Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed last week that the average Australian worker is $3,700 “better off” than a year ago, citing this as proof that Labor in government has delivered on its promise to “get wages moving again”. The West Australian newspaper called it “Labor’s wages growth win”. Other media headlines could almost have tricked you into thinking that workers are getting richer right now.
News flash: we’re not. The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that nominal wages growth has been 3.6 percent in the past year. That’s “strong and sustainable wage growth” according to the treasurer. But wages have been outpaced by inflation, which is 6 percent. So real wages have fallen 2.4 percent. Combine this with skyrocketing mortgage payments from interest rate hikes, and the cost-of-living pressures on many households are intense.
It couldn’t be more obvious to anyone who’s on an average wage: workers are getting poorer at the expense of big businesses, which are raking it in. Inflation-adjusted wages in Australia have declined for almost three years, and they’re now at their lowest level since 2009. 
The bosses think this is great. Multimillionaire property developer Tim Gurner faced some backlash for saying the quiet part out loud when he told the Australian Financial Review Property Summit: “We need to see pain in the economy”. But the Reserve Bank has been saying the same thing non-stop all year, along with big business lobby groups. They say workers should feel the pain, that unemployment should rise and that wages should be held below inflation in the interests of business profits.
The idea that Labor’s mild industrial relations changes might give gig economy workers the right to a minimum wage is enough to send the Business Council of Australia into a fit. Billionaire lobby groups are given space in the media to tell us that the very idea of a minimum wage for food delivery drivers is dangerous. We’re told that any real wage increases would only lead to higher prices. But when wages are held down, corporations jack up prices anyway.
What are unions doing about this? Besides the occasional press release lamenting cost-of-living pressures, most trade union leaders are not even demanding that wages rise above inflation. Instead, union leaders have spent the past year signing below-inflation pay deals with the bosses, rather than fighting for workers’ living standards to improve. 
This do-nothing approach from unions means that there has been no substantial challenge to the attacks on working-class living standards, even though the combination of low unemployment and high profit margins puts workers in a strong position to fight back. 
Falling real wages are at the centre of the cost-of-living crisis. To turn this situation around will require determined class struggle against big business and the rich.

Liam Parry

Falling real wages at the centre of cost-of-living crisis

The student campaign group “Get a Room: Students for Affordable Housing” organised a protest in Brisbane on 14 June, calling on the Queensland Labor government to take action on the housing crisis. Around 500 members of the construction union, the CFMEU, left a nearby building site to join the action outside Parliament House, demanding a rent freeze, a massive expansion of public housing and a ban on evictions.
Despite a $12 billion budget surplus, boosted by increased revenue from the skyrocketing price of coal, the Palaszczuk government has done almost nothing for Queenslanders suffering from housing stress. The surplus is the largest of any state government in history, and yet Labor’s only new housing commitment is to build a measly 500 homes by 2025.
Rally chair Laura Nolan, environment officer for the University of Queensland student union and a member of Socialist Alternative, called out the government’s budget as “bullshit”, saying “The housing market is failing students and failing working class people”, before leading a chant: “Fuck your surplus, we need houses!”. 
Amy McMahon, Greens MP for South Brisbane, noted that there are already more than 50,000 people on the waiting list for public housing in Queensland. “Labor’s plan for public housing will take 50 years to house those people, and that’s if not a single new person is added to that list”, she said.
According to the Queensland Council of Social Services, rents have risen faster in Queensland than in any other state. Rents are shooting up in Brisbane, but the situation is even worse in regional towns. Average rents in Rockhampton and Mackay have increased by over 40 percent in the last five years, and in Gladstone they have gone up by a shocking 80 percent. Homelessness in Queensland has increased by 22 percent since 2017, much faster than the national average of 8 percent. 
The attendance of hundreds of construction workers is an excellent reminder that trade unionists, students and the poor have a shared interest in fighting back against this crisis. The CFMEU has repeatedly called for the government to build more public housing, and construction unionists have a long history of demanding housing that ordinary people can afford. 
“We’ve got capacity to build more public housing in this state. We’re happy to build it; in fact we take great pride in providing a service to the community”, said CFMEU assistant secretary Jade Ingham at the rally. 
“The government needs to get real with their own priorities and start focusing on what really matters. We are in the throes of a war on the working class. [The housing crisis] is a consequence of decades of that war, of profits being put before people, of big multinational corporations, who pay fuck-all tax, being given priority over the working class in this country.”

