The fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence this month was marked by the announcement of a proposed major joint defence treaty between PNG and its former colonial power, Australia. “We’re talking about totally integrated forces,” PNG’s Defence Minister Billy Joseph told the ABC on 15 September, “Australian Defence Force and PNG Defence Force using the same equipment...fighting together, defending our sovereignties as an integrated force”. 
So much for independence. 
Albanese might <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/visit-papua-new-guinea-golden-jubilee">pontificate</a> that Australia and PNG are “neighbours, partners and equals”, but this military agreement shows how things really are. It continues Australia’s 120-year domination and exploitation of PNG.
From 1906 until 1975, PNG was a colonial possession of Australia. School history curricula in PNG acknowledges this, but for Australian students, this nearly 70-year long period of domination likely comes as a surprise. 
In their 2024 article “‘The Moat of Oblivion’: Australia and the Forgetting of Papua New Guinea” academics Helen Garner, Jonathan Ritchie and Brad Underhill suggest that that in the nineteenth century era of White Australia, politicians did not try to integrate PNG into the Australian national identity because most Papuans were, and are, non-white. 
The Australian state did not want to launch a genocidal frontier war akin to those waged against Indigenous peoples on Australia’s mainland and Tasmania, or to encourage migration of whites to PNG. Instead, PNG was shunted “somewhere else” in Australia’s nationalist and cultural mythology, as an island that belonged to Australia, but was not occupied by Australians. This political separation underpins the exploitative nature of Australia’s engagement with PNG. 
While ostensibly an Australian territory, from 1906 onwards Papuans were denied democratic rights, including the right to vote. Even after being incorporated as Australian citizens in 1948, Papuans required permits to travel south. Many Papuans who left the island were ensnared in “blackbirding”—a slave labour system where Pacific Islanders were forced to work on Queensland plantations. 
Sequestering Papua New Guinea also smashed up the migratory traditions of Pacific Islanders. As Gardner et al describe: “The six-kilometre stretch of water between the northernmost Queensland Island Saibai and the Shore of Papua was both a physical and conceptual barrier between continental Australia and the island of New Guinea in the minds of white Australians—but not those of the Torres Strait for whom it had always been a pathway rather than a boundary”. 
The Australian state imposed both English and Christianity on the people of PNG in its colonising drive, attempting to force national cohesion along Western capitalist lines on highly differentiated peoples. To this day, PNG is the most<a href="https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2017/07/20/papua-new-guineas-incredible-linguistic-diversity"> linguistically diverse</a> place on earth, with more than 800 recognised languages. 
Australia’s interest in PNG has always been imperial. Viewed through military eyes, the island is Australia’s gateway to (and from) the Asia Pacific. 
The theatre of imperial conflict expanded from Europe towards Asia in World War II, and with this shift, warfare came closer to Australia’s neighbourhood. In January 1942, Japan invaded Rabaol—a township on the PNG island of New Britain—with the intention of capturing the capital Port Moresby. Had this occurred, it would have represented an incursion upon the northernmost flank of Australian, and therefore US, influence. 
The ensuing Kokoda Track campaign, which repulsed the Japanese invasion, has been incorporated into nationalist myths as an epic chapter in Australian war history. Papuans—whose own homes were besieged—are remembered only as helpful sidekicks in this mythos, as “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” tending to wounded soldiers. 
Ironically, Australian politicians were motivated to abandon PNG as a colony in order to ensure their ongoing imperial influence. As World War II gave way to the Cold War, Australian politicians realised that holding formal colonies was no longer tenable, as major social struggles for national liberation took place in Asia and Africa. 
Australian politicians feared PNG might fall under Communist influence, like many other national independence struggles at the time, without a negotiated transition to independence. Jon Piccini argues this in his 2024 article “‘Time is Against Us’: Anti-Communism, Decolonisation, and Papua New Guinean Independence” in the journal Australian Historical Studies. Catholic organisations worked to foster anti-Communist attitudes among the small PNG elite—and leaders of the trade union movement—as part of their attempts to cultivate a future ruling class loyal to Western capitalism. 
Piccini quotes Richard Krygier explaining that his organisation, the Catholic anti-communist outfit Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, intervened in PNG to “pre-empt the field before the Communists and their friends emerge on the scene”. Whether and on what terms the people of PNG wanted independence was of marginal concern in these circles. 
Preparations for PNG’s independence began in the 1960s under a series of Liberal and Country Party federal governments. In 1964, Australia’s Department of Territories cut the pay of PNG’s public servants to that of 40 percent of Australians doing the same work—supposedly as a precursor for dealing with fewer resources in an independent state. 
Whitlam’s Labor government, elected in 1972, accelerated the move towards independence. In 1973, PNG transitioned to “self-government”, and on 16 September 1975, became fully independent. Gyngell describes that PNG’s first governor-general, Sir John Guise, noted during independence ceremonies that “Papua New Guineans were lowering the flag of their colonisers, not tearing it down”. Typical of paternalistic colonialism, these events have been remembered as examples of Australia’s benevolence towards PNG.
But as even former Australian prime minister Paul Keating admitted in his memoirs, this “benevolence” brought limited benefits to the people of PNG. “As colonialists,” he wrote, “Australia’s army has been generally benign but I’m not sure we were much good at the task. Not least, we had bequeathed Papua New Guinea a public sector and a military force, modelled on our own, that were expensive and quite unsuited to the needs of a developing country”. 
Since independence, PNG has experienced endemic poverty. As of 2022, fewer than 20 percent of households had access to safe drinking water and fewer than 10 percent safely managed sanitation. 
Australia has never been motivated by humanitarian concern for Papuans. It is not concerned with poverty, the education of girls, corruption or rising sea levels, whatever its official statements on Pacific relations might say. Since independence, successive governments have worked to maintain Australia’s economic and military domination of the region. 
According to the Australia—Papua New Guinea Development Partnership Plan of 2024-2029, Australia is Papua New Guinea’s largest trading partner, allocating $637.4 million in loans and grants, and $2.56 billion in budget support loans. Australia has more or less taken for granted that PNG’s economic reliance on Australia will ensure their political affinity to Western capitalism and therefore pliancy to its military presence. 
As imperial tensions between the US and China have steadily heightened, Australia has worried about waning influence. A 2023 naval security agreement launched between China and the Solomon Islands—typically seen as safe in Australia’s sphere of influence—gave the Australian establishment a scare that China’s economic leverage might win them more military allies in the Pacific. 
Albanese’s Labor government has doubled down on their real ambition: reliable, no holds barred military access to PNG. In August, Defence Minister Richard Marles announced that $500 million would be spent on the long-expected expansion of PNG’s Lombrum naval base. 
Should the proposed mutual defence treaty between Australia and PNG materialise, it will represent a formalisation of the existing state of affairs, as well as a guarantee—from Australia’s perspective—that PNG will remain in the Western camp. 
From colonisation, to independence, and after, Australia has never cared about the rights and wishes of Papuans. Their intention has always been to dominate the region economically, to secure military acquiescence.

