About Red Star Australia

            Red Star Australia was incorporated and registered with the Victorian Department of Justice in August 2005. It was publicly launched and its banner unfurled at a ceremony in December of that year. Membership is open to anyone who supports its Philosophy and Aims, which are:
            Philosophy
            Humanitarian relief of natural disaster should be provided without material gain accruing to any of its providers. No specialist, salaried elite is needed to carry out relief work, but rather ordinary men and women guided by the natural principles of brotherhood, solidarity, love and compassion.  The only sane and rational way for human beings to live together is according to the principle "One for all, all for one". Selfishness is learned from social experience, it is not part of human nature.   Australia has become a land of inequality, alienation, loneliness, and hidden hardship. Australia is one of the richest countries in the world which contains more than enough wealth for everyone. Therefore all our sufferings are man-made.
            Poverty is a relative concept. It can only exist where there is inequality. One cannot be poor unless another is rich, and vice-versa. There is great, and growing, inequality in Australia. For all the talk about abolishing poverty, we are actually generating more. Rather than employing an army of social workers to assist the victims of poverty and social injustice, it is better to share out more equally all the good things our society has to offer.
            Aims
            Our objective is to found a humanitarian relief agency of a new type, dedicated to the provision of human service on a completely voluntary basis. Red Star Australia is affiliated with Red Star Sri Lanka, and strives to financially assist their work. We also strive to prevent in Australia the generation of more inequality, poverty, and its consequent unnecessary suffering.

            It costs $5 to join Red Star Australia, plus a $5 Annual Fee

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            Whenever a natural disaster occurs in the Third World, many people feel a human obligation to help those affected. But how? Donating money to CARE, Oxfam, Caritas, Red Cross will not only be largely ineffective, as it has been in Sri Lanka - it will do something far worse. It will finance the exportation of western imperialist ideology into the country concerned. Red Star Australia intends to offer real disinterested aid to Sri Lanka, which the local people, who are in the best position to know what is required, can use in their relief work. They don't need foreigners telling them what to do.
            There are historical precedents for Red Star, but they all date back to before World War Two. International Workers' Aid was set up by the Comintern in the 1920s on the basis of proletarian internationalism. So for example during the famous British General Strike of 1926, money flowed into the hands of the striking British workers from all over the world. But by far the largest amounts came from voluntary collections raised in the Soviet Union by International Workers Aid. This is the spirit Red Star Australia wishes to emulate.
            This spirit was best of all expressed by the Soviet poet V.V.Mayakovsky, who comemmorated his country's magnificent donation in some beautiful lines from his great poem  "To British Workers":