Racial attacks are not the only thing international students have to contend with in Australia. They also work like slaves in horrifying conditions to earn in order to pay their tuition and save money to repay loans they have taken back home. For this they pay a very heavy price. In fact, it is coming to light that working for long hours hardly leaves them enough time to pursue their studies – the reason they are in Australia in the first place.
Now there is evidence of a scam targeting international students who are the victims of “the new slave traders” Down Under. An investigation by the Australian newspaper 'The Age' has revealed that students who are lured to Australia by glossy advertisements in newspapers and other media with tall claims of “world class” facilities and faculty and degrees/diplomas that are “internationally recognised” are nothing but a fig leaf to cover a new slave trade.
The Age reported yesterday (July 15) that thousands of overseas students are being made to work for nothing — or even pay to work — by businesses exploiting loopholes in immigration and education laws in what experts describe as a system of economic slavery.
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. In fact, education has become a cornerstone of India-Australia bilateral relationship, with more than 97,000 Indian students currently enrolled in educational institutions Down Under.
This vast pool of unpaid labour was created in 2005 when vocational students were required to do 900 hours work experience. There was no requirement that they be paid. Overseas students remain bound to the system as completion of such courses became a near-guaranteed pathway to permanent residency in Australia.
Since then the number of foreign students enrolled in the sector has leapt from 65,120 to 173,432 last year — about half of all overseas students.
The changes have created a $15 billion education industry, as comparable countries don't offer residency. But experts, teachers and students say many of the private college courses are little more than “visa mills”. Since 2001 the number of private colleges has risen from 664 to 4892.
Citing the findings from a study by academics from Monash and Melbourne universities – both Tier 1 institutions that attract thousands of students – Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported that almost 60 per cent of the international students in the state of Victoria could be receiving below minimum wage rates.
The study, based on interviews with 200 international students enrolled in nine universities across the state, found as many as 58.1 per cent students surveyed were paid below $15 an hour, with 33.9 per cent receiving less than $10 an hour. The study also confirmed what has been long known, that many of these full-fee paying international students are often pressured to take jobs not wanted by local workers.
Besides driving cabs, overseas students largely work in accommodation and food services, retail trade, health care and social assistance, administrative and support services.
One university-educated overseas student to spent $22,000 and two years doing a hairdressing course she would never use, just to secure her residency. She did her 900 hours' work experience in a salon closely linked to the college, where students are required to pay a $1000 non-refundable bond to use the equipment.
Other colleges charge their students thousands of dollars in “placement fees” only to then advertise their supply of free labour to local business. And a black market has sprung up in fraudulent letters of completion.
A 23-year-old Pakistani student Faisal Durrani's case has become a cause celebre among international students. After working in slave galley conditions, Durrani stood up for his rights and exposed the mistreatment of workers from the subcontinent even as Australia reaps rich dividends with full fee-paying international students.
Durrani, who is suing several companies for being treated as a “slave”, was paid only $1.26 an hour for more than 150 hours of work as a security guard at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne.
“To me it was an act of slavery, we have been treated like slaves,” he told the media. Durrani said he was paid $200 for the 158 hours of work at last year's Australian Open in a statement of claim lodged at the Melbourne Magistrates Court.
“First, we often see cases where a worker is not paid correctly. It’s not so common to see a worker barely paid at all. Second, our client is a vulnerable worker - a visitor to Australia trying to scrape together an income while he completes his studies,” Durrani’s solicitor, Andrew Weinmann of Maurice Blackburn, said.
Durrani says he was also threatened with violence for pursuing to recover his wages. He is now seeking about $4,000 in wages besides pursuing interest, costs and penalties that could run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Incidentally, Maurice Blackburn is a leading law firm, which is also acting on behalf of former Indian doctor Mohammed Haneef in the judicial inquiry into his 2007 failed “terrorism” case. Haneef's case was in fact only the trailer of the sordid saga of rampant racism in Australia, which otherwise claims to promote “multiculturalism”.
Another earlier investigation by The Age revealed that an Indian college head who also owns a 7-Eleven shop allegedly had Indian students working there for no pay. Details have also emerged of a black economy in fraudulent $5000 certificates available to international students from rogue Melbourne colleges. The state's education regulator, the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority, is investigating at least one college linked to the 7-Eleven.
