Update—<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/node/229" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">click here</a> for Vic Socialists results in Dunkley.
Asked how she stays hopeful as a 63-year-old socialist and Palestinian living in the diaspora, Reem Yunis replies: “I don’t have the luxury not to be inspired. My grandparents died without seeing a liberated Palestine, my parents died and were buried in the diaspora. Most of my people are living in the diaspora, and the ones in Palestine are being robbed of water, resources and every bit of land they have. We need to have hope and fight, because if we won’t fight for a free Palestine, who will?”
Speaking to Reem, it’s obvious that the question “If not us, then who?” is central to her views on life, oppression and progress. It’s clearly, for example, behind her decision to run as the Victorian Socialists candidate in the Dunkley by-election during the worst escalation of Israeli violence against the Palestinians since 1948.
Dunkley, a federal parliamentary seat in Melbourne’s outer south-eastern suburbs, has since its establishment in 1984 regularly changed hands between Labor and the Liberals. Most recently, it was won by Labor’s Peta Murphy in 2019 and retained in 2022. Murphy died from cancer in December, and a by-election was called for Saturday, 2 March, to fill the vacant seat.
Federal by-elections are always a bit of a spectacle for the media and the political class. In the case of Dunkley, the focus is on whether Labor can revive its flagging political fortunes following setbacks like the failed Voice referendum, or conversely if it will be a further sign of a Liberal Party resurgence. The fact that this election is taking place at the same time as the genocide playing out in Gaza—a genocide that both the major parties have more or less openly supported—has largely been ignored or dismissed as irrelevant.
“The thing that pushed me to run”, Reem says, “[was] finding a platform to speak about Palestine—any way to get some coverage for Palestine and be a voice for the voiceless facing a genocidal war. We need a voice other than the Labor government and the Liberal Party, who are saying the same things they’ve always said, which is to stand by Israel, and stand by the US, and give cover to the lies. I need to have that voice. We have to fight.”
Reem’s family has a story common to the <a href="https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/brief-report-on-the-population-of-palestine-at-the-end-of-2021/">estimated 7 million</a> Palestinians living outside historic Palestine—a story of exile. Her father’s and mother’s families both lived in the town of Beit Sahour, east of Bethlehem, for generations before the establishment of Israel. Although they remained there after the 1948 Nakba (“the catastrophe”, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and their land by Zionist terror), they were locked out of Palestine, and into exile, during one of the many escalations of occupation and apartheid that followed—the aftermath of Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
“I was seven years old, and we were living in Kuwait”, Reem recounts. “Israel seized Gaza and the West Bank, and my family knew they couldn’t go home any more”. Eventually, Reem made it to Australia with her husband and children after fleeing Kuwait for Jordan during the first Gulf War. Her brothers, mother and father fled to the United States. Other relatives remain in Beit Sahour, where the population is now subjected to the maze of checkpoints, segregated roads and permit systems that Israel uses to police and control Palestinians moving around the occupied West Bank.
Reem was pushed toward left-wing politics by her family’s experience of oppression and exile, as well as other dynamics in the Middle East. “I'm from the generation who became teenagers in the 1970s. I was in university between 1978 and 1982. Remember the Lebanese civil war?”, she asks. 
The civil war raged between 1975 and 1990 and split the country, and much of the surrounding Arab world, along left and right political lines. Palestinian groups living in exile in Lebanon played a major role in the left-wing side of the conflict, while right-wing militias coalesced around anti-communist and anti-Arab ideologies. “Watching these things play out around you affects your thinking and makes you want to choose which side you’re on”, Reem says.
It was connecting the Palestinian cause to other events in the world around her that turned Reem into a socialist. She was at a pro-Palestine rally in Melbourne, just before Israel began its 2006 war on Lebanon, when she met a group of socialists talking about the politics of the Middle East, the Palestinian resistance and imperialism. “I was blown away that they thought the same way I did”, Reem says.
“Socialism is so important for the Palestinian question because it is capitalism that has caused this problem through imperialism. Who has helped the creation of and aided Israel, other than the imperialist powers since World War One? If you believe in the liberation of Palestine, you should be against the system that actually allowed the creation of Israel, and allowed it to continue until now on our ruins. And that means being a socialist.”
For Reem, being a socialist is also about trying to create a system of majority rule. “Australian workers, in general, are oppressed by their own system. They don’t get everything [they want], and they don’t have a say. But we are the majority of society, and oppressed people should flock together.
“I also, as a Palestinian, feel for the Indigenous people of [this] land who suffered from oppression and genocide in order for capitalism to be established here. So, it’s the one percent that is robbing Australian workers, [and] they are the same ones siding with America and Israel, and profiting from the dispossession of Indigenous people.”
Unsurprisingly, Reem has a long list of things she has protested about in addition to being a prominent activist in the Palestine solidarity movement. She marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. She campaigned for LGBTQ rights and has joined marches for marriage equality, for refugee rights, against youth detention, for action on the climate crisis and for Indigenous rights. As a teacher for 24 years, Reem has been an active trade unionist in the Australian Education Union and has been part of every teacher’s strike in Victoria since 2001. 
Pre-polling for the Dunkley by-election starts on Monday, 19 February, and polling day is Saturday, 2 March. You can help Reem’s campaign by <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/donate">making a donation</a> or <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/civicrm/dunkley-volunteer">volunteering</a> for a shift handing out how-to-vote cards at a polling booth.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

Meg Leigh

‘A voice for the voiceless’: the Palestinian socialist taking on Labor and Liberals in Dunkley

