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

Living standards in Australia have been pushed down more than in any comparable country over the last three years, the economy has been in a per capita recession for two years, and households are among the most indebted in the world. 
Working-class households have it worse than the most quoted statistics suggest and have been left with little breathing space after decades of increasing net wealth transfers from employees to bosses.
The findings—drawn from Red Flag’s analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Reserve Bank—paint a diabolical picture. The following charts tell the story. 
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According to OECD data, wages have failed dismally to rise fast enough to compensate for consumer price rises, mortgage rate increases and a higher working-class tax burden. Real household disposable incomes are more than 10 percent lower than in 2021.
While that year’s high came from significant government subsidies and historically low interest rates during the worst phase of the global pandemic, incomes today are lower than before Covid-19 swept the world. In fact, they are not much higher than they were ten years ago. 
“The impact on our living standards has been far greater than anywhere else. There is no argument that the fall is bigger than anything we have seen since 1959 [when the living standards’ index was started]”, economist Chris Richardson told the Australian
newspaper last month.
“Real disposable income” measures the money left after inflation, taxes and mortgage payments are subtracted from wages. Household incomes across the rest of the OECD—sometimes called the club of rich countries—have, on average, increased solidly over the last two years. In the US, incomes are about 25 percent higher than in 2014.
For Australian workers, it’s been a lost decade.
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The decline in incomes has not been uniform. Households with more savings than debts have been able to increase spending because of higher interest rates. But households with high levels of debt and those with little savings have copped the worst of rising prices and rates. 
Economists, politicians and the media (Red Flag included) usually highlight the gap between wage growth and the consumer price index. However, the Bureau of Statistics has other measures of price inflation, the “cost of living indexes”, which measure the effects of rising prices and interest rates on different sections of the population.
Its employee living cost index has been running far higher than CPI inflation for more than two years, which helps to explain why household incomes have been destroyed so rapidly. While general inflation peaked at 7.8 percent in 2022, workers’ living costs climbed 9.6 percent per annum at their peak in 2023. 
They increased by almost 2 percentage points above CPI inflation over the last year (to the start of October); they were 3.6 percentage points higher over the previous year.
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The Australian economy has continued to expand, albeit slowly, primarily because of government spending and high immigration. However, economic growth has been slower than population growth, meaning that output and income per person have been declining.
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<a href="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/">In fact, growth has gone backwards in eight of the last nine quarters, the most prolonged per capita recession in decades. “Over the past 44 years, when GDP has remained flat over the year, unemployment rises on average around 1.1 percentage points”, </a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/dec/05/australia-gdp-figures-economy-september-quarter-abs">Guardian
columnist Greg Jericho points out today</a>.
The unemployment rate is currently 4.1 percent, up from 3.5 percent two years ago. It has been lower in just two of the past 50 years: 2008 and 1974. Which makes it all the more astounding that living standards have gone backwards so much. If people start losing their jobs in greater numbers, the economic pain will only be magnified.
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The more immediate issues noted above should be framed within two longer-term trends. First is the incredible build-up of household debt over several decades. 
The ratio of household debt to annual income is 128 percent higher than 30 years ago. This primarily reflects out-of-this-world increases in property prices, which have climbed much faster than wages over the same period.
Australian households are among the most indebted in the world. But only one-third of households, primarily working class and middle class, are paying a mortgage. They bear most of the debt burden.
In contrast to the US, the UK and the Euro area, where debt levels have declined in the last decade, Australian working households have taken on increasing liabilities to secure a place to live. And with the interest rate on most housing loans changing in line with the Reserve Bank’s “cash rate” (its benchmark interest rate for lending between financial institutions), small movements on such large debts translate into significant changes in mortgage holders’ monthly interest payments.
No wonder the living cost index has climbed much faster than inflation.
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A second long-term trend is the declining share of national income going to the working class. According to ABS figures, the share going to workers is 16 percent lower than 50 years ago; the bosses’ share is 65 percent higher.
The shifts have been expressed primarily in rising income and wealth inequality. For example, a recent Australia Institute research report, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P1689-Wealth-and-inequality-Updated.pdf">Wealth and inequality in Australia</a>, estimated that the richest 20 percent of Australians own more than 63 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 20 percent own just 0.4 percent.
Wealth inequality measures not just the accumulation of riches in fewer hands but the relative decline of working-class economic resources, which resulted in the lack of a significant financial “buffer” for hard times like recent years. 
Recovery?
While real incomes might finally be starting to rise for some groups, many working-class households could struggle to make up lost ground this side of 2030. It is still unclear when the Reserve Bank will begin cutting interest rates and where they will land once the cutting is complete. 
It’s unclear how high unemployment will go, or when the per capita recession will end. Certainly, the huge debts will not be paid down anytime soon (they grew again in the last quarter). And to cap it off, wage growth is now slowing, which means any gains in real wages and incomes will be smaller.
It’s also not clear whether Australia will continue to avoid an absolute economic contraction, as it has, for the most part, for more than 30 years, unlike pretty much every other economy in the world. If that luck runs out, many people will end up pining for the current hard times, which might look like better times by comparison.

