Another year on, and the dismal government of Anthony Albanese has continued to deliver nothing much. Having begun its life with about as much mojo as a koala, the government has spent 2024 as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s yes-man. Albanese’s political strategy resembles a 1-2 combination of Joe Biden and Mike Tyson—rule for the rich, screw your supporters, throw the match and walk away with a $4.3 million mansion. 
Albanese came to power in 2022 on the back of the unpopularity of the dysfunctional Scott Morrison Coalition government. In contrast to the Coalition, which was plagued with infighting, obsessed with culture wars and losing seats to the Teals, Labor presented itself as the “sensible centre”, the “adults in the room”. To the ruling class it promised, in Albanese’s words, an “unashamedly pro-business government”. At the same time, most workers hoped Labor might do something to make life a little easier, and progressives hoped for some sort of progress on climate action.
The Liberal Party was in disarray, but the 2022 election was far from a smashing victory for Labor. The ALP recorded one of its weakest results in history, with a primary vote of just 32 percent. In the years since, Labor’s support has steadily eroded, and the government has become increasingly weak and inclined to run for cover. Dutton, the man whose wife once had to clarify to media that he was in fact a human being and “not a monster”, is now competitive in the polls and setting the political agenda.
Living standards have gone backwards at record rates under Labor
The main factor in all this has been Labor’s failure to take any serious measures to address the cost-of-living crisis. 
High inflation has reduced real disposable household incomes by a whopping 10 percent since 2021, more than any other OECD country and the worst fall in Australia in more than 50 years. While supermarkets and energy companies price-gouge their way to soaring profits, Albanese has done nothing to rein them in. While banks and landlords make the cost of housing impossibly expensive, Labor introduces tokenistic schemes like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which after more than a year of operation will have contributed to just 700 new “affordable” homes.
Worse still, the government has presided over a range of measures to increase the squeeze on working-class households. These include scrapping the low to middle income tax offset, which was worth up to $1,500 for people earning up to $90,000, keeping minimum wage growth below the rate of inflation, and huge interest rate rises. Following the playbook of governments around the world, the interest rate rises were explicitly designed to cut the income and spending of the population, while slowing economic growth and driving up unemployment, in order to combat inflation. In other words, making the working class pay for the economy’s problems.
Meanwhile, Labor governments at federal and state levels have maintained a hard line on public sector wages. And if workers step out of line, demand proper pay rises and take industrial action, as Woolworths warehouse workers have been doing, they soon come up against draconian laws, upheld by the Labor government, restricting and banning strikes and picketing.
It’s not as though Labor weren’t throwing money around when it wanted to. Military spending increased to a record $55.7 billion in this year’s budget. Tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, are forecast to cost $100 billion over four years. Another $50 billion is given away every year in the form of capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing concessions, mostly to wealthy investors and property developers. A further $14.5 billion went in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry last year. This is 10 times the amount the government spent to give everyone a measly $300 rebate on their energy bill.
By January 2024, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/shock-poll-we-dont-trust-albo-to-help-us-with-costs-of-living/news-story/e8b7e7b39bedcd2e4c8d14746d6c0a50?amp&amp;nk=ca4b05041b50440fb106b0a6a7873d34-1705729334">polling</a>
was showing that a big majority (71 percent) considered the cost of living to be their main concern, followed by housing (41 percent). Eighty percent believed the government had failed to address the cost-of-living crisis. More than half thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. While inflation has now come down, the damage done over the last few years has by no means been reversed.
While workers have gone backwards, Forbes reports that “despite a weaker Australian dollar, Australia’s 50 Richest on the 2024 list are better off from a year ago. Their collective wealth rose by US$9 billion to $222 billion, from $213 billion in 2023.” The overall share of national income going to profits, instead of wages, remains at record highs. This explains why the ruling class, and the media, have not turned against the Albanese government.
No progress, only spin, failure and regression on social issues
Labor’s progressive supporters have experienced another year of being kicked in the teeth. On climate policy, Albanese has approved another 28 coal and gas projects since being elected. This has exposed the big scam that was Labor’s flagship “safeguard mechanism” climate policy in 2023, which was touted as “ending the climate wars”, and even celebrated by the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt claimed that “coal and gas have taken a huge hit”. In fact, the policy was adopted from the Business Council of Australia, and backed by the mining and gas companies, which, in 2023, exported the equivalent of another 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Albanese ended 2024 by tearing up a separate deal with the Greens on “nature positive legislation”, at the behest of the Western Australia Labor government, which in turn was doing the bidding of mining companies, and rushing through approval for another three coal mines.
The Albanese government’s climate policy has been based on giving the mining and gas companies whatever they want, while trying to deceive the public that some progress on tackling carbon emissions is occurring, through industrial-scale greenwashing, accounting tricks and fake carbon offsets. Meanwhile energy bills soar. This fuels the cynicism and resentment that Dutton capitalises on to deride the “green agenda” and to blame it for high energy prices. 
