Victorian Socialists (VS) is the largest-scale socialist political project in Australia for decades. There is no other project in which hundreds of socialists—including members of Socialist Alternative and many others—have conversations with literally thousands of working-class people and all comers, over a period of weeks in election campaigns like the one the party just waged in the western Melbourne electorate of Werribee. 
We get some idea of how those conversations have gone by looking at the party’s vote. In the case of Werribee, it was high enough to leave pundits and rival political parties scratching their heads. What unfathomable secret, they wonder, can explain how an area with close to zero history of serious socialist political activity could deliver a very creditable 7.1 percent of the first-preference vote to VS’s Werribee candidate Sue Munro (up from 3.7 percent in the 2022 Victorian state election)? 
The final tally of 3,010 votes was fewer than 200 behind the Greens, who had the benefit of a political profile established over decades (as well as, in the case of Werribee, getting the donkey vote—the number one spot on a ballot paper listing twelve candidates in total). At a couple of booths VS scored 14 percent of all votes cast, coming third behind Labor and the Liberals. “It’s not all great for the Liberals, the socialists got a bigger swing”, the Australian Financial Review moaned in an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15ndxHKFYj/">online headline</a>
reflecting on the Werribee result. 
Melbourne’s Age newspaper described our decent result as a “<a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1888178135075803397">surprise packet</a>”. But it’s no surprise to anyone involved with VS that a socialist message of rage, hope and resistance can strike a chord among thousands of people in the working-class heartlands of Melbourne, and beyond. 
Campaigning for Victorian Socialists gets us into conversations with rage-filled healthcare workers about the state of our hospitals and the slide to privatised health care; with voters appalled at Israel’s genocide in Palestine and Labor’s complicity in it; and with union members disappointed by the lack of fight from what should be the strongest organisations our side has. 
A minority are already committed socialists, delighted to encounter a party that takes working-class politics and working-class people seriously. Many more have never met an active socialist before but can relate to our sincerity, our political conviction and our basic propositions: that it’s crazy that billionaires keep doubling their wealth when it’s working-class people who do all the work around here; that we shouldn’t tolerate being sold out by Labor, which keeps the capitalists’ profits piling up while throwing crumbs (at best) to the rest of us; that everything is the wrong way up in this society; and though we’re not promising to solve every problem, we’re serious about helping working-class people organise and fight back. 
Our Werribee result was no one-off. In Victoria’s 2022 state election, more than 52,000 people voted for VS in the upper house and 48,000 in the lower house. You have to go back to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Victorian_state_election">1940s</a> to find a socialist electoral campaign in Victoria that got anywhere near that number of votes. As the lead VS candidate in the Northern Metro upper house region in 2022, I received just 300 fewer primary votes than the eventual winner of the final of five seats. In the Western Metro region, VS candidate Liz Walsh came even closer to being elected, though both of us missed out after preferences. 
Given how far socialist ideas have been pushed to the margins in this country, this was a real achievement—and a solid contribution to bringing socialism back into everyday political life. We built on our 2022 campaign in last year’s local council elections—winning 67,296 first preference votes, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent for each ward we ran in. Owen Cosgriff was elected as a VS councillor in Bendigo with more than 40 percent of first preferences.
Our goal in winning positions in local councils and parliaments is not to rain socialism down upon a grateful and passive public. Rather, it’s the opposite: we aim to use those platforms to promote every strike, protest and act of collective resistance, and to build the politics of intransigent opposition to capitalism and to the exploitation, wars and oppression that the system produces and feeds off. 
It’s not like we’re waiting around to win parliamentary seats to play a positive role in the resistance though. In 2022, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/reproductive-freedom-precondition-equality-interview-liz-walsh">15,000 people</a> answered a call-out from VS Western Metro candidate Liz Walsh to rally for abortion rights after the US Supreme Court scrapped Roe v Wade. We’ve been <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/campaigns/palestine">active in solidarity</a> with the people of Palestine throughout Israel’s Gaza genocide. When Woolworths workers put out a call for <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/protesters-block-entry-to-woolworths-warehouse-as-grocery-shortages-continue-20241202-p5kv0m.html">picket line support</a> during their recent strike, a couple of hundred Victorian Socialist members and supporters <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DDDp0_3Tbhm/?img_index=4">joined</a> the pre-dawn picket line at Dandenong South. 
All this activity sits alongside Victorian Socialists’ success in waging large-scale and effective electoral campaigns, as a contribution to rebuilding socialist political forces. Our next major opportunity to do this is in the rapidly approaching federal election. 
High-profile housing activist Jordan van den Lamb (aka purplepingers) has become the hero of renters and the scourge of Australia’s landlords through his <a href="https://www.shitrentals.org/">shitrentals.org</a>
website and his viral <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@purplepingers?lang=en">tiktoks</a>. Victorian Socialists is proud to have Jordan as our lead Senate candidate. Anyone across the state of Victoria can play a role in the <a href="https://pingers4parliament.com/">pingers4parliament</a> campaign. We’re also running lower house candidates in the seats of Fraser in Melbourne’s west, Cooper and Scullin in the north, and the regional seat of Bendigo.
We’ve already kicked off the campaigning. Whatever your level of experience, there’s an important role for everyone—letterboxing, doorknocking and helping organise events. <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/join">Signing up to be a member of Victorian Socialists</a> is the best way to contribute and to get involved. Find an event on our <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/join">website</a>
or <a href="https://www.instagram.com/vic_socialists/?hl=en">socials</a>, and bring your friends.
Anyone serious about fighting for socialism needs to take opportunities to expand the reach of socialist ideas, to inspire more resistance to capitalism and to convince more people to become active socialists. Victorian Socialists makes a valuable contribution to each of these projects—so jump on board and get active!

