I attended the picket at FaCSIA organised by the Melbourne Anti-Intervention Collective on Friday 18 June 2010 to mark the 3rd anniversary of the beginning of the NT Emergency Intervention. It was a great event supported by unions and indigenous groups. A large banner was placed across the front entrance of the building and a community picket was announced. This is a traditional union method of protest to stop scabs taking union jobs. No one can cross the picket line. Security at the building helped greatly by redirecting people around to the back entrance and then lurked in the entrance hallway peering anxiously out the front windows. The building was effectively closed. Later the group marched around the building and then all entrances to the building were closed. It was a noisy and effective protest. A replica of the Basic Card was burned to cheers and condemnation as a violation of the human rights of indigenous peoples. The Basic Card requires Indigenous people to spend half their income on food, clothing and medicine. It is an insult to assume that indigenous people cannot choose what things they need to buy. It violates their right to self-determination and to be treated with dignity.

The chaos of the NT Intervention reflects the government’s ridiculous approach to welfare across the board in Australia. Welfare recipients and all marginalised groups are punished for being unable or unwilling to participate in neoliberal society. The only worthwhile contribution in our society is to accumulate wealth and if you cannot be part of this then you will be punished. The welfare sector is applying an approach of discipline and control on those who wish to live by a different set of values than the morals espoused by neoliberal economists. Neoliberal standards have now become second nature to most people (including welfare workers) and they agree that if people need to be coerced then that’s what should happen.

Recently the government applied a legal slight of hand to nullify the effect of the RDA in relation to the Intervention without honouring its spirit. By applying the income management provisions to everyone in Australia receiving a Centrelink benefit and removing specific references to the Northern Territory, the government has applied the principle of non-discrimination that a person should not be treated differently on the basis of race. However they have introduced measures to target ‘vulnerable welfare payment recipients’. Vulnerable welfare payment recipients are defined as such by the Secretary of the relevant Department with provisions for making new determinations and dealing with requests for reconsideration. Certain groups can be targeted through this section of the Act.

Alastair Nicholson AO RFD QC, former Chief Justice of the Family Court, concludes that
‘What is quite clear is that the legislation gives unprecedented power to the Minister and the Secretary in respect of welfare recipients throughout Australia. However, what is also clear is that this is little more than a ruse to overcome the provisions of the RDA and that the real targets of the income management scheme are likely to be Aboriginal people including Aboriginal people living beyond the NT. It is little more than a clumsily disguised and cynical attempt to perpetuate racial discrimination against them.’
The Australian Human Rights Commission has condemned income management as racist, in a report released on November 13 2009. The report condemned the suspension of the RDA in the first place, saying income management could not be regarded as a “special measure” to advance the rights of Indigenous people. But income management was not such a measure, the report said. Any such measures would require prior informed consent before implementation. The Federal Government’s own NTER Review Board reported in October 2008 that income management should be scrapped.

James Anaya, UN human rights envoy, wrote in August 2009, any special measure must be devised and carried out with due regard of the rights of indigenous peoples to self-determination and to be free from racial discrimination and indignity. In this connection, any special measure that infringes on the basic rights of indigenous peoples must be narrowly tailored, proportional, and necessary to achieve the legitimate objectives being pursued. In his view, the Northern Territory Emergency Response is not. In his opinion, as currently configured and carried out, the Emergency Response is incompatible with Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, treaties to which Australia is a party, as well as incompatible with the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which Australia has affirmed its support.

Why, after several reports have consistently criticised this measure, recommending it become voluntary, does the Federal Government persist with it and is extending it to all welfare recipients in the NT and across Australia. This approach is consistent with a neoliberal ideology which punishes the poor as unable to participate fully in the market and marginalizes any alternative system of values. Aboriginal values which emphasise the protection of culture and the sacredness of spiritual connection to land above economic gain and profit have no place in neoliberal society. The Rudd government persists in the ideology of the Howard government putting market values above all others. Unless you can sell your culture on the market and exploit your land for profit (no matter what cost to the environment and your sacred traditions) then you have no place here. You will be strong armed into becoming part of the market no matter what the cost to your society.

This is particularly evident in the NT Labor Government’s policy ‘Working Futures – Remote Service Delivery’. On May 20 2009, the NT Labor government released its Working Futures – Remote Service Delivery policy. It is effectively cuts delivery of essential health, education and housing services to some 580 remote communities, while developing 20 “regional economic hubs” or “Territory Growth Towns”. Thousands of Indigenous people will be forced to move to these larger communities to access government services. As The Age editorial of May 23 noted, “The implementation of Working Futures will effectively mean the death of the homelands movement.”

