Against the backdrop of the sham “peace plan” for Gaza endorsed by the UN Security Council, student activists from across Australia gathered on 22 November to discuss the future of the movement for Palestine on our campuses. 
Students for Palestine’s first ever conference, held at Brunswick Town Hall, brought together 270 people for a day of panels, workshops and a planning session for the group’s future actions. Delegates from Perth, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra and Brisbane joined activists from seven Melbourne universities and numerous high schools. 
Between the opening and closing panels—“The Gaza genocide and the mass movement for Palestine” and “Freedom for Palestine: what kind of movement do we need?”—organisers reflected on the positive lessons of the past two years, in which unprecedented numbers took to the streets in support of the Palestinians. Discussion was tempered by a recognition of the ultimate inability of the movement to force the genocide to a halt, and the need now to organise on new terrain as the immediate horror of daily bombardment and starvation is pushed out of the news cycle.
Closing panellist Amal Naser, from Sydney’s Palestine Action Group, posed the challenge to activists: that we must go from being a reactive to a proactive movement, not just waiting for the next massacre, but convincing people to join the fight now. Naser and co-panellist Monica Sestito also highlighted the importance of harnessing workers’ power, drawing on the electrifying experience of strikes that paralysed Italy’s economy in support of Palestine in October.
Educational sessions, on apartheid in the West Bank with Palestinian filmmaker Mohamed Babai, and on the relationship between the US, Australia and Israel, aimed to give activists a deeper understanding of the structures that oppress the Palestinians and ideas to convince others of why the struggle must continue. 
Workshops also critiqued some “common-sense” attitudes frequently met among activists, such as identity politics—the belief that a person’s identity should be the source of their political authority rather than the efficacy of the strategies and tactics they propose. One salient example discussed was the University of Melbourne Gaza Solidarity Encampment, where attempts by Students for Palestine activists to argue for protest action to defend the camp from attacks were shut down on the basis that a prominent Palestinian disagreed. These were essential discussions for activists committed to establishing a robust culture of debate in our movement. 
As to where next for Students for Palestine, the Freedom Flotilla campaigns featured heavily in conference proceedings. Hamish Patterson and Robert Martin, both of whom attempted to break the siege on Gaza in separate missions this year, spoke alongside veteran flotilla organiser Michael Coleman in a Q&amp;A panel. 
With the last Sumud Flotilla acting as a rallying cry for solidarity with the Palestinians, culminating in explosive strikes in Italy and Spain in late September and early October, SfP activists resolved to make the next flotilla mission a focal point for campaigning into the new year. Just as the last fleet managed to capture the world’s attention with its attempt to bring aid to a starving population, another attempt can highlight the enduring brutality that the population of Gaza suffers under a “peace plan” that entrenches the blockade and occupation and keep the issue of Palestine firmly in the spotlight. 
With the suffering in Gaza ongoing, and escalating raids, settlements and killings in the West Bank, it’s a healthy sign for the future that hundreds came together to sketch out plans to continue the fight for justice on campuses next year.

Jack Mansell

Students for Palestine hold first national conference

<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/community-health-centre-closures-must-be-stopped">Previously in Red Flag, we reported the devastating news</a> that some of the longest running community health centres in the country would close, leaving around 12,500 people without a GP. Since then, a spirited community campaign to defend the clinics in Melbourne’s inner north has won a reprieve. Reprinted below is the 20 November announcement from the Victorian Socialists, whose members played a leading role in the campaign.
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This morning, we woke to the welcome news that the majority of services at the three cohealth community clinics in Fitzroy, Collingwood and Kensington, which were slated to close before Christmas, will remain open until July 2026. 
The Labor Party has buckled under pressure—the pressure of people power. The Fitzroy, Collingwood and Kensington communities, who have fought hard against the government, held mass meetings, protests, pickets and more. Their efforts were not in vain. 
Victorian Socialists acted as soon as we heard news of the closures, which would have left 12,500 people without access to GP services, and left 70 cohealth staff out of work. Our “Socialists In Healthcare” group, alongside local VS branches, helped to transform local anger into collective action. We mobilised hundreds of local community members to bring the issue into the public eye and to put pressure on the state and federal governments. 
Now, federal Labor has announced $1.5 million to keep GP services open until mid-2026 while a review is undertaken. The community has won an important reprieve. Everyone who came to a rally or a meeting, stood on a picket, put up posters or handed out leaflets should be proud: together, we forced Labor to act. 
However, the fight is not yet over. For one thing pharmacy and counselling services are still slated to close on 19 December, including the methadone service for 1,250 people trying to recover from serious addictions. We have to prevent the closure of these lifesaving services. 
Further, an eight-month pause is not a promise to keep the clinics open long term. Nor is it a commitment to maintaining the community health care model. It is possible that Labor is just buying time to hose down the justifiable anger and that its review will ultimately determine that the clinics are “unsustainable”. 
Twenty-five community health clinics across Victoria are still under threat. Those who depend on these clinics include some of the most vulnerable people in the community: refugees, newly arrived migrants, people experiencing homelessness, those living with disabilities and patients managing complex chronic illness. 
These clinics provide vital health services, including pharmacy services, opioid replacement programs, and nursing, counselling and allied health options. Yet they are controlled by private companies and boards. Two such clinics in Melbourne’s south-east have been slated for closure by the Better Health Network Board. 
The coming months will determine whether community health is adequately funded and put into community hands, or cut and further privatised. We must use this time to build a movement against the closure of community clinics and against broader healthcare cuts. We’ve shown that when the community stands together, we can force the government to act. 
To get involved in the campaign or to find out more, follow @socialistsinhealthcare on Instagram.