Hundreds of people in Lismore woke up on Monday morning trapped in their houses. Most of them went to sleep with the reassurance that, despite flood warnings, their houses had never been reached by flood water before—including during the “big floods” of 1954, 1974 and 2017. But after the Wilsons River broke the town’s levee wall, it kept rising far beyond what had been projected. An evacuation order was issued at 1am, while most people were sleeping. They woke to water in their houses—which are mostly on stilts—climbed into attics and onto roofs, and waited.
The State Emergency Service was inundated with calls that almost instantly exceeded the service’s capacity. According to the town’s mayor, Steve Krieg, Lismore had <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/nsw/a-tragedy-unfolding-in-front-of-our-eyes-estimated-400-still-trapped-in-lismore-flood-20220228-p5a06h.html">access to only two SES boats</a>. Desperate people were forced to turn to social media for help. One man posted that his mother who couldn’t swim was trapped inside her second story flat, inundated with rising water. Later, he told Red Flag that she waited in her house for seven hours before being rescued by neighbours, who brought her to the roof of the nearby pub. She waited on the roof of the pub for another two hours before being rescued by the SES.
Another woman told Red Flag she climbed into her roof cavity with her 10-month-old baby, her partner and her two dogs while water rose through their house. They stayed there for eight hours before being rescued by a friend. They were lucky—some 400 people spent a second night trapped.
Most of the town is now unliveable and thousands of people are likely homeless. At the time of writing, nine people are unaccounted for, and two confirmed dead. Meanwhile, Queensland is also reeling. Eight people are confirmed dead in the state, while the flood water is flowing into more towns and the weather system is inundating more communities as it moves south. Buildings have disappeared, roads have been washed away in landslides, bridges have collapsed, and thousands of people have had their lives upended. Whole communities are holding their breath as they wait to discover the true level of human life lost. They deserve answers about what, and who, caused this catastrophe.
Firstly, there is the question of climate change and extreme weather events. Because it is located in a floodplain, Lismore is naturally flood prone. But it has never experienced a flood like this. The Bureau of Meteorology's Jackson Browne called it “biblical”, and said “there is nothing in the record books like it”. New South Wales’ Minister for Emergency Services, Steph Cook, said it was “a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions for this region”. But when the word unprecedented is used as regularly to describe weather events as it has been in Australia over the last few years, there is increasing reason to question exactly how “natural” these disasters are.
Lismore’s levee, which was erected in the early 2000s, was broken for the first time in the 2017 flood, which was called a “once in a lifetime event”. Yet here we are five years later, with a new flood record that has smashed its predecessor by more than two metres. And more minor (in comparison) floods occurred in Lismore that were bad enough for <a href="https://www.nsw.gov.au/disaster-recovery/natural-disaster-declarations">natural disaster classification</a> in December 2020 and March 2021.
Climate change is making these events more extreme and more frequent – and the pattern in the Northern Rivers goes beyond floods. During the Black Summer bushfires in 2019, when the area was experiencing a long drought, bushfires burned for weeks in places with no recorded history of fires. The Nightcap National Park is meant to be one of the <a href="https://lismoreapp.com.au/news-sport/news/nimbin-residents-flee-as-the-wettest-rainforest-in-northern-nsw-is-burning?id=5dc8b5462a4cf1002b98d89d">wettest places in the country</a>, but the long dry spell turned it into bushfire terrain. It’s a forest that <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a8d4y/australias-ancient-forests-survived-planetary-extinction-now-theyre-burning">pre-dates the Australian continent</a>, but will it survive the change inflicted on the climate by capitalism and fossil fuels? The Tuntable community was one of the areas evacuated during that bushfire. Now, parts of Tuntable Road have disappeared—washed away in landslides caused by the flood.
The pace of global warming caused by human activity, compared with the much slower progression of non-human related climate patterns, makes it difficult to prove a direct causal link between recent weather events and human-induced climate change. But as Professor Mark Howden, ​​who is the vice-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group which recently released a report about the likely effects of current warming and director of the ANU Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, recently told the Guardian, “It’s more likely you’re going to see [these sorts of events] in the future with climate change because of the warmer atmosphere, and the ability to hold more moisture in the warmer atmosphere”. He also said that rainfall will be heavier, “The frequency may not change, but the strength of [storms] will change and that will increase the variability of climate in Australia, particularly in the north-east and down through the south-east”. This is what the spiralling process of climate destruction inflicted by governments and corporations across the world will mean: an erratic mix of unprecedented floods, fires, droughts, heatwaves and more.
Secondly, while politicians drive us down a path of climate destruction, emergency services and mitigation efforts remain under-resourced and volunteer-focused. Like Australia’s firefighting services, the SES is an almost entirely volunteer-run service. The inadequate resources at the disposal of SES volunteers in Lismore—two boats with an entire town underwater and hundreds if not thousands of people in need of urgent rescue—is nothing short of criminal.
Governments expect volunteers to risk their lives at the front lines of the climate catastrophe, while the fossil fuel companies that are responsible for these disasters enjoy generous government subsidies. Whether it’s the firefighters forced into the black summer fires or the SES volunteers entering submerged towns, they are expected to deal with these disasters in their own time and with woefully inadequate resources.
The promises made to flood-proof Lismore in <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-03/nsw-floods-turnbull-berejiklian-tour-devastation-in-states-north/8409756">2017</a> and <a href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnsw%2Flismore%2Fpremier-confirms-82m-promise-to-help-flood-proof-lismore%2Fnews-story%2Fb3144a58f5c553b828734547da3e0d6f%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1ilzdAy1f6FXo3eU-4GZQV154uBf8aJbMZR_G0MKUiBAzO2Uu4-LUNGQ0&amp;h=AT3dnQF2AkU8-XLC7qxjumyGRyCau4LS7NvRXMLXzlqTmXvboHRawlm_1qp9PjYy_BCcUI08i_Fl5oS6B_IVmhGoyIkjnE4BwUsuEJTRLIaRSuAboOQDjQoV-TtVXGuUgVRCMd_qdma6">2019 by</a> then-premier Gladys Berijiklian and then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, and again <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/floods-storms-leave-massive-cleanup-nsw-queensland-weather/106a2e36-879e-4375-8167-200a616d1804">in 2020 </a>by prime minister Scott Morrison have come to nothing. If state and federal leaders were serious about tackling the issue, they would immediately begin to convert the country’s volunteer emergency services to the well-funded, permanent systems they should be. Money would be thrown at efforts to stop future floods, but Lismore—Australia’s most flood-prone city—was mysteriously left off a priority funding list <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-13/flood-lismore-natural-disaster-funding/100618338">late last year</a> that instead allocated resources to less-affected surrounding areas.
The $1,000 disaster payment announced amid the current crisis will do little for those who have lost everything. Meanwhile, defence minister Peter Dutton has set up a <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/pine-rivers-flood-relief?utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1&amp;utm_medium=copy_link&amp;utm_source=customer">gofundme</a> for flood relief in Queensland’s Pine River, apparently seeing the recovery as something that should be funded by private citizens, not his government. That’s the same minister who just allocated <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/defence-spending-to-reach-50b-a-year-says-dutton-20211025-p592t0">$50 billion</a> annually to the defence budget.
It’s heartening to see the way that ordinary people step into the void. While the SES in Lismore had only two boats at its disposal, dozens of untrained locals rescued large numbers of people. Mick Cheffins, who works as a cleaner, was one of them. “I picked up about 30 people from the roofs,” he said. “The SES were overwhelmed, so we’d run into an SES boat and they’d tell us where to go—but I smashed my windscreen and broke the propeller by running into so many submerged cars”.
Anne-Marie, Mick’s wife, is an emergency department nurse practitioner at Lismore Base Hospital, which is over capacity after taking in evacuated aged care residents and patients who developed hypothermia waiting to be rescued. The water covering Lismore stretches to the bottom of the hospital precinct, meaning Anne-Marie hasn’t been able to get to work. She said she hoped the water would recede enough that she could use the damaged boat to show up to her shift tomorrow. Meanwhile, a group of immigrant abattoir workers stepped in to evacuate an aged care home when its residents became trapped.
The stories of community self-help that emerge with each extreme weather event show how much ordinary people care about each other. For many, the economic and emotional cost of this and other disasters will be long felt. But for the wealthy, it will be a very different story. In the event they are affected, they will have the resources to recover quickly—to rebuild destroyed houses, replace ruined possessions and the pay the high insurance premiums that will follow.
For the wealthy and those who run Australian capitalism, business as usual matters more than a few destroyed lives. That means keeping coal exports going, keeping the fossil fuel companies in business and keeping budgets for social and emergency services that don’t make huge profits to a minimum. These are the people who must be made to answer for the environmental disasters we are facing now and will face more of in the future.

