.

    In 2017, the PNG daily newspaper The National published a short story of Miklouho-Maclay under the title “A Russian who fought to save Indigenous New Guinea”.

    The Guardian, in 2020, also shared a brief story of him under title “The dashing Russian adventurer who fought to save indigenous lives.” The titles of these articles reflect the spirit of the man.

    After more than 150 years, media headlines emphasise his legacy. One of his descendants, Nickolay Miklouho-Maclay, who is currently director of Miklouho Maclay Foundation in Madang, PNG, has already begun to establish connections with local Papuans both at the village level and with the government to build connections based on the spirit of his ancestor.

    Enembe seeks Russian reconnection
    Governor Enembe believes that Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay’s writings and work profoundly influence the Russian psyche and reflect how the Russian people view the world — especially Melanesians.

    This was what motivated him to arrange his meeting with the Russian ambassador on Monday. The Russians’ hospitality toward Papuan students is connected to the spirit of this man, according to the governor.

    It is a story about compassion, understanding, and brotherhood among humans.

    The story of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay is linked to the PNG side of New Guinea. However, Governor Enembe said Nikolai’s story was also the story of West Papuans too now — because he fought for all oppressed and enslaved New Guineans, Melanesians, and Pacific islanders.

    Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay’s ideas, beliefs and values — calling for the treatment of fellow human beings with dignity, equality and respect — are what are needed today.

    This is partly why Governor Enembe has invited President Putin to visit Papua; he plans to build a cultural museum and statue in honour of Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay.

    “The old stories are dying, and we need new stories for our future,” Governor Enembe said. “I want to … share more of this great story of the Russian people and New Guinea people together.”

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Culture secretary Nadine Dorries has announced a real terms cut for BBC funding, with plans to freeze the license fee for two years. There are several theories on the Tories’ motives. Are they strong-arming the BBC into shape? Reducing funding in retaliation for unfavourable coverage? Or is this a PR manoeuvre intended to appease hard right voters who think the broadcaster is too ‘woke’?

    On the face of it, accusing the BBC of having a left-wing slant would suggest a woeful misreading of the political temperature. It’s a talking point that wouldn’t appear out of place on GB News. But while the idea that the institution is biased against Conservatives might be absurd, it would be foolish to dismiss the idea that the BBC has any political leaning in itself – given it has a clear bias against the left.

    The view of the right

    The persecution complex is a right-winger’s bread and butter. Delusions of maltreatment contribute to a grand victim narrative: mundanities become sinister anti-Conservative plots, evidence of a society that is actively hostile to their beliefs, as opposed to one literally governed by the Conservative Party. The objective of this is to garner sympathy, to convince the wider electorate that if their views are controversial enough to be censored by influential, ‘woke’ progressives, then surely they must be worth listening to.

    In 2022, these dishonest tactics manifest in discourse about a culture war. The term of the day is cancel culture, a mostly online phenomenon involving the supposed censorship of Conservatives by the aforementioned ‘powerful’ progressives. This perceived political suppression ranges from online deplatforming, i.e. losing access to a social media account, to being barred from a venue or space such as a university campus.

    The Rowling debate

    JK Rowling is perhaps the most high profile, alleged case of cancel culture. The author’s many, many controversial tweets about transgender women may not have hurt her bank account, but did lead to significant online backlash. Perhaps nursing a bruised ego, Rowling characterised this as cancel culture in an open letter, signed by various writers:

    The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

    If the power imbalance inherent in a cisgender celebrity millionaire smearing a historically oppressed community wasn’t damning enough, the fact that said millionaire suffered no professional consequences for her comments should have fatally invalidated Rowling’s notion of cancel culture. It didn’t.

    How the BBC fits in

    Establishment media is a crucial component in this narrative of persecution, with the BBC – used as both soapbox and scapegoat. Right-wing commentators and MPs alike use the platform of the broadcaster to condemn what they perceive as the left for the cancelling of their politics. Ironically, the BBC itself often becomes a scapegoat for these grievances – a patsy for their image of a left which is somehow institutionally all-powerful and morally craven at the same time.

    Even while being interviewed on Newsnight or Politics Live, Conservative figures argue that the broadcaster has a discriminative agenda; that it’s an arm of ‘Big Journalism’ infringing on their freedom of speech, and that diversity quotas are corrupting its audience and programming. This is what informs right-wing support of the licence fee cut-off: as long as the BBC is cancelling Conservatives, it is a moral imperative to defund it.

    Of course, this is all total rubbish.

    What’s really going on

    If the media landscape of the past six years has shown anything, it’s that the BBC’s coverage of historically oppressed peoples is far from impartial. Take recent BBC News articles on the transgender community, such as the notorious We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women. When initially published, the piece featured comments by pornographic actress Lily Cade, herself accused of sexual misconduct, who later encouraged the lynching of trans women in a now deleted blog post. Clearly, transgender women aren’t even permitted to date freely without the nation’s most popular, ‘impartial’ news platform associating them with sexual assault. But it’s apparently acceptable for the very same broadcaster to use a cisgender woman accused of sexual assault as a contributor.

    Client journalism

    BBC News also has a dismal track record when it comes to their coverage, or lack thereof, during protests. Trans right activists were still protesting We’re being pressured into sex by some trans women months after its publication, but the BBC neglected to report on any of such demonstrations, even while protestors rallied outside their London broadcasting house. To acknowledge dissent is to legitimise it.

    And who could forget the multiple occasions on which the BBC publicised images of Kill the Bill protestors, after they were circulated by Avon and Somerset Police? A state broadcaster rolling CCTV close-ups of wanted anti-authoritarian protestors – like something out of a dystopian police state. Articles like these have laid bare a reactionary bias that legitimises transphobic tropes, and a contempt for those who reject the Conservative status quo.

    A very British smear campaign

    Arguably even more pervasive is the BBC’s ideological bias. For some, the broadcaster’s red scare-style vilification of Jeremy Corbyn defined the past two elections. BBC News coverage of Labour’s recent election campaigns continues to be scrutinised, including at an academic level. The former Labour leader and his manifesto were often presented with, at best, an air of exaggerated incredulity, and, at worst, downright cynicism.

    The BBC’s complaints division responds to criticism on occasion, but never in good faith. For example, former director-general Tony Hall dismissed allegations of bias as “conspiracy theories” in the aftermath of the 2019 General Election. Also, Newsnight was accused of manipulating a headshot of Corbyn wearing a cap to associate him with communist Russia, by photoshopping a Kremlin backdrop and a shade of Soviet red onto the image. Instead of addressing these complaints, BBC editors only responded to the lesser allegation that they had visually exaggerated the shape of the Labour leader’s hat. Their explanation was a simple technical distortion, a result of “the image [being] projected on to a large curved screen” as reported by the Guardian, though this didn’t explain the colour alteration and background image.

    The subtle yet brazen bias of the BBC’s reporting is perhaps not all that surprising given the senior figures at the broadcaster with links to the Conservative Party. But that isn’t changing the minds of anyone on the right. The online behemoth that is cancel culture is a profitable one, generating more political and social capital with every contrived scandal.

    A paradox of victimhood

    The reality is that the BBC isn’t cancelling right-wingers. They’re providing them with a pulpit; giving commentators access to the most popular news platform in the country, from which they broadcast an incredibly powerful faux victim narrative. Cancel culture isn’t something wielded against the right, certainly not by the BBC – rather, it’s used to undermine and incite violence against the left. Threatening the status quo makes you fair game: transgender people, young protestors, and anyone further left than the most moderate of social democrats are all subject to incendiary smear campaigns.

    Conservative diehards who pride themselves on being frank and outspoken have established themselves as puritans of the online realm. They tell themselves that the entire British establishment is out to get them for their traditional right-wing values, but then condemn media for being inclusive or progressive. They are fundamentally the ones addicted to cancel culture. They clutch their pearls at anything which doesn’t fit with their worldview and beliefs, which often includes queerness, Black and Brown people, and sincerity. All the while, they characterise themselves as the only people brave enough to ‘tell it how it is’ amidst a sea of sensitive snowflakes. The outrage surrounding the BBC’s ‘wokeness’ and political correctness before it (a lineage that stretches back to Mary Whitehouse) is simply the cultural indignation of bigots, dressed up as sensible, no-nonsense populism. Prejudice disguised as pragmatism.

    The sensible response

    Many British political moderates seem to be reluctant to criticise a broadcaster which has essentially become a right-wing propaganda platform. Some feel unwilling to turn on this ‘world-beating’ service, because the alternative is joining a critical voice that is, currently, predominantly right-wing. But it’s important to keep in mind that the Conservatives’ campaign against the BBC, ridiculous as it may be, doesn’t mean that the BBC is in the right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Hand-wringing about optics is useless: if the BBC is allowed to continue its arbitrary, McCarthyist crusade against the left, then speaking out against biased reporting will always be an uphill battle.

    Establishment media will never view even the most moderate of left-wing principles as legitimate, so why worry about the consequences of opposing the establishment? Don’t be tentative to resist an institution that will never approach you with the journalistic impartiality it affords your opponents. Instead, criticise the BBC!

    As a progressive, consider that a de facto state broadcaster that has consistently conflated your politics with Stalinism might, in fact, deserve to lose its funding.

    By Jack Applegate

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Hewn in to human rights legislation borne of fascism’s decline in the mid twentieth century is a pool of glorious protections of civil liberties and press freedoms. It is deep, but it is not entirely immune from attack. Political opportunists undermine it in regular waves, repressing dissidence in their states and satellite states, even and especially in the West. Victims pile up, the criminalisation of journalism gathering steam, the propaganda to justify this awful retrenchment of civil liberties rising in the background. This is fascism resurgent.

    Glasnost translates to ‘transparency’, and it was assumed to be a core value of western government when Gorbachev’s administration began to dismantle socialism in Russia in the 1990s. The liberal democratic system prevalent in the world today is in theory buoyed by open, transparent government, and in every area where it is practised as the predominant form of government, gives rise to the rule of civil liberties said to be inalienable, universal, and non-negotiable. Being as old as democracy itself, they’re deeply rooted in history, representing progress and democratic status. Insofar as it remains worth defending, there remains no better way to adhere to “civilised” culture than to defend civil liberty and constitutional freedoms. While it may be a world away from the current zeitgeist among western leaders for criminalising dissent, journalism, and whistleblowing, reaching its zenith in the prosecution of Julian Assange, it’s nonetheless only a few fights away from restoration.

    All around the world are corrupt governments torturing and oppressing citizens critical of the regimes that rule, not serve, them. True to Orientalist stereotypes, this type of place is reflexively assumed by the privileged commentariat to be an anomaly, in some remote region of the East, where the rule of law is alien and everybody’s neighbour knows someone in the gulag. Taking the American tradition of world policing to new heights, however, the most advanced superpower in the advanced industrial west will supply everything you could want if you were seeking examples of archetypal tyranny, and its satellites are all too happy to turn this practice from an isolated infraction to standard, common practice. Being emboldened in power, the US jurisdiction, and those under its spell, practice extraterritorial prosecutions, extraordinary renditions, in which foreign citizens are either extradited to the empire state for trial and punishment bordering on and oft crossing the rubicon into illegal torture, or have it enforced upon them in US bases overseas.

    Unluckily, the CIA oversee these cases and will bend over backwards to accommodate torture, and to offend the constitution. Set in the context of the Patriot Act (an unconstitutional abomination of law rafted through congress during the hysteria after 9/11) they have unlimited powers to break non-refoulement law in the human rights convention. The principle of non-refoulement forms the crux of many internationally binding contracts in which signatory states agree to uphold and abide by the practice of not forcing refugees or asylum seekers to return to a country in which they are liable to be subjected to persecution.

    Despite power’s collective disgrace of the law by breaking the principles enshrined in non-refoulement law, missing the irony, the Tory government has said the arrest of Julian Assange is just and serves to show he is not above the law. Likewise the official line from Ecuador that Assange’s work constitutes “cyber-terrorism.” Such talk from the government evidences not the culpability of Assange for any crime, but precisely the establishment’s desire to invert the real narrative: ironically, Assange has been arrested for exposing corruption that posits powerful organisations and politicians above the law, and for so doing he is now deemed beneath justice.

    Assange had previously said it was not the prospect of answering to British or Swedish justice that worried him and put forward a robust case for the proximity of a British or Swedish trial to a US extradition during the debate about the moral ambiguity of his self-imposed exile, in which he credibly suggested he feared a kangaroo court in the US which would punish him to life, or gruesome death, for abiding by first amendment ethics, a claim that many thought was paranoid but has been vindicated.

    Like all young people looking out to the world today, I am acutely conscious we are growing up in a times of extreme volatility and complex global politics marred by violence, war and corruption, one yet borne aloft by revolutionary dreams of a better world that have come to fruition in hopeful global rebellions, which I cheered on as a socially conscientious teenager.

