History often happens without warning and, even more often, against all our wishes and best efforts. Sunday, 3 August, was different. Hundreds of thousands woke up ready and determined to make history themselves on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The March for Humanity, a protest against 22 months of genocide and starvation in Gaza, was historic, not least for its sheer size. Sydney has not seen a protest so big since the march against the Iraq war more than twenty years ago. “Massive, unprecedented and huge”, Jewish anti-Zionist journalist Antony Loewenstein announced from the speakers’ platform in Lang Park. There’s no question the march exceeded 100,000 participants, protest organisers predicting the final tally could be triple that.
Half of Sydney’s CBD became a protest-only zone. Helicopters buzzed overhead, drowned out as the day went on by cowbells, drums, whistles and the banging of pots and pans to signify the starvation gripping Gaza. 
“Hello passengers”, said a prerecorded voice on the Wynyard train station loudspeaker. “If you’re here for the protest ...”. I waited at the top of the station escalators to meet up with members of my union. One wrote in our group chat that her train from Glenfield, two hours before the protest, was composed of just two groups: “One: Palestine protesters. Two: Footy fans”. Another chimed in: “We just came through Lidcombe and more and more passengers are getting on ... All walks of life. We stand together, it’s brilliant”.
They weren’t wrong. Up the escalators, in progressively larger instalments, came what looked like all of society. Every conceivable age and background; from choirs, unions, religious groups and political parties; from every suburb of Sydney, every corner of NSW and interstate.
The crowd exited the station and stepped out into truly appalling weather. The rain came in angry fits, and vain hopes raised by fleeting rays of sunshine were repeatedly dashed. Yet this was a day that masses of people wouldn’t have missed for the world. A very dapper man walked past me in Lang Park, hardly giving his beautiful shoes a second glance as they sank into mud. When children are dying of human-made hunger, or shot dead for sadistic target practice, would anyone let a bit of rain hold them back?
I tried to observe what I could by weaving through the crowd. The fastest way to move was by sloshing along the kerb of York Street, where a small river was flowing. Yet the people just kept coming. Homemade placards (“Penny Wong is a ‘non-lethal’ murderer”), keffiyehs galore, shirts with every conceivable slogan. Umbrellas, umbrellas, umbrellas. Each time I returned somewhere—Wynyard Station, Lang Park, or the woefully under-prepared Domino’s Pizza—the crowd was impossibly huger than before, as if I were returning on a different day.
The march was also historic because it was opposed by both major political parties and police. Two other great protest marches across the bridge—the 2000 March for Reconciliation and the 2023 World Pride march—were endorsed and even led by most of official society. The March for Humanity, however, was fought tooth and nail by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns and the state’s police force. Minns lied that the rally would plunge the city into “chaos”. Federal Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi (recently sanctioned by Anthony Albanese’s parliament for silently holding a sign protesting the starvation of children) explained from the platform: “It was never about traffic, it was never about logistics, it was always about protecting Israel and the Labor government from accountability”.
Minns made it clear that he opposed the bridge march regardless of how much notice was given. The NSW police took protest organisers to court to try stop it from going ahead. The outcry and overwhelming support from more than 300 organisations tipped the court ruling in our favour. “We’re here today because people power won”, Amnesty International representative Mohamed Duar told the crowd. Duar’s father still has the key to his house in Palestine that was stolen from his family by Israel in 1967. “I promised my father that one day he would be able to return, and I intend to keep my promise”. Sporting legend Craig Foster also spoke, and anti-war hero Julian Assange marched at the front with the lead banner.
In an encouraging sign, more trade unions than ever endorsed the protest and its pro-Palestinian demands. Flags and banners represented the National Tertiary Education Union, the Nurses and Midwives’ Association and the Electrical Trades Union, among others. As Maritime Union of Australia state secretary Paul Keating told the crowd, organised workers have played an essential role in struggles against war and racism throughout Australian history, from Vietnam to South African apartheid. “I say to my fellow trade unions, if ever there was a time to come together and be a force for good, now is the time”.
As part of my transport job, I drive over this bridge almost every week, and it’s still beautiful every time I do. But that did not leave me any better prepared for approaching the bridge on foot in the middle of the road. The slow but dogged pace, the onwards push of the crowd, the sprawling out as the road widened and the surging mosh when it narrowed again. The bridge loomed ahead like something to conquer, and the crowd moved inexorably to take it. Just as I had this thought, we began to chant: “Whose bridge? Our bridge!”
Cheers erupted as our contingent finally passed under the iconic steel structure. Beneath its magnificent arches, flanked by those gigantic hangers and moving cheek by jowl for a righteous cause—I have never seen the Harbour Bridge from a more beautiful vantage point. Even the bridge climbers above us, who would have seen the march in its full glory, missed something by being so far away from the action (though many raised their fists in solidarity).
Exactly halfway across the bridge, I felt something almost dreamlike. There were a hundred thousand people on this bridge. For a moment, this most famous Australian landmark belonged to Palestine. A brief pause in the chanting. The crowd was enveloped in silence and the sky in fog. I turned to the activist next to me. Did he feel it too? He nodded. “It’s like being in the eye of a storm”.
The crowd’s spirits were not dampened by the endlessly renewed bouts of rain, nor by the police’s sudden decision to block the end of the bridge and make everyone march back the other way. A protester, who on any other day looked like she worked in the quietest part of the library, fumed past: “It’s just a fucking power trip. Absolutely pathetic fuckers cannot hack that we beat them in court”. But perhaps for once in their life, police were telling the truth: at up to six times the anticipated size, the rally might have been simply too big to take the planned route into North Sydney. Not a bad problem to have.
Turning back did not mean giving up. The crowd left the bridge in perfect safety and order, proceeding all the way back to Wynyard Station, and then spilling out onto George Street until reaching Town Hall. “Show me what democracy looks like!” called the megaphoners; “This is what democracy looks like!”, we replied. 
After the march, leading Palestine Action Group organiser and socialist activist Josh Lees wrote on social media that it was “an absolutely incredible day. Minns predicted chaos. Instead, we had what we knew we would: a beautiful outpouring of humanity, marching side by side to end a genocide and demand our government sanction Israel. We’ve sent an enormous message to the world. Today the people spoke, and they said stop the genocide! Free Palestine!”
Each of those individuals amongst the people made a choice to give up their Sunday, catch overflowing trains into pouring rain, stand for hours and march for hours more, and rail against a genocide that Australia’s entire political, media and university establishment has covered up, excused and enabled. And by the sounds of it, most of those who came had been willing to do so even if all the powers that be succeeded in their uncompromising efforts to ban the march. “I was coming either way”, my GP’s receptionist told me the day before, when the court ruling came in. Facing the horror of this modern-day Holocaust, the spirit that captured Sydney on Sunday is exactly what gives socialists hope in the possibility of a better world—one run by ordinary people and not our genocidal masters. 
There’s one more reason that Sunday made history. For the first time ever, the Shit-Eater of the Year Award has been called five months early. Judges say they’ve never seen any nominee, let alone a sitting premier, eat so much shit over a single weekend. Give us a big grin, Chris Minns. With a movement this determined to end the unbearable slaughter of Gaza, there’ll be plenty more for you to come.

