Another day, another round of baby kissing, hi-vis vests and soirees with rich potential donors for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Meanwhile, the string of crises and injustices affecting the lives of millions—from the rising cost of living to global warming, genocide in Gaza, inequality, military build-up and the fascistic rampage of Trump—is studiously avoided in this election campaign. 
There has been a marked turnaround in the polls from late 2024 to the election campaign. From Labor being well behind Dutton and hoping at best to cobble together a coalition to form government, some polls now suggest it could win a majority. Either way, there has been a clear swing away from Dutton’s Liberals. While this could all change by 3 May, it does partly reflect something positive—the unpopularity of Donald Trump in Australia.
It is not just that Liberal policies failed to land (or in some cases even to exist), but also that the association of Dutton with Trump, who even before the tariffs chaos was unpopular in Australia, has hurt the Coalition. 
And Trump is indeed very unpopular here. Australia Institute polling released on 4 March showed that more Australians (31 percent) saw Donald Trump as a greater threat to world peace than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping. Half of Australians think Trump’s election is a bad thing for the world, double the number who think it is a good thing.
It has taken the Coalition quite a while to recognise this. Initially, the Dutton camp made some minor gestures of differentiation from Trump; hence Dutton’s early disavowal of attacks on abortion rights and assurances that trans issues will not figure in this election. 
But like a dog returning to its vomit, Dutton couldn’t quite keep away from Trumpiness, whether promising our very own Musk-style DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) headed by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, or nominating health, education and the ABC as targets for its cuts. On the assumption that everyone was dying to drain the Canberra swamp, Dutton offered the mass sacking of 41,000 public servants, with those who survived being denied the right to work from home.
Since the election date was set, Dutton has been trying to pivot away from the Trump connection, largely by being an echo of Albanese. For example, ahead of the so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, Albanese announced Australia’s pharmaceutical scheme, online news payment and biosecurity protocols were not up for negotiation. “Not on my watch”, he said, and was immediately echoed by Dutton.
Then, in the face of the unpopularity of mass sackings, Dutton backflipped on attacking public servants. One after another, Liberal candidates and campaign managers who turn out to be women-￹haters, Islamophobes and cookers of all kinds have had to be disendorsed or sacked. 
While it is positive that there is no appetite for Trump’s far-right, billionaire-first style of politics in Australia, the focus on Trump has given the major parties breathing room when it comes to their shared do-as-little-as-possible approach to the issue that matters the most to people in this election: the cost-of-living crisis. 
The 3 percent cheaper energy bills Dutton claims will be delivered by the Coalition’s energy policy equals a saving of roughly $50 to $70 a year for most east coast families according to the ABC, almost exactly the miserly household savings Labor has pledged through its tax cuts. Neither of these policies will make a significant difference to the difficulties facing working-class people.
Meanwhile, both parties are determined to hand $176 billion to corporate landlords and property investors over the next decade, and there is seemingly limitless bipartisan largesse available for military spending and subsidies to fossil fuel companies. 
Even though one or other will win the election and form government, the increasing decline in support for the major parties is likely to continue in this election. An aggregate of current polling produced by the Guardian
showed the primary votes share for Labor and the Coalition at 68.5 percent, an all-time low and the continuation of a long-term decline since the two parties claimed 98 percent of votes in 1951.
Nonetheless, both Labor and the Liberals have ruled out minority government or even negotiations with the Greens, something which only emphasises how right-wing Labor is, not that the Greens are some radical threat.
The Greens’ policies are better than Labor’s, especially on housing, renters’ rights and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But they’ve also gone to water again and again in parliament, eventually waving through the useless Housing Australia Future Fund housing program and Labor’s meaningless emissions reduction target.
Worse, there has been a shift in the Greens’ messaging as the election has got nearer. This was really summed up in their press release of 28 March 2025: “Greens hit go on biggest ever national campaign for minority government”. Their electoral positioning—“Greens will keep Dutton out and get Labor to act”—has seen a marked reduction in attacks on Labor in favour of praising them for adopting some aspect of the Greens’ policies.
One sign of this shift is the Greens’ new defence policy, which, although it involves an overall reduction in military spending and the scrapping of AUKUS, nevertheless represents a shift within the party towards greater commitment to military spending and legitimisation of the Australian military and the future conflicts in which it may be a part. Why are the Greens suddenly doing this, having never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”? With electoral possibilities in the air, parties like the Greens that see parliament as the place where change is made need to prove their reasonableness as a potential partner in government. Showing that they accept a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the military, is part of that. It also fits in with the growing tide of Australian nationalism in response to Trump.
In this new era, revived Australian nationalism will likely come in a variety of forms. One will involve the attempt to rehabilitate the myth of an “independent” Australian military that only ever acts in self-defence, ignoring the history of Australian imperialism and the capitalist logic that underpins its alliance with the US. 
Another will take the form of patriotic consumption of locally made goods. The budget committed $20 million towards the government’s “Buy Australian” plan. Western Australian Labor Premier Roger Cook last month launched a “Made in WA” campaign, which he said would “put manufacturing back at the heart of the economy [and help] make more things in WA”. 
Yet another will take the form of overt class collaboration as Labor and union leaders promote sacrifice of wages and conditions for the salvation of Australian industry in a more hostile world market.
An inevitable accompaniment to rising nationalism during a drive to rearmament is repression and the demonisation of dissent. This has already been evident in relation to anti-democratic attacks and vilification of Palestine campaigners, as well as in the politically motivated claims about the supposed rise in antisemitism. Even the revelation that almost all the Sydney graffiti, arson and the infamous caravan were not the action of antisemites but a cynical attempt by organised criminals to try to reduce their sentences, has done little to dent this narrative.
A raft of new anti-protest laws has been passed federally and by some state governments. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media and educational and cultural institutions. The message is clear: if you are on the wrong side of Australia’s imperialist interests and those of its allies, you will be treated like a criminal.
This both builds on and fuels the wider law and order beat-up that is a feature of politics in almost every state. This offensive is directed first and foremost at Indigenous children, such as Queensland’s “adult crime, adult time” laws, as well as immigrant youth. 
All this cries out for resistance. Given that unions, even at only 13 percent membership, still have great social power to take a stand on these issues and many more, it is criminal that the union bureaucracy reduces them to foot soldiers for Labor in its various marginal seat campaigns.
On the campaign trail the only positive has been the left-wing hecklers who both leaders have faced, from campaigners against fossil fuels to opponents of the genocide of the Palestinians to Indigenous people keen to proclaim that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price does not speak for them.
And whatever the result of the election, the issues that animate the hecklers, and the desire to fight those issues, will remain. The hostility to Trump is important not just for its effect on the elections, but for its potential mobilising power in Australia as Trump’s and Musk’s outrages in the US strike a chord here. 
The cost of living remains for very good reason the main election issue for most workers, with the election coming on the back of a steep decline in living standards over the life of the Albanese Labor government. While prices are not rising as fast as they once were, workers and the poor are still burdened with the increases of the past two years. And for most, the prices of housing, food and health care have risen much more than their wages. Wages rose just over 10 percent between March 2022 and December 2024, while inflation rose more than 12 percent and many goods, including essentials such as housing and food, increased even more.
When even Peter Dutton can do it, it’s not enough just to acknowledge that “working families are doing it tough”. Neither major party mentions inequality, let alone offers to do anything about it, because that would draw attention to the fact that those they actually serve—Australia’s capitalists—are raking it in.
The wealth of the richest 200 Australians has risen from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 percent in 2024. Australia Institute research shows the gas corporations have paid zero royalties on over half (56 percent) of all gas exports. In fact, the government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax.
There’s nothing inevitable about any of this. What’s on offer at the election isn’t a reflection of popular sentiment. Genocide, destroying the environment, far-right crazies and being ripped off by the rich aren’t inherently popular. Better funded health care, decent public housing and climate action are. But sentiment alone isn’t enough. Even voting for Victorian Socialists once every three years isn’t enough. Those sentiments and those votes need to be translated into socialist organisation that persists day in and day out, animated not by “put Liberals last” but by a desire to wipe out the whole profit-driven, crisis-ridden system.