    Perhaps the defining note of optimism for me is that I am emboldened by hope in the face of an insurgency of brave truth telling, of righteous civil disobedience against corrupt and ossified power, but at once, the defining note of pessimism for me is that I am equally as worried by the way insurgent bearers of truth are being treated like mice in the maze of a Goliath American state, one that treats the whole world order as if it were its sole domain, its entire extraterritorial jurisdiction, a caliphate, whose subjects are treated with increasingly wanton whim at the behest of the senate, military and intelligence agencies in the empire state.

    Notorious names — Schwartz, Assange, Lauri, Manning, Winner — correspond to notorious cases. While the case specifics encompass a varied range of actions and activities associated with subversion of US imperial strategy, they encompass and are united by concerted efforts to subvert imperial activism of the US state decidedly through electronic means — whistle blowing, data dumping, hacking — activity which, rendered through the realpolitik filter with which hawk politicians have been conditioned in the corridors of Yale and The Pentagon, is tantamount to treason. Thinking logically it is obvious treason is an untenable accusation against those who — with the exception of Manning, Schwartz, Winner — have never been American citizens. Indeed such charges sullying the names of these renegades seems designed to inculcate fear and obedience to American objectives not just within but beyond domestic spheres of influence. Silencing dissent, then, can be seen as core imperial strategy, and one with terrifying, unprecedented extraterritorial reach.

    Hard working, principled journalists — who’d be legends and treasures in a long lost era of good press ethics in society — and their sources are paying a high price out of their human rights under the aegis of a craven new age of US imperialism. Most modern states bar the integration of legitimate journalistic activity with the penal code, like those currently being deployed to get Julian Assange. But in the data age, with less developed laws around the link between technology and sources, criminalisation is being embraced, or at least is being seized upon in the moment before laws and regulation are clarified and tightened up to get Assange.

    But it stinks. For one evidence cited in attempts to justify his arrest and pursuit under the law are at best dubious, at worst slanderous. Moreover in a zeitgeist defined by Brexit negotiations steeped deep in the rhetoric of protecting parliamentary sovereignty it ought to worry us British courts are willing to yield to the whims of US courts who are willing to put Assange away for life, or kill him, for the crime of doing journalism.

    It’s time that the establishment drops pretences and stops using the phrase “no man is above the law” as if the mantra is still meaningful. Either justice is a right or its not. For so many, conspicuously all in the business of exposing corruption, they don’t get it. It’s time to reform society’s treatment of whistleblowers and remove all legal obstructions to their freedoms.

    In theory, we are equal under the law. In practice, some are beneath justice. Equality under the law — from which the maxim “no one above the law” — is a bastion of liberal democracy. It is oft cited in defence of the moral superiority of the western way of life over other systems that have preceded it or stand in opposition. A fair legal system is seen to be the sign of an ethically mature democracy. Yet it is precisely because the law is administered to prosecute whistleblowers on elite crimes and reward elite corruption that this truism about our equivalence in the contemporary justice system is an anachronism with a diluted meaning. In war, justice is always the biggest casualty.

    The post Julian Assange is Not above the Law, but He Shouldn’t be Beneath Justice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • COMMENTARY: By Nick Rockel, a reflection as Aotearoa New Zealand yesterday experienced its worst day since the covid-19 pandemic began.

    It came up in my Facebook memories that it was two years to the day on March 23 since Aotearoa New Zealand started its first lock-down. Coincidentally also the day many of the remaining restrictions and regulations relating to covid were relaxed or removed.

    On this day two years ago Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced, “New Zealand has moved to Alert Level 3, effective immediately. In 48 hours, New Zealand will move to Alert Level 4”. We had our first case of community transfer that could not be traced to the border.

    It would be seven weeks before we went down to level 2

    New rituals were started, the daily health update at 1pm became must watch viewing — were the numbers going up or down? There was much excitement from certain family members each time schools being closed was extended.

    We changed time zones — the kids waking hours shifted, staying up and getting up late, and while you nagged them to attend online classes it didn’t really matter.

    We spent a lot more time with our teenage children than we would have otherwise. Created lots of memories albeit mostly based in the lounge, things like playing charades and enjoying Netflix and popcorn.

    We laughed at the Aussies for buying all the toilet paper, meanwhile here shops ran out of flour, yeast, icing sugar, as everyone baked. Sourdough starter was the thing to do.

    Consciousness cooking
    Diets improved, there was little meat and what was available was wildly over priced. The kids got more involved in cooking, there was less food waste as we became more conscious than normal about what he had and needed to use up.

    A good life lesson, and of course no takeaways or Uber eats.

    The working world changed with Zoom “you’re on mute” meetings. Always interesting if the person in the meeting hadn’t put a background on, realistically we were often not in even the most casual of office attire.

    New Zealand Herald 30032022
    Aotearoa New Zealand’s “deadliest day” yesterday … as reflected in the New Zealand Herald today. Image: APR screenshot

    Teddy bears appeared in windows as people started walking or cycling round the neighborhood. There were many small acts of kindness.

    Sure we missed out on a lot of activities, dance classes and competitions, football seasons, school camps, and of course seeing friends and family.

    At the beginning of covid, as we saw things change from an event in a part of China we probably hadn’t heard of to spreading around the world, we realised planned events that had seen many hours of preparation and fund-raising could not proceed. There would be many more cancellations and disappointments along the way.

    But there were good things too.

    Team of five million
    The pride that the team of five million felt in how well the lockdown was working to stop the spread.

    The excitement the day we reached zero community cases, the PM said she did a little dance — I’m sure she wasn’t the only one.

    We moved forward with restrictions and people mostly were happy to cooperate. There was little sympathy for those breaking the rules, not following lock down restrictions, breaking out of MIQ etc. It felt like those people were letting the rest of us down by not doing their bit.

    We had periods of relative freedom then more lockdowns. We were used to this now, after the announcement of new cases we’d jump on the supermarket site and try to get a delivery window — bugger none available.

    The last of the big lock-downs was predominantly only Auckland. It was a long one and something unexpected and unprecedented happened — the rest of the country started to feel the love for Auckland.

    I have to say as a long time resident, who despite living in Tamaki Mākaurau half my life never fully considered myself an Aucklander, I felt pretty bloody proud of the people of my city.

    Vaccinations arrived and we watched the progress — could we get a high percentage vaccinated before the next wave came? The Vaxathon reminded those of us of a certain age of Telethons gone by — it was such a positive Kiwi thing. And yes, we quickly became one of the most vaccinated populations on earth.

    Along with the vaccines came the mandates and passes. Most of us got it, could see why they were necessary and were happy to go along with them — heck who wouldn’t want to get a free vaccine against a virus killing millions around the world and protect yourself and others?

    Dissent and dissatisfaction
    “Some people who were no doubt a little reluctant to got vaccinated so they could go to work or take part in things. But some people didn’t want to be told to take the vaccine.

    They wanted to be free to not take it and continue to do their jobs, take part in leisure activities, which put them into contact with those of us who had been vaccinated. Many of us had limited sympathy for this point of view.

    The dissent or dissatisfaction of some became rich material for the political opposition who had struggled for oxygen with the daily updates from the PM and the Ministry of Health.

    They and some reporters in the media found that an individual who was having a tough time as part of the restrictions, someone in MIQ unable to be with with a sick relative, someone missing a funeral, someone stuck overseas unable to get home, was given a lot of air time.

    More coverage it often seemed than was given to the vast majority who were happy with things and grateful that we weren’t seeing the serious illness and deaths occurring overseas.

    So what were the changes flagged last week?

    We’ll be keeping the traffic light system to handle new variants or pressure on the health system.

    Pragmatic steps
    From Friday red-level indoor gathering restrictions are raised to 200 people, and there will no longer be limits of for outdoor gatherings including sports events, concerts, etc. There will also be no need to scan or sign in from this time.

    From the April 5 no more use of vaccine passes will be required, and there will be no more mandates for education, police, the military, and staff in places like restaurants and bars. There will still be some mandates required in the health system.

    These are pragmatic steps given the level of community spread and the lack of measures that could realistically contain it. But we also need to continue to protect our most vulnerable people from exposure to covid, I can see why the government has kept some restrictions in place.

    Will those who have complained so much, the mandate protesters, the politicians and media, now draw a line under it? Move forward accepting that even if the government didn’t always get it 100 percent right they did bloody well most of time?

    Yeah right!

    Even after all the precautions and vaccinations my family and I eventually got covid a few weeks ago, pretty unavoidable without isolating such was the infection rate of the omicron strain.

    Isolation felt like another lockdown except everyone around you in the community carried on with life as normal, and there was no sending a designated person to queue at the supermarket. Whereas the earlier lockdowns has been quiet this one was full of noise traffic and construction.

    Remembering best of times
    As we return to life with fewer restrictions we‘ll no doubt remember those days of lockdowns, the extra time with immediate family, taking pleasure in simple things, and yes the hard times and missed events that caused us sorrow.

    This time will remain in the memories of those who are kids today and be something they annoy their own children and grandchildren with tales of many years from now.

    Some will continue to work remotely, perhaps there will be a bit more consideration for those in our community who could do with a helping hand — even if it is just dropping off a few things at the letterbox. If there is another pandemic, a more dangerous variant, or some other event, we’ll be well placed to handle it calmly.

    Dogs will remember lockdowns as the best of times; all of their people were home, even if they didn’t really go anywhere.

    Many of us will remember that feeling of the nation coming together and wonder if maybe, just maybe, we could apply that same collective effort to addressing other problems we face as a society.

    The last two years haven’t been easy but we bloody did it, we saved lives — think of the awful final hours in ICU that didn’t result for so many additional people due to those actions. It was worth it.

    Nick Rockel is a “Westie Leftie with five children, two dogs, and a wonderful wife”. He is the publisher of the Daily Read where his article was first published. It is republished here with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • In 2011, I travelled to Afghanistan as part of a defence sub-committee delegation. I was the only woman. During the program, I met with two Australian female soldiers for a briefing on the issues facing women in Afghanistan. The briefing was an optional extra in the delegation’s program and I was also the only member of the delegation to attend.

    The soldiers had just returned to the Multinational Base in Tarin Kowt after an intelligence-gathering mission “beyond the wire”.

    The soldiers shared the stories of the women they had met in Uruzgan Province. Stories about the women’s lives, their hardship, their fears, their hopes and their dreams. Stories about how they survived as women, right down to how they managed period cramps and the pain of childbirth. And stories about their addiction to opium.

    Because in rural villages in Afghanistan in the middle of a war zone, you can’t just drop in to the local chemist to get painkillers. So you resort to a treatment that’s cheap, accessible, homegrown and abundant – poppy resin.

    What these soldiers discovered, which was little understood at the time, was that women were using opium to manage their pain—the pain that comes from being a woman, and the pain of their reality.

    And, in some instances, they found, men were deliberately addicting women to opium, to pacify and control them, to manage them.

    The stories of those women in Uruzgan Province would not have been told were it not for those two female soldiers and gave added impetus to efforts to build women’s and maternal health centres in remote parts of Uruzgan Province. Because until their mission, those women were unseen and unheard outside Afghanistan. It was only those two female soldiers who gave them a voice and amplified it.

    Those soldiers are no longer there, but that doesn’t mean the women of Afghanistan should be forgotten and unheard. As the international community calls for the formation of an inclusive government in Afghanistan, we need to continue our efforts to amplify the voices of the women who still live there and advocate for female empowerment, education and economic participation. Because too many of them are being silenced through harassment, censure, threats of violence or actual violence – they are in hiding, being hunted or have already been hunted.

    And as we witness the horrors of another war unfolding in Ukraine we need to remember our sisters there too. We need to fight for them to have a voice and be heard during this conflict, and in the transition out of it.

    Because the experience of more than two decades in Afghanistan has taught us many lessons when it comes to empowering, listening and responding to women on national security and peace building.

    Afghan Women

    Gai says lessons from Afghanistan show why women must be consulted. Picture: Afghan Women in Herat, Afghanistan. June 2012. Picture: United Nations Photo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 

    And a lot of lessons on not what to do. During that delegation to Afghanistan, I heard a powerful story that underscored the need to consult with women. It was about a remote village in Afghanistan where the main source of water was a well.

    As part of the international effort to stabilise and build capacity in Afghanistan, a well-meaning team of people from the international assistance community decided that this village needed all its houses plumbed to bring them into the 21st century.

    But, unfortunately, no one consulted with the women in the village about whether this was a good idea. Had they done that, they would have learned that the trip to the well each day was the only time a woman could get out of her house and commune with other women. By plumbing their houses, the international community cut off women from their only daily source of freedom and engagement.

    Now many lessons were learned from that well experience, but in some respects the world seems to be going backwards on the Women, Peace and Security agenda.

    The agenda, which stemmed from a United Nation’s Security Council resolution more than 20 years ago, addresses the important and vital role of women in the prevention and resolution of conflict, in humanitarian assistance responses and in peace building. The resolution calls on the international community to increase the participation of women and incorporate gender perspectives in all peace and security efforts.

    In his Women, Peace and Security report to the United Nations Security Council in September last year, the Secretary General said:

    “The recent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban has attracted much of the world’s attention. But in the months leading up to it, the United Nations had already documented a record number of women killed in the country in 2020, including civil society activists and journalists, and the targeting of academics, vaccinators and even women judges in the Supreme Court.