Deadly floods an unnatural disaster

In Guanajuato, Mexico, activists are <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/mexican-abortion-activists-mobilize-aid-texans">breaking laws</a> to help women terminate unwanted pregnancies. The women are not from Mexico, which last year decriminalised abortion. They’re from Texas, where abortion was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/us/politics/texas-abortion-supreme-court.html?searchResultPosition=16">effectively banned</a> last September. And they’re preparing to help many more US women over the course of 2022 in anticipation of the possibility that the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court ruling will be overturned, jeopardising the reproductive freedom of tens of millions of US women. 
Roe v Wade was a landmark victory for women’s rights, establishing abortion as a constitutional right. There were limits to this victory: it did not establish abortion as an unqualified right and nor did it mean access to abortion services would be available to women to exercise the right. But it represented a major gain nevertheless. 
The Supreme Court has been prompted to revisit Roe by a Mississippi law banning abortions from 15 weeks. Prior to anti-abortion conservatives constituting a majority of the bench, such challenges to Roe tended not to get a hearing, in effect protecting the ruling and abortion rights. With a conservative majority, this has changed. 
There are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/briefing/abortion-supreme-court-roe-v-wade.html?searchResultPosition=2">two likely outcomes</a> of the decision on the Mississippi law, due in mid-2022. Either a precedent is set that restricts abortion access to 15 weeks and undermines but does not entirely overturn the gains of Roe, essentially by fudging the point at which foetal viability is considered to apply. Or, Roe is entirely repealed, opening the way for states to impose any restrictions they choose on abortion rights. Given the composition of the Supreme Court, the latter is the more likely scenario.
Republicans have long been preparing for this, drawing up bills state by state which can be rushed through in the event Roe is overturned. As many as <a href="https://states.guttmacher.org/">26 states</a> are expected to enact such laws. <a href="https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2019/08/state-abortion-policy-landscape-hostile-supportive">The Guttmacher Institute</a> estimated in 2020 that the majority of American women of reproductive age live in states hostile to abortion rights. Without Roe, almost 40 million women will likely lose the right to access abortion in their state. 
This is a serious escalation in a country which, because of its political landscape and history, is a conservative outlier on abortion. Reproductive freedom is not seriously contested in most liberal democracies today, as evidenced by the recent legalisation of abortion in some of the world’s traditionally most Catholic countries, like Ireland, Mexico and Argentina. It has mainly been in countries with repressive, hard-right governments, like that in Hungary, that have been going the other way. Why is the US such an anomaly on this question?
The US is a more Christian country, <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-are-far-more-religious-than-adults-in-other-wealthy-nations/">by almost every metric</a>, than the rest of the wealthy Western world. In 2020, the Pew Research Centre found that nearly <a href="https://www.pewforum.org/2021/01/14/measuring-religion-in-pew-research-centers-american-trends-panel/">two thirds </a>of people in the US were Christian, compared to <a href="http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/8664-religion-in-australia-march-2020-202103220545">44 percent</a> in Australia. 
But it is not just individual religiosity that has shaped American politics. The country has an organised, right-wing Christian political movement that is a serious force in its own right. It influences the wider Christian population, including less political Christians for whom religious identification trumps class or other loyalties.
Texas shows how the Christian right has used its apparatus to change the reality of abortion access on the ground and dominate political debate. The Texan population is, like the wider American population, almost evenly divided on abortion. In fact, a <a href="https://www.texastribune.org/2021/03/02/texas-gambling-abortion-marijuana-confederate/">poll</a> from February 2021 found that 37 percent of Texans wanted abortion laws liberalised, while 32 percent favoured more restrictions. But in September, Texas passed a “heartbeat” law, effectively banning abortion after six weeks. 
Before the law was passed, there were already ten times as many <a href="https://www.thelily.com/with-most-abortions-illegal-in-texas-crisis-pregnancy-centers-see-an-opportunity/">anti-abortion “pregnancy centres”</a> funded by Christian organisations than there were abortion clinics in the state: about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/us/anti-abortion-movement-texas-law.html?action=click&amp;module=RelatedLinks&amp;pgtype=Article">200 and 24</a> respectively. Christian organisations have for years ensured full-time activists are stationed outside clinics, harassing women and coercing them into one of the anti-abortion centres often strategically located next door. The centres are sufficiently well-funded to offer essential services—like ultrasounds—free of charge. 
The provision of free medical services gives a sense of the Christian right’s capacity to throw financial and other resources at the anti-abortion movement, but it only reflects a small part of the effort. The Christian right also uses the legal system to its advantage, building its own Christian law schools to train armies of lawyers ready to argue its case around the country, chipping away at abortion access with the explicit goal of one day overturning Roe. One of these law schools produced Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s final appointee to the Supreme Court who is now considering the Mississippi case.
Importantly, the Christian right also has immense political influence. The entwinement of the Christian right and the Republican Party from the 1970s onwards was the result of a symbiotic process. Firstly, conservative Christian leaders looked to gain greater political influence in reaction to the gains of social movements. Party lines, on the other hand, had been realigning as the Democratic voting base shifted north and Republicans found a conservative audience in the traditionally Democratic south. The partnership was cemented when Evangelical leader Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority” movement helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. A born-again identity became a pre-condition for Republican presidential candidates and in the decade following, the Christian right gained a grip on the party in many parts of the country. By 1994, it essentially controlled the party in <a href="http://are.as.wvu.edu/jhicks.htm">18 states and held major influence in another 14</a>—through filling caucuses and conventions with religious activists, lobbying and becoming a major source of funding. That year, the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2007/11/congress-runs-into-republican-revolution-nov-8-1994-006757">for the first time in 40 years</a>, a victory in no small part due to the Christian (especially evangelical) vote. 
Plenty of non-religious right-wingers were also hostile to abortion rights. Their political perspective tended to made them natural allies of the religious anti-abortionists. They resent progressive social movements and women playing too much of a role in public life at the expense of their families and by association the social fabric. Sexual expression on the part of women, in their eyes, should be sanctioned unless it pertains to procreation or pleasing their husbands. And they see discipline, responsibility and punishment as central to maintaining societal order, and are happy to use the state to intimately control people’s lives when it suits their conservative agenda. 
Although male-dominated, such conservatism is not the exclusive preserve of men. In 2021,<a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/244709/pro-choice-pro-life-2018-demographic-tables.aspx"> 43 per cent</a> of American women self-identified as pro-life, and research by Ziad Munson in 2008 suggested that women made up the majority of anti-abortion activists.
By backing Trump in 2016 and delivering him <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/06/white-evangelical-christians-supported-trump">81 percent</a> of the white evangelical vote, the Christian right struck gold. Trump crowned evangelical Mike Pence his Vice President and appointed conservatives to judiciaries across the country. But, more than anything else, he repaid the Christian right with his three appointees to the Supreme Court, giving it the opportunity to realise its dream of overturning Roe.
The Democratic Party is widely seen as the pro-choice party in the US. But the party’s weak support for abortion rights is a big part of the reason reproductive freedom is now under major threat. 
The association of pro-choice and pro-life positions with the Democratic and Republican camps respectively is a relatively <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/4/10/18295513/abortion-2020-roe-joe-biden-democrats-republicans">recent phenomenon</a>. Both parties historically were home to a mix of pro- and anti-abortion candidates until the realignment in the 1960s and 1970s that eventually secured strong Republican support in the South. 
Today, being pro-choice in the Republican Party is implausible, but the options for Democrats are more flexible. In the South, especially, they have a chequered record. In 2019, Kentucky Democrat John Sims voted for a “heartbeat” bill similar to the new Texas law. That same year in Louisiana, the pro-life Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/05/29/louisiana-passed-an-abortion-ban-its-democratic-governor-plans-defy-his-party-sign-it/">signed</a> a similar law—that was sponsored by another Democrat, John Milkovich—into existence. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has described himself as “<a href="https://www.manchin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/manchin-focus-on-budget-crisis-come-together-to-put-fiscal-house-in-order">pro-life and proud of it”</a>. 
In Mississippi, a law passed in 2007 banning abortions in almost all circumstances will be triggered if the state is successful in its campaign to have Roe overturned. Two of the legislators that were instrumental in getting this law passed were Democrats, one of who later became chairman of the state Democratic Party.
Bill Clinton popularised the slogan that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” in his 1992 presidential campaign. This was an attempt to appease conservative moralisers opposed to reproductive choice without alienating liberals. Obama’s Affordable Care Act—hailed as <a href="https://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/resources/health-care/summary-of-key-provisions.pdf">improving women’s health care</a>—was accompanied by an <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/u-s-health-insurance-system-excludes-abortion/">executive order</a> that restated the 1976 Hyde Amendment’s ban on almost any federal abortion funding for poor women. 
Biden has a notably bad history on abortion: in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/biden-abortion-rights.html">1980s</a> he voted to allow states to overturn Roe and against funding abortions as part of a health care plan for federal employees, and wrote his own amendment to ban the use of foreign aid for abortion research. His <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/us/politics/biden-abortion-democrats.html?action=click&amp;module=RelatedLinks&amp;pgtype=Article">continued silence</a> on the issue since becoming President has been so worrying to abortion rights supporters that some have created a website—<a href="https://didbidensayabortionyet.org/">didbidensayabortionyet.org</a>—dedicated to tracking whether he has even said the word since being elected (the answer, after almost 400 days in office, is no).
The administration is, on paper at least, committed to upholding Roe. Its strategy, though, seems to rest not on mounting a campaign to defend abortion that could pressure the Supreme Court and threaten social chaos if abortion rights are scrapped, but on promising access will be safeguarded where electorates remain under Democratic control. It is a strange “defence” of abortion rights that involves conceding defeat in roughly half of the country at the outset, but at least Democrats are fortifying abortion rights where they have the power to do so, right? Not if the example of Virginia is anything to go by. 
Virginia is a “battleground” state, one of few in the south that is closely contested. Its Governorship had been held by a Democrat since 2014, but was won by a Republican in early November. During that election, Democrats promised to be a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-elections-coronavirus-pandemic-covid-19-pandemic-virginia-49220f2e15a66044f253442775fb16fb">“brick wall”</a> against anti-abortion legislation. But in the more than two months the Democrats had to codify abortion access before the pro-life Republican took over and with the decision on Roe looming they did nothing. Or more accurately, they went on holiday. “We discussed it,” Democrat majority leader Richard Saslaw told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/17/us/politics/virginia-democrats-abortion.html?searchResultPosition=9">New York Times</a>, “there are too many people out of town”. 
Why is the Democratic Party so shy about abortion? Because it doesn’t want to give up on appealing to conservative voters and winning parts of the South on a right-wing basis. The result is that the aggressive Christian right and Republican Party are able to set the terms of the debate and erode reproductive rights.
And because so much of the pro-choice movement is oriented to the Democrats, its approach tends to be disastrously defensive. As Katha Pollitt wrote in her 2014 book Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights put it, “For far too long the pro-choice movement was either complacent or defensive. It relied on brilliant lawyers and sympathetic judges, while abortion opponents built a grassroots movement and took over political offices from zoning boards and school boards to the legislature itself. It sold itself too cheaply to the Democratic Party, even when the Democrats were seeking out anti-abortion and anti-feminist candidates to run in conservative districts. It let its mostly white leadership age in place, pursuing their tired Beltway-focused strategies, and then wondered why young women and working-class women of color didn’t connect with its organizations.”
The US is in desperate need of an unapologetic defence of abortion rights oriented to activism to match the determination and organisation of the right. Anti-abortionists have built an aggressive grassroots movement while much of the pro-choice camp has placed its hope in Democrats. Even in places like Texas, statistics show that there is sizeable—in fact, sometimes majority—public opinion waiting to be mobilised by abortion rights activists. But without a movement that can galvanise its supporters and give them confidence to fight, sentiment counts for very little. The majority of US women are at imminent threat of their reproductive freedom being taken away. The stakes have never been higher.

Why is the US so backward on abortion?