The homelands movement began in the 1970s, when Indigenous communities began to reestablish themselves on their traditional lands. Studies by universities and health authorities show that people in the homelands are in general much healthier than those living in towns, and their communities are stable and cohesive. Being able to keep their language, culture and knowledge of the land alive has given them pride and dignity, and a sense of being in control of their lives.

The far north of Australia has always been the playground of the mining industry. The Land Rights movement in Australia began because a mining company refused to listen to Aboriginal people living in Nullumbuy. The Gove Land Rights case is seminal in the history of the land rights movement in Australia. Australia’s history views Aboriginal people as pests to be killed or removed from the land, or as a source of cheap labour to be exploited at bare survival levels. Australia has its own history of what amount to slavery (or at least indentured labour) in the far North. Most people don’t know this history. I didn’t learn about it until I began studying land rights law in my law degree in my early 30s.

According to J.C. Altman at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University, the core neoliberal ideology of assimilation is behind the NT Intervention. Intervention measures seek to discipline Indigenous labour, through grog bans, bans on pornography, requirements for people to work for the dole on community cleanups, and controlled tenancy arrangements that restrict modes of living. Some measures seek to dilute land rights or expand their potential for commercial development, through abolishing the permit system and the compulsory acquisition of township leases leading to the dispossession of traditional owners of their land. In June 2009, the Federal government compulsorily and permanently acquired the town camps of Alice Springs, sidelining the Tangentyere Council, an umbrella organisation representing 15 of the 18 town camps.

Other procedures depoliticise democratic Indigenous organisations and impose external control over townships. These measures include stripping Indigenous-controlled Community Development Employment Programmes (CDEP) of their assets and abolishing the programs, appointing government business managers with legal rights to attend the meeting of any democratically-elected organisation and with absolute powers in townships that probably exceed those of the settlement superintendent of earlier policy eras.

However even the supposed intention of encouraging all Aboriginal people to work in civilized jobs has not carried through. The NT Intervention promised Aboriginal people real jobs. Instead, according to the Melbourne Anti-Intervention Collective, thousands of CDEP positions have been lost. Under the new CDEP scheme, some Aboriginal people are being forced to work providing vital services such as rubbish collection, school bus runs, sewerage maintenance and aged care in exchange for quarantined Centrelink payments. There are cases of people working between 25-40 hours a week for the base rate of approximately $85 cash and $85 on the Basics Card. Centrelink is threatening to cut off payment entirely if people do not participate in CDEP.

One worker who drives the school bus has had her payments reduced if children are late or she misses a shift. She’s not entitled to be sick, for the bus to break down or simply to be running late. She is traveling on poorly- constructed outback roads, in an old bus which is not regularly serviced. At times she has driven the bus when it has been unregistered and it’s not clear who pays the fine if she gets caught.
NTER Review Board criticised the CDEP program for failing to provide basic training for Aboriginal communities, even literacy and numeracy, and has failed to improve non-CDEP employment opportunities. They have failed at mentoring, case management and workplace assessment and to coordinate activities between education and training providers and Job Network Providers.
The imposition of the NT Intervention followed a fundamental shift in Indigenous policy in 2004. With the abolition of ATSIC, the central concepts of Indigenous policy were changed from a paradigm loosely termed ‘self determination’ to a cluster of terms centred on ‘mutual obligation’, ‘shared responsibility’, ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘normalisation’, a language borrowed from international social policy developments in other neoliberal states. At the same time we have witnessed the abandonment of consultation with Indigenous people, diminishing use of available statistical and research evidence and increased marginalisation of the experts, especially if their views diverge from national leadership. The Rudd Government continues this policy, placing a cynical veneer of legal compliance over measures which fundamentally disenfranchise Indigenous people.

James Anya, UN Human Rights Evnoy, wrote that a number of Government partnerships with local initiatives appeared to be succeeding, but there were many accounts of Government programmes failing to take into account existing local programmes already in place, hampering their ultimate success. Any initiatives that duplicate or replace the programmes of Aboriginals and Torres Straight Islanders already in place, or that undermine local decision-making through indigenous peoples’ own institutions violate human rights norms. The United Nations Declaration guarantees the right of indigenous peoples to participate fully at all levels of decision-making in matters which may affect their rights, lives and destinies, as well as to maintain and develop their own decision-making institutions and programmes. Further, adequate options and alternatives for socio-economic development and violence prevention programmes should be developed in full consultation with affected indigenous communities and organisations. These policies fundamentally breach the human rights of Aboriginal people.

