Days after winning office, Foreign Minister Penny Wong pledged to the Pacific Islands Forum that the Labor government would expand the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme (PALM). In January, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese backed the Papua New Guinea government’s ambition to have 8,000 workers participate.
The scheme allows Australian bosses in agriculture, meat processing, fisheries, hospitality and aged care to recruit workers from nine Pacific countries and Timor-Leste for seasonal work or long-term engagements up to four years. Workers are recruited in their home countries, with employers covering their relocation costs. These costs, as well as employer-provided accommodation, transport and other living expenses, are then paid off by workers through payroll deductions. The scheme is promoted as helping 35,000 participants send money back home while also benefiting the Australian economy.
But scandals in recent years have exposed the cruel reality of the scheme—even the conservative National party Senator Matt Canavan described it as a form of indentured labour.
The scheme ties workers to the employer who sponsors them. Their ability to remain in the country depends on their ongoing employment in that workplace, giving bosses enormous power to compel them to accept degrading conditions.
In early 2022, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a number of workers had their visas cancelled by the Department of Home Affairs after they left Regional Workforce Management, a supplier of Pacific labour to employers in agriculture and the meat industry. Workers had complained that they were denied medical treatment, were forced into unsafe workplaces and accommodation, and that employer deductions left some with pay rates as little as $9 an hour. In a 2016 ABC News investigation, one Tongan worker farm worker said he made just $9.96 in a week.
There have been many complaints of compromised workplace safety. In one instance, an abattoir worker lost an eye, according to a report from the Australian Meat Industry Employees union. In November 2021, the Guardian reported that 30 workers engaged through Pacific labour schemes had died in the last decade.
The Labor government recently announced that PALM workers on one- to four-year placements will be able to bring their families with them. While this offers some comfort to workers, it will be organised through the same restrictive mechanisms of the labour scheme. Family relocation will be at the discretion of the employer, their ability to remain in the country will depend on the worker’s continued employment, and workers will be responsible for their family’s relocation and living expenses. This includes private health insurance because their families will not be able to access Medicare. One Fijian couple employed under the scheme were left with $6,000 in medical bills after they had a child. The rising cost of living and the housing crisis will make it practically impossible for large families to move here.
The extension of the scheme has been marketed as a contribution to easing current labour shortages, particularly in agriculture. But it does so by providing Australian businesses with a pool of cheap and highly exploited labour.
It also helps put the Australian government on a better footing in its regional imperial competition with China. The Morrison government was criticised by foreign policy commentators for neglecting relationships with Pacific governments. Since coming to office, Labor has made efforts to rebuild them. Pacific governments support the scheme and have lobbied for its extension. They get to present themselves as having secured a path to employment that can offer their poor constituencies some hope for a better life.
The exploitative and restrictive nature of the PALM scheme is no accident or oversight, but the entire point of it. The more workers are worried that being sacked means uprooting their families and not being able to support family back home, the easier it will be for bosses to force them to work longer and harder for less pay. Fear of reprisals can also discourage workers from unionising to challenge these conditions.
In industries (like fruit-picking) that are particularly reliant on this form of labour, the wages and conditions of all workers in the industry can be driven down if unions are weak. Standards set in these industries can have knock-on effects to similar sections of the economy.
Expanding the current Pacific labour scheme will allow bosses to reap larger profits, while exposing more workers to dangerous conditions and a precarious existence.

Vinil Kumar

Who benefits from Australia’s Pacific labour scheme?