Aran Mylvaganam arrived unaccompanied at Sydney International Airport when he was just 13 years old. He couldn’t speak English but, like every refugee, understood the word “visa”. And when immigration officials asked for his, he knew he couldn’t give them one.
Australia was only a year into John Howard’s long prime ministership. Aran had fled the war in Sri Lanka. He now entered a country with a brewing political conflict of its own—one in which refugees would be at the centre of debate. He was transferred to the Villawood detention centre, where he stayed for three months.
“There was a conversation happening at that time about refugees and foreigners coming into this country”, Aran says. “It was the time when Pauline Hanson was becoming popular. There was so much fear in the migrant community at that time that Hanson was going to kick every Asian out of the country. You could see the conversation happening in the community as well, and people were worried.”
Aran had lived in Tamil Eelam, the homelands of the Tamil people in the north and east of Sri Lanka. “I was born into war”, he says, describing successive waves of pogroms and military violence perpetrated against his people by the Sri Lankan government and Indian troops. The entirety of Tamil Eelam has been under Sri Lankan occupation since 2009.
The 2013 documentary No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka gives an idea of the scale of the atrocities committed against Tamils in the closing months of the military conflict. Decades of oppression and violence against the Tamils resulted in armed resistance and the founding of a national liberation movement led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known as the Tamil Tigers).
The Tigers controlled an autonomous region across much of Tamil Eelam through the 1990s and into the 2000s. But it was destroyed by a major Sri Lankan military offensive from late 2008 to early 2009.
During that offensive, Sri Lankan authorities created so-called no fire zones, directing hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians to shelter in them for safety. But the zones were then shelled, reduced in size and moved, and then shelled again—funnelling survivors into ever smaller killing fields.
When United Nations workers sent their coordinates to the Sri Lankan government to try to ensure the safety and security of aid operations, they too were attacked. Makeshift hospitals were shelled. New ones were hastily set up and shelled again, until the International Committee of the Red Cross decided to stop providing the Sri Lankan government the coordinates of the hospitals, which had been attacked approximately 65 times.
Ten of thousands of Tamil civilians were massacred over a period of a few months. No Fire Zone is evidence that the government and military perpetrated the most barbaric of war crimes—for which they still have paid no price.
But the tactic was not news for Tamils, or for Aran. In 1995, when Aran was 11, the Sri Lankan Air Force dropped leaflets over his village. The leaflets instructed civilians to shelter in schools, churches and temples if fighting broke out, which it did a few days later.
“The people followed their directions, but they bombed our school. That particular day I lost my brother and three cousins”, Aran says.
“It wasn’t just one bomb. One bomb fell and we all ran. As we were running, bombs were dropped on the tamarind tree that was in front of my house where lots of people were hiding. It was a big tree with a big canopy you could hide under, and so it was bombed by the Sri Lankan Air Force. In Sri Lanka, we all wore white uniforms, so it’s not like they couldn’t see these were school kids.
“From there onwards I was basically on the move, moving from one place to another internally. By 1997 my family had decided to get all the young kids out of the country.”
Some of Aran’s young family members made it to Europe, some died on the way. His 17-year-old older brother made it to Australia a few months before Aran and was detained in Maribyrnong detention centre in Melbourne. After they were both released, they lived with other refugees in Dandenong. It took three and a half years and a community campaign for the Australian government to allow him and his brother to be reunited with their parents, a right of family reunion that refugees were entitled to at the time.
Amid the ongoing decline of refugee rights in Australia, Tamils felt a particular moment of desperation and concern following the 2009 massacre. The Labor government, which had committed its full support to the Sri Lankan regime, began targeting Tamil refugees.
The situation led Aran and prominent sports journalist Trevor Grant to establish the Tamil Refugee Council in 2011.
“The Labor government on the one hand were aiding the Sri Lankan government, coming up with statements of support and providing financial and diplomatic support to the war criminals. At the same time, Tamils who fled the genocide in 2009 and came to this country were treated very differently”, he says.
“Refugees in general were treated very badly by the Labor government. But when it came to Tamil asylum seekers, they gave them negative security assessments. Julia Gillard introduced an enhanced screening process, and a lot of people were handed over to the Sri Lankan authorities without their claims even being assessed.
“It was also around the time that Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop, while they were in opposition, were visiting Sri Lanka quite regularly and making statements to support the Sri Lankan government.”
For the past decade, the Tamil Refugee Council has campaigned relentlessly against Australia’s anti-refugee politics. A flashpoint for the organisation has been the campaign to free the Murugappan family from Biloela, Queensland—Priya, Nades, Kopika and Tharnicaa—who Aran has come to know well over their three years of detention.
The Tamil Refugee Council was founded, Aran says, because Tamils knew they had no friends in parliament. They had to try to mobilise the broader community behind them.
It’s the same rationale he says is behind his campaign leading the Victorian Socialists federal election ticket: there are no reliable friends of refugees or workers in Australia’s ruling parties. The only way to challenge them is to build a movement of our own.
“I’m running for the Senate with the Victorian Socialists because I believe that we haven’t got politicians in Canberra who actually speak for the majority of Australians”, he says.
“The majority of Australians have been taken for a ride for many years by both major political parties. Whether it’s our rights at work, whether it’s action on climate change, refugee rights, the rights of women—both major political parties have contributed to the problems.
“The solution to this is not to elect more politicians who will end up being a voice for the ruling class; it’s electing politicians who will be a voice for the working people, a voice for the oppressed, and who have a track record of advocating for those people.”
The Senate is filled with politicians who have constructed Australia’s refugee detention regime and who claim that Sri Lanka is safe for Tamils. The policies they write and vote for are designed to crush the spirit of refugees and their supporters and—in words Aran has spoken at many protests—to divide working-class people, keeping them poorer so the rich can grow richer.
But Aran has never given up. And he put his beliefs into action, working as a trade union organiser to fight for a better deal for all workers and to build solidarity between all oppressed groups.
“Over the past 20 years, I fled a war that in many ways served the interests of global powers”, he says. “I came to this country as a refugee, lived here below the poverty line, struggled to get three meals a day but managed to get into university. Once I entered the workforce, I fought for workers’ rights, became a union organiser and continued to do that work while fighting for refugee rights.
“I believe I’ve got the proven track record to be a genuine voice for people.”

For workers’ rights and refugee rights. Why Aran Mylvaganam is running for the Senate.