Any hopes of using internal legal avenues to address the excesses of government intervention were crushed in February 2009 in the High Court of Australia, when the court refused to award ‘just terms’ compensation to traditional owners from Maningrida, NT. The Federal Government had compulsorily acquired their land rights and converted them into a five year lease. Indigenous owners held a noisy protest outside the court that day and people expressed their frustration and anger at the decision. The High Court has an uneven history of sympathy to Indigenous issues. In Kruger v The Commonwealth [1997] HCA 27, in which the plaintiffs sought compensation from the government for being removed from their family as a young child, the High Court held that there was no right to freedom from genocide in Australia. The Mabo and Wik cases seem to have been extraordinary exceptions, the decisions of a historically unique bench.

With the appointment of a new Prime Minister, it would be nice to think that things will change but I won’t be holding my breath. If neoliberalism can escape a global economic meltdown essentially unscathed, well it’s hard to see what will change in the near future. Aboriginal people will keep fighting, except for the few notable exceptions, and some members of the non-Aboriginal community will be there to support them. All we can hope for is the emergence of a new paradigm to galvanise the masses and help them to see that slavery to the market is not the only truth of life.

As the experts proclaim the end of the economic crisis, stories like Leanne’s are becoming more common. The House Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth’s Inquiry into Homelessness Legislation reported in November last year that a 17% increase in family homelessness and a 10% increase in adult homelessness between the 2001 and 2006 censuses reflect issues of declines in affordable housing and the private rental market. With 22.5 per cent of Australian households in housing stress (spending more than 30 per cent of their household income on housing and household debt) in 2005-06, and household debt increasing from $795 billion in June 2006 (RBA) to around $1.1 trillion in September 2008 (ABS), it seems that a growing number of people may fall into homelessness.

As the RBA threatens to raise interest rates and Australians continue to struggle with their debt obligations, housing affordability has collapsed. To address the issue of affordability, the Rudd government has introduced the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS) purportedly to increase the supply of affordable housing. At the same time, it props up soaring housing prices with grants and tax breaks. The Rudd government and RBA are playing a strange game of push me, pull you with housing.

Under the NRAS, the Commonwealth Government has pledged funds to support 3000 dwellings in Victoria. Participants include private land developers, real estate agents, non-profit organisations and local government, who will receive these payments in return for supplying dwellings to be rented at least 20 per cent below the market rate to eligible low and moderate income households. To qualify for the NRAS you simply need to be receiving income support payments or Family Tax Benefit Part A, regardless of your housing affordability situation. Unfortunately according to the Victorian government Office of Housing these funds would need to be provided for 10 consecutive years to clear the public housing waiting list.

We have a housing system where either rents need to be high or prices need to be increasing for stakeholders (that is developers, REAs and investors) to be satisfied. The Rudd government’s feted stimulus package with its raft of housing grants for first home buyers and tax concessions has kept housing prices high, according to Professor Julian Disney. If the purpose of the NRAS is to make housing more affordable, this will undermine the housing market which is based on attracting investors and developers into the market to make a short term profit. These stakeholders have an interest in ensuring housing prices remain as high as possible. The paradox is to attract private investment to build more houses to maintain supply, we need high house prices and high rents. This pushes everyone on a normal income out of the market, creates more homelessness and housing stress.

Criticisms of the NRAS further illustrate the problems with the government’s approach. ACOSS has grave concerns that the proposed system of valuations raises the potential for manipulation or inconsistency. There is a high likelihood that real estate agents and speculators will increase their rents to accommodate the subsidies thus undermining the purpose of the scheme. Further, the NRAS subsidy increases annually in line with the rent component of the CPI. Given the expectation of continued rent increases, predicted in January this year as between 5 and 7% by Australian Property Monitors, the level of assistance to developers provided by government increases continuously.

Another problem with the NRAS is that it will probably not assist as many people out of housing stress as is being claimed. Dr Rachel Ong and Professor Gavin Wood from AHURI have analysed the potential impact of the NRAS. They found that only 40 per cent of eligible households would be brought below the 30 per cent benchmark of housing stress by the Scheme.

This figure worsens when applied to the poorest 20 per cent of households, where rates of housing stress are extremely high at 54 per cent of household income. The NRAS fails to bring the levels of housing stress below the 30 per cent affordability threshold. The NRAS is not effective in reducing rates of housing stress because the housing costs of the poorest households are well above the threshold. AHURI has recommended that targeting the NRAS to lower income households, rather than a random allocation to rent assistance eligible households, would improve the Scheme’s capacity to alleviate the housing stress. However, as the housing market fails more people, increasing numbers are forced to seek access to the scheme which ends up blown out waiting lists, as we have seen with public housing.

The NRAS could reduce in the amount of rent assistance which the govenrment needs to pay out. AHURI’s modeling estimates that rent assistance payments could be reduced by $21 million or 5 per cent. This raises the concern that some tenants may be worse off under the Scheme, if they become ineligible for rent assistance or receive reduced payments.