Labor’s pro-business approach has been matched by a general political strategy of wanting to avoid any fight with the right about social questions. From his small-target strategy in opposition, Albanese now wants to lead a small-target government. 
Labor supported the Voice referendum only because the proposal was backed by big business and, initially, seemed uncontroversial. The success of Dutton’s racist “no” campaign, which Labor couldn’t stand up to, weakened Albanese further and reinforced his determination to avoid any controversy and, in particular, criticism from the right.
This has led to Labor jumping to adopt increasingly reactionary policies. One particularly pathetic example was Albanese’s move to break an election promise and scrap questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the national census, only to backflip two weeks later. Here was Labor pre-emptively capitulating to a right-wing culture war that didn’t even exist.
The government’s extreme response to the construction union, the CFMEU, after allegations of corruption aired in the media, probably fits somewhere in Albanese’s Venn diagram between servitude to big business and terror of being criticised by the right, in this case for being too close to the unions. Labor’s complete government takeover of the union and sacking of officials, including in branches not subject to allegations of corruption, is a major attack on one of the few unions perceived still to use workers’ industrial muscle to win decent wages and conditions.
Then we have Labor’s despicable lurch to the right on questions of immigration and refugees, even to the point of trying to out-compete Dutton as “tougher” on denying human rights and deporting people. US President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral success will only encourage Dutton to adopt even more extreme racist, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Rather than blaming the billionaires, immigrants have always been the perfect scapegoat for cost-of-living pressures, unemployment and non-existent crime waves. 
Labor has gone along with this argument, culminating in its rush to pass a trio of hideous new anti-refugee bills, in agreement with the Coalition, in the last sitting days of parliament for 2024. In spruiking the bills, Albanese attacked Dutton from the right, saying, “On Peter Dutton’s watch, there was a huge spike in the number of protection visa applications onshore”.
These extreme new laws allow the government to bribe countries to accept deportees from Australia, regardless of their human rights credentials. They make it harder for asylum seekers to get protection visas and allow the Australian government to ban new visa applications from countries that do not accept forced deportations from Australia, which many have labelled a Trump-style travel ban. And they ramp up the isolation and hellish treatment of those in immigration detention, with bans on phones, and more powers to impose ankle bracelets and curfews on anyone released.
After the laws passed, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that the Coalition is now “basically running the immigration system for the government”. And he is not wrong. 
Albanese punches down
While cosying up to big business and out-competing Dutton on racism, there have been some fights Albanese has embraced with passion and verve—against anyone to his left.
Lashing the Greens has become Labor’s favourite pastime. They have labelled straightforward housing proposals like a rent freeze, which the Greens advocate and which have majority support, as “absolute pixie dust”. They have denounced Greens MPs for “grandstanding” by supporting the CFMEU. Most of all, they have attacked the Greens for supporting Palestinian rights. In language you never see Labor politicians use against the right, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, without any evidence, said the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”. 
This from the government that is continuing to back, including militarily, a state that is committing what even Amnesty International now describes as genocide, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. You won’t find any strong words of condemnation or denunciation from any Labor politician of Israel or its actions in Gaza. Indeed, the only Labor politician who did begin to offer such criticism, Fatima Payman, was driven out of the party. But there’s been plenty of moral outrage, and repression, directed at those who have protested these crimes.
Albanese won’t fight the right, but he will bravely take on children. Labor governments at federal and state level have either led, or gone along with, hysterical law and order campaigns, often directed against Aboriginal children. And now they are banning social media access for under-16s, while doing nothing to actually regulate or take on the big media and social media barons.
Where to from here?
The Labor government is leading our society into a very bleak situation. It has carried out the ruling class’s wish to get inflation under control by sacrificing working-class living standards and job security. The resentment felt by millions, combined with the government’s right-wing stance on issue after issue, is helping pave the way for Dutton.
Around the world similar stories have played out, whereby centrist governments, overseeing growing inequality and pursuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, have fuelled the right and far right. Most recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led to Donald Trump. In the UK, the Keir Starmer Labor government is already tanking in the polls, with a huge growth in support for the Conservatives and the far right. In several countries in Europe, social democratic parties have collapsed and far-right governments have come to power.
The Labor Party may still cling to power in the next election, propped up as a minority government by the Greens, which seems increasingly happy to play this role. Despite Albanese’s best efforts, Dutton is still widely unpopular. But whether it’s Albanese screwing the working class and championing right-wing policies, or the monster Dutton, it remains the case that what is desperately needed is stronger socialist opposition to the rotten Labor Party and the system it represents.