Priya T.

Australian imperialism in Papua New Guinea: past and present

The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not collect data on “class”. It collects data on income levels, household wealth and income by industry, all of which shines a useful light on the realities of working-class life. But class cannot be properly captured by statistics. That is because class is a relationship—between people and the productive process they depend on to survive. A shared relationship to production defines a social class. 
In capitalist society, a very small minority own and control the means of production. That is, whatever physical products—equipment, tools and technology—are required for any industry to operate. This minority is the ruling class, and includes those who own or control major corporations, senior bureaucrats, banking executives and media moguls, among others. The ruling class gets to choose what is made, the cost of products or services, who is employed and under what conditions. These economic decisions form the building blocks of society, and shape the conditions under which we all live. 
The working class, who are the vast majority of the global population, don’t own or control the productive apparatus. They don’t make the important decisions about what is produced or under what conditions. Instead, workers sell their ability to work—their labour power—to a boss, in exchange for a wage or salary. 
Workers can be white or blue collar, work primarily with their hands or their minds. They can be early childhood educators, IT assistants, train drivers, nurses, call centre operators or miners. What defines the working class is that they are denied control and decision-making power over the labour process, and they are exploited by their boss. 
Workers are the lifeblood of the economy. They produce every commodity you can think of and carry out myriad services—like maintaining roads and infrastructure, educating the population and caring for the sick—without which the economy could not operate. 
But workers perform all this indispensable labour not as free individuals but under rules and conditions imposed by bosses. You can’t show up to work whenever you please even under the most “flexible” arrangements. Construction workers employed to build a casino can’t decide to build a hospital instead. Workers are reduced to objects in the labour process, mere components of production with little or no agency or democratic right to make decisions about the work they do. 
Importantly for the bosses, workers are not only denied control over how they work, but also over the products of their labour. The value of what most workers produce in a day is far in excess of what they take home in the form of a wage or salary. The bosses keep the rest, a significant part of which ends up as profit. The expression “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime” encapsulates this relationship, and the theft that is at the heart of it. 
Workers and bosses, then, are in an antagonistic relationship with each other. What’s good for one is bad for the other. The first page of any business textbook will tell you that minimising operating costs will bring in more revenue. Paying workers low wages, denying “benefits” like sick leave and skimping on workplace conditions including safety regulations can mean more in the bank for a company. 
For workers, high pay, job security, greater access to leave and safer working conditions mean a better life. And because workers are human beings, not actually cogs in a machine, they can organise to fight for these things. So the exploitative and antagonistic relationship between bosses and workers gives rise to a constant struggle, taking different forms at different times, but which shapes the capitalist economy. 
Not everyone is a capitalist or a worker. The middle classes form a substantial minority of society, comprising small business owners, general practitioners, senior academics, many freelance artists and writers, sole-trader solicitors and barristers, or mid-level managers and supervisors, for example. The middle classes may own and control sections of production—like a small shop—without being titans of industry. They may have significant control over their labour—the head of human resources doesn’t need to log their bathroom breaks—or might be responsible for exploiting a few workers themselves, despite also having a boss. The middle classes don’t have the economic influence of either workers or bosses, and tend to be pulled in the direction of one or the other politically. 
Capitalism pivots around the exploitation of workers by bosses, and the interests of a group— what is good or bad for them—and their ideas and attitudes, are shaped by their class position. 
The ruling class are driven by endless competition for profit. They benefit from the monetisation of everything, and collective rights for workers and the oppressed being trampled if they stand in the way of profit-making. Members of the ruling class are used to being in control, and treating other people as a means to an end, or a competitor for market share and profit. They can unite around limited demands, but ultimately they are pitted against each other, loyal only to their bottom lines. 
Working-class life, on the other hand, is characterised much of the time by alienation and powerlessness. Workers are taught that there are serious consequences for defying authority. Breaking the rules at work could cost you a job and an income, even if the rules are unsafe like working in hot weather, or humiliating like being expected to carry out errands for superiors. Workers are made to feel like a cog in a machine they have no control over, and face chronic insecurity in the competition for jobs, housing, and the fight to stay afloat as prices rise. 
But at the same time, working-class life is fundamentally collective. Workers have to cooperate with each other for production to function effectively and for the economy to keep ticking over. The injustices of exploitation that can make workers feel the most alone are shared by millions of others. Sharing grievances together, and being exploited by a boss together, time and again push workers to fight back as a class. 
Only through standing together as a group can workers exercise power, by collectively stopping production and the flow of profits to the bosses. Working-class resistance can push back against individualism and the powerlessness engendered by capitalism. It can bring to the fore a sense of solidarity and the collective good, ideas we are told by our superiors are contrary to human nature because they are contrary to the ethos of capitalism. By forcing billions together in exploited labour, capitalism plants the seeds of working-class rebellion that show the hope for a better world.

What is social class?

