This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.
“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.
Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”. 
Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?
Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.
In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries. 
Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.
If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-are-real-costs-australias-housing-crisis-women">brief</a> last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men. 
Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing. 
And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.
Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.

Clara da Costa-Reidel

Women are no better off under Labor

The far right’s “war on woke” has been taken to a terrifying new level with Donald Trump in the White House. He has made it clear that oppressed groups will be trampled until they shut up and put up. Trans kids have no right to be addressed as themselves. Young Black men have no right to resist being murdered by cops. Women have no right to reproductive control. Immigrants are invaders. (But far-right criminals like Andrew Tate should be <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/europe/andrew-tate-romania-us-intl-hnk/index.html">brought back into</a> the country.) 
This isn’t just a push-back against cultural symbols; it is about winding back the clock more than half a century on the rights and expectations of the working class and all of its constituent oppressed groups. The left should oppose all of Trump’s “anti-woke” measures, individually and as a package. 
The move that has grabbed the most attention has been Trump’s orders to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and practices. Basically, DEI has been outlawed for government bureaucracies and institutions. Trump has even rescinded a 1965 executive order mandating non-discriminatory hiring practices for government employees and contractors. 
On the chopping block is everything from the high-profile cosmetic DEI government initiatives of recent years (for example, the <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/21/politics/cia-dismisses-intelligence-officers-diversity/index.html">CIA has dismissed its DEI officers</a>) through to <a href="https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/education/education-department-schools-cut-dei-lose-funding/">cutting vital education programs</a> for disadvantaged kids. In fact, Trump has threatened to shut the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-department-education-budget-employees-why-trump-wants-it-shut-down-2025-02-19/">whole federal education department</a> because it disproportionately assists kids in poverty or with special needs. This offensive against DEI dovetails with the DOGE campaign to trash the public service. 
Trump has also made it clear that the private sector is expected to follow suit in abandoning DEI and woke policies. The response has been more than obliging. Since the Supreme Court decision against affirmative action late in 2023, the anti-woke current has gained ground. But now there is a stampede away from DEI within corporate America. 
Walmart is ending diversity hiring commitments, shutting down its Center for Racial Equity and removing many LGBT-themed products from its website. Goldman Sachs is dropping its policy of having two “diverse members” on its board. Amazon is shutting down its “outdated programs and materials”. Google is ending diversity hiring and its observations of cultural events like Pride Month and Black History Month. Deloitte told its employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures. 
Meta is ending diversity hiring and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to bring more “masculine energy” into the company. Disney is getting rid of its Reimagine Tomorrow website, which highlights diverse employees. Talk about a bleak new order: no tomorrow for the kids. 
It’s an embarrassing turnaround, especially given the fanfare with which DEI was taken up by corporate elites just a few years ago. The craze began in response to the Black Lives Matter rebellion of 2020—the biggest demonstrations in US history. Corporations, government bureaucracies and NGOs rushed to capitalise on and contain the movement by rebranding themselves as “inclusive” and “culturally sensitive”. 
Some of the things they did were positive—like introducing or expanding non-discriminatory hiring processes. But mostly, it was about making token and well-publicised gestures, especially those that appeared to “diversify” management positions. There was also a rush to implement “implicit bias” training programs, often run by grifters such as Robin D’Angelo, who has amassed significant personal wealth by lecturing company employees about their inherent “privilege”.
It was no accident that US capitalists shelled out millions of dollars to corporate consultants like D’Angelo while opposing minimum wage rises and resisting workers’ attempts to form trade unions. 
Given the superficiality of DEI, it is no wonder that many corporate lackeys have quickly abandoned it in favour of the now trending far-right bigotry and an all-out assault on the oppressed. 
In general, the “woke era” offered only superficial reforms, at the same time as creating a sensibility that oppression is the result of cultural backwardness rather than structural and economic inequalities. It has been an era in which social solidarity and challenging the system have been jettisoned in favour of “calling out” bad ideas and the people holding them and adopting the supposedly “correct” and “inclusive” language, symbols and etiquette. 
Of course, it is perfectly legitimate to call people by their correct pronouns, rename or remove colonial monuments and so on. But we should not, especially now, go along with the liberal narrative that DEI and “woke” represented an important extension of the gains made by the civil rights movement and the liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. 
For the left, and those looking to dismantle systems of oppression, the “woke era” actually reflected a period of setbacks. It started with a turn away from the radicalism, collectivism and economic gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and towards the commodification and academisation of identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. This happened alongside Reaganism (named after the Republican US president), which inflicted crushing defeats on working-class organisations and asserted the primacy of markets over all aspects of life. “Woke culture” represents the fusion of degenerated progressivism with the sensibilities of Wall Street financiers.
