Victoria’s Labor government is considering a suite of new anti-protest laws, according to a discussion document being circulated by the Department of Justice and Community Safety. The consultation paper, “Reforms to Victoria’s Protest Laws”, outlines potential new offences, including mask wearing and using “lock-on” devices. 
The right to protest is a fundamental aspect of a democratic society. Governments and corporations across the world are trying to bomb and starve the Palestinians into oblivion—and they want to do it without public opposition. They pillage our natural environment, support police violence and drive up the cost of living. The only real power that working-class people have is our ability to strike, protest and disrupt business as usual.
Proposals that restrict the rights of people attending demonstrations must be rejected out of hand.
Masks
The paper suggests an all-out ban on “face coverings” at demonstrations, with potential exceptions for those who can be proven to be wearing them for religious or health reasons. The proposed punishment is a fine of up to ten penalty units—nearly $2,000. The document points out that this would be a first: “no jurisdiction in Australia has passed laws to create an express prohibition against the wearing of face coverings during a protest”.
It would create a different law for people exercising their democratic right to protest compared to people out shopping or partying, for example.
People’s right to wear masks ought to be defended—whether it be to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases, to protect themselves from capsicum spray or tear gas, or to hide their identity from the state. 
Capsicum spray is an excruciating <a href="https://theconversation.com/tear-gas-and-pepper-spray-are-chemical-weapons-so-why-can-police-use-them-140364">chemical weapon</a> that causes temporary blindness, and Victoria Police use it widely and with impunity. Last year, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission found that <a href="https://www.ibac.vic.gov.au/OC-spray-use-by-Victoria-Police">Victoria Police have repeatedly deployed it</a> beyond its legally defined use. We need to be able to protect ourselves from such police assaults. 
People should also be able to protest without having to reveal their identities. It is important for individuals involved in campaigns and movements to associate with their cause publicly. But this shouldn’t be a legal requirement. If it were, the right to protest against the government would exist only if the state knew who you were. With modern surveillance technology, this is akin to making it mandatory for protesters to hand in their driver’s licences before attending a rally. 
Lock-on devices
The proposal to ban attachment devices like pipes and chains used as part of lock-on protests is also objectionable. These tools are classic symbols of non-violent protest. Today, they are mainly used in the environmental movement by activists risking their own safety to defend our planet from destruction. 
The tactic was important in the 2014 campaign that saved the Manning Valley from fracking. Under the proposed laws, a person could face a fine of 120 penalty units or up to one year of imprisonment if they use the device in a public space and intend to “hinder, obstruct or interfere with a public place or the conduct of a business”. The proposal would also give police the right to search for an attachment device without a warrant. 
Just two years ago, former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard attended the unveiling of a bronze statue of Communist Party member Zelda D’Aprano at the Victorian Trades Hall. The statue is complete with a bronze chain, which D’Aprano used to lock herself to the doors of the Commonwealth Building in 1969 to demand equal pay for women. If these proposals are adopted, her celebrated non-violent act would be a punishable offence.
Terrorist symbols
Another proposal is to outlaw the display of “terrorist symbols”. But again, the state decides which organisations, and therefore which symbols, are to be designated “terrorist”. This is almost always a political decision, and often based on the government’s international alliances, rather than genuine consideration of the group or symbol in question. 
For example, along with many other legitimate national liberation organisations, the US Department of Defense <a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Terrorist_Group_Profiles.pdf">designated the African National Congress as a terrorist group</a> in the 1980s. <a href="https://time.com/5338569/nelson-mandela-terror-list/">It wasn’t until 2008</a> that the United States removed ANC leader and South Africa’s first post-apartheid president, Nelson Mandela, from its terrorism watch-lists—well after he had retired from public life.
The point here is that governments and states have overt political biases, which should, in most cases, disqualify them from being the arbiters of whether people can identify publicly with a political tendency or group.
Anti-democratic attacks on the right to demonstrate
Over the last decade, the prevailing government framework has been that protests ought to be treated as a form of violent crime.
Victorian governments have invested billions into heavily arming and expanding the police force. The cops now have pepper-ball rounds, flash bang grenades, pepper spray and special armoured divisions that are used against protesters. 
In 2017, Labor extended police stop and search powers to users of public spaces and required people to remove face coverings in areas declared “designated zones”. It introduced new offences aimed at those who commit violence in public areas. 
These laws have been used to target and punish protesters. The charge of “affray” has been brought against both those accused of participating in a machete-wielding brawl in a Melbourne shopping centre and protesters opposing a weapons convention last year. While they have been used against demonstrators in all sorts of situations, those laws claimed to target violence and were not specifically about protests. The new proposals would directly target protesters. 
This conflation of “protester” with “criminal”, already implicit but made almost explicit with these new proposals, should be rejected by all those who support the democratic right to demonstrate. It’s a highly concerning development that laws are being drafted to punish certain aspects of non-violent protesting. 
Make no mistake: these proposals are intended to target those who protest against war, racism and the climate crisis. They must be opposed.

