Australian Senate inquiry highlights worsening problem of children “refusing” to attend school

Erika Zimmer

The Australian federal Senate has for several months held an inquiry, “The national trend of school refusal and related matters,” with the findings to be published later this month. Submissions and testimonies provided to the inquiry have shed light on yet another serious problem that has emerged within the crisis-stricken public education system—the inability or unwillingness of large numbers of children to regularly attend school.

Those Who Disappear: the Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about [Photo: University of Melbourne]

The exact scale of school avoidance is unknown, as no national standardised data is kept. One 2019 report, “Those Who Disappear: the Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about,” authored by University of Melbourne researchers, found: “Conservative estimates are that at least 50,000 children and young people of school age have detached from any educational program or institution, across the country at any given time.”

Other statistics suggest this number may just be the tip of an emerging iceberg.

Megan Gilmore, the chief executive of the Missing School organisation, which works to raising awareness of the educational issues facing children who miss school because of critical or chronic illness, spoke to the Senate inquiry panel. She cited another study that estimated that 1.2 million students across the country—that is, a quarter of the estimated 4 million children enrolled in Australian schools—“may be in a well-being, medical or disability crisis serious enough to affect their attendance and educational outcomes.”

A 2017 study by the Grattan Institute reported that a staggering 40 percent of Australian students were disengaged from learning and falling two years behind their peers.

Submissions to the Senate inquiry pointed to the complex and diverse reasons for school avoidance, such as bullying, safety, and experience with disabilities and mental health issues including post-traumatic stress disorder and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Importantly, testimonies also raised the impacts of an increasingly narrow school curriculum and the pressure to attain high academic scores.

A parent Facebook group, “School Can’t,” founded in 2012, changed its name from “School Refusal Australia” because the term refusal implied kids were simply being obstinate. “But it goes a lot deeper than that,” Louise Rogers, an administrator of the group, explained. “Children are experiencing distress and they don’t know what to do with it.”

Professor Kitty te Riele from the Australian Association for Flexible and Inclusive Education commented, “It’s essential that schools operate in ways that fit kids rather than expecting kids to fit in with them. Specialist schools can provide a possible solution but cost and location are prohibitive for most families.”

While school avoidance occurs across all socio-economic groups, the public system is the least able to meet the needs of its students. The submission from the Australian Secondary Principals Association stated, “government schools are not funded at a level which matches the mental, social and well-being needs of their students.”

An empty Australian school class room. [Photo: University of Melbourne]

The decades-long cutbacks to funding government schools are bipartisan Labor and Liberal Party policy. Between 2009 and 2018, total income to private schools rose by 16.9 per cent but by just 2.1 per cent for public schools. The preferential funding for private schools has continued with the Labor government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Its latest budget cut real spending for public schools while continuing the resource advantage for private and Catholic schools.

Other submissions to the Senate inquiry pointed out that only one-third of children with mental illness receive professional help at school. Only 4 percent of primary schools in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, have a school counsellor on site daily. Only half of all children aged 4-11 years who have a mental illness receive any form of treatment. Nationally, one counsellor is funded per 800 to 900 students.

Chronic underfunding in government schools has led to a rise in private school enrolments and concentrations of disadvantage in the public system. Of all public school enrolments, 46 percent of students are classed as either disadvantaged, low socioeconomic background, indigenous, disabled or living in a remote area. The equivalent proportion in private schools is just 20 percent.

Inquiry submissions noted the inflexibility and narrowness of the curriculum. The introduction of the high-stakes National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests in 2009 by the previous Labor government has led to public schools becoming testing factories, increasing stress levels for students, parents and teachers alike.

Dianne Giblin, CEO of the Australian Council of State Schools Organisation told the Senate, “Some of our kids, particularly our ASD and autistic kids are very creative… very artistic and very musical… (but) we tend to worry about their literacy and numeracy.”

Professor Jim Watterston , co-author of the “Those Who Disappear: The Australian education problem nobody wants to talk about,” pointed to the disincentives for schools to accept high needs students. He noted that they “often become collateral damage in the quest for higher academic performance and enhanced reputation.” Watterston cited one school that had attempted to re-engage students but had its government funding reduced because the school’s literacy and numeracy test results were not reaching requirements.

Several submissions and testimonies noted the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple studies have detailed the rise in mental health issues among young people since 2020.

Missing School’s Mary Gilmore told the Senate about the experience of one child: “Owen is a student in year 9 with ASD and anxiety who, after COVID, was too anxious to go to school, missing over a year. His self-esteem plummeted, his anxiety from missing classes grew; and he stopped eating enough, lost muscle tone and eventually could no longer leave home at all. Owen is now non-verbal.”

Powerful sections of the ruling elite have sought to exploit the youth mental health crisis to rail against lockdowns and other necessary public health restrictions. The real issue is that big business and finance capital want to ensure no further measures that impinge on the generation of profit—temporary school closures have been denounced by corporate and media figures because they necessarily involved the removal of children’s parents from their workplaces. Last year, the “Shergold Review,” which was promoted by the press, insisted that schools must remain open in any future pandemic.

The issue is not simply lockdowns, as is asserted by the establishment. Instead, it is the impact of a pandemic, for which the governments had not prepared, on top of the systematic defunding of public education and healthcare over decades. To the extent that issues emerged with online learning, it was yet another symptom of this assault on public education, together with the consequences of rampant social inequality.