April Holcombe

Making history on Sydney Harbour Bridge: massive March for Humanity

The annual hysterics about a “war on Christmas” is a tradition almost as sacred as the Boxing Day shopping spree. This year, before we even broke December, Australian media, politicians and big business had the finger pointed at pro-Palestine activists and striking Woolworths warehouse workers.
Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan was “furious” at “morons” for “politicising Christmas”, telling <a>3AW radio on 15 November</a> that “we cannot let ugly protests ruin a beautiful Christmas tradition”, after a handful of Palestine solidarity protesters announced plans to disrupt the annual unveiling of Myers’ Christmas-themed storefront displays in Melbourne.
In the end, only a dozen gathered to protest on 17 November. Yet word somehow reached the British Isles, the UK tabloid Daily Mail
running a headline just long enough to convey the enormity of the crime: “Shocking moment 70-year Christmas tradition is interrupted as clown-faced protester leads disgraceful demonstration in front of iconic display in Melbourne—ruining the fun for families”.
Next were the unionised Woolworths warehouse workers. On 14 November, the Sydney Morning Herald began warning of the <a>“Strike threat to Christmas liquor supplies in NSW and Victoria”</a> as the United Workers Union prepared for an indefinite shutdown of five Woolies warehouses.
The Australian Industry Group (AIG), a national association of employers, came out swinging for all the little boys and girls on the verge of Tiny Tim-dom. “Stop holding Australian families to ransom”, pleaded AIG chief executive Innes Wilcox. “[They] are struggling through soaring costs of living and trying to provide a happy Christmas for their loved ones. This is the last thing they need after a stressful year.”
The establishment is up in arms over all this unbridled Grinchian bloodlust. Interrupting grocery store super-profits, obstructing retail chain dioramas: What hallowed holiday custom will these godless, tinsel-burning leftie ferals target next? Will climate activists pinprick Big W’s stock of inflatable Santas-in-boardshorts (<a>$99.99 a pop</a>) and officially kill Christmas?
The pages of Red Flag might be an unusual place to stand up for the right to enjoy a bloody good Christmas season. But permit this socialist rag to ask: Who’s really ruining the festive season?
Stock is quickly returning to Woolworths shelves after the conclusion of a heroic seventeen-day strike. Yet who can afford any of it? <a>Comprehensive research</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for its inquiry into supermarket price gouging calculated a 20 percent spike in grocery prices since 2019. The result is that 56 percent of the population plan to cut back on Christmas food and drink this year, with 48 percent buying fewer gifts, according to <a>a November survey</a> by the Salvation Army.
“Cossie livs” (slang for cost-of-living) Christmas, already last year’s theme, is set to get much worse as price hikes and the housing crisis churn on. Consumers plan to spend 16 percent less on gifts, decorations, travel and leisure over this holiday period than last—a drop to $1,002 from $1,192, according to <a>Deloitte’s Retail Holiday Report 2024. </a>
It’s the opposite story for company executives and shareholders. SANTA (Stopping At Nothing To Accumulate) has been very good to them this year. “Australian families struggling through the cost of living” has meant record super-profits for everyone over at the Australian Industry Group.
Take Woolworths. New CEO Amanda Bardwell has snatched a starting salary of <a>$2.15 million this year</a>, with up to $6.9m in possible bonuses. This would outstrip disgraced ex-CEO Brad “<a>Can’t Get Throughcci One Interviewcci</a>“ Banducci’s total take home pay of $8.6m for 2023. That’s equivalent to almost 150,000 Christmas lunches, based on an average cost of $62 per person calculated by YouGov. 
In fact, the company’s record profits last financial year—an eye-boiling $1.7 billion—could buy a sumptuous meal for every single person in the country. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army’s survey found that half of those forced to access charity over the holiday period will be doing so for the first time. A Perth-based community food program called Backpack Buddies, which provides children in need with food for school, <a>told the ABC</a> in late November that demand has risen “from a handful of children at the start of this year to 135 each week”, and predicted being totally overwhelmed come Christmas.
At least we can all enjoy time spent with our families, right? Wrong. To make up for lost cash, a record 7 million people, or 57 percent of the working population, intend to <a>work through Christmas</a> to make ends meet. According to survey data by jobs listing provider Indeed, this is the first time that 5 million of them have ever considered it. It sounds like, to quote AIG again, the “last thing they need after a stressful year”. But Indeed career expert Sally McKibbin told Sky News it’s “positive news” that so many workers are hustling all the way to December 31 to “weather cost-of-living pressures”.
For the rich, every day is Christmas. For a growing number of workers, Christmas is starting to look like any other day.
That is, if you can get the work. Reserve Bank governor Michelle Bullock has told the country interest rates will remain high over Christmas, until the number of unemployed increases by at least another 75,000. ’Tis the season to be jobless.
“If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population”, Bullock said in a 28 November address. Apologies: I have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol open next to the newspaper. That was Ebenezer Scrooge, not Michelle Bullock. She <a>put it more politely</a>: “Conditions in the labour market remain tighter than what would be consistent with low and stable inflation”.
Looks like everyone who doesn’t exploit another for a living is on the naughty list this year. What surprise will the bosses put in your stocking? A real wage cut? An extra shift on Christmas Day? Or maybe redundancy?
Just don’t expect the traditional lump of coal: they need to burn all that. The federal Labor government on 3 December refused a legal request to consider the climate impacts of three new mines, giving the green light to about 850 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions from the Boggabri, Caval Ridge and Lake Vermont projects, and providing an <a>early Christmas present</a> to the coal companies. It just wouldn’t be a 2020s Christmas without the risk of bushfire Armageddon.
If you’re thinking of cooling off from the record-breaking heat, just be careful where you swim. In an unprecedented move to stop kayak-borne protesters blocking ships to and from the world’s largest coal port, NSW Labor went so far as to impose <a>a four-day exclusion zone</a> around Newcastle harbour in late November, threatening fines and arrests for even setting foot in the water. This Boxing Day dip, ensure no-one nearby is trying to make the world a better place: it might be illegal to paddle there if you aren’t a gigantic coal-bearing SS Grinch.
It could be worse; you could be a little baby born in Bethlehem. None of our Christmas crusaders seem to care about a literal war on the scriptural birthplace of Jesus Christ: surrounded by an apartheid wall and facing down violent settlers <a>accelerating their land theft</a> under cover of an ever expanding genocide. Just last month, Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas at young Palestinian schoolgirls in a village adjoining Bethlehem. “Israeli soldiers hurled the <a>toxic gas canisters</a>
directly as the students entered the school grounds, causing them to experience suffocation and breathing difficulties”, a 17 November report from Middle East news website The New Arab reads. 
Yet for Labor Party leaders, calling attention to the crimes of an ironclad Australian ally is ruining the true meaning of Christmas: gawking at tacky window dioramas of upmarket retail chains. “[They’re] more distressed about Christmas windows than about stopping Israel’s genocide and its war on Palestinian children”, said Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
While millions struggle to eat, drink and be merry—or even just stay alive—this Christmas, be thankful that the strikes are over, the protests are repressed, and the mahogany tables of our betters can once more groan under the weight of champagne, cocaine and caviar. 
If you’re lucky, you might get 31 December off to see in a New Year of price hikes, wage cuts, job losses and record quarterly profits. The Grinch will be gone by then, but Australia’s bosses and their lackeys will be watching the fireworks from helicopters and superyachts, plotting to steal another whole year through.