The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme between Australia and nine participating Pacific island nations is supposedly mutually beneficial. Australian industry fills labour gaps by bringing in Pacific islanders on temporary working visas. Struggling Pacific economies get a boost from the money workers send home. The only catch is that tens of thousands of temporary visa workers are denied basic labour rights, and that it is Australian bosses who are reaping all the benefits. 
The more than 30,000 PALM workers currently in Australia are assigned to specific employers, primarily in rural and regional areas. Seventy percent work in the meat industry. Taufa, a PALM participant in an abattoir freezer room, described his working life to <a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/bhright/exploitation-of-palm-scheme-workers-in-aus-meat-industry">researchers</a>
from RMIT: “Each day is a race against time to meet our quotas ... if the order says packing/palletising for 500, we need to complete that 500 by day’s end. It’s a tough job ... we lift entire boxes onto pallets, sometimes stacking the equivalent of three or four cows on a single pallet. Despite the cold, you end up feeling the heat, sweating through the workload”. 
Few would undertake this sort of work if they had other options. The PALM scheme trades on poverty to find people who have no choice but to endure it. PALM workers who arrive in Australia and find that they hate the work, or the employer isn’t paying the expected wages, are not allowed to quit. Instead, they need permission from their boss or the government department that oversees the scheme to find another job. 
Bosses also often control where PALM workers live, especially in remote areas. Rent can be deducted from workers’ wages for often substandard and overcrowded accommodation provided by employers, with paternalistic rules banning alcohol and drugs. 
A May <a href="https://devpolicy.org/publications/reports/kanan-reproductive-justice-palm-scheme.pdf">report</a>
from the Development Policy Centre exposed that women workers in the PALM scheme are required to undergo pregnancy tests before departing their home country and have resorted to covert abortions while working in Australia. They fear deportation for getting pregnant. In Wagga Wagga, a women’s health clinic estimates that a quarter of women seeking abortions are migrant workers, many on the PALM scheme. Trudi Beck, who runs the clinic, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-06-02/migrant-workers-face-pregnancy-discrimination-barriers-abortion/105337020">told the ABC</a> on 2 June, “While I support a woman’s right to choose, I have a moral issue with visa structures that mean a woman has to choose between a pregnancy and supporting her family at home”.
The extreme control bosses hold over PALM workers has drawn rightful comparisons to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-23/palm-visa-scheme-exploitation-modern-slavery/104382194">slavery</a>. No wonder more than 7,000 PALM workers have <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/palm-scheme-workers-at-risk-of-exploitation/61ytu2mt0">run away from the job</a> over the last five years, ending up “undocumented” and even more vulnerable. 
These conditions are no secret. The PALM scheme has had numerous iterations stretching back to 2008, and each one has been criticised for enabling rampant exploitation. <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-04/supermarkets-food-outlets-exploit-black-market-migrant-workers/6441496">Farms</a>
and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-17/foreign-workers-exploited-at-baiada-plant-investigation-reveals/6554570">abattoirs</a>
have repeatedly been the subject of exposés revealing abhorrent working conditions for mostly migrant workers. 
As the Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union pointed out in their February submission to the NSW inquiry into modern slavery, “The attraction to employers of a system of temporary visas for unskilled or semi-skilled foreign workers is precisely because such schemes produce the opportunity to exploit workers and circumvent labour standards”. 
Australian bosses make money from underpaying migrant workers and skimping on entitlements citizens would expect. RMIT researchers found that PALM workers comprise almost a quarter of Australia’s meat industry, which had a turnover in the 2021-2022 financial year of $75.4 billion. 
The Australia Institute estimated in 2024 that PALM workers spend close to $1 billion per year on living expenses and taxes, compared to sending home only around $468 million. <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/palm-visas-superannuation-and-tax/">As the report says</a>, “In other words, Australia benefits twice as much from the scheme as the Pacific countries providing it with cheap labour”. 
Successive Australian governments have had a particular interest in temporary worker schemes targeting the Pacific islands. These economic arrangements are part of Australia leveraging influence in what it sees as its backyard. The Pacific islands rely on foreign aid more than any other region on earth, and Australia is its largest donor. Pacific island governments, then, sometimes willingly, sometimes begrudgingly, acquiesce to Australian demands.
Under Albanese, the PALM scheme has been expanded into aged care and child care, sectors populated by notoriously abusive employers. Instead of heeding recommendations of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/deaths-and-profits-pile-aged-care">Royal Commission into Aged Care</a> to improve working conditions and end privatisation, Labor has chosen to add slave labour to the noxious mix.
In 2024, Albanese mandated that PALM workers must be paid at least 30 hours per week and has piloted allowing 200 workers to bring family to Australia and access Medicare. But PALM workers remain bonded to a particular employer and are denied full access to government entitlements. Bosses will continue to exploit this vulnerability. 
Even less useful has been Labor’s 2024 appointment of the country's first ever anti-slavery commissioner, a political response to media revelations and outrage regarding migrant working conditions. The commissioner’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/deaths-and-profits-pile-aged-care">website</a>
explains that “The Commissioner cannot investigate, or resolve, complaints concerning instances or suspected instances of modern slavery”. The commissioner can, however, “make observations regarding systemic issues based on his engagement with victims and survivors and the broader community”. The anti-slavery commissioner’s office has not issued a single press statement about the PALM scheme, despite complaints about the scheme being an important catalyst for the NSW modern slavery inquiry. 
Labor is helping bosses treat Pacific workers like slaves.

Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery

Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci ignited a minor culture war with the company’s decision not to stock Australia Day merchandise ahead of 26 January. Peter Dutton called for a boycott of Woollies, prompting Banducci to plead that he was not “anti-Australia” or “woke”. 
But who was stocking up on Australia Day merchandise anyway? 
Generation Z would have no recollection of the flag-waving spectacle Australia Day once was. Sydney’s beaches were the centre of Australia Day mania in the 2000s. News.com journalist Mary Madigan toured Bondi Beach on 26 January this year, and remarked “there were no flags, hats, or painted Australia Day faces ... the lack of celebration left tourists confused and needing clarification”. 
In 2007, the Big Day Out festival had been the musical mainstay of 26 January and a notorious nationalist orgy. Stephanie Ashworth, a regular performer at the festival, told Melbourne’s Age newspaper in 2007: “People I know were in the audience last year and witnessed people basically being made to kiss the Australian flag and if they didn’t they would get their head beaten in”.
It has now been seven years since ABC’s Triple J moved its “hottest 100” to 27 January. Triple M’s bid to fill the space with an “Ozzest 100” was condemned and fizzled shortly after. 
The Age reports that 40 percent of Victoria’s local councils have scrapped citizenship ceremonies on 26 January. The City of Perth recently cancelled its Australia Day festivities. 
So Australia Day is dead, and the left killed it: for the last decade, the major event on 26 January has been the big Invasion Day protests. 
Ten years ago, Red Flag celebrated when 400 people turned out in Brisbane, which consistently had the biggest Invasion Day marches in the country. Now, tens of thousands take to streets across Australia every year. 
Years of protest, initially led by a minority of Indigenous activists and supported by socialists and others on the radical left, have flipped the script on what had been a conscious attempt by Australia’s conservative right to stoke nationalism and race hatred. Liberal Prime Minister John Howard pumped Australia Day with steroids as Western imperial forces launched bloody invasions in the Middle East. Indigenous people were aggressively demonised by politicians, with Howard popularising the myth that the land rights movement was about stealing the backyards of hard-working Aussies. 
Today, the conservative culture warriors have to eat shit. 
Steve Price, one of Victoria’s most prominent right-wing commentators, lamented in the Herald Sun this year: “I give up. The rabid left and ignorant brain-washed younger Australians who believe the activists fake news and baseless take on history have won”. He also grasped the unique and international significance of the left’s victory against patriotism, complaining: “I can’t think of any other nation on earth where there is such an active campaign of self-loathing and a demand, we all apologise for everything post-colonial settlement”. 
Not everyone is on board, of course. A recent Ipsos Poll indicated that almost half the population supports Australia Day remaining on the same date. 
But mobilising power is what counts when it comes to shaping politics, and our side has it. 26 January is irreversibly associated with genocide, inequality and colonisation. Politicians and the media can’t get away with attacking Indigenous people who rightly ask what they have to celebrate in Australia. Attitudes among young people are the best in the country. The regular Invasion Day event for many tens of thousands is not a BBQ or festival, but a street protest against racism. 
Invasion Day protests have for some years been about a lot more than the national holiday, raising many questions of Indigenous oppression. Linking the day of protest with opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza is a further left-wing shift, standing up to the crimes of Australian nationalism more broadly. 
Andrew Bolt, another right-wing Herald Sun columnist, noting how a Palestinian speaker at a Sydney protest connected the struggle of Palestinians and Indigenous people, said that it is “frightening” that people in Australia are “inspired by a terrorist-led war against a democracy like Israel, and to think it’s the same war here”. 
That the political right is frightened by the level of anti-racist solidarity on Invasion Day is something to celebrate.

The glorious death of Australia Day 

Brisbane employees of stationary chain Mint My Desk and Million Life arcades took industrial action for the second time in less than a week on Wednesday. 
The workers <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/mint-my-desk-stole-my-wages">first went on strike last Saturday</a> to protest against the company paying them below the minimum wage, cash in hand, without penalty rates, pay slips or superannuation. 
The company responded with hubris and intransigence. On Sunday, workers were offered a contract that dubiously categorised workers as Level 1 Retail Employees, when staff perform tasks such as opening and closing the store, which are in the remit of the higher-paid Level 3 Employees. 
The contract didn’t contain penalty rates and was fixed-term—set to last only until December. No assurances were made of back pay. 
The next day, Mint My Desk announced that two of three Brisbane stores would be closed due to “declining sales” that were “publicity influenced”. 
On Monday night, Mint My Desk workers voted unanimously to reject the company’s contract, and to take industrial action if their demands were not met by Wednesday’s pay day. 
On a statement released on social media, Mint Workers United described the company’s move to close stores as a “lockout”—punishment for workers having taken industrial action. Their statement read: “If they don’t comply we will be taking further action. We will fight until we win.” 
On Wednesday morning, the company made a minor concession by paying workers through bank transfer rather than cash, but at rates still below those set out in the retail industrial Award. And they still didn’t get payslips. 
Making good on their threat of further action, Mint My Desk workers gathered in the afternoon for a second public rally. 
Holly, the coordinator of the Mint My Desk TikTok told Red Flag:
“It’s disappointing to see something so simple be denied to us repeatedly. The bosses have been demanding that we talk to them respectfully, but they certainly haven’t showed us any respect by underpaying us for so long and not fixing it now.” 
Due to the lockout cutting shifts for most workers, only one employee, Charley, was rostered on during the action, and workers posted a video to social media of the Garden City store being shut down as workers and supporters travelled to the CBD for a public action. 
Shortly after arriving at the rally, Charley was texted by one of the company owners and told that they had been “stood down”. 
“I have no doubt that me being threatened to be fired is merely just a scare tactic [against] me and my coworkers, to stop our campaign and to stop fighting for our rights”, Charley told Red Flag. “But this doesn’t scare us at all actually; this just fuels us more to stand strong together.” 
Workers gathered for speeches in the city, and then marched through Brisbane’s Queen Street Mall, with significant support from onlookers, some of whom joined the rally. 
Louisa McCarthy, a spokesperson for Mint Workers United and a socialist, told Red Flag: 
“Young people have a lot to fight for at the moment. We are being slammed with soaring rents and a cost-of-living crisis. Many of us are also in dodgy retail or hospitality jobs, where we are paid below the already low minimum wage. What we need is a fightback. For us at Mint My Desk Workers United, that’s the exact message we have: young workers should and can fight back.”

