Did you know that climate protests cause terrorism? That the Knitting Nannas are a potential gateway to ISIS recruitment? That demonstrating to stop cuts to workers’ compensation is a threat to public safety? That rallying against Nazis is antisemitic? That protesting against record levels of Aboriginal deaths in custody would “rip apart our social cohesion”? Or, the real kicker, that 300,000 people (including several NSW government MPs and ministers) marching over the Sydney Harbour bridge against a genocide caused the Bondi attack? 
This is the insane rationale put forward by NSW Premier Chris Minns and virtually the entire media establishment to justify a new regime banning all protests in NSW for up to three months following a terror attack.
The new laws were rushed through by Minns on Christmas eve, in a textbook case of an authoritarian government not letting a crisis go to waste, as he sought to exploit the horrific Bondi attack for his and the establishment’s own ends. For years, NSW governments have been imposing more and more anti-protest laws, often targeting the climate movement and lately focused on trying to silence the mass movement against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Minns even received a letter of praise from Israeli President Isaac Herzog last year—himself indicted for incitement to genocide by the United Nations—for his service to the apartheid regime.
While Minns often accuses protesters of wanting to bring foreign conflicts to Australia, it is his government that just two months ago sponsored a weapons expo in Sydney with Israel’s biggest weapons companies. On that day, “social cohesion” was ensured the way Minns likes, through police repeatedly charging, punching, pepper-spraying and arresting people—and breaking the bones of two peaceful protesters.
The new laws enable the NSW police commissioner, with approval from the attorney general, to issue a “public assembly restriction declaration” for up to fourteen days following a terrorist attack, which can be repeatedly extended for up to three months. The declaration enables the designation of any area in the entire state, within which protesters cannot have a “form one” accepted by police, and no court can overturn this opposition. A form one is the usual way protesters in NSW obtain the legal right to march on our streets. Without it, police can arrest protesters for things like obstructing traffic. So the laws effectively ban all street marches.
In addition, police have been given extra powers to issue “move on” notices even to static assemblies where no march takes place. All the police have to say is that the protest is obstructing pedestrians. The combined effect of all this is that the people of NSW now have no right to protest at all, about anything, in the entire state, on penalty of arrest. Any protests allowed to go ahead will be entirely at the police’s discretion. This is an extreme and outrageous attack on our fundamental democratic rights.
Already, a protest to commemorate the killing of Indigenous man David Dungay Jnr, who was suffocated to death by six prison guards and who has still received no justice, has had its form one revoked. Protest organisers are vowing to defy the ban and march anyway on 18 January, which they had planned to do long before the Bondi attack. The ban is predicted to be extended to cover the annual Invasion Day March on 26 January, and an upcoming protest against the Israeli president.
It is utterly obscene that a protest ban, ostensibly in place to combat antisemitism, a form of racism, will be used to threaten and prevent demonstrations against the racism faced by Aboriginal people. Even more so when we face a growing street movement of extreme racists and fascists, the so-called March for Australia, which is also planning to mobilise again on 26 January. Well before Bondi, NSW police were notorious for opposing Palestine and other anti-racist protests while allowing neo-Nazis to demonstrate freely.
Logic, consistency and anti-racism have nothing to do with the current agenda. Many of the media outlets now spewing the preposterous lie that opposing genocide is antisemitic and laid the basis for Bondi, are the same that built and promoted the Nazi-led March for Australia. Israel lobbyist and antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s partner is a financial contributor to the far-right, racist outfit Advance Australia. She <a href="https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/watermelons-deemed-an-antisemitic">says</a> that watermelons are an antisemitic symbol, but failed to make any statement condemning the recent Nazi rally outside the NSW parliament. They all support the biggest racist atrocity of our time—the genocide being carried out by the Israeli regime in Gaza. 
The Palestine Action Group Sydney, Blak Caucus and Jews Against the Occupation ’48 have launched a constitutional challenge to these anti-protest laws. Minns has already lost two constitutional challenges to anti-protest laws. This will be the biggest fight yet, as it occurs in the context of a full-blown McCarthyite witch hunt being waged by the entire ruling establishment against the Palestine movement and the left, culminating in a royal commission that they intend to use as a year-long show trial of anyone who has dared to oppose the genocide. We will not win the courtroom battle unless we win the political argument in society.
We must resist this tide of irrationalism and hypocrisy now coming from every institution. There are millions upon millions of us who can see through all this bullshit and know that the biggest racists in society are accusing us of racism, the biggest supporters of violent atrocities and racist terrorism are accusing us of such things, precisely because we have opposed them. They will not silence us.

