If you’d asked Victorians what they were most looking forward to in 2024, local council elections probably wouldn’t have made even the top 20. Many people probably only ever interact with their local council to dispute a parking fine or to order a new wheelie bin—hence the cliché that local government is about three Rs: rates, roads and rubbish. While road maintenance and garbage collection are vital, they’re not likely to be the subject of the next gripping political drama. 
That being said, there’s no shortage of corruption and intrigue in local government, which is one reason the major parties often prefer to run in something approaching “incognito mode” in council elections. Scandals, dodgy dealings and “governance issues” (the official euphemism) are <a href="https://www.governmentnews.com.au/another-week-another-monitor-sent-to-a-victorian-council/">commonplace</a>.
It’s no wonder, then, that most people expect little from their local council and get about as much. But that’s exactly what, in their own small way, Victorian Socialists (VS) have set out to change at council elections taking place in Victoria via postal ballot in October. 
VS want to inject another ‘R’ into the local councils: radical politics. Across the state, some <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/council">80 Victorian Socialists candidates</a> will be running on an unashamedly radical platform that highlights just what councils could and should be doing for working people. 
That includes <a href="https://www.instagram.com/jorge_andres_jorquera/">Jorge Jorquera</a>, Victorian Socialists’ first and only elected representative, who will be running for re-election to the Maribyrnong Council in Melbourne’s inner west. “People think councils just deal with small problems”, Jorquera told Red Flag, “but the simple reality is that behind every one of those small problems is a bigger problem. Whether it’s fixing a pothole or putting in a new sports field, there’s always a bigger problem, and it’s usually spelled with a ‘c’—it’s capitalism”.
Take the cost-of-living crisis, for example. In the latest <a href="https://www.ipsos.com/en-au/issuesmonitor">Ipsos Issues Monitor poll</a>, which surveys Australians on what they see as the main “issues facing the nation”, rising costs ranked as the number one concern by far. Number two on the list was housing, and number three was the economy. In other words, it’s cost of living first, second and third.
“The cost of living and access to affordable housing are the issues that come up over and over”, Darebin Council candidate Cat Rose told Red Flag, “and all levels of government, including local councils, are responsible for walking away from this generational crisis”.
There are plenty of things councils could be doing. They could start with council rates. Victorian Socialists are calling for rate relief for low-income households—a simple measure that could make a real difference. By doing this, councils could also set an example and put pressure on state and federal governments to act in other ways.
Then there’s the rising unaffordability of housing, which is at its <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/sep/21/housing-affordability-proptrack-report-first-home-buyers-renters-mortgage-holders">worst since records began in 1995.</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/17/victorias-social-housing-stock-grows-by-just-74-dwellings-in-four-years-despite-huge-waiting-list">Tens of thousands</a> of people have joined Victoria’s social housing waiting list over recent years. To add insult to injury, it was recently revealed in a <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/">report by Prosper Australia</a> that across Melbourne around 100,000 homes sat empty or underused in 2023.
It’s little wonder when the major parties have for decades pushed neoliberal policies that have turned housing more and more into an investment asset for the rich rather than something that meets the fundamental human need for shelter. Property investors are forecast, according to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/01/negative-gearing-and-capital-gains-tax-discounts-to-cost-australian-budget-165bn-over-10-years-analysis-reveals">an analysis</a> undertaken by the Parliamentary Budget Office at the request of the Greens, to receive $165 billion in tax breaks over the next ten years. Meanwhile, public housing residents <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/beach-views-not-just-rich">are being evicted</a> from their homes as governments dismantle what’s left of Australia’s diminishing stock. In Victoria, social housing now represents only 2.9 percent of all housing stock, the lowest proportion of any state. 
Councils should be fighting, with all the means at their disposal, to change this appalling situation. 
One way they could do that is by making use of their powers to approve or reject proposals for new developments in their area. “We’ve got to use those powers now while we’ve got them”, Jorquera says. He’s referring to the fact that the state government recently moved to <a href="https://www.governmentnews.com.au/victorian-planning-reforms-take-power-away-from-councils/">strip back</a> council planning powers and give a freer hand to property developers, who never miss an opportunity to complain about council “red tape”.
Victorian Socialists say councils need to fight to keep those powers and use them to push for developments that put people before profit by, for example, imposing 30 percent public and community housing inclusions on large private developments. Measures like that could start to address the dire and growing need for affordable housing and put downward pressure on the cost of housing in general. 
VS candidate for Merri-bek City Council Louisa Bassini, a community lawyer and renters’ rights advocate, says these kinds of policies are popular with voters she’s spoken to. “No-one seems to think that it’s fair”, she explains, “that such huge profits are being made out of housing when people are struggling to afford it, and public amenities are inadequate”.
