Win-win-win education
University administrations say they are forced by funding cutbacks to sell courses to full fee-paying students. With at least equal truth, HECS-paying students say this will reduce the quality of their education through overcrowding, reduced staff-student ratios and similar consequences.
However, it seems to me that there is a "win-win-win" solution (for uni administrations, present students and rich dummies). Allow universities to sell degrees directly to whoever has the wherewithal, with no obligation to attend classes or sit exams. Thus uni's will increase their income without overcrowding HECS-paying students, and the rich will save much valuable time.
A similar system already operates in the US, and has produced some almost world-famous scholars in leading-edge fields like ark research and family values studies. I'm sure it would be equally fruitful here.
Sydney
East Timor
Well done on the still excellent reporting on East Timor, and well done to the activism of many Resistance members. I was glad to see that the recent showing of There is only one word: Resist was a success. Even though Dita Sari has been sentenced to six years imprisonment, who can doubt that the situation in Indonesia and East Timor will not change radically before then, and for the better.
My last letter misquoted a motion of Bob Brown in the Senate in December. The motion, defeated by Labor and Coalition votes, congratulated the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in showing an East Timor photo exhibition in Oslo, and asked the presiding officers at the federal parliament to reconsider their ban on the same exhibition. It did not involved congratulating Bishop Belo or Jose Ramos Horta, as I wrote.
Lastly, was any other solidarity group approached by a mercenary organisation, possibly Sandlines, about two years ago? We were contacted by a man claiming to be South African , but with an English accent, at that time. It was so ludicrous, I put it out of my mind, until the PNG mercenary crisis.
Secretary, Australia-East Timor Association (NSW)
Indonesian political prisoners
Is it true that birds of a feather flock with each other? Indonesia has just jailed a political activist for 13 years, ostensibly for taking part in a political demonstration but in reality for opposing the ruthless military dictatorship of President Suharto.
Our lickspittle governments close their eyes to the human rights abuses in Indonesia and East Timor and at the same time launch an attack on the human rights of Aborigines by extinguishing native title. What is needed are international economic, political and cultural sanctions against both Indonesia and Australia until they recognise the elementary rights of their citizens.
Any constitutional reform should have as a common component the inclusion of fundamental rights. Common law rights have proven to be too easily overridden.
Alawa NT
Native title
In 1831, the government had no control over Crown land. Squatters took Crown land in NSW under possessory title. Governor Fitzroy was ordered by the Crown in 1847 to set up pastoral leases to stop squatters from grabbing huge chunks of land illegally.
He also granted the rights for Aboriginal people to hunt and to make spontaneous use of the soil growth (plants) in a coincidence of use with the pastoralists. That was under British common law in 1847, as re-affirmed in the Wik decision.
Howard, by overturning Wik, is also overturning Governor Fitzroy's orders. He has no respect for native title or for indigenous people, their rights and their land. He will have truly pushed the Racial Discrimination Act out the window. He has the hide to say his government is not racist.
Pastoral lease means that farmers have grazing rights only under that lease. In 1847, Fitzroy gave grazing rights only on Crown land which are still the pastoral leases of today. Howard saying that "the farmers will get a fair deal" can only mean he is going to give all that land to the farmers, by overturing the Wik decision that says that pastoral leases can coexist with native title.
And he expects Aboriginal people to sit back and cop this when his government does not even have respect for its own umpire, the High Court. The Howard government, for its own agenda, is changing the law to fit the farmers and the National Party.
Trade sanctions are only the beginning. Aboriginal people now expect the Labor Party, the Trades and Labour Councils, the ACTU, the Greens and the Australian Democrats to fight Howard's attacks. Or do Aboriginal people have to believe that all Australian political parties and trade unions are racist towards Aboriginal people?
It is bad enough that Aboriginal people have to prove, at crippling expense, our own attachments to our traditional lands, which were ours from time immemorial.
When the Wik decision is overturned by the Liberals and Nationals, using Aboriginal people as scapegoats, and on behalf of the handful of farmers holding pastoral leases, the Australian tax payer, not the farmers, will foot the compensation bill. Do the taxpayers know, or want this?