    “And yet, Afghan women were not included among the negotiators with the Taliban in 2020.

    “When delegates representing the Taliban and the Government of Afghanistan met in Moscow in March 2021 to discuss the peace negotiations, there was only one woman among them.

    “This juxtaposition of violence targeting women and their rights, on the one hand, and their extreme marginalization and exclusion, on the other, still encapsulates the women and peace and security agenda in 2021.”

    He outlined that:

    “In 2020, women represented only 23 percent of delegates in peace processes led or co-led by the United Nations.

    “None of the ceasefire agreements reached between 2018 and 2020 included gender provisions.

    “Only 5.2 per cent of military troops in peace operations were women.

    “Bilateral aid to women’s rights organizations and movements in fragile or conflict-affected countries remains strikingly low, well below 1 per cent, and has been stagnant since 2010.”

    Multiple studies over multiple decades have shown that peace lasts longer and conflict zones become more stable when women participate in the negotiations and decision-making. Peace processes involving women as witnesses, signatories, mediators and negotiators have a 20 percent increase in the probability of lasting more than two years, and a 35 percent increase in the probability of lasting 15 years.

    Women shaping their future shows the lives of women, and their community, are improved for the long term.

    Here in Australia, the numbers of women in every field of national security are on the rise, particularly in leadership positions. But there is still more work to be done, and we need to keep applying the pressure for change.

    The Lowy Institute’s Foreign Territory: Women in International Relations report of 2019 found that it has been more than 50 years since the Commonwealth ‘marriage bar’ was lifted in 1966 in Australia.Since then, more than 30 major white papers, reviews, and inquiries had been produced that have shaped Australia’s international relations architecture and influenced our foreign and security policy.

    At the time of the report, none of these major policy-setting exercises had been led by a woman in more than half a century. It’s now time to normalise the presence and voices of women in national security, here and overseas. We need to set a target for speakers and panellists at national security events organised by government agencies or organisations that receive government support through funding, venues or speakers—domestically and internationally.

    The Government has set a target of  50 percent of women holding  Government board positions overall, with at least 40 percent of positions at the individual board level.

    The same 50/40 rule should be applied to government funded or supported national security events.

    And no more excuses that the female talent doesn’t exist. The talent exists in spades, in every national security field. While the numbers in some fields may still be in the single digits, the women are there. Finding them just requires a bit more lateral and creative thinking, a broadening of networks and an end to the lazy churn of the same male voices.

    The 50/40 rule should also apply to national security and international relations task forces and papers, and publications and journals produced by government agencies and government-funded organisations.

    And reporting on performance on the 50/40 rule should be done through the Women, Peace and Security National Action Plan interdepartmental committee and review process, with audits by the Australian National Audit Office.

    National security parliamentary committees also shouldn’t be immune from the 50/40 rule. Currently, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has 36 percent women. The Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade has just 25 percent.

    The application of the 50/40 rule for parliamentary committees inquiring into national security would be a good start, as would a
    cross-party parliamentary friends group on Women, Peace and Security.

    We need to make women’s involvement in peace and security  decision- and policy-making and practice, here and throughout the world, mundane, everyday and unremarkable.

    And that starts with women having a seat at the table, according to the renowned women’s rights defender, peace negotiator, former member of the Afghan Parliament and its first-ever female Deputy Speaker, Fawzia Koofi.

    Because if they aren’t around that table, they end up being the dinner.

    Feature image: Supplied

    Editor’s note: At an International Women’s Day event in Canberra, Gai Brodtmann gave a speech that captivated the room. Gai has kindly allowed BroadAgenda to publish an edited version of that speech. Parts of this article/speech also appeared in a previous article Gai wrote for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2019, Find the publication via this link (see page 117). After Covid-19 Volume 2: Australia, the region and multilateralism (amazonaws.com).

    The post The compelling reason women must help negotiate peace appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • COMMENTARY: By David Reid of Local Democracy Reporting

    A media bribe? More like the deal of the century.

    Fifty-five million dollars does sound like a lot of money. It could buy you a fantastic jet-setting lifestyle, homes around the world and certainly the freedom to never work again.

    But what it won’t buy you is influence over a near 200-year-old industry that costs billions to run every year.

    Local Democracy Reporting
    LOCAL DEMOCRACY REPORTING

    Yet, as the government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund turns towards its home straight, there is the baffling suggestion that somehow editors around New Zealand have all been “bought” by the Labour government.

    It is a false, dangerous and frankly lazy assumption.

    One of the bigger recipients of the fund is the Local Democracy Reporting scheme. It takes about $1.5 million a year. It will likely always need public money because it was set up to fix a problem.

    Regional news is struggling. Advertising revenue has been hoovered by tech giants.

    Facebook versus the Akaroa Mail… who would you bet on?

    Slashed to survive
    So, local radio stations, community papers and even regional titles in place for more than a century have had to slash to survive.

    Reporters could no more sit in council meetings, chase up the activities of ports or dig into what district health boards are up to. There wasn’t the time. There wasn’t the money.

    Journalists, already earning scandalously small wages, got sacked and local news got smaller.

    Private media did not step in to fill the gap as there was no profit to be had.

    So local lawmakers were quietly left alone to manage ratepayer money. Some did better than others.

    Addressing this information vacuum, RNZ and the News Publishers’ Association got creative.

    In 2019, they set up a project known as Local Democracy Reporting. Based on similar schemes in Canada and the UK, it now manages 15 reporters around the country.

    Seeking the truth
    The journalists, funded by taxpayer money, are employed to go and seek truth from publicly elected people and organisations.

    Stories they write can be accessed by rival media outlets at the same time as they go to print by the host newsroom. It is, at its core, a domestic wire service.

    Last year, LDR reporters wrote more than 3000 local stories from around the country generating more than 9 million page views.

    Stories from the top to bottom of New Zealand were shared for free to the 30 media partners who sign up to the scheme.

    And since the project’s inception in 2019, how many stories have been questioned by the purse holders at NZ On Air? Not one. Not a single email, telephone call or meeting has questioned the editorial output of any one of the reporters.

    Neither has there been a single suggestion of a news line that reporters might consider. And if there had been, you can take it as gospel that these reporters would chuck the suggestions straight in the bin.

    Journalists value their independence.

    LDR reporters not ‘newbies’
    LDR reporters are not “newbies” to the game either. They are at least mid-career and know their patches well. Most are part of a newsroom they worked in before LDR existed and are well in tune with their audience.

    They are Māori, Pākehā, female, male, old and young. But most importantly they are skilled reporters who spend their time searching for fact, inconsistency, lies and truth.

    The idea that they and their editors are now craven to government paymasters that they have never met is both preposterous and insulting.

    And the best way to see this is to look at the stories. They hardly paint the government of the day in a flattering light.

    Covid-19 rules, new laws for farmers, racial inequity and management of water are just some of the topics given regional voice. In these stories, government ministers don’t get a look in.

    Some who decry public funding of news are also quick to complain that the ‘metropolitan elite’ don’t pay enough attention to the smaller towns and communities.

    They say the mainstream media has no clue about ‘real New Zealand, doing it tough’.

    Stitching it all together
    LDR is in place to address that very concern.

    Up and down the country, the reporters go out and talk to iwi, business owners, parents, councillors and mayors. They stitch it all together and get it in the news.

    If you want to judge the success and worth of a local democracy reporter, go talk to your local councillors. Ask if they enjoy having reporters present at meetings. If they are honest, they will tell you that they don’t.

    They know public discussion of any rate increase, speed limit change or building project could be online to a big audience within minutes.

    The LDR project constantly keeps its eye on the use of public cash all around the country. It costs every New Zealander about 30 cents a year. What a bargain.

    David Reid is the Local Democracy Reporting manager. Asia Pacific Report is an LDR partner.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • In slightly hushed tones, of the kind so often uttered in workplaces, I conversed with a fellow civil servant the other day, one who could shed light on some of my past experiences. Over the years, we have met several times in passing, as we moved through the dank spaces of municipal life, and laughed about our mutual frustrations. Encounters of this kind are certainly not rare. In fact, one could even call our conversation ordinary or commonplace, if not for a single, defining moment.

    In the half-light of dying florescence, as vending machines hummed and remnants of lunch enticed cockroaches — unnervingly large ones — we discovered something; the unnamed coworker and I, along with many others we had known, had suffered incredibly similar experiences of bullying and what, in some instances, was clearly racism and unfair treatment or some form of harassment intended to insure silence, this over a considerable number of years. Across racial lines, men and women both young and old suffered injustices at the hands of our government employer, but we tended to believe we were alone and without options, as each one of us struggled in relative isolation. The magnitude of this realization struck both of us, and we agreed that employee abuse — and the isolation of survivors — remains the proverbial elephant in the living room, a beast unlikely to leave of its own volition. Indeed, the history which could be told here is sad and alarming. It is a long narrative of decline, a story of progress lost from earlier labor movements, as the exploitation of public servants proliferates in the twenty-first century. Indeed, we find nothing less than a chronicle of sustained wrongdoing, hypocritical government agencies that violate their own laws with impunity, all the while boasting about their “inclusive” workplaces and lack of tolerance for harassment. In a single moment, our ordinary workplace conversation became a rather extraordinary glimpse at reality, the extent of the oppression quietly endured by numerous employees in our municipality.

    Although the number of survivors is likely quite high, considering the many accounts we have heard throughout our careers — spanning nearly three decades in total — activism is rare these days and unity almost unheard of, divided as we are by circumstances. And how effective are the unions? Clearly, the system in question is deeply complex, quite adept at keeping its crimes hidden and its employees isolated — and the unions compromised. Standing against an immensely powerful culture of silence and coercion, they can do tragically little, it seems. Indeed, the problem is staggering, to the extent that its existence has largely become normalized.

    We are faced with a pattern of abuse so pervasive as to be ignored and treated like a non-issue; that is to say, many employees have come to consider their harassment to be normal and inevitable, nothing more than everyday life in the public sector. This should not be the case. Nepotism, cronyism, and racism in civil service abide as secret evils which must be exposed to the light of day, for the sake of employees as well as the public. With all of this in mind, the sheer scope of the wrongdoing in our sector calls out for closer inspection, a hard, scrutinizing stare at some uncomfortable realities.

    When Private Attitudes Become Public Crimes

    The line that separates cronyism (or something as vague as personal favoritism) from outright racial, gender-based and/or age discrimination — all of which are illegal — is fluid and often difficult to discern. However, in climates where the former issues are commonplace, careful documentation is essential; we must note instances of bias when they take place, because those carefree nudges and winks among the favored few lead to discrimination, inexorably. In this manner, the symbiotic relationship that exists between private attitudes and public violations of the law renews itself time and time again, until corrective measures are taken. I consider this now, as I look back upon my career.

    Initiating the Journey

    The beginning of my career, back in 2001, was a time of anticipation, as I prepared to enter an exciting job, one to which I could loosely apply my education and training in museum work. But even as I looked forward to a new life in public service, there were certain surprises in store, things which could not have been anticipated. That my first supervisor had left his career with the State of California ignobly, after detaining an off-duty law enforcement sergeant and berating the man with racial slurs, was something I would learn later, after a colleague and I filed grievances against him with the union. A coworker had taken me aside one morning to provide that piece of information, hoping to lend context to my situation. And, since she was a supervisor, I regarded her account accordingly. Moreover, what she reported seemed very consistent with behavior I had already witnessed and experienced, time and again. And why had this individual continued his career with our agency? That question was never answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

    Apparently, management believed the disgraced state employee to be a good hire, someone immanently well-qualified to supervise people — and to hold a certain degree of authority over the public. Of course, his subordinates could have told them otherwise. We were lied to, yelled at, denied vacation time and routinely given assignments below our job classification, this so the supervisor could allow the employees who should have been doing the work — those whom he favored — time to relax and smile at their good fortune. I recall sharing these difficult years with three colleagues, all of whom had interesting career trajectories after the fact. As for my first supervisor, I eventually — and a bit too charitably — considered his employment with our agency as a one-off, an anomaly for an otherwise reputable organization. In time, I would come to hold a different opinion.

    On subsequent assignments, I had a few helpful supervisors, as well as one who was oddly similar to the first. He was only too happy to make racial jokes and grant favors (like allowing private offices, unlimited overtime, and new vehicles) to subordinates who were not African American, two of whom were fellow military veterans. With all due respect to their service, I took issue with the fact that my seniority had twice been ignored for vehicle assignments, and my continual requests for a desk—a place to do my paperwork and keep my research materials—had fallen on deaf ears. The supervisor laughed one day and said in his most mocking tone, “Of course you can’t have it. You’re not white. That’s the way it is around here.” Beyond this, I was sent to patrol and issue citations after dark in isolated areas or, in some cases, in areas that were simply known to be dangerous; both of these orders, which had been issued directly to me, were expressly prohibited by our department’s policies. My supervisor had taken this course vindictively for an earlier situation, during which time I had formally objected to conducting hazardous waste removal, a task clearly outside the scope of my job classification. I won a modest victory there. In our department, contractors are now more frequently utilized for large-scale waste removal projects. However, “team players” (who hope for promotions) still dutifully remove anything their supervisors deem worthy of disposal. To do otherwise, and to hold the department accountable to its own policies, is to end one’s hope for advancement. Some colleagues, whom I invited to the union meetings I organized, took things a step further and became indignant. “F__ the union! They can’t tell me how to do my job!” Somehow, they felt honored to be exploited by management and insulted by the union’s attempts to defend us. It was puzzling. As for the colleagues mentioned earlier, the ones who also worked under my first supervisor, perhaps their careers help to highlight the extent of the problem.

