In Buenos Aires, the Workers’ Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, MST), a Trotskyist party, is holding a day school for militant workers from the Italian Hospital. It’s 8:30am and the worker militants are trickling in, carrying pastries, sandwiches and maté gourds (a local tea). They are here to discuss everything from the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to the concept of exploitation and the legal framework in Argentina under which unions operate. Some comrades are dressed in their hospital scrubs.
These workers are facing a fierce offensive from President Javier Milei and the hospital bosses and are struggling for their own living conditions and the rights of their class. 
Argentinian workers have experienced a protracted crisis for most of the 21st century. Hyperinflation has eaten away the purchasing power of workers’ salaries as much as it has eaten away the credibility of the major political parties. This includes Peronism, the nationalist party that historically has attracted working-class allegiances. Since last year’s election of Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist and far-right outsider, a new offensive has been launched against every aspect of working-class life. In the first six months of the Milei government, poverty levels rose by more than 11 points to reach 53 percent of the population. 
Two significant sectors facing attacks are health care and universities. Nurses and medical professionals from the Italian Hospital are discussing the history of the Argentine workers’ movement to prepare for the struggles of today. Between sips of maté they give thoughtful answers to questions about labour history and thought experiments about how left-wing trade union militants should respond in various scenarios.
One of the questions passed around on slips of paper and discussed in small groups is something like: “You’re creating a new trade union. What principles should it adopt to prevent bureaucratisation?” Another is: “A local factory is being shut down. What political and legal tactics do you adopt?” 
These are not purely hypothetical questions. In 21st century Argentina, there have been waves of working-class struggle resulting from debt crises, hyperinflation and a series of bosses’ offensives attempting to radically restructure government and society in favour of capitalists. In 2001, under President Fernando de la Rúa, a wave of protest known as the Argentinazo
was unleashed. Protests, strikes, factory occupations and unemployed workers’ struggle partially pushed back a government offensive and toppled five presidents in the space of two weeks. 
Today, the workers are answering very practical questions, and some have direct experience of trying to figure out how to respond to workplace closures. A discussion about the limitations of workers’ cooperatives ensues. They also talk about the possibility of demanding the government nationalise private firms. 
In the crisis of the early 2000s, a range of strategies were adopted by Argentine workers, many of whom were left with factories and workplaces abandoned by the bosses. Some were occupied and transformed into cooperatives, but most of these could not last after government subsidies were withdrawn. As one comrade comments, “The market forces us to exploit ourselves”. Other workplaces struggled for nationalisation: “That workplace closed down, but each worker was guaranteed a job”. 
Our translator, Frederico, tells us the period during and after the 2001 Argentinazo was important in rebuilding the influence of Trotskyist groups, including the MST, in the trade unions. Influence was built through hard-fought battles against the entrenched Peronist leadership. When Frederico says “hard fought”, it is not a metaphor. Going against the hegemonic Peronist leadership in trade unions is no small thing in a country where Peronist trade union bureaucrats are willing to cheat, collude with the bosses and threaten the left with hired muscle. 
On our lunch break, the comrades share pastries, including those named by the anarchists of the early Argentine workers movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were given outrageous titles, which parodied the villains and methods of the workers’ and radical struggles: bolas de fraile (“friar’s balls”), facturas
(“bills”) and bomba (“bomb”), so named after the anarchist penchant for individual violence. Cesar, a socialist militant introducing the discussion, references these pastries as an example of the hidden history of the working-class struggle that existed long before the arrival of Peronism in the ’40s and ’50s. 
A revolutionary socialist lawyer joins the second half of the meeting to teach the delegates about their rights and the relative and always conditional protections of capitalist law. The lawyer comrade is conscious of conveying the gulf between the pretty words of the law and the reality of workplace exploitation. As she says of a UN convention on labour rights, of which Argentina is a signatory: “The bosses use this paper to wipe their asses”. 
Delegates, she says, should know their rights so they can be steadfast defenders of the workers they represent. She is quick to demonstrate, through legal precedent and a wealth of practical examples, that the courts cannot be relied on: they enshrine only those rights that are backed by the organisation and force of the workers.
On Wednesday, we head to the Hospital Garrahan, the largest paediatric hospital in Argentina. Norma Lezana is chairing a meeting of health workers from across the country. Norma is another MST militant and secretary general of the union. They meet in a room in the hospital; others join on Zoom. Worker after worker rails against the inaction of the dominant trade union bureaucrats. One says:
“Enough of controlling the nurses and saying that we are doing politics; the truth is the bureaucracy should be ashamed. We don’t want more [leaders] who don’t represent us. We want true union representation that defends the workers and the entire health team, of course, but for us nurses, as the most discriminated against in the entire health system, there is total disgust and total indignation.” 
Another comrade from the province of Río Negro talks about the collusion of the provincial governors with Milei’s austerity plan, including Peronist governors: 
“Their relation to the privatising project is explicit. The governor of our province? He invited us to withdraw from the public health system if we are not satisfied with that. And this has been happening. The [health] teams are empty in the mountains. They’re closing! They’re closing the intensive care services.”
In attendance at the meeting are activists from the universities. Two socialist students from the medical faculty of a Buenos Aires university speak on the importance of linking the struggles of the public health sector to the fight for public universities. The students are preparing for a march on 12 November, building from a wave of university occupations last month. They invite the health workers to their demonstration and explain that the medical school is discussing the struggle taking place at the Hospital Garrahan. 
Another speaker, Luciana Franco, from the nursing graduates’ association, talks about the struggle of Buenos Aires nurses to win official recognition as “professionals”. Nurses from the association are about to attend the Buenos Aires legislature to pressure politicians to adopt their plan for professional recognition. They have been invited there by Cele Fierro, a deputy from the Workers’ Left Front—an electoral coalition of revolutionary parties from the Trotskyist left. 
After the meeting, Norma invites us back to the hospital later in the week. From 10 in the morning to 10 at night workers from the Hospital Garrahan will be on strike. A festival will take place all day as part of the struggle. As Norma says, this fight is to defend three sectors: the public health system, the families of the patients who rely on the hospital and the workers inside it. 
On Wednesday morning, we wake to the news that Donald Trump has won the presidency in the United States. What this means for workers in the US and around the world is still unclear. Surely it will give a boost to far-right projects the world over, including the government of Javier Milei. Milei believes, or hopes, that Trump will waive debts that the Argentine government owes to the US. If delivered, this could significantly boost the credibility and success of the Milei’s economic shock plan. 
The left the world over could learn a lesson from the serious, hard-headed organising taking place in hospital wards and tyre factories, on the streets and in the universities in Argentina. In the face of rising inequality around the world, a climate crisis and the surging influence of the far right, no-one is coming to save us but us.