Jerome Small

Victorian Socialists: putting socialism on the political map

In the nearly eighteen months since the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, there has been a sharp shift to the right on Indigenous issues in Australia. 
Anti-Aboriginal racism, which had largely been in abeyance since the end of the Howard era, has made an aggressive comeback. Emboldened by the defeat of the Voice proposal, conservative forces have launched numerous attacks on Indigenous rights. In the face of this offensive, the Labor Party has raised the white flag, either joining in on the attacks or offering no resistance to them. 
This racist offensive seeks to undermine the social gains won by Indigenous people and their allies over many decades of campaigning. It also aims to undermine anti-racist attitudes by discrediting or sidelining anti-racist views on Australian history, politics and culture. Any official acknowledgement of the exploitation, dispossession and violence that Indigenous people have been subjected to is being questioned or scrapped. 
This year’s Invasion Day highlighted this shift. For the last ten years, the focus of 26 January activities and discussion has largely been on the day’s significance to Indigenous people and the damage done by European invasion. In 2014, the official Australia Day march in Melbourne was disrupted by anti-racist protesters, and since then Invasion Day protests, rather than flag-waving parades, have gridlocked major cities on the day. In 2018, youth radio station Triple J changed the date of its Hottest 100 countdown as a sign of respect to Indigenous people. Rules for local councils were loosened in 2022, giving them the ability to hold citizenship ceremonies on days other than 26 January without financial penalty, and in 2021, NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian even organised an Aboriginal flag waving ceremony with the cringe-worthy opener that we are “all one mob”. For many progressives, and not a few reactionaries, changing the date seemed as inevitable as same-sex marriage. 
This year was very different. “Australia Day is a celebration of the greatest country in the world”, proclaimed Liberal leader Peter Dutton in a social media video in January, “and we shouldn’t be afraid of celebrating it”. Dutton has pledged that, if he is elected, local councils will be forced to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day or suffer cuts in federal funding. The month before, in an act of racist pettiness, Dutton told the media that he will not stand beside Indigenous flags because multiple flags were “dividing our country unnecessarily”. In 2024, Dutton whipped up a hysterical campaign against Woolworths for allegedly not stocking Australia Day merchandise. This year, the supermarket chain made sure to have its shelves stocked to the rafters with obnoxious nationalist merchandise.
Instead of attacking Dutton and denouncing racism, Albanese’s response to all this was to evade and cede ground. He criticised Dutton for focusing on culture war issues rather than the cost of living, but refused to commit to maintaining the current rules for local councils and reiterated his support for celebrating Australia Day on 26 January. 
The unchecked right-wing offensive has shifted attitudes. Support for keeping Australia Day on 26 January has risen from 47 percent to 61 percent in the last two years, according to a Resolve Political Monitor survey. The fact that a majority of younger people still support changing the date is positive, but it also indicates that the shift among the rest of the population is even sharper. 
The racist backlash has also been happening at the state level. The newly elected Country Liberal government in the Northern Territory has announced it is ending the treaty process that started in 2018. The Queensland state government has repealed the Path to Treaty Act and shut down the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and the First Nations Treaty Institute. 
Labor state governments have not been much better. After the defeat of the Voice referendum, NSW Premier Chris Minns walked back plans for a state treaty and pushed back proposals for any reconciliation process until after the next state election. The Western Australian Labor government does not support a treaty. Only the South Australian, ACT, Victorian and Tasmanian governments remain committed to any sort of treaty process. 
Treaties, much like the Voice and other largely symbolic gestures like reconciliation, are entirely inadequate responses to the grim reality of Indigenous oppression. More often than not, they provide window dressing for governments more than they help improve Indigenous people’s lives. But the trashing of these forms of recognition has to be understood within the broader context of the racist offensive going on against Indigenous people. The retreat from treaty and reconciliation has gone along with toxic law and order beat-ups aimed at Indigenous youth. 
This has been most striking in the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland. The Country Liberal party won the Northern Territory election last year on the basis of winding back some of the limited reforms to the incarceration of Indigenous youth. The new government has lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years and has reversed the previous government’s decision to ban the use of spit hoods on children. Similarly, the newly elected conservative government in Queensland has had to suspend the state’s Human Rights Act in order to push through a wave of racist laws targeting Indigenous youth, including removing detention as a last resort from police guidelines and introducing mandatory sentencing for 10-year-olds. 
Again, these attacks are not being made only by conservative governments. In Queensland, the previous Labor government suspended the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months in order to criminalise children who violated bail conditions and to allow children to be jailed in adult watch-houses. Last August, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen walked back her government’s previous commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027. The NSW Labor government introduced changes to youth bail laws last March that stiffen sentences for even minor crimes and has ruled out any changes to the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 10 years old. 
In the face of all these attacks, the persistent poverty, discrimination and hardship faced by Indigenous people are intensifying. This year’s Closing the Gap report revealed that rates of suicide, youth and adult incarceration, the removal of children by social services and children development for Indigenous people have all gotten worse. Other targets such as the gap between life expectancy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and income inequality have stagnated. Only five of the nineteen Closing the Gap targets are on track to be met by 2031. 
The conservative campaign against Indigenous people aims to put the blame for this on Indigenous people rather than the racist system and its treatment of Indigenous people for more than 200 years, at the same time as it sweeps under the carpet any understanding and awareness of this history. 
What is motivating the conservative right to do this? Part of the explanation is that the Voice defeat demonstrated the potential electoral advantage of drumming up racist sentiment. Albanese’s incompetence in the face of the right’s “No” campaign only reinforced the point. Given the Liberal Party has little else to offer the mass of voters, this is a valuable weapon in its arsenal.
It also has the obvious advantage of potentially being an area in which cuts can be imposed should the Liberals form government, freeing up money for the military, tax cuts and other conservative priorities.
But it also reflects the changing priorities of Australian conservatism. For years, Liberal talking points in election campaigns revolved around vilifying different racial groups, mostly refugees. While Dutton still takes every chance he can to slander asylum seekers as terrorists, the steam around this issue has dissipated due to the barbaric reality of “fortress Australia”, which has largely stopped refugees from arriving here by boat. 
Dutton has also periodically made appeals to broader anti-migrant racism, most notably in regard to the cost of housing and international students. But there is a tension here because large sections of Liberal Party’s base, including both big business and many small businesses, are heavily dependent on high levels of immigration. This dependency is greater than in almost any other advanced economy in the world. So for the right, attacking Indigenous people has all of the benefits, and few of the drawbacks, of attacking migrants and refugees.
Indigenous people do not form an important sector of the workforce for corporate Australia and are severely marginalised from the levers of economic and political power. Under the influence of the resurgence of the far right in Trump’s America and the long history of racist anti-Aboriginal campaigns in Australia, the conservatives can use Indigenous people as a punching bag and demonise them with little immediate blowback. 
Developments since the defeat of the Voice proposal tragically confirm the arguments made in Red Flag at the time of the referendum: that whatever the limitations of the Voice proposal, a defeat for it was going to embolden the racist right and legitimise a new round of attacks on Indigenous people. They also discredit arguments made by the sovereign or “progressive” No campaign at the time. This campaign argued for anti-racists to vote against the Voice on the basis that its defeat would be a blow to the moderate centrist approach to Indigenous issues advocated by the Labor Party and open the space for more radical perspectives. 
In a statement on her website after the referendum, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe argued that the “result marks an end to the era of powerless advisory bodies. It is a win for the Blak Sovereign Movement and First Peoples” and that there were many people who “voted no out of love and solidarity with First Peoples fighting for justice”. The Black Peoples Union argued in a social media post that “Yes campaigners are out of touch with reality if they think a No vote is going to embolden racism”. 
In reality, an Accent Research Report found that when No voters were asked about their number one reason for voting No, only 1 percent said because the Voice doesn’t go far enough. The most popular reason No voters rejected the Voice was that it “will divide Australia” (82 percent), the key talking point of the racist right. Nearly one in three No voters agreed it would give Indigenous people “too much power”, which was the more openly racist argument of the far right. Rather than opening up radical new horizons for Indigenous liberation, the No vote resulted in the terrain of politics around Indigenous issues moving sharply to the right. 
In line with much of the rest of the world, Australian capitalism is becoming nastier. There is less official concern to uphold values like multiculturalism and reconciliation and more viciousness towards the oppressed and exploited. Indigenous people are facing the sharp edge of this, but the attacks are coming thick and fast on many fronts: the rising cost of living, the climate crisis and the expanding war machine. 
In order to begin to turn this around, we need to be prepared to stand up and fight racism and conservative reaction wherever they emerge. The grovelling capitulation of the ALP and those influenced by it to this onslaught is contemptible and compounds the problem. We need a political approach to all of this that is not centred on winning parliamentary seats and appealing to any backward sentiment to do it, but on uniting workers and the oppressed in a collective fight for a society of genuine equality and freedom for all.

