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Last Updated: November 1, 2009
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Interview with Pamela Curr

2,500 words

"There is a public face (in Australia) of a democratic country with a good economy, where people are doing fine - and then there is an underside."

I come from a fairly conservative political background, but one where politics was always discussed.

I went into nursing and did midwifery. In nursing you see many sides of life, you see people who have and you see people who have not. You see the way in which they struggle.This first-hand experience gave me the understanding of how hard life is for some people .

Although I am, I suppose, an agnostic or an atheist now, I was educated in the Catholic tradition. The church has a strong overlay of social justice and doing unto others as you would that they do unto you. I think these things become part of your philosophy and internal make-up - sometimes when you don't realize it.

Then, moving on from nursing and travelling and having babies and families and that sort of thing, I came back to Australia from Holland in 1992 on my own as a sole parent. At that stage I was reassessing my life. I went to the Western Metropolitan College of TAFE and did a Welfare Studies Diploma. I was worried about returning to study but I found it a breeze, so I went on to VUT and completed a B.A., Community Development stream.

Part of the reason for moving away from Welfare to Community development was that the more I studied and reflected, the more I realized that the problem does not lie with the individual . The problem lies with society and the structures that are set up for people to deal with. That is why I wanted to do that course.In April 1996, on the 4 Corners television program on the Australian Broadcasting Commission, there was a program about outworkers. These women sewing in their homes, in Australia, in garages and loungerooms, for $2 an hour.I couldn't believe it. I thought

"We've got a basic wage, a minimum wage in this country.
We have industrial laws, and yet here are wrokers in Australia routinely being underpaid and employers are getting away with it".

I set out to find out if indeed it was happening.

At the time I was doing Social Policy and I had to do an essay assignment so I thought I would combine it with that. That program alerted me to something I hadn't known could happen in Australia.So, I spoke to the unions - I spoke to Annie Delaney from the TCF union, I spoke to the churches and to some groups who had been involved in investigating this.Annie said

"We are looking at setting up a community campaign to work alongside the unions".

I thought about that and I thought

"Wow, that would really be something",

because the more I looked at it, the more I could see that what we had here was a Third World economy with Third World conditions operating in our beautiful, wealthy First World economy. The contradictions were glaring. So, I came on board with the Fairwear campaign before it was launched. I was working as a student on placement, getting it up. Then, after it was launched, as we got a little bit of money, I started working part-time. Initially I was working 2 days a week, co-ordinating the activities.

During that campaign I met a lot of really brave, clever, wonderful women. It reinforced for me the capacity for people to overcome adversity. But it also showed up the question of why they should face this. I remember standing at a picket one weekend, outside a factory in Broadmeadows. The factory made shirts and suit for, as it turned out, people like Jeff Kennett - the right-wing Premier of Victoria. These women told me they knew of factories where the women would go to work and find a red dot on their sewing machine, indicating they hadn't sewed the required amount the day before. This put them on notice - if retrenchments were happening - they were sacked.

They were also timed when they went to the toilet and heavily supervised. They told me how they came to work and were told to do a certain amount of, say, collars. It was something astronomical like 4,000 collars in a day.They would come to work and find the collars hadn't been correctly cut. So the women had to recut them. But that wasn't factored into the time they were allowed. So they would still end up with a red dot.

I realized that it wasn't just outworkers, it was in-factory workers, working under legal conditions, with all the protections that should involve, who were still being really badly treated.I spent five and a half years with the Fairwear campaign. They were fantastic years. I learnt a lot. I worked with wonderful people. Annie Delaney was one of the people who really inspired me.

Annie has an incredible energy, a very clear focus and great integrity. That is the sort of thing you need to take you through a campaign where you are constantly being asked to do deals - to pass over things. Because this was what we were asked. This was a hard campaign for politicians and employers.In the beginning they denied it was happening. By the end, they knew they had to acknowledge it. We got state legislation in the end. We wanted national legislation, we didn't get it. But in the meantime we fought two successive waves of Peter Reith trying to undermine workers' conditions. We were at the forefront of that, and the situation of outworkers was so well known and accepted that the politicians couldn't go around it.

From there, I saw the refugee issue was growing. It disturbed me in 1992 when I realized that people were locked up in detention at Port Hedland. Of course, it was so far away, there were very infrequent stories about it. At that stage the people had some freedoms. They were allowed to go in and out of the camp - that sort of thing. But Labor opened a Pandora's box when they passed the legislation which detained people, who came to this country seeking asylum.They did it for political reasons. They wanted to protect the so-called Cambodian peace plan that had been worked up by Gareth Evans.

I couldn't ignore what was happening in the refugee area. When you think of Woomera, set up with those canvas tents and not air conditioning - people put out there with little children in 46, 48, 50 degree Celsius heat. It was just appalling. I got involved when I realized that the same things were happening at Marybinong. I was contacted by a member of the Palestinian community, because a Palestinian man had disappeared. He and I together eventually found out this man was being held in solitary confinement for 7 months at Marybinong. The Department and the Detention Centre hid that for 2 months - then we found out.

In the end we got him out. Those sorts of things open your eyes to what is happening. There is a public face here of a democratic country with a good economy, where people are doing fine. And then there is an underside.