How the rich stole Christmas

The Woolworths warehouse strike in Sydney’s west continued to heat up through its fifth and sixth days as the city’s temperatures rose in tandem.
The United Workers Union (UWU) coordinated and organised the indefinite strike at Erskine Park distribution centre and four other warehouses in Victoria. Another warehouse in Queensland took action last Friday, 22 November. The 1,500 strikers nationwide appear more determined than ever to win above-inflation pay rises and terminate the company’s “coaching and productivity framework”—a new system that disciplines anyone falling short of a management-defined “100 percent” target.
Monday, day five at Erskine Park, was stinking hot. The sun lashed the backs of necks and boiled the bitumen. The liquid soap in the portaloos was half-scalding. Those who stood at the barbeque over sizzling onions to keep everyone fed deserved a 21-gun salute. 
The sight of 100 members in UWU-branded hi-vis on the main driveway at the peak of the day’s heat discussing their next steps was a sign of unity and commitment. UWU organiser Sharon Eurlings, reporting on Woolworths’ offer of a “reduced framework”, had barely finished her sentence when workers erupted in cries of “No framework!” to the bangs of a big drum. “Put your hand up if you want to stick to no framework”, Sharon said. One hundred hands went up.
Next order of business: the bosses only want a handful of delegates at negotiations. Cries, drums and one hundred hands: all delegates must be at the talks for maximum democracy and opposition.
The union also demands that all six warehouse agreements expire simultaneously and be negotiated together. This is an effort to counter a fragmented system of “enterprise bargaining” introduced by the Hawke-Keating ALP government of the 1980s and 1990s, which replaced industry-wide bargaining and weakened our side’s collective strength.
By now, striking workers have been getting calls from supervisors and managers. 
“‘Just doing a welfare check’, they say”, one reported. “I told them, ‘Yeah, I’m doing fantastic mate’. It’s intimidation and mind games.”
“Welfare” didn’t cross management’s collective mind until profits started going down the drain. 
After the meeting, Roger* and Jay* spoke about a case a few years earlier, when a Pakistani employee had his fingertips on both hands crushed by a closing van door.
“You know what [management] did?” Jay asked. “They said it was his own fault, and gave him a warning”. Two warnings and you’re out of a job. Later, they say, the man tried to cover up a mistake to avoid a second warning and dismissal. Management found out and sacked him on the spot.
According to picketers, the top manager at the time (“the biggest psychopath ever met on the job”, Roger said) is now overseeing the rollout of a new 66,000 square metre semi-automated facility in the southwest Sydney suburb of Moorebank.
Warehousing must be some of “the lucky country’s” most sweated and unsafe labour. The parallels with Amazon seem striking. As with the American logistics giant, very high turnover is part of the Woolworths business model: employing casuals through labour hire, working them to the bone, and then moving on to another batch. 
“When you’re casual, it’s non-stop”, Roger said. “The last intake was 100 people over a couple of weeks, and by the end of it, there were probably five to fifteen left.”
The “framework” is yet another attempt to intensify the labour process, after everything companies like Coles and Woolworths have already done to make this work more dangerous, exhausting and dehumanising. That’s why the workers say they won’t stop until it’s dead.
And it’s why Janet*, one of the oldest workers here with 26 years’ experience, stayed all through the night on Saturday to guard the picket and was back again Monday.
“Myself, maybe I’ve not got too many more years here. But I’m fighting for the young people”, she said as we caught some shade under a gazebo. “They’ve got young families—[management] shouldn’t be pushing them so much, getting injuries to their back and shoulders.”
Sitting next to her was one of those young workers, Lisa*. In her home country, trade unions aren’t even legal. The pace of work is severe and workers have no right to speak out. Yet it’s only after moving to Australia and working at Woolies that she suffered her first workplace injury.
A workmate interrupted to ask Janet for some of the sweet dessert drink she made for the picketers. He wanted to take some home to his kids. After sampling some, I could see why. I sampled continuously as she talked me through the recipe. 
Janet says she’ll stay out “as long as it takes” because she’s confident they can starve Woolies out. “In the next few days, there’s gonna be empty shelves for sure”, she said. “Because we move a million cartons a week and this is day five.”
Another mass meeting on Tuesday reported back from Monday’s negotiations.
Stonewalling and condescending, Woolworths insisted the meeting was only to “educate” workers about the framework. “They’ve never picked a box and they’re trying to educate us”, someone cried out. 
Management offered a 75 or 85 percent target instead of 100 percent, which delegates roundly rejected.
“If we agree with a number, they can change it; they always have things [to get] around it”, one delegate argued at the meeting. “Version 2.0 involves following you around like puppets. Meetings every few weeks to monitor performance. If you’re not picking what they think you should, then they’ll still get rid of you. We want to come here, work and go home. Fuck their framework.”
With negotiations going nowhere, UWU organiser Sharon proposed an escalation. Hoxton Park Distribution Centre, which supplies Woolworths’ Big W stores, is fifteen minutes away. Did workers want to go there and stop trucks from getting in and out?
“At first, not a lot of people jumped [at this prospect] because they'd never done it before. This is the first strike for many workers”, said Cherish Kuehlmann, a student activist organising carloads of young socialists to come to show support every day. “Then one worker asked, ‘Are the uni students coming too?’ And of course we were like, ‘Yeah!’”
Convinced, dozens of workers and supporters drove over to shut down Hoxton Park DC. The strike at Erskine Park is so solid that active picketing is usually unnecessary. So this was the first opportunity many workers had to block the movement of goods physically. Waving big red union flags and chanting in a line blocking the entry, the workers stopped ten trucks in an hour. “One day longer! One day stronger!” 
Managers came trotting out but, failing to scare off the strikers, slunk back into the warehouse as the picket line jeered: “Go back to the aircon!” 
One manager, Dylan, has moved from Erskine Park to Hoxton Park while the strike continues. Workers heckled and taunted, advising him to get back inside before the sun charred the top of his shiny head. 
Meetings with management were held again on Wednesday. If they went the way of Monday’s dead-end discussions, then surely Woolworths deserves many more escalations such as this.
But even this first small escalation showed how a strike can begin turning things the right way up in our topsy-turvy rich man’s world. 
Harassed, bullied and demeaned by managers day in and out, workers can finally get a serve back. 
Trucks arriving at a remorseless pace, hungry for stacked pallets, can be turned away.
Decisions, usually made only by managers in air-conditioned offices, are made in the blazing heat, discussed and voted on by union members. 
The isolation of the headsets, the unknowable efficiency targets and a fragmented warehouse floor—forklift driver pitted against pallet stacker, permanent against casual, morning shift against day shift—can be undone for a while by the workers’ unity. 
And the people called replaceable, disposable, a number or a cog, show that they are in fact indispensable.
A colleague of mine, with almost 50 years’ experience in our transport industry, reminded me of this as we chatted in the lunchroom. After I described the conditions in the warehouse, he paused, turned and said:
“You know, we go about our everyday lives and we totally forget how the food gets on the shelves, and who is putting in what kind of backbreaking labour to get it there.”
It’s only because of the strike that we are talking about it at all. And if Janet is right and Woolies shelves soon start running empty, then many more people might begin pondering the same question: who’s really creating all the wealth in this country?
One thing’s for sure: it’s not Dylan and his toasted scalp.
* Names have been changed at the interviewee’s request. Except Dylan’s.

