Australia Institute Live: Albanese government condemns planned neo-Nazi march, ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle spared jail time. As it happened.

The bill Tony Burke introduced on Monday, with very little fanfare, continues to raise a lot of alarms in legal and human rights spaces.

Human rights groups have come together to condemn the home affairs legislation, which allows for easier resettlement of non-citizens in third countries like Nauru, as “yet another baseless attack on the rights of migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum”.

In a move the organisations say shows blatant disregard for the law, the Albanese Government has
introduced legislation that would strip migrants and refugees of their legal rights when sending them to third countries like Nauru, legislating their way out of cases currently before the courts.

The Bill is yet another attempt at rushed law-making, this time stripping protections from migrants and refugees that make sure bungled bureaucratic decisions that affect people’s safety and family integrity can be challenged. It is designed to limit government accountability for making sure those decisions are fair and based in fact.

The Bill also has a retrospective effect – validating incorrect decisions that were made in the past,
preventing the right for these decisions to be corrected. The Bill even allows the government to continue to prosecute criminal charges that were brought as a result of incorrect decisions.

Jana Favero, Deputy CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre said:

The decisions are serious and lifelong. We are talking about people being permanently deported to
places like Nauru. Decisions like this must not be made without fundamental legal safeguards. This
legislation is clearly designed to manipulate the law so that the Government is not accountable to the courts.”

If the idea of people being deported without the ability or right to challenge the decision makes you think of ICE and Donald Trump – you’d be right. The Albanese government is setting a dangerous precedent of removing people’s legal rights to question when the government has made serious mistakes.”

One of the things we still have managed to reckon with (and there are so many) is the inequality between the regions and the city.

AAP covers some of that here:

Aged care, mental health and disability workers are being priced out of country towns amid soaring housing costs, further entrenching cycles of vulnerability and disadvantage in regional Australia.

Workforce shortages across the community sector were the single greatest factor influencing inequitable access to support services, according to research by Anglicare Australia released on Thursday.

Recruiting staff to rural and remote areas, which experience higher levels of social  disadvantage than the cities, has been hampered by both the high cost of housing and low availability.

“In many regional towns, limited housing stock drives up rents, pricing out essential workers,” said the In Every Community report.

“In mining regions, for example, community workers compete with highly paid mining staff for scarce accommodation, making relocation unviable.”

The shortage of essential staff has created long waiting lists in many regions, while some community services have been forced to shut down, according to the report based on a sector survey and interviews.

Vulnerable people were then forced to travel hundreds of kilometres for support, take limited forms of public transport or go without.

“This disparity between metropolitan and regional service access entrenches inequality,” the report said.

“People in rural and remote communities face higher levels of disadvantage but have less access to the very supports designed to address it.

“Workforce shortages therefore perpetuate cycles of vulnerability and exclusion.”

Outreach service providers in regional areas were also spending thousands of dollars each month on the rising costs of fuel, electricity and compliance activities.

The price of petrol and long distances were also hindering access to support.

“Young people are particularly affected, as they often rely on parents or carers who may not be available due to other commitments,” the report said.

“The result is a cycle in which those most in need of support are also those least able to reach it.”

While community organisations were developing proactive strategies, such as rural workforce incentives, fuel vouchers and transport allowances, public funding often did not reflect the true cost of delivery.

The report called for several reforms, including a dedicated national rural workforce strategy, subsidised housing for key workers and long-term funding models to give employees stability.

“These are vital services – disability support, mental health care, aged care, and family services,” Anglicare executive director Kasy Chambers said.

“But instead of being funded to meet local need, they’re too often treated as one-size-fits-all.”

Given the Trump’s administration joy in embarrassing allies, you have to start wondering when enough is enough.

If ever. All those happy snaps released yesterday? ‘Not a meeting’ says Marles’ US counterpart, in this SMH report.

In news sure to get senior economist Matt Grudnoff’s goat, Money.com reports that the bank of mum and dad is now being used to pay for private health insurance premiums.

The finance website said its research found 48% of parents of adult children paid their premiums through family health insurance, while 30% contributed and 22% covered their whole portion of the family policy.

Who are these parents and how do you find them?

Michaelia Cash’s complaints against the bill seem two fold – one that protest will cause inconveniences – which, yes, is the point. And two, she assumes that if protest is protected to the extent David Shoebridge and the Greens are aiming for, then everyone will choose to protest every time their coffee isn’t served right, and start burning cars in the street.

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of why people protest and what they hope to achieve. The idea that protest is only allowed if it is convenient and doesn’t actually get in anyone’s way or put anyone out is ridiculous. This sanitised idea of protest is one which has taken hold in recent years, leading to poll results like this. Given the hundreds of thousands of people who are turning out across the country, which has forced the government to start paying attention, perhaps they didn’t “fail dismally” after all.

You are going to be shocked to learn that Michaelia Cash and the Liberals are against it. (We have some thoughts which we will outline in the next post)

Cash:

…The Australian people need to understand that (a) they already have the right to protest in Australia,
and (b) let’s call this bill what it really is. It’s been put forward by the Australian Greens for this reason—to give legal cover to the Greens activist base.
For every small business listening in to this broadcast, these are the same groups who block highways, chain themselves to machinery, disrupt small businesses and—listen to this, mums and dads of Australia—even prevent emergency vehicles from getting through when they need to.