Diane Fieldes

We deserve better than what Labor and Liberal offer

The term “social cohesion” has had a workout in Australia over the past year. Always a handy staple for those wanting to cast a blanket of conformity over society, the term has particularly been used to attack those protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its war on Lebanon. 
In late July, the Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as the country’s first special envoy for social cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that friction in the community over Israel’s war on Gaza was causing a “great deal of concern about disharmony” across Australia.
The use of social cohesion as a weapon to reproach pro-Palestine demonstrations came to something of a climax as Israel invaded Lebanon in late September and with the approach of the first anniversary of its murderous onslaught on Gaza.
On 30 September, Sky News reported breathlessly the claims of shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan that “social cohesion is failing in our country” and demanded punitive action when Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared at the weekly Palestine rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.
A week later, NSW Premier Chris Minns tried to ban pro-Palestine protests, to the acclamation of Peter Dutton. Echoing these sentiments, Albanese proclaimed 7 October was “not a time for demonstrations to occur ... It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued”.
What is the “social cohesion” that Australia’s political leaders seek to protect against protest? 
Like every attempt to paper over the massive divisions built into Australian capitalism, it begins from the assumption that unity is something both possible and desirable. Further, if social cohesion is natural, then unity can have been disrupted only by troublemakers—the infamous “outside agitator” thesis beloved by every boss who ever faced a strike and every government that inspired rebellion. 
So social cohesion is based on a demand for compliance and demonisation of those who challenge it. In the Cold War 1950s, it was “reds under the bed”; now it’s Arabs and Muslims who are the supposed danger. 
Peter Dutton spelt it out on 19 April: “Central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract. Whatever our background, our faith, or our cultural traditions, we do not allow the problems, the tensions, or the animosity of other parts of the world to manifest in our communities or on our streets ... there are people in our country today who do not subscribe to our democratic values”.
That demand for compliance is backed by a political and legal infrastructure designed to undermine and criminalise protests of all kinds, including strikes. Sometimes it’s been the crushing weight of <a>a media barrage of the dominant ideas</a>, sometimes it’s been threats from university administrations against even using words like “from the river to the sea” or “genocide”, and sometimes it’s a battery of laws against protesting or striking. 
It is “cohesion” only in the sense of those who run society demanding compliance with their rules. As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey on 15 August: “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting ‘social cohesion’, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters”. All the concern and blame are placed on supporters of Palestine. Where are the headlines calling for supporters of Israel to stop backing genocide because such ideas undermine social cohesion? 
The ALP is the manager of an imposed consensus—from maintaining Australia’s imperialist alliances to centring profitability in the economy—about which it actively works to discourage debate, let alone protest. 
There’s nothing naturally cohering in a class-divided society. At the core of capitalism are irreconcilable competing class interests. Social cohesion is a myth—at our expense. Often the so-called cohesion can be maintained only by exclusion, such as that of Indigenous people, or the ban on marriage equality before 2017. Refugees remain condemned to be permanent outsiders. The attack on the CFMEU coheres the union movement even further around tame cat passivity in the face of the cost-of-living crisis. 
In other words, calls for social cohesion always mean just going along with the status quo. On the other hand, the high points of struggle, such as the successful working-class fight against conscription in World War I or the smashing of the anti-union penal powers in 1969, have involved breaking with the notion of social cohesion and exposing the real divisions in society through mass struggle.
So social cohesion is deserving only of the utmost hostility. Socialists don’t want social cohesion; we want to make the class war visible. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in 1857: 
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

