Sacrifices and difficult decisions need to be made and government spending needs to be cut to clear the Victorian government’s debt. That’s what Spring Street is telling us is required: budget cuts, an annual wage increase cap for public servants, and job losses.
Yet Premier Daniel Andrews is getting a $16,000 pay rise. In fact, from 1 July, all Victorian MPs will receive a 3.5 percent pay rise following the decision of Victoria’s Independent Remuneration Tribunal. It will boost the base salary to almost $200,000 and Andrews’ pay to more than $480,000—the highest of any premier in the country. On top of this is a travel allowance increase of $10,765—a jump of nearly 7 percent. 
Contrast this with public sector workers, who have their wage increases restricted to just 3 percent per year on much more modest salaries. They are the public servants, nurses, teachers and firefighters and others making up 418,000 of Victoria’s 3.5 million-strong labour force.
Job cuts are already underway. The Age reports that the North Eastern Public Health Unit, which services 1.7 million people, informed one-third of its 90 staff members that they would not have a job at the end of June. This comes as they are taking on more responsibility for managing outbreaks of infectious diseases across the state.
The pay increase for Victorian MPs comes after the New South Wales government last month approved a pay freeze for MPs and top executives in the public service. Treasury estimates that it will save about $260 million over four years. 
Andrews has ruled out a pay freeze for politicians. With the Victorian premier unyielding, public sector workers in NSW have shown how the wage cap, and the politicians outrageous pay claims, can be challenged. 
Thousands of public servants went on strike across the state last year, protesting against the pay cap. Teachers, nurses and midwives also went on 24-hour strikes for higher pay.
The NSW government finally confirmed a one-off 4.5 percent wages boost to public sector workers, breaking the state’s 3 percent wage cap, a week after the pay freeze for top officials was announced. 
The MP pay freeze also came the day before the Health Services Union planned a stop work to demand an urgent cost-of-living pay increase. A week later, paramedics went on a 24-hour strike demanding faster action on the NSW government’s promise to scrap the wages cap by the end of this year.

Yen Llanes

Wage rises for Victorian MPs, wage caps for public sector workers

In a major escalation of war games near China, the armed forces of the Philippines and US troops are holding the largest annual Balikatan military exercises in history. From 11 to 28 April, 12,200 US military personnel, 5,400 Philippine forces and 111 Australian troops are taking part in the drills. Balikatan—meaning “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Tagalog, the national language—will be the first time Philippine and US forces engage in live-fire exercises at sea.
The joint operations come just weeks after the Philippine government expanded US military access to nine bases in the country. Under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement signed in 2014, the US military has access to Philippine bases for joint training, pre-positioning of equipment and building of facilities. 
On 3 April, the Philippines announced the locations of four additional sites, nearly doubling the US military’s prospective footprint in the archipelago. The Philippines is a key US ally, and the largest recipient of US military assistance, equipment and training in South-East Asia. 
Of the four new EDCA sites, three are in northern Luzon, just 400 kilometres from Taiwan, while one is in Palawan, near the disputed Spratly Islands.
In opposition to the US military presence, about 7,000 people gathered in Cagayan, a province in Luzon, in a 17 April rally organised by Prayer for Peace Cagayan Movement. 
Clarita Lunas, retired regional supervisor from the Department of Education, told media that the prayer rally was organised after a naval base in Santa Ana and the Lal-lo Airport were selected as locations for the US military to stock weapons and equipment. Governor Manuel Mamba remarked at the prayer gathering that EDCA “is just war” amid rising tensions between China and Taiwan, according to the <a href="https://manilastandard.net/news/top-stories/314322504/cagayan-hosts-prayer-rally-against-edca.html">Manila Standard</a>. 
“We want Cagayan to be the centre of agro-industrial hubs in the international port, not the centre of foreign military bases whose clear objective is to enable war between America and China”, he said.
There were also smaller protests in the capital, Manila, outside of the US embassy on the first night of Balikatan exercises. “We are against this, firstly, on the basis that the Balikatan exercises are disastrous for our citizens and the country”, an organiser of the protest, the League of Filipino Students national president, told 24 Oras, a national TV news program.

