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Housing crisis blows up retirement system

The retirement system in Australia is built on the assumption that the majority of people will own their homes. However, that assumption is collapsing due to falling homeownership rates and people carrying mortgage debt well into their retirement years. As shown below, older Australians are...
www.macrobusiness.com.au www.macrobusiness.com.au
 
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The roots of racism against Aboriginal people

Reading Time: 6 minutes For more than two centuries, Indigenous people in Australia have been resisting attacks on their lives, land and culture. Aboriginal people continually have their working rights, land rights, and welfare rights undermined and attacked. Indigenous communities suffer from...
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The roots of racism against Aboriginal people​

DECEMBER 23, 2019

For more than two centuries, Indigenous people in Australia have been resisting attacks on their lives, land and culture.

Aboriginal people continually have their working rights, land rights, and welfare rights undermined and attacked. Indigenous communities suffer from higher poverty and lower life expectancies than other Australians. They deal with routine racist violence and abuse, including at the hands of police. There is an ongoing outrage of Aboriginal deaths in police custody.

Aboriginal communities also face attacks on their basic legitimacy as a people. This contributes to high suicide rates, including an epidemic of suicide among Indigenous children.

Why does racism exist?
Even though victories have been won against racism over the last hundred years, it has never gone away. Racism is constantly re-created in every new generation. The reason is we live in a class society. Capitalists, the ruling class, have a vested interest in taking land, labour, and resources from Aboriginal people, and in driving wedges between them and other working class people. Racism isn’t the result of simple stupidity or a lack of education, it’s deliberately encouraged by governments, the mainstream press, and big business.

When people are constantly exposed to backward racist ideas, a proportion will believe those ideas. But ordinary people are not the source of racism. The ruling class is. It wants to divide us, and to shift the blame for social problems away from capitalism.

For example, the Northern Territory Intervention was brought in on the basis of slanders against Aboriginal men, who were painted as child abusers. The dire conditions faced by many Aboriginal people were blamed on their culture and race, when in reality these conditions are created by capitalism.

Capitalist profit comes from the exploitation of workers. Workers are not paid the full value of their labour, and can’t afford to buy back the goods they produce in the long run. This is the ultimate reason that poverty exists. Aboriginal communities have faced generations of super-exploitation and racist violence on top of this.

The Intervention brought in a raft of pro-business policies to make these communities easier for the rich to exploit. For example, it was used as the thin end of the wedge to roll out cashless welfare.

This is a food-stamp system based on quarantining part of a person’s income so that it can only be spent at selected stores on selected items. To justify this policy, Indigenous people were painted as incapable of managing their finances. It was first targeted at them so that it could be rolled out to others later.

This policy benefits capitalists. Welfare is already at poverty levels. By making life even harder for the unemployed, more pressure is placed on them to take any job at any pay. Wage levels are determined by the lowest rate in the market, so this puts downward pressure on everyone’s wages as people compete for jobs.

Australian capitalists have always benefited from underpaying Aboriginal labour. In many cases Aboriginal workers have had wages withheld indefinitely, or been subject to outright slavery. Racism is used to justify paying one group of people less than another, forcing workers into a race-to-the-bottom.

All workers are worse off when we allow any one group of workers to be isolated by racist ideas. All of this has kept the ruling class rich.

Land grabs and genocide
Marx wrote that capitalism came into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” In Britain, the early capitalists privatised communal land through a process called enclosure, which caused widespread misery. When capitalism came to Australia, this process was carried out with acts of genocide.
Aboriginal people have been in Australia for more than 60,000 years. They established complex and varied societies across the whole continent. Indigenous communities supported themselves through hunting, gathering, and agriculture, and these societies were not based on the exploitation of one class by another.

Aboriginal societies developed highly sophisticated means of living off the land. Their economy was capable of sustaining small populations with an abundance of varied food, while leaving ample time in people’s lives for ceremonial and leisure activities. They traded extensively with each other, and trade benefited whole communities. This contrasts with capitalism, where trade is about making profits for a few.

In Britain in the 1700s, poverty and hardship were increasing and harsh laws were introduced to protect capitalist profits. The poor were filling up the jails, so the British ruling class decided to set up a convict colony in Australia.

It was a deeply divided society that arrived in 1788. Convicts were transported against their will, and were forced to work as part of their punishment. Privileged individuals were provided with free capital and coerced labour. These people formed the embryo of the Australian capitalist class.

The colonial government and the capitalists wanted land to graze sheep on, to profit from the international wool trade. They embarked on a violent campaign to drive Aboriginal people from their land.

The genocide that took place stemmed from the very foundations of the new capitalist property relations that were being introduced. The profit-driven system was incompatible with the Aboriginal way of doing things. The colonisers were essentially seeking to privatise the land for themselves in order to exploit it.

Tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were either driven out into remote areas or killed. Some were brutally murdered, while others died of starvation or newly imported diseases. The creation of huge sheep pastures meant that plants and animals that Aboriginal people had relied upon were destroyed.

Racism was an important tool, both then and now, to justify this. Australians are falsely taught that Aboriginal people never truly used the land. Today it’s the mining industry rather than the wool industry that covets profitable Aboriginal land. Similar racist justifications are used on the mining industry’s behalf to attack the legitimacy of remote Aboriginal communities.
 
Bluey said:
Your propaganda got one thread locked, i see your heading to another locking of a thread, maybe a suspension as well..
Click to expand...
I never post propaganda. Disinformation is your way of life, not mine. My challenging the mods for not dealing with your rampant racism is what got that thread locked and disappeared. I see you are bringing that same racial slur into this thread. What a shock.
 
You mean your lies , you have an opinion and try and ram it down our throats with multiple cut and paste lies, just lucky for the country that a majority of voters dont agree with you.
MegaRabbitoh said:
I never post propaganda. Disinformation is your way of life, not mine. My challenging the mods for not dealing with your rampant racism is what got that thread locked and disappeared. I see you are bringing that same racial slur into this thread. What a shock.
Click to expand...
 
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