In a <a href="https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-statement/afp-deputy-commissioner-national-security-krissy-barrett-statement">bombshell press conference</a> on 10 March, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and NSW Police shredded the entire story that we have been fed about a supposed tsunami of antisemitism gripping society and leading to a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property. It has all been based on a pack of lies, a “criminal con job”.
For more than a month, attention has been focused on the discovery in January of a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/dural-caravan-nsw-police-find-explosives-in-caravan-synagogue-targeted-20250130-p5l87g.html">caravan in Dural, Sydney, filled with explosives</a>. It was described as a terrorist plot targeting a synagogue. We now know that it wasn’t.
“Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot—essentially a criminal con job”, AFP Deputy Commissioner National Security Krissy Barrett said. “Today, I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” 
For this reason, the police never classified the caravan as a terrorism incident. But that didn’t stop the politicians. On 30 January, NSW Premier Chris Minns <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interview-abc-sydney-10">told ABC radio</a>: “This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event. There’s only one way of calling it out and that is terrorism”. This is the exact opposite of what the police thought, in their own words, “almost immediately”. It is inconceivable that Minns did not know by this point that he was telling bald-faced lies. In the six weeks since, Minns has never corrected the record nor apologised for his dishonesty. 
In the same ABC interview, Anthony Albanese was asked, “Do you classify this as terrorism as well, prime minister?” He answered, “I certainly do. I agree with Chris Minns. It’s clearly designed to harm people, but it’s also designed to create fear in the community. And that is the very definition”. 
Except that the prime minister surely also knew that the police had immediate and serious doubts and believed it to be a “fake plot” with no plan nor prospect of the caravan or its cargo of 40-year-old explosives harming anyone.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton called it a “grave and sinister escalation in this insidious rise of unchecked antisemitism in our country”. He later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/feb/06/australia-politics-news-live-labor-anti-hate-speech-laws-mandatory-sentences-federal-election-campaign-anthony-albanese-peter-dutton-ntwnfb">claimed</a> that it was “believed to be the biggest planned terrorist attack” in Australia’s history. 
None of this is true. 
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-11/burke-says-dutton-conned-by-caravan-hoax/105033778">accused</a> Dutton of deliberately avoiding police briefings so that he would have more freedom to “continue to make the most outrageous claims. He wanted to make sure that he could stoke the most fear”, Burke said. Dutton’s claims were outrageous, but so were those of Albanese and Minns, who cannot pretend they didn’t know the truth.
Beyond the caravan, the police said they believed all of the high-profile antisemitic attacks in recent times in Sydney, which have resulted in dozens of arrests under Operation Pearl, had a “common source” with the caravan plot. “The caravan job was orchestrated by the same individual or individuals that were orchestrating the Pearl incidents”, said NSW Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson. “None of the individuals we have arrested during Pearl have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology”, he said.
This is an extraordinary revelation, although one that the police had been repeatedly theorising about in press statements for weeks. In the first press conference NSW police gave about the caravan, they speculated that it might be a “set-up”. This was ignored by politicians and the bulk of the media, who instead breathlessly reported that an antisemitic “terrorist” massacre “with a blast radius of 40 metres” had been imminent. 
Indeed, the biggest hoax has not been the one carried out by a few organised criminals looking for bargaining chips with the legal system. The main hoax, the biggest con job of all, has been carried out by the entire political and media establishment. They have cynically used this plot to whip up fear, suspicion and hatred for Muslims and Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement, to justify a hysterical witch-hunt and purge of Palestine supporters throughout many institutions, and to rush through a new set of draconian anti-protest laws.
This campaign was on full display at the recent Sky News
Antisemitism Summit, a conference of right-wing and far-right politicians, activists, media outlets and the pro-Israel lobby. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Australia’s main pro-Israel lobby group, presented a <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/15-steps-to-defeat-antisemitism/">fifteen-point plan</a> for combating antisemitism, beginning with a call to “declare the existence of a National Emergency and establish a Joint Counter-Terrorism Taskforce [to] fight against antisemitic terror”. This was followed by a wish list of extreme censorship, attacks on free speech and the right to protest, and purges of pro-Palestine students and academics. 
ECAJ and other pro-Israel lobby groups, who routinely propagandise in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and promote the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, have been given tens of millions of dollars by the Australian government as part of its so-called campaign of combating antisemitism. Jewish organisations that are critical of Israel have not received a cent. 
The attempt to tie what has been confirmed as a criminal plot to the Palestine solidarity movement reached its zenith with the passing of a series of new <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/new-anti-protest-laws-target-opponents-of-genocide">anti-protest laws</a>, especially in NSW. The laws were justified with constant reference to the “antisemitic terror” gripping Australia. 
We now know that Minns, and at least several other senior ministers, clearly knew that they were rushing through these laws based on complete lies. Perhaps they were rushing to beat these revelations coming out. Not only were the attacks not motivated by antisemitism—being in fact, according to the police, a “criminal con job”. There was absolutely no link between these attacks and any protest activity.
Chris Minns must apologise to the people of NSW, and to the Palestine solidarity movement, for using lies and distortions to trample on our democratic rights. He should repeal these laws immediately, and he should resign.
Minns should also apologise to Jewish people in this state. Antisemitism is real and must be opposed, and the actions of these crooks caused legitimate fear among Jewish people. But Minns’ lies, along with those of the media and pro-Israel lobby, who have all made the most of this criminal hoax, have falsely portrayed these criminal acts as a result of a rising tide of antisemitism in society. 
They have deliberately exaggerated the threat posed to Jewish people in a reprehensible and cynical ploy to whip up fear in order to attack and silence opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They were, in effect, the accomplices in this entire hoax.