Chloe Rafferty

In Argentina, the struggle continues

Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Palestine has now brought the Middle East to the brink of regional catastrophe. But if you open up a newspaper in the West, you’ll read that the only nuclear-armed power in the Middle East is the victim of aggression from its neighbours, including one it has just invaded for the fourth time. And while Israel is doing nothing but “defending itself”, its regional rival Iran is being painted as enemy number one. 
The irony is that Iran was once a vital US ally in the Middle East. The post-WW2 period was a golden age of US influence in Iran, during which control over the spigot of Iranian oil was transferred from the British to the US empire. 
In 1953, the US sponsored a coup against progressive nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent the nationalisation of Iranian oilfields. In the following decade, Iran became increasingly authoritarian. The anti-communist and pro-Western king, or shah, was a welcome friend to the US in an era when pan-Arab nationalism was threatening US interests in the Arab states. 
In 1979, a revolution swept aside the hated shah. The revolution, which had opened up the possibility of liberation for workers, women and oppressed minorities, was ultimately hijacked by the clerics, who implemented a new authoritarian state, the Islamic Republic. Unlike the previous autocracy, this regime did not ally with US imperialism, instead presenting itself as intractably hostile to US influence in the Middle East. 
Iran’s anti-Western posture has given a measure of popularity to an otherwise despised regime. And no wonder, given the US has long been the greatest purveyor of violence and instability in the Middle East. 
As a rival capitalist power, Iran has benefited from anti-US feeling and from the US’s strategic failures in the region, particularly during the “War on Terror”. Iran’s major rival, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was removed from power by the US in 2003, and Iran was able to take advantage of the power vacuum created when the US proved unable to establish a pro-Western government. 
Iran’s regional influence was also boosted by the defeat of Israel in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an independent militia strategically allied to Iran, following Israel’s invasion in 2006. In the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Iran also carried out military interventions to prop up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad with the support of Hezbollah, and sponsored the Houthis in Yemen against local forces and a Saudi-led coalition of Gulf states. 
Renewed Iranian influence has presented a strategic dilemma for US imperialism. In the last 15 years, there has been debate in the US ruling class about whether confrontation or containment is the best approach. The Obama-era Iran nuclear deal signed in 2015 represented a pragmatic response to the failure of US occupations in the Middle East. The deal sought to balance overwhelming US military superiority and deterrence with a partial loosening of sanctions on Iran in exchange for a commitment to end Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The motivation for the deal was hardly peacenik: Obama was attempting to tie up loose ends in the Middle East the better to carry out a “pivot to Asia” and prepare for war with China. 
In the intervening years, Trump tore up the nuclear deal and carried out the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Aside from plying their ally Israel with weapons and levelling ever greater sanctions on Iran’s economy, the US has not had a coherent strategy for confronting or containing Iran. 
There is no shortage of anti-Iranian hawks in the US today. When asked in an interview with 60 Minutes what country represents the “greatest adversary” to the US, Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris claimed that Iran was the “obvious” answer. At a campaign event in North Carolina, Donald Trump encouraged Israel to strike Iranian territory to “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later”.
And while there are no doubt differences of opinion in the US elite about Israeli strikes on Iran—whether to avoid hitting oil infrastructure, which would risk destabilising oil prices, and whether to avoid attacks on nuclear facilities, for example—if Israel decides to strike, the US will back it. 
It is absurd to suggest today, as so many in Israel and the West do, that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. The opposite is true. Israel has never been more secure. The Gulf states have all but normalised relations, Egypt maintains the barbaric blockade on the Rafah crossing into Gaza, and Jordan shoots down Iranian rockets to defend Israel. Israel, on the other hand, poses an existential threat to any neighbour that finds itself at odds with US imperialism. 
A comparison of their military capacities and security alliances shows a stark gulf between them. Israel is a rich, nuclear-armed power with the backing of US imperialism and spends nearly three times Iran’s annual military budget. Iran is a relatively weak power, strained under the weight of crippling US sanctions. This is not the clashing of two comparable powers but an attempt to assert full spectrum US and Israeli dominance in the Middle East, which should be resolutely opposed. If war emerges between Israel, backed by the US, and Iran, socialists should be for Israel’s defeat.
Iran’s government is an authoritarian capitalist regime that brutally oppresses its own population. Animosity from the US and Israel does not make it progressive. The anti-government protests and strikes that accompanied the Women, Life, Freedom movement in 2022 were a positive development that required solidarity. Opposition to an attack on Iran, and the desire to see Israel roundly defeated, does not reflect political support for the Iranian regime, just as opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 did not imply support for Saddam Hussein. 
Now as then, anti-war activists in the West have a responsibility to reject the lies and expose the hypocrisy of Israel and the West’s wars—current and threatened—in the Middle East.