United States increases provocations in Asia

For the first time in 25 years, Qenos workers in Altona, in Melbourne’s west, went on strike this month. Thirty-five plant operators voted unanimously to walk out to demand safer operating conditions, a 7 percent pay rise over the next three years and the removal of a four-year traineeship that systematically underpays new staff. 
In response, the company announced an indefinite lockout starting on the day of the strike. Ben Davis, secretary of the Australian Workers Union, which covers plant operators and technicians at the site, told ABC news that 90 percent of the workers’ claims were ignored by Qenos.
However, it wasn’t the pressure of the lockout that ended the strike on 12 October. The company mounted a legal attack using the industrial relations tribunal, the Fair Work Commission, to terminate the protected industrial action as quickly as possible.
Qenos Altona is Australia’s largest plastics producer and the only manufacturer of polyethylene (common plastic) and polymers in the country. The company’s annual revenue is $750 million. According to its website, “If you see or use plastic in your household items, it was probably made by us”. The plastics are produced using ethane extracted from the Esso Long Island Point gas plant in Western Port Bay. The relationship between the two companies influenced the outcome of the strike.
Qenos’ use of ethane for its plastic products has implications for gas supply across all of Victoria. “Without an outlet for the ethane, Esso will need to significantly curtail natural gas supply to reduce the production of these gas liquids”, Esso said in a statement. The Long Island plant processes gas from Gippsland to create ethane, propane and butane. Gippsland supplies around 40 percent of eastern Australia’s domestic gas. 
The 35 plant operators and technicians at Qenos therefore potentially have significant industrial power—directly, through disrupting supply of plastic to Qenos customers and therefore hurting the company’s profits, and indirectly through their role in the chain of gas production and distribution. 
The least that Qenos could do, then, is to ensure safe working conditions for its employees. Yet the workers say that night shifts have reduced and unsafe staffing levels. 
The potential disruption to Victoria’s natural gas supply was cynically wielded by Qenos to terminate protected strike action. As early as 7 October, the company applied to the Fair Work Commission to end the strike under the guise that the action is “endangering life, personal safety or health, or welfare of part of the population”. 
A worker who attended the Fair Work hearing said that Qenos’ lawyer acted like a “supervillain” against them, going so far as to claim that their strike action would cause deaths, while ignoring the question of the company’s responsibility in endangering its own employees. Just a month ago, the plant had a high voltage line explode while workers were on shift.
Moreover, there was no disruption to the state’s gas supply after a full week of industrial action. “AEMO [Australian Energy Market Operator] has advised that there is no current disruption to gas supply, including the use for electricity generation”, a government spokesperson told the ABC. An Esso representative told Fair Work that the company was unaware of the Qenos lockout, indicating that the strike had not yet caused disruptions in gas processing. 
The Fair Work Commission nevertheless ordered that industrial action be suspended for 30 days. And the Qenos lawyer reportedly made it clear that the company would respond to any future industrial action with another lockout.

