 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|||||
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Palm Island Community Leader Jailed: Free Lex Wotton Now! For a Class-Struggle Fight for Aboriginal Rights! The following SL leaflet was issued on 30 November. On 7 November, Palm Island Aboriginal community leader, Lex Wotton, was despicably sentenced to six years in prison. This followed his conviction in the Brisbane District Court on charges of “rioting with destruction” over the November 2004 Palm Island protest that erupted in response to a coroner’s whitewash report into the brutal death of local Aboriginal man, Mulrunji Doomadgee, in the police lockup. Wotton was convicted by an all-white jury in a trial that saw key evidence disallowed and witnesses intimidated. He will not be eligible for parole until July 2010, having already spent 110 days in custody. Lex Wotton’s conviction and jailing is an outrage that must be fought by all opponents of capitalist injustice and racist oppression! He should not have spent a moment in prison! We demand: Overturn the conviction! Free Lex Wotton now! The Queensland state Labor government has aggressively targeted Wotton as a “ringleader” of the 2004 protest against the racist state killing of Mulrunji Doomadgee not least because Wotton is an articulate and resolute Aboriginal man. Mulrunji died less than an hour after being taken into custody early on 19 November 2004. He suffered massive internal injuries including a ruptured spleen, a torn portal vein, four broken ribs and his liver had been almost cleaved in two. The initial coroner’s report claiming his death was “an accident” was met with justified outrage by Palm Islanders. During the ensuing protest the police station, watch-house and other buildings were razed. In response, the state carried out terrifying police raids against Aboriginal residents across the island. Wotton, whose home was surrounded by more than 50 police with dogs, was tasered with 50,000 volts as his partner and children watched in horror. Wotton’s arrest, trial and conviction stand in sharp contrast to the treatment of the Palm Island cop, Chris Hurley, who admitted in court that he must have caused Mulrunji Doomadgee’s fatal injuries. In a whitewash trial in Townsville, in 2007, Hurley was acquitted of manslaughter, also by an all-white jury, and later secretively awarded a $100,000 payout for the alleged loss of belongings as a result of the fires. Then, following Wotton’s conviction, bravery awards were provocatively announced for the cops stationed on Palm Island at the time of the protest. This is “justice” in capitalist Australia where police are exonerated over the killing of an Aboriginal man while Aborigines are imprisoned for protesting this atrocity! Brutal racist oppression in Australia is starkly illustrated from Palm Island to the Northern Territory (NT). Since its election in 2007, the federal Rudd ALP government has strengthened the police and military-enforced government takeover of some seventy NT Aboriginal communities. This occupation, which targets all Aboriginal people, exposes the lie of Rudd’s February apology to the Stolen Generations. Rudd’s Labor has also escalated the former Howard government’s attacks on welfare and enforced repressive “anti-terror” legislation that has shredded the democratic rights of all while particularly targeting immigrant minorities for racist scapegoating. They also maintain Australian imperialist occupation forces, from East Timor to the Solomons to Afghanistan. Australian imperialist troops/cops out now! Cops/military get out of NT Aboriginal communities! Down with racist “war on terror” repression! In targeting the more vulnerable, such as Aborigines and immigrants, the bourgeoisie aims to make it easier to further their attacks on the working class as a whole. Rudd’s Labor government has retained the core of Howard’s widely hated anti-union WorkChoices legislation. This includes the draconian Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), which has accelerated its activities against construction unions since the election of the Labor government, threatening unionists with imprisonment, including charges now dropped against Victorian construction official, Noel Washington. Down with the ABCC! Defend all victimised unionists! For hard class struggle to defend the unions! There Is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! While we support pursuing all legal avenues to defend Lex Wotton and others facing state repression, we put no faith whatsoever in the capitalist courts but instead look to the social power of the organised working class, mobilised independently of the capitalist state and its parties. We seek to win the multiracial working class to championing the rights of Aboriginal people and all the oppressed, from those Muslims framed on “terrorism” charges to African immigrants targeted by racist violence. The bosses, having no solution to the inherent boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism, will step up their attacks on workers and the oppressed in the current economic crisis. Facing looming mass layoffs and grinding debt, it is in the direct, immediate interests of the organised working class to take up the fight for all victims of capitalist state repression, including the fight for Wotton’s freedom. Only by taking up the struggle against the common enemy will the working class be able to defend itself and achieve the unity and consciousness necessary to fulfil its historic role as the gravedigger of the capitalist class. As Karl Marx declared in writing about the American Civil War in 1867, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, where in the black it is branded.” To their credit the Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) have stated support for Wotton, himself a plumber, and recently stopped work for one minute’s silence to mourn the killing of Mulrunji and in support of Wotton. However, this token gesture