Jordan Humphreys

Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights

Something strange and disturbing is afoot. It has been nearly three months since the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. Shane Patton, Victoria’s police chief (at the time of writing), said the matter was “the number one counter-terrorism investigation”. But the perpetrators are still unknown and things have only grown murkier since. 
In late January, the Australian Federal Police revealed that some unknown force seemed to be using cryptocurrency to hire low-level criminals to vandalise, and possibly bomb, Jewish targets around Australia. How many of these antisemitic acts—from graffiti to arson—were carried out by this purported network of crypto-hired goons?
Who would run this operation? What’s in it for them? Religiously motivated terror networks don’t usually hire local meth-heads and junior bikies to write racist slogans on the doors of parked cars. 
The combination of violence, conspiracy and juvenile sloganeering seems compatible with the interests of Australia’s neo-Nazis—but they also take pride in doing their own dirty work, showing up in person to terrorise their victims. For ideologically motivated ultra-Islamists and fascists, committing the act yourself is usually the whole point. 
The AFP suggested that the funders are offshore, which leads us into the mire of espionage and organised crime. It may be some time before we know who ordered these attacks and what they hoped to gain from them.
But we do know some things with certainty: there are antisemitic fascist groups operating in Australia that want to use violence to gain notoriety and terrorise the minority groups they hate.
The National Socialist Network has gained the most notoriety. An insight into the group’s inner life is available from court documents after one of its Adelaide members, Cameron Brodie-Hall, was charged with possessing extremist literature. He lived in a shared house with other NSN members; they were raided by the police in 2021. On a bookcase draped with a Nazi flag, police found an edition of David Myatt’s Practical Guide to the Strategy and Tactics of Revolution, which recommends that neo-Nazis “target and kill several soft targets” because “successful assassination will get the organization known, respected and feared”.
The NSN’s mandatory reading list, discovered and disclosed in the trial, includes Mein Kampf, the Hitler Youth pamphlet Faith and Action and a typically moronic contemporary neo-Nazi pamphlet, “A Squire’s Trial”, which, amid its antisemitic propaganda, quotes Mussolini’s dictum on the intrinsic value of violence: “War is to man what motherhood is to woman”. Text messages revealed NSN members praising the neo-Nazi mass murderers Brenton Tarrant and Anders Behring Breivik.
In the end, Brodie-Hall was acquitted because prosecutors could not prove which of the housemates truly “possessed” Myatt’s terrorist manifesto—a rare legal advantage to share-house living. The NSN has continued to provoke and build; Brodie-Hall’s Adelaide branch staged multiple masked rallies in January.
We know, too, that antisemitic ideology is finding a recruiting ground in the radicalised, taboo-busting, Trumpified right-wing internet. Holocaust denial, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and calls for genocide are now rampant on X, Facebook and Instagram. Elon Musk has become an open and notorious promoter of quasi-fascist political currents, particularly through his favoured method of <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/elon-musk-x-racists-boosting-white-nationalists-south-africa-antisemitism-adl-springfield-doge-holocaust/">re-tweeting Nazi-adjacent accounts</a> when they post anti-migrant propaganda. 
RFK Jr, Trump’s new health chief, has suggested that COVID-19 was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jews and Chinese people. Far-right politics has an inbuilt <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6605">tendency towards antisemitism</a>, or something like it, because it is the natural conclusion of extreme nationalism: the search for a national scapegoat. This tendency is remarkably consistent even when official right-wing politics is duty-bound to support the state of Israel and posture as resolutely opposed to antisemitism.
How stupid, then—how irresponsible and shameful—are those right-wing pro-Israel figures and organisations who have sought to minimise right-wing antisemitism while trying to slander peaceful, anti-racist Palestine solidarity activists as the real threat to Jewish safety? 
The Executive Council of Australasian Jewry complacently asserted in 2023 that “right-wing antisemitism is overt, but marginalised; left-wing antisemitism is insidious, but mainstreamed”. By left-wing antisemitism, of course, it meant Palestine solidarity activism: ECAJ’s Peter Wertheim said the Greens were “like a lynch mob at a pogrom” when they said Israel was an apartheid state. Worse, then, than the real lynch mobs: fascist gangs that genuinely want to kill Jews, and which are organising and studying in preparation to do so.
Why, when there are genuine antisemitic attacks taking place, would anyone want to fabricate more antisemitism? Yet this is precisely what the pro-Israel activists in the Australian media have done. The Daily Telegraph’s <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/02/14/news-corps-backfired-undercoverjew-operation/">failed attempt</a> to goad Arab cafe owners into a racial fight is only the most overt example. The Tele’s “undercover Jew” operation makes its political priorities undeniable: the more antisemitism the better, if it helps smear Palestine supporters.
The same is true of the Israeli influencer Max Zeifer, who spends his time trying to provoke supporters of the Palestinians into saying stupid things. You can see his highly edited output on his reprehensible TikTok channel, where he asks questions like, “Why are the terrorists hiding behind kids?” to unimpressed Bangladeshi teenagers. He scored the scoop of his career when he managed to get two Bankstown nurses to claim that they’d rather kill Israeli patients than treat them. 
The media has treated the incident as if two antisemitic serial killers have been unmasked. Maybe. Or maybe these nurses detected they were interacting with an internet troll and adopted the ultra-aggressive posturing that characterises online discourse—facts and consequences be damned. Zeifer’s own propaganda justifying the very real bombing of Palestinian children has drawn rather less attention than the unlikely claims of these two nurses.
Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians does create a certain risk of an antisemitic reaction. In the first instance, Israel’s rulers and advocates are to blame: they, as the occupying imperial power, fundamentally control the conflict’s dynamic, and so often seek to present their genocide as a clash of civilisations, in which only race hatred could underpin opposition to Israel. But it is not only them. There are religious-sectarian forces that adopt the Palestinian cause and frame it in that lens. They are marginal, but they do exist.
The most effective antidote to this kind of sectarianism is a large-scale, internationalist, anti-racist solidarity movement—just like the movement in support of Palestine. When movements like that are strong, anti-racism becomes the daily reality of its participants. This has been the case over more than a year of intense pro-Palestine activism. At one after another of the huge weekly street marches that have taken place since the Gaza war began, Jewish speakers have taken the stage to situate their solidarity with Palestine in the context of a more broadly anti-racist commitment.
Their participation has been little reported in the mainstream press, which often presented the pro-Palestine marches as inherently antisemitic. But records of the speeches exist, including that by Raphael Duffy, printed in an earlier edition of Red Flag: “If you want to end the inhumanity that caused the Holocaust, we have to demand the end of the siege on Gaza”, he said. Pro-Jewish arguments, slogans and placards are common at pro-Palestine rallies—often recognising the protester’s duty to fight on in the memory of those killed by the Nazis. These are the very protests that pro-Israel institutions have been trying to limit and ban.
It’s the principle of global solidarity that has confronted and challenged antisemitism throughout history. The same principle challenges Israel’s actions today. With an increasingly rabid far-right movement accumulating power throughout the world, and so many dark and unknown forces trying to sow confusion and hatred, the need to speak, organise and act in accordance with that principle has to be defended.