Councils themselves have been run down by decades of neoliberalism. “Potholes are a good example”, says Jorquera. “One of the reasons they don’t get fixed in due time is that councils are paying millions of dollars on things like that because of outsourcing and privatisation. Here in Maribyrnong, it has cost millions of dollars to put in 200 metres of a bike lane, because it’s all outsourced.” One of Victorian Socialists’ core policies is to oppose any further privatisation of council services and assets.
Even where councils’ direct powers are limited, there’s nothing to stop them from putting their resources into helping put some power back into the hands of ordinary people. 
For example, Jorquera wants councils to establish an information service for renters. “In the average local government area”, he says, “40 percent of people are renting. But with councils based on ratepayers [i.e. property owners] renters are basically not part of the equation. Every council should have a rental information service that protects the rights of renters. No council, as far as I know, has one of those”.
As for bigger political questions, Victorian Socialists candidates don’t have much time for the idea that councils should just stick to “roads, rates and rubbish”. And they have a solid record as long-term community activists. “People are paying attention to what’s happening in the world, and they expect local councils to as well”, says Bassini. In February this year, she organised <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/community-workers-walk-out-palestine">an illegal walkout</a> for Palestine at her workplace—one of the only examples of industrial action by workers for Palestine since the solidarity movement erupted last October.
Jorquera has been putting socialist principles into practice at a local council level since his election in 2020. Thanks to him, the Maribyrnong City Council became the first council in Victoria to join the national #racismNOTwelcome campaign, which put up anti-racist street signs across the council area. He has also initiated discussion in the council about recognising 26 January as a day of mourning, not one of celebration. 
Jorquera’s efforts meant that his council became one of the first to fly the Palestinian flag in protest at Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. That set the ball rolling on campaigns in local councils across Melbourne for solidarity with Palestine, campaigns that members of Victorian Socialists played <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/councils-battle-over-palestine">a significant role in</a>.
And we should remember that it’s not just our side that’s getting organised. In America, the far right have been very active in local politics, agitating on school boards and city councils to push their reactionary agenda. In Australia, right-wing bigots have taken note. Last year, far-right groups protested against drag queen story-time events organised by local councils across Melbourne. Shamefully, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/councils-cancel-lgbt-events-are-helping-fascists-win-it-has-stop">several councils caved to the pressure</a> and handed the bigots a win. This year, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/fringe-groups-have-been-causing-council-chaos-now-they-plan-to-get-elected-20240104-p5ev7u.html">it was reported,</a> far-right groups aligned with the reactionary My Place movement, are making a push in the local government elections. Even on local councils, we need people prepared to stand against all forms of bigotry and take the far-right threat seriously.
The council election campaign is part of Victorian Socialists’ larger project of trying to rebuild socialist politics into, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/why-you-should-campaign-victorian-socialists-election">in the words of VS member Jerome Small</a>, “a living, breathing, organising, controversialising political force in this country’s political life”. That means a totally different approach to politics at every level—one that’s about putting power back into the hands of ordinary people and building their confidence to fight and demand more from a system that offers them less and less. 
In the Hume council area in Melbourne’s outer north, where IT worker Mutullah “Mutu” Can Yolbulan is a VS candidate, the campaign is already yielding results. “We’ve already received a commitment from the council [to build] a one-hectare park on Broadmeadows Reserve, and we will make sure that park gets built”, Mutu says. “If we were able to achieve this now, imagine how we could improve the rest of our city in a four-year term and improve the day-to-day lives of working-class people.”
The 2024 council elections will be the first since legislation introduced by disgraced former Labor Party local government minister and veteran branch-stacker Adem Somyurek abolished multi-member wards in all but one Melbourne council and many regional ones. That means councils are now divided up into smaller wards with one elected member each. Labor is worried about losing ground on councils, and this was a transparent attempt to elbow out smaller parties, which benefit from more proportional representation systems. 
That will make things harder for a small party like Victorian Socialists, but its candidates and campaigners remain hopeful that, when all the votes are counted, a new face or two will have been added to the current small crop of socialist local councillors in Melbourne. Even short of that though, the party’s council campaign has further established its credentials as a socialist electoral alternative in Victoria, at the same time as many of its members have continued to play a central role in the Palestine solidarity movement and other areas of grassroots organising and activism. This is a solid platform to build on in the months and years ahead.