Nevertheless, while a left critique of modern identity politics and its effects is necessary, it should in no way prevent us from opposing Trump’s attacks and from recognising their much broader implications. Unfortunately, some on the reformist left have welcomed Trump’s offensive against “woke”. Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin magazine in the US, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/business/economy/trump-dei-democrats-left-unions.html">was quoted in the New York Times</a> as saying: “I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now. What comes next might be worse ... [but] it has a chance to be better”.
This is deeply misguided. For one thing, Trump and his cronies have very different reasons for opposing “woke culture”. And in fact, the political right has, for now, won the conversation on “woke”, a term originally coined by anti-racist activists in the US but now turned into a pejorative term that encompasses every symbol of respect and dignity that oppressed groups have won, as well as our fundamental rights and protections. 
In their eyes, anyone who has even a passing concern about oppression is infected with “the woke mind virus”. And that is why Trump’s moves against DEI are far reaching and include attacks on laws and conventions established as a result of the civil rights movement. And his attacks on woke extend even further: to any individual institution or policy that defends the environment, to threats of deportation to people who dare to stand up to Israel’s attempted genocide in Palestine, to dismembering the National Labor Relations Board, opposing minimum wage increases, trashing the public service and firing thousands of workers. 
Also, the lines between cynical DEI measures and supportable measures are very blurry. The left should not call for diversity on corporate boards or support HR departments having more discretionary power. And the left should not support the punitive and censorial atmosphere that has become associated with social justice and identity politics. But more opposition to racism and other forms of oppression throughout society is a good thing—as is awareness of historical and contemporary injustices.
Rather than distinguishing between reasonable and reactionary “social justice” policies, we should recognise that the right-wing assault on “woke culture” is part of an assault on the working class in all its diversity. In fact, any criticism of wokeness that does not pose a superior way to advance the fight against oppression is a step in the wrong direction. This is especially the case when it is coming from a heinously reactionary administration that is inspiring fascists and the far right the world over. 
Trump is not clearing the path for the left to build a superior way of fighting against racism and other oppressions but throwing up more obstacles to the creation of a more caring and egalitarian society. Trump aims to create an atmosphere of fear. He wants to brutalise the most oppressed, and society more broadly, to lower all of our standards and expectations. He is about attacking the working class and any idea that workers should have rights. 
Sunkara’s comments are linked to a broader political view, termed “class first” socialism, which conflates neoliberal identity politics with all anti-racism and opposition to oppression, and which says that focusing on oppression is alienating to the working class, particularly at an electoral level. In practice, these people tend to support the Democrats. They blame the party’s adherence to identity politics when it fails and, while this is certainly a factor, their critique is aimed at rehabilitating the party. 
As well as a thin veneer for opportunist electoralism, these class reductionists sell out our side twice over: once by in effect arguing for the abandonment of the oppressed, and then again by arguing that the working class is too basic and self-interested to care about oppression. 
Yet, here we have such a clear example, in the negative, of how oppression and class are entwined. Trump wants to attack the oppressed, as a spearhead for a major assault on the working class—not one that is going to be phased in but one that is going on as we speak. In the name of the war on DEI and “woke”, vital services that workers rely on are being slashed, workers themselves are being fired, and basic standards that the workers’ movement has fought for are under threat. 
The political right has clearly benefited from defining its agenda as a “culture war” to make it seem separate from class attacks. The far-right politicians want to be able to masquerade as defenders of workers against culturally progressive elites. Liberal elites also like to peddle this idea, because it assists their class interests to present workers as culturally backwards but also to frame the struggles against oppression as classless pursuits of human progress. 
It is up to the left to reject these lies. The rights of racially oppressed groups, women and the LGBT community are inextricably bound with the class struggle. It was during high points of class struggle that oppressed groups won the most gains. Struggles against oppression have repeatedly been a lightning rod for broader working-class rebellion and advances. 
If we are going to defeat Trump’s assault, our side needs this history and political outlook. Fighting back will require mass resistance in the streets, industrial action by workers and the offering of an anti-capitalist horizon for our struggles. 
We have seen mass resistance in recent times: the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the historic Palestine demonstrations in support of Gaza, some smaller but important mobilisations for trans rights recently. We need all these people and more to start organising, disrupting business as usual, asserting that the rights of the oppressed will be defended and expanded. 
And, crucially, we need to build links of solidarity between our struggles. Agonising about who has more privilege or whether people are harbouring implicit biases or manifesting micro-aggressions is a distraction from building these kinds of movements. 
Ultimately, to make real gains, we need the working class to move, to use its industrial power to fight for better wages and conditions and to fight like hell for the dignity and humanity that we all deserve. The workers’ movement, at its best, takes up the cause of every oppressed group because an injury to one is an injury to all. 
It is no accident that the far right and its billionaire champions want to degrade all of us: their power and wealth are based on trampling people. It is no accident that the liberal elites can be progressive only in tokenistic and superficial ways, because their power too is based on our oppression. 
In contrast to both, our power is based on solidarity and a collective drive for justice and dignity. It is this power—that of the working class and all of its constituent groups—that can one day establish a society that is genuinely diverse, equitable and inclusive.