Plastics manufacturer Qenos clamps down on industrial action

Thirty-six years after disgraced dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr was driven out of the Philippines by the “People Power” movement, his son Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr has been elected president in a landslide victory.
Marcos Jr received 31 million votes, about 58 percent of the total cast, to defeat nine other candidates, including incumbent Vice-President Maria Leonor “Leni” Gerona Robredo, who came second with 14 million votes. This is the first time in decades that a presidential candidate has won a popular majority. Incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016 with just 16.6 million votes, or 39 percent of the total. More than 80 percent of the country’s 65.7 million registered voters participated in the 9 May poll, the highest turnout since 1998.
The popularity of Marcos Jr appears puzzling, given the notoriety and record of his family. The two-decade dictatorial rule of Marcos Sr was characterised by plunder, corruption and grave human rights violations that led to his popular ousting. Yet even after Marcos Sr was chased out of the country, candidates running in local elections in his home province sought the “blessing of the old man in Hawaii” (the place to which the family fled) in the late 1980s. The Marcos “return” can in fact be explained, not by the population’s “love” for authoritarian leaders, but by the heightened level of the country’s political dynasties’ organisation. 
Indeed, Marcos was languishing in the polls until forming a coalition with the current president’s daughter under the name “UniTeam Alliance”. In November last year, four parties fronted by families that previously have held the presidency (the Estradas, Arroyos, Marcoses and Dutertes) signed an agreement to back Marcos Jr for president and Sara Duterte for vice-president. 
Before the announcement of the alliance, it was Sara Duterte and not Marcos Jr who was leading the polls. Pulse Asia recorded Duterte leading in late 2020 with 26 percent, and Marcos Jr with 14 percent. Leni Robredo, who eventually became the head of the Marcos opposition, was at 8 percent. From the moment the coalition was announced, Marcos and Sara Duterte won majority support in polls. They maintained this throughout the campaign. In December last year, Marcos was the top choice for president for 53 percent of respondents. 
In the Philippines, families whose members have served across several terms are called dynasties. According to Rappler, a news website citing an Ateneo School of Government study, “‘fat’ political dynasties—where members simultaneously hold elective posts—hold 80 percent of the country’s gubernatorial posts. In Congress, they control 67 percent of seats”. The most notable dynastic families are the Aquinos, the Arroyos, the Estradas, the Marcoses and the Dutertes.
The Marcos and Duterte clans rose to prominence first as lawyers, then as politicians. Mariano Marcos was elected to the House of Representatives in 1925 as the second district representative of Ilocos Norte, on the island of Luzon, the largest and most populous in the Philippines, and Vicente Duterte as governor of Davao, capital of the southern island of Mindanao, the country’s second largest, in 1959.
Dynastic alliances are not new. The 2019 congressional midterms were won by President Duterte’s coalition, with the Arroyos, Estradas and Marcoses as prominent allies. The Marcoses were also donors to Duterte’s 2016 presidential campaign. Much earlier than that, in 1991, the family returned to the Philippines after Marcos Sr’s death. Since then, according to Manuel Quezon III, writing in the Asia Sentinel, the Marcoses have consistently used their political resources and influence to help other political dynasties when they were confronted by liberal anti-corruption oppositions. In exchange, the Estrada and Arroyo administrations “proved helpful in moderating the zeal of government offices in pursuing the Marcoses’ wealth”.
The unpaid estate tax of the Marcos family is estimated to be nearly US$4 billion. The family matriarch, Imelda Marcos, was found guilty of corruption in 2018, but a Supreme Court appeal is pending. The International Criminal Court opening an investigation into Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, through which thousands of people have been murdered by police, adds another motive for strengthening the alliance and holding on to influential political positions.
The alliance also brought together the Marcoses’ “solid north” base—the nine northernmost provinces under the Ilocos Region and Cagayan Valley, where the new president won 85 percent of some 4 million votes—and the “solid south” of Mindanao. Except for one city and two provinces (out of 27), Marcos garnered around two-thirds of the 12 million votes cast in Mindanao. 
Since 1998, a Marcos has been governor of Ilocos Norte. Similarly, the province’s second congressional district has been represented by a Marcos or a close relative. The seat passed from Imee Marcos to her brother Marcos Jr to their mother, Imelda, and then to the incumbent Angelo Marcos Barba, Imee’s first cousin. Their uninterrupted rule helped consolidate a vast patronage network that flows on to electoral votes. 
The degree of influence of the Marcos machine is illustrated by the fact that even Cory Aquino—who led the People Power movement before becoming president in 1986—appeared to conclude that it was better to use it than to fight it. The LA Times reported in 1988 that Aquino endorsed a Marcos loyalist and his entire slate of mayoral candidates.
The typical pattern of election campaigning in the Philippines involves a local machine, often centred on a mayor or mayoral candidate. These then forge alliances with higher level candidates at the provincial and/or national level. These higher level candidates provide their local allies with resources—such as cash, campaign material and other benefits. In return, the local candidates mobilise their apparatus to help the campaigns of their higher level partners. Often the resources are used simply for vote buying.
As such, local machines run on money. The Marcos and Duterte machines are particularly well oiled and thus able to ally with other dynasties with significant local machines. Another consequence of the “UniTeam Alliance” is that the billionaires who backed Rodrigo Duterte funnelled money to Marcos Jr after the announcement that Sara Duterte was to be his vice-presidential running mate. The third richest man in the Philippines, billionaire tycoon Enrique Razon, went from supporting “Isko” Moreno, another presidential candidate, to Marcos.
Manuel Quezon III remarked that the Marcoses “only needed to reassemble a network of provincial barons, into a disciplined, motivated because well-funded, association of regional powers. Marcos symbolically ran under the banner of the Federal Party [which was formed by Duterte’s supporters in 2018], to demonstrate the sweetener he was offering these local barons ... Infinitely resourced, unbeatably broad, incontestably disciplined and organised, it left nothing to chance and maintained a commanding lead from start to finish”.
While a significant portion of Filipinos identify with and support the political project of “law and order” or “discipline” that is associated with the Marcos-Duterte name and are disaffected with the liberal elite (notably the Liberal Party administrations that ruled after the People Power movement), the organised local machines still remain decisive in elections, particularly this one. The evolution of patronage politics into a Duterte-Marcos bloc supported by regional powers presents itself as a serious challenge for democratic forces in the country.