Community pressure wins reprieve on health clinic closures

With the increasing polarisation of politics and the rise of the far right, socialism is making a comeback as a current. The Socialist Party, the expansion of the Victorian Socialists into a national organisation, currently has more than 5,400 financial members, a significant increase from the 800 members the Victorian Socialists had a year ago. The aim of the party is to unite all major socialist currents in Australia in a broad project. The following letter was drafted by former members of the Socialist Workers Party and Democratic Socialist Party to urge comrades in the Socialist Alliance to join the new project. 
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A plea to old comrades
The success of Victorian Socialists and its growth into a national organisation present socialists in Australia with a much awaited opportunity. Since the demise of the Communist Party of Australia and the failure of numerous unity processes among the socialist left throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the socialist movement has not been in a position where it could aspire to pose some sort of albeit modest mass alternative. The global context demands the socialist movement rise to this challenge. The heyday of neoliberal capitalism is behind us, crises abound, and the far right threatens.
Comrades in the old SWP-DSP tradition who were part of attempts at regroupment in the 1980s will remember that these included a range of party building tactics: the intervention in the Nuclear Disarmament Party, the New Left Party process with the Communist Party, the fusion discussions with the Socialist Party and the work in helping to form the NSW Greens. In none of these were we the obviously larger numerical force. The critical element was the confidence and courage our tradition had accumulated after nearly two decades of party building, which put us in a position of playing a leading role in these regroupment attempts. During our discussion in this period, Jim Percy rightly observed:
“Some [on the left] get caught in the trap of defining their role in ideological terms and general principles while failing to recognise the equally important role of active tactical approaches. Some simply proclaim their program and assume that this guarantees them a big future role. But programs are really products of life itself. They need living verification. It’s no use proclaiming the need for a party in general while failing to take the necessary and possible steps to build one. Such a course reduces formally correct positions to paper abstractions.”
None of the opportunities for regroupment in the 1980s worked out the way we would have wanted, but we did the right thing trying. With hindsight, such ambitions were not likely to bear fruit in the context of a long retreat. Today we are in a very different situation. Difficult, yes, but different. While not all of the decay of the old left is behind us, there are the beginnings of the new. In any case, we haven’t the choice but to try again. Everywhere, the far right is growing, taking advantage of the blame social democracy has for the crises of neoliberalism, and the failure of the revolutionary left to build mass alternatives. We have to win back the language and the practical leadership of discontent.
We have an opportunity now to take the advice Jim Percy put to our old party back in the 1980s:
“What would we, as the SWP, do if a new party comes along more or less fitting our bill? Above all, we’d slip the SWP into idle mode and give the new party our best shot. The most important thing about our best shot will be our attitude. If we join a new party with the view that we have all the answers because of our past experience or theory, we could risk wrecking the whole project. 
“The real test of the organisational viability of the new party will be how soon decisions start to cut across old views and alignments. We have to approach things with open minds and assume that everyone else who joins a new party will do the same … The new party must develop its own life, and institutions that have the confidence of all members. A simple federation of factions wouldn’t last very long.”
A number of us, long-term ex-members of the SWP-DSP tradition, long ago joined Socialist Alternative. We’ve been a tiny minority in an organisation where we have important differences that at some stage may well play out, but we have had the courage to put our perspectives in the context of the class struggle, as it is, which is so much bigger than the small organisations and programmatic positions of the historic tendencies of the far left. You work with what you have, and you put your confidence in the class (the long view of history), even if that puts you in a tiny minority.
The challenge of Socialist Alliance joining the Socialist Party is, frankly, a much more modest ask than the risks the SWP was willing to take in the 1980s. There are already a lot of guarantees in place that were not certain in past regroupment attempts, including the right to maintain and build existing organisations publicly and as tendencies in the Socialist Party. This is simply a beginning, one step at a time without a predetermined path as to where it may lead.
We hope comrades will look back to the rich history of the SWP/DSP and find in that the inspiration to take up this challenge.
Jorge Jorquera, Nick Everett, Kim, Bullimore, Andrew Ian Jamieson, John ‘Togs’ Tognolini, Margaret Perrott, Allen Myers, Helen Jarvis