Fiji’s prime minister, and 2006 coup leader, Frank Bainimarama has been defeated in the country’s 2022 election but has so far refused to concede.
Former PM Sitiveni Rabuka, leader of the 1987 coups, has secured an electoral majority through a coalition of Fiji’s post-independence political establishment. While Bainimarama’s loss rightfully led to celebrations in Suva, Rabuka’s victory is nothing to celebrate for Fiji’s workers, poor and the historically oppressed Indian population. This election represented Fiji’s political elite, old and new, competing to implement their rival visions for Fijian capitalism.
The impact of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions and high inflation damaged Bainimarama’s already waning popularity. According to the World Bank, 20 percent of the urban and 41 percent of the rural population lived in poverty in 2020. Tourism, responsible for a third of Fiji’s GDP and a quarter of all employment, was brough to a standstill by COVID-19. The economy contracted by 15 percent. Bainimarama’s initial border closures made him the public face of Fiji’s economic woes. The country has now suffered more than 700 deaths in a population of less than one million. 
Bainimarama also arrested political rivals and persecuted journalists and unionists. The old establishment used his moves against Fiji’s hereditary chiefs to paint him as hostile to all indigenous Fijians.
While Bainimarama’s FijiFirst party still topped the 2022 polls, its vote fell to 42.5 percent, denying him the majority he won in 2014 and held onto in 2018. 
FijiFirst tied with a coalition of Rabuka’s People’s Alliance and the National Federation Party. The deadlock ended when Rabuka secured support from SODELPA, the descendants of Fiji’s post-independence ruling party, from which he split after losing the party leadership.
A week after the election, Bainimarama has yet to concede and has now deployed troops to Suva, the capital. Fiji’s new parliament hasn’t convened to appoint a new prime minister because President Williame Katonivere, appointed last year, has yet to summon it.
Bainimarama’s sixteen-year rule has upended the political status quo in Fiji and the broader Pacific. Though his coup in 2006 was Fiji’s fourth, it was the first enacted against its indigenous political establishment rather than one backed by it. In the years since, Bainimarama has tried to stabilise and “modernise” Fijian capitalism by restructuring the state machinery and curbing civil liberties.
Significantly, amid rising tensions between the United States and China, he initiated closer diplomatic links with Beijing and extracted greater spending from both rival powers by playing them off against each other. With Rabuka pledging to reorient Fiji back to its traditional partners, Australia and the United States, the elections may have broader ramifications for imperialism in the Pacific.
Britain annexed Fiji in 1874, securing Australian imperialism’s control over the island group. The colonial administration and foreign capitalists allied with sections of the indigenous chiefdom to protect both colonial rule and capitalist industry. These chiefs collaborated in the suppression of clans who rebelled against colonial rule and provided a buffer between the colonial administration and ordinary Fijians.
But this situation posed other problems for a colony intended to produce cotton and sugar. Enslaving Fijians and other Pacific Islanders to meet demand for cheap plantation labour risked provoking a local rebellion.
Instead, more than 60,000 indentured Indian labourers were imported. Over decades, they grew to a majority of the population and became the core of Fiji’s urban and agricultural working class. During the early twentieth century, the militancy of Indian labour on the cane fields and in the public sector began to attract the sympathy of indigenous Fijians and the ire of the ruling class.
Racism became an increasingly important form of divide and rule. The Fijian chiefs used their traditional authority to discourage solidarity. Following the country’s first multiracial strike in 1959 (among oil workers), they convinced the Fijian employees to return to work and encouraged breakaway, racially exclusive unions. Fijian poverty was blamed on the growing number of Indians in the country—particularly small-scale farmers leasing native land, and a growing layer of merchants and business owners.
A racially divided parliament of “communal electorates” granted disproportionate weight to rural Fijian electorates, disadvantaging both the country’s Indian majority and the growing urban Fijian working class. In 1946, after Indians refused to fight in World War Two, a racist hysteria culminated in European hotelier and parliamentarian AA Ragg denouncing the “great increase in non-Fijian inhabitants” and advocating for Fiji to be “kept as a Fijian country”. 
These arguments fuelled Fijian ethnic chauvinism, dressed up in the language of “indigenous rights”, including anti-Indian pogroms and calls for Indians to be expelled from the country. The “racial tensions” often presented as characteristic of Fijian society are not natural, but the conscious creations of capitalist divide and rule.
Following independence in 1970, foreign capital continued to dominate the economy while Fiji’s chiefs dominated politics. Their rule rested on three key, interconnected pillars. 
First was the unelected Great Council of Chiefs, a body integrated into the Fijian state since 1876. Second was the communal electoral system. Third was the Alliance Party—the electoral vehicle of the Fijian chiefs, which also included ruling-class whites and a growing layer of moderate Indian business owners. Its base was among rural Fijians. 
For decades the main party of opposition was the National Federation Party, representing the Indian middle classes with a base among both rural and urban Indians. This setup strengthened the division of Fijian politics along racial lines.
By the 1970s, workers had suffered significant defeats and some unions splintered along racial lines. The Fiji Trade Union Congress entered a tripartite agreement in 1976 with the government and employers, arguing that it would give workers greater say in the economy. But by the early 80s, workers were going backwards under increasing ruling-class attacks. The Trade Union Congress was forced to abandon the tripartite setup, but instead of proceeding with planned national strikes, its leadership around Mahendra Chaudhry oriented to parliament, founding the Fiji Labour Party in 1985.
The chiefdom’s lack of control over industry made control over parliament crucial for its weight in modern Fijian society. The Alliance lost the 1987 elections to a coalition of the Fiji Labour Party and National Federation Party. In retaliation, it backed two coups led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka. Rabuka justified his coups with claims that he would restore the supremacy of indigenous Fijians. The chiefs brought Rabuka into their ranks, reorganised the Alliance into the Soqosoqo ni Vakavulewa ni Taukei (SVT party) and regained government with Rabuka as PM.
But life for ordinary Fijians continued to deteriorate, and in 1999 Labour and the National Federation Party again won government, with Chaudhry becoming Fiji’s first Indian prime minister. In 2000, the chiefs backed a civilian coup and the Fijian supremacist “Taukei movement” to topple Chaudhry’s government. The SVT became the Social Democratic Liberal Party (later renamed SODELPA) and took office.
Commodore Frank Bainimarama came to prominence during this coup. He was not part of the chiefdom, but instead had risen through the ranks of the military. Loyal to the state, he survived an attempted mutiny and helped end the coup. In 2006, the SDL government moved to pardon its leaders. Each coup had caused economic and social turmoil, and fearing that the pardon risked further destabilisation of an already weakened economy, Bainimarama toppled the SDL government and seized power himself.
Bainimarama’s regime dismantled much of the post-independence political setup, which had fettered the long-term development and stability of Fijian capitalism. In 2012, he abolished the Great Council of Chiefs and in 2021 introduced land reforms that undermined traditional land boards and made land more accessible for foreign capital. 
The 2013 constitution abolished the communal electoral system and Bainimarama has since promoted a “multiracial” national identity. This won him support among the Indian population, undermining the base of both the National Federation Party and Fiji Labour Party. It drew the ire of Fiji’s chiefs, and of Rabuka and SODELPA, who have pledged to reinstate the Great Council of Chiefs and the communal system, and reassert indigenous “Fijian paramountcy” if elected.

