Socialists won the highest vote of any political faction contesting the University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council elections in September. Left Action, the ticket organised by Socialist Alternative club members, received 23.88 percent of the formal votes cast, and nine of its candidates have been elected as representatives in a 37-seat council. This comes off the back of last year’s result, when Left Action also won close to a quarter of the vote.
For years, the socialists came up against large campus election machines organised by student politicians in major parties, as well as apolitical or right-wing bloc votes from the colleges or clubs and societies. We could eke out only a small minority on the council. Now, socialist activists are a leading force in the SRC.
With a growing representation of activists over career hacks, the SRC can be part of rebuilding a culture of left-wing protest, which is very much needed in the current context of inequality, climate crisis and the resurgence of mainstream racist politics.
Already, the track record of Socialist Alternative members in the SRC is impressive. Jasmine Al-rawi, convener of USYD Students for Palestine and this year’s SRC global solidarity officer, organised the biggest on-campus pro-Palestine forum for years in May. Yasmine Johnson, an SRC education officer, has taken on the housing crisis, helping to initiate the Get A Room! Students for Affordable Housing campaign. Currently, our club is organising a campus rally to stand up to racism and vote Yes in the upcoming referendum, as well as promoting protests to shut down the fossil fuel industry and defend LGBTI rights. 
This contrasts with other political forces on campus that have used SRC titles to pad out their resumes for future careers, or disappeared into the bureaucratic processes of the SRC. Worse, they have spent many hours sitting on boards with university management for little gain. This is even the fate of the campus faction with a left reputation, the Grassroots Left, which has held the presidency and the lion’s share of positions in the SRC executive for four years.
How did Left Action achieve this result? To begin with, the other campus factions are simply not what they used to be. A contested presidential race in 2019 brought out 5,362 voters, whereas this year’s presidential race between Harrison Brennan of Grassroots (the victor) and Rose Donnelly of the Labor Left netted only 2,023. Since the pandemic, the apolitical social networks that were built by most factions have diminished. The number of active members of Grassroots has declined even while they have run the SRC, and their centre of gravity has shifted towards more moderate law students. The Labor Left have begun to rebuild after spending years in the shadows, but still lack the campaigning skills needed for election victory. 
It’s the willingness of Socialist Alternative to be uncompromising in the fight against university management, the rich and the government that enables us to put forward policies like free education for all and an end to for-profit student housing that cut though to voters. It was also easy for Left Action voters to agree with arguments about the importance of activism<a name="docs-internal-guid-a20f411f-7fff-6376-31" id="docs-internal-guid-a20f411f-7fff-6376-31"></a>—that you have to fight for what you want, because the rich and powerful won’t be shifted by polite asking.
We in the Socialist Alternative club are constantly campaigning around lots of issues thrown up by capitalism, which puts us in a good position to convey our message to students and convince them to vote for left-wing activist candidates. 
All of this is underpinned by our shared commitment to rebuilding a revolutionary socialist left. We are constantly fighting for socialist politics on the campus, building our numbers and capabilities, as well as working towards our goal of rebuilding an activist culture on campus. 
So, while the other political forces faded during the years of the pandemic, we held strong.
There will be much to fight around next year. The cost-of-living crisis is spiralling out of control, we are facing down another hot and fiery summer from hell and Sydney University management continues to cut courses and crowd out classes.
We look forward to doing what we can with the SRC to build campaigns around all these issues and encourage other Sydney University students and political factions to join us in those fights.

