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

Josh Lees

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

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

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

Vashti Fox

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

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

James McVicar

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

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

Rick Kuhn

Life in the cardboard tower: the university experience today

The 48th Australian parliament commenced on Tuesday, the day that 13-year-old Abdulhamid al-Ghalban starved to death in Gaza. Fifteen others perished the same way, including a six-week-old whose uncle, Adham al-Safadi, told Reuters that the family couldn’t find baby formula to feed him. As Australian politicians took their seats in Canberra, thousands of mothers in Palestine searched desperately for sustenance for babies they had spent months carrying and nurturing. 
As proceedings began, Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi held up a small sign: “Gaza is starving. Words won’t feed them. Sanction Israel”. Liberal and Labor senators teamed up to condemn Faruqi for the silent protest. But neither party will countenance sanctioning Israel for its genocide.
Faruqi’s sign referred to a statement, signed by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, condemning Israel’s starvation tactics in the Strip. The hypocrisy of Wong signing the statement is sickening. <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/2025/07/11/revealed-australia-has-exported-f-35-fighter-jet-parts-directly-to-israel/">An investigation this month</a> revealed that Australia is still sending weapons parts to Israel. On 4 July, a package labelled “Aircraft parts” was loaded onto a flight leaving Sydney International Airport. Two days later, the parts arrived in Tel Aviv. They belonged to Lockheed Martin, which supplies Israel’s F-35 fighter jets. According to independent outlet Declassified Australia, the Australian Air Force provided the parts.
By the end of the first sitting day of parliament, at least 85 Palestinians had been killed in airstrikes and shootings. <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/159502">Overnight on Tuesday</a>, Israel bombed a residential apartment in Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, southwest of Gaza City. Is it possible that the jets carrying out the deadly airstrikes relied on parts delivered by Australia?
On Wednesday, not a single Labor politician raised the prospect of sanctioning Israel for the strikes or the ongoing mass starvation. None of them even questioned whether we should be sending Israel parts for their fighter jets. Instead, Wong moved against Faruqi. 
A motion passed by the Senate bans the Greens senator from any overseas parliamentary delegations for the length of the current parliament. Wong then slandered Faruqi as “attention seeking”, implying that she was acting out of self-interest—something Wong has built her career on.
The pile-on against Faruqi is precisely the type of move encouraged by Special Envoy into Antisemitism Jillian Segal’s recent <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-antisemitism-report-is-another-pro-genocide-stunt-from-labor">report</a>, which calls for a severe crackdown on free speech and the hounding of Palestine solidarity activism. 
When the report was released, human rights and civil society organisations criticised its likely chilling effect on freedom of speech. Albanese responded by insisting that it would not limit criticism of Israel because “you can put forward those views respectfully.” 
The sanctioning of Faruqi suggests otherwise. Faruqi did not shout or swear—she didn’t even speak. She was in no one’s way. She sat silently in her chair and held a small sign with a simple political message. If this was not a respectful, acceptable act of protest, then what is? The answer is clear: nothing. 
In the eyes of Israel’s defenders, protest damages the reputations of those who aid the genocide. So every act of protest is a potential target for repression. 
But Faruqi’s small act, and the thousands who protested outside of parliament as its doors opened, show the path forward for those who stand with Palestine. No matter the pushback, we need to keep speaking out. As the genocide continues, so must the resistance.