How Iran became Western enemy number one

The annual Australian Financial Review (AFR) Rich List has, for the last 41 years, tracked the obscene accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class. <a href="https://www.afr.com/rich-list">The 2024 list</a>, published in June, shows that Australia’s richest 200 people now have a collective fortune of $625 billion, up 11 percent in a year.
Compare that to the experience of workers, pensioners and the unemployed. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures released in February show that, in the year to September 2023, Australian workers <a href="https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2024/02/australians-suffer-worlds-biggest-living-standards-collapse/">suffered the biggest drop</a> in household disposable income per capita in the developed world. And <a href="https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/news/new-data-shows-wealth-gap-widening/">research</a> published in April by ACOSS and the University of New South Wales on inequality in Australia showed that 45 percent of the increase in household wealth since 2003 has gone to the richest 10 percent (those with at least $2.6 million).
When reading the headlines about inflation, it’s easy for the real drivers of the cost of living crisis to be obscured. Media pundits talk about rising prices and stagnating wages as if these were natural processes over which no-one has any control. But inflation occurs because capitalists put prices up, and wages stagnate because they don’t raise them. The people who make these decisions have names and (prestige) addresses, and the AFR’s list provides a handy guide to some of the most heinous of them.
Five of the top ten fortunes have been built on extraction, with iron ore oligarch Gina Rinehart ($40.6 billion) sitting at the top of the list for the fifth year in a row. For the first time, Rinehart’s wealth has cracked the $40 billion mark, up $3.2 billion in a year—equivalent to “earning” the median Australian annual wage of $67,600 approximately every ten minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Other miners in the top ten include recently separated pair Nicola ($16.9 billion) and Andrew Forrest ($16.8 billion) of Fortescue Metals, and Ivan Glasenberg ($14.9 billion), former head of Glencore, Australia’s largest coal producer. Joining them is Australia’s Trump-wannabe Clive Palmer ($22.8 billion), whose $40 million super yacht <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/clive-palmer-superyacht-australia-rescued-from-sandbank-after-grounding-gold-coast/87670a40-e621-4c00-8977-190ba3797cde">recently had to be towed to safety</a> after running aground on a sand bar for the second time in a year.
Clive’s laissez-faire attitude to steering boats is understandable. He’s enjoyed a more or less completely risk-free lifestyle for decades—safe in the knowledge that, as one of Australia’s richest mining bosses, the government will always have his back. Under current Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, this has included record-breaking government subsidies for fossil fuels, which <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/fossil-fuel-subsidies-in-australia-2024/">increased by 31 percent</a> in 2023-24 to $14.5 billion. 
In the midst of a historic housing crisis, property developers continued to feature prominently in the Rich List. Coming in at number two is Australia’s biggest landlord Harry Triguboff ($26.5 billion) who, as head of Meriton, has a rental portfolio of 10,000 apartments. “I tried all my life to make housing affordable”, Harry <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-07/harry-triguboff-billionaire-property-developer-building-meriton/6676962">told the ABC</a> in 2015. “The more affordable the house, the more money I make.” 
In Sydney, where an estimated 3 percent of people live in a unit built by Meriton, rents rose by 13.6 percent in the year to March. Meriton itself has contributed to this. It made headlines last year when its Sydney Waterloo complex hit renters with an increase of 45 percent. Around the same time, a<a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11642127/Meriton-urges-landlords-raise-rents-amid-hot-rental-market-international-students-return.html"> leaked email Meriton bosses sent</a> its leasing and building management team called on agents to “ensure you’re pushing rents as hard as possible” at a time when “the market is on fire”. 
It seems (surprise, surprise) that “making housing more affordable” wasn’t quite so important to Triguboff or to his ability to make money as he made out.
Rich listers from the mining and property industries are being joined in increasing numbers by tech billionaires. The insufferable Mike and Annie Cannon-Brookes ($24.4 billion combined)—the self-styled “environmental investor activists” behind software-as-a-service company Atlassian—lead the pack. Atlassian’s profitability was helped along last year by the sacking of one in twenty of its employees. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that taxpayers are footing most of the bill for the company’s new headquarters—with the New South Wales government coughing up $48.2 million to help build “Tech Central” in Sydney’s CBD. 
Another recent addition to the AFR’s list from the tech sector is Ed Craven ($4.5 billion), whose wealth shot up by $1.4 billion, or 45 percent, in the past year. Craven’s company Stake.com has grown into one of the world’s biggest gambling enterprises off the back of crypto-currency deposits. It sounds shady, and it is shady—taking money from often desperate people, and providing a means of laundering money from criminal enterprises, just like regular casinos, but with the added benefit of getting around the kind of minimal regulations that apply when regular currency is used.
Craven <a href="https://www.forbes.com.au/news/billionaires/how-stake-made-australias-ed-craven-a-crypto-billionaire/">has been described</a> as a “self-made” billionaire. Yet, like so many other rich listers, this is at best a half-truth. Ed’s father Jamie Craven was a senior finance executive who was banned from working in the industry for five years and jailed for six months for his part in the <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/what-happened-inside-spedley-19990318-jgk1l">downfall and bankruptcy of Spedley Securities</a> in the 1980s. It appears the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Admittedly, some members of the Rich List didn’t get a leg-up from wealthy parents. Some got one from the government—making their massive fortunes, among other things, by running privatised government services at insanely inflated prices. 
Take the Murphy family ($750 million), who scraped into the list at number 193. Robin Murphy and his sons Rory, Adrian and Daniel run Canstruct International, the company that built the Nauru Regional Processing Centre—a detention centre for refugees—on behalf of the Gillard Labor government in 2012. 
In 2017, under the Turnbull Liberal government, Canstruct was brought back to run the detention centre under a five-year contract. By the time its contract ended in 2022, it had been given $1.8 billion in public funds for its services, despite the number of refugees detained on Nauru having fallen from more than 1,000 to just 100. According to government figures, Canstruct was, by 2021, receiving almost $12,000 a day per refugee detained.
Torturing refugees is all in a (highly lucrative) day’s work for the kinds of upstanding characters who make up Australia’s richest 200 capitalists. 
The $625 billion these parasites collectively control is just a small fraction of the rapidly expanding wealth of Australia’s capitalist class as a whole. The market capitalisation of the top 200 companies listed on the ASX is more than $2.5 trillion. Imagine what could be done with that wealth, and the enormous productive infrastructure and human labour that went into making it, if we didn’t leave it all in the hands of people like Gina Rinehart, Clive Palmer and Robin Murphy.
These are people whose sole interest in life lies in amassing ever greater wealth for themselves—no matter the cost for everyone else. They are practically begging to be expropriated. If we’re to build a world of justice and equality, they’ll need to be.

