In 2021, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Royal Commission shone a harsh light on the sickening and dangerous priorities of the business interests that control the aged-care sector. It exposed that billions of government dollars were flowing into an increasingly privatised industry, fuelling enormous wealth for the operators, while workers copped rock-bottom wages and old folks were locked in their rooms in squalor due to lack of staff. 
One of the aged-care companies at the centre of media attention in the years that followed was Heritage Care, which operated nine for-profit aged-care homes. Heritage Care and its owners became infamous in 2020, after 38 people died of COVID-19 after a major infection control breach at its Epping Gardens aged-care facility in Melbourne. 
In the wake of this disaster, family members talked of short staffing leaving residents unwashed, unfed and undressed. The Age revealed that another of the company’s facilities, in the Sydney suburb of Botany, had failed all eight minimum standards in an audit by the regulator in 2019. Management of nutrition, hydration, skin injuries, falls and pain was inadequate, the food was bad, and staff numbers had been cut, leaving residents uncared for. Nonetheless, the regulator allowed the facility to keep operating. 
Much of the government money that was never spent on staffing or care was instead siphoned off to finance the luxury lifestyle of Peter Arvanitis, one of the two co-owners of Heritage Care, and wife Areti Arvanitis. In October last year, the Australian Financial Review <a href="https://www.afr.com/property/residential/aged-care-mogul-asking-55m-for-toorak-temple-of-opulence-20241009-p5kh61">gushed</a>
over the Toorak residence of these two aged-care industry profiteers: 
“From a French chandelier sourced from Hollywood producer Aaron Spelling’s Los Angeles home, to the master bedroom’s plum-red silk carpet floors – the aesthetic on display throughout Estia Healthcare founder Peter Arvanitis and his wife Areti’s Toorak mansion is nothing short of unbridled opulence.
“The entrance hall alone features brass doors, marble floors, eight-metre-high ceilings, a hand-blown glass dome with hand-painted roses and a sweeping curved staircase… 
“The five-bedroom home comprises 2000 square metres of sumptuous interiors across three levels. Along with six bathrooms, there’s a wellness room, a 10-car garage, cinema and a secretly accessed wood-panelled bar inspired by London’s private clubs.”
Government money and pathetically weak regulation lead to low wages for the workers, unspeakable conditions for many of those who rely on the sector for care—and Toorak mansions for the owners. 
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is designed on similar lines to the profit-driven childcare and aged-care sectors. A funnel of government money flows to private operators, with light-touch neoliberal “regulation” putting no constraint on private enrichment.
Unsurprisingly, the NDIS is starting to attract similar headlines to the well-documented capitalist-made disaster zones of child care and aged care.
Even Murdoch’s tabloids <a href="https://mobile.x.com/Johnkehoe23/status/1804355727932428578/photo/1">reported</a>
last year on the NDIS being transformed into “an ATM for the mega-rich”. Australian retail boss Brett Blundy seems typical of these new operators. Blundy is the 38th-richest person in the country, according the annual Australian Financial Review Rich List, with an estimated wealth of $3.95 billion. Having made his pile in retail, Blundy has recently bought into Independent Living Specialists, which supplies aids such as modified furniture and mobility scooters to NDIS customers. 
Sixty-three of the 67 ratings for Independent Living Specialists on the “<a href="https://au.trustpilot.com/review/ilsau.com.au?page=2">trustpilot</a>” website are one star, with feedback to match: “Negative star—absolute worst experience”; “Bad service, greed-driven, overpriced products”; “This company should be shut down”; “Shameful company. Dishonest. Should be banned from using NDIS logo”; “PREY ON SICK AND INJURED—AVOID”.
While people needing mobility aids for family members put up with endless delays and poor products, Blundy buys and sells luxury super-yachts with <a href="https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/news/billionaire-retails-big-ticket-items-1196789/">reported</a>
price tags of around a quarter of a billion dollars. It’s business as usual in Australia’s grotesque, profit-driven care sector.

Jerome Small

Aged care and disability: ‘opulence’ for the owners, at our expense

Watching the footage of the March for Australia rallies on 31 August, it was impossible not to conclude that they were gatherings of hard-core racists. 
When speakers chanted “Send them back! Send them back!” and “Heil Australia!” and the crowd enthusiastically joined in, or when demonstrators held placards stating “Mass migration = silent invasion”, or when t-shirts sporting the slogan popularised by the 2005 Cronulla riots “Fuck off, we’re full” were a common sight, you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out that these were racist mobilisations demanding a return to White Australia. 
Curiously, though, politicians and newspaper editors are now trying to convince us that these were not far-right mobilisations by racist dogs who should be shunned by society. The open Nazis, whose presence at the rallies could not be denied, did cop some flak. Victorian Police Minister Anthony Carbines called them “unhinged grubs”, and Nazi leader Thomas Sewell was remanded in custody on charges of violent disorder, affray and assault following the attack on Camp Sovereignty. 
But self-declared Nazis aside, Labor and Liberal alike are now doing their best to convince us that the rest of the crowd were essentially decent folk duped by fascists. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the crowd as “good people turning up to demonstrate their views” but who should be cautious about giving neo-Nazis a platform. Multicultural Affairs minister Anne Aly agreed: many of those attending had been “conned” by the far right. When asked to comment on the appearance of Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter as guests of honour at the Canberra and Townsville rallies, Aly could not bring herself to denounce even these out-and-out racists.
On the other side of the chamber, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said that the rallies were “attended by people of goodwill but hijacked by violent neo-Nazis spouting hate and racism”.
It hasn’t just been right-wing politicians who have downplayed the bigotry on display. The Age
editors condemned the rally but said that “it must be acknowledged that many of those choosing to protest on Sunday were not racist”. ABC journalists chimed in along the same lines.
What has been the defence put up for the bulk of the March for Australia demonstrators? That they were motivated by “legitimate concerns”, including about the housing crisis, inadequate infrastructure and the cost of living. 
These naïve folk should under no circumstances be called racist or called out on their disgusting actions, apparently. Oh no, that would be “polarising” and, according to Albanese, would “push them further down the rabbit-hole”.
Accompanying this has been near unanimity across the political and media classes that there needs to be a “mature conversation” about immigration, thereby accepting the fascist claim that immigration is a cause for concern.
Some on the left echoed these sentiments. Student members of socialist group Solidarity at Sydney University argued that the rally was “not a White Australia rally, but a housing crisis rally” and that the attendees were “impoverished” and “concerned about the housing crisis”. Solidarity’s online coverage of the event included quotes from racist trade unionists in an apparent attempt to play up a division between open Nazis and “softer racists”. They seem to believe that if racist workers march, their involvement somehow mitigates the fascistic character of these rallies and presents an opportunity to split their ranks.
It doesn’t seem to bother those trying to play up the supposed “legitimate grievances” of the crowd or insisting there were “good people” on both sides that not one chant at these rallies called for any government action to ease the housing crisis other than an immediate halt to immigration. Nor that the only printed placard mentioning housing—“Stop mortgage rises—stop immigration!”—was produced by One Nation. Nor that Nazi speeches, according to an Age reporter, were met with “rousing cheers”, and the one attempt to take the microphone from a Nazi, at the Adelaide rally, was met with fierce opposition from the crowd who demanded that he be given the right to speak. 
Emphasising the “legitimate concerns” of organised racists only weakens the struggle against bigotry. It is imperative that anti-racists organise to resist the growth of a far-right movement; casting its adherents in the most positive conceivable light is an obstacle to that goal.
It is hardly new that racism is dressed up as innocent “concerns”. Just look at the many excuses given for people voting against an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Indeed, scabs always claim to have “legitimate concerns”, including that they will face financial hardship if they go on strike. Police informers always have “legitimate concerns” that they face a tougher sentence if they don’t cooperate with the cops. But how do you build a strike, how do you protect people from harassment and how do you fight racism if your starting point is to make excuses for the people who do their best to defeat your efforts? The task of the left must be to solidarise with the millions repelled by displays of bigotry, not to apologise for the racists or to explain why they adhere to rancid ideas.
We must call these demonstrations for what they are: not assemblies of innocents somehow hoodwinked into supporting unfortunate causes but collections of hard-core racists trying to cohere into a political force. They need to be crushed, not “understood”.
Government ministers won’t do this. They recognise these pigs as potential voters they don’t want to alienate. And they understand that every grievance directed at a migrant is one less directed at them. Labor depends as much as the Liberals do on promoting flag-waving and rabid nationalism as part of the broader project of running Australian capitalism. Even if the government is not about to slash immigration (because Australian capitalists depend on it), it understands that right-wing nationalism certainly helps things along when you’ve got spending on public services to cut, a war to prepare for and hundreds of billions of dollars of extra military spending to justify. It’s the same reason Albanese refused to call the “No” campaign in the Voice referendum racist: to do so would require him to fight them, and fighting racism is simply not in Labor’s DNA. 
The ALP wants to run the capitalist state which requires it to pursue racist policies. The Greens, to their credit, condemned the racists. But they won’t mobilise to take them on. The trade union leaders have done nothing to push back. To take on racism, we need socialist politics grounded in class struggle and opposition to all forms of oppression.

