The federal Labor government has overseen the biggest fall in living standards in at least half a century. And Australian household income has dropped by more than in any comparable country in the last two years, <a>according to a recent report</a> published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young people in particular <a>have been screwed</a> by rising rents and falling wages.
People are rightly pissed. According to <a>polling in mid-October</a>, Anthony Albanese’s net approval rating has fallen to a new low of negative 14 percent, and the ALP’s primary vote has sunk to 31 percent. 
Yet, if you took the Labor PR machine seriously, you’d think the government was doing all it could to help people economically. There is endless talk about “cost-of-living relief” and bragging about the measures Labor has implemented. But what has the government really done?
The prime minister’s website has a special “cost of living relief” page that highlights every policy Albanese is trying to promote. At first glance, the listed measures appear to be designed to put more money into the pockets of struggling people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a different story. Many big-ticket relief items are just handouts to big business—a transfer of tax dollars to mega-corporations already raking in super-profits from charging higher prices. 
Take the energy rebate, which reduces annual household energy bills by $300. While it has helped millions struggling with eye-watering bills, it is also a $3.5 billion gift from taxpayers to the energy companies that have been ripping us off in the first place. And it’s hardly one they need. AGL, Australia’s largest electricity generator, recorded a 189 percent increase in underlying profit to $812 million in the last financial year. Origin Energy’s profit surged 172 percent to $1.2 billion, on top of an 83.5 percent increase the previous year. They are raking it in. 
The government could have capped energy prices, or imposed a super-profits tax on the energy behemoths, and saved the tax money for something else, like housing. But it is too wedded to the idea that companies have an ordained right to extract as much profit as possible through the market, regardless of the social consequences. 
It took the same approach to child care. Last year, the Child Care Subsidy was lifted and broadened to include more households. Once again, the government is just handing stacks of money—$10.7 billion, to be precise—to, in many cases, private for-profit childcare centres.
A <a>report released at the end of last year</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that any financial benefits from increases to the government subsidy were largely, if not wholly, eroded by increased day-care fees. It also found that “childcare fees across all services have grown faster than inflation and wages since the introduction of the subsidy”.
Like the energy companies, childcare companies are rolling in cash. G8 Education, Australia’s biggest listed childcare company, posted a 53 percent profit increase in 2023 and paid its CEO a $3 million package. That same year, G8 increased its fees by nearly 25 percent. 
So the government’s great plan means that parents are out of pocket just the same, the Treasury is poorer, while the companies increase their margins. Great “relief” if you can get it.
Then there’s the housing crisis, which needs no introduction. Labor promises to fix it by building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade through the $32 billion Homes for Australia plan. It’s already failing: forecasts from Oxford Economics in July showed that the government will miss its target by more than 20 percent. 
More to the point, Labor’s entire plan follows the same investor- and developer-first model that created the housing crisis in the first place.
This is most notable with the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—Labor’s answer to affordable housing. It’s another handout to private developers, construction firms and investors. The HAFF fact sheet repeatedly states that “one of the key objectives of the program is to encourage private investment in social and affordable housing”. The model is designed to get private investors to team up with a social housing provider to purchase, renovate or build new housing stock by handing over government money to ensure each project remains profitable. 
Take it from Conscious Investment Management chief investment officer Matthew Tominc, who has established a $200 million fund to cash in on the plan. He told the Financial Review that the HAFF would likely offer investors a net 8 to 12 percent return, guaranteeing no losses. So the big winner will again be—you guessed it, the investor class.
As for anyone not in the social housing sphere, which is most people, the government is basically hoping and praying that spending money on infrastructure will encourage developers to build more homes. But it’s doing nothing to ensure those homes will be affordable—the generous tax concessions and other incentives for investors remain untouched.
Another category of cost-of-living relief is the Stage 3 Tax Cuts, which could also be called “tax cuts that will help ordinary people a bit, but disproportionately benefit the rich and further entrench economic inequality”. Accurate, if a bit wordy. 
Finally, there are measures that aren’t objectionable but are so small that it’s almost like the government is playing a joke on the rest of us. 
For instance, the government claims it’s “delivering a better deal for renters” by raising Rent Assistance. The payment is available only to eligible welfare recipients—a fraction of the renting population. It’s also minuscule—it was raised by 10 percent to a maximum rate of $211 a fortnight for a single person with no children (the current median fortnightly rent is about $1,250). 
Eligibility for the single-parent payment has been extended to when the youngest child turns 14, up from 8, but still below 16—where it was when the Gillard Labor government reduced it in 2013. It’s also a maximum of $987.70 per fortnight. How anyone is supposed to live on that is one of society’s great mysteries. And despite a recommendation from the government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the below-the-poverty-line JobSeeker payment has hardly been touched.
Wage rises also slide into the “did you even notice?” category. The government congratulates itself for backing a 3.75 percent pay rise for minimum- and award-wage workers and a 15 percent pay rise for aged care workers. It’s good that the workers got a pay rise, but it’s hardly enough. 
Even with two significant wage increases, aged care workers will still receive only $25 to $30 an hour, depending on their role. We’re talking about small bumps to extremely low wages. As of July, average real wages for all workers were still nearly 5 percent lower than before the pandemic.
To top off this list of do-little policies, Labor’s latest offering is banning debit card transaction fees, which banks charge when you buy something with a debit card. Obviously, the move is supportable. But touting it as a game-changing measure is absurd. 
It’s like the Albanese government is parodying itself. In the last financial year, Australian banks made $40 billion in profit, an 8 percent increase on the previous year. Prolonged high interest rates have been a windfall for the so-called Big Four—the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Westpac—which charge a higher interest rate on loans than they pay into savings accounts. 
Debit fees range from 0.5 to 1 percent of the cost of a transaction. Sure, we should all hang on to that money, but will it make the slightest difference to the crushing weight of rising rents, mortgages, bills, groceries and everything else? No.
Labor is taking us for a ride. They know there’s a crippling cost-of-living crisis and they don’t want to take on big business, but they also want to win the next election. So they’re giving handouts to big business, throwing pennies at the rest of us and calling it relief.