Josh Lees

The great antisemitism con job

This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.
“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.
Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”. 
Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?
Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.
In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries. 
Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.
If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-are-real-costs-australias-housing-crisis-women">brief</a> last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men. 
Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing. 
And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.
Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.

Clara da Costa-Reidel

Women are no better off under Labor

Ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred has finally dissipated after rampaging across south-eastern Queensland and northern New South Wales for days. It has caused significant flooding, destruction to homes, widespread power outages and, tragically, the death of a 61-year-old man near Dorrigo.
Last week, as the cyclone approached the Queensland coast, Peter Dutton had his “Scomo moment”. He fled his home electorate north of Brisbane to the relative safety of a Liberal Party fundraiser in Sydney. Held in the deluxe mansion of billionaire Justin Hemmes, whose Merivale Group was recently sued by its staff over $129 million in alleged unpaid wages (roughly the value of Hemmes’ house), Dutton’s flight was a reminder that the rich live by different rules to the rest of us. In the face of disaster, they can use their money and connections to keep themselves safe. Most of us cannot.
Anthony Albanese was keen to emphasise that politics should be left out of these disasters. When asked about the possibility of calling an election this week, he responded that “this is not a time for looking at politics”. In the context of a warming world though, where the increasing frequency of extreme weather is intersecting with issues like growing inequality, housing insecurity, and the steady erosion of essential public services, these events are thoroughly political—whether politicians like Albanese admit that or not.
The exact development and path of Cyclone Alfred cannot, of course, be attributed to climate change—cyclones have struck south-east Queensland before. But the growing frequency of such disasters on a global level can be. Increases in ocean temperatures are <a href="https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/news/2024/10/15/hurricanes-supercharged-by-climate-change.html">supercharging</a> cyclones and increasing their occurrence further from the equator. They are lasting longer, moving more erratically, and dumping more rain. Whatever the exact balance of “normal” and “climate change-fuelled” in Cyclone Alfred’s impact, governments like Albanese’s that fail to act on the climate crisis should be seen as sharing some of the blame for it.
The calls to “keep politics out of it” are part of an effort to conceal this reality, and the fact that instead of doing anything about climate change our leaders are bent on further fuelling it. Last September, Labor Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek approved three new extensions to coal mines in Queensland and New South Wales. The mines will now operate until at least 2070. By then, global average temperatures could be at 7.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, according to the <a href="https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/05/temperature-climate-change-greenhouse-gas-niche-emissions-hot/#:~:text=If%20greenhouse%20gases%20emissions%20increase,times%2C%20the%20study%20authors%20predict">World Economic Forum</a>. Such a rise in temperature would make large parts of the world uninhabitable. 
Then there’s the massive Scarborough gas project, soon to be constructed off the coast of Western Australia by one of Australia’s premier polluters, Woodside Petroleum. Labor approved the project even though, according to <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org.au/article/woodsides-new-scarborough-gas-project-is-really-risky-business/">Greenpeace</a>, it will lead to up to 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions over its lifetime. This would make it the worst single emitter in Australian history. 
In addition to bringing the climate crisis to the fore, extreme weather events like Cyclone Alfred expose other failures and crises of capitalism. One of these is the chronic underfunding of government services. A worker involved in the Queensland government's Community Recovery program, who spoke anonymously to Red Flag in the days before Alfred made landfall, said the state was still scrambling to provide support to victims of the recent North Queensland floods. "There are people in Townsville who’ve lost almost everything”, they said, “and [they] are still waiting for government grants”.
More frequent flooding means less time for communities to recover before the next disaster hits. In the northern New South Wales town of Lismore, which saw devastating flooding only three years ago in February 2022, up to 1,200 people were still living in emergency or temporary accommodation as of last December, <a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8533085/lismore-still-recovering-two-years-after-record-flood/">according to the Canberra Times</a>. Others are still homeless or have been forced to return and squat in ramshackle houses in flood-prone areas. No effort has been made to permanently house or relocate these people, who now face another round of flooding. 
Residents of towns in south-east Queensland, such as Logan, face similar issues, as many there also lost their homes in 2022. Now parts of Brisbane are flooding again, raising the possibility of homelessness for thousands more people. 
Labor under Albanese has done nothing to fix the housing crisis for anyone, let alone flood victims. What little remains of public housing stock in Australia is being demolished, rents have skyrocketed, and developers and landlords have been given free rein to make massive profits. Rather than spending more money on things—like more secure housing built away from flood-prone areas—that might actually help in a disaster, Labor has other priorities.
Shockingly, subsidies (aka. handouts) to fossil fuel companies increased by more than 31 percent in 2023-24 to $14.5 billion, according to the Australia Institute. This money could have gone towards emergency services, or investment in renewable energy, housing or welfare. Instead, it went to lining the pockets of fossil fuel bosses. 
On current trends, we can expect the frequency and severity of disasters like that of Cyclone Alfred to increase in coming decades. Unless we get organised and fight back against the likes of Albanese, Dutton, and the fossil fuel bosses they serve, it will be the working class and the poor that continue to bear the brunt of them. Whoever wins the next election, we need to bring back the climate war. Only this time we should see it, and fight it, as the class war it fundamentally is.