“If you wanted to make a corrupt system, this is absolutely how you would do it,” Sydney immigration agent Karl Konrad said. He said the system began to go bad when the requirement for 900 hours' work was introduced.
“You've got the agents and the proprietors realising that there is a flood of free labour, but, of course, the demand for placements outstrips the supply, so even if they wanted to take all that free labour they can't use it all,” said Konrad, the former Victorian police officer famed for his whistle-blowing exposure of corruption among fellow officers. “It's all about supply and demand.”
He said a trade in fraudulent documents had evolved with employers and agents selling students verification they had completed their 900 hours. One agent said charged $15-20,000 for such paperwork. “They are slaves,” he said. “They work for free from 11 o'clock to 11 o'clock, no breaks, no nothing. They have to pay the owner for the paperwork. They want to stay here. They will do anything.”
He described the entire industry as a racket. “They work with no workers' compensation, no insurance. If they are injured at work, bad luck.” Konrad said the colleges and employers had a dangerous amount of power over their students, who face deportation if their enrolments are cancelled. Even the pretence of education has been abandoned at many colleges, say students and teachers.
One cooking trainer said if he did not keep passing students, migration agents would stop sending them to the college where he worked and his job would disappear. “As for this 900 hours' work experience, at least 60 per cent of my students were paying for it. It made a lot of Indian restaurant owners very rich,” he said. “Two years ago a student would shudder if you asked them if they were here for PR (permanent residency). Now it's blatant.”
Konrad said many students had taken out loans or mortgages back home to pay the exorbitant fees. “If you have taken a loan in Indian dollars of $20,000 to study here, that is going to take you nearly 20 years to pay off in India. “At least if they make it into Australia, they can pay that off within a reasonable time frame.”
So, as more and more skeletons tumble out of the Australian education system's cupboard, it has become absolutely clear that Down Under students are not human beings, just “consumers” and the degrees/diplomas they are offered in return for fat tuition fees are mere “products”.
After the racial attacks on international students in May and June stirred up a hornets' nest, Trade Minister Simon Crean declared: “It’s not just the quality of the product, it’s the safe environment in which we bring people” that was Australia's USP.
Just last week Colin Walters, a senior Australian government official who is currently leading a high-level delegation to India to reassure Indian people about safety in Australia in the wake of a series of attacks on Indian students, told the Times of India (TOI), "Australia is basically a safe country. We are doing our best to control the crimes. Indian people are extremely welcome into our country." Seeking to dispel the notion that Australia is unsafe for overseas students, Walters said the Kangaroo country is much safer than several other countries in the world
But truth be told, the Australian 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.
Roger And Out
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Racism In Australia: Indian Students Boycott 'Walk for Harmony'
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.
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.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Are Indians Racist?
Racist attacks on Indians in Australia continue. The press continues to raise a hue and cry. And Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been forced to denounce the attacks to safeguard the interests of the education sector that is Australia's second biggest export revenue earner after iron ore.
But now questions are being asked here if we Indians are racist as well. Speaking at a seminar in Singapore on June 25, Mizoram chief minister Pu Lalthanhawla startled delegates to conference on water by claiming he too was a victim of racism – in India!
“In India, people ask me if I am an Indian. When I go south, people ask me such questions. They ask me if I am from Nepal or elsewhere. They forget that the northeast is part of India. I have told many that see, I am an Indian like you. I am a victim of racism,” he said. Indians consist of three races - “Dravidians, Aryans and we in the northeast,” Lalthanhawla said, airing his angst.
Lalthanhawla has certainly touched a raw nerve. How good are we in treating our fellow citizens? In a recent article, an assistant professor at AIIMS Dr Shah Alam Khan wondered whether Indians practice equality at all.
He points out we take the wrong sides in our strife against dalits. Protests against the killing of harijans in Haryana and UP in the recent past don't go beyond a few gratuitous editorials. The Khairlanji massacre is only an “dalit atrocity”.
Indeed, very few upper caste Indian are willing to eat on the same table with an “untouchable”. (Working in AIIMS - the epicentre of the anti-reservation protests and where SC/ST students are forced to stay in separate wings and are discriminated against by the upper caste faculty members who fail them regularly – Shah Alam should know.)
In fact, inequalities are a common or rather a daily occurrence in our country. Abhorrence of people of different faith, low caste and different races is incredible and phenomenal and we even believe and differentiate on the basis of colour.