Mint My Desk strikes again

The doors of corporate privilege are opened for prime ministers, and Anthony Albanese has leapt inside many. 
A quote from Lenin’s State and Revolution makes a fitting caption for Albanese, donned in his personalised Rio Tinto uniform: “The bourgeoisie are connected with [the state machine] by thousands of threads”.
Fossil fuel corporations are destroying the planet in return for a quick buck. Rio Tinto is a particularly scandal-ridden entity, disgraced for blowing up the Juukan Gorge cave, an important Indigenous heritage site, to expand an iron ore mine.
But while on a tour of the WA mining town Karratha, “Anthony” gushed that “Watching the iron ore go into the hull of that ship, what I was also watching was funding for schools, funding for hospitals, funding to keep our national economy going that comes from this sector”. 
Never mind that just last year Rio Tinto was ordered by the Australian Tax Office to pay nearly $1 billion in dodged taxes. 
Albanese’s corporate flirtations reach beyond the mining sector. The Australian Financial Review revealed in August that Albanese’s 23-year-old son is a member of the ultra-exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge—members are personally approved by CEO Alan Joyce, who describes himself as “good mates” with the prime minister.
Qantas has been a symbol of corporate heartlessness during the pandemic, and greed during the cost-of-living crisis. The airline is currently subject to a class action suit to refund nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of cancelled flights the company is holding as credits. Meanwhile, Qantas boasted a record pre-tax profit of $2.5 billion in the last financial year. 
Albanese and Joyce have scratched each other’s backs: in August, Albanese blocked Qatar Airways from introducing new international flights from Australia, fending off a Qantas competitor. 
The Financial Review also reported that Albanese engaged in another sleazy tête-à-tête with accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to land his son a two-month internship in 2021. Here’s the catch: PwC doesn’t have an internship program. The company effectively invents internships—and tasks for the interns—when it’s expedient. This is akin to a political donation—currying favour with an influential political leader while no doubt expecting something in return.
Peter Collins, former head of international tax at the Australian branch of PwC, is currently facing a potential criminal investigation for leaking government tax schemes (which he was appointed to advise the federal government on) to clients in return for millions of dollars’ worth of business. 
And then there are the parties. 
While Albanese attends Business Council of Australia dinners as part of official prime ministerial duties, he took a personal day before the 2023 federal budget week to attend the wedding of right-wing shock-jock Kyle Sandilands. 
Sandilands is a misogynist goon, a backer of Scott Morrison and a right-wing troll. But Albanese lauded him as “an Australian success story” and justified attending the April wedding by saying “I keep my commitments, including to Kyle Sandilands”. 
Nearly $1 million was spent on the wedding, which had a star-studded guest list. Sandilands’ best man was convicted drug smuggler and former brothel owner Simon Main. Andrew Hornery reported in the Sydney Morning Herald that Albanese was seated prime of place next to Sandilands’ mum. 
Albanese is not hiding his high-flying personal relationships, nor is he apologising for them. Why would he? They don’t contradict his political agenda of fossil fuel expansion, tax cuts for the rich and corporate handouts. Politicians inhabit the universe of the wealthy, whatever occasional rhetoric they pay to the plight of workers. The grass is plusher, sleazier, more obsequious and ostentatious—and utterly appalling—on the other side.

Albanese loves the wealthy

Some people are sailing through life at the moment.
The Southern Ocean Lodge on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island is taking bookings for its grand reopening, after the luxury resort burned down in the 2020 bushfires. There’s already a waiting list for rooms, which cost up to $18,000 per night. 
No housing crisis for those people. 
Luxury industries are virtually recession-proof because the people at the top make working people pay whenever there is an economic problem. And “luxury” doesn’t mean merely “expensive”, something only the affluent middle classes can afford. It means being so rich that someone might make a television series about your brat kids competing for inheritance. 
It means things like $10,000-an-hour rides on a Bombardier private jet. “People who used to fly first class began to realise that they can fly their entire family or management on one flight and avoid contamination as we were going through the pandemic”, CEO Eric Martel told the Australian Financial Review’s Lucas Baird in November 2022, explaining his optimism for growth in the private jet market. 
Every flight is enough for someone’s house deposit.
“The interest of Australians for luxury goods has really increased—and is increasing—really fast”, Cyrille Vigneron, CEO of upmarket watch branch Cartier, told the Financial Review in April. Demand for Cartier products is growing faster in Australia than any other country. 
The company’s lower priced watches will set you back around $5,000; the Australian website doesn’t bother showing prices above $78,500. 
It's a different world from ours, where the nightly news regularly features journalists telling viewers which supermarkets have discounted vegetables this week.
More than 60 percent of respondents to a recent Essential poll said that they find it “a bit difficult” or are “really struggling” to afford housing expenses, childcare, insurance, utilities, school education, petrol, groceries and food. 
That means living is “a bit difficult” or “a real struggle” for most Australian workers. 
Alison Manners lost her home in Brisbane’s 2022 floods. Ten months on, she recounted to the Guardian: “Go into your kitchen right now and imagine scraping every single shelf into the bin. Then imagine going out to buy all that stuff again … You really notice how much prices have gone up when you have to replace your whole life”.
Sixty-year-old support worker Beth was one of more than 750 respondents to an ABC call-out for stories about the cost-of-living crisis last year. “There’s no going for coffee anymore”, she said. “That used to be our luxury on a Saturday morning. My daughter and I would go have a coffee, a muffin, a Pepsi. Not anymore—that’s nearly $20.”
The people shopping for Cartier watches or staying at the Southern Ocean Lodge spend the equivalent of what would help Alison live a little without struggling and could shout Beth morning tea for years. The Labor government’s priority, however, is to give the wealthy tax cuts.
Even those who do the actual work of building new houses and apartments could now be finding it tough to keep a roof over their heads. A May Anglicare report found that a single construction worker on the minimum on-site Award rate would need to spend 63 percent of their income to pay the average apartment rent. 
A full-time early childhood educator earning $1,059 a week would struggle to send their own kids to day care. An Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report published in July estimates that the average out-of-pocket cost at a childcare centre is nearly $50 per child, per day. 
As thousands of Australian workers forego heating to save on bills this winter, the uber-rich can lounge in luxurious accommodation with ocean vistas and look at their Cartier watches. Some of them will have caused the cost-of-living crisis, as they profit from charging tenants higher rents and through the companies they own benefitting from the rising cost of services. Our pain funds their pleasure.