Connor Knight

Tropical Cyclone Alfred and the politics of ‘keeping politics out of it’

West Australian voters have returned Labor to office in another landslide. Labor won 42 percent of the primary vote, compared to the Liberal’s 28.5 percent, making this the second largest Labor vote ever—topped only by the party’s stomping 2021 victory.
At the close of counting on election night (8 March), Labor had secured 40 of the 59 seats in the state’s Legislative Assembly. The Liberals had secured five and the Nationals four, with ten seats remaining in doubt. 
Labor is now set for a third term in office. Only in the 1980s did WA Labor enjoy such a long period of government, beginning with the election of Brian Burke and ending with the stench of the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/6661">WA Inc. scandal</a>. 
Since the Pilbara iron ore industry came to dominate the state’s economy in the late 1960s, successive state governments—both Labor and Liberal—have dutifully served mining interests. The Cook Labor government has been no exception. Premier Roger Cook <a href="https://www.perthnow.com.au/entertainment/music/premier-roger-cook-slams-singer-peter-garrett-for-sowing-seeds-of-hatred-with-gina-rinehart-rant-c-17901693">lashed</a>
Midnight Oil singer Peter Garret for “sowing seeds of hatred” a week out from the election, after Garrett sledged Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, at a Perth Festival gig.
In 2017, Labor came into office under the leadership of Mark McGowan. In that election, the Liberals suffered a 16 percent swing, their worst <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/node-5719">electoral defeat</a>
on record. The outgoing Barnett government had presided over the largest mining boom in the state’s history. However, it had been an opportunity squandered. When the Liberals proposed to sell 50 percent of the state’s electricity corporation to pay off mounting state debt, voters gave them a drubbing.
In 2021, Labor secured nearly 60 percent of the primary vote, while the Liberals faced near <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/smashing-wa-liberals">annihilation</a>. Labor won 53 Legislative Assembly seats, the Nationals four and the Liberals just two. The Liberals faced the shame of losing their opposition party status.
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/mark-mcgowans-legacy-serving-big-capital">McGowan’s strategy</a> of insulating the state from the ravages of Covid-19 behind tightly controlled borders proved a winner with voters. While the measures provoked ire from Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Qantas chairman Alan Joyce, and a High Court challenge from Queensland mining magnate Clive Palmer, they were popular with mining bosses in the West. Hancock Prospecting, BHP, Woodside and Fortescue Metals Group (FMG) profited handsomely from having mine workers work the Pilbara mines non-stop without the interruption of lockdowns that had plagued industry elsewhere.
McGowan quit unexpectedly mid-term, in May 2023, handing the baton to deputy leader Roger Cook. Back in 1986, during his Murdoch University student days, Cook became the National Union of Student’s first president before becoming a staffer for various Labor politicians. In 2008, he entered state parliament as the member for Kwinana, an industrial suburb south of Perth. Cook became deputy Labor leader ten days later and held senior ministerial posts during the six years of the McGowan government.
When Cook became premier, the state’s mining industry was once again booming. In the wake of the disruption to global trade during the pandemic, commodity prices were sky high. So were mining royalties. The state recorded a $4.2 billion surplus in May 2023 and a $3.2 billion surplus last year.
Spending splurge amidst a cost-of-living crisis
With cash in the bank, the Cook government has been spending heavily on infrastructure. Last year’s budget committed $12.1 billion, including an expansion of Perth’s rail network (Metronet) and spending on healthcare and school infrastructure. 
Election promises included a major upgrade to Royal Perth Hospital, another round of student assistance payments for families with school-age children and an expansion of the school breakfast program. Property developers have been offered substantial subsidies to construct large apartment complexes to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-18/build-to-rent-scheme-western-australia-explainer/104946158">boost rental availability</a>. <a href="https://www.apimagazine.com.au/news/article/wa-premier-announces-home-equity-scheme-expansion-to-improve-access-to-property-ownership">Keystart</a>, a shared equity scheme to assist home ownership, will also receive a funding boost.
