The open use of military and naval force by the Australian government to block would-be asylum seekers from landing on Australian territory was welcomed in one capitalist tabloid's headline as the use of an "Iron Fist." But class-conscious working people in Australia and around the world need to condemn this act of brute force for what it is: an attack on the right of refugees to asylum, and on the sovereignty of ships engaged in innocent passage, including saving people from sinking boats. It was an assault on the interests of the whole working class, as the imperialist rulers prepare to get workers and farmers inured to the use of more and more military force, both against their capitalist rivals and against the oppressed and exploited.

Above all, they seek to scapegoat sections of the toiling population for the economic and social crisis caused by their capitalist system. They hope to make working people think that instead of fighting the employers and the government, which is waging an antiunion assault, that the problem lies with immigrant workers.

In this way the government and big-business parties, as well as ultrarightist formations like Pauline Hanson's One Nation, seek to turn working people in Australia against their allies in the region and to support the capitalist government in Canberra in a "Fortress Australia" campaign. Hanson's anti-immigration policies dovetail with the hysteria in the capitalist media about the "human flood" of "boat people" supposedly about to "swamp" Australia, one of the largest and least populated countries in the world. Falling into this trap is a deadly threat to the labor movement and all who are fighting exploitation and oppression.

Far from immigrants, it is the system of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation, of which the superwealthy Australian ruling class is a part, that is the cause of the economic and social crisis working people face today. It is this system that brings wars, economically devastates semicolonial countries, and transfers the wealth of the oppressed nations into the coffers of the imperialist masters. It drives workers and farmers from their homelands to seek refuge and employment in other lands.

The Australian government's dispatch of 50 armed Special Air Service troops to board the Norwegian ship is also aimed at what the imperialists arrogantly talk of as the "arc of instability" to Australia's north, where capitalist crises are breeding battles for national rights and worker and peasant resistance. With one warlike stroke, Howard's conservative government, with bipartisan support, has sought to advance the imperialist rulers' drive for militarism and war to protect their exploitative interests in the region. This is not a ploy to get reelected but a historic course in the face of capitalism's global slowdown and disorder.

Working people have different class interests and a different historic course. We should demand: Let the refugees land! No human being is illegal! Equal rights for all!
 
 
Related article:
Australian troops attack refugee ship  
 
 
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