This bill has got nothing to do with the right to protest. Let me tell you what this bill does. We’re going to go through a few of the clauses. When you go through the clauses you actually understand what this bill does. It is basically seeking to legislate the right to cause chaos. Senator Shoebridge says that this is an essential reset of the right-to-protest laws in Australia. It depends on what you mean by reset, doesn’t it?

I would have thought that the right to cause chaos and basically have a society based on anarchy is possibly not something that the Australian people will accept.

Let’s have a look at the bill. To say that it’s an absurd bill is an understatement. It is designed to take away safety and civility from our streets, in favour of the Greens’ activist support base. Let’s have a look at what the bill actually does. When you look at the bill, as opposed to listening to the comments of Senator Shoebridge, it is a one-clause bill of rights. Let’s be very clear about what that does. The right is one that enshrines protest rights in a completely unfettered and unprecedented manner. It’s never been done before in any international human rights instrument or in any legislative charter of rights.

I want to read the definition in the bill. Once you read the definition in the bill,
you basically know that you can only go downhill from there. This is what section 5 says:
In this Act: protest includes the following:
(a) actions that are political in nature;
(b) actions that are disruptive, or that seek to be disruptive.

Again, for those listening in to the broadcast, this is what the Greens want to do. They basically want to give, by this bill, legal cover to their activist base—those same groups, as I said, who block highways and cause you inconvenience, chain themselves to machinery and disrupt small businesses. God help any small business—they don’t need any more disruption; it’s bad enough under the Albanese government

David Shoebridge:

The bill ensures that excessive penalties, such as lengthy prison sentences and exorbitant fines, are considered unnecessary and disproportionate limitations on the right to protest. It reads them down. The bill provides that, where state or territory laws conflict with this federal protection, those laws will be invalid, and they’ll be invalid to the extent of the inconsistency. This bill is an essential reset. Some might criticise it as being too reasonable and to proportionate a protection of the fundamental right to protest. I’ll face those criticisms.

What we’re doing here today is placing the protections that the federal government agreed to when it entered into these international agreements into domestic law.
I want to place on the record one person who was critical for me, my office and my team. I want to give a shout-out to my chief of staff, Kym Chapple, for the enormous work she’s done on this. I want to point out one person who was critical for getting this work done, former Greens leader Bob Brown.

Some 18 months ago I caught up with Bob in Hobart. Bob, the Tasmanian Greens and countless forest protectors in Tasmania have been putting themselves on the line to protect that old growth forest. They have seen firsthand how those state laws in Tasmania were designed to criminalise the very act of protecting a forest and standing up for those beautiful natural assets, arresting protesters and grabbing them, even before they get to the forest, on public land. I want to thank him for his courage, his support and his pressure in bringing this bill to the chamber today.

We call on all parties in this place, who live and breathe only because we have a functioning democracy, to join us today to legislate for the right to peaceful and essential protest

Yesterday, we brought you David Shoebridge’s right to protest legislation which he introduced into the senate, with the aim of enshrining the democratic right to protest in Australia.

State governments have used anti-genocide protests as an excuse to crack down on protest rights all around the country.

Shoebridge said if that wasn’t stopped, Australians could lose one of the tenets of their democracy. Here is part of the speech he gave when introducing the bill:

A few short weeks ago I and, I think, all of my Greens colleagues across the country joined thousands of people— 300,000 of whom walked across the Harbour Bridge—in an historic march for a free Palestine and an end to genocide. In that moment, I saw solidarity and the possibility for a better world. I saw people of all ages, all abilities, all backgrounds uniting in the driving rain to stand up for conscience and to end the suffering of the people of Gaza.

But where I saw solidarity and possibility, where I saw hope, where I saw my beautiful hometown of Sydney come together for peace and for humanity, the New South Wales Labor Party just saw a problem. Like too many state and territory governments, New South Wales Labor sees protest not as a fundamental part of our democracy, not as a human right, not as the most powerful tool for driving progress in societies; they saw the protest as an irritant—as a political problem. They would far rather we had not marched.

They would have liked Sydneysiders to stay at home, watch their Netflix and passively let governments fail to oppose a genocide. They would rather our voices had not been heard. They want to keep power in the walls of parliament and in the offices of police commissioners they appoint, and they desperately want to stop power being exercised in our streets and in our workplaces, as we come together as people with good conscience who care about the future

Amnesty International Australia and the Centre for Non-Violence have announced the end of their relationship with healthcare and community sector super fund HESTA over its fossil fuel investments.

It’s part of a growing push to have big funds divest from fossil fuel, given the impacts on the environment and people’s health.

Jesuit Social Services has maintained its relationship but is advocating directly to HESTA to raise pressure on oil and gas companies Woodside and Santos to end their oil and gas expansion plans.

Brett Morgan, the Superannuation Funds Campaign Lead for Market Forces said HESTA has more than 1 million members and nearly $97bn in assets under its management and could divest.

HESTA has disrespected its one million members by supporting Santos’ climate plan, which is consistent with catastrophic levels of global heating.

Woodside and Santos have been on HESTA’s watchlist for nearly three years so it’s high time for the fund to stop failing its members and publish a concrete escalation plan detailing how it will hold these oil and gas companies to account.”

Amnesty International Australia has removed HESTA as its default super provider in its enterprise bargaining agreement, as has the Victorian based Centre for Non-Violence..”

Ok, one more bit of Midwinter Ball news – Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes a Court was the highest bidder at the auction to be flown by Sussan Ley in her plane to a pub for lunch and then watch some sheep shearing. He can take a friend, so he plans on taking a climate scientist, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.