The political establishment’s expressed concern for young people’s wellbeing amounts to nothing but hot air. Nowhere is any consideration made of the terrible mental health consequences that would have accompanied unchecked COVID infections in 2020, including through countless children being orphaned as a consequence of pre-vaccine mass infection. Likewise there has been no consideration of how proper public resourcing for online psychological services and related supports could have minimised the challenges experienced by young people during lockdown periods.

It can be safely anticipated that when the Senate report on school refusal is published on June 21, the Labor, Liberal and Green parliamentarians on the panel will not include any investigation of the crisis of the public education system nor properly address the shortfall of psychologists and other support services. The ruling elite is responsible for the disaster in the public education system that has fueled the phenomenon of “school can’t,” and it will not implement measures leading to its solution.

The destruction of an independent judiciary in Ukraine

Maxim Goldarb

An independent judiciary is one of the fundamental features and principles of bourgeois democracy. As far back as in the 18th century, Charles Montesquieu clearly outlined the division of state branches of power into three: legislative, executive and judicial, and argued each of them should be independent of the others.

In turn, any regime that tries to become dictatorial, first of all makes efforts to destroy the independence of the judiciary.

Over the past 10 years, the judicial system of Ukraine has undergone four cardinal reforms, countless changes, and judges have undergone endless attestations and recertifications, dismissals, rotations and even persecution. The attempts of the authorities to destroy the remnants of judicial independence and completely subjugate the judiciary have reached their apogee during the presidency of Volodymyr Zelensky.

Back in 2021, Zelensky tried to take control of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine (CCU), a judicial body that evaluates the constitutionality of decisions of the president and parliament. In 2020, the Constitutional Court declared the judicial reform which was initiated by Zelensky and subsequently adopted by the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) to be partially unconstitutional. The CCU also declared several articles of the Law “On the Prevention of Corruption” unconstitutional. All this provoked anger on the part of Zelensky and threats from his office against the judges of the Constitutional Court.

The president does not have the authority to dismiss judges of the Constitutional Court. They are supposed to be independent, and decisions on early termination of the powers of judges are taken only by the Constitutional Court itself, in a few cases expressly stipulated in the Constitution.

However, in order to remove judges not under his control from the court, the president issued a decree in March 2021 by which he tried to dismiss the head of the Constitutional Court Alexander Tupitsky and judge Alexander Kasminin. At the same time, Zelensky issued a decree canceling the presidential decrees from 2013, by which these judges, in accordance with the Constitution, were appointed judges of the Constitutional Court. This criminally exceeded his powers and grossly violated the law.

US President Joe Biden and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev. [Photo: @POTUS Twitter]

The illegality of such actions by Zelensky was so obvious and blatant that the Supreme Court recognized them as illegal and canceled the relevant decrees.

In retaliation for this, on May 27, 2022, at the request of the prosecutors of the Office of the Prosecutor General, the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Tupitsky, was put on the international wanted list on charges of—attention!—a supposedly illegal departure from Ukraine in March 2022, although there is no legal basis whatsoever for such a charge. 

The very wording of the groundless accusations against the head of the Constitutional Court testifies to the obvious involvement of the authorities in this case of illegal persecution of the judge. Clearly, the Zelensky government sought to create a precedent to intimidate any other Ukrainian judge who is trying to go against the president. 

The work of the Constitutional Court was, in fact, blocked in 2022. And no one, neither the citizens of Ukraine nor the subjects of constitutional appeal, can actually use their right to apply to the Constitutional Court to check the constitutionality of presidential decrees and parliamentary laws.

In an even more extreme case, the authorities attacked the District Administrative Court of Kiev (OASK), whose judges opposed acting as servants of the president’s office. The OASK was the court responsible for considering the legality of acts of the highest officials of the state, including the president.

Thus, the District Administrative Court at one time canceled the decision to increase electricity tariffs; declared it illegal to increase the price of gas for the population; canceled the decision to rename Moskovsky Prospect and General Vatutin Avenue in Kiev into Stepan Bandera Avenue and Roman Shukhevych Avenue, respectively, in honor of the leaders of Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis; designated the symbols of the SS “Galicia” division as Nazi symbols; and made many other decisions objectionable to the authorities.

Then, on December 13, 2022, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine voted for bills No. 5369, developed by the office of the president, on the liquidation of the Kiev District Administrative Court, and No. 5370, on the formation of the Kiev City District Administrative Court instead. In this way, the president and parliament simply eliminated an independent court.

The Kiev City District Administrative Court, created by the new law, has not yet begun its work. As a result, citizens are effectively denied the opportunity to appeal against decisions of the president and other higher authorities that restrict their rights.

Moreover, two key bodies that make decisions on the appointment of judges are not working at all any more. In particular, the High Qualifications Commission of Judges (HQJC), due to changes in legislation adopted in November 2019, had not been working for 26 months by February 24, 2022.

In addition, a very important constitutional body, the High Council of Justice (HJC), was paralyzed, because 10 of its members all resigned on February 22, 2022, two days before the beginning of the war. About 60 state functions, which they collectively carried out, were stopped. The HJC is the body responsible for the appointment of judges and may punish and dismiss judges. Almost the entire judicial system is in the hands of this body.

The reason for the collective resignation of 10 members from the High Council of Justice was the creation by the Zelensky government of the so-called Ethics Council. This was supposedly designed to establish the compliance of a candidate for the position of a member of the High Council of Justice with “the criteria of professional ethics.” But half of this Ethical Council consists of foreign citizens from Western countries. This was openly demanded by the authorities of the United States and other Western countries in a clear effort to control the judicial system of Ukraine through their representatives in the Ethics Council.