Ben Hillier

Five charts showing the destruction of workers’ living standards

A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s. 
Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973. 
Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia. 
In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court. 
In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country. 
The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on. 
Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed. 
The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia. 
In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians. 
The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.
US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity. 
After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.
Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA. 
Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven. 
In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door. 
It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past. 
Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup. 
In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents. 
In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored. 
The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the <a href="https://anticapitalistas.cl/2024/11/20/el-caso-de-la-represora-adriana-rivas-la-impunidad-como-legado-dictatorial/">Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas</a>. 
The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Chloe Rafferty

Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

The <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2024-council-election-results">results are in</a> from Victoria’s local council elections, which took place via postal ballot in October, and there’s some good news for socialists. Victorian Socialists (VS) ran a much bigger campaign than in the last elections in 2020, standing candidates in 78 council wards, mainly across Melbourne but in a number of regional areas too. The party’s candidates received a total of 67,296 first preference votes, up from 20,210 in 2020, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent.
Had VS achieved a result like this under the old, multi-member council ward system, it’s very likely a whole new crop of five or ten socialist councillors would have been elected. This time, though, thanks to changes initiated in 2020 by the then Labor Party minister for local government and subsequently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/20/ministers-breached-codes-in-blatant-and-extraordinary-misuse-of-public-funds-to-fuel-branch-stacking-ibac-finds">disgraced branch stacker</a> Adem Somyurek, the elections were held in single-member wards across Melbourne (with the exception of Melbourne City Council) and in many regional areas. This change was designed to make things harder for small parties like VS, and the results of this election show it worked as intended.
When two or three councillors were elected from a single (larger) ward, minor party candidates were in with a shot even when up against candidates from established parties like the Greens and Labor. In multi-member wards, two higher profile candidates could be elected, and there would still be space for a third candidate to get up. This is what happened in 2020 with VS’s Jorge Jorquera, who was elected in the Yarraville ward of Maribyrnong Council after receiving a first preference vote of just 8.8 percent.
In single-member wards, victory depends on both a high first preference vote and a decent flow of preferences from other candidates. In traditional strongholds of Labor and the Greens, this was always going to be a tough ask for socialists. 
VS went into this election with Jorquera as its sole sitting councillor. To the extent there is bad news in the party’s result this time, it’s that it couldn’t build on that total. Jorquera, unfortunately, narrowly missed out on re-election. About two hours’ drive north from Melbourne, though, in the regional town of Bendigo, VS candidate Owen Cosgriff <a href="https://x.com/6NewsAU/status/1854407601720885695">was elected</a> as the representative for Whipstick ward in the City of Greater Bendigo Council.
In a three-candidate field, Cosgriff received a first preference vote of 40.7 percent, winning with 52.7 percent after the distribution of preferences. This was a significant breakthrough for socialist politics in an area not known, <a href="https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/7290147/inside-the-bendigo-rsls-battle-with-a-communist-trades-hall/">in recent times at least</a>, for its radicalism. 
Cosgriff told Red Flag that the result reflected the fact that “Victorian Socialists was the only progressive option on the ballot” (neither Labor nor the Greens ran a candidate against him). In addition, he said, “I was the only candidate who put forward a program of what I would attempt to do in office ... We promised concrete reforms like undoing the privatisation of aged care [and] lobbying for a commuter timetable for Bendigo trains, and we were rewarded for it”. 
Another bright spot for socialists was the re-election of Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton to Merri-bek Council. Bolton was first elected in 2012 off a first preference vote of 9.5 percent (in a multi-member ward) and this year received a first preference vote of 46 percent in a field of four candidates in the (single-member) Bababi Djinanang ward of Merri-bek, which covers the suburb of Fawkner and parts of North Coburg. Bolton told Red Flag that a big factor in her win was the work she has done to promote Palestine solidarity at a council level. In the last census, conducted in 2021, just under 35 percent of Fawkner residents <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/210031237">identified as Muslim.</a>