Understanding Fiji’s political landscape

The announcement of a new security agreement between the Solomon Islands and China has set off alarm bells in Australia’s ruling circles. The deal would reduce the Solomon Islands government’s reliance on Australia for domestic security and strengthen its relationship with China—a clear challenge to Australian and US dominance in the Pacific.
The agreement empowers the Solomon Islands to request China’s assistance in maintaining “social order” through the deployment of law enforcement and military personnel. In return, it permits China to “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in Solomon Islands, and the relevant forces of China can be used to protect the safety of Chinese personnel and major projects in Solomon Islands”.
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare insists the deal is not a rejection of his government’s existing security partnership with Australia, but defended the “need to diversify the country’s relationship with other partners”.
As China has grown into an economic and military rival to the US, it has attempted to expand its reach by establishing diplomatic and economic links with Pacific nations. According to the Lowy Institute, China committed US$2.44 billion in foreign aid to the Pacific in 2019, the same year Sogavare’s government ended its diplomatic links with Taiwan in order to accept US$500 million in aid from Beijing.
Australia is no stranger to using foreign aid in the region to advance its own interests and has been alarmed at the prospect of a rival power doing the same. While China has previously established security partnerships with governments in Africa, this agreement is the first such deal between China and a Pacific government.
The Sogavare government sees many potential benefits of a closer relationship with the rising superpower. As China has stepped up its foreign aid spending in the region, Pacific islands governments have seen an opportunity to get a better deal out of the imperialist powers eager to expand their influence. Many have welcomed another pool of aid funding made available by China, which often comes with less onerous terms. But Sogavare’s 2019 shift away from Taiwan towards China <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-solomon-islands-messiah-or-menace">led to and deepened domestic political disputes, resulting in protests and riots in Honiara in November 2021.</a> The unrest forced Sogavare to invoke the Solomons’ security agreement with Australia, resulting in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s deployment of Australian federal police and defence force personnel to “restore order”. This gave Canberra an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of Solomon Islands’ security agreement with Australia. But for Sogavare’s government, it showed that its reliance on Australia to maintain domestic stability constrained its ability to engage freely and benefit from economic links with other powers. Now, the government in Honiara is in a position to choose between Chinese and Australian flavours of authoritarian state repression to put down domestic dissent and safeguard the interests of its rich and powerful.
It is an open question how this will play out domestically. There is precedent for the government’s growing ties with China to become a line of attack for Sogavare’s West-aligned opponents trying to mobilise social discontent and destabilise his government.
In Australia, there is concern about the encroachment of the US’s—and by association Australia’s—key imperialist rival into its existing sphere of influence. The Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea, are of particular strategic importance for Australian capitalism. Both countries are situated along Australia’s northern approach, and the Solomon Islands are positioned along critical shipping routes between Asia and Australia’s east coast. And the agreement sets a precedent for further and more far-reaching such deals between China and a broader range of Pacific islands governments. This would be a serious blow to Australia’s monopoly on domestic security in Pacific island countries and to its dominance in the region. Hence the bipartisan disapproval, condemnation and Morrison’s signature brand of patronising “Pacific family” rhetoric in response to the deal—a response that has been described by Sogavare as “insulting” and undermining of the Solomon Islands’ sovereignty.
Government and media commentary within Australia, as well as on the part of Solomon Islands opposition leader Mathew Wale, has warned of China establishing a naval base in the island nation. Formally, the agreement does not allow China to do this, only to resupply its ships. But that doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Short of permanent bases, the agreement will be important in helping to protect existing Chinese investments in the country, as last year’s unrest ransacked and burnt Chinese-owned businesses along with others.
As it stands, Australia is the single largest aid donor to the Solomon Islands, having committed more than US$1.7 billion since 2009 according to the Lowy Institute. The day before the new security agreement leaked, High Commissioner Lachlan Stratan was in Honiara <a href="https://www.solomontimes.com/news/australia-and-solomon-islands-working-together-as-a-pacific-family/11740">announcing</a> a further $22 million aid package, which would include funding for communications, health and border security outposts. Canberra’s “Pacific Step Up” has attempted to strengthen its diplomatic and economic links with Pacific islands nations to preserve its sphere of influence, but it is being increasingly outpaced by China.
The rulers of the Solomon Islands have decided that their interests are best served by undermining the political restraints placed upon them by Australian imperialism. For them, rejecting China’s overtures would mean putting up with Canberra’s scraps and all the political meddling that goes with them. Having two major regional imperialist powers competing for favours is a much more lucrative position to be in.
The agreement has and will be used as an argument for further bolstering Australian militarism and reinforcing its dominance in the region. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which in the early 2000s advocated a ten-year military occupation of the Solomon Islands, has <a href="https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/to-stop-chinese-bases-australia-must-lead-in-the-pacific/">argued</a> that Australia needs to increase its military spending and consider establishing a permanent naval base in the Solomons to combat the growing threat of China.
The upshot of all this is a heightening of imperialist tensions in the region, and the inevitable ramping up of militarism on all sides that goes with it. It makes the prospect of military confrontation in the Pacific more likely, and with it, the prospect of destruction and misery for working-class people across the Pacific, in China and in Australia.

Solomon Islands deal ramps up tensions in the Pacific

Australia in the Solomon Islands: messiah or menace?

