More than 300 students joined a special general meeting for Palestine at the University of Western Australia (UWA) on 2 October, after Students for Palestine submitted a petition with more than 700 student signatures demanding the UWA Student Guild convene it.
Dozens of staff and others from the broader campus community joined the students. Attendance exceeded the venue’s capacity, causing some people to be turned away and forcing others to sit on the floor or in the aisles. 
Students voted overwhelmingly in favour of the motions supporting Palestine, with a small number of Israel supporters speaking and voting against. 
The meeting was one of the key events in the ongoing campaign organised by Students for Palestine to pressure the university to cut its ties with Israel and end its complicity in the Gaza genocide. 
“The ties between the university and Israel are substantial”, recently elected Guild Councillor and Socialist Alternative member Finn Penter told Red Flag. “UWA leads a project that has ‘defence applications’ with L3Harris, a weapons company which supplies over 1600 components for F-35 fighter planes used by Israel. The university also has an exchange program with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—which has a campus situated on Occupied Palestinian Territory—and an incoming Chancellor who is staunchly pro-Israel. We want our university to help people, the environment and society—not to help Israel’s genocide in Palestine.” 
Students also voted to call for a free Palestine “from the river to sea” and for an end to the genocide. Before this meeting, the UWA Student Guild, which is dominated by a faction of moderate student independents called Spark, had not taken a clear stand against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The previous year’s Guild Council initially responded to Israel’s attacks on Gaza in late 2023 by moving a motion that simply opposed violence in the “ongoing conflict”. This was followed by another motion passed in May, which condemned “the recent military assault in Rafah” but did not name Israel as the perpetrator.
“It’s a huge shift for the position of the Guild”, Danica Rachel, who chaired a snap rally after the meeting, told Red Flag. “What the Guild has said up to this point has been mealy-mouthed and frankly pathetic. But thanks to the SGM, the Guild can finally take a clear position in favour of Palestinian liberation, with equal rights for all from the river to the sea.” 
Credit for the meeting goes to the socialists, activists and left-wing students who connected with and mobilised the considerable sympathy for Palestine and opposition to Israel among students. 
In the week leading up to the meeting, Israel began its bombing campaign in Lebanon, raising the possibility of regional war. Student activists felt it was crucial to respond to this. They moved an extra motion without notice to “condemn Israel for its drive to war in the Middle East” and to identify “Israel [as] the clear aggressor in the region”. The motion passed to roaring applause. 
In the last twelve months, student activism has exploded in solidarity with Palestine around the world and across the country. With this latest mass meeting, UWA students have decisively joined this movement.

