If you’re as old as me (soon to be 45), you’ll remember setting up your first Hotmail account and choosing a super cool email address. Using lyrics from my favourite song (“32 flavors” by Ani DiFranco) seemed like a great idea at the time. The same goes for purplepingers, as I found out when I first met Jordan van den Lamb in a bar in Brunswick to suss out whether I wanted to lead his campaign team. He was gracious in answering the question that he’s been asked hundreds of times. It turns out that “purplepingers” was a high school gaming handle that stuck. 
As Karl Marx (roughly) said, the political challenge we faced was set by the circumstances we found ourselves in. As a founding member of the Victorian Socialists, I have been part of the party’s development. Last year, we won more than 70,000 votes in the local council elections and got a councillor elected in Bendigo. 
We’ve got some great policies, one measure of which is how many of them have been adopted by the Greens over the last few years. Most importantly, we have fantastic volunteers. At the core of the party are serious socialists. Many more are local activists, and plenty are enthusiastic young people who would do (allegedly) anything to tear capitalism to pieces with their bare hands. 
But since 2018, we’ve never had the opportunity to campaign with a candidate who had a following way beyond our limited socialist circles: a candidate bemoaned and/or celebrated as a TikTok influencer who set up a website to document “shit rentals” and found thousands of people eager to send in submissions (4,755 and counting).
As a Senate candidate, you need to win votes. So how do you get people concerned with the shit state of their rental properties or radical solutions to the housing crisis to vote for a party they’ve probably never heard of? And could we get these people involved in a socialist party as volunteers? How would we run a ground campaign across a territory the size of the UK and appeal to an electorate of 4.5 million people to put a 1 in the Victorian Socialists’ box on the Senate ballot paper?
Not afraid of a challenge, we set up the Pingers4Parliament website, and I chaired our first campaign committee on 8 October last year. After some serious discussions, we decided to organise a tour of the state to see whether we could meet real people and talk to them about socialism. The selection of locations for the tour was partly scientific (demographics, voting history, size of population), partly “vibes” (aka where could we go wild swimming after the meeting). Luckily, the alchemy worked. 
We started in Bendigo, where, with socialist Ned Kelly (aka VS councillor Owen Cosgriff) promoting the meeting, we had a turnout of more than 60, including 30 new to socialist politics. They may have been new to organised socialism, but they had clear ideas and were keen to share their experiences. 
The tour continued, visiting fifteen locations and attracting more than 750 participants. At all of the meetings, there was no shortage of contributions to the discussion. What should we be talking about at this election? I didn’t have to ask twice. 
In Castlemaine, a grandma worried about her grandchildren’s future living in a regional town where minimum-wage jobs and the explosion of Airbnbs mean that they will never be able to afford a rental. 
On a hot day in Ballarat, a local council worker talked about the failures of local “social” housing promises to deliver anything real. 
In Geelong, a young person described receiving a call that week about emergency accommodation—eight years after lodging their original claim.
We launched an “empty home crime scene” campaign to highlight (with bright yellow stickers) that the housing crisis is more about distribution than supply. The simple fact is that more empty homes exist than people experiencing homelessness. Jordan took part in a live online debate with Fiona Patten (now with Legalise Cannabis) and “bad Jordan” (the Libertarian candidate), during which we discovered that Legalise Cannabis has only one policy (no prizes for guessing it). 
Our volunteers did the time-consuming but vital work of delivering more than 700 yard signs and thousands of letters to the mailboxes of people who had never had the opportunity to vote for a socialist before. We hit our target of raising $25,000 in donations in two weeks. 
When the ABC broke an exclusive story featuring “Carol”, whose empty house had been moved into by squatters after Jordan listed the address online (with no connection found between those two facts), we finally had the opportunity to get some mainstream media coverage. 
When Albo described Jordan’s activism to address the housing crisis as “a disgrace”, a former Greens candidate suggested we send him a bouquet of flowers as a thank you. That night, Jordan went on The Project to defend his actions and suggest that building public housing would be a step in the right direction. More than 360,000 people watched the video. 
The evening before election day, we had the final training session for new volunteers. While we were hopeful Jordan’s social media reach would translate into votes, we also knew from previous elections how important it is to talk to people in person to convince them of the importance of putting us number one on the ballot. 
The centre was packed. One volunteer had driven nearly two hours to collect materials for a voting booth at which he would spend the next day on his own. Another new volunteer wanted to make sure they understood preferential voting so they could explain it to their friends and neighbours at their kids’ primary school booth. On election day, dozens of new volunteers set themselves up at booths from Warrnambool to Wonthaggi to campaign for a socialist senator. 
To each and every one of our volunteers: thank you! We know the steps we’ve taken are hard fought and small, but they matter. Now, more than ever, we need to rebuild a socialist opposition to capitalism. Let’s go and meet the next layer of people who can help us build it.