Hersha Kadkol

Strong result for socialists in University of Sydney student elections

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Tesla CEO Elon Musk illustrate everything that is wrong with capitalism. Just when you thought that the three billionaires could not be more out of touch with humankind, they decided to remove themselves from the planet entirely, spending at least US$21.8 billion of their personal wealth on space flight projects.
Bezos jetted off for eleven minutes in a rocket that, fittingly, looked like a giant dick. Fortune magazine reports that he spent at least $5.5 billion on his space company, Blue Origin, which nevertheless is a drop in the ocean compared to his overall fortune of nearly $200 billion. 
Branson spent at least $1 billion of his wealth on Virgin Galactic. This came after Virgin companies received hundreds of millions in bailout funds from the UK and Australian governments to cover losses due to the pandemic. And Musk, a cult hero of libertarians, has an eye-watering $15.3 billion holding in SpaceX, which aims to launch rockets to the moon and to Mars. 
The three space billionaires have a combined net worth approaching $400 billion. Their new-style conspicuous consumption comes at a time when more than 800 million people around the world go to bed hungry every night. What could their collective wealth be used for instead of ego-driven joy flights? 
According to the Ceres2030 project—a partnership of researchers from Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Institute for Sustainable Development—governments need to spend $33 billion a year to eradicate global hunger by 2030. Bezos, Branson and Musk could do it themselves and still be left with tens of billions to spare.
The cost of vaccinating the world against COVID-19 is posed as a barrier to dealing with the worst pandemic humanity has experienced since the Spanish flu. Yet the estimated $66 billion price tag is little more than three times as much as the three billionaires spent on their hobby projects.
If the wealth of just these three could address such problems, we could do so much more with the wealth of all the world’s super-rich people. According to Forbes magazine, the combined wealth of the world’s 2,755 billionaires is a whopping US$13 trillion. Add to that the wealth of the multi-millionaires with more money than they could reasonably spend in a lifetime. 
The $73 trillion it would take to fund a global renewable energy transition to 2050, according to a 2019 report published by Stanford University, is small potatoes compared to the wealth the global elite will accrue in the coming decades.
But the problem goes much deeper than their own accumulated funds. Billionaires are undeniably greedy, but that alone can’t explain how they have been able to accumulate so much individual wealth. 
Bezos, Musk and all the world’s super-rich argue that their riches are a just reward for investing wisely and innovating. But their wealth isn’t just about income. They belong to a select group in society that collectively controls the vast bulk of productive resources.
They own the agricultural land and claims to the minerals taken out of the ground. They own the vehicles and ports required to transport goods and the vast warehouses to store them. They own the oil refineries and the steel furnaces. They own the telecommunications infrastructure and office buildings. These economic resources sustain our society. They are required to produce food and electricity, phones, fridges and paper. 
The wealthy decide what gets produced, how things get produced, who participates in the production process and where the products go. This minority group is the capitalist class. They are a separate social class not only because of their accumulated wealth, but because of this economic control.
For this reason, redistributing much of the money wealth—by introducing much higher taxes, for example—while desirable, would not get to the heart of the problem. If you took most of Jeff Bezos’ personal fortune tomorrow, he would still control Amazon and would just re-accumulate his riches over time. 
How do they turn their investments into more and more money? By putting millions of people to work without working themselves. In the case of Bezos’ Amazon, 1.3 million people globally, to be exact. Those workers have no say over the direction of the company or over what the massive logistics network is used for. On his return from orbit, Bezos himself pointed out that all the money for his space flight came from the labour of workers. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all this”, he said. 