Leaked: Victorian Labor’s planned anti-protest laws

Labor’s trouncing of the Liberals in the federal election represented a clear popular rejection of former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s partial embrace of Trumpian politics. Nonetheless, the extreme right, both within the Liberals and Nationals and outside of them, is far from disappearing from the political scene. It remains a threat to workers and all the oppressed and needs to be confronted.
The far right outside the Coalition parties, despite its fragmentation into about ten separate groups, maintained the significant gains from the 2022 elections on the back of the reactionary anti-vax and anti-lockdown protests. In the Senate, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent (almost 2 million votes)—up slightly from 13.3 percent in 2022.
The menagerie of extreme-right and semi-fascist parties—including One Nation, Trumpet of Patriots, Family First, People First, Libertarian Party, Citizens Party, the Christians and other fragments—is stridently pro-business, “free enterprise” and hostile to anything vaguely smacking of “progressiveness”. They all champion an array of racist, extreme nationalist, climate denialist, pro-nuke, anti-vax, anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and “anti-woke” policies.
The reactionary emphasis varied a bit. In some rural areas, vile Aboriginal bashing was at the fore (notably the Libertarian candidate who achieved sizeable votes in the area around Goondiwindi in Queensland). In others, the emphasis was on denouncing multiculturalism or wind farms or hostility to Labor’s “creeping communism” (if only!) or calls for a royal commission into COVID health measures.
The sadly resurrected Family First, running again after missing the last couple of elections, unsurprisingly emphasised policies to “encourage and incentivise monogamous, heterosexual marriage” and opposition to “LGBTIQA+ gender fluid ideology”. Its top candidate in NSW, Lyle Shelton, was the leader of the failed campaign against marriage equality.
But Family First also embraced a long list of other standard far-right policies: cutting government spending, opposing multiculturalism, raising military spending to 3 percent of GDP, exiting the Paris climate accords, supporting nuclear power, cutting immigration, encouraging small and family businesses, banning Muslim migrants and an emphasis on “reading, writing and arithmetic” in schools. As a bonus, the party also encouraged shooting sports. Who and what to shoot was left unspecified.
A newcomer to the far-right gang is Gerard Rennick’s People First party. Aided by his profile as a sitting senator, and running on a joint ticket with Katter’s Australian Party, Rennick gained 4.7 percent of the Queensland Senate vote, challenging One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts on 7.1 percent for the final seat.
Like numerous other far-right leaders, including Pauline Hanson, Bernie Finn (Family First’s Victorian Senate candidate) and Craig Kelly (heading the joint Libertarian/HEART/People First NSW ticket), Rennick is a product of the Liberal Party, forming People First only after losing his Liberal National endorsement last year.
Rennick almost makes Hanson seem moderate. When still a Liberal, he advocated closer ties with Putin’s Russia because “they’re part of the West; they drink, they’re Christians, they play soccer, they’re Caucasian”.
In 2020 on Sky News, Rennick denounced the supposed “communist takeover of the classroom and the bedroom”, which he argued was an even bigger threat than the Chinese government. He also claimed Labor’s proposed free child care for three-year-olds was a conspiracy “to strengthen the role of the state”.
Rennick is a fanatical climate change denier, claiming that the Bureau of Meteorology tampered with data to “perpetuate global warming hysteria”. One of People First’s core policies is to remove all government references to climate change and abolish the Climate Change Department, along with the Multicultural Department.
People First also calls for denying entry to people from “radical nations”—they don’t mean Trump’s America—expelling all “illegal” immigrants, forcing foreign-born citizens to wait ten years to access Centrelink , embracing nuclear power and ending funding for Welcome to Country.
Nonetheless, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation remains the largest reactionary outfit with just over 40 percent of the total far-right Senate vote. It benefited from the demise of Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and the Liberal Democrats to improve its first preference vote by 1.3 percent to 5.7 percent nationally.
Hanson also benefited from the decision of the Liberals and Nationals to preference One Nation, something that even the crusty old conservative John Howard refused to do. This was a clear message from Dutton that Hanson’s vile racist rantings were an acceptable part of mainstream politics.
As a consequence of the preference deal, the NSW electorate of Hunter was turned into a runoff between One Nation and Labor. Thanks to the Nationals’ preferences and those of far-right fragments, One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds went from a primary vote of 16 percent to 41 percent in the two-party preferred count.
The Hansonites gained two new senators—one in NSW and the other in Western Australia—for a total of four. They were aided by a more favourable preference flow this election and in NSW gained most of the Legalise Cannabis voters’ preferences. 
One of the new senators for this party that supposedly stands up for hard-done-by battlers is Tyron Whitten, the boss of a Western Australian construction company employing 1,000 workers. The other is Warwick Stacey, who, in true Trumpian fashion, called to “make Australia strong again”.
After being “educated” at exclusive Sydney Grammar and Britain’s Royal Military College Sandhurst, Stacey became a troop commander in the British 22 SAS regiment. On leaving the army, he worked as a military consultant in the Middle East. Despite these years serving British
imperialism, Stacey demands migrants “respect Australian values” and “the country’s way of life”.
The far-right racist and fascist-style vote is disproportionately concentrated in rural areas, various regional centres and on the periphery of some major cities. In the Senate, it was strongest in Queensland (18.2 percent), followed by WA (13.5 percent), SA (12.4), NSW (12.3), Victoria (11.9), Tasmania (11.5) and lowest in the ACT (1.2 percent), where One Nation did not even bother to run. 
In the Northern Territory, the combined far-right vote fell from 15.2 percent to 10.2 percent in part because Trump lover and darling of the racists, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who headed the Country Liberal ticket, gobbled up some of the reactionary vote.
In regional Queensland, the far right obtained more than 25 percent in at least five House of Representatives seats, including 29 percent in Wright (Lockyer Valley, Beaudesert and Gold Coast hinterland), 27 percent in Flynn (Biloela, Blackwater, Emerald, Gladstone) and 25.6 percent in Maranoa (Chinchilla, Dalby, Goondiwindi, Kingaroy, Warwick). In many individual booths, the reactionaries obtained extremely high votes: 40 percent in Hatton Vale, 39.5 percent at the Blackwater pre-poll, 39 percent in Laidley, 36.6 percent in Miles, 35.3 percent in Grandchester, 34.5 percent at the Sarina pre-poll, and many more.
But it was not just Queensland. The far-right vote reached 28.8 percent in the western NSW seat of Parkes (with 38.8 at the Cobar pre-poll and 46.1 on the day), followed by 24.5 percent in Hunter (Hunter Valley) and 20.2 percent in Riverina plus another 4.8 percent for a right-wing independent.
In rural Victoria, the top far-right vote was in 21.7 percent in Nicholls (centred on Shepparton, including 35.4 percent at the Puckapunyal army base and 28.2 percent in polarised Broadford, just outside Melbourne, where the Greens got 12.6 percent and Labor 34.6 percent), 18.2 percent in Mallee and 17.7 percent in Gippsland.
Both the Liberals and the far right failed to break into outer-suburban working-class suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, in most of these areas, their votes fell.
An exception was the northern Melbourne seat of Scullin, where the far right polled 18.7 percent, up 1.3 percentage points. The far right also got a sizeable vote of 16.6 percent in the Sydney seat of Lindsay (Penrith and St Marys) where six far-right candidates ran, including old time Nazi Jim Saleam (1.1 percent), plus 14.4 percent in both Macarthur (Campbelltown) and Labor’s Ed Husic’s seat of Chifley (Mt Druitt and Quakers Hill). 
So what are we to conclude from all this? First, that while the far right did not have a breakthrough this election, it is not going away.
Moreover, the far right’s Senate vote of almost 2 million understates the support for many of its appalling policies. There is only a smidgen of difference between the likes of Hanson and Rennick and the hard right of the Liberals and Nationals.
As well, the strong flow of preferences in NSW from Legalise Cannabis to One Nation indicates that many voters for protest parties are far from rejecting obnoxious racist politics. 
This is all in a context in which Labor’s priorities are very clear. It is ruling for the big end of town, not workers.
With the union movement in a very weak state and tied to Labor’s coat-tails, rising discontent and disillusionment could provide a fertile breeding ground for the far right. We can’t be complacent.
So far in Australia, the far right has not been able to form one strong united party like the National Rally in France or develop one authoritative popular leader like Donald Trump. Pauline Hanson has been incapable of playing that role and has failed to build an active base in the major cities or among young people.
Moreover, the street-fighting fascist movement remains weak and mainly confined to the small openly Nazi National Socialist Network.
But we can’t assume that the far right will never get its act together. The experience of country after country in Europe, even in liberal Scandinavia, is that fascist-style politics can quickly make inroads.
We need to rebuild a fighting union movement to stand up for the interests of workers and the oppressed. We need to be prepared to confront far-right groups when they mobilise on the streets.
Most importantly, we need to build a socialist political alternative to the far right. A socialist movement that takes on the rich and powerful, that defends the rights of the mass of people and offers hope of a better world for humanity, not a bleak Trumpian dystopia.