Australia’s rich list: 200 capitalist parasites begging to be expropriated

As the First World War neared its end, ANZAC soldiers charged through the Palestinian village of Surafend al-Amar in a rum-soaked orgy of violence. It was early evening on 10 December 1918, and around 200 soldiers entered the village, expelling some of the women and children. Then they proceeded to bayonet and burn their way through the community, killing between 40 and 137 civilians. 
In a taped recording held in the <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C88026">Australian War Memorial archives</a>, first brought to public attention by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2018/dec/10/the-moment-that-forever-changed-my-perspective-on-anzac-mythology">author Paul Daley</a>, Ted O’Brien, from the celebrated Australian Light Horse, related that the men “had a good issue of rum” and “done their blocks” when they “went through [the village] with a bayonet”. 
This episode is unlikely to have made it into any dawn service speeches. After all, ANZAC Day is not about remembrance; it’s about selective amnesia. Recalling the horror of trench warfare only to venerate the sacrifice of the fallen is an exercise in avoiding fundamental truths about imperialist conflict: that the sacrifices were at the altar of profit, power and empire. 
There is a line running from the violence of the ANZACs in Surafend to the genocidal violence Israel is unleashing on Gaza. That line charts the course of imperialism, profit and colonialism, which have shaped and reshaped the Middle East. 
What were Australian diggers doing in Palestine in 1918 anyway? They certainly were not there for “mateship”. Australian soldiers played an important role conquering territory in what would become British mandate Palestine.
The British colonial possession of Palestine had already been secured by the generals of the allied forces long before Australian troops set foot in Gaza. In late 1915 and early 1916, British diplomat Mark Sykes and French counterpart François Georges-Picot had drawn up a secret agreement giving London control of Palestine and Paris control of Syria when the war concluded. With a few strokes of a pen, the Sykes-Picot agreement had carved up the Middle East, deciding the fate of millions. 
(Incidentally, the failed campaign that landed Australian troops at Gallipoli was actually part of upholding the <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0968344520953455#fn1-0968344520953455">1915 Constantinople Agreement</a> between the British and the Russians. The deal promised the Russian tsar Constantinople (Istanbul) as part of the postwar carve-up if he agreed to keep sacrificing his peasants in the eastern front against Germany.)
Over the past few months, those opposed to genocide have learned the names of many towns and cities across the Gaza Strip. We watched in horror as the Israeli military obliterated Gaza City, occupied Khan Yunis and laid siege to Rafah. 
In World War One, the ANZACs knew these towns well. They were the sites of victories for the British Empire as its forces swept from Cairo across the Sinai Peninsula, driving back the Ottomans and occupying territory soon to be conquered by the major European powers—not only Gaza, Beersheba and Jerusalem, but also Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. 
The ANZACs played a major role in the violence that established British mandate Palestine. This was an essential precondition for the Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), when 750,000 fled or were driven from their homes with the establishment of Israel, and for the occupation and apartheid system Palestinians endure to this day. 
As Australian troops captured Beersheba (just south of today’s West Bank) on 31 October 1917, the British war cabinet approved the text of the Balfour Declaration announcing British support for the Zionist aspiration to secure a foothold in Palestine. This was a pivotal part of the chain of events leading to the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948.
The Zionists have not forgotten this legacy. At the <a href="https://beersheba100.com.au/home/events/israel.html#:~:text=Commemorations%20in%20Israel%202017&amp;text=Describing%20the%20significance%20of%20the,enter%20this%20stage%20of%20history%E2%80%A6">100</a><a href="https://beersheba100.com.au/home/events/israel.html#:~:text=Commemorations%20in%20Israel%202017&amp;text=Describing%20the%20significance%20of%20the,enter%20this%20stage%20of%20history%E2%80%A6">th anniversary</a> commemoration of the battle, in the modern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the ANZACs had “liberated Beersheba for the sons and daughters of Abraham”. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull added that the ANZAC victory “did not create the state of Israel but enabled its creation”.
In World War One, the Labor Party was as committed to the cause of imperialism <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-drive-to-war">as it is today</a>. Labor PM Andrew Fisher declared at the outbreak of war that Australia would fight for the British Empire “to the last man and the last shilling”. 
There’s another tradition from the First World War that’s worth remembering, but it isn’t talked about in the dawn services or any of the flag-waving celebrations of militarism. It’s the tradition of anti-imperialist resistance, class struggle and revolution.
World War One was a time of bitter class conflict. Against the backdrop of massive wartime repression and persecution of radicals, there was a wave of struggle, from the Great Strike of 1917 to the two referendum campaigns that defeated conscription. 
Trade union militants built a Labor Volunteer Army. Thousands of workers pledged to resist industrial or military conscription by the “capitalist military oligarchy.” The Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary syndicalist group, played a leading role in the anti-conscription campaign. Among other things, the group published a famous anti-war poster mocking the establishment:
“To Arms! Capitalists, parsons, politicians, landlords, newspaper editors, and other stay-at-home patriots. Your country needs YOU in the trenches!!!” 
The experience of many rank-and-file Australian soldiers turned them against the system of capitalism that produced the horror of the trenches. Working-class soldiers returning to grinding poverty were compelled to lead bitter strikes like the <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/disturbing-the-peace-riots-and-the-working-class/">1919 riots in Fremantle and Townsville</a>. 
In Europe, insubordination and rebellion in the trenches turned to revolution. The 1917 Russian Revolution was sparked by the crisis of the imperialist war. One of the first actions of the Bolshevik government was immediately to negotiate for peace. The Bolsheviks published all of the secret war agreements of the Allies, including Sykes-Picot, and declared its solidarity with workers and oppressed people around the world. 
ANZAC Day, on the other hand, is about burying the secrets to prepare workers for the next slaughter.