Josh Lees

Chris Minns exploits Bondi to attack democratic rights

On 4 November, Judge Navi Pillay, former member of the UN special commission of inquiry that found Israel guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, addressed the National Press Club. “Under the Genocide Convention, every state has the legal obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, to deal with the commission of genocide, and to protect against genocide ... Be careful what you’re doing”, Pillay said. “You may one day face charges of complicity in genocide.”
As Pillay was delivering her speech in Canberra, two major Israeli weapons companies were spruiking their wares in Sydney at the Indo Pacific weapons expo, officially sponsored by the NSW government and the Australian Navy. Elbit Systems and Rafael have enabled and profited from the genocide in Gaza, and even <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-weapons-firm-rafael-uses-gaza-killing-marketing-campaign">use their war crimes as selling points</a> for their weapons systems. They were joined by a host of other arms dealers that have amassed fortunes by turning Gaza into a mass grave, including Lockheed Martin, Leonardo and Thales. 
While the Israel connection was the most morally repugnant feature of the expo, it went well beyond this. The main game for Australian imperialism is bolstering its military power and further integrating with the US military, to better contain and combat China. These priorities were reflected in the convention, which <a href="https://indopacificexpo.com.au/news-media/latest-news/74-american-companies-come-together-at-indo-pacific-2025-to-celebrate-innovation-collaboration-and-250-years-of-the-us-navy/">celebrated</a>
the US bringing the “largest national presence to date to Indo Pacific 2025 with 74 leading American companies representing nineteen states present at the show”. These companies are competing to get their snouts in the trough of the global arms race, now worth about US$2.5 trillion annually, and with Australia set to nearly double its military spending to $100 billion per year by 2033-34.
The weapons expo encapsulated the barbarity and the banality of the evil of present-day capitalism. Thousands of senior military and government personnel rubbed shoulders with war profiteering corporations, many of which are run by ex-military or government personnel themselves. Far from being a barrier to entry, complicity in the genocide in Gaza was almost a requirement of entry, and the rosy dawn being hailed was one of mushroom clouds and future holocausts. Free gifts for participants included hand-grenade plush toys.
Despite officially sponsoring the event, the NSW government tried to downplay its involvement in the expo, a spokesperson for NSW Industry Minister Anoulack Chanthivong <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/30/israeli-weapons-companies-elbit-rafael-should-be-removed-sydney-defence-expo-over-gaza">telling the</a> Guardian that the state government was not paying international companies to attend and was not involved in planning the expo. Information leaked to the Palestine Action Group, however, claims that the NSW government has spent at least $1.6 million to secure the hosting of the expo in Sydney, and that staff from the Premier’s Department were involved in setting up and running the exhibition.
Federal Labor ministers were much less coy. The keynote speaker, Defence Minister Richard Marles, gushed that the machines of death before him spanned “the breadth of the beautiful, the menacing and the extremely cool ... the very best of human ingenuity”.
While these “beautiful” weapons were being bought and sold inside, other weapons were being deployed outside—against anti-war protesters.
Pepper spray is banned for use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention. But NSW Police did not hesitate to repeatedly spray hundreds of demonstrators with this chemical weapon, which causes severe pain and blindness for up to half an hour. The attacks on our demonstration began as soon as people arrived in Darling Harbour, police violently charging protesters from 6:23am, riding horses into the crowd, punching demonstrators in the head, emptying whole canisters of pepper spray into people’s faces and making violent arrests. One protester, Amy, a journalism student, was thrown to the ground, fracturing her tibia (shin bone). 
The police attacks continued intermittently for several hours, even after we were driven away from the International Convention Centre and into Tumbalong Park, a “designated protest area”. At one point, the police escorted an expo attendee into the park and through the middle of our protest, just to have an excuse to pepper spray the crowd again. I was sprayed directly in the face while trying to help up another protester who had been knocked down and blinded. 
Senior police later lied about events, telling a media conference that they had been “set upon by a pack of very angry people”. Several <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DQoitfwE3kb/">videos</a> show that the exact opposite occurred. When I tried to ask a question at this press conference—about whether NSW Police had begun any investigations into war crimes by companies at the expo—I was <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/propalestine-protesters-to-blockade-nsw-governmentsponsored-arms-expo/news-story/837abdd47900072694e75780444c2b46">surrounded by police</a> and threatened with arrest. 
Despite all of this, the spirits of protesters remained high, as we knew we had stood together, defied police violence and at least shone a spotlight on this abominable weapons expo and the sick priorities of our rulers and their repressive police. Next time, we need thousands more of us to shut it down and demand our money be spent on public housing, the health system and wage rises, not weapons, and for a world without war and genocide.
Josh Lees is a member of the Palestine Action Group Sydney.