Sydney Woolies workers striking while it’s hot

On an average day, 200 people enter the round-the-clock Erskine Park Distribution Centre (DC) in western Sydney and bust their gut packing goods that end up in Woolworths supermarkets. But on Saturday 23 November, the two dozen in high vis turning up at the site weren’t there for the 5am morning shift. They were starting day three of an indefinite strike.
That is already a day longer than their last strike in 2017, and this time, it seems they are just getting started. The picket line looks built for long-haul, 24-hour operation: portaloos, a big box trailer of supplies, gazebos, barbecues, even a flat-screen TV powered by a generator. They are also joining five other warehouses in Victoria and Queensland. 
So far, the pickets are working. One worker said that the morning truck drivers don’t come to cross the picket line; they just come to greet and support the strikers. For Woolworths—whose shelves might start running empty later this week—the screws will turn tighter the closer we get to the holiday season.
“[We don’t care] if it takes one, two, three months—even if we’re here in the New Year”, a worker, Tee,* told Red Flag in an audio interview, as chill R&amp;B played from a nearby speaker. “And if anyone’s listening [to the recording in the future], happy New Year, merry Christmas. If you’ve got empty shelves in your local Woolies store, blame Woolies, not us.”
Almost all Erskine Park DC workers are members of the United Workers Union (UWU), and almost all voted for the indefinite strike. That sense of unity against management is a major point of pride. “I haven’t seen people in this high spirits in many, many years here”, Jamie, a UWU organiser, said. Despite the weekend’s heat wave, which could already be felt by 8am, workers kicked a ball around on the street, or crowded around a mate’s motorcycle.
The strike’s key demand, alongside higher pay, is to “<a href="https://unitedworkers.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Disciplinary-Power-in-Aust-Grocery-Warehouses-UWU.pdf">abolish the framework</a>”. Every worker seems determined to kill and bury it before they walk back inside the gates. The framework allows management to discipline any worker that fails to meet the “100 percent” target: a pick rate that the company can set and adjust with no oversight, rationale or accountability. “It’s trying to manage us for every second that we work, 24/7 non-stop”, Tee said.
At the best of times, work inside a Woolworths warehouse is rushed and strenuous. Workers on foot weave around forklifts, lay pickers and pallet movers in a mad rush to grab stock from aisles. 
With management constantly forcing the pace, Jamie, who worked for years at Erskine Park, described how extreme accidents are waiting to happen. “There’s a big risk of getting hit by machinery. Someone lost their life <a href="https://7news.com.au/news/nsw/woolworths-worker-killed-in-horrific-pallet-accident-remembered-as-beautiful-man-c-11173079">only a year ago</a>”, he said. “My first year on the job, I was a few inches away from being crushed by a machine myself.” But the recently introduced “framework”, Jamie said, “is gonna create chaos in there”.
The chaos is already starting. “We’ve got a lot of people that have been here for years, been doing their job perfectly fine, and now just last week, we had two people injured on Friday”, Tee said. “One of the guys had to leave in a wheelchair and they actually had to drop him home; he couldn’t go home in the vehicle he came in. On one day we’ve had more injuries than in the last couple of months.”
“Even those who can reach 100 percent, they can’t maintain it”, Jamie said. Humans cannot do what the AI program in their work-provided headset demands, such as moving 18-kilogram boxes every five seconds. “How can one person do this all day, every day? It’s 800 to 1,000 boxes per day”, another worker, Craig,* said. 
At the same time, the robot appears unable to do what human workers can, such as make sensible decisions about how to stack physical objects on a pallet. That creates even more work for employees. “The program is telling us to put medium-weight things on light things; it doesn’t work. So we have to take it all back off and repack it”, Craig explained.
Another striker who has worked here for more than a decade said the pressure to meet 100 percent every day adds a new layer of fear, stress and anger that’s affecting home and family life. “You don’t want to take work home with you; everyone will agree with you on that”, Ajay* said. “[But] when you go home to your families, you’re thinking about how you gotta do that again tomorrow.”
100 percent is not a fixed amount of work—it’s an efficiency aspiration. Management can continuously adjust it and reset working conditions to ensure that more profits are squeezed from the workforce. People are stressed about falling behind the target and losing their job. A few minutes lost here or there, and workers can be called in to meetings. 
“I’ve seen people hauled into the office for going 20 seconds, 30 seconds over their lunch break”, Jamie said.
“A lot of the guys have gone in there for a meeting and they haven’t come back out, you just see them getting walked off site”, Tee said.
That was all before the framework, which is giving managers even greater powers to bully and victimise. According to Jamie, management pushes workers harder if it wants them gone. “We’ve got ladies who’ve been with the company for 25 years, yet on a daily basis, they have to pick a lot more than others. It’s almost as if the company is trying to force them out, getting them to crumble and give up and walk out of their own accord.”
The union is also fighting for a proper wage rise to combat inflation. Woolworths says its pay offer is above the current inflation figure of 2.8 percent. But UWU members say this ignores the financial pain felt after years of rising grocery prices and housing costs, which are still worsening. 
“Sydney is one of the most expensive cities in the world”, Tee said. Like most workers here, he is renting and has only just now been able to move out and find a place for his growing family. “It’s $600 a week, so I asked the real estate agent, does it have two swimming pools and a Ferrari out the front?”, he joked. 
Those workers with mortgages are suffering from thirteen consecutive interest rate hikes. For each of the past two years, average wage increases have fallen behind average mortgage increases by around $1,000, according to Guardian economics editor Greg Jericho. Meanwhile, the big banks (as with their mates at Coles and Woolworths) are celebrating superprofit bonanzas. Little wonder that Reserve Bank governor Michelle Bullock came in for colourful rebuke around the picket line.
The pay claim is also about fairness. Across the country, wages differ from one Woolworths warehouse to the next. Erskine Park is praised by management as the most efficient distribution centre in Australia. Yet its hourly rate is much lower than at Minchinbury DC, just fifteen minutes’ drive away. “Align us with the other sheds”, one delegate demanded, echoing the union’s green placards cable-tied to the warehouse gates: “Every site, same rights at Woolworths!”
The first few days have seen a rock-solid shutdown, but it’s just the beginning. Workers at Erskine Park are assembling for an all-members’ meeting on Monday to discuss the next steps. 
Whatever comes next, Woolworths warehouse workers are prepared for a long, hot summer strike against one of Australia’s most hated companies. The rest of us workers should be offering moral and material support—and learning a thing or two. 
* Names have been changed at the interviewees’ request.
If you live in Sydney, show solidarity with strikers at their round-the-clock picket of Woolworths Distribution Centre, Sarah Andrews Close, Erskine Park.