Eleanor Morley

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

The term “social cohesion” has had a workout in Australia over the past year. Always a handy staple for those wanting to cast a blanket of conformity over society, the term has particularly been used to attack those protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its war on Lebanon. 
In late July, the Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as the country’s first special envoy for social cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that friction in the community over Israel’s war on Gaza was causing a “great deal of concern about disharmony” across Australia.
The use of social cohesion as a weapon to reproach pro-Palestine demonstrations came to something of a climax as Israel invaded Lebanon in late September and with the approach of the first anniversary of its murderous onslaught on Gaza.
On 30 September, Sky News reported breathlessly the claims of shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan that “social cohesion is failing in our country” and demanded punitive action when Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared at the weekly Palestine rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.
A week later, NSW Premier Chris Minns tried to ban pro-Palestine protests, to the acclamation of Peter Dutton. Echoing these sentiments, Albanese proclaimed 7 October was “not a time for demonstrations to occur ... It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued”.
What is the “social cohesion” that Australia’s political leaders seek to protect against protest? 
Like every attempt to paper over the massive divisions built into Australian capitalism, it begins from the assumption that unity is something both possible and desirable. Further, if social cohesion is natural, then unity can have been disrupted only by troublemakers—the infamous “outside agitator” thesis beloved by every boss who ever faced a strike and every government that inspired rebellion. 
So social cohesion is based on a demand for compliance and demonisation of those who challenge it. In the Cold War 1950s, it was “reds under the bed”; now it’s Arabs and Muslims who are the supposed danger. 
Peter Dutton spelt it out on 19 April: “Central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract. Whatever our background, our faith, or our cultural traditions, we do not allow the problems, the tensions, or the animosity of other parts of the world to manifest in our communities or on our streets ... there are people in our country today who do not subscribe to our democratic values”.
That demand for compliance is backed by a political and legal infrastructure designed to undermine and criminalise protests of all kinds, including strikes. Sometimes it’s been the crushing weight of <a>a media barrage of the dominant ideas</a>, sometimes it’s been threats from university administrations against even using words like “from the river to the sea” or “genocide”, and sometimes it’s a battery of laws against protesting or striking. 
It is “cohesion” only in the sense of those who run society demanding compliance with their rules. As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey on 15 August: “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting ‘social cohesion’, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters”. All the concern and blame are placed on supporters of Palestine. Where are the headlines calling for supporters of Israel to stop backing genocide because such ideas undermine social cohesion? 
The ALP is the manager of an imposed consensus—from maintaining Australia’s imperialist alliances to centring profitability in the economy—about which it actively works to discourage debate, let alone protest. 
There’s nothing naturally cohering in a class-divided society. At the core of capitalism are irreconcilable competing class interests. Social cohesion is a myth—at our expense. Often the so-called cohesion can be maintained only by exclusion, such as that of Indigenous people, or the ban on marriage equality before 2017. Refugees remain condemned to be permanent outsiders. The attack on the CFMEU coheres the union movement even further around tame cat passivity in the face of the cost-of-living crisis. 
In other words, calls for social cohesion always mean just going along with the status quo. On the other hand, the high points of struggle, such as the successful working-class fight against conscription in World War I or the smashing of the anti-union penal powers in 1969, have involved breaking with the notion of social cohesion and exposing the real divisions in society through mass struggle.
So social cohesion is deserving only of the utmost hostility. Socialists don’t want social cohesion; we want to make the class war visible. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in 1857: 
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Diane Fieldes

‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

The Liberal National Party decisively won the Queensland state election on the weekend, defeating Labor in many of its historic safe seats. 
Labor was hit hardest in the state’s north, losing key areas such as Townsville, Rockhampton and Mackay. There were significant swings toward the LNP, largely fuelled by a “tough-on-crime” campaign. These losses are particularly striking; Labor had held Mackay for 99 years. While Labor retained many Brisbane seats, there were notable swings against it. 
The LNP victory is bad news for the Queensland working class. The centre of the conservatives’ campaign was a racially charged beat-up about youth crime—so expect the new government to unleash a range of punitive measures targeting Aboriginal youth. 
Labor has governed Queensland for 30 of the last 35 years. It has been defeated primarily because it failed to protect workers’ living standards, the number one concern for voters, according to polling. 
Over the last decade, wages increased by a quarter—but Brisbane house prices doubled, and unit prices rose 45 percent. Outside Brisbane, unit prices surged by 90 percent and houses by 60 percent. Once you factor in higher mortgage repayments, rent, bills, groceries, etc, there’s a lot for people to be bitter about. 
Facing an election wipeout, the Miles government rolled out last-minute cost-of-living policies, including free lunches for primary school children, 50 cent public transport fares, a new state electricity retailer and a 20 percent reduction in car registration fees. The measures likely saved Labor from what was expected to be a complete rout.
Another factor that helped Labor was the emergence of women’s rights as a campaign issue. 
Abortion access became a focal point after Katter’s Australia Party promised to overturn the 2018 decriminalisation of abortion if the LNP were to win. The LNP did not want this topic to dominate the election, given the high support for abortion rights among the public but the widespread pro-life sentiments of LNP members. 
Party leader David Crisafulli dodged media questions about the issue many times—primarily because LNP members have a clear history of opposing abortion rights. In 2018, all but three LNP members voted against Labor’s decriminalisation bill, Crisifulli included. 
The swing toward the LNP reflects discontent with Labor rather than general enthusiasm for the LNP’s platform. 
However, the party’s “tough-on-crime” policies did strike a nerve. Sixty percent of respondents to a Brisbane Times poll said crime was a “very important” issue.
The LNP’s central policy—“adult crime, adult time”—proposes giving youth offenders adult prison sentences. In campaign speeches, Crisafulli referred to a “generation of untouchables”, a euphemism for Indigenous youth, who pro-prison campaigners think are treated too lightly by the justice system.
The portrayal of a “youth crime crisis” is, in reality, a racist fabrication. Queensland’s Police Service data show an 18 percent decrease in unique youth offenders and a 6.7 percent drop in youth offences since 2021. 
And Queensland already leads the country in youth incarceration, Aboriginal children being disproportionately represented in detention facilities.
Why then did the LNP’s scare campaign resonate so much in north Queensland? 
Whenever Labor has faced pressure from the LNP on crime, they have historically capitulated. In the past three years, Labor has suspended the Human Rights Act twice, most recently to remove detention as a last resort for children. 
These concessions have legitimised the LNP’s rhetoric. Instead of diffusing right-wing pressure, Labor has amplified it, allowing the LNP to propose new measures like “reset camps” for young people.
The Queensland Greens were confident they could retain their two inner-city seats and potentially win more. But, while their statewide vote was stable, they lost ground in their target seats. 
They lost South Brisbane and are on a knife edge in Maiwar in the inner west.
The LNP’s decision to preference the ALP over the Greens in South Brisbane, reversing its 2020 strategy, likely contributed to this outcome. But the Greens’ primary vote also fell across inner-city areas because the ALP’s policies, such as low public transport fares and free school lunches, attracted more left-wing voters.
The incoming government has made its priorities clear. The first order of business is introducing punitive measures that would increase the Aboriginal prison population. 
Crisafulli has promised “no employment cuts” in the public service, distancing himself from the mass sackings that destroyed the popularity of the last LNP government. However, as he aims to reduce state debt while expanding youth detention, public service job cuts could still eventuate.
The right to abortion also looms large. The LNP might want to avoid a confrontation immediately, but it could become unavoidable if Robbie Katter pushes the issue in parliament. 
We must be prepared to fight the new government’s right-wing agenda.
The unions must fight if the party goes on the offensive against workers.
We need to build a movement against racism.
And we need to build a movement to defend abortion rights. 
A rally calling for the protection of abortion rights is planned for 6 pm this Friday, 1 November, in Brisbane Square. Within 24 hours of the election results, the rally details garnered more than 1,000 shares on Instagram.
Abortion rights could serve as a rallying point against the LNP’s broader agenda. It’s encouraging that resistance will greet the LNP’s first week in office.

