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Open Letter for the Equal Treatment of Displaced International Students

We demands equal treatment for all people fleeing Ukraine


30/05/2022

We are international students who fled the war in Ukraine — we are Black, Indigenous, and people of color without Ukrainian citizenship.

Together with students in FU, HU, TU, UdK, BHT, and more supporters, we have written an open letter and demands addressing the unequal treatment we experience in Germany. We are fighting against discrimination, bureaucratic and legal obstacles, and the fear of deportation after August 31.

We urgently need your support before the Ministers Conference on 1-3 June, which will determine our futures in Germany bound to these laws.

OUR LETTER IN FULL is below. German, Ukranian, Russian, French and Arabic versions here.

SIGN by sending your individual or group name & affiliations to studentcoalitionforequalrights@protonmail.com

PLEASE SHARE & SUPPORT!

 

To the 

  • German government,
  • Interior Ministers of the German states,
  • Federal Ministry of Education and Research,
  • Berlin Senate,
  • Berlin State Office for Immigration,
  • Berlin’s university presidents,
  • University Admissions Foundation,
  • and anti-discrimination and diversity offices and public officers of Berlin.

 

We are international students who fled the war in Ukraine—who are Black, Indigenous and people of color without Ukrainian passports.
We are still being traumatized from the war, as every part of our life was lost or uprooted. Our dreams were short-lived and the opportunities we sought out for in Ukraine were destroyed.

We have experienced violence due to discrimination and racial profiling on our way out from Ukraine to Germany. Once in Germany, we have had further unwelcoming encounters on a structural level, as its current policies are preventing us from reclaiming prospects to build our future lives.
While Ukrainians, according to the EU Council Decision of 4th March 2022, have received relatively uncomplicated and unbureaucratic access to residence permits, work permits, study permits, stable housing, social benefits, and ample time to rebuild their lives in Germany, we have not been given the same rights. We condemn the unequal treatment of any and all war refugees based on country of origin, citizenship, socioeconomic status, or race.

In conjunction with students from Freie Universität, Humboldt Universität, Universitat der Künste Berlin, Technische Universität, Berliner Hochschule für Technik and more supporters, we have come together to address the unequal, discriminatory treatment of Germany’s laws and policies that displaced students without Ukrainian passports are facing. There are about 70 000 international students in Ukraine who had built thriving careers, studies, and lives that were suddenly disrupted by militarized violence. A large number of these students, fleeing the war, came into Germany.
Speaking from our perspectives and our experiences, we demand:

 

1. Equal Inclusion in § 24 AufenthG

Because we do not have Ukrainian citizenship, we experience extreme instability in our personal lives and in pursuing our futures in Germany.

Most importantly, there is no consensus from the German government about our ability to apply for the EU-wide directive § 24 AufenthG, which offers relatively unbureaucratic and uncomplicated procedures for Ukrainian refugees, the right to study and work, social and state assistance, and exemption from proving finances (proving Lebensunterhalt, according to § 5 Abs. 3). All of our lives and the prospects of our futures centered in Ukraine, which should uniformly be regarded as meaningful links according to the European guideline 2022/C 126 I/01.

Instead, we are facing a dire lack of housing, the inability to meet our basic needs, and no clarity or support about our right to work and study. When we apply to universities in Germany trying to legalize our stay outside of the § 24 AufenthG, we have already been given rejections, stating that we can only apply if we first get a legal resident permit. We are not applicable—or it is completely unclear—how we can be involved in the existing refugee integration/”Guest student” (Gasthörer*innen+ programs at HU, TU, and UdK, to take Berlin as an example) as a means to continue our studies and legalize our stay, since we cannot apply for asylum first nor be eligible for the § 24 AufenthG.

Our exclusion from this temporary protection under section 24 of the German Residence Act results in the loss of our achievements and our futures, by forcing us to ‘go back’ to countries of origin, which we have all left for still unchanged and true reasons.
We fled the same war. We traveled the same distance. We left our lives behind, too.

We demand equal inclusion for those without Ukrainian passports in § 24 AufenthG!

 

2. Support for Those Without Documents

We face many obstacles to access and get our documents recognized.

Some of us have had our documents taken from us wrongfully, or we have lost our documents whilst fleeing to Germany. Ukrainian universities are holding our transcripts, claiming that we have to return to Ukraine physically to pick them up, graduate first, and/or self-expel from our studies. Furthermore, we face the difficulty that the Ukrainian grade system is not easily transferable to the German system. For some programs such as medicine and dentistry, it has proven impossible for us to transfer our existing credits and recognize our former studies.

High school transcripts in many of our countries (such as those from West Africa) are also not recognized here in Germany.

With all these bureaucratic hurdles, it is impossible for many of us to enroll here.

According to the Berl-HZVO, § 2 Abs. 4, universities can freely decide on the documents required and the “form” of applications. We urge the invocation of this regulation to adapt to our situations.

We demand support or exemptions for those who are not able to access their documents, or get them recognized!

 

3. Financial Support

Unlike people with Ukrainian passports, we face unreasonable financial obstacles to study.

