Sydney University students have organised the largest Palestine solidarity action ever held on the campus—an 800-strong student general meeting (SGM) that voted for the university to cut ties with Israel.
Those ties include research programs with Thales, the sixth-largest weapons company in the world. In collaboration with Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, Thales produces the Watchkeeper drone, which has been used in Gaza. Sydney University also maintains exchange programs with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Israel Institute of Technology, which work closely with the Israeli military and security agencies.
The first SGM at Sydney University was held in 1971 and concerned another apartheid regime. Students at that meeting voted to boycott the South African rugby tour, which was eventually cancelled after students, trade unionists and Indigenous activists harangued and harassed the team across the country.
“This meeting represents a lot of hope”, Jasmine Al-Rawi said as she opened the meeting on 7 August. The activist group Students for Palestine, of which Al-Rawi is the convener, called the SGM.
The lecture theatre in the Eastern Avenue Auditorium slowly filled with hundreds of students. The queue outside stretched for more than 100 metres. Soon, an overflow lecture theatre was opened, and students filled that too. It wasn’t until half an hour after the scheduled start that everyone had finally taken their seat.
The meeting was chaired by Al-Rawi and Harrison Brennan, president of the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council (SRC). In her opening remarks, Al-Rawi spoke about the history of SGMs, and how they are an opportunity for students to practise a kind of mass, participatory democracy that is at odds with the usual running of the university.
SRC Education Officers Shovan Bhattarai and Grace Street moved the main motion of the night. “Above this lecture theatre there is an ad for the uni, which claims it is about ‘leadership for good’”, Bhattarai said. “But we know that is bullshit.”
After Bhattarai and Street introduced the motion, a Zionist and member of the Young Liberal Club spoke to oppose it. The audience was unsympathetic, to say the least. When the vote occurred, the supporters of Israel could muster only half a dozen or so to vote against the motion.
Anti-Zionist Jewish activist Yasmine Johnson rebutted the Zionist arguments. “A state that is based upon the oppression, the genocide, the apartheid of the Palestinian people—that is not a project of Judaism or of humanity”, she said. Johnson pointed to protests and sit-ins in America led by Jewish Voice for Peace, whose slogan has been “Not in our name”.
After the meeting ended, students marched out of the lecture halls and onto Eastern Avenue. Their destination was the Michael Spence Administration Building and Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott’s office for an impromptu protest to relate news of the student vote. 
The SGM came after ten months of organising and mobilising. In April, Sydney University became the first university outside of North America to establish an encampment, which activists set up on the Quadrangle lawns and which lasted for more than two months. The protests and teach-ins held at the camp spread awareness of the university’s ties to Israel, contributing to the overwhelming vote. 
Since the camp’s winding down, activists in Students for Palestine have been furiously getting the word out about the SGM. The patient and determined work of reaching out to everybody possible and making an argument about why they needed to be at the meeting laid the basis for the SGM’s success. 
The meeting also tried to engage students less involved or familiar with activism. By aiming to bring wider layers of students into the movement, Palestine solidarity activists can begin to mobilise to disrupt the business of usual of the university. That is the only strategy that could force our universities to end their complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Deaglan Godwin