The High Council of Justice quite rightly insisted that the powers of the Ethics Council have no constitutional basis. Moreover, according to the Constitution, citizens of other countries generally do not have the right to participate in the formation of public authorities in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the war, the authorities, hiding behind the concept of “military secrets,” also began to actively close access to citizens to the register of court decisions. On February 24, 2022, the State Judicial Administration, the body responsible for the operation of the register and the reflection of court decisions in it, completely closed access to the register. It was resumed in June 2022, but human rights activists found that almost all criminal convictions over the past three years have disappeared from public access. Thus, for example, in the Kharkiv region, only 30 sentences for 2022 remained in the court register, and only 19 for the whole of 2021. If you believe the court register, then for the whole of 2020, all the courts of the Kharkiv region (with a population of more than 2 million people) issued only four verdicts, which is clearly impossible.

On December 21, 2022, human rights organizations filed an open appeal with the State Judicial Administration (SCA), in which they demanded it stop the practice of restricting access to documents in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions, to restore access to the adopted court decisions and to ensure the timely submission of procedural documents to the register.

The SCA did not have the authority to seize open-access court decisions just because they had data on the location of legal entities—public authorities, as well as critical infrastructure. This is a direct violation of the Law of Ukraine “On Access to Court Decisions.” The Unified State Register of Court Decisions is an important source for journalists who investigate corruption offenses and abuses of power, which become doubly dangerous for the country during the war. In addition, access to court decisions is a daily necessity in the activities of lawyers, law enforcement officers, public activists and human rights defenders.

As a result of this severe pressure exerted by the authorities on the judiciary, a lot of absurd and frankly illegal decisions are made by courts. For example, people are sentenced for “unpatriotic and anti-state” mobile phone conversations, and all opposition parties in Ukraine were banned on the basis of fabricated, blueprinted judgments.

In this way, the courts have been transformed into tools for the suppression of democratic rights and dissent. Particularly severe sentences are passed against anti-war activists. One of the most infamous such cases is the story of the pacifist Ruslan Kotsaba. Several years ago (2015), he publicly called for an end to the war in the Donbas and for a refusal to mobilize. Kotsaba was then accused of treason and obstruction of hostilities and arrested.

He spent 524 days of arrest in custody. By the decision of the Ivano-Frankivsk city court, he was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and released only after pressure from international human rights organizations.

This systematic destruction of an independent judiciary in Ukraine, backed by the NATO powers, is yet another clear refutation of the lie that the war in Ukraine against Russia is waged “in defense of democracy.”

China’s second wave of COVID infections, deaths, Long COVID, and government lies: Conclusion

Lily Zhao & Evan Blake

Criminal silence from the corporate media and pseudo-left

The mass suffering and deaths from China’s second COVID-19 wave has been met with virtually complete silence in the corporate media internationally. Even in the regional press in China and throughout East Asia, outside of a handful of local media outlets reporting on Dr. Zhong Nanshan’s projection of 65 million weekly infections by the end of June, there has been no coverage of this catastrophe.

The South China Morning Post published two brief reports in June that simply repeated the official monthly figures from the Chinese CDC, which vastly underestimated the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths. These articles also parroted the lies and deliberate misinformation from health care officials downplaying the scope and impact of the current wave.

One of the only recent articles on COVID-19 in China by the Western corporate media was published on June 6 in the Washington Post titled “China abandoned ‘zero covid.’ But some don’t want to leave it behind.” The article maligns China’s Zero-COVID policy and people who continue to adhere to strict measures to protect themselves, while drastically minimizing the impact of China’s second COVID-19 wave, as well as its first. Nowhere do the words “death” or “Long COVID” even appear.

The Post interviews a handful of people, whom they refer to as “zero covid holdouts,” including Gugu, who “wears a face mask outside.” While noting that Gugu has diabetes and high blood pressure, so she “felt safe under zero covid,” the Post slanders this policy that once protected people with underlying conditions like Gugu as “China’s notoriously strict approach to keeping the virus out.”

Another person interviewed in the same article, Lin Yiwu, is concerned about the consequences of multiple reinfections, which will be hard to avoid under current circumstances. He said, “If possible, avoid catching it at all. Delay—the later you get it the better. And as much as possible, reduce the number of times you catch it. Delay, reduce and avoid.”

Lin is part of an online community formed by like-minded people where they share “tips on how to build an air purifier at home or what face masks are more breathable.”

The Washington Post attempts to present these people who remain careful about COVID-19 as crazy and refers to them as “evidence of the long shadow that the zero-covid approach still casts on China.” However, this vilification cannot cover up the existing and growing social concerns over the prospect of unending waves of the pandemic.

Even more damning than the silence of the corporate media is that of the international pseudo-left organizations, which claim to be socialist or in some cases even Trotskyist. Not a word has been said about the deepening social disaster in China by any of these political tendencies, all of which had advocated for the lifting of Zero-COVID.

These include but are not limited to Socialist Alternative, La Izquierda Diario, the International Marxist Tendency, International Viewpoint, Socialist Appeal, Committee for a Workers’ International and Jacobin. A browse through these organizations’ websites reveals that most of their coverage on the COVID-19 pandemic stopped altogether in January.

For over two years prior to the lifting of Zero-COVID in China, virtually every pseudo-left tendency continuously denounced the Zero-COVID policy as “draconian” and demanded that it be lifted immediately. In late November 2022, these tendencies hailed the “white paper” protests, a series of small, choreographed anti-Zero-COVID protests at universities and cities across China, which were seized upon by the CCP to fully scrap Zero-COVID on December 7, 2022.