It’s significant that, even with single-member wards stacking the odds against them, VS candidates came within striking distance of victory in several other places. In the Harvester ward of Brimbank Council (which covers the suburbs of Sunshine and Sunshine North in Melbourne’s west) <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/liz-walsh-council">Liz Walsh</a>, who was the VS candidate for the Western Metro upper house region in the 2022 state election, received a first preference vote of 26.3 percent in a field of four, and ended second on 46.8 percent after the distribution of preferences. This result was particularly encouraging given that VS didn’t campaign in the area.
Other standout results include long-time marriage equality campaigner, local community activist and nurse <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/cat-rose">Cat Rose</a> getting a first preference vote of 32.4 percent in Darebin Council’s West ward (in the inner-northern suburbs covering Thornbury and parts of Preston and Northcote). In a field of three, Rose finished just 36 votes behind the Greens candidate, and less than 200 votes behind Labor. Had she finished ahead of the Greens, there’s a decent chance she would have moved above Labor on preferences and been elected. At the last council election in 2020, the VS candidate in this ward (Darebin had already moved to single-member wards) got a first preference vote of 7.7 percent.
In the Bulleke-bek ward of Merri-bek Council (which covers the area immediately to the west of Sydney Road in Brunswick), VS candidate <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/louisa-bassini">Louisa Bassini</a>, a community lawyer in the area of renters’ rights, came in second in a field of five candidates with 23 percent of first preference votes (behind the Greens candidate on 36.9 percent and ahead of Labor on 20 percent). Results in other wards in the area of the Victorian lower house seat of Brunswick were also well above the 8.1 percent that VS candidate Nahui Jimenez achieved there in the<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/brunswick-district-results"> 2022 state election</a>.
No doubt some of the 67,296 people who voted for a VS candidate didn’t pay much attention to party affiliation. Council elections in Victoria are carried out in a way designed to depoliticise things as much as possible and encourage engagement with candidates as individuals, rather than representatives of parties or political world views. Holding elections via postal ballot contributes to this, as it precludes the possibility of party volunteers talking to voters at polling booths. And party affiliation isn’t listed next to candidates’ names on ballot papers.
VS pushed against this as much as possible. Its aim isn’t merely to get socialists elected, but to build the profile of socialist politics and to convince more people to join the socialist movement. Unlike many Labor and Liberal-aligned candidates, who (probably sensibly from a purely electoral perspective) preferred to present as “local independents” rather than associating themselves with their party brands, VS candidates put their political affiliation front and centre. Leaflets delivered by VS volunteers to voters’ homes encouraged them to “vote socialist for a council that puts people before profit”.
The main pitch to voters on these leaflets highlighted how “an out-of-control capitalist system is eroding the economic, social and environmental foundations of our society”. “We need councillors”, it went on, “who will stand up to the destructive, profit-driven agenda that dominates politics. Socialist councillors will fight for our communities, for workers and for those in need”. VS seriously campaigned in only a fraction of the 78 wards in which it stood a candidate. In those wards, which were by and large also the wards in which the party got its highest vote, it would have been hard for people to miss the socialist affiliation.
The results of this election will help to further establish VS as a serious socialist electoral alternative in Victoria. Heading into 2025 and the next federal election, the party has a growing membership and a higher profile than ever. In addition to the council campaign, VS members have this year kept up a hectic schedule of activism and organising in the Palestine solidarity campaign, rank-and-file unionism and many other areas.
In recent weeks the Murdoch press has run several hit pieces targeting the party. Most recently, the Australian <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1857577253590401530">published an “exclusive” </a>in which it revealed that the lead VS Senate candidate, renters’ rights advocate and well-known socialist radical Jordan van den Lamb (aka <a href="https://www.instagram.com/purplepingers/">purplepingers</a>), had—in a post on the social media platform X—shockingly labelled police as “pigs” and “Nazis”. Melbourne’s Herald Sun <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1847044199021240510">earlier called out</a> VS council candidates for, among other things, speaking at rallies in solidarity with Palestine and “calling for revolution”. This kind of attention from Murdoch’s attack dogs can only bode well for the future.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications manager.

James Plested

Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

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.