    One of the above-mentioned coworkers ended his career by physically assaulting a member of the public — an elderly woman — and being sentenced to a small amount of community service, all the while being supported by a number of colleagues who, unsuccessfully, petitioned for his reinstatement. I was not one of them. As for the other two coworkers, I have spoken to some of their former subordinates on occasion and heard reports of abuse, unrelenting harassment and bullying blithely ignored by management; after being promoted, they created situations quite similar to the ones we endured all those years ago. As for the supervisor who deliberately placed me in harm’s way, he received a special award from management for caring about the safety of his employees, an honor bestowed upon him at our annual department meeting, the same year of my complaints. Eventually, he was rewarded with a promotion and moved to another department, despite the numerous allegations of abuse made against him by an alarming number of employees. Of course, not everything was reported. I recall one woman who confided that she was simply too scared to come forward and believed that nothing would change, regardless. Sadly, she was correct. Here, I note that I have had numerous conversations with coworkers who report being hindered by cronyism and, just as often, victimized by bullying and discrimination.

    And what do we make of this? The municipality in question has, over the years, been at the center of a number of lawsuits, some involving racial discrimination, others pertaining to sexual harassment, crimes incubated by a demonstrably toxic atmosphere. So, this begs the question of why one might remain with such an employer. Being chilled by the shadow of abuse and corruption is terrible, but a steady paycheck, benefits, and a pension do offer a bit of mitigating warmth. And some people simply love their jobs enough to remain and choose their battles wisely, enduring until the sunlight of retirement appears on the horizon. In the end, we all arrive at our own conclusions, some people voting with their feet and choosing to leave, others electing to remain and hope for the best. And here I should note something of importance; a number of employees I spoke to reported that they have enjoyed positive experiences, on the whole. Others, however, were fearful and chose not to speak on the record regarding the bullying and discrimination they suffer, which is understandable. The prevailing system is formidably self-contained, keeping people so isolated as to make the sharing of information difficult at best, and the fight for justice a rare occurrence. Year in and year out, a sizable municipality protects its own perpetrators and betrays the employees who offer their service in good faith. Indeed, there are numerous stories which, for the historical record, really deserve to be told. I am reminded of one which serves as a fitting conclusion, if only in the form of a brief sketch.

    A number of years ago, in the cool breeze of an employee parking lot, a colleague asked me an interesting question; did I know why our maintenance staff no longer had the services of court-appointed laborers? At the time, I did not. So far as I knew, the men and women who once fulfilled their community service with our department had simply disappeared one day, without explanation, almost entirely unnoticed. Apparently, certain government employees had been accused of extorting them for cash and sexual favors, so the laborers were quietly sent elsewhere. As I recall, that episode never made it to the evening news.

    Hopefully, this reflection provides a useful bit of context to those who have not, and probably will never, work as civil servants. In the United States, as elsewhere, I’m sure, the public sector is an old and powerful house where secrets hide behind each closed door. As for solutions, they will need to be profound, as far-reaching as the scope of abuse, and their assessment lies well beyond this reflection. However, we can all be assured that many stories still linger in memory, calling out to be told, needing to be resolved.

    The post Systems of Abuse in American Civil Service first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is a huge piece of legislation that’s designed to increase the government’s control over the people. The so-called police bill’s origin, promising a ‘smarter approach‘, claims to deliver on Conservative manifesto commitments to keep the public safe. Now that parliament has concluded a consideration of amendments, it’s expected to receive royal assent shortly.

    In reality, the bill is a vicious, repressive, and racist piece of legislation that’s sparked massive protests across the country. It criminalises those deemed to be causing a nuisance, whether it be noise, annoyance, or the blocking of streets. A reversal of policy in some cases, it expands the use of controversial stop-and-search powers and discriminates against Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller people. The bill also changes sentencing rules, meaning those convicted of a crime will spend more time in prison.

    Almost all of the hated police bill is wrong and does not respect human rights. However, while parliament should ‘Kill the Bill‘ while it still has the chance, it is my opinion that there is one small detail hidden within the bill that should be embraced.

    The bill will update the complex and lengthy rules on criminal records. These have been known to hamper societal reintegration by creating a divide between those who have made mistakes in life and those who haven’t. The current rules on criminal record disclosure are neither proportionate nor effective. For example, they state that if you receive a one-year suspended sentence, you have to legally announce it for five times that amount of time.

    Consistently vilified

    Allow me to state that I am on the side of prisoners, a group of people who are consistently vilified and are stripped of fair chances by our ruthless society. My position is that regardless of their crime, people in prison deserve to be treated like human beings. Their efforts at rehabilitation should be aided and encouraged, not hindered. The prisoner is a recurring scapegoat of the mainstream media, with partisan headlines found in the Daily Mail and Sun. I often write for Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners. And in doing so, I aim to correct the record on matters of criminal justice and champion the work of groups like Unlock, who campaign relentlessly for fairness.

    The police bill builds upon a foundation that will help people with a conviction in their pursuit of a normal life. In 2011, the government introduced their Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill (LASPO), with a consequence of justice becoming ‘just for the rich’. The LASPO Bill cut legal aid and criminalised squatting in a residential property. In a surprise move, however, it did relax the rules on criminal record disclosure that had been set back in 1974. These rules dictate for how long an individual must suffer a criminal record that will hinder their employment, travel, and insurance needs.

    That relaxation has changed lives for the better, helping former prisoners move on from their past mistakes. The policing bill will further relax the disclosure rules – though hardly to the extent proposed by respected prison reformer David Ramsbotham.

    An excessive regime

    I have previously written about the disproportionality of the criminal records regime. I believe it represents an unwinnable situation where people are shut out by society after serving their punishment. This is not theory or hypothesis but a reality. If the state makes it impossible for an ex-prisoner to get a job, that person will have no choice but to claim social security to feed themselves. And we all know the labels that are placed upon those reliant on benefits.

    The parts of the police bill concerning criminal records do remain imperfect. But the bill contains some satisfactory improvement, reducing those excessive and impractical disclosure rules. For any sceptics of ex-prisoner rehabilitation, I would advise them to look at the evidence and success stories. Furthermore, if not convinced, keep in mind that the law sets out a long list of roles and offences to which the reforms do not apply. This means a person will have to disclose their conviction (even if it is spent) for the rest of their life.

    While the bill may give with one hand, it overwhelmingly takes with the other. A worrying projection estimates that by 2026, the prison population will have increased by 20,000. And to accommodate that increase, the government intends to build 18,000 new prison places. This is money that could instead be spent on rehabilitative services. According to the Prison Reform Trust, the majority of the police bill’s sections that relate to serious and violent offences are not supported by evidence, or the evidence used is misleading and selective.

    Party politics

    Shamefully, the ‘shoot first and ask questions second’ Labour Party rarely takes an interest in the plight of ex-prisoners. They prefer a hard-line approach involving antagonism by police ‘at three o’clock in the morning’. A compassionate approach of educating and supporting people, rather than shaming and humiliating them for eternity, especially when they have paid their dues, would lead to a better end result for everyone. We would see lower reoffending rates and fewer victims as a consequence.

    The Conservatives, on the other hand, are a cunning bunch. While I welcome their improvements to the criminal records regime, I’m reluctant to dish out praise for their efforts. This is because they do not truly believe in reform. The Tories are using an important cause for a reason yet to be determined. It could be to make the legislation more palatable or to get campaign groups such as Unlock temporarily off their backs. I ask myself about the day our prime minister – an alleged criminal – finds himself involved with the justice system. When it affects him personally, will he finally support a reasonable disclosure regime?

    While I always hoped that the criminal records regime would be reformed beyond the LASPO amendments, I never envisaged it happening this way. For everyone’s sake, let’s come up with something that can truly be described as a ‘smarter approach’.

    Featured image via Wikimedia/Chmee2 – cropped to 740×220, CC by-SA 3.0

    By Elliot Tyler

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • ANALYSIS: By Joanne Wallis and Czeslaw Tubilewicz of the University of Adelaide

    The draft security agreement between China and Solomon Islands circulating on social media raises important questions about how the Australian government and national security community understand power dynamics in the Pacific Islands.

    In Australian debates, the term “influence” is often used to characterise the assumed consequences of China’s increasingly visible presence in the Pacific.

    There’s an assumption China generates influence primarily from its economic statecraft. This includes its concessional loans, aid and investment by state-owned enterprises (which partly manifests in Beijing’s involvement of Pacific Islands in its Belt and Road Initiative).

    On its face, the leaked draft seemingly proves Chinese spending “bought” enough influence to get the Solomon Islands government to consider this agreement. But such an interpretation misses two key issues.

    The role of domestic politics
    First, the draft agreement is primarily about Solomon Islands domestic politics — not just geopolitics.

    As explained by Dr Tarcisius Kabutaulaka after the November 2021 riots in Honiara, geopolitical considerations intersect with, and can be used to, advance longstanding domestic issues.

    These include uneven and unequal development, frustrated decentralisation, and unresolved grievances arising from prior conflicts.

    Power in the Pacific is complex. It is not just politicians in the national government who matter in domestic and foreign policy-making.

    Take, for example, the activism of Malaita provincial Governor Derek Suidani, who pursued relations with Taiwan after Solomon Islands switched diplomatic recognition to China in 2019. This highlights the important role sub-national actors can play in the both domestic and foreign policy arenas.

    Neither Solomon Islanders (nor other Pacific peoples) are “passive dupes” to Chinese influence or unaware of geopolitical challenges — and opportunities. Some do, however, face resource and constitutional constraints when resisting influence attempts.

    Australia’s current policy settings are not working
    The second key issue is that Australia’s current policy settings are not working — if their success is measured by advancing Australia’s strategic interests.

    Australia is by far the Pacific’s largest aid donor and has been on a spending spree under its “Pacific Step-up” initiative.

    Australia spent billions leading the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), as well as significant bilateral programMEs to the country. Yet Australia has not been able to head off Honiara considering the security agreement with China.

    Perhaps Canberra has not sought to influence Solomon Islands on this matter. But given Australia’s longstanding anxieties about potentially hostile powers establishing a presence in the region, this is unlikely.

    Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews has already commented in response to the leaked draft that:

    This is our neighbourhood and we are very concerned of any activity that is taking place in the Pacific Islands.

    The rumours (subsequently denied) that China was in talks to establish a military base in Vanuatu, and China’s attempt to lease Tulagi Island in Solomon Islands had already intensified Australia’s anxieties.

    Such concerns partly motivated the government’s investment in the Pacific Step-up.

    A closer look at the draft security agreement
    The terms of the draft security agreement should make Australia anxious. It goes significantly beyond the bilateral security treaty between Solomon Islands and Australia.

    Article 1 provides that Solomon Islands may request China to “send police, police, military personnel and other law enforcement and armed forces to Solomon Islands” in circumstances ranging from maintaining social order to unspecified “other tasks agreed upon by the Parties”.

    Even more concerningly for Solomon Islands’ sovereignty, Article 1 also provides that

    relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands.

    It remains unclear what authority the Solomon Islands government would maintain once it consents to Beijing’s deployment of “relevant forces” to protect Chinese nationals.

    Article 4 is equally vague. It states specific details regarding Chinese missions, including “jurisdiction, privilege and immunity […] shall be negotiated separately”.

    The agreement also raises questions about the transparency of agreements Beijing makes and their consequences for democracy in its partner states.

    According to Article 5,

    without the written consent of the other party, neither party shall disclose the cooperation information to a third party.

    This implies the Solomon Islands government is legally bound not to inform its own people and their democratically elected representatives about activities under the agreement without the Chinese approval.

    The version circulating on social media may prove to be an early draft. Its leak is likely a bargaining tactic aimed at pursuing multiple agendas with multiple actors – including Australia.

    Australian High Commissioner Lachlan Strahan met yesterday with Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare and announced Australia will extend its assistance force until December 2023.

    It will build a national radio network, construct a second patrol boat outpost, and provide SI$130 million (A$21.5 million) in budget support.


    Playing whack-a-mole
    While the timing was likely coincidental, it highlights an emerging dynamic in Australia’s Pacific policy: playing whack-a-mole by seeking to directly counter Chinese moves through economic statecraft.

    Think of Telstra’s recent purchase of Digicel Pacific, headquartered in PNG — a move seen by some analysts as really an attempt to shut China out of the Pacific.

