Joe Toscano, West Papua’s political candidate for the Australian Senate in 2020, with Jacob Rumbiak (Foreign Affairs Minister, West Papua Transitional Government).
Renowned political activist, Public broadcaster, and practicing Medical Doctor, Dr Joe Toscano has raised his hand as an independent candidate for the Victorian Senate in the 2020 Federal elections. Joe developed his suite of refreshingly progressive social policies, and how much they will cost, during years of thinking about the world and being politically active in it. Importantly for West Papuans, he is pursuing the development of an Independent Foreign Policy to facilitate federally legislated support for West Papua’s independence and self-determination.
About Joe Toscano, by Jacob Rumbiak
“Australia’s democracy would be poorer and less equitable without Dr Joe’s intelligent and dedicated activism. For years I’ve heard him educating people on the radio, and watched him campaigning in boardrooms and on the street for a better system of Public Housing and Public Health and for a Universal Basic Income.Joe’s hard work and innovative thinking has ensured the survival of the West Papua Rent Collective, which has financed our inspiring green (5-star-energy) office in Docklands since it opened in 2014.
As a Senate-candidate Joe is lobbying for an Independent Foreign Policy so that Australia can help us in the United Nations to liberate our Green Melanesian State from Indonesia” (Jacob Rumbiak, Foreign Affairs, West Papua Transitional Government)
Dr Joe Toscano: Be realistic, demand the impossible
Below is a downloadable summary of Joe’s policies (and costings), which, essentially, are a comprehensively developed case for putting the Public Interest before Corporate Interests. “No one in this resource rich country should be living in poverty. The problem isn’t the size of the cake. The problem is how the cake is divided. It is unacceptable to have 1.2 million children living in poverty and one-third of Australians living on less than $500 per week”.
Dr Toscano’s Policies and Costings (PDF, 4xA4)
Senate 2022 – Dr Joseph Toscano
Press Release (PDF)
Joe Toscano, Media Release
Dr Joe Toscano on West Papua
Joe’s concern for the West Papuans right to self-determination has deepened since he established the West Papua Rent Collective in 2014. The WP Rent Collective is a growing galaxy of Australians who believe that financing the Federal Republic of West Papua office at 838 Collins St, Docklands is an investment in the future of an independent Melanesian state. The inspiring green (five-star energy) space is co-ordinated by Jacob Rumbiak, the Foreign Affairs Ministers of the WP Transitional Government, and managed by the FRWP Women’s Office within the guidelines of Self-determination, Sustainability and Good Governance.
Joe’s primer on West Papua was his formidable artistic wife, Ellen José, who many West Papuans in Melbourne called ‘Muma’. Ellen was from Torres Strait, the swathe of water between Australia and New Guinea, whose indigenous island people are Melanesian, like the coastal and island Papuans. (It is because Torres Strait Islanders are Melanesian, not Aboriginal, that their green-blue-white flag sits alongside the red-black-yellow Aboriginal flag in Australian Government offices and the offices of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners).
There are many Melanesian nations (including Bougainville, the Kanaky of New Caledonia, West Papua), but just four Melanesian states: Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Vanuatu. It was the Solomon Islands Prime Minister, Manasseh Sogavare, who in 2015 brought West Papua “out of the darkness into the light”, when he invited the nation’s independence movement to be an Observer in the Melanesian Spearhead Group (Sogavare’s inspiring Martin-Luther-type speech, below). Sogavare’s subsequent address to the UN General Assembly, alongside Tongan Prime Minister Pohiva’s, paved path for the first West Papua motion by the Pacific Islands Forum (18 UN Member-States) and African Caribbean Pacific Group (79 UN Member-States) in 2019, and the UN’s unprecedented condemnation of Indonesia’s behaviour in West Papua in 2021.
Prime Minister Sogavare, Opening 2015 Melanesian Spearhead Group Summit (2 mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbV4MHeIVcc
Note a Solomon Islander’s comment about his state’s contract with China: “the region’s countries don’t want to get dragged into a geopolitical tussle between Washington and Beijing. Remember, when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled”
More about Dr Joe Toscano’s activism?
1. Dr Joe drove the creation of the monument in Franklin St (Melbourne) to Maulboyheenner and Tunnerminnerwait, the Aboriginal freedom fighters hanged in public by the colonial government in 1842. And has been working to establish 3 June as Mabo Day since the High Court replaced Terra Nullius (empty land) with Native Title in 1992.
2. In 2004, Joe established the Spirit of Eureka, a movement inspired by the relevance—for present day justice, democracy and sovereignty struggles—of the Ballarat gold-miners historic revolt against the British colonial authority and the inequities it forced upon them.
Want to know more about the WP Transitional Government that Dr Toscano supports?
The West Papua Transitional Government was established on 1 December 2020 after a petition for independence, hand-signed by 1.8M Papuans, was presented to the United Nations in 2017 and 2019. It governs the people of a richly endowed sovereign state (that has a defined territory and permanent population, and capacity to enter into relations with other states). It is accountable to the people’s key political organisations—the Federal Republic of West Papua, Coalition for the Liberation of West Papua and West Papua National Parliament—and to their Tribal Councils and the WP Council of Churches. The parliamentary system has a President and Prime Minister, 12 Cabinet Ministers of working bureaucracies, as well as Governors of the territory’s seven states. President Benny Wenda told media at the 2021 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow “We have a constitution, government, cabinet, and a Green State policy framework to restore balance between the human and non-humans in our homeland”.
West Papua now has the support of the Pacific Islands Forum (18 UN member-states, including Australia and New Zealand); the African Caribbean Pacific Group (79 UN states); the European Union, and the Parliaments of the UK, Poland, the Netherlands and Spain. Vanuatu is the state’s legal sponsor to the United Nations. All of this support may mean that Indonesia has squandered its opportunities to negotiate directly with the Papuans and will now have to suffer exposure of its brutal occupation during international mediation of the long-standing conflict.
Care to join the West Papua Rent Collective co-ordinated by Dr Joe Toscano?