Why we protested the weapons expo of war criminals

Italy’s Autumn of mass protests and strikes for Palestine boiled over into four days of rebellion following Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla. This culminated in a general strike and millions on the streets on 3-4 October. The explosion of popular struggle, with the working class and the strike now placed at its centre, accompanied by a mass, militant student movement, is a hugely significant development in the fight for Palestine, and the broader fight against the capitalist and imperialist system.
A rising tide of struggle in Italy has been set in motion since 1 September, when 50,000 people marched in Genoa to accompany the launch of the Global Sumud Flotilla. Genoa hosts one of Europe’s most important ports, and the protest sent off the Flotilla with mass support and a warning: if the Flotilla were attacked, then dockworkers, along with other workers, and backed by a mass movement, would strike and “block everything”—blocchiamo tutto! 
The declaration was initially made by the dockworkers organised in the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (CALP). It was quickly taken up by the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), one of Italy’s many so-called base unions which have been set up in recent decades to organise rank-and-file workers into class struggle in opposition to Italy’s traditional trade union federations which, like Australian unions, are dominated by institutionalised, do-nothing bureaucrats. 
The base unions directly organise only a small minority of Italian workers, so their ability to implement serious industrial action without the main union federations is usually very limited. But now, the boldness of the slogan—blocchiamo tutto—combined with rising anger at the situation in Gaza and the Italian government’s complicity with Israel’s genocide, sparked a surge of energy, confidence and mobilisation. Along with the base unions and the growing calls for strike action, this has been fuelled by growing mass Palestine rallies, a youth radicalisation centred on high school and university blockades and occupations, and countless smaller actions, including rallies, local blockades, encampments and so on, often organised by Italy’s social centres. At the core of most of this upsurge in spontaneous activity are Italy’s various far-left and communist organisations.
The date was set for a general strike, called by the base unions, on 22 September. To try to undermine this call, and to give itself some much-needed left cover in the face of growing pressure, Italy’s main union federation, the CGIL, called a last-minute strike for 19 September. A cynical manoeuvre, this strike was not intended to be widespread, and indeed it wasn’t, outside of some transport and education workers. Yet, contrary to the wishes of the CGIL leaders, it helped to legitimise the idea of a general strike for Palestine, and helped to lay the basis for the success of the 22 September general strike.
This strike involved many more workers than 19 September and unleashed a confident mass movement prepared to defy the police and new anti-protest laws, to block ports, train stations, highways, schools and universities. Without the backing of the major union federations, many workers did not participate in the strike, or participated as individuals without much economic impact on their workplace. But the momentum was building.
With the attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla on 1 October, a new peak of mobilisation was unleashed. Snap protests drew thousands into the squares of every major city late at night and with no notice. I eventually found the tail-end of the protest in Florence, where hundreds were still in the square at 1am. In some bigger cities, clashes with police and blockades of stations and roads were already beginning and raging through the night.
Crucially, on the night of 1 October, the CGIL now backed the call for a general strike on 3 October. The momentum was such that there was no way they could avoid such a call at this point without losing all legitimacy in the eyes of the working class. Forcing the CGIL into such action was a major victory for the movement and ensured 3 October would be a historic day.
The day before, still in Florence at this point, I headed at 8am towards what I’d been told was going to be a university blockade. On the way, I happened to run into something else—hundreds of high school students standing in the street outside their school in the centre of the CBD. The entrance was being blockaded by a combination of school and uni students. The high school students seemed very happy about this situation, with support for Palestine ubiquitous among their cohort, and any waverers won over by the fact that this was much more exciting than school. They could name at least three other high schools in Florence alone that were also being blockaded that morning.
Half an hour later, and following people wearing keffiyehs, I found my way to the blockade of the University of Florence. The student activists had chosen the via Laura campus due to its ongoing ties with Israel. The entrance was blocked, and protesters chanted and made speeches outside. As more students arrived, many presumably expecting to go to class, they instead overwhelmingly joined the protest. When a critical mass was reached, the blockade became an occupation. Hundreds of students marched into classes to shut them down, chanting, singing and pulling the students out to join the protest. 
One of the songs was clearly a bit new and took a while to catch on, but soon hundreds were singing it on repeat. I was told it was an adaptation of a workers’ song associated with an important strike a few years earlier. Some of the lyrics translate as: “Forward together; united in the struggle; against imperialism; there will be victory!” A mass assembly was held to discuss the politics and organisation of the occupation, before the students then led a march into the city centre, stopping by every blockaded high school along the way, whose students joined the march. At the time of writing, the occupation at via Laura is ongoing.
That night, I joined another mass demonstration in Florence. This time, thousands marched through the city centre before heading to Florence’s main train station, Santa Maria Novella. Everyone knew what was coming: the night before, stations had been stormed and blockaded in Milan and Turin. We faced a line of fully decked-out riot police. As the crowd swelled and surged, a series of explosions rang out—smaller fire crackers thrown by protesters, I think, followed by thunderously loud explosions from police flashbang grenades. But no one was deterred; the crowd grew, the chants grew louder, and soon the police retreated. Thousands stormed in, occupying the train platforms and tracks. These scenes were playing out across Italy. A 24-hour strike on the railways began at 9pm that night.
The 3 October general strike is an incredible and perhaps unprecedented achievement. A purely political strike, and a general strike, carried out with massive, active participation, as a result of a surging movement from below, which was declared illegal by the Italian government, given no real support from any of the entire official opposition of the political establishment; and all for an international cause that does not seemingly directly affect Italian workers. And not just any international cause, but that of the Palestinians—a people systematically demonised and dehumanised as Islamic terrorists.
The general strike and mass mobilisations were a big victory over the far-right Meloni government, which serves the interests of Italian capitalism, the third biggest exporter of arms to Israel after the US and Germany. Like governments around the world, Meloni wants to impose further austerity on the working class to fund obscene increases in military spending. She derided the strikers as people just seeking a “long weekend”, and her government declared the strike illegal, threatening unions and individuals with repercussions. She also recently passed laws to punish protesters who block important infrastructure. This all failed miserably.
The CGIL reported the strike as a widespread success, with 60 percent participation. It was particularly strong in the education, transport and logistics industries, and among metalworkers. Mass demonstrations accompanied the strike, with perhaps 2 million people mobilising across the country, including 300,000 in Rome. Along with this went an enormous wave of blockades, often led by student activists who swarmed past police lines to block, occupy and shut down ports, train stations, major highways, even airports, warehouses and distribution centres, along with schools and universities. The blockades made the strike massively more disruptive. Long-distance trains, for example, were announced by the CGIL as not being affected by the strike. But occupations of the train tracks meant that everything was stopped—something I can attest to, as I was trying to get to Rome for the huge national demonstration the next day. I’ve never been so happy to wait several hours for a train!
It’s incredible to think that after all this frenetic activity, the very next day, 4 October, 1 million people took to the streets of Rome for Italy’s biggest demonstration since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I made it into town the night before, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs greeted me everywhere. The metro on the way to the protest’s starting point was packed with rally-goers—I remember thinking that there were more people on this single train, two hours before the march was even due to start, than I’ve been with at many Palestine protests over the decades.
It felt like the whole world was protesting there in Rome; a never-ending sea of humanity which, despite walking up and down for hours, I never saw the start or the end of. Every side street of the official march route was jam-packed. It was so big you could easily go and line up for a pizza and beer, sit for two hours, rejoin the demonstration and still be nowhere near the end of the march. As we marched past the Colosseum, I couldn’t help but think of the petty attempt of NSW police and Premier Chris Minns to stop us in Sydney from marching to the Opera House on supposed “security” and “safety” grounds. What a joke.
There are a few important points flowing from the events in Italy. First, the global complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza has encapsulated so much about the morally bankrupt world we live in. In the last two years, every institution of this system has utterly debased itself in the service of genocide, from the Labor Party to the ABC, and so many more. In Italy, this includes all the so-called opposition parties. I say “encapsulated” and not revealed, because for so many workers and students, this system has already been failing them year after year, while its politicians and ideologues become less and less credible.
This partly explains the explosion of struggle in Italy. The banner of Palestine has become a symbol and a unifying rallying cry for everyone fed up with a system of shameless liars, hypocrites and murderers, who preside over an economic system of inequality which keeps us poor, locked out and with nothing to lose.
Second, while socialists have been saying for some time that Israel’s barbarism is a product of an entire sick system of capitalism and imperialism, and that the road to Palestinian liberation was inseparable from a working-class struggle against that system, nothing makes the case quite like a general strike. Italian workers and students have planted the flag, and it’s now up to the rest of the world to emulate these efforts. Mass, militant class struggle is the way forward for Palestinian liberation, and the liberation of us all.
Third, Italy shows that in circumstances of widespread discontent, a bold minority—in this case comprising relatively embryonic rank-and-file workers’ organisations and a radical student movement—with an orientation to mass action and class struggle, can galvanise millions into struggle and transform the situation, precisely because they called for militant, determined action. They didn’t do it by moderating their demands or sucking up to the likes of the Italian Democratic Party or the CGIL leaders, the rough equivalents of our Labor Party and ACTU. This should be a huge inspiration for us all, as it shows that a movement that is both mass and militant is not only what is needed, but is clearly possible.