Mick Armstrong

The far right continues to make gains in Australia

Treasurer Jim Chalmers is set to lift the tax rate on superannuation account balances above $3 million from 15 percent to 30 percent. Despite the modesty of the proposal, there has been a broad conservative backlash arguing that it’s an unjust money grab.
The reaction is nothing but fearmongering and deceit to defend privilege. Today, only the top 0.5 percent of superannuation accounts have more than $3 million. The average superannuation account balance upon retirement for men is about $450,000 and for women $400,000. Based on current trends, we’ll have to wait until the next century for the average super balance to reach the nominal $3 million mark.
Considering the extensive tax concessions for superannuation, the proposal is merely a slight reduction in existing government generosity to the wealthiest people. Indeed, superannuation provides tax breaks worth more than $50 billion per year. The richest people stuff their assets into self-managed super accounts to take advantage of the concessions. There exist some superannuation accounts worth more than $100 million.
Chalmers’ tax, controversially, applies to “unrealised gains”, meaning it applies to assets not yet sold. But it’s laughable to think that very wealthy people don’t have the means to pay the extra tax. And if they don’t want to pay, they can simply limit their super balances to a healthy $3 million.
The Teals have opposed the policy, in part because of this unrealised gains tax. Allegra Spender has argued that Chalmers’ proposal is unfair because it doesn’t have a provision for refunding tax paid if asset values fall. The Teals think we should compensate people who avoid tax if the scheme doesn’t work out perfectly. Besides being an expression of their overall right-wing alignment, this move by the Teals is a defence of the interests of their constituencies, their seats being some of the wealthiest in the country. It’s no surprise that they’re against taxing the rich.
The Greens have proposed reducing the tax threshold to $2 million, while also indexing it—so that the threshold would increase over time. With indexation, the measure would ever affect only the wealthiest—perhaps the top 1 percent. But why should we give generous tax concessions to the top 10 percent? Why should we provide tax concessions to wealth accumulation at all? 
The Greens have accepted the ideological premise of the debate: that people’s retirement income should be determined by their capacity to accumulate assets.
Since the 1980s, the surge in asset prices, primarily stocks and real estate, has been a significant driver of growing wealth inequality, asset holdings being concentrated among the top 10 percent of the population. Superannuation has been part of this. It’s a means of wealth accumulation through investment, rather than an equitable provision of retirement incomes.
Instead of focusing on wealth accumulation, the economy should be restructured to raise working-class incomes, including those of working-class retirees. This would mean raising wages, Jobseeker, the pension and other support payments. Avenues to hoard wealth should be closed off, starting with the housing market. 
Labor has no intention of taking substantive action in this direction, and historically championed the economic restructuring which led to our current situation.