Joel Schneider

How not to fight antisemitism

For most of the time since the 2022 federal election, the Labor Party has held office in almost every state and territory. Such a strong political position could have been used to introduce reforms that would help ordinary people. Instead, the party has ruled for the rich, while overseeing the most significant attack on working-class living standards in generations. By nearly every measure, workers, renters, pensioners and students have gone backwards under Labor, while the billionaires’ wealth has increased.
The private rental market has been one of the greatest sources of insecurity and poverty for the one-third of the population that rent, while being a boon to the roughly 8 percent of the population who are property investors. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems proud to be part of that elite 8 percent, having recently bought his second investment property for a cool $4.3 million (and listing it at $1,500 per week). 
As a property investor, he also enjoys a share of more than $20 billion in annual tax concessions. So while he and his cabinet of landlords (together, they own 57 properties) continue to rig the market in their own favour, rental prices have hit record highs under the current government. The median rental price in Australia now sits at $640 per week, up $43 per week in a year.
Of the one-third of the population with a mortgage, most are from the middle classes. But thirteen consecutive interest rate rises have been a colossal hit for working-class households that owe the banks. Since just before the pandemic, the average monthly repayment has increased by $2,100, according to Mozo, a financial comparison site. According to Roy Morgan, around 27 percent of owner-occupiers are living in mortgage stress. Meanwhile, the banks are recording record profits. The Commonwealth Bank, for example, which holds a quarter of all Australian mortgages, just announced a half-yearly after-tax profit of more than $5 billion.
Pensioners are another group that has faced the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. Around 2.6 million people are on the age pension, and millions of others are dependent on other forms of pension payments. Most pensioners own their own homes, which will not be true, if current trends continue, when today’s young people retire. Twelve percent of pensioners rent—and most live in poverty. It’s particularly bad for pensioners who rent in the private market: two-thirds live in poverty. 
This is the grim reality for the working class under Labor. Even when the government has offered crumbs as “cost-of-living relief”, it has served corporate interests. For example, the much-touted energy bill rebates do nothing to put downward pressure on energy prices. Instead, the energy companies continue charging exorbitant prices, but taxpayers subsidise them.
The cost-of-living crisis, however, has not been a crisis for all. The billionaires of Australia—there are nearly 50 of them—have used their political and economic control to turn the misery of millions into new yachts and mansions. The government helps to facilitate this system through a network of tax breaks available only to the rich and major corporations. 
Tax office data show that, in the 2022-23 financial year, nearly one-third of big companies paid no tax. The top ten of those companies by total income—including household names like Qantas, Virgin, NewsCorp, Netflix and Mastercard—had a combined $56 billion in income yet did not pay a cent in tax.
This system has caused the wealth disparity in Australia to reach eye-watering levels. According to a recent Monash University report, the top 1 percent of the population now own 24 percent of all wealth, and the top 10 percent own 57 percent.
As rage-inducing as the current state of affairs is, there is nothing natural about it. The rich and powerful consciously work to ensure that society’s wealth flows to them while denying it to the workers who produce it. 
They do so because they can. The only way to begin challenging their power is by building a political force that looks to a different power—the working class. When workers go on strike, they show that, without their labour, the whole system comes grinding to a halt. This is the power that can seriously challenge the system. Building this type of political force is today’s most important task for anyone who wants to challenge the rule of the rich and build a better society.

Tom Sullivan

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

The right to freedom of speech and political expression on university campuses is under attack by the media and Labor government. Under the guise of “fighting antisemitism”, student activists and academics are being targeted for their opposition to Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank. 
The growing repression of Palestine supporters is demonstrated by the Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities. The joint parliamentary commission, launched in January 2025, has conflated Palestine activism on campuses with a recent spate of genuine acts of antisemitism in Sydney and Melbourne. The commission said in its opening statement that:
“There is an alarming and intensifying nationwide rise in antisemitism including arson attacks on synagogues, a parliamentarian’s office and now a childcare centre ... The focus of this inquiry is on responding to the rise in antisemitism at Australian universities. Antisemitism in universities is connected to broader antisemitism in our communities and neighbourhoods.”
That none of these attacks occurred on campuses or have been linked to campus activists is ignored. The commission is chaired by Labor MP Josh Burns, who opposed a ceasefire deal passed by the UN and supported by Australia in December 2023. 
The media has contributed to the campaign against academics who support Palestine. At Macquarie University, Palestinian researcher and activist Randa Abdel-Fattah has been repeatedly smeared by the press—for instance, the Australian has published more than a dozen articles against her. She was first targeted for co-running an arts and crafts day with kids at the University of Sydney Gaza solidarity encampment last year, being accused by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry of trying to “induct children into racial hatred and religious extremism”. 
Liberal Party Shadow Minister for Education Sarah Henderson has repeatedly called for Abdel-Fattah to be sacked. Labor’s Minister of Education Jason Claire has requested that the Australian Research Council (ARC) formally investigate Abdel-Fattah’s existing research grant. 
The threat from Labor and the Liberals is clear: if you dare support Palestine, then your academic career is in jeopardy. 
Last week, Macquarie University Vice Chancellor Bruce Dowton was hauled in front of the Commission of Inquiry. Any illusions that he would defend free speech, or his staff members, were quickly dashed by his prostrated responses. He reassured the commission of Macquarie’s firm commitment to fighting antisemitism and that academic freedom and free speech should be considered a “privilege”. 
When pressed by Burns on why Abdel-Fattah hadn’t been fired, Dowton suggested he’d be happy to do so if the law allowed, saying that he found it “personally abhorrent”, but lamented the fact that Australian law is “silent” on whether anti-Zionism is considered antisemitic. He repeatedly invoked the staff contract as a legal impediment to sacking Abdel-Fattah or disciplining staff over their support for Palestine. Dowton went so far as to advocate for “industrial law reform” that would effectively annul the existing workplace agreement. 
These hearings are reminiscent of the McCarthyist witch-hunt in the US during the Cold War. In this time, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was formed and used as a political weapon against the left: thousands were sacked or blacklisted, and hundreds were arrested. While the scale of repression in Australia is currently nowhere near that of the Red Scare, it is incumbent on all progressive university workers and students to fight these attacks on our right to free speech and protest. We must stand in solidarity with Palestine activists.

Steven Hansen

Academics under attack for supporting Palestine

The People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine is a grassroots initiative bringing together students, activists, academics and legal experts to assess the state of free speech on Australian university campuses in relation to Palestine. 
The People’s Inquiry has been initiated in response to the worsening climate of repression and censorship of campus-based Palestine activism.

Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi, who is a patron of the People’s Inquiry, announced the launch in a <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/peoples-inquiry-campus-free-speech-palestine-launches-today">joint statement</a> with members from the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN), the Jewish Council of Australia, Students for Palestine and the National Union of Students. 
“University campuses should be political spaces where students and staff are encouraged to speak out on issues of social, racial and environmental justice, not shut down”, wrote Senator Faruqi in the statement.
“The People’s Inquiry is a critical pushback by and for the people against the suppression of free speech and the criminalisation of solidarity with Palestinians”, APAN wrote. “Advocating for an end to Israel’s decades of oppression of Palestinians is not hate speech—it is a fight for justice and liberation.”
Just as they have in social justice movements of the past, university students have played a prominent role in the Palestine solidarity movement, marching in the streets, organising historic student general meetings and establishing protest encampments. This has, in turn, made university campuses sites of intensifying repression and censorship. Students and staff have found that even expressing support for the Palestinian people can attract threats of disciplinary action. 
The University of Sydney shut down a bake sale fundraiser for Gaza under its draconian Campus Access Policy, introduced in response to last year’s Gaza solidarity encampment. Three students at RMIT were told by the university that their keffiyehs posed a safety risk by provoking “anticipatory anxiety”—whatever that means.
A page on Monash University’s website titled “A proud history” reads: “In the 1970s the foundation campus at Clayton became the centre for student protest in Australia, and this philosophy of challenging the status quo permeated the University”. But nine Monash students who challenged the status quo of their university’s links with weapons companies at the Monash encampment were not even allowed to set foot on a central part of the campus, let alone permeate it. 
The People’s Inquiry aims to shine a light on these concerning attempts to curtail freedom of speech and assembly.
It will convene while the Labor-led joint Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities is piling pressure on universities to restrict political expression and protest activity. For instance, the commission has recommended that universities adopt a definition of antisemitism that “closely aligns” with the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition, which includes calling the state of Israel a “racist endeavour”. On campuses in the United States and United Kingdom, the definition has been used as justification to shut down criticism of Israel and brand it as hate speech. 
Similar scenes have played out in the United States, where university heads were hauled into Congressional committee hearings and grilled over their failure to crack down on pro-Palestine students swiftly and severely enough. Since returning to power, President Donald Trump has launched investigations into antisemitism at five US universities and has called for the deportation of foreign students who participate in pro-Palestine protests.
Students, university staff members and organisations are invited to make submissions via the inquiry’s <a href="https://www.palestineinquiry.com/">website</a>, where more information can be found. In particular, the inquiry is interested in submissions relating to the infringement or restriction of political communication or activity concerning Palestine on university campuses. The panel will include Lama Qasem, executive member of APAN; Professor Linda Briskman of Western Sydney University; and Professor Gill Boehringer, former head of the Law School of Macquarie University. 
James McVicar is the 2025 education officer for the National Union of Students and is a panelist for the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine.