The infamous conditions and inflexibility of Amazon warehouse work make exploitation there explicit. But even workers who are much better paid and in better jobs make more money for their boss than the boss gives back to them in wages. Capitalists and workers are not equal in the economy, because one controls all the economic resources and the other owns little more than their ability to work. 
This exploitation is at the heart of the system. Under capitalist control, the resources of our society are mobilised to produce for the markets to generate profits for the owners of businesses, rather than to fulfil human needs. In this framework, the people with the greatest needs are usually those with the least access to the goods available. 
Hunger and malnutrition exist even in wealthy countries because, to gain access to a necessity like food, you must be able to pay for it. The only way for people to pay is for a capitalist to offer them a job. But capitalists will provide jobs only if they think they can make a profit. And even when they hire people, they hold wages down to generate those profits. So while the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN forecasts record high cereal production this year, people in poorer countries like Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon are being priced out of staples by rapid cost rises and a decline in incomes. Even in the US, more than 10 percent of households are deemed “food insecure” by the Department of Agriculture. 
Take another necessity. In the current pandemic, instead of halting the viral spread by making vaccines freely available around the world, pharmaceutical companies’ COVID-19 vaccines have been competitively developed and patented so that money can be made from their production. Instead of society collectively directing the mass production of vaccines, the rollout has been hostage to supply chain blockages, pharmaceutical companies refusing to share their vaccine recipes and the richest countries purchasing more than they need.
So we have the grotesque spectacle of Pfizer CEO Albert Boula making $21 million last year—a 17 percent increase—while millions now are dying because they can’t get access to the vaccine.
And because capitalist investment is calculated only to make profits, it often produces waste and destruction. There is no better example than fossil fuels. These are embedded in the current economic set-up. The dire predictions of climate and environmental scientists are increasingly acknowledged yet have not been allowed to inform a transition to a green economy because it would cost too many capitalists their existing investments.
To solve the problem of climate change, the capitalist class would need to put aside the desire to make profit, and instead spend trillions reshaping the economy in the interests of human society. That’s like asking a pride of lions to go vegetarian. Which member of the capitalist class would begin this process of transition? To do so would be to give up their own social status. Maybe one or two might. But their position would just be taken by someone else. 
The capitalist class is therefore up to its eyeballs in greenhouse gas pollution. Musk’s electric car company Tesla is no exception: in the first quarter of 2021, selling $518 million worth of carbon credits to dirty companies was the only reason the enterprise turned a profit. And it doesn’t matter that Bezos describes the Earth as precious and worth saving while he’s hovering above it—here on the ground, his class is to blame for the planet’s degradation.
Capitalism doesn’t cause only economic problems. A system of class exploitation also creates and perpetuates social oppression to sustain itself. When so few own and control so much wealth, while so many struggle with so few resources, those at the top have to keep the rest of the population divided, fighting among ourselves. And they use a tremendous amount of violence to keep oppressed groups subjugated. Today, capitalists everywhere rake in extra money by paying different sections of the workforce different rates, and convincing one group that the other is to blame for poverty. Social divisions along lines of nationality, race, gender and sexuality, enforced by oppression, break up the solidarity of the exploited against the bosses who rule over us. 
Bezos, Branson and Musk are just the tip of the iceberg: at every turn, the control of the world’s resources by a small minority of people is the main barrier to creating a society run in the interests of all people on the planet. With every passing year, the competitive drive for profit produces more and more disastrous effects. Whole sections of the world’s population are condemned to poverty, while everywhere the oppressed endure discrimination and suffering. That’s what’s wrong with capitalism.