Tierna Parker

Labor loses Queensland, fight against LNP begins

For the first month of Israel’s current war on Lebanon, Australian media and politicians were focused not on the thousands killed or the more than a million civilians displaced, but on attacking anti-war demonstrators and denouncing anti-war activists as supporters of terrorism. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton both called for the cancellation of pro-Palestine protests scheduled for 6 and 7 October and railed against the small number of demonstrators who brought Hezbollah flags to protests against Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon. 
In a <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/doorstop-interview-melbourne-9">doorstop interview, </a>Albanese said about the protests, “There’s no place for mourning a terrorist leader, and we’re very concerned about some of the terrorist symbols”. Meanwhile, Labor’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, threatened to cancel the visas of any non-citizens caught waving a Hezbollah flag, and then cancelled the visa of Khaled Beydoun, a law professor from Arizona State University. The reason for the cancellation was a 7 October speech in which Beydoun noted the rise of global solidarity with the Palestinians, saying, “Today is not fully a day of mourning. In many respects, today is also a day that marks considerable celebration, considerable progress, and in some respects, considerable privilege. The level of global literacy around what’s taking place in Palestine has exponentially risen”. Burke and the media smeared Beydoun, disingenuously asserting that he was celebrating Hamas’ 7 October attack. 
Of course, there were no words of condemnation for those cheering on Israel’s murderous attacks on civilians in Lebanon, nor the intensification of genocide taking place in Gaza. The Australian political class dutifully fell in behind Israel’s propaganda machine by crapping on about Israel’s “right to defend itself” and joining in the hysteria about protesters supporting the Lebanese political group Hezbollah.
Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation has been on the Australian government’s list of “terrorist organisations” for some time. In late 2021, the listing was changed from the External Security Organisation to simply Hezbollah, meaning the entire organisation is now considered terrorist. This happened on the watch of then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, under pressure from supporters of Israel.
This decision was based on only seven submissions to the parliamentary committee responsible, five of which were from pro-Israel organisations or individuals, including the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. One of the two individual submissions was from Emmanuele Ottolenghi from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, who wrote an article last year titled “<a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/barbarians-at-the-gate/">Barbarians at the Gate</a>” in which he argued that the notion of Palestinian statehood must be destroyed. “The barbarians must be vanquished”, was his grossly racist conclusion. 
Whatever criticisms leftists can make of it, Hezbollah is not a terrorist organisation. It is a mass Shia political party which holds 13 seats in the Lebanese parliament, and was founded to resist the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The party functions as a second state in the south of the country and in Dahieh, a large area of Beirut. Hezbollah runs a large social welfare apparatus and has interests in numerous businesses, especially construction companies. Its armed wing is the world’s largest non-state military apparatus, and, rather than carrying out terrorist attacks, it uses standard military and guerrilla tactics.
The Australian government’s list of “terrorist acts” Hezbollah has allegedly been <a href="https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/what-australia-is-doing/terrorist-organisations/listed-terrorist-organisations/hizballah">responsible</a>
for illustrates this. There are nine, and none involve any confirmed casualties. Three are public threats made by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah against US and Israeli military targets in response to violations of Lebanese airspace and the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, none of which were carried through. Two involve legal cases brought against individuals in the US, and one involves the provision of support to Palestinian groups. Only one involves an actual act of violence—the firing of a missile at an Israeli tank in September 2019 that Israel says caused no deaths or injuries. 
Even with highly motivated Israel supporters and the resources of Australian intelligence at their disposal, this is the best that Dutton and the Liberal government could come up with. But the fact that the listing was a politically motivated sham doesn’t make it any less effective at smearing, threatening and intimidating opponents of Israel’s atrocities. And it doesn’t prevent someone who is legitimately protesting the invasion of Lebanon—a sovereign country—and who also supports a mainstream Lebanese political party potentially being thrown into jail.
But while it might not be accurately described as terrorist, Hezbollah is nevertheless a reactionary organisation that should be opposed by progressives. It has been part of the neoliberal regime in Lebanon, which has made working-class people pay for the economic crisis the country is facing. It also helped sabotage the investigation into Beirut’s port explosion in 2018. Its military wing played a counter-revolutionary role in the Syrian revolution in alliance with the dictator Bashar al-Assad, and it helped to suppress mass democratic protests across Lebanon in 2019 and 2020. So there are plenty of reasons to oppose Hezbollah, but resistance against Israel is not one of them. Referring to the group as a terrorist organisation just plays into the narrative that Western governments have long attempted to create, in which Middle Eastern and Islamist politics poses a uniquely dangerous threat to those in the West.
Israel, on the other hand, is undeniably a terrorist state. Extreme violence toward, intimidation and massacres of civilians are Israel’s speciality. It has made no secret of its calculated atrocities and the intent behind them in Gaza over the last year. “Nothing happens by accident”, an Israeli military source <a href="https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?fbclid=IwAR15qSbuTiMzn-2jLLss3na2LPYa8h942dlf6vHctnNTR8yNVaiohIHjJEA">told</a>
Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed ... Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
In September, Israel detonated thousands of bombs as part of its efforts to wipe out the entire leadership of Hezbollah, killing and injuring numerous civilians in the process. Israeli forces also assassinated Nasrallah and have killed the two main leaders of Hamas. Assassination of political leaders is against <a href="https://theconversation.com/assassination-is-always-unlawful-regardless-of-who-is-killed-and-on-whose-orders-236004">international law</a> and meets the definition of terrorism. Israel’s terrorist activities have extended to manufacturing fake Australian passports to aid in assassinations of political leaders. But no Australian government officials are threatening supporters of this terrorist regime with deportation or arrest.
Quite the opposite. Those who leave Australia to fight in the Israel Defense Forces have been <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/we-are-resilient-australian-reservists-called-up-in-israel-join-fight-20231012-p5ebn9.html">celebrated</a>
and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-fighting-with-idf-killed-in-gaza-20240102-p5eunj.html">mourned</a>
by Australian mainstream media. In December last year, the Australian Centre for International Justice <a href="https://acij.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/2023-12-20-Letter-to-Ausgov-regarding-Australians-in-the-IDF.pdf">quoted</a>
an estimate that 1,000 Australians have recently or are currently serving in the IDF. The government and opposition are not drumming up concern about these activities, nor warning those involved that they may face criminal charges when they return—which, if they are part of the genocide, they should. There is no outrage about them from the political class: no parliamentary tirades, doorstop speeches or livid articles in the mainstream press about what a threat these people are to social cohesion. Taking part in a genocide is acceptable activity to the Australian establishment. Waving a yellow flag is not. 
One Sydney man wrote a <a href="https://www.australianjewishnews.com/a-warriors-commitment-to-country/">piece</a>
in February for the Australian Jewish Times on the months he spent fighting for the IDF in frontline combat in Gaza, in which he claimed to have “eliminated” multiple people referred to as “threats” and “Hamas terrorists”. A photograph attached to the article pictures the man inside a child’s bedroom, kneeling among the cushions in combat gear with another Israeli soldier, both carrying guns. Not only did he kill multiple people in the course of an active genocide, but the man also provided security detail inside Gaza for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the International Criminal Court prosecutor <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-icc-prosecutor-karim-aa-khan-kc-applications-arrest-warrants-situation-state">filed</a>
a request for an arrest warrant related to crimes against humanity. “The contrast between my recent leisure time on Bondi Beach”, he wrote, “just a few weeks prior, and the responsibility of safeguarding the Prime Minister of Israel was stark and surreal”. More thoroughly legitimate activity in the eyes of the Australian political class.
The government, opposition and mainstream media justify the threats against Hezbollah supporters on the basis that “we don’t want foreign conflicts being brought into Australia”. But it is the Australian government and its slavish support for Israel that import foreign conflicts or, more accurately, make them local conflicts. It is the Australian government’s complicity in genocide that creates the imperative for people who value human rights to raise their voices and protest.
“Not in our name!” was the rallying cry of those who marched against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The same applies today. What is happening in Gaza and Lebanon is not a “foreign” conflict. It is an illegal military campaign enabled, funded and armed by the Western powers, including Australia. We have a duty to resist it. And so long as Hezbollah continues to be the main force fighting to repel Israel from Lebanon, people will support it and anti-war activists should defend their right to do so in defiance of racist and politically motivated anti-terror laws.