Tom Bramble

‘Legitimate concerns’?

Last Sunday’s March for Australia was a significant moment for the far right across the country, as goons draped in Australian flags took to the streets in substantial numbers. In Melbourne and Sydney, they brought out close to 10,000 people, while in Adelaide, Brisbane, Hobart and Newcastle their numbers were in the hundreds or thousands. While the marches didn’t reach the size and militancy of the anti-lockdown demonstrations in Melbourne during the COVID era, they are the biggest explicitly racist demonstrations for some decades.
It was never made public who exactly organised the marches, which called for an end to mass immigration. But in many places, particularly in Melbourne, it was clear that the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network played an important role. Even where the NSN were less central, the strategy was the same: far right forces sought to build a relatively broader right-wing movement around anti-migrant racism. That is, this was an attempt by Nazis and their ilk to try and enter the mainstream of Australian political life. 
None of this would have been possible without the Murdoch press, which has clearly decided that becoming a Fox News tribute act is its best chance of staying relevant. Rupert’s local minions want to see Australia become more like the US and UK, where the far right is ascendant. So, they provided free advertising to boost the “March for Australia”, with the Daily Telegraph even publishing the official promotional leaflet. The Seven TV network, owned by billionaire Kerry Stokes, also publicised the rally, continuing its tradition of promoting filth like Pauline Hanson and Ben Roberts-Smith.
The movement produced by this classic alliance of fascists and billionaires was a predictable orgy of racism, anti-leftism and conspiracy theories. In a few cities, speakers promoted the “great replacement theory”, which posits that Western governments are consciously replacing white people with migrants. (Yes, those same governments that are incarcerating, deporting and drowning record numbers of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers the world over.) In Melbourne and Sydney, well-known neo-Nazis received rapturous applause, while in Adelaide the crowd went ballistic after a member of the NSN had a microphone wrenched from his hands, insisting on his right to speak. The Melbourne rally transformed into a terrifying pogrom against migrants and people of colour, before culminating in a violent attack on Camp Sovereignty, a protest camp led by Indigenous activists since 2006.
It's clear beyond doubt that the NSN played a key role in these demonstrations. But the despicable rhetoric was far from limited to the Nazis. Each and every speaker raged against migrants in their own deranged way, at times remembering to qualify their hate by insisting they were not against all migrants, before collapsing into calls to deport them all. Politicians Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts and Bob Katter addressed the crowds.
The fact that the fascists can make what sounds like a coherent link between housing and migration is a result of much more mainstream racism. For years, we’ve been subjected to arguments about how migration is leading to higher house prices, led by the Coalition and encouraged by Labor. This is reinforced by the lies told by the housing industry about so-called housing shortages, which continue to be peddled by politicians, the mainstream media and the vast bulk of capitalist economists, despite being <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/housing-supply-not-problem">systematically</a> <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-the-housing-crisis">debunked</a>. 
But the reality is that very, very few of those on the streets were mobilised by economic concerns. The typical attendee was a 55-year-old white man, the vast majority of whom would have owned their own homes and/or businesses. One of the main organisers in Melbourne is Hugo Lennon, heir to a property developer worth hundreds of millions. In any case, there were no signs on the day complaining about housing, rent prices, failing education or health systems, or any such issues. This was not a protest about living standards, but a national day of racism and bigotry. Anyone who pretends it had anything to do with the former is giving cover to the Nazis and their followers.
Unfortunately, the media and political class have taken the bait hook line and sinker, earnestly discussing how the housing crisis and cost of living issues triggered these demonstrations. This is echoed by political leaders, shamefully including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who described the far-right hooligans as possessing “legitimate concerns”. The anti-fascist left should have no truck with this line of argument. These racist thugs need to be crushed, not empathised with.
In Melbourne and Sydney, a coalition of anti-fascist activists argued that the weekly Palestine rallies should take on the issue politically, and the resulting mobilisations were the largest anti-fascist actions seen for many years. Elsewhere, the left was less organised and far less effective in responding. In any case, the far right had the element of surprise on the weekend. Knowing what we now know, it’s clear that the left needs to be better organised for the future, to take to the streets in a show of unity and strength only possible through united action. We have prevented the far right’s growth before, and we can do it again.
Having said that, developing a serious anti-fascist approach means looking at the wider context for this resurgence in far-right sentiment. Unlike during the days of Reclaim Australia (a revival of the far right in the mid-2010s), which was a peculiarly Australian phenomenon, today the far right is surfing a wave of international success. In many European countries, fascists and the far right are playing substantial roles both in government and opposition. In the US—the most powerful country on the planet—Trump is in charge, leading the most aggressively reactionary and authoritarian administration in living memory. Alongside Putin’s Russia, Israel’s ethno-nationalism has become a model and an inspiration for fascists the world over, even as they continue to hold deeply antisemitic views.
More broadly, the growth of the far right reflects the crisis in the old strategy of capitalist domination, sometimes known as neoliberalism. This model emphasised trust in the free market (except in its love of union busting) and was prepared to tolerate symbolic improvements around certain social issues. Now there’s been a hard shift back to economic nationalism as the ruling class respond to rising imperialist tensions. Inequality has risen dramatically alongside the drastic decline of trade unions, and the rich rely increasingly on authoritarianism and bigotry to keep workers repressed and distracted. 
But while it’s important to build anti-fascist coalitions and actions where possible, alone such work is inadequate. Capitalism creates the conditions where fascism can breed, and as long as it exists so too will the far right. Mainstream capitalist politicians, be they social democrats, centrists or conservatives, all promote “moderate” versions of the ideas that make up fascist ideology: bigotry, hierarchy, oppression and militarism. So aside from day-to-day battles, the urgent task remains to construct a powerful socialist movement with roots in the working class, with all its wonderful diversity. Only by developing such an instrument and then using it to overthrow the rich and make capitalism history, can we end the far right for good.