Bill Shorten’s parting announcement as he left parliament was new cuts to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
As NDIS minister, in 2022 Shorten announced a review to “reduce the needless waste happening in the NDIS”. This was followed by months of confected media outrage, fuelled by government announcements about NDIS participants and suppliers engaging in fraud, and that bullshit services (psychics, crystal healing and tarot cards featured a lot) were being funded by the scheme. 
This produced a predictable result. In August 2024, new NDIS legislation passed with bipartisan support to reduce the growth in NDIS spending by $14.4 billion over the next four years. 
Many valid critiques have been made of companies that have rorted the system, most notably through the practice of charging more for products and services because a client is on the NDIS. But this isn’t the key problem—it’s a symptom of a for-profit disability service overseen by cost-cutting bureaucrats. 
The overriding goal of production under capitalism is profit, not helping people. What determines what is produced, and how, isn’t whether a product or service fulfils a genuine need, but how much profit it will make for the person selling it. This is as true of private healthcare provision as it is for any other commodity. Profit is integrated at multiple levels of the NDIS, from the companies that provide a workforce of poorly-paid support workers, to those companies (“support coordinators”) that manage people’s cases because the complexity of organising your own support services through the web of private providers is almost impossible. 
Long before the NDIS, governments were already defunding and privatising disability support services. This was part of a longer-term drive across the globe, stemming from the economic crisis that began in the 1970s. Bosses and governments attempted to shore up falling profit rates at the expense of the working class. Some of this was in the form of attacks on wages and conditions and union rights. Some of it was in the form of cutting back government spending on social services needed by workers. Privatisation was a mechanism for both.
When the Gillard Labor government introduced the NDIS in 2013, its goal, stripped of the rhetoric of empowerment and individual choice, was the complete privatisation of disability support—to open up disability services to profit-driven corporations that have already wreaked havoc in health, public housing, aged care, education and other vital social services. 
The NDIS was not designed to help the majority of the 5.5 million people living with disability in Australia. The scheme covers only 650,000 of them. The latest legislation aims to further reduce that number—not because people have become less disabled, but because they have become less eligible. 
Forget the talk about “waste”. Forecast to cost $41.4 billion in 2024-2025, the NDIS is the second most expensive government welfare program in Australia, after the age pension. The driving force behind the latest cuts is not that it is too expensive, but that Australian capitalism has other priorities. The Albanese government is boosting defence spending by $6 billion this year. The budget projects this figure to rise to $100 billion by 2033-34, not including the hundreds of billions for the nuclear submarines that are part of the AUKUS pact. So-called “excess spending” is only a problem when it comes to helping people. For warfare, the sky’s the limit.
It’s hard to tell what the cuts to NDIS funding will look like when they come into operation on 3 October 2024. This is itself a source of stress to anyone accessing the scheme. What we can be sure of is that it will be cost-cutting at the expense of quality of life. People using the NDIS already must battle to have equipment such as noise cancelling headphones needed to cope with sensory overload classified as “disability items” rather than the “everyday expenses” they are expected to fund themselves.
The ABC <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-10/ndis-funding-cuts-children-with-autism-families-impacted/104303492">recently reported</a> the story of a mother who has been unable to access an early intervention service for her daughter who has been diagnosed with level three autism due to NDIS funding cuts. To be diagnosed at level three on the autism spectrum means you require very substantial support. Accessing it is another matter, as more services are deemed ineligible for NDIS funding.
These cuts disproportionately impact lower-income families. If those needing support are assessed as not eligible for a NDIS package, or their package is inadequate, they can still buy the services they need—if they are rich enough. 
What is needed is a free, universal, publicly funded scheme organised to meet the needs of those living with disability. The trajectory of the NDIS takes us ever further from that.

NDIS: new cuts to an unfit system

“Sydney’s gay community is rightly hurt and angry. Police should not march in this year’s Mardi Gras.” So said the Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 25 February. By the end of the day, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras board had uninvited the police from marching in Saturday’s parade. By 28 February, they had invited them back, albeit wearing T-shirts with a police logo instead of their uniforms.
The hurt and anger to which the Herald editorial referred arose from the domestic violence-fuelled murders of a Sydney gay couple, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a gay police officer, has been charged with the murders. He allegedly used his police gun.
The only positive to come out of this horrendous crime is that it has re-raised the argument about whether the police should march in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. Not because an individual cop turns out to be a homicidal stalker, but because they are the police, and not everyone has forgotten their repressive role in society, past and present.
The police have been part of Mardi Gras for 26 years. In that time they have committed, as an institution, egregious crimes against every oppressed group in society. Lamarre-Condon himself was photographed marching in the police contingent at Mardi Gras in 2020. That was the year he was also filmed repeatedly tasering an Indigenous man in the face, neck and chest. He was later cleared by an “internal investigation” in what is standard procedure for police caught enacting violence on and off the job.
The Mardi Gras board didn’t seem to think this—or the other ongoing crimes of the police force—was a good enough reason to question the cops’ participation.
So why this time? Timing played a role. News of the murders came to light ten days before Mardi Gras, and only two months after the police’s refusal to even apologise when an inquiry into LGBTI hate crimes criticised them in December for being “indifferent, negligent, dismissive or hostile” to the investigation. More importantly, while much grief ensued for the victims, there was also from many an angry reaction against the cops in general.
The NSW police commissioner Karen Webb understood what was at stake. She needed to draw a line between the “one bad apple” and the force as a whole. How else to explain that on 24 February she suddenly remembered to apologise for the four decades of LGBTI hate crimes that the police had previously ignored?
The Mardi Gras board decided to make a gesture to assuage popular anger at the police. Yet what has eventuated is meaningless. The logic of “inclusion” based on identity (“don’t you realise there are LGBTI police officers?”) won the day and the cops were back in. When it came down to it, even a one-off absence of the police from the parade raised too many awkward questions. Most importantly, why was this repressive force ever part of an event that had started with a police riot against protesters for LGBTI rights?
The police should never have been invited in the first place.
Mardi Gras at its 1978 origin was a protest in solidarity with the gay liberation movement in the United States. It took place on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots of 1969 that initiated that movement. The first Mardi Gras and the campaign to drop the charges against protesters that followed it gave an enormous boost to LGBTI radicalism and mass mobilisation in Australia.
Yet twenty years later, in 1998, Mardi Gras had been so transformed that the cops were invited to participate in an event that had once chanted: “Stop police attacks on gays, women and Blacks!”.
Had the police changed their spots? Or had Mardi Gras? 
Did, perhaps, the police get let into the parade in 1998 because they made a nice apology in 1997 for the beatings and arrests that they inflicted on the original Mardi Gras protesters in 1978? Nothing like it. That insincere utterance only came in 2016, after they’d already been polluting the parade with their presence for eighteen years (and three years after they physically attacked several gay men on the night of Mardi Gras 2013—something else that failed to move the Mardi Gras board to un-invite them).
The police force is a violent, right-wing institution that plays no role in protecting oppressed people, and an enormous role in holding up structures of oppression and injustice. Police brutality is defended by and entrenched in the entire institution.
What has changed is Mardi Gras’ “management”. Having the police march in the parade is just one sign of what a conservative corporate entity Mardi Gras has become. 
While Marxists, socialists, anarchists and other radicals established Mardi Gras, its nature did not go uncontested. By 1980, the key debate was between those fighting to retain Mardi Gras as a political protest and those (including gay business owners) who wanted to make it a celebration of “our lifestyle”. That the date of the march was shifted in 1981 from the chilly climes of the winter Stonewall anniversary in June to the tourism-friendly warmth of late summer should tell you who won.
Mardi Gras was no longer organised by the radical activists of the Gay Solidarity Group but by a specific Gay Mardi Gras Task Group, the forerunner of today’s board of directors of what is now a registered charity and company with a multi-million-dollar turnover. The parade itself is a huge tourism event from which major profits are made, many of them by the organisation’s corporate backers such as Qantas. Political floats are rare. The 78ers float is now limited to 100 participants—apparently subject to the same numerical restriction as the police who bashed and arrested us throughout 1978.
The only positive about today’s Mardi Gras is that the crowds of people of all genders and sexualities that come to view it—hundreds of thousands lining the parade route, and millions online—remind us of the effect that radical mass campaigns for LGBTI rights, from Mardi Gras to marriage equality, have had on popular attitudes.
The police, on the other hand, have resisted every advance. Normalising this repressive force by including them in the Mardi Gras has not improved them one bit. Instead, it has whitewashed their true nature.
Diane Fieldes is a 78er who marched in the “drop the charges” rally on 27 August 1978 at which more than 100 people were arrested.