Indian indentured slavery should be remembered as one of British and Australian capitalism’s historical atrocities. The indenture system, as it is commonly called, existed between 1834 and 1920, during which time about 2 million Indians were transported to 19 colonies across the British empire, and to some French and Dutch territories. More than 400,000 were taken to both Mauritius and Malaysia, 240,000 to what was then British Guiana, 150,000 to Natal (now part of South Africa), 145,000 to Trinidad and Tobago and more than 60,000 to Fiji. The mass displacement created a substantial diaspora, with Indian migrants and their descendants approaching half the population in some countries.
By the turn of the 19th century, the international slave trade had become less central to British capitalism. The Haitian revolution, a mass uprising of slaves against French colonialism, showed the threat slavery could pose to colonial rule. There were mounting calls for the trade to be banned, which Britain and the United States did in 1807. The abolition of slavery across the British empire followed in 1833. But abolition created a shortage of cheap labour for the sugar plantations of the British Caribbean and other developing colonies across the empire. Without a new supply, the profits of these plantations and the sugar industry were in jeopardy. Among the profiteers was the Australian-based Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), which had to find cheap labour for the Fijian sugarcane fields it would come to dominate.
“Indenture” was an attempt to quench this thirst for labour while tiptoeing around the new legal restrictions on slavery. The system was based on an agreement (girmit), which each labourer would enter into for five years. They would leave India to work for a small wage for an employer. When the contract expired, they could return home at their own expense, or extend their indenture for a further five years, after which they would be granted free return passage for themselves and their immediate family.
The British plunder of India had left vast regions impoverished and famine-struck for decades. Young men (and some women) from these areas were approached by local recruiters offering work and the promise of fortune. They were taken to local recruitment depots for medical checks and to finalise a written agreement. Calcutta and Madras (Kolkata and Chennai) became the main departure ports. 
The seemingly consensual and paid nature of indenture allowed the British government and many historians subsequently to argue that the system was nothing like slavery. Reality tells a different story. The low regard for Indian indentured labourers was reflected by the derogatory term “coolies”, which was associated with the Urdu word “kuli”, meaning slave. Deception was rife in recruitment. Thumbprints were used to sign agreements because many couldn’t read or write. Historian Brij Lal recounts the complaints during a 1907 strike at CSR’s Labasa plantation in Fiji. Khani Zeman, one of the labourers, insisted that he was illiterate at the time of recruitment. “Nor did we even put our thumb-marks to any paper”, nor had any agreement been read to him, he said. 
Another striker, Gunda Singh, said he was promised a government job and was reassured that he would not be employed as plantation labour. They complained that their rate of pay fell short of what was promised (one shilling per day for men and nine pence for women). Labourers were also unaware of their final destination and just how far from home they would be travelling. Accounts from the Caribbean tell of labourers escaping into nearby rivers, assuming they were close enough to swim back to India. There were also cases of Indians being kidnapped and the forgery of indenture documents. 
But even if the labourers had understood what their contracts entailed, had signed them willingly and had been paid the promised rate, they had no choice over who they would work for nor the work they would do. They could not leave their employer, nor could they leave their plantation without written permission of their overseers. Refusal to work, not completing assigned tasks, inciting others not to work, absenteeism and desertion were severely punished by loss of wages, fines and arbitrary extensions of the period of indenture. The system was structured to dissuade repatriation to India and create new pools of cheap labour in the colonies. Of the more than half a million brought to the Caribbean, for example, only 66,000 returned home.
The conditions of indenture were brutal from the moment of departure. The sea voyages across the kala pani (black waters) were traumatic. Labourers from various regions, religions and castes speaking various languages were crammed into the confined hulls of ships. Many people died during the journey, particularly during the early years of transportation. Children under the age of 4 were also among those who perished. According to British parliamentary papers, one ship bound for the Caribbean recorded a death rate of 31 percent. In 1884, the Syria was shipwrecked en route to Fiji, killing 56 labourers.
In parts of the Caribbean, Indian labourers often moved into the same cabins or neighbourhoods in which the former African slaves lived. In Fiji, they lived in barracks, called “coolie lines”, next to the plantations in which they worked. The cramped tin shacks typically were three metres by four metres and housed three single men or one man and his family. The lodgings contrasted with the luxurious residences of the plantation owners. In the West Indies, the white overseers, often the same people who years earlier had commanded African slaves, lived in manor houses overlooking their plantations. Learning from the use of racism to divide Black slaves and white indentured labourers after revolts in 17th century Virginia, plantation owners in Trinidad and British Guiana built separate villages for Indian labourers and encouraged traditional cultural practices to segregate them from communities of former African slaves.
The pace of work was relentless, often exceeding the hours in the formal agreement. “Drivers” enforced this pace of work and the flow of profits, terrorising labourers into submission and at times shooting those who disobeyed. One survivor of indenture in Fiji told the BBC in 2005 that they would be awakened by men on horseback at 3am and forced to work. “The white men used to kick us and beat us with whips ... ‘Get on with your work’, they said. ‘This is your agreement.’” Beatings and whippings were common for those who disobeyed. In parts of the Caribbean, rubbing salt and pepper into the wounds of labourers who had been whipped became part of their punishment. The plantations became known as naraka – hell in the mythology of many Indian religions.
Malnutrition and sickness resulted from the abject poverty and unsanitary conditions many lived in. Absenteeism due to sickness resulted in labourers losing wages, feeding a vicious cycle. The BBC documentary Coolies: How Britain reinvented slavery provides an insight into the conditions. A woman who survived indenture in Guiana recounted that she lost all six of her children, five to miscarriage and one to infection. The mortality rate of babies born to indentured women in Fiji was very high. The authorities blamed mothers for their children’s deaths, claiming the women “lacked motherly instincts”. Children who survived were often forced to toil alongside their families, gathering scraps or digging holes. Death by cholera, malaria, dysentery, typhoid and suicide were common.
Though labourers could complain to the authorities about abuses, they rarely found justice. Without permission from managers, they were not allowed to leave the plantations to attend the courthouses in which their complaints would be heard. Language barriers meant that the available written evidence favoured the planters, and translators often misrepresented what labourers were saying. Legal representation was also prohibitively expensive, and the state loyally sided with the plantation owners and companies like CSR.
While some labourers attempted to serve out their period of indenture to escape these harsh conditions, others resisted. This resistance sometimes took simple forms: faking illness, absenteeism, speaking out against the overseers, refusing to perform assigned tasks and sabotage. In Disturbing History: Resistance in Early Colonial Fiji, Robert Nicole notes that in just one year (1884), one-third of immigrant labourers had been prosecuted for such offences. In 1886, prosecutions outnumbered the number of immigrants in some areas.
Collective resistance by labourers began to threaten the system of indenture. The first strikes in the Caribbean occurred in the late 1880s. According to a paper in the collection Chalo Jahaji: On a journey through indenture in Fiji, there were four strikes during Fiji’s period using indentured labour. In 1886, 300 struck at Navuso and 130 at Koronivia plantations over the issue of “over-tasking”. Another strike followed in 1888 at Koronivia. The 1907 Labasa strike began over rations, but labourers began to question the deceptive conditions of indenture as a whole. 
In South Africa, where more than 100,000 had been brought to work on the railways, sugar fields and mines, protests against indenture erupted in 1908. Protests and strikes involving more than 20,000 labourers in November 1913 forced the South African administration to suspend indenture and question the viability of the system. With Britain now engaged in the First World War, labourers revolting in the colonies and agitation in India against the system, indenture was formally ended on 15 April 1917.
But the formal end of indenture only prohibited recruitment and transportation. It did not release those already indentured from their agreements. In 1919, agitation began in Fiji for the end to the system in its entirety. When the remaining indentures were cancelled on 1 January 1920, it unleashed what the governor of Fiji later described in a report to the Colonial Office as “a certain swollen-headedness which ... makes the Indian community, for employers and for Government alike, perilously difficult to handle at the present time”. 
Indian labourers employed by the Public Works Department in Suva, the capital, struck against increased work hours. When they won, they stayed on strike, calling for a wage increase to 5 shillings per day. The strike spread across the country but was crushed by force on 15 February, killing one striker. Australia sent a warship to help put down the strike, but New Zealand reinforcements were delayed when waterside workers refused to load ships that would be used to crush Indian strikers. Racism was used to undermine this solidarity when the waterside workers were told they would be helping protect European women and children against rioting Indians. A six-month strike by sugar workers against CSR the following year called for the release of strikers arrested in 1920.
Karl Marx wrote that capitalism comes into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. The system’s rulers relied on brutal exploitation and oppression to enrich themselves. The story of Indian indenture is no different. It is both part of the story of how capitalism was made, and a glimpse into how its brutal bondage can be unmade by struggle.
 