Omar Hassan

When fascists march, the left must get organised

The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites, writes Martin Barker. 
--------------------
The Nazis and far-right racists (including the son of one of Australia’s largest property developers) who called the reactionary March for Australia on 31 August are demanding an end to mass migration because “Aussies are sleeping on the streets”. 
It’s not just fascists linking migration to the housing crisis. Before the last election, both the Liberals and the ALP had migrants in their sights. “We’re going to cut immigration because Labor’s brought in a million people over two years and that has created the housing crisis”, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said at the time. Labor criticised Dutton but conveyed essentially the same message in more acceptable language. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said of a proposed cap on international students: “Enrolments have grown ... this puts pressure on prices and rents ... it makes finding a house harder for everyone”. 
Politics and the media blame migrants for the housing crisis, and it can seem to make sense. We’re told there aren’t enough houses to meet demand, so the more people there are, the more prices rise. 
But the argument doesn’t stack up.
First, there is no shortage of houses in Australia. As the Australia Institute think tank <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">reported in March</a>, the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the last ten years. Indeed, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of residential properties in Australia exceeds the number of households by almost 1 million.
Second, there is no meaningful connection between immigration levels and rents. As TikTok user @acutallyadu has <a href="https://x.com/ArtistAffame/status/1958698381779579363">pointed out</a>, the proportion of housing relative to the population in 2014 was roughly the same as today, but rent price growth in 2014 was 1.2 percent compared to 8.1 percent in 2023. Similarly, the <a href="https://www.tenants.org.au/blog/rents-and-migration-what-does-data-tell-us">Tenants Union of NSW</a> has created a dashboard comparing rental price changes to population changes, which shows that there isn’t a strong link between the two. (One example: rent prices in the Sydney suburb of Ryde fell by 5 percent in 2019 and rose by more than 7 percent in 2022, but 33 percent more migrants moved into Ryde in 2019 compared to 2022.) 
It’s the same with house prices. At times, prices have fallen while immigration has increased, and prices have gone up when immigration has reduced. During the COVID-19 border closures, there was negative net migration, meaning more people left the country than came in; but house prices rose by <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">20 percent</a> in eighteen months. 
International students in particular have been blamed for high rents and low vacancy rates in the suburbs surrounding major universities. The <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-24/international-students-did-not-drive-rents-inflation-higher-rba/105562616">Reserve Bank of Australia</a> found that the return of international students after lockdowns had a marginal effect on rents, contributing at most 0.5 percentage points to rent increases. The majority of rent increases occurred before the borders were reopened, jumping by 13.8 percent between 2021 and 2022. 
So if migrants aren’t to blame, why are house prices and rents so unaffordable? 
House prices and rents are soaring because access to housing in Australia is dominated by a for-profit market that is rigged in the interests of billionaire developers and wealthy investors.
Developers like Mirvac and Meriton (owned by Australia’s second-richest person, Harry Triguboff) are making a killing from high house prices. Meriton made $290 million in profits last year, and Mirvac more than $500 million. And that’s only two of the companies that dominate the housing market. 
Their only concern is profit, and they have a clear interest in higher house prices. In April, the Melbourne Age newspaper reported that <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html">developers in Melbourne were letting 8,000 properties sit empty</a> because prices weren’t high enough, and selling them too quickly would bring down the cost to buyers. 
Developers receive tax and development concessions from the government and benefit from policies like the First Home Buyers scheme, which claims to make it easier for people to buy, but actually drives up prices. 
The tiny proportion of investors who own most investment properties (1 percent of taxpayers own more than 25 percent of them) also want to drive up prices. They receive massive handouts from the government that subsidise their speculation, which increases prices and allows them to out-compete first-home buyers for properties. 
Negative gearing (when a property costs more to maintain than it generates in income, even if it is increasing in value) allows them to claim losses as a tax deduction, and capital gains tax discounts mean they pocket more of the returns when they sell. The ABC <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/one-million-australians-are-negatively-gearing/104737164">reported last year</a> that CGT discounts cost the public $23 billion, with 80 percent of the benefits going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers. 
These government handouts mean that investors and developers can sit on properties until the price is right. Some rent them out, others leave them empty, knowing they’ll get a tax concession when they sell. That’s why Prosper Australia, a research and advocacy group, estimates that there are <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/">100,000 empty or “barely used” properties in Melbourne</a> while 30,000 Victorians are homeless. 
Blaming migrants for the housing crisis shifts the blame away from those who are actually responsible: big corporations and banks, the super-wealthy and Labor and Liberal governments. Migrant bashing is about dividing workers to make it harder for us to unite and fight against our common enemy. The super-rich would much rather have us blaming each other for unaffordable homes than aiming our sights on them.
The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites.
Even if there were a housing shortage and migration was having a measurable impact on housing affordability, socialists would still oppose blaming immigrants and imposing migration controls. 
Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We have more than enough resources and productive capacity to comfortably house a significantly larger population. The problem is that the vast majority of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population, whose sole concern is making profits. 
The housing crisis won’t be fixed by blaming migrants or limiting immigration. The solutions lie in challenging the market’s domination over access to housing, the power and wealth of developers and investors, and the Labor and Liberal governments that act in their interests.