Josh Lees

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

There has been a renewed attack on the right to protest in NSW, led by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, in conjunction with the NSW Liberal Party and a right-wing media campaign designed to smear the Palestine solidarity movement. 
The campaign began with sections of the media hyperventilating about the presence of some Hezbollah flags at our Sydney protest on 29 September. It worked itself up into a full-blown moral panic about anyone daring to discuss the 42,000+ Palestinians killed by Israel in the past year, on the anniversary of 7 October. 
Although Israel was invading Lebanon and continuing a year-long genocidal rampage in Gaza, it was us, those protesting against the slaughter, who were labelled terrorist supporters, violent, insensitive and a threat to “social cohesion”.
For the Australian establishment, only Israelis can be mourned. According to them, there is no such thing as a Palestinian victim who deserves to have their life remembered and honoured—they are only Hamas terrorists and human shields. 
The campaign culminated in the NSW police, under orders from Minns, taking the Palestine Action Group Sydney to the Supreme Court to try to stop our protest on 6 October and a candlelight vigil on 7 October from going ahead. The arguments of the police and prosecutors were farcical and drew on long-established racist stereotypes, particularly about Lebanese people. They tried to concoct an image of violent, terrorist-sympathising mobs. 
At one point, they claimed that flower beds in planter boxes posed a safety risk. At another, they argued that a protest route, which they themselves had proposed to protest organisers at a previous meeting, went too near a Sydney synagogue. Later, they argued that the protest should be banned because all the publicity, generated by their own court challenge, meant it would be bigger than expected! In the end, the police withdrew their application to stop us from marching.
But they mobilised an obscenely large mob of police who were itching for any excuse to make arrests to justify the hysterical anti-protest panic. Hundreds of riot police were sent to surround and intimidate a candlelight vigil. Despite this, both events were massive and successful, and the police and government were left with egg on their faces at the lack of “violent terrorists” they could invent.
Chris Minns, not one to let a good law-and-order panic go to waste, then went on 2GB radio with shock jock Ben Fordham (where Minns seemingly makes most of his policy announcements) to complain about the cost—supposedly $5.4 million this year—of policing our protests. As if it were our decision to send hundreds of cops to a candlelight vigil! 
“I’m going to have a review into the resourcing that police put into these marches, and it’s my view that police should be able to be in a position to deny a request for a march due to stretched police resourcing”, he said. Minns has also appeared to endorse the idea of Liberal opposition leader Mark Speakman that a “user pays” system should be introduced, whereby protesters are forced to pay the costs of the police. Besides being a general attack on protests, this proposal would create a perverse situation in which the rich could protest but not the poor.
Minns also personally singled me out as a “serial protester”, prompting the baying bloodhounds of Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph to write an attempted <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/serial-propalestine-rally-organiser-josh-lees-received-covid-fines-after-campaigning-to-lock-down-nsw/news-story/ec8d90ca4fe038838fde4148f6c4ff65">hit piece</a> on my history of protest, presumably based on information leaked to them by NSW Police.
At our protest on 13 October, two 19-year-old women from Students for Palestine were arrested, had their bags searched, were given move-on orders to leave the protest and were told they would receive infringement notices in the mail. Their “crime”? Putting up a poster on a pole in Hyde Park to advertise a protest.
These threats to our right to protest are just the latest in a long line of authoritarian laws adopted in recent years. The Human Rights Legal Centre <a href="https://www.hrlc.org.au/news/2024/07/03/protest-peril">reports</a>: “Over the past two decades, 49 laws affecting protest have been introduced in federal, state and territory parliaments. New South Wales has introduced the most anti-protest laws”.
In 2022, the NSW Liberal and Labor parties teamed up to pass the Roads and Crimes Act, which introduced two years’ jail and/or a $22,000 fine for anyone found to be disrupting bridges, tunnels, major roads, train stations, ports and public and private infrastructure. The laws targeted climate protesters but can be used against anyone. Last year, they were used to charge Palestine solidarity protesters attempting to blockade Israeli shipping company Zim at Port Botany.
It has become common police practice to impose insanely strict bail conditions on protesters, even when the alleged offence is minor and would attract only a fine if proven. These conditions often include exclusion zones around the CBD or potential protest sites like universities, bans on attending future protests, and even bans on associating with other activists. The latter powers were supposedly introduced to help NSW police deal with criminal gangs. They are now routinely used against protesters.
Every movement in history has had to contend with the repressive state apparatus, which is devoted to maintaining the “cohesion” of the current, unequal, unjust and murderous social order. The best way to fight for the right to protest is to protest, in bigger numbers than ever.
Josh Lees is an organiser with the Palestine Action Group Sydney.

NSW assault on the right to protest

One year ago, Israel began its genocidal bloodbath in Gaza. As the bodies of men, women and so many children piled up, ripped apart by bombs made in the USA, everyone was called on to answer the question: “Which side are you on?”.
Governments of every stripe, from the far right in Italy and Argentina, to the Democrat and Labor administrations of the US and Australia, and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East, chose the side of genocide. Weapons companies kept the ammunition and profits flowing. The Australian media became mouthpieces of Israeli state propaganda. Palestinians whose families were being annihilated were either ignored or asked only one question: “Do you condemn Hamas?”.
But against the tide, a new movement rose. It started with those of us who had been organising in solidarity with Palestine for many years. In Sydney, we in the Palestine Action Group started making calls and by 9 October we had 2,000 people on the streets. Within a few days, protests were occurring in every major city.
We had organised protests against Israel’s previous massacres in Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. But none of us predicted just how bloodthirsty Israel would be this time. And none of us knew that we were kicking off a movement that would mobilise thousands of people every week, for 52 weeks, to demand freedom for Palestine. If there is one ray of hope amongst all the horror of the past year, it’s that millions of ordinary people have defiantly taken a stand with this movement for liberation.
No sooner had we taken to the streets than the attacks on us began. The script was familiar: we were labelled antisemites. The Jewish organisations and individuals who participated in every protest were erased from the media narrative. In NSW, Labor Premier Chris Minns lit up the Opera House with the colours of Israel’s flag and then declared that our protests would be banned. Police threatened the use of extraordinary powers to crack down on us, and even forcibly strip-search protesters. Peter Dutton called for protesters to be deported. It took real bravery for people to mobilise in the face of all that, but on 15 October, 15,000 people demonstrated that we could not be intimidated into silence.
The centrepiece of this movement has been the nationwide mass weekly or fortnightly protests. They have been the biggest rallies for Palestine in Australian history. In Melbourne and Sydney, upwards of 60,000 people have mobilised, with huge numbers out in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. Even smaller cities and towns like Wollongong, Newcastle, Cairns and Katoomba have held regular protests, attracting hundreds.
These sustained mobilisations have kept Palestine at the centre of Australian political debate, piling pressure on our rotten politicians, drawing huge numbers into the cause for the first time, giving confidence and inspiration to all who come that we are on the right side of history, and showing the people of Gaza that we are with them, even if our governments are not.
Crucially, the protests have mobilised far larger numbers of non-Arabs and non-Muslims than the Palestine movement had previously. It is a testament to the argument that ordinary people, regardless of their background, are capable of rejecting racism and standing in solidarity with oppressed people. 
The mass protests have created the foundation for countless other actions to be organised in the past year: occupations of train stations, pickets at weapons companies, attempted blockades of ports, convoys to Canberra, protests and sit-ins at Albanese’s office, hundreds of vigils, plays and film-screenings, actions aimed at local councils and much more.
Students have played a big part. High school socialists in Melbourne organised the biggest school strike for Palestine in the world last November, and students elsewhere followed suit. Students for Palestine kicked off the Gaza solidarity encampment movement on Australian universities, setting up the first camp at Sydney University in April, before it spread to twelve other campuses. 
A wave of huge student general meetings has been held at campuses around the country, mobilising 1,500 people at the University of Queensland and several hundred in other places. The immense majorities voting for pro-Palestine motions are extraordinary and demonstrate how large support for Palestine is amongst young people.
Everywhere people have tried to express their opposition to the genocide, they have come up against institutions that try to repress them. Journalists Antoinette Lattouf and Nour Haydar were sacked for reporting the truth. Fatima Payman was driven out of the Labor Party. Pro-Palestine school students and teachers have faced off against principals and education departments, demanding their right to wear the keffiyeh. Actors and musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to the Sydney Theatre Company have been punished for taking a stand. Many trade union members have campaigned against their union leaders to take a stronger stance in support of Palestine. University students and staff are currently facing a concerted right-wing campaign to silence them. Recent protests against the arms convention in Melbourne were met with police violence. Yet still, we resist.
As the genocide grinds on and Israel escalates its violence in Lebanon, there are precious few victories for us to celebrate. But all of us who have thrown ourselves into the fight to stand against this descent into hell should be proud of what we have done. There are thousands and thousands of people who are more committed than ever to free Palestine and tear down this barbaric system, and we aren’t done yet.