A housing system where the market fixes the supply and value of housing and the government attempts to regulate this through indirect macroeconomic measures has resulted in housing which fewer and fewer people can afford to buy and rents which leave a large number of the population in housing stress and in danger of homelessness. People treat the housing market as a strange unpredictable beast and struggle to understand and calculate its next move. The government’s NRAS will do little to influence this monstrosity.

The case had been heavily criticised as an aggressive form of “SLAPP” writ. SLAPP writs, or strategic litigation against public participation, are civil complaints or counterclaims which are made with the intention of intimidating and silencing individuals or organisations who voice issues of public interest or concern.

From EDO Vic Bulletin

The election of Tony Abbot to the leadership of the Liberal Party signals a resurgence of the neocons. The self-flagellation, blame-apportioning and purging have finished, the neocons have regrouped and outflanked the liberals in the party. This is a dangerous time for Australian politics as the agenda which dragged us into the quagmire of the War on Terror and the disaster of Iraq has returned in the form of Tony Abbott. So why are the neocons dangerous? In combination with neoliberal globalisation, it has created a hollowing out of democracy, a swelling of Executive authority and a penchant for ethnic violence.

Neoliberal political rationality represents a business approach to governing. The Emission Trading approach to climate change is one example of this approach, as are privatized child care and skeletal emergency services which cannot cope with emergencies, like the Victorian bushfires in February. The saturation of the state, political culture, and the social with market rationality effectively strips commitments to democracy from governance concerns and political culture.

Abbott’s approach to climate change also prioritises business over reducing carbon emissions. He articulates it as prioritizing ‘the economy’ but all that really means is that we don’t do anything to annoy big business or big agriculture. The position of the National Farmers Federation is that the battle against climate change is lost. We need ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaptation’ strategies.

Neoconservatism is characterised by moralized state power and animated by angst about the crumbling status of morality within the West. It identifies the state, including law, with the task of setting the moral-religious compass for society. Through the political mobilization of religious discourse, neoconservative governance models state authority on church authority, a pastoral relation of the state to its flock requiring submission to truth and to the authority that speaks or wields it. This attribution of moral authority to the state is at odds with liberalism.

There isn’t really a religious-moral aspect to climate change. Not in the way that neocons think about morality: as a good vs evil dichotomy. There is no enemy or humanity as a whole is the enemy. Fundamentalist thinking requires the destruction or punishment of the enemy as in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for the War on Terror. This type of fundamentalism has led the neocons into the position of climate change denial and brought the world to the brink of climate disaster.

The uncertainty created by climate change creates a feeling of insecurity, adding to the trepidation already faced by people confronted by global economic uncertainty, terrorism, continuous war, and global movements of refugees. Existing networks of social knowledge are eroded by rumour, terror and an everchanging technological environment. One response to social uncertainty is violence which can create a macabre form of security and a means for ensuring suspicion between ‘us’ from ‘them’. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan came as a response to the uncertainty created by the September 11 attacks but also in response to the erosion of social knowledge which has occurred under neoliberal globalisation. The erosion of liberal democratic principles which had formed the social bonds in Western democracies until hollowed out by principles of neoliberalism. Neoconservatism attempts to recreate such social bonds by calling on forms of identity politics at odds with liberal democracy.

Identity politics does not just play out as the demonization of other ethnic identities; it also plays out as rural versus urban identities, ‘climate change denier’ becomes associated with the bush ethic. Neocons in Australia are particularly skilled at mobilizing the bush identity as part of identity politics. Just as ‘stolen generation denier’ and ‘native title denier’ also form a consistent part of the neoconservative philosophy. It plays into an already existing social identity which has existed politically since Australia was colonised. Climate change denier becomes a righteous identity, the expression of a moral (not just a political) position.

This position was illustrated well by the debate between Ian Plimer and George Monbiot on Late Line. Both sides maintained condescending moral positions, both sides accusing the other of fraud, misrepresenting data, lying, etc. These are moral positions, not a rational debate on the merits of climate change science. The climate change debate remains frozen in competing moral positions framed by identity politics and undermined by political maneuvering. Meanwhile the ice caps continue to melt, Greenland sink holes expand…

Neoconservatives draw on identity politics through emphasis on particular moral codes and modes of behaviour. Neoconservatism polices cultural and national borders, the sacred, and the singular through discourses of patriotism, religiosity, and the West. It is clear that neoconservatives oppose the creation of global solutions to climate change and mobilise identity politics to undermine the creation of international agreements. However what is also clear is that, without such agreements, we cannot deal with this problem. If we sit behind our national borders, playing realist politics, reality will soon catch up with us.