Sydney University students vote to cut ties with Israel

The University of Sydney has introduced measures to clamp down on political expression and protest on campus. It is an escalation by management, and targets students campaigning against Israel’s genocide and fighting for a more just university.
On 27 June, university management quietly released its new “campus access policy”. The document states that organisers of any campus protest must give at least 72 hours’ advance notice to the university. The university assures us that “prior approval is not required”. However, there are conditions attached.
The policy contains a list of activities requiring prior approval, which is basically an ABC of activist essentials. It includes using “megaphones or amplifiers”—ubiquitous at any protest. It also includes “attaching materials, banners or structures to university buildings or fixtures” and “erecting temporary structures” such as booths, card tables, temporary enclosures, mobile structures and electronic signs. Under the policy, activists would need approval from the university to put up posters, hand out leaflets and distribute political literature. 
Then there is a list of “unacceptable activities”. Camping is high on it—undoubtedly a retaliation for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment that occupied the Quadrangle Lawns last semester. The list also includes “using a megaphone or other amplifier in close proximity to a person”. The document warns that anyone found to be engaging in these activities will be in breach of policy. The punishment? University security kick a student off campus. If you don’t comply? The document empowers security to detain people until the police arrive.
Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott is tightening the screws on student activists, who have humiliated the university over the past couple of months. The Gaza Solidarity Encampment shone a light on the university’s complicity with Israel’s genocide. Through rallies, teach-ins, class announcements and social media, activists highlighted to thousands of students the ties between Sydney University, weapons companies and the Israeli military.
Sydney University’s new measures align with similar moves at other universities. Students at the Australian National University, Melbourne University, Deakin University, La Trobe University and Adelaide University have faced disciplinary action in recent months for speaking out against the war on Palestine. 
Beneath empty statements about “respecting freedom of speech” and operating as a “marketplace of ideas”, universities across the country have proven to be hostile to activism against powerful political and commercial interests. While Sydney University honours the Aboriginal Freedom Rides of last century with a plaque at the very place the Gaza Solidarity Encampment pitched its tents, the activists of today are honoured with suspensions.
We refuse to accept these attacks on our democratic and civil rights. If they become the norm, they will rob Sydney University of the vibrant political culture for which it is known. Management’s measures extend not only to political causes, but to other activities. Must the Dog Society and the Drama Society beg Mark Scott for permission to advertise and promote their latest play or dog therapy session? In targeting pro-Palestine activists, university administrators have curtailed the rights and freedoms of all students and staff.
Students will fight these attacks on freedom of speech and our right to protest. Activists have written an <a>open letter</a> for students, staff, unions and other organisations to sign. Students for Palestine is planning a student general meeting in the second week of semester, which will consider a motion that university cut ties with Israel and repeal this draconian policy. We are determined to fight to defend our freedom of speech and right to protest.
Deaglan Godwin is vice president of the University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council.