However, none of these measures have eased the spiralling costs for working-class people. Under two terms of a Labor government, house prices and rents have soared, making WA an increasingly unaffordable place to live. Since Labor was elected in 2017, <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-s-housing-crisis-in-numbers-what-s-changed-since-labor-took-office-in-2017-20250213-p5lbv5.html">average house prices</a> in WA have increased from $564,000 to $913,000. <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/western-australia/wa-s-housing-crisis-in-numbers-what-s-changed-since-labor-took-office-in-2017-20250213-p5lbv5.html">Rental vacancy rates</a> have slumped from 4.7% to 1.4%, resulting in a median rent hike from $365 to $660 per week.
Social housing unit numbers dropped in McGowan’s first term and are now barely above 2017 levels. Forty-four thousand social housing units make up just 3.7 percent of all housing stock in the state. Consequently, Perth has become one of the <a href="https://www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/perth-now-one-of-hardest-cities-in-the-world-to-find-a-rental-20240612-p5jl5w.html">worst cities in the developed world</a> for finding a rental, with tenants often bidding well above the advertised rent to secure an abode. 
According to <a href="https://www.shelterwa.org.au/new-figures-support-peak-bodys-election-asks-to-scale-up-on-housing-and-homelessness-solutions/">Shelter WA</a>, 61 people are turned away from emergency accommodation each day, the highest rate in the country. And more working people are experiencing homelessness: 15 percent of those accessing emergency accommodation in WA are employed, up from 10 percent five years ago. 
Liberals anti-woke agenda
Unable to differentiate themselves from Labor on economic policy, the Liberals attempted to mimic Dutton and Trump’s “anti-woke” agenda. Liberal leader Libby Mettam promised to defund the <a href="https://www.edo.org.au/our-funding/">Environmental Defenders Office</a>, stating that “taxpayer money should not be spent propping up activists”. She also <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/wa-liberal-leader-libby-mettam-aboriginal-flag/104829360">declared</a>
that she would not stand in front of the First Nations’ flags during media conferences. 
Mettam also <a href="https://www.waliberal.org.au/state-news/wa-liberals-will-ban-harmful-gender-treatments-for-children/">promised</a>
to “ban the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone treatments and surgical intervention for children under the age of 16 for the purpose of gender transition”.
This stance backfired spectacularly.
Several Liberal candidates found themselves in hot water for racist, sexist and homophobic comments. The Liberals’ Kimberley candidate, publican Darren Spackman, was forced to stand down after a slew of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-20/wa-liberal-candidate-darren-spackman-withdraws-from-election/104963082">racist social media posts</a> denigrating Aboriginal people were uncovered. 
During an awkward press conference at which the Liberals were set to unveil new domestic violence policies, Darling Range candidate Paul Mansfield was <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-22/wa-liberals-endure-bruising-week-as-election-race-gets-tough/104951020">confronted</a>
with what the ABC described as “a series of derogatory social media posts, including homophobic slurs and two lewd posts about women”.
Albany candidate Thomas Brough was <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-15/wa-liberal-candiate-thomas-brough-workplace-training-lgbtqi/104090148">ordered</a>
to take workplace training with the Australian Human Rights Commission after making statements linking LGBTQIA+ people with paedophilia. The Medical Board also <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-24/wa-liberal-candidate-thomas-brough-referred-to-medical-tribunal/104975970">referred</a>
Brough, a doctor, to the State Administrative Tribunal for his comments.
Unsurprisingly, none of this helped the Liberal Party’s electoral fortunes. While Labor suffered a negative 18 percent swing, the Liberal vote was up only 7.3 percent (after the previous electoral wipeout). The National Party vote climbed only 1.1 percent and One Nation was up 2.4 percent. The Greens’ vote was up 3.6 percent, and votes for independents increased by 2.9 percent.
Labor’s Fremantle upset
Nowhere was voter discontent more starkly demonstrated than in the electorate of Fremantle, where sitting Labor member and industrial relations minister Simone McGurk faced a 22 percent swing against her. Traditionally a working-class seat, Fremantle has been held by Labor for a century—apart from a 2009 byelection upset when it was lost to Greens candidate Adele Carles. Labor regained the seat at the next state election in 2013.