It seems the most up-to-date news is to be found on Twitter, a social networking site. When the standard news services must compete with this sort of immediacy (news presented in 140-characters or less), one begins to worry about the quality of journalism and the future of the media. Journalism is generally perceived to have been deteriorating since the advent of television. (Jurgen Habermas put it somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century.) Movies such as Broadcast News, Wag the Dog and the wonderfully satirical ABC show, Frontline, have explored the commercialization of the media and its attack on the ideal of journalism devoted to accuracy.

The impact of the internet has been blamed for deteriorating social relations, isolation, superficiality and suicide. With no quality control on the information, of course, there remains a great deal of misinformation (intentional or otherwise), a great deal of celebrity and sports commentary and hoaxes which can always find someone who hasn’t seen it before. One movement which seems to be bucking the trend is the Free Software Movement. Its conscious culture of collaboration has led to a number of permutations such as Indymedia and the, now ubiquitous, social networking sites which build on this model of participation.

Indymedia formed in 1999 in response to the ‘Battle for Seattle’, the protests against the World Trade Organisation negotiations. The software was developed in Australia. It was the first internet site which allowed users to post their own content. Its slogan was ‘Don’t hate the media, be the media.’ Later came You Tube (the seeming Internet equivalent of Funniest Home Videos) but which is used by people to share a great deal of content which is important to various social identities thus encouraging diversity. This tool is extremely creative for those who wish to post there own video work, and is even used for mini documentaries.

The use of these sites to post copyrighted content represents a serious challenge to corporate control of information. The idea of a contributing community which freely distributes what they create confronts business control of copyright law.

In recent years, major U.S. and EU copyright industry rightsholder groups, such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, have sought stronger powers to enforce intellectual property rights across the world by negotiating an agreement, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). In 2006, Japan and the United States launched the idea of a new plurilateral treaty to help in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy. The aim of the initiative was to negotiate an agreement that enhances international co-operation and contains effective international standards for enforcing intellectual property rights.

These efforts have been underway in a number of international fora, including the World Trade Organization, the World Customs Organization, at the G8 summit, at the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Advisory Committee on Enforcement, and at the Intellectual Property Experts’ Group at the Asia Pacific Economic Coalition. The World Copyright Summit in July furthered these negotiations.

The agreement potentially represents attempts to restrict the sharing of information, including music, movies and software. Among the suggested measures is enforcement of such laws without waiting for complaints from rights holders; the seizure and destruction of ‘goods and equipment’ involved in infringement, both internally and at a country’s borders; searches at the request of a single party, and the disclosure of supposed infringers to rights holders.

Groups such as the Australian Digital Alliance are concerned that many of these measures represent an erosion of basic civil liberties, such as the right to a fair hearing. The US-based Free Software Foundation is critical that ACTA-inspired laws may be enforced by people with limited knowledge. Using free software and free formats or even a non-standard piece of hardware, such as a non-iPod music player could conceivably cause trouble for you, especially when going through a signatory country’s customs.

After the conviction of the Pirate Bay creators in Sweden, Nick McDonald from law firm Brown Jacobson, warns that sites like Google, eBay and other sites containing user- generated content may also be criminally liable. Pirate Bay is a well-known Swedish file sharing site, which uses BitTorrent technology to allow its users to share and download content. On 31 January 2008, charges were filed by Swedish prosecutors against four individuals, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundstrom, for ‘promoting other people’s infringements of copyright laws’. On 17 April 2009 the four men were convicted and each sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay a total of 30 million SEK (3.6 million USD). This draconian enforcement seems completely out of proportion to the activity being conducted and seems to smack of corporate influence.

Given that the vast majority of artists and writers receive such pitiful remuneration for their work, the arguments of megacorporations that free downloading is stealing from the artists themselves seem rather hollow. The only ones making money out of music and other artistic content are large corporations at the expense of the creators of content. The Free Software Movement represents the attempt to break corporate control of computer software and some branches defend the free exchange of content in defiance of copyright law. This movement potentially represents a resistance to the superficiality and immediacy which the internet can create. If Twitter is the future of news reporting, then the Free Software Movement represents a counter direction.

The suing of KFC by an Australian family in New South Wales for causing serious injury to their 7 year old daughter opens the whole bucket of chicken for industrial agriculture once again. This is not a localized issue of whether something nasty got into the food because of poor hygiene standards of the local store but goes to the issue of how food is manufactured in our world today.

In October 2005, Monika Samaan, now 11, collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital after eating part of a Twister from Villawood KFC. Her salmonella poisoning developed into acquired spastic quadriplegia, acquired profound intellectual disability and liver dysfunction. She is now confined to a wheel chair.

