Have you got what it takes? Joining the Australian killing machine

By Lisbeth Latham

In 2002, 5836 people joined the Australian Defence Force (ADF) as regular members -about 700 more than joined in 2001. The vast majority of them were young people between the ages of 18 and 24.

While no survey has been taken of the young people who have joined the ADF in recent years, a glance at the pitch made in recruiting advertisements does not support the idea that there is any significant increase in support for the Australian military among young people.

During the last financial year, the ADF spent more than $33 million on recruiting ads in newspapers, on TV and at movie screenings.

The thrust of this advertising is not aimed at telling the truth. It does not try to convince young people to become part of the Australian military machine to kill people in other countries in order to protect Australian businesses' overseas investments. Nor does it aim to convince young people to become part of the ADF to fight "terrorism" or "rogue states": the current establishment justification for imperialist military intervention in the Third World.

Rather, ADF recruiting advertisements focus on how being part of the ADF enables young people to get fully paid training in some highly skilled, technical job or to help poor people in other countries rebuild the basic services. (Recent ADF ads highlight Australian military personnel's role in rebuilding East Timor's roads, schools and health services in the wake of the devastation caused by Indonesian occupation of that country.) The ADF's combat role is only alluded to through scenes of war games - never images of real combat situations.

Historically, the bulk of general enlistments, that is non-officers, of the world's armed forces, have been drawn from the working class, usually its poorest sections. General enlistment in the army and navy by young people from impoverished working-class families is motivated, much less by patriotism, than by the desire to obtain a regular, guaranteed income. It is for this reason that African and Hispanic Americans make up a considerable, and increasing, proportion of the soldiers and sailors in the US armed forces.

The ADF chiefs are well aware of this. That's why their recruiting ads emphasise the amount that recruits will get paid. According to the comparative employment value adjustable model (CEVAM), an 18-year-old ADF recruit who has completed basic training can expect to take home at least $690 per week.

CEVAM is a spreadsheet on the Stay Army web site that allows ADF personnel to work out what they would need to earn as a civilian to receive the same financial remuneration and benefits they receive in the ADF.

In the case of the hypothetical 18-year-old, to receive the same level of income (take-home pay and other benefits) in civilian employment that he or she would get in the ADF, they would have to earn $45,927 per annum, putting them in the top 3.5% of wage earners for 15-19 year-olds.

The desperate financial situation that the majority of university students face, whether they are working part-time or living on the poverty-level income provided through the Youth Allowance, makes joining the army reserves an attractive financial proposition. It is for this reason that army recruitment stalls are becoming an increasingly common sight on university campuses.

These stalls target students who are desperate to make ends meet with tax-free pay that doesn't affect Centrelink payments. The army reserves' advertisement of a commitment of "one weekend a month and two weeks a year" adds to the attraction of the army reserves. The time required is actually higher, including at least one night a week and the possibility of being called up to full active service.

In 2001-2, there were 1034 reservists in regular service out of the total reserve force of 21,001. This is likely to be much higher this year with the war on Iraq. On January 7, Britain announced it was calling-up 6000 of its 40,000 reservists.

The financial motivation for enlistment in the ADF increases the possibility of a growth of opposition to war within its ranks and those considering it as an employment option, as occurred in the US army during the Vietnam War.

The growth of anti-war sentiment within the US army, of course, reflected the growth of anti-war sentiment in the general population. But it was also encouraged by sections of the anti-war movement seeking to convince the ranks of the armed forces that the war was unjust and supporting the right of military personnel to publicly express their political opposition to the government's foreign policy.

From Green Left Weekly issue #522

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Cockburn to become US Navy base

Lisbeth Latham

FREMANTLE — On January 6, the USS Abraham Lincoln, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, returned to Fremantle just two weeks after its last visit. It had been scheduled to return to the US, but was ordered back to Fremantle to prepare for deployment to the Persian Gulf.

The Abraham Lincoln’s return to Perth signals both the imminence of a war on Iraq, but also the state and federal governments’ desire for Fremantle and Cockburn Sound to play an important logistical role in support of the US’s war drive.

On January 13 the destroyer USS Fletcher will arrive in WA to conduct a sea swap. Sea swap is the term used by the US Navy to describe the changing over of crews and resupplying of its ships. The Western Australian, federal and US governments agreed to the first swap on October 24, more are expected to take place, with US ships to be docked in Cockburn Sound south of Perth.