----------
Vinil Kumar is the National Union of Students anti-racism officer.

Britain and Australia's hidden history of Indian slavery

The COVID-19 crisis has given the “Pacific Step Up” – a strategy for curtailing China’s growing influence in the region by strengthening Australian diplomatic, cultural, economic and military ties with Pacific island nations – a new relevance. “If we do not make the ‘Pacific Step Up’ a ‘Covid-19 Step Up’”, Labor’s shadow minister for international development argued in the Guardian recently, “our Pacific friends will look to other nations to assist them in their time of crisis”. 
Australian officials have not been happy about China providing COVID-19 testing kits and face masks to the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, nor about a Chinese plane delivering ventilators and other medical equipment to Vanuatu, preventing an Australian plane from landing there. The Australian government is keenly aware that the provision of aid by a foreign power in the Pacific is not about benevolence, but about control.
The Australian government’s motivations in the Pacific, much like its response to COVID-19 in Australia, have always been about advancing the interests of Australian capitalism. Scott Morrison’s claim that Australia is part of a “Pacific family” hides a sordid history. Australia is less a caring older sibling, and more a schoolyard bully that beats you up and takes your lunch money.
From its infancy, the Australian ruling class had its eyes on the region. The colonial administration in London and the elites of the eastern colonies considered nearby island groups, including New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji, to be as much in their “sphere of influence” as the Australian mainland. The growing presence of rival powers in the region was viewed as a threat to potential colonial control over land, resources, labour and shipping corridors. While the eastern colonies had differing interests, they agreed on the need to establish a mini-empire in the region.
From as early as the 1820s, newspaper owners used their publications to agitate for the realisation of this ambition. The Sydney Herald and the Sydney Gazette urged the colonisation of New Zealand in 1839. In 1869, the Melbourne Age argued: “Since England can rule India, why should not Victoria make the experiment of trying to rule Fiji?”. In 1875, a 400-person banquet was held in the Sydney Exchange to inaugurate the pursuit of New Guinea. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, among those present were “most of the leading men connected with the trade and commerce of this city”.
However, the fledgling ruling class lacked the capacity to realise these lofty ambitions. They needed the backing of a larger military power. London was more concerned with putting its finite forces into more significant and profitable enterprises, particularly Egypt and India. The eastern Australian colonies therefore had to campaign vigorously for their Pacific expansion plans. Backing Britain, then the US, in their wars became part of securing the support of a powerful ally to underwrite Australian control in the Pacific. 
New Zealand was the first project. The treaty of Waitangi was imposed in 1840 by New South Wales governor George Gipps and backed by British guns. Troops were dispatched to put down Indigenous resistance in the following years, resulting in more than 2,700 Maoris massacred during the “Land Wars”. 
Fiji was next. The New South Wales Legislative Assembly made its first plea for British annexation in 1859. US and Australian settlers flooded the country and established cotton plantations after shortages due to the American Civil War. “Blackbirding”, the Australian trade in Pacific Islander slave labour, resulted in more than 45,000 people being taken to Fiji as cheap plantation labour between 1865 and 1911. Settlers from Victoria and New South Wales organised themselves into white supremacist organisations and helped put down Indigenous rebellions alongside colonial troops. A measles outbreak wiped out roughly one-third of Fiji’s population in 1875 after the disease was deliberately imported from Sydney. 
The Melbourne-based Polynesia Company conducted the first significant seizure of land in Fiji six years before British annexation. In 1868, its representatives – Melbourne businessmen William Brewer and John L. Evans – took control of more than 200,000 acres of land including Suva, the current capital. The earliest government structures in Fiji were created to handle land disputes among plantation owners. Fijian chiefs acted as symbolic figureheads to give the government legitimacy. Even after independence, Australian officials occupied many senior positions in Fiji’s state bureaucracies until 2006.
Australian corporations have dominated the Fijian economy for much of the past century. Qantas is the major player in tourism, while Westpac and ANZ control much of the banking sector. Trading giants <a>Burns Phillips</a> and Morris Hedstrom are Australian run. Melbourne-based Colonial Sugar Refinery came to Fiji after sugar replaced cotton as its main agricultural product in the late 1870s. The company brought more than 60,000 indentured labourers from India to work on sugar plantations. Indians made up 39 percent of Fiji’s population by 1921. Stoking racist divisions between Indigenous Fijians and Indians was an important element of colonial rule, laying the basis for present day ethnic tensions.