We all know that eating junk food is bad for us but the fast food chains seem to like to add an extra bullet in the game of dining roulette. In 2003, the Food Safety Information Council estimated that a whopping 5 million Australians are affected by food-poisoning every year and a 2005 report found that approximately 120 people die from food-borne illnesses in Australia every year.

KFC only stopped using partially-hydrogenated oils, one of the worst sources of trans fats which massively increases the risk of heart disease, to fry their chicken when the Centre for Science in the Public Interest took them to court in 2006. Health authorities worldwide recommend that consumption of trans fats be reduced to trace amounts. Baskin and Robbins makes a large Fudge Brownie (‘vanilla soft serve blended with brownie chunks and hot fudge’) which packs two days’ worth of saturated fat (39 grams) and almost a day’s worth of recommended calorie intake (1,900 calories) into a snack.

If that doesn’t put you off, listen to this. In the United States in 1994, health investigators found that contamination of icecream pre-mix occurred because it was transported in tanker trailers that had previously been used to haul liquid eggs contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis. The contamination was not detected until the icecream had been distributed across the nation. Researchers estimated that 224,000 people in many different states contracted gastroenteritis as a result of eating the contaminated icecream. The practice of mass-distribution and transporting food long distances contains extensive risks as well.

The principles of the fast-food restaurants are coming to dominate more and more sectors of society and everyday life. Producing things in similar, standardized ways embodies four principal processes: ‘efficiency’, ‘calculability’ based on quantitative indicators, such as profit, ‘predictability’ as standard products are delivered in predictable ways, and ‘control’ through technology.

These principles seem to be applied so that even routines to ensure food safety and hygiene operate at their most economical and efficient rather than their most effective. KFC’s own internal hygiene review found the Villawood outlet, the subject of the legal action, regularly failed to comply with standards around food cooking, storage temperature and shelf life. In March, the NSW Food Authority dished out a $73,000 fine to two KFC restaurants in Sydney for poor hygiene and QSR Pty Ltd, which operates the outlets, was convicted of 11 charges of breaching food hygiene laws.

Such principles become especially problematic when applied to large-scale agricultural production from which KFC and other fast food chains source their never-ending demand for chicken and beef. The connection between flu viruses, now a source of global epidemics, and the practices of agribusiness have been strengthened by the findings of a report by Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (2009) produced in association with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

‘Industrial farm animal production is characterized by confining large numbers of animals of the same species in relatively small areas, generally in enclosed facilities that restrict movement. In many cases, the waste produced by the animals is eliminated through liquid systems and stored in open pit lagoons.’ This image of farms surrounded by lakes of excrement is almost enough to put you off your 2-Piece Feed.

One of the report’s damning findings is that the ‘intensive confinement production system’ or factory farming increases antibiotic resistance because of their misuse in the industry. OK we all want clean, healthy animals killed for our gastronomic pleasure. But antibiotics are administered in huge quantities, not just for disease prevention, but also for growth promotion. Tender, juicy breasts of chicken so big that the poor chicken cannot stand up and lies face down in its own excrement.

Reports show that between 17.8 to 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics per year are pumped into these animals. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 70% of the antibiotics dispensed in the United States annually are used in farm animals. The practice of adding low levels of antibiotics and growth hormones has become common practice among battery farm operations.

Disease experts are investigating the links between this widespread use of antibiotics in animals and the role of antimicrobial resistance in epidemics. Benign or beneficial bacteria, which normally live in the human digestive tract or on human skin, such as Golden Staph, may pass antimicrobial resistance to harmful bacteria. Golden Staph is an enduring problem in many large Australian hospitals, attacking intravenous lines, catheters and wounds after operations.

The Pew report states ‘While it is difficult to measure what percent of resistant infections in humans are caused by antimicrobial use in agriculture as opposed to other settings, it can be assumed that the wider the use of antimicrobials, the greater the chance for the development of resistance.’

The essentially unregulated use of antibiotics in US industrial farming has serious implications for the incubation of epidemics. Public health experts are studying the correlation between conditions in industrial food animal production and the spread of the influenza virus. Dr. Ann Marie Kimball, at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health says influenza surveillance may be missing the key bridging populations, such as farmers, veterinarians and meat packers. Just as avian influenza (H5N1) and SARS had connections to human contact with animals, reports point to a swine flu epicenter around a huge hog farm in Veracruz.

Industrial food animal production and fast food consumption are intimately linked. These production centres are no longer farms. We must relinquish our bucolic dreams of cows peacefully chewing in lush fields and chickens clucking contently in the farm yard. They have now been replaced by the clamour and bustle of something more like the cross between a science lab and a factory but with more shit, blood and pain. Surprisingly, these images are produced by dispassionate scientists not by animal activists in the street. Monika Samaan is a symbol for everybody on the planet. We are all at risk from this dehumanised factory system.