Sarah Garnham

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

The University of Technology Sydney has marked International Women’s Day by banning a poster asking the question: “Why are teenage boys so misogynistic?”. 
The meeting was called to discuss rising sexist attitudes among, and the broader right-wing drift of, young men. Numerous indicators point to this reality, including a recent King’s College London survey showing that young men are far more likely than young women, and even older men, to say that men have it tougher than women today. In the United States, Donald Trump increased his support among young men by 15 percentage points last year compared to the previous election; in Australia, young men support Liberal leader Peter Dutton in much higher numbers than young women. Also, a recent Monash University study found that female teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic behaviour everywhere—and many are quitting the profession because of it. 
One woman who attended the meeting told the audience that in her first-year business tutorial, the tutor had to tell off men in the class because they were rating every woman who spoke in the discussion in the zoom chat.
Most universities have put up posters celebrating women and our contributions to society. But the UTS administration has sided with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump stans. 
UTS was alerted to the poster by at least one male student on campus, who also emailed the UTS Socialist Alternative club complaining that he feels “unwelcome and stereotyped” by the mere presence of a poster advertising a campus meeting about the growth of the far right and its expression in the political attitudes of young men. 
For years, the political right called the left “snowflakes”. People wrote hundreds of books and articles lamenting the “coddling” culture in universities and about how the political left and progressives can’t cope with ideas they don’t agree with. Right-wing provocateurs such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson made famous phrases such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
How the tide has turned. It seems that young men from the political right, like those at UTS, are now the ones who might start campaigning for safe spaces and trigger warnings. 
The Centre for Social Justice &amp; Inclusion handles complaints relating to sex, gender identity, race and disability discrimination. According to its equity policy, it seeks “diversity, fairness, social justice and ethical treatment of others”. The policy seems to have been written with oppressed groups in mind, so it’s remarkable to see it being used against women on campus. 
The directive to remove the poster is also related to the university fad of introducing policies to protect the “psychosocial safety” of staff and students, which were initially designed to silence Palestine solidarity activists. The feelings and emotions of those in positions of power are being protected while those trying to address injustices face disciplinary hearings. 
A staff member from Activate, which manages campus life, instructed the club to remove the posters during a phone call with Yasmine Johnson, UTS Socialist Alternative club president and the woman who hosted the meeting.
“He said to me, ‘You followed all the correct procedures, but unfortunately you are going to have to take these down. This has gotten around the uni top level very fast—the deputy vice-chancellor, the equity department, everyone knows’”, Johnson recounted to Red Flag. “He even said that the deputy VC instructed that the posters be removed as they violate the UTS equity policy.” 
That university management is worried about some men being distressed because people are discussing sexism tells you something about the political shift that is happening. 
Johnson reported being mobbed by Trump supporters while she handed out leaflets for the meeting. They loudly professed their love for the racist and sexist president of the United States. They were precisely the sort of young men who have been politically drawn to the far right and influenced by the violent misogyny of the sex-trafficker Andrew Tate. They are much more confident to express their bigoted attitudes, which will only become worse as institutions like UTS support them.
By not wanting to trigger any boys on campus who have trouble distinguishing between fact (young men are pretty sexist) and their feelings (a poster made me sad), the UTS administration has silenced the free speech of young women who are trying to fight back against the growth of a global far right.

