The entire political establishment has united in a smug, self-serving tirade against the Greens following the federal election. The indirect target is anyone who wants a more egalitarian country. 
The ABC’s Laura Tingle, who gets far too much credit from progressives, started the onslaught with her initial election summary, arguing that voters had “comprehensively rejected” the Greens’ “grievance politics”. This was despite the party’s national vote being more or less the same as three years ago. 
Sydney Morning Herald
chief political correspondent David Crowe blamed party leader Adam Bandt’s loss on his “hyperbolic and offensive” comments about the genocide in Gaza and his opposition (in rhetoric, rather than votes) to Labor’s (rubbish) environment and housing policies. Crowe also charged the Greens with backing “public protests that became platforms for antisemitism”, despite there being not a shred of evidence linking the mass Palestine solidarity campaign to antisemitism. 
In the Australian Financial Review, former ALP adviser and speechwriter Nick Dyrenfurth asserted without evidence that “voters came to associate Adam Bandt’s federal and state outfit with the corrosion of social cohesion and an explosion of antisemitism” and that the party’s vote (which, again, didn’t change substantially from the last election) “reflects a broader collapse of public trust in a party that increasingly prioritises performative activism over genuine progressive outcomes”.
The Guardian
published an opinion piece by Griffith University lecturer Paul Williams, who argued: “the Greens may need to temper some of its post-material aspirations with material economic relief”. This is despite the party running on a moderate social democratic program, which included wealth redistribution from rich to poor, more social services and an end to the rampant expansion of, and tax breaks for, the fossil fuel industry and other big capitalists. Williams cited the Greens’ support for Palestine as one of these “post-material aspirations”, as though electoral considerations ought to determine whether to oppose genocide.
Politicians joined the pile-on. Anthony Albanese clearly loathes the Greens more than his actual parliamentary opposition, the Liberal Party. The prime minister celebrated Max Chandler-Mather’s and Bandt’s seat losses more than Peter Dutton’s. Penny Wong also chimed in, arguing: “Australians rejected the politics of conflict and the politics of grievance”. 
The establishment’s hatred of the Greens came together neatly on the ABC’s election night panel, when Queensland LNP Senator James Mcgrath embarked on an unhinged rant:
“The Greens are a nasty, horrible, racist antisemitic party ... they are just horrible people. I’d happily take the Labor Party and, with all due respect, union thugs any day of the week compared to the Greens. They’re horrible people ... the ugly side of politics in Australia. They are a horrible political movement.”
Journalists Sarah Ferguson, David Speers, Annabel Crabb, Laura Tingle and Patricia Karvelas, and Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers sat quietly through the tirade without any pushback, apart from Crabb’s “there have been allegations on all sides about rival parties tearing down corflutes”. 
Imagine if Chalmers had called the Liberals a “nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party”. He would’ve been countered with outraged calls to maintain a “respectful dialogue” and been roundly denounced across media outlets for resorting to name calling. (As an aside, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/london-mayor-sacks-australian-over-race-jibe-20080624-gdsj7z.html">McGrath was sacked as an adviser to Boris Johnson</a> in the UK after making racist remarks about the West Indian immigrant community.)
Among all detractors, the objective is the same: to present the Greens as out-of-touch fringe radicals. Yet the Greens’ most prominent policies are generally popular. Last year, Essential Research found that four in five Australians support dental costs being covered by Medicare—a core Greens policy. A 2023 Guardian Essential poll found that three in four believed rent increases should be capped to inflation or frozen until economic conditions improved. 
Also in 2023, two-thirds of the population supported a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry, and 59 percent supported a levy on fossil fuel exports to fund efforts to prepare for the consequences of climate change, according to the Australia Institute. A standards-meeting Lonergan Research poll commissioned by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi found that a clear majority think universities and TAFE should be free and fully funded by the government.
This gets to the heart of the matter: the ruling class in Australia is united in opposition to the idea that the government should improve the living standards of the majority at the expense of the increasingly wealthy minority. And the political establishment of the ALP and the Liberal Party, along with their supporters in the media, is united in slavish service of the capitalists.
So, to the extent that the Greens tap into some of the broader social sentiments for wealth redistribution and curbs on unfettered markets, and question some of the ruling foreign policy priorities, the entire political and economic establishment is united against the party.
The ruling class, through its political apparatchiks, spent the better part of two decades smashing the Labor left—from Gough Whitlam’s intervention into the ALP’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 to the ALP-ACTU Accords in the 1980s and early 1990s to crush militancy in the trade unions and introduce neoliberalism. The goal was to make Labor a more reliable “partner” of the bosses by eradicating any nagging internal opposition while making Australian capitalism more friendly to big business. 
It was a highly successful endeavour. As Rodney Cavalier, a former NSW state Labor minister, noted fifteen years ago in his book Power Crisis: “No force describable as a ‘left’ has engaged in active contest within the ALP over ideas, policies or a framework to respond to unfolding issues, since the mid-1980s”. 
With the left faction’s degeneration into a club with no purpose other than dividing the spoils of office among its parliamentary representatives, there was pretty much zero organised opposition within the ALP as government-run services were privatised, company taxes were lowered and housing became a lucrative means through which property investors made millions. The union movement was smashed with the complicity of the left officials, paving the way for a sharp rise in inequality. 
Yet in recent years, the Greens have grown in influence and shifted to the left, particularly in the lead-up to and after their 2022 lower house breakthrough. The party’s overt campaign message this year was that it would basically be a revived Labor left, summed up in the campaign slogan “Keep Dutton out and get Labor to act”. That is: make us part of a minority government so that we can force Labor to govern more like the olden days of social democracy. This is almost identical logic to the old Labor left argument that, to get a left-wing Labor government, you have to elect more left-aligned delegates to the national conference, get more left-aligned MPs, and thereby drag the whole party to the left.
No-one was more upset at the prospect of such a role for the Greens than the nominal Labor left—whose uselessness is exposed by the existence of a party with more left-social democratic policies than the ALP—and the broader establishment that it now serves. The message was clear: we worked long and hard to establish untrammelled capitalist rule, to dampen working-class expectations, to make Labor utterly subservient and to get rid of this niggling parliamentary left. There is no going back; we won’t cop a new left opposition after 40 years of neoliberalism.
That’s the political basis on which the major parties preferenced each other over Bandt’s party and on which a Liberal senator could say on national television that he prefers the ALP and “union thugs” to the Greens. There isn’t any serious opposition from Labor and the (mostly Labor-aligned) union leaders to the status quo. So the Liberals often do get along with them just fine.
Viewed in this light, the attacks on the Greens represent something much broader than hostility to one party. They show that the ruling class and its political and media servants won’t countenance the slightest shift to a more equal, less dog-eat-dog society.