Free speech under attack at Sydney University

The system of South African apartheid—the political and economic rule of a small minority of white people over the Black majority—was one of the most heinous ever to have existed. 
Black people were stripped of national citizenship, instead designated as citizens of artificial “Bantustans” (or “homelands”). They were robbed of the right to vote and form trade unions, and their political organisations, like the African National Congress (ANC), were banned. They were allowed to reside or work in “white” areas (most of the country) only with a government pass. If found without a pass, they were arrested, beaten and deported back to the Bantustans. These laws were enforced by a brutal police force and military, which were twice given extraordinary powers in government-decreed states of emergency.
This brutal system, which began in 1948, was eventually demolished in the early 1990s. It was brought down by a mass working-class movement, not simply top-level negotiations by political leaders, as is often taught. The struggle against apartheid holds important lessons for political movements today. Here are a few of them.
<h4>Lesson #1: Apartheid was a product of capitalism</h4>
Most histories paint apartheid as a peculiar aberration. Yet, elements of it prevail today in Palestine, and racism in various forms plagues all capitalist countries. Apartheid in South Africa was an extension of this structural racism, designed to meet the particularly brutal needs of South African capitalism. 
The profits of the white capitalist class were made off the backs of highly exploited Black workers. For a long time, South Africa’s most valuable export was gold, which Black miners dug out of the ground in gruelling conditions and for minuscule wages. In the 1940s, workers fought back and challenged the racist laws that prevented them from residing in certain areas or accessing skilled jobs.
The response of the ruling class was to double down on the repression of Black workers. By controlling the mobility of the entire Black population through the pass system, they could prevent workers from organising against their horrific conditions, as well as direct the unemployed into industries that needed a greater supply of labour. The need to preserve the rule of a small minority, along with the logic of profit accumulation, combined to create the racist apartheid system. 
Although racism is built into capitalism everywhere, the even more brutal and codified system of apartheid was necessary because the white South African capitalist class found themselves in an extreme minority, not only economically but also racially. As Jan Lombard, one of the chief ideologues of apartheid, put it: “If an unqualified one-man, one-vote election was held today in the Republic, a non-white leader with a communistic programme would probably attain an overall majority on a pledge to confiscate and redistribute the property of the privileged classes”.
<h4>Lesson #2: Apartheid was ended through mass working-class struggle, not peaceful negotiations</h4>
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all are its own gravediggers”, wrote Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto, referring to the working class. You could say the very same about apartheid. By so openly and brutally repressing the majority of South Africans, apartheid laid the basis for its eventual overthrow.
From 1973 onwards, Black workers began to organise. That year, a great strike wave broke out in the southern port city of Durban, which laid the basis for new independent (and illegal) unions. Over the next two decades, these would swell to become one of the biggest and most militant workers’ movements in the world.
School students and young people joined the struggle, often playing a particularly heroic role. The students of Soweto, a million-strong Black township outside Johannesburg, who in 1976 led a mass school walkout of 20,000 students, deserve special mention. Their decision to riot after police fired live rounds into their protest—killing 23 of them—sparked a nationwide rebellion that took months to put down. School boycotts and youth uprisings in the Black townships that began in the 1980s made sections of South Africa simply ungovernable.
This militancy and radicalism infected the workers’ movement, which by the early 1980s had exploded in size; by 1985, the trade unions had 800,000 members. In November 1985, students and workers in the Transvaal, the country’s mining and industrial heartland centred on Johannesburg, organised a stay-away (meaning everyone stayed at home). An estimated 300,000-800,000 people answered the call.
Two sections of the working class were particularly important: the mineworkers and metalworkers. In 1987, metalworkers in the Mercedes auto factory in East London won a gruelling nine-week strike. Three years later, the firm’s boss complained, “We have had a factory with worker control since 1987”. He detailed in an interview with the South African Labor Bulletin: “Supervisors used to clock in and then lock themselves in their offices for the whole day. They didn’t dare go out on the assembly lines”. When ANC leader Nelson Mandela was released from prison, workers fought for the right to make him a car. The car was completed, to the shock of management, with only a fraction of the usual faults.
By 1987, South Africa was on the brink of revolution. The capitalists were terrified and vacillated between offering concessions (but absolutely not the right to vote) and heightening repression.