Anneke Demanuele

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

Louise O'Shea

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Four months after Texas legislators implemented a total abortion ban in 2021, Josseli Barnica presented at a Houston hospital. She was 28 years old and seventeen weeks pregnant with her second child, and she was miscarrying. In any normal circumstance, doctors would have offered to induce delivery or empty her uterus; to do otherwise would mean risking serious infection and possibly sepsis. 
But Texas’ anti-abortion laws make it a crime to end the heartbeat of a foetus, no matter how life-threatening the situation is to either mother or child. Doctors at the hospital agreed that they couldn’t intervene until the heartbeat was no longer detectable, so Barnica waited an agonising 40 hours to deliver, each passing hour increasing her risk of developing a deadly infection. Three days later, she died as a result of sepsis due to acute bacterial endometritis.
Barnica’s is just one case among many. Maternal mortality rates are climbing in states with abortion bans. Infant mortality is increasing too. The Journal of the American Medical Association
recently found that there’s been an almost 6 percent increase in infant mortality since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022. That number jumps to 11 percent for Black babies.
Despite the clear and present danger posed by denying or delaying lifesaving health care to their patients, the tangled web of anti-abortion legislation in red states puts doctors and nurses in a bind.
If doctors in states like Texas decide to break the laws, they risk prosecution, fines and prison sentences of up to 99 years. The rare exceptions to blanket bans, such as in cases when the mother’s life is at risk, are too ill defined to interpret with confidence in the heat of a medical emergency.
“Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion’”, an obstetrician in San Antonio told ProPublica. These laws have made it nearly impossible for healthcare workers to provide patients with the care they want to deliver. In Idaho, another state that restricts all abortion outside of exceptional circumstances, one in four obstetrician-gynaecologists have left the state or retired in the last three years.
These bans affect women who want to carry their pregnancies to term as much as those who want to access abortion. Many of these states have now banned abortion even in cases where the foetus has a life-threatening condition or serious anomaly in utero, forcing women to endure the pain of childbirth in the knowledge that their baby will not survive outside the womb.
In this context, Trump’s re-election is another lurch backwards for reproductive justice. The 2022 Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v Wade has already set US federal abortion rights back by five decades, opening the space for a whole series of states to implement severe restrictions, and Trump’s administration promises to go even further. For anyone concerned about defending abortion and fighting for a world without sexism, this is a disastrous development.
But for the fanatically anti-abortion right, it’s as though Christmas has come early.
First, they were given a clear signal that the incoming administration will not stand in the way of the “pro-life” movement. Trump’s early flurry of executive orders included pardons for a number of activists charged with obstructing access to abortion clinics. The message is clear: the government and justice system will turn a blind eye to organisations and individuals who harass, intimidate or threaten violence against people seeking abortions. Pro-lifers can rest easy knowing they have the support of the president himself.
Next, Trump reinstated the global gag order, a law that prevents US foreign aid being sent to organisations that provide or counsel abortion. This first blow against global reproductive health care has been compounded by the blanket freeze on USAID implemented by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The freeze has already had a catastrophic impact on women’s health care across the world. According to sexual health NGO the Guttmacher Institute, it has so far impacted 3 million women in recipient countries including South Africa, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and Palestine, blocking their access to contraceptive care and other vital services through family planning clinics. If the freeze lasts all year, up to 4 million unintended pregnancies may occur and at least 8,000 women will die unnecessarily in childbirth.
Dr Elizabeth Sully, senior research scientist at Guttmacher, described the dire situation now faced by countless women around the world. “You can go to a clinic now that maybe you’d been to before, and that’s where you’d been receiving your injections or your contraceptive pills ... and you show up to that clinic now and its doors are closed, or there’s no commodities in stock, and no one can tell you when to come back.” Not only will this decision force many millions into conceiving and carrying children they do not want, but it will also massively undermine efforts to curb HIV/AIDs and other preventable illnesses.
The total expenditure on USAID in 2023 amounted to $44 billion, providing millions of people with lifesaving health care. Musk’s unilateral decision to freeze funding will cause incalculable harm. And this from a man who has increased his wealth, according to some estimates, by <a href="https://fortune.com/2025/02/21/musk-companies-add-613-billion-value-since-election/">more than $600 billion</a> just since November.
On the home front, Trump and Vance have reaffirmed their commitment to de-funding Planned Parenthood, playing into pro-life hysteria that the organisation is a one-stop abortion shop. During last year’s election campaign, Vance was asked where he expected women to go for reproductive health care if Planned Parenthood clinics across the country were shut down. Vance declined to comment; the Republicans simply don’t care.
In 2025, the pro-life movement is pushing against an open door. The far right is in power and waging a campaign against social progress of all kinds, be it environmental protections, gender diversity, immigration or workers’ rights. The rise of this meaner, nastier, more nakedly pro-capitalist politics has rapidly shifted the parameters of what’s acceptable in mainstream public discourse. And capitalists everywhere are determined to be at the forefront of the new era of reaction.
Take two of Trump’s biggest billionaire backers, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Both men have made overtures towards supporting abortion in the past—in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision, Zuckerberg and Bezos both publicly vowed to support financially any workers who had to travel interstate to access abortions. At the time, they clearly felt some pressure to pose as supporters of reproductive justice. But privately, both used their companies to donate large sums of money to anti-abortion Republicans. And now that unashamed misogyny is in the ascendancy, they have dropped any pretence of concern for the rights of women.
<a href="https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study">Studies show</a>
that when women are forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies to term, they become more vulnerable, less likely to finish higher education, less likely to stay in full-time work, more likely to stay with abusive partners and more likely to suffer mental health issues. And at the deadliest end of the spectrum, they are much more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications. When abortion is banned, women and babies die. This is the central hypocrisy at the heart of the pro-life movement.
The truth is that anti-abortion politics has never been about protecting life. Abortion is a central cause for the right because it is a way to push back against the gains won by women and other oppressed groups in the 1960s. The idea that people should be allowed to exercise agency over their lives and not conform to a preordained role dictated by the state, church or family, is anathema to the right. Attacks on abortion therefore fit into a broader reactionary world view concerned with forcing ordinary people to bow down and accept their place in society. The right stand for strengthening the power of the nation, the state, the police, borders and every other institution that enables the capitalist class to hold onto their power and profits. This is why right-wingers are rarely single issue; they have a comprehensive vision for society that includes attacking women’s rights, promoting gender norms, jailing and deporting immigrants, crushing unions and slashing regulations that impose on the rights of capitalists to amass yet more wealth. 
To turn this situation around, a serious fight needs to be had. Luckily, despite the overall backwardness of US politics, a majority of people continue to support the right to abortion. Recent data from the<a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/public-opinion-on-abortion/">
Pew Research Center</a> puts that number at nearly two-thirds of the population, a figure that has increased since the Dobbs decision. The first flickers of resistance to the Trump administration are growing in protests against ICE raids and deportations; the left needs to build on these examples to broaden the struggle against the resurgent right.
Just as the far right have linked together a broad spectrum of reactionary causes in their fight to shape society in their interests, our side needs to draw the links between every instance of injustice and oppression, pulling these disparate struggles together into a wholesale challenge to the system. Only through turning the rage that millions of us feel into a force that can’t be denied do we stand a chance of turning back the tide of reaction.
The capitalist class are fickle friends to anyone interested in building a society in which women aren’t forced to carry children against their will, in which health care is fully funded and freely available, in which the immense resources at our disposal are used to make the world a better place, rather than an increasingly dystopian hellhole for all but the wealthiest. Their representatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties are more concerned with defending the status quo than fighting for the oppressed.
As long as society is ruled by a clique whose power relies on dividing and disempowering the majority, women’s lives will continue to be subordinated to the interests of social stability and deference to power. Capitalism is the fundamental barrier to a society in which people’s needs and desires come before arbitrary structures of power and privilege; ending its reign of death and destruction has never been a more urgent task.