Still fighting for Palestine, one year on

Fresh from driving Fatima Payman out of the Labor Party, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has now appointed Jillian Segal, former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), a rabid pro-Israel lobby group, as “special envoy to combat antisemitism”. The role has nothing to do with combatting antisemitism and everything to do with silencing opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
“We have been blessed to live in a country with no history of antisemitic laws or institutional persecution of Jewish Australians, but the world is changing”, Segal said soon after getting the job. In fact, Australia was rife with antisemitic persecution for decades, including under the racist “White Australia” immigration laws, which excluded Jews. And antisemitic far-right groups are active today and are growing globally. 
But this stuff doesn’t much concern Segal because her appointment isn’t about challenging racism; it’s about stoking it.
Segal and ECAJ have <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/07/10/jillian-segal-antisemitism-envoy-labor-banking-nab-israel-palestine/">campaigned</a> against a ceasefire in Gaza, <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/ecaj-zfa-joint-statement-on-foreign-minister-penny-wongs-abc-insiders-comments/">justified</a> bombing hospitals, <a href="https://everythingisfine.beehiiv.com/p/jillian-segal-right-wing-peak-bodies-and-zionist-antisemitism">repeated</a> false claims about babies being beheaded on 7 October, and lobbied for student protesters to be persecuted. In her own words, speaking at a pro-Israel rally in May, Segal said she wants to “drive anti-Zionism and antisemitism back into the darkest and most disreputable corners of our society”. 
Of course, the way for organisations such as ECAJ to oppose anti-Zionism is to equate it with antisemitism, so that any criticism of Israel can be dismissed, and the critics can be accused of racist hate speech.
It is such a familiar tactic that it barely needs to be explained for the sham that it is. It has been deployed so often and so ludicrously that it is having less and less impact in cowing people who want to stop the genocide and support Palestinian liberation. 
But a real threat lurks behind this appointment, which is the increasingly repressive environment for anti-genocide activists around the world. Segal will use her position to campaign for Australia to adopt the extreme anti-democratic measures we have seen in places like Germany and the UK, where pro-Palestine protesters, including many Jewish anti-Zionists, are being routinely <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/1/we-jews-are-just-arrested-palestinians-are-beaten-german-protesters">arrested</a> under the preposterous pretext of inciting racial hatred.
Similar moves have already begun in Australia. A Melbourne activist now <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/palestinian-activist-hash-tayeh-told-he-will-be-arrested-for-inciting-hatred-20240711-p5jsrv.html">faces arrest</a>, and many student protesters are facing university discipline for criticising Zionism. And there are threats to ban chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”.
This leads us to the crux of the issue. When it comes to racial hatred, there is no form more extreme than genocide. It is, in the words of the Genocide Convention, an attempt to destroy “in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. 
The practice of genocide goes well beyond words and hate speech, although is inevitably accompanied by odious racist ideology. It is killing on a vast scale, mass terror, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of the physical and social preconditions of life. It’s what Israel has been doing for nine months.
Every week, another atrocity is revealed. Surgeons working in Gaza have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/11/israeli-weapons-shrapnel-children-gaza-injured">described</a> the huge numbers of shrapnel injuries they are treating, leading to horrific numbers of civilian deaths, amputations and other internal injuries. They result from the kinds of shells and bombs Israel is dropping on residential areas and refugee camps, where the main munition is encased with a fragmentation sleeve consisting of hundreds of tiny tungsten cubes that explode in every direction, shredding organs and bones. The only reason to use such weapons is to kill and injure as many people as possible. They are being killed because they are Palestinian.
Beyond the 38,345 people counted as killed by the Gaza Health Ministry, a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">letter</a> published in the journal of the British Medical Association estimates that the real death toll could be more than 186,000, or 7.9 percent of the pre-October Gaza population. Add to this the tens of thousands who have been forced to flee Gaza altogether (and who have been able to make it out), and this amounts to a significant depopulation of the Strip, one which Israel seems intent on continuing via ongoing massacres, blockade and starvation. Meanwhile, Israel carries out its biggest <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/04/israel-has-approved-largest-west-bank-land-grab-in-30-years-watchdog-says">land theft</a> in 30 years in the West Bank.
This is what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza—an immense slaughter, an ethnic cleansing, the worst possible form of racist crime: genocide. Then there are those outside of Israel helping to enable and justify this racist atrocity, like the Australian government, the various Israel lobby groups, the corporate media. 
They <a href="https://overland.org.au/2024/07/you-dont-end-racism-with-envoys/">systematically dehumanise</a> the Palestinian people, erase and delegitimise their suffering, oppression and aspirations for liberation. This, in turn, fosters <a href="https://islamophobia.com.au/publications/press-releases/">racist abuse</a> and discrimination against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in Australia. Moreover, the government signs a $917 million military deal with Elbit Systems, an Israeli manufacturer of fragmentation shells, to help kill more Palestinians. 
This is the main form of racism we confront in Australia today: support for genocide.

Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide

Western Australian federal Senator Fatima Payman has resigned from the Labor Party after being indefinitely suspended from the caucus and purged from party committees and communications. Her crime? Crossing the Senate floor to support a Greens motion to recognise Palestinian statehood. 
As Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather put it, “This Labor gov has done more to sanction Fatima Payman than Israel for committing a genocide”. 
“My family did not flee from a war-torn country to come here as refugees for me to remain silent when I see atrocities inflicted on innocent people”, Payman said. “Not just on this matter, but various matters that Western Australians have raised with me, from incarceration rates of Indigenous people, to locking up kids as young as ten years old, from the rising cost of living pressures to families living in cars and tents due to the housing crisis.” 
Payman’s resignation highlights, yet again, the contemptible role played by the Albanese Labor government over the last nine months of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Labor has rhetorically called for a ceasefire, but on all matters of substance has backed Israel’s genocidal campaign, justifying it as Israel “defending itself”. It has continued to sign deals with Israeli weapons companies, allowed hundreds of Israeli-Australians to participate in the atrocities by fighting with the Israeli military and refused to back international efforts to put pressure on Israel through the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. 
The responses to Payman’s resignation speak volumes about the vacuous, heartless establishment machine that is the modern ALP. Anonymous Labor sources immediately floated that maybe Payman is ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background—a particularly nasty notion given that her family fled Afghanistan as refugees. 
Concerning the Senate vote that sparked Payman’s exit, Labor has tried to argue that it also supports “recognising Palestine” but only as part of a peace process and two-state solution. This only demonstrates what deliberately meaningless phrases these are. There is no peace process; Israel is committing genocide, and no one in the Israeli government or opposition supports the creation of a Palestinian state.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong tried a different angle to attack Payman, thinking that reminding everyone of Labor’s long refusal to support marriage equality—and her own appalling stance during those years—might be a winner. “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”. Wong told ABC Radio’s AM program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.”
Underlining this argument is the idea that real change comes from behind closed doors, through polite lobbying, patience and faith in incremental progress within the ALP. This argument has been raised not just by Wong but also by parts of the left in recent years, and more recently in the Palestine campaign, with some saying we should celebrate and give platforms to ALP figures such as Ged Kearney, who claim to be fighting for change inside the party even when they consistently toe the party line and vote for every reactionary bill. We couldn’t possibly demand they cross the floor, one argument goes, because Labor’s rules don’t permit it.
Payman’s stance has blown these arguments out of the water, and exposed all these other Labor politicians as careerist hacks. Not one of them has come to Payman’s defence. The Palestine campaign has been absolutely right to refuse to platform Labor politicians who won’t break ranks with Albanese. We haven’t met them halfway; we have drawn a line in the sand and demanded they pick which side of history they want to stand on. 
Payman herself credits the student Gaza solidarity camps for making her realise she needed to break ranks with Labor. When she visited the camps, she was greeted not with scones and grovelling but with plenty of anger at Labor politicians who were supporting Israel’s genocide.
Payman’s current stance is a result of our mass protest movement over these past nine months. Her crossing the floor is a step forward and has done more for the Palestine cause in Australia than anything Penny Wong ever did for marriage equality. In fact, marriage equality was won through years of mass protests and was finally enshrined under a Coalition government—no thanks to Labor and the likes of Wong. 
There is no incremental progress in today’s world, if ever there was. We are surrounded by the rise of the racist and fascist right, climate destruction, falling living standards and genocide. Labor is on the wrong side of every question. Change, including Palestinian liberation, will come only through mass defiance of the whole system that Labor supports.