No cost-of-living crisis for the rich

The Labor Party is broadly perceived as the political representative of Australian workers. Yet, despite the party holding office federally and in every mainland state, workers face stagnating wages and a housing crisis. The wealthy, on the other hand, have received tax cuts and historic military spending. 
Labor, rather than representing workers, is the party of Australia’s trade union officials. Unions are more than a lobby group imposing external influence upon the ALP. They are embedded in its internal operation at all levels of the party apparatus—from local branches to the highest parliamentary office—and impact its structure, financing, candidates, policies and campaigns. 
The centrality of unions to the ALP has had contradictory effects over the years. Labor has been uniquely impacted by working-class politicisations due to these attitudes being refracted in the party through the union officials inhabiting it. But the party is firmly committed to holding power in the capitalist state and has at times been the preferred option for Australia’s bosses due to its ability to rein in industrial militancy. 
Taken as a whole, Labor’s connection with the unions has been a backwards drag on the workers’ movement, the parliamentary party and trade union leadership having much to answer for in falling union membership and soaring inequality. 
The basic structure of the ALP was laid during its foundation by trade union officials, first in various colonies in the 1890s, and then at a national level following federation in 1901. In New South Wales and Queensland, the Australian Workers Union (AWU) held commanding influence within the newly forming parties. D.J. Murphy, in The Labor Party and governments in Queensland, 1915-57, explains that seats were reserved for the AWU on party political executives, and every Labor parliamentarian was offered AWU membership. Unions provided the bulk of funding and campaigners during elections, with the AWU coordinating elections directly in rural areas of NSW and Qld where Labor received its strongest vote. Such was the connection between unions and the ALP that historian Ray Markey, in The Making of the Labor Party in New South Wales, said that the AWU’s journal the Worker was considered “the parliamentary party’s Hansard”. 
Today, unions retain structural power within the decision-making bodies of the party. Thirteen of twenty elected representatives on Labor’s 2023 national executive are currently serving union officials. Half of all delegates at Labor conferences are elected by trade unions. 
Political factions play a crucial role inside the Labor Party, determining political perspectives and how votes will be exercised ahead of party conferences. Unions hold predominant positions within these factions—for example, the AWU remains decisive in the Right, and the United Workers Union in the Left. 
Unions also provide considerable financial support to the ALP; the Grattan Institute calculated that, in the 2022 federal election, over half of declared donations to the ALP came from large unions. 
Political candidates of the party regularly hail from trade union ranks. In 1974, Gough Whitlam was the first Labor prime minister not to come from a trade union background. Bob Hawke moved swiftly from president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions to Labor prime minister, with only a single intervening term in parliament from 1980 to 1983. Bill Shorten was an important factional leader of the AWU before rising to party leader in 2013. 
Labor’s links to trade unions has historically made it the preferred electoral option for workers. However, the party is based, not on rank-and-file union members, but in the trade union bureaucracy. Officials employed by trade unions inhabit a unique and contradictory position within capitalism: tasked with organising workers but removed from the day-to-day realities of working life. Where once trade union officials would have worked in the industry they organise, today they increasingly hail from legal or political backgrounds and earn many times the average working-class salary. The trade union bureaucracy seeks to negotiate the conditions of exploitation; they may fight for workers’ rights, but without any intention of abolishing the capitalist system that underpins working-class oppression. 
Politicians within the ALP are not solely accountable to unions. Patrick Durkin, in a June contribution to the Australian Financial Review, wrote that the “inner circle” of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews “includes trucking magnate Lindsay Fox and his son Andrew, former [Price Waterhouse Coopers] CEO and Carlton president Luke Sayers and Melbourne property rich lister Max Bec ... also ... a selection of union bosses including Victorian Trades Hall Council secretary Luke Hilakari and Victorian head of, the Australian Nursing &amp; Midwifery Federation Lisa Fitzpatrick”. Former Labor leader Bill Shorten was a powerful factional leader within the AWU, but in 2019 attended a $5000-per-head fundraiser hosted by Australia’s then-richest person, Anthony Pratt, at his Melbourne mansion. 
These dual relationships within the ALP—connection to the union bureaucracy and integration with the elite—give it the character of a capitalist-workers party. 
Through the union officialdom, Labor retains a mediated connection to the working class, and can be shaped by industrial and political developments among workers. As Ben Hillier described in a 2011 article for the Marxist Left Review: “All parties are subject to the general external pressures that the labour movement can muster ... But the ALP, unlike the Liberal Party, is subject to significant internal pressures and ruptures precisely because union officials inhabit the ranks of the party and have a significant vote via union affiliations”.
Union officials are subject to greater pressure from the demands of workers than parliamentarians. While politicians roll in circles entirely divorced from the workers who elected them—often on a heavily guarded hill in Canberra—union officials can be phoned up, emailed or forced to answer questions on site or at branch meetings. Working-class demands—including dissatisfaction with the actions of ALP parliamentarians—have caused upheavals within the party through the activity of union officials. 
Rebellions by union leaders have repeatedly split the ALP and expelled party leaders. For instance, trade unions led a successful campaign in 1916 to vote No to a referendum on conscription, challenging Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Hughes and two state premiers were expelled from Labor in a climate of industrial and political ferment. 
However, union officials have also prevented and crushed working-class struggle, as well as refused to fight or supported craven behaviour from Labor politicians.
In 1974, unions used their resources to derail the largest general strike in Australia’s history, in response to Governor-General John Kerr’s sacking of Gough Whitlam. Alongside Labor parliamentarians, union officials directed workers’ anger towards an upcoming election, rather than risk a deeper challenge to the status quo. 
Where Thatcher’s government in Britain faced sustained strike action during the 1980s neoliberal turn, in Australia unions proudly helped implement regressive reforms through Hawke’s Prices and Incomes Accord. Trade unions offered the government a no-strike pledge, which was used to win favour from the ruling class as the government embarked on privatisation and wage restraint. The Australian Financial Review described unions as “an industrial police force” as they disciplined workers and the few unions unwilling to comply with the Accord. 
Decades on from the Accord, union leaders in Australia have more experience in meetings with management than shopfloor organising, let alone taking industrial action. Union membership has fallen to the abysmal rate of 12.5 percent at the end of 2022, and the wage share of national income has similarly plummeted. 
In 2004, then Prime Minister John Howard proposed an extraordinary attack on workers and unions with the WorkChoices industrial legislation. Strikes were made virtually illegal, the average number of disputes dropped by a third, and unions lost 216,000 members in the first two years of the legislation’s implementation. WorkChoices was broadly unpopular; however, the Australian Council of Trade Unions held little desire to respond with collective industrial action. A series of mass rallies under the banner “Your Rights at work: worth fighting for” drew hundreds of thousands of people—but these were not translated into consistent strike action or an uptick in workplace struggles. By 2006, the unions had changed the title of the campaign to “Your rights at work: worth voting for” and raised over $1 million to fund Labor leader Kevin Rudd’s election campaign. 
Once elected, Rudd returned the favour by refusing to roll back the core Howard industrial and political policies, and expressly snubbed the unions to demonstrate an adherence to business stability.
Despite their industrial base shrinking, unions still exercise considerable muscle at Labor Party conferences. 
In 2008, unions in NSW rebelled against a highly unpopular proposal by Labor Premier Morris Iemma and Treasurer Michael Costa to privatise the electricity grid. After a series of strikes and demonstrations, a Labor Party conference voted 702-107 against the proposal, which led to the ousting of both premier and treasurer. In contrast, left-wing unions saved the unpopular Queensland Premier Anna Bligh at the 2010 state Labor conference by sabotaging a motion presented by the Electrical Trades Union to condemn electricity privatisation. 
In 2023, internal tensions within the Labor Party around Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s commitment to the AUKUS military partnership have demonstrated the positive and negative aspects of union influence within the party. In Queensland, unions led by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and ETU voted down a motion put by the AWU celebrating AUKUS, citing longstanding opposition to nuclear energy. 
A threat by the Victorian branch of the AMWU to move a similar motion led to Albanese being forced to field questions about party unity in Canberra. But when push came to shove, the motion was deferred from being voted on at the state conference, as right- and left-wing unions blocked together to prevent it being discussed. 
The relationship between the ALP and trade unions has complementary and antagonistic aspects. While it provides parliamentary leaders many benefits—such as money and connections to a voter base—it also limits the leaders’ freedom of manoeuvre. 
Because unions are involved in the ALP, the bosses of Australian capitalism typically look upon the Liberal-National Coalition as their preferred party of government. But the bosses are also aware that Labor’s union connection can at times be advantageous for a government if it requires militant workers to be brought to heel. 
Labor can never be trusted to fight for workers’ interests, as its history and current term in office display. As much as the ALP may get many workers’ votes, its real loyalty is to capitalism.