Eleanor Morley

Why the establishment hates the Greens

There are a lot of big political issues you might have expected to generate serious debate in this federal election. Rising sea levels, skyrocketing housing costs, global remilitarisation and historic levels of wealth inequality spring to mind. 
Instead, the campaign has been dominated by big headlines about the utterly mundane.
For instance, there’s the Teal independents vs. Liberals corflute wars. Ro Knox, Liberal candidate for Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, fired the opening shot when she accused sitting MP Allegra Spender’s campaign of sticking a poster over an image of an Israeli hostage family (Spender has since threatened to sue for defamation). 
The Sydney Morning Herald launched a detailed investigation, including analysing metadata from photos of said posters, to get to the bottom of the escalating dispute. This battle for the ages heated up when a grainy video emerged of three posh women using lipstick to deface a corflute of Teal MP Zali Stegall in Sydney’s Mosman. 
“It was Chanel! Why’d you let me do that?”, cried the first woman. 
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, do piggy things on her nose”, her friend replied. 
When Kooyong Teal MP Monique Ryan’s husband seized a campaign sign belonging to her Liberal rival, the incident received media coverage comparable to that of Trump’s tariffs. 
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s most media-saturated moments came when he fell off a stage and then spent a day bizarrely denying it (before presumably being told by his PR guy that this only made him look weirder), and when he tried to relate to the yoof in classic boomer dad style by saying the Coalition is “delulu with no solulu”. The cringe still reverberates weeks later. 
Liberal challenger Peter Dutton has also had a few moments in the spotlight. When he whacked a cameraman in the head with an errant kick of a football, the newspapers cleared their front pages. Melbourne’s Herald Sun
released a blow-by-blow account, imploring readers to “SEE THE PHOTOS, WATCH THE VIDEOS”. 
But of greatest interest to the media has been which taxpayer-funded mansion Dutton will live in should he win the top job: Sydney’s Kirribilli or Canberra’s Lodge? 
The first leaders’ debate was aptly described by satirical site The Chaser
as “a rare chance to see the two most boring men in the country squabble for an hour” and “a bid for both major parties to confirm their commitment to the leader of Australia, Rupert Murdoch”. 
It all seems kind of humorous, until you stop to think about it and realise it’s not funny at all. There are no substantial political differences, so the drama and the debate revolve around who’s better at holding steady on a stage, kicking a football or sabotaging an opponent’s plastic signage. 
And they’re pumped out by a corporate media all too happy to keep quiet on the fundamental issues facing most voters. To question the politicians seriously would mean questioning the current inequalities and injustices of Australian capitalism; good luck getting that headline past the Murdochs or Kerry Stokes.
When it comes to the cost of living, the only difference is a $5-per-week tax cut (Labor) or a 25-cent discount on a litre of petrol (Liberals). Both parties are in lockstep on protecting a housing market geared towards the bank balances of landlords, spending half a trillion dollars on nuclear-powered submarines, letting the fossil fuel companies ravage the environment and denying the humanity of refugees seeking safety. 
They’ve adopted the same campaign strategy: don’t rock the boat, i.e. don’t say anything that will piss off big business.
The boredom of this election campaign is contrasted with the dire need for a political alternative. Thankfully, socialists are trying to make that happen. The Victorian Socialists are running in four lower house seats and the Senate. 
With no attachment to or funding from corporate Australia, VS is implacably hostile to landlords, bosses and the political elite. The party’s program can be summed up as “people before profit”. The working class is getting screwed by rising living costs while the rich have never had it better, so we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. With Trump in the White House and endless atrocities such as the genocide in Gaza, now is not the time to sit at home and despair but to go out and fight for a different kind of world.
In this election, vote socialist wherever you can, vote Greens before Labor (the Albanese government deserves a beating) and put the Liberals and right-wing micro parties last.
Socialists are not yet able to make a decisive stamp on the Australian political scene. But with declining support for the two major parties, there is an appetite for an alternative. The more people who get involved in fighting for that to be a socialist alternative, the better off we’ll all be.