Eleanor Morley

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

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

Diane Fieldes

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

The Liberal National Party decisively won the Queensland state election on the weekend, defeating Labor in many of its historic safe seats. 
Labor was hit hardest in the state’s north, losing key areas such as Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay. There were significant swings toward the LNP, largely fuelled by a “tough-on-crime” campaign. These losses are particularly striking; Labor had held Mackay for 99 years. While Labor retained many Brisbane seats, there were notable swings against it. 
The LNP victory is bad news for the Queensland working class. The centre of the conservatives’ campaign was a racially charged beat-up about youth crime—so expect the new government to unleash a range of punitive measures targeting Aboriginal youth. 
Labor has governed Queensland for 30 of the last 35 years. It has been defeated primarily because it failed to protect workers’ living standards, the number one concern for voters, according to polling. 
Over the last decade, wages increased by a quarter—but Brisbane house prices doubled, and unit prices rose 45 percent. Outside Brisbane, unit prices surged by 90 percent and houses by 60 percent. Once you factor in higher mortgage repayments, rent, bills, groceries, etc, there’s a lot for people to be bitter about. 
Facing an election wipeout, the Miles government rolled out last-minute cost-of-living policies, including free lunches for primary school children, 50 cent public transport fares, a new state electricity retailer and a 20 percent reduction in car registration fees. The measures likely saved Labor from what was expected to be a complete rout.
Another factor that helped Labor was the emergence of women’s rights as a campaign issue. 
Abortion access became a focal point after Katter’s Australia Party promised to overturn the 2018 decriminalisation of abortion if the LNP were to win. The LNP did not want this topic to dominate the election, given the high support for abortion rights among the public but the widespread pro-life sentiments of LNP members. 
Party leader David Crisafulli dodged media questions about the issue many times—primarily because LNP members have a clear history of opposing abortion rights. In 2018, all but three LNP members voted against Labor’s decriminalisation bill, Crisifulli included. 
The swing toward the LNP reflects discontent with Labor rather than general enthusiasm for the LNP’s platform. 
However, the party’s “tough-on-crime” policies did strike a nerve. Sixty percent of respondents to a Brisbane Times poll said crime was a “very important” issue.
The LNP’s central policy—“adult crime, adult time”—proposes giving youth offenders adult prison sentences. In campaign speeches, Crisafulli referred to a “generation of untouchables”, a euphemism for Indigenous youth, who pro-prison campaigners think are treated too lightly by the justice system.
The portrayal of a “youth crime crisis” is, in reality, a racist fabrication. Queensland’s Police Service data show an 18 percent decrease in unique youth offenders and a 6.7 percent drop in youth offences since 2021. 
And Queensland already leads the country in youth incarceration, Aboriginal children being disproportionately represented in detention facilities.
Why then did the LNP’s scare campaign resonate so much in north Queensland? 
Whenever Labor has faced pressure from the LNP on crime, they have historically capitulated. In the past three years, Labor has suspended the Human Rights Act twice, most recently to remove detention as a last resort for children. 
These concessions have legitimised the LNP’s rhetoric. Instead of diffusing right-wing pressure, Labor has amplified it, allowing the LNP to propose new measures like “reset camps” for young people.
The Queensland Greens were confident they could retain their two inner-city seats and potentially win more. But, while their statewide vote was stable, they lost ground in their target seats. 
They lost South Brisbane and are on a knife edge in Maiwar in the inner west.
The LNP’s decision to preference the ALP over the Greens in South Brisbane, reversing its 2020 strategy, likely contributed to this outcome. But the Greens’ primary vote also fell across inner-city areas because the ALP’s policies, such as low public transport fares and free school lunches, attracted more left-wing voters.
The incoming government has made its priorities clear. The first order of business is introducing punitive measures that would increase the Aboriginal prison population. 
Crisafulli has promised “no employment cuts” in the public service, distancing himself from the mass sackings that destroyed the popularity of the last LNP government. However, as he aims to reduce state debt while expanding youth detention, public service job cuts could still eventuate.
The right to abortion also looms large. The LNP might want to avoid a confrontation immediately, but it could become unavoidable if Robbie Katter pushes the issue in parliament. 
We must be prepared to fight the new government’s right-wing agenda.
The unions must fight if the party goes on the offensive against workers.
We need to build a movement against racism.
And we need to build a movement to defend abortion rights. 
A rally calling for the protection of abortion rights is planned for 6 pm this Friday, 1 November, in Brisbane Square. Within 24 hours of the election results, the rally details garnered more than 1,000 shares on Instagram.
Abortion rights could serve as a rallying point against the LNP’s broader agenda. It’s encouraging that resistance will greet the LNP’s first week in office.