Vanuatu, then the New Hebrides, became a priority for Australia after the French colonised nearby New Caledonia in 1853. During the 1860s, most settlers were from Australia, drawn by cotton, then cocoa, bananas, coconuts and slaves.
Australia began blackbirding in Vanuatu in 1863, taking more than 62,000 people from the country by 1901. Some islands had their entire male population kidnapped. A quarter of those taken died during transportation or shortly afterwards. In a cruel twist, when the White Australia policy was introduced in 1901, more than 7,000 islanders were deported to and abandoned on random islands.
While sections of capital profited from these enterprises in the Pacific, geopolitical concerns motivated the annexations of Fiji and Papua New Guinea. In 1875, the Melbourne Daily Telegraph spelled this out, stressing that there was “no promise of immediate wealth in New Guinea” and that “though we do not want the island ourselves, we do want very much that no one else shall have it”.
Imperialism didn’t always mean boots on the ground or direct control over Pacific territories. Throughout the 20th century, Australian control and Pacific immiseration took many forms.
Nauru was captured from Germany in 1914. For most of the 20th century, it remained under Australian control, being strip-mined for phosphate. Nauruans fought to set up an independent nation on Curtis Island rather than be Australian subjects. When Australia refused, the country declared its independence in 1968. Once the phosphate deposits were depleted, the economy collapsed. To survive, Nauru turned itself into a tax haven and agreed to the establishment of an Australian detention centre in 2001. From 2005, Australia appointed government advisers, including a secretary of finance with control over the country’s budget. The High Court of Australia was the highest legal authority in Nauru until 2018.
German New Guinea was also captured in 1914. Australian rule in the territories of Papua and New Guinea (which merged in 1949 and were renamed Papua New Guinea in 1971) meant the repression of Indigenous communities and Papuan workers by police and armed forces. During World War Two, Australian troops conscripted locals as unpaid labourers to carry wounded Australian soldiers during the Kokoda campaign. Those who refused were brutally punished. In some villages, all fit males were taken, resulting in the collapse of village life, starvation, disease and a sharp increase in infant mortality. 
After the war, its constitution gave power to Australian officials, in particular the minister for external territories (the precursor to the minister for foreign affairs). Even after gaining independence in 1975, the country was dominated by Australian imperialism. Initiatives such as the 2003 Enhanced Cooperation Program planted high-ranking Australian officials within the state apparatus to make the country’s bureaucracy subservient to Australian capital. Most of PNG’s urban and mineral sectors are still dominated by foreign capitalists. 
PNG remains the single largest recipient of Australian foreign aid, which is used as leverage to ensure cash-strapped governments remain compliant. Australian soldiers and police maintain a strong presence as part of security and training operations. This strategy has been repeated across the Pacific in the past 50 years. 
Between 1965 and 1999, Australian governments supported Indonesian control over East Timor, backing the Suharto dictatorship, which massacred 200,000 people on the island. Australia sent troops to East Timor in 1999, supposedly to support independence, although they waited till some of the worst massacres were over in order not to antagonise Indonesia. 
In the following decade and largely because of their presence in the country, Australia was able to secure billions in oil and gas revenue. As a 2004 statement by the Movement Against the Occupation of the Timor Sea pointed out: “East Timor is the largest international donor to Australia. The relatively small amounts you spend to help us do not compare with the amount you are stealing from our resource birthright”. Australia backed the imposition of harsh IMF structural adjustment programs, which turned East Timor into one of the poorest countries in Asia. Australia also maintains a military base in Dili, the capital.
Australian “success” in East Timor was followed up by an intervention into the Solomon Islands, which has significant mineral deposits and timber reserves and is near important shipping lanes. In July 2003, Australia led the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI), involving more than 2,500 troops and police. The old logic of the “white man’s burden” evolved into concern about “failed states” and “good governance”. Civilian members of RAMSI included economists, development assistance specialists and budget advisers. RAMSI took over many key posts within law enforcement, finance and other government departments.
In 2006, Australian soldiers and police were sent to Tonga to help put down pro-democracy protests and back up the Tongan monarchy. 
Australian capitalism will defend the Pacific empire it has built for more than a century in the face of threats. Old myths will be called upon to justify imperialism. We will be told hope in the Pacific will come, not from the actions of 4,000 striking nurses in Papua New Guinea and solidarity from workers in Australia, but from boots on Pacific soil marching to the tune of Australia’s “national” interests. But Australia’s rulers have never fought for anyone’s interests but their own. Our allies are in workplaces here and across the ocean. Our common enemies are in Canberra.