Jasmine Duff

Terrorism designations are politically motivated

Last month, Treasurer Jim Chalmers fronted the media with a gloating smile to announce the federal government was posting a consecutive budget surplus of $18 billion. “Our bigger than expected surplus in the year just gone is entirely due to lower spending”, beamed Chalmers. “A second straight surplus is proof of our responsible economic management.” 
Any normal person observing this “responsible economic management” was probably feeling their stomach turn. We are living through one of the worst cost-of-living crises in generations, and the Labor government has decided to lower government spending rather than increase it in areas that would help the millions of people struggling to make ends meet.
The latest <a>Guardian Essential Poll</a>
shows something that socialists have been arguing for the last few years—that most people, when confronted with a lack of affordable housing and rising electricity and grocery prices, think that the government should intervene to make things more affordable. Seventy percent of survey respondents thought that price caps should be introduced on rent, groceries and electricity bills, and the same number thought that the rich should be paying more tax. 
Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that the gap between the rich and poor is widening. According to the <a>latest poverty and inequality report</a> from the Australian Council of Social Services, one in eight people in Australia are living in poverty. With rising costs, this number will only increase. 
The latest CoreLogic report from September found that rents had increased by 7.2 percent since last year. These increases are not uniform across the country. In Melbourne, it was working-class suburbs like Dandenong (16 percent) and Broadmeadows (14 percent) that went up the most. The same is true for New South Wales, rents in Roselands, Villawood and other working-class suburbs increasing by 24-30 percent. The amount of money one must earn to purchase a house in Sydney is eye-watering—only those on nearly $300,000 could purchase a property at the median value without incurring mortgage stress (this is $200,000 more than the average annual income), according to financial comparison site Canstar. Unsurprisingly, only 16 percent of people are opposed to removing tax breaks for property investors, according to the Essential poll.
Wages haven’t gone up to compensate for rising prices. In fact, the latest employment outlook from the OECD found that wages in Australia have gone backwards by 4.8 per cent compared with pre-pandemic levels. Bosses in Australia have taken advantage of the economic situation, and wealth is rapidly moving from the bottom of society to the top. Corporations like Coles—which posted an annual profit of $1.1 billion in the last financial year—are laughing all the way to the bank. 
Many people know this situation isn’t right. Forty percent of respondents to the Essential poll said that our political system needs fundamental change, which rose to 49 percent for those who are struggling or in serious financial difficulty.
Capitalism is always going to produce stark wealth inequality, poverty and anxiety for ordinary people. It’s a system predicated on a class divide in which a minority get rich off the labour of the majority. The bosses and the politicians who represent them clearly have no interest in overturning this state of affairs. 
That’s not to say there’s nothing the government could do to alleviate the current financial burdens for millions of people. They just refuse to. The government could raise taxes on companies like Coles and individuals like Gina Rinehart and use that money to pay for public housing. Instead of posting an $18 billion surplus and bragging about cutting government spending, Labor could increase government spending on social services and Centrelink. They could legislate price caps on essential goods and ban greedy landlords from ripping more rent out of young people. 
It’s an indictment on the Labor government that they refuse to implement these measures. It’s also an indictment on the union movement that there aren’t more strikes and actions for wage increases. 
Ordinary people understand the problems and know what the solutions are. I say we should let them be in charge.