PREDICTIONS of economic tsunamis always accompany downturns in Asia. Yet these economies remained resilient through the major economic meltdown of 1997 (with the possible exception of Indonesia) and subsequent reductions in growth. Does the Asian economic model have something to teach the West?

As Mark Twain so eloquently wrote, ‘The land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, the country of hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of traditions…’

It is hard to reconcile this world with that of the neverending dispute with Pakistan, intercommunal violence, nuclear posturing, and cacophonous call centres. When I pick up the phone and an Indian accent responds at the end of the line, I want to ask them what is your life like, what did you have for lunch, what can you see out of your window? The world of call centres suddenly seems so much more romantic. The efforts of Indian students in particular seem heroic to me. They have a reputation for studying hard, for practicality, they dominate the business and economics courses. You see them late at night in the library and at Coles stocking shelves. This is the new generation of Indians, successfully taking their place in the world and tilting at the mighty US.

However, in Australia, the spectre of past racist policies will continue to haunt us, if we fail to respond to these attacks. The support of racism in this country is now reaping its rewards in the bashing of people who represent a lucrative industry to this country, that is overseas students.

A growing number of overseas students are studying in Australia. Australian Education International (AEI) data show that in the year to October 2007, enrolments of full-fee paying overseas students in Australia increased by 19% to 437,065. Today the education industry generates substantial income for the Australian economy. ABS data show that in 2006-07 education-related spending by overseas students was valued at more than $11 billion. While students from China made up the largest proportion of overseas students in 2006, accounting for 22%, the second largest proportion was from India (11%).The number of enrolments of students from India more than tripled from 11,370 in 2002 to 39,166 in 2006, and has continued to grow.

Australians have a racist history. People of all ethnic groups were treated badly but Australia presented an opportunity to them, a new start. As Farouk says in ‘The Castle’: ‘He say plane fly overhead, drop value. I don’t care. In Beirut, plane fly over, drop bomb. I like these planes.’ Australia has, while not always embraced, at least tolerated refugees from Europe, Vietnam and Africa. We learned to live with their strange food and customs. When we hear the stories of those in their forties and fifties, of being vilified at school for their food and language, we can hardly credit it. But this era was followed by a time where we attempted to put our racist roots to bed, to smooth the dying pillow of racism: reconciliation, Mabo, the Native Title Act; it seems like a golden age, a far flung time of prosperity and generosity. Where different was not a dirty word.

But after twenty years of rampant globalisation, security issues and terrorism have made us all more afraid, more suspicious of the guy wearing the turban on the train, of the woman in the Hijab. The threat they present in our minds was heightened as a deliberate government policy for seven years. Our fear of the different increases, as the world shrinks. But now it is time to learn to live together again. We need a new government ad campaign to make us proud of the quality of our education system which attracts students from the region and all around the world.

This is a cynical call to practicality. As the world continues to descend into economic turmoil, Australia cannot afford to cut off any sources of revenue. Let’s welcome these students, embrace them. They are members of a growing global middle class. These students are the future managers and entrepreneurs, alienating them now will only present difficulties for our trade and business relations later. Let’s not forget that India is one of the economic powerhouses of the future. The US is in decline, economically, they should be declared a disaster area. We need to turn our trading eyes to other places.

The time has come for Rudd to shuck off that grey flannel suit, and show us some flair. The man who wooed the Chinese with his knowledge of Mandarin needs to find a way into the Indian psyche. If Rudd wants to be seen as the great internationalist and Australia as at least a safe, if not actually welcoming, destination for overseas students, then we need to improve our image. Just as Nataraj’s demon eventually destroys himself, so we will be destroyed (and repeatedly injure our international reputation) if we fail to exorcise the demons of racism in this country.

Mary Kostakidis, one of the panel heading the consultation, said that the passage of a Human Rights Act represented the hallmark of a civilized society.

Various right wing and Christian groups advocated the rights of the unborn child and the right to express unpalatable religious views. One speaker referred indirectly to the controversy of anti-Islamic views expressed by Catch the Fire Ministries in 2004, as an infringement on freedom of expression and religion. Another speaker alluded to the recent debate surrounding the Victorian abortion legislation and the rights of doctors to refuse treatment. Certain groups see the requirement for doctors to refer patients to other help where they are unwilling to advise on abortion as an infringement on freedom of religious belief.

The variety and plethora of issues, causes and interest groups represented at the morning session of the Federal Government’s Human Rights Consultation in Melbourne represents democracy at its best. Numerous views of the pros and cons for a Human Rights Act in Australia were aired.