Today, Fremantle is not the working-class suburb it once was. A once lively port city, its old warehouses have been converted into expensive, trendy apartments. Despite its gentrification, however, it has been the site of protests around issues such as homelessness, fracking, AUKUS ship visits and Palestine. 
Though the seat is still too close to call, it appears that McGurk is set to lose to independent Kate Hulett, a Fremantle business owner. Hulett <a href="https://www.kateforfremantle.com/priorities">campaigned</a> on climate action, expanding public and affordable housing and transparency in government dealings with industry. Hulett won support from both traditional Labor and Greens voters for advocating a statewide ban on fracking, a ban on new or expanded fossil fuel projects, the retention of Fremantle as a nuclear-free zone, and opposition to AUKUS. 
While Hulett tailed McGurk’s primary vote, she looks <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/elections/wa/2025/guide/frem">set to win</a>
on Greens preferences. McGurk won 33 percent of the primary vote, compared to 29 percent for Hulett and 16 percent for the Greens. McGurk’s re-election prospects hang narrowly on a flow of Liberal party preferences.
A business-friendly government
The morning after Cook’s thumping election victory, the state’s business tycoons lined up to congratulate the premier and cash-in their election donations. Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA CEO Rebecca Tomkinson and Wesfarmers boss Rob Scott each praised Cook for his contribution to the profitability of their businesses. Cook’s seat of Kwinana is home to Wesfarmers’ new lithium hydroxide refinery.
Scott <a href="https://thewest.com.au/business/manufacturing/praise-for-premier-roger-cooks-storming-election-victory-comes-with-red-tape-warning-from-wa-business--c-17978740">told</a>
the West Australian he looked forward to working with the premier to ensure “competitive, reliable gas for domestic industry”.
“With a seat that covers the Kwinana industrial strip, one of Australia’s leading manufacturing hubs, the premier understands the important role that gas and WA can and will play, to support the climate transition”, Scott said.
Tomkinson <a href="https://thewest.com.au/business/manufacturing/praise-for-premier-roger-cooks-storming-election-victory-comes-with-red-tape-warning-from-wa-business--c-17978740">called on</a> the premier to unlock cheaper electricity and more land, telling the West that Cook must advocate to the federal government for policy that includes “repealing productivity-killing industrial relations reforms and changes to improve and streamline project assessment processes, enhancing environmental outcomes while eliminating duplication and providing certainty over timeframes”.
Cook has already proved his worth to the big end of town, having advocated strongly to kill federal Labor’s proposed (and largely symbolic) “nature positive” legislation that would have enabled the creation of a federal Environmental Protection Agency. In January, Cook <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/wa-premier-warns-east-coast-latte-sippers-over-nature-positive-laws-20250129-p5l83v">lashed out</a> at Labor backbenchers who continued to push the legislation, telling them:
“Your standard of living, the reason why you can afford your long mac and your lattes, is because of WA industry and the WA economy. Do not for a moment think that we will stand by idly and allow you to damage our economy because, ultimately, it will damage your standard of living. I think the prime minister is highly attuned to the issues which impact on Western Australia’s economy and Western Australian industry.” 
In August 2023, in the middle of the Voice referendum campaign, Cook <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-capitulates-racist-campaign-against-aboriginal-heritage-law">bowed to</a> mining and pastoral industry pressure to roll back the state’s newly introduced Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation. Acting on behalf of mining interests, the Cook government has also advocated for a watering down of already threadbare native title rights for traditional owners. The Australian
<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/wa-seeks-changes-to-native-title-act-to-protect-miners/news-story/6a9cd1c05161397ff31818b47ac1e7e4">reports</a>
that current and former state mining ministers have written to the federal government urging amendments to the Native Title Act.
As the dust settles, Albanese will look to WA Labor’s win as an opportunity to spruce up Labor’s credentials in the upcoming federal election. However, Labor has never been and will never be a party that represents the interests of working-class people. The challenge remains to build a serious political alternative.