Alevine Magila

Hundreds vote against genocide and war at the University of Western Australia

Australian capital city house rents have recorded their biggest quarterly increase in seventeen years—and the second-highest increase on record. 
According to a <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/rental-report/march-2024/#nationwide">recently published report</a> by property portal Domain, Sydney has the highest median rent, a whopping $750 per week. Perth experienced the largest year-on-year rent increase, median weekly housing rents jumping $100 to $650. 
The report revealed similarly bleak trends for units and apartments. Median rental prices climbed by another $20 across capital cities in the first three months of the year, the eleventh consecutive quarter of growth—another new record. 
The trends highlight the ongoing crisis for renters.
The price pressures have been compounded by low vacancy rates. According to the report, there are record low rates in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. The national vacancy rate stands at only 1.08 percent. In Adelaide, it is down to just 0.83 percent, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-09/rental-market-in-adelaide-becomes-the-tightest-in-the-nation/103684532">the lowest in the country</a>. 
The result is intense competition for shelter. Viral videos proliferating on social media of <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/renting/video-shows-australias-rental-crisis-as-dozens-queue-for-melbourne-rental-property/news-story/85eff02328e32c1863f540d6ae5d5e33">long queues for rental property viewings</a>
reflect the degrading scramble the rental market has created. 
While the situation has been deteriorating for renters, Labor has made the problem worse. In early April, the party blocked with the Liberals to <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8585247/act-greens-bill-for-a-rent-freeze-has-been-defeated/">shoot down a bill for a rent freeze</a>
moved by the Greens in the ACT Legislative Assembly. 
In Melbourne, the state Labor government <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/last-ditch-legal-action-to-stop-public-housing-towers-knockdowns-20240219-p5f62o.html">is demolishing</a> 44 public housing towers. It plans to replace them with a mix of private “affordable” apartments and social housing, in which tenants typically have fewer rights and higher rents. <a href="https://cityhub.com.au/public-housing-block-in-sydney-will-be-demolished-in-contentious-government-plan/">Similar moves</a> to destroy public housing have been approved in Sydney.
While state Labor governments are destroying public housing, federal Labor is promoting an insulting “Help to Buy” bill. The proposed legislation would establish a national shared equity scheme, through which eligible applicants would be helped by the government buying and jointly owning a share of their house. 
As a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/housing-market-class-war">previous Red Flag editorial</a> noted, the Help to Buy scheme is “available to only a tiny number of eligible households and will do nothing to address the general unaffordability of housing”. Although the Help to Buy bill passed the House of Representatives in March, it is yet to pass the Senate.
The Greens are apparently looking to capitalise on this. Speaking to the Guardian after the party supported the Housing Australia Future Fund in the Senate <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/13/greens-housing-labor-help-to-buy-scheme-rent-caps">last year</a>, Greens leader Adam Bandt said: “We’re going to use our power to continue to push for a cap and freeze on rent increases”. 
But based on the Greens’ track record of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/greens-capitulate-housing">capitulation to the Future Fund</a> and to Labor’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/greens-put-stamp-approval-labors-greenwashing-climate-plan">greenwashing safeguard mechanism reforms</a>, the party’s fighting words don’t inspire much confidence. The Greens have an established pattern of raising rhetorical opposition to Labor before eventually settling for very little.
The left must oppose Labor’s obsession with market-based reforms.
We need state and federal governments to expand massively the stock of public housing, to impose a national program of rent reductions and freezes and to end residential property investor tax concessions. Idle properties of the ultra-rich should be converted into emergency relief accommodation for the homeless and housing insecure. 
Why should some people be allowed to accumulate residential properties as wealth-generating assets while so many people struggle to get or to keep a roof over their head?
A solution to the housing crisis will not come through the market, but against it—by treating housing not as a commodity, but as a right.