A principled resignation from the Australian Genocide Party

The Nakba (“catastrophe” in English) is marked on 15 May every year to remember the day the state of Israel was founded in 1948 on the back of a genocide of the Palestinian people. In that year, Zionist militias—armed and trained by various great powers including Britain and the Soviet Union—carried out a campaign of massacres and ethnic cleansing, forcing around 750,000 Palestinians to flee their homes. They have never been allowed to return.
This year, the Nakba was remembered with mass protests and student occupations around the world, as people strive to stop Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many have dubbed the nearly eight-month-long invasion of the Gaza Strip “a new Nakba”, and they are right to do so.
The Nakba of 1948 was planned, calculated and articulated in advance. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and commander of the Haganah militia, which carried out massacres and forced expulsions during the Nakba, was crystal clear that the creation of Israel required genocide. He spent years campaigning and preparing for it.
“The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple”, said Ben-Gurion in 1937. In a letter to his son, he stated, “We must expel the Arabs and take their places”. 
During the ethnic cleansing operations his armed forces were carrying out, he wrote in his diary in July 1948, “We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return”.
The United Nations helped pave the way for the Nakba through its partition plan of 1947, which backed the creation of Israel. While publicly pretending to accept partition alongside a Palestinian state, Ben-Gurion planned a violent expansion. In a 1948 letter he wrote, “If we will receive in time the arms we have already purchased, and maybe even receive some of that promised to us by the UN, we [can] ... take over Palestine as a whole”.
The Nakba of 2023-24 must be understood in this larger context. It is the latest episode of Israel’s ceaseless expansionism, which has always required an ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. 
The latest news from Gaza is that Israel is expanding its assault on Rafah, pushing further west into more populated areas. Bombing and massacres continue throughout the Strip, including in northern and central Gaza. The official number of Palestinians killed is now over 35,000, with thousands more still buried under the rubble of their homes. 
But like the original Nakba, for Israeli political and military leaders this is not merely about blind revenge for Hamas’ attack on 7 October. It is a calculated offensive, albeit one that is ill defined and politically contested within the Israeli war cabinet. The assault has been designed to destroy the necessities of human life and society in Gaza through the targeting of power stations, bakeries, water and sewage systems; the systematic destruction of hospitals, residential buildings, universities, schools, mosques and churches; the starvation-siege; and the deliberate killing of huge numbers of civilians, including children.
As in the 1948 Nakba, Israeli politicians have been open about their plans and dreams. “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba”, Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister <a>Avi Dichter declared in November</a>. In October, a leaked document revealed that the Israeli Intelligence Ministry <a>advised</a> the government to forcibly expel the entire Gazan population.
Millions have mobilised around the world to stop this genocide, which has led to international pressure from Israel’s chief arms suppliers, notably the US, to rein in civilian casualties and tone down the planned invasion of Rafah.
In a big blow to Israel’s legitimacy, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for their war crimes in Gaza, along with three Hamas leaders.
The Israeli government and its international supporters are apoplectic at the “moral equivalence” they accuse the ICC of drawing between themselves and Hamas. Indeed, there is no equivalence: whatever you think of Hamas, they are not the occupying power, and they have never killed 35,000 people, razed entire cities or tortured and starved on a scale such as Israel has done in Gaza since October.
For now, at least, it seems the more ambitious goal of some in the Israeli establishment to expel or eradicate the entire Gazan population will not be carried out in the short term. That is a small mercy. But Israel clearly intends to keep killing and starving the population for some time to come, and any ceasefire that eventually emerges will leave Gaza in ruins and its people subject to an ongoing brutal occupation and siege. 
The Nakba of 1948 never really ended. In that sense, this is not a new Nakba, but a continuation of Israel’s foundational genocide. It won’t end until the state of Israel itself is stopped.

This is a new Nakba

More than 500 Palestine supporters, including hundreds of university students and staff, rallied on Friday morning at Sydney University to support the student Gaza solidarity encampment. The rally was called in response to a planned demonstration by supporters of Israel, who are calling for the students’ camp to be forcibly shut down. As in turned out, the Palestine rally was more than double the size of the Zionists’, which could muster only around 200 people who assembled a few hundred metres away.
This was a very important mobilisation for the Palestine solidarity campaign in Australia, as it comes in the midst of the vicious repression of student pro-Palestine protests in the US, and follows an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/zionists-attach-monash-university-gaza-encampment">attack by far-right Israel supporters</a> on a student protest camp at Monash University in Melbourne at 2am on Thursday morning. In that attack, a dozen thugs <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C6cl-qZBYfy/">tore down tents and destroyed donated food</a> while blaring a far-right Israeli song celebrating the genocide in Gaza. The pro-Israel rally in Sydney today aimed to stir up and pressure the authorities to crack down on the student camp at Sydney University.
The big mobilisation of Palestine supporters to defend the camp sends a message that the students do not stand alone, that they will not be intimidated, and that any attempt to violently suppress their right to protest—whether by Zionist thugs, university management or police—will have to contend with hundreds of determined students, and the broader Palestine movement, which has mobilised thousands upon thousands of people weekly for the last 7 months.
The ideological attacks on the protest camp by politicians and the media have deployed the usual bogus claims of anti-semitism—arguing that a peaceful protest against genocide somehow makes Sydney University unsafe for Jewish students and staff. The protest today refuted those claims, with numerous anti-Zionist Jewish speakers addressing the crowd. 
Protest camp organiser and MC of today’s rally, Yasmine Johnson, spoke of her Jewish family’s suffering during the Holocaust, and denounced the cynical attempts by Zionists to use that genocide to justify Israel’s current atrocities against the Palestinians. American Jewish academic Mark LeVine spoke of his son being one of the brave protesters at UCLA who had just been attacked by <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/2/activists-say-ucla-palestine-encampment-assault-followed-days-of-harassment">Zionist vigilantes</a> and <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-police-flatten-pro-palestinian-camp-ucla-arrest-protesters-2024-05-02/">police</a>. 
Vivienne Porzsolt from Jews Against the Occupation ‘48, Maggie from Jewish collective <a href="https://www.facebook.com/tzedekcollective/">Tzedek</a>, and Jewish professor Peter Slezak also spoke, alongside Ahmed Abadla, a Palestinian activist from Khan Younis in Gaza, which was recently devastated by Israeli bombing. The National Tertiary Education Union’s Sydney University branch President Nick Riemer, and the university’s Student Representative Council President Harrison Brennan also spoke.
The activist group <a href="https://www.instagram.com/studentsforpalestinesydneyuni/">Students for Palestine</a> established the protest camp at Sydney University on 23 April, following the lead of students in the US. Like many US universities, Sydney University has links with companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza, such as weapons manufacturers Thales and Ratheon, which are both involved in supplying Israel with the military hardware and software it uses to commit massacres of the Palestinian population.
Universities around the world have so far refused to meet student demands that they disclose and break their ties with Israel—indicating they would rather support a genocide, and in many instances the crushing of their own students’ democratic rights to protest, than deliver any change. The student protests continue to <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/palestine-solidarity-encampments-spread-across-australia">spread to new campuses around Australia</a>, as well as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/may/01/uk-students-begin-new-wave-of-protests-against-gaza-war-after-us-arrests">the UK</a>, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/france-paris-university-campus-protests-israel-palestinians-gaza-b2743b076ff31a8dbe74478a046c1379">France</a>, New Zealand, and some Arab countries. At Sydney University, the students have vowed to stay as long as they can to break their university’s ties with Israel and stop the genocide in Gaza.