Roz Ward

Inside the Pingers campaign

Welcome to Sex: Your no-silly-questions guide to sexuality, pleasure and figuring it out describes itself as a “frank, age-appropriate introductory guide to sex and sexuality for teens of all genders ... inclusive, reassuring and all about keeping sex fun, real, and shame-free”. 
The book has become the latest target for right-wing campaigners obsessed with children’s sexuality. To give you a sense of the content, topics covered include: “What is sex?”, “Parents and carers and awkward conversation”, “Getting intimate with myself”, “Orgasms”, “Labels: sexual and gender identities”, “What the outside world is telling us about sex” and “Reasons to not have sex”. 
The tone is very much fun/cool aunty. The introduction encourages young people to “feel good about who you are”. As well as content addressed directly to young readers, quotes from qualitative research and “experts” in the field of sex education offer reassurance to adult readers that this is all evidence-based content. 
Welcome to Sex is a useful contribution to comprehensive sex education, but the debate it has sparked demonstrates the need for a more combative approach to the conservative right. We should absolutely be talking about pleasure, consent and communication. If we don’t produce books, teach it in schools or talk to our children about sex, there are plenty of places where they will learn terrible lessons. The most significant of these is the increasingly violent world of pornography. 
But if we want to win this battle, we must go beyond small-l liberal appeals to “scientific” research. Since the mid-1970s, more than 1,000 sex education books for young people have been published in English. The debates about what is “appropriate” are not going to go away just because the evidence suggests they should. 
Welcome to Sex came under attack from the usual right-wing media outlets such as 2GB radio “shock jock” Ben Fordham, who did a punchy segment, News Corp, which ran sensationalist stories, and an army of online creeps were stirred into action. Sky News then reported random online comments describing Welcome to Sex as a “sick sexual book”. 
Rachael Wong, CEO of “Woman’s Forum Australia”, did the rounds positioning herself as a defender of children. Wong, a regular contributor to the Australian edition of the right-wing magazine Spectator, last year defended transphobic Liberal candidate Katherine Deves and described abortion as not being “in the best interests of women”. 
As a result of their campaigning, Welcome to Sex was removed from the shelves of retailer Big W and co-author Yumi Stynes received death threats. The book subsequently hit the top of the Amazon Australia bestseller list. You know what they say about publicity. 
After being targeted by a sustained media campaign for my work leading Safe Schools, a program aimed at supporting gender and sexual diversity in education, the media discussion of the controversy surrounding Welcome to Sex is very familiar. 
In 2016, News Corp, conservatives in the Liberal Party and online trolls published hundreds of homophobic and transphobic articles to try to stop teachers being nice to gay and trans students. Campaigners against Welcome to Sex have used all the same talking points of the misogynist right, including the nebulous idea of “gender ideology” and whipping up fear about grooming and paedophilia. 
In response, appeals to evidence have been presented in defence of the book, just as they were raised in defence of Safe Schools—as if a lack of scientific rationality in educational materials is the main animator of the political right.
Yumi Stynes told the Sydney Morning Herald: “We really have a lot of credentials”. But an array of supportive doctors and professors are generally of zero interest to those on the right, unless of course they peddle conservative ideas. 
The research on the benefits of sexuality education has been clear and unequivocal for decades. Emma Whatman from the University of Melbourne, summed it up in a piece in the Conversation: “Comprehensive and inclusive sex education that begins at a young age can prevent child sex abuse, decrease rates of domestic violence and intimate partner violence, and reduce homophobic bullying”. 
Conservative campaigners couldn’t care less about this. They engage in moralising to generate emotional responses. During her 2GB interview, for example, Wong told Fordham that she “felt physically ill at the thought” of children reading Welcome to Sex. There were no references to research on child sexuality, the impact of sex education, or links between sexual knowledge and grooming. 
For the right, the main aim is to whip up fear and disgust. This is why conservatives will always highlight what they consider to be the most shocking elements of sex education programs. The page of Welcome to Sex featured in most of the critical media shows an illustration of two naked people in a “scissoring position”. Shock horror!
Crucially, the right-wing campaigners are backed by personalities in the media and mainstream politicians who want only heteronormativity, “family values” and pro-capitalist ideas promoted. Who has time to worry about climate change or the cost of living when there are predatory cultural Marxists influencing your children? 
That is why, when defending sexuality education, we need to go further than just pointing out the health and social benefits. We need to understand that the right is not interested in the welfare of children; its main concern is to create a moral panic to build a reactionary political movement.
We need to push back against the political right at every opportunity and, ultimately, reshape the system that operates to oppress our genders and sexualities.