Labor’s connection to trade unions—for better or worse?

An undignified display: two vainglorious leaders of mid-level powers groping in front of 20,000 people. Anthony Albanese and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were clumsy with excitement as they embraced at Sydney’s Olympic Park on Tuesday, projecting unity ahead of well-publicised bilateral talks. 
Modi was originally to visit Australia alongside US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, representing the other two member states of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, a revived alliance that fancies itself as the guardian of liberal democracy in the “Indo-Pacific”. When Biden’s cancellation put paid to the meeting, Modi’s Sydney visit became the last stop on a grandstanding tour of Indian soft power. 
As US-China tensions have sharpened, India, a historic leader of the Cold War-era non-aligned movement of underdeveloped countries, has surfaced as a prize in the West’s scramble for allies. Its population has overtaken China’s and its economy is one of the fastest growing in the world, according to International Monetary Fund estimates. Crucially, India’s strategic position, particularly its naval capacity in the Indian Ocean, is important to US designs in Asia. 
Modi has something the West wants. And he knows it. 
The United States is now India’s largest trading partner, the two countries’ bilateral trade in goods and services approaching US$200 billion in 2022. Last year, Biden and Modi signed the US-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, a deal to deepen tech-sector ties as the US tries to isolate China in the semi-conductor sector. India’s trade with Australia has been similarly prioritised: the countries’ first free trade agreement was signed last year. 
More significant are the emerging military ties. In 2021, the Indian Navy signed its first joint guidance document to cement India-Australia naval cooperation. India participated in a series of joint military exercises with the US and Australia, including Exercise Kakadu in Darwin last year, dubbed by Australian Vice Admiral Mark Hammond as “our navy’s most significant international engagement activity”. And in January, the US and Indian governments agreed to a Defence Industrial Cooperation Roadmap to enhance collaboration on weapons systems.
India has a series of border and trade disputes with China, which makes participation in the Western alliance attractive. But New Delhi is far from all-in with Washington. Russia remains India’s largest military supplier and a source of cheap oil and gas. Modi also refused to condemn the invasion of Ukraine. India participates not only in the Quad, but in a series of international bodies with China, including the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Brics forum, which brings together Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. 
Perhaps this is why Albanese has been so obsequious—India is still hedging between the West and its adversaries. Australia has repeatedly lumped India in the “liberal-democratic camp”. The India-Australia comprehensive strategic partnership is supposedly based on “mutual trust and understanding, shared values, and common interests, of democracy and rule of law”. 
But one thing that no-one in the Western camp will say out loud is that Modi is not a colourful Bollywood democrat—he is a lifelong fascist. His ruling political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, or Indian People’s Party), combines partisan influence over the legal system and the police force with street-based thuggery.
In Modi’s India, non-Hindu minorities <a href="https://theconversation.com/indias-new-citizenship-act-legalizes-a-hindu-nation-129024">are becoming second-class citizens</a> and inter-faith marriage is <a href="https://www.codastory.com/rewriting-history/india-interfaith-marriage-love-jihad-conspiracy/">under assault</a> in several BJP-run states, including the most populous Uttar Pradesh.
“Modi’s far-right supporters and other Hindu supremacists celebrate their connections with Nazis”, Yale University professor Jason Stanley noted at a forum of the Indian American Muslim Council in February. “The RSS explicitly says, ‘We want to do to Muslims what the Nazis did to Jews’.” The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, or National Volunteer Organisation) is a fascist paramilitary group. Modi’s BJP is its political wing.
Political repression under Modi has become naked. The highest profile case is Rahul Gandhi—leader of the former governing party the Indian National Congress—being jailed for two years for “defaming” Modi at an election rally. On the streets, the growing fascist movement, brown shirted with an admixture of saffron, inflicts terror. Lynchings of Muslims and Dalits are common and are regularly pardoned by the state, which has been infiltrated by the Sangh. Writing last year at Al Jazeera, author and political activist Arundhati Roy noted:
“Today in India, we are living through the political equivalent of a scorched-earth policy. Everything—every institution that has taken years to build—is being destroyed. It is stupefying ... Within the cadre of the Hindu right there is a new, aggressive far-right displaying a palpable restlessness the Modi government is increasingly hard-pressed to control, because they are the BJP’s core support base. On social media, it is now routine to encounter open calls for the genocide of Muslims. We have reached the point of no return.”
Yet Albanese hugs, kisses and lauds the achievements of Modi. When asked by Sunrise host David Koch whether Modi was “a bit of a tyrant”, Albanese could only offer: “It’s not up to me to pass a comment on some of the internal politics in India”. Albanese has, however, been happy to let Modi spruik his brand of Hindu nationalist politics. Mass rallies, like the 20,000 in Sydney’s Olympic Park, are staples of BJP campaigning and help cement Modi’s cult figure. 
The New South Wales government even allows the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a far-right outfit affiliated to the RSS, and an important element of the on-the-ground fascist thuggery underpinning Modi’s rule in India, to teach <a href="https://www.vhp.org.au/hindu-dharma-classes-sre">special religious education studies in public schools</a>. 
Albanese has never commented on or condemned the activity of Hindu nationalists in Australia. He has, however, under gentle prodding from Modi, repeatedly condemned graffiti on Hindu temples in Victoria, which the far-right nationalists label an overseas expression of Sikh separatism—a current bogey wielded by the BJP in its litany of scaremongering about threats to Indian “unity”. 
For all the mentions of “democracy” and “human rights” peppered into the imperial propaganda surrounding Modi’s regional visit, it’s clear that Western leaders will say anything, do anything and partner with anyone to maintain US dominance of Asia. When it comes to India, what’s a bit of fascism between friends?