A mass working-class and popular movement made the legal system of apartheid untenable. South African rulers were terrified that they might lose not just political power, but their economic power also. The recognition of this by the last white prime minister, F.W. de Klerk, was the “pragmatism” for which Western liberals lauded him when he died. Even when negotiations with the ANC began, the Nationalist Party government refused to concede the basic democratic right of “one person, one vote”. It took yet more political general strikes by workers to drag the government kicking and screaming into submission.
We’re taught that it is “great men” who make history. But it was neither apartheid’s last rulers, nor even just the anti-apartheid leaders like Mandela, to whom we owe a debt. It was ordinary people, waging a relentless struggle, who brought down apartheid. This has been the case for nearly every progressive change—whether it is universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, trade union rights, decolonisation or anti-racism.
<h4>Lesson #3: The movement inspired solidarity across the world.</h4>
When white troops fired on Black protesters in Sharpeville in 1960 and when police killed 12-year-old Hector Pietersen during the Soweto uprising, the brutality of apartheid was exposed to millions across the world. Coinciding with the political radicalisation of the 1960s and ’70s, these events sparked an international solidarity campaign that highlighted Western complicity with South African apartheid. 
In many countries, this was organised by the trade union movement, student radicals and Black activists. Here in Australia, opponents of apartheid organised a boycott of the white South African rugby team, the Springboks, when they toured Australia in 1971. The white rugby players soon found themselves flown around by the military and without a hotel to stay in, as the hotel, liquor and transport unions refused to assist the tour. Two leading members of the Builders Labourers Federation were arrested for attempting to saw down the goal posts at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
In 1986, the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group set up a permanent picket of the South African high commission building in London’s Trafalgar Square. The picket lasted for four years, until Mandela’s release in 1990.
The campaigns of global solidarity may have played only a small part in the struggle against apartheid, but they were important steps in building anti-racist and radical politics in their own countries and gave heart to those fighting in South Africa itself: they understood that they had supporters around the world. 
<h4>Lesson #4: Ending legal apartheid wasn’t enough</h4>
Nelson Mandela was declared the first Black president of South Africa on 10 May 1994, after the first election in which Black people had the right to vote. The ANC won 62 percent of the vote. This was rightly regarded as a momentous event in the fight against injustice.
However, ending the legal framework of apartheid could only be a first step. Apartheid had massively impoverished Black South Africans. In 1990, 42 percent of the population lived in poverty, Black unemployment was 37 percent, and only one in five Black households had running water. The anti-apartheid movement had always fought, not just for legal equality, but for real economic and social equality.
The platform the ANC was elected on appeared to recognise the need for drastic change. It promised a massive investment in housing and welfare. But the ANC was hamstrung by its own decision not to challenge the wealth and economic power of the white elite. Long before being elected, ANC leaders met with representatives of South African capitalism, such as Anglo-American, the multinational mining corporation. Mandela and other ANC leaders publicly assured the capitalists that they were not socialists and would not nationalise corporations. Once in power, they delivered on these promises. Neither the first ANC government nor successive governments since have tried to improve substantially the lives of most Black South Africans. 
When platinum miners at the Marikana mine went on strike in 2014, the ANC government sent in police to break it up. They massacred 34 workers—the greatest single use of lethal force by the state since Soweto in 1976. Cyril Ramaphosa, former head of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s, had by then become one of the board directors of the mining company that workers were striking against. He is now the country’s president. 
Capitalism everywhere relies on and perpetuates racism, inequality and misery. Winning real equality would have meant seizing and redistributing the wealth of the mining and industrial bosses—wealth generated by Black workers themselves.
This was possible in South Africa. Millions of workers were organised into trade unions by the late 1980s, and a significant minority were not only willing to struggle for the end of apartheid, but were inspired by a specifically socialist vision. However, this was counterposed to the vision of the ANC and the Communist Party, who sought to limit the struggle to narrowly ending apartheid. These former radicals then went on to establish themselves as the next ruling elite. 
Meanwhile, about two-thirds of Black South Africans are languishing in poverty, according to the South African Human Rights Commission. The World Inequality Lab reported in 2021 that the richest 1 percent have likely increased their share of wealth since the end of apartheid.
The millions of Black workers and students who fought with such heroism and bravery should be celebrated by all those who despise injustice. But to do away with systems of oppression entirely, an even greater struggle against capitalism is required.