Ongoing sea swaps with the US seventh fleet will require the conversion of the Cockburn Sound into a US naval base, which would include the deepening of the channel in the Cockburn sound from 12 to 16 metres, to allow aircraft carriers to dock. Also included in the agreement is the opening up of the Lancelin, north of Perth, for the US Navy to conduct live fire practice of sea and air bombardments and marine amphibious assaults. Lancelin is already used by the Australian Defence Forces for live fire exercises.

State and federal governments’ public motivations for the proposal have been based around the possible economic benefits of gaining access to part of the US Navy’s US$100 billion budget and an expansion in tourist spending associated with an increased presence of US naval personnel.

The biggest carrot to accept the sea swaps has been the prospect of jobs growth in Western Australia’s ship industry through demands for the repair of US ships. The Fremantle Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG) has suggested that there is unlikely to be any significant increase in jobs due to US “Title Ten” laws. These state that repairs must be carried out in US ports or in foreign ports if the ship is based there, leaving only repairs essential to keeping ships operational available to be conducted in Cockburn Sound.

Irrespective of any possible local employment opportunities associated with a sea-swap, it should be opposed. The proposal is aimed at strengthening the US navy and its ability to enforce US foreign policy. The push to conduct sea swaps in Fremantle and other Australian ports, such as Darwin, reflects the continued focus of US operations in the Middle East and southwest Asia, which require increased deployments in the Indian Ocean; Red Sea and Persian Gulf.

Shifting operations to Cockburn Sound will dramatically increase the turn-around time for US naval battle groups that at present return to San Diego on the US west coast, or Hawaii.

According to an October 24 press release from Australian defence minister Robert Hill’s office, the swap “will enable the US Navy to transfer crews without the need on every occasion to return the ship to the United States, allowing a more efficient use of navy assets. The sea swap agreement demonstrates Australia’s support for a principal ally and friend”.

The establishment of a permanent US military installation has raised a number of environmental concerns for both Cockburn Sound and Lancelin. According to the FANG spokesperson Scott Ludlum “The US military is the single largest source of industrial pollution in the world. Many US bases in other countries and the US have been closed by public demand, leaving a legacy of radiological and chemical contamination which the US refuses to take responsibility for”.

From Green Left Weekly issue #521

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'No to war'

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH - On December 8, more than 1000 people rallied in Perth to oppose the impending war in Iraq. Organised by the NOWAR Alliance, the protest demanded: no war on Iraq; no Australian support for war; an end to sanctions on Iraq; and no attacks on civil liberties.

ALP parliamentarian Carmen Lawrence spoke at the protest. "Australian people are not willing to support a new American imperialism", she said. "People need to come out and oppose the war."

Other speakers included Theo Mackaay, from the Anglican Social Responsilities Commission, Russell Pickering, from the Socialist Alliance, Sheik Omran from a local Islamic college, Rosemary Miller from the Uniting Church Social Justice Commission, local Greens MLC Giz Watson and Democrats representative Helen Hodgson.

Pickering said: "World wide protests against the war on Iraq are developing solidarity with people of the Third

World, who are under attack from the military and corporations from countries like Australia and the US. Today we are taking a stand against the agenda of repression and exploitation that divides our world. The war on Iraq is bringing together a powerful movement for change -

a peoples' movement which says no to war, end the sanctions."

From Green Left Weekly #520.

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WA building workers win 36-hour week

Lisbeth Latham
On November 22, members of the Western Australian branch of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's construction and general divisions began the process of implementing of a new enterprise agreement.

The agreement includes a 36-hour week for construction workers, based on the introduction of increased rostered days off over the next three years (five days in first year, nine in the second and 13 in the final year).

Other gains include: a 12% pay rise over the next three years; travel allowances increased to $22.50 a day; weekly superannuation payments of $95 in the first year, $100 in the second and $110 in the final year; redundancy payments increased to $70 a week; a 150% increase in trauma insurance payouts for death or permanent incapacitation, from $100,000 to $350,000 (in addition to any workers compensation payments); and a 10% increase in site allowances.

The agreement has been signed by WA's eight largest construction contractors and 40 subcontractors, with 100 subcontractors likely to sign on in the next two weeks, resulting in 6000 CFMEU members (90% of the union's WA membership) in Perth being covered by the agreement.

The CFMEU is committed to winning the extension of the agreement to all members, CFMEU construction division secretary Kevin Reynolds told Green Left Weekly. “We will seek protected action and take all forms of bans, limitations and strike action against the companies that haven't signed”, he said. The CFMEU has not signed an agreement with notorious anti-union millionaire Len Buckridge. However, the union will sign up the subcontractors used by Buckridge.