Anneke Demanuele

Workers know what to do: tax the rich and cap prices

In August of 2023, someone wrote the word “ESHAY” on a pillar in Sydney. How do I know this? And why am I telling you? Because this enigmatic incident was included in the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s “Report on Antisemitism in Australia 2023”—a report that claims to document and record trends in anti-Jewish hatred, and which is treated as a serious, even definitive, source by the mainstream media and political parties.
If you don’t want to subject yourself to a Trotskyist publication explaining what “eshay” means, look away now. We will stick to reputable sources. Wikipedia describes an eshay as a member of a subculture of young men who “wear sportswear, have mullets and engage in immature and anti-social behaviour”. An alternative definition—“dickheads whom [sic] seem to think they are top shit”—comes courtesy of an Urban Dictionary contributor writing under the nom de plume “I hate eshays”.
Was this graffiti in Sydney anti-eshay? Or was it a public assertion of eshay pride? Its author did not leave us enough evidence to make a conclusive determination of this question. Yet I think we can say that it probably didn’t have much to do with Jews. Nonetheless, this message found its way into the ECAJ’s 2023 list of antisemitic incidents in Australia, and it wasn’t the dumbest thing in there. Not by a long shot. According to the report, cited as authoritative by the entire political gamut of Australian daily news outlets, even organising a protest against neo-Nazis is an act of antisemitic hatred. But we’ll come to that later.
The ECAJ published its report at the start of 2024, a couple of months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. It’s nearly 300 pages long and claims to document and analyse incidents of antisemitism in Australia. The report’s publishers got the response they were after: “An unprecedented wave of antisemitic hatred surges through Australia” was how the Murdoch press reported it, with more measured but effectively identical analysis appearing in the Nine papers, the Guardian, ABC and SBS.
This report is a scam. It downplays a very real antisemitic threat—that of a growing conspiratorial and far-right movement that has shown a real interest in violence—while using false claims and distorted definitions of antisemitism to slander left-wingers, Muslims and anyone else critical of Israel’s genocidal conduct. Its authors declare their political goals at the outset. “Antisemitism has many active sources – extremist right-wingers, extremist left-wingers, and Islamists”, they explain. “However, each of the main sources operates differently. In general: right-wing antisemitism is overt, but marginalised; left-wing antisemitism is insidious, but mainstreamed.” So don’t worry too much about actual Jew-hating Nazis and conspiracy theorists: they’re “marginalised”. Worry about the “insidious” antisemitism associated with the supporters of Palestine. And if you can’t detect or prove any antisemitism at all, that just proves how insidious it is.
And so the report proceeds. Its catalogue of antisemitic incidents is full of examples of straightforward Palestine solidarity activism, involving no hostility towards or criticism of Jewish culture or religion, and that usually takes place within, and is often motivated by, an anti-racist framework. One example cited is advocacy for boycotts of Israel or its settlement economy. “BDS mimics the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses”, the report warns. “More insidious, BDS officially preaches non-violent forms of protest.” BDS obviously involves no such racial targeting. In fact, more to the point, it mimics one of the most significant and effective anti-racist campaigns in history: that to end the apartheid regime in South Africa. 
Alongside the eshay incident, the report lists in its documentation of antisemitic incidents:
<ul><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’ (anti-Israel ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’), written four times on a concrete wall, Paddington, Sydney (15 May 2023).”</li><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’ in two places, Surry Hills, Sydney (17 June 2023).”</li><li dir="ltr">“Graffiti of ‘BDS’, re-written where previously removed, Surry Hills, Sydney (18 July 2023).”</li></ul>
There’s plenty more like that. And they all get counted in the statistics. Mentioning the year 1948 or the term “Nakba” is also antisemitic, according to these esteemed researchers: graffiti, stickers and posters with these words are included in the lists, and therefore also in the headline numbers.
Perhaps, on reading this, you have begun to suspect that aspects of this report might be a little misleading. Well, guess what? By thinking that, you just perpetrated an act of antisemitism. In the report’s list of forms of antisemitism, we find: “Jewish organisations being accused of concocting false accusations of antisemitism ... specially in order to stifle criticism of Israel”. (Research by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students is leaned on heavily in the report. AUJS is a pro-Israel group with the unusual distinction of having had to issue a <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/5219">public apology to Socialist Alternative</a> for concocting false accusations of antisemitism in order to stifle criticism of Israel.)
Maybe you’re guilty of something worse than scepticism about the report. Maybe you organised a protest against neo-Nazis and chanted about the need for anti-racist unity. Believe it or not: antisemitism. Describing a rally against a neo-Nazi base organising in the west of Melbourne, the report quotes a single chant: “Black, Indigenous, Arab, Asian and white—unite, unite, unite to fight the right!” This incident is listed under the category “Omitting Jews”. So desperate are the report’s authors to slander left-wingers and Palestine supporters that they even found a way to construe an anti-Nazi rally as an act of antisemitism.
What is particularly inexcusable about all this is the way it obscures the genuine antisemitism that exists and which should be combated. Falsified reports like this, along with the meaningless statistics that emerge from them, make it much harder to understand the form real antisemitism takes today. 
The report itself documents many examples, most of which are perpetrated by the same neo-Nazi grouplets that socialists and other left-wingers have been organising against for years—with groups like ECAJ contributing nothing to the cause, only intervening to slander the anti-racists. These Nazi groups descend from a revived far-right movement that emerged from the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric that dominated public life during Tony Abbott’s government. There’s a related current of conspiratorial antisemitic sentiment attributing the proposal for an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament to Jewish influence. In both cases, the genuine antisemitic incidents emerge from groups that largely espouse radicalised versions of Liberal Party talking points.
Further along the right-wing conspiratorial spectrum, the ECAJ reports various ranting voicemails and graffiti along the lines of “JEWS DID COVID” and (more mysteriously) “COVID IS JEW”. These far-right conspiracy theorists, like the neo-Nazis, may see themselves as distinct from the mainstream right wing. But they still draw their fears and hopes from a radicalised version of mainstream conservatism, whether it be hostility to immigration, resentment of Aboriginal people, opposition to public health measures that inconvenience business owners or paranoia about a progressive conspiracy to undermine national unity. This is real antisemitism. The left has always opposed it, in word and in deed, usually without the support of opportunistic pro-Israel political groups that falsely claim to act in defence of Jews. The same right-wing media outlets that fearmonger about every progressive cause, contributing to the rise of this current, are also ECAJ’s best allies in promoting the lie that Palestine solidarity is antisemitic.
It is quite possibly true that there is an increase in religiously conceived antisemitism relating to Palestine. The report documents things like pro-Palestine slogans being shouted at people wearing identifiably Jewish religious clothes. This is a terrible, but predictable, result of the occupation of Palestine being understood as a clash of religions. Yet this misunderstanding is exactly what the ECAJ promotes. ECAJ describes any attempt to understand Israel and its imperialist and expansionist policies in anti-racist political terms—as colonialism, for example, or apartheid—as forms of anti-Jewish prejudice. Its entire report is structured to suggest that the Jewish people are inseparable from the genocidal Israeli government and that any criticism of the latter can emerge only from hatred of the former. The alternative to this is to build an anti-racist pro-Palestine movement—which the anti-Zionist opponents of ECAJ, Jewish and non-Jewish, have been doing for more than a year.
The report is a joke. It is vexatious, mendacious, outrageous: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcEietIoxk">preposterous</a>. It should be utterly, instantaneously discrediting to the institution that published it, and to the individuals associated with it. But it isn’t. Quite the opposite. The former president of ECAJ, Jillian Segal, has been appointed Australia’s new “antisemitism envoy” by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. 
This report is not exceptional or an outlier. ECAJ is part of an international group of Zionist organisations, the so-called J7, that includes the Anti-Defamation League of the US, Britain’s Board of Deputies, France’s CRIF and the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Most of these produce similar reports, with similar intentions, promoting similarly misleading and unreliable statistics. ECAJ claims its 2024 report is coming out “soon”. Given the explosion of pro-Palestine activism in the last 12 months, it is absolutely certain that it will claim a horrifying rise in what it calls antisemitism. The lies of pro-Israel groups won’t help us fight real antisemitism—and nor will they stop us standing in solidarity with Palestine.

