Indian students boycotted Sunday's 'Walk for Harmony' in central Melbourne after the Victorian Labor government of Premier John Brumby refused to allow them to address the rally.
This outrageous act of censorship laid bare the real agenda of what had been billed as an official show of support for diversity and equality: to help secure the lucrative inflow of international students’ tuition fees by organising a public relations exercise advertising Victoria as a safe and attractive place to study.
Indian students held protests in Melbourne and Sydney in late May and early June following a series of racist and violent attacks. Amid ongoing coverage of the issue in the Indian media, the federal and state Labor governments became increasingly concerned over the potential impact on the $15 billion education market.
Brumby responded by announcing the Walk for Harmony. The event was timed to coincide with a tour of several Indian cities by a high-level delegation—including federal and state government officials, university representatives, and police—aimed at countering negative reports about the situation confronting international students in Australia.
The exclusion of representatives of the Indian students from the Walk for Harmony platform reflected the fact that every aspect of the stage-managed affair was designed to prevent discussion of the issues raised by the racist assaults. Such a discussion would immediately pose the question as to how the Labor Party could posture as a champion of equality, inclusion, and fairness, while at the same presiding over the most ruthless exploitation of international students.
Facing systematic and institutionalised discrimination, students from overseas pay exorbitant tuition fees—several times higher than those paid by most Australian students—are unable to access Medicare and other social welfare programs, and are even refused permission to access public transport at student concession rates.
The Brumby government’s cynical calculations suffered a serious blow when the media reported early Sunday that the Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA) was staging a boycott.
FISA spokesman Gautam Gupta told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “We think the government is now basically using it as a political media stunt,” he declared. “Nothing more than that. Unfortunately they are trying to dilute the main issue, and we don’t want to be part of any dilution. We want the debate to be basically focused on the victims, the unsafe streets, and the rising crime rate and the failure of the justice system.”
The government’s absurd pretext for silencing the Indian students was that “harmony walk” speakers were to be restricted to “umbrella groups that aren’t ethnic or religion-based”.
Brumby declared that a selected member of the Federation of International Students would be allowed to participate—but in the end even this was restricted to allowing a young woman to speak before the walk, when most people were still assembling and unaware that they were being addressed. The official platform erected in central Melbourne’s Federation Square was restricted to Labor and Liberal politicians and the police.
A small number of leading FISA members attended the rally, but stressed that they did not do so as participants. Gautam Gupta said: “I attended as an observer, and I covered my mouth in protest at not being able to speak. FISA had four or five people there—we were hoping till the end that we would be invited to speak. The march was a political stunt.”
Later, at the end of the “harmony walk, FISA president Amit Menghani explained, “Instead of addressing the facts, instead of having debates, instead of coming up with solutions to these particular problems, what the government has tried to do is divert the whole situation. They have tried to eliminate the debates that were going on in terms of students’ safety concerns.
“We support multiculturalism but we will not support any politician’s PR exercise towards this particular rally.... They have clearly said they are not letting any of the student bodies speak. They are eliminating the student factor in this thing. Now if you look at the rally how many students are here?
“Nobody is here to listen to us. They don’t want to discuss anything on the real issues. They are just diverting themselves, contradicting themselves after each new statement. At the end of the day, we all know that the education system is one of the biggest sources of revenue for Australia after iron and coal—it’s the third biggest industry.
“Now they’re just having some task force ready, holding some committee meetings—it’s basically going round the table, passing the ball from one person to another, until at some point they say, ‘OK, let’s have a harmony walk’. So what’s the point of it? There was no use in having this sort of harmony walk.”
As Menghani indicated, very few university students attended the event. About 5,000 to 10,000 people participated, many as part of officially invited national, ethnic, and religious groups. Among the largest delegations were the Chinese religious sect Falun Gong, exiled Vietnamese flying old South Vietnam flags, and members of the Ethiopian Oromo group.
The entire event had a contrived and artificial atmosphere. Large numbers of Walk for Harmony marshals distributed official balloons, T-shirts, stickers, and small Australian flags. No handmade banners or placards were visible. No doubt in response to the Indian students’ boycott, there was a definite attempt to shift the emphasis of the event away from the issues surrounding the international students and towards a more general support for “multiculturalism”.