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

It was only in July 2008, four years after Nelson Mandela announced that he was retiring from public life and fourteen years after he had been elected president of South Africa, that US President George W. Bush signed a bill to remove Mandela’s organisation, the African National Congress, from the US terrorism watch list. 
Mandela being on that list in the first place is a reminder that the US and numerous other governments were on the side of the apartheid regime for decades. They were prepared to defend any atrocity when it suited them.
It is worth remembering this as governments around the world line up to defend Israel using the language of “historical memory”, “universal values” and “decency”.
Every government that today supports Israeli apartheid, is now (and supposedly always has been) against South African apartheid. But when the question was posed at the time, many were, like today, on the wrong side of history. Yet you’d never know it from what they say these days.
Indeed, the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013 led to an outpouring of self-congratulatory revisionism.
On leaving Australia to attend the memorial service, Prime Minister Tony Abbott claimed that both sides of Australian politics had campaigned for an end to apartheid. A Toronto Star headline claimed: “Canada helped lead international fight against Apartheid”. But Canadian and Australian governments had done nothing of the kind.
As late as the 1980s, the decade when the international campaign to free Mandela and end apartheid reached its peak and the struggle by the Black South African working class intensified, conservative leaders around the world rallied to support the South African regime—just as they had done for decades.
Following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, decolonising African and Asian countries moved to have South Africa excluded from the Commonwealth. Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, rejected such moves, refusing to condemn apartheid. 
Nelson Mandela’s sentencing to life imprisonment in 1964 left Western powers totally indifferent. In fact, after a voluntary arms embargo was agreed by the UN in 1963 (and widely ignored), the French government increased its trade with South Africa, including becoming the leading supplier of arms to the regime. Within a decade, France was a major trading partner with South Africa, second only to Britain.
The imperialist powers’ support for apartheid South Africa was at least partly motivated by the chance to profit from the supply of super-exploited Black labour that apartheid ensured, and to make money from the arms trade. 
Added to this were the requirements of inter-imperialist competition (in this period, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union), which is always bound to trump humanitarian concerns. In 1969, the commandant general of the South African Defence Force (SADF) summed up this reason succinctly: 
“In the entire ocean expanse from Australia to South America, South Africa is the only fixed point offering modern naval bases, harbours and airfield facilities, a modern developed industry and stable government.” 
And should the West need military help in keeping Russian influence out of Africa, the SADF would provide it.
The arms prohibition that the UN declared mandatory in 1977 after the total failure of the 1963 voluntary embargo simply meant that South Africa developed its own technology, manufactured its own weapons and looked for new military supplies. 
Apartheid South Africa also found a new strategic partner. Israel was openly critical of apartheid through the 1950s and 60s as it built alliances with post-colonial African governments. But those links were broken by its wars in 1967 and 1973.
In 1976, Israel invited South African Prime Minister John Vorster—a Nazi sympathiser who had been interned during World War Two—for a state visit. Vorster’s trip laid the ground for a collaboration that transformed the Israel-South Africa axis into a force in the international arms trade. 
Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, explained how this worked: “At the UN we kept saying: we are against apartheid, as Jewish people who suffered from the Holocaust this is intolerable. But our security establishment kept cooperating”.
It was only in the late 1980s that the United States, the United Kingdom, and 23 other states passed laws placing various trade sanctions on South Africa. Not because they’d had a moral epiphany. Their victory in the Cold War meant that the release of Mandela and a negotiated settlement involving the African National Congress were now their preferred method to generate stability for future profitable investment in South Africa.
Now that the issue has been settled by history—apartheid having been smashed by the irrepressible organising and mass movement of Black South Africans—the Western establishment clings to the anti-apartheid legacy as a way to make themselves look historically progressive.
This is not the only example of a historical reversal to claim contemporary anti-racist credentials. As Louise O’Shea wrote in <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/when-the-australian-ruling-class-embraced-fascism/">a 2017 Marxist Left Review article</a>: 
“Enthusiasm about Mussolini or the Third Reich is rightly regarded as shameful today, but it was common currency within Australian conservative circles of the 1920s and 1930s. Repression and intimidation of the union movement and the left, a willingness to dispense with democracy in favour of dictatorship and rampant authoritarianism—all qualities the Australian far right admired about European fascism—were widely considered at the time to be both desirable and applicable here.”
The Brisbane Courier wrote in 1923 of Mussolini’s ascension: “every barrier against Communism—and the Fascisti have proved a strong one—is a bulwark of civilisation”. In 1923, the premier of Victoria, Harry Lawson, had a private audience with Mussolini in which he expressed his “keen sympathy with the fascist movement”.
In Britain, Hitler was applauded, like Mussolini, for restoring order and national pride, bringing economic revival and, not least, for suppressing the left and the workers’ movement. Once war began, these embarrassments were buried as if they had never happened, as the “fight for democracy” became the justification for another inter-imperialist slaughter.
Every respectable politician and establishment figure now touts their credentialed anti-Nazism and purported admiration for Mandela. But you don’t get to be on the right side of history when the questions have already been decided.
Today, Israel is the oppressor state. It is <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/what-happening-palestine-genocide">carrying out a genocide</a> and <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/">practises apartheid</a>. This is history’s litmus test—not past horrors on which everyone can now comfortably agree.