James McVicar

More than just ‘rates, roads and rubbish’: Victorian Socialists vie for local councils

The Capitol building in Washington, DC, which houses the US Congress, is no stranger to war criminals. It was built on indigenous land by enslaved Black workers in the 18th century, and by the middle of the 20th sat at the heart of the most bloodthirsty imperial machine in human history. 
Radical linguist Noam Chomsky <a href="https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/">famously claimed</a> in a speech in 1990 that every US president since World War Two would be hanged if the same legal standard were applied to them as was applied to Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trials. What could be more normal, then, than for Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu to be guest of honour at the Capitol? Indeed, when Netanyahu addressed a joint sitting of Congress on 24 July as the invited guest of the Republican and Democratic parties, it was for the fourth time—breaking a record he previously shared with former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
Earlier in the month, a <a href="https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext">letter</a> published in the British medical journal Lancet made a conservative estimate that Israel’s war in Gaza could already have claimed 186,000 lives. Officially, more than 39,000 people have been killed so far. The starvation conditions, the annihilation of healthcare infrastructure and the reality that nowhere is safe in the strip make it certain the toll will continue to climb.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court <a href="https://apnews.com/article/icc-khan-netanyahu-070941d21ccd1f2b9611032b88527575">recently accused</a> Netanyahu of bearing responsibility for war crimes in Gaza and requested a warrant for his arrest. Very much in line with historic precedent, though, when this genocidal criminal appeared in Congress to speak before the assembled representatives of the world’s “greatest democracy” and self-styled defenders of the international “rules-based order”, he was feted as a hero.
The scene was reminiscent of the most grotesque spectacles of high Stalinism. Netanyahu was on the podium for less than an hour, during which time he received <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/07/benjamin-netanyahu-address-us-congress">58 standing ovations</a>. It was enough to make North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un—who reportedly averages a measly rate of <a href="https://t.me/s/Middle_East_Spectator?q=Kim+Jong+Un">one ovation every four minutes</a>—look like an amateur.
It’s said that the kind of lengthy standing ovations that greeted speeches by Stalin during the years of the great terror in Russia in the 1930s can be explained by the fear among Soviet officials of the repercussions of being the first to stop clapping. No such fears can excuse the behaviour of the members of the US Congress today. The cheering and the hooting and the interminable clapping for Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, were not just not coerced. It was genuinely enthusiastic. Even Mitch McConnell, that dwindling light of American gerontocracy, was more animated and lifelike than ever.
The only thing more nauseating was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKkcstwPd9k">Netanyahu's speech</a> itself. How many civilians had been killed in Rafah? “Practically none”, he claimed. What of the widely attested claim that Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza? “A complete fabrication.” He continued: “If there are Palestinians in Gaza who aren’t getting enough food, it’s not because Israel is blocking it, it’s because Hamas is stealing it”. Cue another standing ovation.
While many Democrats chose to not to attend Netanyahu’s speech, their motives were mixed. Among them was venture capitalist and staunch Zionist Nancy Pelosi, who suggested in January that calls for a Gaza ceasefire <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/29/pelosi-condemned-pro-palestinian-russia-ties">should be investigated by the FBI</a> as potential Russian interference. She <a href="https://x.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1816208313572364356">made it clear</a> that her objection was to Netanyahu’s failure to secure the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza, not the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel or the thousands held hostage under its infamous regime of administrative detention. No doubt, too, some Democrats had an eye to the possible electoral repercussions of seeming too cosy with Netanyahu at a time when increasing numbers in the US are turning against Israel.
Among the few people to come out of this with some dignity intact is Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. She was the only member of the “Squad” of left-leaning Democrats to attend the address, during which she held up a sign that read “war criminal” on one side and “guilty of genocide” on the other. You could be forgiven for missing it. This was a very small flicker of decency amid the bipartisan celebration of slaughter.
Israel couldn’t get away with its crimes without the support it receives from “both sides of the aisle” in American politics. The bombs that have laid waste to Gaza are shipped off on the say-so of the US Congress. That’s the reason Netanyahu was there in the first place. “Give us the tools faster”, he pleaded, “and we’ll finish the job faster”. 
If anything is to change for the better, it won’t be thanks to the politicians in that building on Capitol Hill. It will be thanks to the thousands protesting outside it on the same day that Netanyahu spoke, and to the many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who continue to show up for Gaza day in day out all around the world.

Republicans and Democrats rally around Netanyahu

Staff at RMIT University went on strike for three-and-a-half days last month. It was the longest and biggest strike in the university’s 127-year history. Their demands include reduced and manageable workloads, and a pay rise above inflation. Striking staff were joined by students at three major entrances to the campus.
In 2022, RMIT took in more than $1.2 billion in revenue. Vice-chancellor Alec Cameron takes home nearly $1 million a year. Where does this cash come from? Squeezing as much as possible out of overworked, underpaid and precariously employed staff. 
In a <a>damning report</a> about widespread wage theft in higher education released by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) last year, RMIT was the third-worst offender with $10 million in proven stolen pay. What the bosses can’t get by outright theft they manage by other means: maintaining inadequate wages and work conditions. 
The first day of the strike, 25 March, marked 1,000 days since the last workplace agreement expired. Since then, inflation has risen by more than 15 percent, while staff have been given only two pay rises of 2 percent and 3 percent. 
Workloads are also a major problem. RMIT staff, like many others in the education sector, are highly overworked and complete hours of unpaid overtime, particularly since hundreds of jobs were cut during the pandemic. 
“I coordinated seven courses across two degrees, both undergrad and masters [and] I’m a contact point for 300 to 400 students”, Dooyeon Park from the School of Media and Communication explained to Red Flag. 
Higher education is one of the most casualised sectors in the country. Over 60 percent of RMIT staff are casuals, meaning their work is unstable and precarious. 
One tutor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies who has been on a casual contract for seven years told Red Flag that they are “constantly wondering if [they] would have a job next semester”. 
Another striking staff member has worked at RMIT for more than ten years, most of that time in casual positions. When he sought a permanent position, management refused on the grounds that the classes he taught fell on different days from one semester to the next, and so didn’t qualify as regular work. 
On top of working conditions other bosses only dream of, RMIT management has deployed union-busting tactics by trying to cut the NTEU out of negotiations with multiple non-union ballots. That’s been coupled with a strategy of dragging out negotiations over a new workplace agreement for as long as possible. Liam Ward, a lecturer at RMIT and an elected member of the NTEU branch committee, told Red Flag:
“It is disgusting and outrageous that RMIT management has dragged this out for 1,000 days and refused to provide us a real agreement that would meet our needs as staff in this institution. But we are making it clear to them that we will take 1,000 more if that’s what’s needed. We aren’t going to sign any old crap, we are only going to sign an agreement that makes our life better. We will keep fighting and won’t stop till we win.”
Staff know it’s their labour that keeps the university running. As NTEU RMIT branch President Tricia McLaughlin said at the opening rally: “We are RMIT, and we deserve better!”.