James McVicar

People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine launches

With just a few months, possibly weeks, until the next federal election, the Albanese government faces the prospect of being turfed out of office after just one term, an ignominious fate no federal government has suffered for nearly a century. At best, Labor may scrape back into office as a minority government with the backing of the Greens, but even this is less likely as the election draws closer.
In an increasingly presidential political system, Albanese himself only contributes to Labor’s woes, scoring net dissatisfaction ratings well into double digits. Fawning liberal media coverage enjoyed by DJ Albo, the boy from the school of hard knocks who slayed the Coalition monster, has been replaced by damning accounts of his lack of vision and dull managerial style, and despair at his apparent determination to lead Labor to election defeat. And that’s leaving aside the Murdoch media, which are campaigning relentlessly to bring down Labor.
Albanese may be a soulless bureaucrat and a classic representative of the swill that inhabits the upper echelons of the modern Labor Party, but his bland personality is not the main cause of Labor’s problems. The issue is that Labor has overseen a swingeing cut in living standards for the working class and a fair chunk of the middle class too. 
Australian workers are not alone in suffering squeezed living standards in recent years, but they have endured one of the most severe cuts to real wages. Household incomes are now back to where they were in 2014: a full decade of stagnation, an exceptional historical event. This has allowed the Murdoch media to win an audience for their anti-Labor bile.
The Albanese government inherited from the Morrison government the highest inflation rate in decades and a string of Reserve Bank increases to interest rates. It has done nothing, however, to rescue household budgets slammed by increasing supermarket bills and mortgage payments forced up by hundreds of dollars a month. 
The main effect of the measures the government has taken is simply to channel more public money to the capitalists. Take the $300 energy rebate, which, while giving some relief to households for 12 months, is also a $3.5 billion gift to the energy companies responsible for ripping us off in the first place. Or the expanded childcare subsidy, which will include more households but hands $11 billion to for-profit childcare companies. 
Then there’s the government’s signature housing program, the Housing Australia Future Fund, which proposes the construction of 1.2 million new homes by 2032 but entirely depends on private developers, investors and construction firms buying in. Already, construction is falling well short of the government’s target because the private sector exists to make money, not meet public needs. As for low-income renters, the increased rent allowance introduced in last year’s Budget is a spit in the face—just $19 a fortnight when rents have gone up by $100 or more.
Under popular pressure, the government changed the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts last year, offering some relief to middle-income earners. However, that was outweighed for many by the elimination of a tax break for low- and middle-income households. Even after the rejig, the changes to the tax system still leave high-income earners the main beneficiaries.
The government now points to inflation coming down from its peak as a sign that the pain is over. It is desperately hoping the Reserve Bank cuts interest rates in February. Even if it does so, however, this will do nothing to reduce prices or raise real wages, only slow down the rate at which workers are going backwards. 
It doesn’t take too long to think of what the government could be doing to address falling living standards that doesn’t simply funnel public money to those responsible. The government could set price caps on supermarket groceries or on petrol prices. It could impose rent caps. It could lower prices in one fell swoop by reducing the Howard government’s GST. It could introduce gas reservation to prevent the fossil fuel companies exporting gas and charging exorbitant prices at home. It could lift the wages of public sector workers and social security payments to the unemployed and those with disabilities. It could include dental care in Medicare or restore bulk billing for GP visits.
It’s not as though the government couldn’t afford to do these things. Treasurer Jim Chalmers crowed last year about two successive budget surpluses. There’s plenty of room to impose tax hikes on those who have been living high on the hog during the cost-of-living crisis, the property investors, including dozens of federal politicians, Labor and Coalition alike, who have benefited from generous tax breaks for years. The government could eliminate handouts to fossil fuel companies worth billions each year. It could scrap the AUKUS nuclear submarines and halt the billions of dollars already flowing to US shipyards, releasing funds for social needs while reducing the risk of war in the Asia-Pacific.
The problem with all these things is not that they are unaffordable or might be electorally unpopular—polling by Essential Media last year shows that they’d be welcomed by two-thirds of the population or more—but that they’d threaten the interests of the capitalists and the broader moneyed class. Taking serious steps to restore working-class living standards would eat into the bosses’ incomes and profits. Scrapping the submarines would endanger Australia’s military pact with the US, the basis of Australia’s own imperialist ambitions. And it is these things that lie closest to the government’s heart. If the working class must suffer, so much the worse for them—do they think we live in a democracy?
This desire to suck up to the rich shapes the government’s approach across the board. It has waved through more than two dozen new coal and gas projects, giving the lie to its claimed environmentally friendly credentials when it took office. Late last year, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek vainly attempted to get a piece of relatively ineffectual “nature-positive” legislation through parliament. All it took was a few phone calls by the bosses of WA mining giants to Albanese and WA Labor premier Roger Cook, and the bill was nixed.
Even though the ALP was founded by the unions, this hasn’t stopped it from putting the main construction union, the CFMEU, into the hands of well-paid government-appointed administrators. Labor ministers regularly speak at union conferences, but it’s much more important for the Albanese government to be seen as “tough” on a union with a militant reputation and to avoid being wedged by the Coalition as supposed union puppets.
While millions have been watching in disgust the developments in the US since Trump’s election, Penny Wong headed off to Washington to attend Trump’s inauguration to assure the White House that no matter what horrors the US unleashes on the world, it has a friend in the Australian government.
The Albanese government can’t even follow the practice of past Labor prime ministers who have at times given a nod to some progressive social cause to fend off criticisms of their anti-working-class policies—Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations come to mind. Albanese, however, isn’t interested even in going through the motions. His election night enthusiasm for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament soon disappeared when Peter Dutton came out against it. Since the referendum’s defeat, Indigenous rights have been chucked in the bin. Albanese’s idea of smart politics is now to invite Peter Dutton to join him at Australia Day celebrations in Canberra. 
So scared is the government of being seen by the capitalists as in any way hostile to their interests that it has refused to convene a royal commission into the Murdoch media despite their daily outpouring of lies and corruption, their ferocious anti-Labor campaigning and a half-million strong petition calling for one. Albanese is much happier to yuk it up with the media billionaire and attack people who criticise him, like Grace Tame, whom he labelled “disrespectful” for wearing a “Fuck Murdoch” T-shirt to a morning tea at the Lodge.