An election campaign about nothing that matters

No matter who wins the federal election on 3 May, most of us will lose. This election is about the rich vs. the poor, and both major parties are firmly in the camp of the former.
Since the Albanese government took office in May 2022, Australian workers have suffered their steepest decline in living standards in modern history. Household disposable income has dropped by 8 percent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Every cent of real wage growth made in the 2010s has been obliterated. Property website Domain’s rental reports show that the median rent for a house in a capital city has increased by 26 percent. Those who took out the average mortgage for a new home were spending $2,218 to $2,694 on monthly repayments back in 2022—now they’re spending $4,096, according to ABS data.
Food is more expensive. Bills are more expensive. Clothes, shoes, flights, coffee, petrol, brunch: everything is more expensive.
Some, however, have done very well for themselves over the last three years. The 200 parasites who grace the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List have increased their combined wealth from $520 billion to $625 billion. That $105 billion is enough to wipe all outstanding HECS debt and have enough left over to raise the rate of welfare payments to $88 a day, lifting 2.3 million people—including 840,000 children—out of poverty. 
Instead, Australia’s billionaires have hoarded their wealth, grown their share portfolios and expanded their property holdings. An article about the luxury property market on the National Australia Bank website sums it up well: “Despite broader economic uncertainties, the high-end property segment remained largely insulated due to resilient demand in high-net-worth individuals”.
The Labor government has done basically nothing to try to rectify this startling rise in inequality. It handed out tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich and has refused to touch the generous concessions provided to landlords. “We’re not trying to bring down house prices”, Labor Housing Minister Clare O’Neil declared on ABC radio in November. At least she’s honest. Albanese’s solution to the housing crisis? Purchase a $4.3 million clifftop mansion with timber-lined cathedral ceilings and sparkling ocean views. 
Labor has allowed supermarkets, airlines and energy companies to price-gouge while dismissing calls to hit them with a super profits tax. The minuscule increases it has made to poverty-inducing welfare payments have been eaten up by inflation.
And there is no illusion that the Liberals would do anything differently. Peter Dutton proved where his loyalties lie when he flew to Sydney to attend a lavish fundraiser hosted by billionaire pub-and-club boss Justin Hemmes as Cyclone Alfred approached his hometown of Brisbane. A new mural hanging in the reception of Australia’s top billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill mine depicts a banquet on her 70th birthday with Dutton seated next to the mining magnate herself. 
Now that the election campaign is well underway, what are the major parties offering to entice our vote? For Labor, it’s a $5-per-week tax cut. For the Liberals, it’s 25 cents off a litre of petrol. That’s the extent of the choice we have in this election.
While it’s pennies for us, billions are spent on the most odious industries. Both major parties have committed to doubling military spending, from about $50 billion in 2022 to $100 billion by 2034. Federal subsidies to fossil fuel companies totalled $14.5 billion in 2023-24, an increase of 31 percent on the $11.1 billion recorded in 2022-23, according to the Australia Institute think tank. 
We deserve much better than this. It’s no wonder that combined support for the major parties has been steadily falling over the last twenty years—in 2022, a third of all votes went to candidates not from Labor or the Coalition. But we also deserve better than what’s on offer from the existing minor parties and independents. 
A small chunk of the vote is going towards crackpot right-wingers who’d love to see a MAGA movement in Australia. The Teal independents are, broadly speaking, “lapsed Liberals” targeting the wealthiest electorates with a conservative economic framework and girl-boss energy. 
Then there’s the Greens, who had their best run yet in 2022. Across the board, their policies are better than Labor’s, and they’ve done some heavy lifting in calling out the government on the housing crisis, renters’ rights and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But despite having the numbers to block shitty Labor policy in the Senate for the last three years, they’ve waved through some of the worst—from do-nothing housing programs to climate policy that ensures the continued destruction of the environment. 
Recently, the Greens announced that ending native forest logging will be a key demand put to Labor in negotiations to form a minority government following the upcoming election (no other “key demands” have been raised). Worthy as this is, it hardly gets to the heart of the assault on living standards, the fossil fuel industry, Labor’s brutal refugee policy or rising militarism. 
We need a socialist political alternative that takes on the major parties and fights for a world that puts people before profit. In Victoria, this means a vote for Victorian Socialists in selected lower house electorates, the Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton in the seat of Wills and Jordan van den Lamb (aka “purplepingers”) in the Senate. Elsewhere, vote socialist where possible. 
But we also need to get organised beyond the federal election—socialist activism is not a once-in-three-years activity. If the last three years has taught us anything, it’s that no-one is coming to save us but us.