Martin Barker

Migrants are not to blame for the housing crisis

You may have seen one of the hundreds of videos on social media (or more recently also <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=DTWEB_WRE170_a_GGL&amp;dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnational%2Fprotesters-rally-troops-ahead-of-march-for-australia-rallies-on-august-31-heres-what-you-need-to-know%2Fnews-story%2F0c64229d1fca403dfcdc96a625feb637&amp;memtype=anonymous&amp;mode=premium&amp;v21=GROUPA-Segment-2-NOSCORE">stories in the Murdoch press</a>) promoting the “March for Australia” protests against <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN1vRmA3p8l/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=dXF5eGM5ZHpjeTdn">“mass migration”</a> that are set to take place in cities around the country this Sunday 31 August. 
The talking points in these videos and other promotional materials for the rallies track closely with those on the event <a href="https://marchforaustralia.org/">website</a>. There, next to the claim that “80 percent of Australians want immigration reduced”, is the question, posed under the heading of “weakened identity”: “who are we as a nation, when one in three people were born overseas?” 
This, to anyone familiar with theories and narratives popular on the far right, could be taken as a pretty unsubtle reference to the “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2499827#abstract">great replacement theory</a>”, according to which mass migration is a conspiracy being carried out by Western elites to replace the white population with immigrants from the global south. 
In its contemporary iteration, this theory arose from the work of French far-right novelist and conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, but its origins trace back to late 19th century European antisemitism and it has been passed down to contemporary far-right and neo-Nazi movements via the writings of Adolf Hitler and other 20th century fascists. When neo-Nazis held a mass march in the US city of Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, one of their favoured chants was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo">“Jews will not replace us!”</a>
The fact that an association with these kinds of theories is barely concealed beneath the veneer of respectability that March for Australia organisers have fostered is cause enough for concern. Perhaps though it’s all a coincidence? The more mainstream forces involved in the rallies certainly would like us to believe so. To get to the bottom of it, let’s dive a little deeper.
On 3 August this year, a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM4gT4HBSHy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">video</a> by Sam Bamford calling for a rally against mass migration was posted to TikTok and Instagram. The post quickly gained traction, reaching hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. According to a subsequent public <a href="https://x.com/i/spaces/1djxXVWlqNNGZ/peek">X Spaces stream</a> with one of the nationwide organisers of the rally who goes by the name of “Bec Freedom”, the video’s virality prompted certain unnamed individuals to reach out to Sam and to put him in touch with her. Since then, Sam has relinquished any involvement in the rallies, and responsibility for organising them has passed to people described in the stream as “trusted individuals” within the far-right movement.
There have been several developments that point to the involvement of neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network (NSN). The “March for Australia” website was created on 8 August, the day before the NSN’s national conference, which took place in the Victorian town of Bacchus Marsh on the weekend of 9-10 August. Notably, the website uses the same content management system and fonts as the NSN’s “White Australia” website. 
Perhaps most damning though is the fact that among the revolving cast of <a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1958911146297368891">state organisers</a> named on the march’s Facebook events, those who have been identified (most are using aliases) have either been NSN members, or have worked closely and directly with the NSN in the past. This includes Matt Trihey (one of the on-again, off-again Victorian organisers), who is a founder of white supremacist organisation the <a href="https://voxpol.eu/nazis-at-the-salad-bar-the-national-workers-alliance-and-mixed-unclear-and-unstable-ideology/">National Workers Alliance</a> and former <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/australian-white-nationalists-reveal-plans-to-recruit-disgruntled-white-male-population">Lads Society</a>member who was most recently in the news for getting <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/white-supremacist-crashes-friends-of-abc-candidates-meeting-in-seat-of-kooyong/news-story/be9520dc5a6a55df4c4c411d98d9bb82">punched in the face</a> by an elderly woman at an election event in Kooyong earlier this year.
Once the march began to gain traction online, <a href="https://x.com/purplepingers/status/1956547447750070659">notable Zionist organisers</a> and far-right content creators from different cultural backgrounds expressed interest in attending and helping to promote the rallies. This prompted an angry tirade from none other than NSN leader Tom Sewell, who complained in an 11 August post on his telegram channel that “after only just arriving home from our summit today [the NSN’s 9-10 August national conference], I have been informed that foreign fifth columns are attempting to hijack our August 31st public rally for Australia. Australians must say NO to Israeli, Palestinian, Chinese and Indian foreign interference trying to hijack our common-sense patriotic spirit. White Australians must assemble on August 31st against the traitors and foreigners who are trying to destroy our great nation!”
Even on the more outwardly “respectable”, public-facing level the veneer has sometimes slipped. In the X Spaces stream mentioned earlier, “Bec Freedom”—the main public face of the rallies on a national level—<a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1955069467681231141">stated that</a> the march is to “protect white culture, heritage and way of life”. In a previous X Spaces stream she also said that “we need to see violence” like what happened in the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cronulla-race-riots">2005 Cronulla Riots</a>. This argument wasn’t met with disgust or apprehension, but by her co-hosts saying it didn’t go far enough.
On available evidence then we can only come to one conclusion. The March for Australia isn’t some wishy washy far-right populist event patched together by suburban “mums and dads” with legitimate concerns. It has been initiated and built with direct neo-Nazi involvement every step of the way. And at its core isn’t limited to the demand for a reduction in rates of immigration, but the plan to build a movement that will violently target anyone deemed not to fit with the NSN’s vision of a racially “pure”, Nazi-led, white Australia.
Wherever possible, these rallies should be actively countered by socialists, pro-Palestine activists, and all those concerned with standing in solidarity with migrants and against the far right and fascism (in Melbourne a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DNka6mTRLIW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=Zng5OHI5N2c1NHp4">counter rally</a> has been organised meeting at 11am Sunday at the State Library). Against their hatred and division, we must advance a vision centred on anti-racist solidarity, collective action and democracy to advance working-class interests against the dog-eat-dog ideologies of capitalism that Nazis aim to take to their most barbaric extremes.