Nick Everett

Liberals walloped, Labor returned in WA state election

A raft of new laws, purportedly to combat the antisemitism “crisis” in Australia, have been passed federally and by some state governments. The Human Rights Law Centre <a href="https://www.hrlc.org.au/reports-news-commentary/2025/02/21/hate-speech">summed up</a> the situation, saying that the laws have “been introduced under the guise of protecting against hate speech and vilification [but] on closer inspection, these laws are likely to have a chilling effect on our democracy while failing to stamp out hate speech and discrimination”. 
The same political leaders who in sucking up to Donald Trump have refused to condemn his calls for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, or the recent Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, are now pontificating about “racist hate” to pass laws that undermine our democratic rights. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media, educational and cultural institutions.
At a federal level, the new laws mostly increase sentences for existing offences, while also introducing new offences of threatening to use force or violence against protected groups, and either advocating or threatening damage to, or destruction of, places of worship. The Labor government performed a spectacular backflip, capitulating to Peter Dutton and the Liberal opposition by including mandatory minimum sentences of up to six years’ imprisonment for some offences, while ramming through the legislation in less than 24 hours. This is despite Prime Minister Anthony Albanese just weeks earlier describing mandatory prison terms as “fraught” and “unproductive”. 
Mandatory sentencing explicitly goes against the Labor Party’s own official policy platform, given its disastrous history of resulting in mass incarceration of marginalised and oppressed people. This didn’t stop Albanese and every Labor MP voting for these laws.
In NSW, the Chris Minns Labor government has gone further, passing three new sets of laws. The first targets the display of Nazi symbols and graffiti near synagogues, Jewish schools or the Sydney Jewish Museum. The second and third are explicitly targeting protesters, despite there being no link between protests and the recent spate of antisemitic attacks—which the police have theorised were likely coordinated by organised crime networks.
The NSW government’s Crimes Amendment (Places of Worship) bill 2025 creates an offence with a potential two-year imprisonment and/or a $22,000 fine for blocking, impeding or hindering access to places of worship. It grants NSW police the extraordinary powers to arrest and move on people in or near a place of worship for any reason. As the NSW Council for Civil Liberties <a href="https://www.nswccl.org.au/news">argues</a>, “these offences could be used to charge members of the faith protesting their own organisation, sexual abuse survivors demanding justice and any snap rally or assembly that happens within a vicinity of a place of worship, such as Town Hall”. The laws are extraordinarily broad, especially given that almost everywhere in the Sydney CBD is “near” a place of worship, all of Sydney’s most common protest locations being close to a church. 
Minns has made no secret of the fact that he is a staunch supporter of Israel and wants to stamp out the mass Palestine movement that has mobilised tens of thousands against the genocide in Gaza for more than sixteen months. These laws follow a wave of other anti-protest laws passed in NSW in recent years, many targeting climate protesters, and could be used against people protesting for any cause, including the union movement.
The third law passed by Minns makes it a criminal offence to incite racial hatred, with a maximum penalty for an individual of two years’ imprisonment and/or fines of up to $11,000. In Victoria, new anti-vilification laws have also passed, although they include other protected categories besides race, and potentially some protections from the laws for political speech.
The danger of these laws is that a concerted effort is being made by supporters of Israel to define criticism of or opposition to the state of Israel as inherently antisemitic. Pro-Palestine activists have been falsely accused of antisemitism for decades to silence opposition. Now they want to make opposing Israel a crime. In a similar vein, Universities Australia recently adopted an official definition which says that calling for the abolition of the state of Israel is antisemitism, potentially opening up thousands of academics and students to disciplinary proceedings.
Decisions about who should be prosecuted under these laws will be in the hands of the police and public prosecutors—that is, the very institutions of power that uphold racist inequalities and the interests of Australian capitalism. For that reason, no-one should be under any illusion that these laws will be used to prosecute vicious racists like Peter Dutton, Sky News or the pro-Israel lobby, who have dehumanised the Palestinian people, supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza and systematically demonised the Arab and Muslim population. In fact, all these racists are clamouring for even more draconian “hate speech” laws to try to outlaw dissent. 
All progressive causes, including the union movement, should unite in opposing these undemocratic laws.