Zavia Lingenti

Historic RMIT staff strike

From the outset, the Labor Party has steadfastly defended Israel’s crimes.
The day after Hamas’ 7 October attack, Anthony Albanese was unambiguous. “Israel has the right to defend itself and it will be doing so”, he said on ABC’s Insiders. As he and everyone else knows, “self-defence” for Israel means killing people. The claim itself is absurd coming from an occupying power that has held the Gaza Strip under siege since 2008. But the prime minister’s message could not have been clearer: whatever Israel decided to do, it could count on Labor’s support.
By 10 October, Israel had shut off access to food, water and electricity to the more than 2 million Palestinians. Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong was asked on Radio National’s Breakfast what she thought of this act of collective punishment. “It’s always difficult from over here to make judgments”, she replied.
On 28 October, as bombs rained down on Gaza, the government abstained on a vote in the UN General Assembly calling for a ceasefire. By that stage, 7,000 Palestinians had already been killed and Israel’s ground invasion had begun.
Since then, the massacre has intensified. Israeli rockets have pummelled Gaza’s hospitals and homes. More than 1 million Gazans have been driven into the southern half of the territory while Israeli troops occupy the north. As all of this has unfolded, Labor has been unmoved. 
Earlier this month, when Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi called on Labor to back the modest call for a ceasefire, Penny Wong accused the Greens of trying to score political points. 
Labor has divided its time between defending Israel’s right to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and attacking protesters who stand with the Palestinians. 
On 23 November, when more than 1,000 students in Melbourne walked off their school campuses and gathered at Flinders Street Station to demand an end to the massacre, Education Minister Jason Clare told them: “If you want to change the world, go to school”. 
In Labor-run NSW, cops attacked and arrested demonstrators gathered in Port Botany. They were peacefully protesting the unloading of an Israeli ship. 
That not a single MP or high-ranking Labor member has resigned over the party’s support for genocide—not even those who shamelessly call themselves “friends” of Palestine—shows just how spineless and rotten the entire party is. 
If Labor is the face of progressive politics in Australia, then the word progressive no longer has any meaning. 
In fact, Labor acts, and always has acted, in the interests of Western imperialism. It’s why Labor is spending nearly $400 billion to acquire a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. It’s why the ALP is wholly committed to the US alliance and to Israel. It’s why no number of Palestinian dead will shift their position.
The need for a socialist alternative to the Labor Party could not be any clearer or more urgent.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

Labor is an enemy of the Palestinians

As Israel embarks upon the second stage of its assault on the Gaza Strip, which has already killed more than 9,000 and reduced whole swathes of the enclave to rubble, Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank are facing increasing violence on multiple fronts.
More than 100 Palestinians have been killed, hundreds injured, and more than 1,000 arrested in the West Bank since 7 October. According to United Nations representative Martin Griffiths, the week following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was the deadliest for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005.
On 19 October, four Palestinian children were killed along with six others by an Israeli missile strike during a raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp in the northern part of the occupied territory. Later that day, not far from Nur Shams, 14-year-old Ali Khazna was shot twice in the chest from an IDF truck.
The next day, residents from the camp protested, with one telling the Guardian, “I’m here to stand with my people. Even if you do nothing to the Israelis they will shoot you—no one is safe these days”.
Israel has used its tight control over movement in the West Bank—with military checkpoints dotting the region’s segregated roads—to blockade Palestinian towns and villages, cutting them off from one another and making daily life for residents impossible.
Israel’s illegal settlers in the West Bank, who now number more than 700,000, are feeling increasingly emboldened to maraud through Palestinian towns with protection from Israeli soldiers. 
Last week, Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced his ministry would purchase 10,000 assault rifles, some of which would be distributed to West Bank settlers. A <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231024-security-minister-itamar-ben-gvir-arms-israeli-settlers-in-occupied-west-bank/">video shared by Middle East Monitor</a> shows Ben-Gvir shaking hands with settlers and giving out rifles personally. 
Settlers have long used a combination of intimidation and violence against Palestinians with the aim of driving them off their land permanently. Since 7 October, almost 1,000 West Bank Palestinians <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/eu-laments-upsurge-of-settler-attacks-against-west-bank-palestinians/">have been forcibly displaced</a>. Farmers have been attacked in their fields and their crops destroyed, and villages have been ransacked by settler mobs. Last week, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-west-bank-attacks-leaflets-blood-dolls-nakba">Middle East Eye reported </a>that settlers vandalised an Arab school near Jericho and left behind dolls smeared with red paint to terrorise students.
Even in the scattered fragments of West Bank territory under formal Palestinian control—<a href="https://www.anera.org/what-are-area-a-area-b-and-area-c-in-the-west-bank/">the so-called “Area A”</a> set up by the Oslo Accords in the 1990s—it’s not safe. Residents there contend with the repression meted out by the Palestinian Authority (PA). 
12-year-old Razan Nasrallah was shot dead by PA forces during a protest in the northern West Bank city of Jenin. In Ramallah, the PA’s stronghold, protests took aim at PA President Mahmoud Abbas, demanding his resignation. Among wide layers of Palestinians, the PA is seen as little more than a security agency subcontracted by Israel to rule Area A enclaves on its behalf.
Life under occupation means the bereaved don’t even have the right to mourn their dead. On 12 October, two men, a father and son, were gunned down at a funeral procession for four Palestinians killed by settlers in the village of Qusra near Nablus. <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67173344">The BBC reported </a>that before the funeral a photo was circulated around the village of a masked group holding weapons and a petrol can, with a message: “To all the rats in the sewers of Qusra village, we are waiting for you and we will not mourn you”.
Unrelenting terror, targeted violence against civilians, repeated humiliation—this is daily life for Palestinians in the West Bank. In the weeks since 7 October however, the terror has reached new heights.