I see the role of the Left to find the underside - because it is often well hidden - bringing into public awareness and fighting for the people who are chained to the underside. Whether it is workers, whether it is asylum seekers or refugees who now have 2nd class rights in this country, whether it is women who are denied equality and equity, whoever it is - there are goups of people who miss out. Our society is predicated on winners. They don't want to worry about the losers.

The refugee issue has taken all of us into dark places. We have seen a side of our country that I think many of us couldn't believe existed. We have witnessed conditions for people that cause us shame.I think that is why people are fighting so hard. The politicians and the neo-liberal economic rationalists would like to forget about refugees, but it won't go away.If we look at the media in this country we are ill served. We have a Packer/Murdoch press who are actively merchandising a neo-liberal economic rationalist agenda. Because it is a democracy, there are bits and pieces here and there which will reflect an anti-war position or will question privatisation or will question the refugee policy, but on the whole the press it solidly merchandising this agenda.

We have the public broadcasting corporation - the ABC - who is being attacked. We have seen the way in which those attacks are underming their confidence to be independent. 17.000 hours have been spent examining tapes of broadcast material over the war to justify Senator Alston's position that the ABC is predjudiced. It seems that when the neo-liberal economic rationalists are losing, they can't even acknowledge that.Most of the people in Australia were opposed to going to war in Iraq. Even when war commenced, still more than half were opposed to it and nothing that has happened since then has made them change their minds.

That war has not made the world safer. There has been a lot of spin-doctoring about the reasons why we went to war. But there are enough intelligent people in this country - even though they are informed by this biased media - who have come to their own conclusions. That again is the role of the left, the dissidents, the activists in our society. To stimulate people to look outside the arguments put before them and to come to intelligent conclusions.

At the moment I am working with the Victorian Peace Network. I am also the national spokesperson for the Greens for refugees, but even if I weren't, I see myself as one of the many refugee activists. Some of us are aligned to groups and some of us are not. We are all in communication through email. This is a campaign that has been connected through email.

Recently I went to the Rural Australians for Refugees conference in Albury. There I met people Ihad been talking to for the last two and a half to three years by email and on the telephone. I met them face to face. It was fantastic.There are a lot of us who have become friends but never met each other, because of our concern for the refugees.

We often talk about what activists do for causes and for groups, but I think we sometimes forget what they do for us. The asylum seekers, in coming to this country, have allowed us to see another way - another view of life. They have also allowed us to see at first hand the incredible strength that people have to struggle and fight back. They give us an example of how we must struggle.

For many Australians life has been fairly easy. We come up against these people who have faced a death struggle. They really can inspire us and show us ways to endure - because that is what we have to do. So I think we need to remember, as activists involved in struggles and fights for others, what these people are giving back to us. It is more than a 50-50 exchange.

Also, I would say there are more women than men working as activists in the refugee movement. That may come about because women have a tendency to see the humanity in people first and the politics and other things second. We are not only doing this for the asylum seekers. We are also doing it for ourselves, because if we allow a political situation to exist in this country where one vulnerable group is picked off, we then are allowing the next vulnerable group to be picked off too - and so on.

Another group I am involved with is the Civil Rights Network. This, I think, is a really important work. What we are seeing in the reaction to terrorism is the Australian Government winding back our democratic rights. I believe it is a great excuse for them to curtail the rights of the population.

Increasingly they are introducing policies which are not to our benefit. They are to the benefit of corporations. That means people are going to respond - they are going to react. A lot of the legislation being introduced at the moment is legislation curtailing people's rights. In effect, what they are doing is criminalizing dissent. They are criminalizing protest. We activists need to remember that we will be the first to go!

Just one example. In the paper today the State Government has reacted with legislation to protect property developers. This is a group who, you would think, is doing well in a development driven state. But no, we have to protect them more. It is almost laughable, really. We have reached the stage where people don't see the joke in it anymore. They are so used to seeing governments protecting corporations, private companies and finance.

If we think about it, and that is another issue for us as a community, who does the government have the strongest, deepest and most intimate relationship with?

It is not with the people.
It is not with the grassroots.
It is not with the community - it is with the corporations. The directors, the CEO's are the ones they sit down to lunch with. The are the ones they dine with at night and socialize with and whose interests are being protected.

Civil rights, human rights, workers' rights and the peace movement. They are the four areas I work in. But you can't do everything. Annie once said to me

"you have to focus on where you will be most effective".

But when you are an activist, you just see so much. It is as if a lens is lifted from your eyes so you actually see the injustice. You see things happening that are going to lead to injustice and you want to engage with it.

I am trying to stay within clear paramaters, but of course, I sometimes get a call from somebody about something and I may have something useful in my toolbag. I see activists as having a bag of tools. We all have different bags of tools - this is why it is good to work together. I think it has been very encouraging to see, over the past few years, that people are working together more, putting their political differences to one side to focus on the concerns they share and to work together.

That has worked very well in the Victorian Peace Network. There may be forty or fifty of us sitting around the table. There are people from churches, from left-wing groups, from student groups, from ethnic groups, from other community groups and from the unions - all sitting together trying to work out a way to oppose a government decision to take us to a war that we knew was unjust. This also happened in the Fairwear campaign. You could go to a protest and find, say, a Christian brother holding the banner at one end and someone from a far-left political group holding the banner at the other end.

I think we need to see more of that.

"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.": John F. Kennedy