What’s wrong with capitalism?

On 8 December 1987, at a Gaza checkpoint, an Israeli truck ploughed into a line of cars returning Palestinians from a day’s work in Israel. Four were killed, including three from the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza’s largest.
An outpouring of collective grief at the funeral of the victims transformed into political anger. Thousands of Palestinians moved through the streets in mourning. Soon, the permanent military presence in the refugee camp was confronted with a hail of stones, bricks and bottles thrown by teenage boys. Then began a cycle of repression and resistance, with each round of martyred protesters, many of them children, becoming a spark for further demonstrations. Years of humiliation and rage burst forth. 
The merciless conditions of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank had crushed the spirit of rebellion among the older generations. Gaza was overcrowded with the unemployed and destitute. The hardline Israeli government had accelerated the pace of settlements in the occupied territories, which grabbed land and water from Palestinians.
Day work doing menial jobs in Israel was the only economic prospect for many. Gaza and the West Bank had become Israel’s Bantustans. Palestinian wages were kept low—on average, just 40 percent of the Israeli wage in 1977—and while Palestinian workers paid income taxes, the Israeli state refused to provide even basic services. 
No Palestinian village or element of Palestinian social life was free from Israeli control. Political and trade union organisations were intimidated and suppressed. 
Previously, heavy repression had kept a lid on mass resistance—but not this time. Young people, outweighing the rest of the population in Gaza, moved to the front lines. Children as young as eleven confronted the most heavily armed military in the Middle East. They were armed with slingshots and bound their heads with the keffiyeh, the symbol of this “revolution of the stones”. 
The young people had known nothing other than occupation. But as observers noted—some with appreciation, others with alarm—the new generation was no longer afraid. They had nothing left to lose. 
The response from Israel was swift and sharp. In the first ten days, 27 protesters were killed and more than 250 were injured. But even this was not enough to curb the intifada (Arabic for uprising or rebellion).
Worse for the Israeli ruling class, a general strike called for 21 December resulted in profits collapsing in hospitality and fruit farming. The strike and resistance spread to Palestinian citizens of Israel—a mass, collective struggle of Palestinians from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. 
Israeli politicians agreed that the Palestinians needed to be crushed. They had the full backing of the United States, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger writing: “The Palestinian uprising must be suppressed brutally and rapidly”.
The rising had come spontaneously, but organisations quickly emerged to deepen the revolt. Local committees coordinating demonstrations, boycotts, tax strikes and economic self-sufficiency were led by the National Unified Command of the Uprising, composed of leading Palestinian organisations.
If it were down to a question of the justness of the struggle or the determination of the Palestinians, the Israeli state would have been defeated in this confrontation.
There were places in the West Bank that Israeli military personnel could not bring under control even with hundreds of troops. Settling scores with the Palestinian uprising cost Israel $526 million. But that was only 20 percent of total US aid in 1988, and there was no indication that the aid would cease to be forthcoming. 
Despite strikes causing disruption in some sectors, the core industries of the Israeli economy had long been guarded from Arab labour and remained untouched by the rebellion. Israeli civil society, including trade union members, mobilised to fill labour shortages and suppress the revolt.
It would have taken an immense movement of solidarity across the region to wrest control of Palestine from the Israeli state. Masses of workers across the region did heed the call. In Egypt, activists mounted a serious solidarity movement that drew in the power of organised workers. Employees of the Mahalla al-Kubra textile plant, later the powerhouse of the 2011 revolution, faced down riot police sent to break up their solidarity demonstration.
Soon, anger was directed against the Arab regimes, which had, for their own economic and geopolitical interests, acceded to imperialist control. Moreover, the Arab ruling classes feared that a contagion of rebellion might threaten their own governments.
In 1988, Algerians launched their own intifada. The country’s greater economic integration into world markets had produced economic discontent that generated, among workers and the poor, anger against the Algerian ruling class as much as Israel. 
However, the politics dominating the National Unified Command of the Uprising was not revolutionary internationalism, but Palestinian nationalism. In seeking to establish no more than another capitalist nation-state, the leading organisation in the intifada, Fatah, failed to present a viable alternative to coexistence with the Israeli state and the Arab regimes.
So when the Arab masses rose and faced stiff opposition from their rulers, Fatah leader Yasser Arafat rushed to cool tensions. The Arab rulers sought a compromise that would leave their regimes intact. And the US agreed to broker peace talks. Arafat declared a Palestinian mini-state in Gaza and the West Bank and recognised the existence of Israel. 
But this seeming victory for the limited, “two-state” solution was a disaster for the Palestinians, who were made to accept oppression at the hands of Israel. Now that acquiescence had been extracted from the Palestinian leadership, Israel played hardball with the intifada. It made sweeps through every village for activists, jailing 30,000 by the end of 1988, according to the Palestine Human Rights Information Centre. More than 1,000 Palestinians were killed, and the movement petered out. 
The energy of the movement, sustained for so long against tanks and bullets, was finally crushed by a combination of the repression of the Israeli security forces and betrayal at the hands of the official Palestinian leadership. The Arab regimes watched on, satisfied that the threat to their own positions was subsiding. 
In later talks, Israel and Fatah concluded negotiations that created the Palestinian Authority. Far from forming an independent Palestinian state, the Palestinian Authority became a police force for Israel in the occupied territories.
Today, a new generation of Palestinians has risen. Their freedom one day will come. But it will be achieved by the mass of exploited and oppressed fighting in their own interests, not in peace with their capitalist rulers, but through an uprising that pushes them out of the way.