Shirley Killen

Abortion rights under siege in Trump’s America

Just a week after the victory of the Liberal National Party in the Queensland state election, hundreds rallied in Brisbane city in defence of abortion rights. Homemade signs read “LNP = Anti-choice”, “This is not America” and “Hands off my body, hands off my rights!”. The 500-strong crowd heard speeches and then marched around the city. 
Abortion returned as an issue in Queensland after the far-right Katter Australia Party leader, Robbie Katter, pledged to move a private members’ bill to repeal abortion laws during the election campaign. Despite the Liberal National Party leader, David Crisafulli, insisting that there would be no change to the laws if his party were to be elected, he refused to provide details about how this would be achieved, despite being asked more than 132 times. 
There is good reason to be concerned. Abortion was only fully decriminalised in Queensland in 2018. At the time, all but three Liberal National MPs voted against decriminalisation, including Crisafulli himself. Crisafulli and sections of the LNP leadership may have wanted to pragmatically smother the issue for electoral reasons during the campaign, but their MPs and party cadre are highly motivated by religious bigotry. They may well decide to make a stand about the issue, regardless of electoral expediency. 
While Queensland Labor has attacked Crisafulli for refusing to guarantee abortion rights, at the same time the party capitulates to bigots within its own ranks with the provision of conscience voting, and in government has refused to invest the necessary funds in healthcare to make abortion accessible throughout the state. 
As it stands, there are only two clinics that provide surgical abortions in Brisbane. Most public hospitals do not offer abortion access, disproportionately disadvantaging women in regional or rural areas who are forced to travel hours to seek an abortion. Because of this, speakers at the rally emphasised that it is not enough for abortion to be legal, it must also be free and accessible. 
Protest also matters. When the only abortion clinic in Rockhampton was closed in 2021, community activists protested for over a year for access to be reinstated to the regional city. Under pressure, the Labor state government announced that the procedure would be provided from then on at the local public hospital. 
With abortion activists facing a hostile state government, this is an important lesson in resistance and how to defend hard-won rights.