The political right isn’t interested in child welfare

Australian universities have been stealing the wages of their most vulnerable workers for years. Almost one in four of Australia’s public universities is currently “repaying money, undertaking audits or in dispute with casual staff”, according to a recent ABC report. Top of the list is one of the richest institutions in the country, Melbourne University, with an executive team that were collectively paid a princely $12,198,000 last year.
Several years of organising by unionised workers have managed to bring university wage theft into the open and forced managements to scramble their defences around the country. In particular, casuals and their activist allies at Melbourne University have built their strength through collective organising—systematic outreach, public actions, meetings and relentless determination. There have been no shortcuts to success.
Meanwhile, the leaders of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), in the wake of their failed National Jobs Protection Framework, have jumped on the chance to make a splash in the media, national president Alison Barnes promising to “launch a wave of class actions”.
It should go without saying that maintaining hard-won wages is core union business. That is why it was so important that, when the union leaders tried to push a deal with the vice-chancellors that would rob workers across the sector of 15 percent of their salaries, a rank and file campaign led by NTEU Fightback was able to destroy their plans and force the Framework to be abandoned.
The current union leadership has been well aware of the dual problems of casualisation and wage theft for many years. Available data suggests that up to 70 percent of workers employed in universities today have insecure contracts.
Back in 2013, doctoral research by Robyn May at Melbourne University showed that “casual employment, a unique Australian expression of insecure employment, has become embedded in the university sector as a management response to dealing with funding uncertainty”. In the uncertainty created by the current crisis, management will use the opportunity to drive more workers into insecure jobs.
Already, teaching, student support and vital administrative tasks at universities are carried out by people whose jobs can be lost at one hour’s notice. The experience is highly stressful. For tutors like me, every semester ends with the sudden disappearance of our pay cheques followed by an anxious wait to see if we will be rehired weeks later. No sick pay, no holiday pay, but always the expectation that you will work unpaid overtime.
To push back, we need an approach that goes beyond media releases and memes. Right now, debates are taking place in union meetings around the country about how to respond to threats of restructures and job losses. At Melbourne’s RMIT, on top of the hundreds of casuals and fixed-term workers already sacked, 355 more jobs are set to be lost via voluntary redundancies. For every job that goes, those left behind suffer ever greater workloads.
The approach underpinning the Framework has proven an abject failure. In the universities where staff accepted the deal to “sacrifice” wages to save jobs, the sackings continue to mount up. For example, at Melbourne’s La Trobe, where Vice-Chancellor John Dewar was one of the key architects of the Framework and a 10 percent pay cut has already been imposed, two rounds of redundancies have already cut more than 400 jobs, with remaining staff expected to lift their productivity by 20 percent. In many ways, this is a case study in reverse that shows how important it is that we connect the issues—wages, job security and workload. When you don’t fight for one, you lose them all.
NTEU Fightback has argued that, in order to end the decades-long model of increasingly casualised university employment and to reset the debate on public funding of public education, we need the sort of extensive, mass-participation industrial action that we’ve seen from teachers’ unions in the US in recent years. Concretely, this means building vigorous resistance to job cuts, agreement concessions and underpayments. Even if we don’t win every round, such campaigns can cohere activists in a way that will be important for the future.
We also need to work actively across the divisions that weaken our efforts. This means casuals, fixed term and ongoing staff working together, professional and academic staff organising together. Serious union work is more than grand statements of intent. It takes time and effort. Fighting wage theft means defending every job, resisting increased workloads and organising in ways that build our strength for the battles to come.