Jehiel Lomaz

Opposition to super tax only defends the rich

The federal Labor government’s extension of Woodside’s North West Shelf Project (NWS) in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, allowing Australia’s largest natural gas facility to operate until 2070, is an environmental disaster. 
Over its extended lifetime, the NWS will produce ten times more carbon dioxide emissions than the whole of Australia did in 2024, according to the Climate Council, which describes the extension as a “carbon bomb”. The approval also comes just weeks after Woodside spilt 16,000 litres of petroleum products into the ocean near the Ningaloo reef, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/28/woodside-toxic-spill-near-ningaloo-reef-world-heritage-area-under-investigation">reported by the Guardian</a>.
Environment Minister Murray Watt approved the extension less than 30 days after Labor’s federal election victory—faster than the Coalition had promised to move had it been elected. Watt was not even obliged to consider the climate impact when assessing the proposal, since the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA) does not require it.
That is thanks to Labor’s Roger Cook, premier of WA. Cook intervened late last year to prevent the EPBCA from being changed to include climate considerations in the environmental assessment process. In doing so, Cook did the bidding of the state’s mining and resources capitalists, and it’s already paying off.
What did need to be considered by both the federal and state Labor governments was the potential impact of the extension on nearby significant heritage sites. Murujuga, the area encompassing the Burrup Peninsula and surrounding islands on the Pilbara coast, is home to a rich and ancient collection of Indigenous rock art, some of which is estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. It’s also where the NWS natural gas processing facility is located.
An 800-page report on the effects of pollution on the Murujuga rock art was produced for the WA state government last year. It was made public less than a week before the NWS extension decision, along with an eight-page summary document. The summary says “the research indicates that the current levels of the pollutants of most concern for the rock art are lower” than the level that puts the art at risk of continuing damage.
Cook himself told reporters days before Watt’s decision that gas extraction has had no effects on the rock art, and that would continue to be the case.
Leading scientists say this is a lie. Speaking at a press conference on the steps of the state parliament, Benjamin Smith, professor of archaeology at the University of Western Australia, said that the government’s summary document “contradicts directly the findings inside the report”. Smith continued: “This report contains very serious evidence that industrial emissions are currently damaging the rock art at Murujuga”.
An anonymous scientist involved in the rock art monitoring program told the ABC’s 7.30
program: “The claim that we established that no further damage is occurring to the rocks is simply false”.
According to the ABC, Curtin University’s Emeritus Professor Adrian Baddeley, one of the report’s authors, accused the state government of “unacceptable interference” to modify a graph from the report in the summary. The change removed a line showing that “five of the [rock art] monitoring sites were experiencing pollutant levels above” the level that puts the art at risk.
This apparent cover-up would not be the first time the Cook state government has chosen to sacrifice Indigenous cultural sites for the interests of the mining and resources industry. In 2023, his government <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/wa-labor-capitulates-racist-campaign-against-aboriginal-heritage-law">repealed the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act</a>, which had been in effect for just one month, bowing to a racist campaign by farming, mining and pastoral interests.
Instead, the 1972 Aboriginal Heritage Act applies, which allows the state government to override heritage concerns due to “public interest”, with traditional owners given no right to review this decision. It was under this Act that Rio Tinto blew up two sites sacred to the Pinti Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples at Juukan Gorge in 2020.
Despite various gestures and phrases about “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, state and federal Labor governments are clearly committed to the fossil fuel industry. The North West Shelf Project is part of the Burrup Hub, a mega fossil fuel project involving facilities on the Burrup Peninsula for processing liquified natural gas taken from offshore gas fields. If completed, the Conservation Council of WA says the Hub will be the most polluting project ever developed in Australia.
Labor is willing to allow the destruction of priceless Indigenous cultural heritage and the further destabilisation of the planet’s climate so that the capitalists in charge of Woodside and other fossil fuel companies can continue to rake in billions in profit. We have to resist this. The Burrup Hub must be stopped.

Danica Rachel

Labor sacrifices Indigenous cultural sites, and the climate, for fossil fuel profits—again

Progressive legislation allowing nurse practitioners and midwives to prescribe medication abortions has passed in the NSW parliament. Yet the debate over these laws illustrated the abject refusal of the Labor Party to challenge proactively the politics of the right.
The new bill, introduced by Greens MP Jenny Leong and MLC Amanda Cohn, was moved as a response to the postcode lottery that is abortion access in NSW. The 2019 legalisation of abortion has done little to make it more accessible in practice. Only three of the state’s 220 public hospitals are currently providing routine, open access to formal abortion services, according to researchers at the University of Sydney. 
A particularly egregious example of the barriers facing NSW women was brought to light by the ABC’s November 2024 investigation into abortion access at the Orange public hospital in regional NSW. Hospital staff were sent a flow chart explicitly banning them from providing abortions where there was “no identified pregnancy complication”. All women seeking abortions for non-medical reasons were to be directed to private providers like GPs or the nearest Family Planning clinic—neither of which provide surgical abortions. Staff reported to the ABC at the time that they believed this was part of an “unspoken ban” on abortion for non-medical reasons due to anti-abortion attitudes “high in the health bureaucracy” of the Western NSW Local Health District. 
The new legislation will help provide wider access by allowing a greater variety of healthcare providers to prescribe medication abortions. But that’s no substitute for widespread, free, on demand access to surgical abortions. Medication abortions are generally prescribed only up to nine weeks of pregnancy—there will inevitably be cases in which people either don’t realise they’re pregnant in time or simply change their minds about continuing a pregnancy. 
The Greens’ original draft of the bill acknowledged this and included other measures to boost abortion access. The two most important were a requirement for local health districts to ensure that public abortion is accessible to everyone in NSW within a reasonable distance of their homes, and stricter obligations for “conscientious objector” doctors to transfer patients directly to a provider who will give them an abortion. These measures were stripped out of the bill by Labor and Liberal MLCs backing up amendments moved by right-wing crank Rob Borsak of the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers. 
Of course, this still wasn’t enough for the anti-abortion right, who mounted a repulsive sexist campaign against the bill. Leading the charge was Tony Abbott, who had the backing of all the usual suspects: the Catholic Church, alongside other ideologues from the religious and secular far right. But the campaign drew attention because of the addition of far-right “anti-abortion influencer” and Labor member Dr Joanna Howe, whose self-proclaimed goal is to “make abortion unthinkable”. 
It can seem as though abortion is a settled question in Australian politics. Polling repeatedly finds that a strong majority of people support unconditional abortion access. Attempts to wind back abortion rights are unpopular, as illustrated by the desperation with which Liberal leaders like Dutton and Queensland Premier David Crisafulli ducked the question during recent election campaigns.
But unpopularity has not deterred the right from campaigning stridently to chip away at abortion rights whenever they get the opportunity. As the US illustrates, we cannot be complacent about gains for progressive politics. They must be vigorously defended and strengthened in the fight against a right that show no signs of giving up on their reactionary agenda.
Many in parliament and the media decried the campaign against the bill as an attempt to bring Trump-style politics to Australia. It’s true that Trump has given a fillip of confidence, and something of a political role model, to many far-right ideologues. But sexist, anti-abortion politics and the religious right have a longstanding political home in Australian politics, not only on the fringes, but also in the mainstream parties of capitalist rule.
Labor’s pandering to the religious right is particularly shameful. Labor has a tradition of allowing a conscience vote on laws relating to abortion, meaning parliamentarians are not bound to vote with the official party position. This policy only legitimates anti-abortion politics as a spiritual belief that is above political challenge, rather than what it is: run-of-the-mill bigotry. No comparable exception exists for left-wing opposition to Labor’s line on morally pressing questions like the plight of refugees or Australia’s complicity in the war on Gaza—as Senator Fatima Payman found out just last year. Bigoted and sexist ideas can be tolerated because, unlike left-wing opposition, they do little to disrupt Labor’s enthusiastic commitment to ruling for the rich. 
Labor parliamentarians not only worked with the right-wing parties to strip the bill of important measures; even when the bill passed the lower house in this reduced form, five Labor MPs voted against it. 
Why does hard social conservatism have such a safe home in the Labor Party? In part, it’s about electoral opportunism. In certain conservative electorates, pandering to right-wing religious institutions by parroting their regressive social politics can help win votes. But it’s also about the political weight conservative religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, enjoy in Australian capitalism. The Catholic Church on its own is a massive, wealthy landowning institution, a bastion of conservative politics, and runs a vast network of private schools, hospitals, shelters and charities that function (poorly) to patch holes in the social safety net that Labor and Liberal have taken turns defunding and neglecting. 
In the case of the NSW abortion laws, there has been an unholy coalescence of Labor’s internal anti-abortion right with the party’s unanimous, bland, neoliberal unwillingness to spend on making public health care better for ordinary people. Just as despicable as the open bigotry of Labor parliamentarians like Greg Donnelly were the cynical speeches made by the likes of Penny Sharpe, who claimed “[Labor] realise there are issues for women” in accessing abortion, while at the same justifying her vote to strip the bill of its strongest provisions on the basis that cancer and heart attack treatment are not also mandated in legislation.
In the wake of a federal election result that Labor are trying to sell as the victory of the “sensible centre” over “extremism”, we would do well to draw the lesson that Labor governments are no bulwark against the bigoted politics of the right. Indeed, on questions like abortion, the call is coming from inside the house.

