Melbourne’s high rise public housing towers are icons of the city’s skyline. Indelibly associated with the inner-city suburbs, they are the product of hard-fought battles between social reformers, residents’ associations and the sprawling bureaucracy of the Housing Commission of Victoria. Throughout their history, they have been both hated and loved, generating protests against their construction and then, once established, to defend them from demolition. 
All 44 towers have now been <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/wholesale-destruction-of-public-housing-fears-raised-over-tower-knockdowns-20230920-p5e670.html">slated for demolition by 2051</a>, in what was the final act of Daniel Andrews’ reign as premier. 
The state government’s policy of “urban renewal” is a program of creeping privatisation, one that has already destroyed nearly a dozen walk-up public housing estates across the city. The high rise flats are the last remnants of a time when the Victorian government engaged in ambitious projects to increase public housing stock instead of selling it off to the highest bidder. Their destruction is about disowning that history, eradicating its legacy from public consciousness, and a major milestone in the long march towards the eradication of public housing in Victoria. 
Melbourne’s imposing high rise towers have their origins in the social reform campaigns of the 1930s. As in many industrialising cities during the early period of capitalism, the combination of heavy industry, overcrowding and poverty had created a dire housing crisis in Melbourne. By the early twentieth century, huge swathes of inner-city suburbs such as Carlton, Collingwood and Fitzroy were crammed full of poor and working-class families living in slum conditions. Houses were narrow, with as many as three or four dwellings occupying a single allotment. They were badly maintained and lacked basic amenities. Poor sanitation encouraged the spread of disease. 
The situation horrified the delicate sensibilities of many a middle-class do-gooder. One of the most dogged advocates for slum reform was Frederick Oswald Barnett, a Methodist socialist who documented life in the slums with his camera, submitting dozens of photographs to local newspapers and journals to draw attention to the conditions faced by the residents. A conscientious social reformer, Barnett advocated careful and gradual rehabilitation of the slums, emphasising that poor living conditions were not a reflection on the character of the inhabitants. 
Barnett’s campaigning resulted in the creation of the Housing Investigation and Slum Abolition Board in 1936. The board surveyed more than 7,000 homes within eight kilometres of the city centre and found that the majority required demolition or extensive renovation. Barnett’s work, which included taking then Premier Albert Dunstan on a tour of the slums, gave rise to the 1937 Housing Act and the subsequent creation of the Housing Commission of Victoria. The commission had a mandate to deal with the slum problem by reconstructing houses and rehousing residents if required. 
Early projects were put on hold in 1939 due to the outbreak of World War II, and shortages in construction materials and labour caused by the war only made the housing crisis worse. The situation grew so desperate that, from 1946 to 1954, Royal Park played host to Camp Pell, a military camp repurposed as emergency accommodation for those displaced by the early slum clearances. When the health and housing minister defended the appalling conditions in the not-so-affectionately named “Camp Hell”, one letter writer to the Age offered to donate £10 to the children’s hospital if the minister could name a rougher slum in Melbourne.
From 1938 to 1956, the commission built around 32,000 units, mostly single-family homes and low rise apartments, and mostly in the suburbs. But at the same time, the number of dwellings classified as “slum housing” in the inner city continued to grow. So, in 1956, there was a policy shift that emphasised sweeping large-scale redevelopment and the construction of high-density apartment blocks in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. This was the beginning of the great postwar slum clearance program, which would continue until mid-1973. 
Two key factors motivated the commission’s move away from low rise and mixed-use dwellings to the now ubiquitous high rise flats. The first was the surging demand for housing following WWII and the ongoing problems of slums in the inner city. The Brotherhood of St Laurence led an “All Parties Housing League” which held protests in the suburb of Oakleigh and on Collins Street in the city in 1949, demanding greater attention to the city’s poor and destitute, and it produced many pamphlets and films about the housing crisis. By 1955, pressure was mounting on the newly elected Liberal state government under Premier Henry Bolte to address the issue.
The second factor was the cost. “Multi storey flats are the only way of economically developing sites with high site values”, explained a 1958 report by the commission’s housing director and chief technical officer. The increasing cost of buying up inner-city land pushed the commission’s directors to aim for the highest possible density, a logic that RMIT urban development Professor Libby Porter has pointed out <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-12/century-of-challenges-for-melbourne-public-housing/12445604">continues to inform housing policy to this day</a>.
Developments in construction techniques provided further economic incentive for ambitious high rise construction. In 1945, the state government had acquired the Holmesglen factory, a former munitions facility, and turned it over to the production of prefabricated concrete panels for use in housing construction. This method allowed hundreds of panels to be produced in quick succession, transported to building sites by truck and assembled like a pack of cards. By the early 1960s, this technique had been refined to the point where it was possible to build towers of as many as 30 storeys using precast panels. 
This convergence of social need, a government with a view to large-scale urban redevelopment and the economics of modern productive technology created the 44 high rise towers that ring the city today. But this development was not without controversy.
In the 1988 book New Houses for Old, architect George Tibbits argues that in the postwar period the commission made a turn away from “social welfare values” and towards a cold, technocratic approach to urban renewal. This view was shared by Barnett, who, at 85, was invited to attend the opening of the 32-storey Park Towers development in South Melbourne. There he expressed his dismay at how far the commission had strayed from its original mandate, reportedly commenting at the time, “They’ve gone in for high rise. Our thinking was for homes”.
From the outset, slum residents resented being told they had to leave homes that were well loved despite their disrepair. The closely knit communities that had been built in the narrow streets and laneways of Carlton, Collingwood, North Melbourne and surrounds were not willingly sacrificed in the name of modernisation and social good, but the commission was increasingly unwilling to let residents’ concerns stand in the way of progress. Its callous approach to rehousing and compensation was the subject of an angry Collingwood council meeting in 1958, where, according to Tibbits, the mayor accused the commission of “terrorising the people of Collingwood”.
As the high rise flats sprung up around the inner city throughout the 1960s, they provoked a new tide of anger. In Trendyville, a book by Renate Howe, David Nichols and Graeme Davison that documents the struggles over inner-city development in the 1960s and ’70s, student activist and future Labor MP Pete Steedman sums up the reaction. “Fucking monster blocks went up”, he recalled, “and I think it was only when a couple of them went up that people suddenly realised, shit, what this was doing and people started to have an understanding”. 
The high point of the commission’s bureaucratic overreach was the 1966 Carlton Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) plan, a scheme devised by the architecture firm Leslie M Perrott &amp; Partners that recommended more than half the suburb be demolished and rebuilt along modernist, planned lines. Had the plan been followed through, it would have destroyed the entire Lygon Street shopping strip, constructed a six-lane freeway in place of Princes Street and demolished and redeveloped all housing between Princes and Victoria Streets.
Opposition to the CDA and other developments came from residents, church groups and activists schooled in the radical movements of the late 1960s. By 1970, a residents association had formed in every suburb where the commission engaged in extensive redevelopment, linked together by the city-wide Committee for Urban Action. The Fitzroy and Carlton chapters were particularly active, and managed to stymie plans to redevelop parts of North Fitzroy and North Carlton respectively, at times aided by union work bans. Concerted effort by the Carlton Association prevented a second attempt to impose parts of Perrott’s CDA in the early 1970s and played a major part in the eventual collapse of the commission’s slum clearance program. According to Tibbits, resident activism had become the Achilles heel of the project.
So, as much as they are valued today, the high rise towers have a chequered history. The price paid for modern living was the destruction of closely knit communities of poor and working-class people. Some would be rehoused in the towers, but others would be scattered to further-flung suburbs, separated from people they’d lived with for decades. Indigenous author Tony Birch recalled in a 2006 ABC interview that, on being rehoused to the Fitzroy estate, his mother “got running hot water, but she lost her whole family to get it”.
On the other hand, their construction was part of Victoria’s most ambitious public housing program ever. The flats, more than half of which contain at least two bedrooms, were modern and spacious. The towers stand as a reminder that governments are capable of building thousands of homes for those who need them, if the political will exists.
And in the intervening decades, communities have been built inside the towers that very much object to their demolition. Sarah, a resident of the Flemington high rise, told the Age last month, ‘“If they cared about us, they wouldn’t move us. It’s all rubbish. They want to build the houses and put higher rent for rich people. They are moving us from the city”.
The demographics of the towers have shifted over time. From an initial focus on the elderly and those displaced by the slum clearances, the flats gradually became a landing pad for migrants. For many, the high rises formed a bridge between the countries they left behind and the new life they embarked on in Melbourne. “In the high-rise you spend a lot of time in communal spaces”, 25-year-old South Sudanese migrant Awak Kongor told the Guardian in 2020. “It’s very intimate, you are forced to get to know each other. You know every crevice, every hole, every corner of those flats. You’ve just come out of war, so finding another black or African person in your building is crazy. We grew up figuring out our identities. We were all fish out of water at the same time.” In 2017, migrant communities in the Flemington and Kensington flats poured into the streets to join anti-fascist activists in a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6129">protest against notorious racist Milo Yiannopolous</a>.
Residents have complaints about the towers, it’s true. After decades of systematic neglect and a concerted campaign by the press to demonise public housing residents, as well as constant police harassment, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/11/well-see-you-after-dark-how-melbourne-police-target-african-men-in-high-rises">life is not always easy on the estates</a>. But the incontrovertible fact is that in the depths of Australia’s worst housing crisis in generations, the Victorian Labor government is moving not to improve existing homes and build thousands more, but to tear down and sell off all that remains of the city’s dwindling public housing stock. The demolition of the high rise estates will destroy the communities that reside there, and it will erase from the landscape any sense that all people are entitled to housing and that governments should be obliged to build it.