    That China has been able to persuade Solomon Islands to consider an intrusive security agreement raises questions about our understanding of how power and influence are exercised in the Pacific.

    If influence is taken to result in concrete behavioural changes (such as entering into a bilateral security agreement), and if Australia is going to “compete” with China on spending, you’d need to ask, for example: how much “influence” does an infrastructure project buy?

    This understanding of power, however, is insufficient. Instead, a more nuanced approach is required.

    Influence is exercised not only by national governments, but also by a variety of non-state actors, including sub-national and community groups.

    And targets of influence-seekers can exercise their agency. See, for example, how various actors in Solomon Islands are leveraging Australia, China and Taiwan’s overtures to the country.

    We must also consider how power affects the political norms and values guiding governing elites and non-state actors, potentially reshaping their identities and interests.

    The draft security agreement may come to nothing — but it should provide a wake-up call to Australia and its partners.

    Old assumptions about how power and influence are exercised in the Pacific need urgent re-examination — as does our assumption that explicitly “competing” with China advances either our interests or those of the Pacific.The Conversation

    Dr Joanne Wallis is professor of international security and Dr Czeslaw Tubilewicz is senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Well before the floods hit the Northern Rivers of NSW, many people were already living precariously.

    The images of shattered men, women and children losing their homes from weatherboard ‘queenslanders’ to caravans was spine-tingling, even for me, a seasoned reporter. Homes now full of mud, sewerage and mould had to be abandoned.

    A shortage of affordable housing was the context too of the Black Summer bush fires. Many who lost homes across the south coast of NSW are still in temporary accommodation.

    Our geography doesn’t help. A startling fact tucked away in a recent Insurance Council of Australia report explains that Australians especially vulnerable. The Insurance Catastrophe Resilience Report 2020-21 tells us that “Australians are five times more likely to be displaced by a natural disaster than someone living in Europe”.

    And yet after decades of research sounding the alarm on the science, Australia still has no national and cross-jurisdictional housing strategy, and certainly not one that anticipates climate impacts on housing.

    We at the Equality Rights Alliance (ERA) keenly make this point in our submission to a Productivity Commission review into the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement currently underway. The five-year state-federal agreement expires next year and the PC is asking the public for comment.

    The agreement is national in name-only. It largely excludes local government. It lacks accountability measures to keep all parties focussed on the objective of delivering affordable housing and reducing homelessness. There is no explicit policy connection to climate change adaptation and mitigation, nor women’s safety, gendered poverty or the needs of people with a disability. And it avoids the elephant in the room, tax reform.

    What’s holding us back is a narrative stuck in a groove: ‘housing as an investment right’ rather than ‘housing as a human right’. While the Federal Government tries to reduce affordability pressures with measures like rent assistance (which is way too low in our view), policy settings simultaneously bias the housing market in favour of those with capital.

    We argue that a new National Housing and Homelessness Agreement should join up the dots and be driven by a federal housing minister who sits in cabinet, and with the support of a dedicated agency that measures and marshals the evidence. That way it gets the sustained attention it needs.

    All levels of government have to work together better, recognising the Commonwealth’s role with macro-policy settings which drive housing demand such as taxation and population, and the responsibilities of State, Territory and Local governments for land use, land supply and urban planning and development policy, infrastructure policy and tenancy legislation.

    The Commonwealth is best placed to deliver overarching leadership that strengthens cooperation and accountability and it is best placed to provide capital injection for net growth in social housing stock in partnership with the states.

    The design and delivery of housing and homelessness services must be more gender explicit. Conditions are undoubtedly worse today for anyone on low income but the fastest growing group to experience homelessness in Australia is older single women. Many are first-time users of the welfare system.

    Maggie Shambrook of Brisbane had post graduate studies behind her and steady work but an abrupt change in her family’s life suddenly saw her at risk of homelessness.

    “The stereotype of a person who is homeless does not reflect reality. It’s a surprising picture of women who have been carers for chapters of their life and who have enjoyed modest incomes, even earned PhDs.”

    Maggie is now an advocate with the Housing Older Women (HOW) movement based in Queensland.

    “There are many women who are hidden from view.  A friend moved 18 times in 3 years trying to stay safe, staying with friends and family, remaining invisible. The toll on her physical and mental health was huge,” she told ERA.

    Women and children are disproportionately impacted in the wake of economic shocks and natural disasters. They will need specialised support over some time because women are more likely to take on unpaid care while living with the legacy of systems that lead to compound disadvantage.

    The Housing Older Women movement is among many in the sector who with at ERA argue for measures that address a ‘missing middle in terms of housing options’ – options in between private ownership and multi-level public housing where every tenant is struggling.

    We hope the Productivity Commission will listen to the call for more housing options. Its review is a once in a generation opportunity to reset housing policy for the long haul, one that sees beyond annual budgets and political terms and one driven by a vision that leaves no one behind.

    The post National housing policy: Where’s the vision? appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • Truth is often the first casualty of war, so it’s imperative that all those in power are still held to account during these times. Curtis Daly gives his opinion on troubling authoritarian moves by Volodymyr Zelensky. 

    By Curtis Daly

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Rishi Sunak’s Spring Statement just confirmed that most people claiming social security from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are, in his eyes, worthless. Because the chancellor has done nothing for millions of people on so-called benefits. In fact, Sunak has further consigned them to the ‘digital workhouse’: entrenching poverty and misery under the DWP system.

    A Spring Statement for the rich

    The Spring Statement contained no new measures on social security. The one mention of it was to say what the government did in 2021. Sunak failed to address the fact that around 10 million households are facing at least a £290 real terms cut to their social security. This is on top of things like the benefit cap which has caused persistent child poverty.

    Sunak has also done nothing about energy prices for poor people – unless you can afford to install solar panels or heat pumps. So, most households will see a £1,300 increase in their energy bills by October 2022. The Spring Statement did take 5p a litre off fuel duty. But again, that means nothing for the poorest households – 35% of whom have cars versus 93% of the richest ones.

    A big announcement of bullshit

    Sunak’s main announcement was an increase in the threshold at which people start paying National Insurance. It’s now the same as income tax – so £12,570, an increase of £3k. Overall, this is supposed to mean an average £330 extra in people’s pockets. But again, this is nonsense for the poorest people – among them chronically ill and disabled people who can’t work; unpaid carers; those on Jobseeker’s Allowance, and part-time workers who didn’t meet the National Insurance threshold in the first place.

    Moreover, it means little for those who do pay National Insurance but also have to claim Universal Credit. This is because the 55% Universal Credit taper rate at which the DWP cuts your social security payment will swallow much of the £330 back-up anyway.

    The digital workhouse expands

    All Sunak’s Spring Statement has done is to continue an ideological drive by the Conservatives. As I previously warned in 2018, the Tories designed Universal Credit with a Victorian mindset of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor:

    Sick, disabled, unemployed and low earning people would no longer be different, distinct benefit groups. They would become one, homogeneous ‘underclass’ of people. And… the state would give minimal support to these people. Instead, charities and communities should carry the burden of this workless/underemployed group.

    In May 2019, UN rapporteur Philip Alston called Universal Credit a ‘digital workhouse‘. Sunak’s Spring Statement has now cemented that vision. He’s done nothing to support the poorest people amid the worst cost of living crisis in decades. Instead, Sunak has locked millions of low-paid workers, social security claimants, and chronically ill and disabled people into this digital workhouse. Their incomes will continue to fall behind everyone else’s – trapping them in poverty and misery. And sadly, there seems no way out of the digital workhouse on the horizon.

    Featured image via Wellcome Images – Wikimedia, cropped to 770×403 under licence CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia and Sky News – YouTube

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Carving up the Papuan provincial cake.
    Carving up the Papuan provincial cake. Graphic: Image: Lugas/tirto.id

    On Thursday, 10 March 2022, thousands of Papuan people in the Lapago Wamena Cultural Area took to the streets to paralyse Wamena city. They occupied Wamena City. They rejected the Indonesian colonial plan to expand Papua province.

    Remember: The voice of the people is the voice of God. The Papuan people, people and leaders of Indonesia, Melanesia, Pacific, Africa, European Union. USA, Australia, listen to the voices of the two million Melanesian people in West Papua who are currently on their way to being annihilated due to Indonesia’s systemic racist politics.

    The expansion of Papua provinces, Special Autonomy Volume 2 and military operations in six regencies in Papua is not a solution for West Papua. Only one order — give us the right of self-determination for the political rights of the Papuan nation in West Papua.
    Our greetings and prayers from Wamena, the heart of Papua.

    Waaa … waaa … waaa.

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Yamin Kogoya

    The above text was written by Markus Haluk, director of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) on Thursday, March 10. The text encapsulates the sentiments of Papuans protesting across West Papua and Indonesia, calling for Jakarta to stop the creation of new provinces.

    Haluk’s words were written amid escalating protests in various parts of West Papua’s customary lands and across Indonesia over Jakarta’s plans to create six new provinces under the unilaterally renewed — and unpopular — Special Autonomy Law 21/2001.

    Here is an overview of the breadth and depth of protests against this repression, with reports that at least two people have been shot dead:

    Jayapura – Mamta customary land
    Tuesday, March 8: Hundreds of students and communities clashed with Indonesian security forces at university campuses in Waena and Abepura cities, protesting against the expansion. The protest coordinator, Alfa Hisage, stated that this demonstration was to reject the creation of a new province altogether.

    Wamena – La Pago customary land
    Thursday, March 10: Doni Tabuni, the coordinator of the demonstration in the highlands of Wamena (the location that Markus Haluk refers to in his text) warned on March 10 that the expansion would wipe out Papuans. Protesters declared: “We will stop all government office activities in the Lapago region if the central government does not stop the expansion,” reported CNN Indonesia (10 March 2022).

    “The expansion will not bring prosperity to Papuans; it will only serve to benefit the elites, bring more migrants, and create more opportunities for military and human rights violations,” said Doni Tabuni.

    Paniai – Meepago customary land
    Monday, March 14: thousands of residents of Paniai took to the streets to demonstrate against the expansion of the “New Autonomous Region”, also known as “Daerah Otonomy Baru” (DOB). The demonstrators repeatedly shouted against the new proposal and do not want to join the province of Central Papua, which would become a new autonomous region.

    Petrus Yeimo, a member of the Paniai Regency Legislative Council (DPRD), said that communities are not involved in the formation of this new region.

    “That’s why we Paniai people firmly reject the expansion,” said Petrus, when he was met by the mass in front of the DPRD office (innews.id).

    Manokwari – Domberai customary land
    Tuesday, March 8: The same message also echoed in Manokwari city — a coastal town popularly known as a “city of the gospel” for its historical significance of the landing of the first two German missionaries (C.W. Ottow and J.G. Geissler) for the “Christianisation” project in the mid-1800s.

    Sorong – Domberai customary land
    Monday, March 21: A series of protests has also taken place in Sorong city, at the Western tip of West Papua, involving sections of Papuan society, including students and communities.

    Protesters in Sorong
    Protesters in Sorong carry a banner saying, “The expansion of the new autonomous region is oppression against the Papuan people.” Image: APR

    “The expansion of new autonomous region depletes our forests, depriving us of our land rights. The goal of our meeting is to convince the mayor, who is also the head of the creation of the new Southwest Papua province that we Papuans all over Sorong Raya oppose the expansion,” said action coordinator Sepnat Yewen on Monday. But they were disappointed that they were unable to see the mayor twice (Compass.com, 21 March 2022).

    Jakarta – the heartland of the colonial powerhouse
    Tuesday, March 11: Papuan students held protests in central Jakarta, calling on Jakarta to stop the colonial expansion of their homeland, during which one police officer, Ferikson Tampubolon, was injured on the head (Detiknews, 12 March 2022).

    Indonesian security forces line up against Papuan protesters in Jakarta
    Indonesian security forces line up against Papuan protesters in Jakarta. Image: APR

    South Sulawesi – an Indonesian island
    In Kendari city of South Sulawesi, the Papuan Student Association declared that the newly created provinces would not benefit Papuans. Kiminma Gwijangge, the group coordinator, said that this was a game of the political elites and rulers who control the public service in Papua and ignoring the rights and wishes of Papuans. These Papuan students demanded that the Papuan elites, who eat money and expand on behalf of Papua, be stopped immediately.

    Yahukimo – La Pago customary land
    Tuesday, March 15: Tragically, a peaceful demonstration for the same cause in the Yahukimo region did not go well. Two young men, Yakop Deal, 30, and Erson Weipsa, 22, have been martyred for this cause by the Indonesian police — the cause for which Papuan men and women courageously risked their lives to fight against fully armed, western-backed, modern security forces with advanced mechanical weapons.

    Two young Papuans gunned down and a dozen wounded
    Witness accounts of the Yahukimo tragedy stated that the protest initially went ahead safely and peacefully. However, provocation by police intelligence officers posing as journalists in the midst of the protest led to the shooting.

    It is alleged that an unidentified Indonesian person flew a drone camera during the demonstration. Seeing that action, protesters warned the Indonesian man not to use drones to record the protest, creating fear.