The ANZAC spirit they would prefer you forget

The truth, it turns out, won’t set you free: under capitalism it can get you locked up. That’s what Julian Assange discovered when he spoke truth to power. 
Today, the Wikileaks founder is languishing in Britain’s notorious Belmarsh Prison, awaiting extradition to the United States to face charges that could send him to prison for 175 years. He is charged with 18 felonies, including seventeen counts of espionage, over the publication of hundreds of thousands of classified documents in 2010. If convicted, he will join the likes of socialist Eugene Debs, anarchist Emma Goldmann and Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning, all of whom have fallen foul of the 1917 Espionage Act due to their opposition to war. 
According to his wife, lawyer Stella Assange, extradition would be a death sentence. Assange is physically and mentally destroyed. He has now spent five years in the maximum security Belmarsh Prison, often described as Britain’s Guantanamo Bay, where many inmates spend up to 22 hours a day in solitary confinement. 
His crime is journalism. Assange and Wikileaks did more to expose the lies and war crimes of the US and its allies during the War on Terror than all of the rest of the media combined. This included thousands of leaked diplomatic cables, torture manuals, classified military reports and war zone footage of civilians being murdered. 
One of the most widely viewed Wikileaks releases was the <a href="https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/">Collateral Murder</a> video. The footage was from inside an Apache helicopter flying over Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007. It recorded an exchange between two US military personnel as they were given permission to open fire on a group of Iraqi men: 
“Light ’em all up.” 
“Keep shoot’n. Keep shoot’n.”
“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards.” 
“Nice.”
The aerial assault resulted in the murder of seven civilians, including two Reuters journalists. When help arrived to assist the wounded, the soldiers were again given clearance to shoot. This time two adult civilians who stopped to assist the wounded were killed, along with two of their children. 
Collateral Murder was just the tip of the iceberg, demonstrating how commonplace the murder of civilians was in the occupation of Iraq. 
In 2010, Wikileaks released hundreds of documents revealing beatings, burnings and lashings of detainees by their Iraqi captors under American tutelage. One report by US soldiers in June 2007 documented that a victim “... received extensive medical care at the Mosul General Hospital resulting in amputation of his right leg below the knee[,] several toes on his left foot, as well as amputation of several fingers on both hands. Extensive scars resulted from the chemical/acid burns, which were diagnosed as 3rd degree chemical burns along with skin decay”.
In another release, the leaked manual from Guantanamo Bay prison showed that the US army had a policy of hiding some prisoners from Red Cross inspectors and holding new prisoners in isolation for two weeks to make them more compliant for interrogators.
The Afghan War Logs, released by Wikileaks in 2010, included 91,000 classified documents that revealed a civilian death toll significantly higher than that being reported by the US military. In one instance in 2007, US special forces dropped 2,000 pounds of bombs on a compound where a “high-value individual” was allegedly sheltering. While the US senior commander reported the incident caused the death of 150 Taliban fighters, the Wikileaks document revealed the death toll included at least 300 civilians. As Assange noted, the Afghan Files were “the most comprehensive history of a war ever to be published during the course of the war”.
Wikileaks was also one of the first outlets to expose the financial and military support the US gave to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. The Yemen Files revealed the true scale of the US’s covert military involvement in the Middle East’s poorest nation. In one cable, the president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is reported as saying to the US ambassador, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”. Years before it became public knowledge, Wikileaks exposed that the US was shipping arms to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen while the US continued to deny any role in the conflict.
After profiting enormously from Wikileaks’ revelations, most of the mainstream media nevertheless hung Assange out to dry—parroting the unsubstantiated claim that his journalism put American secret agents and collaborators in danger. Just last year, a Sydney Morning Herald editorial wrote that Julian’s “recklessness” had him “[t]rapped in a limbo of his own making”. 
With the passage of time, most Australian news outlets have come out in favour of his return to Australia. The powerful he exposed are no longer themselves in power, which helps. But the media for the most part still don’t see Assange as one of their own, more a hacker with a vendetta than a journalist. In some ways, they’re right. Assange and his Wikileaks sources like Chelsea Manning did what no well-resourced liberal newspaper like the Guardian or the Washington Post was willing to do. They published the secrets of US imperialism with no concern for the damage done to the credibility of the US military, or the personal repercussions it would have on their careers and ability to access the powerful. 
At a time when ABC radio presenters are being sacked for tweeting about Israel’s actions in Gaza, it would do well to remember the record of the media establishment during the last major US war in the Middle East. 
According to a Brown University report released last year, 4.5 million to 4.6million people have been killed as a result of the War on Terror. In the early days of the war, the US empire and its junior partners like Australia could rely on a largely compliant and loyal media to help them get away with this atrocity. 
One of the early innovations of that war was “embedded journalism”. This was the practice of war correspondents being attached to specific units of the military—an in-house service in effect. In 2003, at the start of the war on Iraq, there were 775 reporters and photographers travelling as embedded journalists. When asked why the US military initiated this practice, Lieutenant Colonel Rick Long of the US Marine Corps was surprisingly honest. “Frankly, our job is to win the war”, he said. “Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment.” 
Assange’s reporting and subsequent persecution expose the hollowness at the core of Western democracy. It shows that the values our rulers profess to uphold—democracy, transparency, accountability, free speech and human rights—are highly conditional and subordinate to advancing empire and the political and corporate interests that underpin it. 
So while the West cooperates to crush dissent and make examples of those who engage in it, it has no qualms about criticising its rivals that engage in the same practices. When Putin critic Alexei Navalny was found dead in an Arctic prison after suffering what Russian authorities have called “sudden death syndrome”, Biden was quick to express his moral outrage and declare Putin responsible. He even invited Navalny’s widow to his State of the Union address, which she rightly turned down. 
Biden’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. It’s not just that the US is currently starving and obliterating the children of Gaza, giving it no credibility to talk about human rights. But it is also the case that in 2021, a former national security adviser revealed that senior CIA figures had considered options for assassinating Assange if they couldn’t leverage the Ecuadorian government to kick him out of its London embassy—exactly what the US is supposedly so morally outraged about when another regime does it. 
The Australian political class also bears responsibility for Assange’s fate. His Australian citizenship counts for nothing when stacked up against the importance of the US alliance. Federal parliament recently passed a toothless and face-saving motion calling on the UK and US to bring “this matter to a close so that Mr Assange can return home”. Weakly worded motions aside, Albanese has refused to exert any public pressure on the Biden administration. 
When asked on the ABC’s Insiders program if it was time for Biden to intervene in the case to drop charges against Assange, Albanese’s answer was “no”. 
The Australian ruling class are happy quietly to step aside and let the US make an example of Assange. After all, the Australian parliament has passed anti-whistleblower and surveillance legislation that rivals the Bush-era Patriot Act. The Australian state is keen to cover up its own crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and get on with the business of preparing for the next war. And the Australian Federal Police were happy to conduct raids on ABC journalists to prosecute those who leaked the Afghan Files, the documents that exposed the war crimes of Ben Roberts-Smith and his SAS cronies. 
Secrecy and lies are essential to the functioning of capitalism. It is a system that depends on large-scale violence as part of the competitive struggle for profit and access to markets by different states. The war on Iraq was launched on a lie—that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—promoted by the Bush administration and parroted by its allies in the UK and Australia. The war was carried out with Orwellian euphemisms: kidnapping and torture became “extraordinary rendition”, mass murder was “winning hearts and minds”, invasion and occupation were “regime change”, “liberation” and “bringing democracy”. Unlike the bulk of the mainstream media that largely repeated these lies and spin, Assange told the truth, and for that he is paying an enormous price. He deserves our full support.

What Julian Assange taught us about empire

University bosses have ripped off workers to the tune of $83 million over the last three years, according to the National Tertiary Education Union, which has uncovered widespread wage theft across the sector. 
The NTEU’s Wage Theft Report, released last month, documents 34 separate instances of theft in 22 higher education providers. With cases still ongoing at Monash University, Deakin University and the University of New South Wales, the figure is set to rise to more than $90 million. 
The largest instances occurred at some of the richest and most prestigious sandstone universities. Melbourne University ranked number one for wage theft—and number one for executive pay. Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell received $1.5 million last year, higher than any other university boss, while his institution’s total stolen wages bill was more than $31 million. 
Rampant casualisation in universities has allowed bosses to structure wage theft into their business model. According to the NTEU, two-thirds of university staff are on casual or fixed-term agreements. At Sydney University, casual staff make up 52 percent of the workforce. If you include fixed-term contracts, the proportion of insecure workers rises to 74 percent. 
The Wage Theft Report shows just how systematic wage theft practices are, and how university managements rely on insecure work to get away with them. 
Unpaid overtime is one of the biggest contributors to wage theft. It’s easier for universities to set unrealistic time frames for tasks when casual tutors know that their contract is reviewed at the end of each semester. Even the Fair Work Ombudsman was forced to admit that the practice of payment based on fixed rates (rather than time actually worked) has led to “systematic underpayment of employee wages”. 
Universities have also been caught dramatically underpaying workers for marking and other work, both inside and outside the classroom. 
For some workers, unpaid wages have totalled tens of thousands of dollars. One casual academic at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts had to be paid back $35,000. 
But getting caught with their hands in the till has done little to stop university bosses from stealing again. For example, a year after Melbourne University was caught underpaying 1,000 casual academics by $9.5 million, management admitted that it had to pay back another $22 million to more than 15,000 workers. 
In this context, the Labor government’s proposed Higher Education Accord is a joke. University workers and students have nothing to gain from round-table discussions with university bosses who can’t abide by the minimum legal employment requirements. 
The strategy of cosying up to the bosses and the ALP has gotten us into this situation—a corporatised environment in which higher education becomes a debt burden for students and hyper-exploitative for workers. 
The legal victories the NTEU has won so far are a welcome relief for many casual and insecure workers. In the long term, though, it will take much more than legal challenges to fight systemic wage theft. University bosses are mounting legal challenges to halt or whittle down claims made by union members. Monash University, for example, is asking Fair Work for permission to change retroactively the enterprise agreement so that the university’s $8.6 million in wage theft can be made legal. 
Workers across the higher education sector will need a broader fight against low wages, real wage cuts and the casual and insecure work that have made wage theft endemic. NTEU members at Sydney University are once again striking this semester for an above-inflation wage rise and more secure work. This is a good start, but we’ll need more and longer strike action coordinated across the sector to undo the damage already done.