New anti-protest laws target opponents of genocide

When Jordan van den Lamb, using his online pseudonym “purple pingers”, launched a website for renters to review their rental properties and real estate agents anonymously, he had no idea it would turn him into the “bane of all landlords”. Hating landlords is a big part of his life, however, so it’s a title he wears as an honour. Now, van den Lamb is taking his pro-renter, pro-worker platform to new heights by running for the Australian Senate with the Victorian Socialists in the upcoming federal election.
Shitrentals.org has become a database for renters to get information about potential rental properties that landlords don’t want prospective tenants to know about. Maybe it’s an ad that boasts a carpet floor but fails to mention that it squelches when you walk on it. Or it could be that you can’t bring your pet because a possum is living in the extraction fan. Perhaps you don’t need to bring your plants either, because there’s already one growing out of the kitchen floor. Some reviews have been so damning that landlords have offered him money to take them down—which he always refuses.
Van den Lamb started shitrentals.org for a few simple reasons. First, “the material conditions of the average renter are pretty shit, so you can just point at that and say, ‘That’s bad’”, he says. Second, “there’s really nothing in common between a renter and a member of the ruling class, so renters’ rights are something we can link to a broader struggle against the system”. 
If elected, he plans to be quite the rabble-rouser. “I would shout at so many people; I’d be really excited about that”, he says. “I’d use question time to point the finger at people ... maybe a bit of swearing. I kind of want to see what the cafeteria is like, maybe throw some food at someone. And normal politics stuff, like trying to introduce bills or whatever.” Such a lack of respect for capitalist institutions is refreshing and appeals to many people.
Van den Lamb wants to use the Senate to challenge the anti-worker politics of the mainstream parties while building a movement of renters, students and workers outside of parliament. It’s an openly socialist approach to politics, which acknowledges that real change comes, not through respecting the institutions of capitalism, but by challenging them in all spheres. “If we got a socialist elected to parliament, we could shake some stuff up”, he says.
The campaign has already begun shaking up stuff. In early December, van den Lamb and the Victorian Socialists launched the “Empty Homes Crime Scene” campaign. The campaign involves placing bright yellow stickers on empty homes, exposing them as crime scenes for sitting empty during a housing crisis. 
It got the attention of the landlords, too. The president of the Real Estate Buyers Agent Association of Australia “slammed” it as “quite extremist”. Van den Lamb is also part of the Renters and Housing Union (RAHU), where he has helped to organise empty home occupations. 
They recently occupied three Brunswick homes that had been empty for almost 25 years cumulatively. Also in December, he was on the picket line with striking Woolworths warehouse workers. These are the sorts of actions that van den Lamb would use his Senate position to make even bigger.
“Victorian Socialists isn’t like the other parties, where they ask you to vote once every few years”, he explains. “Politics is something we want you to do every day—at home, on campus, in the workplace, wherever. Get involved.”
The Pingers4Parliament campaign is travelling all across Victoria. After a large forum in Bendigo in January with socialist councillor Owen Cosgriff, the campaign is going to Geelong, Ballarat, Castlemaine, Shepparton and beyond. Van den Lamb wants to bring his left-wing platform to the entire state.
<a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/node/364">That platform</a> includes establishing a public builder to construct 1 million new homes, a five-year rent freeze and scrapping negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. Other policies include putting politicians on a worker’s wage, reversing privatisation, fighting for climate justice and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Achieving such a vision will not come simply through getting a socialist into parliament—something van den Lamb regularly emphasises. But a socialist in parliament could be a voice for the struggles of ordinary people both inside and outside of parliament. Yelling at Liberals in the Senate in the morning, speaking at a rally in the afternoon, going to an organising meeting in the evening—all in a day’s work for a socialist parliamentarian. 
These are the steps that van den Lamb and the Victorian Socialists are taking to rebuild the socialist movement in Australia.