You don’t get to be ‘on the right side of history’ on questions history has already decided

The 1967 referendum on Indigenous issues defied the propensity of referendums in Australia to fail. In fact, with 90.77 percent voting Yes, the referendum passed by a margin greatly surpassing all other successful ones.
The referendum altered the constitution to amend Section 51, which specified that the federal government could make laws with respect to the “people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”—the words “other than the Aboriginal race in any state” were deleted. Section 127, which stipulated that in “reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a state or other part of the Commonwealth, Aboriginal natives shall not be counted”, was also deleted.
Much has been written about the formal constitutional implications of the 1967 vote, and a series of wrong ideas have been put forward regarding what was being voted on. For instance, Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus write in their book The 1967 referendum: race, power and the Australian constitution: 
“Over the years it has been popularly claimed that the referendum gave Aboriginal people the vote, granted equal citizenship, repealed racially discriminatory laws, transferred Aboriginal affairs from the states to the Commonwealth, or that it did all of these things ... Yet, a reading of the Constitution would suggest that the changes endorsed in the referendum could have had none of these outcomes.”
The referendum has also been misrepresented as allowing Indigenous people to be counted in the census, but a recent article by academics Murray Goot and Tim Rowse in the Australian Journal of Politics and History shows that Indigenous people had been counted in every census since 1911. The referendum simply allowed these figures to be taken into account when calculating per capita grants to the states or determining the size of federal electorates. 
This is all pretty irrelevant.
It was concerted political activism that gave popular meaning to the referendum far beyond changing the arcane words of the constitution. Campaigners turned it into a decision about rights for Indigenous people and the unacceptable situation they were in. The majority of people who voted Yes did so because they thought it would improve the lives of Aboriginal people.
Even the fairly anodyne official Yes case (there was no official No case because no parliamentarian would sponsor it) argued that the referendum, if successful, “will remove words from our Constitution that many people think are discriminatory against the Aboriginal people”. 
The main campaign organisation, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander (FCAATSI), produced leaflets that more bluntly proclaimed “Right wrongs. Write Yes for Aborigines on May 27”, and posters that urged people to “Vote Yes for Aboriginal rights”. That is what the vote was about.
A 1967 Gallup Poll of 1,200 voters conducted face-to-face a week before the referendum confirms this. In response to the question of what they thought the chief effect would be if the Yes vote won, 74 percent answered with reference to real improvements in the lives of Indigenous people: 38 percent mentioned “better opportunities, improved conditions, better housing, education”, 22 percent referred to “equal rights as citizens”, and 14 percent “higher morals, improved status, freedom”. Of the remaining 26 percent, a majority (16 percent) failed to express an opinion, 4 percent answered “bad effects, drinking, more discrimination”, and 6 percent “no effect”.
As none of the issues that animated the 74 percent of positive respondents had appeared in the official Yes case, the origins of their responses lie elsewhere—in the decade-long campaign for the referendum, and the political context of rising activism in the early 1960s. Renewed campaigning for Aboriginal rights intersected with international concerns about decolonisation, apartheid in South Africa and civil rights in the US. A growing youth radicalism and working-class militancy had come into full flower by the end of the decade.
It is worth enumerating the kind of things that had been law well into the period in which FCAATSI had been demanding a referendum. 
In the early 1960s, most Indigenous people could not vote; receive welfare such as the age pension or unemployment entitlements; move freely from place to place; make decisions about their own lives such as where to live or work or who they could marry; be legal guardians of their own children; decide what they could do with their earnings; receive the award wages mandated for other workers; or drink alcohol. 
By the time of the 1967 referendum, only Western Australia and Queensland retained explicitly discriminatory laws against Aboriginal people. In those two states, many Indigenous people still lived “under the Act”, meaning that the government still maintained control over many aspects of their lives. 
The changes that took place owed much to the pressure of campaigning by both FCAATSI and many other Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists over the decade of the referendum campaign, and in many cases for decades before. 
The referendum would not have been held without the pressure from fighters against Indigenous oppression over a much longer preceding period. 
Groups such as the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in NSW took up petitioning for a referendum and the repeal of all discriminatory legislation in April 1957 at a meeting of 1,500 people—of whom about a third were Indigenous—at Sydney Town Hall. Within a year, the first national Aboriginal organisation, the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA, changed to FCAATSI in 1964), was formed. It took up the demand initiated by the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship.
The campaign for a referendum reflected the effects of the conservative and moderate nature of Indigenous activism during the 1950s. The focus on constitutional changes and empowering the federal government fitted with the cautious focus, especially during the height of the Cold War, of appealing to the United Nations and supposedly progressive Liberal politicians such as Paul Hasluck and William Charles Wentworth. 
Despite these political limitations, they gathered 26,000 signatures on the original petition in 1958, and a new petition launched in 1962 gathered a further 103,000 signatures. Kath Walker (later known as Oodgeroo Noonuccal) became the campaign’s national coordinator and undertook an Australia-wide speaking tour, and a wide range of bodies were approached to support the campaign.
The focus placed on the constitutional changes proposed by the referendum was contested among Indigenous activists. As Attwood and Markus’ book points out: “Several Aboriginal leaders expressed serious criticisms of it in the lead-up to the poll”. For instance, “[Herbert] Groves expressed the desire of Aboriginal people ‘to be part and parcel of the community’ at the same time as he made it clear they wanted ‘to do this without losing [their] identity as Australian Aborigines’”. Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship member Ken Brindle later told activist Faith Bandler that he “couldn’t see how it would benefit us”. And yet they campaigned for the referendum to pass, as did many non-Indigenous activists, most importantly in the trade unions.
A range of left-wing unions dominated the FCAATSI affiliates list: the Building Workers’ Industrial Union, the Builders Labourers Federation, the Australian Railways Union, the metal industry unions such as the boilermakers and sheet metal workers, Miscellaneous Workers’ Union, teachers, plumbers and engine drivers, and some state Trades and Labour Councils.
By the end of 1964, some commentators were talking of a significant shift in workers’ consciousness, and that awareness of the demands of Indigenous people was one of the most important aspects of this. Many Aboriginal activists developed their political knowledge and gained organisational skills as working-class militants in unions. Some unions, generally Communist-led, had been gradually taking up Aboriginal issues in town and country since the early 1950s. 
By early 1964, the Department of Labour was worried about the convergence of economic and political strikes. A report listed “unprecedented” strikes across a range of industries from the postal service to car manufacturing, and waterfront protests against apartheid as “just some” of the disputes in which “labour generally sought to exploit its strong position”. In 1964, reports of Black riots in the US over civil rights dominated the daily press. FCAATSI sharpened the international message: “A ‘No’ vote to the Aboriginal rights question will brand this country racist and put it in the same category as South Africa”. 
The Menzies government resisted calls for a referendum for years. In 1965, it changed its tune, shortly after the Student Action for Aborigines’ Freedom Ride protest in country NSW exposed the reality of racism in a way that few previous protests had been able to. 
When Harold Holt became prime minister in January 1966, he proposed a referendum the following year. It was all for show. Holt made it clear that his government had no plans to change the direction of Aboriginal policy. Its campaigning for the Yes vote was consequently lacklustre, to put it kindly.
By contrast, an enormous amount of work was put into the Yes campaign by progressive activists once the date was set in early 1967. The top official levels of the campaign were still lobbying politicians and contacting the media. But at the grassroots, the growing activism of the Freedom Ride and the Gurindji strike and rising union militancy positively infected the referendum campaign. Dozens, if not hundreds, of stop-work meetings were organised by trade unionists across the country, and petitions were gathered, meetings held, leaflets distributed, posters pasted up and badges sold. 
Despite the limited nature of the demands raised by the referendum, the fact that more than 90 percent of the population voted Yes was a sign that mass sentiment had started to shift and that the radicalisation of the late ’60s was gaining momentum. 
However, the constitutional change delivered nothing concrete to improve the lot of Indigenous people and this, combined with the Liberals’ refusal to grant even token land rights, revealed the limits of the referendum. Even Barrie Dexter, a member of the government’s Council for Aboriginal Affairs, which advised on Indigenous matters, conceded: “The mountain [of the referendum] gave birth to a mouse”. Gurindji leader Vincent Lingiari commented bluntly after the referendum: “Our citizenship has not brought us the opportunity to live a decent life”.
Political lessons were learnt. As Jordan Humphreys writes in Indigenous Liberation and Socialism: “The referendum campaign was in many ways the last roll of the dice for the older, more conservative, forms of activism around Aboriginal rights that had become hegemonic in the 1950s. Soon a new generation would take the lead”. 
The resulting disillusionment among younger activists, combined with a deeper radicalisation fuelled by the anti-Vietnam War movement and 1969 general strike, led to more confrontational methods, such as those of the Australian Black Power Movement, and mass actions, such as the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