Woolies warehouse workers keeping Sydney picket strong

Parents these days have it tough. They are endlessly accosted with the dangers facing their children: drugs, gangs, TikTok, strangers, junk food, Fortnite, vaping.
So while it pains to add to the list, there is a much greater threat that never gets a second of airtime: liberal centrism. Luring victims into official politics with talk of “change from within” only to suck out their souls and fill the hollow shell with careerist ambition—now that’s scary.
Parents from the radical left should not think their offspring are immune. Former US President Barack Obama, aspiring president Kamala Harris and federal Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg all had a socialist parent. But each embraced the Democratic establishment abyss with the imperial nihilism of the glassiest-eyed Washingtonian dynasty. 
Barack Obama Sr., an economic adviser in newly independent Kenya, criticised the government’s pro-market development strategy, advocating the maintenance of communal land ownership and the nationalisation of foreign companies. “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation, so that not only a few individuals shall control the vast magnitude of resources”, he wrote in a <a href="https://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM41_080411_bhobama_article_1965.pdf">1965 paper for East Africa Journal</a>. “The government should tax the rich more ... Theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income.”
Barack Obama Jr., on the other hand, bailed out America’s largest banks and companies, destroyed union agreements and cut spending on social security. During his first term, 95 percent of all income gains in the US <a href="https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2012.pdf">went to the richest 1 percent</a>. In his second term, Obama <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/us/politics/obama-offers-to-cut-corporate-tax-rate-as-part-of-jobs-deal.html">appealed to Republican lawmakers</a> to help him cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent. 
Joseph Buttigieg produced the first English translation of the Prison Notebooks, written by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci while imprisoned under Mussolini. Buttigieg <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/303230?seq=1">described </a>Gramsci’s legacy as one of “selfless commitment to the socialist vision ... of unwavering dedication to the cause of the oppressed; of brave, unyielding and very costly defiance of the fascist dictatorship”.
The legacy of his son Pete Buttigieg, formerly an intelligence officer in Afghanistan and corporate consultant for McKinsey &amp; Company, now the transport secretary to Genocide Joe, is decidedly less noble. “The secretary has focused on intervening to support American supply chains ... including measures to help cut in half the long-dwelling container congestion at America’s largest ports”, the official US Department of Transportation website <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/meet-secretary/secretary-pete-buttigieg">notes</a>.
Liberal centrist ghouls stalk elite universities’ law schools and political science departments, hunting for prey. Those in freshman tutorials who flirt with notions such as social justice and systemic racism are shepherded like proverbial lambs into career politics. 
In his Oxford University days, Pete Buttigieg and his friends talked of pushing the Democrats of their native US to the left and away from the “Third Way” centrism of Bill Clinton. But “over time, I’ve come to appreciate more the policy work that comes out of moderate organisations”, he <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/12/03/784151111/pete-buttigieg-spent-his-younger-days-pushing-democrats-off-middle-ground">told National Public Radio in 2019</a>, ahead of his failed presidential nomination bid. 
Donald J. Harris, a left-wing academic at Stanford University, was once <a href="https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1976/11/03?page=4&amp;section=MODSMD_ARTICLE11">described</a>
by the Stanford Daily as a “pied piper leading students astray from neo-classical economics”. He dedicated his 1978 Marxist work Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution to daughters Kamala and Maya.
Kamala Harris apparently loved the first two words of the book’s title but didn’t care for the rest. Economist Adam Tooze called her a “straight-up, main-line, big tech-identified happy Californian Democrat” on his podcast Ones and Tooze. Her presidential campaign has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/technology/silicon-valley-trump-biden-democrats.html">“invigorated” Silicon Valley</a>, as venture capitalist cash flows back into Democratic coffers. 
Between her father’s generation of radical Caribbean diaspora, who understood the criminal “justice” system to be a weapon of racist oppression, and Kamala’s campaigning as a tough prosecutor who knows how to put felons behind bars, something went terribly wrong. 
The liberal centre is clearly a danger to our youth. So let’s picture the television advertisements we might run if we finally sounded the alarm. 
A middle-aged radical sits on a couch, Che Guevara on her T-shirt and a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X on her lap. Low strings begin to throb menacingly. A deep voice-over asks: “Do you know where your child is right now?” 
Cut to the Sine Institute at the American University in Washington, DC. Nineteen-year-old College Democrats in blue blazers are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAqtK-WFd7w">conversing politely</a> with Young Republicans in red blazers. “The best part is that they’re going to talk about what they agree upon”, says Sine Institute director and disgraced former Democratic National Committee CEO Amy Dacey, laughing maniacally into the camera.
Fade out. 
“Is your child seeking common ground with Republicans? Stop it before it’s too late.” 
We pan down thousands of billowing, blood-soaked American flags to reveal Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi grinning and shaking hands with a conga line of Republican congressional representatives in celebration of the record number of <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/biden-managed-put-together-many-bipartisan-wins-rcna61883">bipartisan bills passed</a> under Biden.
Cut back to the university room, now all but empty. One last student from the audience, slinging a backpack over their shoulder, is about to leave when a shadowy figure in a knee-length <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/power-coats-inauguration">power coat</a>
approaches. A leaflet is placed in the curious student’s hand: “Campaign launch for Kamala: Meet your elected officials!”
Next shot: a speechifying Kamala Harris sports a sheriff’s badge the size of Arizona and wields a red-white-and-blue judge’s gavel in each hand. The lectern is branded with her official campaign slogan: Vote Blue Literally No Matter What We Do. The voice-over asks: “Does your child accuse you of supporting Trump any time you raise a criticism of the Democrats?”
Fade. The music grieves now, like a requiem mass. The screen fills progressively with a collage of photographs: college students smiling rapturously in selfies with Obama, Biden, Clinton, Harris, Schumer or Pelosi. 
A man strolls soberly into the centre of the shot.
“Every eight minutes, a law student accepts a summer job in a Democratic Party office. Look at these photos: notice the deadness behind the eyes, the ruthlessly pragmatic grip. At this point, it’s already too late. Liberal centrism claims thousands of young people like these every year. Without early intervention, your child could be one of them.”
A young woman’s blurred face speaks to the camera: “I told Mum and Dad I wanted to study law to fight systemic racism in the courts. But in sophomore year, I joined the College Democrats. Now I see everything is a lot more complicated than Daddy made out. If we don’t get tough on crime, we’ll lose office. Then how would we begin cautious police reform in 2044?”
A black screen; silence. A line of text appears: “Don’t let your child be sucked into the centre”.
We hear a final, sombre voice-over: “Know the warning signs. A meme about brat girl summer or coconut trees might look harmless at first. But suddenly, your child is canvassing for Top Cop Kamala. It’s never too early to start talking to your child about the true history of the Democratic Party”.

Kids: Just say no to liberal centrism

China’s boom is well and truly over. Through the 2000s, the economy enjoyed double-digit annual growth. Now, few expect it to hit the 5 percent target announced at this year’s National People’s Congress, the dictatorship’s rubber-stamp parliament. Previous pillars of growth, property and infrastructure are teetering on mountains of debt, and the United States is trying to block the country’s advance into high-tech manufacturing.
In anticipation of an economic slowdown, President Xi Jinping has long centralised political power. “The current leadership believes that it can survive an economic downturn by tightening its control over society, eradicating autonomous elite factions, and adopting a more assertive posture on the international stage amid rising geopolitical tension”, Ho-fung Hung writes in New Left Review.
That assertive posture involves directing investment into “new quality productive forces”. The first group of outputs in this category includes solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium batteries, areas it already dominates in terms of global production. China hopes to remain the pre-eminent manufacturer of such goods. 
The second group includes silicon chips, IT systems and artificial intelligence. Here it faces sanctions and other obstacles because such technologies are crucial for military hardware and are of supreme importance in the country’s rivalry with the United States. With growth slowing and foreign investors leaving, a single-minded focus on technological innovation means squeezing greater profits from Chinese workers.
Modern China’s meteoric rise involved two phases. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the country welcomed a flood of foreign direct investment into low-end manufacturing and assembly plants, attracted by seemingly inexhaustible reserves of cheap labour held down by the “Communist” dictatorship. Deeply dependent on exports and foreign investment, China narrowly avoided being dragged down with the West during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. 
It shifted rapidly to a second, domestic phase of growth: infrastructure development. In his book Ghost Cities of China, Wayne Shepard described the country in the 2010s as like a giant construction site. “The old is being replaced with the new, and the new is being replaced with the newer, in a cyclical process of creation and destruction”, he wrote. Local governments were given free rein to sell land and build bridges, roads, airports, shopping centres and apartment blocks. Beginning in 2002, the government built a high-speed rail network from scratch. By 2015 there were 12,000 kilometres of tracks; today, the network stretches 45,000 kilometres.
While the United States and Europe stagnated through what Marxist economist Michael Roberts called “the long depression” (beginning with the financial crisis), China enjoyed another decade of strong growth. Yet this led to enormous government debts, the world’s largest property bubble, and significant excess industrial capacity. The government is now banning new highway and building projects in ten of China’s most indebted provinces, according to documents viewed by the Financial Times.
Many Western commentators anticipate China falling like a house of cards under this debt burden. But Kevin Lin, a researcher specialising in China and its labour movement, is sceptical of such prognoses. “There have been predictions of an imminent economic crisis going back twenty years now”, he tells Red Flag. “It’s not just a prediction, it’s almost like a hope.” 
The regime keeps a tight grip on national banks, allowing it to simply “roll over” what is owed by local government and state-owned enterprises. This is something Shepard also noted. “When considering domestic ‘debt’ in China, what we’re really discussing is the amount of money the Communist Party owes to the Communist Party”, he wrote.
That the debt might indeed be manageable is evident in the country’s property sector. Housing has been the number one investment for China’s burgeoning middle classes. And decades of untrammelled private investment in urbanisation resulted in skyrocketing valuations, which reached US$52 trillion combined, according to US investment bank Goldman Sachs. The speculative bubble centred on the world’s largest property company, Evergrande. Rather than let it burst, the government began a controlled demolition of the firm before it was finally liquidated. The process has lowered property prices and squeezed many households. But it also prevented a financial crisis.
“It hasn’t eliminated the risks—some of them are structural to capitalism, so they won’t just go away because of better economic management”, Lin says. “But if we take the longer view, instead of a crash, the economic crisis may be a continual slowdown for years to come.”
There are undoubtedly additional problems. Depressed consumer spending and falling prices have hurt economic growth. But President Xi Jinping has no plan to expand service industries or increase welfare. That would mean raising wages, increasing holiday leave and taxing the rich to fund higher pensions for a rapidly ageing population. Instead, spending is being directed towards the “new productive forces”. So bosses are suppressing wage growth and increasing the number of hours worked, while Xi tells young people that they must be prepared to “eat bitterness”.
Unemployment, like bitterness, is growing. Twenty-one percent of young people were unemployed by June 2023, before the government suddenly stopped publishing figures (then changed its calculation method). The solar panel giant Longi will sack more than 20,000 workers due to a supply glut, according to Bloomberg, one consequence of capitalist over-investment.
Why is the government doubling down on investment in manufacturing? Over 30 years, the world has relinquished its manufacturing capacity to China, profiting from low wages and economies of scale. It’s not just shoes or iPhone assembly. Last year, the United States built ten commercial shipping vessels. China built more than 1,000.
The focus on “new productive forces” is about pressing this advantage. The regime under Xi Jinping is building what he calls “national champions” to dominate global markets. The “old trio” of textiles, furniture and appliances has given way to the “new trio” of solar panels, electric vehicles and lithium batteries.
So far, it is steamrolling the competition. The New York Times reports that China installed more solar panels in 2023 than the United States has in its history. Its ultra-cheap exports drove European solar companies out of business long ago. Electric vehicle company Tesla has fallen to second place behind China’s BYD in terms of global sales. “In many sectors such as EVs, [Western countries] are—for the first time in modern history—in a technological catch-up mode vis-a-vis a more advanced competitor, which they also consider a key geopolitical rival”, Paolo Gerbaudo wrote in a recent article for political economy website Phenomenal World.
The West is retaliating with what Lin calls “open economic warfare”. The US Congress’s vote to ban Chinese-owned app TikTok is only the latest move towards IT “decoupling”. As Intel, Dell and IBM pull out of Chinese markets, the Communist Party has announced a plan to “Delete A” (“A” being America) and replace all foreign software systems in government computers by 2027. The European Union is poised to impose tariffs on electric vehicles it accuses China of “dumping” into its markets. All this has culminated in foreign direct investment falling to a 30-year low. 
Crucially, Chinese capitalism faces the prospect of being blocked from buying the most advanced silicon chips from the United States, Taiwan, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and South Korea. In response, the government has invested heavily to try to develop its own. Although lagging a generation behind Taiwanese nanochips, China has just released a new Huawei phone series powered by domestically produced chips.
This economic warfare is not only, or even primarily, about short-term profits. “More than the economic benefit to the US, the underlying motivation is to maintain US global hegemony”, Lin says. High-tech manufacturing, especially of semiconductors, is the foundation of military “innovation”. Any country whose missile components are produced in enemy territory has a big problem. The key reason that US imperialism is preventing China from accessing foreign technology is to prevent its military expansion. Mass reserves of foreign exchange will furnish China with the capital to build its own, so the US is trying to block Chinese exports as well. 
Beijing is not, however, entirely left out in the cold. Russia and Iran have forged closer economic ties with it to recover from Western sanctions. The Economist magazine estimates that Russia has become the largest importer of Chinese cars: sales have tripled since the invasion of Ukraine, and Russian gas exports to China have spiked in return.
China remains the major trading partner of 120 countries. Despite complaints of Chinese steel dumping, most countries are unlikely to block super-cheap cars, phones and laptop computers. Some middle-ranking powers are exploiting the rivalry between Washington and Beijing, moving politically closer to one and economically closer to the other.
But if the aim of economic strategy is to build military power, China has a long way to go. Military spending has more than doubled since 2015, and its nuclear stockpile is set to quadruple by 2035. This still puts it far behind the United States, which is shoring up its comprehensive system of alliances.
China has rapidly developed its navy (by some measures now the world’s biggest) but can barely project power past its own coastline. Aggressive moves into waters to the east and south have angered its US-allied neighbours along the “first island chain” of the Pacific. Japan is negotiating its first new security pact with the United States in 60 years, while the Philippines has granted the US military access to more of its bases. Taiwan, which faces almost daily intimidation by China’s navy and air force, launched its first domestically built submarine in February. 
Chinese armed forces also suffer from corruption, inefficiency and inexperience. “China’s military has definitely achieved a major upgrade from twenty years ago, but I don’t think the government leadership has full confidence in their military”, Lin says. “They have not engaged in any conflict since the invasion of Vietnam in the late 1970s.”
China’s economy is slowing and vulnerable—but not weak. Its high-tech export plan is a strategy to maintain growth and build military power. That’s because, as tensions increase between powerful countries, everything from electric cars to media apps is treated as a potential weapon.