To apply for universities in the hopes of continuing our studies, we must prove a blocked account (Sperrkonto) of 10,332 Euros, which will change to 11,172 Euros in the fall semester, on top of uni-assist fees (75 Euros for the first application and an additional 30 EUR for every following application), fees to translate our certificates into German or English (approximately 250 Euros), fees to pay for English language tests such as IELTS, TOEFL, or the Cambridge exam (approximately 245 Euros), and fees for health insurance (approximately 120 Euros per month).

It is absolutely unreasonable to require these finances from us when we have fled war and abruptly left our entire lives. Many of us are young adults who were preparing for future careers through our education in Ukraine, and cannot be expected to have large sums of savings. Our finances went towards our housing, livelihood, and studies in Ukraine, and in Germany they have to go towards immediate needs such as travel, housing, food, hygiene, and more.

With vague, unclear, and inconsistent laws about how we can be granted permits, it is difficult to work legally in this country.

We demand financial support, various avenues for financial assistance (e.g. BAföG), and the exemption of application fees—for example, through decentralized admission processes rather than uni-assist!

 

4. Reasonable Extension of Deadlines

Unlike people with Ukrainian passports, we face stressful, short, and inconsistent deadlines to legalize our stays through study.

While we just arrived in this country mere months, weeks, or even days ago, we are recommended to apply several weeks beforehand (by approximately the end of May) for processing of uni-assist applications for the fall semester (which often have the deadline July 15). For some of us who would need to do a Studienkolleg (preparatory course) because our diplomas and certifications are not recognized in Germany, these deadlines can be even earlier.

The legal stay for those without Ukrainian passports until August 31, 2022 as determined by UkraineAufenthÜV is similarly not a sufficient amount of time for us to gather our documents, get finances, and meet the various, necessary requirements to apply for universities. Contradictorily, our stay under the current policy is shorter than the Berl-HZVO, § 2 Abs. 1 deadline of application of October 1 intended for people who are not legally considered equal to German students, for example.

We demand the extension of the UkraineAufenthÜV and university application deadlines to gather our basic needs in this country and meet further requirements!

 

5. Centralized Language Support

We receive little to no support regarding German and English language requirements for study.

The entirety of West African countries are not recognized as proof of English language sufficiency. We strongly condemn this, as most of us have spoken and read English our entire lives, and English is the official language for many countries (for example, Nigeria, Ghana, and more). For some of us who have completed their Bachelor’s in English, even this diploma is not recognized as language proficiency because the degree came from a non-Western country.

In most of Berlin’s university programs, we are required to meet a level of B2-C1 German language proficiency. Without centralized support that streamlines where we can study German, as well as financial support for us to fund these language studies, it is extremely difficult for us to even know where we can begin. It is impossible to reach that level of language proficiency when we have only been in Germany for a short time.

Most universities do not offer German language classes from A1 every semester, including this semester. We are forced to learn in a short amount of time, and with little to no resources, the minimum proficiency to be considered for language class enrollment.

We demand centralized, state-funded services that help us learn German, and for all universities to offer large and frequent German language classes from A1 for all!

We demand for all English language programs to be made readily available for us to browse, and to exempt the German language requirement for admission for courses that don’t require German!

We demand for teachers and courses that can be taught in English to do so, to ensure our classrooms are equally accessible for all!

 

6. Social, Psychological and Anti-Discrimination Services

Like everyone who has fled war, we experience the trauma and difficulties of leaving our lives behind. Beyond that, as students without Ukrainian passports who are predominantly Black, Indigenous, and people of color, we face extreme and unequal bureaucratic hurdles, the fear of imminent deportation, the difficulty of integrating into a foreign country, and discriminatory experiences of racial profiling.

We face hostile immigration staff in our attempts to legalize our stays and follow confusing bureaucratic procedures. Some of us have been wrongfully detained or forced into the asylum procedure without any resources or consent. Some of us have been wrongfully deported back to our home countries and do not know what to do. Some of us have even desperately returned to the unsafe situation in Ukraine, as we cannot deal with the unfair difficulties of staying in Germany.

Due to unequally applied laws, our experiences in Germany have been unwelcoming and stressful.

We are isolated from community spaces and access to social and psychological resources.

According to BerlHG § 5b Abs. 4, universities are meant to consider the extraordinary circumstances of international students with a history of migration. We call on the implementation of this consideration, because while both universities and state structures claim to practice anti-discriminatory behavior and laws, they are clearly not doing enough to support us in our precarious situations at the moment.

We demand all wrongful asylum requests to be annulled!

We demand for public officers in immigration structures to offer adequate, accessible, anti-discriminatory treatment as well as accurate information!

We demand state-funded complaint offices and accountability procedures that recompense wrongfully treated people!

We demand the coordinated activation of social, psychological, and anti-discrimination support structures to apply to us!

We urge for the change of Germany’s current discriminatory policies to meet our demands and realize the continuation and possibilities of our futures here. We situate our above list of demands within past and ongoing migrant, anti-racist struggles, and demand the use of all legal possibilities—such as those suggested by Flüchtingsrat and Migrationsrat for refugees and displaced international students—to support the situations for all third country nationals displaced by war, including foreign workers.