Now that China has joined the rest of the world in the horrific “forever COVID” policy of repeated waves of mass infection, death and debilitation, all these pseudo-left tendencies have gone silent about their complicity in this public health disaster.

The real political orientation of the pseudo-left stands thoroughly exposed. In no way do they speak for or represent the interests of the working class. Rather, they give voice to the individualist and self-centered politics of the affluent middle class, who largely view anti-COVID public health measures as interruptions to their lifestyles.

Conclusion

Contrary to the depictions of Zero-COVID as oppressive and widely resented, it was understood within broad sections of the Chinese population that these measures, despite their inconvenience and sometimes bureaucratic excesses, were necessary to protect their health and lives. In a poll conducted just prior to the lifting of Zero-COVID in China, only 11.9 percent of the population supported “large-scale adjustment” to the policy.

Even today, when almost all public health measures have been revoked, a section of the population that sees the real danger of the virus and used to actively support Zero-COVID measures still strives to protect themselves through strict infection control measures. They are joined by millions of people globally who continue to shield themselves from COVID-19 to the greatest extent possible through indoor masking in public places, limiting social contact, testing and other measures.

At the same time, the individual struggles of these “Zero-COVID holdouts” underscore the impossibility of combating a global pandemic on an individual basis without any public health infrastructure or global coordination. Fundamentally, the pandemic can only be stopped through the building of a mass movement of the international working class, in unity with principled scientists, fighting for a global elimination strategy.

The necessity for this strategy was underscored in a significant interview conducted by the World Socialist Web Site last week with COVID-19 researcher Arijit Chakravarty, whose team at Fractal Therapeutics has produced among the most far-sighted and critical papers throughout the pandemic.

In the interview, Chakravarty warned of the immense dangers of letting COVID-19 spread completely unchecked, which increases the likelihood that a far more dangerous variant will evolve. He stated:

I can’t predict the outcome of the next wave. I can’t predict the outcome of the next five waves. But, at the rate that we are going, a prediction can be made with a high degree of certainty that something bad will happen sooner than later along these lines. Keep this pandemic running for another five years, and you’ll face a debacle on a scale that you haven’t yet seen. That’s a given.

Commenting on the ending of the Public Health Emergency declaration by the World Health Organization last month and the false claims that “the pandemic is over”—which he characterized as “Orwellian Newspeak”—Chakravarty said that global society now has nothing in place to protect against a more dangerous variant. He stressed:

In that kind of reactive strategy what will happen is billions will be infected before we realize something is wrong. And that’s too late to do anything about it. So not only is the pandemic very much not over, but by creating the impression that the pandemic is over in the face of rampant viral spread and continuing rapid viral evolution, we are essentially sticking our chin out and asking the virus to do its worst.

Chakravarty is one of the best-informed scientists on the pandemic, and his warnings must be heeded. The complete scrapping of Zero-COVID in China and global adoption of a “forever COVID” policy is only accelerating the process of viral evolution. The coronavirus now has a home among 8 billion people throughout the world in which it will continue to mutate and evolve.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically altered global society, exacerbating the preexisting contradictions of world capitalism and exposing the bankruptcy of this social system in the eyes of masses of workers. It has accelerated the eruption of a new imperialist redivision of the world through the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, while at the same time propelling the working class into struggle on every continent.

The same process is now taking place in Chinese society, which confronts the horrific reality of perpetual waves of mass infection, death and Long COVID and the growing threat of military conflict with US imperialism. It is essential that the Chinese working class orient to its international brothers and sisters and initiate a global struggle to stop the pandemic, as well as the escalating danger of a nuclear World War III, climate change and other existential threats confronting mankind.

US-EU move forward in anti-Chinese critical mineral supply chain agreement

Gabriel Black

Bystrinsky Mining and Concentration Plant, located in the Trans-Baikal Territory. [Photo: Andrey Kuzmin]

The United States and the European Union announced Thursday that they had reached the initial stages of an agreement aimed at establishing a new international supply chain for critical minerals. The purpose of this Critical Minerals Agreement (CMA) is to economically prepare for the escalation of the US-led drive to cripple and dominate China.

Over the last two years, the US and the EU have launched a series of measures to encourage the production of so-called critical minerals. Critical minerals refer to several dozen nonferrous metals that are essential to many aspects of modern production, including batteries, electronics, and advanced weaponry.

Demand for some of these minerals, for example, lithium, is expected to grow by as much as 42 times in the next decade. This is being driven by, among other things, booming sales for electric vehicles (EVs).

The supply chains, however, for critical minerals are dominated by Chinese companies.

Facing lackluster domestic oil production and an increasingly expensive and volatile global oil market outside of its control, China made a strategic bet almost two decades ago to develop a domestic EV supply chain. In order to do so, several Chinese companies emerged in the 2000s that excelled at battery production and the critical minerals necessary to produce them. This, and the turning of China into the world’s sweatshop, have caused critical mineral supply chains to be largely controlled by Chinese companies.

As the US prepares for war with China, and leads or cajoles its European allies to join, securing new critical mineral supply chains, as well as battery production, is vital to these military-economic preparations.

The new US-EU CMA lays the groundwork for how the US and the EU will begin to cooperate with each other on creating these new mineral and EV supply chains, while at the same time reducing the chances that they harm each other’s economies in the process. It follows a similar agreement between the US and Australia signed in May.