Eddie Stephenson

Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right

With few exceptions, Liberal Party federal parliamentary representation is now restricted to regional and rural seats removed from the centres of political and financial power it once dominated. 
For the Liberals to lose their traditional blue-ribbon seats in wealthy areas of Sydney and Melbourne in two successive elections is significant not just because of the loss of votes on the floor of the House but also because of the role these electorates have traditionally played in the internal life of the party. 
Branches in these electorates have a long history of training activists and leaders, making connections with business executives and senior state functionaries, fostering relationships with deep-pocketed donors and contributing to the party’s image a meeting place for the country’s elites.
The Liberal Party has historically been the preferred party of the capitalists, who have been important financial contributors and at times run serious campaigns on its behalf. Currently, though, the capitalists and their representatives are despairing of the Liberals. 
In part, that’s because the Liberals have now lost two federal elections and could be out of power until the 2030s. But it’s also because, through his attempt to create a right-wing populist constituency, former leader Peter Dutton advocated a shift away from the “free-market” policies beloved by business. 
Dutton’s nuclear power program would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds, a white elephant in the eyes of capitalists who can access much cheaper sources of energy and who were happy to let private investors decide if nuclear power had a future in Australia. 
Dutton’s pitch to regulate or even break up supermarkets, insurance companies and Bunnings and to introduce a gas reservation policy appalled the likes of the Business Council as outrageous infringements on big capitalists. 
Dutton backed away from his initial commitment to press ahead with the original highly regressive stage three income tax cuts if he won office and very soon learned to love what he initially called Labor’s “cost-of-living sugar hits”. 
This was a far cry from 2014, when Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey delivered a budget written by Business Council of Australia, which threatened a wholesale attack on social welfare and a huge redistribution of income to business and the rich. 
Since the defeat of the 2014 budget, coming on top of the defeat of the Howard government’s anti-worker WorkChoices industrial relations laws, the Liberals have not been game to try such a full-frontal offensive against the working class again. 
For this, they have been slammed by pro-business partisans and capitalists. During and after the election, business mouthpiece the Australian Financial Review ran a string of comment pieces blasting the Liberals for running economic policies that were “Labor Lite”, “defied basic liberal economic principles” and were a “mix of economic populism and socialism” that “bowed to an insidious entitlement culture”. 
The Financial Review’s attacks are echoed by the Business Council and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. They want a fresh wave of “economic reform” involving income and corporate tax cuts, “workplace reform” (i.e. reductions to minimum wages, awards and worker protections), public asset sell-offs, a reduction in “reckless” public spending on things that benefit workers and the poor and the winding back of industry regulations. 
The goal, these business lobbyists say, is to increase “productivity”. What that means in practice is fewer restrictions on the capitalists’ ability to rip off the working class, fatten their profit margins and improve their ability to undercut competitors.
Yet, presumably, one of the reasons that the capitalists have complained but not intervened to discipline their party is because they have generally done well financially under governments of all stripes. The profits share of national income has increased decade after decade, the economy has expanded almost uninterruptedly since the early 1990s, Labor has governed in the capitalists’ interests and, thanks to the trade union leaders, strikes have been at historic lows. So the bosses have not needed special laws to screw the working class; they have just been getting on and doing it in the absence of much resistance.
Business may have tolerated the Liberals’ failure to mount a more aggressive attack on workers and to preside over a new wave of pro-capitalist “reform”, but they don’t like it. The Australian economy may have steadily expanded, but in recent times, growth has tanked and relied entirely on immigration. Capital investment is low, public debt is rising, even if it is lower than elsewhere, and “productivity” is stagnant. These are all alarm signals for the capitalists—and they want a party that can tackle these head on, at the expense of the working class.
Since the Liberals lost the election, the bosses must, perforce, lobby the Albanese government to squeeze the working class and cut taxes on business and the well-off. We cannot trust the ALP to resist these demands, 
While Labor rules for the rich, the capitalists are never satisfied. They want a government run by their own people to rule the country in their interests; they want their party back. Similarly, we need a party to fight for our interests.