Jasmine Duff

The 48th Australian parliament is a monsters’ caucus

Healthscope—Australia’s second largest private hospital operator—has entered receivership after accruing more than $1.5 billion in debt. The private corporation’s abject failure to provide quality care to patients mirrors horror stories coming out of the childcare, aged care and disability services sectors.
Healthscope has insisted that business will be maintained “as usual” in the hospitals that it runs. Business “as usual” in a Healthscope hospital—as evidenced by the inquest into the preventable death of toddler Joe Massa at Sydney’s Northern Beaches Hospital late last year—is a frightening prospect. Joe Massa and his mother spent nearly three hours in the emergency department waiting room while Joe’s condition deteriorated. In a bed with no staff present and no monitoring in place, Joe suffered a cardiac arrest. He died two days later.
The hospital, along with 36 others run by Healthscope across the country, operates to extract profit for its parent company, Brookfield Asset Management, a North American private equity firm. Healthscope was contracted by the NSW government to operate the Northern Beaches Hospital, which opened in 2018, as a public-private partnership <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/revealed-the-real-2-billion-cost-of-privatised-northern-beaches-hospital-20150501-1mxgqd.html">at a cost of more than $2 billion to taxpayers</a>.
Healthscope’s inability to turn a profit in part stems from the reorientation of health resources during the COVID pandemic, when elective surgeries were cancelled. Without this source of income, the company demanded more money from private health insurers—<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-22/healthscope-ahsa-bupa-private-insurance-contracts/104633886">tearing up the contracts of insurers that refused to pay</a>—and lobbied the federal government for a bailout. The operator fell behind in its rent payments, owed to the landlords of 22 hospitals it had acquired and subsequently sold to real estate and investment firms in order to rent the facilities back. 
Even before the pandemic upended its business model, Healthscope’s mismanagement of the Northern Beaches Hospital attracted serious scrutiny. A Legislative Council report published in February 2020 found an extensive suite of issues, including junior medical staff working up to 110 hours a week to fill staffing gaps, late payment of staff salaries and a dearth of policies and guidelines to facilitate clinical decision making. The report also found that many supplies, including essential life-saving medications, were delivered and stocked using a just-in-time model, leaving staff incapable of accommodating any increase in demand. This is not ideal for the standard model of private facilities that operates around planned, elective admissions—but for a major hospital with an emergency department, it’s an absurd disregard for patient safety in order to save on costs.
It is not difficult to imagine how all of this could result in preventable tragedies, as with the case of Joe Massa. 
So obvious is the dysfunction that in recent weeks the NSW Labor government has moved to prevent the future establishment of similar private-public hospital arrangements and is seeking to terminate Healthscope’s Northern Beaches Hospital contract, which runs until 2038. It has not, however, committed to placing the hospital in public hands and will likely offer Healthscope a hefty payout for terminating its contract. 
Privately owned health infrastructure should not be bought back, forcing the public to cop the cost of a capitalist’s failed business venture. It should be taken over without compensation and utilised to provide the essential, high-quality care that the victims of the for-profit system were cruelly denied.
A scenario in which Northern Beaches Hospital is placed entirely under public control would be a welcome one. Profiteering in health care should be totally abolished. But the public system in NSW, run by successive Labor and Liberal governments with cost-cutting and anti-union policies, is in a crisis of its own. As has been extensively documented, the public system has suffered an exodus of nurses, midwives and junior doctors due to the pay discrepancy that makes us the lowest paid in the nation (while many live in the most expensive city), culminating in days of historic strikes and the mass resignation of many of the state’s psychiatrists. 
A healthcare system that genuinely operates according to just and universalist principles cannot palm off much of its infrastructure to profiteering capitalists while subjecting its public arm to cuts and austerity.

A NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association member

The deadly cost of privatising health care

What do you think is a good use of $1 billion of public money? You might say building more schools and hospitals, raising public sector wages or making transport, groceries and housing more affordable. The correct answer, according to the NSW Labor government, is none of the above—it’s to give the money to billionaire property developers. 
The $1 billion “Pre-Sale Finance Guarantee Scheme” is the centrepiece of NSW Labor’s housing affordability policies announced in its 2025 budget. Under the scheme, the government will guarantee to buy apartments from property developers if the developers can’t pre-sell enough to secure finance, no strings attached. They can build overpriced apartments in developments so risky even the banks wouldn’t fund them, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out if they can’t find buyers at the price and profit margin that they want. 
The government says this will result in an additional 15,000 homes on the market, because developers will be able to get loans they otherwise couldn’t. That is rubbish. The government is guaranteeing to buy properties that developers can’t sell, so it’s just paying for properties that people either don’t want or, more likely, can’t afford. Even if the government ends up owning some properties and uses them for public housing—a big if—it will have paid a market price that includes the developer’s profits, instead of the fraction it would cost to build the properties itself. 
The scheme is a handout to multibillion-dollar corporations and the billionaires who own them. Instead of corporate welfare, the government should spend that money on building desperately needed public housing. 
In addition to the scheme, NSW Labor Treasurer Daniel Mookhey announced two other policies that he said would help “build, build and build our way out of the housing crisis”.
The first is to make the 50 percent land tax exemption for build-to-rent properties, due to expire in 2039, permanent. Build-to-rent developments already get significant <a href="https://www.planning.nsw.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2023-04/build-to-rent-flexible-design-fact-sheet.pdf">planning concessions</a>, including “flexibility” on things like whether apartments should have sunlight or storage space. The apartments are rented out at market rates, and this additional tax handout to property developers just props up their profits without doing anything to make rents more affordable. 
The second measure allows developers themselves to build the civic infrastructure associated with new housing developments. Currently, developers contribute to a government fund that is used to build the roads, schools and other infrastructure needed for new developments. Under Labor’s “work in kind” scheme, developers will be able to avoid the contribution by building a road or handing over a plot of land for a school. The government says this will fast-track new developments by completing essential infrastructure more quickly. 
But the residents of Wilton in south-western Sydney know what happens when developers are responsible for building infrastructure. As the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/feb/26/it-will-be-a-disaster-mayors-dire-warning-over-developer-led-housing-outside-sydney#:~:text=Anne%20Davies,interchanges%20to%20the%20existing%20network.">Guardian</a>
reported, developers were approved to construct what was touted as a flourishing new residential hub and permitted to take responsibility for building key infrastructure under a “voluntary planning agreement”, very similar to what Labor is proposing with its “work-in-kind” policy. But after six years of construction, “developer-led” infrastructure resulted in a town centre that has only a single skydiving business, land being sold without sewerage pipes and the nearest supermarket a 14km drive away. One developer provided a road to connect the development to the main arterial, but because traffic lights were more expensive, it proposed that cars would only be able to turn left into and out of the estate, meaning a 4km detour if residents needed to turn right. 
This is the logical result of giving big corporations control over building essential services; they care only about their profits and will literally cut corners to increase their bottom line. 
Labor’s policies in the 2025 state budget are a cash splash to big corporations that will only make housing more unaffordable. Rather than see escalating house prices and rents as a crisis, the NSW Labor government sees an opportunity: an opportunity to give public money to multibillion-dollar corporations, to reduce already threadbare planning controls to allow developers to build lower quality homes and to boost profits for billionaires in a housing market that is already the second most expensive in the world.