    The protestors also asked for his identity and whether or not he was a journalist, but he failed to respond. The crowd protested against his action. He then ran for cover towards hidden police officers who had been on standby with weapons. Immediately, members of the police fired tear gas at the crowd without asking for the person responsible for the peaceful demonstration. Soon after, police opened fire on the crowd.

    Papuan Police public relations chief Kombes Pol Ahmad Musthofa Kamal confirmed that two protesters had died, and others suffered gunshot wounds (Suara.com).

    Gathering evidence of the Yahukimu shootings by the Indonesian military.
    Gathering evidence of the Yahukimu atrocity – alleged shootings by the Indonesian military. This Papuan man was shot in the back. Image: APR

    OPM and civil society groups
    The Free Papua Movement, also known as Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), and their military wing, The West Papua National Liberation Army, which was launched in the 1960s to protest against the Indonesian invasion, are opposed to the new expansion of provinces.
    Sebby Sambon, the group spokesperson released a statement that threatened to shoot Papuan elites who imposed Jakarta’s agenda onto Papuans (tribunnews.com, 12 February 2022)

    More than 700,000 people have also signed the Papuan People’s Petition which represents 111 organisations opposing Special Autonomy.

    These protests are not the first and they will not be the last. Papuans will continue to resist any policy introduced by Jakarta that threatens their lives, cultural identities, and lands.

    This is an existential war, not a political one — it is a war of survival and resisting extinction.

    The genesis of these recent protests
    Those protests are not simply a reaction against the new expansion, but a part of a movement against the Indonesian invasion that began when Papuans’ independent state was seized by the Western governments and given to Indonesia by the United Nations in 1963.

    This is a conflict between two states — the state of Papua and the state of Indonesia.
    Having the big picture is vital to prevent misrepresentation of these protesters as just another angry mob on the street demanding equal pay in Indonesia.

    However, the protests that cost those two men their lives in Yahukimo had a specific genesis. It began in 1999 when 100 Papuan delegates went to then-President Habibie and demanded independence after the collapse of Suharto’s 31-year New Order regime.

    Habibie and his cabinet were shocked by this demand, as people whom they thought were members of his family suddenly told him they no longer wanted to be part of the great Indonesian family.

    Having been shocked by this unexpected news, Habibie and his cabinet told the Papuan delegation to go home and think it over in case it had been a mistake. But this was not a mistake. It was the deepest desire of Papuans being communicated directly in a dignified manner to the country’s highest presidential palace.

    This occurred during a time of great turmoil in Indonesia’s history. Strongman national father figure Suharto, once considered immortal, no longer was. His empire had crumbled.

    Suddenly, across the archipelago, a cacophony of demonstrators unleashed more than 30 years of dormant human desires for freedom, frustrations, and fear, combined with the ravages of the Asian economic collapse.

    If there was a time when the Papuans could escape the tormented house, this was it. One hundred Papuan delegates marching to Habibie indeed made their mark in that respect.

    At this momentous time, the man who understood this deepest desire and would help Papuans escape was President Abdurrahman Wahid, better known as Gus Dur. He lives on in the memories of Papuans because of his valiant acts.

    President Gus Dur – a political messianic figure
    On 30 December 1999, or exactly two months and 10 days after being inaugurated as the 4th President, Gus Dur visited Irian Jaya (as it was known back then) with two purposes — to listen to Papuan people during the congress, which he funded, and to see the first millennium sunrise on January 1, 2000. On this day, a significant moment in human history, he chose to stand with Papuans and for Papuans.

    During his stay, he changed the region’s name from Irian Jaya to Papua and allowed the banned Papuan Morning Star flag to be flown alongside Indonesia’s red and white flag.

    Changing the name was significant for Papuans because these changes marked a significant shift in how the region would be governed. The former name symbolised Indonesia’s victory and the latter symbolized Papuan victory.

    Prior to these historical occurrences, the region was known as Netherlands New Guinea during Dutch rule, then as West Papua during a short-lived, Dutch-supported Papuan rule in 1961, then from Irian Barat to Irian Jaya when Indonesia annexed it in May 1963.

    Just as their island has been dissected and tortured by European and Asian colonial powers, so too have Papuans, being tortured with all manner of racism and violence in the name of the civilisation project.

    The messianic Gus Dur’s spark of hope instilled in the hearts of Papuans was short-lived. In July 2001, he was forced out of office after being accused of encouraging Indonesia’s disintegration. Gus Dur’s window of opportunity for Papuans to escape the tortured house was closed. The new chapter that Gus Dur wrote in Indonesia-Papua’s tale of horror was ripped out of his hands during the most pivotal year of human history — the new millennium 2000.

    The demand for independence conveyed to President Habibie a year earlier by one hundred Papuan delegates was discarded. Instead, Jakarta offered a special gift for Papuans — gift the Special Autonomy Law 21/2001.

    There was a belief among foreign observers, and Papua and Jakarta elites that this would lead to something special. It reflects Jakarta’s ability in terms of its semantic structure and highly curated selection used in law.

    Rod McGibbon, an analyst and writer on Southeast Asian politics in Jakarta, noted in a Wall Street Journal article on 14 August 2001 that despite the challenges Jakarta faces in its dealings with Irian Jaya (Papua), the Special Autonomy approach represents the best opportunity for Jakarta to begin meaningful dialogue with provincial leaders. He also predicted that if Jakarta fails special autonomy, the province will suffer further ethnic and regional conflicts in the future.

    He was right, 20 years later Special Autonomy turned out to be a big mess.

    The law consisted of 79 articles, most of which were designed to give Papuans greater control over their fate — to safeguard their land and culture.

    Furthermore, under this law, one important institution, the Papuan People’s Assembly (Majelis Rakyat Papua-MRP), together with provincial governments and the Papuan People’s Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Papua-DPRP), was given the authority to deal with matters that are most important to them, such as land, population control, cultural identity, and symbols.

    Section B in the introduction part of the Special Autonomy law reads as follows: “That the Papua community as God’s creation and is a part of a civilised people, who hold high human rights, religious values, democracy, law and cultural values in the adat (customary) law community and who have the right to fairly enjoy the results of development”

    Assassination of prominent Papuan leader and Papuan chief
    Three weeks after the law was passed, popular independence leader Theys H. Eluay was killed by Indonesian special forces (Kopassus). Ryamizard Ryacudu, then-army chief of staff, who in 2014 became Jokowi’s first Defence Minister, later called the killers “heroes” (Tempo.co, August 19, 2003).

    In 2003, the Megawati Soekarnoputri government divided the province into two. She was violating a provision of the Special Autonomy Law, which was based on the idea that Papua remains a single territory. As prescribed by law, any division would need to be approved by the Papuan provincial legislature and MRP.

    Governor Lukas Enembe – Melanesian chief
    On August 22, 2019, Narasi (central Jakarta’s TV programme) invited Papua provincial Governor Lukas Enembe and others (both Papuans and Indonesians) to discuss mass demonstrations that erupted across West Papua and Indonesia after Papuan students were racially attacked in Surabaya.

    The programme host, Najwa Shihab, was shocked to hear the governor’s response. When asked about his opinion about the situation, the governor said that Papuans already had their own concept to address problems in West Papua, but they needed an agreement/treaty under international auspices — or something of the sort — because no Jakarta-made law would work in Papua.

    The host then asked, “you are a governor, but why don’t you believe the authority of Special Autonomy Law?” Governor Enembe replied, “The Special Autonomy Law 21/2001 has not worked until now.”

    The governor stressed that Papuans do not have political power or free will to make any meaningful decision.

    “We are supposed to make our own law under this Special Autonomy, but Jakarta refuses to allow it. Jakarta only gives money under this law, that’s all.”

    The statements come from Papua’s number one man and not from someone on the street. The ruling elites in Jakarta are not fazed about breaking their own laws, showing their disrespect of the Papuan people and their integrity as a nation.

    The governor is not the only official in the country’s highest office who lacks faith in the central government. Otopianus Tebai, a young Papuan senator who represents Papua in the central government said in a response to this new expansion plan that most Papuans reject the divisions (Suara.com, March 18, 2022). Divisions of which Papuans are being coerced into by the old special autonomy law renewal, which Governor Enembe declared as a total failure.

    The MRP, Papua’s highest institution established under the special autonomy law to safeguard cultural identities, no longer has the power to act as intended. This institution has been stripped of its power, as well as other things, as a result of the 2021 amendment to the law which was passed two decades ago.

    Timotius Murib, the chairman of this institution, said that the plan to create an autonomous region did not reflect the wishes of the people of Papua and would probably create more problems if Papuans were divided over it.

    The chairman emphasised the law was designed for Papuans to have specific authority to implement local laws pertaining to our affairs, but the central government removed that authority by destroying any legal or government mechanism that materialised this authority.

    Adding to these statements from the highest offices, more than 700,000 people have signed the Papuan People’s Petition, which represents 111 organisations opposing Special Autonomy.

    Indonesian Brimob forces ready to move against Papuan protesters in Jakarta
    Indonesian Brimob forces ready to move against Papuan protesters in Jakarta. Image: APR

    Deep psychological war against Papuans – ‘divide and rule’ tactic
    Despite overwhelming opposition from many segments of Papuan society, the Indonesian government persists in imposing its will upon Papuans. It is precisely this action that is causing protests and havoc in recent weeks.

    But not all Papuans are against it. Several regents (mostly Papuans) are supporting this expansion with their cronies and supporters, in conjunction with the Indonesian government, a few Papuan elites in Jakarta, and other misfits and opportunists.

    The issue has caused division among indigenous Papuans. Among the Papuans, it plays directly into identity politics, as many tribes speak different languages, live in different ancestral and customary lands, and even practise different religions.

    A protracted horizontal conflict between these languages, cultural, and geographical lines was already being created by the creation of more regencies and districts in the past. Adding three new provinces would lead to more regencies, which means more districts, which means more security forces and settlers and more problems.

    In the midst of this drama, Jakarta is setting traps for Papuans by forcing them to face each other and preventing them from collectively confronting the system that is tearing them apart. The creation of more provinces and regions is leading to such traps since this will divide the people — which is clearly Indonesia’s ultimate goal.

    If Papuans are too busy fighting one another, then the atrocities of the elites will fly under the radar, unopposed. What West Papua needs is unity, which has been demonstrated in recent protests. Together, Papuans will always be stronger than apart in their cause, and Jakarta will stop it with all its tricks.

    If you are an imperial strategist or scammer in an empirical office somewhere in London, Canberra, Washington DC, or Jakarta, you might think that this is the best way to control and destroy a nation.

    But history shows that, all dead ancient empires and the current dying Anglo-American led Western empires use this little magical trick “divide and rule” over others until it collapses from its wicked pathological and hypocritical weights from within.

    Imperial planners in Jakarta should be focusing on overcoming their own internal weaknesses that would eventually bring them down rather than chasing after the monster they created out of West Papua.

    In this frame of mind, any vestige of hope for Papua’s restoration and unity, whether contained within or outside the law, is a threat that will be undermined at any cost.
    The term autonomy is also defined differently in Papua’s affairs because Jakarta does not intend to empower Papuans to stand on their own two feet.

    There is no real intention for Jakarta to give Papuans a chance to have some level of self-rule, which is exactly what being autonomous means in essence.

    Papua’s autonomous status seems to be all part of the settler-colonial regime: occupation, expansion, and extermination. Papuans have been told that West Papua is special, but Jakarta is undermining and paralysing any mechanism it agrees upon to convince them that that is truly not the case.

    In other words, Jakarta introduces a law, but it is Jakarta that violates it. The situation is analogous to students having a teacher who is not just negligent but hypocritical; everything the teacher believes in, they teach, not taking time to critically analyse their actions and how it all contradicts itself.

    Under the whole scheme, Indonesia is presented as a self-appointed head of the class that they are holding hostage. They believe they are the only ones capable of teaching the stupid Papuans, of civilising the naked cave men, of saving the wild beasts, and developing the underdeveloped people.

    But under the guise of the pathological civilisational myths, Jakarta poisons and destroy Papuans with food, alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, diseases and the ammunition which is used against them.

    Rulers in Jakarta act as narcissistic sociopaths — they promise development, happiness, or even heaven while committing genocidal and homicidal acts against Papuans.
    They portray themselves as the “civilised” and the Papuans as the “uncivilised” – a psychological manipulation that allows them to avoid accountability for their crimes. Jakarta makes Papuans sick, then prescribes medication to cure the very same illness it caused.

    A deep psychological game is being played to convince themselves (colonisers), and the Papuans (colonised) that Indonesia exists so that West Papua can be saved, improved, and developed. This pathological game is then embedded into the psyche of Papuans through all the colonial development products Jakarta sells to Papuans through education and indoctrination.

    This programming is evident in the way that a few Papuans (with Jakarta acting as the puppeteer) fool their own people by telling them that Indonesian rule will bring salvation and prosperity.

    Even the mental work of most Indonesians is being reprogrammed to view West Papua with that lens – they believe that Indonesia is saving and improving West Papua. Unbeknownst to them, this entity called “Indonesia” annihilates Papuans.