For months, European lawmakers and car company executives have been upset about the impacts of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

While the act was not seriously aimed at addressing climate change—and, in fact, provided a major boon for the fossil fuel industry—it did create a $7,500 tax rebate for EVs with a majority of their mineral content made in the US or one of its free trade partners. This significant tax bonus was seen by European car companies as a potentially devastating measure that would prevent the competition of European EVs in the US.

The new EU-US CMA is still being worked out. What has been agreed to, following talks at the G7 and in Sweden last month, is an initial framework for collaboration between the US and the EU on critical minerals.

This initial framework contains two core aspects.

First, the US has agreed to make an exception for the EU in terms of the IRA, therefore giving European critical mineral production the same status as American production. Effectively this means that EVs and batteries made with American and European critical minerals will receive a massive $7,500 rebate, but companies that rely more on Chinese sources will not. (Because Chinese companies are so widespread in this sector, the IRA only stipulates that at least half of the mineral content should come from the US or an allied country.)

Second, the US and EU have agreed to begin developing a series of cooperative measures aimed at improving the “sustainability,” “equity,” “environmental protection,” and “labor rights” of critical mineral production.

The true purpose of this language is to cloak the construction of an anti-China supply chain in progressive terms.

“Sustainability” and “labor rights” are not the real concerns of the major capitalist governments, whose industries and militaries pollute and maim on a daily basis. Rather, as they construct their new supply chains with the world’s largest, most advanced mining companies, they will use these claims to drive a wedge between “good” critical minerals—from the US and its allies—and “bad” minerals from China.

The US-EU agreement builds upon existing EU and US agreements, including the Net Zero Industry Act (EU), the Critical Raw Material Act (EU), the CHIPS Act (US) and the Inflation Reduction Act (US), as well as the expanded use of the US’s wartime Defense Production Act. Collectively these are funneling hundreds of billions of dollars towards the development of critical mineral production controlled by the US and the EU.

While the agreement suggests a new period of cooperation between the EU and the US on these issues, it should not be assumed that the tensions between these two blocks have subsided.

In Germany, in particular, there is a high degree of dependency on the Chinese consumer market for the selling of its cars. BMW, for example, sells a third of its cars in China. As the US intensifies its economic and military ensnarement of China, the position of German capital in the country may be disrupted.

This is one of many potential rifts between the ruling class of the US and sections of the European bourgeoisie. As nationalist protectionist measures grow, and all pretenses of supporting the “free market” are abandoned, conflicts between the major imperialist powers are bound to rise and fracture the US-led imperialist world.

Within the borders of Europe there are preparations underway for critical mineral production. However, it is unlikely that production within European borders will significantly change in the next five to 10 years.

Last week, Norway announced that it would open up a massive underwater region in the Arctic to mining. The size of the area it is opening up is equivalent to the size of Germany. However, the mining would be of a highly experimental character, operating at depths up to 4,000 meters. The minerals beneath the floor bed include cobalt, nickel and copper. But the feasibility and affordability of this potential zone of extraction remains to be seen.

Neighboring Sweden previously announced the find of the largest rare earth deposits in the EU. Now, LKAB, the Swedish company overseeing the development of a new mine to extract these minerals, says the deposit is a quarter larger than they thought.

More importantly, Russia and Ukraine have some of the most substantial reserves of critical minerals in Europe, making the outcome of the NATO-Russia war of key importance for the development of a US-led conflict against China.

The problem, however, with many of these European deposits, including Ukraine’s lithium, Norway’s deep-sea mining, and Sweden’s rare earth find, is that they are all in relatively early stages of speculative exploration. In contrast, the production chains in Russia, Indonesia, Chile, China, Australia and the Congo are proven, long-established sites of profitable extraction.

As in all resource extraction, the feasibility of extracting a resource—the time it takes to develop it, how much is actually there, and the profitability of the operation—cannot be fully understood before extraction. This is particularly the case with Norway’s deep-sea mining, an extreme form of production that will not easily compete with cheaper, easier sources elsewhere. Sweden’s rare earth deposits, for example, are thought to take a minimum of 10 years to develop.

This difficulty in starting new mines for these operations, placed alongside the expected growth in demand for these minerals, further underscores the feverish hunt by the US and the EU to develop these resources.

Australian Senate passes Voice referendum bill amid falling public support

Mike Head

The Australian Senate yesterday passed, by 52 votes to 19, the Albanese Labor government’s legislation to hold a referendum, sometime this year, to entrench in the country’s 1901 Constitution an indigenous Voice, an advisory body, to “make representations” to parliament and the executive government.

Australian PM Anthony Albanese (centre with red tie) with Voice Working Group in Canberra, 23 March 2023.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has staked his personal political position, and that of his government, on securing a “yes” vote, but polling indicates increasingly that the referendum is likely to fail.

Now that the bill has passed both houses of parliament, the government must set a referendum date, no sooner than two months away and no later than six months. According to media reports, Albanese will probably set the date for mid-October. Yet there are growing doubts that a “yes” vote will reach the constitutionally necessary majority of voters, and separate majorities in four of the six Australian states.

At a media conference after the Senate vote, Albanese vowed to be front and centre in the referendum campaign, saying he and his government were “all in.” At the same time, he and other government leaders sought to boost the flagging support for the proposal by downplaying the Voice plan itself. They presented the referendum as simply one about recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Constitution for the first time.

Albanese and Labor ministers declared they had “confidence” and “faith” that the Australian people would vote “yes.” But the government has shifted its ground, to avoid referring to the Voice as much as possible. That is because the more people learn about this proposed unelected institution at the heart of the existing political order, the more they distrust it.