Criminal wage theft in Australian universities

Workers across the country are facing a largely one-sided class war. A combination of bosses raising prices on essential goods, the housing crisis and profiteering on the part of energy companies is leading to a cost-of-living crisis. Conditions are ripe for a fight back: unemployment is at historic lows, and bosses are so desperate for labour they’re trying to entice pensioners back to work. 
Yet there’s no indication that union peak bodies have an appetite for a fight. Unions NSW—the peak union body in New South Wales—has celebrated the paltry scraps offered by the new ALP government, while the secretary of the ACTU, Sally McManus, has rushed to reassure her Twitter followers that 1970s-style cross-industry wage rises—which workers won at the peak of union power in Australia—are a thing of the past.
In this context, the ongoing strikes in New South Wales are a very welcome and much-needed development. Across the state, nurses and midwives, public and Catholic school teachers, railway workers, road workers, public servants and university workers have all taken strike action. 
At the forefront of this small but significant uptick in struggle is the New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association. This union is the largest in the state, with a membership of more than 70,000. In February, nurses and midwives took their first statewide strike action in nearly a decade. They have followed this with a further two days of statewide action, raising the stakes in their second strike to a 24-hour stoppage. Before the statewide actions, many individual branches of the union had taken their own industrial action, including walkouts at Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Hospital over plans to replace critical care nurses with less experienced assistants and, before that, actions at Blacktown and Westmead hospitals. 
The strikes have unleashed the anger of workers, who are burned out due to overwork and unsafe staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nurses and midwives have been campaigning for over a decade for legislated nurse to patient ratios in New South Wales. The pandemic has thrown a hospital system already on the brink of crisis into disarray, with staff shortages due to illness and hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients and a backlog of delayed care. 
Nurses aren’t angry just about working conditions. The pay in the industry is also appalling, partly because the workforce is dominated by women. Despite opposition from their leaders, rank-and-file nurses have successfully pushed to raise the pay claim of the union to 7 percent. An amendment moved by rank-and-file socialist activists in a mass members meeting in July rejected the Perrottet government’s 3 percent pay offer. 
The push to raise the pay claim was in opposition to the strategy put forward by the union’s leadership. While the officials wanted to continue to campaign for ratios, they argued to accept the Perrottet pay offer for this year. Rank-and-file activists won the vote twice—first in the July mass members meeting and then by an even greater margin on a branch-by-branch basis, after the officials forced a revote. Central to the argument of rank-and-file activists was that ratios and a real pay rise above inflation are not counterposed: nurses and midwives need to fight for both, and they need a serious strike campaign that can win regardless of who is in government. 
While the nurses and midwives union leaders’ support for strikes is welcome, their approach to the campaign is not a departure from the conciliatory approach that has led to decades of wage stagnation and worsening working conditions. Like most of the public sector unions, the officials’ strategy primarily revolves around electing a state ALP government. 
But it’s a hard sell convincing New South Wales unionists that Labor is on our side. NSW Labor are so right wing that they are yet to support a single one of the union’s demands. In fact, state ALP leader Chris Minns explicitly ditched Labor’s commitment to ratios, which was previously Labor election policy, claiming it is too expensive. Nor will Labor support an above-inflation pay rise for nurses, and Minns has been at pains to distance his party from public sector unions, telling striking teachers that their demands would not be met under a Labor government. 
Union officials in New South Wales are open to calling strikes and strengthening their demands precisely because their union’s negotiations are taking place under a Liberal government, and the state election is not until March next year. By contrast, in Victoria under the Andrews government, the latest public sector negotiations have been abysmal. The Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union rushed through an agreement last year with a pay rise of just 2 percent—a significant pay cut given inflation then was already at 5.1 percent. In an impressive display of opposition, nearly 40 percent of members voted against the deal. 
Federally, it’s the same problem: Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated the Albanese government expects workers to pay for the system’s inflationary crisis, arguing that workers must accept that real wages will go backwards until 2024, and the unions have demonstrated little willingness to challenge this. 
Yet wherever a lead is given, rank-and-file workers have shown themselves willing to demand more and fight for it. The strikes by nurses and midwives, teachers and transport workers should be an inspiration to unionists around the country. We desperately need more socialists and left-wing activists willing to challenge the current strategy of the most influential union leaders. 
In New South Wales, we will need sustained strike action to end the public sector pay cap and win real pay rises and better conditions. The pay cap introduced in 2011 will not be abandoned lightly—it’s an effective tool of the government and the bosses to suppress wages. When it was introduced, there was a campaign of strikes, and even joint stoppages by public sector unions against Liberal then Premier Barry O’Farrell, including a 30,000-strong protest of striking teachers, public servants, firefighters and nurses. But rather than continue a sustained campaign of escalating joint strike action, the unions backed down in the face of fines by the Industrial Relations Commission. Instead, they pinned their hopes on electing a Labor government. 
There must be a break from this strategy. Labor has made no promises to concede union demands, and state Labor governments across Australia have implemented their own public sector pay caps. We need a new approach that fights for workers’ rights regardless of which party is in charge, and which uses all the weapons available to us: stop-works, strikes, mass protest, solidarity action. Without it, living standards will continue to be trashed by bosses and politicians alike.