Tierna Parker

Labor loses Queensland, fight against LNP begins

For the first month of Israel’s current war on Lebanon, Australian media and politicians were focused not on the thousands killed or the more than a million civilians displaced, but on attacking anti-war demonstrators and denouncing anti-war activists as supporters of terrorism. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton both called for the cancellation of pro-Palestine protests scheduled for 6 and 7 October and railed against the small number of demonstrators who brought Hezbollah flags to protests against Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon. 
In a <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-interview-melbourne-9">doorstop interview, </a>Albanese said about the protests, “There’s no place for mourning a terrorist leader, and we’re very concerned about some of the terrorist symbols”. Meanwhile, Labor’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, threatened to cancel the visas of any non-citizens caught waving a Hezbollah flag, and then cancelled the visa of Khaled Beydoun, a law professor from Arizona State University. The reason for the cancellation was a 7 October speech in which Beydoun noted the rise of global solidarity with the Palestinians, saying, “Today is not fully a day of mourning. In many respects, today is also a day that marks considerable celebration, considerable progress, and in some respects, considerable privilege. The level of global literacy around what’s taking place in Palestine has exponentially risen”. Burke and the media smeared Beydoun, disingenuously asserting that he was celebrating Hamas’ 7 October attack. 
Of course, there were no words of condemnation for those cheering on Israel’s murderous attacks on civilians in Lebanon, nor the intensification of genocide taking place in Gaza. The Australian political class dutifully fell in behind Israel’s propaganda machine by crapping on about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and joining in the hysteria about protesters supporting the Lebanese political group Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation has been on the Australian government’s list of “terrorist organisations” for some time. In late 2021, the listing was changed from the External Security Organisation to simply Hezbollah, meaning the entire organisation is now considered terrorist. This happened on the watch of then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, under pressure from supporters of Israel.
This decision was based on only seven submissions to the parliamentary committee responsible, five of which were from pro-Israel organisations or individuals, including the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. One of the two individual submissions was from Emmanuele Ottolenghi from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, who wrote an article last year titled “<a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/barbarians-at-the-gate/">Barbarians at the Gate</a>” in which he argued that the notion of Palestinian statehood must be destroyed. “The barbarians must be vanquished”, was his grossly racist conclusion. 
Whatever criticisms leftists can make of it, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation. It is a mass Shia political party which holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament, and was founded to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The party functions as a second state in the south of the country and in Dahieh, a large area of Beirut. Hezbollah runs a large social welfare apparatus and has interests in numerous businesses, especially construction companies. Its armed wing is the world’s largest non-state military apparatus, and, rather than carrying out terrorist attacks, it uses standard military and guerrilla tactics.
The Australian government’s list of “terrorist acts” Hezbollah has allegedly been <a href="https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/what-australia-is-doing/terrorist-organisations/listed-terrorist-organisations/hizballah">responsible</a>
for illustrates this. There are nine, and none involve any confirmed casualties. Three are public threats made by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah against US and Israeli military targets in response to violations of Lebanese airspace and the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, none of which were carried through. Two involve legal cases brought against individuals in the US, and one involves the provision of support to Palestinian groups. Only one involves an actual act of violence—the firing of a missile at an Israeli tank in September 2019 that Israel says caused no deaths or injuries. 
Even with highly motivated Israel supporters and the resources of Australian intelligence at their disposal, this is the best that Dutton and the Liberal government could come up with. But the fact that the listing was a politically motivated sham doesn’t make it any less effective at smearing, threatening and intimidating opponents of Israel’s atrocities. And it doesn’t prevent someone who is legitimately protesting the invasion of Lebanon—a sovereign country—and who also supports a mainstream Lebanese political party potentially being thrown into jail.
But while it might not be accurately described as terrorist, Hezbollah is nevertheless a reactionary organisation that should be opposed by progressives. It has been part of the neoliberal regime in Lebanon, which has made working-class people pay for the economic crisis the country is facing. It also helped sabotage the investigation into Beirut’s port explosion in 2018. Its military wing played a counter-revolutionary role in the Syrian revolution in alliance with the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it helped to suppress mass democratic protests across Lebanon in 2019 and 2020. So there are plenty of reasons to oppose Hezbollah, but resistance against Israel is not one of them. Referring to the group as a terrorist organisation just plays into the narrative that Western governments have long attempted to create, in which Middle Eastern and Islamist politics poses a uniquely dangerous threat to those in the West.
Israel, on the other hand, is undeniably a terrorist state. Extreme violence toward, intimidation and massacres of civilians are Israel’s speciality. It has made no secret of its calculated atrocities and the intent behind them in Gaza over the last year. “Nothing happens by accident”, an Israeli military source <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?fbclid=IwAR15qSbuTiMzn-2jLLss3na2LPYa8h942dlf6vHctnNTR8yNVaiohIHjJEA">told</a>
Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed ... Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
In September, Israel detonated thousands of bombs as part of its efforts to wipe out the entire leadership of Hezbollah, killing and injuring numerous civilians in the process. Israeli forces also assassinated Nasrallah and have killed the two main leaders of Hamas. Assassination of political leaders is against <a href="https://theconversation.com/assassination-is-always-unlawful-regardless-of-who-is-killed-and-on-whose-orders-236004">international law</a> and meets the definition of terrorism. Israel’s terrorist activities have extended to manufacturing fake Australian passports to aid in assassinations of political leaders. But no Australian government officials are threatening supporters of this terrorist regime with deportation or arrest.
Quite the opposite. Those who leave Australia to fight in the Israel Defense Forces have been <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/we-are-resilient-australian-reservists-called-up-in-israel-join-fight-20231012-p5ebn9.html">celebrated</a>
and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-fighting-with-idf-killed-in-gaza-20240102-p5eunj.html">mourned</a>
by Australian mainstream media. In December last year, the Australian Centre for International Justice <a href="https://acij.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023-12-20-Letter-to-Ausgov-regarding-Australians-in-the-IDF.pdf">quoted</a>
an estimate that 1,000 Australians have recently or are currently serving in the IDF. The government and opposition are not drumming up concern about these activities, nor warning those involved that they may face criminal charges when they return—which, if they are part of the genocide, they should. There is no outrage about them from the political class: no parliamentary tirades, doorstop speeches or livid articles in the mainstream press about what a threat these people are to social cohesion. Taking part in a genocide is acceptable activity to the Australian establishment. Waving a yellow flag is not. 
One Sydney man wrote a <a href="https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-warriors-commitment-to-country/">piece</a>
in February for the Australian Jewish Times on the months he spent fighting for the IDF in frontline combat in Gaza, in which he claimed to have “eliminated” multiple people referred to as “threats” and “Hamas terrorists”. A photograph attached to the article pictures the man inside a child’s bedroom, kneeling among the cushions in combat gear with another Israeli soldier, both carrying guns. Not only did he kill multiple people in the course of an active genocide, but the man also provided security detail inside Gaza for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court prosecutor <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state">filed</a>
a request for an arrest warrant related to crimes against humanity. “The contrast between my recent leisure time on Bondi Beach”, he wrote, “just a few weeks prior, and the responsibility of safeguarding the Prime Minister of Israel was stark and surreal”. More thoroughly legitimate activity in the eyes of the Australian political class.
The government, opposition and mainstream media justify the threats against Hezbollah supporters on the basis that “we don’t want foreign conflicts being brought into Australia”. But it is the Australian government and its slavish support for Israel that import foreign conflicts or, more accurately, make them local conflicts. It is the Australian government’s complicity in genocide that creates the imperative for people who value human rights to raise their voices and protest.
“Not in our name!” was the rallying cry of those who marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same applies today. What is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is not a “foreign” conflict. It is an illegal military campaign enabled, funded and armed by the Western powers, including Australia. We have a duty to resist it. And so long as Hezbollah continues to be the main force fighting to repel Israel from Lebanon, people will support it and anti-war activists should defend their right to do so in defiance of racist and politically motivated anti-terror laws.