Reynolds told Green Left Weekly that the ability of the CFMEU to make significant gains for its members without having to take industrial action reflected the union's strength in Western Australia and Victoria. “The builders saw what can happen when they take us on, in Victoria three years ago. The builders there made a decision that they were not going to go through hell again. The major contractors in Western Australia are the same contractors who operate in Victoria and they knew what they were in for. Therefore, they made a commercial decision and decided it would be cheaper to settle with the union without a brawl, than to have a punch-up.”

Reynolds added that “on this occasion it suited us to negotiate ... as it demonstrates to everyone that the unions and the employers, left to negotiate things, can sort out their problems ... without any interference from governments or royal commissions”.

In recent weeks in Perth, there have been two deaths on building sites. Reynolds blamed the deaths on intransigent employers who refuse to work with unions. Unionised companies are more likely to enforce safety regulations.

However, Reynolds pointed out that when the same companies operate in places where the CFMEU is not strong, their health and safety records are significantly worse.

“We hope for the day that contractors who kill workers face manslaughter charges”, Reynolds told Green Left Weekly.

Originally published in Green Left Weekly http://www.greenleft.org.au/2002/519/27053

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Building workers protest royal commission

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH — On October 2, some 1000 members of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's construction division protested against the return to Perth of the royal commission into the construction industry.

CFMEU state secretary Kevin Reynolds, who appeared at a commission hearing for the first time, informed the rally that "of the 640 witnesses called only 30 have been from the side of the union".

Reynolds reminded the CFMEU members that commissioner Terence Cole "is not interested in the truth, but in destroying your union. Kevin Reynolds may come and go but the union will always remain a strong militant union willing to bring them to heel."

Transport Workers Union state secretary Jim McGiveron expressed his union's support for the CFMEU and all unions under attack. He pointed out the hypocrisy and anti-union bias of the commission's hearings with "97% of the witnesses called in NSW being anti-union [and] 71% of all witnesses were employers, it amounts to an attack on unions".

CFMEU mining and energy division state secretary Gary Woods, former West Australian Labor premier Brian Bourke and former federal industrial relations minister Senator Peter Cook also addressed the rally.

From Green Left Weekly #512

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Unions attempt to stop deportation

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH — On June 1, Iranian asylum seeker Nader Sayadi Estahbanati was deported from Esperance in WA on the Iranian freighter Mazardaran.

In 2000, Estahbanati and two friends stowed away on the Mazardaran to flee persecution in Iran following the Abadan uprising during which 23 people were shot dead and hundreds disappeared. Hosein Iran hid them in the 60-centimetre-high space above his cabin for five weeks.

When they arrived in Australia, Hosein was charged with "people smuggling", but received a suspended sentence because the magistrate found that he broken the law for humanitarian reasons rather than financial gain. The sentence is being appealed and Estahbanati's deportation will impact negatively on subsequent hearings.

During Hosein's case, Estahbanati gave testimony and was named as an enemy of the Iranian state. His picture appeared in the media. He was worried about the safety of himself and his family and friends. Since Estahbanati's brother Nesser voluntarily returned to Iran last month, no-one has seen or heard from him.

Despite lawyers' appeals, on May 29 Estahbanati was drugged in the Perth Immigration Detention Centre and forcibly transported to the Mazardaran, which was docked in Fremantle and about to sail to Esperance.

Under maritime law it is legal to return stowaways to the vessel they came in on. After activists contacted the ACTU for support, they accompanied Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the International Transport Federation (ITF) officials to Esperance to issue a subpoena, obtained by the ACTU, to remove Estahbanati from the ship.

The ship's master initially denied Estahbanati's presence, but then told the officials and activists that they could see Estahbanati if they had legal documents. He added that he would prefer Estahbanati was removed because he did not think the asylum seeker would make it to the next port of call due to his poor health.

Before Estahbanati could be seen, Australasian Correctional Management officers arrived and directed the officials and activists to wait in another room. After several phone calls, they were informed that they could not see Estahbanati, however, the subpoena would be delivered.

The ACTU and ITF asked that Estahbanati be allowed to see a doctor. The doctor later said that Estahbanati seemed in good health, but admitted that he had not seen identification for the patient. He described the man he treated as being 2 metres tall with a beard — very different to Estahbanati's description.

The ACTU has committed to take up Estahbanati's case with the government, and the ITF will discuss it at its conference in Britain next month. The ITF and ACTU are also concerned about Estahbanati's deportation because of the broader implications of merchant ships being used as detention centres and to assist deportations.

From Green Left Weekly #496.