We condemn the social invisibility and precariousness for certain populations of people made vulnerable by unequal legal systems. We believe that migration is a human right and that education must be accessible to all.

Signed,

STUDENT COALITION FOR EQUAL RIGHTS

Anatomy of the German Far Right

The combination of electoral representation, a presence on the streets and support from the State is what makes the German Nazis still dangerous


29/05/2022

Based on a speech I gave to the Marxism 2022 Conference in Melbourne earlier this year. It was a panel discussion on the far right in Europe. I therefore spoke only about general trends. Here I have linked to more detailed articles, in English and German.

I will use three acronyms. AfD is the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’, which sits in the German parliament; PEGIDA, is the ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicisation of the Western World’, is a racist street movement; and the NSU, or ‘National Socialist Underground’ is a pro-Nazi cell which murdered migrants with state support.

It is important to discuss all three organisations to get an understanding of the German far right. In France, Marine Le Pen came within a whisker of the presidency, but she lacks a large street movement to back her up. The potential of a Nazi movement which combines parliamentary representation and street fighters is arguably even more worrying in Germany.

This is not to say that the growth of the German far right has gone uncontested. I conclude with examples of how their inexorable growth was not automatic, and if we organise a broad and militant anti-Nazi movement, we can stop them.

Alternative für Deutschland – Nazis in parliament?

The AfD was formed in 2013, initially as a neoliberal party against the EU. Original party leader Bernd Lucke was an economist, former advisor to the World Bank and long-time CDU member but left the AfD in 2015, saying that it had “fallen irretrievably into the wrong hands”.

The party made an electoral breakthrough in 2017, profiting from the polarisation of German society around the 2015 “refugee crisis” when over 1 million Syrian refugees were allowed to enter Germany. Much of German society welcomed the refugees, organising reception committees at stations. But there were enough insecure racists who became an easy target for the AfD.

At the 2017 election, the AfD received 12.6% of the vote, giving it 94 MPs. This made the AfD the third largest party in the German parliament. As the CDU and SPD formed a coalition government,  the AfD became the official parliamentary opposition.

In the elections last September, the AfD vote went down to 10.3%. There are two ways of looking at this result. On one hand, you could welcome the fact that the AfD parliamentary representation had gone down. On the other, over a tenth of the population showed itself prepared to regularly vote for a party where Nazis were increasingly winning hegemony.

The up-and coming star in the AfD, Björn Höcke, is party chief in Thüringen. Höcke is a proper Nazi, making provocative statements like “Christianity and Judaism are an antagonism” and “I don’t want Germany to have only a thousand-year past. I want Germany to also have a thousand-year future.”

Höcke is the leader of the Der Flügel (the wing) group inside the AfD. Der Flügel was officially disbanded in April 2020, after the Federal Office for the Protection of the German Constitution declared it to be a “guaranteed right-wing extremist endeavour against the liberal democratic basic order.” But its members remain active and Höcke still has political ambitions.

As Sabine Am Orde argued in the taz: “the AfD leadership has not drawn personal consequences for Höcke … and other Flügel leaders. They remain influential and powerful in the party and in office. Networks and dependencies will continue to have effect. You don’t lose the ability to organise majorities on which some national party leaders are dependent by just removing a Flügel logo, nor do you lose the extreme right wing ideology.”

Until now, the anti-Fascist Left has preferred to say that the AfD is not a Nazi party, but a party with Nazis in it. I think that this analysis still holds. This is not static nor is it definite that Nazis will not be able to take over the party in the relatively near future.

PEGIDA – a dangerous street movement

Unlike the AfD, there is no dispute about the Nazi background of the PEGIDA leadership. The street movement’s founder Lutz Bachmann was forced to stand down after photos were found of him posing as Hitler. Facebook discussions were also discovered of him describing migrants as “’cattle’, ‘scumbags’ and ‘trash’”

Nonetheless, PEGIDA mobilised tens of thousands, particularly in Eastern Germany. In December 2014, 15,000 joined the ‘pinstriped Nazis’ in an Islamophobic demonstration against “criminal foreigners” in Dresden. The following month, 25,000 demonstrated in the same city. Although they were met with counter-demonstrations attracting at least as many people, an Eritrean refugee was murdered on the night of the demonstration.

In the face of this opposition, PEGIDA was unable to sustain weekly mass mobilisations, but attempted a comeback in 2018. In October, on the 4th anniversary of the first demonstration thousands turned up for a “Monday stroll.” Police were accused of protecting the demo.

Querdenken and Coronaleugner – Covid brings a new wave of right wingers onto the streets

As Covid hit Germany, and Angela Merkel’s government prioritised protecting German industry over public safety, the far right saw an opportunity. A strange mixture of anti-Vaxxers, libertarians and open Nazis took part in a series of demonstrations against government restrictions. Not everyone on these demonstrations was a right-wing extremist: the organisers of the demos professed themselves “neither Right nor Left” and “open to everyone”.

This provided fertile soil for the far right. Sabine Volk from the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right noted that “Pegida was among the first groups to claim that it is ‘peaceful‘ activists, not elected representatives, who defend democracy. Not long into the pandemic, a large-scale anti-lockdown movement joined forces with Pegida.”