Shirley Killen

High rise history: the life and death of Melbourne’s public housing

The cost of food is soaring and so are the profits of Australia’s major supermarkets.
Like many people around the country, you’ve probably noticed that your grocery bills have been rising steeply over the past year. An average trip to the supermarket has increased in cost by around 8 percent each year since the pandemic, outpacing general inflation, and the prices of many essential foodstuffs have risen at twice that rate. 
Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ June <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/price-indexes-and-inflation/consumer-price-index-australia/latest-release">inflation report</a> show dairy products leading the price rises, with the cost of cheese, yoghurt and similar products increasing by 15.2 percent over the last year. Bread and cereals have risen by 11.6 percent. This is despite overall food inflation decreasing slightly from a peak of 9.2 percent last December.
In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Sunitha Binoy, a nurse from Melbourne’s outer south-east, described the food stress being experienced by millions of working-class Australians:
“Before, we could buy so many things ... like today, even though we paid $160 ... before we could get one trolley full of household items, but now look at the trolley. It’s half full, only.”
A <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/27/australian-supermarket-profits-rise-woolworths-coles">recent poll</a> published in the Guardian found that, like Sunitha, 72 percent of respondents are simply buying less food to cope with increased prices. But food isn’t a luxury item that you can just cut from your budget. Buying less means skipping meals and forgoing necessities. It also means food banks being overwhelmed by surging demand as greater numbers of people are unable to afford supermarket prices. 
Australia’s largest supermarket chains blame these price increases on higher energy costs and logistical expenses. But with both Coles and Woolworths posting their highest profit margins in recent memory, this story doesn’t add up. 
Coles has pushed up its gross margins from 24.7 percent pre-pandemic to 26.5 percent, while Woolworths has reported a similar increase: from 29.1 to 30.7 percent. This indicates that the two companies, which share almost two-thirds of the food retail market, are engaged in price-gouging: increasing the cost of their products above their rise in expenses. 
Their market domination allows them to push prices up without worrying much about competition from other retailers. While they rake in the profits, poor and working-class people around the country are forced to go hungry.
When pressed about the supermarkets’ profiteering, Labor’s assistant minister for competition, Andrew Leigh, told people feeling the strain to vote with their wallets and shop elsewhere. But with the country’s food supply in the grip of a duopoly, the idea that people can challenge the power of these corporate behemoths through smart shopping is ludicrous.
The federal government acts as though its hands are tied when it comes to supermarket price-gouging. But just as the national cabinet implemented energy price caps last year, it could intervene immediately to put limits on what grocery chains are allowed to charge. It could guarantee that all necessities are available at prices affordable to those on the minimum wage or Centrelink.
Price caps could also have a disinflationary effect: with just about everyone but the Reserve Bank of Australia acknowledging that corporate profits are a <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/oecd-report-shows-corporate-profits-contributed-far-more-to-inflation-in-australia-than-wages/">major driver</a> of inflation, putting price caps on groceries and forcing supermarkets to forgo some of their record profits could ease the pressure on millions of people.
For months, workers have been asked to tighten their belts and do their bit to bring inflation under control. Increasingly, this belt-tightening looks like being priced out of the necessities required for survival—housing, heating and now food, all while the companies selling these products rack up record profits. It’s well beyond time to turn the tables and force them to sacrifice something instead.