Jasmine Duff

Terrorism designations are politically motivated

Last month, Treasurer Jim Chalmers fronted the media with a gloating smile to announce the federal government was posting a consecutive budget surplus of $18 billion. “Our bigger than expected surplus in the year just gone is entirely due to lower spending”, beamed Chalmers. “A second straight surplus is proof of our responsible economic management.” 
Any normal person observing this “responsible economic management” was probably feeling their stomach turn. We are living through one of the worst cost-of-living crises in generations, and the Labor government has decided to lower government spending rather than increase it in areas that would help the millions of people struggling to make ends meet.
The latest <a>Guardian Essential Poll</a>
shows something that socialists have been arguing for the last few years—that most people, when confronted with a lack of affordable housing and rising electricity and grocery prices, think that the government should intervene to make things more affordable. Seventy percent of survey respondents thought that price caps should be introduced on rent, groceries and electricity bills, and the same number thought that the rich should be paying more tax. 
Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that the gap between the rich and poor is widening. According to the <a>latest poverty and inequality report</a> from the Australian Council of Social Services, one in eight people in Australia are living in poverty. With rising costs, this number will only increase. 
The latest CoreLogic report from September found that rents had increased by 7.2 percent since last year. These increases are not uniform across the country. In Melbourne, it was working-class suburbs like Dandenong (16 percent) and Broadmeadows (14 percent) that went up the most. The same is true for New South Wales, rents in Roselands, Villawood and other working-class suburbs increasing by 24-30 percent. The amount of money one must earn to purchase a house in Sydney is eye-watering—only those on nearly $300,000 could purchase a property at the median value without incurring mortgage stress (this is $200,000 more than the average annual income), according to financial comparison site Canstar. Unsurprisingly, only 16 percent of people are opposed to removing tax breaks for property investors, according to the Essential poll.
Wages haven’t gone up to compensate for rising prices. In fact, the latest employment outlook from the OECD found that wages in Australia have gone backwards by 4.8 per cent compared with pre-pandemic levels. Bosses in Australia have taken advantage of the economic situation, and wealth is rapidly moving from the bottom of society to the top. Corporations like Coles—which posted an annual profit of $1.1 billion in the last financial year—are laughing all the way to the bank. 
Many people know this situation isn’t right. Forty percent of respondents to the Essential poll said that our political system needs fundamental change, which rose to 49 percent for those who are struggling or in serious financial difficulty.
Capitalism is always going to produce stark wealth inequality, poverty and anxiety for ordinary people. It’s a system predicated on a class divide in which a minority get rich off the labour of the majority. The bosses and the politicians who represent them clearly have no interest in overturning this state of affairs. 
That’s not to say there’s nothing the government could do to alleviate the current financial burdens for millions of people. They just refuse to. The government could raise taxes on companies like Coles and individuals like Gina Rinehart and use that money to pay for public housing. Instead of posting an $18 billion surplus and bragging about cutting government spending, Labor could increase government spending on social services and Centrelink. They could legislate price caps on essential goods and ban greedy landlords from ripping more rent out of young people. 
It’s an indictment on the Labor government that they refuse to implement these measures. It’s also an indictment on the union movement that there aren’t more strikes and actions for wage increases. 
Ordinary people understand the problems and know what the solutions are. I say we should let them be in charge.

