confessions about confessions: schools, sexual assault, suicide, trauma counseling, etc

Some of my friends have been working on a community education project called Undercurrent.  It’s aimed at young people in the Western suburbs of Melbourne: a gentrifying region, but one that’s still predominantly working-class, and home to many recent migrants.  The aim of the workshops is to foster healthy relationships, end intimate violence, and combat misogynist and victim-blaming attitudes in young people.  Their C.A.R.E. program is modeled on workshops for schools designed by SECASA (South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault), but there are a few differences, too.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

One of the things I really like about Undercurrent is that it’s authentically grounded in the West.  Everyone in the core collective lives here, and most of them grew up here.  They understand the specific issues facing teenagers and young people in the West — racism, poverty, police harassment, underfunded schools and services.  They understand why young people might choose not to approach authority figures if they’re experiencing violence — not in a patronising bourgeois social workery way, “oh, yes, I understand your reluctance, let’s manipulate you into reporting anyway”, but like, “hey, yeah, I get it, that makes sense, here are some alternatives to police or school admin or your parents”.

So the Abbott government wants to make it an offence to encourage a consumer boycott in Australia.

You can read more about it in the Australian and the Guardian.

Here’s the gist: it’s illegal under the Consumer and Competition Act, section 45D, to interfere in the trade activities of third parties in any way.  You can’t encourage a boycott, you can’t picket a shopfront, you can’t stop people at the checkout and ask them to buy something else, you can’t barricade a supply road, you can’t do anything like that.  The only reason that it’s currently permissible for activist groups to encourage mass boycotts is that there’s a specific exception (section 45DA) for boycotts  “substantially related to environmental or consumer protection”. The Abbott government (and significant portions of the ALP, let’s not let them off the hook) want to remove these exceptions.

A lot of people I know have been talking about this with rhetoric like “so much for the free market”, drawing out the apparent contradiction between the Abbott government’s professed support of the free flow of trade and their blocking of the freedom not to consume particular products.  When I was at uni learning how to conduct an empirical study, they told us to pay special attention to cases that didn’t fit the general trend you observed.   These cases provide the richness of your data.  When you examine why things behave weirdly, you get more insight into the norm.

If an individual consumer wants to boycott Monsanto for their treatment of Indigenous people, she’s perfectly free to do so under the proposed changes.  It’s only if she wishes to organise collectively to encourage others to join her in this boycott that she becomes liable for prosecution.  This isn’t an assault on individual freedom.  It’s an attack on collective freedom.

The freedom to act collectively is already significantly constrained by the Act as it currently stands.  Unions and anyone concerned with labour rights are already open for prosecution.  It’s only the rights of the consumer – their individual rights not to be poisoned, basically – that are protected.  The rights of groups not only aren’t covered by the Act as it stands, they’re specifically attacked.

The idea that communities might have certain rights, or that individuals might have the right to join together collectively, is anathema to the individualism at the heart of neoliberalism.  There’s no contradiction here, and activists should stop pretending that we’re surprised by this move.