Supermarket profits soar amid cost-of-living crisis

Earlier this year, the Australian Energy Regulator released its <a href="https://www.aer.gov.au/retail-markets/guidelines-reviews/default-market-offer-prices-2023%E2%80%9324/final-decision">final determination</a> on energy prices for the 2023-24 financial year, increasing prices by 20-25 percent across the country. 
If you were to listen to what far-right commentator Andrew Bolt has to say about it, you’d think renewable energy is to blame for this new assault on working-class living standards.
In recent Sky News talk show episodes, Bolt has gone on the offensive against the Labor Party’s “green transition”, warning that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his energy minister, Chris Bowen, are forcing Australians to pay more for unreliable, intermittent energy and regular blackouts. Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce has also appeared on Bolt’s program to argue that we could deliver cheap and reliable power to the whole country if only we would give the fossil fuel industry the money and assurances it needs.
But Bolt is wrong about where these price increases are coming from.
It’s not renewable energy pushing up the price of electricity in Australia. The Australian Energy Council <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-03/renewables-make-power-prices-among-lowest-in-world/100801126">reported last year</a> that energy costs are driven down where renewables make up a greater share of energy production.
Instead, it’s fossil fuel producers and retailers that are setting sky-high prices. According to this year’s Clean Energy Council report, most energy produced in Australia continues to come from coal and gas—over 60 percent. And the industry’s growth has given these companies unprecedented power to demand an ever-greater share of profits. Disruptions associated with the war in Ukraine have also driven the price of oil and gas to new highs.
Australian gas producers, for example, have been holding the country to ransom as punishment for the modest price caps imposed by the federal government during last winter’s energy crisis. Senex, a major producer on the east coast, has refused to increase supply until it secures “workable rules” for its new $1 billion Atlas project in Queensland. 
Companies posting record profits are demanding further deregulation of the industry so that they can charge even more. Far from standing firm against this bullying, the Labor Party has dropped its proposal from late last year to tighten gas price controls.
In this context, it’s unsurprising that energy retailers feel they have the green light to push prices even higher.
In recent weeks, the cost of wholesale energy has dropped to just half the predicted price used by the Australian Energy Regulator in its calculations. Even so, retail prices remain higher.
This raises the question of why the regulator, which is supposed to keep energy companies in check and electricity prices at reasonable levels, allows retailers to get away with it. The truth is that they’re playing the same game. The regulator has argued that energy networks should be allowed to reap big profits from selling and distributing electricity, or else they’ll be discouraged from investing in energy infrastructure in the future.
The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that up to half of the price hikes could be eliminated if the government closed regulatory loopholes. But the obvious solution is to take back control of the production and distribution of power.
Bringing the energy sector under public control would guarantee electricity at a lower cost. The wealth and resources of the fossil fuel companies and the billions in government subsidies doled out annually to the industry could be used to jumpstart the wholesale restructuring of the electricity grid.
Bolt and Joyce may whinge about Labor’s supposed “green transition”, but there is no 
sign this is coming any time soon. Renewable power supplies have grown recently, doubling their contribution to energy production in 2017-22, according to the Clean Energy Council. But they are starting from a very low base and growing at a snail’s pace compared to the required rapid transition. With the Labor Party handing out approvals for new coal and gas projects across the country, the growth in renewables is likely to be overshadowed by the huge fossil fuel export projects coming online in the next decade.
If there’s one thing Andrew Bolt is right about, it’s that the transition to renewable energy will be expensive. The CSIRO estimated last year that<a href="https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2022/January/technological-innovation-will-drive-change-in-australias-energy-system"> at least $500 billion</a> would be needed to overhaul Australia’s energy, transport and industrial sectors. But it’s an expense that doesn’t have to fall on working-class people. Instead, the fossil fuel companies must be made to bear the cost of fixing the crisis they have played a central role in creating.
A recent Financial Times editorial warned that “the sheer scale of the physical infrastructure that must be revamped, demolished or replaced is almost beyond comprehension”. This is also true. In Australia, for example, the electricity supply has been built around coal and will have to be <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/fuelled-by-coal-piercing-the-mirage-of-a-sustainable-capitalist-australia/">completely restructured</a>.
None of this necessary disruption to business as usual is possible without disrupting the drive for profit that is at the heart of the problem. Without challenging capitalism, the international economic transformation needed to fix the climate crisis will not occur. 
In an age of soaring energy prices and fossil fuel profiteering, and with deadly new climate change milestones passed every week, the need for a total transformation of our energy system is urgent. Wresting control from the fossil fuel companies and energy retailers and building a publicly owned renewable energy grid would enable us to kill two birds with one stone: relieving the financial pressure on working-class people and tackling the climate crisis.

Fossil fuel profiteering is to blame for the energy crisis

Australia has some of the most miserable unemployment benefits of any developed country, and the Albanese government is refusing to increase them across the board. 
The JobSeeker payment has been declining relative to median wages for almost 30 years. The current rate of $50 per day sits well below the poverty line. The crisis in welfare has intensified as cost-of-living pressures mount for millions of Australians, both in paid work and on Centrelink. What have been recognised for decades as grossly inadequate payments are now, in the context of soaring prices, criminally low.
Welfare recipients are forced to choose between essentials: whether to buy food or medicine or pay the bills. Food banks are reporting increased demand as millions across the country regularly skip meals, priced out of <a href="blank">even the cheapest options</a> at supermarkets. In a recent survey of the rental market, Anglicare Australia found that only four rentals out of 45,000 listed nationwide were affordable for a single person on JobSeeker. For someone on Youth Allowance, there were zero—not even a room in a share house. 
Treasurer Jim Chalmers recently acknowledged that JobSeeker is “tough” to live on. NDIS Minister Bill Shorten admitted on Sky News that he couldn’t live on it. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly reminds us that he knows what it’s like to grow up poor. But does that mean the government will substantially increase the payment, as per the recommendations of its <a href="blank">own advisory committee</a>? Absolutely not. 
Chalmers reiterated that his aim is not to boost financial support for those out of work, but to “move as many people as we can off that payment”—in other words, to leave thousands of people languishing below the poverty line. In a context where financial institutions in Australia and around the world are arguing that the unemployment rate should be <a href="blank">increased</a>, not brought down, this will mean more people are forced to subsist on JobSeeker, not fewer.
When pressed about welfare, Labor ministers fall back on arguments about needing “budget repair” and not wanting to feed inflation. “We’re not able to fund every single good idea”, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said recently. But they have no issue with splashing billions of dollars on the military and tax cuts for the wealthy.
It would cost <a href="blank">$24 billion</a> over the next four years to increase JobSeeker payments to 90 percent of the aged pension, according to researchers from the Australian National University: just a 4 percent increase in total spending on welfare cash payments. This is the bare minimum recommended by the government’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. A more comprehensive 10-year plan is estimated to cost $75 billion. 
That is a small fraction of the more than $254 billion cost of the Stage 3 tax cuts and the $368 billion dedicated to building nuclear submarines. In addition to these headline expenditures, there are the everyday handouts to business and the wealthy: subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and tax concessions on investment properties, to name a few.
It’s not that there isn’t enough money to raise JobSeeker, launch a massive public housing build, inject funding into the country’s decrepit services or any number of other desperately needed social investments. It’s a question of political will, and the Labor Party is more interested in helping the rich get richer and gearing up the country for war than it is in looking after the most vulnerable.
During the pandemic, JobSeeker payments were doubled overnight. This lifted thousands out of poverty and allowed people to pay their bills, buy fresh food and even spend a little money on things they enjoy. This episode demonstrated that a huge, life-changing increase to welfare payments is entirely possible and could be implemented tomorrow. 
But this measure was quickly scrapped, and the situation today is even more dire than it was pre-pandemic.
Recent pre-budget leaks to the media indicate that the government intends to raise JobSeeker for those over the age of 55—possibly in response to widespread outrage at what seemed to be its blanket refusal to raise the rate. While 220,000 welfare recipients will receive some much-needed relief, another 680,000 will get nothing at all. Labor is trying to appear as though it cares about the most disadvantaged, but basically is just wiping its hands of the problem.
Australia is swimming with money: corporations are making super-profits, the rich are getting tax breaks, and the military budget is rising. It’s workers and the poor who are currently suffering, a suffering which is set to get significantly worse under the Labor government.

