LRC 90.5
1. The United States keeps seeing horrific mass shootings, often racially charged. Debates around gun control continue to transpire after these tragedies. What is your parties position? Is gun control the answer or is it rightful that people have the right to be armed?
2. EU leaders have placed a 75% embargo on Russian oil imports and it is set to increase up to 90% by the end of 2022. Russian gas supplies have already been cut off from Bulgaria and Poland and energy firms in other European countries are being shut off. EU leaders have stated they will continue to send arms to Ukraine. How should EU countries and Russia maintain their relationship that inevitably impacts the global public? 3. The University of Melbourne student union recently passed a motion calling for their university to boycott and divest from Aparthied Israel and to support for the occupied Palestine but have had to rescind their democratic motion due to legal threats by the Zionist lobby. Why did it escalate to this and what should The University of Adelaide take away from it?
Socialist Alternative | ASHRAF ABDUL HALIM 1. Mass shootings have unfortunately become a mainstay in the lives of Americans. We support actions that would reduce the power of weapons manufacturers and gun fundamentalists and keep people safe. Gun ownership should be held to the same standard of automobile ownership. There should be licensing and training. The fact that guns are a commodity that is kept from the health and safety regulations most other things have to go through is absurd. Things that are made exclusively to kill large amounts of people very quickly shouldn’t be made in the first place. There should be a prohibition of the manufacture of weapons like the AR-15. But beyond these things, socialists want to see change at a much deeper level. We need to look at why so many mass shootings happen in a country like the United States. The recent massacre at Buffalo supermarket was perpetrated by a white-supremacist specifically targeting a black neighbourhood. These people have grown up in a country where their own police force regularly use guns to murder with impunity, and where their government glorifies the murder of thousands in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. We should not forget that the Pentagon played a role in this as well. After all, the powerful guns used in these mass shootings are merely domestic versions of the models requested by generals to inflict maximum casualties in war zones. 2. In whatever decisions get made between or by the EU and Russia, the interests of the poor and working class are barely an afterthought. The sanctions and embargoes placed on Russia by and large harm the poor and working class in Russia, not Putin. They further exacerbate a crisis in the energy market that millions of workers are paying for around the world, and plunge people suffering a cost of living crisis into further financial insecurity. This crisis also points to the need to accelerate 14
production of renewable energy, not double down on fossil fuels in our own country. 3. It is incredibly alarming that we have a situation where a student union has been pressured by legal threats to back down and rescind a progressive, anti-apartheid stance. There were pro-bono offers from lawyers to defend the union for its historical position, but union bureaucrats chose not to fight. Student unions should be champions of the oppressed. UoA should understand this as a step backwards for UMSU and progressive student unionism in the country in general.