Jordan van den Lamb

The neo-Nazis behind the ‘March for Australia’

Twenty years ago, Eddy Groves blazed a trail as the first of Australia’s childcare industry capitalists to make the annual Rich List. As Groves’ portfolio of childcare centres ballooned, so did his personal wealth—from a hundred childcare centres and $40 million in 2002, to a thousand childcare centres in Australia, a similar number overseas, and a fortune of $260 million in 2006. By this stage, Groves owned a ranch in Nevada, a house in France and the Brisbane Bullets basketball team.
Groves’ empire collapsed in 2008. But he had proved in practice that it was possible for cashed-up operators to make a fortune in care industries governments were retreating from. So long as there is a steady flow of government money, rapid expansion of the corporate footprint, poorly enforced regulation and a ruthless, cost-cutting approach to staffing and conditions, there is money to be made. 
Just look at Pejman Okhovat, the CEO of G8 Education. His total remuneration was $3.3 million in 2024, up from $3 million the year before. G8 Education is the biggest childcare provider in Victoria, with 130 centres across the state. An <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-s-largest-childcare-chain-repeatedly-failed-to-protect-children-20250805-p5mkg0.html">investigation</a>
by the Age following a major alleged child abuse scandal reveals a chronic shortage of trained staff in multiple centres and a failure to report incidents in which a child was harmed or at risk of serious harm: “One mother said she believed it was ‘painfully obvious’ the childcare giant prioritised its reputation over providing adequate care”. 
Child care today is highly profitable. The public financial advice website <a href="https://www.finexia.com.au/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-average-profit-of-daycare-centers-in-australia#:~:text=Average%20Profit%20of%20Daycare%20Center,explore%20in%20the%20subsequent%20sections.">Finexia</a>
claims that a profit margin of 10 to 20 percent is typical—which is significantly more than Woolworths’ reported profit rate of around 6 percent of sales. 
But the big money comes from accumulating the centres themselves, which ensures larger streams of government cash. News.com <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/revealed-the-cashed-up-players-making-millions-from-childcare-centres/news-story/5c5075f0aed1143a007795d20b399b09">carried a story</a> in March this year profiling just a few of the characters who have enriched themselves in this way. The list includes Brendan McAssey, who sold off his “Only About Children” childcare chain to private equity company Bain Capital in 2016 for $400 million. The deal set him up for a $22.5 million luxury home at Noosa and (according a <a href="https://bigsteps.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/spitting-off-cash-uwu-report.pdf">report</a>
from the United Workers Union in 2018) a “44 metre superyacht, helicopter, private jet and $17 million mansion at Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour”. 
Vijay and Phyllis Narula sold their 14-centre Little People’s Places childcare business for $40 million in 2021. This cash funds what news.com describes as their “opulent lifestyle played out online with pictures of their beachfront mansion, Lamborghinis, and first-class global travels, regularly updated on social media”.
Adrian Fonseca already owned a $14 million mansion in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Selling his 12 childcare centres to Affinity in 2022 for around $40 million no doubt helped him find the $15.6 million needed for the mansion next door in 2023. 
We could continue the list, but even this is all chickenfeed. The big players in the industry aren’t motivated by luxury lifestyles, though they no doubt enjoy them. The real game is capital accumulation, on a spectacular scale. 
This is enabled by steady government money and a regulator uninterested in creating barriers to private enrichment. In 2016, the model was attractive enough to entice private equity firm Anchorage to buy Affinity Education, one of Australia’s biggest childcare operators, for $210 million. Anchorage achieved an extraordinary return on this investment, tripling their money in just five years by selling Affinity off to Quadrant, another Sydney private equity company, for $650 million in 2021. 
The executives at incoming owners Quadrant were then faced with the task of squeezing even more money out of Affinity Education. The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-big-money-behind-childcare-operator-at-the-heart-of-alleged-sex-abuse-scandal-20250717-p5mft7.html">plan</a>
seems to have been a simple one: load up on debt, crack down on costs, expand the corporate footprint by buying up more centres—and then cash in. 
The ABC’s reporting shows that breaches of mandated legal minimums on staffing—and intense pressure on staff to leave regulatory breaches unreported—are part and parcel of this business model.. Loretta Dodwell was one of the childcare workers who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">spoke to the ABC</a> in May about what she’d seen while employed by Affinity Education. “The cost cutting and the lack of staff really caused serious incidents in the centre”, she said. “They were also putting on lots of trainees, like young trainees that were cheap to employ and that put a lot of pressure on the qualified staff ... They [Affinity] are just not suitable to be in the childcare industry because they are just so greedy ... They cut staff, they put the staff under so much pressure ... they’re just a big company that wants to make money out of children.”
The head of this “big company that wants to make money out of children” is Chris Hadley, the executive chairman of Affinity Education’s current owner, the private equity firm Quadrant. Hadley is a legend in Sydney money circles. He’s probably a billionaire, although, as the Australian Financial Review <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/inside-the-dog-eat-dog-world-of-australia-s-most-successful-pe-firm-20230822-p5dyf6">reported</a>
in 2023, Quadrant’s “labyrinthine corporate structure” makes it impossible to be certain. 
For the workers, it is a different story. “Food or rent. I can’t afford both.” This is how one member of the United Workers Union responded to a union <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202423-sub-uwu-020625.pdf">survey</a>
of early childhood educators last year. Others reported working a second job, not being able to afford essentials, or not being able to afford a holiday with their kids. 
This is the reality of caring being left to the market. Capitalism has always seen care as a high fixed cost that generates no direct profit, and that therefore should generally be cut to the minimum. This counts double for those too old to make a profit for a boss, or too young, or with a disability that makes someone less profitable to employ. So even before our current neoliberal age with its mania for privatisation, aged care, childcare and other community care facilities were often overcrowded institutions with underpaid and overworked staff. 
But it’s also true that all of these problems have become dramatically worse as the Chris Hadleys and their ilk moved in. Instead of local councils providing the bulk of aged care and child care, with some basic level of political and legal accountability, the profiteering wannabe billionaires (and actual billionaires) are interested only in making a buck. 
Tripling your corporation’s wealth, as Anchorage private equity did with Affinity child care in five years, and as Quadrant hope to do, is the highest mission for any capitalist. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx explored the desperation of capitalists to multiply their capital in volume one of Capital, quoting the British trade unionist Thomas Dunning: “With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain ten percent will ensure its employment anywhere; twenty percent certain will produce eagerness; fifty percent positive audacity; hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged”.
The quote sums up the ethos of capital perfectly. The only difference today is that there’s no chance of any of the childcare profiteers being hanged for their crimes. In fact, it’s an absolute rarity for any of them even to be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Modern day neoliberal “regulators”, in child care and anywhere else, are generally no impediment at all to companies systematically breaching the regulations in pursuit of profit. 
So back in the day, Eddy Groves walked free despite leaving over $1 billion in bad debt. And 20 years later, Affinity look to be following in his footsteps. Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillet <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">reported</a>
on the ABC in May this year that, despite constant pressure on staff not to report regulatory breaches, between 2021 and 2024 Affinity childcare centres “were hit with more than 1,700 regulatory breaches, averaging more than one a day” in New South Wales alone. “Despite this”, Jones and Gillet reported, “the NSW regulator issued just nine infringement notices, totalling less than $2,000 in penalties.”
Labor’s reforms, at best, tinker at the edges of this grotesque system—a system that they’ve helped to create since the 1990s, and which they have no interest in transforming. 
In the wake of Eddie Groves’ spectacular implosion, academic and gender equity advocate Deborah Brennan outlined Labor’s track record on child care, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald: “How did we get into this mess? Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has blamed John Howard for ‘letting the market rip’, but it was the Hawke government, in 1991, that introduced market forces into the sector. It did this by extending child-care assistance to the users of for-profit care and then by changing the structure of Commonwealth funding to encourage private provision and marginalise the community sector ... The Howard government intensified Labor's market focus, ending operational subsidies to community-based care in 1997”.
This whole architecture needs to be scrapped. ABC investigations are important, but far from sufficient to drive this level of change. In aged care, for instance, there have been incremental improvements to wages and staffing since the royal commission triggered by a shocking 2018 Four Corners investigation. However, the fundamental structure of the industry remains untouched and, with it, many of the problems. 
For more far-reaching reforms, the crisis in child care will have to be transformed into a political crisis for the government and the profiteers. The actions of workers in the sector—which we saw a glimpse of in the Big Steps campaign of walk-offs and protests organised by the UWU—can be crucial in this. 
We should be fighting for a society that puts human dignity first—in early childhood education, disability, aged care and far beyond—and relegates the profiteers, their Lamborghinis and their obscene, dog-eat-dog system to history.