Widjabul clan
Bundjalung Nation
Hong Kong hand-over
I am apprehensive at the thought that come July 1, 1997, Hong Kong will be handed over from the British to the Chinese government, according to a mutual accord made in 1897.
As a keen student of modern history I know there have been precedents whereby treaties have been broken — only witness Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler and Stalin. In David Irving's recent book Hitler's War an incident is related where the foreign minister von Ribbentrop's staff were going to present him with an ornate box containing treaties made by Nazi Germany since 1933 only to discover that most of them had been broken which made Hitler break into tears of laughter.
There have been indications lately in the media that China is not prepared to give the Hong Kong people the same freedoms they've experienced under British rule, and this should not be surprising given China's appalling track record on human rights.
Are we to witness another fall of Saigon in 1975 when men, women and children scrabbled frantically to escape before its capture by North Vietnam? No one will ever forget those last hours when helicopters and other expensive material was pushed over the side of American Aircraft carriers to avoid falling into the hands of the enemy. Yet the war was Eisenhower's fault for not allowing free elections and the horrors that followed from the 1950s onwards.
Regardless of this, I hope the hand-over in July will be peaceful and that my fears are unfounded.
Eastwood NSW
Marxism and the Jewish question
I have been bemused and amused by the attempt by various writers in GLW to put Philip Mendes right by pointing out that Lassalle was not a Jew as he was not religious, and only religious Jews can be described as Jews. Pity Karl Marx didn't read GLW as he referred to Lassalle as a Jew.
Similarly Lenin (with whom Trotsky argued on this point) referred to the fact that Jews are a larger proportion of the socialists and bolsheviks than their proportion in the general population. This must mean that Lenin referred only to religious Jews, in which case he was plainly wrong, or he referred to "secular Jews", in which case he was not a Marxist according to GLW readers.
What's even worse, Trotsky repeatedly referred to a "Jewish nation", but GLW readers and DSP members know better. There is no such thing as a Jewish nation (echoing Stalin on the national question).
Trotsky even went so far as to state in an interview that recent experience in the Third Reich, even in the USSR, had caused him to give up hope for the assimilation of the Jews and that the Jewish question required a "territorial solution".
Trotsky explained that due to such experiences, he had to change his views on the Jewish question. Only dogmatists stick to their tenets, irrespective of changing circumstances. I would have though this was an elementary lesson of Marxist dialectics. Reading these letters in GLW I can only echo Marx's view "Thank God I'm not a Marxist".
Lower Templestowe Vic
Graffiti attack
At the time of a media splurge for the racist right, which gives cover to the anti-Aboriginal and anti-migrant policies of the Liberals and the ALP, the left must be aware of who our real enemies are.
I can't understand why, in the hours of darkness, instead of covering Sydney with anti-racist or pro-East Timor slogans as others do, some anarchists appear to have targeted the Resistance Centre here for their air-blown efforts. (Although perhaps one person's remark to me recently when I was selling GLW — "I'm an anarchist, not left" — should have given me a hint.)
Fortunately, this incident should only spur us to contribute to the building maintenance fund for GLW, whose office is in the same building. As for the bookshop security door, a discussion has already begun about painting a mural there.
Unfortunately, some who mouth the word "revolution" seem unable to determine who it will be directed against.
Sydney
Blaming the problem
I'm an unemployed youth. I was upset on Monday night when a spokeswoman, I assume for the government, defending the work for the dole stupidity, said that an important point of the scheme was putting to work those unemployed people avoiding work!
If it isn't bad enough that the parrots of talk and current affair shows entertain audiences with such socially damaging falsehoods, it is an irresponsible lie to suggest that unemployment is in any general sense, a choice. The cause of unemployment is a lack of available jobs.
Work still defines the individual, and there is no avoiding the shame associated with having no social definition. If society and the government honestly believe that "the youth of today" choose to have no purpose nor future, then it is hardly surprising that nothing is done to affect the real problem of employment opportunities.
If I were suicidal, and let's face it who isn't, it would be solutions like that outlined by the spokeswoman, demonstrating a dangerously negligent attitude similar to "let them eat cake", that would leave me feeling hopeless, forsaken and vulnerable. Perhaps the government can employ me as their official adviser on reality and compassion — both positions are obviously vacant, and I, like most unemployed people, am desperately keen to work.
Aranda ACT