°Border softwars [aka there are many copies]

June 11, 2008

From Graeme Philipson’s piece in the Age:

If a treaty based on its provisions were adopted, it would enable any border guard, in any treaty country, to check any electronic device for any content that they suspect infringes copyright laws. They need no proof, only suspicion. They would be able to seize any device - laptop, iPod, DVD recorder, mobile phone, etc - and confiscate it or destroy anything on it, merely on suspicion. On the spot, no lawyers, no right of appeal, no nothing.

While the borders proliferate, they’re being proposed as the means to stem proliferations of another kind. The leak of the US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement is here, scheduled to be discussed at the G8 in Tokyo, next month.

°borders 2.0 - future, tense

June 3, 2008

The first paragraph, in late-running final draft, of a collaborative text-image project with Bryan of subtopia (and it may explain something more of this recent cryptic post):

°Pogroms pt2 - nomadi, clandestini, rifiuti

May 22, 2008


°Pogroms, pt1 - Amakwere-kwere


°Protest zoning

May 21, 2008

Sorting and corralling. (A discarded part of a set of panels - but put here, since I particularly enjoyed adding the cattle and megaphone, which might not appear in the final version.)

°Student+Migrant+Worker

May 4, 2008

The remarks below about the connections between student visas and work in Australia were written by Liz. I moved them from the comments under the post about the taxidrivers’ strike in Melbourne so as to prompt further discussion. - a.

So - if you look at Australia, obviously there has always been the use of low-wage migrant labour, and worse, slave labour for indig crew and Pacific Islanders.

However, I would suggest that the transformations in the Australian economy since trade liberalisation in the 1980s (1989 - Professor Ross Garnaut - Australia and the north east asian ascendancy - the policy document that Rudd’s new climate guru wrote convincing Hawke to move to tariff reductions - in textiles this actually predated tariff reductions in the rest of the West), as well as the nationalist counter-reaction from the trade and student unions, have created new and more direct manifestations of the attempt to drive the wage floor down by deliberately tweaking migration schemes towards the creation of low wage and precarious labour markets. As Ange has said many times, it is possible to trace the intersections between the internment camps and the labour market. I’m going to try to do this with a little bit on student visas too… actually, most of this is going to be about student visas, but with other stuff thrown in as poorly organised thoughts.

°Multiculti Plus Electrification

April 28, 2008

John has a brief post on the Snowy Mountains Scheme - as with some recent posts here, part historical-, part biographic-archival, those intersections of intimate, political, cultural … that strain against the definition of each of these as discretely lived experiences and analytical categories. The Snowy Mountains Scheme not only signaled, as John points out, the emergence of multiculturalism in Australia, but also industrialisation - a shift from mining and agriculture to manufacturing, or at least its infrastructural precondition, electricity. Industralisation and multiculturalism are, in this instance, inseperable, and both shaped the sensibilities of Melbourne more than any other city in Australia.



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