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR0AZU7ibw2MuZxG-YB6xAV-KB4pOwG2FmWZqRgcxVB9wIpPkjnCc4XRaMk&amp;v=PaHw_bGI2ME&amp;feature=youtu.be">Wittenoom</a> is an abandoned town in the desert north of Perth. Once, it had a population of almost 1,000, making it the biggest town in the Pilbara. Now, it’s been removed from maps and cut off from all essential services, to stop people from visiting. Wittenoom is a kind of Australian Chernobyl, poisoned not by radioactivity but by the deadly blue asbestos dug up from the town’s mine, where most of the population worked.
“People who lived and worked in Wittenoom in these years stress that ‘We didn’t know’, ‘No one told us anything’”, reads a section of the <a href="https://www.australianasbestosnetwork.org.au/asbestos-history/asbestos-wittenoom/closure-wittenoom/">Australian Asbestos Network</a>’s website dedicated to the town. “They had no idea of the danger they lived with, nor of the suffering they would face as families decades later when, after the long latency period characteristic of the disease, mesothelioma would be diagnosed.”
Wittenoom, the town so badly poisoned it was wiped off the maps, is an extreme case, but not an anomaly. Valuing profit above human life is the very basis of the capitalist system. It’s the reason so many people have died unnecessarily from the virus over the past eighteen months of the pandemic.
To most of us, the coronavirus represents a threat to our health and lives. To a business owner, it represents a threat to the flow of profits. Common sense suggests that a contagious and deadly virus should be fought with social distancing, closing down and refurbishing the places where we might catch the disease and pass it on. Lots of those transmission sites are workplaces, commuter systems and schools where children are trained to enter life in the capitalist system. So bosses have spent the last eighteen months pushing back against the idea that our health should come before the economy. Sometimes it’s relatively covert: consider the many decidedly inessential jobs and industries that have somehow been classified “essential” throughout the pandemic. For bosses, anything that makes money is essential. For them, avoidable deaths during a pandemic are essential too.
Beyond the pandemic, there’s an ineradicable tension between our health and our bosses’ interests. Bosses make more money when we work harder or longer. Entire industries are continually reshaped in the pursuit of that goal. The Monthly recently published a piece, “On the Chain”, investigating conditions among migrant meat workers. Recent changes to visa rules allowed bosses to impose more extreme conditions of exploitation on their workers. “The working day lengthened, pay fell relative to other jobs. Tasks were simplified and productivity increased.” These changes meant more accidents and illness. One worker is quoted complaining of severe pain in his hands due to the repetitive nature of his work removing hides from as many as 70 cows an hour: “”Even holding chopsticks or closing my fist, I have trouble”, he told the Monthly.
Time is money. So is equipment that can make workers safer. So, notoriously, many workers have worked through the pandemic without adequate personal protective equipment. According to <a href="https://shift.hks.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Essential-and-Unprotected-COVID-19-Health-Safety.pdf">one study</a> from the University of Berkeley, provision of masks to workers in the United States in March and April 2020 was dire: “4% of fast-food workers, 5% of convenience store and coffee shop workers, and 9% of restaurant workers [had access to masks]. About a quarter of workers in retail and grocery stores had access to masks, as did around 15% of those in bigbox and department stores. Here, too, the workplaces that back-stop the online economy fell short: just 17% of warehouse, 14% of fulfillment center, and 10% of delivery workers had access to masks”.
And some of the most profitable industries can never be made healthy for humanity—fossil fuels being a pressing example. It’s profitable to discover, invent and market addictive and poisonous substances: tobacco, alcohol, fast food and the over-prescription of dangerous medication have all made fortunes for bosses.
Bosses are constantly trying to find new ways—and holding on tight to old ways—to kill us. The struggle between life and health, on the one hand, and profit, on the other, is one of the defining features of work and life under capitalism. That’s the tension that made Wittenoom disappear.
Long after the Wittenoom mine was closed, the town became the inspiration for Alistair Hulett’s song “Blue Murder”:
<blockquote>I feel my health is failing 
Working down in the thick blue dust. 
The kids play in the tailings. 
The boss says work, and work I must. 
Day in, day out, everyday they drive us harder. 
Day in, day out, they’re getting away with blue murder.
</blockquote>
The song could have been written about many places where people still live and work. The kids in Broken Hill, for example, still play in poisonous tailings—waste products from the mines. In <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-04/broken-hill-lead-program-shows-signs-of-progress/9205916">2017</a>, 47 per cent of all children and 79 per cent of Aboriginal children in the town had an amount of lead in their blood above the official “threshold of concern”. Lead dust from mines was blown all over the town. It contaminates the soil and makes the rain water undrinkable. It accumulates on surfaces in <a href="https://theconversation.com/toxic-playgrounds-broken-hill-kids-exposed-to-poisonous-dust-32325">playgrounds</a>, finding its way onto kids’ hands and into their mouths. Kids in Broken Hill are eating lead. 
What action has been taken to punish the mining companies operating in Broken Hill for poisoning the community? The government has preferred to launch campaigns of “awareness”, teaching parents and children to wash their hands after playing in playgrounds or touching the soil. Similar programs have been implemented in Mount Isa and Port Pirie, mining towns also suffering from lead poisoning. All of them have been criticised as <a href="https://theconversation.com/toxic-playgrounds-broken-hill-kids-exposed-to-poisonous-dust-32325">dangerously misleading</a> in a study by Macquarie University academics published in the journal Environmental Research.
 “With slogans such as ‘Lead, it’s in our hands’ and ‘Living safely with lead’, the cities’ health education programs all promote the idea that parents can sufficiently protect their children from lead exposure through individual actions, such as hand washing, household cleaning, and taking precautions in the garden”, the academics wrote. “Yet there is no evidence to show that’s true.”
Broken Hill’s “lead awareness” has a mascot. He’s called Lead Ted Junior. Lead Ted Junior tours classrooms and teaches kids to wash their hands of lead, while parents are kept unaware that the World Health Organization warns “there is no known level of lead exposure that is considered safe”. In reality, the mines would need to be shut down to eliminate the health risk. Their profits are the reason this has not even been considered. There are comparisons that can be drawn to the pandemic here: Isn’t “Living safely with lead” eerily similar to the government’s favourite mantra at the moment: that we have to live with Covid in order to open up the economy? 
Broken Hill is an example of a mass poisoning de facto sanctioned by the government, but in one of the most infamous mass poisonings in recent years, government was the immediate perpetrator. From 2014 to 2019, the people of Flint, Michigan, suffered a “water crisis”. The mostly African American population had their water supply poisoned with chlorine and lead. The area’s industrial history meant the Flint River was toxic, badly polluted by bosses past and present. But during a period of budget cuts, the city’s water supply was switched to the river anyway. Residents complained of orange and brown water that was undrinkable, so the water supply was switched again. But anti-corrosion measures hadn’t been implemented, so the old water pipes leached lead into the drinking water. The people of Flint were drinking lead.
 Poisoned towns and neighbourhoods are not usually evacuated or shut down. In fact, Wittenoom’s residents mostly left of their own accord, migrating family by family as lung diseases claimed a rapidly growing tally of victims. The deadly effects of asbestos began to be uncovered in the early 20th century, and asbestosis was discovered in <a href="https://www.mesotheliomahelp.org/asbestos/history/">1930</a>, but the industry covered it up to keep profits flowing. Wittenoom’s mine was shut down decades later, in 1966, not because it was killing people, but because it wasn’t making enough money any more.
The asbestos industry didn’t just knowingly send workers into death traps; it also lined their homes with poison. The asbestos from Wittenoom’s mine was sold to James Hardie Industries, a company that manufactured building materials. Hardie’s asbestos-contaminated supplies were used in construction jobs all over Australia, inflicting debilitating and deadly lung diseases on manufacturing, construction and maintenance workers, on their friends and relatives who were exposed to dust and on others who worked around the sites. 
Yet the company is making a reputational comeback. In February of this year, the <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/infrastructure/james-hardie-goes-from-pariah-to-high-flyer-20210208-p570no">Australian Financial Review</a> published an article titled “James Hardie goes from pariah to high-flyer”. “The rising popularity of its fibre cement board for renovation and construction projects and the ability to turn that into fatter profit margins pushed building products group James Hardie Industries to a record high on the ASX on Tuesday”, the article gushed. Meanwhile, their old asbestos keeps claiming new victims. Asbestos removed from buildings is sometimes dangerously <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/22/revealed-asbestos-contaminated-waste-found-landscaping-material-sydney-housing-estate-site">dumped</a>, contaminating soil for decades to come. Houses that contain asbestos are often <a href="https://www.commerce.wa.gov.au/publications/safety-alert-032020-exposure-asbestos-during-demolition-works">demolished</a> without adequate protection for workers and nearby residents. People engage in home renovations in contaminated houses, not knowing they are creating clouds of deadly asbestos dust as they knock through walls. It’s possible that some of the asbestos claiming new victims today was dug up in the Wittenoom mine: it was the country’s major domestic supplier of blue asbestos in the 1950s and 1960s.
The struggle between human life hand on the one hand, and profits on the other, isn’t just a few horror stories. It’s built into the system, and new horrors will keep emerging until we create a new way to organise our work, our lives and our relationship with the environment. Bosses are still getting away with blue murder.

Why do bosses keep trying to kill us?