On the other hand, “fair and lovely” brides are much sought after in a land which was once dominated by the Dravidians, the real inhabitants of India whose DNA can be traced to black Africa.
Shah Alam laments we live through these atrocities as if they are a natural consequence of race and creed. “Unfortunately, our belief in inequalities of caste, creed and religion are so strong that we refuse to raise questions and protest. It is an abject submission to the power of inequality which is rampant in India.”
Contradictions in the Indian society are not new. We preach morality but rank highest amongst the most corrupt nations of the world. We preach Gandhism but stage pogroms to annihilate ethnic minorities (that too in the land of Gandhi!). We claim we have never attacked another country, but we were busy attacking our own churches, our own dalits, our own adivasis, our own peasants, our own men, women and children in the name of caste, religion and race.
These are very important questions. Maybe once things cool down in Australia, we can get down to providing answers to ourselves.
But now questions are being asked here if we Indians are racist as well. Speaking at a seminar in Singapore on June 25, Mizoram chief minister Pu Lalthanhawla startled delegates to conference on water by claiming he too was a victim of racism – in India!
“In India, people ask me if I am an Indian. When I go south, people ask me such questions. They ask me if I am from Nepal or elsewhere. They forget that the northeast is part of India. I have told many that see, I am an Indian like you. I am a victim of racism,” he said. Indians consist of three races - “Dravidians, Aryans and we in the northeast,” Lalthanhawla said, airing his angst.
Lalthanhawla has certainly touched a raw nerve. How good are we in treating our fellow citizens? In a recent article, an assistant professor at AIIMS Dr Shah Alam Khan wondered whether Indians practice equality at all.
He points out we take the wrong sides in our strife against dalits. Protests against the killing of harijans in Haryana and UP in the recent past don't go beyond a few gratuitous editorials. The Khairlanji massacre is only an “dalit atrocity”.
Indeed, very few upper caste Indian are willing to eat on the same table with an “untouchable”. (Working in AIIMS - the epicentre of the anti-reservation protests and where SC/ST students are forced to stay in separate wings and are discriminated against by the upper caste faculty members who fail them regularly – Shah Alam should know.)
In fact, inequalities are a common or rather a daily occurrence in our country. Abhorrence of people of different faith, low caste and different races is incredible and phenomenal and we even believe and differentiate on the basis of colour.
On the other hand, “fair and lovely” brides are much sought after in a land which was once dominated by the Dravidians, the real inhabitants of India whose DNA can be traced to black Africa.
Shah Alam laments we live through these atrocities as if they are a natural consequence of race and creed. “Unfortunately, our belief in inequalities of caste, creed and religion are so strong that we refuse to raise questions and protest. It is an abject submission to the power of inequality which is rampant in India.”
Contradictions in the Indian society are not new. We preach morality but rank highest amongst the most corrupt nations of the world. We preach Gandhism but stage pogroms to annihilate ethnic minorities (that too in the land of Gandhi!). We claim we have never attacked another country, but we were busy attacking our own churches, our own dalits, our own adivasis, our own peasants, our own men, women and children in the name of caste, religion and race.
These are very important questions. Maybe once things cool down in Australia, we can get down to providing answers to ourselves.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Class Issues At Root Of Racism In Australia
Successive Australian state and federal governments are directly responsible for the attacks on international students studying in that country
Protests by Indian students in Australia over the past 12 days have brought to light an ugly under-current of violent and racist attacks that have produced outrage and deep concern among many ordinary people in both India and Australia.
Once again the suppressed tensions produced by social inequality and decades of free market policies have erupted in a malignant and reactionary form with “foreigners”—this time Indian students—subjected to racist abuse and violence.
The attacks have escalated in the past several weeks. In Sydney, an apartment was firebombed, cars have been set alight and in Melbourne, amid racial taunts, another youth was brutally stabbed with a screwdriver.
On May 31, Indian students responded with a 4,000-strong demonstration through the streets of Melbourne’s central business district, demanding action by police and by federal and state governments to protect their safety.
The Labour government’s initial response was one of damage-control. On June 1, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered assurances that “the more than 90,000 Indian students in Australia are welcome guests in our country”.