Welfare recipients to remain in poverty under Labor

Last week’s conclusion of the Royal Commission into the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme">Robodebt scheme</a> has once again brought national attention to the program that, from 2015 to 2019, saw nearly half a million welfare recipients hounded over unlawful fake debts concocted using faulty calculations.
Over 46 days, the Commission heard from a parade of some of the country’s most repulsive politicians, bureaucrats and spin doctors as they denied, feigned ignorance and outright lied about their role in the most deliberate and cold-blooded persecution of the poor and destitute in recent Australian history.
Centrelink’s Robodebt scheme was cooked up by Liberal Party ministers and high level bureaucrats from the Department of Human Services (DHS) and Department of Social Services in 2014. In an effort to bulk up the 2015 budget, these vultures turned to some of the most vulnerable Australians for some easy revenue raising, proposing a concerted campaign against alleged welfare fraud. The program’s architects promised a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210209080011/https:/archive.budget.gov.au/2015-16/glossy/Tax-and-Benefits.pdf">return of $1.5 billion </a> from the scheme.
In order to raise this improbable sum, government bureaucrats created an automated program that compared the fortnightly income reporting that Centrelink recipients are required to provide with Australian Tax Office yearly income data. The program looked for discrepancies between these two figures and calculated debts that ranged anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. The <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/shameful-robodebt-chapter-ends-with-massive-settlement/news-story/9cc3ac6edc0883646726e2bcaf6e99ee">estimated 443,000</a> Centrelink recipients identified by this process as having been paid more than they were entitled to were then subjected to a campaign of harassment via letters, emails and automated calls. 
All human oversight was removed from the process of debt collection and replaced by an algorithm. And it quickly had the desired effect. Before the program’s launch, Centrelink issued roughly 20,000 debt notices per year. Between July 2016 and October 2018, DHS spokesman Michael Keenan reported that his department had sent out a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/2030-people-have-died-after-receiving-centrelink-robodebt-notice/10821272">staggering 900,000</a> of these notices.
The human toll of the Robodebt scheme is difficult to convey. At least two people committed suicide after being relentlessly pursued over debts they had no ability to pay. Many thousands more were subjected to intense and traumatic stress and panic. Sandra Bevans, a palliative care worker and single mother who testified at the Royal Commission, described driving home from work with the debt looming large in her mind and contemplating crashing her car into a tree “just to make it all stop”. 
Those who tried to challenge their debts found themselves repeatedly brushed off by dismissive and unsympathetic bureaucrats. It was only as courageous victims came forward publicly that people began to realise they were caught up in a fraudulent scheme alongside hundreds of thousands of others. 
The Royal Commission has shone a light on the deep hatred for poor and oppressed people that permeates not just the Liberal Party but the upper-echelons of government bureaucracies. One of the chief villains to emerge from the hearings was Kathryn Campbell, the former secretary of DHS. Over the course of the hearings, she admitted she knew from the start the scheme was illegal and would lead to the over-calculation of debt on a mass scale (unemployment benefits are calculated, by law, based on the recipient’s income in a particular fortnight, rather than their average income over an entire year). Despite this, she defended the scheme publicly for the whole period of its operation. 
The racket was also supported by a whole apparatus of advisors and spin doctors that worked overtime to prop up the scheme, even as it faced increasing public scrutiny from 2017 onwards. Liberal Party ministers consistently defended Robodebt in the press. Minister for Human Services Alan Tudge appeared on A Current Affair in late 2016 to warn victims "we'll find you, we'll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison”.
Tudge’s media advisor Rachelle Williams admitted to leaning on “the more friendly media, the right-wing media” to smear victims of the scheme that went public, going so far as to release their private information to the press. This was in aid of achieving a chilling effect on further victims speaking out.
Aside from exposing the callousness and deep-seated disdain for the vulnerable shared by those at the top of society, the Robodebt affair also reflects something more fundamental about the punitive logic of welfare under capitalism. The whole system—the below poverty line level payments, the punishing “mutual obligations”, the bureaucratic stonewalling—is designed to make receiving welfare so stressful and so dehumanising that people have little choice but to find whatever paid work will accept them. 
The scheme is over, and the Royal Commission’s final report, due in June this year, will provide something of an epilogue to the whole affair. But with the Albanese government’s recent introduction of a points-based welfare scheme, and their ongoing commitment to keep payments at current rock-bottom levels, it’s clear the structures that keep welfare recipients in desperate poverty remain firmly in place.