In a more comprehensive article, Volk noted “continuities and breaks in PEGIDA’s activism during the first wave of the pandemic”. She located PEGIDA as a “social movement organisation inside broader a right wing populist movement.” Voss concludes that “the PEGIDA organisers have used the opportunity to cultivate the image of a resistant political actor”.

In December 2021,Michale Nattke from the Kulturbüro Sachsen noted that “in Saxony we observed over half a year ago that the protests against the pandemic have been taken over step by step by organised Neo-Nazis.” Nattke believed that “we have a similar situation as with the Pegida protests. In Eastern Germany there is the potential that … mobilises exactly the people who were on the streets in 2014 and 2015.”

Protest researcher Dr. Piotr Kocyba noted the presence of PEGIDA and recognised familiar patterns: “I have the impression that I’m experiencing a déja-vu. … Such people are much more dangerous than the extremist fringe of society, because they develop a large mobilisation force, normalise extreme right wing ideas and are not to some extent stigmatized from the majority of society in the way that Neo-Nazis are.”

I would refine Dr. Kocyba’s analysis – it is not that everyone, or even the majority, of people on the Covid demos were neo-Nazis, but that the demonstrations led to a normalisation of the far right. They were able to gain significant influence on many of the demos and in the wider “Querdenker” (lateral thinker) movement.

In Wedding, North Berlin, where I live, the small Monday demonstrations consisted almost entirely of liberal hippies. Nonetheless we organised counter-demonstrations with the slogan “you’re marching with Nazis”. Whatever the individual views of the people on the protests, they were enabling a national movement which enabled the far right to gain influence and build a cadre on the streets.

The NSU Affair – State collaboration with Nazis

I will now move to the most shocking element of the story – the open collaboration of state forces with violent Nazis. Victor Grossman sets the scene: “NSU is the secret pro-Nazi cell which murdered ten men of Turkish or Greek background and a policewoman, blasted a Turkish-populated street with a bomb and robbed several banks. The two main NSU killers died, perhaps suicides, in the closing scenes of this tragic series of events.”

The initial reaction of the police was to harrass the victims’ families. The experience of Abdul Kerim Şimşek, whose father was one of the NSU’s victims was typical: “while his father was still dying, his mother had to go to the police station to make a statement. They asked if her husband was involved in criminal machinations, or if he had an affair or enemies.”

Günther Beckstein, the interior minister of Bavaria briefly considered a racist background. But the investigators assumed from the start that they would find the murderers in the (non-German) drug or mafia scene. The police sent drug-seeking sniffer dogs to the Şimşek family home and tapped their phone. The victims of the murders were made into suspects.

The press talked of a Turkish gang war, and the killings were labelled “Döner-Morden” (Döner murders). As Christian Fuchs reported in Der Spiegel: “over years the murders by the extreme right terror cell were labelled with this phrase. It is evidence of how long investigators and journalists were groping in the dark – but also of how racist prejudices resonated.”

In the end, it seems that the police should have been looking closer to home. V-Männer (police liaison officers) were, according to reporter Stefan Aust “extraordinarily closely involved” in the murders. Forty V-Leute (they weren’t all men) were NSU members, and took part in robberies and murders. One V-Mann was the leader of the violent Nazi group ‘Blood & Honour‘.

When the NSU suspects were raided, police destroyed evidence and provided weapons, at least one of which was present at the crime scene. NSU members were tipped off about forthcoming police raids. When 5 people were finally charged, they were all described as “Einzeltäter” (lone gunman).

The word “Einzeltäter” was to crop up again. When a gunman attacked first a synagogue, then a kebab shop in Halle in 2019, he was called an Einzeltäter. When another far right extremist attacked two shisha bars in Hanau in 2020, killing 9 people with migrant background, he was once more identified as an Einzeltäter.

The German press, the legal system and many politicians have much less problem conceiving of attacks being carried out by crazed individuals than accepting that Germany has a far right racism problem that has often been sustained by the State.

There is a solution: Learning from Dresden Nazifrei

This does not mean that the far right in Germany is on an inexorable rise. Nazi street forces have been stopped before, and they can be stopped again. Just 10 years ago, the largest Nazi demonstration in Europe took part in Dresden every year on the anniversary of that city’s bombing by Allied planes. In 2007 and 2009, 6,500 took part in explicit neo-Nazi demonstrations.

Mass blockades in 2010 and 2011 confronted the Nazis, and in 2012 they were not able to march at all. This was possible because of an alliance ‘Dresden Nazifrei‘, which was both broad and radical. It contained mainstream politicians like Bundestag president Wolgang Thierse (SPD) and the then young LINKE party, but it was absolutely committed to not giving a centimetre of the street to the Nazis.

Such an alliance may be required again soon. As I’ve documented above, the Nazis have not gone away, and have received some support from the German State. The demonstrations, first against refugees, more recently against the Corona measures – succeeded in mobilising at least part of society alongside the far right, especially in the East, which had suffered over 3 decades of neglect.

Less than a year ago, Germany voted in an SDP-Green-Liberal government which proved more eager to double Germany’s military budget than to solve the problems of a broken society. This gives Nazis new opportunities to offer simple solutions, based on nationality not solidarity. They must be stopped. They can be stopped! We must remain vigilant.