Citrus farmers in Queensland dumped tonnes of fruit in May, complaining they wouldn’t make a profit this year. The scenes were reminiscent of what John Steinbeck called a “crime beyond denunciation” in his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath: while the poor starved during the Great Depression, the orange harvest was left to rot in order to keep prices—and therefore profits—from falling. 
The Queensland farmers say they were forced into this due to labour shortages, the latest in a consistent string of media reports about the plight of Australian farmers since the pandemic began. But the reported shortages haven’t prompted them to improve the industry’s notoriously bad conditions in order to attract more workers. 
A new report on farm work by Unions NSW and the Victorian-based Migrant Workers Centre, Working for $9 a day: Wage Theft and Human Rights Abuses on Australian Farms, has found that 78 percent of backpacker farm workers surveyed between September 2020 and February 2021 were underpaid. Some workers reported earning less than $1 per hour. Only 2 percent earned the minimum award rate for casuals. The report reconfirms earlier findings: what agriculture industry heads brush off as the methods of a few rogue farmers are in fact systemic. 
Since the beginning of the pandemic, farmers have been complaining about how the reduced number of seasonal and migrant workers has hit them while they’re down. They say the work pays well, but locals are just unwilling to do it. In January, the ABC reported that Victorian farmers were dumping $150,000 worth of celery due to labour shortages. Bill Bulmer, chair of the peak horticulture industry body AUSVEG, told the ABC, “It’s a sad statement to say, but with JobSeeker and JobKeeper, the locals don’t seem to want to take up the manual labour. The standard wage for casual workers is around $27 per hour ... so it’s not an issue of not paying enough money.”
But the workers surveyed for the report say otherwise. Only 2 percent reported earning $26 per hour or more. Eighty percent were underpaid while working on the dominant and controversial piece rate system, in which workers are paid by the quantity of produce harvested rather than time working. Unions have rightly argued that this system, especially without a minimum pay floor, facilitates hyper-exploitation and provides a loophole for employers to avoid paying award rates. But even on hourly rates, more workers were underpaid than not, 61 percent earning less than the legal hourly rate. 
The reality is that farm bosses have created an entire industry model based on underpayment. As the director of the Migrant Workers Centre, Matt Kunkel, told Red Flag: “The industry is one that only exists on the hyper-exploitation of workers, and something needs to be done about it”.
“Farms are no different to any other business in Australia; they’re extracting as much profit as they can from the workers”, Kunkel explains. “There are large numbers of people who are effectively forced to work on farms if they want to stay in the country, and employers have a lot of power over them. They’re using that power to underpay their workers, steal wages and push down conditions, knowing they are less likely to complain because, if they do, they might not be able to stay. So this idea that there is some kind of labour shortage on farms and that farmers have no role to play in resolving the circumstances that lead to this so-called shortage, we would dispute that.” 
Examples of wage theft in the industry are not hard to find. Take Bill Bulmer, who assured the ABC that workers were paid $27 an hour, for example. In addition to being the chair of AUSVEG, Bulmer is also the owner of Bulmer Farms, which, in 2019, was accused by the then National Union of Workers of underpaying workers, unilaterally reducing picking rates and threatening any worker considering joining the union. Ironically, just weeks earlier Bulmer had complained of a labour shortage and that farmers who treated their workers fairly were being driven out of the industry: “The consequence of the labour shortage is that growers are held captive by unscrupulous operators who profit from the mistreatment of workers”, Bulmer said in 2019, before the pandemic had caused new immigration restrictions and border closures. Despite the irony and blatant misrepresentation of the extent of the issue, Bulmer did have a point: it is uncompetitive to pay legal wages, and it has been since long before farmers took advantage of the pandemic to intensify their complaints about labour shortages. 
An earlier union audit of job advertisements provides further evidence that the pandemic has not changed farmers’ disposition towards workers. The audit by Unions NSW of 1,000 horticulture job advertisements between December 2019 and September 2020 suggested that more than 96 percent of the piece rates advertised would translate into earnings below the minimum wage. “Unions NSW’s audit confirms the levels of exploitation in the horticultural industry reported in academic research remains unchanged, despite the farm sector’s claims of labour shortages”, the report read.
It’s not that the pandemic hasn’t affected farmers—it has wounded an industry that relies on migrant populations for a hyper-exploitable workforce. But for that they deserve no sympathy. Temporary visa schemes have been used to recruit farm workers since the mid-1990s. Workers relying on employer immigration sponsorship and ongoing employment to stay in the country are predictably favoured by bosses looking to skirt legal wage requirements—although migrant farm workers have led some heroic union campaigns in recent years despite this. Eighty-four percent of workers surveyed for the new report were on temporary visas. The report found that those on temporary visas were more likely than citizens to be underpaid, but that the vast majority of both categories were underpaid—80.1 percent and 71.2 percent respectively. 
Farmers and politicians confidently claim that local workers and unemployed are unwilling to do farm work. But we don’t know what would happen if they paid legal wages, because they have refused to do so, even in the face of a reported 26,000 shortfall in seasonal workers. Indeed, as the New Daily has reported, when a recruitment company offered to find local workers—i.e. not highly exploitable temporary migrants—for farmers during the pandemic, it was unable to secure a single placement, despite receiving more than 1,500 applications in three days. This suggests that an unwillingness to pay, rather than work, is at the root of the problem.
Despite an abundance of evidence testifying to the abusive nature of the industry, Australian farmers never seem to pass up an opportunity to play victim in the press. The pandemic has been a big opportunity for bosses across the board in this regard, with many spending much of the last year creating narratives that lay the basis for government handouts. Farmers are particularly adept at this, and governments are all ears. This is despite the fact that the Horticulture Statistics Handbook recorded a significant increase in the agricultural industry’s value over 2019 and 2020 “despite the challenging growing and market conditions”: “Although production volume had decreased by 1.5 percent due to seasonal conditions such as drought and bushfires”, the handbook reads, “value increased by 4.5 percent, from $14.4 billion to $15.1 billion”.
Between 2000 and 2019, Australian farmers received more than $8 billion in drought relief funds, farm management deposit schemes have been created to help farmers defer tax payments, and a “future drought relief” fund of $100 million annually was set up in 2020, the year the drought broke. The 2021-22 Queensland state budget also allocated $71.4 million to drought assistance for future droughts. And now farmers are also receiving a further $50 million financial assistance to deal with rural Australia’s mouse plague, ironically a problem contributed to by unsustainable farming methods. The federal government has also announced it will waive $51 million of debt for farmers who have received illegitimate income support over the past few years by “underestimating” their income. 
Meanwhile, workers on temporary visas are denied any welfare at all. The sort of government support and sympathy farmers receive is something farm workers can only dream of. The message is clear: paying starvation wages and leaving food to rot because you won’t pay a cent more is encouraged and rewarded in our society, while those struggling to survive on criminally low wages are left to starve.

Farmers want more workers to rip off and underpay

Anti-lockdown lunacy isn’t the exclusive preserve of right-wing commercial media. Since the coronavirus first hit Australia last year, the ABC has been keen to get in on the act. Take the example of Leigh Sales, one of Australia’s most prominent journalists and an important public representative for the ABC as host of the primetime current affairs program 7.30. Sales has wielded that influence to undermine public health, campaigning for Australia to move away from Covid-19 elimination.
“Next time you hear a Premier claim a short term lockdown for a handful of cases has ‘crushed’ the virus – remember that the data so far shows they’re pointless”, Sales <a href="https://twitter.com/leighsales/status/1396604621116764163">tweeted</a> on 24 May, the day four mystery cases were detected in Melbourne. The tweet linked to an <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/western-australia/lockdowns-don-t-crush-anything-with-a-covid-outbreak-every-12-days-this-year-this-is-how-each-state-responded-20210512-p57r7f.html?btis">analysis</a> by the Sydney Morning Herald of previous outbreaks around the country.
Hundreds of people responded online to refute the claim. Patience may have run thin, given the memory of Sales repeatedly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAo3IQeWVnw">questioning</a> the value of lockdowns in February, during the last Victorian outbreak. And it was clear that her “questioning” was on behalf of the economic interests of bosses, not the health and wellbeing of workers: “If snap lockdowns are going to continue to be a tool, an option, for a small number of cases, how can Victorian businesses make any regular planning, let alone investment planning?”, she asked the premier.
Sales’ program aired a typical <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/melbourne-restaurant-owner-questions-lockdown/13370882">interview</a> with Melbourne restaurant owner Caterina Borsato on 7.30 this week, after Melbourne’s most recent lockdown had been extended. This is how Sales introduced it: “The Victorian government’s decision to keep Melbourne under lockdown comes at a heavy cost for its residents, particularly those trying to run businesses”. She then invited the business owner to comment on matters of public health: what did she think of the elimination strategy espoused by the Victorian chief health officer earlier that day, and would people in Melbourne be comfortable with a more Sydney-like strategy, with “a degree of virus circulating”? Why would a business owner be treated as an expert on this topic, if not to suggest that health policy should be subordinated to the economic needs of bosses?
That same day Sales <a href="https://twitter.com/leighsales/status/1399945149648494593">tweeted</a>: “Suggested Q for tmrw – since covid deaths for under 60s in Australia are minuscule, why not reject lockdowns once you have 75% vaccination of over 50s + vulnerable people?”
Unsurprisingly, Sales has faced plenty of criticism for her pro-business, anti-health advocacy. Sales and her industry colleagues have responded to online criticism by labelling it “trolling” and “bullying”. The Age published a piece titled “Leigh Sales versus the trolls: How the 7.30 host handles the COVID hot seat”: “Sales declined to comment for this story. But her executive producer Justin Stevens said the abuse she is subjected to online was ‘unacceptable [and] sometimes truly disgusting’”, the piece read.
“As anchor of the program Leigh does much of the heavy lifting ... her job is to question and challenge decisions taken by people. Asking questions isn’t expressing a point of view, it’s doing her job as a journalist”, Stevens told the Age.
“This seems to be misunderstood by some in the audience. Would the public prefer us to go with the flow, not ask any questions and be subservient to every decision taken? Of course not, and that isn’t our job as journalists.”
But the article provides no evidence that Sales has been “bullied” or “trolled”. Rather, the online responses are a small sign of the sanity of ordinary people and the popularity of public health measures among them.
“There’s a difference between asking the questions that need to be asked, and asking questions that either promote an anti health expert perspective, or overlook what we actually have accepted as fact (eg it’s not just deaths we’re protecting against) without calling it such”, one person responded on Twitter.
Sales and her colleagues were so insulted by “the public’s” expression of opinions and disagreements on the internet that they considered it a form of unacceptable personal abuse. But that makes sense: the capitalist media, including the state broadcaster, act as a gatekeeper. A select few are entitled to decide which ideas society should discuss and how. Elite journalists and business owners are among those few.
The ABC is far from exempt. Its top journalists display the same kind of affinity with business owners that many have come to expect of the Herald Sun. Why doesn’t Sales ask about the tens of thousands of casual workers in Melbourne who went without an income, due not to the lockdown but the inhumanity of Australia’s welfare system? 
Sale proposes to drop lockdowns once we’ve vaccinated the most vulnerable. That’s easy to dismiss given the state of Australia’s vaccine rollout, but the logic is still worth addressing. It’s close to the attitude of the UK government, which uses mass vaccination of the vulnerable to justify reopening the economy while cases are spiking rapidly and a new, more dangerous, virus variant has become dominant.
It’s the logic that weighs profits against health and decides in favour of the former, of letting “the bodies pile high” to protect business, as Boris Johnson argued in Britain. Even with mass vaccination in the UK, thousands of people are falling ill with a serious illness every day, with unknown long-term consequences. And more people will die as a result. In Australia, if Sales’ position were to prevail now—while we’re largely unvaccinated—it would mean death on a much larger scale.
Meanwhile, after Melbourne’s lockdown was extended, we learnt there was a second and unknown source of infection in the city. If the state government had listened to Sales on 24 May, we’d almost certainly be facing a much bigger health crisis than we are now. But that is exactly the point: Sales is part of a chorus that demands we learn to live with the virus, and its human cost.