The Voice has become more widely seen, including among ordinary indigenous people, as an elite project, backed by big business and other establishment voices, that will do nothing to address the appalling conditions of most indigenous people, whether in remote communities, regional towns or working-class suburbs of the major cities.

In fact, the Voice will further integrate a privileged indigenous layer of CEOs, entrepreneurs and senior academics into the capitalist political establishment, which is presiding over a deepening cost-of-living crisis and declining conditions of the working class as a whole. Soaring prices, home mortgage payments and rents are having a devastating impact on all working-class households, aggravated by sharply falling real wages, staff shortages and intolerable workloads.

Media polls have shown a decline in support for the Voice, down below 50 percent, over the past year since Albanese first announced the referendum plan in his May 2022 election victory speech. A defeat would be a blow to the government. Albanese has made the Voice absolutely central to Labor’s agenda, which consists of escalating war preparations against China, delivering income tax cuts for the wealthy, axing all remaining COVID-19 safety measures and further cutting public health and education spending.

Yesterday, most Liberal Party senators joined hands with their Labor and Greens counterparts, as well as three crossbench senators, to vote for the bill. But many Liberals, including party leader Peter Dutton, are calling for a “no” vote, which is the party’s official position. Several Liberals voted against the bill, in order to participate in writing the “no” case in the official referendum pamphlet to be mailed out across the country. Also voting against were the rural-based Nationals, the far-right Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Lidia Thorpe, a former Greens, now independent, indigenous senator who opposes the Voice from a black nationalist standpoint.

The Labor government is systematically burying all reference to a report by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma, two prominent indigenous figures, setting out the proposed structure of the Voice. That is because the report outlines plans for an unelected 24-member body, chosen by the existing bodies and vested interests, such as land councils and government-funded service providers, that have presided over the social misery suffered by most indigenous people, augmented by a growing number of indigenous business owners.

Likewise, the multi-million dollar corporate-funded “yes” advertising campaign does not even mention the Voice. Instead, it makes a vague reference to giving indigenous people “a real say” and “recognition” in the Constitution.

At the media conference, Albanese again presented a “yes” vote as an act of national patriotism. “It will be a moment of national unity, a chance to make our nation even greater,” he insisted. It was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lift our great nation even higher.”

That message is part of the government’s efforts to manufacture a new image of national unity, above all for war purposes, under conditions of ever-widening social inequality. It is connected to its call, issued in its Defence Strategic Review in March, for an “all of nation” effort to transform the economy into one prepared for war, including by pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military weaponry, such as AUKUS nuclear-powered attack submarines and long-range missiles.

Albanese also asserted that the Voice referendum was “something that has not arisen in Canberra.” It was “the culmination of years of discussion, consultation and patient hard work by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves.” That is utterly false. Far from arising from a grassroots movement, it originated from the very top—a 2015 meeting between selected indigenous leaders and then-Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott at his official Sydney harbourside residence.

As documented in a book by two central advocates of the Voice scheme, Megan Davis, an Aboriginal law professor, and fellow law professor George Williams, rather than a movement from below, the Voice project originated as, and remains, a bid by members of an indigenous elite, including Davis and right-wing lawyer Noel Pearson, to head off anger and disaffection among ordinary indigenous people, especially after Abbott’s government slashed funding for indigenous services.

Today, most of all, the Voice plan seeks to prevent that ongoing discontent from linking up to the growing unrest throughout the working class as a whole, as workers and their families suffer the greatest cuts to their living conditions since World War II.

Albanese further claimed that “recognition of this continent’s first people in our nation’s constitution” would mean “making concrete practical change that makes a difference to people’s lives.” He has previously ruled out, however, extra funding to redress the shocking social conditions, including in remote settlements and town camps denied basic facilities.

As with previous initiatives, such as Labor’s 2008 parliamentary apology to the Indigenous Stolen Generations who were forcibly removed from their parents, the Voice will provide a supposedly progressive gloss over a stepped-up onslaught on welfare and other social rights of working people as a whole.

And the health, housing, education and living conditions of the majority of indigenous people, as one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class, will continue to decline, as they have throughout the official “Closing the Gap” program since the 2008 apology.

Moreover, “recognition” in the colonial-era 1901 Constitution means strengthening the very capitalist state apparatus and socio-economic order that has been responsible for the more than two centuries of massacres, dispossession, separations and suppression inflicted on the indigenous population.

Speaking against the referendum bill during the final debate in the Senate, Thorpe declared it was “happy assimilation day.” An advocate of treaties between Australian governments and indigenous groups, she denounced the Constitution as “an illegal document.” She declared that “sovereignty was never ceded” by indigenous people and this sovereignty would mean dissolving “the colonial, violent institution that we’re all in right now.”

Behind this seemingly radical rhetoric, Thorpe demanded a place “at the table” for the “black sovereignty movement” and “real power.” This is basically a call for greater privileges and resources for the indigenous elites along the lines of the Treaty of Waitangi process in New Zealand. There, hundreds of millions of dollars have been distributed to Māori tribal corporations, fostering a wealthy layer of Māori entrepreneurs, politicians, lawyers, academics and bureaucrats, at the expense of Māori workers, one of the most oppressed sections of the New Zealand working class.

Ideologically, Thorpe and those backing the Voice share a similar outlook. Both are proponents of Aboriginal identity politics, which insists that race, not class, is the fundamental division in society. While racism certainly exists, and is fostered by the ruling class to seek to divide workers along racial lines, the source of the oppression of the indigenous people, as it is with the rest of the working class, is the capitalist private ownership of society’s resources—relations that Thorpe and the other identity politics representatives defend.