Italy’s general strike shows the way forward

Sunday, 3 August, will go down in history as the day that 300,000 people, in pouring rain, marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and that the Australian government sanction Israel. The people have spoken. It is the day the whole political and media establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, which have spent nearly two years trying to convince us that Israel’s endless slaughter is justified, definitively lost the argument.
They tried to stop this march from happening, because they understood its potential power. The New South Wales Labor government said it couldn’t happen. The police took us to court to try to stop it. The media ran with their scare campaign about “disruption”, “chaos” and a potential “crowd crush”. 
The media and government also tried to put the spotlight on me, hoping they could discredit and split the Palestine movement. They ran a good old-fashioned campaign of Cold War red-baiting, “outing” me as a Trotskyist, dismissing me as a “serial pest” and a “professional protester” and decrying that I had cost the state $10 million. The Sydney Morning Herald
suggested that I would “jump behind a megaphone for the facile thrill of annoying the establishment”. This attempted character assassination had a transparent intent: to discredit the cause without engaging with the arguments being made, and to drive a wedge between Palestine activists and the growing numbers who agree with them. 
This strategy failed sensationally. In the wake of the campaign’s Supreme Court victory and the enormous numbers who mobilised on the bridge, it was the media’s campaign that looked out-of-touch and the genocide apologists the real serial pests. Not used to failure, the right went into meltdown. The Australian ran a series of hyperbolic pieces, in which they both doubled down on their attacks on me and turned on the Supreme Court for enabling me and revealing its supposedly communist sympathies. 
“The most powerful man in Sydney on Sunday leads his pro-Palestine supporters across the Harbour Bridge basking in the global spotlight—and revelling in a sweet victory handed to him by the NSW Supreme Court”, lamented the Australian. “Josh Lees, the 43-year-old Trotskyist who now calls the tune in the harbour city, has captured the nation’s most iconic landmark and plans to use the moment well into the future ... The keffiyeh-wearing Lees has led a string of causes in the last two decades, his exploits on behalf of refugees, LGBTQI rights and against capitalism all breathlessly recorded in the Red Flag, his Socialist Alternative news outlet. On Saturday night the Red Flag was hailing Lees’ court win as a triumph in the ‘test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism’ ... Lees walked away from the court waving the Palestinian flag. And making it very clear: this was just the beginning.”
It may come as a surprise to readers of Red Flag that in fact I do not “call the tune in the harbour city”, nor that Trotskyism or socialism has yet triumphed. What the gigantic success of the March for Humanity does signify is a huge collective victory of people power over the capitalist establishment, which has backed the genocide in Gaza from the outset. The credit for this belongs to all those who argued, endorsed, organised and mobilised to make that day what it was, and especially to those in the Palestine Action Group Sydney who have stuck it out and kept this movement going for the past two years, most of whom don’t get the “glory” of mainstream media hit pieces. And above all it goes to the hundreds of thousands, who represent many hundreds of thousands more, who took a stand in the face of two years of pro-Israel propaganda, repression and slander from the government, the media, the universities, the arts establishment, but who can recognise a genocide when they see one and refuse to remain silent. 
The establishment is right to be worried, because we do now have a platform to build a much stronger Palestine solidarity movement, with much wider social backing, which is calling into question the entire rotten reality of imperialist deals like that by which Australia is still helping to arm Israel’s military machine. The dam has burst, and the federal government’s attempts to run for cover under Palestinian statehood recognition have already fallen apart. We are going to see a huge mobilisation all around the country on Sunday, 24 August, for the Nationwide March for Palestine, demanding sanctions and an end to the two-way arms trade with Israel.
In this sense, our victory in the Battle of the Bridge is more than just a victory for the Palestine campaign. It is a powerful demonstration that decency and humanity can win out against this vicious capitalist system, that we can win against the governments, the media empires and the institutions that uphold the status quo regardless of the human cost. It is an inspiring example of what socialists always argue: that hope lies with the people, the working class and the oppressed, who can stand together in the spirit of solidarity and internationalism against their common enemies in the ruling establishment; and that those masses are far more fit to rule the world than the media barons, billionaires and their political lackeys who have justified, supported and profited from genocide.

Right-wing media in meltdown after protesters win ‘Battle for the Bridge’

Israel has spent the past two years on a relentless, extremely violent, calculated rampage of slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East. And yet, we are still told, it is the real victim. 
The supposedly ever-present existential threat faced by Israel has been a core part of the ideological justification for every Israeli atrocity since the creation of the state in 1948. Supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/27/israel-gaza-propaganda">from President Isaac Herzog down</a>, claim that every Palestinian, including children, is a legitimate target to be expelled or killed, because every Gazan is either a current or future “terrorist”. 
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister and wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Iran was imminently going to acquire nuclear weapons and use them on Israel in a “nuclear holocaust”—the same claim he has been making for more than 30 years. Of course, the only nuclear-armed states that actually bombed anyone were Israel and the US, which killed nearly 1,000 Iranians in 12 days of strikes.
The mainstream media and politicians’ constant attempts to spin the story that Israel is the victim, the underdog, the state “defending itself”, are so out of touch with reality that they are becoming increasingly desperate and farcical. The UK Labour government is perhaps leading the Western world into this Orwellian abyss by its charging of the band Kneecap with terrorism offences due to their support for the Palestinian people, its attempts to censor artists at the Glastonbury music festival and now its proscription of non-violent protest group Palestine Action as a “terrorist” organisation, all while the UK continues to arm and support Israel’s genocidal terror in Gaza. But if you were to listen to the UK political establishment, you’d think it was the IDF that was the victim.
Welcome to the upside-down world of 2025, where the daily mass murder and starvation of children is fine and normal, but speaking against that is extremism, violence and hate speech.
Israel is the dominant military power in the Middle East, a position considerably strengthened in recent years. It is the only nuclear-armed power in the region, and is thought to have as many as 400 nuclear warheads. It is backed to the hilt, armed and given favourable intelligence-sharing and economic deals by all the Western imperialist powers, while also enjoying friendly relations and trade deals with other major powers like China, Russia and India. The US State Department boasts: “Since its founding in 1948, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance ...This assistance has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces into one of the world’s most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide”.
Israel has, since October 2023, laid waste to Gaza, dropping the equivalent of six nuclear weapons’ worth of explosives on the tiny enclave, while also bombing Yemen, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, the latter two which it also invaded and continues to occupy. Much of this carnage has been bankrolled by the US, with more than US$30 billion delivered in aid and other financial and military assistance packages in the past two years. Since its creation, Israel has begun wars with every one of its neighbours, some on multiple occasions.
Israel has turned Gaza into a killing field, where soldiers are <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-06-27/ty-article-magazine/.premium/idf-soldiers-ordered-to-shoot-deliberately-at-unarmed-gazans-waiting-for-humanitarian-aid/00000197-ad8e-de01-a39f-ffbe33780000">ordered to shoot</a> starving civilians seeking aid. Many Israeli soldiers don’t need orders; they understand their mission is genocide, and they <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-12-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/when-you-enter-gaza-you-are-god-inside-the-minds-of-idf-soldiers-who-commit-war-crimes/00000193-f2a4-dc18-a3db-fee62b540000">shoot and torture</a> Palestinians for fun, while taking selfies, singing and dancing, in line with their extreme ethno-nationalist ideology, in which they are god’s chosen people and the Palestinians are not even human beings. 
Within the rest of the historic land of Palestine, Israel has constructed a suffocating apparatus of military occupation and control, built on the principles of apartheid, exclusion, constant surveillance, checkpoints, mass incarceration, torture, terror, impoverishment and humiliation of the Palestinian population. All this is conducted with cutting-edge technology and in conjunction with the collaborationist Palestinian Authority. Israel’s ambition for the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank, or within what is now called Israel, is ultimately similar to Gaza: expulsion, death and the complete destruction of any Palestinian identity.
The state of Israel is manifestly not under any current existential threat. It is Israel that is the existential threat: to Palestinians and millions of others in the region. Despite the absurdity of the claim, it persists because the powerful repeat it over and over again, without regard for evidence. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently explained why: “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us”. He doesn’t mean the billions of people, including the majority of Germans, who oppose Israel’s rampage, but the billionaires, bureaucrats and military chiefs who run the system. For them, seeing their Middle East proxy wage death and destruction is satisfying proof of a good investment.

Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the downfall of the election’s biggest loser, Peter Dutton. Scott Morrison’s electoral loss in 2022 was the worst Liberal-National Party result for at least 70 years. Dutton has topped that, with a further swing away from the Coalition and the loss of at least a dozen more seats. The Liberal Party’s lower house representatives have been wiped out of many major Australian cities, and the entirety of Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.
Dutton says his hero and mentor is the conservative former PM John Howard. Dutton has managed to emulate none of Howard’s successes, only his final act of humiliation by losing his seat of Dickson, just as Howard lost Bennelong in 2007. In fact, Dutton has made history by becoming the first opposition leader to lose his own seat, suffering an 8 percent negative primary vote swing, more than twice as bad as his party’s terrible national average, and falling a whopping 12 percent short of Labor’s Ali France in two-party preferred terms.
Dutton praised his other hero, Donald Trump, as a “big thinker” after the US president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. He suggested that he would be best-placed to have a cosy relationship with the far-right billionaire. But Dutton is such a loser that, after the election, Trump said he had “no idea” who Dutton even was. Sad.
On election night, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he did not “intend to dance on Peter Dutton’s grave”. That’s fine, because we don’t want to share the dance floor with Labor politicians who spent far too much of their last term dancing to Dutton’s tune. For everyone else, join us as Red Flag, Australia’s leading “hate media” outlet, leads us on this merry jig atop the corpse of the despicable career of Peter Dutton.
Dutton grew up in Brisbane and joined the Young Liberals at age 18. By 19, he was already running (and losing) as a Liberal candidate. He failed out of his business degree at Queensland University of Technology and, in a logical move for a human failure, joined the police force. He remained a cop for a decade, until he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-11/federal-election-peter-dutton-ali-france-united-by-trauma/11057856">crashed</a> and rolled his unmarked Mazda 626 while on a stakeout outside a fast food restaurant. He then joined his father’s property development business, reportedly making more than $30 million in property transactions over the subsequent 35 years, making him one of Australia’s richest politicians. Dutton became a member of parliament in 2001.
His <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=375542584398963">maiden speech</a> in 2002 railed against our “over tolerant society” and the “politically correct”, singling out “the Civil Liberties Council, the Refugee Action Collective, and certainly the dictatorship of the trade union movement”. Under the Howard government, he championed attacks on civil liberties, welfare recipients and workers’ rights and justified the “war on terror”.
In 2015, after the Tony Abbott government tried (and failed) to dismantle the public health system and introduce compulsory fees for seeing a GP, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/12/peter-dutton-ranked-as-worst-health-minister-in-35-years-in-poll-of-doctors">doctors voted Dutton</a> “the worst health minister in 35 years”.
Dutton’s whole political career was built on law-and-order scare campaigns and racism, while hating unions and ruling for the rich. This is hardly unique among right-wing politicians, but Dutton brought a certain zeal that marked him out even among his appalling colleagues as a sociopathic thug who dreamt of imprisoning or deporting half the population. He has been at the forefront of every racist campaign in Australia for a decade or more.
In 2008, Dutton boycotted parliament so he wouldn’t be present as the official government apology was delivered to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. In 2023, he led the racist campaign against the Voice.
In 2018, Dutton railed against “Sudanese gangs” in Victoria and said Melburnians were afraid to go out to restaurants due to violence perpetrated by South Sudanese people. This year, he tried again, saying Melburnians were afraid to go to the shops due to crime. On both occasions, the Liberals subsequently got thumped.
Dutton once said that Lebanese Muslim migration to Australia had been “a mistake”. He cheered on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, threatened to deport anyone who protested against it, promised to introduce support for Israel as a condition of Australian citizenship and pledged to stop any refugees from Gaza coming to Australia.
Dutton’s time as immigration and home affairs ministers from 2014 to 2021 cemented his reputation as a sadistic authoritarian. During this time, he presided over a cruel regime of offshore concentration camps in which asylum seekers were indefinitely detained, abused, beaten, raped and vilified. In many ways, Peter Dutton helped pioneer the cruel treatment of refugees and immigrants that has since taken hold in Europe and the US.
Such was his reputation that Dutton had to wheel out his wife to reassure the public that he was, in fact, a human being and “not a monster”. The memes were glorious, perfectly balancing the menace that Dutton represented with the ridicule this potato-headed mediocrity deserved.
From failing business school, to rolling his police car, Dutton has now crashed the LNP and his own Temu Trump political career. We can only hope for a climate change-induced cyclone or a youth crime spree to destroy his property portfolio and complete the schadenfreude. 
While Dutton’s loss is a setback for hard right politics in Australia for now, the right and the far right are far from dead. The conditions that give rise to them, and the capitalist forces that back them, are alive and well all around the world. 
What’s more, almost everyone Dutton spent his career punching down on is also being punched under the newly elected Labor government. Our goal must be to turn this repudiation of Dutton into a repudiation of the similarly right-wing agenda pursued by Anthony Albanese, who himself covets his “warm” relationship with Donald Trump.