Ella Gutteridge

Hundreds rally for abortion rights in Brisbane

On a busy Friday night on 11 October, a lively crowd of 400 gathered outside South Australia’s parliament. Spilling across the pavement, protesters brandished homemade signs reading “Abortion care is healthcare”, “Hands off my body” and “Forced birth = violence”.
Young women and men, workers who had just clocked off for the day, families and trade unionists were there to rally against a new anti-abortion bill being proposed this month. If passed, these changes would force people who are more than 27 weeks and 6 days pregnant to give birth regardless of their wishes or the advice of their doctors.
The crowd was protesting to defend the hard-won right of women to control their own bodies and to decide their own futures. Loud booing and jeering followed the mention of Ben Hood, the Liberal MP introducing the private member’s bill. Hood aspires to be a culture warrior in the mould of US conservatives who spent decades chipping away at abortion rights until Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
Abortion was decriminalised in South Australia in 2021 with widespread support. According to a 2019 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1753-6405.12997">study</a> in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, 80 percent of South Australians support decriminalisation, 65 percent support widespread and readily available abortions and 63 percent support late-term abortions.
Most South Australian politicians are disinclined to attack abortion rights. So Hood’s bill is unlikely to pass either house of parliament. But the battle over abortion is far from finished.
As Prudence Flowers, Flinders University lecturer and co-convenor of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (SAAAC), told the crowd, a small but committed hard-right minority view undermining abortion access to organise their forces. Last month, around 1,000 anti-choice campaigners <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-25/ben-hood-abortion-bill-supporters/104397276">reported</a>ly gathered at parliament in support of Hood’s bill. This included prominent anti-abortion activist and academic Joanna Howe, who describes herself as advocating for “an Australia where abortion is <a href="https://www.drjoannahowe.com/about_dr_joanna_howe">unthinkable</a>”. For the hard-right and religious conservative wing of the Liberal Party, this is an opportunity to enthuse their base, recruit to their cause and drag their party—and the rest of society—even further to the right.
There is an important tradition of coming out onto the streets to defend abortion rights in South Australia. Rallies were held in 2021 in the lead-up to decriminalisation, and when Roe v. Wade was overturned in the US, many thousands marched in solidarity with the protests there. Friday’s rally continued this proud tradition. Those who took to the streets were united by anger, defiance and a commitment to action. Grey, a former health worker, told Red Flag: 
“I used to be a nurse, so this kind of issue is incredibly important to me. When I was a nurse, the times we went on strike were the only times things happened and people paid attention. Australians can be laid back people, but we need to get out and scream about it. People trust the government too much.”
Many placards and speeches called not just for the right to abortion, but to make it free, accessible and available without conditions. Barbara Baird, a long-time abortion activist and co-convenor of SAAAC, told the crowd “There are still access problems that haven’t been solved by decriminalisation”. These challenges particularly affect people in remote, regional and rural areas, 80 percent of whom must travel to Adelaide to access abortion care. It also involves significant costs for many women and requires them to take time off work. 
Labor has played an appalling role. Despite sixteen years in government before 2018, Labor did not decriminalise abortion. The party is expected to allow a “conscience vote” on Hood’s bill, which is an inexcusable concession to bigotry inside the party. Maddy Tapley, rally chair and convenor of the Defend Abortion Action Group told Red Flag: 
“The Liberals’ hard-right faction is attacking abortion while the Labor Party is committed to pandering to anti-women bigots inside and beyond its own ranks. A conscience vote would let Labor members vote against abortion rights with no repercussions. The real opposition won’t happen in Parliament—it’s going to happen here, in the streets.”

