There’s an obvious wealth divide in Australia. Drive through or use Google street view to peruse Perth’s Cottesloe, Melbourne’s Toorak or Sydney’s Darling Point. You will find no shortage of decadent mansions worth more than any working-class person will likely make in their entire life. Walk through any capital city CBD. You’ll see flashy shops selling luxury items to the richest few alongside desperate people begging for loose change.
The <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/04/wealth-gap-widening-new-report-acoss">Inequality in Australia 2024</a> report, published in April by the Australian Council of Social Service and the University of New South Wales, estimates that the richest 10 percent of households have on average fifteen times as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent. Almost half of Australia’s wealth is concentrated in the top decile, and less than a fifth in the bottom six.
Home ownership, or lack thereof, is the biggest contributor to the wealth gap. This is unsurprising, given that many working-class people find it difficult to find an affordable home to rent, let alone buy. And when they do rent, they’re probably paying that top 10 percent, who own (or rather, hoard) two-thirds of all investment properties by value.
Workers who do own their home are usually still paying off the mortgage, and are therefore subject to the whims of the banks that set their interest rates. Being squeezed for cash by the banks via home loan repayments is not a problem if you own your home outright and are adding a second, third, fourth, or fifth property to your portfolio.
Inequality in Australia 2024 compares household wealth in 2023 to 2003. To put the findings bluntly: the rich are getting richer while most Australians are falling further behind them. Since 2003, the top 10 percent accrued almost half of the overall growth in household wealth. Their average wealth went from $2.8 million to $5.2 million per household, an increase of 84 percent. The bottom 60 percent went from an average of $222,000 to $343,000—a 55 percent increase.
Why is wealth accumulating at the top? One part of the problem is government policy that favours the rich.
Negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount are the most notorious housing policies. The latter was introduced by John Howard’s federal Liberal government in 2000, but every subsequent government, Coalition and Labor alike, has defended them.
Negative gearing lets investors deduct any losses on properties they own (including interest payments on property loans) from their taxable income. This subsidises investors and shields them from needing to sell their extra houses.
The CGT discount favours the wealthy. It lets investors who profit from capital assets (investment properties are one category) halve the amount of tax paid on that profit if they hold the asset for twelve months or more. By the Treasury’s own estimates, this left more than $23 billion in the coffers of property investors in the 2022-23 financial year instead of in public hands, where it could have been used to boost social welfare or—here’s an idea—build public housing.
Both of these policies primarily benefit landlords, especially big landlords. They make it less risky and more lucrative for investors to speculate on the housing market. They create an incentive to accumulate properties and endlessly push up house prices, driving the wedge between the wealthy and the rest of us ever deeper.
Scrapping negative gearing and the CGT discount would slow down the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority and alleviate the housing crisis. Even better would be forcing landlords to sell homes that are vacant for too long. But none of this is likely when parliament is full of landlords. That includes PM Anthony Albanese, who this year evicted a tenant from one of his several properties so he could sell it and put the money toward the $4.3 million mansion he bought in October.
Beyond real estate, other factors in wealth inequality include savings, superannuation, and assets like cars. These are all obviously heavily dependent on a household’s income level and necessary expenditures like rent and mortgage repayments.
To address this area of inequality, the simplest solution is a real wage rise for workers. In 2021 inflation exploded ahead of average pay rises. The Consumer Price Index (CPI, how much more expensive basic goods are than a year prior) peaked at just under 8 percent at the end of 2022, while wages were growing by 3.4 percent on average, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Only this year did wages start rising more than CPI, and then only barely. 
So Australian workers have been set back by years of real pay cuts. But the Labor government doesn’t seem at all interested in doing anything to get them caught back up to where they were, let alone substantially ahead. Many of their “cost-of-living relief” policies don’t do anything about inequality. For instance, the Stage 3 tax cuts gave all taxpayers an income boost, including the rich, who gained the most.
It’s not as though Albanese’s hands are tied. His government could raise welfare payments to the minimum wage and wipe out student debt. It could give public sector workers enough of a pay rise to make up for years of declining wages, which would put pressure on private employers to do the same.
It could pay for all this by taxing the living daylight out of the rich. Undoing the Stage 3 cuts for the top earners would give the budget $148 billion extra to work with over the next ten years—turning the dial back the other way and increasing their taxes would net even more.
If we wait around for governments to be nicer, nothing will ever get better. Things meaningfully improve only when the fucked-over fight back. And the most powerful force in this category is the working class.
Workers can strike to demand higher wages. By refusing to work, they hit their boss in the only place the boss cares about: the bottom line. The recent strikes by workers at Woolworths distribution warehouses should be defended and celebrated as the path forward for winning better pay and conditions.
But as powerful as they are, strikes are rare. The leaders of the trade unions, the highest body of which is the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), have, for the most part, collaborated with governments and bosses, rather than fighting them, for decades. 
Any discussion about the working class’s declining living standards has to account for the failures of its organised leadership. Concessions can be forced, and bad policies overturned, but it takes a fight. Instead, this year, the ACTU has been helping and justifying the government’s hostile, undemocratic takeover and hamstringing of the CFMEU, one of Australia’s strongest unions.
But the main reason there’s a wealth divide in Australia is not government policy or the weakness of the trade union movement.
The main cause of inequality is capitalism itself. Capitalism is based on a tiny minority of the population owning and controlling society’s productive economic assets. Most of the rest of the population have to work for the capitalists, making their profits for them and getting paid relative scraps in return.
In capitalism, everything is commodified and organised via the market—including housing. For capitalism, houses exist primarily, not for living in, but for making money from. The housing market being rigged for landlords isn’t just because of negative gearing and the CGT discount. That housing is bought and sold on a market means it will always favour those with the most economic resources.
In a society organised around profit, workers will never get a fair deal. Every cent of profit the bosses keep for themselves is in effect stolen from the people who actually did the work. So, if we want an equal society without poverty and destitution, we need to end capitalism.