Lessons from the 1967 referendum

Before the March 2023 NSW election, state ALP leader Chris Minns made a series of promises to public sector workers: to hire more nurses, to create more teaching positions and to improve public sector pay and working conditions, including scrapping the public sector wage cap of 2.5 percent for all 400,000 public sector workers.
Within hours of Labor claiming victory after twelve years of Coalition government, the peak union body, Unions NSW, declared this an opportunity “to restart how we do industrial relations and deliver public services”. 
The Australian Financial Review even described the proposed axing of the wage cap as a move “likely to embolden public sector workers in Victoria, where the Andrews Labor government has a 1.5 percent wage cap”.
All such hopes (or in the case of the AFR, fears) have sadly come to nought. The Minns government never intended otherwise. The whole thing was a cynical move to wind up industrial action by the unions in the run-up to the election, with the added bonus of getting the union leadership to fall in behind Labor’s election campaign.
The reality of what the unions had convinced their members of became apparent within a few months of the election. Rather than act on its promise, the Minns government instead chose to wait until the regulation that limits pay rises expired, a further six months delay after Labor won on a platform of scrapping the wages cap. 
When the government finally revealed in early July that the first part of its pay offer would be a mere 4 percent pay rise plus an extra 0.5 percent on superannuation for one year, even Minns had to acknowledge that the offer was not in line with inflation. After this real wage cut, the previous Coalition pay cap of 2.5 percent was to be reimposed for the following three years. Like many Labor governments that betray their supporters, he excused this attack with the well-worn phrase that “It is significantly different to the previous government”.
By August, even Unions NSW secretary Mark Morey was telling the Sydney Morning Herald that the government’s offer resembled the Coalition’s public service wage cap and would leave public sector workers earning the same as they had in 2013, once inflation was accounted for. 
“It’s not just about teachers, it’s all the workers who stood out on polling booths or voted for Labor because they wanted change”, Morey lamented. Unlike the euphoria of election night, this time he was right.
Before the election, union officials sang a different tune. They sold Labor’s false promises to their members as good coin, called off industrial action and mobilised to secure a Labor victory. 
A typical example is what has happened to NSW Teachers Federation members. Minns was invited to speak to the NSWTF council in October 2022, five months before the election. As well as promising to abolish the state wages cap, he claimed he would “instruct the Department of Education to immediately begin negotiations with the union ... with a view to reaching a comprehensive agreement to reduce workloads and make salaries more competitive”. Teachers were deliberately demobilised by their officials in order to throw their weight behind the union’s “More Than Thanks” election campaign.
In the aftermath of Minns’ wages announcement, a Western Sydney principal was only stating the obvious when she told the Saturday Paper that returning to the 2.5 percent wage cap for three years “breaks faith with election commitments”. She went on to add: “Teachers are white-hot with rage because they went to the polling booths and fought for [Minns] to be elected because he promised to drop the cap. The 2.5 percent for the other years is the cap”.
A previous agreement reached on 31 May at a meeting between Teachers Federation President Angelo Gavrielatos, NSW Education Minister Prue Car and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey was simply torn up as too expensive. Eschewing strike action, the union announced a toothless “Honour the Deal” campaign that is being ignored by the government.
Nor have other public sector unions shown any fight. On 21 July, the Public Service Association was the first union to accept the government’s pay offer. The others have since caved.
Yet there have been complaints from members in every union that the pay increase represents a real wage cut at a time of sharply rising costs of living. These are the bright spots in this otherwise dismal picture.
The NSW Nurses and Midwives Association polled its 50,000 public hospital members on whether to accept a 4 percent pay rise. In an abject display of weakness, NMA State Secretary Shaye Candish announced that the union leadership had not taken a position on the proposal. That a big minority (40 percent) of union members voted against the deal, despite no lead being given, is something to build on.
Such was the anger about the 4 percent offer that Health Services Union Secretary Gerard Hayes concocted a formula for a one-year flat $3,500 increase to all base rates of pay to get the deal over the line. Coincidentally, it will cost the government no more than the 4 percent would have. But more encouraging is that Hayes felt the need to do it at all. Perhaps the rowdy heckling (“Pay us more!”) of NSW Treasurer Daniel Mookhey at the HSU conference in early July gave him the hint. 
There will need to be a return to serious strike action across the public sector if the government’s attacks are to be reversed.