The profiteers plundering child care

Sunday, 3 August, will go down in history as the day that 300,000 people, in pouring rain, marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and that the Australian government sanction Israel. The people have spoken. It is the day the whole political and media establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, which have spent nearly two years trying to convince us that Israel’s endless slaughter is justified, definitively lost the argument.
They tried to stop this march from happening, because they understood its potential power. The New South Wales Labor government said it couldn’t happen. The police took us to court to try to stop it. The media ran with their scare campaign about “disruption”, “chaos” and a potential “crowd crush”. 
The media and government also tried to put the spotlight on me, hoping they could discredit and split the Palestine movement. They ran a good old-fashioned campaign of Cold War red-baiting, “outing” me as a Trotskyist, dismissing me as a “serial pest” and a “professional protester” and decrying that I had cost the state $10 million. The Sydney Morning Herald
suggested that I would “jump behind a megaphone for the facile thrill of annoying the establishment”. This attempted character assassination had a transparent intent: to discredit the cause without engaging with the arguments being made, and to drive a wedge between Palestine activists and the growing numbers who agree with them. 
This strategy failed sensationally. In the wake of the campaign’s Supreme Court victory and the enormous numbers who mobilised on the bridge, it was the media’s campaign that looked out-of-touch and the genocide apologists the real serial pests. Not used to failure, the right went into meltdown. The Australian ran a series of hyperbolic pieces, in which they both doubled down on their attacks on me and turned on the Supreme Court for enabling me and revealing its supposedly communist sympathies. 
“The most powerful man in Sydney on Sunday leads his pro-Palestine supporters across the Harbour Bridge basking in the global spotlight—and revelling in a sweet victory handed to him by the NSW Supreme Court”, lamented the Australian. “Josh Lees, the 43-year-old Trotskyist who now calls the tune in the harbour city, has captured the nation’s most iconic landmark and plans to use the moment well into the future ... The keffiyeh-wearing Lees has led a string of causes in the last two decades, his exploits on behalf of refugees, LGBTQI rights and against capitalism all breathlessly recorded in the Red Flag, his Socialist Alternative news outlet. On Saturday night the Red Flag was hailing Lees’ court win as a triumph in the ‘test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism’ ... Lees walked away from the court waving the Palestinian flag. And making it very clear: this was just the beginning.”
It may come as a surprise to readers of Red Flag that in fact I do not “call the tune in the harbour city”, nor that Trotskyism or socialism has yet triumphed. What the gigantic success of the March for Humanity does signify is a huge collective victory of people power over the capitalist establishment, which has backed the genocide in Gaza from the outset. The credit for this belongs to all those who argued, endorsed, organised and mobilised to make that day what it was, and especially to those in the Palestine Action Group Sydney who have stuck it out and kept this movement going for the past two years, most of whom don’t get the “glory” of mainstream media hit pieces. And above all it goes to the hundreds of thousands, who represent many hundreds of thousands more, who took a stand in the face of two years of pro-Israel propaganda, repression and slander from the government, the media, the universities, the arts establishment, but who can recognise a genocide when they see one and refuse to remain silent. 
The establishment is right to be worried, because we do now have a platform to build a much stronger Palestine solidarity movement, with much wider social backing, which is calling into question the entire rotten reality of imperialist deals like that by which Australia is still helping to arm Israel’s military machine. The dam has burst, and the federal government’s attempts to run for cover under Palestinian statehood recognition have already fallen apart. We are going to see a huge mobilisation all around the country on Sunday, 24 August, for the Nationwide March for Palestine, demanding sanctions and an end to the two-way arms trade with Israel.
In this sense, our victory in the Battle of the Bridge is more than just a victory for the Palestine campaign. It is a powerful demonstration that decency and humanity can win out against this vicious capitalist system, that we can win against the governments, the media empires and the institutions that uphold the status quo regardless of the human cost. It is an inspiring example of what socialists always argue: that hope lies with the people, the working class and the oppressed, who can stand together in the spirit of solidarity and internationalism against their common enemies in the ruling establishment; and that those masses are far more fit to rule the world than the media barons, billionaires and their political lackeys who have justified, supported and profited from genocide.

Josh Lees

Right-wing media in meltdown after protesters win ‘Battle for the Bridge’

After almost two years of horror, two prominent Israeli human rights organisations have finally spoken the truth about the situation in Gaza. B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have released reports arguing that Israel has been conducting a “genocidal” policy against Palestinians. 
“Based on a careful legal analysis of the facts, we state with a heavy heart this is a genocide”, Guy Shalev, executive director of the physicians’ group, told reporters in Jerusalem. “The systematic destruction of the health care system, the denial of access to food, the blocking of medical evacuations and using humanitarian aid to advance military objectives—all indicate a clear pattern of conduct, a pattern that reveals intent.”
Following the release of these reports, 31 high-profile Israelis—including Academy award recipient Yuval Abraham, former Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair, and former speaker of Israel’s parliament and former head of the Jewish Agency Avraham Burg—accused the Israeli government of “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the strip”. They also urged states to “impose crippling sanctions on Israel until it ends this brutal campaign and implements a permanent ceasefire”. 
Gaza is being starved, with forethought and deliberation, by the Israeli state. This is genocidal state policy. It is denied, of course. Israel’s deputy chief of mission in Canberra, Amir Meron, argues: “We don’t recognise any famine or any starvation in the Gaza Strip. Israel has never acted in a policy of starvation. There is no such policy. There is no starvation in the Gaza Strip and there is no willingness of Israel that such a thing will happen in the Gaza Strip”. 