New South Wales public sector workers on strike

New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association members across the state have voted branch-by-branch to reaffirm their commitment to fighting for a pay rise of at least 7 percent, in defiance of union officials. 
At a mass meeting on 29 June, union members first rejected the union officials’ proposal to accept the government’s 3 percent pay cap over the next year. An amendment moved from the floor by rank-and-file members, who are also socialists, called for the pay claim to be raised to at least 7 percent to keep up with inflation. Members voted narrowly to accept the amendment, and in retaliation, the union officials organised to re-run the vote on a branch-by-branch basis—a method of voting that favours the officials.
After the mass meeting, the union leaders sent an email to all members arguing that they should accept the current 3 percent pay offer—a significant pay cut in real terms—on the grounds the Industrial Relations Commission is unlikely to overturn the government’s pay cap. The 3 percent pay offer is well below the inflation rate, and below the 4.75 percent claim the union called for at the beginning of the industrial campaign.
Nurses and midwives have once again rejected this argument. As one union member told Red Flag: “A majority of members voted in favour of this amendment because they know that the cost-of-living pressures will continue to rise, and nurses deserve so much better than having their pay packet be slashed in real terms over the next year”. 
The cost-of-living crisis featured heavily in rank-and file arguments to maintain a higher pay claim. A new report modelled by public sector unions shows that nurses, paramedics and teachers in New South Wales face real wage cuts of more than $7,200 a year if the pay cap stays in place. Workers are facing price hikes across the board, with energy prices increasing by 141 percent this year, and interest rate rises lifting average mortgage repayments by $351 per month. Combined with the enormous stress health workers are under due to the pandemic and the long-term under resourcing of hospitals, it is no wonder nurses and midwives have an appetite to strike for a proper pay rise. 
Contrary to the hopes of the union officials, the margin of support for amending the pay claim to 7 percent was impressive in the branch-by-branch re-vote. At the Royal Prince Alfred hospital branch, 73 percent of members voted in favour, 75 percent voted in favour at the Prince of Wales hospital, 71 percent at Sutherland and 64 percent in Shellharbour. Where active rank-and-file unionists campaigned among their workmates, the vote was highest. 
After three separate days of state-wide strike action so far in this campaign, the push to increase the pay claim is much more than words and sentiment. But to win the 7 percent demand, more serious strike action will be needed. 
Nurses and midwives know the government isn’t going to concede to a 7 percent pay rise and improved conditions without a fight and without support from other public sector workers. In a positive sign, in an email to members after the re-vote, the union officials called on branches to prepare for further state-wide action. As a delegate from the Prince of Wales hospital, who also led the push to increase the pay claim, argued: “What we need now is sustained strike action to win this. Our strikes earlier in the year pushed the government to marginally increase their wages cap—we have to keep that up until they remove the wages cap and give us the pay rise we deserve”.
Nurses and midwives have voted for this pay claim at a time when public sector workers across industries are taking industrial action. New South Wales public servants and railway workers have all taken separate strike action. Public and some private school teachers have taken joint strike action for the first time ever. All of these workers are facing state government pay caps which are in reality pay cuts. The nurses and midwives call for a 7 percent pay rise should encourage activists in these unions to raise their claims and escalate strike action. 
“We know the government is not going to give us this pay rise without a sustained fightback and so we will need strikes across the health system. But we also need strikes across the public sector—nurses are not the only ones being screwed over by this government”, another union member argued. 
Joint strike action across the public sector, encompassing nurses, teachers, public sector workers and rail workers would be a significant escalation that would raise the temperature on the government to scrap the cap. 
As the largest union in the state, the nurses and midwives can set an important precedent. In the words of one rank-and-file nurse:
“The state government has no interest whatsoever in paying nurses and midwives a decent wage and are determined to make public sector workers everywhere pay for the crisis. We absolutely need the trade union movement to not compromise on the question of pay, and to raise the stakes. Nurses, midwives, teachers, train drivers and everyone else need to organise longer, more militant strikes that disrupt the state government’s business as usual. 
“Most of all, we need to organise joint strikes across different industries. Ultimately, we need to lay the basis for a general strike in the public sector that makes the state government too scared to cut another cent of workers’ pay or undermine our conditions any further.”

Nurses’ union raises pay claim under pressure from rank and file

2001 was a watershed in Australian politics—the year that the Liberal federal government, led by John Howard, enacted the “Pacific solution” of offshore imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers, thumbed its nose at the Aboriginal stolen generations, joined the US-led “war on terror” and participated in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which became Australia’s longest war. It was a year that was decisive in shifting Australian political culture to the right and creating a meaner, nastier society and a more violent and repressive state.
With the release of government cabinet papers twenty years later—mandated for 1 January every year—you might expect some searing indictments of the Howard government from political commentators and journalists surveying its legacy. You would be disappointed. 
The Guardian pre-empted the release of the 2001 cabinet papers with an interview with Howard, in which the former prime minister claimed that his refugee policies “saved lives”. A piece in the Conversation bemoaned the end of the “far more nuanced view on climate change” that the Liberals apparently held in the halcyon Howard days, despite Howard refusing to sign on to the criminally low-ball emission targets of the Kyoto Protocol. 
The ABC’s James Glenday was quick to note the cultural sensitivity Howard’s cabinet demonstrated in their eagerness to ensure no member of the community felt vulnerable after 9/11 due to their “ethnic or cultural heritage”. This is Olympic medal gaslighting from journalists keen to rehabilitate a racist, union busting war hawk. It’s all the more galling given the enduring negative influence of the Howard years on contemporary politics. 
Only a few months ago, we watched the final wretched moments of the two-decade occupation of Afghanistan. None of the journalists interviewing Howard asked any tough questions about a war now accepted as an embarrassing failure by even its most sycophantic champions. Nor were there questions about the allegations, detailed in the 2020 Brereton report, of war crimes committed by Australian troops—including the murder of civilians, cover-ups of massacres and the defiling of corpses. 
In the political environment after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Howard enacted some of the most draconian national security laws in the Western world. A suite of anti-terror laws, including the Anti-Terrorism Act, undermined civil liberties here more than President George W. Bush’s notorious Patriot Act did in the United States, granting greater powers for surveillance, warrantless searches and detention without charge. 
“No other nation can match the volume of Australia’s counter-terrorism laws. Their sheer scope is staggering”, academics Rebecca Ananian-Welsh and Keiran Hardy wrote in a Conversation piece last year. “Many ... are unprecedented in Australian law, outstripping even our historical wartime powers.” George Williams, writing in the Melbourne University Law Review in 2011, estimated that Howard’s government passed a new anti-terrorism statute every 6.7 weeks on average. 
The corporate press, in its deferential treatment of Howard “the statesman”, barely raises a squeak of criticism about this new Orwellian age that Howard ushered in.
Nor is there much commentary about the intensely Islamophobic atmosphere that his government stoked from 2001. Howard should be remembered for the racist violence of Cronulla in 2005, when thugs descended on the beaches to attack Lebanese and anyone of Arab appearance. The prime minister, confronted with a race riot, refused to acknowledge that racism played any role in people of colour being hunted down and bashed in broad daylight by mobs of white men. 
Howard should be remembered for the refugee families locked up in their thousands in remote prisons such as Woomera, Baxter and Port Headland and in the offshore gulags of Nauru and Christmas and Manus islands. His government plumbed new depths when it came to the brutal treatment of asylum seekers. Two incidents mark John Howard as a man ahead of the curve for cruelty: the Tampa and “children overboard” affairs. Both of have been left out of the cabinet paper release. 
In August 2001, a Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, rescued more than 400 refugees from a distressed fishing boat trying to reach Christmas Island in the northern Indian Ocean. When the government’s threats to prosecute the ship’s captain failed to prevent it entering Australian waters, Howard sent the military to intercept the Tampa to prevent the refugees from exercising their right to seek safety.
Australian soldiers boarded the ship and, after a standoff, forced refugees at gunpoint onto a Navy vessel that took them to a prison camp 7,000km away on the Pacific island nation of Nauru. Howard’s government then rushed through legislation to retroactively make his actions legal. In a creative piece of legal manoeuvring and with the Labor Party’s support, Howard changed the law to remove certain parts of Australian territory from the country’s migration zone. This kind of legal magic became the norm under both Labor and Liberal governments, reaching its zenith when Labor Prime Minister Gillard excised the Australian mainland from the migration zone in 2013. 
The day after Howard announced that a federal election was to be held, the Navy intercepted another fishing boat, known as the SIEV-4 (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel 4), which was carrying more than 200 refugees to Christmas Island. In an act of political bastardry, government ministers falsely accused the rescued asylum seekers of blackmailing the government by threatening to drown their own children if they were not taken to Australia. Photos were released, and splashed across the media, purporting to show that children had been “thrown overboard”. The reality was that the fishing vessel was in distress and sinking fast—the refugees had needed to be rescued.
The Tampa affair and the “children overboard” lies fuelled an election campaign infused with racism. Howard infamously declared during the campaign: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.
Former British Prime Minister and war criminal Tony Blair just received a knighthood, and George W. Bush—who along with Blair and Howard is responsible for the decimation of Iraq—has been rehabilitated. So I suppose no-one should be surprised that the Australian media would prefer to celebrate Howard as a great Australian statesman. 
But the rest of us shouldn’t be so quick to forget Howard’s true legacy.