Tom Sullivan

Pingers4Parliament: the campaign to get a socialist into the Senate

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has released its findings and recommendations from the inquiry into antisemitism on university campuses in Australia. They call for an even greater crackdown on free speech and the right to protest.
The inquiry was launched last year in response to the mass Palestine-solidarity movement on university campuses. In the wake of these anti-war actions, university administrations launched a series of attacks on student activists. Supporters of Israel made a string of bogus complaints about campuses purportedly developing a hostile atmosphere towards Jewish students, claims that were then amplified by the media. 
The panel’s recommendations include that universities tighten and expand their disciplinary processes and report complaints to a national student ombudsman. If universities don’t act on the recommendations, the government might launch a judicial inquiry. 
Another recommendation is for universities to adopt the International Holocaust Memorial Association’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been criticised by many for its potential to associate any criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism. The recommendation has been accepted by all universities across Australia, which have agreed on a definition of antisemitism that closely mirrors the IHRA definition. 
A section of the definition reads: “Criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions and when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel ... Substituting the word ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jew’ does not eliminate the possibility of speech being antisemitic”. This means students and staff can be disciplined for calling for a free Palestine or for criticising Israel or Zionism—which is a political ideology. 
As Senator Lidia Thorpe noted in comments about the inquiry: 
“[T]he Special Rapporteur on the right to education, Ms Farida Shaheed, observed that universities in the United Kingdom have used the working definition of antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to ‘silence lawful speech supportive of Palestinian human rights and the right to self-determination’”. 
The National Tertiary Education Union and the National Union of Students have voiced concerns about adopting the IHRA definition because it may restrict pro-Palestine advocacy and limit academic freedom. 
Another recommendation directs the government to investigate whether the Fair Work Act should be altered to allow universities to fire staff more easily. <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/academics-under-attack-for-supporting-palestine">As reported in Red Flag</a>, universities are already unfairly treating staff who stand up for Palestine. Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian academic, is facing a smear campaign from the press; her own vice-chancellor, who fronted the inquiry, says the Act is impeding his ability to fire her. 
The inquiry was a blatant witch hunt against supporters of Palestine. For instance, one submission’s “proof” of bigotry at the University of Sydney consisted of anti-war posters calling for weapons companies to be kicked off campus, Muslim men praying at the Gaza solidarity encampment and a sign that read “apartheid free zone”. 
According to Dr Noam Peleg, a Jewish professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Zionist organisations advised people on how to flood the inquiry with submissions. He wrote in his submission (which was largely ignored by the panel): “These organisations encouraged individuals to spam the commission with submissions that include so-called evidence about antisemitism on campus by circulating templates ... [They] called this template a ‘Submission Cheat Sheet’”. 
In their submissions to the panel, university administrations said they had already tightened disciplinary procedures, banned encampments and made it easier for people to complain. Nevertheless, the inquiry recommends that universities do more to restrict democratic rights and to act quickly. 
Politicians, the corporate media and university administrators are campaigning hard to conflate Palestine-solidarity activism with an apparent rise in antisemitism. There have been abhorrent acts of antisemitism, such as attacks on synagogues or swastika graffiti. But virtually no evidence is provided to uphold the claim that there is a rise of antisemitism on university campuses. 
Instead, genuinely antisemitic acts are being cynically tied to legitimate protests against Israel’s war crimes—as though the people who oppose today’s genocide are no different from those who celebrate the Holocaust. Equally perversely, many people who openly support Israel’s actions in Palestine claim to be the victims of a broad anti-war sentiment, despite there being no official sanctions or inquiries into their pro-war behaviour and intimidation of Arab and Muslim students. Some Australian citizens have even flown to the Middle East and joined the Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza—yet there is not a peep of opposition to this in the media or among the political class.
If there were a genuine increase in racism against Jewish staff and students on campuses, silencing protests would not be the way to deal with it. In its submission, the Human Rights Law Centre argued that actions curtailing racism “must not come at the cost of silencing critical or dissenting voices”. But that is precisely what is happening at universities across Australia. 
The University of Western Australia administration has banned almost all forms of mass political communication between campus activists and students. Students can no longer put up posters or hand leaflets to other students, affix signs, banners or other displays, or use chalk on pavements. If students want to hold “events relating to the current Middle East crisis”, they must ask for approval ten days in advance and detail how they will “ensure the safety” of attendees. 
Not only are basic activist activities banned, but students also “must refrain from using phrase[s] and slogans that are contrary to the university’s policies (in either written or verbal form) at any time or place on campus”. This is a flagrant restriction of free speech. 
This mirrors the introduction of the University of Sydney’s civility code, which prohibits the use of “contested” phrases unless their meaning is explicitly defined. Slogans such as “from the river to the sea” will require further explanation if students and staff are to avoid misconduct and disciplinary hearings. 
The university recently wrote that “practices such as sit-ins and protests in buildings and classrooms are out of step with contemporary work health and safety standards and our obligations to maintain psychosocial safety on campus”. 
Dr Peleg has described how “frameworks such as cultural safety and psychosocial safety are also used to attack, harass and bully staff and students, Palestinians and their allies, including Jewish staff who oppose Israel’s actions. This is done in the name of combating antisemitism”.
Universities and governments are also introducing policies and legislation to censor and punish individuals and groups who protest peacefully and express critical ideas. Charges of antisemitism are, disturbingly, being weaponised to introduce these measures. We must resist the push to limit free speech and the right to protest. We will need them as the drive to war and the growth of the far-right gains momentum.

Anneke Demanuele

Antisemitism inquiry recommends crackdown on free speech

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.

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