Leigh Sales: the ABC's anti-lockdown campaigner

When Daniel Andrews announced that there would be a major reopening of the economy at the beginning of November, if not earlier, the bosses’ anger at having to endure any restrictions at all only intensified. 
With an opening date within reach, big business saw an opportunity to escalate its campaign and force through bigger concessions sooner. By the time Andrews had finished his 18 October press conference, Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott had slammed what she called “inexplicable and unacceptable delay for Victorians and small businesses who are hanging on by a day, not a week”.
Seven of the country’s top chief executives wrote a<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/480822429/Open-Letter-to-Daniel-Andrews#from_embed"> joint letter </a>to the premier demanding he accelerate his proposed timeline. The signatories represented massive corporations like BHP Billiton, the Commonwealth Bank and Coca Cola Amatil–companies not distinguished by a track record of concern for public health and community wellbeing.
And, of course, the mainstream media were happy to play along.
It wasn’t just Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, who have been campaigning for months against “Dictator Dan” and who are often seen as the biggest problem with Australia’s media landscape.
Fairfax’s Age and “our” ABC have for months campaigned against restrictions, openly or implicitly. Their liberal veneer adds illegitimate credibility to big business’s campaign for reopening.
The Age’s <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/covid-success-will-only-come-when-premier-trusts-the-public-20201018-p5669c.html">opinion pages</a> were opened up to arguments that mystery cases will surely “peter out” if the economy were reopened, while ample space was devoted to three senior academics bemoaning “inequities in the rules” – like lack of access to holiday homes: “Those who have a regional residence have been denied access to their other home for many months now”.
This is absurd even in an opinion page. But over months, the sob stories of the rich have been normalised by the country's biggest media outlets.
The Age’s coverage of the easing of restrictions managed to source a quote from almost every industry group in the state, but could not find a single worker to interview.
The Business Council of Australia, the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Australian Industry Group, Restaurant and Catering Australia, the Australian Retailers Association and Wesfarmers had their voices front and centre in an article that the Age rushed to publish online before Andrew’s announcement press conference <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/andrews-offers-small-doses-of-hope-to-state-craving-more-20201018-p5668s.html">had even finished.</a>
That article had 14 sources. Seven were business owners or industry group representatives; three were politicians who have called for restriction easing. There was not a single worker quoted: not one nurse, teacher, abattoir worker, warehouse packer or hospitality worker. Nobody who might be exposed to the virus in their frontline job; nobody who might experience the “inequity” of being exposed to coronavirus for the economic benefit of their employer.
According to the <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/by%20subject/2071.0~2016~main%20features~business%20owner%20managers%20across%20australia~23">2016 Census</a>, less than 7 per cent of the Victorian population, and less than 15 per cent of the working population, identified as “business manager-owners”–a vague category that blurs the line between small and big business. Yet business owners have dominated the media coverage of our biggest public health crisis for at least a century.
The last few weeks of the Age’s coverage make the obsession, and the bias, plain. The headlines speak for themselves: "Business blasts Victoria's plan for restrictions", "Business owners happy to reopen", "Tears of joy in the rush to reopen", "Ready to serve: riverside restaurant craves a date to reopen", "'It's horrendous': retailers fear worst amid doubt over reopening date".
The ABC’s approach is equally focused on the needs of bosses. The day after the announcement, ABC’s <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-18/melbourne-victoria-coronavirus-rules-for-business-industry-work/12779468">coverage</a> led with: “As Victorian coronavirus restrictions ease, business pushes for concessions on Melbourne's path out of lockdown”. The piece quotes twelve sources, nine of whom were business owners and industry representatives–and none of whom were workers.
Business owners already have control over the economy. Why are their voices prioritised in the media–even the supposedly liberal media, like the Age and the ABC? Why are the people who suffer and risk the least–business owners with multiple homes–made into martyrs, while the media ignores workers who are exposed both to the most difficult aspects of lockdown and the greatest risk of coronavirus in a premature reopening?
Most of the country’s biggest media outlets are themselves big businesses. Their owners have an affinity with the rest of the business community in valuing profit over human lives. They have a degree of class solidarity with bosses who are suffering an interruption in the flow of profit, and they know how to campaign on their behalf. And they select and promote likeminded editors and journalists.
And the personal values of individual, aspirational, middle class journalists tend to align with the values of the status quo broadly. The ABC, despite being not for profit, is a state institution and one of the pillars of capitalist civil society. It is dominated by journalists who worship the establishment and the powers that be. ABC journalists’ obsequious attitude towards the rich has been disgustingly clear in much of the commentary.
The day after Daniel Andrews announced that Melbourne's lockdown would soon be eased, ABC’s Radio National started the day with <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/businesses-frustrated-about-melbourne/12781030?fbclid=IwAR12dJEHEcDQzFQCnf9BTy9zKFxxvqsPEmhJYJkvhpKCL1bv7VJfQh7n7sk">an interview</a> with Susan Alberti, the managing director of construction company DANSU, which they replayed throughout the day.
Alberti was named one of the most influential Victorians by the Herald Sun just last week. She is a wealthy business owner who has also spent millions building her profile as a “philanthropist”.
“I do my own research,” she told the ABC. “I’m not an epidemiologist, but evidence suggests that 99 per cent of people who are diagnosed or infected with COVID recover from the disease.” 
She went on to bemoan her empty offices, the businesses that “aren’t coming back”, and, of course, the cost to mental health, about which she is no doubt deeply concerned. She asserted that cancer and diabetes were bigger problems than the global pandemic.
None of Alberti’s dubious claims were questioned by the ABC presenter, Geraldine Doogue, who instead asked Alberti: “Have you reflected, as business people in Melbourne, on where you don’t have agency? That’s what I’d be left with, if I was a business person in Victoria.”
“I just feel we don’t have a voice, we’re not being listened to,” Alberti responded. Her comments were replayed for the rest of the day, and remain on the ABC website.