Editors

An appeal for socialist unity

Teachers in Queensland staged their first strike in sixteen years in August and are set to walk out again on 25 November. This would be the first time in more than three decades that Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) members have struck more than once in a year. 
Within the QTU, a network of radicals has been campaigning for the union to take more strident action to improve our pay and conditions: that network is called Queensland Teachers Fightback. The strikes are occurring against an intransigent Liberal National Party government, which has on three separate occasions offered teachers a desultory 8 percent pay offer over three years, with no improvements to workload.
While the campaign continues, teachers have already scored a significant victory against the government, voting “no” in a significant majority against its offer on 31 October.
But first, some context. During the last decade of successive Labor state governments, teaching conditions in Queensland significantly deteriorated. When the COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, the then Palaszczuk government froze teachers’ pay for eighteen months, costing teachers thousands. This was followed by an 11 percent wage “increase” over three years, which was so far below inflation that it meant a real wage cut for teachers of 6.5 percent. 
Queensland teachers also have the slowest salary progression of anywhere in the country, alongside Tasmania. The situation is so bad that a seventh-year teacher on the Gold Coast could earn $20,000 more by teaching over the border in NSW. Planning time for Queensland teachers is also below the national and OECD average. For high school teachers, our planning time (time when we’re at school but not teaching) hasn’t improved since the 1970s, despite a significant increase in reporting requirements. Our lunch breaks are technically unpaid, but we’re still required to do playground duty. We get two to three student-free days in January (of which only three hours is individual planning time), and then one student-free day in September (which is professional development, not planning time). There is a constant and steady stream of new curriculum updates, program changes and new assessments we write or modify every year without the time in the day to do them. Teachers regularly take sick days just to keep on top of work. 
While other states offer 15 days’ sick leave per year, Queensland teachers get only ten. And in a vast state with many regional cities and towns, the remote incentives are nowhere near enough to retain staff and to address the higher cost of living in those areas. 
What has not helped our situation is the lack of strike action. Fightback began in 2019 during negotiations for our last agreement, when 94 percent of union members voted to strike in support of our demands, yet our leadership didn’t follow through. Instead, members were encouraged to vote yes to an offer that made no serious improvements to wages or conditions. So, we got started by making some basic arguments—that we shouldn’t vote yes to any offers that aren’t worth voting for. Enterprise bargaining periods provide us with the opportunity to take protected industrial action, so we need to make the most of this—by striking! 
Previous offers, which members were recommended to accept by the leadership, would usually pass with 95 percent in favour. In 2019, though, nearly 20 percent of members voted against. This was a significant achievement for a newly formed group with no institutional weight within the union. Fightback tapped into members’ outrage and frustration with the union’s direction and gave them the arguments to use in their schools against the offer. In the past, disgruntled members would have simply left the union. Fightback provided them with a crucial alternative—stay, fight and help organise for something better.
There have been several other industrial campaigns Fightback has been a part of, such as pushing for school closures during the pandemic. In 2023, we ran for the union’s presidential positions on a platform of class struggle and putting our leaders on a workers’ wage. Fightback candidates won between 38 and 44 percent of the vote across the three positions.
But it’s not just industrial questions. Fightback members have made efforts to politicise our workplaces—inviting colleagues to rallies for Palestine, for refugee rights, against the far right and more. We haven’t shied away from speaking out against genocide and bigotry, which sometimes requires a discussion or argument, but is important for deepening our understanding of what fighting for workers’ rights and solidarity is all about. 
It was crucial that our members spoke up in defence of other unionists when the CFMEU was put into administration, and their democratic say overruled by Labor state governments. Solidarity isn’t charity; our rights and conditions are genuinely impacted by our government’s treatment of refugees, their support for Israel’s genocide, dictatorial control of other unions, tolerance for the far right and so on. We’ve had Fightback contingents and our banners at many protests this year, showing we don’t just talk the talk, but we walk it as well, and that has helped us identify and connect with sympathisers and fellow activists.
Fightback began our intervention in the current enterprise bargaining campaign by getting some decent demands into our log of claims. We put together some example motions and provided them to our email list and Facebook group—demands such as 10 percent pay rise per year, doubling planning time and increasing sick leave to fifteen days. The motions were taken up with gusto—more than 30 branches voted for our pay demand to be 10 percent per year, and several branches voted for 15 percent. 
For many, it was their first time going to a union branch meeting. In one instance, three people who didn’t know each other independently printed the Fightback motions and turned up to the same branch meeting to move them!
Pushing for a decent log of claims was important for raising members’ expectations of what we should be fighting for, rather than tailoring our demands to what we think the government considers acceptable. Part of Fightback’s intervention has been to push for the union to adopt a log of claims with teeth. The QTU has adopted an “interest-based” approach to bargaining, meaning that rather than raising specific demands, the union’s negotiators seek common ground with the government. 
Described by the <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/issues-we-help/collaborative-approaches-program/interest-based-bargaining">Fair Work Commission</a>
as a “consensus-seeking and cooperative” approach to bargaining, interest-based bargaining stands in contrast with a “traditional” adversarial approach, where parties “approach the process with predetermined positions or a log of claims”. It also makes it much harder for workers to hold their representatives to account during negotiations, and vague demands are much harder to mobilise people to campaign for. Fightback has <a href="https://qldteachersfightback.org/need-more-than-ibb-to-fight-the-lnp.html">pushed back</a> on this approach, and, thanks to our intervention, more members are now arguing against interest-based bargaining.
Fightback has been making the case for strike action and protests across all the union’s official channels. When the union backed away from implementing work bans last year, Fightback called a snap speak-out outside parliament, which mobilised dozens of teachers and supporters, and, importantly, attracted media coverage.
The 6 August strike confirmed the arguments about strike action Fightback members have been making. These include that, when a lead is given, members will follow. The strike was widely observed, with approximately 50,000 teachers on strike. Five thousand mobilised in Brisbane at the strike meeting and rally, and a further 5,000 gathered across the state in other rallies.
The strike also highlighted the union’s relevance to previously unorganised teachers: 2,300 joined the union just before the strike. And the public got behind the strike—disproving the idea that the public resents teachers striking or won’t back the action. As we marched through the city, the support was obvious, from people clapping and cheering for us to fellow unionists on construction sites downing tools to raise a fist and chant with us.
Despite the positive energy from the strike, the QTU state council, comprising 120 delegates, “paused” consideration of further industrial action for four weeks. Fightback members pushed back where we could. We argued on the floor of council against the idea. In one school, teachers turned a members’ “briefing” on the pause into a proper meeting with debate, and won—carrying a motion opposing the decision.
The strike was crucial for what came after: in late October, teachers were presented with another government offer which had a few minor changes, yet the substance remained: 8 percent over three years, no improvements to workload. The strike had helped raise teachers’ expectations and we had 50,000 teachers out on strike saying 8 percent wasn’t good enough. To be presented with the same pay offer felt like a slap in the face.
Fightback activists jumped into action, campaigning against such an insulting offer. We were presented with the offer on Monday; voting closed that Friday. Our members were quick to put together a leaflet, and were circulating arguments about the pay, the lack of workload improvements and the need for strike action. 
While the official position from the union leadership was to request that members give the offer “due consideration”, their communications led with “QTU members secure an improved offer”, claiming it was the government’s “best and final offer” and spelling out the dangers of voting it down. These focused on arbitration: that it’s a lengthy process that would delay any pay increases, and that our existing conditions would be under threat if we voted no. As Fightback (and many other teachers) said in response, given how little there was to lose in the offer, members are ready to “roll the dice” on arbitration. What sitting commissioner is going to gut teachers’ conditions during a teacher shortage?
In a stunning turn, with almost 29,000 members voting, 67 percent voted against the government’s offer. Members shared that they didn’t feel alone and that their faith in their fellow members had been restored.
Union leaders had not been campaigning against the offer. The only voices in the media were the government and a right-wing ex-principal talking about how great it was. But Fightback members campaigned against the offer and carried members with us. Wherever we could, we pushed for special branch meetings. This involved checking the union rules and collecting the small number of signatures required. As of this writing, there have been six special branch meetings called by rank-and-file members in the last two weeks—something pretty unheard of. 
The special meetings have been positive for us for a few reasons. They’ve brought members out to vocalise their opposition to the government’s offers and sharpen their arguments for a better deal. They’ve been very well attended, with a combined total of more than 140 members taking part.
With the prospect of arbitration looming, it’s not obvious why we should strike. The meetings have given union members the space to argue to colleagues about why strike action is still crucial: that it shows how important our labour is; that without us, schools stop. And that the past sixteen years without strike action demonstrate that when business isn’t disrupted, our pay and conditions decline. Strikes also make the point that we don’t have to accept what we’re told we deserve by others: not by the government or the union officials, all of whom enjoy much higher salaries and better conditions than teachers. Instead, we can decide what we deserve and fight for it.
Throughout this campaign, members have had a crash course in how the processes of the union work: meeting procedure and protocol, moving and speaking to a motion; all valuable skills that have been useful in this campaign and invaluable for the fights to come. 
By using every forum available to make left-wing arguments and try to win rank-and-file members to our perspective, Fightback has won considerable influence among a wide layer of teachers. We have also helped to educate a wider layer to be leaders and fighters in their workplaces and branches.
Fightback is here to stay, and we’re growing. Rebuilding class-struggle unionism is not going to happen overnight, but there are no alternatives. Wherever we are, in a big workplace or small, we’re there to make the key arguments, to give a lead to members who want to see the union fight for more and to argue that fighting for a better world involves pushing on any question, industrial or political, and looking to our collective power to win.