The only thing “welcome” is the billions of dollars in fees paid by Indian students annually, part of the $15 billion dollars wrung from international students each year that the Rudd government fears losing.
In reality, it is successive state and federal governments—both Labour and Liberal—that are, along with police, directly responsible for the attacks on international students studying in Australia.
According to Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA) spokesman Gautam Gupta, bashings and other crimes against Indian students have grown steadily over the past two years, yet complaints lodged to police have been systematically ignored, with students themselves blamed for being “soft targets”.
While police have allowed muggings and bashings to proceed with impunity, this month’s student protests have received no such leniency. Police repression has been immediate, with the mobilisation of riot police, dogs and mounted police.
After students and local residents assembled at railway stations in Melbourne last week, providing safe escort to young Indians arriving home by train, they were set upon by police. Such is the face of state “protection”.
It is noteworthy that Local Area Command Superintendent Robert Redfern, who led this week’s police operations in Harris Park, was also LAC chief in Cronulla during the notorious race riots that occurred there in December 2005.
Under Redfern’s command, police were held back while racist and alcohol-fuelled crowds brutalised West Asian youth. When the latter retaliated over ensuing days, police repression was swift. The state government passed draconian police powers through parliament and the media vilified “Lebanese gangs” for allegedly threatening “public order and safety”.
Calls have been made by demonstrators for greater police protection, but students must be warned: as in Cronulla, these demands are being seized on to justify further ruthless “law and order” policies, aimed against the entire working class.
The allies of the students are not the police and the state, but the students around the country and the world, and the international working class.
“Australia” declared Rudd on June 1, just hours after police violently assaulted Indian demonstrators in Melbourne’s central business district, “is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance”. On the contrary, like every other capitalist country, it is riven by enormous—and growing—class divisions.
In the suburbs surrounding Harris Park in western Sydney, and in the western suburbs of Melbourne, including St Albans, where bashings and racial victimisation are on the increase, social tensions are at breaking point, produced by more than three decades of economic restructuring.
Industries, banks and offices that once employed tens of thousands of workers, were closed down during the 1980s and 1990s, condemning entire families to a life of unemployment and poverty from which they have never recovered.
Now, in the face of the worst global depression since the 1930s, unemployment is again rising, with predictions it will hit one million by next year. Over the past 12 months the number of 15-19-year-olds without work has leapt from 10 to 18 percent nationally, with youth joblessness in some areas nudging 40 percent.
The Rudd government, like the Howard government before it, has responded to the deepening social crisis with the stock standard methods of Australian capitalism, seeking to shift public anger and resentment into the reactionary channels of national and race politics.
Over the past 10 years, immigrants, asylum seekers, “boat people”, Muslims and “Lebanese gangs” have all become scapegoats for the failure of the profit system to provide adequate livelihoods and services to millions of ordinary people.
This week, as protests by Indian students continued, Rudd declared on Melbourne radio: “In the last decade, I was advised we had, I think, up to 20 Australians who had either been murdered or had various forms of assault committed against them. That is not the result of Australians being targeted in India, that’s just a fact of violence in cities around the world.”
Rudd and the entire political establishment seek to prevent any serious probing of why the attacks are occurring. That high levels of youth unemployment and poverty have fuelled racial tensions in Australia’s major cities is not an inevitable “fact” of life.
These conditions are a product of the free market policies administered by successive capitalist governments—both Labour and Liberal—and the absence of a politically unified movement of the working class to combat them, offering a progressive, socialist alternative. It is this that has left many young people prey to the reactionary diversions of race and nationality.
In opposition to attempts by Rudd, the police and capitalist media to divide Australian, Indian and West Asian youth along racial, national and ethnic lines, with the real danger that tit-for-tat retaliatory attacks may escalate, the most advanced layers of students and working class youth must turn precisely to the development of such an internationalist and socialist movement in the working class.
Laura Tiernan/WSWS
Protests by Indian students in Australia over the past 12 days have brought to light an ugly under-current of violent and racist attacks that have produced outrage and deep concern among many ordinary people in both India and Australia.
Once again the suppressed tensions produced by social inequality and decades of free market policies have erupted in a malignant and reactionary form with “foreigners”—this time Indian students—subjected to racist abuse and violence.
The attacks have escalated in the past several weeks. In Sydney, an apartment was firebombed, cars have been set alight and in Melbourne, amid racial taunts, another youth was brutally stabbed with a screwdriver.
