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.

Priya De

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.

Ohio train derailment a disaster of profit 

The United States has invaded more countries, launched more coups, armed more dictators and trained more terrorists than any empire in history. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the country’s military spending will hit US$1 trillion per year in the next decade. And the US controls at least 750 overseas military bases in 80 countries—it can put troops on the ground almost anywhere at the drop of a dollar. It remains the only state to have ever exploded an atomic bomb over a city.
The US began to develop as an imperial power from the mid-nineteenth century, undergoing rapid economic growth while other world powers such as Britain and Spain began to decline.
Early US expansionism involved annexing the western states from Mexico and occupying guano islands and then Hawaii in the Pacific. In 1898, the Spanish-American war marked the entrance of the United States as a true imperial power. Spain faced a war of national independence in the Philippines, led by Emilio Aguinaldo. The Filipino independence movement initially accepted tactical assistance from the United States, expecting to govern an independent state after the Spanish were ousted.
Instead, the US cut a deal with Spain, allowing it to purchase the Philippines for $20 million and take the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba. The star-spangled banner was raised in Manila and a bloody three-year war to occupy all the Philippines ensued, killing potentially 1 million people to put down the nationalist movement.
In April the following year, US General William Shafter, who was responsible for maintaining supplies to the army in the first phase of the invasion, told the Chicago News: “It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords”.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the US economy continued an unprecedented industrial expansion, and the government began using its financial clout, backed by growing military might, to structure international trade to most suit its capitalist class. Future President Woodrow Wilson explained in a 1907 Columbia University speech:
“Since trade ignores national boundaries, and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down.”
The US dominated the lucrative sugar and tobacco export trades in Cuba and invaded the country three times between 1906 and 1922 to maintain unequal arrangements. This involved lending political support to the dictator Fulgencio Batista from 1934 until his overthrow in the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
The US entered World War Two not as a champion of anti-fascism, but more than two years into the conflict, when the German Nazi regime had already taken control of much of continental Europe. In this supposed “war for democracy”, the US came into its own as a utiliser of unchecked brutality in both Europe and Asia. In 1946, Edgar L. Jones, a former war correspondent in the Pacific, described US conduct in the Atlantic Monthly:
“We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones for letter openers.”
By 1945, when Axis defeat was imminent, the US began exercising cutting-edge war technologies as a warning for what it was prepared to do if challenged in future. In March, the American-British firebombing levelled Dresden, and the US military firebombed the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe until all its weaponry was exhausted, causing a more concentrated loss of life, it is estimated, than any other time in human history until that point.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki had escaped firebombing only because the US wanted to experiment with a new type of weapon. In August, the US dropped atomic bombs on the cities, killing at least 150,000 people instantly, or gruesomely in the days and weeks to follow. The surrender of Japan had already been guaranteed; the US engineered this enormous loss of life to test its new nuclear technologies and prove its willingness to use extreme force.
When the Cold War with the Soviet Union began, US imperialism acquired an increasingly political dimension. The country repeatedly provided support to right-wing movements and dictators to prevent the success of left-wing struggles that could have challenged US economic supremacy or diplomatically allied with the Soviet Union. A nuclear arms race brought the world close to annihilation in several tense movements, leaving tens of thousands of warheads scattered across continents.
In 1948, the US director of policy planning, George F. Kennan, wrote an influential Cold War policy paper, in which he argued:
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population ... Our real task is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity ... We should cease to talk about vague objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.”
In the wake of World War Two, the US established the School of the Americas—dubbed the “School of Assassins” or “School of Coups” by its opponents—in Panama. Here, the US trained police and military personnel of dictatorships and the extreme right across Latin America.
In 1954, President Eisenhower launched “Operation Success” against the democratically elected government in Guatemala, which challenged the landholdings of the dominant US United Fruit Company. The US orchestrated a successful coup, led by School of the Americas-trained Guatemalan forces, which banned independent trade unions and plunged the country into four decades of Central America’s bloodiest civil war.
The US subsequently invaded Honduras and Panama four times, the Dominican Republican, Haiti and Nicaragua twice, and Grenada once, as well as propping up almost every Latin American dictator, from Brazil to El Salvador to Argentina.
In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency supported the overthrow of elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, threatening British and American profits. In the 1960s, the US supported the dictatorial regime of Indonesia’s General Suharto, who murdered up to 1 million people in an anti-communist pogrom. These methods were repeated in 1973, when the CIA supported the military coup of Augusto Pinochet against social-democratic leader Salvador Allende in Chile, which resulted in the establishment of a brutal military dictatorship.
The US also invaded Korea in the 1950s. Up to 4 million Koreans were killed or disappeared in the conflict, and the country was divided. The war was a precursor to the Vietnam War, launched the following decade, which followed a different course due to the enormous resistance of Vietnamese national liberation fighters and a rebellion of US soldiers. Nonetheless, the US deployment of chemical weapons such as napalm and Agent Orange permanently poisoned widespread environments and led to birth defects occurring among the Vietnamese even decades later.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the US sought to establish itself as an unchallengeable global superpower. Often dubbing its imperialist invasions as “humanitarian interventions”, the US launched the brutal Gulf War in Iraq in the early 1990s. In 2001, the US invaded and began a decades-long occupation of Afghanistan, and in 2003 again invaded Iraq.
The US had desired a short and sharp victory in Iraq, and hinted that it would then move on to regime-change wars in Syria and Iran to install political leaders pliant to US interests in the oil-rich and strategically important Middle East. Iraqi resistance stalled this expansionist dream, and instead the US was bogged down in a bloody occupation that resulted in at least 1 million deaths.
Alongside these invasions and coups, the US has carried out innumerable war crimes, operated facilities of torture and “disappeared” untold thousands of people. It has experimented with ecological, biological and psychological warfare. It has politically excused and militarily supported murderous governments on every continent.
The number of people dead at the hands of US militarism—from warfare, injuries, disease or poverty—is perhaps incalculable, but stands certainly in the tens of millions. The United States, capitalism’s “greatest democracy”, is the most terrible purveyor of violence the world has known.