Labor and Liberals rule for the rich—we need a socialist alternative

US President Donald Trump has thrown Ukraine to the wolves. After carrying out a brutal invasion for three years, during which a million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or wounded, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now being rewarded with a large slice of the country’s territory, while Trump is demanding a substantial stake of its resource wealth for the US.
This is imperial plunder at its finest: powerful countries ripping up a weaker one for their own benefit.
Commenting on the war in recent weeks, Trump has repeated his strange views on the world’s hierarchy of suffering. According to him, the main victim of the European slaughter is the US, because it has sent “hundreds of billions of dollars” in aid (like most of Trump’s comments, this is a gross exaggeration). The villain is Ukraine for continuing to resist Russian imperialism. And exhausted Russia, with its unfairly maligned dictator, deserves a break. 
This is Trump’s enduring view of international politics: poor little America has been ripped off by everyone. It is as unhinged as his ramblings about migrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio. 
The US spent the greater part of the last century invading other countries, overthrowing governments and exploiting half the globe through its multinational corporations. Now, Trump wants to amp it up by acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, subsuming Canada and turning Gaza into a playground for US billionaires.
Putin, for his part, has sent the Russian military and mercenaries on bloody rampages through Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and West Africa, and shielded his fellow dictators from popular uprisings in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
It appears that everyone wants to play the victim now. The European powers and the United Kingdom say that Trump has abandoned them—that they have been left to fend for themselves in the noble task of protecting weaker countries. They say they must massively beef up their military spending to develop much bigger and much deadlier armed forces.
The European Commission has moved to allow €800 billion in additional borrowing by EU governments to “substantially increase” military spending. Germany’s incoming chancellor Friedrich Merz has vowed to do “whatever it takes” to raise half a trillion euros for the military. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to cut the foreign aid budget to increase military spending. This is all on top of a 30 percent increase in EU member states’ spending on the military since 2021.
Their justification for military expansion is one of the more Orwellian pieces of capitalist propaganda: that more weapons equal more peace. In reality, they want only to defend and extend their own national interests in an increasingly unstable world.
The increased spending will come at an enormous cost to European and British workers, who have already endured waves of austerity over the last fifteen years. The money will have to come from somewhere, most likely health and social services that matter far less to the capitalists than lower taxes and subsidies for business. Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it plainly in an article titled “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state”:
“The welfare state as we have known it must retreat somewhat: not enough that we will no longer call it by that name, but enough to hurt. It was never designed for a world in which living to 100 is banal ... I have come to doubt whether rich, democratic societies can make difficult reforms—except in a crisis. Chronic discomfort isn’t enough. An element of real fear has to come in, as perhaps it has now.”
While workers get poorer, those at the top get richer from an expanding war machine. According to the US State Department, US weapons manufacturers and military contractors registered an unprecedented increase in sales last year. This made 2024 one of their most profitable years ever, thanks to the slaughters in Ukraine and Gaza and the military buildup around China. European weapons companies’ stocks have soared in the last week. 
There is much speculation about why Trump has sold out Ukraine. Some chalk it up to his erratic nature and admiration of dictators. While Trump does indeed seem to have an affinity for Putin (an authoritarianism to aspire to, perhaps), there’s an underlying imperialist logic to his actions—one that has nothing to do with peace. 
The biggest threat to US global supremacy is China, the world’s second-biggest economy, which has significantly modernised its military over the last decade and formed an alliance with Russia. The US has been trying to “pivot” its war machine to confront China for years; there’s just a disagreement among US elites over how exactly to do it. 
The Biden administration favoured strengthening multilateral international alliances, such as NATO, while building the military-industrial complex at home. 
Trump favours a more transactional approach—get the best deal with whatever country—which can mean extorting traditional allies. Some in the Trump administration, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, argue that the US should try to cleave Russia away from China, or at least weaken their alliance. In addition, Trump has grumbled for years that the US shoulders the economic burden of Western military alliances—he wants the Europeans to spend substantially more, rather than rely on a US security guarantee.
There has been much handwringing among global commentators about Trump’s approach, particularly about what it means for the “rules-based order”. In foreign policy speak, this refers to the post-World War Two set of rules administered through bodies such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, which supposedly protect the sovereignty of individual countries, preserve peace and curb excessive uses of power. 
But one only has to look at the Vietnam War, successive invasions of the Middle East, Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians and countless other atrocities to see that the “order” was an alliance of powerful countries, including the US, Europe, the UK, Japan, Australia and others, who used economic or military pressure to rig the world in their favour. 
The US’s allies and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media are upset that the rules are possibly being altered. But they’re all still playing the same dirty game: powerful countries ruling the world through shifting networks of alliances. 
The Trump administration also demands higher military spending from Australia, an increasingly important country for the US because of its location in Southeast Asia and willingness to host US military and spy bases. Eldridge Colby, Trump’s nominee for head of policy at the Defence Department, said last week that Australia needs to increase defence spending to 3 percent of GDP. Australia is already trekking in this direction, spending a record $56 billion, or 2 percent of GDP, this year. Treasury expects it to rise to 2.4 percent in 2027-28.
Many Australian commentators are beginning to urge the government to join the global military buildup. Take the Australian Financial Review’s Christopher Joye: 
“We have to be able to produce our own ballistic missiles with the ability to strike any place on the planet. We need independent nuclear power and the capacity to enrich weapons-grade uranium for strategic optionality. And we need scores of nuclear submarines ...”
The Labor government has steadfastly refused to criticise Trump in any way, even over Ukraine, for fear of pissing off the new president, in part fearing that the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal be put at risk. But that deal ought to immediately be scrapped. Writing at the Conversation last year, Australian National University visiting fellow Peter Martin noted:
“Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the $268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.”
The threat of a future global war seems so far away that many don’t take it seriously. The climate change and attacks on our living standards and the oppressed seem, and are, more immediate. But every new increase to a military budget, every new nuclear-powered submarine and every new speech about the threat of China takes us a step closer to that reality. 
The Ukrainian experience gives us a horrifying glimpse of what such a war might look like: the military tactics of old—protracted trench warfare in which millions of young soldiers are fed through the meat grinder—combined with cutting-edge technology such as kamikaze drones and AI-assisted cyber warfare. Not to mention that there are now enough nuclear weapons to obliterate all of humanity. Inside Russia, Putin has overseen an authoritarian crackdown to suppress any whiff of dissent to his invasion.
Workers and the oppressed worldwide have no interest in any of this—wars are the consequence of rivalries among the world’s ruling class spilling out into armed competition. Trump, Starmer, Merz and the rest are ramping up nationalist rhetoric to convince their populations to accept the economic burden of this remilitarisation drive. 
But you won’t ever see Elon Musk, Gina Rinehart, Donald Trump or Anthony Albanese on the battlefield—they make the rest of us fight on their behalf. Our world is run by monsters who will send millions to die if it means a bigger slice of the capitalist pie for themselves.
We have to build a socialist alternative to this never-ending nightmare of death and destruction. Unless we fight back, they will keep playing the same game of war and conquest, with us as their pawns.

Resist the new militarism

A student at the University of Sydney has been threatened with suspension for writing Palestine solidarity statements on a whiteboard using a non-permanent marker. It is the latest of dozens of misconduct charges levelled against activists by the university over the last year.
Luna,* a postgraduate international student, received a notice of misconduct from the academic registrar on 3 February, alleging that she engaged in “inappropriate and unreasonable conduct” by writing the following slogans in January:
USyd invest in weapons manufacturing (Thales, Lockheed Martin), USyd supports genocide in Gaza.
USYD Vice Chancellor Mark Scott supports Gaza Genocide.
From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.
As of 13 January 2025, 46,600+ dead in Gaza. USyd cut ties with genocide.
The university appears to have used CCTV footage and electronic student card tracking to identify Luna.
The Registrar claims that the conduct breaches several university policies, including clauses in the Campus Access Policy introduced at the end of last year in response to the Palestine solidarity campaign. 
In addition to purportedly prejudicing “the good order and government of the university” and “good name or academic standing of the university”, writing on a whiteboard also allegedly constitutes “protest activity on university lands”. Such activity must be “orderly and peaceful”, cannot be held inside any building, and requires 72-hours advance notice to the administration. 
The alleged conduct is also said to be an act of graffiti, which is defined as “the placement of posters, notices, advertisements and similar items” on any area that has not been “designated for official notices” by the university.
Basically, the administration has ruled that students who want to exercise their democratic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and to protest must organise something that is nothing like a protest using means of communication that prevent any meaningful mass communication. Even writing on a whiteboard is beyond the pale.
The administration has told Luna that she will likely be expelled, suspended or receive a reprimand if she is found guilty of the alleged misconduct. It also warns that “the penalties applied will be more severe [bold in original] in the event that you deny the conduct, which is ultimately found to be substantiated, than if you admit the conduct at this stage”.
This threat—an attempt to pressure Luna not to defend herself against the allegations—is far from empty, given her visa status. As a transgender woman from a country that criminalises and punishes non-binary expressions of gender, she is currently seeking asylum in Australia. For now, she holds a student visa, which means her right to remain in the country depends on her continued enrolment. 
Luna wrote to the university on 24 February asking for more time to respond to the charges. Specifically, she requested an extension until after 21 March (when she will gain a bridging visa) so that she can “assess this matter in a clear-headed fashion without worrying about being deported to danger”. The university refused the request the following day, reaffirming that the “likely penalty if the conduct is admitted at this stage is suspension”.
In its initial misconduct notice, the university insisted that the entire process “must be kept confidential”; otherwise, it “may take disciplinary action”. This clause is ubiquitous in misconduct charges at Sydney University, supposedly to stop victimisation against complainants. It might make sense in cases involving accusations of serious abuse or violence. But it is illegitimate to include the clause in cases where the administration itself levels misconduct charges against activists. One can only assume the intention is to keep the spurious misconduct process opaque and free from external scrutiny. 
After the details of the complaint were made public on 5 March, the university quickly entered crisis management, publishing two responses on its website. The first claimed that the suspension threat was a simple “administrative error” and, finally, granted Luna a time extension to respond. 
The second stated that the administration had contacted Luna, “confirmed the likely penalty range does not include potential suspension” and “apologised”. The university refused to relent following private communication with Luna but quickly backed down (partially—the charges still stand) after being forced to answer publicly for its behaviour. 
This entire case is a farce. Student activism has historically included acts far more rebellious than scrawling solidarity messages on a classroom whiteboard. Sydney University appears determined to wipe out criticism of its dirty deals with weapons manufacturers and suppress support for the Palestinian cause—or at least to extraordinarily limit how such support can be expressed.
* Name has been changed at the student’s request to protect them from retaliation.