China after the slowdown

Channel Seven gives special treatment to special people.
Former Liberal Party staffer Bruce Lehrmann, who assaulted his colleague Brittany Higgins on a senator’s couch at parliament house, is just the most recent. Lehrmann is a rapist—but a rapist whose $2,000 weekly rent was paid for by Seven News until early April, once his disastrous defamation case came to a head.
To clinch exclusive interviews with Lehrmann for the Spotlight program, the network also paid a total of $10,000 for Thai massages, paid for flights for a golf trip to Tasmania and reimbursed Lehrmann for his outlays on cocaine and sex workers, according to ex-producer Taylor Auerbach. The subsequent Spotlight puff pieces gave the rapist a national platform to try to destroy his victim’s reputation.
“Gutter journalism” is too lofty a term: this was scraping the bottom of the sewer. Yet this was no one-off.
It follows Seven’s support for war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith in his defamation suit against Fairfax journalists. That case backfired too: the court on 1 June 2023 agreed with reporters that the decorated ex-SAS soldier murdered four Afghans in cold blood. Total legal costs, which reportedly reached $35 million according to an article in the Guardian, were paid for by Seven West Media’s billionaire owner and chair Kerry Stokes. 
Is this also the tale of a slimy commercial power struggle? Lehrmann’s defamation suit targeted Network Ten journalist Lisa Wilkinson, while Roberts-Smith fought reporters from the Nine Entertainment Company. The war for market share between Seven, Nine and Ten is the stuff of corporate legend, and perhaps played a part. But it is not the full story: Seven also backed Lehrmann, and especially Roberts-Smith, to push the toxic politics of its billionaire owner.
Stokes is arguably the country’s most influential news mogul. As well as the television channel, Seven West Media controls 30 newspapers and exercises a near-monopoly over Western Australian news. 
In 2022, Perth Mayor Basil Zempilas introduced him as “the man who really runs the state” at an annual dinner hosted by Stokes and attended by then WA Premier Mark McGowan, according to the Australian Financial Review’s Mark di Stefano. “Stokes gathers oligarchs to kiss the ring”, the newspaper headlined its report of the following year’s gathering.
It’s easy to see why Stokes backed Roberts-Smith: his undying support for Australian militarism. In the 1990s, Stokes founded the charity SAS Resources Fund to support returned soldiers and served as chair of the Australian War Memorial from 2007 to 2022. Roberts-Smith was general manager of Seven Media Queensland, and fellow ex-SAS Andrew McMahon was chief operating officer for Stokes’ private company Australian Capital Equity.
In the Lehrmann case, Liberal partisanship played a role. Seven’s decision to pay more than $100,000 for mudslinging interviews was partially damage control for a party still haunted by misogyny scandals.
Some are questioning whether Seven can survive. Free-to-air television is already the sick man of the media, kept on life support by declining year-on-year advertising revenue. SWM’s share price of $0.21 is far from its 2007 peak of nearly $15. The company is currently worth $323 million—down 48 percent since August. It’s a fraction of Stokes’ total wealth of $10.1 billion, which overwhelmingly comes from investments in property, mining and construction.
But Stokes may be determined to hold on to the ailing network, because owning a traditional media empire pays in other ways. For example, it can disseminate ideas that its owner wants more people to hold, and therefore is quite a political tool. 
You can partly thank Seven for Pauline Hanson’s rehabilitation after a decade in the political wilderness. The disgraced former politician resurfaced on morning show Sunrise before the 2016 federal election. The network paid at least $5,000 for 20-odd appearances, according to Crikey estimates. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation went from zero to four senate seats in that election, and still has two. 
When Australian terrorist Brenton Tarrant slaughtered 51 Muslims in Christchurch in 2019, Sunrise host David Koch described his white supremacist manifesto as “like One Nation immigration policy”—but Seven kept Hanson as a regular guest anyway.
Then there’s plain-old Seven “news”: round-the-clock promotion of law-and-order politics, turning the camera away from society’s most elite criminals and zooming in on its pettiest. On 22 April, the top twenty headlines at 7news.com.au included twelve related to interpersonal violence and car crashes, including “Man attacked and robbed by women after kind act” and “Domino’s worker allegedly throws pizza at customer”.
Finally, with its power to steer policy debate, and make or break political careers, traditional media acts as a force multiplier for big business’s built-in leverage. Describing the influence of the West Australian, Glenn Dyer and Bernard Keane write at Crikey: “That paper functions as the in-house newsletter and chief enforcer of the mining and fossil fuel lobby that controls that state and its government-for-hire, currently managed by WA Labor”. Now, mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is funding the launch of another Stokes project, online newspaper the Nightly.
With 30 established newspapers and another just released, the sewer at Seven is just one burst main in Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit.