Joel Schneider

Zionist groups are falsifying antisemitism statistics and the media are playing along

For left-wing people, it has long been uncontroversial to welcome into Australia refugees and migrants. 
Perhaps not any more. In a recent Instagram post, Keiran Stewart-Assheton, president of the Black People’s Union, an Indigenous activist group, claimed that “economic migrants” (those seeking a better life away from poverty in the underdeveloped world) participate in the colonial occupation of Australia and therefore “reap the fruits of colonialism and imperialism themselves” and are “agents of empire”. 
The post was particularly bizarre, given the context in which it was made. In recent months, refugees have set up protest camps outside government offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. The encampments are attempts to highlight the federal government’s inhuman treatment of refugees. Stewart-Assheton’s post was in response to an Indigenous activist’s speech at the Melbourne protest, welcoming both refugees and migrants to Australia. 
Stewart-Assheton’s anti-migrant prejudice is shameful. Indeed, the label “economic migrants” has long been used by the political right to generate hostility toward immigrants and to turn working-class people against each other, distracting them from the crimes of big business and politicians. 
Yet hostility towards so-called settler migrants isn’t a random quirk of the Black People’s Union. It flows from some of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary “anti-colonial” politics. 
The dominant framework on the left for understanding anti-Aboriginal racism is settler colonial theory, first popularised by the academic Patrick Wolfe. Activists influenced by that framework present the main divide in Australia as being between Indigenous people and a homogeneous “settler” population. Anyone who is not Indigenous—no matter how exploited or oppressed they may be themselves—is considered to be a privileged settler and coloniser reaping the benefits of Aboriginal people’s oppression. 
This idea downplays the fact that the majority of so-called settlers suffer from gross forms of exploitation and oppression. After all, can we really believe that poor migrants working shitty jobs in the outer suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne have more in common with CEOs or politicians than they do with refugees and Aboriginal people, just because they happen to have moved to Australia? 
What utility does the concept of “settler” have when it can be equally applied to Peter Dutton, who calls for people waving Hezbollah flags to be deported from the country, and people of Lebanese heritage who defy the pervasive racism of the politicians and the media—and harassment from the cops and the security services—to protest against Israeli terrorism? By the logic of modern “anti-colonial” politics, whatever the differences between them, both are part of a privileged settler population.
The movement of people worldwide has been a constant feature of human society, particularly in modern times. Some migrants move to flee poverty, only to be met with horrendous racist treatment in their new country—if they are admitted at all under the many migration laws that determine whether or not they will be of use to capitalists. 
Migrants can be horrendously paid and work in precarious workplaces, while their rights as workers are not respected at all. On top of this, they are often used as scapegoats to cover for the failures of the capitalist system. 
For example, in Australia, the Liberals are now blaming the housing crisis on migrants, when it’s the government-designed housing market that has turned shelter into a vehicle for making one section of the (disproportionately Liberal-voting) population incredibly wealthy through perpetual asset-price inflation. 
The housing crisis affects almost all working people, particularly those with lower incomes and families lacking accumulated wealth. Yet supporters of settler colonial theory would have migrants slaving away in shitty jobs and living pay cheque to pay cheque “pay the rent” as though they are no different from Rio Tinto. 
Of course, there have been periods when migration has occurred as a part of brutal processes of colonisation—as in the history of colonial Australia. However, to condemn anyone as an evil settler and coloniser for having left the country in which they were born to go somewhere else that has an indigenous population—that is foolish in the extreme. As in the case of Stewart-Assheton, it can just dovetail with the anti-migrant bile of the racist right. 
The problem isn’t just that it can lead activists to counterpose the interests of refugees and migrants. To follow the logic of the argument would mean condemning the hundreds of millions of workers living in Canada, the US, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand as lackeys of imperialism and capitalism.
In some situations, the strident denunciation of settlers has been used to justify the most reactionary crimes. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalists have unleashed waves of violence and forced expulsions of Rohingya, who have been categorised as “migrants” rather than native to the country. 
In her book Home Rule, Nandita Sharma shows that conflicts in Africa have often been framed as racialised struggles between supposed “Black African natives” and “light-skinned Arab migrants”. Sharma argues that the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide had its roots in “the self-identification of Hutus as the National-Natives of Rwanda and the categorization of Tutsis as colonizing Migrants” who had to be violently removed from a country that they apparently did not “belong” to. 
Sinhala chauvinists in Sri Lanka similarly argue that Tamils are basically foreigners, and far-right Hindu nationalists in India want to expel Muslims from the country on similar grounds. 
None of this is to deny the very real oppression suffered by indigenous peoples in many countries around the world, particularly here in Australia. However, when activists and theorists try to set up a world view based on the idea that the whole planet is a struggle between settlers on the one hand and radical indigenous peoples on the other, it can only lead to absurdity. 
Many activists influenced by settler colonial theory would reject Stewart-Assheton’s conclusions. But conceptualising the fundamental divide in the world as a battle between indigenous peoples and settler populations makes it easy to see why people can dismiss the rights of migrants and the struggles of workers.
In many ways, settler colonial theory is a form of indigenous nationalism. Like all forms of nationalist politics, it views the world in a classless and sectional manner. This is clear from Stewart-Assheton and the Black People’s Union argument that the key divide in Australia is not between bosses and workers but between Indigenous people and settlers, and that, therefore, an anti-colonial revolution by Indigenous people (who make up just 3 percent of the population) is supposedly the first step to both Indigenous liberation and socialism. 
It’s on this basis that Stewart-Assheton says that all anti-racist, progressive and working-class struggles should be subordinated to Indigenous struggles (and therefore subordinated to the Black People’s Union) and that any failure to agree with such a program or its theoretical underpinning springs from a settler mindset.
This so-called radical program is incapable of securing either Indigenous liberation or socialism. In the end, all it does is take the focus away from the capitalist class and pit the struggles of oppressed people against each other in an Olympics-style game of identity politics, in which the starting point is figuring out who is most oppressed, rather than thinking about how we can best unite to beat our common enemy—the capitalist ruling class and its repressive state.
Oskar Martin is the Indigenous representative on the Student Council at the University of Melbourne Student Union.
Jordan Humphreys is the author of <a href="https://shop.redflag.org.au/products/indigenous-liberation-and-socialism">Indigenous Liberation &amp; Socialism</a>.