A short and dirty history of US imperialism

The Queensland Labor government has strengthened the powers of police and the courts. Many of the new laws, announced in late December, target juvenile offenders. They include raising the maximum penalty for stealing a car to ten years imprisonment, building two new youth detention centres and increasing the scope for courts to impose tracking devices on youth detainees.
The announcement followed a historic increase in police funding in 2020 and the abolition of the presumption of bail for certain youth detainees in 2021. Last year, Queensland Labor voted against a bill, moved by the Greens, to raise the minimum age of criminal incarceration from ten to fourteen. 
Queensland’s prison population has grown by nearly 70 percent in the last decade, with the poor and oppressed copping the worst of it. Most prisoners face the prospect of homelessness on release, and one in three live with a disability. Inequality is worst in youth detention. Queensland locks up more young people than any other Australian state, and 62 percent of youth detainees are Indigenous.
Labor has repeatedly provided the police and magistrates with resources and political license to lock people up, despite revelations of abuse in Queensland’s criminal justice system.
The 2019 “Watch House Files”, aired by the ABC’s Four Corners program, exposed widespread practices of incarcerating youth detainees in adult prisons—including instances of placing young girls with adult sex offenders. Last year’s follow up report showed that this practice has continued.
The bolstering of police powers is particularly egregious considering recent inquiries and whistle-blower leaks revealing extreme misogyny, far-right attitudes and racism within the Queensland Police Service.
A government-commissioned inquiry released a damning report into Queensland police responses to domestic and family violence, A Call for Change, in November. A significant portion of the inquiry was based on interviews with victim-survivors of domestic violence, as well as hundreds of current and former Queensland Police members.
The report revealed that Queensland Police members widely expressed a misogynistic view typical of the far right: that the oppression of women is an invention of the left. The Queensland Police Union condemned the inquiry as “woke” and labelled women’s organisations the “DV [domestic violence] industry”. Many cops believe that women commonly fabricate domestic violence claims out of jealousy or revenge against male partners or invent accusations of rape as an alternative to launching child custody cases in the Family Court.
Unsurprisingly, Queensland Police members were revealed to have behaved in appalling ways towards women seeking help. One anonymous respondent, a former Queensland Police member, described:
“Police officers would use derogatory names and make degrading comments and jokes about the clients. These included statements such as ‘she’s just a druggie slut’, ‘she doesn’t deserve to have these children’. The most common reference was ‘grub’. In responding to domestic violence, I’ve had police officers say, ‘she’s just a filthy grub trying to get back at him and this is a waste of our time’.”
A former police officer recalled a senior detective labelling a statement provided by a female rape victim a “struggle-cuddle” and said: “It’s not a good rape unless you get [an erection] whilst reading it”.
Alongside the official inquiry, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/13/queensland-police-service-qps-leaked-audio-recording-tape-brisbane-city-watch-house">several whistle-blowers</a> provided the Guardian with examples of racist and anti-protest attitudes, including using racial slurs, wanting to injure Extinction Rebellion protesters in 2019, and railing against local Greens councillor Jonathan Sriranganathan.
The inquiry recommended introducing special training protocols, reporting mechanisms and diverse hiring practice to combat the bigotry within police service. But these revelations are not simply products of poor HR methods; they stem directly from the core function of the police as violent enforcers of an unequal status quo. To maintain the law and order of capitalism—a system based on inequality and oppression—the police have to accept the values of the society they are tasked with defending.
The police operate with impunity, confident that no matter how many allegations of obscene behaviour come to light, they can be assured of funding increases and a thumbs up from whoever is in government. If the police know they can kill and get away with it (no police officer has ever been convicted of murdering an Indigenous person in Australia) what is to stop them expressing prejudice?
The Queensland Police Service and Queensland Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk refused even symbolic admissions of wrongdoing in response to the Call to Change inquiry. Palaszczuk rejected calls for the resignation of Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll, who strenuously denied the existence of widespread misogyny within her force. 
Some argued that Carroll should not lose her position as Queensland’s first female police commissioner because she can’t be held responsible for “inherited” misogyny. But one former female police officer told the inquiry: “We all hoped a female commissioner would have changed the culture, sadly this hasn’t happened”.
Instead, Palaszczuk has affirmed that the Queensland government is happy for the police to continue in this way and has indeed given them greater ability to do so.

Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery

The glorious death of Australia Day

Mint My Desk strikes again

Albanese loves the wealthy

No cost-of-living crisis for the rich

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

Albanese and the fascist

Ohio train derailment a disaster of profit

A short and dirty history of US imperialism

Queensland Labor rewards misogynist cops

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us