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

In a <a href="https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-statement/afp-deputy-commissioner-national-security-krissy-barrett-statement">bombshell press conference</a> on 10 March, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and NSW Police shredded the entire story that we have been fed about a supposed tsunami of antisemitism gripping society and leading to a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property. It has all been based on a pack of lies, a “criminal con job”.
For more than a month, attention has been focused on the discovery in January of a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/dural-caravan-nsw-police-find-explosives-in-caravan-synagogue-targeted-20250130-p5l87g.html">caravan in Dural, Sydney, filled with explosives</a>. It was described as a terrorist plot targeting a synagogue. We now know that it wasn’t.
“Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot—essentially a criminal con job”, AFP Deputy Commissioner National Security Krissy Barrett said. “Today, I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” 
For this reason, the police never classified the caravan as a terrorism incident. But that didn’t stop the politicians. On 30 January, NSW Premier Chris Minns <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interview-abc-sydney-10">told ABC radio</a>: “This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event. There’s only one way of calling it out and that is terrorism”. This is the exact opposite of what the police thought, in their own words, “almost immediately”. It is inconceivable that Minns did not know by this point that he was telling bald-faced lies. In the six weeks since, Minns has never corrected the record nor apologised for his dishonesty. 
In the same ABC interview, Anthony Albanese was asked, “Do you classify this as terrorism as well, prime minister?” He answered, “I certainly do. I agree with Chris Minns. It’s clearly designed to harm people, but it’s also designed to create fear in the community. And that is the very definition”. 
Except that the prime minister surely also knew that the police had immediate and serious doubts and believed it to be a “fake plot” with no plan nor prospect of the caravan or its cargo of 40-year-old explosives harming anyone.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton called it a “grave and sinister escalation in this insidious rise of unchecked antisemitism in our country”. He later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/feb/06/australia-politics-news-live-labor-anti-hate-speech-laws-mandatory-sentences-federal-election-campaign-anthony-albanese-peter-dutton-ntwnfb">claimed</a> that it was “believed to be the biggest planned terrorist attack” in Australia’s history. 
None of this is true. 
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-11/burke-says-dutton-conned-by-caravan-hoax/105033778">accused</a> Dutton of deliberately avoiding police briefings so that he would have more freedom to “continue to make the most outrageous claims. He wanted to make sure that he could stoke the most fear”, Burke said. Dutton’s claims were outrageous, but so were those of Albanese and Minns, who cannot pretend they didn’t know the truth.
Beyond the caravan, the police said they believed all of the high-profile antisemitic attacks in recent times in Sydney, which have resulted in dozens of arrests under Operation Pearl, had a “common source” with the caravan plot. “The caravan job was orchestrated by the same individual or individuals that were orchestrating the Pearl incidents”, said NSW Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson. “None of the individuals we have arrested during Pearl have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology”, he said.
This is an extraordinary revelation, although one that the police had been repeatedly theorising about in press statements for weeks. In the first press conference NSW police gave about the caravan, they speculated that it might be a “set-up”. This was ignored by politicians and the bulk of the media, who instead breathlessly reported that an antisemitic “terrorist” massacre “with a blast radius of 40 metres” had been imminent. 
Indeed, the biggest hoax has not been the one carried out by a few organised criminals looking for bargaining chips with the legal system. The main hoax, the biggest con job of all, has been carried out by the entire political and media establishment. They have cynically used this plot to whip up fear, suspicion and hatred for Muslims and Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement, to justify a hysterical witch-hunt and purge of Palestine supporters throughout many institutions, and to rush through a new set of draconian anti-protest laws.
This campaign was on full display at the recent Sky News
Antisemitism Summit, a conference of right-wing and far-right politicians, activists, media outlets and the pro-Israel lobby. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Australia’s main pro-Israel lobby group, presented a <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/15-steps-to-defeat-antisemitism/">fifteen-point plan</a> for combating antisemitism, beginning with a call to “declare the existence of a National Emergency and establish a Joint Counter-Terrorism Taskforce [to] fight against antisemitic terror”. This was followed by a wish list of extreme censorship, attacks on free speech and the right to protest, and purges of pro-Palestine students and academics. 
ECAJ and other pro-Israel lobby groups, who routinely propagandise in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and promote the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, have been given tens of millions of dollars by the Australian government as part of its so-called campaign of combating antisemitism. Jewish organisations that are critical of Israel have not received a cent. 
The attempt to tie what has been confirmed as a criminal plot to the Palestine solidarity movement reached its zenith with the passing of a series of new <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/new-anti-protest-laws-target-opponents-of-genocide">anti-protest laws</a>, especially in NSW. The laws were justified with constant reference to the “antisemitic terror” gripping Australia. 
We now know that Minns, and at least several other senior ministers, clearly knew that they were rushing through these laws based on complete lies. Perhaps they were rushing to beat these revelations coming out. Not only were the attacks not motivated by antisemitism—being in fact, according to the police, a “criminal con job”. There was absolutely no link between these attacks and any protest activity.
Chris Minns must apologise to the people of NSW, and to the Palestine solidarity movement, for using lies and distortions to trample on our democratic rights. He should repeal these laws immediately, and he should resign.
Minns should also apologise to Jewish people in this state. Antisemitism is real and must be opposed, and the actions of these crooks caused legitimate fear among Jewish people. But Minns’ lies, along with those of the media and pro-Israel lobby, who have all made the most of this criminal hoax, have falsely portrayed these criminal acts as a result of a rising tide of antisemitism in society. 
They have deliberately exaggerated the threat posed to Jewish people in a reprehensible and cynical ploy to whip up fear in order to attack and silence opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They were, in effect, the accomplices in this entire hoax.

The great antisemitism con job

A raft of new laws, purportedly to combat the antisemitism “crisis” in Australia, have been passed federally and by some state governments. The Human Rights Law Centre <a href="https://www.hrlc.org.au/reports-news-commentary/2025/02/21/hate-speech">summed up</a> the situation, saying that the laws have “been introduced under the guise of protecting against hate speech and vilification [but] on closer inspection, these laws are likely to have a chilling effect on our democracy while failing to stamp out hate speech and discrimination”. 
The same political leaders who in sucking up to Donald Trump have refused to condemn his calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, or the recent Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, are now pontificating about “racist hate” to pass laws that undermine our democratic rights. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media, educational and cultural institutions.
At a federal level, the new laws mostly increase sentences for existing offences, while also introducing new offences of threatening to use force or violence against protected groups, and either advocating or threatening damage to, or destruction of, places of worship. The Labor government performed a spectacular backflip, capitulating to Peter Dutton and the Liberal opposition by including mandatory minimum sentences of up to six years’ imprisonment for some offences, while ramming through the legislation in less than 24 hours. This is despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just weeks earlier describing mandatory prison terms as “fraught” and “unproductive”. 
Mandatory sentencing explicitly goes against the Labor Party’s own official policy platform, given its disastrous history of resulting in mass incarceration of marginalised and oppressed people. This didn’t stop Albanese and every Labor MP voting for these laws.
In NSW, the Chris Minns Labor government has gone further, passing three new sets of laws. The first targets the display of Nazi symbols and graffiti near synagogues, Jewish schools or the Sydney Jewish Museum. The second and third are explicitly targeting protesters, despite there being no link between protests and the recent spate of antisemitic attacks—which the police have theorised were likely coordinated by organised crime networks.
The NSW government’s Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) bill 2025 creates an offence with a potential two-year imprisonment and/or a $22,000 fine for blocking, impeding or hindering access to places of worship. It grants NSW police the extraordinary powers to arrest and move on people in or near a place of worship for any reason. As the NSW Council for Civil Liberties <a href="https://www.nswccl.org.au/news">argues</a>, “these offences could be used to charge members of the faith protesting their own organisation, sexual abuse survivors demanding justice and any snap rally or assembly that happens within a vicinity of a place of worship, such as Town Hall”. The laws are extraordinarily broad, especially given that almost everywhere in the Sydney CBD is “near” a place of worship, all of Sydney’s most common protest locations being close to a church. 
Minns has made no secret of the fact that he is a staunch supporter of Israel and wants to stamp out the mass Palestine movement that has mobilised tens of thousands against the genocide in Gaza for more than sixteen months. These laws follow a wave of other anti-protest laws passed in NSW in recent years, many targeting climate protesters, and could be used against people protesting for any cause, including the union movement.
The third law passed by Minns makes it a criminal offence to incite racial hatred, with a maximum penalty for an individual of two years’ imprisonment and/or fines of up to $11,000. In Victoria, new anti-vilification laws have also passed, although they include other protected categories besides race, and potentially some protections from the laws for political speech.
The danger of these laws is that a concerted effort is being made by supporters of Israel to define criticism of or opposition to the state of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Pro-Palestine activists have been falsely accused of antisemitism for decades to silence opposition. Now they want to make opposing Israel a crime. In a similar vein, Universities Australia recently adopted an official definition which says that calling for the abolition of the state of Israel is antisemitism, potentially opening up thousands of academics and students to disciplinary proceedings.
Decisions about who should be prosecuted under these laws will be in the hands of the police and public prosecutors—that is, the very institutions of power that uphold racist inequalities and the interests of Australian capitalism. For that reason, no-one should be under any illusion that these laws will be used to prosecute vicious racists like Peter Dutton, Sky News or the pro-Israel lobby, who have dehumanised the Palestinian people, supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza and systematically demonised the Arab and Muslim population. In fact, all these racists are clamouring for even more draconian “hate speech” laws to try to outlaw dissent. 
All progressive causes, including the union movement, should unite in opposing these undemocratic laws.