The icing on the cake of the sheer awfulness of the Albanese government is its leader’s enjoying the fruits of office while the party’s base is getting screwed. This includes attending Kyle Sandilands wedding, his membership of Qantas’ Chairman’s Lounge courtesy of CEO Alan Joyce, or his recent purchase of a $4.3 million seafront mansion on the NSW Central Coast. Everything he does shows how far his former public persona of the scrapper from South Sydney has been pushed aside—even if he does still every now and then wheel out his origin story in an attempt to convince us to go along with his right-wing agenda.
Labor’s record in office is only providing the Coalition with a free run at the Lodge. Albanese has achieved what might have been regarded as impossible in 2022, being more hated than Dutton. It’s not just a federal problem. Labor’s right-wing policies in government resulted in it being swept out of office in Queensland and the NT last year, and the party is heading for a wipe-out in Victoria in 2026.
Dutton is from the Liberal right and rests on support from the party’s hard-right membership base and machine. Together, they have squeezed out most of the party’s so-called moderate wing. 
Dutton has promoted a series of right-wing causes his entire career and made his name as a vicious anti-refugee immigration minister. There’s been no change here. As an opposition leader, he has targeted not just refugees but migrants and Indigenous rights. He gave free rein to Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price, who told meetings of riled-up racists that the Voice to Parliament would make non-Indigenous Australians second-class citizens. He has vowed to pass legislation compelling local councils to hold citizenship ceremonies on 26 January and has prosecuted a hard-right, pro-cop, law and order agenda aimed squarely at Indigenous and African youth.
Dutton’s promotion of nuclear power is simply a gift to the fossil fuel industry while purporting to be a measure addressing global warming.
The opposition leader has loudly backed Israel in its genocidal war on Palestine and, with the help of the Murdoch press and pro-Israel lobby groups, has slandered Palestine campaigners in Australia as antisemitic hate-mongers. He has also blamed the Albanese government for encouraging antisemitic attacks at home and for rewarding Hamas by splitting with the US on votes about Israel at the United Nations.
Dutton has pledged to scrap many of the 36,000 new public sector jobs created by the Albanese government and announced unspecified public spending cuts of $100 billion, presumably including Labor’s modest cost of living relief measures, which he describes as “sugar hits”, while at the same time promising $20,000 annual tax deductions for business lunches and golf matches. Dutton has appointed Price as shadow minister for “government efficiency” to add to her existing brief of “auditing expenditure” on Aboriginal services, in a nod to Trump’s appointment of Elon Musk as tsar of a new Department of Government Efficiency in Washington.
Dutton has also stated that a Coalition government would bar the CFMEU from involvement in publicly funded upgrades to the Bruce Highway in Queensland. Everyone who supports the rights of workers and the oppressed must oppose Dutton’s right-wing agenda.
But while Dutton may be scum, he’s not stupid. He knows that aping Donald Trump won’t win him office. He’s not remotely equipped to do so, lacking any of Trump’s brash showmanship and unashamed public vulgarity, which thrill the president’s supporters. Far from positioning himself as an outsider riding into town to drain the swamp, Dutton advertises his life of “public service” and his many years as a cabinet minister (while keeping quiet about his property portfolio and his wife’s childcare centre business benefiting from government subsidies). Dutton is a machine politician, an elder statesman first elected to parliament in 2001; if he were in the Republican Party, he would have been pushed to one side by Trump.
More fundamentally, Australia is far removed from the reactionary political culture that dominates the US. The electoral system, compulsory voting in particular, works against right-wing extremists winning government. So, Dutton has avoided following Trump’s overall “war on woke” agenda, rejecting attacks on abortion or trans rights, for example, and distancing himself from his National Party colleagues on this score. A Dutton government will also remain a signatory to the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump walked away from (again) on his first day in office. Open climate denialism simply won’t wash in Australia anymore.
Dutton may bang on about high levels of immigration and wants to cap the number of international students, but he’s careful not to take this too far. With the ruling class having benefited for decades from high immigration, Dutton is careful not to slam the door on migrants, emphasising the need for more skilled migrants. No mass deportations here. Nor is Dutton backing Trump in supporting the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza, advocating the Coalition’s traditional (and farcical) “two-state solution” instead. 
Dutton may say he is against woke ideology and spew racist poison against Indigenous people, refugees, immigrants and Palestine supporters, but his main weapon is popular discontent at the destruction of living standards. This is why he is always careful to promote his pet issues—curbing immigration and union power and advancing fossil fuels, for example—as a solution to the cost-of-living crisis: cutting international student numbers will take the pressure off house prices; attacking the CFMEU will cut construction costs and, therefore, bring down the cost of housing; nuclear power will lower energy bills; and so on.
These supposed solutions fall apart as soon as they are interrogated. But they achieve the objective of being seen to care about the pain experienced by millions of households while pointing to right-wing remedies that direct the finger of blame well away from the capitalists responsible. This, and not some electoral embrace of Trumpism Down Under, explains why the Coalition is emerging as a potential winner at the coming federal election. Blame for this lies squarely with the Albanese government. Just as Labor did in 2022, the Coalition could win government in 2025, not for any love of the opposition, but disgust with the incumbent.
What Trump has done in Australian politics is give the right confidence. The right in Australia look around the world—at the US and Canada, at France, Italy and Germany, and at India—and see their side on the march.
Labor, by contrast, does nothing for those who want to push back against this global shift to the right. The government has responded to the Palestine solidarity campaign, the most significant mass movement against war for decades, by joining Dutton in attacking the movement as antisemitic and dangerous. Labor state governments have introduced anti-protest laws to criminalise political activism, whether environmental, anti-war or anti-racist. Labor’s response to the anti-Trump sentiment is not to solidarise with it but to crawl to the orange bigot, promising Australia’s unstinting loyalty to the American war machine and, perhaps vainly, hoping to exempt the country from Trump’s new tariffs.
Dutton may not currently be pushing a far-right agenda like Trump. But that is not to say he won’t begin to do so at some point, especially if he wins office. Australia is not immune to the rightward shift in mainstream politics witnessed in Europe and North America. Labor won’t do anything to resist this trend. The lesson from politics around the world is that centrist governments like Labor’s simply prepare the way for the hard right as they contribute to a general sense of disgust at incumbents. Shutting up about Labor’s crimes in the hope that it squeezes back into office—the preferred strategy of virtually every union and NGO—will do nothing to stop this. Nor will simply holding out for a “progressive” Greens-Labor power-sharing agreement, the goal of Greens leader Adam Bandt.
We must fight to defend the rights of workers and the oppressed, whoever is in office. We need to bring together all those who look at Trump and his ghouls and want to resist, not cower. However, such fights and movements need political organisation and clarity regarding the need to fight capitalism. Labor won’t provide that, nor will the Greens. This is the task and duty of socialist organisation.

