Write on: Letters to the editor
Support for S11 protest
As chair of the International Committee of the United Trades and Labor Council of South Australia, I am proud to support the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne later this year. The September 11 protest was initiated as a follow up to what happened in Seattle and Washington, when thousands of ordinary citizens involved themselves in protests against the negative effects of globalisation. The US Labour unions played a crucial role in these protests.
I support all protests being non-violent and constructive in nature. Despite the uncaring, traumatic and often violent destruction of people's lives by forces of globalised capital, as the free trade bandwagon has rolled its way around the world over the last 20 years, I believe all protests against such corporate tyranny should be conducted in accordance with the principles of peaceful protest and civil disobedience inspired by leaders such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.
As a supporter of social movement unionism, I believe organising, recruitment and retention strategies will come to nothing if the unions stand apart from the broadest possible coalition of social forces opposed to globalisation's anti-social effects.
As an ACTU delegate to the 17th World Congress of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in Durban this year, I do not oppose negotiating with the transnational corporations, and their agents, to try to get our message across, but I support doing so from within a broad coalition protesting against their actions.
A clear commitment to a non-violent constructive series of protests will help secure the maximum participation from ordinary citizens in these important community actions.
Adelaide
Program needed
The discussion of a left demand for a Tobin tax (GLW 9/8/00) is typical of a major contradiction in activist politics. Each success in improving conditions under capitalism tends to weaken the arguments against the system itself.
This is exemplified by years of success of the Australian trade union movement, which assisted in fostering reformist illusions alongside a higher living standard as measured by capitalist "values".
While purists can pick out the dichotomies in any one area, such as the Tobin tax, protests against aspects of the system rather than against the system itself will, of necessity, occupy much of the ground of political activity in the foreseeable future and give rise to counter-productive conflict within the left.
Such contradictions may appear to be unbridgeable while demands for a socialist alternative remain vague and often reformist in themselves. What is needed is a program for social change, which would include a change in human relationships, a critical evaluation of technology, a radical reduction of the time spent on alienated labour, the abolition of wage labour and a total change from economic to human and ecological values.
Such an explicit and internally consistent program, once developed in principle, could then be used to guide our day-to-day struggles. While not constituting a blueprint for a future society, it could be an inspiration in a world where the notions of desirable social change are often limited to minor variants within the existing rotten value system.
Blackburn Vic
The right to know
Those who disagree with Helen Riley's arguments against current IVF (donor conception) (GLW #408) practices need to ask themselves these questions: Do you support a system of secrets and lies in which a child is denied information about the parties involved in its conception? Do you want to say that?
Because that's the primary issue: the right to know.
If you think a child has the right to know who their biological parents are — then IVF and donor conception is changed utterly. Instead of being a routine medical procedure it becomes something else. Let's not be blind to the huge qualitative impact such shared information would have.
If you think the child does not have that right then who should keep the secret? Because that's what it is — a conspiracy resting on implicit secrets.
I don't think it is a very good argument to answer for the child and say that they won't (or maybe they won't) want to know. Nor is it a viable argument to call up assumptions about how a child should or would be brought up as though that justifies the secrecy that engendered their conception.
This is much more complex than contributors to Green Left Weekly have so far recognised. If we cannot concretely factor in the rights of the child, then the default position will be one which implies that the state has the power to say who or who should not have access to these programs. That's precisely what we don't want.
Brisbane
[Abridged.]
Asylum seekers
Thanks to you for your coverage of the asylum seekers' demonstration in Brisbane on National Refugee Action Day in July.
Asylum seekers are the most marginalised and invisible people in this country. They suffer repeated human rights abuses under our noses and few people hear about it.
Most asylum seekers come from war-torn countries, to this country on visitor, student or working visas, often with their families, and with many skills to offer and share with us. They apply for protection, and are forced to jump insurmountable legal hurdles, without community support or any money. Some asylum seekers have been fighting for protection for more than 10 years!
Once here, most of them are denied work permission, which also means they cannot get Medicare, any government income, food, education, transport, housing or other basic necessities of life. This is because of a number of legislative traps laid for them, with the sole purpose of driving people back to their home countries which most are under threat of death, torture or imprisonment. And we call this a democracy?