Oskar Martin

Jordan Humphreys

Are migrants colonisers?

One year ago, Israel began its genocidal bloodbath in Gaza. As the bodies of men, women and so many children piled up, ripped apart by bombs made in the USA, everyone was called on to answer the question: “Which side are you on?”.
Governments of every stripe, from the far right in Italy and Argentina, to the Democrat and Labor administrations of the US and Australia, and the Arab dictatorships and monarchies of the Middle East, chose the side of genocide. Weapons companies kept the ammunition and profits flowing. The Australian media became mouthpieces of Israeli state propaganda. Palestinians whose families were being annihilated were either ignored or asked only one question: “Do you condemn Hamas?”.
But against the tide, a new movement rose. It started with those of us who had been organising in solidarity with Palestine for many years. In Sydney, we in the Palestine Action Group started making calls and by 9 October we had 2,000 people on the streets. Within a few days, protests were occurring in every major city.
We had organised protests against Israel’s previous massacres in Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2021. But none of us predicted just how bloodthirsty Israel would be this time. And none of us knew that we were kicking off a movement that would mobilise thousands of people every week, for 52 weeks, to demand freedom for Palestine. If there is one ray of hope amongst all the horror of the past year, it’s that millions of ordinary people have defiantly taken a stand with this movement for liberation.
No sooner had we taken to the streets than the attacks on us began. The script was familiar: we were labelled antisemites. The Jewish organisations and individuals who participated in every protest were erased from the media narrative. In NSW, Labor Premier Chris Minns lit up the Opera House with the colours of Israel’s flag and then declared that our protests would be banned. Police threatened the use of extraordinary powers to crack down on us, and even forcibly strip-search protesters. Peter Dutton called for protesters to be deported. It took real bravery for people to mobilise in the face of all that, but on 15 October, 15,000 people demonstrated that we could not be intimidated into silence.
The centrepiece of this movement has been the nationwide mass weekly or fortnightly protests. They have been the biggest rallies for Palestine in Australian history. In Melbourne and Sydney, upwards of 60,000 people have mobilised, with huge numbers out in Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra. Even smaller cities and towns like Wollongong, Newcastle, Cairns and Katoomba have held regular protests, attracting hundreds.
These sustained mobilisations have kept Palestine at the centre of Australian political debate, piling pressure on our rotten politicians, drawing huge numbers into the cause for the first time, giving confidence and inspiration to all who come that we are on the right side of history, and showing the people of Gaza that we are with them, even if our governments are not.
Crucially, the protests have mobilised far larger numbers of non-Arabs and non-Muslims than the Palestine movement had previously. It is a testament to the argument that ordinary people, regardless of their background, are capable of rejecting racism and standing in solidarity with oppressed people. 
The mass protests have created the foundation for countless other actions to be organised in the past year: occupations of train stations, pickets at weapons companies, attempted blockades of ports, convoys to Canberra, protests and sit-ins at Albanese’s office, hundreds of vigils, plays and film-screenings, actions aimed at local councils and much more.
Students have played a big part. High school socialists in Melbourne organised the biggest school strike for Palestine in the world last November, and students elsewhere followed suit. Students for Palestine kicked off the Gaza solidarity encampment movement on Australian universities, setting up the first camp at Sydney University in April, before it spread to twelve other campuses. 
A wave of huge student general meetings has been held at campuses around the country, mobilising 1,500 people at the University of Queensland and several hundred in other places. The immense majorities voting for pro-Palestine motions are extraordinary and demonstrate how large support for Palestine is amongst young people.
Everywhere people have tried to express their opposition to the genocide, they have come up against institutions that try to repress them. Journalists Antoinette Lattouf and Nour Haydar were sacked for reporting the truth. Fatima Payman was driven out of the Labor Party. Pro-Palestine school students and teachers have faced off against principals and education departments, demanding their right to wear the keffiyeh. Actors and musicians from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to the Sydney Theatre Company have been punished for taking a stand. Many trade union members have campaigned against their union leaders to take a stronger stance in support of Palestine. University students and staff are currently facing a concerted right-wing campaign to silence them. Recent protests against the arms convention in Melbourne were met with police violence. Yet still, we resist.
As the genocide grinds on and Israel escalates its violence in Lebanon, there are precious few victories for us to celebrate. But all of us who have thrown ourselves into the fight to stand against this descent into hell should be proud of what we have done. There are thousands and thousands of people who are more committed than ever to free Palestine and tear down this barbaric system, and we aren’t done yet.