The mainstream media's deranged campaign to rush Victoria's reopening

After their co-workers contracted COVID-19, Spotless cleaning workers walked off the job – so their bosses took them to the Fair Work Commission in an attempt to force them back.
That’s just one of a number of industrial battles that have broken out in Melbourne’s workplaces during the current wave of infections. Workers have struck against unsafe conditions in retail and supermarket distribution centres, while employers have revealed themselves as the ones lacking regard for the lives of others.
Over the course of July and August, workers have struck to stop the disease spreading at <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-30/spotless-staff-taken-fair-work-commission-coronavirus-outbreak/12504094">Spotless</a>, Woolworth’s <a href="https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/victoria-coronavirus-case-leaves-woolworths-distribution-centre-staff-in-laverton-walking-off-the-job-c-1211991">Melbourne Liquor Distribution Centre (MLDC)</a>, a <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/staff-walk-out-of-kmart-warehouse-over-contact-tracing-fears-20200807-p55jpl.html">Kmart distribution centre</a> and a Mitre 10 distribution centre. That’s because their bosses, keen to keep profits rolling, have been lax on testing, cleaning and other safety measures. It’s fallen to workers to take responsibility for stopping the spread of the disease.
Ben Schneiders, reporting on the Spotless strike for the Age, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/a-city-divided-covid-19-finds-a-weakness-in-melbourne-s-social-fault-lines-20200807-p55ji2.html">wrote</a> that if the company had won at Fair Work then “stopping work for safety reasons during the pandemic would have been ruled unlawful”. But for now, in a country with draconian anti-strike laws, the ability to stop work for health and safety is one of only a few legal opportunities workers have to withdraw their labour. During the pandemic, it’s proven vital to establishing even a semblance of safety in the workplace.
At Spotless, the workers’ action won them the right to be paid while the workplace was shut indefinitely – whether they are casual, part-time or full-time, and regardless of whether they can access leave. By walking off the job and winning rights to good leave entitlements, workers stopped a potential outbreak.
At Woolworth’s MLDC, workers were kept in the dark about a positive COVID-19 case at the end of July. “Over the weekend, Woolworths asked workers to perform overtime hours”, Thomas Edwardson, a worker at the centre, <a href="https://red-ant.org/2020/08/03/woolworths-workers-walkout-over-covid19/">wrote at Red Ant</a>. “Many of these workers had not been informed that COVID-19 was detected in the workplace. Critical of the lack of communication and insufficient cleaning, workers decided that it was unsafe to commence work and refused ... It seems the work stoppage today is now forcing MLDC management to take the global pandemic a little more seriously.”
While the company ignored some of the workers’ demands, the stop-work won guarantees of more stringent deep cleaning, better testing and a reorganisation of equipment and facilities. 
On 7 August, hundreds of workers walked off the job at a Kmart distribution warehouse in the city’s west. They were unhappy with the company’s virus control efforts after a worker tested positive. 
Three days later, more than 60 workers at a Mitre 10 distribution centre in Derrimut, also in Melbourne’s western suburbs, stopped work over a positive case. The warehouse was shut down and workers were sent home with pay to be tested. They forced the company to stop cross contamination between sheds and to provide protective equipment for each worker.
Yet, at his daily press conferences, Premier Daniel Andrews expresses great empathy with bosses, while endlessly repeating stories about individuals caught going out for a coffee at night. Despite repeating the mantra that “these rules are there for all of us”, he seems uninterested in naming, shaming and going after the bosses risking their workers’ lives and spreading the pandemic. In fact, he’s caved to pressure from employers’ associations.
Jim Penman, a right-wing crank and CEO of Jim’s Group, told his franchisees that if they disobeyed the new restrictions, he would defend them. Then he wrote <a href="https://au.news.yahoo.com/ceo-slams-victorian-premier-in-scathing-letter-011200795.html">an open letter</a> accusing the premier of “replacing well thought out departmental regulations with your personal agenda” for shutting down some non-essential businesses. In his reply, Andrews struck an apologetic tone: “I appreciate this is very painful, very difficult”.
When stage four restrictions were announced, building companies threatened to shut down the state’s construction industry – so <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/coronavirus-victorian-building-industry-shutdown-averted/news-story/af51bbee44268aeee829ab393ec3b27d?fbclid=IwAR1WXiFHND-IqgF67X-5HPKURAgiUMlZQWpLheodhzZ9L96nGOAZhO3WhEA">Andrews caved</a>, and let them move workers between three sites a week. After employers at warehouses and distribution centres threatened “supply-chain problems” in supermarkets if the government went ahead with restrictions in their sector, Andrews decided to <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/coronavirus-victorian-government-reaches-deal-with-supermarkets-to-ensure-food-supply-panic-buying/3a04b24d-0599-4b9a-8d94-e4dba85f971c?fbclid=IwAR2t2_LHE74rnavOY83ZdkMZXrj5gzt_fB_hMc02z_H0dWJjX55cw4Yw39o">let the warehouses continue to work at full capacity</a> and gave them an extension on the original deadline.
The premier seems uninterested in disciplining companies that break restrictions or run unsafe workplaces with the same vigour he seems to apply to random individuals. His daily press conferences are structured to reassure bosses and threaten workers, even when workers are having to stand up to the irresponsible, disease-spreading practices of employers.
This hasn’t been lost on health experts. “I can’t believe <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/aug/07/is-melbournes-coronavirus-curfew-likely-to-be-effective-we-ask-the-experts">we are not seeing laws requiring employers to make workplaces COVID-safe</a>, and instead we have this mass focus on individual members of the public, and not even in the settings which most COVID-19 transmissions are happening”, Daniel Reeders, a health promotion practitioner who has worked on virus responses for years, told the Guardian.
Warehouse workers, like others involved in transport and logistics, perform some of the lockdown’s most essential work. It’s mostly indoor manual labour, with large, often casual, workforces – perfect conditions for the virus to spread. The workers’ organisation shown in the health-and-safety stoppages is the most important method of enforcing safety in workplaces, where the majority of outbreaks happen.
And the successful strikes by these essential workers show that we can fight for much more. In Wyong, central New South Wales, 500 workers at a Woolworths distribution centre walked out in late July. They weren’t prompted by a coronavirus scare, but were demanding a pay rise and for an end to insecure work. They’d been negotiating for five months. Workers struck for a day, and bosses responded with a lockout. By the time work resumed, two weeks later, the workers had won <a href="https://www.facebook.com/UnitedWorkersOz/photos/a.416871155667358/603451540342651">wage rises of more than 10 percent and permanent jobs for labour-hire workers</a>. Essential workers – not just warehouse workers, but teachers, childcare workers, supermarket workers, health care front liners and more – can strike and win better pay and conditions during a pandemic.
We need strikes to protect us from other threats, too. We’re entering a prolonged period of crisis. Unemployment is high, and bosses in some industries are going on the offensive. The economic recession can ruin lives and kill just like a virus. And just as with the virus, we can protect ourselves best with working-class organisation and strike action.

Coronavirus strikes are spreading, but Andrews is coddling bosses

People in Bristol had petitioned their city council for decades to take down the city’s statue of slave trafficker Edward Colston. In early June, the world watched it being torn down and pushed into a river by protesters. Mass protests around the world have pushed back against reactionary historical narratives, and that push back is represented by attacks on monuments to racist figures of the ruling class.
Different shades of the right have come out in defence of public tributes to mass murderers, colonialists, slavedrivers and Confederate generals. Armed far-right militias have defended statues in the US, as have the far right in the UK (joined in sentiment by prime minister Boris Johnson). During a protest in Australia, police encircled a statue of captain Cook, and NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian pushed for harsher punishments for those charged with vandalising Cook’s effigies.
Right wing culture warriors have expressed shock at what they call an erasing of history. Sky News host Rita Panahi, writing in the Herald Sun, compared protesters tearing down statues to the Islamic State in an attempt to portray the phenomenon as a wave of cultural Marxism, leftist terrorism and thought control. “This cultural revisionism is dangerous and deeply idiotic”, Panahi wrote. “It seeks to erase history rather than learn from it.”
But statue-toppling doesn’t erase history. These statues were erected to pursue right wing political agendas; targeting them brings their history to light.
The statue of Colston in Bristol, for example, was erected 170 years after his death. It was part of a concerted effort by Bristol’s elites to beat back rising class struggle in the city in 1895. Colston’s statue plaque did not mention the 84,000 people he enslaved, as he was chosen for his “philanthropic” record, professor Madge Dresser told the Guardian: “There was a growing threat from organised labour and unskilled labour so they really wanted to rally people around a Bristol figure rather than on class lines”.
In the US, most of the statues of Confederate war heroes were set up as part of the wave of reaction that set back the gains of Blacks in the aftermath of the US Civil War. They belong to the Jim Crow establishment. A recent article in the Washington Post noted:
“Most of the Confederate statues that dot the Southern landscape were erected, however, not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, but half a century later ... the groups that paid for the monuments sought to send a message at a time when they were pushing for – and winning – Jim Crow laws to codify racial segregation.”
By toppling these statues, protesters educate the world, not just about the Civil War, but also about its aftermath. That’s when the racist southern ruling class remained in place and erected statues symbolising its commitment to oppressing Black people. As of 10 June, while the list of statue-topplings grew, more than 700 Confederate statues still remained across the US south.
In Australia, efforts to make us identify with Captain Cook are in fact efforts to reinforce a particular version of history – one that has always erased the reality of Indigenous community, culture and struggle, as well as Australia’s class divisions.
The struggles that have torn down those statues have not erased history but have educated millions about the reality of our society and the history of capitalism.
We should be glad to see those symbols thrown out of the public square by the force of a mass movement. But the history lesson provided by this struggle shows the depth of the issue. We can take down statues and reduce the amount of overt racism in the cultural sector, but neither adds up to a structural victory against racism and reaction.
Whether statues are retired to riverbeds or museums, we will still face the system that erected them in the first place. Capitalism will never face a shortage of racist politicians, corporations or media barons. It will always have another genocide up its sleeve, and another mass murderer to crown. 
It’s beautiful to see shrines of reaction that have stood for a century or two torn down. It signals that the system they represent is under siege from below. We should tear down all of them, but make sure that system is torn down too.

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