Minns government screws NSW public sector workers

The World Health Organization declared on 5 May that the public health emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is over. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus proclaimed that the downward trend of the pandemic has “allowed most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID-19”.
This was a partial statement of fact. Governments around the world were way ahead of the WHO, having already scrapped most of the health measures required to keep the disease at bay. They had already replaced the mantra of “Learn to live with the virus” with “What virus?”
What was left out of the WHO declaration was the awkward truth that people around the world are still dying and suffering long-term debilitating health effects from the virus. COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in most countries (it’s number three in Australia). Worldometer, one of the many online sources run by scientists attempting to make what data there is publicly available, puts the death toll of the pandemic so far at nearly 7 million.
But if you look up WHO figures for COVID deaths, you find a total of just 1,345 worldwide for the week to 14 June. What is striking about the data as you scroll down the page is that most countries registered zero deaths. After Afghanistan (two deaths), Australia is the next country, with 240 deaths, that records anything. Bolivia records two, Brazil 384, China one, the United States zero. 
Altogether, the countries that the WHO classifies as “high income” and “upper middle income” account for 1,301 of the recorded deaths. This is not because COVID-19 is killing more people in them, but because these countries are more likely to have some remnant of record keeping still in place. Total deaths, whether recorded or not, are disproportionately in poorer countries.
Even in the wealthiest countries (witness the US’s zero deaths), the records do not reflect reality. In the past twelve months, the disease has been recorded by US government bodies as the cause of around 125,000 deaths. That’s a death rate two to ten times that of US deaths from the flu.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that reduced data availability (for example, US hospitals no longer have to report when cases of COVID are contracted by patients in their facilities) means that it can no longer reliably calculate rates of community transmission.
As Matt Mazewski, a fellow at the think tank Data for Progress, <a href="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/covid-19-biden-vaccines-debt-ceiling-masks">recently wrote in Commonweal magazine</a>: “Donald Trump rightly got blowback from many quarters for musing in 2020 that ‘if we stop testing, we’d have fewer cases’, but his successor has brought his vision closer than ever to reality. When it comes to Covid, there is now a solid bipartisan consensus that ignorance is bliss”.
And for the capitalist class and its mouthpieces in government and the media, it is. COVID denialism serves the interests of the ruling class well.
The measures that would dramatically reduce transmission and the social burden of the disease are already well known. Epidemiologists and other scientists have developed an array of health measures that should be implemented, from ventilation and air purification in all indoor public spaces, along with vaccination, testing, contact tracing, supported isolation, waste-water monitoring, the use of high-quality masks, funding for cures and research into “long COVID”. 
But while every one of these meets the demands of human need, none of them meets the demands for business profit. Instead, in the US, vaccines, antiviral treatments and high-quality PCR tests will no longer be paid for by the government and provided free to all. Instead, companies such as Pfizer and Moderna intend to jack up the prices of their vaccines well above cost. White House Covid Coordinator Ashish Jha spoke enthusiastically about this at an event sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation, telling attendees: “My hope is that in 2023, you’re going to see the commercialisation of almost all of these products”. 
But ignorance is not bliss for the working class and poor of the world, disproportionately more likely to die and to be less able to cope with the effects of long COVID and other effects of the virus. Infection can increase the risk of developing other chronic health problems, including cardiovascular disease, auto-immune conditions or neurological disorders. According to the WHO, “current evidence suggests approximately 10-20 percent of people experience a variety of mid- and long-term effects”.
All of which gives the lie to any idea that capitalism has any concern for the lives of those on whose labour it depends. Nor should the hypocrisy around COVID be a surprise. It’s hardly unique. The system rewards bosses for exploitation, landlords for evicting people, arms companies for dealing death, fossil fuel and mining companies for destroying the planet, and much more.
What the capitalists really care about was succinctly revealed in a 2023 PwC report titled “Changing places: how hybrid working is reinventing the Australian CBD”, which laments in its conclusion: “We may look back at the COVID-19 era as one that adversely impacted the owners of CBD properties”.
As ever, the priorities of capitalism are not human life. Last month, the US ruling class used the manufactured crisis of a self-imposed debt ceiling to cut social spending by $136 billion. With support from both Democrats and Republicans, Congress also added work requirements to getting food stamps, restarted student loan repayments, approved another natural gas pipeline, froze health spending and clawed back $27 billion in COVID spending. It also approved tax cuts for the rich and nearly a trillion dollars for the military.
The message couldn’t be clearer. From a capitalist point of view, COVID-19 is too expensive to manage in a way that prioritises human life and health.

The descent into COVID denialism

It is a real treat to have a new edition of Socialist Alternative member Tom O’Lincoln’s 1993 book, Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era. While the text remains basically unchanged, as it did in the 2012 re-issue, this edition by left-wing publisher Interventions is significantly expanded and enlivened by the addition of photos, leaflets and posters from the time, and a twelve-page afterword by Rick Kuhn.
Years of Rage remains the best account of the Fraser era, all the better for being, as its publishers put it, “a partisan and Marxist history” whose author’s “sympathies lie with the militants and activists fighting for a better world”.
While framed by the undemocratic dismissal of the Whitlam Labor government in 1975, which brought Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal Party to power, and Fraser’s own electoral demise in 1983, the book is anything but electoral in focus. It pulses with the life of the class struggle (from both the workers’ and the bosses’ side), with the fight back of oppressed groups—including those for Aboriginal land rights, LGBTI and abortion rights—with other political campaigns such as those against uranium mining or for civil liberties and the right to march in Queensland. Most importantly, it provides both an explanation for these struggles and an insight into their political strengths and weaknesses.
The dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 provoked a massive working-class response of strikes, walkouts and street protests. O’Lincoln reminds us why the ruling class got rid of Whitlam—not because he was too radical but because his government could not move fast enough to dampen working-class militancy to keep the bosses happy. 
Following the dismissal of Whitlam by Governor-General John Kerr, the December 1975 election confirmed Fraser in office after Labor and the Australian Council of Trade Unions told the working class to “cool it”—to maintain their rage for the ballot box—and ran an election campaign not about democracy but about wage restraint and sound economic management. 
Nonetheless, the dismissal left a residue of profound working-class hatred for Fraser, “Kerr’s cur”, during his seven years in office.
Yet from the ruling class’s point of view, the Fraser government never produced the goods. The working class, though battered by the Kerr coup, high unemployment and several important industrial defeats in 1976 and 1977, managed to regroup. From 1979 to 1981, the strike rate soared, destroying business hopes that the Liberals could rein in the unions. When the strike wave was followed by another serious recession, the government’s fate was sealed.
Years of Rage outlines Fraser’s initial successes for the capitalists. He gutted Medibank despite a 24-hour general strike on 12 July 1976—the biggest in Australian history. But from the latter part of 1978, unions began to reassert themselves industrially. The fight over wages re-galvanised working-class struggle, destroying the wage-cutting indexation system and unleashing a strike wave. Average weekly earnings increased by 16 percent over two years. 
When this successful strike wave was followed by a sharp recession in 1982, the ruling class had had it with Fraser. ACTU leader Bob Hawke’s regular pleas to the Fraser government to include the union leaders in some form of consensus economic management now looked more attractive to the bosses.
The strengths of the book lie not simply in the wealth of vibrant detail with which O’Lincoln conveys the struggles of the era. The chapter “Issues on the left” is particularly important. As well as explaining the shift away from radicalism by many on the left, from academic Marxists to feminists, O’Lincoln also provides an analysis of why, despite the fact that workers were still capable of great militancy, the main political beneficiaries were not the left but the political centre—the ALP leaders who sought a new era of class collaboration.
He locates this in the return of economic crisis to world capitalism in the 1970s, and the political responses to it on the left. From Labor, it was straightforward: don’t go too far too fast, prove to the bosses you can be a safe pair of hands in attacking the working class as the only way to get re-elected.
But electoralism is not the only form that reformism takes. The 1979-81 wages push took place during an economic boom centred on the resources sector, which came to a sudden halt in 1982 as commodity prices fell. Unemployment went from less than 6 percent to more than 10 percent. Most of the union movement capitulated to the argument that recession and unemployment stemmed from “excessive” wage claims.
The necessary anti-capitalist argument, that economic crises stemmed not from workers trying to get what was theirs, but from the logic of capitalist competition itself, was made only by small groups of revolutionaries without significant influence in the workers’ movement.
The Fraser years showed the continued economic strength of the organised working class in Australia. But they also showed the political weaknesses of the left. As O’Lincoln writes at the end of the book: 
“A fairly large minority of workers went into the mid-1970s with an ill-defined but genuine belief that the crisis of capitalism was the appointed time for labour to impose its will on a society whose old order was proving bankrupt. A sizeable minority of political activists held similar views. But in the absence of a mass political movement determined to pull these currents together and lead a struggle for power, this fragmented vanguard could not ... prevail.” 
Whether future years of rage end more favourably depends on socialists’ ability to gain a wider hearing. This book will help us.