Kerry Stokes’ empire of shit

Big companies are pulling the rip-off of the century. Coles and Woollies, Qantas and Virgin, AGL and Origin Energy, and the Big Four banks are passing on inflated prices and interest rates to consumers, cutting workers’ real purchasing power and boosting company profits to record highs. 
Last month, Coles and Woolworths were put in the spotlight. A Four Corners report exposed how the grocery duopoly, which controls two-thirds of the supermarket sector, is driving up the cost of the weekly shop. They have been doing so by means of things such as “shrinkflation”—when products get imperceptibly smaller for the same or greater price—and “was/now pricing”, a trick played with the “discount specials”: for example, when goods are advertised as “50 percent off” a price they were never sold for.
The anger is palpable. The federal Labor government is under pressure to do something, and a parliamentary inquiry is now under way. Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci’s resignation after a train wreck interview was a delicious interlude, but predatory pricing will carry on as usual.
The most obvious and immediate fix—government-mandated price caps on essential goods—is also the most popular, supported by 70 percent of the population, according to a 2022 Guardian Essential poll. But the very idea draws gasps from economists and journalists. Sydney Morning Herald business columnist Elizabeth Knight described a maximum price on a loaf of bread as “draconian”, “extreme” and “beyond the pale”. Labor for its part refuses to make any encroachment on corporate power.
The only solution offered by commentators and “experts” is to introduce more competitors against corporations with too much market power. Even an Inquiry into Price Gouging and Unfair Pricing Practices commissioned by the Australian Council of Trade Unions identifies the problem as “Australia’s less than fully competitive economy”.
Why would more competition help to lower prices? Economists argue that when customers have more options, each retailer feels more pressure to offer goods that are cheaper, better quality or both. 
The same argument is used to justify the selling of public utilities and services (often “natural monopolies”). Qantas, for example, was once government-owned and run with fully unionised workforces. When it was sold, thousands of workers were sacked, and their benchmark pay and safety standards were torn to shreds. Last year, the airline was revealed to be selling tickets to overbooked or cancelled flights. Now the experts say Qantas, already opened to competition, just needs to “open up to competition”. What did Albert Einstein say about insanity?
Economists cannot get their story straight about monopolies. Big corporations are just as often accused of “flooding” the market with cheap goods (such as when Coles introduced $1-a-litre milk in 2010) as of artificially inflating prices. Well-unionised monopolies such as Sydney Trains are accused of providing workers with “cushy” pay and conditions, while non-unionised ones such as Amazon are condemned (rightly, and by very different people) for the most aggressive forms of exploitation and management despotism.
The problem is not monopoly, but the profit motive. Every company, big or small, is allowed to produce what our society needs entirely for its own selfish gain, in ruthless competition with each other. As a class, the capitalists enjoy a collective monopoly over everything we need to function and survive. 
When workers collectively organise and strike against this state of affairs, things can improve. When they don’t, businesses always take the shortest path to profit: cutting wages, worsening services or raising prices.
Spreading capitalist power across several companies gives us no more control over the prices and distribution of goods and services. It can even make things worse.
Streaming is a good example. The free and easy age of torrenting whatever you liked was monopolised by Netflix. That was bad. When Netflix was “opened up to competition”, we got Binge, Stan, Hulu, Disney, Amazon Prime and Apple TV, each with a separate subscription fee and a separate slice of the popular shows.
Capitalist competition inevitably gives rise to its “opposite”, monopoly. Telephone monopoly AT&amp;T Company (founded by Alexander Graham Bell) was forced by US courts in 1984 to break up into many “baby Bells”. By the 2000s, the babies had merged back to form AT&amp;T Inc. and two other giants that still dominate US telecommunications.
In fact, the freer the competition, the faster the concentration of capital. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook each began as one of many start-ups battling in a deregulated, globalised free-for-all. Within a generation they were some of the largest corporations ever to roam the Earth.
Adding five or six more competitors is a pro-capitalist diversion from a cost-of-living crisis fuelled by competition. Let’s take “too much market power” to its logical conclusion: let’s just have one food distribution system in the same way we have one road system. 
The whole food supply chain—from farms to warehouses to supermarkets—should operate according to a single, democratic plan. The population can decide collectively on what goods should be produced and for what price—if any. The workers at each stage of the process should plan together how to carry out their part of the work. The concentrated wealth, technology and organisation of modern-day monopolies make this a far more realistic proposal than breaking them up. 
Under democratic planning, however, there’ll be no place for profit and exploitation. So for defenders of capitalism, “beyond the pale” doesn’t begin to describe it.

Market forces got you down? Try more market forces

What would you do with $1.5 million? You could put down deposits on ten median-priced Sydney houses, or you could buy one outright and spare yourself the crushing mortgage repayments.
What about the next $1.5 million? And the next? If you were mining barons Gina Rinehart and Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest or billionaire real estate developer Harry Triguboff, the question would be posed repeatedly. Since 2020, the three richest Australians have collectively amassed this much money every hour.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for four years.
Welcome to the “New Gilded Age”. That’s what British charity Oxfam is calling this era of post-pandemic wealth accumulation. Its 2024 report Inequality Inc. estimates that Rinehart, Forrest and Triguboff have increased their wealth by $50 billion, while the richest 47 Australians enjoyed a 70 percent surge.
It seems like impossible fortunes to spend, but they find ways. Twiggy’s got a $42 million luxury resort island off the Great Barrier Reef. Triguboff bulldozed and rebuilt his $100 million Vaucluse compound. With their recent respective buyouts of R.M. Williams and Akubra (Twiggy), Driza Bone and Rossi Boots (Gina), Australia’s two biggest mining bosses are trapped in a sartorial showdown: who can most own the high-fashion-outback-billionaire look?
“You’re rich, but are you family office rich?”, Primrose Riordan asks in the Australian Financial Review. Family offices deal with dynastic fortunes so enormous that the families in question require full-time staffers to manage them. These firms have doubled to more than 2,000 in a decade, KMPG researchers say, and offer discretion or downright secrecy for clients. 
“They don’t want the employees of the company knowing what they are investing in or spending their money on”, one family office founder explained. When surveyed by the Private Wealth Network, 70 percent of family office clients said they hid their wealth from friends and relatives too, to avoid the “awkward”, “uncomfortable” and “isolating” situation of being asked to share any of it.
If the age doesn’t feel very gilded for you, it’s because you’re footing the bill. These fortunes are built dollar by dollar on the labour and losses of the rest of us. Underneath Australia’s rosy image as an egalitarian “lucky country” lies a deep and wide class divide. There is luxury and extravagance above us, and poverty all around. 
Even before the pandemic, in the decade after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a staggering 93 percent of the benefits of all economic growth in Australia went to the richest 10 percent, according to research by the think tank Australia Institute. 
Now, an even greater transfer of wealth from workers to bosses is taking place. Real wages last year fell at their fastest rate in four decades. Rising prices on the shelves have forced 70 percent of people to cut back on groceries, a Guardian Essential poll found last year.
For corporate profits, it’s the opposite. A new report on price gouging from former Australian Consumer and Competition Commission chair Allan Fels tells us that they reached their highest level ever recorded in 2022 and were the key driver of inflation. 
On housing too, it is the best of times and worst of times. Rents are up 30 percent since 2020, according to CoreLogic’s latest Rate Review. So are property developer Lang Walker’s profits, the Financial Review informs us. Mortgage costs have skyrocketed with interest rate rises, while the big banks recorded $32.5 billion in profits last year.
Colleen Carina, a 60-year-old assistant nurse working in aged care, is living out of a Coffs Harbour motel room provided by Mission Australia. “I’m looking at rentals at $460 a week”, she told the Guardian in August. “Say I’m making my average wage, maybe $600 or $700 a week, by the time you pay for fuel, you put money away for electricity, or even a car account—how do you live?”
If you ask the rich, it’s Colleen’s own fault. Once workers cut back on non-essentials like haircuts and dental care, we’ll finally have more money to give to our needy banks. “Put your shoulder to the wheel”, Sally Tindall, research director at RateCity implored ABC radio listeners on 7 February. “If you put just an extra $200 a week to your mortgage, you could save tens of thousands of dollars down the line.”
It is tempting to think that, because our hard work appears like magic in their bank accounts, the rich are sincerely this uncoupled from reality. But then they give the game away. In a clip since gone viral, developer Tim Gurner tells a Financial Review Property Summit that workers have forgotten their place:
“We need to see unemployment rise—unemployment has to jump 40 to 50 percent, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”
Gurner belongs to a new generation of “longevity bros” with so much money they are terrified of dying before spending it all. With $150 million, he is opening a chain of exclusive anti-ageing clubs called Saint Haven. Members will pay tens of thousands a year to access meditation caves, cryotherapy, IV drips and spiritual healers.
“It’s not just superstar business elite, we’ve got an incredible musician who will be a member, we’ve got one of the top bankers in Australia, we’ve got a jewellery store owner, an artist and a restaurant owner, a completely diverse mix”, Gurner explained to the Financial Review, before adding that “it will be quite cult-like”.
I’ll take the eternal abyss, thanks.
“Corporate power”, Oxfam says, “is an unrelenting inequality-generating machine”. Fuelled by increased exploitation, the machine is speeding up.