Fighting university wage theft means defending every job

Can you tell us about the context in which the Accord emerged?
In 1972 the Whitlam Labor government was elected on the back of rising workers’ struggle and the black, anti-war, women’s and gay movements. Whitlam introduced a range of reforms in the areas of health, welfare and women’s rights, and oversaw the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Workers saw the potential for more gains, and by 1974 there was a massive strike wave, the most significant since the revolutionary post-WWI years. But the world economy, including Australia’s, soon began trending down. The ruling class turned to what we now call neoliberalism as a way to rescue their system and to reverse working class gains.
Malcolm Fraser, his Liberal/National Coalition and their ruling class backers started the offensive by engineering a coup and throwing Whitlam out of office in 1975. Workers struck in their millions, but the ACTU, as they have done time and again, turned a potential strike wave into an electoral campaign to restore the government, which of course failed. Fraser, who promised much to the ruling class, including an end to strikes, more anti-union legislation and higher profits, did not deliver in government.
The big industrial and political battles during those years ended in a stalemate. By 1980, workers had begun to gain more confidence and industrial action began to pick up. But then came a sudden recession and talk of deals between government and unions, even with employers, became louder. The promise of more jobs, security and stable wages to pull the economy out of recession seemed more plausible than tearing down the system. The most common of these agreements were the social contracts – known as the Accord in Australia – in countries such as Sweden, the UK and Austria.
They promised unions a seat at the planning table, but at the cost of concessions on wages and conditions and limitation on industrial action. With the election of the Hawke-Keating government in March 1983, the Accord became a reality. Bill Kelty, then ACTU president, explained: “The philosophic framework [of the Labor government]... [was to] open up the economy to the rest of the world, increase productivity, promote competition ...”. Of course there were still the fig leaf promises of “powerful safety nets in national health care, superannuation and wages”, but for Kelty these measures were useful only if they promoted “adaptation and change, thus increasing productivity”.
As the Accord years rolled on, workers’ welfare and living standards fell at the same time as productivity and profits for the bosses rose. Meanwhile, workers’ defensive organisations, the unions, collaborated with government and employers to destroy solidarity and rank and file industrial power. For the working class, it was sacrifice after sacrifice to ensure the survival of capitalism. The Financial Review summed up the result: “Under the Accord, the ACTU has deliberately facilitated the biggest redistribution of national income from wages to profits”.
Laurie Carmichael, Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU) leader, claimed the Accord was a “pathway to socialism”. What was the role of the CPA and others on the left?
Far from being a pathway to socialism, the Accord was a major defeat for the working class, and the Communist Party and Labor Left played a critical role in this defeat. Using their union and Labor government positions, they “educated” the working class in a retreat from class struggle and into class collaboration. The leading left wing union, the AMWU, began the process. Starting in 1976, the AMWU brought out The People’s Budget and then, along with the ACTU, went on to publish a series of pamphlets – Australia Uprooted, Australia Ripped Off, Australia on the rack, Australia on the brink. All argued for a left nationalist, class-collaborationist solution to capitalism’s woes. The CPA and its Labor Left allies continued to play that role from the lead-up to and formulation of the Accord through every step in its development, supporting and enforcing every attack on workers’ wages and conditions.
You describe a pretty grim scenario, but your book argues that workers didn’t just go along with these attacks – some were prepared to fight back.
I cover around 15 major disputes in the book, from 1983, right through to the end of the Accord in 1996. The smallest – Dollar Sweets, where Peter Costello made his name as a lawyer for the company – involved just 15 workers. Others, like the APPM paper mill in Tasmania, Robe River iron and Cockatoo Island in Sydney, involved hundreds of workers.
Then there were the really big ones – the Victorian nurses, the builders’ labourers and the pilots. Certainly the majority lost, but the resistance was important and remains a legacy of the Accord years. Whether you win or lose, how you fight – or even if you fight – matters. It makes the difference between being crushed or living to fight another day.
Some of the most inspiring of these battles involved women workers – those belonging to the small Food Preservers Union and the thousands-strong Victorian nurses, for example. Their determination, backed by solidarity actions from other unions, delivered them wins in the face of intransigent opposition from the government and ACTU. At the Heinz, Plumrose and Rosella-Lipton factories, the workforce went on strike, imposed bans and took other industrial action for higher pay and better conditions.
Union members at Rosella had the book thrown at them. Industrial relations minister Ralph Willis berated the union for being “selfish”, urging members to defy their officials and go back to work. Hawke instructed the Social Security department (now Centrelink) not to pay the workers or their dependants unemployment payments and tried to get them excluded from the September national wage case. More dangerously, the federal government, backed by Kelty, threatened to rush through legislation to cancel the union’s award, which would have left union members around the country with no protection at all.
In the face of their determined action – and the industrial support they got from other workers and their unions such as the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) and Transport Workers Union – the employers caved in, and the Arbitration Commission was forced to grant them the national wage rise. Food Preservers’ organiser Denis Evans insists that, after listening to the rank and file, the union backed its members. They refused to become, in his words, “industrial policemen”. If members said they couldn’t live on what they were getting, “what right does a union official have to say, ‘you can’t improve your wages and conditions because the Accord says you can’t’? ... Members fuelled the anti-Accord position”.
In Victoria, the nurses’ union held out for 50 days, escalating the dispute until the entire workforce was on strike. They eventually claimed victory, having stared down a hostile Labor government, an obstructive ACTU and Trades Hall Council . These forces accused the nurses of being naive and not knowing the system. Nurses state secretary Irene Bolger was quick to rebuff these charges. “Of course we knew the system”, she said, “but we ignored it because it was their rules and their system – and we’d decided that it was time to chuck their rules out the door ... [our members] were fed up”.
These are inspiring wins, but the Accord left a terrible legacy for workers. What were the defeats that left the unions and their members weakened both industrially and politically?
The losses were significant and overall had a massive effect on workers and their unions. Two of the strongest unions, the builders’ labourers and pilots, were smashed with the help of the police, draconian state and federal laws, other unions and the ACTU.
The BLF did manage to hold on, but in its strongest state, Victoria, the state and federal governments pursued the union to the end, raiding its offices, taking over its finances and passing laws that made it impossible for the union to re-establish itself. It avoided total annihilation by amalgamating with the construction union, but has remained under attack from the ruling class ever since.
In the case of the pilots, the government, with the full backing of employers and the ACTU and other transport unions, brought in the air force to break their strike in 1989. The pilots were taken to court and fined millions, scabs took their jobs, and many of the strikers never returned to the industry. The union has rebuilt, though to nothing like its previous power.
One of the most destructive moves was the introduction of enterprise bargaining – former prime minister Paul Keating’s parting “gift” to workers at the end of the Accord years. Enterprise bargaining left workers more casualised, isolated, on lower wages and conditions, de-unionised and weaker overall. Resistance to it was shut down by the officials.
The Accord and its supporters are responsible for the weak state of the union movement today, and its orientation to class collaboration rather than class struggle. Nonetheless, the fact that the government – backed by the bosses and ACTU – was forced to destroy two unions, impose massive fines and bring in more and more anti-worker laws, is an indication of the level of resistance amongst the rank and file, often in defiance of union leaders. For our side, it means that, though battered and bruised, enough class antagonism remains that every time there has been a call to the fight, workers have responded enthusiastically.
Hundreds of thousands hit the streets during the waterfront dispute in 1998 and against WorkChoices towards the end of the Howard years. Class collaboration is on the agenda of the left union leadership and Labor once again, as the federal government plans massive cuts to wages and conditions in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. We desperately need to reignite a spirit of resistance inside the union movement if we are to fend off the coming attacks.
The resistance by workers during the Accord years was, for me, the education of a lifetime. As well as highlighting the pitfalls of class collaboration, it provided confirmation of the potential for solidarity and struggle and the vital role of the working class in building for a better, socialist future.
 