QTU member and QTU Fightback activist

Inside QLD teachers’ campaign

It’s hard to think of a starker contrast. 
In Italy last month, Israel’s attack on the Global Sumud Flotilla sparked a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/italys-general-strike-shows-the-way-forward">general strike</a> backed by Italy’s largest union federation and a number of smaller union groups. Strikes and mass blockades shut down the nation’s ports and large sections of rail, logistics, education and other industries. Somewhere close to a million people marched in solidarity with Palestine in Rome the next day, the biggest protest in a generation.
Meanwhile in Australia, record numbers have rallied—most notably 300,000 at the March for Humanity on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in August. 
But the response of the Australian union movement’s official leadership to Israel’s assault on the Sumud Flotilla was largely confined to a couple of <a href="https://x.com/unionsaustralia/status/1974025863126503925/photo/1">tweets</a>. It was moving to see footage of seafarer Hamish Paterson, a member of the Maritime Union of Australia, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/reel/1524377095418162">welcomed home</a> by a crowd of hundreds of supporters at Sydney airport. But the fact remains that not a single branch of a single union in this country has authorised industrial action in opposition to the Australian government’s role in arming Israel’s genocidal military. 
It wasn’t always like this. 
Fifty years ago, Australia’s union movement was <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-workers-struck-against-apartheid">famous</a>
for putting bans on companies that did business with the blood-soaked apartheid regime in South Africa. <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C98588">“Stop work to stop the war”</a> was likewise the slogan of the left wing of the movement against the US and Australian war in Vietnam—with many unions turning it into reality. In the 1970s, metalworkers regularly banned jobs connected to <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6837">uranium mining</a>, and sections of the union movement backed strikes, protests and <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7540">blockades</a> for Aboriginal land rights. 
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/recollections-militant">Peter Close</a>, who as a tugboat crew member implemented the bans on South African shipping in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, spoke to Red Flag in 2013 about what it was like to be a militant at that time: “Proletarian internationalism, class politics, and class struggle itself was on the menu every day”. 
This doesn’t mean that everything was perfect. I remember Harry Bocquet, a Maoist who had worked on the Melbourne waterfront from the early 1960s, being very critical of the neglect of political discussion and education in that period. On one occasion, wharfies were pulled off a ship by the union leadership—but it was only when the workers got to the pub that they found out the stoppage was a protest against the war in Vietnam. 
The workers were supportive on this occasion, according to Harry. But this downplaying of political discussion and democracy meant any culture of militancy was hard to sustain, especially from the early 1980s, when the Labor government moved systematically to stifle union militancy through the Prices and Incomes Accord. 
The aim of the Accord was to impose sweeping neoliberal “reform”, including privatisations and deregulation of the labour market. This was carried out by the Labor government in partnership with business and almost all of the union movement’s official leadership. 
If you’re a union leader allied to a Labor government imposing neoliberalism on the working class, one thing you definitely don’t want is a politicised, militant current in the union movement. So the sometimes heroic traditions of the 1970s had to be smothered. 
A huge amount of effort was spent—especially by “left” leaderships like the key Metalworkers union—in “educating” union delegates out of militancy and browbeating them into compliance with the class collaborationist approach of the Accord. 
Rates of industrial action fell. Delegate organisation withered. Unions that refused to meekly go along with this shift were smashed, with a key role played by Labor governments. 
The union leadership that sold us this disaster hasn’t improved with time. This is evident from the lack of fight over wages during the recent inflationary surge.
It’s no surprise, then, that Australian unions have overwhelmingly been reluctant even to entertain discussions about Palestine, let alone take industrial action. 
Not wanting to embarrass the Labor government is obviously a factor. Any party that governs Australian capitalism has to respect that holiest of holies—support for the US alliance, and thus for Israel. So long as acknowledging Palestine means criticising Labor, the union leaders will resist.
Added to this, the political forces that led much of the working-class action against war and racism 50 years ago have all but disappeared. The Communist Party helped design and implement the Accord and then voted itself out of existence in 1991. The Stalinist breakaways from the Communist Party also withered under the impact of the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the embrace of capitalism by China’s totalitarian rulers. 
Forces to the left of the CPA and its splits were reborn during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but were too small to change the course of the union movement. In more recent years, Socialist Alternative members have compiled an <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/socialist-alternatives-record-of-workplace-organising">impressive record</a> of industrial disputes—including helping to lead the only <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/community-sector-workers-to-walk-out-for-palestine-again">strikes for Palestine</a> in Australia over the past two years. But the sort of active solidarity seen in decades past has so far not been re-created.
This had also been the case in Italy, until the last few months. The wonderful response to the call for a strike in solidarity with Palestine has taken almost everyone involved by surprise.
It’s not hard to understand why. Critical commentary on the state of Italy’s unions isn’t difficult to find. In February this year, the mainstream news agency Reuters <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/big-toothless-italys-unions-blamed-wage-stagnation-2025-02-07/">carried a report</a> with the title: “Big but toothless—Italy’s unions blamed for wage stagnation”, noting that Italy is the only country in the European Union where real wages went backwards relative to inflation over the three decades to 2020. 
More than 90 percent of major strikes in Italy last a day or less, while in the US, 80 percent last two days or longer. “Trade unions in Italy have mutated to become mainly service providers”, according to Filippo Barbera, an academic interviewed by Reuters: “They help you do your tax returns and calculate what your pension will be, but they won't take on employers to secure salary rises”.
This is no surprise, given the politics of the three main union federations in Italy (the UIL, the CISL and the CGIL) and the parties they are associated with (respectively the Socialist Party, the Christian Democrats and the Italian Communist Party—whose main political successor is the Democratic Party). Each has been every bit as committed as the Australian Labor Party and the leadership of Australia’s union movement in wanting to work in “partnership” with capital. 
One sign of this is the series of “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2022.2107044#d1e325">social pacts</a>” involving the Italian unions signing on to neoliberal “reform” from the late 1970s onwards. The intention of these pacts mirrored Australian Labor’s approach with the Accord: to assist the restructuring of capitalism along neoliberal lines. Such accords played a role in the ending of automatic wage indexation, the introduction of “flexible” contracts, privatisation of key state assets and cuts to Italy’s previously relatively generous pension scheme. 
This has not always been a smooth process, but overall, the main union federations in Italy have been ineffective in resisting neoliberal “reform”, and at times have been just as actively complicit as Australian unions. 
There is no system of government registration of unions in Italy. And the Italian far left of the 1970s—though plagued with all sorts of <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/workerism-and-autonomism-in-italys-hot-autumn/">serious political problems</a>—was much larger than the equivalent forces in Australia. These two factors came together in Italy in the formation of “base unions” from the 1980s. Some of these are splits from existing unions, others are the creation of politicised militants who set to work organising the unorganised. 
The main premise of the base unions is to reject union bureaucracy as inherently conservative, and to attempt to build a more combative rank-and-file-driven movement. Even advocates of this approach admit its limitations, however. 
Donato Romito, writing from a sympathetic perspective in 2003 on the anarchist-aligned Libcom website, <a href="https://libcom.org/article/exploring-alternative-forms-workers-organization-anarchist-communists-and-italian-base">noted</a>
that the CGIL “was systematically demonized, but there was never any strategy of dialogue with its members or with its internal opposition”. 
Further, Romito noted that the pressures of having to survive as a union can push towards conservatism, regardless of the formal politics of the leadership. There is also a serious tendency towards fragmentation among the base unions, where “everyone felt they were an alternative to everyone else ... Italian grassroots syndicalism remains trapped between the radicalism of its platforms and the need for bargaining, between its criticism of bureaucratism and the inevitable formation of a leadership class”.
An informative <a href="https://libcom.org/article/port-genoa-first-focaccia-then-class-struggle-article-autonomous-dock-workers-collective">commentary</a>
by Anna Jikhareva from 2022 paints a picture of the Autonomous Port Workers Collective (Collettivo Autonomo Lavoratori Portuali, or CALP) in Genoa. The CALP were key initiators of the recent strikes in solidarity with Palestine as part of the Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) federation of base unions. 
Remarkably, in a major port with an on-site workforce of 4,000, including 1,200 dock workers, the CALP has only around 20 or so active members, according to Jikhareva. All of them are the sons of dock workers and continuators of a militant industrial and political tradition in the port of Genoa. 
Despite these small numbers, in the right circumstances the CALP can pull other workers behind them. Jikhareva describes relatively modest numbers of workers and supporters—dozens growing into a crowd of over a hundred—blockading the port in October 2021, as part of a one-day strike of the base unions on economic issues. 
In the extraordinary circumstances of late 2025, however, with a wave of revulsion sweeping the globe against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the modest forces of the CALP helped set something much more substantial in motion. Heading up a rally of 40,000 in Genoa at the end of August, CALP member Riccardo Rudino threatened to shut down the port—and every other port in Europe—if the Global Sumud Flotilla was attacked. Everyone understood that there was at least the potential of real power behind this threat. 
A series of factors were important in turning this threat into a reality. The fact that the Democratic Party (associated with the CGIL) is in opposition, and that unions are sidelined under the far-right Meloni government, probably removed one obstacle to the CGIL falling in behind the USB federation. The fact that there were two Democratic Party members of parliament on the Sumud Flotilla no doubt helped as well. And when Rudino threatened to “block everything” that night in Genoa, he was building on the substantial “block everything” union protests in neighbouring France.
The mass strikes would never have happened without the movement on the streets and on the campuses in solidarity with Palestine. Also crucial was the presence of politicised militants in a string of workplaces, who were capable of leading something. There are valid and important criticisms of the base unions, but they got enough right to make some history. 
Of course, we don’t know what comes next. We make our own history, as Karl Marx once observed, but not in circumstances of our own choosing. The USB has now called for a general strike against the Italian war budget on 28 November. 
In Australia, those frustrating “circumstances” include the disastrous continuing consequences of Labor’s all-too-effective imposition of the politics of class collaboration on the country’s union movement. Rebuilding a different and more combative workers’ movement requires rebuilding the politics of class struggle. After all, which political forces are organised, and to what end, is one of the few “circumstances” we have some control over. 
But if recent events have reminded us of this, they should also remind us of something else—that not every damn thing is predetermined. 
Marco Bertorello, a socialist and writer who works at the port of Genoa, wrote a moving <a href="https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article9157">account</a> of the 40,000-strong protest in Genoa at the end of August, describing how the long-dormant traditions of struggle in Genoa were taking on a mass character before his eyes. His account is a reminder that, though we can be all too aware of the circumstances we’re in, sometimes we can still roll the dice and make history:
“I think it was an important moment for my city. I don’t know what it might mean for the future and for other cities, but it seems to me to be a possible barometer of the social climate. I hope it is not just a passing anomaly. In difficult times, there is always room for the unexpected, the surprising—in short, for humanity.”