A war on the poor: Royal Commission exposes Robodebt disgrace

In the late 1960s, cryptic notes began to appear on poles and noticeboards around Chicago, directing women who were pregnant and in trouble to “call Jane”. The number provided connected them to the Jane Collective (officially the Abortion Counselling Service of Women’s Liberation), an underground network of activists providing illegal abortions in the years before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision. This collective is the subject of The Janes, a new HBO documentary directed by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin.
Chicago in the late 1960s, like much of the world, was a hotbed of protest and activism. The civil rights movement, marches against the Vietnam War and a host of other connected struggles radicalised a generation. Police crackdowns, most famously at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, imbued activists with a distrust of the state and its authorities. Out of this upsurge emerged the Jane Collective.
Pildes and Lessin interviewed more than a dozen women who were connected to the collective, as either members or clients. The women of Jane came from a variety of backgrounds—some were activists, some were college students and others women who had at one stage needed abortions themselves. Many came straight from the civil rights and anti-war movements, inspired by the possibilities opened up by these struggles. Some were frustrated with the sexist attitudes and machismo that coloured sections of the movement. All were influenced in one way or another by the political climate of the time, inspired to organise for themselves a service that the state had decisively denied them. 
These links between the broader radical upsurge and the work of the Jane Collective are a point of emphasis throughout the film. It’s notable that the first surgeon the women established a relationship with was himself a leading figure in the civil rights movement—a Mississippi doctor named T.R.M. Howard, who was forced to flee his home state after being put on a Ku Klux Klan death list for speaking out against the murder of Emmett Till. The widespread radicalisation in Chicago gave the Jane Collective not just the political inspiration but the connections they needed to operate a service that made them criminals in the eyes of the law.
The Jane Collective wasn’t the only underground abortion service. Many women needing abortions in Chicago were forced to turn to the local Mafia. The connections with the mob entrenched a sense that abortion was something illicit, seedy and shameful. And with raking in extortionate fees their main objective, the Mafia’s abortionists treated their patients like cattle. Botched mob abortions would frequently leave women in life-threatening situations, regularly filling the city’s septic abortion wards.
The collective’s approach—informed by a desire to provide a quality and compassionate service—was everything the mob’s was not. The women of Jane took care to talk their patients through the procedure, breaking the silence around women’s health that had been deliberately cultivated by a deeply sexist society. They kept in touch for several weeks afterwards, and charged very little, often nothing at all. 
The humanity and solidarity imbued in the collective on the one hand, and the appalling state of women’s health care on the other meant that, for many clients, getting an abortion through Jane was, in the words of one woman, “the best medical experience I’ve ever had”. It was a profound moment for many women who had spent their lives being dismissed by the medical establishment, and were now offered a glimpse of another kind of society. It inspired some to join the network themselves.
There are real limits to organisational strategies like those pursued by the Jane Collective. As inspiring and important as their work was, small networks that operate outside the law to provide services denied by the state cannot pose a serious challenge to the system. It was ultimately the mass involvement of people in protests and strikes that forced real (if temporary) changes to the conditions of women in the US. And it will take a similarly broad and disruptive movement to push against this latest attack from the right.
But The Janes still holds useful lessons for socialists today. It reaffirms the argument often made by activists organising around abortion—that criminalisation doesn’t stop women having abortions; it just makes them less safe. It also demonstrates, as socialists have always argued, that abortion is a class question. Following the 1970 decision to legalise abortion in New York, the collective lost many of its middle- and upper-class clients, who could afford the trip interstate; meanwhile, the Janes continued to serve greater numbers of poor and working-class women of colour. 
In interviews, Pildes and Lessin often emphasise that they didn’t produce the film as an educational tool or a way to convince the mass of people that abortion is something worth defending. They rightly argue that this is not the task at hand. Public opinion in the US is already in favour of protecting abortion—it’s a vocal section of the right that is behind this attack.
“We have the majority”, said Pildes in an interview with Variety. “We just have to be reminded that we have to express that, we have to take to the streets, we have to do what we can to be accounted for as the 70 percent and the majority.”
The Janes is rooted firmly in the late 1960s and early 1970s, using a wealth of archival footage to build a portrait of Chicago’s radical heyday. But released just weeks before a historic decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade was issued by the Supreme Court, it can’t help but be coloured with a sense of urgency. 
“It was during that summer that I learned that sometimes you have to stand up to illegitimate authority. And sometimes there are unjust laws that need to be challenged”, says founding member Heather Booth. It’s a lesson we should take heed of today.

‘Pregnant? Need help? Call Jane’

We’re taught in school that the police perform a just and noble service—brave officers put their bodies on the line to prevent crime, protect us from violence and uphold our rights. But the real story of modern policing is different.
Before the rise of capitalism—and even throughout some of its early development—the police as an organised force did not exist. Communities meted out their own justice through a hodgepodge of night watches, small groups of volunteers or social practices like the “hue and cry” (in which small groups of citizens came together temporarily to apprehend an accused criminal). There existed no paid, permanent force that was integrated into and controlled by the state.
But by the early nineteenth century, societies across Europe and North America were undergoing profound changes. Urban centres were receiving an influx of wage workers as capitalist enterprises demanded ever larger pools of labour. Often these workers were peasants recently cleared from their lands or, in some parts of North America, newly freed slaves.
This population growth presented challenges as well as opportunities for the capitalist class. On the one hand, they had a plentiful supply of labour to be exploited in their factories. But on the other, they faced a population that was more concentrated than before, and which had a vibrant political life of its own. And these new workers were not used to accepting the discipline expected of waged labourers. They frequently resisted attempts by the capitalist class to build and fortify a social order characterised by extreme inequality and exploitation.
The earliest fully funded state police force in Britain, the Thames River Police, emerged in 1800 to enforce capitalist property relations on a working class that was largely unwilling to submit. Workers on the London docks would flagrantly disregard their employers’ “right” to the cargo they unloaded, pocketing bags of sugar, tea and whatever else happened to be on the ships. To the workers, it was only logical that they should be allowed to take some of the goods they spent all day hauling around. It wasn’t the bosses who did all the heavy lifting—why should they reap all the rewards?
But to the bosses, this was an offence of the highest order. Something had to be done to enshrine their exclusive right to property. So the Thames police would patrol the docks, patting down workers and confiscating any goods they tried to take home to their families. The unjust social relations of capitalism were not readily accepted by the working class, so laws needed to be drawn up to criminalise violations of the bosses’ sacred rights. And to enforce these laws, a permanent police force was required.
It wasn’t just small acts of insubordination, like taking a packet of sugar here and there, that the police were needed to stop. Over the course of the nineteenth century, workers increasingly engaged in riots, protests and strikes to assert their rights. These acts of resistance, particularly strikes, posed a direct and immediate threat to the profits of the capitalist class and thus to their whole social order. To put down this rowdy and rebellious working class, a reliable and fully funded force was needed that could not just inflict lethal violence as the army did, but which could perform the vital functions of crowd control and strikebreaking.
Unlike earlier night watches or volunteer groups, police were able to operate at all hours of the day, every day of the week. This allowed them to maintain a constant presence in working-class neighbourhoods, enforcing the rule of capital by force and identifying potential sources of rebellion before they erupted. They could penetrate into every part of society, acting as the eyes and ears of the bosses.
Police continue to play the role of keeping acts of resistance within acceptable limits. They sow fear and distrust through a million small acts of intimidation as well as outright violence. Police show up at every protest, strike and occupation, intimidating and, if necessary, violently repressing those who fight back. They have a presence at every picket line, and show up at protests to ensure that climate criminals, politicians and the wealthy can continue their activities without disruption. From Sudan to Myanmar, police have been on the front lines defending capitalism from resistance and revolution. Wherever struggle breaks out, you can be certain that the cops will be there, on the wrong side.
The cops also play a role in reinforcing structural disadvantage, with much of their activity targeted at marginalised groups. In the US, that means singling out Black people for traffic stops or petty criminal activity, and in Australia, Indigenous people for crimes of poverty like drinking in public or unpaid fines.
Police, then, serve the interests of capital. They protect private property and those who own it, whether that’s from petty theft or from mass struggle that threaten the bosses’ accumulation of profit. They do not protect the marginalised or the oppressed, but are a key enforcer of that marginalisation and oppression. Whether an individual cop is “good” or “bad” matters little—the institution exists to perform a social function, which is to maintain the status quo.
So when the police commit acts of violence and brutality, it’s no aberration or deviation from what is otherwise good and necessary work. When police brutalise protesters, break strikes, harass people sleeping on the streets or kill unarmed civilians, they’re doing what they’re meant to do. Until the whole capitalist system is uprooted, the cops will continue to be the enemies of anyone committed to equality and liberation.