Remembering the first intifada

The Berejiklian government’s response to the Sydney COVID-19 outbreak has been a total disaster, with cases emerging across the city after weeks of inaction. Avoiding a lockdown and refusing to mandate mask wearing is criminal—and working-class people could pay with their lives for the Liberal Party’s callousness.
When the number of new reported cases rose to eighteen on Wednesday, Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant was forced to admit that “this isn’t just a northern beaches local government area [LGA] problem”. As of 29 December, 43 cases had been detected across Sydney, including in Wollongong. More than 25 suburbs so far are reported to be sites of infection.
And yet only the northern beaches has anything resembling a lockdown—an extremely inadequate one. Workers still travel outside the area if their workplace is in another suburb. Bizarrely, the LGA was cleaved into northern and southern zones, with restrictions eased in Manly for Christmas even as case numbers there rose.
Now a new cluster has emerged in the inner-western suburb of Croydon, with six confirmed cases and more expected among 34 close contacts. The cluster began at a family gathering, indicating that Christmas may have been what UNSW public health expert professor Raina MacIntyre termed a potential “super-spreading disaster”. In a Sydney Morning Herald article on 20 December, MacIntyre said that we may not know the full picture of Christmas transmission for many days. In the meantime, the “the mother” of opportunities for rapid virus spread would have occurred: New Year’s Eve.
Today’s increased restrictions on home gatherings in Sydney, from ten to five indoor visitors, still leaves room for exponential transmission. And pubs, clubs and restaurants will be open with barely any restrictions. Patrons are officially limited to one every four square metres, a meaningless distance considering that epidemiologists now agree that the virus can linger indoors for hours. “We don’t want New Year’s Eve to be the cause of a super-spreader” event, the premier said today. And yet the government refuses to put in place the restrictions that could avoid this outcome and protect working-class people across the city.
We are beginning to see chinks in the contact-tracing armour. “Mystery cases” keep emerging. The chain of transmission leading to the new Croydon cluster is unknown, as is the case for two other confirmed cases today in Wollongong and in northern Sydney. The government has no idea who was “patient zero” for the Avalon cluster. So authorities do not know when they began to pose a risk of infection, or how many people they may have been in contact with.
This is the result of what Morrison terms the NSW “gold standard” approach to the virus: an ideological commitment to capitalist normality while the deadly pandemic is in our midst. An intransigence that puts business profits above human lives.
Testing, even at much higher rates than in the past few days, provides no guarantee that all chains of transmission are caught. And right now, contact tracers cannot establish the links between cases quickly enough to prevent further spread. Asymptomatic infections are potentially much more widespread than anyone knows; however, they are barely acknowledged by the government. No-one should be surprised if contact tracers are soon overwhelmed; they have been in almost every country that has tried the “test-and-trace” approach, hoping to avoid an economic shutdown.
According to premier Berejiklian, “outbreaks are inevitable”. In the UK, the same attitude has led to a record 53,135 new COVID-19 cases reported in one day. It’s not “herd immunity” that’s achieved in these conditions, but a laboratory with hundreds of thousands of experimental subjects in which the virus can replicate itself and mutate. That’s what led to the new, highly infectious strain that has spread out of London.
In Los Angeles, patients are being turned away from hospitals that are overflowing. And more evidence is emerging of the long-term and debilitating effects of COVID-19 for at least 40 percent of cases in Australia. International reports show that long-term symptoms have included chronic fatigue, neurological disorders and even psychotic behaviour.
For the NSW government, none of this matters—because profits come first. And of course, the third cricket test at the SCG must go on! New Year’s Eve fireworks are also continuing, but we are merely advised to not gather to watch them—because it’s our own personal responsibility to avoid catching the virus. Tell that to all the hospitality and transport staff who have to keep working while their customers don’t even have to wear a mask. The government has no other strategy to bring down case numbers while keeping the economy open. We are being left to fend for ourselves.
Mask mandates and lockdowns are far and away the most effective tools for containing and even eliminating the virus. They should have already happened across Sydney before Christmas. Instead, we could be facing a summer and beyond of spiralling case numbers, lives lost and the long-term health complications for those infected. At best, we’ll chug along for a while with the virus in our midst, clusters and half measures the norm when we could have dealt with this outbreak quickly right at the start.
The bulk of current cases are among more wealthy people. But if and when casualised, underpaid workers are infected, like in the Victorian second wave, half measures are useless because many people just have to go to work—bosses will not shut anything down of their own accord if it will cost them money and most workers can’t afford to take time off without government support. So if the virus starts to get into more working-class areas, the chains of transmission can rapidly get out of control.
The virus was eliminated in Victoria by a hard lockdown and mask mandate, which working people strove to make a success. We need this in Sydney now, before it’s too late.