Students and unionists protest Brisbane’s housing crisis

In the wake of the Manchester bombing, Melbourne mayor Robert Doyle has called for Victorian police to be armed with assault rifles. Doyle’s controversial statements, made in an interview on 3AW, shocked right wing presenter Neil Mitchell. “You can’t have a bloke on point duty or walking down the beat carrying one”, he responded. 
“Yes you can … and they’ve done it in France for a very long time”, Doyle said, referring to state of emergency laws under which French troops have been deployed on streets across the country for more than 18 months. These laws have also been used to outlaw and suppress protests and dissent in France.
Doyle’s call to arm local police with the gun that was reportedly named by Hitler – who thought that assault rifle sounded more frightening than machine gun – is just the latest push to militarise Australian police. 
The secretary of the Victorian Police Association has strongly supported Doyle’s suggestion, pointing out that the association has been making the same demand for more than 10 years. Similar proposals are also under consideration by NSW police. 
Already, the weapons stockpile of the Victorian police is terrifying. Paramilitary wings such as the Special Operations Group have access to submachine guns, shotguns, stun grenades, armoured cars and the type of sonic weapons used in Iraq and Afghanistan to disperse crowds. 
It’s not just the specialist squads either – after decades of militarisation, general duties cops are also more heavily armed than ever. Carrying a gun has been mandatory for all police since 1993, and standard issue revolvers were replaced with rapid firing semi-automatic handguns in 2010. General duties police have also been issued with pepper spray since 1996, and tasers since 2010. 
And, since 2011, more than a thousand protective services officers have been employed to stalk the train network. PSOs receive 12 weeks of training before they hit the rails, each armed with a gun, pepper spray and a baton.
More weapons in the hands of police do not make ordinary people safer – they only make the cops more violent. Australian police have killed at least six people using supposedly non-lethal tasers since 2002. Between 2011 and 2014, Victorian police were found to have used pepper spray more than 90 times against children under the age of 15.

Doyle’s army: mayor wants more guns in Melbourne

The Maritime Union of Australia led a protest in Darwin on 8 February, calling for the resignation of the head of NT WorkSafe, Stephen Gelding.
The protest highlighted the failure of the agency to respond to a series of workplace accidents, some fatal. Most recently, a seafarer died after falling from a barge in the Hudson Creek area. The wharf at Hudson Creek was known to be dangerous, and the MUA has been calling for corrective action since 2014, when a part of the wharf collapsed.
“We raised our concern with the structural integrity of the infrastructure, yet NT WorkSafe refused to inspect, condemn or modify the operational area”, said MUA NT branch secretary Thomas Mayer. “NT WorkSafe wrote no penalties to the owner/operator of Shorelands, who also sits on the NT WorkSafe advisory board.”
It’s not just Hudson Creek. In 2013, Ryan Donoghue, 20, was electrocuted while working on a prawn trawler in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He was using an angle grinder onboard when the trawler was hit by a wave. Ryan’s employer, Austral Fisheries, had failed to equip the boat’s power supply with a basic safety switch – a device that probably would have saved his life. NT WorkSafe took no action against the company.
Charged with investigating Ryan’s death, NT coroner Greg Cavanagh issued a blistering attack in his report, released last year. “Ryan’s life was forfeited due to the failure to provide a safe workplace”, he said. “It would have been prevented if there was even a modicum of compliance with the law. There was not.” The coroner also took aim at the lack of action after his death, saying it “beggars belief and is shameful”.
Coroner Cavanagh referred the case back to NT WorkSafe for “further and better consideration”. To date, no action has ever been taken to punish Ryan’s employer.

Union protest: workers lives ‘forfeited’ in unsafe workplaces

The number of prisoners in Victoria has increased to 5,756, a record rise of 750 people, or 15 percent, in one year. More than half of this growth occurred during the past four months.
It isn’t because crime is increasing, but the result of recent crackdowns on the parole system and the abolition of suspended sentencing and home detention. The number of prisoners in custody for breach of parole has doubled in the past year, to 836; parole denial or cancellation has risen 40 percent.
New laws introduced in September also make breaching parole conditions an offence punishable by up to three months in prison (in addition to any previous sentence) and a fine of $4,200.
These laws could make parolees serve greatly extended sentences for innocuous “offences” such as being late for a meeting with a parole officer, or forgetting to notify Corrections Victoria of a change of address within 48 hours.
Corrections Victoria has also announced that it will no longer be publishing statistics on the Victorian prison population. Instead the figures will be buried in annual reports from the federal Productivity Commission.

Falling real wages at the centre of cost-of-living crisis

Students and unionists protest Brisbane’s housing crisis

Doyle’s army: mayor wants more guns in Melbourne

Union protest: workers lives ‘forfeited’ in unsafe workplaces

Record rise in Victoria’s prison population

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