Australia’s ‘New Gilded Age’

Davos, a small skiing town in Switzerland, once a year becomes the world’s most consequential insane asylum. On Europe’s highest populated mountaintop, 3,000 of the global elite meet to ponder why the climate they pollute is so polluted, why the people they impoverish are so poor and why the world they fight over is at war. 
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is the ruling-class Comic-Con, a fantasy fortress where the 1 percent’s 1 percent can save the world that they are sending to hell. 
The 2024 iteration in mid-January offered five days of unadulterated bullshit. (All sessions can be viewed at weforum.org.) One session was about “liberating science”; another was about “empowering humans and machines in industry” (empowering machines?). Amid the melting slopes, hundreds, including “ecopreneurs”, arrived on carbon-spewing private jets to hear skiing equipment CEOs talk about the challenge of “alpine economies at +2°C”. 
This year’s conference theme? “Rebuilding trust”.
And who wouldn’t trust Ronald W. Hovsepian, CEO of Indigo Agriculture. “For so long, we’ve taken advantage of those natural resources and not put that into the economic equation”, he told attendees on 17 January. “So we do look at it and we include it in the way we look at the markets and how we’re going to tie together a number of the players to bring the value chains to life as part of that overall journey.”
That sentence sure was a journey.
Davos coincides with the release of British charity Oxfam’s annual report on global inequality. The 2024 issue, Inequality Inc.: A Gilded Age of Division, estimates that, in the last four years, the wealth of the world’s five richest men more than doubled to US$870 billion, while the poorest 5 billion are even poorer than they were in 2019. 
“The sharp increase in the cost of food and other essentials that began in 2021 has become a grinding new reality for many families across the world as they try to buy oil, bread or flour without knowing how much they can afford this time, or how hungry they and their children will have to go today”, the report notes. 
Meanwhile, at US$190 billion, the combined annual profits of oil and gas companies are triple their pre-pandemic average. Luxury goods profits have doubled—evidenced by the suits, watches, jewellery and handbags opulently displayed at Davos. Women, by the way, made up 28 percent of all attendees, which conference organisers said is really good for a creepy old-boys’ club and “marks a significant milestone in the 54-year history of the annual meeting”.
The point of the WEF appears to be demonstrating that the rich live, quite literally, in a different part of the atmosphere. According to swissinfo.ch, up to 5,000 Swiss armed guards were deployed to protect the conference. That’s called rebuilding trust one hotel-rooftop-sniper at a time. 
Architects of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza lined up at the conference buffet. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen all spoke about the democratic, rules-based order. In the same week, a Palestinian doctor in Gaza told Al Jazeera about having to amputate his own daughter’s leg without anaesthetic. 
On 19 January, attendees were safely, soundly and warmly “anticipating the Middle East in 2024”. The region is a century-long victim of the West’s rapacious competition to secure oil, gas and trade routes. Now that it’s teetering on the edge of general war, Davos-goers wondered how they might extract even more profits from the place. 
That was a common theme at the conference’s more serious sessions. Capitalists don’t solve problems; they anticipate them. They try to keep pace with the “risk environment” created by their own blind profiteering. If the Congo introduces child labour restrictions in its cobalt mines, how badly will margins be affected? If Taiwan is invaded and millions are vaporised in a nuclear war, where will be the next happening place for silicon chip production? When will interest rate hikes finally lift the unemployment rate and reduce the heat on wage bills?
But for many, the WEF was about getting down to brass tacks. The talks, delusionally self-serving as they were, were a flimsy pretext for getting the world’s shiniest shoes into the same building and under the same tables. 
“Ask almost anyone who is here, and they will tell you—some freely, some coyly—that their chief purpose in Davos is to get several weeks’ worth of high-level business meetings and networking done in three to five days”, Hans van Leeuwen, the Australian Financial Review’s Europe correspondent, reported. “I didn’t overhear anyone during my trip discussing climate change, the challenge of artificial intelligence, the likely fate of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia this year, or the world’s economic prospects.”
Behind the images projected to the world (was anyone watching?), Davos was capitalism in all its glory. Thousands of executives and politicians wheeled and dealed, wined and dined. An arms deal here, a fossil fuel project there, a tax break on top. 
Freshly gorged and eyes glazed, they sauntered to another plenary to pretend to listen to think tankers, stakeholders, thought leaders, trendsetters, philanthropists, trustees, advisors, editors, commissioners, directors, professors, consultants, analysts, wonks—an army of grubby bullshit artists waxing and wanking over issues their coked-up audience couldn’t care less about—unless there’s a buck to be made. Show us the money!
It is amazing that Thomas Hobbes’ famed war of all against all never broke out on the conference floor. But the wars are always fought by people other than these. The WEF spirit is to revel in what the parasites share in common: a lifestyle, a worldview, a set of economic interests to exploit, pillage and plunder.
If you thought the prospect of the whole world going down the capitalist gurgler would provoke a reflective thought or two, think again. The Davos set are doubling down. New far-right Argentine President Javier Milei gave the keynote address, which the Financial Times reports was “met with warm applause”. According to him, there is not a thing wrong with the system: 
“Talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures ... Thanks to free trade capitalism, the world is now living its best moment. Never in all of mankind or humanity’s history has there been a time of more prosperity than today ... I would like to leave a message for all businesspeople here ... You are social benefactors. You are heroes. You are the creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.”
These people rule the world. Davos is not a padded cell for Ayn Rand LARPers debating how much heroin in children’s lollipops would maximise marginal utility. It’s real life, just not as we know it. 
“The Davos Matrix is plugged directly into the mainframe”, Hamilton Nolan wrote in the Guardian about last year’s conference. “The decisions that these people make in their little atmosphere of illusion percolate out into the real world, leaving the rest of us holding the bag as wealth trickles further and further upwards.”
Little wonder that polls show all-time low levels of trust in governments and corporations, as capitalists rampage across the globe leaving destruction, poverty and resentment in their wake.
“Yes, it’s a volatile, tense world we are living in”, Rio Tinto CEO Jakob Stausholm admitted in a panel discussion on 18 January. “But it’s opportunity rich. And I think the opportunity far outweighs the problems.”
That’s the Davos spirit.

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