Revisiting the years of rage

What a breath of fresh air it was to hear the words “Fuck the police!” at Mardi Gras once again. Senator Lidia Thorpe’s outraged cry was one of the few things at Mardi Gras in 2023 that echoed the original spirit of the event. 
Who cares that—after only 38 years—the police apologised to the original protesters! They have never stopped being the enforcers of an unequal status quo. Even this year they were strip-searching people for drugs at Mardi Gras. And, as Thorpe was right to point out, the toll of police-inflicted death and injury of Indigenous people grows greater every week.
It is an absolute disgrace that the cops are welcome in the parade, with not one but two contingents. What’s more, today’s Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras depends for its existence on a multitude of corporate bloodsuckers all too happy to engage in some pinkwashing to cover their real purpose—the pursuit of profit. 
The parade itself now bears a remarkable resemblance to the Mardi Gras’ list of partners, from “principal partner” American Express to a cavalcade of corporate scumbags like Coles, Qantas and Meta. 
Instead of this cop-loving corporate jamboree, the first Mardi Gras in 1978 began with a protest and ended with running street battles with the cops. It revived the radical activism of the movement that was linked to the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York.
In 1978, gay activists in the US put out an international call for solidarity action. In Sydney it was socialists Ken Davis and Ann Talve who first responded. A meeting on 20 May of the Gay Solidarity Group planned a demonstration and public meeting for the Stonewall anniversary. It was CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) executive member Ron Austin and Communist Party member Lance Gowland who proposed the further action—a night-time celebration or “Mardi Gras”, the name given it by Margaret McMann, which stuck.
On the day, the response exceeded the organisers’ expectations. More than 500 people marched through the streets of the city in the initial morning rally. The public meeting also drew a good crowd. But it was the evening event, the Mardi Gras, that took things to a new level.
Hundreds marched from Taylor Square to Hyde Park, singing and chanting for people to get out of the bars and onto the streets. And people did. There were close to 2,000 people by the time the march arrived at Hyde Park.
There, the police tried to shut it down, confiscating the truck and sound system. This only angered the crowd of demonstrators, who boldly marched on.
At the El Alamein fountain in Kings Cross, the police went for revenge, determined to violently quash the marchers’ defiance. Gangs of NSW police bashed and arrested as many as they could get their hands on. 
Undeterred, those left standing moved the protest to the Darlinghurst police station, where the arrested had been taken. As they heard comrades and friends inside being beaten, those outside kept up a barrage of solidarity chanting, while collections for bail money took place at the cop shop and in activist households across the city.
Activists were not intimidated by the police violence or the fact that Sydney’s polite liberal broadsheet, the Sydney Morning Herald, published the name, address and occupation of everyone arrested. 
Instead, it was the start of more protests, beginning with the court appearances two days later, where more were arrested. Thousands marched again on 15 July and 27 August 1978, demanding that all charges be dropped.
The cops tried to put a stop to the wave of anger with mass arrests, taking the total to almost 200. This only further fuelled the “drop the charges” sentiment (many of which the cops did quietly drop in 1979, claiming they’d lost the files). Protesters also demanded the right to march. 
The campaign forced the NSW government to repeal all the sections of the hated Summary Offences Act that the police had used to try to stop protests by a wide range of left-wing groups. This was a win for every campaign, and for defiance over compliance.
At a time of extreme homophobia and transphobia, we had to battle the cops and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus—such as the courts and the government— as well as the media and even conservative gay groups. 
One of the five 78ers still active in Socialist Alternative today, Mick Armstrong, was arrested at the court protest on 26 June 1978 for the crime of “discharging a missile, to wit, an egg”. As Mick wrote on the 40th anniversary of the Mardi Gras:
“Hundreds of activists, both gay and straight, threw themselves into a vibrant campaign of mass meetings and protests. It was the most impressive campaign for LGBTI rights ever seen in this country and paved the way for many future victories.” 
Diane Fieldes is a 78er who marched in the “drop the charges” rally on 27 August 1978 at which more than 100 people were arrested.

We deserve better than what Labor and Liberal offer

‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

NDIS: new cuts to an unfit system

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

You don’t get to be ‘on the right side of history’ on questions history has already decided

Lessons from the 1967 referendum

Minns government screws NSW public sector workers

The descent into COVID denialism

Revisiting the years of rage

Mardi Gras was a riot

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