Stuff the Accord! is published by Interventions. You can buy it online at <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/revolutionary-history/products/stuff-the-accord-pay-up">Red Flag Books</a>

Liz Ross

Ryan Stanton

When Australia's workers fought back against the Accord

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told to wash my hands. But what if you work in a workplace with a break room that doesn’t have a sink? With no supplies of hand sanitiser are provided? And what if over 100,000 people come through your workplace every day and your job is to provide them with customer service?
That was the experience of one of the many workers who have shared their stories with <a href="https://www.facebook.com/WorkersOrganisingResistance/">Workers Organising Resistance during the Pandemic (WOR</a>), a new Facebook page and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/workersorganisingresistance/">discussion group</a> set up to share stories of our conditions at work and our experiences of organising and fighting for safety and dignity.
The good news is that workers in Australia are not just accepting these conditions. The customer service worker with no hand sanitiser and no sink told WOR: “We organised for a group of workers to refuse to continue working until sanitiser was found, which it quickly was. We then sent a joint email to management and their health and safety reps raising concerns about the breakroom sink and nearby toilets that were not operational. After escalating their concerns with the union and senior management plumbers were organised and a sink was operational within 24 hours – a small victory!” 
While the leadership of our unions wait for their invitations to official meetings with government and management, some workers are taking action into their own hands. Like the university workers in Melbourne, rostered onto a student help desk that normally sees dozens of students a day: they simply refused to staff it, because any form of social distancing would have been impossible. For them, waiting was not an option. 
With government schools still open across the country, and mounting evidence to suggest that closing schools can help to delay and reduce the peak of an epidemic, teacher activists are organising and campaigning to the government to shut down schools. Importantly, any shut down must guarantee indefinite emergency leave pay and provide free childcare and small-scale classrooms for school-aged children of healthcare and hospital workers. (Sign their <a href="https://www.change.org/p/scott-morrison-shut-our-schools-with-full-pay-soscovid19">petition</a>,)
If there aren’t many other union members at your workplace, organising is a big challenge but not impossible. When workplaces are rapidly closing, it can become even harder. Retail and hospitality workers who are employed casually face the prospect of being thrown out of work indefinitely. Despite the challenges, workers are getting together with their workmates and organising open letters to management, listing their demands, and demanding their rights under health and safety legislation.
A delegate working in a bakery reported how management had already conceded some of their demands after adding pressure with an open letter. They wrote: “One thing I've noticed is that health and safety measures are something that can really activate people. It's a good combination of looking out for your own safety but also practising social responsibility. It's a good way to get people placing demands on the boss for the necessary supplies to implement them. If you have a solid list of suggestions for procedures it could help to cohere people.” Others are sharing their workplace petitions and comparing demands. 
A casual worker who gets sick, or who is exposed to COVID-19, might face a choice between going to work to spread the pandemic, or losing their pay – or their job. One call centre worker writes: “I’m a delegate and our workplace is currently refusing to pay us sick leave (as we are all casual) despite the fact that their parent company has promised all of its workers leave in response to COVID-19. We are having an on-shift union meeting tonight and will be distributing stickers to people wear on shift that say SRC: SERIOUSLY RISKING CORONAVIRUS. PAID LEAVE NOW”. Some big employers have now started to offer paid sick leave for casuals, but often with 14-day limits and only in the case of self-isolation. 
“I’m working at a suburban retail store where the manager's housemate has tested positive for COVID-19 and the manager has been home sick with fever for 9 days,” one worker wrote. “We are operating under the assumption that he has COVID-19. The manager, 9 days ago, came in with a fever, used the store phones and point of sales systems until we made him leave. Upper-level management are refusing to close the store or tell anyone about the situation. Everyone who was rostered there today called in sick; management got staff from other stores and didn't tell them what the situation was. Of 9 regular staff, 4 have now showed COVID-19 symptoms in the past week”.
There are two huge issues so far: getting access to proper sanitary protection, and pay for casual leave. One worker who works for a big company providing essential services reported “at my workplace they keep saying they’re out of hand sanitiser... then we cause a big fuss and eventually a new bottle appears. We’ve been asking for a while how much they have and they keep trying not to tell us. Today someone managed to catch our manager getting sanitiser out of the safe and we saw there are 20 bottles”. A few hours later, it was reported that after workers continued to agitate a large delivery of hand sanitiser and disinfectant wipes were delivered to the same company’s multiple workplaces.
While the government tries to tell us we’re all in this together we know that it is the workers who will be forced to pay unless we organise collective resistance. We hope that WOR will be able to organise simultaneous actions over common demands. Governments and employers will continue to attack our rights, we want WOR to work with our unions to be able to organise coordinated responses. When they try to make us pay for their crisis, we must resist. 
 
If you're a workplace activist, get involved with WOR by following the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/WorkersOrganisingResistance">Facebook page</a> and joining the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/workersorganisingresistance/">discussion forum</a>.