Josh Lees

Still fighting for Palestine, one year on

“Resembled a Hitler Youth rally”. Those are the slanderous words that Executive Council of Australian Jewry Deputy President Robert Goot chose to describe the 500-strong student general meeting held by Students for Palestine at the University of New South Wales on 25 September.
Quoted in the Australian last week, Goot’s comment adds another salvo to the barrage of attacks on the student-led Palestine solidarity movement, levelled under the pretext of “combating antisemitism” on campuses.
It was a strange sort of “Hitler Youth rally”, where half the speaking list was Jewish, and the vast majority of attendees voted against a genocide. Two of those Jewish speakers, UNSW associate professor Dr Peter Slezak and Students for Palestine member Milo Riggs, spoke in favour of the motion to stand for a Free Palestine and demand that UNSW sever its ties to weapons companies.
For all the howling about a climate of fear prevailing on campus for Jewish students, and the supposedly Nazi-like nature of Palestine activism, seventeen pro-Israel students attended the meeting draped in Israeli flags and holding a banner that said “Students Supporting Israel”. They were able to participate in the meeting and make their case—they were not harassed or silenced. 
Comments like Goot’s trivialise one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed. The idea that hundreds of students gathering to vote against genocide and for peace is anything like a rally of Nazis calling for the murder of millions of Jews is beyond offensive and patently absurd. It’s a cynical strategy to deflect criticism of Israel’s atrocities—using the legacy of one genocide to justify another.
Thousands of students across Australia have mobilised because they have watched as Israeli leaders describe Palestinians as “human animals”, pledge to “raze Gaza to the ground”, and then proceed to obliterate human life and vital infrastructure in the Gaza strip. Yet in Australia today, if you attend a mass meeting to register your opposition to this unfolding genocide, it is completely acceptable for a public figure such as Goot to compare you to a Nazi and demand retribution. This will then be published in a major news publication such as the Australian without any challenge from journalists.
Goot was particularly upset by the fact that meeting attendees applauded Dr Slezak’s comment that “Jews should feel uncomfortable. It’s our duty to make them uncomfortable”. The Australian makes out like Dr Slezak was saying Jewish people should be made to feel uncomfortable simply for being Jewish. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 
His point, wilfully taken out of context, was an important one. Israel purports to act in the interests of all Jews, and many pro-Israel Jewish organisations actively promote this idea. But growing number of Jews feel uncomfortable about the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza in their name, and they are right to feel this way. And it is understandable then that they appeal to other Jews to resist this. As Dr Slezak pointed out, this is precisely why there is now a growing constituency of Jewish people who have shunned the lie that Judaism and Israel are synonymous and joined the movement for Palestine.
The foundational Zionist idea—that the only decent response to the Holocaust is to unconditionally defend Israel—is in tatters. In fact, it’s the brutal reality of the genocide in Gaza that has driven many progressive Jews, who know all too well what a genocide looks like, to speak out against Israel. Imploring students to vote in support of Palestine, Riggs, a Jewish student activist, argued that “never again”, a rallying call to prevent future Holocausts, “means never again for anybody”. 
The other part of Dr Slezak’s point about discomfort was to say that the oppressed are not obliged to account for the feelings of their oppressors. If wearing keffiyehs, calling for justice “from the river to the sea”, and mobilising against Israel on an unprecedented scale means that defenders of a genocidal state feel uncomfortable, then so be it. No such handwringing about discomfort is afforded to Israel’s actual victims, nor to the students of Palestinian and Lebanese background who are confronted by students draped in the Israeli flag—the symbol of their oppression. Nor is the discomfort of Russian students who might support the invasion of Ukraine, or Chinese students who might approve of human rights abuses in Xinjiang, afforded the same deference. And nor should it.
Incapable of making, let alone winning, a convincing argument amongst the student body, all that supporters of Israel can do is rile up university administrators and the political establishment to repress pro-Palestine students on bogus charges. While the universities, that are tied to the weapons industry that arms Israel, might relish this line of attack to put activists back in the box for daring to oppose them, they’re sorely mistaken if they think it will stop the movement.


As the campus meetings all over the country demonstrate, students know that the enablers of genocide are not just in Tel Aviv and Washington. They also sit in executive suites and chancelleries right here in Australia, counting their millions as the bombs rain down on children. Thousands of students have mobilised against them this year in Australia’s largest ever campus actions for Palestine. The days where slander like this would deter anyone from standing on the right side of history are over.

Jack Mansell

Slander won’t stop students from resisting genocide

It was the best of school funding, it was the worst of school funding. 
In one corner of Melbourne, at Presbyterian Ladies’ College (PLC), the sun rose on the bustling construction site of an expansive, state-of-the-art swimming and sports complex. The school’s halls gleamed, echoing with the buzz of students discussing future extracurriculars—swimming lessons in their Olympic-sized pool, dance classes in a dedicated aerobics room, badminton tournaments in a fully reconfigurable gymnasium.
The day started differently in Melbourne’s northern suburbs at a local public secondary college. The sun may have risen, but the mood was subdued. Teachers hurried between classrooms, covering for absent colleagues, their numbers stretched thin as the school faced another day without enough casual relief teachers to fill the gaps. Inclusion aides faced the difficult decision of supporting this student or that one, to assist in this classroom or the other. The ancient photocopier groaned under the strain of last-minute worksheets. There was no swimming pool to speak of, much less an $85 million sports complex.
The chasm between these two schools, separated by geography and a stark disparity in resources and opportunities, is widening. This is the almost Dickensian reality of Victoria’s education system in 2024. While wealthier private schools build new swimming pools and welcome students with an array of luxuries, many public schools are battling to keep the classrooms staffed and students supported.
At PLC, where annual fees hover around $38,000, students enjoy not just the basics but some of the best that education can offer. The new sports complex alone—complete with spectator seating, a gym, spin room and underground parking lot—demonstrates the level of privilege at play. Along with student fees, PLC collects $9.25 million in combined government funding annually. The school offers its students a wealth of extracurricular activities, small class sizes and personalised attention from staff. PLC claims the school’s reserves and donations entirely fund its new swimming pool, but the generous government funding that flows to the school undoubtedly frees resources for such extravagant projects.
Compare this to our secondary college in the northern suburbs, where 64 percent of students come from the bottom quarter of the socioeconomic spectrum and 67 percent speak a language other than English at home. This school faces serious challenges made worse by funding inequality. With a student body of just over a thousand, the school must get by on significantly less than PLC—around $18,600 per student per year when state and federal government funding are combined. Here, classrooms are often overcrowded, and the programs designed to support students with high needs are perpetually underfunded.
The differences between the two schools are not limited to facilities. They reflect broader systemic inequalities that play a crucial role in shaping the future of the students who pass through their doors. In wealthier private schools, students are surrounded by resources that encourage them to excel in both academics and extracurricular activities. Small class sizes and abundant staff ensure that students receive individualised attention, which helps them succeed in exams and ultimately gain entry to elite universities.
In contrast, our public schools are struggling to meet the basic needs of our students. Teachers are overstretched, and schools often lack the resources to retain enough staff or run full-scale literacy and numeracy programs. Students needing extra help may find themselves slipping through the cracks, with fewer academic or personal development opportunities.
The disparity in funding—and, by extension, the quality of education—reinforces pre-existing social inequalities rather than addressing them. While students at wealthier private schools are primed for success, with a network of alumni and well-resourced programs that set them up for high-status careers, students at many public schools face a much steeper climb. Without access to the same level of resources and support, many students from underfunded schools will struggle to break free from the socioeconomic circumstances into which they were born. This situation seems to be by design.
Universal access to education is often hailed as a great equaliser, the force that can lift horizons for students from all walks of life. But in Australia, it is increasingly becoming the opposite: the great reinforcer of socioeconomic hierarchy. The funding model that allows private schools to receive significant government support while public schools languish is a clear example of how education policy can entrench inequality rather than reduce it.
If politicians are serious about providing quality education for all students, this inequality must be reversed. Public schools cannot continue to struggle while private schools flourish. The state and federal governments need to fund public schools fully to meet 100 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard outlined in the Gonski report over a decade ago. And that is just a start.
The growing divide between schools like PLC and this northern suburbs secondary school is not just an issue of fairness—it is an issue of justice. Without urgent action, education in Australia will continue to perpetuate the very inequalities it should be dismantling.

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