Socialists make electoral breakthrough in Victoria, Australia

Summary of the Victorian Socialists’ campaign in the recent Australian elections


28/05/2022

After the article we published this week on the Australian elections, here is some supplementary information about the Victorian Socialists, who were mentioned in the article.

The Victorian Socialists is an electoral alliance involving members of Socialist Alternative, Socialist Unity Caucus, and many independent socialists based in the southern Australian state of Victoria. It was formed in 2018 to contest the Victorian state election in November that year, where it fell just short of having someone elected to the state parliament. Details on the party’s formation and its results in the 2018 state election, and 2019 federal election, can be found here. In local council elections in 2020, VS member Jorge Jorquera was elected as a councillor for Maribyrnong in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

The following is an edited extract from an email sent to members of Victorian Socialists by party secretary Corey Oakley on Sunday 22 May detailing the results the party achieved in the election.

Across the eleven lower house seats we contested, 22,116 voters had given their first preference to Victorian Socialists when counting closed last night. With more counting to come, this is easily the largest number of votes for a socialist electoral project in many years in this country.

Once again we’ve shown that a socialist message of hope and resistance, which for decades has been pushed to the margins of Australian political life, can strike a chord with many thousands of people in some of the key working class heartlands of Melbourne.

It’s important to put our 2022 results in context. In the 2019 federal election, Victorian Socialists contested just three seats. We were pleased with our 2019 results—4.6 percent in Calwell, 4.5 percent in Wills and 4.2 percent in Cooper. In 2022, campaigning over 11 seats, we were always going to be massively stretched. We had significantly fewer campaigning resources in Calwell, for instance—both on the booths on election day, and in advance to knock on doors.

So it’s a terrific achievement that the first preference vote recorded for Jerome Small in Calwell is currently at 4.91 percent, with the large Craigieburn pre-poll booth still to report. At a couple of booths in Roxburgh Park we won 10 percent of the vote.

Other results in the north also held up well. Kath Larkin in Cooper is currently on 3.9 percent, Emma Black in Wills on 3.3 percent, and Colleen Bolger in Melbourne on 3.8 percent. In Scullin—where we didn’t have the resources to do much beyond letterboxing and a presence on some booths—Cameron Rowe is on 3.1 percent. The Scullin result includes booths like Lalor North where 7.4 percent of people voted socialist, and Thomastown Secondary where we won 5.8 percent of the vote.

In the western suburbs, Victorian Socialists has never run a candidate in a federal or state election. Though our local councillor Jorge Jorquera has raised the profile of VS with his consistent work, in most areas we’re starting from scratch. So it’s great to see Catherine Robertson currently on 5.4 percent of the vote in Fraser, a really good result for all the work put in by our campaigners. Two booths in Footscray reported over 10 percent for Catherine, with another five booths reporting over 7 percent.

Most of our campaigns in the west consisted of letterboxing and a small presence at the polling booths, engaging with voters who had never heard of us before. Belle Gibson in Gorton is on 2.5 percent, Andrew Charles in Gellibrand on 1.6 percent, Jack Hynes in Hawke on 1 percent, Claudio Uribe in Lalor on 1.8 percent, and Daniel Dadich in Maribyrnong is on 2.2 percent.

In each of these campaigns, our campaigners could find a sympathetic audience for a socialist project when we could engage with voters. For instance, 9.6 percent of voters at Deer Park voted for Belle Gibson, while 5.8 percent of everyone who voted at Tarneit West voted for Claudio Uribe. The sheer scale of the task meant that duplicating this kind of vote across the west was always going to be a challenge, however.

Of course, these raw numbers tell only one part of the story. In those numbers are the airport workers, aged care workers, students, construction workers, retail workers, warehouse workers and all sorts who have heard a socialist message, often for the first time in their lives, and who have responded by voting socialist.

We’ve put socialist politics on the map through large sections of the working class suburbs of Melbourne’s north and west for the first time in decades—or for the first time ever, in the case of the massive growth suburbs. We’ve done this through putting hundreds of thousands of leaflets in letterboxes, through knocking on tens of thousands of doors, and through countless thousands of conversations on doorsteps, in shopping malls, and especially on the voting booths.

In particular, the contribution of the 200 campaigners from Tamil and other refugee communities who were part of Aran Mylvaganam’s Senate campaign needs a very special mention. Most of these campaigners are systematically pushed to the margins of Australian society—but over the last few weeks and in particular yesterday they have played a crucial and inspirational role in rebuilding a militant, anti-racist, socialist current in this country.

Importantly, all of this work has built a platform the Victorian state election on November 26, where we’ll be aiming to achieve a breakthrough for the socialist left by getting a socialist elected to the Victorian upper house. Though we have plenty of work to do in sifting through the results and planning our campaign—and an enormous amount of work to do in the lead-up to November 26the results from our federal campaign give us confidence that it’s possible to achieve this task.