Albanese and the fascist

Ian Jeffries, CEO of the American Railroads Association, provided witness testimony to a United States Congressional hearing in early February, in which he gloated that American trains were environmentally sustainable, world-leading in safety and working conditions, with further efficiency held back by onerous government regulations. 
The next day, a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the city of East Palestine, Ohio. 
Three employees staffed this train, which stretched kilometres and contained thousands of tonnes of hazardous chemicals. The train relied on a braking system first developed in 1968, when carriages were shorter and slower. Norfolk Southern initially championed the innovation of safer electronic brakes, then recoiled from the potential cost of upgrading its freights. 
United States unions have blamed the industrial method of “precision-scheduled railroading” (PRS) for the Ohio disaster. PRS involves speed-ups, staff cuts, fewer trains with larger loads and the evasion of maintenance protocols. The Railroad Workers United (RWU), in a 22 February press release, argued that the derailed train experienced a mechanical failure it deemed unthinkable “save for a combination of incompetence and disregard for public safety”. The train was also organised to hold heavy weight towards its rear, which the RWU condemned as “bad practice” and a product of “cut corners”, as it resulted in heavy carriages slamming into lighter ones, worsening the derailment. 
“While PRS might help to deliver record profits and all-time low operating ratios ... [w]orkers are vulnerable to ever more hazards and dangers, as are surrounding communities”, Mark Burrows, a spokesperson for the RWU, wrote in a union publication back in 2019. 
When the trail derailed in East Palestine, hundreds of thousands of kilograms of chemicals spilled into the land and waterways. Black plumes of toxic smoke wafted over the 5,000 residents. Norfolk Southern decided to initiate a “controlled burn” of the substance vinyl chloride, supposedly to prevent a catastrophic explosion. Residents were briefly evacuated. 
“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open”, Sil Caggiano, a hazardous material specialist, told an Ohio news station on 12 February. 
Phosgene, which had been used as a chemical weapon during World War I, was among the chemicals released into the atmosphere by the burn. In the 3 March Guardian, toxicologist Stephen Lester wrote, “It is well documented that burning chlorinated chemicals like vinyl chloride will generate dioxins”, a group of extremely dangerous chemicals that, among other things, were one of the deadliest poisons in the notorious Agent Orange of the Vietnam War. Thousands of dead fish washed up on waterways in the days following the burning. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources estimated that more than 38,000 small fish and 5,500 other aquatic creatures had died by 23 February.
Weeks after returning home, residents have complained of lingering chemical smells, rashes and headaches and unusual medical symptoms among animals in the farming region: hens laying purple eggs, pigs losing weight and dogs dying. The water in East Palestine was declared safe to drink—by a test Norfolk Southern funded that didn’t comply with federal standards. 
“While the world was learning about the horror occurring in East Palestine on television, [Norfolk Southern] officials assessed the damages and carried out their plans for rebuilding their track structure so that they could get trains moving again. After all, if trains are not moving, the railroads are not making (as much) money”, wrote Jonathan Long, a Norfolk Southern employee and chairman of the American Rail System Federation, in a letter to Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg. 
US senators introduced the Railway Safety Act of 2023, partly in response to the disaster, on 2 March. The bill contains a series of measures pertaining to speed restrictions and track standards and suggested imposing a paltry minimum staffing requirement of two employees per train. Absent from the bill is any improvement in conditions for railroad workers. 
Last September, the Biden administration signed an eleventh-hour agreement with railroad unions to avert a planned national strike. The deal failed to legislate sick pay or reduce working hours. Rail workers have long complained of isolating and arduous conditions. Trains operate 24/7, and shifts can last eighteen hours. Chronic understaffing plagues the workforce, with 40,000 railroad jobs lost from 2018 to 2020. 
Meanwhile, the profits of train bosses have soared. Norfolk Southern boasted an extra US$4 billion in returns last year, while the six biggest railroad corporations recorded more than US$22 billion in total. 
Rail derailments are not uncommon in the US. The Federal Railroad Administration suggests that 1,000 occur each year. Some have been deadly and rendered towns uninhabitable. East Palestine, perversely, may have been lucky, partly due to the skilled, rapid action of the three workers onboard the train. Disasters like this will continue so long as profit blinds bosses to the demands—and warnings—of workers.

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