But just as there could be no more credible denials of the American use of napalm in Vietnam after the publication of the image of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc naked, burnt and sobbing on a smoky road, there today is no credible denial of Israel’s genocide. Even the New York Times, one of Israel’s staunchest public defenders, has been forced to shift its tone, last month publishing <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html">a piece by Israeli-American holocaust historian Omer Bartov</a> titled “I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it”.
While a few Israelis are defying the fascism of their own government and calling for serious action against the state in which they live, the most Australia’s political leaders can do is deny and deflect. Anthony Albanese claims Israel’s actions are now “indefensible”. But he refuses to sanction the country. Albanese can’t even muster the willpower to engage in the weak symbolism of recognising a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Penny Wong maintains that selling Israel key components to its F-35 fighter jets is morally justifiable because they are purportedly the “non-lethal” parts. 
The Australian establishment is committed to the global military order of the Trumpian United States and its fascist compatriots in Israel. There is no red line for these slaves to the capitalist order. No number of dead children will be enough for them to break with the Western imperialist order of which they are a part. 
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”, wrote William Shakespeare in The Tempest. The aphorism is appropriate for today’s political landscape. The devils sit in Israeli cabinet meetings, the Australian parliament, the US Congress and elsewhere.

Vashti Fox

‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’: the Australian establishment and Gaza

Anthony Albanese has made his strongest declarations to date on the genocide in Gaza, calling on Israel “to comply immediately with its obligations under international law”. The prime minister’s <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/statement-situation-gaza">official statement</a>, released on Friday, was <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-27/albanese-says-israel-clearly-breaching-international-law/100020874">followed by comments</a> on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday that Israel’s behaviour is not only “quite clearly” a breach of the law, but also “a breach of decent humanity and of morality”. 
That these are Albanese’s most strongly worded statements to date only shows what an absolute monster he is. His remarks on Sunday alternated between banal (“International law says that you can’t hold innocent people responsible for what is a conflict”) and insulting (“A one-year-old boy is not a Hamas fighter”).
The press is reporting all of this as though it’s news; as though hundreds of thousands of people have not been crying out, demanding an end to the genocide and warning of worse to come for months and months and months. In his statement on Friday, Albanese said the situation in Gaza has gone “beyond the world’s worst fears”. 
But his government has been demonising the people expressing those fears from the very beginning: the people who have protested week in, week out for nearly two years; people like Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who Albanese’s party sanctioned this week for holding a sign in parliament calling for sanctions on Israel. 
Criminally, his government has been <a href="https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/despite-denials-australia-has-exported-f-35-parts-to-israel/">approving weapons exports to Israel</a> and then lying about it. The federal government is complicit in the genocide.
The one-year-old boy the prime minister referred to ​​is Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, whose <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2025/07/world/photos-starvation-in-gaza-intl-cnnphotos/">photo has appeared in media outlets</a> around the world. Muhammad is so severely starved, down to his tiny, frail skeleton, that he is barely recognisable as a human child. The Gaza Health Ministry estimates that 900,000 children are going hungry. The United Nations and aid agencies have repeatedly warned of the likelihood of mass starvation being the result of Israel’s calculated barbarity.
So Anthony Albanese, 21 months into the genocide, offers us a “strongly worded” statement of the bleeding obvious: that this acutely malnourished child is not a Hamas fighter. What the hell is that even supposed to mean? Every time Albanese mentions Hamas, he is recycling the excuse Israel has used for every shot fired, every bomb dropped, every ounce of food denied in Gaza.
French President Emmanuel Macron has announced France will recognise a Palestinian state. That was one empty gesture too far for the Australian prime minister. Albanese maintained that a Palestinian state could not be recognised until it is certain that Hamas will not be a part of it and that it poses no threat to Israel. 
Imagine the same standard being applied to the state of Israel: that it could exist only if it posed no threat to the Palestinians. It would be necessary to dissolve almost every political party in the Knesset. There wouldn’t be much point in having a Knesset either, because the majority of Israelis, who <a href="https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jewish-israelis-support-expelling-gazans">support the ethnic cleansing of Gaza</a>, presumably would have to be denied the vote.
At any rate, while the “international community” debates whether to recognise a Palestinian state, Israel is preparing to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip and annex more and more land in the West Bank. The territorial basis for a Palestinian state is being annihilated before our eyes.
The sign that got Mehreen Faruqi censured in parliament read: “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them.” She is dead right. Albanese’s empty words—21 months into the crime of the century—won’t do anything. But his government has done worse than issue a few belated words. As long as Albanese’s government continues to arm Israel and vilify Palestine solidarity protesters, his words are worse than useless.