John Howard’s despicable legacy

Sydney’s outbreak developed through the inaction of a government that staked its reputation on hostility to lockdown measures. Non-essential retailers like Bunnings, the Reject Shop and Gucci remained open weeks into the outbreak; Bunnings was told to reduce operations to click-and-collect only eight weeks into lockdown. But workers’ lives are being risked by more than the extremely broad interpretation of what is “essential”. Workers in genuinely essential workplaces such as food production, transport, child care for essential workers’ kids, aged care and distribution have been offered little or no protection.
Twenty-seven-year-old Iraqi refugee Aude Alaskar became the youngest person to die from COVID-19 in NSW, after he caught the virus from his wife, who works in disability support. Both workers were employed in truly essential industries, which would have to keep operating even in the strictest lockdown. Because of their young ages and the inadequacy and mixed messaging of the vaccine rollout, neither was vaccinated.
NSW has failed to introduce even the measures taken in the extended lockdown in Melbourne last year, when warehousing and distribution centres were limited to no more than two-thirds of their normal workforce on site at one time. Risk ratings were assigned to every industry, and personnel reductions were imposed accordingly. That resulted in 250,000 workers being stood down.
Last year, Victorians were advised that while meat would be available, there might be shortages of particular products. This was because meatworks across the state were required to reduce their output by a third, to carry out temperature checks on employees and to clothe workers in full personal protective equipment. This was after several meat processing and distribution outlets were among the largest clusters in Melbourne’s outbreak.
In NSW this year, businesses have largely been left to regulate themselves, as Berejiklian focusses on individual non-compliance in the broader community despite the fact that workplaces are the key source of transmission. At a recent press conference, NSW Deputy Health Officer Dr Marianne Gale admitted that this is the case, despite the government’s focus on “rule breakers” .“We’re seeing younger people and those who are often those authorised workers, those people who provide essential services, who work in aged care, work in disability, who work in healthcare settings, who work in factories, work in shopping centres. And so, transmission is happening between workplaces and households.”
Besides mandatory masks and poorly enforced social distancing, there have been very few extra safety regulations for essential workers. Supermarket workers in so-called hot spots were given priority vaccine access only in late July, and childcare workers are still lobbying the government for priority access.
Supermarket workers from high-transmission areas could have been paid to stay at home to curb the spread early in the outbreak, with reduced rosters to keep workplace density down. Restrictions could be placed on the number of customers allowed in store and click and collect services ramped up. Rosters could be organised in recurring groups to reduce the number of co-workers being interacted with and limit the risk of transmission.
Although we have known for 18 months that COVID-19 transmits through aerosols, very little has been done to ensure workplaces have better ventilation. Social distancing indoors and square metre restrictions are important but inadequate on their own. The NSW government could be inspecting all genuinely essential workplaces and mandating air filtration checks that ensure workplaces are not recirculating stale air and potentially spreading the virus.
In this outbreak, many childcare centres have been transmission sites. It’s a reflection of the disturbing reality that, unlike earlier strains, Delta is highly transmissible between children. According to NSW Health statistics, there have been more than double the number of COVID-19 cases in patients less than 19 years old than in the next highest age bracket. One hundred and fifty-seven childcare centres have been closed nationally as a result of outbreaks, but the government has failed to regulate the industry accordingly. Even bosses’ organisations, like the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia, are asking for guidance. The NSW government should make child care accessible only to the children of genuinely essential workers, and urgently provide frontline childcare workers with priority access to a vaccine.
`While mandatory testing has been imposed for many industries, its implementation has been a debacle. The public and private pathology system is overloaded, some people in western NSW waiting nearly six days for test results. In western Sydney, the lines for drive-through testing have been notoriously long, workers waiting for hours in their cars after work in hot spots like Fairfield. The state government has had months to prepare this infrastructure. Mandatory testing and vaccination should be made available at large essential workplaces, and other workers should be paid for any time spent being tested, vaccinated or isolated.
Berejiklian is quick to blame the “minority doing the wrong thing”, targeting individual non-compliance and reporting at every daily press conference on fines being issued for beachcombers and soccer games. But she has nothing to say about cracking down on bosses doing the wrong thing. Berejiklian wants to push the message that selfish individuals are to blame for the spiralling outbreak, not clusters overwhelmingly linked to workplaces and the unavoidable interaction of family members with workers.
As with every outbreak so far, the key way to ensure individual compliance with necessary health restrictions is to pay people adequately to stay home and provide government services to support people’s reduced movement. The minority we should be fining heavily are the bosses. There should be a ramping up of workplace health and safety requirements like ventilation, social distancing, reduced rosters and workplace quotas, and massive fines to businesses that fail to comply.
Similar measures need to be put in place in Victoria, where, so far, only the construction industry has had mandatory density limits imposed.
Berejiklian wants us to “learn to live with the virus”. We need to resist. That means fighting for more workplaces to be deemed non-essential and workers provided with full pay to stay at home during lockdown. There is also much more for unions to fight for in genuinely essential industries, such as ventilation requirements, reduced quotas with stand-down pay for those who lose shifts and an expansion of mandatory testing. It’s in the workplaces that the bosses’ hunger for profits most directly threatens all of our health and safety.

In Argentina, the struggle continues

How Iran became Western enemy number one

Australia’s rich list: 200 capitalist parasites begging to be expropriated

The ANZAC spirit they would prefer you forget

What Julian Assange taught us about empire

Criminal wage theft in Australian universities

New South Wales public sector workers on strike

Nurses’ union raises pay claim under pressure from rank and file

John Howard’s despicable legacy

Lock down essential workplaces - make them safe

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