Jerome Small

A tale of two union movements: Palestine and the unions in Italy and Australia

For the Australian Labor Party, university campuses are a vital source of recruits and a training ground for future politicians and leaders. Through their control of the vast majority of the country’s student unions, student Labor members learn to manage budgets and bureaucracies, network and harvest votes, and to face down pressure from rival groups, mostly on their left—all vital skills for the Albaneses and Wongs of tomorrow. But they also have to prove themselves effective advocates, which means at times supporting or engaging in activism against governments, in support of education demands as well as broader social justice. 
So two years of campus activism against their party’s support for the genocide in Gaza have put them in an awkward spot. Labor students have had to balance the competing pressures of pro-Palestine sentiments on campus, their own personal views and loyalty to the staunchly pro-Israel line of their party and of university administrations. 
Predictably, and in line with the adult party’s stance, Labor-dominated student unions on many campuses have expressed outward hostility toward Palestine campaigning and used their resources to obstruct it. Labor students who run the University of Melbourne Student Union, fearful of spoiling relationships with the university hierarchy and drawing the ire of right-wingers, have rescinded union support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. 
Last year, the union responded to a request signed by 1,200 students for a special general meeting (SGM) to reinstate a pro-BDS position by hiring lawyers from Labor-aligned law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal basis to prevent the meeting happening. They then used similar tactics to defeat a campaign by office-bearers to donate $19,000—the remainder of their 2024 budget—to a Palestinian activist group in the West Bank.
The Labor right-dominated Deakin University Student Association has used the precedent created by the disgraceful backdown at Melbourne University to refuse to hear pro-Palestine motions, arguing explicitly that the union should not take “political” stances. 
At Swinburne University, Labor students sabotaged last year’s SGM for Palestine, requested by 400 students, by scheduling it at the remote Wantirna campus. At Monash, Labor-left students reluctantly oversaw a requested SGM, but locked the doors before the meeting had reached quorum, rendering the meeting unable to change union policy. So far, so predictable. 
At some other places, however, the possibility of cynically harvesting pro-Palestine votes has softened their hearts to the plight of Gazans. At La Trobe University, Labor students registered the ticket “Social Justice—Free Palestine” in the student union elections to confuse students and compete with the left-wing ticket organised by Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine members. And at Swinburne, the same Labor students who sabotaged the SGM called through attendees claiming to be from Students for Palestine to get votes for their group in elections. While not ideal, this sort of deviation from official pro-Israel talking points can be tolerated by Sussex Street so long as there are some votes in it and no-one important notices. 
But then there are the cases where Labor students have outright supported Palestine activism, a position at odds, to say the least, with their party’s policy. At RMIT, the Labor right-controlled union endorsed the campus’s Gaza encampment, even bringing fresh fruit to famished activists. At University of Wollongong, Labor members promoted and attended the SGM organised by Students for Palestine. Through the National Union of Students, leaders of the Labor right have used union resources to promote the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine—a counter to Labor’s witch-hunt antisemitism inquiry—and endorsed a national day of protest against the government’s support for Israel. 
Even at Melbourne University, where the Labor students have more recently been hostile, their past conduct suggests this may be as much about toeing the line as conviction. In 2022, they supported the very BDS motion that they later rescinded under pressure. During the 2024 encampment, they gave limited behind-the-scenes support, including by booking lawn space for a camp, but avoided any public association with the event. This contradiction raises a question—if support for Israel is the great moral cause that Labor leaders claim it is, why do they tolerate such blatant disloyalty to party policy in their own ranks? 
For two years, Labor leaders have maintained the spurious line that Palestine campus activism is part of a detestable upsurge in antisemitic hate. Labor’s federal Education Minister Jason Clare labelled the University of Melbourne’s Gaza solidarity encampment “repugnant”, while Defence Minister Richard Marles asserted last May: “The levels of antisemitism that we have seen in the past few months are more than any that I’ve seen during my lifetime”. Labor supported a motion moved in the Senate by the Liberal opposition that condemned the traditional slogan of Palestinian resistance “from the river to the sea”, describing it as “used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. Labor have staked credibility on a bogus campus Senate inquiry led by Jillian Segal, a bigoted pro-genocide activist, that cynically and dishonestly conflated support for Palestine with threats against Jewish students. And anyone who dares speak up for the Palestinians, from former Labor Senator Fatima Payman to Greens Senator Mehreen Farouqi, has had the book thrown at them.
And yet Labor turn a blind eye to their own future leaders when they associate themselves with this same campaign and sentiments on campuses. If Labor leaders really believe all this, you would expect them to extend their condemnations to party members who have associated themselves with these campaigns. The fact that they haven’t makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that there is a lot of cynicism at work here, and a willingness to say whatever is required in service of Australia’s imperial interests and alliances.
It also reflects a lack of confidence in imposing their political line on their own student groups. Labor’s leaders have to give their student clubs a longer leash with the campaigning they tolerate because the clubs have to recruit from campuses that are populated by young people, the vast majority of whom are well to the party’s left, and where contempt for the party and its conduct in government is at record highs. So there’s an appreciation that pragmatic adaption to the prevailing pro-Palestine sentiment has to happen to keep the machine being supplied with raw material. 
Notably, it has been students from Labor’s right faction (Unity) in particular that have provided the most support to these campaigns. While the Labor left faction has been in long decline, Unity is overwhelmingly dominant and has the largest base amongst students. It recruits strongly among international students, many of who are from backgrounds where support for Palestine is widespread. Adapting to this sentiment is expedient, and whatever is expedient is acceptable, whatever the bombast about the moral righteousness of Israel.
And there is an understanding that all this has very clear limits. Student politicians who want to climb the ranks accept that “serious politics” is ultimately about trading principles away for influence and power. Penny Wong explained how this “serious politics” works when Payman crossed the floor to vote for a pro-Palestine Greens bill in 2024: “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”, Wong told ABC Radio’s AM program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.”
Wong, who married her same-sex partner in 2024, adhered to Labor policy by voting against the Greens’ attempt to legalise same-sex marriage in 2008, and spent years publicly undermining the campaign for marriage equality. Her reward was the foreign ministry.
Payman’s case shows what happens when you don't exhibit this highly nuanced and sophisticated conception of politics that involves shutting up about things that are important with the hope of gaining power and influence at some point in the future, and instead say what you think. Payman was immediately shunned and suspended from the Labor caucus, while anonymous Labor sources backgrounded the press that Payman might be ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background. Payman was the first to cross the floor and vote against party since 2005. 
This is how Labor holds the line. For budding Labor careerists, the stick of discipline and ostracisation goes along with the carrot of career advancement. Some Labor students, as at University of Melbourne and Deakin, prove their mettle by openly defending Labor’s line against the movement, and copping the ensuing student outrage. Some others pretend to care about an issue they have no real interest in to harvest votes in elections. Others who, because of prior political conviction or family background, personally support greater rights for Palestinians, learn eventually to bite their tongues to get ahead. 
For the party to function, it counts on the people that matter becoming too cynical to ever want to really change anything.