Hundreds rally to defend Sydney University Gaza solidarity camp

A deal has been struck between Israel and Hamas which could see a four day pause in fighting while a limited prisoner swap takes place and some aid is allowed into Gaza.
The timing and exact details of the deal remain unclear. What is clear is Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s pledge to continue the offensive in Gaza once the four day pause is over. “We are at war,” he said, “and we will continue the war until we achieve all our goals”. Israeli spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus echoed this, saying the Israeli military will “use the time to prepare for future operations”.
Israel’s “operations” have so far killed more than 13,000 Palestinians, including more than 6,000 children. It has systematically bombed, attacked and destroyed hospitals, schools, bakeries, water and sewage systems, power plants, mosques, churches and all other vital infrastructure, along with more than a third of all residential buildings. More than a million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, while Israeli MPs and intelligence officials have openly discussed plans to expel the entire Palestinian population from the Gaza Strip—a second Nakba.
The genocidal dreams of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich were on display recently when he shared an article on X by former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland, saying he “agreed with every word”. In the <a href="https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/influential-israeli-national-security-leader-makes-the-case-for-genocide-in-gaza/">article</a> Eiland argues that "Israel must ... not provide the other side with any capability that prolongs its life ... When senior Israeli figures tell the media, ‘It’s either us or them,’ we should clarify the question of who is ‘them’. ‘They’ are not only Hamas fighters with weapons but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population”.
While even a temporary or partial relief from Israel’s genocidal offensive will understandably be welcomed, the fact that it plans to resume the mass slaughter after just four days means there is very little to celebrate in the ceasefire deal.
A potential danger for the Palestine solidarity movement internationally, much of which has rallied around the demand for a ceasefire, is that some people could be lulled into thinking that this is the beginning of the end of Israel’s bloody rampage, and that we can ease off on the unprecedented explosion of pro-Palestine protest we have seen over the last seven weeks.
This would be a mistake. The deal won’t even bring an end to the immediate suffering of the people of Gaza. Even if there is a pause in fighting for four days, Israeli troops will remain where they are, and most much-needed aid, supplies and rescue efforts for the thousands trapped under rubble will continue to be blocked.
Neither does the deal move things closer to anything resembling genuine peace and justice for the Palestinians. As a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=677649241163394&amp;set=a.443872964541024">statement</a> released by pro-Palestinian activist groups around Australia that have been organising massive weekly demonstrations argues, “Even if Israel were not simply pausing before another onslaught, a ceasefire would not address any of the broader demands of the Palestinian people. Israel continues to occupy land across historic Palestine, including in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Using the Gaza war as cover, armed Israeli settlers have been stealing new territory, destroying crops and depopulating entire villages”.
The ceasefire deal will not free the 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. It won’t end the military occupation and accelerating process of violent ethnic cleansing and settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It won’t end the apartheid conditions for Palestinians living inside the state of Israel or give the millions of Palestinian refugees around the world the right to return to their homeland.
All this shows why the Palestine solidarity movement around the world can’t base itself merely on the slogan of “ceasefire”. It must embrace the wider cause of ending the oppression of Palestinians in all its forms. Those of us in countries that support Israel also need to demand that our governments break ties with this state, the existence and ongoing expansion of which rests on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
As the activist statement quoted above concludes, “We will not be fooled by media lies and Israeli spin. The struggle must continue until the Palestinians have justice”.