We're workers organising resistance in the pandemic

A new page dedicated to “Gender Issues” in the Australian is a disgusting platform for bigoted and backward ideas. Each week, the editors push journalists to scrape together new piles of transphobic shit to peddle as news. Their coverage has been widely condemned by LGBTI activists and medical professionals. AusPATH, the body that represents doctors and workers in gender health, put out a statement saying that the Australian’s coverage of transgender topics is “biased, emotive and ... not based on fact”.
A glance through the headlines from the paper in the past few weeks provides a clear picture of the editorial direction. A selection from the page includes such delights as: “They’re castrating children”, “Fears grow for trans kids”, “Transgender project ‘out of balance’”, “Concerns on gender transition”, “Concerns omitted in trans pushback”. The authors have claimed that a “trans reform bill will put women at risk”, that “trans law reforms could make it harder to track criminals”, and that “the gender agenda is out of control!” One columnist asked, “Why are we so quick to accept delusion as the norm?”
The “experts” called on to write and contribute to these stories do not try to disguise their one-sided transphobic perspectives. A regular commentator is John Whitehall, the former deputy president of Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party and a frequent guest on Sky News and radio 2GB. Whitehall is a professor of paediatrics and child health, but has admitted to never having treated a transgender patient. The page has also included “specialist” comments from William Malone, a conservative Christian doctor from Idaho whose actual expertise is diabetes.
While the coverage may appear ridiculous to anyone progressive, there are serious implications.
Research shows there was a massive increase in transphobic posts among far right groups online during the Australian’s concerted campaign against Safe Schools in 2016. Liberal and National politicians who have historically appealed to “family values” to galvanise conservative support are more than comfortable to push transphobic views, whatever the consequences.
Those who work in the media and want to maintain a degree of professional ethics are distancing themselves from the Australian. In August, the former editor-in-chief of the paper, David Armstrong, cancelled his subscription and said he was tired of its unrelenting conservative columnists. Despite this, the paper continues to influence the political scene in Canberra.
Mainstream coverage like that given in the Australian’s “Gender Issues” page, provides credibility, legitimacy and momentum to increasingly reactionary causes. Research published this year by Victoria University found that broad media saturation of issues such as Safe Schools and the so-called threat of African gangs has emboldened violent far right extremists. When these small groups can show that their ideas are backed by supposedly reputable sources, their doors are opened to new layers of members.
As well as providing recruitment assistance to groups on the far right, this coverage also whips up fear and loathing among the ranks of the Liberal Party base. Transphobic and essentialist views on gender are neatly combined with anti-left sentiments to create righteous outrage. That is why you’ll also find headlines on the Australian’s “Gender Issues” page such as: “Left wing journalists try to censor the inconvenient facts”.
Despite being behind a sturdy paywall, the Australian was the fourth most shared content source on the Facebook pages of far right groups in Australia. It is not enough for the left to ignore or ridicule the Murdoch press; its agenda should be opposed at every level.

Oppose Murdoch’s gender agenda

Australia’s special military forces will enjoy an additional $3 billion in funding over the next two decades as part of the government’s commitment to spending 2 percent of GDP on “defence” by 2021. The combined military will receive an extra $200 billion in funding over the next 10 years. This is the largest increase in defence funding outside of war since the colonisation of Australia. Labor has gone on record supporting the increase.
In the 2019-20 budget, defence was allocated $32.24 billion. Compare this to government schools, allocated $8.3 billion, or the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which has been underfunded by $1.6 billion. Or the less than half a billion that will be spent on youth mental health and suicide prevention, despite the shocking rise in the number of Indigenous children killing themselves over the past year.
The boost for the SAS – the special operations section of the Australian Defence Force – was announced as an inquiry into the misconduct of Australian special forces during the war in Afghanistan continued in Kabul this month. Defence spokespeople have steadfastly refused to comment on the investigation, which began in 2016. But hundreds of pages of internal defence documents leaked to the ABC provide some insights into the atrocities committed by Australian troops.
The “Afghan Files” contain formal reports of at least 10 incidents in which SAS soldiers unlawfully shot and killed children and unarmed men. The problems became so widespread that senior officers warned that the SAS had developed a dangerous “warrior culture”. Internal investigators also described soldiers as “desensitised” and experiencing a “drift in values”. 
In one incident, a 13-year-old boy fetching water from a well was shot in the back of the neck. Another report detailed an unarmed man and his 6-year-old son being killed by SAS soldiers during a house raid. 
The initial response to these crimes from the top brass in the defence hierarchy was to issue a series of memos instructing soldiers to make sure Afghans were “directly participating in hostilities” before shooting them. The Morrison government’s response to these atrocities has been to reward the SAS with an extra $3 billion to buy new killing machines and body armour, which can only make them feel even more like invincible warriors.
For those who are battling to survive on Newstart payments that are below the poverty line, there is no such boost in sight. Morrison described the $277.85 a week Newstart allowance as “modest” and said last month that he had no plans to engage in “unfunded empathy”. By contrast, Morrison described his $3 billion boost to SAS funding as “one of the most important investments that I can make as a prime minister ... to keep Australians safe”. 
A recent Australian Council of Social Service report found that 30 percent of those trying to survive on Newstart skip three or four meals per week. A $75 per week increase to Newstart would cost $3 billion. The failure of both sides of politics to raise the rate of Newstart, while giving bipartisan support to a massive expansion of military funding, is not an oversight or a mistake. Barbarity is built right into the system. People have value only insofar as they help make the rich richer, by either working or advancing the interests of the capitalist class through imperialist war. Rewarding cruelty while refusing to provide housing or food to keep unemployed people safe is second nature for a government that presides over such a sick system.