Martin Barker

NSW Labor builds profits, not housing

If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves. 
Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence, a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629623001846">study</a>
by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization. 
The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety.
The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the Lancet in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there.
Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report <a href="https://asthma.org.au/about-us/advocacy/housing/">Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia</a> that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the Sydney Morning Herald explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-toxic-blooms-hiding-in-many-of-our-homes-and-a-new-way-to-find-them-20250526-p5m29i.html">vertigo and cyclical vomiting</a>. This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould.
So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/hypocaust">hypocausts</a> that acted as a system of underfloor central heating.
The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all. 
In a 2022 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/freezing-indoors-thats-because-australian-homes-are-closer-to-tents-than-insulated-eco-buildings">piece in the Guardian</a>, “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If [a house] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars. 
Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built before national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum).
Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health. 
For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s <a href="https://www.finder.com.au/news/heating-hardship-winter-2024">August 2024</a>
Consumer Sentiment Tracker found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so. 
We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens.
Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare

A recent Red Flag article (“<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-palm-scheme-is-modern-slavery">Labor’s PALM scheme is modern slavery</a>”, by Priya De) outlines the PALM scheme, a policy facilitating agricultural production based on nearly slave conditions for many immigrant labourers. This is far from the only instance of unfree labour in Australian history. 
The use of highly exploited, unfree labour in Queensland is as old as the state and former colony itself. From the mid-1860s until 1906, the indentured labour trade, also known as “blackbirding”, was one of many foundational crimes in the history of early White Australia. 
In his 2006 doctoral thesis, <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/0d27c6fe-7a8c-4b84-b84e-8a306366e82e">The making of White Australia</a>, historian Phil Griffiths writes that colonial planners and agriculturalists “were convinced of the racist myth that ‘white men’ could not safely do manual labour in tropical climates”. The high instances of disease and exhaustion, owing to the arduous work of plantation production, would be too high a barrier for white farmhands, they believed. A better acclimatised labour force appeared as the logical alternative: Pacific Islanders. 
There was an economic logic to this racist idea. Islander labour, especially if indentured, was far cheaper than hiring whites. Workers from Vanuatu, Kanaky (New Caledonia) and Papua New Guinea, as well as some from Indonesia, Malaysia and south Asia, were brought to Queensland in the tens of thousands. 
The Queensland government estimates that, of the approximately 65,000 brought to Australia, one-third died on plantations, not including those killed during “recruitment” and transport. Three-year, locked-in contracts with an employer bound Islander workers. They were to be paid at the end of their contract, and only then were they allowed to find employment elsewhere. 
Workers performed a range of tasks, predominantly on sugar plantations. They cultivated fields, planted sugarcane, cut and harvested, refined and milled. The workers also maintained the plantations and performed laborious tasks such as fencing and tree felling. Domestic tasks were often undertaken by women workers, who were responsible for sustaining the workforce as well as the landlords and plantation owners.
Living conditions were squalid: cramped living quarters, minimal leisure time and little access to the world beyond the plantation. Workers faced harsh restrictions, often being confined socially and financially to the plantations and beaten if “out of line”.
In her book Workers in Bondage, Kay Saunders writes about two Islanders, nicknamed Tom and Dick, who received rations of maize meal and pollard, which is usually fed to animals, instead of flour. “When we spoke to Captain Whish about it he said ‘maize meal is good enough for blackfellows, flour for white men”, one of the Islanders is quoted as saying.
In his 1993 book Cane and Labour, Adrian Graves notes that resistance was not uncommon, often by feigning sickness, working extra slowly and, occasionally, going on strike. However, when bosses triumphed, workers faced the lash. 
Indentured labour was chosen because it enabled the Queensland sugar industry, and the colonial economy more broadly, to remain profitable and competitive with its rivals in southern Asia and elsewhere within the British Empire. 
While economic competition initially led to the demand for cheap labour, it later drove technical changes in the industry, which, from the 1880s, ultimately contributed to the abolition of indentured contracts. For instance, advances in milling resulted in the rise of small-farm production and reduced the demand for labour as the industry became more capital intensive. 
Importantly, there were also political factors behind the abolition. Indenture had always been controversial within liberal ruling class circles. And the mistreatment of Islander workers sometimes sparked outrage. In 1885, the Brisbane Courier deemed the trade a “scandal to the Empire ... The labour trade must cease”. 
Beyond moral objections, liberal opposition was also motivated by a desire for social stability and economic development. By the 1890s, with federation around the corner, the existence of a large, “backward” tropical plantation economy in the north of the continent was a sore point for leading parliamentarians and businesspeople who wanted Australia to develop a modern, industrialised economy. Brisbane’s The Week, a business journal, accused supporters of indenture of trying “to build up an aristocracy on a basis of cheap labour”. 
A racially homogeneous society was considered essential to establishing a new federal government and a united Australia. A nationalism founded on Anglo-identification was created to instil fears of racial disloyalty from Asian and Islander populations, and to unite the white population.
By 1901, indentured labourers, brought to Australia by racist employers for exploitation, were being deported under the White Australia policy. Between Federation and 1906, roughly 7,500 workers were shipped back to the Pacific, many to islands they or their families had not come from. 
As Labor continues to promote the exploitation of Islander workers today, we must not forget how the PALM scheme echoes one of Australia’s founding colonial crimes.