NSW’s COVID-19 response is a disaster

Despite calls for an international boycott, SBS has maintained that it will broadcast the Eurovision Song Contest 2019, which is to be held in Israel next year.
The contest is set to be hosted in Tel Aviv – 70 kilometres from the Gaza border, where the Israeli military murdered more than 200 protesters this year. The event was planned for occupied East Jerusalem, where Israel has made an aggressive push to assert a territorial claim over the city. The retreat to Tel Aviv was the first significant victory for the boycott campaign.
The Australian wing of the international boycott, led by BDS Australia, has demanded that SBS not participate in “artwashing” Israeli apartheid. 
Staff at Irish broadcaster RTE have won the right not to work on its coverage of the contest, another victory for the boycott and a good precedent for the campaign here in Australia. 
BDS Australia launched the boycott in October, with more than a thousand responses to a petition directed at SBS management. But SBS responded by threatening BDS Australia with legal action for using the SBS logo in its online campaign and leaflet. 
Undeterred, BDS Australia protested outside SBS studios in Artarmon, Sydney, on 15 November, to raise awareness among staff about the Boycott Eurovision campaign and to continue to call on management not to cover the contest and to end its legal threats. Several staff expressed support for the boycott, requesting leaflets and chatting about the importance of Palestinian human rights. Hilmi Dabbagh, an activist with BDS Australia, said: 
“We are very happy that so many SBS staff showed interest in Palestinians’ human rights, but so far it’s business as usual for SBS management and their partner Blink TV. Our campaign – with those in every Eurovision country except Israel – will continue to pressure broadcasters to put Palestinians’ human rights ahead of their advertising revenue. 
“We will be reminding SBS viewers that just 70 kilometres from the Eurovision venue, unarmed protesters are being murdered at the Gaza fence for daring to challenge the never ending siege and a future of forever being refugees.”
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Sign the petition at <a href="http://www.bit.ly/BoycottEurovision2019">www.bit.ly/BoycottEurovision2019</a> and email <a href="mailto:contact@bdsaustralia.net.au">contact@bdsaustralia.net.au</a> to get involved in the campaign.

Paulie Bover

Palestine solidarity activists demand SBS #BoycottEurovision2019

The email came through at 3:40pm on Friday, 5 October: all 53 of us employed at the University of Sydney’s fundraising call centre had just lost our jobs. The “regrettable” closure of the centre, the message told us, was to occur the following day, meaning we had less than 18 hours until our final shift and no time at all to find an alternate source of income.
The fundraising call centre is a huge revenue raiser for the university. Through aggressive and mandated selling techniques, student callers had clocked up donations worth almost $300,000 this year alone. 
The sackings came just weeks after tens of thousands of dollars were raised as part of the annual fundraising campaign, Pave the Way. 
On the phones we were expected to promote the “University of Sydney philosophy” of “giving back” to the community in order to convince alumni, parents and others to donate. Good though it was for public relations and to channel private money into the university, this “spirit of giving” clearly does not extend to call centre workers. 
We were told in a meeting before our last shift that we should accept the sackings because we are casuals and therefore have no rights. Perhaps in order to reinforce this point, we were later told by management that the time spent in the meeting would not be paid. 
University management was able to get away with this because of our particular employment arrangements. Rather than being hired by the university directly, we are on the books of a US company, Ruffalo Noel Levitz. RNL specialises in soliciting funds from individual private donors, and it pays its workers an hourly wage $10-15 lower than the union-won minimum at the Sydney University campus. 
The flexibility that is a purported benefit of such work all goes one way. While the bosses have the flexibility to sack us at will, RNL workers are required to adhere to onerous rules, including having to give notification well in advance of holidays, having to find replacement workers for refused shifts and working a mandatory six shifts per month. 
On news of the sackings, workers immediately got together to plan a challenge to the decision. We raised an outcry about what was going on, talking to the student newspaper and organising collectively before meetings with management. 
We vocally challenged the RNL bosses to justify what they had done. Their response was to repeat continually that the sackings were necessary for “operational reasons”. 
We demanded that the university end its practice of outsourcing to third party operators that put workers on shoddy casual contracts. This practice undermines the conditions and wages of university workers by undercutting hard-won standards. 
By kicking up a fuss, we were able to win some concessions. Management offered us 10 more shifts, effectively two weeks’ notice, and, unusually for casuals, severance pay worth a week’s average wage for each “active” employee. 
The union covering our call centre, the National Union of Workers, was able to argue that RNL had breached the award by not consulting with the workers, which helped wrench concessions from the management. 
A further demand we will continue to fight for is to be reinstated as in-house employees of the university.