Supreme Court Upholds Law Protecting Native American Children

Kirsten Matoy Carlson

The Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, a 1978 law enacted to protect Native American children in the U.S. and strengthen their families, in a June 15, 2023, ruling. Tribal leaders praised the decision as upholding the basic constitutional principles governing the relationships among Native nations and the federal government.

Congress originally passed the Indian Child Welfare Act in response to requests from tribal leaders, and other advocates for Native Americans, to stop state governments from removing an alarming number of Native children from their families. Before the law took effect, state social welfare agencies were removing between 25% and 35% of all Native American children, and 90% of those removed were sent to be raised by non-Native families.

The Indian Child Welfare Act recognizes the government-to-government relationship Native American nations have with the United States. It covers certain child placements and sets uniform standards for state and tribal courts to follow when they decide American Indian child welfare cases. These standards include provisions that ensure that tribal governments are aware of and can have a say in the placement of Native American children. They aim to reduce the trauma of family and tribal separation by instructing courts to make active efforts to keep families together.

In 2017, the state of Texas and non-Natives seeking to adopt or foster Native American children challenged provisions of the law. They argued that the law exceeds Congress’ constitutional powers, impermissibly tells state officials what to do, and illegally discriminates against non-American Indians.

Writing for a 7-2 majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote, “the bottom line is that we reject all of the petitioners’ challenges to the statute.”

As a result of the ruling, Native nations’ most valuable resource – their children – will continue to gain the benefits of growing up knowing their own Indigenous cultures and communities.

Court and Congress diverge

As my research has shown, Congress and the Supreme Court have increasingly diverged in how they view the laws that relate to Native American tribes.

The court has not consistently deferred to Congress but rather has increasingly claimed the power to be the final arbitrator of American Indian policy. In doing so, it has undermined congressional policies meant to foster tribal governance and protect tribal lands and bodies.

The petitioners in the current case, Haaland v. Brackeen, seized on this trend. They questioned Congress’ ability to enact laws affecting tribal governments and their citizens. They argued that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to enact the Indian Child Welfare Act.

From my perspective as an expert in federal Native American law, the court’s decision is significant because the court affirmed Congress’ constitutional power over American Indian affairs.

Congress’ role in Native American affairs

The majority of the justices responded to the petitioners’ arguments by reiterating the court’s longstanding characterization of Congress’ power over American Indian affairs as “plenary and exclusive.”

Writing for the majority, Barrett stated, “Congress’s power to legislate with respect to Indians is well-established and broad. Consistent with that breadth, we have not doubted Congress’s ability to legislate across a wide range of areas, including criminal law, domestic violence, employment, property, tax, and trade.”

Barrett relied on earlier cases to find that Congress’ power over American Indian affairs comes from and remains limited by the U.S. Constitution. “We reiterate that Congress’s authority to legislate with respect to Indians is not unbounded,” she wrote.

The majority concluded, “If there are arguments that [the act] exceeds Congress’s authority as our precedent stands today, petitioners do not make them.”

Open questions remain

The majority reaffirmed Congress’ broad authority over Native American affairs but left other questions unresolved.

The Texas attorney general and the other litigants claimed that the Indian Child Welfare Act discriminates against non-Native Americans by making it harder for them to adopt Native children. The law instructs courts to place children with their relatives – either Native or non-Native, someone in their tribe, or an American Indian family if possible.

The litigants said this preference for placement with an Native family is racial and violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution, which requires government policies to be racially neutral. Tribal nations counter that federal laws and previous court decisions have defined Native status as a political, not racial, designation. The Court did not deal with this claim.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to emphasize the seriousness of these claims. He stated, “[t]he equal protection issue remains undecided.”

Kavanaugh’s words may invite future challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act and to the political status of American Indians as citizens of tribal governments.

In the meantime, the court’s decision ensures that Native children will continue to experience the social and health benefits of being raised in their tribal cultures.

More importantly, the court’s decision acknowledges the vital, constitutional role that Congress plays in Native American affairs and defers to a congressional policy protective of Native nations and their people.

Lineages of Lies and British Politics

Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The hundred and six pages Partygate inquiry report, conducted by the Privileges Committee of the British Parliament, not only highlights the evident character of Boris Johnson as a habitual liar but also exposes the deceptive political strategies employed by the Tories. The timing of the report’s release is part of a broader strategy by conservative spin doctors to construct a convenient exculpatory narrative, allowing both past and current Tory Prime Ministers to evade accountability for their utter failures while diverting public attention. The Conservative Party has been successful in diverting public scrutiny for the past fourteen years, employing customary tactics that have shielded five of its Prime Ministers from public and parliamentary scrutiny. Boris Johnson is not the first liar in Tory politics, nor will he be the last in British politics. It is customary for both the ruling classes and non-ruling elites in British politics to propagate lies to serve their own interests. Throughout history, political integrity has been foreign to the British ruling classes. The Partygate report may unveil the truth, but ironically, truth itself becomes a casualty, where Tories escape accountability and outsource the blames on others. Will Boris Johnson be remembered as the first liar in British politics? And will he be the last?

Lies in British politics are not coincidental; they are deeply ingrained. Deception and misleading both the Parliament and the public have become customary practices in modern British politics. Manipulating public opinion through diversionary tactics has become a weapon for gaining and retaining power. False narratives and political expediency lie at the core of modern British politics, spanning from Churchill to Sunak.