Our table heard a heart-wrenching story from a grandmother who has a grandson with a severe brain injury, unable to move or communicate, whose entire needs must be provided by another. Her concern for his welfare has fallen on deaf ears as she desperately seeks assistance in the bewildering world of human services bureaucracy and legal confusion. The concern that governments remain unaccountable was expressed over and over, as others articulated unease that a Human Rights Act would take decision-making out of the hands of Parliament into the hands of the judiciary.

As other countries, like Thailand, descend into turmoil because the people lack a voice to call their politicians to account, I felt proud of our country’s political system for the first time in many years. All listened with interest and tolerance to the views of others. Any disagreements were aired as differences of opinion, in a way that many politicians in Parliament could learn from.

While I felt ambivalent about the opulence of the Grand Ballroom at the Windsor Hotel as a venue, it seemed that the figures in the stained glass windows peered at us with curiosity and benevolence. The atmosphere of this grand room imbued the proceedings with an air of dignity which heightened the atmosphere of tolerance and rational debate.

The views expressed portrayed a Human Rights Act as the answer to many ills in our society, which of course it cannot be. We can only hope that the positions voiced will not simply disappear into some bureaucratic black hole but will inform the decision making process in this milestone in Australia’s history.

Under the WorkChoices legislation, some businesses have been a little too eager to abandon corporate responsibility and impinge on labour rights, working conditions and fair pay. Internationally, companies have invested massive resources and money into countries like Indonesia and Burma, turning a blind eye to gross human rights violations, including the use of child labour.

A growing body of evidence details human rights violations due to corporate activities in poor communities in developing countries. A study undertaken by the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) in June 2008, found that in 159 cases from 66 countries, business enterprises have had significant negative impacts upon the enjoyment of all types of human rights, in different political systems, around the world and across industries. Professor John Ruggie, UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights in 2006 found that the oil, gas and mining extraction sector were responsible for two-thirds of reported abuses. The damage caused to company image in the past has been severe and lingers on even when the company cleans up its act.

Rachel Nicholson from Allens Arthur Robinson law firm, at the Everyday People, Everyday Rights Human Rights Conference on March 17, argued that a national human rights charter may make it possible to pursue human rights violations committed offshore by subsidiaries and related entities of companies incorporated in Australia.

In its Submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Fair Work Bill 2008, the Australian Human Rights Commission raised concerns that the Bill fails to fully implement Australia’s international human rights obligations. The continuing exemption of small businesses from unfair dismissal procedures violates the rights of more than a third of the workforce (36%) to procedural fairness and a fair hearing. It recommended that employees of all small businesses be entitled to the same protections from unfair dismissal as all other employees. The WorkChoices legislation seriously eroded the labour rights of Australian workers and the current government is continuing these appalling practices.

However in a seeming contradictory move last year the government launched a consultation process on how best to promote and protect human rights. Sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Australia is the only modern democracy without a national charter of human rights. Rachel Nicholson argues that under the Victoria Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, in certain circumstances, businesses already have a responsibility to protect human rights.

Under the Charter, where a company wins a government tender or otherwise receives government funding, it may be acting as a ‘public authority’. It is unlawful for a public authority to act in a way that is inconsistent with human rights set out in the Act and it has an obligation to give proper consideration of the impact of any decision on the rights protected.

Councils, Government Ministers and public officials have an obligation to act consistently with and give proper consideration to human rights in relation to all acts, omissions and decisions of a public nature, including the granting of contracts, project approvals and licences and the reviewing of impact assessments. Thus businesses applying for contracts, projects and licences are likely to be required to take human rights into account in the development of their project and be able to demonstrate that they have done so.

Telstra has expressed a general interest in having better protection of human rights in Australia. In its submission to the federal government last year it called for a national charter of rights, similar to the charters introduced in Victoria and the ACT, based on the statutory model adopted in Britain in 1998. However Telstra’s manouvering around negotiating a new enterprise agreement since June last year does not suggest a great respect for employees’ rights to freedom of association.

Ben Schokman of the Human Rights Law Resource Centre asserts that there is a sound economic case for a human rights charter. ‘When you look at human rights violations, whenever you’ve got the violation of a human right, that’s essentially a real cut to any human potential, it’s a cut to the economic potential of their society.’

With the passage of the Fair Work Bill, the arrangements for unfair dismissal procedures still fail to apply to significant numbers of the Australian workforce. If a human rights charter is passed, it leaves corporations in doubt as to their legal position. In spite of any legal uncertainty, it seems the movement to protect human rights is gaining momentum and business needs to be in position to meet the challenge.