Government rewards barbarity

The Andrews Labor government will spend an additional $1.8 billion on prisons and corrections in the next year, building a huge new maximum security prison for men and expanding the women’s prison at Ravenhall. 
This is not because we are witnessing a crime spree in Victoria. The massive increase in the prison population is a direct result of tougher bail laws, which have led to a widely reported crisis in remand. 
According to Corrections Victoria, the prison population increased overall by 81.5 percent between 2008 and 2018, while the number of people held on remand increased by 196 percent in the six years to March 2019. People being held on remand have not been convicted of any crime. 
The draconian bail laws which have led to people being held in remand for long periods were a response to widely publicised crimes against women and have been justified on the basis of protecting women. But they have only served to increase the brutalisation and criminalisation of vulnerable women.
Almost half of the total population of incarcerated women in Victoria are on remand. Ninety percent of all women currently entering prison are being held on remand. About 70 percent of these women have children.
There is no shortage of studies showing a correlation between poverty, homelessness, drug use, domestic violence and incarceration for women. National research in 2012 found that more than half of women in prison had been sleeping rough or living in short-term accommodation in the month prior to being incarcerated. Not only that, but a new study by the Women’s Legal Service Victoria this year found that police were consistently misidentifying female victims of family violence as primary aggressors. This means that women who are survivors of violence and abuse are being arrested and locked up. These women can be held on remand for months, which often leads to the loss of jobs, housing and custody of children. 
Structural racism means Aboriginal women are particularly affected. There has been a staggering 240 percent increase in the number of Aboriginal women incarcerated in Victorian prisons over the past five years. Trauma on top of intergenerational trauma locks these women into a brutal cycle with very little chance of escape. Ruth Barson, director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre, told the Age, “Women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, people with disabilities and people falling on tough times are hit hardest by punitive bail laws that have seen the number of people behind bars in this state skyrocket … The Andrews government is criminalising the very women it should be providing support to”.
The government’s announcement that more money will be spent on prisons is an indication that it is doubling down on its approach. Appearing to be just as tough as the Liberals on law and order is a top priority for Labor, whatever the cost for poor and vulnerable women. 
And while advocacy groups consistently argue that access to affordable housing is the most significant factor in reducing the risk of women being locked up, the Andrew’s government continues with its plan to sell off public estates for profit. The increased budget for prisons alone could build 2,200 new housing units. 
The legal system may appear to be broken, but the reality is it is working as intended. As Vicki Roach, Aboriginal activist for women in prison, said in a 2014 interview with Red Flag, “The entire system is rotten to the core, from the top down, and it all needs to come down. I’m not just talking about the prison system; the entire rotten capitalist system needs to come down”.

Andrews government punishes women 

The Court of Arbitration for Sport has ruled that Olympic champion athlete Caster Semenya must undergo medical treatment to reduce the levels of testosterone in her body or be banned from competing in certain athletic events. 
The decision is a disgrace. It is a form of institutionalised violence that imposes an arbitrary distinction between the categories of male and female. It should be rejected as sexist and racist and resisted at every level.
Ever since Semenya began running competitively she has been targeted because of her gender presentation and performance and subjected to inhumane and abusive so-called sex-verification testing. Semenya’s response to the ruling, after easily winning the 800m Diamond League meet in Doha last week, was simple: “Hell No. No man can tell me what to do”. She will fight on. 
You don’t have to be radical to object to this ruling. The World Medical Association and the United Nations have both lodged criticism of the determination. The WMA said its advice to medical professionals would be “not to implement [these] rules on classifying women athletes” on ethical grounds. Its chair, Frank Ulrich Montgomery, said that “no physician can be forced to administer these drugs, and we definitely urge our colleagues to refrain from giving hormonally active medication to athletes simply because some regulations demand it”.
A UN resolution passed in March declared that the regulations violate “international human rights norms and standards” including the rights to freedom from torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and the right to full respect for the dignity, bodily integrity and autonomy of the person. 
Even the court that made the decision admitted the ruling was “discriminatory”, but also argued such discrimination was “necessary”. Necessary for what? 
On the face of it, those backing the decision argue that its purpose is to “to ensure fair and meaningful competition” and to reduce unfair natural advantage. Anyone who has ever taken part in competitive sport knows this is a fallacy. No two humans are the same. The obvious physical advantages of individuals in other cases are welcomed and celebrated. 
Many commentators have pointed to the fact that white American cisgender male swimmer Michael Phelps is advantaged by his vast wingspan, double jointed ankles, and the fact he produces half the lactic acid of a typical athlete. These unusual traits have been admired and used to win him and the US a swag of gold medals. Nobody called for Phelps to be injected with extra lactic acid to let his competitors catch up.
The real motive for this public punishment of Semenya can be found in the court’s defence of its self-admitted discrimination. It wrote that it was “preserving the integrity of female athletics”. This is not new. Since the 1930s, sports highest bodies, including the International Olympic Committee, have said they want to do the same thing. In the 1960s, athletes were forced to undergo intrusive genital examinations before being allowed to compete. In the 1990s, they tried out genetic testing. 
These processes are about determining and regulating the imposition of a firm line between those bodies that should be considered male, and those bodies ruled to be female. Without this physically determined line, the whole basis of gender stereotypes created and reinforced by society would be much more easily challenged. Without gender stereotypes and women’s oppression, the fabric of capitalism begins to unravel. These same structures also underpin the brutal oppression of transgender and gender diverse people. 
As an individual, Semenya represents a defiant challenge to all those with an interest in maintaining gender stereotypes. Pierre Weiss, then-secretary general of the International Association of Athletics Federations, said of her in 2011: “It is clear that she is a woman but maybe not 100 percent”. What does it mean to be (or not be) 100 percent woman? 
Those who have been medically diagnosed with a Difference (or “disorder”) of Sex Development – who may use the umbrella term intersex – are familiar with the assignment and enforcement of a gender category based on an assessment of particular physical characteristics. Their active rejection of the forced surgeries and hormone “treatments” justified as “corrections” to their bodies should be supported by the left and all progressives.
While oppression and discrimination continue, medical practitioners and researchers are increasingly concluding that all the particular hormonal, chromosomal and physical characteristics chosen to define “sex” exist on a spectrum. A line is then drawn at a particular arbitrary point to separate what are considered the “male” or “female” sides. While this line may move around it is always drawn. 
Testosterone is one of these measures of “sex” that is based on stereotypes not science. Dr. Karkazis and Dr. Jordan-Young, authors of the forthcoming Testosterone: An Unauthorised Biography, argue that “talk about testosterone as the ‘male hormone’ has woven folklore into science, so that supposedly objective claims seemingly validate cultural beliefs about the structure of masculinity and the ‘natural’ relationship between women and men”.
Semenya tweeted, “They laugh at me because I am different. I laugh at them because they are the same”. Her refusal to back down in the face of this discrimination should be an inspiration to anyone who wants to fight gendered oppression not just in sport but across the whole of society wherever it’s imposed.