Tom Bramble

The Liberal Party in crisis

For the second time, in spite of notoriously censorious defamation laws, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, has been confirmed to be a war criminal. After spectacularly losing a defamation case against Fairfax Media’s Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe in 2023, Roberts-Smith’s appeal, heard by a full bench of the Federal Court, went down in flames on 19 May. 
Central to the case was claims, now upheld twice to be substantially true, that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes during Australia’s occupation of Afghanistan. These crimes included kicking a man off a cliff and directing soldiers under his command to shoot him; murdering another man and encouraging other soldiers to drink alcohol from his prosthetic leg; and multiple instances of directing other soldiers to kill unarmed people.
In his repeated attempts to clear his name and punish his accusers for telling the truth, Roberts-Smith has succeeded only in proving more convincingly that he is, indeed, a war criminal. His arrogance is almost comical. He presents as a man who believes that he is untouchable. 
In 2021, Roberts-Smith fronted a court to explain why he had petrol-bombed hard drives in his backyard in 2018. This was after McKenzie broke the story that he was being investigated by the Australian Federal Police for war crimes. Roberts-Smith explained: “If you don’t get rid of a hard drive, all of the data on the hard drive ... can typically be pulled off it”. Indeed. These were the actions he was trying to paint as those of an innocent man.
At the time of the original defamation case, barrister Bruce McClintock deployed a foolproof defence in the mould of another war criminal, Bill Clinton: “My client did not drink from the leg”. Unfortunately for Ben Roberts-Smith, video footage has recently emerged which shows that he did, in fact, drink from the leg.
It doesn’t take a lot of digging to work out where Roberts-Smith’s self-righteous arrogance comes from. He likely believed he could get out of trouble, like so many private school boys before him, simply by asking the question “Do you know who my father is!?” His own dear papa being, of course, a former Supreme Court justice in Western Australia. 
He is also backed by a who’s who of Australia’s rich scumbags, from Seven Media’s Kerry Stokes—who funded Roberts-Smith’s original defamation case to the tune of $30 million and gave him an upper management job—through to MAGA mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who has sprung to his defence in recent weeks.
He expected the establishment to defend him. He assumed, not without reason, that anything goes in the pursuit of Western interests in the Middle East—that a culture of impunity is an important part of hyping up soldiers to commit the sort of atrocities that are part and parcel of carrying out military campaigns. Australia’s most decorated soldier has become a symbol of the hubris of an empire which gave itself the right to kill not just four innocent Afghans, but thousands upon thousands in the course of a nihilistic 20-year slaughter and occupation. 
If that wasn’t enough, Roberts-Smith is ostentatiously remorseless. In 2023, he posed for a photo at a beach club in Bali alongside Zachary Rolfe, the still-serving Queensland police officer who shot dead Aboriginal man Kumanjayi Walker in the remote Northern Territory town of Yuendumu in 2019. In the comments, Rolfe mockingly wrote “Just a couple of cops/murderers and war criminals Havin a lovely afternoon in the sun”.
Satisfying as it is to see Roberts-Smith lose again, the reality is that he is walking away with a slap on the wrist. Despite twice being found, on the balance of probabilities, to have committed war crimes, he is not rotting in a cell, nor lying dead at the bottom of a cliff like one of his victims. Instead, he continues to wear his Victoria Cross—Australia’s highest military decoration—proudly on his chest. He was spotted doing so only a month ago, at Perth’s ANZAC Day dawn service. 
His uniform continues to be displayed in Canberra’s War Memorial, alongside a story of his award-winning “gallantry” in Afghanistan. Only now, it has a mealy-mouthed disclaimer: “In June 2023 a Federal Court judge determined that there was ‘substantial truth’ to the allegations that Roberts-Smith had been involved and complicit in unlawful killings in Afghanistan”. It goes on to remind us, “Roberts-Smith has appealed this decision. Roberts-Smith has not been charged with any offence under criminal law”. 
The Brereton report, which was commissioned in response to news of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan surfacing, has been similarly toothless. Despite finding evidence of 39 “unlawful killings” perpetrated or participated in by 25 special forces soldiers, not one has been convicted of a crime. Only one, former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, has faced charges. Naturally, the report stopped short entirely of laying any blame at the feet of the generals and ministers who were ultimately responsible for the war. 
By contrast, former army lawyer David McBride, who leaked documents about the conduct of Australian troops in Afghanistan to the ABC in 2016, languishes in prison, serving a five-year sentence. Like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning before him, for the simple crime of telling the truth, McBride has faced far harsher consequences than any of the murderers in the ranks of the Australian army. 
Astoundingly, Roberts-Smith has indicated he will be launching a second appeal, this time to the High Court, presumably bankrolled by Gina Rinehart. Despite all the legal professionals who have so far deemed him a war criminal, he obviously thinks there is a chance of winning and getting revenge on those who dared bring his crimes to light. 
Real justice won’t be served until Roberts-Smith, and every murderous general, politician and media baron who enabled and decorated him, is locked up.