The police serve the system

Last week, a 22 year old climate activist was sentenced to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/12-month-jail-sentence-for-newcastle-coal-protester/100642414">12 months’ jail time</a> for participating in the disruption of Australia’s busiest coal export chain. The harsh sentence illustrates the stark difference between the justice system’s treatment of activists putting their bodies on the line to avert climate catastrophe, and of the rich and powerful people whose environmental crimes are rapidly destroying our planet.
On 10 November Eric Serge Herbert, a member of the direct action group <a href="https://www.blockadeaustralia.com/">Blockade Australia</a>, climbed onto a train travelling along the Hunter line in New South Wales and glued his hand to the carriage. This simple act of peaceful civil-disobedience immobilised the train for two hours and delayed a further 15 coal trains destined for the Port of Newcastle. Blockade Australia chose the port—one of the biggest coal export ports in the world—as the site of a series of actions coinciding with the COP26 conference in Glasgow. The Hunter rail line that Herbert disrupted is estimated to have transported 150 million tonnes of coal to the port in 2020 alone, a cargo worth close to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/nov/17/blockade-australia-anti-coal-activists-vow-more-disruption-despite-warnings-of-25-year-jail-sentences">$19 billion</a>.
The NSW state government, panicking at the prospect of further disruption to the flow of profits, quickly moved to defend the coal companies against Herbert and his group. NSW Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean <a href="https://7news.com.au/news/crime/anti-coal-activists-disrupt-newcastle-port-c-4586220">demanded police “throw the book”</a> at the protestors, and the police duly set up a special unit—<a href="https://www.police.nsw.gov.au/news/news_article?sq_content_src=%2BdXJsPWh0dHBzJTNBJTJGJTJGZWJpenByZC5wb2xpY2UubnN3Lmdvdi5hdSUyRm1lZGlhJTJGOTg1MDEuaHRtbCZhbGw9MQ%3D%3D">“Strike Force Tuohy”</a>—specifically to target Blockade Australia. NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller threatened to charge the group under an arcane law pertaining to the obstruction of railways—a law carrying a maximum sentence of 25 years in jail.
Herbert and many of his fellow activists were arrested by the strike force. He was subsequently charged with impeding the operation of mining equipment and obstructing a railway locomotive. His crime—attempting to disrupt an industry that is hurtling us towards global climate catastrophe—saw him given a one year prison sentence, bringing into stark relief the fact that under capitalism, there’s one law for ordinary people, and another for big business and the rich.
Earlier this year, Canadian oil giant Enbridge made headlines when it was revealed that it had given <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/05/line-3-pipeline-enbridge-paid-police-arrest-protesters">US$2.4 million dollars</a> to the local police department in the US state of Minnesota in exchange for its use as a private security force. Enbridge funded riot gear, officer training, wages and overtime so that local officers could surveil and crack down on activists blocking construction of the company’s Line 3 oil pipeline—which cuts through pristine wetlands and which, by increasing the availability of heavily polluting tar sands oil on global markets, <a href="http://priceofoil.org/2020/01/29/line-3-climate-impact/">is predicted to generate</a> as much greenhouse gas emissions as 50 coal power stations.
Ordinarily, fossil fuel companies don’t actually have to buy police protection in this way, for the simple reason that the entire capitalist justice system—from the politicians who make the laws, to judges, right down to the lowest ranking police officers—is set up to serve them. And this “service” goes well beyond just cracking down on activists. Particularly in countries like Australia, where fossil fuel extraction is one of the most important and lucrative sectors of the national economy, it extends to a level of immunity from the normal standards of behaviour that apply to the rest of us.
This is precisely what played out last year, when mining giant Rio Tinto blew up 46,000 years of Indigenous history in a just a few seconds. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juukan_Gorge">The Juukan Gorge sacred site</a> in the Pilbara region of Western Australia was extinguished by a corporation worth $81 billion dollars so its owners and shareholders could squeeze a little more profit out of an area already ravaged by an industry that has poisoned its waterways and devastated its ecosystems.
Rio Tinto’s CEO at the time, Jean-Sébastien Jacques, was forced to resign in disgrace, as were two other top executives. The three were made to forgo their end of year bonuses—$5 million for Jacques and $1 million each for the executives. But that’s where the punishment ended. Jacques isn’t languishing in prison, stripped of his power and status. And while he may have lost his top position at Rio Tinto, he’s certainly not queuing up at Centrelink, struggling to pay rent and forced into humiliating meetings with job providers.
No, Jacques is enjoying a break from the hustle and bustle of CEO life. He’s splitting his time between his luxury apartment in Walsh Bay, Sydney, and his “charming Pittwater-facing weekender” in Avalon Beach, worth $3.5 million. He’s started two new <a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/margin-call/ex-rio-tinto-boss-jeansebastien-jacques-still-calls-australia-home/news-story/130566fcff0aa187ff93111f05ba5419">“private corporate vehicles”</a>—no doubt financed by his eye-watering $13 million Rio Tinto payout. In other words, he’s faced no real consequences at all for presiding over the destruction of a globally recognised Indigenous heritage site, a crime akin to someone blowing-up a section of the Louvre in Paris or the Colosseum in Rome.
Compare Jacques’s treatment with Eric Serge Herbert’s punishment for briefly stopping a coal train. Compare it with the fate of activists in the US who disrupted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, some of whom were sentenced to 8 years’ jail. Compare it to the 227 environmental activists who were murdered in 2020, the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/09/13/1036575970/killing-land-climate-environmental-activist-global-witness">deadliest year on record</a> for those who put their lives on the line to protect our planet.
At the time of writing, Herbert is currently out on bail and will appeal his sentence. He may not end up serving his full 12 months in jail. But his sentence is a clear indication of the lengths the state is willing to go to protect the profits of the fossil fuel industry, and the kind of reception climate activists can expect as the need for protest and direct action becomes ever more urgent. Across the world, from <a href="https://www.bigissue.com/news/activism/how-priti-patels-new-policing-bill-threatens-your-right-to-protest/">the UK</a> to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/us/politics/republican-anti-protest-laws.html">the US</a>, states are stepping up their capacity to harass and silence activists in anticipation of large scale unrest.
When faced with the barbarity of capitalism, Berkeley student activist Mario Savio in 1964 urged, “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus—and you’ve got to make it stop”. We need to build a climate movement strong enough to bring the drills, the trains and the machines to a screeching halt, and we need to challenge not just the fossil fuel industry but the whole network of governments and courts and companies that will fight us every step of the way.