Caster Semenya runs into bigotry 

In the wake of cardinal George Pell’s guilty verdict for child abuse, the hypocrisy of his conservative supporters and the church leadership has been unrelentingly disgusting. 
Before the jury made its decision, Pell, like the investment banks that caused the global financial crisis, was considered by many to be “too big to fail”. But fail he did, in the most appalling way. For all those who have managed to survive after being assaulted and abused at the hands of the Catholic Church, the conviction of Pell is one small step in the struggle for justice. 
When I co-founded the Safe Schools Coalition, our aim was to challenge homophobic and transphobic abuse so that LGBTI students, teachers and families could feel genuinely included in schools. Even though it was a modest program, receiving minuscule funding compared to the government’s school chaplaincy program, I knew there would be institutions and prominent individuals who would attack us. The Catholic Church was high on that list. 
The first time I was warned about expressing a “political opinion” at work was when I gave a comment to the media about the church. That was in 2015, after the archbishop of Melbourne, Dennis Hart, distributed to every Catholic school student in Victoria an 18-page pamphlet titled “Don’t mess with marriage”. An accompanying letter referred to same sex marriage as a “serious injustice”. All the while, Pell and the church hierarchy were fighting to silence survivors of abuse.
At the same time, the archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, publicly criticised Safe Schools for “enforcing an extreme form of the LGBTI agenda on schools”. That “extreme agenda” was trying to make LGBTI students feel safe at school and be free from bullying and abuse. If only the same efforts were made to protect all the children traumatised and abused while in the care of the Catholic Church and its institutions. 
When Safe Schools came under sustained attack from the Murdoch press, the Australian Christian Lobby and the political right, I was subjected to a torrent of personal abuse. My work email and social media inboxes were full of messages calling me a paedophile and a sick pervert. Many said god would punish me for my sins. 
Miranda Devine and Andrew Bolt accused me of “sexualising children” and engaging in systematic “Marxist indoctrination”. Lyle Shelton, head of the Christian Lobby, said Safe Schools was akin to the Holocaust and Nazi mind control. Tony Abbott, then the prime minister, described Safe Schools as a “social engineering program” and called for our funding to be cut. 
These same people are now falling over themselves to defend a convicted paedophile and child molester. They are truly vile enablers of child abuse.
After Pell’s conviction, Andrew Bolt wrote: “The man I know seems not just incapable of such abuse, but so intelligent and cautious that he would never risk his brilliant career and good name on such a mad assault in such a public place”. Miranda Devine said: “I don’t believe that Pell, who I know slightly and admire greatly, could be guilty of sexually assaulting two schoolboys”. Tony Abbott described the verdict as “a devastating result … for the friends of cardinal Pell”. Lyle Shelton backed and retweeted every one of them.
The evidence we now have about the scale and nature of the Catholic clergy’s crimes could not be any clearer. From the top down, the church has covered up a massive paedophile ring that has abused countless children for decades. 
How are these people allowed to run schools with billions of dollars of public funding? Why have their assets not been frozen and their land taken? Where are the child protection officers in every parish? How is confession still above the law? 
Safe Schools was a small program attempting to change school culture and attitudes for the better. We were labelled child abusers for our efforts. The Catholic Church is a proven perpetrator of abuse. And the commentators and politicians so “concerned” about children now rally behind its great leader. 
Reportedly there is a marble and terrazzo mausoleum prepared for Pell in the crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. I hope very soon he rots in that crypt and that the edifice of the church comes crashing down around his stinking corpse.

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Government rewards barbarity

Andrews government punishes women

Caster Semenya runs into bigotry

Roz Ward on clergy hypocrisy and the valorisation of child molesters

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