Sacked fundraisers raise hell

Two out of every three dollars of commonwealth school funding go to private schools: one of the highest levels of private school funding in the Western world. With substantial assets and yearly income in the millions, these schools clearly need some extra help for their pool renovations, large-capacity theatres and new rowing sheds. 
All this was supposed to change with the Turnbull government’s Gonski 2.0 funding plan, announced last year. Under the new plan, commonwealth funding is meant to be redistributed from private to public schools, resulting in an immediate decrease in funding for 24 elite schools.
But figures obtained by the Guardian reveal that, for all 24 of these schools, government funding has actually increased, as has the overall proportion of federal funding going to private schools. 
This is thanks to a $7.1 million fund established to top up schools that stand to lose funding in the first year of the new arrangement. 
Money from the fund has gone to such disadvantaged schools as Loreto Kirribilli on Sydney’s North Shore and Melbourne Grammar in South Yarra. Loreto Kirribilli received $381,274 from the federal government this year, despite being slated for a $200,000 decrease in funding. 
Some schools are getting the money despite being able to recoup the shortfall through private sources. William Clarke College in Sydney actually raised its 2018 income by $100,000 by increasing student fees and receiving donations from parents. Yet the college still got $252,000 from the government. 
This isn’t the only handout being given to the nation’s wealthy young students. The National Adjustment Assistance Fund, $40 million set aside for “disadvantaged or vulnerable schools”, is also accessible to private schools. 
Who gets the cash? The government won’t say, but the Australian Education Union says “secretive special deals” mean that money which should be going to disadvantaged public schools is being channelled to the private sector.So while Gonski 2.0 has been sold on the basis of reducing massive handouts to private schools, behind the scenes, the Turnbull government ensures that no such reduction takes place and that the creeping privatisation of the school system continues.