Luca Tavan

Labor’s student clubs and Palestine activism

The rich in Australia are experiencing massive wealth gains, but a new report reveals just how challenging life is for those at the bottom. The <a href="https://reports.foodbank.org.au/wp-content/uploads/documents/Foodbank_Hunger_Report_2025_Web_Edition.pdf">Foodbank Hunger Report 2025</a> estimates that one in three Australian households (approximately 3.5 million) experienced food insecurity in the past year. Of those, two-thirds (or 20 percent of all households) were severely food insecure, meaning they had skipped meals or even gone whole days without eating. 
The most vulnerable in society are the worst affected—67 percent of households with a person with a disability or health issue experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months, as did 68 percent of single-parent households and 48 percent of low-income households, defined as those earning less than $33,800 per year. 
The report makes it clear that this is driven by the cost-of-living crisis. Only 21 percent of Australian households live comfortably on their current income, while 87 percent cite the cost of living as one of their top concerns. 
“Australia’s housing affordability crisis appears to be supercharging food insecurity in a way we haven’t seen before, with nearly 1 in 2 rental households reporting as food insecure”, Kylea Tink, CEO of Foodbank, said. Highlighting the direct relationship between the housing crisis and food insecurity, 35 percent of renters cited “changes in their household or living arrangements” as a cause of food insecurity. 
In response to the rise in the cost of living, households experiencing food insecurity have also reduced eating/drinking in restaurants, cafes and bars, dipped into household savings, cut back on fresh produce, protein, dairy or other food and grocery items, and relied more on credit cards or buy now, pay later apps. 
What has the federal Labor government done about this? Has it raised JobSeeker, the single-parent payment, the Disability Support Pension and other welfare payments above the poverty line? Has it placed price caps on groceries and other essentials? Has it capped rents and begun building a deluge of public housing? No. It has not. 
All of this comes as the rich are getting even richer. The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors’ most recent report on executive salaries found that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies made, on average, 55 times the wage of an average worker. 
Some of Australia’s largest corporations are making major profits from the crisis. Coles and Woolworths made a combined $2.5 billion in after-tax profit last financial year, while Meriton Properties—a developer owned by Australia’s second richest person, Harry Triguboff—<a href="https://www.afr.com/property/residential/harry-triguboff-collects-222m-profit-as-rental-income-jumps-20251102-p5n74a">recently announced</a> that it made $222 million, an increase from $165 million the year before. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/banking-giants-to-pocket-30b-in-profit-as-lending-ramps-up-20251029-p5n69z.html">analysts expect</a> big Australian banks to have made $30 billion in profit this financial year, driven by growth in loans—particularly home loans. 
But not everything is as rosy as it seems for Australia’s wealthiest. While working-class families struggle to afford food, the Australian Financial Review <a href="https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/too-many-boats-not-enough-berths-why-marinas-are-hot-property-20250718-p5mfwl">recently reported</a> that the rich are suffering from severe super-yacht parking-space insecurity, driven by the increasing number and size of yachts in Australia.
According to the Foodbank report, 35 percent of food-insecure households don’t seek help because they believe that others are in greater need. While those most in need are concerned about taking too much from society, the rich possess no such compunctions. Just take Elon Musk’s (successful) bid for a US$1 trillion (A$1.5 trillion) pay packet, or the estimated $165 billion in negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions housing investors are expected to receive from the federal government over the next decade. 
“The capitalist class is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because ... it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him”, Karl Marx wrote in the
Communist Manifesto. “Society can no longer live under this class, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.” 
We need a society that uses its resources to meet everyone’s needs, ensuring no-one goes hungry or without a roof over their head ever again. Even more than that, everyone ought to live dignified and fulfilling lives. The wealth is there, but currently it funds the otherworldly extravagances of the rich. We have to take it from them.