Backyard bully: Australia's imperialism in the Pacific

Socialist Alternative’s Socialism conference, held at the University of Sydney over the weekend 18-20 August, attracted more than 500 participants.
In the wake of the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the toppling of Confederate statues and sizeable anti-fascist mobilisations in the United States, hundreds packed out the opening night panel on “Racism and resistance in the Trump Era”. Headlining the panel was Haley Pessin, Black Lives Matter activist and member of the International Socialist Organization, who travelled from New York to speak at the conference.
Pessin said of the far right resurgence: “It is not just a phenomenon of the US alone. It has been an international polarisation where we’ve seen the rise of the right … and we’ve also seen the rise of the left but not on the level of organisation that is necessary. That is the cause and the call that we have everywhere in the world today”.
The opening session also heard from National Union of Students LGBTI officer Chris Di Pasquale, who spoke on the challenges and opportunities presented by the urgent campaign for a Yes vote for marriage equality.
Discussions on developments in the United States continued throughout the conference, with sessions on “The struggle for socialism in the United States” again presented by Pessin and a discussion on “Six months of the Trump presidency” introduced by Red Flag editor Corey Oakley.
There were sessions concerned with the political polarisation internationally, including “From Blair to Corbyn: the rebirth of social democracy?” and “Catalyst or cure? The role of the centre in the rise of the populist right”. Escalating military tensions between the United States and China also brought large turnouts for the sessions on “Making sense of a multi-polar world: understanding imperialism today” and “Can the United Nations be a force for global peace?”
As with previous years, the conference was an opportunity for those new to socialist politics to get an introduction to key ideas in the “Marxism 101” stream. Topics included “Does the working class even exist any more?”, gender and sexuality, the roots of racism and “individual vs. collective action”. With the exception of the opening and closing panels, the session on the history of the Russian revolution was the largest at the conference, drawing more than 150 people.
The conference also featured a number of special panel discussions: “How to rebuild the union movement: case studies from the past”, “30 years on from the Palestinian intifada” and “Class struggle and women’s liberation”. More than 130 people attended a vibrant panel discussion on refugee rights with Rebecca Barrigos and former Nauru social worker, whistleblower and author Mark Isaacs.
The Socialism conference has become an annual highlight on Sydney’s political calendar and will return in 2018.

Hundreds attend Sydney Socialism conference

Students and staff at the Sydney College of the Arts have rejected plans by the University of Sydney to shut down their campus. A “Let SCA Stay” campaign was initiated by more than 200 staff and students at a meeting on 24 June. Its central, non-negotiable demand is halting the campus closure.
The closure was announced by the university on 21 June. If it goes ahead, more than 600 students will be forced to study at University of New South Wales Art &amp; Design, which lacks the specialised facilities of the SCA. The closure would also result in significant job losses, potentially leaving many postgraduates without supervisors and unable to continue their degrees.
University of Sydney provost Stephen Garton admits that the closure has been discussed for more than 18 months. During that time students and staff were kept in the dark. Enrolments continued to be taken, even though students would not be able to complete their degrees. If closed, the Callan Park campus would be handed over to the NSW Government, opening up the possibility of the inner-city site being sold to private developers.
A forum was held by management on 28 June. More than 200 students and staff took over the meeting. For 90 minutes Garton and SCA dean Colin Rhodes were grilled and confronted with stories, facts and outrage as they attempted to dodge questions and downplay concerns.
Students ejected Garton and Rhodes from the auditorium after they refused to agree to the campaign’s demand. A chorus of “SCA, here to stay!” accompanied their exit.
Students have vowed to escalate their campaign until plans for SCA’s closure are abandoned.
[To find out more, visit the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/letscastay/">Let SCA stay Facebook page</a>.]

Sydney College of the Arts students fight campus closure

A 24-hour national strike by Patrick waterside workers on 18 January caused major disruptions to container cargo movements at Australian ports, according to Patrick NSW and Queensland general manager Anthony Jones.
Appearing before the Fair Work Commission on 21 January, Jones said that the strike – the first national stoppage of wharfies since the 1998 waterfront dispute – put container movements in some ports seven days behind schedule. “It just keeps cascading down”, Jones told the commission, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review.
The current dispute between Patrick and its workforce, represented by the Maritime Union of Australia, is about enterprise agreement negotiations in which job security is a major unresolved issue. It also comes amid plans by Patrick’s parent company, Asciano, to sell the stevedoring business.
Prospective buyers of Patrick include Qube Holdings, now headed by Chris Corrigan, former Patrick Stevedoring boss and architect of the 1998 offensive against waterfront workers.
The MUA is demanding that Patrick management grant all workers permanency and guarantee that none will be sacked as a result of the sale or any ensuing restructure. The union is also seeking to address existing issues around workplace safety and redundancies.
The company has moved quickly to slander the union in the press. Asciano’s head of HR, Alexandra Badenoch, accused the union’s Sydney branch of making claims that are “out of touch with community standards of what is considered acceptable in an Australian workplace”. Badenoch singled out the demand for weekend and night shift penalty rates as an example of the union’s “unacceptable” claims.
“This is corporate propaganda”, MUA Sydney branch deputy secretary Paul Keating told Red Flag. “It’s breathtaking for the company to claim that we’re demanding penalty rates. We have penalty rates. This is not part of the claim”, he said.
“They accuse us of demanding 35 hours’ pay for a 32-hour roster, which is false. As part of a 32-hour roster, workers are working ‘penalty shifts’ including on weekends, which, according to industry standards, should be accompanied by an increase in salary. In fact, the roster as it currently stands is $1,000 short of the industry standard salary”, Keating said.
The right to permanency and job security has long been an issue on the waterfront. Increasing automation of operations at ports across the country, despite guarantees to the union, has been used by Patrick (and other operators DP World and Hutchison Ports) as a pretext to sack permanent staff and rehire them as casuals.
These workers lose the entitlements owed to permanent workers (long service leave, annual and sick leave) and are not paid any additional loading when they work multiple shifts with fewer than eight hours’ break.
David (not his real name), a delegate at Patrick, described the devastating impact job insecurity has on workers, including the advent of a new category of worker – PIRs (permanent irregulars). “You don’t know you’re working until the night before. You have no regularity, you live day to day. There’s no way to plan in advance or have a life outside of work. You can’t plan holidays.
“People’s marriages have broken up because of the toll it’s taken on their relationships. You have no regular income, and they use it to control you. They target workers who speak up. If a casual calls in sick, they use it to penalise them by not calling them in for four days – that was until the union stopped them doing it.”
David says that if Patrick gets away with these attacks, then the bosses will come after everyone else. “It’s the same as with the attack on penalty rates; they come for us one by one.”
The union had served notice of a 48-hour stoppage at Port Botany on 25 and 26 January, with shorter actions at Melbourne and Brisbane ports.
However, late on 22 January, after an urgent application by Patrick, the Fair Work Commission ordered a 35-day ban on any industrial action by Maritime Union of Australia members. Coming down heavily on the side of Patrick, Fair Work Commission vice president Graeme Watson accepted the company’s claims that its managers couldn’t simultaneously deal with strike action and engage in enterprise agreement negotiations. 
“The issues in dispute are important to a major employer and require careful and detailed consideration”, his ruling said. “An escalated industrial campaign creates significant complications for that type of consideration.” 
The union has said it will appeal the decision which shockingly shrinks even further the already narrow scope for legal industrial action in Australia.