Climate activist’s jailing shows it’s one law for fossil fuel bosses, and another for us

Victoria is on a rapid path to full reopening, even as rising case numbers continue to break records. While this is new for many, the state’s students and teachers have been on the front lines of this reckless push for weeks now. And if the situation in schools is anything to go by, we could be in for a dangerous summer.
My experience of working in a Melbourne school, combined with the testimony of many teachers and students and the guidelines provided by the state government itself, paints a picture of safety precautions being cast aside for the sake of returning to “normal”. Thousands of teachers, students and their families are being put at risk just so that the economy can get back to business as usual.
Mary*, a teacher at a public secondary school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, told Red Flag, “I’m very confused as a teacher because [initially] there was a careful and staged approach to the return to school, where you had certain levels coming in on certain days and so forth. But the plan has gone down the gurgler now. Because they’re opening up earlier, they’re opening up schools without giving warnings to teachers and students, who are directly impacted by this.”
In the lead-up to the reopening, much was made of the state government’s purchase of 51,000 air purifiers. But so far, only around 2,000 have actually found their way into schools, meaning that most teachers are forced to rely on open windows. As the weather heats up, students and staff face the possibility of studying in blistering temperatures, high winds and bushfire smoke.
When pressed about the slow rollout of air purifiers, Education Minister James Merlino said that it will take “weeks and months” to equip schools fully. Yet the return to in-person teaching has been fast-tracked, with the Education Department declaring that every student will sit their exams next month, even if they’re a primary close contact of a positive case.
The laissez faire approach to COVID-19 safety also extends to the hiring of staff. As a casual exam supervisor at a school in Melbourne’s east, at no point was I asked whether I’d been vaccinated or recently tested before working at the General Achievement Test on 5 October. For all they knew, I was spreading COVID-19 to unvaccinated students.
On top of this oversight, there’s no social distancing in hallways, the cleaning procedures are lax, and many of the protocols followed last year have been abandoned. The atmosphere of caution that characterised the 2020 exams (at which I also worked) has all but disappeared.
This is not surprising. In fact, it’s wholly in line with the government’s relentless campaign to downplay the seriousness of the current situation. For weeks, it’s encouraged a sense of complacency to soften up the population for a reopening that risks even higher numbers of cases, more deaths and further pressure on the health system.
Students I’ve spoken to have reported similar experiences to mine as they go back to the classroom. Holly, a year 12 student at an inner-city public school, told me that safety measures were “much more stringent last year”, but that now things are no different to what they were pre-pandemic. There’s been no sign of the promised air purifiers, and she dreads having to study with open windows in the summer heat.
Mary’s experience is the same. “We’re all at risk now”, she says. “There are 25 people in each classroom at a minimum, so how can we socially distance? How can I socially distance myself when there are 25 students breathing on me? There’s talk of having open-air classrooms. How’s that going to work? Are they going to set them up on the oval? And charge the laptops there?” 
Another area of concern is the announcement of new contact tracing and isolation procedures for when there is a positive case. From now, vaccinated close contacts will have to isolate for only seven days instead of the full fourteen, and exemptions will be given so that they can still sit their exams at school.
The effects of this new and dangerous contact tracing strategy have already been felt, and fought, at schools across Melbourne. My former high school is an example. Two weeks ago, a positive case attended class for two days—on a Tuesday and Wednesday. The school was notified early on Saturday, but was permitted to inform the broader school community only on Sunday evening, leaving more than 24 hours for possible close contacts unknowingly to transmit the virus.
Throughout this process, the school was never officially closed—students and staff were simply told they couldn’t be on site. This suggests that the official list of school closures understates the degree to which the virus is spreading in schools.
At my school, the Health Department’s primary concern once the school was shut down seemed to be rushing students and teachers back onto campus as quickly as possible, regardless of the effect on public health. This meant issuing “study exemption” certificates to those deemed “moderate close contacts”. A moderate close contact could have sat one seat removed from a positive case for an hour-long lesson in a poorly ventilated room and then be allowed to return to class within days.
It also meant announcing on Wednesday (three days after informing the community about the positive case) that classes were to go back in person the following day, with those moderate close contacts included.
In response, teachers called an emergency sub-branch union meeting for later that day, at which the 70 members in attendance voted unanimously to support a motion instructing their health and safety representative to issue a cease-work. Their motion called on school leadership to “take the initiative to protect staff and students from contact with the close contacts of a positive case by keeping the school closed and teaching remotely”.
Following a WorkSafe inspection, the cease-work was rejected, but the process bought teachers valuable time. The school returned the following Monday rather than Thursday, and under pressure from the community, close contacts were not brought back on site. This is a big win—learning remained remote for an extra four days, giving more space for testing, cleaning and contact tracing.
Perhaps more importantly, the situation alerted the union and then the Education Department to the new “study exemption” procedure, and they succeeded in pressuring the Health Department to drop it. This challenge therefore resulted in the defeat of a dangerous policy in all schools across the state.
From failing to list school closures to publicising transmission days after the fact, the Health Department has created a climate of confusion and fear. The changes to contact tracing are opening dangerous gaps that put the health of whole school communities at risk and leave teachers in the dark. “The silence stuff is really problematic. Basic human solidarity surely means we tell each other basic stuff about our safety”, one teacher and union activist at the school told me.
Mary concurs. “This is putting our students at risk. And staff at risk”, she says. “For older people like me, there’s still a real chance that we’ll get COVID—even if, I hope, we don’t die from it. We can still get really sick. Even people who are double vaccinated can end up in hospital.”
As cases continue to surge, the risk of contracting the virus is higher than it’s ever been in Victoria. Vaccination rates among under-18s lag well behind the general population, which makes the fight against negligent contact tracing and “study exemptions” at schools even more important. This terrifies teachers like Mary. “Kids can get sick and die. If I was a parent and my child who was under 12 hadn’t been vaccinated, there’s no way I’d feel safe about them going to school” she says. “Teachers have done an amazing job”, she continues, “We’ve worked our butts off to create the best environment in online classes. It’s been phenomenal. And it’s about time that we recognised just how much pressure and how much hard work teaching involves. Much like nursing, teaching is seen as ‘women’s work’ and degraded.”
Teachers aren’t alone in this struggle. Holly and a group of other Victorian high school students have recently launched the <a href="https://www.change.org/p/don-t-let-schools-be-superspreaders?utm_source=share_petition&amp;utm_medium=custom_url&amp;recruited_by_id=c787fc70-308e-11ec-8319-81c652d42580">Don’t Let Schools Be Superspreaders</a> petition to demand adequate ventilation, proper contact tracing and other safety measures. They also argue that online learning options should be maintained.
The coming weeks will present new challenges, particularly as tens of thousands of students are packed into classrooms and assembly halls for their VCE exams. As the Victorian government and their friends in the business community continue to sell us the lie that opening up is safe, we need to be fighting for basic safety measures in schools and workplaces everywhere.
 