Of course, though we’re proud of our efforts, Victorian Socialists is under no illusion about the state of politics in this country. We’re celebrating the appalling Morrison government being tossed out of office. And it’s great that the Greens have picked up at least 2 lower house seats in Brisbane. But with a drab Labor government under Albanese determined to look like a pale imitation of the Liberals, and a surging far right vote, the urgency and importance of rebuilding a socialist current in Australian political life is clearer than ever.

 

That was the second Left Journalism Day School

Report back from the event on creating better left-wing journalism in Berlin. Spreefeld, 22nd May 2022


26/05/2022

Last Sunday, we met in Kreuzberg for the second Left Journalism Day School. This followed a Day School organised 6 months ago by theleftberlin website. The aim was to share information among people writing left-wing articles about socialist politics, and hopefully to win more collaborators for our website.

The Day School started with workshops given by Tom Wills from Radio Berlin International about making field reports for radio and by award winning film maker Tim Kelly about producing videos. Each talked about their experience in the field, followed by a discussion on how to apply what people have learned.

Taking Interviews

After lunch, Phil Butland from theleftberlin led a session on How to Take an Interview. You can see Phil’s presentation here.

Phil started by explaining why interviews are important for a website like theleftberlin, which largely depends on voluntary work. It enables to learn the perspective of an expert or someone centrally involved in a campaign, who may not have the time to write us an article, but often has half an hour free for a chat. It is also a format which is easier to read than most articles. Our research shows, that an audience is prepared to spend more time reading an interview, which is split into discrete sections than they are a “normal” article.

The first interviews on theleftberlin were taken by sending question to an interviewee and waiting for them to return written or recorded answers. This is the least time consuming activity for the interviewer, but it does put more burden on the interviewee, and it reduces the possibility of asking questions asking for clarification or more info on an interesting comment. For this reason, theleftberlin is moving to conducting most interviews face-to-face or online, which allows them to be more interactive.

This brought up the biggest single problem of interviews. If conducted properly, they are very work intensive for the person carrying out the interview, This is why theleftberlin is moving from interviews conducted by individuals to setting up teams which divide responsibility for different stages of the process. If you are interested in joining one of the teams, please contact us at team@theleftberlin.com.

Phil then went through the different stages in an interview (more detailed information in the presentation).

  • Find a suitable interviewee (suggestions often made after the weekly editorial meeting).
  • Contact the interviewee and agree when and where to meet (face-to-face or online)
  • Make a list of 8-10 questions to ask and send them to the interviewee before the interview. You may not end up asking these precise questions, but they give an idea of what you’d like to cover in the interview.
  • Record the interview and put it through transcription software. You then need to go through the transcription to correct transcription errors and remove hesitations and repetitions.
  • Edit down the transcription to a reasonable length. You may rearrange questions and answers to improve the flow.
  • Choose a title (usually the most compelling quote from the interview) and a subtitle (usually what the interview is about).
  • Always send the edited transcription to the interviewee for approval and always offer them final edit.
  • You are now ready to publish the interview.

Tom Wills then added some information about online interviews, which cannot be post-edited, which means, among other things, that the best interviewers and interviewees train themselves not to hesitate and to keep to the point.

The audience was then given an exercise – to prepare a set of questions for one of 8 interviewees currently on theleftberlin wishlist. The wishlist mainly contains the names of people who will either be speaking in Berlin soon or have specialist knowledge about an issue or a campaign which is currently in the news.

Storytelling and Research

Tina Lee, the Chief Editor of Unbias The News, then led a session on Storytelling and Research. You can see Tina’s presentation here.

Tina started by reminding us of the main points from her presentation at the First Left Journalism Dayschool: pick a catchy and unambiguous title for your article, start your story with a good anecdote, start by concentrating on a specific before moving out to the general picture, and finish your article by connecting it up with the start and showing which lessons (should have) been learned.

Tina explained how this works in practise by using examples from two recent articles from her Website – Elena Gagovska on Sexual Harrassment in North Macedonia, and Mahdi Garba and Modupe Abidakun on Vaccine Hesitancy in the Global South.

She insisted that stories should show, not tell – by using specific examples rather than dictating to the audience. You can also link different parts of information presented by highlighting the structural cause which connects them.

Tina also highlighted the importance of good research. Any issues that seem anomolous or possibly untrue should be fact checked, and evidence found to back them up. Unanswered questions in the middle of an article disrupt the flow – use hyperlinks to at least show that claims made in the article are based on proper research.

Tina finished off by introducing the concept of Google Dorking – how you can us Google to find the information you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for more information on political assassinations, just putting those 2 names into Google will only get you so far. Instead, think of real life examples of what you’re trying to research (eg Lincoln, Kennedy, Gandhi) to get more comprehensive answers.

Futher Research

After the Day School, Tina sent us the following links for people wanting to follow up her advice.

  • To get news sent to your in-box, sign up for Newsletters by organisations like Statewatch and Lobby Control
  • For a quick guide to using tweetdeck for monitoring, watch this video.
If you want to follow international news media, Tina recommends among others the following sites:

Summing up and What next?

We finished off by looking at the plans for theleftberlin in the next half year and beyond. Finally, Radio Berlin International had a live broadcast from the Event. Thanks to Magda and everyone from Palästina Spricht for their cooperation.