Fair Work issues strike ban against MUA

A 24-hour national strike by Patrick waterside workers on 18 January caused major disruptions to container cargo movements at Australian ports, according to Patrick NSW and Queensland general manager Anthony Jones.
Appearing before the Fair Work Commission on 21 January, Jones said that the strike – the first national stoppage of wharfies since the 1998 waterfront dispute – put container movements, in some ports, seven days behind schedule. “It’s just keeps cascading down”, Jones told the Commission, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review.
The current dispute between Patrick and its workforce, represented by the Maritime Union of Australia, is about enterprise agreement negotiations in which job security is a major unresolved issue. It also comes amid plans by Patrick’s parent company, Asciano, to sell the stevedoring business.
Prospective buyers of Patrick include Qube Holdings, now headed by Chris Corrigan, former Patrick Stevedoring boss and architect of the 1998 offensive against waterfront workers.
The MUA is demanding that Patrick management grant all workers permanency and guarantee that none will be sacked as a result of the sale or any ensuing restructure. The union is also seeking to address existing issues around workplace safety and redundancies.
The company has moved quickly to slander the union in the press. Asciano’s head of HR, Alexandra Badenoch, accused the union’s Sydney branch of making claims which are “out of touch with community standards of what is considered acceptable in an Australian workplace”. Badenoch singled out the demand for weekend and night shift penalty rates as an example of the union’s unacceptable claims.
“This is corporate propaganda”, MUA Sydney branch deputy secretary Paul Keating told Red Flag. “It’s breathtaking for the company to claim that we’re demanding penalty rates. We have penalty rates. This is not part of the claim”, he said.
“They accuse us of demanding 35-hours’ pay for a 32-hour roster, which is false. As part of a 32-hour roster, workers are working ‘penalty shifts’ including on weekends, which, according to industry standards should be accompanied by an increase in salary. In fact, the roster as it currently stands is $1,000 short of the industry standard salary”, Keating said.
The right to permanency and job security has long been an issue on the waterfront. Increasing automation of operations at ports across the country, despite guarantees to the union, has been used by Patrick (and other operators DP World and Hutchison Ports) as a pretext to sack permanent staff and re-hire them as casuals.
These workers lose the entitlements owed to permanent workers (long service leave, annual and sick leave) and are not paid any additional loading when they work multiple shifts with fewer than eight-hours’ break between.
David (not his real name), a delegate at Patrick, described the devastating impact job insecurity has on workers, including the advent of a new category of worker – PIRs (Permanent Irregulars). “You don’t know you’re working until the night before. You have no regularity, you live day to day. There’s no way to plan in advance or have a life outside of work. You can’t plan holidays.
“People’s marriages have broken up because of the toll it’s taken on their relationships. You have no regular income and they use it to control you. They target workers who speak up. If a casual calls in sick, they use it to penalise them by not calling them in for four days – that was until the union stopped them doing it.” 
David says that if Patrick gets away with these attacks, then the bosses will come after everyone else. “It’s the same as with the attack on penalty rates; they come for us one by one”, he said.
The union had warned the company to expect further strike action and a 48-hour stoppage was planned for Port Botany on 25 and 26 January, with shorter actions at Melbourne and Brisbane ports.
However, late on 22 January, the Fair Work Commission ordered a 35-day ban on any industrial action by Maritime Union of Australia workers against Patrick. The union is yet to comment on the decision.

Who benefits from Australia’s Pacific labour scheme?

Understanding Fiji’s political landscape

Solomon Islands deal ramps up tensions in the Pacific

Australia in the Solomon Islands: messiah or menace?

Britain and Australia's hidden history of Indian slavery

Backyard bully: Australia's imperialism in the Pacific

Hundreds attend Sydney Socialism conference

Sydney College of the Arts students fight campus closure

Fair Work issues strike ban against MUA

Fair Work bans further wharf strikes after successful national stoppage

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us