Jack Mansell

Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal

Every day we are bombarded with messages that degrade women. Sexualised images of women are used to attract attention to advertising, news stories, social media accounts, pop culture, TV shows and pretty much anything else you can possibly imagine. You only have to think of Bianca Censori attending the Grammys as Kanye West’s virtually naked accessory to appreciate how ingrained into celebrity culture the objectification of women is. Meanwhile, the spread and mainstreaming of horrifically sexist pornography and the sex industry is normalising violent sexual practices and the dehumanisation of women.
So imagine an artist is given a whole wall to make a statement, free from corporate influence, and the thing they choose to do is to add yet another demeaning, objectifying image of women to the world. This is exactly what happened in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, where a mural was recently installed depicting a bound and gagged female body in stilettos, a studded dog collar and cat ears. Rightly, the mural has been denounced by anti-violence group Collective Shout as “a chilling image of eroticised violence against women”. Many members of the public have likewise registered their outrage in emails to the council. And fair enough—are women entitled to no relief from this unrelenting reminder that we only have value when we’re being debased for the pleasure of someone else? 
The artist responsible for the mural, Los Angeles-based Lauren YS, responded to the criticism by saying that “anyone imposing negative narratives onto it is incorrectly assuming its meaning”. They claim it is a piece about “empowerment and queer selfhood”. A local man speaking to the ABC defended the work on the basis that it is “representing a culture that a lot of people don’t know about, shibari (Japanese rope bondage) is a beautiful art-form that brings intimacy in people”. Apparently, violence against women, when it is a reference to Japanese culture or a form of queer expression, is different to other misogynistic images. But why? If Andrew Tate were to claim that his interest in abusing women was a queer fetish with allusions to feudal customs would that make it ok? 
The refusal to engage with the idea that the mural might be sexist even extended to progressive Yarra mayor Steve Jolly. When asked about it, Jolly chose not to comment on the content of the image, citing his main concern as the potential breach of council by-laws. 
Most of the media reporting about the mural has focussed on its location on a public street where children might see it, and the appropriateness of exposing children to sexually explicit content. But this misses the point. Whether its children or adults exposed to it, the problem is the acceptance of the dehumanisation of women as legitimate sexual activity, in the context of a society in which women are oppressed and already subject to unacceptably high levels of violence, often deadly violence. How can we wring our hands at every news report of another woman killed by a man at the same time as every conceivable available space is saturated with images that erotise such violence to make money and, even worse, elevate it to art? 
There is no denying the connection between the demeaning portrayal of women in advertising, pop-culture and pornography and abuse in the real world. A 2023 report by a French equality watchdog found that 90 percent of online pornography <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/27/online-pornography-breaks-french-law-equality-watchdog-france" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">involved verbal, physical and sexual violence against women</a>. Higher levels of consumption of porn correlate with men holding <a href="https://cdn.jss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/05144735/The-Man-Box-2024-7.1-LR.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">more derogatory attitudes towards women</a>. Acts like choking, commonly depicted in porn, have become more mainstream with 61 percent of women, and 79 percent of trans and gender diverse people aged 18 to 35 <a href="https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/4978840/Sharman,-Fitzgerald-Douglas-2024.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reporting that they have been strangled during sex</a>. Sexual assault is also increasing among young people, <a href="https://www.anglicare-tas.org.au/young-in-love-and-in-danger/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">with 28 percent of men between 18 and 30</a> reporting using at least one form of physical or sexual violence against a partner. And, abhorrently, sexist attitudes among young men <a href="https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/july/radical-anti-feminism-the-most-prevalent-form-of-violent-extremism-in-australia,-report-finds" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">are on the rise</a>. 
Too often today, objections to sexist objectification and the normalisation of porn are dismissed as prudery, and support for it sold as “sex positivity”. But objecting to demeaning portrayals of women is not anti-sex. Sex is not synonymous with degrading other people. That young women and queer people are today exhorted to release their inner porn star, love kink and BDSM, and even see violence against (almost always) female bodies as “empowering” does not make these practices liberating. Rather, it is a victory for the sex and pornography industries, which are the main beneficiaries of the mainstreaming of violent or non-consensual sex as pleasurable. 
The acceptance of depictions of violence when they are sexualised points to a glaring cultural hypocrisy. If this mural had glamorised a woman being violently restrained in a police cell or lying unconscious on the kitchen floor after being assaulted by her partner, or being stalked by an ex, it would not have been seen as progressive or appropriate for public display. Similarly, if the figure in the mural had been a man, the meaning of the mural would be completely different. This double standard is a product of sexism—violence is not ok, unless it’s for someone’s sexual gratification and is being directed at a woman. 
Anti-sexists have a responsibility to resist this and to stand up for a world in which human interactions are first and foremost about equality and mutual respect, not degradation and dehumanisation. When I first got involved with activism, feminists and leftists would never have embraced such filth. Women have for a long time been subjected to demeaning stereotypes in popular culture. These things used to be met with hostile eye rolling, culture jamming or protest. Today, it is self-described activists and leftists who are embracing sexist symbols and tropes, or refusing to criticise them on an anti-sexist basis. Those of us who want to see a world of genuine liberation need to stand against this reactionary tide, to assert our right to be socially equal and sexually free.