Lessons from the South African anti-apartheid movement

Liberté. Egalité. Fraternité. That was the slogan with which the French masses overthrew the hated monarchy in 1789. Today, it stands above the door to every government building, town hall and police station. To the poor Black and Arab youth of France, anything but free or equal, these words must seem like a sick joke.
The recent murder of Nahel M, a teenage boy shot in cold blood by a police officer, shone a light on the reality of racism in France today. Police brutality, intergenerational poverty and the deportation of migrants are as prevalent in France as they are in the United States. Yet, official French politics is unable even to pronounce the term “structural racism” when talking about the police or the situation in the banlieues, the migrant working-class suburbs on the outer ring of major cities. Claiming to be “colour blind”, the French government refuses to collect data based on the category of race or ethnicity. Racial minorities are blamed for “ethnic separatism” simply for trying to assert their existence. The ideology of “laïcité”, an aggressive form of secularism, provides cover for discriminatory laws banning the veil.
The roots of racism in France, specifically against those of Arab and African descent, can be traced back to France’s large and brutal colonial empire. France once ruled swathes of the Americas, Northern and Western Africa, and South-East Asia. To this day, politicians refuse to recognise the reality of this legacy. In 2005, the conservative government of Jacques Chirac tried to <a href="blank">move a law</a> requiring schools to teach the “positive role” of French colonialism. Modern laws and rhetoric around Muslims echo those used in French Algeria, where women were forcibly unveiled. “La mission civilisatrice”, the French equivalent of the “white man’s burden”, contrasted the supposedly backward Islamic practices of Algerians with the secular enlightenment of the French Republic.
When a revolutionary struggle for Algerian independence erupted in 1954, the French state employed widespread torture, collective punishment and fascistic paramilitaries to cling on to its colonial rule. Known for decades as the “war without a name”, the atrocities committed by the French state went unacknowledged. In Paris in 1961, riot police murdered over a hundred Algerian immigrants protesting in solidarity with the revolution, dumping their bodies into the River Seine. Following the victory of the Algerian revolution, the paramilitaries were brought back to France, with many of them forming the shock troops of the far right, including figures such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the National Front. 
Islamophobia today is not merely a hangover from the era of colonialism; it has been repurposed and retooled as an ideological weapon in the class struggle at home.
Racism diverts economic and social grievances into debates about religion and ethnicity, helping to justify state repression and divide the multiracial French working class.
Workers of North African, West African and Middle Eastern heritage have historically been an important source of labour for French factories. Immigrants and their descendants continue to work in these factories today, but the decline of traditional industry has led to rising unemployment amongst migrant communities. 
Youth unemployment in the banlieues of Paris and Marseille ranges from double the national average of 8 percent to <a href="blank">as high as 70 percent</a> in one suburb of Marseille. Successive laws banning the veil in public service jobs mean that women who wear the hijab face the choice of not wearing the veil or being forced out of these jobs. Racist tropes about the laziness of immigrants are then mobilised to explain and justify this structural exclusion and impoverishment.
Over the past two decades, French governments have introduced successive waves of regressive legislation attacking the welfare state and workers' rights. However, the French working class have proven themselves to be not only victims, but persistent rebels. General strikes have paralysed the economy, students have occupied their high schools and universities and Yellow Vest protesters have blockaded highways and stormed the boulevards of Paris. Each time, the state has mobilised large numbers of riot police to repress these movements. Time and time again, politicians have turned to racism to win support for their exploitative and unjust project.
The major parties have weaponised racism to justify the huge expansion of the state’s repressive forces. Following terrorist attacks in 2016, the Socialist Party government of François Hollande declared a state of emergency, giving the state far-reaching powers to shut down protests. Armed soldiers are frequently seen on the streets of Paris. The French police may stop anyone at any time to check their identity papers. According to a <a href="blank">2012 report by Human Rights Watch</a>, brown and Black people were six to eight times more likely to be subject to these humiliating identity checks. 
Anti-terror laws and rhetoric create a siege mentality in the population, uniting workers and the state in an alliance against perceived threats to the French Republic, thereby disguising the most significant division in French society, that between the multiracial working class and the French ruling class. What “republican unity” can exist between a garbage worker and Bernard Arnault, boss of Louis Vuitton and the world’s richest man? 
Each time the real fissures in French society are exposed, the French ruling class reach for racism. Emmanuel Macron’s presidential term is a perfect example of this. Following the 2018-19 Yellow Vests revolt against increased fuel tax and the 2020 general strikes against a proposed increase in the retirement age, Macron introduced the Separatism Bill in 2021. This law extended the ban on the hijab beyond state employees to anyone working for a company contracted by the state, as well as allowing for the dissolution of NGOs or mosques that were found to breach a “republican engagement” contract. At the same time, the Minister for the Interior Gerard Darmanin launched a months-long campaign against “Islamoleftism”. In this racist fantasy world, Darmanin saw in the radical left and Muslims a mortal threat to French civilisation.
This racism of successive centre-left and centre-right governments has only provided succour to the French far right and its infamous leader, Marine Le Pen. Every time the government attacks Muslims and whips up a moral hysteria around immigration, it lends greater legitimacy to the even harder rhetoric and policies of Le Pen. After the Hollande government proposed in 2016 to strip citizenship from French dual citizens convicted of terrorism, Le Pen gleefully described it as “an homage to [her party] the FN”. In the lead-up to last year’s presidential election, and following Macron’s Separatism Bill, Le Pen proposed banning the veil in all public places. This is why it’s utterly hypocritical to paint Macron as a bulwark against the far right. He is their enabler and accomplice.
It won’t be the French elites who challenge racism in France, but the multiracial working class. This is not an abstract argument—it already exists in the various protest and strike movements. Non-white workers make up a significant section of public transport workers, garbage collectors and nurses, groups who have gone on strike several times in recent years. One of the popular leaders of the 2019-20 Paris metro strikes was the French-Moroccan socialist Anasse Kazib. Significantly, the left in both the unions and parliament have demonstrated their solidarity with the recent riots against the killing of Nahel. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, of the left-wing La France Insoumise party, <a href="blank">tweeted</a>, “The [government] guard dogs order us to call for calm—we call for justice”. A <a href="blank">joint statement</a> of several trade unions highlighted the social and economic motivations of the rioters and called for workers to join several upcoming anti-racist demonstrations.
So long as capitalism exists, the ideals of the French Republic remain a sick joke. That Republic, and the power of the bosses it protects, must be smashed if we are to realise true liberty, equality and fraternity.