Ben Lourie

Workers go hungry while corporations rake it in

The sound of an exploding flashbang grenade is hard to describe; the noise thunders through your skull and leaves you disoriented. They are violent, dangerous and potentially lethal devices, designed for use as part of military and armed police operations. Yet they are now being deployed regularly on the streets of Melbourne as a tool of protest management. So too is OC spray, a chemical weapon that’s banned from warfare due to its indiscriminate and potentially deadly impact. Then there are the batons, horses, water cannons, bird-shot rounds and rubber-coated steel bullets.
The growing militarisation of police forces around the world is well documented. It is one reflection of the growing disconnect between capitalist governments and the mass of people they supposedly represent and who are increasingly expressing their opposition to genocide, economic inequality, climate inaction, racism and other injustices in significant numbers. Lacking positive reform proposals to address these concerns or improve people’s lives, the state is increasingly responding with brute force, as well as legal restrictions on the right to organise and demonstrate both at work and on the streets. 
This tendency towards repression and violence is a serious threat to left-wing organising. It is an attempt to make disrupting the status quo harder, and it often succeeds. Anti-union laws, for instance, have played a role in taming the workers’ movement and reducing strike activity. The NSW police successfully used the courts to stop a recent pro-Palestine demonstration from occupying the Opera House shore, and regularly deny all sorts of campaign groups the right to march. And most states have introduced laws that specifically target climate activists who dare to disrupt business as usual.
It is possible to push back against these encroachments on our rights, and effective tactics that can be employed to do it. The most obvious is to mobilise significant numbers of people so that crude repression becomes significantly harder. Unfortunately, however, this is not always possible. 
When our numbers are smaller, it still matters what tactics we adopt. Tactics have to have the aim of making the action meaningful to those involved, helping encourage passive sympathisers to get more involved and being defensible to those not already invested in the issue. To do this, our message needs to be clear and our tactics must seem reasonable and effective. When mobilisations have a comprehensible message and approach, it makes it easier to win wider support to the cause. This doesn’t necessarily prevent repression, but it makes the political cost to the authorities much higher. 
Not every person and group involved in protesting the far right subscribes to this approach. The “black bloc”, in particular, does not, and its tactics are worth addressing. 
The black bloc is known for turning up to demonstrations as a distinct contingent wearing uniforms (black outfits, black hoods/helmets etc) designed to hide their identities and shield them from police attack, and with the aim of carrying out anonymous acts of violence. Sometimes this violence is targeted against police, as at the anti-fascist demonstration on 19 October in Melbourne and the attempted blockade of the Land Forces arms fair in Melbourne last year. At other times it has involved fairly random attacks on businesses and property along the path of broader demonstrations.
These activities are justified by black bloc supporters as attacks against authority, fascism, capitalism or whatever the issue of the day may be. And unlike the regular “sheeple” who attend conventional demonstrations, creating “<a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/in-defence-of-black-bloc/">banal spectacles</a>” within the rules, the black bloc sees itself as striking more serious blows against the system. But the truth is they do nothing to challenge the establishment, and often help strengthen it. 
Only a mass movement of the working class can seriously challenge capitalism. The same is true of the far right, which is now an entrenched part of politics in almost every country on Earth and in charge of the US military empire. While we’re not quite there yet in Australia, with Pauline Hanson polling at 15 percent nationally, and repeated street demonstrations numbering in the thousands, it feels like we’re catching up. In this context, thinking seriously about how we can build an anti-capitalist movement based in the working class is vital, even if it is a medium- to long-term prospect. Bashing a few fascists or throwing stones at police is the very definition of performative. It is pure street theatre, a chance for small groups to feel tough and radical by acting out their pseudo-revolutionary fantasies. 
Worse, these black bloc tactics expose the broader movement to violence at the hands of police and slander from the media and the political class, and give the state an excuse to further erode the right to protest. Sometimes such attacks can’t be avoided regardless of our tactics, but to provoke them for no strategic purpose is hugely damaging and irresponsible. 
Such tactics undermine our capacity to mobilise our existing supporters. Only the most committed activists will continually show up to events that end in widespread police brutality. This is especially so when the state then seizes the moment to introduce new repressive measures, as are now being floated in Victoria, confirming yet again to potential supporters that anti-fascism is an extreme sport better left to the experts.
The scandals that follow black bloc actions also end up distracting from the actual issue being addressed by the protest, giving the media a free pass to jump instead to the predictably reactionary terrain of protester conduct and law and order. This then tends to isolate the movement from the wider public who might otherwise have been sympathetic or open to joining.
In the current moment, this is particularly disastrous given that the key task the left faces is to convince larger numbers of people to take the far-right threat seriously, and to turn up when the call goes out. Currently, there are thousands of fascist and far-right scum mobilising on our streets every few weeks. They’re gaining strength inside the Liberals and Nationals, and One Nation has doubled its membership since the election. If the anti-fascist left is to get to the point where we can challenge and reverse these dynamics, we need massively more numbers. 
Sometimes the black bloc is defended on the grounds that a “diversity of tactics” is needed to maintain left unity. And in most movements, there is room for different approaches: fundraising, public forums, public postering, street art and so on are all useful activities with different audiences and rationales. But the black bloc is not some complementary part of a wide-ranging effort: its tactics are inherently counter-posed to it. 
Perhaps the worst aspect of the black bloc approach is how it relies on the very mass movement its adherents dismiss as not radical enough for cover and protection. If a group of masked militants were to attack a fascist event alone, they would easily be crushed by the state. But by deploying their violence within or around broader crowds, the black bloc make themselves safer by using the rest of us as shields when the police reaction inevitably comes—the very definition of parasitic. 
This behaviour is also profoundly undemocratic, in that it imposes the consequences of the block’s tactic—the state’s violent response—on others who did not necessarily support, agree to or carry out the tactic and could not reasonably be prepared for it. 
None of this is to excuse the state’s brutality. But knowing that the capitalists and their political lackeys are violent, anti-democratic scum doesn’t absolve us of agency and responsibility for our actions. Quite the opposite. Any serious approach to building a movement must take into account the way the capitalist system defends the status quo and organise in ways that can overcome it. As long as it has existed, the black bloc has been a barrier to doing that. It’s time for the left to draw a line in the sand and make it clear the black bloc is not welcome at our actions.

Omar Hassan

Police are getting more violent, but black bloc tactics make things worse

In a timely response to Donald Trump’s phoney “peace plan” and Israel’s continual violations of the ceasefire agreement, the concluding session of a <a href="https://gazatribunal.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“people’s tribunal” on Gaza</a> was held in Istanbul, 23-26 October. Over the four days, an audience of hundreds, plus many more online, heard compelling testimony from dozens of experts and individual victims of Israel’s ongoing genocidal campaign, including the mass murder, deliberate starvation and destruction of medical care, housing, the environment and other civilian infrastructure. The statement below was issued at the conclusion of the Gaza Tribunal hearing. All talks from the Istanbul session are <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@GazaTribunal/videos">available on YouTube</a>.
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The Steering Committee members of the Gaza Tribunal issue this conclusion at a historic moment of darkness, but in a continuing quest for the light of justice. 
The Gaza Tribunal recognizes that the current genocide in Palestine, rooted in a century of colonization and oppression, represents a watershed moment in the history of our world. If the Israeli perpetrators and their western enablers are allowed to escape justice, and the Palestinian survivors are left without meaningful redress and, ultimately, their full liberation from the dehumanizing shackles of Zionism and colonialism, the world will have ratified one of the worst atrocities in history. The Tribunal notes that if colonialism, apartheid, and genocide are not moral redlines, then there are no redlines. And the world that presages will be a world of unprecedented horror. Every member of the human family has a stake in Palestinian justice. 
Cognizant of this, the Gaza Tribunal was established in London in November 2024, as a people’s tribunal in the tradition of the Russell Tribunal that was established at the height of US aggression in Vietnam. It convened public hearings in Sarajevo in May 2025, adopting the historic Sarajevo Declaration as a statement of the principles of the Tribunal and of the global quest for justice in Palestine. Its work over the past year has consisted of the collection of information and analysis, the hearing of witnesses and survivors, the archiving of evidence, and the issuing of appeals to humanity for action to end the genocide and to secure justice for the Palestinian people. Its convening here in Istanbul has brought together members of the Tribunal, witnesses, survivors, experts, and an international Jury of Conscience to issue a moral judgement on the crimes of the Israeli regime and those complicit in their perpetration, and to set the course for the next phase of the quest for justice in Palestine. The members of the Gaza Tribunal welcome the findings of the Jury of Conscience, applaud their moral clarity, and commit to the struggle to see their implementation in full. 
The accelerated genocide of the past two years had shocked the conscience of humanity. The images of its audacious cruelty are forever seared in the minds of decent people everywhere, and the echoes of the cries of its victims will forever ring in our ears. We will forget none of it. The brutal attacks on an imprisoned civilian population, the intentional infliction of hunger, thirst, and disease as weapons of genocide, the targeting of bullets and bombs and drones at innocents, the mass arrests and imprisonment in notorious dungeons, the systematic beatings, and torture, and sexual violence of the genocidal perpetrators, the sniping of toddlers for sport, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools, churches, mosques, homes, refugee shelters, aid facilities, agricultural fields, food stores, even cemeteries, and the deliberate targeting of civilian truth tellers, journalists, medical personnel, aid workers, and other protected persons. So too will we remember the arrogant genocidal threats and declarations of the perpetrators, and their cruel laughter and public celebration of their crimes, all recorded forever in a catalogue of shame. 
We warn the world today that the genocide in Palestine has not ended. The Israeli regime continues to murder Palestinians in Gaza with its Western-supplied bullets and bombs. It continues to obstruct the delivery of food and medicine to the survivors. It continues to impose its unlawful siege on the survivors. Its two-year systematic imposition of hunger, disease, injury, the plaguing of all of Gaza with toxic chemicals and explosive ordinance, its destruction of most shelter as well as the infliction of mass mental disorder and impaired developmental capacities for surviving civilians, will all continue to claim victims of the genocide for years to come. Even as Gaza continues to bleed, the Israeli regime has extended the annihilation phase of the genocide to the West Bank, where land, and livelihoods, and lives are claimed every day in the ethnic cleansing and racist assaults of the Israeli army and its violent settlers. 
Nor do the colonial maneuvers reflected in the so-called Trump Plan, or in the New York plan, offer any hope for end to the genocide, or for freedom or justice for Palestine. Even as we welcome any ceasefire, we note that the Israeli regime has continued to violate with impunity the current declared cessation with daily killings of Palestinians and the continued obstruction of humanitarian aid. We reject the provisions of both plans that would violate fundamental Palestinian rights of self-determination, the essential elements of which are agency, sovereignty, authentic representation and unified leadership. The proposed Plans presuppose impunity for Israeli genocide and apartheid, normalize the Israeli regime, ignore the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, and impose proxy occupation and colonial control over the victims of genocide, while doing nothing to reign in the perpetrators of genocide. Palestinians must lead the restoration of Gaza, and Israel and its enablers must be held responsible for all reparations. 
We demand accountability for the perpetrators and their complicit enablers, redress for the victims and survivors, action to address the root causes of Zionist colonization, occupation, and apartheid, rejection of all efforts to normalize the perpetrator regime and its criminal acts, and freedom for Palestine. In sum, we demand justice. 
To these ends, we call on people of conscience everywhere to intensify their efforts to secure justice for the Palestinian people, through increased and coordinated efforts to isolate the Israeli regime, reject its normalization, and to hold it to account through boycotts, divestment, sanctions, military embargoes, criminal prosecutions of perpetrators and complicit actors, civil actions against those benefitting from harms, education of our neighbors, public protest and civil disobedience, and the amplification of calls for a free Palestine.