New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

US President Donald Trump has declared his intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian population. Trump outlined his genocidal vision during a grotesque press conference, standing alongside a smirking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has overseen the massacre of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, and who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes.
Trump justified his calls for the annihilation of the Palestinian people from their homeland by describing the complete devastation that has been wrought on Gaza—devastation caused by the man grinning next to him, and by the US itself which has supplied Israel with the weaponry to destroy Gaza’s homes, hospitals, schools and all other civilian infrastructure.
As if ethnic cleansing wasn’t bad enough, Trump added his own billionaire-parasite twist, declaring that the US would “own” Gaza, and that he would turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put it succinctly: “Let’s turn Gaza into Mar-a-Lago”. 
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has kept his knee bent before the hard-right US president by refusing to condemn these open calls for genocide. Albanese said he “would not give a daily commentary on statements by the US President”. Even spineless world leaders who have been lining up to kiss Trump’s arse, like the UK’s Keir Starmer, have at least verbally rebuked his calls for ethnic cleansing. Not so Albanese, who is setting new standards for pathetic capitulation to the far right. 
Trump’s open support for the total removal of Palestinians from Gaza puts much of the political and media establishment in Australia and around the world in a bit of a quandary. They continued to support Israel through sixteen months of its genocide in Gaza, no matter how many children were massacred. They have dehumanised the Palestinian people and engaged in an escalating campaign of slandering, sacking and repressing those who speak up for the Palestinians, from journalists and academics to students and protest organisers. But most of this has happened under the official pretence that Israel was “defending itself”, accompanied by weasel words from former US President Joe Biden and Albanese pretending that they wanted peace and a two-state solution, and a compliant media who presented this fairytale as though it were real. Netanyahu knows this game well; he knows that to get away with genocide it’s best to deny that is what you’re doing.
Trump has shattered that pretence. He has said out loud what has been Israel and the US’s policy all along, obvious to anyone who wanted to see, yet officially denied: wiping out the Palestinian people. That’s what the last sixteen months have been about, and the US and Australia have provided the arms to do it.
The media’s reaction has been mixed, reflecting this quandary of how to deal with a US president who makes it harder to justify the rotten system we live in. Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph ran an opinion piece titled “Can Trump’s plan to level Gaza finally bring peace?”. Pondering about whether genocide equals peace was a bridge too far for most, though, who have instead tried to reassure us that Trump’s statements are “outlandish” and unrealisable. 
But the genocide in Gaza is not outlandish. It has been happening. And Trump’s statements have effectively ripped up the ceasefire deal and given Netanyahu the green light to resume the slaughter in coming months. They must be stopped.