James McVicar

Albanese’s ‘strongly worded’ statements shouldn’t fool anyone

Even before vice-chancellors started <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/religion/australian-universities-free-speech-right-to-protest/105164636?utm_campaign=abc_religion_fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR5PnBd0b7_RLoBzYiWAwBHbdJrEtIP-aAfolH8RTWzk3qFht8aDmd3KU1C6TA_aem_dhGiVX7WxtZwQWBgpTDeww">savagely limiting</a> what students and staff could say, studying or working at a university was nothing like the romantic notion of life in the “ivory tower”.
There are myths that universities are places to pursue knowledge for the joy of it, where students can learn how to help others and make the world a better place, while on the path to great jobs.
The reality is quite different. Unfortunately, students have minimal say about the content of inflexible courses. Progress through units and degrees depends on jumping through assessment hoops, as universities continue the “hidden curriculum” of the school system, which is at least as important as the overt curriculum. The hidden curriculum teaches students that success, measured in marks (a proxy for dollars), depends on doing what you’re told and not challenging what teachers say—excellent training for dictatorial workplaces.
Universities have increasingly geared their offerings to the needs of business and governments, and their own profitability. That does not include learning how the wellbeing of most of the world’s population requires radical social changes, let alone how to make revolution.
Courses—and even whole departments—have been <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-05/university-of-wollongong-cuts-academic-jobs-international-cap/104560250">axed</a>
because they don’t satisfy those needs or bring in sufficient money. The jobs that most university graduates go into are overwhelmingly white-collar, working-class positions, in which employees, like other workers, have very limited or no control over what they do. Such jobs are subject to the vagaries of the labour market, capitalism’s boom-bust cycles and governments’ whims.
Unis are increasingly just glorified high schools. Students are sausages in its digestive tract, chewed up, dissolved in acid and shat out at the end with a degree, while the funding they bring is sucked out into the universities’ profits.
Outside the ranks of management, the situation of the roughly two-thirds of <a href="https://www.education.gov.au/higher-education-statistics/staff-data/selected-higher-education-statistics-2024-staff-data/key-findings-2024-higher-education-staff-statistics">university employees</a> who are not academics is equally gloomy. They are blue- and white-collar workers subjected to inadequate pay, attacks on their working conditions and frequent restructures. 
What about academics? Such jobs appear to offer scope to read and write about things you’re interested in, to tell others about those things, and lots of autonomy. The jobs are rewards for having a big brain and a way to get a public profile (for your big brain). And the jobs have “tenure”—they are secure—and you get to work in your own office.
The academic life is very different. The workloads of most academics today are punishing. Time to conduct and write up research is restricted. Career progress, and even keeping your job, depends on publishing in prestigious—that is conservative—journals. There’s pressure to do research that is “outside funded”, overwhelmingly by businesses or governments and according to their priorities.
Over the past twenty years, university bosses have dramatically tightened their control over academics’ research and teaching. Courses must go through time-consuming bureaucratic procedures, through which managers shape content and assessment methods and can even veto them. Anyone involved in teaching can tell you that marking is a horrible aspect of the job, humiliating for the marker and the markee. Teachers and students alike are subject to stressful time pressures. Most students are inadequately prepared for university. A teacher reading an essay whose first two sentences are clear and grammatical will think, “Wow! This should be much better than most of the others”.
To get an academic job, you must jump through many educational hoops and therefore go through a very sustained hidden curriculum: at school and in undergraduate and postgraduate study. Then, you must anticipate what the people who interview you want. Interview panels are dominated by universities’ most senior members, who are managers.
This promotes the “big brain syndrome”: the idea that your own unique talents are the key to your wellbeing at work and career advancement. That’s why academics tend to be poor unionists, compared with other university employees. They are even more prone than most workers to the illusion that their individual merit rather than collective action is the most important route to improve pay and conditions.
The “big brain syndrome” also affects some academic unionists who think of themselves as left wing, leading them to believe that sophisticated tactics in dealing with university bosses (and top union officials) can substitute for the unglamorous effort of detailed workplace organising or the crudity of strike action.
A public profile for you and your research? Only if the mainstream media are interested.
As for job security, most academic jobs are now casual, low paid and not paid for all hours actually worked. As a casual, you don’t even get the cubbyhole individual office that is increasingly standard for other academics.
Even continuing academic jobs are no more secure than continuing jobs anywhere else. Tenure is ancient history.
Initially, thanks to a disastrous policy of the National Tertiary Education Union, universities created “teaching-focussed” jobs, which allow no or laughably little time for research. Yet career progression is very difficult without an extensive publishing record. There are more and more of these jobs.
Academics who don’t supervise anyone or for whom that is a very small part of their duties (the majority) are just workers, gut flora in universities’ digestive tracts.
Why is there such a gap between the myths and realities of university life?
Universities have always been institutions that help to maintain, defend and develop systems of class rule. Initially, they provided administrators, clergy and lawyers who maintained the feudal order. Those graduates justified the hierarchy of feudalism as divinely ordained or in accord with “natural law” or assisted its smooth operation by overseeing its legal system and state.
With the rise of capitalism, through to the Second World War, universities remained elite institutions, whose graduates generally went on to be managers in business and government, increasingly with scientific and engineering expertise, as well as middle class professionals, especially lawyers and doctors.
Universities became mass institutions after the war. Today, most people who get degrees become skilled workers who can generally be relied on to do what they’re told.
The spread and production of ideas that serve capitalist interests are still significant university functions. Thomas Müntzer was a priest in the sixteenth century who took the side of peasants and artisans in the massive uprising against the old feudal order in Germany, known as the “Peasants’ War”. His observation in July 1524 is still a pretty good description of an aspect of universities’ ideological roles today: 
“[In biblical times] clever soothsayers and interpreters of dreams ... said only what the lords wanted to hear, just as our academic scribblers do nowadays, for they have a taste for the choicest morsels at court.”
Contemporary lords of capital don’t want to hear only tried and trusted apologies for the way things are, but also more up-to-date variations and even innovations around that fundamental theme. When an academic or journalist hits the right note, they can count on politicians, spokesthings for the state or business and the mass media to amplify it and boost their career. Think of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist who promotes far-right ideas, including racism and sexism.
University research generates genuine insights into how people behave, societies function and the nature of the material world: science. These can improve our lives and understanding of reality.
But the lens of class politics tends to affect all aspects of the production of ideas, including sciences. It shapes universities as workplaces and biases research priorities. Scientific advances can often be used by corporations and state institutions to improve their control and manipulations of consumers, workers and citizens. They can help businesses develop new products or production processes that improve profitability, <a href="https://www.techtransfer.org.au/news-item/17346/finalists-announced-for-the-2024-kca-awards">from</a>
controlling fires to lithium refining, disinfection technologies to “<a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2025/03/31/sydney-spinout-deteqt-secures-backing-for-diamond-on-silicon-sen.html">quantum sensing</a>”.
The creation of new ideas depends on academics having some autonomy, not just parroting dogmas. The degree of this autonomy can vary dramatically. In some cases, it has even allowed Marxists to get jobs in social sciences or arts. But the structures of universities and career paths in them mean that academics often produce ideas and analyses without attention to the contexts of the phenomena they are trying to grasp. There is a wonderful word in German for this: Fachidiotismus. Literally it means the idiocy of academic disciplines: knowing more and more about less and less.
Universities are bureaucratic organisations like corporations or public service agencies. As capitalist enterprises, universities are there to make profits for themselves and their <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/highest-university-executive-pay-packets-revealed-as-crackdown-looms-20250101-p5l1i1.html">top managers</a>. They make profits by producing workers and developing ideas that are useful for the state and other capitalists, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism.
Although universities make profits through educating workers and developing ideas that are useful to the state and other capitals, and are fundamentally committed to the maintenance of capitalism, their senior managers can act in ways that contradict interests of the capitalist class as a whole. The dumbing down of courses over recent decades, and the consequent decline in the average abilities of graduates, is an example. But such conflicts, in which universities pursue their own sectoral interests, do not make them different from any other section of capital.
In some places, the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s led to some reforms that included students and non-professorial staff in the decision-making processes of the whole university, faculties, schools and departments, to a limited extent. Since then, managers, encouraged by politicians and businesspeople, have either eliminated this representation or rendered it purely tokenistic. Appointed managers have replaced elected heads of departments or schools and deans of faculties. The powers of appointed top managers have increased.
Most members of university councils or senates—their boards of directors—are appointed by governments or existing members and are thoroughly reliable servants of capitalist interests.
Although there are profound myths about the nature of universities, they can be sites of resistance against capitalism. That’s true of all workplaces but there’s an additional element that leads to this possibility in universities.
The main raw material that goes into its production process is students. They come to universities with an optimism about the world that hasn’t been worn down by years of wage labour, and they generally have more free time to engage in political activity than people with full-time jobs and families. They have more scope to explore ideas and engage in political activity, if they want to.
While socialists regard the working class as the only force that can bring down capitalism and create a new society, winning more people to active socialist politics is important, especially workers but also workers-in-the-making at schools and universities.
Rick Kuhn worked in academic jobs for 28 years and is a life member of the National Tertiary Education Union.

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