No relief for tenants as rents record biggest jump in seventeen years

<a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">A bombshell report </a>in the West Australian has uncovered details of appalling abuse in Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre in 2022. 
Extreme violence was used by prison officers against a suicidal 16-year-old boy. At one point, he was “folded up” by prison officers into a figure-four hold—when guards lie handcuffed children down on their stomach, fold their legs behind their backs, and sit with their full body weight on top of them. The practice is now banned in some states for its risk of causing asphyxiation.
Video footage of the incident shows the boy moaning in pain and sobbing throughout. While the squad “folded up” the boy, a commanding officer is heard in the background telling the team to “go hard”. 
“The bodycam footage is genuinely shocking”, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.au/banksia-hill-riot-squad-uses-force-on-16-year-old-boy/">Amnesty International </a>spokesperson Rachel McPhail said in a media release. “It’s devastating to see any young person in this manner, when they really need care and compassion.” 
In a separate incident, a riot squad burst into the room of the same boy and transferred him to another cell with “three-point” shackles, which cuff the wrists and ankles in chains and padlocks, a separate chain linking them all together. The prison officers cut off the clothes he’d been wearing for two weeks and left the boy in the room, shackled. 
“I’m definitely killing myself ... you treat me like a dog in this place”, the boy cried out <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">according to the </a><a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">West Australian</a>. 
This was only the latest act of cruelty that has been brought to light from body cam and CCTV footage. Barely a month goes by without a new revelation about torturous conditions in the state’s prison system.
Last October, another 16-year-old, Indigenous boy Cleveland Dodd, died a week after self-harming in his cell. He was the first young person to die in Unit 18, the abominable youth wing of the adult maximum security Casuarina prison in Perth’s south. 
Cleveland was not under proper observation, even though he had indicated several times that he was intending to self-harm. An internal probe into Cleveland’s death found that prison staff had faked welfare checks on him. When he fatally injured himself, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/10/prison-officers-watched-movies-and-relaxed-as-16-year-old-cleveland-dodd-fatally-self-harmed-minister-says">prison guards were watching movies.</a> 
“This tragedy could have been avoided”, advocate Megan Krakouer <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-26/cleveland-dodds-mother-breaks-silence-on-death-of-son-unit-18/103021576">told the ABC</a>. “We have warned time and time and time again. The West Australian government is not listening.”
Children’s Court President Hylton Quail recently criticised the “unlawful manner” in which the Department of Justice runs Unit 18, including its use of lockdowns, when prisoners can be locked inside their cells for 24 hours or more. Quail described the prison as a <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/judge-hylton-quail-blasts-unit-18-as-a-barbaric-dungeon-releases-damaged-teenager-c-13054159">“barbaric dungeon where children are deprived and dehumanised”</a>.
Corrective Services minister Paul Papalia initially reacted to Cleveland’s death by defending the prison officers and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-11/unit-18-cleveland-dodd-paul-papalia-analysis/103050596">bringing makeshift weapons</a> confiscated from Unit 18 detainees to present as part of a speech to state parliament. The implication was that the violence against people inside Unit 18 is justified. Premier Roger Cook displayed a similarly blithe attitude when he described Unit 18 as a “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-13/wa-premier-under-fire-after-boy-attempts-suicide-in-adult-prison/102970996">necessary evil</a>”. 
Unit 18, Banksia Hill, and the entire prison system in WA is a monstrosity.

WA prisons are ‘barbaric dungeons’

Banksia Hill is a youth detention centre with an overwhelmingly Indigenous population and a notorious record of human rights violations. Detainees are regularly confined to their cells under “lockdown” conditions, which means that they are released from their tiny, suffocating rooms <a href="blank">for only 10-30 minutes a day</a>, as has been exposed by the ABC. One inmate spent 79 out of a total of 98 days in solitary confinement, according to Jesse Noakes in the Saturday Paper. 
On top of this psychological torture are a myriad of other abuses. Dehumanising strip searches <a href="blank">occur regularly</a>, and former detainees have spoken out about children being dangerously restrained in suffocating positions and subjected to degrading, racist insults from prison guards. 
An autistic girl detained at Banksia Hill was forced to sleep on a mattress <a href="blank">covered with faeces and saliva</a>, and was regularly restrained with handcuffs, leg shackles and spit hoods, according to legal documents related to a class action lawsuit launched against the prison late last year. Another teenage girl in the centre was forced to receive a contraceptive implant.
These are just the atrocities we know about; if the walls of Banksia Hill could talk, no doubt they would reveal much more. 
Even officials from the state government’s own agencies have rebuked the conditions inside Banksia Hill. A report from the inspector of custodial services tabled in WA state parliament in April 2022 concluded that conditions inside the centre breach international human rights standards. 
But with oppression comes resistance. The depth of the inhumanity in such a cruel and hopeless environment makes every act of resistance an assertion of humanity. Riots <a href="blank">occur regularly</a> at Banksia Hill, and that anger broke out again recently. 
On the evening of Tuesday, 9 May, about 50 of the 91 children detained at Banksia Hill rioted. After lashing out at a youth custodial officer, one of the detainees managed to take a master key and release other children from their cells. Dozens rioted and burnt down parts of the hated prison. Some tried to escape, and others climbed on to the roof and fought to stay there into the morning of the next day, before being forced to surrender. On the roof of the facility, heavily armed officers in riot gear aimed rifles towards the children.
“In Banksia Hill, there’s nothing transformational, nothing reformative, nothing rehabilitative”, Gerry Georgatos, a leading advocate in the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery project, explained to Red Flag. “Facilities aren’t conducive to support—the intensive support you get is a cage. It’s a cage within a cage. The cells are three metres by three metres, basically arms wide length and a bit. They’re suffocating. 
“They are rebelling because they’re locked up twenty hours a day. This is all the children, on average, locked up twenty hours a day all last year. A lot of them have given up, and they’re just fighting back and they’re crying out for help”, he said. “What they’re feeling is a sense of bleakness and hopelessness.”
In the aftermath of the riot, WA Premier Mark McGowan did not denounce the armed riot police brutalising detainees, but the children lashing out for their dignity and freedom. He said they had engaged in a “form of terrorism”. McGowan is from the same party, the ALP, that is fronting as progressive on Indigenous rights through support for the Voice to Parliament. 
“To call it an act of terrorism when you are stripping away a child’s human rights is appalling”, Angel Rohan, co-founder of community organisation Break the Cycle, said to Red Flag. “It is in a person’s innate instinct to want to be cared for and looked after and to fight back when they’re being oppressed. 
“The conditions are just so atrocious ... if I was stuck in those conditions, I would probably feel like rioting is my only way out.” 
Speaking at a rally on Sunday, 14 May to protest the barbaric conditions inside Banksia Hill, Georgatos condemned the systemic abuses facing Indigenous people and pointed out that you get what you give: “You give hate—you get hate”. 
Torture prisons like Banksia Hill should be burnt down. The children locked up there are victims of a racist system both inside and outside the facility. In contrast to the torturous system of cruelty and punishment defended and run by the state government, they deserve justice and support. Short of that, the Indigenous children in Banksia Hill need not just our sympathy, but our solidarity.