    Local Papuan elites legitimize their power by saying that their own people also have serious problems (backwardness, stupidity, poverty) and that they have solutions to solve these problems. However, the solution is Jakarta-made, not Papuan-made, and that is the problem.

    When governor Enembe said we need an international solution rather than a national one, he was conscious of these games being played against his people in his homeland.
    The Indonesian government exterminates Papuans by controlling both poison and antidote, but there is no antidote to begin with. It is all poison; the only difference is the label.

    Markus Haluk’s words
    Markus Haluk’s words make a desperate plea for help as they face what he terms “annihilation” due to Indonesia’s racism, responding to mass demonstration in his own homeland.

    His words highlight that the only viable solution is to grant the people the right to self-determination to establish their nation-state and declare that the people’s voice is the voice of God.

    As tragic and ironic as it is, it is highly unlikely that Haluk’s words “the voice of the people is the voice of God” will mean anything to the ruling class in Jakarta since in the past 20 years all the attacks, betrayals, torture, racism, and killings have been committed after these words were written on the Special Autonomy Law No 21/2001.

    Section B in the Introduction part of the law reads: “That the Papua community as God’s creation and is part of a civilized people, who hold high Human Rights, religious values, democracy, law and cultural values in the adat (customary) law community and who have the right to fairly enjoy the results of development.”

    It seems that these words are merely part of the theatrics — the drama of cruelty, torture and death.

    The full English text of the law can be accessed here: Refworld | Indonesia: Law No. 21 of 2001, On Special Autonomy for the Papua Province

    Settler-colony – the logic of ‘destroy to replace’
    Indonesia’s occupation in West Papua is not temporary — they are not simply taking resources and going home. The Indonesians want to make West Papua their permanent home.

    This is a permanent population resettlement colonial project based on the logic of destroy to replace. Papuans are being destroyed — and even worse, they are being replaced by Indonesian settlers. They are powerless to stop the annihilation and perversion of their ancestral homelands.

    To occupy and own the land is the ultimate goal of settlers. Settler states aim to eradicate Indigenous societies through what an Australian historian and scholar, Patrick Wolfe, refers to as a the “logic of elimination” in his paper, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native (2006).

    Colonialism through population resettlement is the most destructive form of colonial project underpinned by self-righteous, pathological rationality which exterminates the original inhabitants as a moral requirement to justify the process of replacing itself.

    In this pathological project, genocide is not considered evil but a necessity to achieve its exterminating objective. That is why the assassination of Theys H. Eluay just three weeks after the passing of the Special Autonomy Law was perhaps seen as a necessary evil to satisfy this colonial project.

    West Papua: not just another one of Indonesia’s provinces
    Over the past 60 years, virtually all literature ever produced on West Papua failed to refer to it as a settler colony. The region is still treated as if it were just another province of Indonesia, and Jakarta insist on creating more provinces as if they have legal and moral rights. This is misleading and illegal considering Indonesia’s genocidal actions and the circumstances in which the region was incorporated into Indonesia in the 1960s.

    Indonesia did not merely incorporate West Papua; it invaded an independent state by military force supported by Western governments by manipulating the UN’s system.
    Our continued use of West Papua as a part of Indonesia has distorted our understanding of the nature of the Indonesianisation programme being carried out there.

    We need to scrutinise Jakarta’s activities on West Papua’s soil with a settler-colonial lens. This will help us frame our questions and structure our languages differently regarding Indonesian activities in West Papua.

    It will also help us to see how West Papua is being destroyed under settler colony, similar to how European colonisation destroyed Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada.

    We need to frame any administration centres of any type, whether religious, political, cultural, educational, legal, social or security forces established on West Papuan soil with a settler-colonial lens.

    This will allow us to see how Jakarta created these parasitic colonial spaces camouflaged as province and regency to occupy, expand, and eventually exterminate its original inhabitants.

    The settler-colonial system is a structure that facilitates this whole extermination project. Replacing one landscape for another, one people for another, one language for another, one system for another.

    In light of this, it would appear that any law, policy, decree, regulation, or project enacted and enforced by Jakarta serves the purpose of eradicating the Papuan population from the land and replacing them with Indonesian settlers.

    This has been done in Australia, America, Canada, and New Zealand, and now these Western powers are aiding Indonesia to do the same in West Papua.

    Physically and psychologically, these new provinces (whether materialised or not) have become new battlefields in the war on Papuans. Indeed, Papuans are being forced onto these battle grounds, as in Rome’s Colosseums, to fight for their lives.

    The most tragic outcome for Papuans is going to be Jakarta pitting brother against brother and sister against sister in Indonesian’s controlled colosseum of vile games. The blood of these young Papuans that was shed in Yahukimo during the recent demonstration, shows how Papuans are paying the ultimate price in this theatre of killing.

    A way forward
    Let the same mechanism of the UN that was used to betray West Papua 60 years ago be used to deliver overdue justice for the Papuan people.

    United States of America, the Netherlands, Indonesia and their allies of all kinds — thieves, criminals, thugs, militias and multinational bandits who betrayed the Papuan people and continue to drain them of their natural resources must take responsibility for their crimes against Papuans.

    Countless of Resolutions on West Papuan human rights issues that have been written on paper in the offices of the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (ACP), UN Human Rights Council (UNHC), and European Union (EU) must be materialised to end this tragic and unjust war Papuans are forced to face on their own.

    These institutions need to unite and put their words into actions if they place any value on human life.

    If no action is taken in these resolutions, their words only serve the imperial purposes, such as these meaningless words used in the Law 21/2001 on Special Autonomy, providing false hope to deceive people whose lives and lands are already at stake.

    Remember what Markus Haluk wrote on March 10 — reproduced in the introduction to this article — calling on the world’s humanity to listen to the voices of two million Papuans and to intervene.

    Yamin Kogoya is a West Papuan academic who has a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development from the Australian National University and who contributes to Asia Pacific Report. From the Lani tribe in the Papuan Highlands, he is currently living in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • An estimate from the United Nations (UN) shows that by the end of 2021, 377,000 people will have been killed during the war in Yemen. Around 150,000 people have been killed from the conflict, and many more have died from disease and hunger caused by the humanitarian crisis Yemen now faces.

    Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition that has been bombing Yemen since March 2015. The UK, however, has provided the supplies for much of this bombing. This choice to continue to supply weapons to Saudi Arabia in its campaign against Yemen has the same roots as the majority of Western-led involvement with conflicts in the area: oil.

    How do we know that?

    The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) released research in February 2022 which shows that the:

    published value of UK arms licensed for export to the Saudi-led coalition since the bombing began in March 2015 is £8.4 billion (including £7.0 billion to Saudi Arabia alone) [our emphasis]

    According to its own estimates, however, this figure jumps sharply:

    CAAT estimates that the real value of arms to Saudi Arabia is over £20 billion, while the value of sales to the Coalition as a whole (including UAE and others) is over £22 billion. [our emphasis]

    CAAT make it clear that the UK’s monetary support is vital to the ongoing Saudi presence in Yemen. Human Rights Watch has said:

    armed conflict in Yemen has resulted in the largest humanitarian crisis in the world

    CAAT have been given permission to proceed with a legal challenge to stop the UK government’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In a previous legal challenge, the Court of Appeal ruled that approving arms sales to Saudi was “‘irrational and therefore unlawful”. However, after a temporary suspension, arms sales have resumed with foreign secretary Lizz Truss claiming that violations of international law were “isolated incidents”.

    The Yemen Data Project has the following figures for casualties in Yemen (as of 18 March 2022):

    Almost 25,000 air rids from the Saudi-led coalition is a catastrophically high number. The UK’s supply of weapons to the Saudis has facilitated these figures.

    Greasy palms

    Last week, Boris Johnson paid a visit to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The trip has been touted as an attempt to reduce the UK’s reliance on Russian oil. The Canary’s Joe Glenton reported on how Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s recent release from prison in Iran also bears the context of sanctions against Russia restricting oil supplies to the UK:

     Russian oil is going to be less accessible as sanctions pile up following the Putin regime’s invasion of Ukraine. Other sources must be found. It follows that a thaw between the West and Iran is on the cards.

    Johnson’s visit to Saudi Arabia is, then, part of a more general effort to remain in the good books of oil suppliers like Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Whilst Vladimir Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine is rightly condemned, Johnson seems to be happy to cosy up to Saudi Arabia and its government’s awful human rights records. Much like Zaghari-Ratcliffe was a pawn in geopolitical relations between the UK and Iran, so too are the people of Yemen made into pawns caught between the UK’s desire for oil and willingness to ignore morality when convenient.

    Who will help?

    March 2021 saw an update from the House of Commons library which summarises a significant cut in aid for Yemen. Initially, £160m was due to go to Yemen in 2020/21, but only 54% of that was actually announced in 2021 – a downgrade to £87 million.

    At the time, the government admitted that it hadn’t even done an impact assessment on this decision.

    Of course, Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine has also seen devastating and horrific loss. However, it is difficult to swallow the UK government’s support of Ukraine and its citizens as anything more than lip-service.

    While it is wonderful that UK citizens want to open their homes to refugees from Ukraine, and are doing what they can to show solidarity, the story cannot end there. Expressions of solidarity are vitally necessary, but that solidarity shouldn’t ignore the Black, brown, Muslim, and otherwise marginalised communities whose blood is on the hands of the UK government.

    One understanding of whether a country is at war might be a physical presence in an outside nation. That is an outdated and ineffective understanding. Modern warfare and the global market means that the UK is indeed at war, not just with Yemen, but also with other countries the UK is selling arms exports to. The UK has played an active role in the assaults on Yemen. To then cut whatever patchwork humanitarian aid may have been possible is monstrous beyond belief. The UK is at war with Yemen, has killed people in Yemen, has decisively contributed to the humanitarian crisis in Yemen – and Yemen can’t fight back.

    The UK has blood on its hands, and its modern relations to countries like Yemen are a modern approach to coloniality: neocolonialism.

    Featured image via screenshot/Evening Standard – cropped to 770×403

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • I was being humiliated, my position had essentially been made  redundant as all of the decision making had been taken off me in a way that implied my total incompetence. I was repeatedly berated in front of the staff, and I had my team members reduced to tears for being yelled at in the office.. When I learned that I no longer had any power to protect my team from harassment, I could no longer justify staying in that role. Furthermore, I had strong objections to the content being produced, the racial nature of incitement of an already volatile audience, led to a visceral reaction that I could no longer tolerate. As the only person of colour on the media team, to be told almost daily that our audience is racist, became too much to bear.

    This was the response I gave in my exit interview when asked why I chose to leave. This doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of my experience at this organisation. I won’t name them and I have deleted the experience from my Linkedin profile, in fact, I have erased those eight weeks from my life. I have accepted the learnings reflected on how this traumatic experience has helped me grow.

    Enough time has passed for me to be able to reflect on what has transpired and how it has changed me. How it has taken the experience of a culture that is rotten to its core to allow me to truly appreciate what my values are. To have made a decision that prioritises my mental health and racial integrity was an empowering move that I am proud of.

    Why diversity matters

    To the best of my knowledge, I am the only person of colour to have ever worked on the media team for this organisation. During my first week, a story came across my desk about the Federal Police reporting an increase in terrorism activity online. The details in the report indicated that the increased activity came from factions of far right extremist groups, yet the image used to accompany the alarmist headline was one that played directly to the indoctrinated masses that had consumed white washed media for decades; i.e: a bearded brown man with a turban. 

    I rejected the story immediately. What astounded me was that no one could understand why. Even after I had explained that the story exacerbates an already wounded culture that is stigmatised by exactly that kind of media coverage, I was still met with confused faces. 

    Antionette Lattouf, CEO & Founder of Media Diversity Australia says, “Racialised and inflammatory reporting, for some outlets, seems to be part of their business model. But for most journalistic output, the discriminatory content is often due to unconscious bias and the fact that most people in editorial roles hail from the same cultural and socio economic background.

    “Do I think most journos wake up and think, ‘Which minority am I going to marginalise today in my reporting?’ No, I don’t, but when newsrooms are monolithic, lack cultural competence and connections to our very diverse community, then the bias easily creeps into reporting, and goes unchecked.”

    The story was pulled in the end, but I was really taken aback by the total lack of comprehension. Perhaps they may not have deemed it offensive because they were so used to reporting on such issues, maybe they didn’t understand the impact they had on such a large audience? I later found that reporting on such things suited ‘our brand’. 

    Once the dust settled and the ink on my employment contract dried, I was told almost daily that our audience is racist and that we should write accordingly to appease them and increase traffic. There were unspoken parameters in which I had to work within. Anytime my objective journalism would creep beyond those boundaries, I was swiftly put in my place and told, “we’re not socialists”. 

    There was no reprieve from this narrative being pounded in me and it began to erode my racial integrity. It was at that point that I removed my title from my Linkedin profile. I was careful not to send too many work emails as I didn’t want to be associated with the platform. After two weeks, I began looking for another job. 