Labor Party state parliamentarians and their staffers, together with local mayors and councillors, made themselves prominent. Also attending were many uniformed police officers with their partners and children.
Melbourne Police Assault Indian Students (Video)
This attempt to present cops as being “part of the community” was all the more grotesque given the actions of dozens of police on June 1, when they viciously broke up a sit-down protest staged by Indian students and their supporters at a busy intersection outside Flinders Street train station, just metres from where the official Walk for Harmony speeches were made. Unsurprisingly, the event’s organisers made no mention of the police assault.
Police Commissioner Simon Overland addressed the crowd. He appeared alongside two young immigrant children who had been dressed up in police uniform as part of the shameless photo opportunity.
Without directly raising the assaults on Indian students and the widespread reporting of police indifference to these crimes, Overland mentioned “recent challenges”, and declared that the police “understand our responsibility to deal with those issues and we take those responsibilities seriously”.
The other speakers were Melbourne Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, state opposition leader Ted Baillieu, and Premier Brumby.
Brumby declared the walk “a great event for our state” that sent “a very loud, clear message out to the rest of Australia, and around the rest of the world” about Victoria’s support for diversity. The premier made no direct reference to the Indian students, but declared that “we condemn racism in whatever form that it takes” and said that, “in relation to our international students”, the government would create a new “one-stop shop” to assist with “counselling, accommodation, and welfare support”.
This measure will do nothing to address the real problems confronting international students and, like the harmony walk itself, is only intended to bolster the state’s international image.
Showing posts with label Attacks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Attacks. Show all posts
Monday, July 13, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Attacks On Students Reveal Deeper Malaise
The recent assaults on Indian students are an expression of the deepening social crisis in Australia
Indian students have long complained of police not taking their complaints of racist attacks seriously. Reports have emerged of officers refusing to formally lodge reports of criminal incidents; one student was told to simply move to another suburb to avoid further trouble.
Surprisingly, a few days ago deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe’s absurdly claimed that there was no evidence that recent assaults and robberies were racially motivated.
In reality, the political establishment has nothing but contempt for the well-being of ordinary students, whether they are from India, Australia, or anywhere else. The attacks have been going on for months, with nothing of substance being done or said until now.
The real concern is to ensure that the highly lucrative flow of education tuition payments into the country continues. International students are ruthlessly exploited, having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees while being denied basic rights afforded to Australian students, such as concession fares on public transport.
Education is now worth more than $12 billion annually and ranks as Australia’s third largest export, ahead of tourism and just behind coal and iron ore. Nearly 100,000 Indian youth are studying in Australia, second in number only to those from China.
That's why Trade Minister Simon Crean has held discussions with his Indian counterpart Anand Sharma admitting his fear that recent violence threatened to undermine Australia’s education sector. “It’s not just the quality of the product, it’s the safe environment in which we bring people,” he declared.
Reactionary forces in Australia are exploiting the attacks on Indian students to advance their own agenda. Victorian Liberal leader Ted Baillieu has launched a “law and order” campaign, demanding that the government bolster police numbers and enhance their powers.
Such measures, which the state Labour government of Premier John Brumby will likely implement, will not resolve the situation confronting Indian students and will only result in even worse police harassment and violence against working class youth.
Indian students are left vulnerable because of their precarious situation. Many are unable to live anywhere near their university, due to low incomes and high inner-city accommodation costs, and are forced to travel from the more affordable outer suburbs.
To support themselves, students are typically compelled to combine full time study with long hours of paid employment as convenience store workers, taxi drivers, and other low-paid shift work. This often involves taking public transport late at night.
Most of the perpetrators of the violence against the students are reportedly young people from Melbourne’s working class western suburbs. Many parts of this region have been devastated over the last two decades by mass job losses due to manufacturing plant closures. Tens of thousands of secure and full time jobs have gone, along with apprenticeships, replaced with little more than a few dwindling opportunities for young people in low paid and typically casual sectors such as retail.