Israel ramps up West Bank terror

Dave Sweeney, an activist in the anti-nuclear movement for many decades, works for the Australian Conservation Foundation and co-founded the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). He sat down with James McVicar to talk about the past successes and present challenges of the anti-nuclear movement.
How did you first get involved in anti-nuclear campaigning?
I always had a long-time interest in peace. When I grew up, there was a lot of talk of nuclear war, and there was a significant protest movement for nuclear disarmament. I was very aware of that as a young secondary student, but I became increasingly aware of Australia’s role in the nuclear trade and the fact that we hold one-third of the world’s uranium, the primary source for nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
I was involved in street marches against nuclear weapons, but I thought it would be good if we could get in earlier and turn off the tap that feeds that industry.
I’ve worked with trade unions, media, environment and civil society groups, but a thread through that has been nuclear-free politics, resource politics, and how that interfaces with Indigenous rights.
What do you think is the legacy of those movements against nuclear weapons and against uranium mining in Australia?
The threads of nuclear-free and peace have been pretty constant in people’s concerns and aspirations. It’s greatly shaped how a lot of Australians and a lot of organisations and civil society groups see the world. It’s deep in union DNA—like they say, “Peace is union business”. If there hadn’t been people on the streets, advocating and arguing, then Australia would be a far more militarised and far more nuclearised nation than it currently is. I think the lasting legacy is a real scepticism about people who think we can either shoot or nuke our way out of problems.
A lot of people might not know that uranium is mined in Australia. What would you want them to know about the uranium industry in this country?
Uranium is often the forgotten part of the nuclear chain. It’s the basic fuel for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. And Australia has the largest deposits—35 percent of the world’s recoverable uranium. So that’s a very significant contribution that becomes a really major threat, a long-term environmental hazard. Every gram of Australian uranium becomes radioactive waste once it’s dug up. And it can also fuel nuclear weapons. Nine nations are declared nuclear weapons states; five of them developed their nuclear weapons capacity through a civilian nuclear program. So the distinction between military and civilian nukes is cigarette-paper thin. It’s more psychological than real.
The best contribution that we could make on a global level is to take Australia offline, to say: “If you’re looking for the fuel that feeds reactors and weapons and creates waste, Australia’s offline”.
Australia has a real dig it, rip it, ship it culture: it’s a big resource-based economy. So it’s been quite an achievement by people over the decades to constrain the uranium industry. We have two mines in Australia: a small one in northern South Australia called Beverley and a massive one called Olympic Dam—again in northern South Australia, 500 km north of Adelaide in Roxby Downs—owned by BHP.
But there are hundreds of uranium deposits in Australia and scores of projects that they’ve tried to start and, through community resistance and, particularly, Indigenous resistance, they haven’t gone ahead. So it’s only South Australia where uranium mining is happening, since Australia’s longest running uranium mine—the Ranger mine in the NT—closed in 2021. There, the local Mirarr traditional owners and environmentalists are working hard to ensure that Rio Tinto, the company that owns the mine, does a comprehensive and credible clean-up. That clean-up bill is now valued at over $2 billion, which gives an indication of how contaminating this sector is.
To constrain the uranium sector so severely has been a real tribute to sustained effort from a broad range of people over decades. There’s never been a uranium project in Australia that has gone unchallenged, and there have been big fights. Sometimes we lose, like at Olympic Dam. I was arrested 40 years ago protesting the development of that project. But readers will also remember the fight in Jabiluka over twenty years ago. That was a massive project planned in Kakadu. They were meant to have uranium mining until 2065. Well, uranium mining in Kakadu is over now; it ended in 2021. That’s 40 years early—and against the run of play: against what the conservative politicians wanted, what the Minerals Council wanted, what the mining media cheer squad wanted.
That action came from a broad range of groups. One ecological principle is that the healthiest ecosystem is the diverse one. The same goes for protest and social movements for change. Some people say it can only be direct action; some people say it can only be in parliament. They’re all wrong and they’re all right. If everybody uses the connections, power and ability they have—whether it’s lighting a candle in a church, locking onto a big yellow machine, asking questions in a shareholders’ meeting or calling your local MP—the whole spectrum is needed.