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Why this is a racist war

Lisbeth Latham

Recently at an anti-war rally in Perth, I was asked by another participant ``is it really a racist war?’‘ George Bush, Tony Blair and their bellicose supporters in Australia, John Howard and Kim Beazley, have argued that the bombing campaign on Afghanistan is not a war on the Afghan people and it is definitely not a racist war.

The central aim of these statements has been to attempt to block the ability of opponents of the war to mobilise public opinion against the war. This aim has been necessitated by the growth since the 1960s of a general sentiment against racism. This popular anti-racist sentiment means that racists do not always openly claim to be racist or speak in openly racist terms.

This raises the question ``what is racism?’‘ Racism is the view, expressed either overtly or covertly, which justifies social inequality between people based on fetishising superficial external physical features, most particularly skin colour.

Racism first emerged with the development of capitalism to justify the forcible transportation of millions of Africans to the Americas in order to provide a system of institutionalised forced labour on the plantations of the European settler colonies.

At the end of the 19th century, racism continued to provide justification by the capitalist rulers of imperialist countries, whose populations were predominantly white, for the economic and political subjugation of the non-white peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The current US bombing campaign against Afghanistan has been justified as necessary to ensure that terrorist attacks like that on September 11 in New York and Washington, in which more than 4000 people were killed, do not occur again. But the bombing has already been estimated to have killed 1000 Afghan civilians.

Moreover, aid agencies such as Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF, Doctors without Borders) estimate that at least two million Afghans (with upward estimates of seven million people), will die from starvation by the end of winter if the bombing does not stop and aid agencies are unable to deliver large-scale food aid. The widespread unchallenged implication is that the lives of at least two million people, 10% of the Afghan population, are of less value than those who died in the US on September 11.

Imperialism is a word that is often misused. Marxists use it to refer to a particular stage in development of capitalism that emerged in the industrially developed countries at the end of the 19th century. Nearly all branches of their economies came under the monopolist control of a few large corporations.

These large corporations were owned by super-rich capitalist families, like the Rockefeller and Morgan families in the United States, who also owned the big banks, insurance companies and stock exchange investment houses. These families were often financially and personally inter-related and formed a financial oligarchy that dominated not only the economy but the political life of the developed capitalist countries.

The corporations and banks in the developed countries took advantage of the uneven development of the world capitalist economy to preserve their monopoly of ownership of advanced technology and to use this monopoly to extract above-average profits from the underdeveloped capitalist countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As a result of the emergence of monopoly capitalism, the world was divided into a handful of predominantly white, rich nations dominating the economic and political life of the great majority of the world’s population.

The division of the world into rich and poor nations created a massive drive towards the militarisation of the imperialist nations. This was essential to ensure that they would be able to protect their investments and markets from challenges by their imperialist rivals. This was the central focus of both the first and second world wars.

Since the second world war, the imperialist powers have subordinated their rivalry to uniting behind the strongest imperialist power, the United States, to crush any challenges from the oppressed nations to throw off imperialist domination. This was the driving force behind the US-led military interventions into Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s.

During the US-led war against Vietnam, anti-war sentiment became widespread in the United States and other imperialist countries like Australia. So too did anti-racist sentiment.

Widespread acceptance of the idea that it was racist for the governments of rich, white nations to wage war to stop the non-white peoples of the poor, Third World countries from choosing governments that US and its allies were hostile to, helped to limit the ability of the US and its allies to utilise their own armies to wage such wars.

Instead, the imperialist powers were forced to rely on the creation and support of right-wing proxies to attempt to maintain their domination over Third World countries. This is what the US did in the 1980s in Nicaragua with the contras, and in Afghanistan with the mujaheddin and the Taliban.

Since the September 11 terror attacks, the rulers of the imperialist countries have sought to regain public acceptance for the large-scale use of their own ground troops to impose on Third World countries governments that are totally subservient to the imperialist interests.

This is the real goal of the current “war on terrorism”. But it is being masked by claims that it is aimed at defending “civilisation”. Blair has even attempted to present the US-led war as part of a drive for a better world for “the starving, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor”.

The US government has increasingly made it clear that the “war on terror” will have no end, and has already identified more than 60 countries that it will take action against for allegedly harbouring “terrorist organisations”.

The imperialists’ “war on terror” aims to crush all resistance to their ability to exploit the peoples of the Third World, and thus to maintain global inequality between the rich, predominantly white, nations of the First World and the poor, predominantly non-white, nations of the Third World. That is why this is a racist war.

From Green Left Weekly issue #472

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