Sydney University threatens to suspend student for writing on a whiteboard

One of the great myths of US President Donald Trump’s political career is that he’s an anti-establishment warrior, fighting on behalf of the everyman. 
The corporate media have pushed this narrative, publishing hundreds of articles arguing that Trump represents the revenge of the “white working class”—a term used by elites of both the liberal and right-wing varieties to refer to either dumb uneducated masses or salt-of-the-earth patriots, respectively. 
Indeed, this is the way he’s pitched himself since 2015. “Today we are not just transferring power from one administration to another”, Trump said in his first inauguration speech. “We are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people.” His early calls to “drain the swamp” (remove nefarious lobbyists and insiders from Washington) have evolved into Elon Musk’s DOGE: they claim they are ending the wasteful spending of taxpayer money on programs designed by a DEI-obsessed urban elite. Or, in Musk’s words, “@DOGE will reprogram the base code of the matrix”.
The claim that an army of billionaires taking state power somehow represents a victory for factory workers, nurses, receptionists and agricultural labourers is absurd. They have climbed their way to the top by trampling on those below. 
Musk, who has fast become something like an unelected co-president, is the richest person on the planet. Just half of his US$360 billion net worth could end world hunger by the end of the decade. He made his fortune after getting a hefty leg up from his emerald-mine-owning dad, and protects it today by resisting unionisation inside his companies (Tesla workers make 30 percent less than members of the United Auto Workers). In 2023, Musk said: “I disagree with the idea of unions ... I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants sort of thing”. What?
Trump has a net worth of US$6.4 billion, according to Forbes
magazine (though he claims it’s much higher). His wealth comes from a substantial inheritance and a career in real estate, although his most valuable asset is Truth Social, his hard-right Twitter knock-off. He first gained super stardom by telling a succession of people “you’re fired” on reality show The Apprentice and for twenty years owned the Miss Universe pageant organisation (in which creepy old men like him leer at bikini-clad young women). He owns a multimillion-dollar Manhattan penthouse plated with gold. 
Man of the people he is not.
Trump has assembled the wealthiest administration in history, with thirteen billionaires appointed to government posts. His cabinet is worth at least US$7 billion. These people have made their wealth by exploiting millions of workers and the environment and hoarding profits in offshore tax havens. 
In case there is any illusion that they might be forgoing their own interests to rule in the interests of American workers, just take a look at what the Trump administration has done since taking office.
In late February, the House of Representatives moved forward a mammoth budget blueprint that contains much of Trump’s legislative agenda. In it are massive tax cuts—worth up to US$4.5 trillion—and deep cuts to social spending. The tax cuts, which mostly extend those made during Trump’s first administration, mostly benefit the already wealthy. Medicaid and Medicare (which provide health insurance to poor and elderly Americans), student loan repayment plans and school breakfast and lunch programs that serve low-income children have all been slated for cuts. 
This is what the administration is really about: taking from the poor to give to the rich. Trump is Robin Hood in reverse. 
The DOGE cuts will also have a terrible impact on working people, not least the tens of thousands of public sector workers who have just lost their livelihoods after being fired by Musk. Public education is under attack, as are whatever measly regulations exist to put a check on corporate power.
There’s nothing new in this political strategy. Former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan claimed to represent the “silent majority” of everyday Americans, who supposedly shared their conservative world view. During their bid for power, the Nazis said they wanted to serve the German people who had been betrayed by the elites. They even went so far as to call themselves socialists, just “national socialists” interested only in the good of the German masses. When winning an election requires securing the votes of a substantial section of the population, overtures must be made to the issues they care about. But once the political right takes power, it’s a different story.
The “anti-elite” message can ring a little true because the Democrats indeed come from another wing of the US elite. When in power, they rule for the rich. The squabble between the major parties does not represent a battle between opposing class interests, but simply different strategies for managing capitalism.
The MAGA crowd are picking on the vulnerable to stoke divisions among workers, all of whom will be oppressed by Trump’s administration. He’s using hyper-nationalist rhetoric to try to bind a section of the population to his project: generate fear about and loathing towards a purported enemy within—migrants and progressives, among others. 
Like many of Trump’s business ventures (google “Trump University”), it’s a con job to enable his wealthy capitalist friends to get even richer than they already are.