You have written about the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011 and how there was Australian uranium in the reactor when it failed. Where else is this stuff going?
There are two ports in Australia licensed to handle and ship uranium—the port of Adelaide and the port of Darwin. When that ship sails off, with barrels inside a shipping container, it effectively disappears off the radar. There’s all this talk about instruments and agreements and checks and balances, but in practical effect, these things are self-regulated and the checks and balances are remarkably cursory.
And even in countries where there is some sort of established system and transparency, the rules aren’t kept. There was concern after concern about the behaviour of TEPCO, the company that runs Fukushima. They were facing legal challenges about corner-cutting, corrupt and improper behaviour; there were all these whistleblowers saying their safety procedures weren’t being followed, and no pressure from Australia, which was selling them uranium. Then in March 2011, the tsunami happened: Fukushima melted down. It was a nuclear catastrophe with massive continuing damage. And it was confirmed in September 2011 that it was Australian uranium inside the Fukushima reactor. So when you hear about Fukushima radiation, it started in the back of a big yellow truck in the NT and northern SA.
Now, some of the environmental groups active in the nuclear-free space are campaigning to highlight and try to halt Japan’s plans to directly dump a million tonnes of contaminated water into the Pacific. It hasn’t been front-page news in Australia, but it’s a really big concern in the Pacific. There are big concerns on the Japanese seaboard, in Korea and China. It’s extraordinary that a dozen years after a nuclear accident in a very advanced nation, with very sophisticated technology and a lot of money, the best they can come up with for their waste management treatment is to chuck it into the ocean. So if anyone still says this industry is clean, they’re either not looking or not wanting to look.
We can’t talk about nuclear in Australia without talking about the AUKUS deal, a major turning point in nuclear politics in Australia. What’s your advice to people who want to keep up the fight against nuclear?
AUKUS is a major injection of cash, profile, momentum and enthusiasm into the nuclear sector. A lot of people want a piece of what they see as a multibillion-dollar action.
Already they’re saying: If we have to deal with the high-level radioactive waste from our submarines in the future, let’s take the world’s high-level waste and use it as a financial opportunity. If we’re going to have nuclear reactors, shouldn’t we have domestic uranium and domestic nuclear fuel? Others are saying: If we’re having nuclear reactors at sea, why wouldn’t we move some reactors onshore? Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, the Minerals Council: this whole chorus of nuclear promoters are saying AUKUS is a game changer and we’re now a nuclear nation.
So we’re contesting AUKUS in its own right, but also trying to ring-fence Australia’s domestic situation from whichever way AUKUS goes. We want to contest AUKUS; we don’t want to see it happen. But a pivotal priority is to make sure it doesn’t escalate to include nuclear weapons.
What people can do is critical. The maintenance of hope is critical. So we need to maintain our hope and express our views—in conversations, explain why we think it’s a bad idea, join public manifestations. It reminds people quietly sitting at home that they’re not alone, that they’re not Robinson Crusoe, that there are other people that feel this way and you’re not mad to think that what’s going on is mad.
Small actions can collectively strengthen and tie down the beast. And that can be across whatever range of activities you’re involved in or comfortable with. If you like direct action, do that. Just do something. Don’t acquiesce, don’t be quiet. And you can plug in to groups like the Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition to stay informed.
And while Labor’s pretty locked into AUKUS, there are some in Labor and many in the unions who aren’t convinced. There are many members saying, “I didn’t stand in the rain and hand out how-to-vote cards for 40 years for this”.
At ICAN (the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), we’ve pushed for an international treaty to make nuclear weapons illegal. In 2018, Labor said they agreed to a treaty to end nuclear weapons. We’re pushing them to sign it. That won’t roll AUKUS back or stop submarines, but it will stop the erosion of Australia either requiring, accepting, or acquiescing to nuclear weapons.
Sometimes people ask, “What can I do when it’s me against BHP?” Firstly, you’re not alone. And secondly, remember what the Dalai Lama once said: “Whoever thinks they’re too small to make a difference hasn’t spent a night in a room with a mosquito”.
We all need to be anti-AUKUS anti-nuclear mosquitoes. We can get in the ear of power and say, “No, not here, not us”.