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

Another year on, and the dismal government of Anthony Albanese has continued to deliver nothing much. Having begun its life with about as much mojo as a koala, the government has spent 2024 as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s yes-man. Albanese’s political strategy resembles a 1-2 combination of Joe Biden and Mike Tyson—rule for the rich, screw your supporters, throw the match and walk away with a $4.3 million mansion. 
Albanese came to power in 2022 on the back of the unpopularity of the dysfunctional Scott Morrison Coalition government. In contrast to the Coalition, which was plagued with infighting, obsessed with culture wars and losing seats to the Teals, Labor presented itself as the “sensible centre”, the “adults in the room”. To the ruling class it promised, in Albanese’s words, an “unashamedly pro-business government”. At the same time, most workers hoped Labor might do something to make life a little easier, and progressives hoped for some sort of progress on climate action.
The Liberal Party was in disarray, but the 2022 election was far from a smashing victory for Labor. The ALP recorded one of its weakest results in history, with a primary vote of just 32 percent. In the years since, Labor’s support has steadily eroded, and the government has become increasingly weak and inclined to run for cover. Dutton, the man whose wife once had to clarify to media that he was in fact a human being and “not a monster”, is now competitive in the polls and setting the political agenda.
Living standards have gone backwards at record rates under Labor
The main factor in all this has been Labor’s failure to take any serious measures to address the cost-of-living crisis. 
High inflation has reduced real disposable household incomes by a whopping 10 percent since 2021, more than any other OECD country and the worst fall in Australia in more than 50 years. While supermarkets and energy companies price-gouge their way to soaring profits, Albanese has done nothing to rein them in. While banks and landlords make the cost of housing impossibly expensive, Labor introduces tokenistic schemes like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which after more than a year of operation will have contributed to just 700 new “affordable” homes.
Worse still, the government has presided over a range of measures to increase the squeeze on working-class households. These include scrapping the low to middle income tax offset, which was worth up to $1,500 for people earning up to $90,000, keeping minimum wage growth below the rate of inflation, and huge interest rate rises. Following the playbook of governments around the world, the interest rate rises were explicitly designed to cut the income and spending of the population, while slowing economic growth and driving up unemployment, in order to combat inflation. In other words, making the working class pay for the economy’s problems.
Meanwhile, Labor governments at federal and state levels have maintained a hard line on public sector wages. And if workers step out of line, demand proper pay rises and take industrial action, as Woolworths warehouse workers have been doing, they soon come up against draconian laws, upheld by the Labor government, restricting and banning strikes and picketing.
It’s not as though Labor weren’t throwing money around when it wanted to. Military spending increased to a record $55.7 billion in this year’s budget. Tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, are forecast to cost $100 billion over four years. Another $50 billion is given away every year in the form of capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing concessions, mostly to wealthy investors and property developers. A further $14.5 billion went in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry last year. This is 10 times the amount the government spent to give everyone a measly $300 rebate on their energy bill.
By January 2024, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/shock-poll-we-dont-trust-albo-to-help-us-with-costs-of-living/news-story/e8b7e7b39bedcd2e4c8d14746d6c0a50?amp&amp;nk=ca4b05041b50440fb106b0a6a7873d34-1705729334">polling</a>
was showing that a big majority (71 percent) considered the cost of living to be their main concern, followed by housing (41 percent). Eighty percent believed the government had failed to address the cost-of-living crisis. More than half thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. While inflation has now come down, the damage done over the last few years has by no means been reversed.
While workers have gone backwards, Forbes reports that “despite a weaker Australian dollar, Australia’s 50 Richest on the 2024 list are better off from a year ago. Their collective wealth rose by US$9 billion to $222 billion, from $213 billion in 2023.” The overall share of national income going to profits, instead of wages, remains at record highs. This explains why the ruling class, and the media, have not turned against the Albanese government.
No progress, only spin, failure and regression on social issues
Labor’s progressive supporters have experienced another year of being kicked in the teeth. On climate policy, Albanese has approved another 28 coal and gas projects since being elected. This has exposed the big scam that was Labor’s flagship “safeguard mechanism” climate policy in 2023, which was touted as “ending the climate wars”, and even celebrated by the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt claimed that “coal and gas have taken a huge hit”. In fact, the policy was adopted from the Business Council of Australia, and backed by the mining and gas companies, which, in 2023, exported the equivalent of another 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Albanese ended 2024 by tearing up a separate deal with the Greens on “nature positive legislation”, at the behest of the Western Australia Labor government, which in turn was doing the bidding of mining companies, and rushing through approval for another three coal mines.
The Albanese government’s climate policy has been based on giving the mining and gas companies whatever they want, while trying to deceive the public that some progress on tackling carbon emissions is occurring, through industrial-scale greenwashing, accounting tricks and fake carbon offsets. Meanwhile energy bills soar. This fuels the cynicism and resentment that Dutton capitalises on to deride the “green agenda” and to blame it for high energy prices. 
Labor’s pro-business approach has been matched by a general political strategy of wanting to avoid any fight with the right about social questions. From his small-target strategy in opposition, Albanese now wants to lead a small-target government. 
Labor supported the Voice referendum only because the proposal was backed by big business and, initially, seemed uncontroversial. The success of Dutton’s racist “no” campaign, which Labor couldn’t stand up to, weakened Albanese further and reinforced his determination to avoid any controversy and, in particular, criticism from the right.
This has led to Labor jumping to adopt increasingly reactionary policies. One particularly pathetic example was Albanese’s move to break an election promise and scrap questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the national census, only to backflip two weeks later. Here was Labor pre-emptively capitulating to a right-wing culture war that didn’t even exist.
The government’s extreme response to the construction union, the CFMEU, after allegations of corruption aired in the media, probably fits somewhere in Albanese’s Venn diagram between servitude to big business and terror of being criticised by the right, in this case for being too close to the unions. Labor’s complete government takeover of the union and sacking of officials, including in branches not subject to allegations of corruption, is a major attack on one of the few unions perceived still to use workers’ industrial muscle to win decent wages and conditions.
Then we have Labor’s despicable lurch to the right on questions of immigration and refugees, even to the point of trying to out-compete Dutton as “tougher” on denying human rights and deporting people. US President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral success will only encourage Dutton to adopt even more extreme racist, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Rather than blaming the billionaires, immigrants have always been the perfect scapegoat for cost-of-living pressures, unemployment and non-existent crime waves. 
Labor has gone along with this argument, culminating in its rush to pass a trio of hideous new anti-refugee bills, in agreement with the Coalition, in the last sitting days of parliament for 2024. In spruiking the bills, Albanese attacked Dutton from the right, saying, “On Peter Dutton’s watch, there was a huge spike in the number of protection visa applications onshore”.
These extreme new laws allow the government to bribe countries to accept deportees from Australia, regardless of their human rights credentials. They make it harder for asylum seekers to get protection visas and allow the Australian government to ban new visa applications from countries that do not accept forced deportations from Australia, which many have labelled a Trump-style travel ban. And they ramp up the isolation and hellish treatment of those in immigration detention, with bans on phones, and more powers to impose ankle bracelets and curfews on anyone released.
After the laws passed, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that the Coalition is now “basically running the immigration system for the government”. And he is not wrong. 
Albanese punches down
While cosying up to big business and out-competing Dutton on racism, there have been some fights Albanese has embraced with passion and verve—against anyone to his left.
Lashing the Greens has become Labor’s favourite pastime. They have labelled straightforward housing proposals like a rent freeze, which the Greens advocate and which have majority support, as “absolute pixie dust”. They have denounced Greens MPs for “grandstanding” by supporting the CFMEU. Most of all, they have attacked the Greens for supporting Palestinian rights. In language you never see Labor politicians use against the right, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, without any evidence, said the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”. 
This from the government that is continuing to back, including militarily, a state that is committing what even Amnesty International now describes as genocide, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. You won’t find any strong words of condemnation or denunciation from any Labor politician of Israel or its actions in Gaza. Indeed, the only Labor politician who did begin to offer such criticism, Fatima Payman, was driven out of the party. But there’s been plenty of moral outrage, and repression, directed at those who have protested these crimes.
Albanese won’t fight the right, but he will bravely take on children. Labor governments at federal and state level have either led, or gone along with, hysterical law and order campaigns, often directed against Aboriginal children. And now they are banning social media access for under-16s, while doing nothing to actually regulate or take on the big media and social media barons.
Where to from here?
The Labor government is leading our society into a very bleak situation. It has carried out the ruling class’s wish to get inflation under control by sacrificing working-class living standards and job security. The resentment felt by millions, combined with the government’s right-wing stance on issue after issue, is helping pave the way for Dutton.
Around the world similar stories have played out, whereby centrist governments, overseeing growing inequality and pursuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, have fuelled the right and far right. Most recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led to Donald Trump. In the UK, the Keir Starmer Labor government is already tanking in the polls, with a huge growth in support for the Conservatives and the far right. In several countries in Europe, social democratic parties have collapsed and far-right governments have come to power.
The Labor Party may still cling to power in the next election, propped up as a minority government by the Greens, which seems increasingly happy to play this role. Despite Albanese’s best efforts, Dutton is still widely unpopular. But whether it’s Albanese screwing the working class and championing right-wing policies, or the monster Dutton, it remains the case that what is desperately needed is stronger socialist opposition to the rotten Labor Party and the system it represents.

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Why we protested the weapons expo of war criminals

Italy’s general strike shows the way forward

Right-wing media in meltdown after protesters win ‘Battle for the Bridge’

Won’t somebody think of poor Israel?

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

The great antisemitism con job

New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

Trump spells out plan for ethnic cleansing in Gaza

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

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