falls qualitatively short of the broad-based union action needed to free Wotton. Unleashing the social power of the organised working class, for example, through closing down the ports for a day and mass proletarian-led protests, would make the bosses think twice about Wotton’s imprisonment. In a powerful action in 1989, Sydney building workers walked off their construction site and formed a protective perimeter around a protest outside police headquarters against the cop killing of Aboriginal worker, David Gundy. For union/black/minority actions against racist state injustice and terror! For a class-struggle fight for Aboriginal rights! An injury to one is an injury to all! The key obstacle to mobilising workers in a class-struggle fight is the stranglehold of the Laborite trade-union tops who foster nationalism and reliance on the capitalist state. In denouncing Aboriginal deaths in custody as a “national disgrace,” MUA Sydney Branch Secretary Warren Smith declared that the branch “urges Governments at all levels to put in place policies to stop this occurring again” (mua.org.au, 7 November). Such appeals to capitalist governments only breed illusions in the very state that is persecuting Wotton and targeting the unions. Tailing the union misleaders are the reformist opponents of revolutionary Marxism. The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) has led the way in groveling before the capitalist state following Wotton’s conviction. Their declaration that they are “not prepared to let the matter rest” amounts to “contacting the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission [a state body] to ask that they investigate this case as well as Attorney-Generals of Queensland and Federal governments” (Guardian, 12 November). The CPA joins other dyed-in-the-wool reformists, such as Socialist Alliance/ Democratic Socialist Perspective (SA/ DSP), in appealing for a government Royal Commission into the death of Mulrunji and subsequent events. In the mid-1980s, the forerunners of these groups helped to channel growing anger over Aboriginal deaths in custody into a campaign for a Royal Commission, which was duly established by the federal Hawke Labor government in 1987. Like all such government enquiries, its findings whitewashed the crimes of the capitalist state, endorsing the police and coroner verdicts in all 99 deaths it “reviewed.” Since then the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people has doubled, accompanied by more deaths in custody! Government commissions also serve to ratchet up the bosses’ anti-union attacks, with the 2001 Cole Royal Commission spearheading the witchhunt against the CFMEU construction union, including the formation of the hated ABCC. The very idea of appealing for a Royal Commission ought to be repellent to anyone aspiring to fight for the rights of workers and the oppressed. Since Australia’s formation as a white settler outpost in Asia, racist state terror against Aborigines has been written in blood and systematically covered over through police terror and government obfuscation and lies. In despicably petitioning for yet more Royal Commissions, calling to implement their recommendations or raising the demand, promoted by the Freedom Socialist Party, to “jail the killer cops,” the reformists once again seek to refurbish the image of the brutal exploitative capitalist order. Break With Laborism, Build a Revolutionary Workers Party! In the last federal elections SA/DSP, Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation (now part of Solidarity) all treacherously called for a vote to the capitalist Greens in order to pressure the Rudd Labor Party, which they above all wanted elected to office regardless of its commitment to the occupation of NT Aboriginal communities, more anti-union attacks, strong state repression and imperialist militarism. These reformists deeply believe that the capitalist state, particularly when administered by a Labor government, can be pressured to serve the interests of the working class and oppressed. In reality, the bourgeois state is a repressive apparatus consisting at its core of the cops, army, courts and prisons. It exists to defend the profits, property and rule of the capitalist class against the workers and oppressed. It cannot be reformed but must be smashed through socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state. The cops, prison screws and security guards are in no way “workers in uniform,” as the Socialist Party claims, but part of the armed fist of the state, the front-line enforcers of capitalist rule. They should be expelled from the trade unions. In contrast to the Labor-loyal reformists, we Trotskyists fight to forge a multiracial revolutionary workers party through a political fight to split the working-class base of the ALP from the pro-capitalist leadership. This will require a struggle in the unions to win the most advanced layers of the proletariat away from the politics of Laborite reformism, promoted by the current union misleaders, to a revolutionary perspective. A Leninist-Trotskyist party will act as a tribune of the people, seeking to mobilise the working class against every manifestation of capitalist tyranny in an uncompromising fight for international socialist revolution. As the Spartacist speaker concluded his speech at a 7 November Sydney protest, one of a series of rallies held in support of Wotton: “It’ll take a socialist revolution to end police brutality and achieve justice and equality for Aborigines and all the oppressed. We look to the example of the Russian Revolution which happened 91 years ago today. That’s our model for overturning racist Australian capitalism, which will give Aboriginal people the right to justice and equality, and voluntary integration or autonomy as they choose it.” Free Lex Wotton now! For a class-struggle fight for Aboriginal rights! For a workers republic of Australia, part of a socialist Asia!
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