*Name changed

The front line of Victoria’s risky school reopening

Last Sunday’s German election was a big one. Angela Merkel’s sixteen-year chancellorship has come to an end, and Germans across the country went to the polls to decide which uninspiring member of an establishment party would replace her. But for Berliners, another important vote was cast that day: a referendum on whether to expropriate the property of the city’s biggest landlords and turn it into public housing. A stunning 56.4 percent—1,034,709 people—voted in favour.
The referendum targeted the corporate landlords that have a monopoly over a large portion of Berlin’s rental market. It called for any company with more than 3,000 units to have their excess properties turned over to public ownership. It’s estimated that, if actioned, this initiative could lead to the expropriation of up to 240,000 apartments, or 11 percent of housing in the city.
This result is a huge victory for the grassroots campaign that’s fought for years to challenge the stranglehold of gigantic corporations over Berlin’s housing. In a city where more than 80 percent of residents are renters, housing is one of the places where class inequality is most sharply manifested. Over the last decade, rent has doubled while wages have barely risen. Gentrification has seen working-class and migrant communities pushed out of their neighborhoods. And the city’s growing population, combined with a lack of investment in new housing projects, means that finding housing is a nightmare for working-class people. 
This has made big landlords incredibly wealthy and powerful. Those that have benefited most are corporations like Deutsche Wohnen, which buys up huge swathes of housing and charges rents well above average while only investing 1 percent of its profits in building new stock. The company uses the rest of its profits to pay enormous dividends to shareholders and to add to its already bloated portfolio, estimated to be around 100,000 apartments. To add insult to injury, many of the apartments being snapped up by private companies today were once public housing, sold-off by governments in the early 2000s.
Last year, a rent cap provided much-needed relief to renters, but did little to change the long-term picture. Introduced in February, the cap froze rents for five years in nearly all of the city’s apartments, but it was overturned in April this year after being deemed unconstitutional. Almost immediately, rents rocketed up by hundreds of Euros, and many renters were forced to pay back the savings they’d accrued while the cap was in place. 
The growing frustration with Berlin’s hellish housing situation provided solid ground for the <a href="https://www.dwenteignen.de/">Deutsche Wohnen &amp; Co Enteignen</a> (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen &amp; Co) campaign to gain a hearing among the city’s disaffected renters. On the ground campaigning was crucial to building broad support for the initiative. DW Enteignen organised street demonstrations, bike protests, boat convoys and mass postering. They brought leaflets and petitions to busy streets and football games, connecting with ordinary Berliners and arguing that they should support the referendum. And the campaign clearly struck a chord: A massive 343,000 residents signed onto the campaign petition, smashing the initial target of 175,000 signatures required to translate a petition into a city-wide referendum. 
Now the initial support has translated into a resounding vote in favour of expropriation. Whether the vote will be enacted, however, is another matter. Already, landlords’ associations have kicked up a fuss about the proposal being unconstitutional, despite the fact that <a href="https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/politics/the-german-basic-law-article-14-property-and-the-right-of-inheritance-shall-be">Article 14 of Germany’s Basic Law</a> explicitly allows for the socialisation of property for the public good.
But while resistance from corporate landlords was inevitable, the biggest hurdle may lie in the political sphere. The referendum isn’t legally binding and its enactment depends on the local government in Berlin. Out of the three party coalition that currently governs in the city—comprising the Social Democratic Party (SPD—equivalent to Australia’s Labor Party), the Greens, and the Left party—only the Left have committed to respecting the results. The Greens have been equivocal at best, and the SPD have been vocal opponents. At a DW Einteignen forum, Berlin’s newly-elected SPD mayor Fransizka Giffey made her position clear. She doesn’t want, she said, “a city that sends the signal: This is where expropriation is taking place.”
“You are horrified”, Karl Marx wrote in the <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm">Communist Manifesto</a>, “at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.”
Given the situation in Berlin and many other cities around the world, who can say these words ring any less true today than they would have in 1847? A big majority of Berliners have voted “to do away with” the private property of major landlords, and the bourgeoisie is in a panic. They fear their engorged property portfolios might be taken away from them, and they’re working furiously alongside their loyal political servants to find a way to disregard the democratic will. Meanwhile, a large portion of Berliners can hardly afford to pay their rent, let alone dream of one day having secure housing.
Some in the political establishment argued that DW Enteignen’s demand for full expropriation was too radical and would alienate potential supporters. This weekend’s vote can put that argument to bed. In a world wracked by crisis, where the rich are getting richer and working-class people are being priced out of their own communities, only radical solutions will suffice. 
This referendum shows that ordinary people can see there’s something deeply wrong with a system that allows even basic necessities to be controlled and exploited by the rich. It shows that only a serious on the ground campaign can win big reforms. Hopefully the German example inspires activists across the world to challenge the hegemony of corporate landlords. But it also shows that reforms alone aren’t enough. Even though a majority of Berliners have voted in favour, and even though the referendum is clear that expropriation will not proceed without compensation for the housing companies, there is a strong likelihood that the promised socialisation will not happen. 
As socialists, we need to fight for reforms today. But we also need to fight for a world where workers can take back everything that we have produced, where not just housing but all private property is returned to us—a world where expropriation is carried out from below and without compensation. That’s a world worth living in.

High rise history: the life and death of Melbourne’s public housing

Supermarket profits soar amid cost-of-living crisis

Fossil fuel profiteering is to blame for the energy crisis

Welfare recipients to remain in poverty under Labor

A war on the poor: Royal Commission exposes Robodebt disgrace

‘Pregnant? Need help? Call Jane’

The police serve the system

Climate activist’s jailing shows it’s one law for fossil fuel bosses, and another for us

The front line of Victoria’s risky school reopening

How Berliners won a vote to expropriate big landlords

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