The Tory-led “EU Referendum” project, for instance, was built upon a foundation of lies. Similarly, the Labour Party, under Tony Blair, infamously presented the “dodgy dossier” that served as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, also based on a pack of lies. The Costs of War Project report by Brown University and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs revealed the devastating toll of the Iraq war from March 2003 to October 2018, with an estimated 268,000 to 295,000 people killed in violence, including 182,272 to 204,575 civilians according to Iraq Body Count’s figures. Tony Blair’s lies resulted in the loss of millions of Iraqi lives. The consequences were dire, not only in terms of human lives but also in financial terms. British taxpayers were burdened with a staggering £8.4 billion, and numerous British and American soldiers paid the ultimate price for the lies perpetuated by war criminals like Tony Blair and George Bush. The mistakes made by Blair and his counterparts were not mere errors but deliberate falsehoods that led to catastrophic consequences. The cost in terms of lives lost and resources squandered cannot be understated, and it is a painful reminder of the grave impact that lies and deception can have on the world.

The vilification campaign against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is yet another example of the pervasive use of lies in British politics. Corbyn’s unwavering honesty and integrity in both public and private life became a disqualification in the eyes of the British political establishment. The ruling classes orchestrated his defeat, but they were unsuccessful in tarnishing Corbyn’s reputation for honesty and integrity. Despite enduring relentless vilification, Corbyn continues to hold a prominent position in British politics. The truth has a remarkable resilience throughout history, and no matter how much reactionary propaganda is employed, it cannot conceal the everyday realities of politics in Britain. Corbyn’s steadfastness in the face of such attacks serves as a testament to the enduring power of truth. While the British ruling classes may have sought to undermine Corbyn, they have failed to extinguish the genuine integrity that he embodies.

The literal normalisation and naturalisation of Kiplingian lies have played a role in shaping and domesticating everyday lives in Britain. The persistence of otherness in British politics is evident as the current Tory Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, leads efforts to target establishments such as restaurants, car washes, nail bars, barber shops, and convenience stores in order to apprehend so-called illegal immigrants, many of whom are among the poor and homeless. It is important to question who these individuals labelled as illegal immigrants truly are, why they have come to Britain, and the circumstances that compelled them to leave their loved ones and homes behind.

The lives and livelihoods of people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been devastated by colonial and neo-colonial wars, as well as neoliberal economic policies. These individuals have been sold fraudulent dreams of a better life in Britain and America, prompting them to embark on perilous journeys across treacherous waters and roads. Tragically, their paths often lead them to death, destitution, or encounters with figures like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who acts as a heartless immigration officer.

Rishi Sunak’s temporary role as an immigration officer is a part of a juvenile and deceptive practice employed to divert attention from his party’s failures and shield himself from public scrutiny. The racist political tactics rooted in colonial discourse on migration form the core of the lies perpetuated by the British ruling class. Blaming refugees and illegal immigrants for health and homelessness crises allows the Tories to find respite for their own underfunding and austerity measures while evading accountability. These lies and misleading narratives provide a smokescreen for the Tory government’s own failures and create a buffer against public scrutiny. It is crucial to challenge and expose the deceitful practices that perpetuate injustice and divert attention from the real issues at hand.

The history of Pax Britannia is indeed tainted by a legacy of lies, dishonesty, death, destitution, robbery, looting, scandals, and deceptive practices perpetrated by the British colonial empire. The concept of “civility” and the so-called “civilizing” missions of British colonialism served as a grand deceit to exploit people and plunder their resources. The notion of colonial civility, in reality, meant endless murder, boundless exploitation, and the enslavement of indigenous populations in their own lands. The absence of accountability defined the scandals of the British empire, allowing its atrocities to go unpunished.

The relationship between lies and British politics is deeply entrenched in history, with the ruling classes weaving deception into the very fabric of political discourse in modern Britain. Lies, misinformation, and deceptive political strategies serve to undermine democracy and weaken citizenship by sowing disillusionment among the masses. They provide a means for the ruling and non-ruling elites to evade public scrutiny and democratic accountability. The erosion of trust, accountability, and the subversion of democratic processes are central to the growth of a culture of depoliticisation, which aligns with the requirements of capitalism to shield itself from democratic scrutiny.

Boris Johnson represents the epitome of deceptive politics in contemporary Britain, where the ruling class undermines democracy and democratic practices to subjugate its citizens through the proliferation of lies. The purpose is to domesticate the population and maintain control in the name of nationalism based on white supremacy.

Working class politics offers an alternative to combat the pervasive culture of deceptive mainstream politics in Britain and beyond. Grounded in the reflections on the everyday realities of both material and non-material aspects of people’s lives, working class politics has the potential to drive transformative change in society along a progressive trajectory that aligns with the needs and aspirations of the masses. Working class politics is rooted in an understanding of the mosaic of truth and reality, acknowledging the historical struggles of the working class against various forms of capitalist deception. Throughout history, these struggles have highlighted the need for alternatives that challenge the status quo and address the systemic injustices perpetuated by deceptive political practices by the ruling classes. The resurgence of working-class alternatives is evident, and it is crucial for society to open its doors and windows to embrace the working-class political struggles. By doing so, we can strive towards a peaceful and prosperous society that is founded on truth and authenticity, moving away from the manipulative tactics of deceptive politics. Embracing working class politics provides an opportunity to prioritise the well-being and aspirations of the majority, fostering a more equitable and just society for all.