'Not here, not us': the long fight against nuclear in Australia

In December 2021, Victorian government officials went door to door at the Barak Beacon public housing estate in Port Melbourne to tell residents they had to leave. By the time resident Margaret Kelly, who uses a mobility scooter, reached the door, they had already left. Later that day, there was a letter in her mailbox telling her she was going to be “relocated”.
Now, Margaret is the last resident at the estate, and the Andrews government has already started demolition work. It’s a stone’s throw from the beach and only minutes from Melbourne’s CBD. Its nine medium-rise walk-up blocks were completed in 1982. 
“It was designed not just for houses but to build a community”, Margaret explained at a recent Victorian Socialists housing crisis forum.
Precious little is left of that community now. Only a few weeks after they came knocking on Margaret’s door, housing department officials started pressuring residents into going by implying they would get a worse relocation offer if they held out.
“It was disastrous for people ... it absolutely panicked them.” The residents have all left except for Margaret, who refused to be bullied out of her home for over twenty years. In response, the government got a possession order to have Margaret forcibly removed on 7 August. 
These standover tactics are being used in the name of the Andrews government’s Big Housing Build, a $5.3 billion program announced in 2020 and touted as “the largest social and affordable housing program in Victoria’s history”. The truth—as <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7480">Louise O’Shea wrote in Red Flag at the time of the announcement</a>—is much bleaker, at least for people who think housing should be a right. 
Daniel Andrews is not one of those people.
Between 2018 and 2022, the state’s public housing waiting list swelled by 45 percent, from 44,000 applications to 64,168. So how does this stack up with the government’s claim to be building “thousands of new homes for Victorians in need” through the Big Housing Build? 
In reality, the project is a scheme to hand out prime public land to private developers and shift existing public housing tenants into more precarious, privately managed “social housing”. Barak Beacon is just one of many public housing estates facing this kind of “redevelopment”. In Northcote, for example, the Walker Street public housing estate was demolished in 2020 to make way for private apartments set to fetch up to $3 million. 
It’s clear why developers are keen to get their hands on Barak Beacon, or more precisely, the land underneath it. The median price for a two-bedroom house in Port Melbourne is $1.75 million. One house opposite the estate sold for $2.3 million in 2021. These figures—not ballooning public housing waiting lists—are what guides Labor government policy.
Margaret Kelly’s determination to fight against Labor’s smash-and-grab is heroic. Housing activists have joined her to protest outside state parliament in recent weeks, and there are currently daily vigils from 3 pm to 5 pm at the estate. 
Solutions to the housing crisis aren’t hard to find. Margaret has a straightforward one: “Build a hell of a lot more public housing”. But we won’t get that without a fight, and that means campaigning, like Margaret, to defend what’s left of Victoria’s dwindling public housing stock.
One slogan that’s come out of the campaign makes an important point: “Beach views not just for the rich”. Public housing shouldn’t just be abundant; it should be beautiful.

Willy Law

‘Beach views not just for the rich’

While most of us are being hit hard by the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, Australia’s “big four” banks—Commonwealth, Westpac, ANZ and NAB—have had a record-breaking start to the financial year, posting <a href="https://www.pwc.com.au/media/2023/pwc-major-banks-analysis-half-year-may-2023.html">a combined half-year profit</a> of $17.1 billion. That’s a 19 percent increase from the equivalent period in 2021, and $1.3 billion more than the previous record of $15.8 billion in 2015.
To put it in perspective, the big four made more in net profit in the last six months of 2022 than the Labor government plans to spend <a href="https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/jim-chalmers-2022/media-releases/cost-living-relief-labors-2023-24-budget">on cost of living relief</a> over the next four years ($14.6 billion), or that it is proposing to invest in its <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/22/what-is-labors-10bn-social-housing-fund-and-will-it-be-torn-down-by-parliament">“housing future fund”</a> to build new social and affordable housing ($10 billion).
The banks are raking it in, not in spite of the cost of living crisis, but because of it. One way they make such eye-watering sums is by charging higher interest rates on loans than they pay on deposits—the wider the margin, the juicier the profit. That’s why the banks are always so quick to pass Reserve Bank interest rate rises on to borrowers but much more circumspect about lifting rates on deposits.
Rate hikes to date have meant that, as of December last year, nearly <a href="https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/9148-mortgage-stress-risk-early-2023">a quarter of mortgage holders</a> (more than a million people) were at risk of “mortgage stress”, in which more than 30 percent of a household’s pre-tax income is spent on mortgage payments. Back then the average monthly repayment on a $500,000 loan was up by $900 compared to a year earlier. With further interest rate rises since, this figure will only have increased.
What are the bankers doing with their windfall? Not improving their service, that’s for sure. According to <a href="https://www.fsunion.org.au/fsu-campaigns/australian-bank-branch-closures/">figures from the Financial Sector Union</a>, between 2017 and 2022 the number of bank branches around Australia went from 5,694 to 4,014—a 30 percent fall.
One thing they’ve been spending their money on is the inflated pay packets of their CEOs. The CEO of Commonwealth Bank, Matt Comyn, pocketed almost $7 million last year, Westpac’s Peter King took home $5 million, and NAB CEO Ross McEwan got $6.3 million.
Do the bankers feel sympathy for the millions of Australians who are experiencing the financial strain of a cost of living crisis they’re profiting from? Of course not. When asked <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/nab-ceo-predicts-one-or-two-more-rate-rises/102361064">in a recent interview</a> with ABC Radio National’s Patricia Karvelas whether he’d support a rise in the minimum wage commensurate with the rate of inflation, McEwan said that instead of a raise, those workers should “start looking around” for a higher paying job.
As for the rest of us, we might consider the benefits of a world in which banking CEOs like McEwan had to look around for something useful to do, and the immense transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that they preside over could be reversed.