How the Marcos family made a comeback in the Philippines

Clothing donated for a relief operation was instead used to wipe Emmanuel Asuncion’s blood off the floor of the Worker’s Assistance Center in the Calabarzon region of the Philippines on 7 March. Not too far away in Batangas, the 9-year-old son of Chai Lemita Evangelista and Ariel Evangelista hid under his bed after witnessing the state-sanctioned murder of his parents in their bamboo home.
The day is now known as “Bloody Sunday”. In total, nine human rights activists were killed and six others were arrested in simultaneous police and military operations. While the government’s attacks were an escalation of state repression, they were not exceptional—government assassination is common in the Philippines.
President Rodrigo Duterte’s main innovation since being elected in 2016, the thing that sets him somewhat apart from his predecessors, has been the increasingly overt deployment of state terror. His so-called drug war, according to conservative estimates in a June 2020 report from the United Nations High Commissioner, has claimed more than 8,000 lives. Other estimates put the number three times higher.
The killings are largely the result of the increased use of “tokhang nanlaban”-style raids. Tokhang is a portmanteau of two local words meaning “knock” and “plead”; nanlaban means “resist”. When the drug war was launched, the president emphasised the first word to allay fears of state violence. But, as an editorial in the Philippine Daily Inquirer noted in 2018: “tokhang has become a familiar word with a familiar, unmistakable meaning: it means ‘killed’”. One operation a year earlier in Bulacan, just north of the capital, Manilla, claimed 32 lives in one night. Now “tokhang nanlaban” raids are being used not only against suspected drug users and dealers, but against Indigenous people, unionists and activists.
According to Rappler, an online news site, Calabarzon police chief Brigadier General Felipe Natividad confirmed that the “Bloody Sunday” operations were part of a new “whole-of-nation” approach to ending the 52-year insurgency led by the Communist Party of the Philippines. Duterte last year established a task force ostensibly aimed at ending “local communist armed conflict”. But it has orchestrated an intensified campaign of counterinsurgency operations that do not distinguish between armed combatants of the New People’s Army—the Communist Party’s armed wing, which conducts guerrilla warfare in the countryside—and unarmed political activists.
The Philippine House of Representatives also passed an anti-terrorism law. Claiming to address “violent extremism and terrorism”, its imprecise definitions facilitated increased repression against both armed and unarmed groups that have legitimate and long-standing grievances against the Philippine state. In addition, there has been a rise in “red-tagging”—the blacklisting of individuals or organisations critical or not fully supportive of the president. They are “tagged” as either communist or terrorist, or both, regardless of their political beliefs or affiliations.
Each president since the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986—from Corazon Aquino through to her son Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino (Duterte’s predecessor)—had their own version of a counterinsurgency plan. Each presidential term also had its own notable headline human rights abuses.
As early as 1990, the Los Angeles Times noted that international human rights organisations had issued reports of “widespread ... abuses, including murder, torture and illegal arrest”. They criticised then-President Corazon Aquino’s government and the country’s armed forces. At the time, Amnesty International claimed:
“More than 200 real or suspected critics or opponents of government policies, including human rights activists, church workers, trade unionists and peasants, were killed in apparently extrajudicial executions by government or government-backed forces, and dozens reportedly ‘disappeared’.”
The content of the report could be recycled for each successive president. In another report, published by Human Rights Watch in 2011, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was criticised for similar reasons.
A culture of impunity is deeply entrenched in the Philippine state and reflects the deep class divisions in Filipino society. On one side, Duterte and the armed forces represent the interests of the ruling class to preserve existing inequalities and to preserve the integrity of the state to that end. On the side are the slain activists who represent the interest of oppressed Filipinos who campaign for rights to housing, higher wages and the conservation of the environment.
When ordinary Filipinos organise, even simply campaigning for higher wages, the state places a target on them. Their organising work and the state’s repressive response confirms the criticisms of Philippine society offered by the Communist Party and others on the left—the country’ problems cannot be solved without revolutionary means.