Deindustrialisation and permanently high unemployment has inevitably been accompanied by a slew of social problems, including alcohol and drug abuse. Many of those who have recently targeted Indian students were reportedly drug users looking to fund their addiction.
Intersecting with all this is a toxic political atmosphere in which the major parties have all promoted various forms of national chauvinism, invariably involving an undercurrent of White Australia racism. The Rudd Labour government, for example, has recently slashed the immigration intake in response to the economic crisis, thereby implying that lost jobs in Australia are the fault of too many “foreigners”.
At the same time, both politicians and the media have embarked on a new scare campaign over “illegal” refugees. It is no surprise, moreover, that international students have been targeted given that they have long been the victims of systematic and institutionalised discrimination in the tertiary education system. Moves are already underfoot to pre-empt any discussion of these issues.
In the final analysis the attacks on Indian students reveal the tense and violent state of social relations in contemporary capitalist Australia.
Indian students have long complained of police not taking their complaints of racist attacks seriously. Reports have emerged of officers refusing to formally lodge reports of criminal incidents; one student was told to simply move to another suburb to avoid further trouble.
Surprisingly, a few days ago deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe’s absurdly claimed that there was no evidence that recent assaults and robberies were racially motivated.
In reality, the political establishment has nothing but contempt for the well-being of ordinary students, whether they are from India, Australia, or anywhere else. The attacks have been going on for months, with nothing of substance being done or said until now.
The real concern is to ensure that the highly lucrative flow of education tuition payments into the country continues. International students are ruthlessly exploited, having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees while being denied basic rights afforded to Australian students, such as concession fares on public transport.
Education is now worth more than $12 billion annually and ranks as Australia’s third largest export, ahead of tourism and just behind coal and iron ore. Nearly 100,000 Indian youth are studying in Australia, second in number only to those from China.
That's why Trade Minister Simon Crean has held discussions with his Indian counterpart Anand Sharma admitting his fear that recent violence threatened to undermine Australia’s education sector. “It’s not just the quality of the product, it’s the safe environment in which we bring people,” he declared.
Reactionary forces in Australia are exploiting the attacks on Indian students to advance their own agenda. Victorian Liberal leader Ted Baillieu has launched a “law and order” campaign, demanding that the government bolster police numbers and enhance their powers.
Such measures, which the state Labour government of Premier John Brumby will likely implement, will not resolve the situation confronting Indian students and will only result in even worse police harassment and violence against working class youth.
Indian students are left vulnerable because of their precarious situation. Many are unable to live anywhere near their university, due to low incomes and high inner-city accommodation costs, and are forced to travel from the more affordable outer suburbs.
To support themselves, students are typically compelled to combine full time study with long hours of paid employment as convenience store workers, taxi drivers, and other low-paid shift work. This often involves taking public transport late at night.
Most of the perpetrators of the violence against the students are reportedly young people from Melbourne’s working class western suburbs. Many parts of this region have been devastated over the last two decades by mass job losses due to manufacturing plant closures. Tens of thousands of secure and full time jobs have gone, along with apprenticeships, replaced with little more than a few dwindling opportunities for young people in low paid and typically casual sectors such as retail.
Deindustrialisation and permanently high unemployment has inevitably been accompanied by a slew of social problems, including alcohol and drug abuse. Many of those who have recently targeted Indian students were reportedly drug users looking to fund their addiction.
Intersecting with all this is a toxic political atmosphere in which the major parties have all promoted various forms of national chauvinism, invariably involving an undercurrent of White Australia racism. The Rudd Labour government, for example, has recently slashed the immigration intake in response to the economic crisis, thereby implying that lost jobs in Australia are the fault of too many “foreigners”.
At the same time, both politicians and the media have embarked on a new scare campaign over “illegal” refugees. It is no surprise, moreover, that international students have been targeted given that they have long been the victims of systematic and institutionalised discrimination in the tertiary education system. Moves are already underfoot to pre-empt any discussion of these issues.
In the final analysis the attacks on Indian students reveal the tense and violent state of social relations in contemporary capitalist Australia.
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