More money for filthy rich private schools

This year marks the 170th anniversary of the beginning of “blackbirding”, the kidnapping of people from Pacific islands and bringing them to the Australian colonies as indentured labour. 
In 1847, “pioneer” Benjamin Boyd, in an effort to maintain a failing pastoral and whaling business, kidnapped 119 Melanesian men to work as slaves in Eden on the New South Wales coast. This year, the committee of Australian South Sea Islanders-Port Jackson (ASSI-PJ) commemorated the anniversary with a conference, held on 8 September, to bring these stories to light. 
Emelda Davis, president of ASSI-PJ, told Red Flag that Boyd’s entrepreneurial experiment was “a human disaster”. It was also a stark illustration of how Australian capitalism was built: first on the bodies of the Indigenous people who were an impediment to profit, and then, as Davis put it in interview with Matt Wordsworth on Radio National Breakfast, “on the backs of Blacks … and those other nationalities that came in as part of indentured labour” and lived here in servitude. 
The South Sea Islanders enslaved by Boyd made several attempts to escape. Finally leaving Eden on foot as refugees, and vilified by the rabidly racist press, they walked all the way to Sydney seeking passage back to their lands. A man named Tanna tragically drowned in Sydney Harbour right near Boyd’s estate. None of the group made it back to their home.
This episode pre-empted the official start of the Australian slave trade some years later. On 14 August 1863, people were lured onto ships from the beaches of Vanuatu. Between then and 1901, some 62,500 people were captured from 80 different islands. Some places had their entire male population taken away. 
It is thought that up to one in four died either on the journey or while working in the atrocious conditions on ships, or more commonly among sugar cane in Queensland. Some died from common colds, which their immune system couldn’t handle, others from malnutrition from the “stodgy flour-like food” they were served, or from working from dawn until sundown, which broke them physically. Davis said that some died from “broken hearts” due to intense feelings of dislocation. 
With 30 percent of kidnapped South Sea Islanders dead within the first year of blackbirding, the colonial administrations knew full well the horrors, but continued the practice regardless. If the establishment of profitable industry in Australia came at the cost of lives, the ruling graziers, cane barons and administrators said, “So be it”. 
After the White Australia policy was introduced in 1901, 7,000 South Sea Islanders were deported to random islands. Davis’ grandfather escaped these deportations on foot from Mackay to Sydney.
“Australia needs to know the truthful beginnings of the nation”, Davis said. Recognition of these stories, even though they contradict the national mythology, is the first step. However, the issue of compensation for unpaid wages ($40 million in today’s money) and reparations is one that the government is unwilling to broach. 
Furthermore, it’s still the case that monuments to the genocidal practice of blackbirding remain. Townsville is named after wealthy blackbirder Robert Towns. Benjamin Boyd has a national park to his name. 
Commenting on the worldwide movement to tear down racist monuments, Matt Wordsworth asked Emelda Davis her response to the right’s catchcry, “Where do we draw the line?” Davis responded, “The line gets drawn at telling the truth”.

Owning up to Australia’s slave labour past

A concerning new precedent has been set for how university managements can deal with student activism.
Students from the Education Action Group (EAG) have been organising to support staff at the University of Sydney, who are fighting attacks on pay and working conditions.
The EAG created large posters to inform students about the strike, which has been organised by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for 13 September. The posters, urging students to respect the picket and encouraging them to get involved, were put around the campus Thursday morning.
However, management deemed the posters “damaging [to] the property of the university” and directed campus security to harass those who were seen with them.
One security guard entered the Student Representative Council building – the first time campus authorities have done so – and confiscated the remaining posters.
The fact that campus security was able to steal materials kept in a student institution is a blatant attack on student rights. It’s a way of cracking down on campus protest and is an attempt to undermine the staff strike by hindering student solidarity.
Campus security guards increasingly police many aspects of student life. We need to fight back against the encroachment on our right to organise politically at the university. This means rejecting the presence of these forces on campus and recognising that they don’t serve students or staff – they do the work of the university bosses.
Management isn’t going to get its way this time, however; the NTEU will be helping the EAG to print more posters so that activists can continue to publicise our solidarity with university workers in the lead up to the strike.
All supporters are welcome to join the picket line at the City Rd entrance, from 7 am on Wednesday 13 September.

Campus security targets student activism at Sydney University

“Illegal people aren’t a race; they’re people who don’t belong in your country,” disgraced alt-right spokesperson Milo Yiannopoulos declared to cheering students at the University of New Mexico on 27 January.
The rise of the far right has been reflected in student political life everywhere, not just in the US. From the ABVP (youth wing of the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP) sweeping student elections across India, to the Austrian Freedom Party student groups gaining a foothold among students, the far right is seeking to build a base campuses around the world.
Australian universities are not immune. On 8 April last year, students at Melbourne University arrived on campus to find phrases such as “Go home Muslims” and “Islam is not a race” chalked on every available surface.
Fringe groups have been gaining visibility using posters, graffiti and stickers – at Sydney University with outright Nazi-esque slogans such as “Culture stems from race”. Alt-right mascot Pepe the Frog makes frequent appearance on campuses across the country. And the red “Make America Great Again” cap is worn openly by some students (mostly those also sporting Ralph Lauren polo shirts and boat shoes), and not in an ironic fashion.
It is notable that these symbols of hate have mostly emerged on the sandstone campuses, the traditional province of rich students. No wonder, since they have the most to gain by promoting such views.
The goal of the far right is to use the campus environment to build their organisations and promote hate speech.
It will be up to the left on campuses to fight and not let the far right win.

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