Our main project is setting up teams of interviewers, as explained above. If you are interested in helping here, please contact us. We are also looking for editors, translators, people active on social media and anyone who can help in any other way. Also Radio Berlin International always welcomes new presenters.

You are also invited to the open Editorial Meetings which we hold every Sunday night at 7pm. Because of the Traditional Armenian Lunch on Sunday May 29th, the next meeting will be in or around Bilgisaray, Oranienstraße 45. Please try to be there by 18.55.

We are hoping to have another Day School in around 6 months. Here are some of the things that we discussed getting even better next time:

  • Even more exercises in which the audience can try things in practise.
  • Better way of introducing new people – e.g. an exercise before people attend the event.
  • Look at the possibility of a week-end long School (may need change of venue or funding model).
  • Better use of space for simultaneous workshops to allow people to be loud without disturbing the other workshop.

If you were at the Day School and have further feedback, or if you have any other suggestions, please contact us at team@theleftberlin.com.

Australian election: Conservatives ousted as voters desert major parties

The main victors were the parties outside the two traditional parties of government. What happens next now depends on extra-parliamentary work


25/05/2022

Elections to Australia’s federal parliament took place on Saturday 21 May. After nine years in power, the country’s Coalition Government, an alliance between the conservative Liberal Party and the rural-based National Party, was ousted. It saw a drop in its primary vote of more than 5 percent and lost a slew of seats (Results for major parties in the election can be found here). This was a public judgement of its’ agenda of tax cuts for the well-off, wage cuts for workers, inaction on housing, cold-hearted neglect of the elderly, and indifference to climate change.

The defeat was also a judgement of the actions of Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister. In December 2019 he holidayed in Hawaii as bushfires destroyed thousands of homes; he failed to order enough vaccines and rapid antigen tests to deal with the pandemic; he attempted to sabotage the highly popular Western Australian border closure as COVID-19 raged in the eastern states; he did nothing to counter the culture of sexual abuse in parliament and his idea of governing amounted to little more than posing for photos.

Australia’s billionaires never had it so good as under the Coalition. Their fortunes rose to stratospheric heights. The Coalition showered money on private schools. After promising to follow the recommendations from the ‘Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry’, Morrison quietly shelved virtually all of them, protecting the Liberal Party’s rich mates. It was the same with the Royal Commission into aged care, which lifted the lid on the appalling situation in privately run facilities. Virtually nothing has changed since the Commission handed down its report.

The Morrison government threw tens of billions of dollars in subsidies to business during the pandemic. Even when those businesses in many cases were continuing to make substantial profits.

The poor were shafted under successive Liberal prime ministers. JobSeeker (unemployment) payments are at scandalously low levels. Welfare recipients were persecuted under the ‘robodebt program’, which generated fake debts and drove tens of thousands into stress and some to suicide. As inflation began to run hot, the government could only offer a future of endless wage cuts. Ministers told workers looking for wage relief that they should just get a better paid job, and those suffering rental stress that they should just buy a house. Students were slugged with big increases in university fees.

Through it all, the military was expanded, and the Morrison government began to ramp up threats of war against China. Hundreds of billions that should go to welfare, health and education are instead going to building up the means of mass destruction.

So good riddance to the Morrison government.

No great mandate for the Australian Labor Party

The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has won office, but hardly received a ringing endorsement. Its primary vote has sunk to an historic low. It won at least seven seats, but in large part only because of Greens’ preferences. Only a strong performance in Western Australia allowed it to potentially form a majority government. In several outer suburban seats in Melbourne, Labor’s primary vote fell by double digits.

Labor’s primary vote is even lower than its’ 2019 prior low. That is an indictment on the ALP’s rightward shift since losing that election. The conclusion the party leaders took from that loss was that they must retreat from offering even the mildest program of redistribution to the working class. Out the window went policies aimed at tackling tax breaks for the middle classes and wealthy—franking credits, capital gains tax concessions, negative gearing. Out went any rhetoric about attacking the top end of town. Out went any hint that Labor might seriously deal with climate change and the fossil fuel industry.

Under Labor leader Anthony Albanese and shadow Treasurer Jim Chalmers, the rhetoric was to help the “aspirational” voter. Soon after the 2019 election, Labor backed the Morrison government’s program of tax cuts for the well-off and threw its support behind the Carmichael coal mine and the opening of the Galilee Basin in central Queensland. This reaction to defeat explains why Labor had nothing to offer. As Chalmers told the Press Club just days before the current election: “We want to be a pro-business, pro-employer Labor Party”.

The low combined primary vote for the two major parties indicates significant and growing dissatisfaction with the political status quo. From 1946 until the early 1990s, the two parties racked up 90 percent or more of the vote, and in the following two decades, at least 80 percent. At this election, the two parties won the support of just 68 percent of the electorate.

Success for different minor parties

The beneficiaries of this shift away from the major parties vary enormously. The Greens benefited from declining loyalty to the ALP. They received their highest ever primary vote results in the Senate and the House in this election, beating their previous best in 2010. The party showed a positive swing in its only lower house seat of Melbourne, won two seats in Brisbane and may yet claim another. The Greens also picked up several extra Senate spots.

