Unite against Racism in Melbourne brought together a panel of speakers last month in the lead up to the Victorian state election in November to discuss fighting racism and One Nation. Below is an edited transcript of the speeches.
Rathy Barthlote, Tamil refugee and co-founder of Refugee Women Action for Visa Equality
Right now, people are struggling. Rent keeps going up. House prices are out of reach. Food, electricity and healthcare are getting more expensive. People have every right to be angry. But instead of solving the problems, politicians tell us to blame somebody else–blame refugees, blame migrants, blame Muslims, blame people who came from another country.
We have seen this before. For decades, refugees have been used as political footballs in Australia. And now One Nation wants to take this politics of fear and division even further.
We cannot accept that migrants are the problem. Migrants are workers. They build our houses. They work in our hospitals. They care for our elderly. They work in construction, factories and warehouses. They help keep this country running.
We are being divided by race, religion, language and where we were born. Why? Because divided people are weaker.
Unity is powerful. I know this from my own experience. I helped lead a campaign for permanent visas for thousands of refugees who had spent years living in limbo in Australia. We were told nothing would change, but refugees organised. The union movement stood with us. The Palestine solidarity movement stood with us, refugee organisations stood with us, ordinary people stood with us and we won permanent visas.
We didn’t win because politicians suddenly became compassionate. We won because ordinary people organised, fought back and refused to be ignored. That is an important lesson for our fight against racism and One Nation. Our answer cannot simply be, don’t be racist. We also need to fight for solutions to the problems people are facing.
When they say migrants are taking your homes, we say build more public and affordable housing. When they say migrants are taking your jobs, we say raise workers’ wages and protect workers’ rights.
Let’s organise in our workplaces. Let’s organise in our unions. Let’s organise our communities. Let’s fight together for housing. Let’s fight together for decent wages. Let’s fight together for health care, education, and properly funded public services. And wherever racism appears, let’s stand against it. We have to build a movement that challenges racism wherever it appears.
Uncle James Williams, Wakka Wakka man and Greens candidate for Essendon
This continent has carried my people for tens of thousands of years. Long before there was an Australia. Pauline Hanson’s own presence on this land depends entirely on invasion, on dispossession, on the violence done to my ancestors and the violence that continues to this day.
That woman has appointed herself the gatekeeper of who belongs. That is so wrong. You don’t get to define who is on my Country, nor my brothers’ and sisters’ Country, it’s up to them to say.
I say refugees are welcome here, migrants are welcome here. Everyone has come to this land seeking safety, seeking a future, seeking dignity.
One Nation are rising because people are hurting. And instead of pointing at the people actually responsible, they’re pointing at Black and brown people.
They point to anyone who looks like an easy target rather than pointing at who is actually driving the cost of living. It’s not the refugee working two jobs, it’s not the migrant family living next door. It’s billionaires like Gina Rinehart. And they are the very people that One Nation cozies up to.
We know that a divided community cannot fight for better wages. A divided community cannot hold power to account.
In the 1990s, we ran One Nation out of town before. So here is what I’m asking of you: get organised in your workplace, in your school, on your campus. Don’t let racist remarks pass unchallenged. Put One Nation last.
This land has never belonged to hate. It never will.
Lucy Honan, Fight the Crisis and Australian Education Union activist
We’re hot off a really empowering campaign. It’s been a couple of intense months of fighting this Labor government. The pretty miserable working lives that so many people have is a reality that doesn’t get talked about. It’s not articulated well enough by anybody who is supposed to represent us.
In the Australian Education Union, we also unfortunately found that that was true of our own union leaders. They couldn’t articulate how bad the situation is in schools, let alone the Labor government that is supposed to represent working people admitting that.
When you have that situation, people listen to other voices. And unfortunately One Nation are the loudest ones saying there is a crisis and I’ve got the solution. Theirs is a toxic non-solution, but the articulation that there is a major problem hits a nerve.
There has been an argument put to us as unionists that the antidote to this is to wrap up our own fights. In the Australian Education Union, we were told that, close to the election here, our campaign against the Labor government is going to get awkward. We need to focus on fighting One Nation.
That is a disaster. To stop fighting Labor in order to fight One Nation is to confirm all the views of the people who are leaning towards the far right. They say you’re just part of the system that protects the Labor government and the people who have run us into the ground.
Unions have the power to blow Pauline Hanson out of the water and fight the Labor government and that sense of demoralisation that One Nation feeds off.
In the course of our campaign the teachers’ union went from 35,000 members to 50,000.
There are park rangers out on strike, council workers out on strike, the doctors and all the Melbourne hospitals are out on strike because of conditions where they can’t take a break for 12 hours on end. Melbourne University staff are going out on strike and transport workers have mobilised in their thousands.
We have to fight to put One Nation last and support candidates who are talking about racism. But this won’t be resolved through the election.
We’ve seen in Europe and in the US with Trump that the far right is on the rise.
We have to confront Pauline Hanson and fight her on the streets. In Melbourne we have tried in various ways to confront the far right on the streets. But we need an orientation to getting many different groups of people, not just the far left, out against the far right, that sees mosques, members of political parties, churches, unionists all standing together on the streets against One Nation. Taking this action together will help discredit her as any alternative.
Trades Hall is running a campaign to put Pauline Hanson last. But Trades Hall, Getup and other organisations have gone really hard on the anti-worker politics of Pauline Hanson and really soft on her racism.
The most likely outcome of this election is that Pauline Hanson and the Liberals win.
We need to say that One Nation is racist and if they’re elected, we will all fight them tooth and nail.
Imam Alaa Elzokm, Elsedeaq mosque, Heidelberg Heights
Every day we hear Pauline Hanson and One Nation pushing a toxic narrative that blames migrants and refugees for the cost-of-living crisis, soaring rents and the housing shortage.
The facts completely dismantle these lies. When immigration dropped to virtually zero during the pandemic, housing prices did not fall. Migrants are not draining essential supports like the NDIS. They are the front-line workers caring for the most vulnerable people in our community.
Racism is nothing more than a deliberate distraction to deflect public anger away from failed economic policies.
There is a well-documented tactic known as strategic inaction. The ruling authority deliberately stands by watching hate speech and division escalate without enacting protections. It postures as a safe alternative and the lesser of two evils to demand vulnerable communities support them unconditionally because the alternative, the far right, is worse.
This strategy is not new. Between 1881 and 1905, the Tsarist regime in Russia faced mounting economic failure. Instead of addressing this, the Tsarist regime invented scapegoats. Public anger was channelled towards vulnerable minority communities. Reactionary gangs known as the Black Hundreds carried out violent pogroms, while the police and authorities stood by. The regime sent a message to the targeted communities that you have no protector except the Tsar.
Today we see the modern echo of that playbook.
We have to build cross-community solidarity by refusing to rely on promises from political leaders. We must build coalitions across unions, refugees and migrant workers and First Nations.
We need to organise community support whenever any group comes under attack. We have to stand together. We have to be in the streets. Your fight is my fight, and my fight is your fight.
We will not let Labor or Liberal control us through silence and inaction. Instead of condemning the genocide of over 70,000 people, including more than 20,000 children, in Gaza, the Labor Party welcomed the Israeli President here.
Our power lies in our solidarity and collective struggle.