Harvey Bail

Nix Herriot

Abortion rights rally in Adelaide

Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time. 
It starts from before we are even born. An experiment described by Annie Murphy Paul in her book Origins highlights the different ways pregnant women interpret the movement of their babies in utero. Those who knew they were expecting a boy were more likely to use words like “energetic”, “vigorous” and “jabbing” to describe the movement, while for girls it was “gentle”, “rolling” and “quiet”. 
This sort of unconscious bias shapes and curtails women’s potential throughout their lives. In her book Delusions of Gender, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine describes an experiment which showed that simply reminding university students about whether they’re a man or a woman at the beginning of a test, by asking them to tick a box, reduces women’s performance on the test compared to that of men; in the absence of such a reminder, men and women perform equally well. Even the “feminine” or “masculine” nature of the décor in the room where the test is held has a measurable impact on performance. If such subtleties can have a statistically significant effect, just imagine the cumulative effect of this conditioning over a lifetime. 
The sexist bias that plagues data collection and design has been documented by Caroline Creado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Every area of design and technology is affected, from medical testing and drug development to building design, workplace temperature and tool size, all of which have wide-ranging and material effects on women’s health and lives. The male bias built into car safety testing, for example, means women are 49 percent more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents and 17 percent more likely to die than men. 
Then there are all the manifestations of sexism that we are conscious of, like unequal pay, lack of adequate maternity leave, limited access to child care, greater poverty on average for women throughout their lifetimes, greater risk of violence and death from intimate partners, sexualisation and objectification in daily life as well as in popular culture and advertising, to name just a few. 
There is not an aspect of life that isn’t affected by the gendered, and therefore sexist, nature of society in some way, from the most personal to the most public. 
So what can be done about this so all-pervasive form of inequality?
First, we—women and men—need to become as conscious as we can of sexism in our daily lives and strive to minimise it as best we can. We want women to be able to reach their potential and participate in whatever area of society, work and culture they want as equals. That means being sensitive to how the minutiae of behaviour—things like who dominates conversations and who gets listened to and taken notice of—affect women, who are used to being ignored, dismissed and generally treated as less important than men. It means treating women as equals, not sex objects, there merely to be admired or preyed on by men. And it means taking pro-active measures to push against the various subtle ways sexism shapes all sorts of human interactions. 
But even if we do everything we can to be alert to everyday sexism, it doesn’t alter the social reality around us that is reinforcing sexist ideas and norms as fast as we can reject them. 
So we also need a strategy for changing society and the inequalities that are structured into it and which every day normalise the subordinate position of women. 
In the immediate term, this means policies and services that enable women to participate as equals in paid work and the public sphere as much as possible—free, accessible child care and aged care, unlimited maternity leave, greater scrutiny of hiring and promotion to reduce discrimination against women, as well as higher wages in industries dominated by women, to name just a few. 
But on their own, these measures merely support women to undertake paid work more easily while they continue to take primary responsibility for caring as well. Hence the notorious “double burden” that plagues working women’s lives. In themselves, such reforms don’t challenge the idea that women are naturally nurturing and better suited to caring for others than men, who, by their nature, belong in positions of power. 
So, important as measures that enable women to participate fully in paid work and the public sphere are, they are not sufficient to bring about genuine equality or liberation. To achieve this, we need more radical change. In particular, we need to transform the way work is done, including breaking down the division between work in the formal economy and caring work, and the subordination of all work to profit making and capital accumulation. 
As long as most of us are expected to spend 40 hours or more a week performing waged labour—during which our “real” lives are on hold and we are under the control of a boss and doing work to generate profit for those who hire us rather than doing what is needed to keep ourselves and those around us alive, healthy and happy—the division of labour that so effectively supports this economic model will endure. Indeed, this is why it persists more then 50 years after most formal rights for women were won, including the right to equal pay, the right to work while married, the right to financial autonomy, the right to divorce and reproductive freedom. 
The bosses rely on the existence of a sub-class—women— to take responsibility for ensuring workers are looked after and fit for work, and that new generations of workers are produced who are willing and able to work. Women perform the majority of this work for free out of a sense of duty and because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of those around them. But the value to the bosses, who rely on that work to provide a productive workforce, is nevertheless enormous. 
A 2017 PWC report, “Understanding the unpaid economy”, found that unpaid work is worth $2.2 trillion to the Australian economy, equivalent to a third of GDP. Unpaid child care is the largest contributor, worth 25 percent of GDP, and would be by far the biggest industry in Australia if it was part of the formal economy. Domestic household tasks, including cooking and cleaning, are the next biggest category of unpaid labour. 
Having more women in the halls of power won’t be enough to change this. The halls of power are dedicated to strengthening the economy—i.e. generating more GDP through better exploiting workers and maximising the profits of business—and are dominated by the economic interests of the powerful few who control major corporations and industries. Waged labour and the status quo that ensures exploitation continues smoothly serve their interests, and those who challenge that soon find themselves on the outer. So while women have as much right as men to occupy parliaments and boardrooms, this is not a strategy for liberating women. 
To bring about the radical change that is necessary, we need to orient to an alternative source of power: the power the working class has collectively to challenge and transform society by mobilising at the point of production. Workers make everything, and they do it together. Rather than bosses directing this process, workers have the potential to decide democratically how and what to produce and for what purpose. 
Work and production could and should be reorganised to meet need—including the social need to care for everyone as well as the need to protect the planet from destruction. And because it could only be done collectively, cooperation, solidarity and fostering mutual respect are necessary to help strengthen working-class power. This is why we can be confident that the prejudice and inequality that are so rampant in capitalist society would be organically challenged and eventually overcome in the course of workers fighting for a socialist society, as has happened historically at high points of workers’ struggle. 
Working-class women aren’t necessarily conscious of the need for this sort of radical change to solve the problems they experience as a result of capitalism’s need both to exploit them and maintain their caring role. And nor are most male workers, who likewise have an interest in challenging waged labour and exploitation. But the reality is this is the only way to bring about a society of gender, as well as broader, equality, and to have a society that can meet people’s needs as a matter of priority, not as an afterthought or a ritualised hand-wringing every year on International Women’s Day. 
To get there, we need to start with rebuilding working-class consciousness and power from the bottom up. This is the radical origin of what was originally known as International Working Women’s Day when it was founded by socialist women in 1910 and celebrated under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. 
There is no easy way to do that, and we are currently a long way from the sort of consciousness and organisation needed to overthrow this system of inequality and prejudice. But if we want to avoid the cynicism or despair that comes from watching politicians carp on about women’s empowerment while they maintain policies that keep women down, or CEOs raising champagne glasses at International Women’s Day breakfasts while women languish on low wages in low-status jobs, we need some idea of what could actually transform the position of women. And we need to fight for those ideas wherever we are—at work, on university campuses and in every other area of life—and get together with other people doing the same, so that we can maximise our impact and form a larger pole of attraction for people who are continually pushed to radical conclusions by the injustices and atrocities of the capitalist system. That is the small but important step we can take towards women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity, in the here and now.