Tom Bramble

Appalling Albanese gives Dutton a clear run

Werribee, known for its zoo and mansion, is a booming suburb located 30 kilometres from the Melbourne city centre. Labor has represented the area at a state level since 2002, during which the population has doubled. Despite this growth, the working-class residents of Werribee have been left to rot, abandoned by the very political party that claims to represent them. 
As a social worker in the area, I have seen these issues firsthand. I have watched families struggling to survive in a system that fails them repeatedly. Whether it’s finding affordable housing, waiting months for medical care or struggling to navigate broken public transport systems, I’ve witnessed families unable to access the basics of life. I’ve seen parents break down over their inability to afford school supplies for their children or make impossible choices between paying rent and buying food. These are not isolated incidents. They are the result of a system that leaves the working class to fend for itself while the powers that be prioritise corporate profits and marginal seats.
In the lead-up to the 8 February Werribee by-election, many candidates have jumped upon the fear-mongering narrative of rising youth crime and community safety, pushing for an increased police presence and harsher laws as the solution. 
Victorian Labor has already allocated $419 million to the construction of the Cherry Creek Youth Detention Centre in Little River, part of the seat of Werribee. The original plan was to build it in Werribee South, but the location was changed after a protest by more than 3000 residents in 2017. 
The government has also funnelled $271 million into building the Wyndham Law Courts, right next to the Werribee Police Complex. The new courts, which will house a Children’s Court and a Magistrates Court, are set to become the largest of their kind in Victoria outside Melbourne’s CBD. 
While hundreds of millions are funnelled into the punishment of young people, the same cannot be said for the critical services that could help prevent crime and build a sense of community. The lack of investment in community infrastructure deepens the alienation that contributes to anti-social behaviour. Without safe, accessible spaces for recreation, education or social engagement, young people are more likely to be drawn into criminal activity and substance abuse. 
In Werribee, the Kelly Park Community Centre, one of two library and community hubs in the area, is set for demolition following a fire, despite an overwhelming majority of residents voting for its restoration. Many residents argue that the decision to demolish the centre is not necessary, but the result of poor management and official disregard for the role the centre played in the community. Before the fire, it was the heart of social life for youth, the elderly and cultural communities, offering a safe space and essential services. 
Despite its central role, the council has claimed that restoring it is financially unviable. The rebuild was estimated at $8 million—with the $690 million spent on the new detention centre and courts, the state government could build 82 new community centres and 20 new libraries. Funds are instead spent by the state on repressive measure that criminalise and isolate the very communities in need of support.
It’s the same story with other infrastructure: there is only one aquatic centre per 48,000 residents in the City of Wyndham, which takes in Werribee, compared to one per 5,000 residents in inner Melbourne. The proportion of households in the west that include children is higher than the state-wide average (52.1 percent compared to 45.5 percent), yet library access is much worse. There are only 1.48 libraries per 100,000 residents in Wyndham, compared to 5.64 per 100,000 in Stonnington in the inner east or 5.46 in inner city Yarra.
The issue of chronic underfunding goes beyond libraries and community centres. It also extends to health and education. Mercy Hospital Werribee is smaller than most metropolitan hospitals and has the longest emergency wait times in the state, 60 percent of patients not being seen within the recommended time frame. 
There are likewise only two public high schools in Werribee, serving a population of 50,00. Before recent repairs of Werribee Secondary College, the schools were plagued by crumbling infrastructure, with some buildings infested with maggots and posing serious fire hazards. I’ve seen firsthand the challenges faced by teachers. They are routinely tasked with overcrowded classrooms and given limited resources to support children living in poverty, dealing with trauma and often coming from migrant backgrounds. Teachers are stretched thin, overworked and struggling to meet the needs of their students. As a result, already vulnerable children are not receiving the quality education they deserve. According to the Department of Education, the Wyndham area has one of the highest teacher vacancy rates in Victoria. 
Public transport is also woefully inadequate, the area being served by just one train line and an unreliable bus system. As a result, 80 percent of households are forced to own two cars, a significant expense made necessary by the lack of public transport.
While the government continues to funnel resources into punitive measures like new prisons and courts, it neglects desperately needed investments in housing, public transport and essential infrastructure. Property developers, meanwhile, profit from poorly planned urban sprawl that leaves working-class communities to suffer the consequences. 
The upcoming by-election will be a chance for residents to send a message to the Labor government. Victorian Socialists are contesting the seat and offer a radically different agenda to the major parties. The party’s candidate, Sue Munro, is a parent and nurse and is committed to fighting for the rights of Werribee’s working-class residents. The real change we need won’t come from the same political forces that have failed us for decades—it will come from a movement dedicated to putting people before profit and challenging the systems that takes working-class people for granted.

Rayan Hassan

Werribee: left to rot by Labor

Over the last year, we have obtained a clearer picture of what the AUKUS agreement between Australia, the UK and the US will mean for Western Australia. The first big announcement came in March—the federal government will <a href="https://www.defenceconnect.com.au/naval/11609-western-australia-to-house-upgraded-aukus-submarine-base">spend $8 billion to expand the HMAS Stirling naval base</a> on Garden Island so that it can dock Australia’s first nuclear-powered submarines from the early 2030s. It will also host regular rotations of US and UK nuclear-powered submarines.
The next major announcement came in July. HMAS Stirling, only five kilometres from the residential suburb of Rockingham, will be a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-19/nuclear-waste-facility-at-hmas-stirling-rockingham/104114228">dumping ground for radioactive waste</a> generated by the nuclear submarines. While the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) has made standard assurances of the planned facility’s safety, nearby residents have raised concerns. 
Speaking to the ABC, James Mumme, a local science teacher and Greens candidate, said: “I’m concerned about radiation leaks. Accidents, they do happen, and [there’s the] threat of Cockburn Sound being made a target and the 130,000 people who live in Rockingham being incinerated”. 
Another resident, adjunct professor of psychology George Burns, raised the potential for waste leakage to harm nearby species, explaining, “We have three endangered marine species in this area”. While ARPANSA received 165 submissions from a 30-day community consultation, it has not made them available to the public.
The most recent announcement was made in October. Henderson Shipyard, just a few kilometres from residential areas such as Beeliar, Hamilton Hill and the popular Coogee Beach, will become the location of a <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-16/new-aukus-submarine-servicing-base-at-hmas-stirling/104478192">new AUKUS submarine servicing and shipbuilding precinct</a>. It will be the maintenance hub for the submarines and a manufacturing facility for Australian army landing craft and naval frigates. 
Of course, while workers are told to tighten their belts, there is plenty of funding to go around for the military. Defence Minister Richard Marles has not provided an exact cost for the hub’s development. But, according to the ABC, industry sources expect a range of between $12 billion and $20 billion. 
These are huge projects, and they will drastically shape WA’s economic and political landscape in a militarist direction. As Marles put it, “This represents the most significant defence industry offering to Western Australia since federation”. According to Premier Roger Cook, “This particular industry will rival the resources industry as one of our main areas for economic growth, for economic activity and for employment”. 
The argument most often cited in favour of these developments is “job creation”. But jobs can and should be created by investing in projects that meet social needs. How many jobs could be created if these billions of dollars were instead spent building schools, hospitals and social housing?
Another announcement made last year on the topic of housing was that 550 new homes will be built to house the US and UK soldiers involved in submarine visits. This is during a housing crisis in which Perth rentals have become among the most expensive in the country! It is an outrage that the government can suddenly build hundreds of new homes for US and UK soldiers, but not for the desperate people waiting on social housing lists. 
Western Australia is rapidly becoming a major military hub in the build-up to war between the US and China. Working-class people have nothing to gain from any of it. While WA politicians celebrate the federal cash splash, for the rest of us it is nuclear waste, dilapidating schools and overrun hospitals, never-ending social housing wait lists and the prospect of becoming a target in nuclear war.