Gaza Tribunal: The genocide continues

On 4 November, Judge Navi Pillay, former member of the UN special commission of inquiry that found Israel guilty of committing genocide in Gaza, addressed the National Press Club. “Under the Genocide Convention, every state has the legal obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, to deal with the commission of genocide, and to protect against genocide ... Be careful what you’re doing”, Pillay said. “You may one day face charges of complicity in genocide.”
As Pillay was delivering her speech in Canberra, two major Israeli weapons companies were spruiking their wares in Sydney at the Indo Pacific weapons expo, officially sponsored by the NSW government and the Australian Navy. Elbit Systems and Rafael have enabled and profited from the genocide in Gaza, and even <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-weapons-firm-rafael-uses-gaza-killing-marketing-campaign">use their war crimes as selling points</a> for their weapons systems. They were joined by a host of other arms dealers that have amassed fortunes by turning Gaza into a mass grave, including Lockheed Martin, Leonardo and Thales. 
While the Israel connection was the most morally repugnant feature of the expo, it went well beyond this. The main game for Australian imperialism is bolstering its military power and further integrating with the US military, to better contain and combat China. These priorities were reflected in the convention, which <a href="https://indopacificexpo.com.au/news-media/latest-news/74-american-companies-come-together-at-indo-pacific-2025-to-celebrate-innovation-collaboration-and-250-years-of-the-us-navy/">celebrated</a>
the US bringing the “largest national presence to date to Indo Pacific 2025 with 74 leading American companies representing nineteen states present at the show”. These companies are competing to get their snouts in the trough of the global arms race, now worth about US$2.5 trillion annually, and with Australia set to nearly double its military spending to $100 billion per year by 2033-34.
The weapons expo encapsulated the barbarity and the banality of the evil of present-day capitalism. Thousands of senior military and government personnel rubbed shoulders with war profiteering corporations, many of which are run by ex-military or government personnel themselves. Far from being a barrier to entry, complicity in the genocide in Gaza was almost a requirement of entry, and the rosy dawn being hailed was one of mushroom clouds and future holocausts. Free gifts for participants included hand-grenade plush toys.
Despite officially sponsoring the event, the NSW government tried to downplay its involvement in the expo, a spokesperson for NSW Industry Minister Anoulack Chanthivong <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/30/israeli-weapons-companies-elbit-rafael-should-be-removed-sydney-defence-expo-over-gaza">telling the</a> Guardian that the state government was not paying international companies to attend and was not involved in planning the expo. Information leaked to the Palestine Action Group, however, claims that the NSW government has spent at least $1.6 million to secure the hosting of the expo in Sydney, and that staff from the Premier’s Department were involved in setting up and running the exhibition.
Federal Labor ministers were much less coy. The keynote speaker, Defence Minister Richard Marles, gushed that the machines of death before him spanned “the breadth of the beautiful, the menacing and the extremely cool ... the very best of human ingenuity”.
While these “beautiful” weapons were being bought and sold inside, other weapons were being deployed outside—against anti-war protesters.
Pepper spray is banned for use in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention. But NSW Police did not hesitate to repeatedly spray hundreds of demonstrators with this chemical weapon, which causes severe pain and blindness for up to half an hour. The attacks on our demonstration began as soon as people arrived in Darling Harbour, police violently charging protesters from 6:23am, riding horses into the crowd, punching demonstrators in the head, emptying whole canisters of pepper spray into people’s faces and making violent arrests. One protester, Amy, a journalism student, was thrown to the ground, fracturing her tibia (shin bone). 
The police attacks continued intermittently for several hours, even after we were driven away from the International Convention Centre and into Tumbalong Park, a “designated protest area”. At one point, the police escorted an expo attendee into the park and through the middle of our protest, just to have an excuse to pepper spray the crowd again. I was sprayed directly in the face while trying to help up another protester who had been knocked down and blinded. 
Senior police later lied about events, telling a media conference that they had been “set upon by a pack of very angry people”. Several <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DQoitfwE3kb/">videos</a> show that the exact opposite occurred. When I tried to ask a question at this press conference—about whether NSW Police had begun any investigations into war crimes by companies at the expo—I was <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/propalestine-protesters-to-blockade-nsw-governmentsponsored-arms-expo/news-story/837abdd47900072694e75780444c2b46">surrounded by police</a> and threatened with arrest. 
Despite all of this, the spirits of protesters remained high, as we knew we had stood together, defied police violence and at least shone a spotlight on this abominable weapons expo and the sick priorities of our rulers and their repressive police. Next time, we need thousands more of us to shut it down and demand our money be spent on public housing, the health system and wage rises, not weapons, and for a world without war and genocide.
Josh Lees is a member of the Palestine Action Group Sydney.

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