Down With Bracks Labor Government Repression!

Defend Anti-G20 Protesters! Free Akim Sari!

In Melbourne on 18-19 November, thousands protested outside a meeting of the G20 (Group of Twenty), which included representatives of U.S. and Australian imperialism, and the bloodsucking IMF and World Bank. In the wake of the protests, the Bracks Labor government has waged a witchhunt against “violent” protesters. We reprint below a 14 December Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) letter sent to the Victorian attorney general, Rob Hulls, demanding all charges against anti-G20 protesters be dropped and protesting the almost three-month detention on remand of Akim Sari. The PDC is a class-struggle, non-sectarian, legal and social defence organisation which champions cases and causes in the interest of the whole of the working people. This purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League.

Despicably Socialist Alternative (SAlt) have fallen in behind the government witchhunt, denouncing protesters in and around the so-called “Arterial Bloc.” SAlt leader Mick Armstrong grotesquely stated “The left should offer no comfort to these crazies. We should do whatever we can to isolate them” (www.leftwrites.net, 19 November). Echoing the bourgeois media’s baiting of “outsiders,” he pointed the finger at anarchists who came to Melbourne from interstate and overseas. A subsequent 21 November statement by SAlt, “The left must take a stand against the elitist violence of the ‘Arterial Bloc’,” alibis the government, blaming the victims for the repression meted out to them:

“...we need to take a clear and unambiguous stand against these provocateurs.... Actions like those at G20 by the Arterial Bloc will make it difficult to build the necessary links between organised workers and the smaller, social issue campaigns. Anything which weakens our ability to build such a movement makes it that much more difficult to deal with state repression.

“The violence at the weekend did not combat that repression, but opens up the left to increased militarisation of policing when we do not have the mass grass roots organisation and support capable of repelling it.”

This naked capitulation to the violence baiting of the capitalist state demonstrates SAlt’s loyalty to the ALP capitalist government and the forces of “law and order.” Laborite reformism is at the core of their politics. In opposition to Laborism, we Trotskyists of the Spartacist League fight for the perspective of building a Leninist vanguard party, which stands as a tribune of all the people, capable of leading the working class in a revolutionary and internationalist struggle against ruling-class attacks. This would open the road to socialist revolution and workers rule.

The same police who bloodied anti-G20 protesters also terrorise Aborigines and attack workers picket lines. The capitalist state—its cops, courts and prisons—is a machinery of repression committed to defending the private property, profits and rule of the capitalist exploiters, including when administered by a Labor government. The autonomous types and those in their orbit seek, for example, to pressure the existing social order through “direct action,” eschewing the need to mobilise the power of the working class against the capitalist system. Despite our vast political differences, we stand in defence of them and all the anti-G20 protesters under attack by the capitalist state. Drop all the charges now!

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We protest the arrest and detention of 28-year-old student, Akim Sari, following the anti-G20 protests in Melbourne on 18 and 19 November. Charged with affray, riot, criminal damage and theft, he has been denied bail and is held in remand until his 12 February court appearance—in effect, almost a three-month sentence! Sari’s detention is an attempt to intimidate anyone who protests the injustices of capitalism. It is a reminder of the vicious treatment the capitalist courts daily mete out to asylum seekers and the oppressed Aboriginal people of this country. We demand that Akim Sari be released immediately!

Sari is reportedly one of at least 11 anti-G20 protesters arrested and charged. Others include 19-year-olds Rosalie Delaney and David Vakalis, 22-year-old Danya Bryx and 24-year-old Dominic Richardson, charged with riot and affray for alleged crimes such as throwing a milk crate and street signs at police barricades and vehicles. Drop all the charges against the anti-G20 protesters now! These serious charges follow a media frenzy against “violent” protesters. The real violence was in fact perpetrated by the state. Some 100 police attacked a [anti-]G20 festive gathering outside parliament on 18 November. It is reported they chased and beat people, such that an ambulance had to be called to attend to several. Three people were arrested. The next day, during a violent police attack on an anti-G20 street theatre protest, one woman was so badly injured she required hospitalisation.

Aided and abetted by the hysterical trial-by-media witchhunt, the police taskforce set up by the Bracks Labor government to track down and arrest “suspected ringleaders,” has operated with frightening abuse. In a scene reminiscent of a military dictatorship, young worker Drasko Boljevic feared for his life when he was abducted and terrorised by unidentified men who turned out to be undercover cops. Eventually released after a traumatic two-hour ordeal, police acknowledged that it was a case of mistaken identity—he wasn’t even at the anti-G20 protest!

The G20 meeting provided a forum for U.S. imperialist spokesmen, like Paul Wolfowitz, and their Australian junior partners to plan the future immiseration of the working masses. It occurred in the context of the ongoing murderous neo-colonial occupation of Iraq by the U.S., Britain and Australia (having bombed, bled and starved that country for 16 years), and “war on terror” government repression which shreds hard-won civil liberties and whips up a racist, anti-Muslim social climate, targeting those of immigrant background such as Akim Sari and Drasko Boljevic. We recall that in 2000, a year before the criminal attack on the World Trade Center, the then-recently elected Bracks Labor government oversaw a brutal police assault on youthful protesters who were demanding an end to “third world debt” outside the World Economic Forum in Melbourne. Today, as then, the aim is to squash leftist political dissent. Release Akim Sari! Drop all the charges against the anti-G20 protesters now!