Big banks profit from cost of living pain

While French President Emmanuel Macron continues his months-long battle to raise workers’ retirement age from 62 to 64, his government is waging war on another front, some 8,000 kilometres away on the island of Mayotte.
Sitting between Mozambique and Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, Mayotte is part of the Comoro archipelago. But officially it is part of France. The colonial legacy of capitalism sometimes means that you can be in two places at once. 
Falling under French colonial rule in the 1800s, during the European powers’ “Scramble for Africa”, Mayotte has been bound to the country ever since. A disputed referendum in 1974 granted independence to the Comoro Islands, but Mayotte remained a French territory. In 2011, it was incorporated as the country’s 101st department. 
Today, unemployment among the island’s 310,000 people is 70 percent. More than three-quarters of the population live below the poverty line of €1,100 a month, according to the French national statistical bureau. 
Nevertheless, thousands of migrants come to Mayotte every year from the neighbouring Comoros, where the situation is even worse. Comorans now make up almost half of Mayotte’s population; many are undocumented.
This state of permanent social crisis and dislocation has been fertile ground for the far right—Marine Le Pen’s fascist National Rally scored a solid victory in Mayotte in the second round of the 2022 presidential elections. 
Le Pen’s vile anti-immigration stand has earned her a sizeable following in the majority-Muslim department. But it is Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, who is about to unleash the violence. Last month he announced the dispatching of 1,800 police and gendarmes to Mayotte—including members of the infamous Republican Security Corps riot squad—as part of Operation Wuambushu (“recapture” in the local Shimaore language).
Their mission—dressed up as a law-and-order campaign against “criminal gangs”—is to expel thousands of migrants from the island and to flatten the shanty towns in which they live. 
Local politicians are doing their part to whip up the anti-migrant frenzy. Salime Mdéré, the vice-president of the island’s governing council, caused a minor scandal when he launched a tirade against young migrants on local television, suggesting it might be necessary to “kill some” for Operation Wuambushu to be a success. 
Mdéré might have been the only one to say it out loud, but the French government’s contempt for human life is clear as day. 
The fight against anti-migrant racism cannot be separated from issues of social class. Every successful attack on the rights of oppressed groups strengthens the hand of the ruling class against the working class. 
The connection couldn’t be clearer when the same police thugs deployed against striking French workers are now terrorising the slums of Mayotte.

French government’s war on the poor abroad

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. In her 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus”, Jewish-American poet and activist Emma Lazarus imagined the newly built Statue of Liberty speaking these words, symbolising hope for “tempest-tost” refugees seeking safety and a better life. Engraved on a bronze plaque, her poem adorns the pedestal upon which “Lady Liberty” stands to this day.
Half a century later, hundreds of Jewish refugees onboard the MS St Louis didn’t get close enough to the iconic statue to read those celebrated and much-repeated lines. US President Franklin Roosevelt ignored their pleas for asylum. It was 1939, and the Nazi Holocaust was about to begin.
After being refused entry to the “land of the free” (as well as to Cuba and Canada), those aboard were returned to the Europe they had desperately fled. More than 200 of the 900 who set out from Hamburg on the St Louis perished in Hitler’s death camps, all because they didn’t have the correct paperwork.
This is one story among many told in Ken Burns’ latest documentary, The US and the Holocaust, which explores the response—indeed, the conflicting responses—in America to the Nazi persecution of Jews, from Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 to the death camps of World War Two. 
The persecution of German Jews was no secret in the United States; indeed, the Nazi’s antisemitic policies, and the racist ideology with which they justified them, were inspired by the anti-Black segregation policies in the southern states. The Nazis also took inspiration from the antisemitism of Henry Ford, one of the richest and most powerful men in America at the time, whose bigoted pamphlet series The International Jew was translated and published in Germany in the 1920s. 
The eugenics movement, which aimed to “improve” the genetics of the human population by eliminating “inferior” genes, was very influential in early twentieth century America. Its ideas were taught at elite universities and embraced by members of high society such as Madison Grant, a prominent conservationist and racist, who may well have been the world’s first eco-fascist. 
Excerpts from Grant’s work The Passing of the Great Race were later used by defence lawyers at the Nuremburg trials, which were held after the war to charge Nazis and others with crimes against humanity. The defence pointed out that racist ideology was far from unique to Nazi Germany. Hitler referred to it as his Bible.
Burns’ documentary is not without inspiring moments. Stories of resistance to Nazi atrocities include marches of up to a million people across America in solidarity with the Jews of Germany, and a campaign to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. But the emotions it stirs overwhelmingly are anger and frustration, as the official US response to worsening Nazi crimes ranged from cold, bureaucratic indifference to despicable, outright racism. 
We will never know how many lives could have been saved if governments had been willing to throw open their borders to all who sought protection from Hitler—because there were none. The Australian government was no better than its US counterpart, its White Australia policy still firmly in place. 
The US and the Holocaust is a heart-breaking but important documentary full of lessons for today’s fighters against oppression. One is that racism is not some by-product of poor education, but a conscious creation of the people who rule over a system that has inequality at its heart.

More than just ‘rates, roads and rubbish’: Victorian Socialists vie for local councils

Republicans and Democrats rally around Netanyahu

Historic RMIT staff strike

Labor is an enemy of the Palestinians

Israel ramps up West Bank terror

'Not here, not us': the long fight against nuclear in Australia

‘Beach views not just for the rich’

Big banks profit from cost of living pain

French government’s war on the poor abroad

New documentary highlights US indifference to Holocaust

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us