The party’s pitch was left of Labor: with policies to tax big business and the mining industry to fund dental and mental health care in Medicare, free childcare, increased public school funding, the wiping of student debt and the construction of one million new homes, along with halting all new coal mines and gas projects. Its strong vote was one of the few things to welcome on election night, showing that over a million voters are looking for a party more progressive than Labor.

In possibly the most significant electoral development, the so-called teal independents destroyed much of the Liberals’ parliamentary representation in wealthy areas in Sydney and Melbourne. This exposed the deep rift in the Australian ruling class’s preferred party of government. Tens of thousands of relatively affluent, professional middle-class voters – disproportionately women – turned on their traditional party to protest its misogyny and refusal to seriously address climate change. It is impossible to tell how permanent this schism is, and whether the teals can form a stable parliamentary bloc.

The far right also picked up votes from the major parties and represent an increasing problem. One Nation stood in many more seats than in 2019. Combined with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party (UAP), the two boosted their primary vote by 2.7 percent to 9.2 percent. Adding the Liberal Democrats and other far right micro parties takes the far-right vote to 11.7 percent, up 5.0 percentage points since the last election. Worryingly, the far right did well not just in their regional strongholds and traditional Liberal suburbs, but also increased their vote in traditional Labor-voting working-class outer suburbs. In Sydney and Melbourne, they picked up 15-20 percentage points. Unsurprisingly, the UAP lost Liberal Party recruit Craig Kelly’s lower house seat, but the party might yet claim a Senate seat in Victoria.

Finally, the Victorian Socialists (VS), openly championed the working class against the billionaires. They put up a decent fight in eleven seats theyn contested across northern and western suburbs of Melbourne. Fielding 700 volunteers, VS won more than 20,000 first preference votes when the counting of votes closed on election night. This is easily the largest number of votes for a socialist electoral project in many decades. In Calwell in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, VS notched up just shy of 5 percent of the primary votes and in Fraser in the west, 5.4 percent. Elsewhere in the north, VS fought off stiff competition for the left vote to win 3-4 percent. In some cases, VS candidates outpolled those from the far right. In November, VS will be repeating this enormous effort in the Victorian state election. (More details about the VS can be found in an article appearing on theleftberlin soon).

What happens now?

The newly elected Labor government offers little to the millions who wanted the Morrison government tossed out. Even though Labor’s leaders claim the party will defend workers’ living standards, they refuse to push for a real increase to the minimum wage. They will do nothing to keep a lid on prices. They will do nothing to control rents or expand public housing. And they will do nothing to help workers build union power to fight for higher wages on the job.

All the pressure now is the other way. With government debt ballooning from AUD$273 billion in 2013 to a forecast $1 trillion next year, and with interest rates rising, the bosses and their representatives in the financial press are demanding urgent action to cut government spending. For years, they were urging the government to do something to lift wages, now they are saying that wages must be cut to curb inflation. Expect public spending cuts from this Labor government in coming years. And don’t expect the ALP to go after the rich to do their bit. Labor is committed to tax cuts in 2024 that will benefit those on incomes of more than $200,000 to the tune of billions of dollars.

With the world economy now looking shakier than for some years, we can anticipate that a Labor government will do the bosses’ bidding in enforcing sacrifices for the working class. To prove their commitment to the capitalists during the election campaign, Albanese and Chalmers pointed to the experience of previous Labor governments. In particular to those of Hawke and Keating, when Labor brought the union leaders, bosses and government together to screw the working class. Or, as Labor’s leaders put it, to “lift productivity and profits”. This is just what they have in mind for us now.

Nor can we expect to see Labor take serious action to deal with climate change. Labor is committed to the fossil fuel industries and its carbon emissions targets are a joke.

While Labor offers nothing and as the economic circumstances for millions get tougher, we can expect to see growing dissatisfaction with a government with weak foundations for which only one-third of the electorate voted for. The right will undoubtedly try to capitalise on this dissatisfaction. With many of the so-called Liberal moderates losing their seats, with Peter Dutton keeping his, and with the Nationals holding up their vote, the balance in the Coalition will shift to the right.

Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin wasted no time arguing in Murdoch’s Sunday tabloids that the Liberals must move further right to reconnect to their supporters in the outer suburbs who had abandoned them for the far-right parties. The far right will be emboldened by their experience in this election. If they can cohere their forces, may be able to mobilise people in protests against a federal Labor government. They did this in Victoria in opposition to lockdowns and vaccine mandates late last year and earlier this year.

The threat from the right must be combatted. If the Albanese government will not lift a finger to defend workers’ living standards in the face of rising inflation, unions will have to strike. That will involve an argument in unions to convince fellow workers we can organise and fight; but also against our union leaders who have done their best to turn unions into electoral machines to get the vote out for Labor. The union leaders have stood by for years ,while the bosses and governments have got away with whittling away jobs and workplace rights. That has to end.

To wage such a fight, we need to build a bigger socialist current in workplaces and on university campuses. The growth of the far-right vote at this election shows that other forces will take advantage of the situation. We have to fight for the politics of solidarity and socialism, against the politics of division and despair – to point a way forward for workers and students everywhere.

A version of this article originally appeared on Red Flag. This has been edited for an international audience.