MAGA’s elite ‘anti-elites’

The hard right is making serious ground globally. But, while increasingly powerful, their ideas are not hegemonic. Now is not the time to despair, but to fight for a better world.
--------------------
There’s an undeniable sense that a right-wing vibe shift has taken place over the last eighteen months. Bashing migrants, trans people and women’s rights is “in”, as is climate denialism and the unfettered right of billionaires to accumulate as much money as possible. The hard right have become normalised; they are the mainstream in politics.
Donald Trump’s re-election and his rapid-fire assault on the oppressed and regulatory departments are the pinnacle of this new political era. He campaigned on assertions that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of US society and eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio. He celebrated his success in appointing Supreme Court judges who overturned national abortion protections. He vowed to abolish the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Authority. And now that he’s taken office, he’s holding good on many promises, while threatening US territorial expansion.
But it’s not just the US. The far right is on the march across Europe, surging in France, the United Kingdom and Germany, on the verge of taking power in Austria, and ruling Italy and several Central European countries. Many trace historical links to 1930s fascist parties. In Australia, Liberal leader Peter Dutton has borrowed elements of the MAGA playbook, lashing out at the “woke agenda”, lamenting that young men are “disenfranchised and ostracised” by diversity initiatives and setting up his own DOGE-inspired shadow minister for government efficiency. 
Unsurprisingly, corporate America is also going MAGA. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has inserted himself into the heart of the Trump administration, while using his control of X to promote far-right parties internationally. In a speech to the fascist Alternative for Germany party, Musk encouraged Germans to move beyond “a focus on past guilt” less than a week after performing a Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration. 
The titans of Silicon Valley—where many of the richest men in the world made their billions—have embraced Trump. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now sports a gold chain, encourages companies to embrace “masculine energy” and recently dropped diversity initiatives. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is spending $40 million for the right to make a documentary about first lady Melania Trump, live streamed Trump’s inauguration and, along with many other tech billionaires, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. There was a revolving door of corporate leaders bending the knee at Mar-a-Lago in the months before Trump took office.
It’s unsurprising, because these are the people set to benefit the most from an administration that is gutting regulations seen as impediments to the rich making money. In a world that feels more unstable (economies are stuttering, climate change is wreaking havoc and the threat of global war is looming), Trump promises a more ruthless administration focused only on “making America win”. Be under no illusion: it’s corporate America he is referring to. 
Diversity, equity and inclusion programs fitted the vibe of the 2010s and early 2020s, when millions of people mobilised to demand racial justice and the #MeToo movement excoriated misogynistic corporate culture. Companies adapted to try to maintain relevance amongst their consumer base. But that moment has passed, and the naked pursuit of profit and power, the preferred state of affairs for the billionaires, is making a comeback. “I feel liberated”, a top banker told the Financial Times. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled ... It’s a new dawn.”
Right-wing politics also feels ascendant in broader society and popular culture. Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have infected a growing section of young men with their noxious brand of hyper-misogyny and hustle culture. Trump received loud cheers during the Super Bowl live stream. Joe Rogan rules the airwaves. #YourBodyMyChoice trended immediately after Trump’s election. UFC fighter Bryce Mitchell received barely a slap on the wrist for a pro-Hitler rant that called the Nazi leader “a good guy”.
This all amounts to a dangerous new normal in world politics. For anyone who cares about the plight of the oppressed, this is serious cause for concern. It also raises a few important questions: How did we get here? And what can we do about it?
The first thing to note is that it’s not the case that everyone is now a bigot. Trump did not win by a large margin—at 1.8 percent, it’s the smallest since 1968—and nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home. Only one newly elected president has had a lower approval rating than Trump since the end of World War II: himself, in 2017. Across Western Europe and the UK, a majority of voters still reject the far right. If Dutton wins the upcoming federal election, it will be because of the ALP’s failure to help ordinary people during the cost-of-living crisis: every Australian poll conducted in the last twelve months shows more than two-thirds of respondents do not support Trump.
Polling also indicates that many of the key right-wing talking points are not very popular. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support legal access to abortion in most or all cases (which has increased since the Dobbs decision), according to the Pew Research Center. In June last year, Gallop found that more than six in ten Americans opposed banning access to gender-affirming care for minors. Only 37 percent of US adults support Trump’s call to deport all undocumented migrants, according to a survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
In the cultural sphere, Chappell Roan, who loudly promotes LGBTI rights and supports Palestine, is the pop star of the moment. And apparently Trump’s cheers at the Super Bowl were challenged by loud jeers—Fox sport just edited those bits out.
The next thing to understand is that the right has not risen to power because the masses turned fascist. The story of electoral politics in 2024 was the crisis of incumbency: parties that have overseen the rising cost of living of recent years were booted out of office. For instance, in the United Kingdom the Labour Party defeated the Conservatives, but now that they’re just dishing out more of the same, the far-right Reform UK party has surged in the polls. Politicians of all stripes are being punished for rising inequality.
In addition to that, official politics has for years been shifting to a harsher, more racist edge. For the last fifteen years, everyone from the traditional conservatives to the social democratic parties has tried to deflect anger away from themselves and on to migrants—it’s a classic case of divide and rule. Fortress Europe—the decade-long effort to keep migrants out of Europe by building barbed wire fences and letting at least 25,000 refugees drown in the Mediterranean—was not constructed by the fascists, but the political “centre”. Last year, deportations under Biden surpassed Trump’s record. When all we are hearing from politicians and the mainstream media is that we can’t afford a house because migrants are flooding the borders, is it any wonder that people start to believe this?
Popular consciousness is not only hardening to the right, but polarising to the left as well. There are countless examples of this: from young people demanding action on climate change, growing acceptance of trans people and outrage over attacks on abortion rights, not to mention the popular response to Luigi Mangione assassinating a health insurance CEO in New York last year. As the world becomes a nastier place, many are looking for a progressive alternative. 
So how do you square this circle with the rise of the right? For one thing, it’s easier for the right. Despite their anti-establishment rhetoric, they fit much more neatly into the system, venerating hierarchies, national divisions, racist scapegoating and profit making. They’re not trying to overthrow capitalism and create a society of genuine equality—quite the opposite. When it comes to electoral politics, the right has the advantage: for instance, the left doesn’t have the support of the richest person on the planet (and nor would we want it).
But mistakes have also been made by the left. Many have tried to transform the centre left parties into a weapon for economic and social justice. This means that organising efforts are wasted on hopeless projects like the Democrats or Labor-type parties. When these parties continue to betray their hopeful supporters, people become demoralised and withdraw from politics entirely. We saw this with Bernie Sanders in the US, Jeremy Corbyn in the UK and even more left-wing, but limited, electoral projects in Europe. 
The other mistake is thinking that the bosses can be compelled to right society’s wrongs. “Woke capitalism” and diversity programs still gave us soaring inequality, accelerating climate change and the genocide in Gaza. 
Left-wing people feel defeated while the right is ascendant, which has a broader impact on society. The right-wing trolls who were hiding in subreddits five years ago are now brimming with confidence.
Instead, we need to look towards forms of organising that history has shown can push back against the right and the ills of capitalism more broadly. Protests are an essential part of that strategy. At the start of last year, support for the German far right fell after mass protests swept the country. The Black Lives Matter uprising—the largest protests in US history—helped put the final nail in the coffin of the first Trump administration. They’re also a way to gather those who share a common outrage and vision for society, cutting against the atomisation and demoralisation that the system relies on. 
Working-class power is the other necessary element. Imagine if every teacher in the US stopped work to stop Trump from gutting the Education Department. Or if every doctor and nurse went on strike against cuts to public health or the health insurance vultures. Without the labour of ordinary people, their system would come to a standstill.
But we also need a political alternative: socialist parties that fight this shitty system, instead of capitulating to or compromising with it. Politics that fights for workers, for migrants, for trans people and women’s rights, against war and genocide and greenhouse-gas-emitting corporate criminals. 
We’re living in an increasingly dangerous world. The rich want to stamp down harder on workers, the oppressed are having hard-fought rights stripped away, and the threats of war and climate catastrophe loom large. Standing on the sidelines is not an option for anyone with a shred of decency. It’s time to join the fight.