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year. 
A significant gender pay disparity in some areas with relatively small numbers of women, such as mining or construction companies, might not be surprising. But others, such as banks and airlines, often have even higher wage gaps. In retail women’s wear, for every dollar a man gets, women’s pay ranges from 42.3 to 79.1 cents. 
Importantly, the WGEA figures compare full-time work, with pay rates for part-time work translated into a full-time rate for the purposes of comparison. But because women disproportionately work part time, the actual amount they are paid—what goes into their bank account each fortnight—is even less compared to their male counterparts than what the pay gap alone suggests. 
Why does the pay gap exist? The problem is well illustrated by Bain Consulting. Bain is a company with a 31 percent wage gap, despite winning awards from the WGEA for gender equality. At Bain, women make up just 31 percent of its highest earning advisers, 45 percent of its second-highest ranks and 71 percent of its bottom quartile. 
A similar situation exists at the Commonwealth Bank, which has a 54.4 percent female workforce. Around 71 percent of the lower-paid customer service roles in branches and call centres are women, which accounts for its 29.8 percent pay gap. The bank may pay the same wage for the same work, but men get the higher paid jobs with all the perks and bonuses that go with them.
The solution, according to Angela Priestley in Women’s Agenda, is to “Bring on the heat around the gender pay gaps ... Bring on the scrutiny ... the awkward discussions” in companies championing the UN’s International Women’s Day slogan “count her in”. 
But while it’s welcome that the WGEA has published business names and matching figures of pay rates for the first time, transparency itself won’t necessarily improve things for women. In Denmark, when similar data was published, the gender pay gap narrowed because bosses responded by holding down men’s wages, rather than increasing women’s. 
Not mentioned by the WGEA, companies or media commentary is the one thing that has won gains for women in the past—militant union organising.
Since the 1800s, Australian unions have been organising for equal pay. As early as 1902, telegraphists and postmistresses in the new federal public service won equal pay after a determined campaign by the union. Later campaigns during WWII saw tram conductors, munitions workers and bread carters win after taking industrial action. 
Two campaigns particularly stand out: one by manufacturing workers in 1969 and the other by insurance workers in 1973. Several industrial campaigns in manufacturing in the early 1960s were instrumental in bringing about the 1969 decision that enshrined equal pay for the same work. This decision triggered a two-year campaign to win full equal pay for 72,000 women process workers. Concerted industrial action, including the unionisation of many new workplaces and joint action with their fellow male workers, got results.
After the second equal pay decision in 1972 broadened the scope for claims by requiring equal pay for comparable work, insurance workers initially relied on the courts to implement pay equality in their industry. When this didn’t happen, they started to organise and in 1973 several thousand workers demonstrated in Melbourne and stayed out for the rest of the day. They then went on to have a stop-work a week later and another strike, and a month later threatened a national strike—the first in the industry. The employers backed down and, though it took another year and a further threat of industrial action, pay equality was won for most of the workforce. 
We’ve now had decades of reports, committees, court rulings, new legislation undoing some of the structural barriers to women’s work—and yet the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. It remains high because union leaders have forgotten the lessons of the past, relied on all these committees and laws instead of the industrial strength of their members. 
The 1980s ALP-ACTU Accord promised many things for women, but collaboration with the bosses led to women’s wages falling and big job losses in female-dominated industries as the economy was restructured. Unions held back from taking industrial action, unionisation and wages and conditions plummeted, while the bosses reaped the profits.
In the wake of this latest WGEA report, the ACTU released several memes, concluding that “There is much to be done, but union members are no stranger to getting things done”. Where we have actually won equal pay or broken through barriers, it is because we have used our industrial strength, not meme wars. Where is the call from the ACTU or individual unions for a stop-work on International Women’s Day? 
We can’t rely on naming and shaming the bosses into granting equal pay. We have to take on the system that reinforces inequality. If unions were prepared to take on the banks, the supermarkets and the airlines to demand better wages for women and back it up with industrial action—like workers did in the insurance industry in the 1970s—there is every indication it would be popular and they would be under huge pressure to pay up. But for all the talk of “breaking the rules”, there is clearly no appetite for that sort of action.
If we are to break through the gender pay gap, it will be necessary to follow the example of those before us who used their industrial power to win better conditions for women. And to do that, we need to start building power in our workplaces from the bottom up.

Liz Ross

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

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

Women are no better off under Labor

Trump’s ‘war on woke’ is a war on all the working class

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

Capitalism can’t end women’s oppression: we need a revolution

Abortion rights under siege in Trump’s America

Hundreds rally for abortion rights in Brisbane

Abortion rights rally in Adelaide

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us