“Bloody Sunday” took place in the Calabarzon region, which has the highest concentration of manufacturing workers and has become the second-largest contributor to national GDP. Automotive assemblers are mostly located in Laguna province; semiconductors and high-tech industries and electronics are in Cavite and Batangas, and garment manufacturers are in Rizal. The issues that slain activists campaign around provide an indication of the economic and political situation in the region.
Chai Lemita Evangelista and Ariel Evangelista were fisherfolk and staffers for the citizens’ network against the destruction of nature and land. The group fights against mining and land-grabbing and works on issues pertaining to the rights of fishing communities.
Emmanuel Asuncion was a coordinator for Bayan, a campaign centre for several left-wing organisations. It hosts seminars, pickets, marches, demonstrations and people’s strikes. According to Bulatlat, an online news site, Asuncion was working at a Taiwanese company in Cavite Export Processing Zone as a machine operator in 1999. He and seventeen others were laid off and, while pursuing the case with the Workers’ Assistance Center’s help, he became a full-time activist. Since then, he has campaigned around many issues, such as for wage rises, and was involved in resolving land disputes. Furthermore, as a coordinator, Asuncion oversaw information gathering about human rights violations in Cavite province.
Mark Lee Bacasno, siblings Abner and Edward Esto, and Michael Dasigao were members of a local organisation that advocates for housing rights in Kasiglahan Village, Rodriguez, Rizal. According to Rappler, Bacasno and the siblings were homeless until at least 200 people occupied empty housing units in Rizal in 2017. They continuously fought for their housing since. Dasigao, as the head of the organisation, took care of local farmers’ concerns about quarrying sites. He also assisted residents in the aftermath of Typhoon Ulysses last year and helped student organisations distribute relief packages for farmers and scavengers in Rodriguez, Rizal last month.
Puroy dela Cruz and Randy “Pulong” dela Cruz were members of the Dumagat tribe—a major and semi-nomadic indigenous group in Calabarzon numbering 30,000 people—and activists with Dumagat Sierra Madre. They advocated for the rights of Indigenous peoples and fought against the controversial Kaliwa Dam project reintroduced by the Duterte government under his “Build, Build, Build” program. The tribe successfully fought against a larger dam twelve years ago.
These short profiles of the “Bloody Sunday” victims confirm that the Philippine state does not distinguish between armed combatants and non-violent activists. It would rather commit a massacre than take steps to ameliorate the conditions of poverty, landlessness and national oppression that allow guerrilla war to persist.
The National Union of People’s Lawyers has called for a review of the issuance of the search warrants (more aptly described by some as “death warrants”) that resulted in the killings. While supportable, it does not acknowledge how unjust the legal system is.
The state kills civilian dissidents with or without warrants. A lack of warrants did not stop the deaths of thousands in the drug war—it was sufficient to call them “drug pushers” and members of the urban poor. Having dubious search warrants did not stop the murder of Emmanuel Asuncion, whose search warrant was meant for his home in another town as reported by Lian Buan of Rappler. 
A search warrant, legitimate or otherwise, in the Philippine context is a pass for murder. National police chief General Debold Sinas claims the operations that resulted in the nine deaths were covered by search warrants and were, therefore, legitimate. With Duterte’s term ending in 2022, repeats of Bloody Sunday can be expected. More organisation on the part of oppressed people is needed and for more to see the fight against human rights abuses as not just the fights of activists and their families.
The New People’s Army, in response to the Tumandok Massacre, which claimed the lives of nine Indigenous leaders in similar simultaneous raids in December, has announced the formation of partisan units. Others on the Left, such as the Party of the Labouring Masses, also condemned the killings and is calling for “non-stop protest—on the streets, on social media, in Congress, in the Supreme Court, and by any means [that] we can express condemnation of arrests and killings”.
In 1988, Myanmar looked to the People Power Revolution of the Philippines that had ended the Marcos dictatorship two years earlier. In 2021, the Philippines can look to Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, particularly the leading role of the working class in the mass movement against the military junta.

Wage rises for Victorian MPs, wage caps for public sector workers

United States increases provocations in Asia

Plastics manufacturer Qenos clamps down on industrial action

How the Marcos family made a comeback in the Philippines

Bloody Sunday in the Philippines

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