Israel pledges to continue its genocidal offensive despite ceasefire deal

Ten thousand people took to the streets of Melbourne last weekend to protest Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has already killed more than 2,400 people—including 800 children. 
The protest heard from Samah Sabawi, a playwright born in Gaza who has <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/world/middle-east/leave-now-i-begged-my-aunt-to-flee-gaza-here-s-what-she-said-20231013-p5ec2e.html">written</a> about the Israeli bombardment her family is currently enduring.
Jerome Small from the Victorian Socialists also spoke, telling the crowd: “The Gaza Strip is smaller than the local government area of Hume (from Broadmeadows and Tullamarine out to Craigieburn, Mickleham and Sunbury). Imagine putting two million people in that area, cutting off water, electricity, food and fuel—and then dropping 6,000 bombs in a week. This is the obscenity unfolding right now, courtesy of the Israeli state”.
In Sydney, politicians and the media spent a week trying to threaten and deter people from protesting in solidarity with Palestine. NSW Premier Chris Minns declared earlier in the week: “The idea they’re going to commandeer Sydney streets is not going to happen and I’m sure the NSW police will make that clear”. 
Police called the rally “unauthorised” and threatened to search and demand ID from any attendees. Opposition leader Peter Dutton was even calling for protesters to be deported.
These attempts to scare people failed—thousands packed into Hyde Park and the police did not invoke their special search powers. Two Jewish speakers addressed the crowd: Michelle Berkon from Jews Against the Occupation and Tzedek, and Peter Slezak, both of whom had relatives who escaped the Holocaust. They argued that the state of Israel does not speak for them, that the movement for Palestine has always opposed anti-Semitism, and that there is nothing anti-Semitic about opposing Zionism and the apartheid state of Israel.
“Politicians ... argue that Israel has the right to defend itself”, said Berkon. “Since when is genocide self-defence? Since when does an occupier have the right to crush into oblivion people whom it has brutalised and dehumanised and persecuted and oppressed for decades?”
Co-organiser of the rally Fahad Ali told the crowd: “I am on the brink of tears because I’m looking at the children sitting right here before me”. He called for an “end to the massacre” in Gaza. Ramia Abdo Sultan, from the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, also spoke. Her 25-year-old cousin, Youssef Abu Abdoh, who was soon to be married, was killed in a missile strike in Gaza city last week.
Protests will again take place around the country this weekend:
Canberra: 5.30pm Friday, Garema Place
Sydney: 1pm Saturday, Sydney Town Hall
Brisbane: 2pm Saturday, King George Square
Wollongong: 1pm Saturday, Crown St Amphitheatre
Perth: 12pm Saturday, Stirling Gardens
Melbourne: 12pm Sunday, State Library
Adelaide: 2pm Sunday, Parliament House
Hobart: 11am Saturday, Hobart Town Hall
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

Thousands defy scare campaign to protest for Palestine

As Israel carpet bombs and starves the population of Gaza, and prepares for a ground invasion that could unleash an unprecedented slaughter of civilians, governments in the West are whipping up a frenzied repression of Palestine supporters.
In France, Palestine protests have been banned outright, with protesters facing arrest or deportation. In Australia, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called for protesters who aren’t Australian citizens to be deported. In NSW, Premier Chris Minns has declared: “The idea they’re going to commandeer Sydney streets is not going to happen and I’m sure the NSW police will make that clear”. 
NSW police are blocking demonstrators from marching and threatening to invoke extraordinary powers to harass and intimidate those showing solidarity with Palestine. These include the power to stop and search any individual or vehicle, without any reason, and the power to demand people produce identification—a particularly chilling and racist measure given Dutton’s call for deportations.
This follows a hysterical political climate whipped up by politicians and the media, depicting Palestine protesters as violent and anti-Semitic. 
They have seized on an anti-Semitic chant by a tiny number of demonstrators at a protest in Sydney on 9 October to try to smear the whole cause. The chant took place after the rally organised by the Palestine Action Group had concluded, and by people who had arrived for a separately advertised event. It was immediately denounced by protest organisers, who told those involved to stop the chant and to leave. 
The Palestine Action Group subsequently put out a strongly-worded <a href="https://www.facebook.com/syd.bmbc/posts/pfbid09gaw5kQ6hy7zVWC9TsUab3w9FajHdCtKXziyT2bnXzm3j1EGCEXfado1mHVXDzHul">statement</a> condemning anti-Semitism and reaffirming: “This is not what our movement stands for. We oppose Zionism, an ideology distinct from Judaism. We oppose Israel, a racist state which has waged genocide on Palestinians. We are a anti-racist and anti-colonial movement and we refuse to fight racism with racism”.
The other purportedly great crime of protesters was to throw a few flares on the steps of the Opera House, which had been lit up with the Israeli flag—the flag of the country currently bombing their families. In the last fourteen years, Israel has massacred civilians in Gaza on five separate occasions. Not once has the Opera House or any other monument been lit up with the Palestinian flag.
It’s worth putting all this in perspective. The NSW government and the federal government are giving whole-hearted support to an apartheid state ruled by a far-right government—one with nuclear weapons, F16s and tanks—as it bombs and starves 2.3 million largely defenceless people, nearly half of whom are children. And they want to call Palestine protesters racist and violent?
We are witnessing a return to the racist tropes of the “war on terror”. Israel, we are told, represents civilisation, modernity, European values. Palestinians represent barbarism, savagery.
So dehumanised are the Palestinians—so absent are their lives, their stories, their suffering, and their deaths from the dominant narrative presented in the West—that the protests of Palestine supporters are presented as nothing but bloodthirsty celebrations of dead Israelis, the only victims that our media and politicians deem worthy of grieving and of avenging.
Protesters are not taking the repression lying down. Civil liberties organisations, unions, Muslim groups and the Greens in NSW have all stepped up to defend the right to protest against Israel’s crimes. The Palestine Action Group will be rallying this Sunday, despite police threats, and have vowed to take to the streets from next weekend.

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

NSW assault on the right to protest

Still fighting for Palestine, one year on

Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide

A principled resignation from the Australian Genocide Party

This is a new Nakba

Hundreds rally to defend Sydney University Gaza solidarity camp

Israel pledges to continue its genocidal offensive despite ceasefire deal

Thousands defy scare campaign to protest for Palestine

Genocide? Yes. Protests? No, says NSW government

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