Anneke Demanuele

Workers know what to do: tax the rich and cap prices

In August of 2023, someone wrote the word “ESHAY” on a pillar in Sydney. How do I know this? And why am I telling you? Because this enigmatic incident was included in the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s “Report on Antisemitism in Australia 2023”—a report that claims to document and record trends in anti-Jewish hatred, and which is treated as a serious, even definitive, source by the mainstream media and political parties.
If you don’t want to subject yourself to a Trotskyist publication explaining what “eshay” means, look away now. We will stick to reputable sources. Wikipedia describes an eshay as a member of a subculture of young men who “wear sportswear, have mullets and engage in immature and anti-social behaviour”. An alternative definition—“dickheads whom [sic] seem to think they are top shit”—comes courtesy of an Urban Dictionary contributor writing under the nom de plume “I hate eshays”.
Was this graffiti in Sydney anti-eshay? Or was it a public assertion of eshay pride? Its author did not leave us enough evidence to make a conclusive determination of this question. Yet I think we can say that it probably didn’t have much to do with Jews. Nonetheless, this message found its way into the ECAJ’s 2023 list of antisemitic incidents in Australia, and it wasn’t the dumbest thing in there. Not by a long shot. According to the report, cited as authoritative by the entire political gamut of Australian daily news outlets, even organising a protest against neo-Nazis is an act of antisemitic hatred. But we’ll come to that later.
The ECAJ published its report at the start of 2024, a couple of months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. It’s nearly 300 pages long and claims to document and analyse incidents of antisemitism in Australia. The report’s publishers got the response they were after: “An unprecedented wave of antisemitic hatred surges through Australia” was how the Murdoch press reported it, with more measured but effectively identical analysis appearing in the Nine papers, the Guardian, ABC and SBS.
This report is a scam. It downplays a very real antisemitic threat—that of a growing conspiratorial and far-right movement that has shown a real interest in violence—while using false claims and distorted definitions of antisemitism to slander left-wingers, Muslims and anyone else critical of Israel’s genocidal conduct. Its authors declare their political goals at the outset. “Antisemitism has many active sources – extremist right-wingers, extremist left-wingers, and Islamists”, they explain. “However, each of the main sources operates differently. In general: right-wing antisemitism is overt, but marginalised; left-wing antisemitism is insidious, but mainstreamed.” So don’t worry too much about actual Jew-hating Nazis and conspiracy theorists: they’re “marginalised”. Worry about the “insidious” antisemitism associated with the supporters of Palestine. And if you can’t detect or prove any antisemitism at all, that just proves how insidious it is.
And so the report proceeds. Its catalogue of antisemitic incidents is full of examples of straightforward Palestine solidarity activism, involving no hostility towards or criticism of Jewish culture or religion, and that usually takes place within, and is often motivated by, an anti-racist framework. One example cited is advocacy for boycotts of Israel or its settlement economy. “BDS mimics the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses”, the report warns. “More insidious, BDS officially preaches non-violent forms of protest.” BDS obviously involves no such racial targeting. In fact, more to the point, it mimics one of the most significant and effective anti-racist campaigns in history: that to end the apartheid regime in South Africa. 
Alongside the eshay incident, the report lists in its documentation of antisemitic incidents:
<ul><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’ (anti-Israel ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’), written four times on a concrete wall, Paddington, Sydney (15 May 2023).”</li><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’ in two places, Surry Hills, Sydney (17 June 2023).”</li><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’, re-written where previously removed, Surry Hills, Sydney (18 July 2023).”</li></ul>
There’s plenty more like that. And they all get counted in the statistics. Mentioning the year 1948 or the term “Nakba” is also antisemitic, according to these esteemed researchers: graffiti, stickers and posters with these words are included in the lists, and therefore also in the headline numbers.
Perhaps, on reading this, you have begun to suspect that aspects of this report might be a little misleading. Well, guess what? By thinking that, you just perpetrated an act of antisemitism. In the report’s list of forms of antisemitism, we find: “Jewish organisations being accused of concocting false accusations of antisemitism ... specially in order to stifle criticism of Israel”. (Research by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students is leaned on heavily in the report. AUJS is a pro-Israel group with the unusual distinction of having had to issue a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5219">public apology to Socialist Alternative</a> for concocting false accusations of antisemitism in order to stifle criticism of Israel.)