The roots and reality of racism in France

The mission statement of Universities Australia, the peak industry group for the sector, describes in lofty terms the purpose of universities: “For hundreds of years”, it reads, “universities have existed as institutions that seek to further human endeavour through the distribution of knowledge and the embodiment of the ideals of free inquiry, equality and independence”.
But after the recent announcement of the AUKUS deal, through which Australia will obtain nuclear powered submarines, universities have quickly abandoned such guiding principles. Mere weeks after the A$368 billion announcement, Catriona Jackson, chief executive of Universities Australia, was touring the US and meeting with State Department national security officials to learn how American universities could be integrated into the needs of the American military-industrial complex.
“The foundation has been laid”, she concluded, “so Australia’s universities can play their fullest role in supporting AUKUS, and we’re looking forward to building on these conversations at home”.
The tour was backed by Universities Australia’s submission to the Defence Strategic Review. The submission emphasised the key role universities could play both in training skilled workers and providing high-end technological research and development. The order of the day is aligning university research and education with the needs of Australian imperialism.
Every university wants a slice of the cake. “There’s a huge enthusiasm for [AUKUS] in industry, in the tertiary education sector and in government”, notes John Blaxland, professor of international security and intelligence studies at the Australian National University, in Cosmos, a quarterly science magazine. “I think momentum is building quite rapidly.” 
He is not wrong—in the weeks since the AUKUS announcement, university after university has jostled to get a slice of the growing militarist pie.
The University Adelaide, which dares prospective students to “make history”, is updating its master’s degree in marine engineering to focus on nuclear propulsion and introducing a postgraduate course in radiation management. For university managers, making history means helping to construct and maintain the newest weapons of mass destruction.
The Western Australian state Labor government has announced $2.5 million for its public universities to develop short courses “to meet the defence industry’s workforce needs”. This must be music to the ears of Gia Parish, director of the Defence and Security Institute at the University of Western Australia. She warned Cosmos that students “don’t consider defence and security as a career path enough, it’s something we need to work on”. 
For Parish, and the authors of the Sydney Morning Herald’s “Red Alert” series, Australia needs to develop a military-industrial complex of its own.
None of this is so surprising. Although they dress themselves in the lofty language of Enlightenment liberalism, universities usually perform quite a mundane function for capitalism: they indoctrinate and train professionals, managers and bureaucrats. As huge research institutions, they help corporations and governments develop new technology to make greater profits or carry out the business of war more effectively.
As Australian capitalism becomes more aggressive and militaristic, we can expect the universities to follow. Not just in rhetoric but in deed, with more teaching and research being concerned with “national defence”. The task for students will be to reject this, and the drive to war that it serves.

Australian universities join the drive to war

Ruling classes have a long tradition of foot-in-mouth comments that reveal their disdain for the people they rule over. From Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” to Henry Ford complaining, “Every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached”, the people in charge can’t help telling us what they really think.
Kenny Graham and Jake Smyth, the bearded hipster founders of Mary’s Group, which owns several trendy pubs across Sydney, stood in this tradition when they shared what they really thought of their workers, via their podcast The Fat.
The pair went after young hospitality workers, slandering them as “whining” and “self-entitled”. The industry, they said, has “over corrected” from its previous tyranny; the relationship between workers and bosses is now too favourable to workers. Sounding like a caricature from moralising Victorian times, Graham lambasted workers for “getting hammered” on their nights off. Considering that their entire business model is based on encouraging people to drink, the pair might want to reconsider that advice.
After their comments went viral, attracting derision, the pair went into a pathetic attempt at damage control. In a leaked email, Graham and Smyth assured their staff that the comments were not aimed at them but instead at a “tiny minority of people”. A pair of honest, plain-speaking capitalists, the pair also affirmed their commitment to truth telling. “To pretend that this does not exist is a lie. And we will not lie to you”, they wrote. A public statement released on their website continued targeting this wretched minority whose “attitude is poisonous to all involved”.
It was particularly egregious coming from two business owners in one of the most exploitative industries in the country. A survey conducted this year by the United Workers Union, which covers hospitality workers, found that 83 percent of workers surveyed had experienced wage theft—by their boss not paying penalty rates, paying below the award or doctoring payslip hours.
In fact, the pandemic has shown that attitudes “poisonous to all involved” are concentrated among hospitality bosses. In Victoria, they decried the state’s eradication of COVID-19 as “an Orwellian nightmare”, initiating the “Unlock Hospitality Now” campaign while the virus was still spreading. In their crusade to place profits above lives, they had posters plastered all over the suburbs and paid for full-page ads in major newspapers.
Graham and Smyth devoted time to lambasting what they saw as workers not taking enough care of their mental health. This apparently resulted in a “poor work ethic” and “poor performance at work”, two cardinal sins under capitalism. But living up to their guru name, they offered some advice: “Exercise and hard work and diet change really does [sic] a lot for mental health”. 
As with Marie Antoinette, you couldn’t make this up: two fat headed burger-sellers telling us we need to eat better and get a gym membership. A better solution for the mental health issues afflicting hospitality workers: organise and fight to end the rampant wage theft in the industry.

