Refugees and other immigrants are fellow working people who need the solidarity of the labour movement. Opening Australia's doors to all who seek refuge here is a central plank of my platform, along with working-class opposition to the imperialist war on Afghanistan now being brutally waged by Washington, London, and Canberra.

The catastrophe last Friday [October 19] with the sinking of an overcrowded, rotting vessel and subsequent deaths of more than 350 refugees, asylum-seekers and immigrants to Australia off the coast of Indonesia, is far from the only fatal sinking in past years and months. The deaths of these working people are directly attributable to the restrictive and discriminatory immigration policies of Australia's capitalist rulers, and especially to the brutal new measures Canberra has adopted as part of its war drive. The Howard government, with almost total bipartisan support from Labor, has, since the August 29 storming of the Tampa by the SAS [Special Air Services], used naval warships to try to slam the doors in the faces of working people trying to get to this country by the only means they can now find: by sea, in deathtrap boats.

By its callous refusal to accept the people rescued by the Tampa from a similar sinking boat some eight weeks ago, the Australian government declared--in effect--that it would be better for them to have drowned. That is the fate that would have met the Tampa refugees if they hadn't been saved by the Norwegian freighter's captain and crew. Already, several boats like the one that sank have been forced back at gunpoint by the Australian navy. This is a murderous policy that will lead only to more deaths.

But the massive wave of migration around the world today will not stop. Millions are on the move from the Middle East and Central Asia especially, driven from their countries by the devastating economic and political crises of capitalism, sharpened by imperialist intervention and war. Desperately seeking a better life, they are drawn to the handful of wealthy countries whose rulers have plundered the resources and exploited the toil of working people worldwide. Now this refugee crisis is being fueled by the U.S.-led relentless bombardment and ground attacks against Afghanistan, with massive destabilising consequences for the whole region and the world.

While Canberra brutally turns away desperate working people from the shores of one of the richest countries in the world, it is sending troops, warplanes and warships to join in the assault on the peoples of Afghanistan, who live in one of the poorest countries in the world. This criminal course of attacking working people around the world is also aimed at working people at home, as the capitalist rulers try to squeeze more profits from the labor of workers and working farmers, and to push back our political rights won in decades of struggle. That is why the one-day strike by New South Wales nurses, the snap bus drivers strike, and the ongoing battle by Ansett and other airline workers are so important.

That is why I call on the labour movement to vigorously protest Canberra's war on working people from the Tampa assault and denial of refugee rights, to the imperialist war on Afghanistan, from the expansion of political police powers, to wider attacks on workers' rights in this country.  
 
 
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