Banksia Hill tortures kids. It should be burnt to the ground

Perth activists converged on the Yongah Hill detention centre on 6 March to protest against the imminent deportation of more than twenty Tamil refugees to Sri Lanka.
Almost 100km outside Perth in a location exemplifying the phrase “out of sight, out of mind”, Yongah Hill incarcerates hundreds of refugees.
Among those issued with deportation notices was Prabu. “If he goes back to Sri Lanka he will be separated from his child”, Sanjeev, a member of the Tamil Refugee Council, told Red Flag. “We cannot allow separated families.” 
Prabu has been at Yongah Hill for about a month. He had previously been held at the Christmas Island prison for several years. His child is just five years old. Their story, however, is all too common.
“Hundreds of people don’t have visas, cannot access Medicare, have no work rights, no study rights ... and children born here don’t have any of these rights either”, Sanjeev said. “They’ve lost their lives; they’ve lost ten years in this country”.
This is not the result of bureaucratic oversight. It is the outcome of the federal Labor government’s choice to maintain Operation Sovereign Borders, which denies protection to refugees arriving by boat. 
The deportation notices came as Labor voted on 8 March with the Coalition and One Nation against a bill that would have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/08/afternoon-update-labor-votes-with-coalition-against-asylum-seeker-bill-musk-mocks-disabled-employee-and-full-fat-milks-comeback">ended the offshore detention of refugees</a>. 
Yongah Hill is a huge facility surrounded by towering fences and floodlights.
At the protest, about 70 people marched through boom gates at the entrance and down the facility’s long driveway. Several guards unsuccessfully attempted to block protesters, before half a dozen police officers arrived as reinforcements. 
Unfortunately, the protest action was not large enough to stop the deportations. But the refugees could hear us. Between our speeches and chanting, yelling and chanting in response from inside the detention centre could be heard. 
We could not see the refugees and they could not see us. But we know our message came through: that there is opposition to what the government is doing to them. 
Sending that message was the least we could do.
The Tamil Refugee Council is organising a rally in Perth at Forrest Place, Saturday 11 March 3:00 pm, to demand permanent visas for all refugees.

Hundreds vote against genocide and war at the University of Western Australia

No relief for tenants as rents record biggest jump in seventeen years

WA prisons are ‘barbaric dungeons’

Banksia Hill tortures kids. It should be burnt to the ground

Perth activists protest refugee deportations

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