    Although I didn’t stick around long enough to make any kind of a difference to this workplace, hiring a team rich in cultural backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, abilities, genders and sexual orientations gives the organisation a better understanding of the real world. Such an understanding leads to a sensitivity of what is and isn’t acceptable. What could be deemed offensive and what is downright wrong. It’s irrelevant that this diversity is made up of minority groups, no matter how minor these groups are, they’re still people that deserve respect.

    I’ve written many times of my own personal struggles of dealing with race, it’s an altogether different battleground when it comes to my professional struggles. It’s confronting working in an industry that has contributed so much to the pain of my culture. It’s also a wonderful opportunity to make a difference. 

    I couldn’t achieve that in this workplace, but the fight continues. 

    Generation gaps

    Born at the end of 1980, I am one of the youngest cohorts of Generation X. Raised by Baby Boomers, our generation was taught to be hard workers, has a strong work ethic instilled in us, and we take great pride in our work, regardless of our chosen professions. 

    We were also raised by a generation that doesn’t believe in mental health. If you’re sad, you pray, you go for a run or you simply get on with it. Ours is a generation that teeters between stoicism and an overwhelming display of constant emotion. It’s a difficult place to navigate. 

    I’m also one of the youngest in my circles of friends. It’s not surprising that when I told friends that I had resigned from a terrible job that left me depleted, left me doubting my ability to do anything at all, that had a toxic culture littered with acts of covert and overt racism, I was met with faces of shock, concern and confusion.

    Do you have another job to go to?

    What about your kids?

    What are you going to do?

    How could you just leave?

    I don’t blame my friends for their reactions. I would probably react in the same manner if the situation were reversed. 

    What was interesting was when I had reached out to my younger friends. Their instant reaction was celebratory. 

    Good for you!

    Well done for standing up to them.

    Their loss… can’t wait to hear what you do next.

    Blind optimism or a generation that is not held down by cynicism? Whatever it may be, the disparity of reactions were stark.

    I have never left a job before finding another one. Furthermore, I had taken on this role after a seven month stint of unemployment having been made redundant from my previous role, not unusual in media. I had never been unemployed for that long either. 

    Another characteristic passed on to our generation from the boomers was resilience. 

    I always pride myself on being quite resilient, but at what point does resilience give way to tolerance? Does tolerance then lead to complicitness? By ignoring or not allowing certain abusive behaviours to impact you, do you then become complicit in accepting that behaviour? It’s like the saying goes, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

    When younger people speak up against something they don’t agree with, they are immediately branded snowflakes. Women especially are held to a different standard when displaying any kind of emotion in the workplace. By showing what we perceive to be a sign of strength and enduring discriminatory behaviour, are we suggesting that toxic environments in a workplace are acceptable?

    There are only so many things that are in our control or influence. As a manager, I tried to influence at a micro level, the culture of my team; I failed. I tried to influence the outcome of the content we produced; I failed. I then went into preservation mode and simply tried not to let my CEO have such an emotional hold on me; initially, I failed that too. 

    Ultimately, all I could control was whether or not I chose to stay in that workplace. By making that choice to leave, I regained my power. Shortly after I left, removing myself from an environment where I was told repeatedly in front of an audience how poorly I was doing and how little I was achieving, I reclaimed my confidence. 

    My resignation was a huge display of strength. It was an incredibly difficult decision that impacted my career, my family, my wellbeing, and my finances. I had finally achieved my goal of leading a news room. No easy feat for a woman in media, let alone a woman of colour. By making a choice to leave, I am making a stand to say that behaviour is not acceptable. 

    Congratulations, you’re successful!

    2021 was a tumultuous year, personally and professionally. I was made redundant in January and resigned from a job in October. 

    Two days after my resignation I was informed that I was accepted for the Walkey Foundation Mentorship Program. I had gone from completely doubting my ability to write at all, to being recognised by the most coveted organisation in Australian journalism. Obviously, it’s not an award, but a group of highly respected writers and journalists thought my work was deserving of being mentored to reach a higher level of my career. 

    Furthermore, within a week of my resignation, I was offered another role. It’s a smaller team, I am not in a managerial position, a completely different industry and I’m working alongside, quite possibly, the kindest people I have ever met. The organisation stands by their mission of work-life balance (yes, it’s achievable) by offering a hybrid model of working from home and in the office.

    Somewhere along the way of my career, I lost sight of my values. I got so caught up in the big paychecks and fancy titles, that I forgot why I had chosen this path in the first place.

    I wrote my thesis many moons ago on the gang-rape trials in Sydney in 2000. I wrote about the atrocity of the crimes committed and the appalling coverage in the media that led to an all-out assault on all people of middle eastern appearance.

    I wanted my words to matter, I wanted for a different voice to be heard. Through the years, my voice has reached a wider audience. I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my career, writing to an audience of well over two million people. I know now that it’s not about who I am reaching, but the message I am conveying. I would much rather have a tiny audience and be true to my values than write absolute garbage that erodes everything I stand for to reach the masses.

    This is my success.

    • Feature image: Supplied by the author. Photo: Dominka Lis

     

     

    The post Experiencing racism inside the media appeared first on BroadAgenda.

    This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.

  • By Michael Field of The Pacific Newsroom

    Fiji’s police chief Sitiveni Qiliho looks to have dug out an old playbook that was used over a couple of years ahead of Voreqe Bainimarama’s 2006 coup.

    Qiliho is on a shorter game plan though, he’s got to sow uncertainty and fear in Fiji’s population quickly — before the June general elections.

    If he doesn’t, then Bainimarama and his Sancho Panza, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, will lose the elections and the likely winner will be 1987 coup maestro Sitiveni Rabuka.

    At least that is what seems to show through the Fiji Sun’s recently heavily doctored opinion poll.

    Today the Fiji Sun came out with this: “Police ready to prevent potential unrest.”

    The one-sided slavish account of a ramble by Qiliho carried no details or names of those “elements” or what they might do. Other than to explicitly mention Rabuka.

    Undoubtedly 1987 with its two coups — staged by Rabuka — was a disaster, but the unrest and uproar was not all his work. As we know now, Sayed-Khaiyum himself was one of the 1987 “elements”.

    Arson investigative skills
    Qiliho himself had arson investigative skills in another coup or two.

    But the Fiji Sun left that out.

    “We’ve had past history where some people have utilised elements to create instability,” Qiliho is quoted in the Fiji Sun as actually saying. “Not in particular during election period, but there have been reports with our history from 1987 that people can be utilised for the wrong reasons.”

    Qiliho and the intelligence boys are planning countermeasures.

    The Fiji Sun today 22032022tall
    The Fiji Sun today … another beat-up before the June elections. Image: Fiji Sun screenshot APR

    “We are awake to that and our intelligence bureau and other stakeholders that we continue to discuss these issues with, we are well awake to that to see that there is no political influence on those types of activities,” he said.

    “In terms of the security landscape it’s important for us to provide that security and stability so that elections can run smoothly and keep the criminal landscape stable as well.

    “We don’t want to be used as a political football if we don’t provide that secure environment so that is important now.”

    Qiliho has a short memory.

    ‘Dirty politics at its worst’
    Ahead of the May 2006 elections, which saw Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase reelected, Bainimarama was one of those “elements” that Qiliho now talks of. Bainimarama referred to “Mr Qarase and his cronies” and said Fijian politics was “dirty politics at its worst…it is cannibalistic.”

    Qarase responded that Bainimarama’s “stated intention of involving the military in the national election campaign is a threat to peace and stability, and the conduct of free and fair elections. It goes against the rule of law and good governance.”

    It would appear Qiliho – a military officer rather than a constable — is keen on getting 4576 police into the political game. What roll the 10,000 strong Fiji Military Force — the traditional leader of coups – is not spelt out.

    In 2006 Bainimarama was explicit about the May elections and said that if the result was not to his liking, then he would act.

    Has Qiliho with his piece today stuck his toe into the tub?

    Michael Field is a co-publisher of The Pacific Newsroom. He is the author of Speight of Violence: Inside Fiji’s 2000 Coup. This article is republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • ANALYSIS: By Ashwin Swaminathan, Australian National University

    It seems not a day goes by without learning someone in our inner circle of family, friends and colleagues has covid. When we ask how unwell our acquaintance is, the responses vary from “they’re really crook” to “you wouldn’t even know they had it”.

    This is in line with studies that report moderate to severe illness in a minority of people (usually older with other risk factors) and that up to one in three positive people exhibit no symptoms.

    Given the ubiquitous presence of this highly infectious coronavirus in our community and the high rate of asymptomatic illness, those who have not been diagnosed with covid might wonder, “how would I know if I had been infected?”

    And, “does it matter if I have?”.

    How covid is diagnosed
    Most people know they’ve had covid because they had a fever or upper respiratory tract symptoms and/or were exposed to an infected person AND had a swab test (PCR or rapid antigen) that detected the covid virus (SARS-CoV-2) in the upper airway.

    At the beginning of 2022, many people with consistent symptoms or high-risk exposures were not able to access PCRs or RATs to confirm their diagnosis, but instead presumed themselves positive and quarantined.

    It is possible to diagnose past infection in those who never tested positive. A blood test can look for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (also known as immunoglobulins). When we are infected with SARS-CoV-2, our immune system launches a precision counter strike by producing antibodies against viral targets, specifically the Spike (S) and Nucleocapsid (N) proteins.

    Covid vaccination induces a similar immune response against the S protein only. The S antibody “neutralises” the invader by preventing the virus from attaching to human cells.

    These antibodies can be detected within one to three weeks after infection and persist for at least six months — potentially much longer. A blood test that shows antibodies to S and N proteins indicates someone has been previously infected. Detection of antibodies to the S protein only indicates vaccination (but not infection).

    The problem with antibody tests
    Before you rush off to get a covid antibody test, there are a few notes of caution. There is still much to learn about the characteristics of the immune response to covid infection.

    Not everyone mounts a detectable antibody response following infection and levels can decline to undetectable levels after several months in some people.

    Because there are other circulating seasonal coronaviruses (such as those that cause the common cold), tests may also pick up antibodies to non-SARS-CoV-2 strains, leading to “false positive” results.

    Commercial and public hospital pathology labs can perform SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing, but the interpretation of results should be undertaken carefully.

    So, antibody testing should really only be done when there’s a good reason to: say, when confirming past infection or effectiveness of vaccination is important for the current care of an individual.

    Diagnosing a post-infectious complication or eligibility for a specific treatment, for example. It could also be useful for contact tracing or for assessing the background population rate of infection.

    Antibody testing a population
    Seroprevalence studies” test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in repositories of stored blood that are representative of the general population, such as from a blood bank. This data helps to understand the true extent of covid infection and vaccination status in the community (and informs our assessment of population susceptibility to future infection and reinfection). It’s more useful than daily reported case numbers, which are skewed towards symptomatic individuals and those with access to swab testing.

    New research from the World Health Organisation, which is yet to be reviewed by other scientists, reported the results of a meta-analysis of over 800 seroprevalence studies performed around the world since 2020. They estimated that by July 2021, 45.2 percent of the global population had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies due to past infection or vaccination, eight times the estimate (5.5 percent) from a year earlier.

    There are plans to conduct fresh seroprevalence studies in Australia in the coming year, which will update local data and help us understand to what extent the omicron wave has washed through the population.

    Does it matter if I have had covid and didn’t know?
    For most people, knowing your covid infection status is unlikely to be more than a topic of dinnertime conversation.

    While some studies have pointed to a less robust and durable antibody response following mild or asymptomatic infection compared with severe illness, it is not known how this influences protection from reinfection. Certainly, the knowledge we have antibodies from past infection should not deter us from being fully up-to-date with covid vaccination, which remains the best protection against severe illness.

    There are reports of people with mild or asymptomatic covid infection developing ‘long covid’ — persistent or relapsing symptoms that last several months after initial infection. Symptoms can include shortness of breath, physical and mental fatigue, exercise intolerance, headaches, and muscle and joint pain.

    However, the likelihood of developing this condition appears higher in those who suffer a heavier initial bout of covid illness. This might be linked with higher viral load at that time.

    Bottom line
    As we enter the third year of the covid pandemic and given that up to one in three infections may be asymptomatic, it is likely many of us have been infected without knowing it.

    If you are experiencing lingering fatigue, brain fog or other symptoms that could be long covid, you should talk to your GP. Otherwise, knowing our covid infection status is unlikely to be of much practical benefit. Antibody testing should be reserved for specific medical or public health indications.

    Being up-to-date with covid vaccination is still our best defence against severe illness moving forward.The Conversation

    Dr Ashwin Swaminathan is a senior lecturer at the Australian National University in Canberra. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Early on the evening of Tuesday March 15, anarchists and anti-authoritarians converged in the historic working-class neighborhood of St-Henri, Montreal, for the 26th annual International Day Against Police Brutality. This year, in addition to venting their hatred of the SPVM (the Montreal police), a central theme of the march was the colonial repression faced by Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters at the hands of the RCMP.

    The post In Montreal Everyone Still Hates the Police first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.