Resisting the right-wing vibe shift

Donald Trump has nominated about two dozen monsters in an administration that is sure to inflict serious damage on workers and the oppressed in the US and beyond. Trump’s team members want to cut taxes for the wealthy and slash whatever paltry regulations exist to protect workers and the environment from capitalist greed. Many of them are anti-abortion and determined to make life hell for undocumented migrants and trans people. They’ve climbed their way up the slimy ladders of far-right politics and corporate America; now they’ve found themselves at the top of the most powerful state in the world. 
Trump’s top picks—all announced in quick succession on X—are a who’s who of the US far right, from Fox News presenters to prominent conspiracy theorists and arch-reactionary billionaires. This is hardly surprising. Trump has spoken of migrants “poisoning the blood” of the US, accused Haitian migrants of eating pet cats and dogs, floated using the national guard or military to handle “radical left lunatics” and suggested that police be allowed “one really violent day” to crack down on retail crime. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has supported a nationwide abortion ban and espoused the far-right “great replacement” theory.
One of the first nominees was Matt Gaetz, a Republican congressional representative from Florida, as attorney general. After just a week, he stepped aside to avoid the release of details of an investigation into allegations that he had sex with a minor. Gaetz was quickly replaced by Pam Bondi, previously the attorney general of Florida and on Trump’s defence team during his first impeachment trial in 2020. Trump also selected his lawyer, Todd Blanche, for deputy attorney general.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to deport all undocumented migrants living in the US, estimated by Pew Research Center to number more than 11 million people. He’s announced two candidates to enforce this most fascist of his policies. Tom Homan, the new “border czar”, was head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement last time Trump was in power and has since defended heinous policies like removing children from their parents at the border. On a podcast with Donald Trump Jr last week, Homan said his anti-migrant campaign will be one of “shock and awe”. 
He will be assisted in this by Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota and nominee for Homeland Security secretary, who boasted at a National Rifle Association convention last year that her one-year-old granddaughter already owned two guns. While governor, Noem deployed South Dakota National Guard members to the US-Mexico border in Texas. She was recently banned from the land of all nine Indigenous tribes in her state over a comment that tribal leaders focus more on benefiting from drug cartels than they focus on the wellbeing of their own children.
Trump has nominated China hawks Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, and Mike Waltz, another Florida Republican and a former Green Beret, for secretary of state and national security adviser, respectively. This area has had the most continuity in US politics over the last decade: both Democrats and Republicans agree that it’s time to prepare for World War Three. Rounding out the foreign policy trio is Pete Hegseth as defence secretary. Hegseth is an army veteran turned conservative media personality, hard-right culture warrior and defender of US soldiers accused of war crimes. His body is covered with tattoos of iconography associated with far-right Christian nationalists and white supremacists.
Then there are the billionaires. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, poured in at least $130 million to Trump’s campaign, for which he is now being handsomely repaid. His personal wealth has soared by at least US$80 billion since markets responded to Trump’s election with glee; along with fellow billionaire and Trump acolyte Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk will be heading the new Department of Government Efficiency. 
Despite the meme acronym, this is no joke—their remit is to slash and burn jobs, spending and regulations across government agencies. It should be noted that DOGE isn’t an official government department but a presidential advisory committee. The intention is for Musk (who cut 80 percent of Twitter’s staff when he bought the company in 2022) and Ramaswamy to draw up a list of targets to be presented to Trump, as the pair outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal article. They’re promising US$500 billion in cuts, including, in their words, to “progressive groups like Planned Parenthood”—a women’s health body. Presumably Musk will also recommend Trump take the axe to areas like the Environmental Protection Agency that have been a thorn in the side of his own companies. 
Howard Lutnick, a billionaire financier who donated at least $6 million to Trump’s campaign, has been nominated for commerce secretary—the role responsible for enacting Trump’s promise of significant tariffs on imports. Alongside him will be hedge fund billionaire Scott Bessent as treasury secretary. Linda McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and Trump’s fourth-largest donor, will be education secretary.
Trump’s energy policy, as articulated during the campaign, is “drill, baby, drill”. Doug Burgum, the billionaire governor of North Dakota, the third largest oil and gas-producing state in the country, will be secretary of the interior (responsible for managing public lands) and the new “energy czar”. Chris Wright, chief executive of the world’s second largest fracking company, is set to become secretary of energy. In a 2023 video, Wright declared: “There is no climate crisis”. 
Perhaps the craziest picks in this new madhouse are those responsible for the health of 330 million US citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the anti-vaxxer in chief and enemy of fluoride in the water, will now be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Dr Mehmet Oz, a TV personality and grifter who peddles quack supplements and weight loss products from which he financially benefits, will serve under Kennedy as the head of Medicare and Medicaid. 
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”, wrote Italian communist Antonio Gramsci from a fascist prison in 1929. He was describing a time of great upheaval for global capitalism, and the political “monsters” produced by the system as a consequence. History, once again, repeats.