Erin Russell

Western Australia’s south coast to become a major military hub

From 14 July last year, refugees ran a continuous protest encampment for 100 days outside the Home Affairs Department in Melbourne, demanding permanent visas. They braved icy rain, attempts by council workers and police to move them on, and being marched on by neo-Nazis. Red Flag
spoke to Aran Mylvaganam, one of the key organisers of the camp, about how it all went. 
Give us some background: what is the situation of the refugees who protested?
The refugees who initiated the encampment are part of the cohort of nearly 10,000 individuals denied permanent visas, leaving them on bridging visas or with no visa at all. Some have appealed to the minister, who can grant visas, while others have taken appeals from the Immigration Assessment Authority to the courts. It is important to note that they are not appealing the decisions themselves but challenging the government on grounds of unfair treatment and failure to follow due process. In the meantime, many are denied the right to work, access to Medicare, higher education and, most critically, the ability to reunite with their loved ones or leave the country.
These refugees arrived in Australia between 2009 and 2013, seeking safety and security. Many had already been here for a year when the Labor government lost power in 2013. However, the Gillard and Rudd ALP governments had delayed processing protection claims, leaving the refugees in limbo. When the Coalition government took over, it waited two more years before introducing the “fast-track” process and issuing temporary protection visas. This fast-track process was meant to address the backlog of protection claims, but it created a host of new injustices. 
Under the process, applications were unfairly assessed, often dividing families and granting one person protection while denying another with nearly identical circumstances. The process relied on questionable country reports—such as the flawed report used to assess Tamil asylum seekers, which was later discredited by a UK court. Labor itself acknowledged the unfairness of fast track while in opposition, and once in power, they abolished it. Yet the 9,500 refugees who went through the fast-track process remain in limbo. 
Labor has now been in power for over two years, fully aware that these refugees are victims of an unjust system. Yet they have taken no meaningful action to resolve their status, and we are now approaching another election. If Labor loses, as they might, the unresolved situation for these refugees could effectively be a death sentence. With this level of urgency, these refugees felt they had no choice but to protest. The encampment became a platform to make their voices heard, demanding justice and the fulfilment of promises made by a government that holds their futures in its hands.
How was the encampment organised?
The encampment started out as a spontaneous action organised by refugees. Tamil refugees joined an Iranian-led, 24/7 demonstration outside then Home Affairs Minister Claire O'Neill’s office in Oakleigh, and pretty soon, we all decided to make it an indefinite encampment. After visiting the RMIT Students for Palestine encampment, we got some inspiration and quickly adapted their set-up to work for us.
The big challenge was that we had no support for basics like water, electricity or shelter. We were camping right on the street, with everyone stepping up to organise the essentials on the go. A food team came together by the third day and grew to over 60 volunteers, making sure everyone was fed from morning until night. All meals were cooked by refugees on bridging visas. Even though there is a large number of Tamil-speaking Australians who have citizenship, they didn’t really pay any attention to our camp. But we kept going, organising our own rotation system, with shift coordinators covering morning, afternoon, evening and overnight shifts to keep everything running.
We held daily coordinators’ meetings to go over what was working, what wasn’t and ways to keep improving. Fridays were a big deal, with rally nights that helped us build momentum for the week ahead. Coordinators also used these times to get more people involved and to clear up any misinformation going around in the refugee community. These Friday gatherings were a way to bring everyone together and make sure we stayed united.
Keeping the camp clean was another priority. We had volunteers washing dishes, tidying up and making sure everything looked respectful and organised. We were really aware of how the public saw us and didn’t want to give anyone a reason to view us negatively. We also worked hard to make the space safe and family friendly, with no alcohol and no smoking in the area, so even children could participate. There was a library for reading and learning about politics, and if any issues came up, we had people ready to handle concerns quickly.
Over time, the encampment became more than just a protest—it turned into a community hub. People would bring ginger tea, snacks, and we’d play games like cards and chess. It was a meaningful, supportive space where people came together, despite the tough circumstances they faced. In the end, it became a strong, well-organised encampment, fully run by refugees on bridging visas. It showed the resilience and determination of refugees in their fight for permanent visas.
Did the encampment change the people involved? How?
Living in limbo for over twelve years had left many refugees feeling hopeless. But when they came together at the encampment, there was a powerful shift. At first, many believed they could achieve quick results with enough determination. But as the weeks went on, they came to realise that victory isn’t guaranteed. They saw that all they could control was their own commitment to the fight—and that to have any chance of winning, they needed to keep going.
This experience also broadened their perspectives, helping them see how their own struggle is part of a larger global fight for justice, one shared by Indigenous Australians, Palestinians, workers and other marginalised communities. Their solidarity with groups like the Palestine movement and the union movement underscored the interconnectedness of their cause with others facing oppression.
Over time, people found their own confidence and became leaders. They learned to stand up to government and state representatives who tried to shut down the encampment, and they organised everything themselves. People who had never imagined leading protests were now setting agendas, organising supplies and mobilising supporters. Their transformation was inspiring. For example, my friend Rathi, who once hesitated to attend a Palestine rally, recently told me she went on her own accord. She said, “A year ago, you had to drag me there, but now I feel like I need to be there”. The encampment awakened in people a sense of responsibility, a belief that they can’t just sit on the sidelines when injustice persists.
Various pro-refugee NGOs and charities tend to stick to a model of providing refugees with legal aid, food and other services, while lobbying the Labor Party for policy change. Why do you think that protest action and civil disobedience are important?
While pro-refugee NGOs and charities do crucial work, these efforts often fall short when it comes to achieving lasting change. Many of these organisations rely on government funding and work within a model that depends on lobbying and service provision, which is vital for meeting immediate needs but often hinges on the good will and timing of politicians. Too often, this leads to delays or evasions on decisions that directly impact refugees.
The reality is that, despite the presence of hundreds of advocacy groups spending millions to support refugees, thousands of people are still waiting—often over a decade—for permanent visas or even basic security. Politicians repeatedly break promises, like abolishing temporary protection visas, and when they do, many advocacy groups stay silent or only voice mild objections. Labor politicians, for instance, have made countless empty promises to create a pathway to permanency for the 9,500 refugees affected by the fast-track process. But even after two years in power, there has been no meaningful action. This shows clearly that polite meetings and petitions don’t create urgency for those in power—public pressure is necessary to hold them accountable.
This is why protest and civil disobedience are so important. When we protest, we’re showing that refugees and their supporters won’t sit quietly through broken promises and delays. Direct action brings these injustices into the open, forcing politicians and the public to confront the reality: people’s lives are indefinitely on hold because of political inaction or indifference. In fact, over the past two years, many of our actions have been intentionally kept out of the public eye. But with larger demonstrations, the message breaks through, reaching more people.
Direct action disrupts the status quo, challenging both politicians and the public to recognise how many people suffer due to policies rooted in racism. Civil disobedience builds solidarity, bringing together a broad community that also has grievances with the government. This form of protest empowers the refugee community, showing that they are not just passive recipients of charity—they are active agents fighting for their rights.
Protests bring this message to the forefront and remind the Australian public that refugee mistreatment is not an isolated issue; it’s part of a broader system of exploitation. The racism in these policies doesn’t just stem from Australia’s colonial past—it’s a tool the state uses to divide the working class, maintaining inequality and preventing unity. Racism toward refugees is a by-product of this system, which affects everyone. 
Supporting refugee rights is, therefore, in the best interest of all working people, not just refugees. Direct action brings this truth to light, aiming to unite everyone who should be fighting against policies that exploit and divide us.
During the encampment, a neo-Nazi group twice tried to march on and disrupt protests by the refugees. Melbourne City Council made various attempts to shut down the camp using police. What was it like to stand up to all of this?
The two incidents involving the Nazis were deeply concerning. For many refugees, their presence triggered painful memories of the oppression and violence they had fled in their home countries. While some were understandably frightened, the majority were determined to stand their ground and send a clear message: they would not be intimidated by a group spreading hate. In fact, many saw the presence of neo-Nazis as an opportunity to highlight how the Labor government's policies were appeasing groups like them, rather than addressing the needs of ordinary people. 
The encampment faced constant challenges from the council and Victoria Police. The council frequently cited by-laws to remove furniture, signs and megaphones, working with the police to disrupt and shut down the protest. Security guards from the Department of Home Affairs also added to the hostility. Meanwhile, some ethnic community leaders, aligned with organisations known for their strong connections to the Labor Party, worked to undermine the movement. They sought to divide the refugees, discourage their participation and create confusion through meetings designed to derail the protests. 
Despite these obstacles, the encampment became a powerful space of solidarity and resistance. Refugees and their supporters stood together, transforming the camp into a platform for raising awareness and demanding justice. Every challenge—whether from neo-Nazis, the council, the police or community leaders providing cover for Labor—was turned into an opportunity to organise and mobilise even more people. These efforts only strengthened the campaign and demonstrated the refugees’ resilience and determination to fight for their rights.
What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to the start of the encampment?
Looking back, there are a few things I’d have done differently, even though the encampment evolved organically and wasn’t planned from the start. If I could give myself any advice, I’d suggest studying the successes and challenges of other encampments to get a sense of what to expect. But ultimately, our circumstances were unique, and it’s difficult to prepare for all the twists and turns we faced.
If I could start over, I’d focus on establishing clear structures and roles earlier, forming teams for logistics, communications and security right from the beginning. Setting up political teach-ins and creating regular opportunities for people to reflect would have helped deepen everyone’s understanding of the broader movement, keeping us all motivated and focused. Finally, having daily debriefs could have allowed us to address issues as they arose and adjust more effectively. 
In the end, though, the encampment grew into something powerful because it was shaped by everyone involved. It was a collective effort that revealed our strength and resilience. And no amount of preparation could have anticipated the incredible spirit of unity and determination that came from everyone who participated.

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