On May 31, Indian students responded with a 4,000-strong demonstration through the streets of Melbourne’s central business district, demanding action by police and by federal and state governments to protect their safety.
The Labour government’s initial response was one of damage-control. On June 1, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered assurances that “the more than 90,000 Indian students in Australia are welcome guests in our country”.
The only thing “welcome” is the billions of dollars in fees paid by Indian students annually, part of the $15 billion dollars wrung from international students each year that the Rudd government fears losing.
In reality, it is successive state and federal governments—both Labour and Liberal—that are, along with police, directly responsible for the attacks on international students studying in Australia.
According to Federation of Indian Students of Australia (FISA) spokesman Gautam Gupta, bashings and other crimes against Indian students have grown steadily over the past two years, yet complaints lodged to police have been systematically ignored, with students themselves blamed for being “soft targets”.
While police have allowed muggings and bashings to proceed with impunity, this month’s student protests have received no such leniency. Police repression has been immediate, with the mobilisation of riot police, dogs and mounted police.
After students and local residents assembled at railway stations in Melbourne last week, providing safe escort to young Indians arriving home by train, they were set upon by police. Such is the face of state “protection”.
It is noteworthy that Local Area Command Superintendent Robert Redfern, who led this week’s police operations in Harris Park, was also LAC chief in Cronulla during the notorious race riots that occurred there in December 2005.
Under Redfern’s command, police were held back while racist and alcohol-fuelled crowds brutalised West Asian youth. When the latter retaliated over ensuing days, police repression was swift. The state government passed draconian police powers through parliament and the media vilified “Lebanese gangs” for allegedly threatening “public order and safety”.
Calls have been made by demonstrators for greater police protection, but students must be warned: as in Cronulla, these demands are being seized on to justify further ruthless “law and order” policies, aimed against the entire working class.
The allies of the students are not the police and the state, but the students around the country and the world, and the international working class.
“Australia” declared Rudd on June 1, just hours after police violently assaulted Indian demonstrators in Melbourne’s central business district, “is a country of great diversity, harmony and tolerance”. On the contrary, like every other capitalist country, it is riven by enormous—and growing—class divisions.
In the suburbs surrounding Harris Park in western Sydney, and in the western suburbs of Melbourne, including St Albans, where bashings and racial victimisation are on the increase, social tensions are at breaking point, produced by more than three decades of economic restructuring.
Industries, banks and offices that once employed tens of thousands of workers, were closed down during the 1980s and 1990s, condemning entire families to a life of unemployment and poverty from which they have never recovered.
Now, in the face of the worst global depression since the 1930s, unemployment is again rising, with predictions it will hit one million by next year. Over the past 12 months the number of 15-19-year-olds without work has leapt from 10 to 18 percent nationally, with youth joblessness in some areas nudging 40 percent.
The Rudd government, like the Howard government before it, has responded to the deepening social crisis with the stock standard methods of Australian capitalism, seeking to shift public anger and resentment into the reactionary channels of national and race politics.
Over the past 10 years, immigrants, asylum seekers, “boat people”, Muslims and “Lebanese gangs” have all become scapegoats for the failure of the profit system to provide adequate livelihoods and services to millions of ordinary people.
This week, as protests by Indian students continued, Rudd declared on Melbourne radio: “In the last decade, I was advised we had, I think, up to 20 Australians who had either been murdered or had various forms of assault committed against them. That is not the result of Australians being targeted in India, that’s just a fact of violence in cities around the world.”
Rudd and the entire political establishment seek to prevent any serious probing of why the attacks are occurring. That high levels of youth unemployment and poverty have fuelled racial tensions in Australia’s major cities is not an inevitable “fact” of life.
These conditions are a product of the free market policies administered by successive capitalist governments—both Labour and Liberal—and the absence of a politically unified movement of the working class to combat them, offering a progressive, socialist alternative. It is this that has left many young people prey to the reactionary diversions of race and nationality.
In opposition to attempts by Rudd, the police and capitalist media to divide Australian, Indian and West Asian youth along racial, national and ethnic lines, with the real danger that tit-for-tat retaliatory attacks may escalate, the most advanced layers of students and working class youth must turn precisely to the development of such an internationalist and socialist movement in the working class.
Laura Tiernan/WSWS
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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