Chris Morris

Australia’s history with slavery

Nobody is surprised that Jillian Segal’s blueprint for “combating antisemitism” is a blueprint for authoritarianism <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/the-great-antisemitism-con-job">based on a pack of lies</a>. We’ve seen this time and time again. People who are themselves deeply, passionately racist—like the US right-wingers who dreamed about opening fire on Black Lives Matter protesters, or the European post-fascists whose parties were founded by SS officers and Holocaust deniers—often claim to be outraged by antisemitism.
Not so outraged that they will ever try to build coalitions against fascism, support anti-racist politics, or consider the deeper forces that give rise to racist ideas and conspiracy theories. But just outraged enough to outlaw dissent against Western foreign policy, ban protests and deport oppositionists.
Segal, the federal government’s special envoy to combat antisemitism (and reportedly one of <a href="https://theklaxon.com.au/jillian-segal-and-husband-funding-far-right-group-advance/">the most significant financial contributors</a> to the right-wing racist lobby group Advance Australia) is no different from Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or indeed the quasi-fascist government of Israel itself: hardcore defenders and perpetrators of racist oppression who will stoop to any low, and tell any lie, to crush dissent.
But this isn’t just about the extreme right. Segal herself might have the politics of Peter Dutton. But the centre-left are the true masters of using authoritarian methods backed by slanderous lies to silence dissent.
In Britain, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has banned the nonviolent group Palestine Action and made it a criminal offence to express sympathy for them. European liberal governments—such as the purportedly enlightened centre-liberals around French President Emmanuel Macron and the various German governments who purport to have learned the lessons of the Holocaust—have long equated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, banned pro-Palestine protests and slogans, and established new norms of repression in dealing with supporters of Palestine.
And here in Australia, it’s Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party who gave Segal the most august title of “envoy”, empowered her to issue her deranged report, and who now will execute whatever repressive measures he chooses to draw from her recommendations.
While the centre-left parties around the world focus their fire on dissent, they do nothing serious to challenge the real sources of antisemitic ideas: the fascist-friendly ultra-nationalist movements and figures of the radicalising global right. 
Trump, Musk, and their co-thinkers can posture as the saviours of Western civilisation; Albanese can grandstand as the champion of social cohesion and multiculturalism. All agree that the genocide of the Palestinians can go unchecked, that the complicity of the West should be covered up, and that those who resist should be persecuted with extreme prejudice.
While Segal—who considers wearing a keffiyeh to be an act of anti-Jewish racism—demands a crackdown on dissent, let’s not forget the Palestinians themselves: starving and dispossessed; maimed, bombed and shot as they queue for food and medicine; incinerated in their hospitals; mocked by their murderers.
By facilitating the crushing of dissent, Albanese and his colleagues have once more made themselves complicit in this ongoing genocide. No matter how much it claims to abhor racism, Labor—like centre-left parties throughout the imperialist West—has few limits when it comes defending the crimes of Australia’s military allies and business partners, no matter how racist the politics of those partners, no matter how genocidal the acts of those allies. For the Western alliance, authoritarianism and mass murder are business as usual. Segal’s report is just part of the cover-up.

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