Maybe you’re guilty of something worse than scepticism about the report. Maybe you organised a protest against neo-Nazis and chanted about the need for anti-racist unity. Believe it or not: antisemitism. Describing a rally against a neo-Nazi base organising in the west of Melbourne, the report quotes a single chant: “Black, Indigenous, Arab, Asian and white—unite, unite, unite to fight the right!” This incident is listed under the category “Omitting Jews”. So desperate are the report’s authors to slander left-wingers and Palestine supporters that they even found a way to construe an anti-Nazi rally as an act of antisemitism.
What is particularly inexcusable about all this is the way it obscures the genuine antisemitism that exists and which should be combated. Falsified reports like this, along with the meaningless statistics that emerge from them, make it much harder to understand the form real antisemitism takes today. 
The report itself documents many examples, most of which are perpetrated by the same neo-Nazi grouplets that socialists and other left-wingers have been organising against for years—with groups like ECAJ contributing nothing to the cause, only intervening to slander the anti-racists. These Nazi groups descend from a revived far-right movement that emerged from the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric that dominated public life during Tony Abbott’s government. There’s a related current of conspiratorial antisemitic sentiment attributing the proposal for an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament to Jewish influence. In both cases, the genuine antisemitic incidents emerge from groups that largely espouse radicalised versions of Liberal Party talking points.
Further along the right-wing conspiratorial spectrum, the ECAJ reports various ranting voicemails and graffiti along the lines of “JEWS DID COVID” and (more mysteriously) “COVID IS JEW”. These far-right conspiracy theorists, like the neo-Nazis, may see themselves as distinct from the mainstream right wing. But they still draw their fears and hopes from a radicalised version of mainstream conservatism, whether it be hostility to immigration, resentment of Aboriginal people, opposition to public health measures that inconvenience business owners or paranoia about a progressive conspiracy to undermine national unity. This is real antisemitism. The left has always opposed it, in word and in deed, usually without the support of opportunistic pro-Israel political groups that falsely claim to act in defence of Jews. The same right-wing media outlets that fearmonger about every progressive cause, contributing to the rise of this current, are also ECAJ’s best allies in promoting the lie that Palestine solidarity is antisemitic.
It is quite possibly true that there is an increase in religiously conceived antisemitism relating to Palestine. The report documents things like pro-Palestine slogans being shouted at people wearing identifiably Jewish religious clothes. This is a terrible, but predictable, result of the occupation of Palestine being understood as a clash of religions. Yet this misunderstanding is exactly what the ECAJ promotes. ECAJ describes any attempt to understand Israel and its imperialist and expansionist policies in anti-racist political terms—as colonialism, for example, or apartheid—as forms of anti-Jewish prejudice. Its entire report is structured to suggest that the Jewish people are inseparable from the genocidal Israeli government and that any criticism of the latter can emerge only from hatred of the former. The alternative to this is to build an anti-racist pro-Palestine movement—which the anti-Zionist opponents of ECAJ, Jewish and non-Jewish, have been doing for more than a year.
The report is a joke. It is vexatious, mendacious, outrageous: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcEietIoxk">preposterous</a>. It should be utterly, instantaneously discrediting to the institution that published it, and to the individuals associated with it. But it isn’t. Quite the opposite. The former president of ECAJ, Jillian Segal, has been appointed Australia’s new “antisemitism envoy” by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 
This report is not exceptional or an outlier. ECAJ is part of an international group of Zionist organisations, the so-called J7, that includes the Anti-Defamation League of the US, Britain’s Board of Deputies, France’s CRIF and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Most of these produce similar reports, with similar intentions, promoting similarly misleading and unreliable statistics. ECAJ claims its 2024 report is coming out “soon”. Given the explosion of pro-Palestine activism in the last 12 months, it is absolutely certain that it will claim a horrifying rise in what it calls antisemitism. The lies of pro-Israel groups won’t help us fight real antisemitism—and nor will they stop us standing in solidarity with Palestine.

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