Trump’s monsters

The federal Labor government has overseen the biggest fall in living standards in at least half a century. And Australian household income has dropped by more than in any comparable country in the last two years, <a>according to a recent report</a> published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young people in particular <a>have been screwed</a> by rising rents and falling wages.
People are rightly pissed. According to <a>polling in mid-October</a>, Anthony Albanese’s net approval rating has fallen to a new low of negative 14 percent, and the ALP’s primary vote has sunk to 31 percent. 
Yet, if you took the Labor PR machine seriously, you’d think the government was doing all it could to help people economically. There is endless talk about “cost-of-living relief” and bragging about the measures Labor has implemented. But what has the government really done?
The prime minister’s website has a special “cost of living relief” page that highlights every policy Albanese is trying to promote. At first glance, the listed measures appear to be designed to put more money into the pockets of struggling people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a different story. Many big-ticket relief items are just handouts to big business—a transfer of tax dollars to mega-corporations already raking in super-profits from charging higher prices. 
Take the energy rebate, which reduces annual household energy bills by $300. While it has helped millions struggling with eye-watering bills, it is also a $3.5 billion gift from taxpayers to the energy companies that have been ripping us off in the first place. And it’s hardly one they need. AGL, Australia’s largest electricity generator, recorded a 189 percent increase in underlying profit to $812 million in the last financial year. Origin Energy’s profit surged 172 percent to $1.2 billion, on top of an 83.5 percent increase the previous year. They are raking it in. 
The government could have capped energy prices, or imposed a super-profits tax on the energy behemoths, and saved the tax money for something else, like housing. But it is too wedded to the idea that companies have an ordained right to extract as much profit as possible through the market, regardless of the social consequences. 
It took the same approach to child care. Last year, the Child Care Subsidy was lifted and broadened to include more households. Once again, the government is just handing stacks of money—$10.7 billion, to be precise—to, in many cases, private for-profit childcare centres.
A <a>report released at the end of last year</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that any financial benefits from increases to the government subsidy were largely, if not wholly, eroded by increased day-care fees. It also found that “childcare fees across all services have grown faster than inflation and wages since the introduction of the subsidy”.
Like the energy companies, childcare companies are rolling in cash. G8 Education, Australia’s biggest listed childcare company, posted a 53 percent profit increase in 2023 and paid its CEO a $3 million package. That same year, G8 increased its fees by nearly 25 percent. 
So the government’s great plan means that parents are out of pocket just the same, the Treasury is poorer, while the companies increase their margins. Great “relief” if you can get it.
Then there’s the housing crisis, which needs no introduction. Labor promises to fix it by building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade through the $32 billion Homes for Australia plan. It’s already failing: forecasts from Oxford Economics in July showed that the government will miss its target by more than 20 percent. 
More to the point, Labor’s entire plan follows the same investor- and developer-first model that created the housing crisis in the first place.
This is most notable with the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—Labor’s answer to affordable housing. It’s another handout to private developers, construction firms and investors. The HAFF fact sheet repeatedly states that “one of the key objectives of the program is to encourage private investment in social and affordable housing”. The model is designed to get private investors to team up with a social housing provider to purchase, renovate or build new housing stock by handing over government money to ensure each project remains profitable. 
Take it from Conscious Investment Management chief investment officer Matthew Tominc, who has established a $200 million fund to cash in on the plan. He told the Financial Review that the HAFF would likely offer investors a net 8 to 12 percent return, guaranteeing no losses. So the big winner will again be—you guessed it, the investor class.
As for anyone not in the social housing sphere, which is most people, the government is basically hoping and praying that spending money on infrastructure will encourage developers to build more homes. But it’s doing nothing to ensure those homes will be affordable—the generous tax concessions and other incentives for investors remain untouched.
Another category of cost-of-living relief is the Stage 3 Tax Cuts, which could also be called “tax cuts that will help ordinary people a bit, but disproportionately benefit the rich and further entrench economic inequality”. Accurate, if a bit wordy. 
Finally, there are measures that aren’t objectionable but are so small that it’s almost like the government is playing a joke on the rest of us. 
For instance, the government claims it’s “delivering a better deal for renters” by raising Rent Assistance. The payment is available only to eligible welfare recipients—a fraction of the renting population. It’s also minuscule—it was raised by 10 percent to a maximum rate of $211 a fortnight for a single person with no children (the current median fortnightly rent is about $1,250). 
Eligibility for the single-parent payment has been extended to when the youngest child turns 14, up from 8, but still below 16—where it was when the Gillard Labor government reduced it in 2013. It’s also a maximum of $987.70 per fortnight. How anyone is supposed to live on that is one of society’s great mysteries. And despite a recommendation from the government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the below-the-poverty-line JobSeeker payment has hardly been touched.
Wage rises also slide into the “did you even notice?” category. The government congratulates itself for backing a 3.75 percent pay rise for minimum- and award-wage workers and a 15 percent pay rise for aged care workers. It’s good that the workers got a pay rise, but it’s hardly enough. 
Even with two significant wage increases, aged care workers will still receive only $25 to $30 an hour, depending on their role. We’re talking about small bumps to extremely low wages. As of July, average real wages for all workers were still nearly 5 percent lower than before the pandemic.
To top off this list of do-little policies, Labor’s latest offering is banning debit card transaction fees, which banks charge when you buy something with a debit card. Obviously, the move is supportable. But touting it as a game-changing measure is absurd. 
It’s like the Albanese government is parodying itself. In the last financial year, Australian banks made $40 billion in profit, an 8 percent increase on the previous year. Prolonged high interest rates have been a windfall for the so-called Big Four—the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Westpac—which charge a higher interest rate on loans than they pay into savings accounts. 
Debit fees range from 0.5 to 1 percent of the cost of a transaction. Sure, we should all hang on to that money, but will it make the slightest difference to the crushing weight of rising rents, mortgages, bills, groceries and everything else? No.
Labor is taking us for a ride. They know there’s a crippling cost-of-living crisis and they don’t want to take on big business, but they also want to win the next election. So they’re giving handouts to big business, throwing pennies at the rest of us and calling it relief.

Why the establishment hates the Greens

An election campaign about nothing that matters

Labor and Liberals rule for the rich—we need a socialist alternative

Resist the new militarism

Sydney University threatens to suspend student for writing on a whiteboard

MAGA’s elite ‘anti-elites’

Resisting the right-wing vibe shift

Trump’s monsters

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

Socialists and the US civil rights movement: an interview with Joel Geier

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