Episode 16: The Ongoing Crisis (Election Special w Jonathan Sriranganathan)

Welcome to another episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, continuing our current series on crisis, disaster & collective futures. This week, we’re turning our attention to the recent federal election here in so-called australia. Last Saturday, roughly 1 in 3 people voted Labor, 1 in 3 voted Liberal/National, and 1 in 3 voted for someone else. Has anything changed? With the centre-right-wing Labor party now dominant nationally, what lessons should we take from this election? Is running for elections still worth the time for those of seeking deeper radical change? Where should we all be putting our energy? In this episode, we talk through some of the initial results from the election, and what we might be able to learn from these trends. With help from Mununjahli and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego’s new “Let’s Talk Race on the Run” series, we debunk the unhinged-from-reality narrative that this election constituted a “progressive” victory against Trumpism, and work to contextualise the election results in the context of the broader waves of repression that we’re seeing in this moment. We wade through the mixed results that we saw for the Greens in this election: minor swings against the party in the lower house, an increase in the Senate vote, and some absolutely massive swings towards some key candidates, including our dear friend Remah Naji in Moreton, and Huong Trang in the seat of Fraser. Notably, both of these candidates ran on explicitly pro-Palestine platforms, and both Remah and Huong are actively involved in activism and community organising beyond the Greens. Both the Moreton campaign and the Fraser campaign drew explicit connections in their campaigns between racial justice, environmental justice, housing justice, and anti-colonial solidarity, focusing more directly on discussions around refugee justice, Palestinian liberation, and Land Back for First Nations communities on this continent. Perhaps not coincidentally, Remah & Huong are both the children of refugees: Remah’s family were displaced from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and she grew up as part of the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan; Huong grew up in the seat of Fraser and describes herself as “the daughter of Vietnamese boat people.” Both Remah & Huong saw significant swings towards them, particularly in the most racially and culturally diverse and working class parts of their electorates. So - what does this all mean for what’s to come? We end this episode with a generative reminder from local organiser Bec from the Community Union Defence League who are right now organising eviction defence, food support and mutual aid for folks sleeping rough in Musgrave Park. In case you missed it, the Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner, announced a couple of weeks ago that they planned to forcefully evict all homeless people from parks across the city on the grounds of “community safety” and “public accessibility”, despite the fact that no suitable housing could be provided to folks sleeping rough. I doubt that it is a coincidence that they decided to move ahead with the evictions only a few days after the federal election, perhaps in the hope that many organisers would be burnt out from the long election campaign. What they didn’t bank on was the scale of popular opposition to these evictions, and this week we’ve seen inspiring solidarity with hundreds turning out early each morning to support folks facing move-on directions, to challenge these evictions, and to refuse to allow this violence to go uncontested.