Hospitality 'gurus' are disgusting hypocrites

Sydney University was the site of a serious police crackdown on 28 August, as students gathered to protest against the latest round of cuts and restructures to higher education. Around 80 police, including mounted and riot squad, swept through the campus, dispersing the demonstration and arresting or fining at least 10 protesters.
The excuse for this repression was public health, but the protest was organised with a strict COVID-safe plan to keep attendees in socially distanced, separate groups of fewer than 20 as per the state’s public health requirements. None of this was good enough for the New South Wales police, who have jumped at every chance to use the health crisis as cover to crack down on dissent. Preventing transmission of disease appears not to be their main concern when it comes to protests; instead it is a question of the organisers’ intent. 
Unsurprisingly, this interpretation of the rules appears to apply only to protests, and has not been used to break up considerably more hazardous gatherings, whether a cramped supermarket or Sydney’s popular Camperdown Park on a Saturday afternoon. 
Despite all the talk from top cops, government and the media, months after tens of thousands participated in impressive Black Lives Matter demonstrations around the country, health authorities have not found a single case of transmission, let alone a cluster, of COVID-19 linked to a protest. When comparing that to the clusters and outbreaks linked to restaurants, pubs, schools and workplaces, the real motivations of police become more obvious.
At the busy Broadway shopping centre down the road from Sydney University, for example, thousands gather to shop, essential or non-essential. Only last week, a confirmed case visited several stores in the centre. But the powers that be have not closed this health hazard, let alone sent in police. 
The hypocrisy is compounded by the fact that universities themselves, where students are expected to attend in-person classes of up to 35 people, are exempt from the health order’s four square metre social distancing requirement. History lecturer David Brophy pointed out to student newspaper Honi Soit: “Yesterday I had 20 plus students in a room for a tutorial. But today, Michael Spence call[ed] the riot squad onto campus to shut down a rally against fee hikes, on the grounds that it exceeded the 20-person limit. ‘Let’s pick ’em off one by one’ was what I heard one of the cops say”.
According to rally marshals, police were targeting known activists. Indeed, two of the people arrested and fined had been arrested at previous demonstrations. 
Cooperation between police and the university administration has been cause for concern for some time on campus. The university worked with police when they attacked picket lines during staff strikes in 2013 and 2017, and particularly after the administration hired the homophobic former head of nearby Newtown police station. 
Contrary to police propaganda, the students and staff who attended the 28 August protest care the most about the health of ordinary people. It is they who have been campaigning for schools to remain closed, for all non-essential business to be shut down, and for healthcare funding to be expanded to meet the needs of the mass of ordinary people. 
Contrast that to those with wealth and power who the police serve: the federal government whose criminal underfunding of aged care in this country has caused hundreds of deaths, or mining magnate Clive Palmer, who is pushing to sacrifice Western Australia’s public health on the altar of his own mega-profits. 
Students and staff are facing a sustained assault from both the federal government and university managements across the country. Some course fees will double and punitive restrictions will be placed on HECS loans if the government gets its way, while staff are being told they must accept massive cuts to their pay and conditions or face the sack. 
At Sydney University, management has signalled job cuts of up to 30 percent in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. It is not merely a matter of one small change here or there, but a concerted attempt to move Australia further towards a US-style model of higher education.
Despite the repression and difficult conditions, it is nevertheless heartening that around 200 students and staff joined the protest. As Vinil Kumar, National Union of Students ethnocultural officer and Socialist Alternative member, said in a rousing speech before being detained by police, “From Minneapolis to Belarus to Lebanon, people are showing that in this crisis, when ordinary people are being made to pay, we can stand up, we can shut down society, we can say no, we can push back. It’s up to us to keep that alive here. It’s not always easy, but it is necessary, and it is something we will continue to do!”
Resisting repression is going to be an important part of this struggle. In early June, as police pushed for the 7 June Black Lives Matter demonstration in Sydney to be cancelled, tens of thousands of people flooded into Town Hall Square, rendering the court injunction against the action impotent. When we mobilise in sufficient numbers, all police can do is clench their fists and watch. 
We can’t conjure rallies of tens of thousands with will power alone. But nor should we give up on mass action just because it doesn’t come easily in today’s conditions. The challenge is to build up the strength and confidence of our side, in part by fighting with all our strength to resist the precedent of repression that’s been set by the state in New South Wales. 
Organisers are asking supporters, whether individuals or groups, to sign on to an open letter that can be viewed here: <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y5cyvpcq">https://tinyurl.com/y5cyvpcq</a>.

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