Sarah Garnham

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

In light of the positive results for Victorian Socialists (VS) in the federal election and the significant momentum the party has gained, the VS executive on 11 May decided to expand the project across the rest of Australia. 
Year after year and decade after decade, the wealth of the richest few has soared while millions struggle daily just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The trend of increasing inequality has continued whether Labor or the Coalition has been in power. 
Last year, the collective wealth of Australia’s 47 billionaires—people like Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer—increased by $28 billion. That works out to $67,000 per billionaire, per hour. A 2023 report by the Australia Institute, Inequality on Steroids: The Distribution of Economic Growth in Australia, found that in the decade from 2009 to 2019, the top 10 percent of income earners received 93 percent of the benefits of economic growth.
The evidence of this growing inequality is everywhere. We see it in the decades-long housing boom in which those with money to spend have enjoyed massive wealth gains from buying and selling property, while increasing numbers are consigned to a lifetime of housing insecurity and many to homelessness.
We see it the mega-profits of big banks, fossil fuel companies and other big corporations that often pay no or very little tax, at the same time as politicians claim there’s not enough money to properly fund public housing, health care, welfare and other essential public services.
The Labor Party has shown no interest in changing this. Labor politicians have spent much of the time since the election attacking the Greens—the one mainstream party that did offer something in the way of a left alternative to aspects of the status quo.
There’s a class war going on, but Labor is waging it against workers and the poor on behalf of the capitalist class and the rich. And part of the thing that has made them so effective at that is the sense, consciously fostered by politicians, the media, the education system and all the other instruments of ruling-class ideology, that there is no alternative.
The Victorian Socialists was established in 2018 as an attempt to push back against that, and to force open a space for the politics of rage, hope and resistance (as Jerome Small aptly puts it on page 8 of this issue)—the politics of socialism—in an otherwise barren political landscape.
Every election we’ve contested since then has seen us take another step forward. In this federal election we gained a vote share of 15 to 20 percent on individual booths in both inner urban areas like Footscray and Thornbury and more working-class areas in outer suburbs like Epping and Campbellfield.
Where socialists can run a decent campaign, we can gain a hearing and often even win people away from voting for the faux anti-establishment parties of the far right. And there’s no reason, given the shared political context, that this would be any different in other parts of Australia.
Join the Socialists in your state today and help us rebuild socialism as a living, breathing, organising and fighting movement in Australian political life—one that can shake up the rotten status quo of capitalism and finally start to win real change.
If you’ve been following VS’s growth as a small but serious force on the left of politics in Victoria, and would like to be part of replicating that in your state or territory, then sign up as a member today by following the QR code link below.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists’ communications manager.

James Plested

Expanding the Victorian Socialists project

The Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s flagship policy to address the housing crisis, described by Housing Minister Julie Collins as “life-changing legislation that will help generations of Australians”, has not resulted in a single home being built in the nearly two years since it was passed. This was revealed in Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February, when Labor’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tried to claim that the HAFF had “completed” 340 new homes (already a derisory number). She was quickly forced to admit that these were existing properties that had been acquired. 
From the beginning, the HAFF was a fig leaf to hide Labor’s inaction on the housing crisis. What was touted as a $10 billion boost to housing was actually an investment fund, with the money gambled on the stock market and a maximum of $500 million in returns to be spent on housing each year. Labor claimed the HAFF would build 30,000 “social” and “affordable” houses over five years, but <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/05/19/housing-australia-future-fund-10-billion-welfare/">reporting by Crikey</a> showed that it would construct around 14,000 properties at best. With 122,000 people homeless, 172,000 on the social housing waitlists and thousands more people being pushed into housing insecurity each year, the HAFF was only ever going to help a tiny number of people to afford a home.
Two years on and the HAFF hasn’t helped anyone. Anglicare’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot reported that affordability has crashed to record lows. Buying a home is more out of reach than ever: you’d need an income of more than $275,000 a year to get a mortgage for a median-priced house in Sydney, according to a SQM Research report. As this article is being written, Queensland police are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/08/police-rangers-and-excavators-move-in-to-brisbane-parks-as-tent-city-residents-face-eviction">clearing a “tent city”</a> of the homeless in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park. Where these people are supposed to go is anyone’s guess. 
The Liberals have blamed the HAFF’s failure on government bureaucracy and red tape, but this is cynical rubbish coming from a party whose idea of “red tape” is a planning control requiring windows in an apartment or paying construction workers the minimum wage. The Liberals’ real objection to the HAFF is that they don’t think the government should even pretend to be building affordable housing. They’d prefer to dispense with the fig leaf and openly shovel public money into the pockets of the developers and let the market rip. 
The HAFF hasn’t resulted in any properties being built because almost none of the money was ever intended to go directly into the construction of affordable homes. The HAFF is a <a href="https://www.housingaustralia.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/HAFFF%20NHAF%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20Developers%2C%20Builders%2C%20Financiers%20and%20Investors.pdf">financial instrument</a> that gives concessional loans and subsidies to private developers who partner with community housing providers. In other words, it’s a handout to big corporations, which can get cheaper debt to build for-profit developments in return for providing a small number of “social” or “affordable” properties. The government has no control over when the homes are built, or whether they are built at all. Instead, it’s up to developers, whose sole concern is maximising their profits. If the market looks good, then maybe they’ll build, but if not, they’ll wait and build nothing, as we’ve seen for the past two years. 
The HAFF is a failure. If the government’s priority was building affordable homes rather than underwriting corporate profits, there are straightforward measures it could implement now to tackle the crisis. It could spend $10 billion (or more) directly on housing, rather than gambling it on the stock market and drip-feeding the returns. It could establish a public builder to construct new homes, rather than holding itself hostage to the market and developers’ profits. And it could keep the properties as public housing, not hand them off as “social housing” to external providers. 
In the wake of Labor’s election win, Albanese has told the Greens and anyone who cares about housing justice to “get out of our way on housing”. Get out of the way so Labor can do what? Introduce more policies like the HAFF that can’t get a single property built? Give more cash handouts to developers like Build to Rent? Tout more token measures like Help to Buy that drive up house prices? We shouldn’t get out of the way; we should get in the way and fight a Labor government that has made the housing crisis worse.

Leaked: Victorian Labor’s planned anti-protest laws

The far right continues to make gains in Australia

Opposition to super tax only defends the rich

Labor sacrifices Indigenous cultural sites, and the climate, for fossil fuel profits—again

Debates on NSW abortion legislation show Labor won’t fight the right

The Liberal Party in crisis

Ben Roberts-Smith reminds us he is a war criminal

There is nothing edgy about turning violence against women into art

Expanding the Victorian Socialists project

A HAFF is not a home

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