Danica Rachel

Why do so few have so much wealth?

The annual hysterics about a “war on Christmas” is a tradition almost as sacred as the Boxing Day shopping spree. This year, before we even broke December, Australian media, politicians and big business had the finger pointed at pro-Palestine activists and striking Woolworths warehouse workers.
Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan was “furious” at “morons” for “politicising Christmas”, telling <a>3AW radio on 15 November</a> that “we cannot let ugly protests ruin a beautiful Christmas tradition”, after a handful of Palestine solidarity protesters announced plans to disrupt the annual unveiling of Myers’ Christmas-themed storefront displays in Melbourne.
In the end, only a dozen gathered to protest on 17 November. Yet word somehow reached the British Isles, the UK tabloid Daily Mail
running a headline just long enough to convey the enormity of the crime: “Shocking moment 70-year Christmas tradition is interrupted as clown-faced protester leads disgraceful demonstration in front of iconic display in Melbourne—ruining the fun for families”.
Next were the unionised Woolworths warehouse workers. On 14 November, the Sydney Morning Herald began warning of the <a>“Strike threat to Christmas liquor supplies in NSW and Victoria”</a> as the United Workers Union prepared for an indefinite shutdown of five Woolies warehouses.
The Australian Industry Group (AIG), a national association of employers, came out swinging for all the little boys and girls on the verge of Tiny Tim-dom. “Stop holding Australian families to ransom”, pleaded AIG chief executive Innes Wilcox. “[They] are struggling through soaring costs of living and trying to provide a happy Christmas for their loved ones. This is the last thing they need after a stressful year.”
The establishment is up in arms over all this unbridled Grinchian bloodlust. Interrupting grocery store super-profits, obstructing retail chain dioramas: What hallowed holiday custom will these godless, tinsel-burning leftie ferals target next? Will climate activists pinprick Big W’s stock of inflatable Santas-in-boardshorts (<a>$99.99 a pop</a>) and officially kill Christmas?
The pages of Red Flag might be an unusual place to stand up for the right to enjoy a bloody good Christmas season. But permit this socialist rag to ask: Who’s really ruining the festive season?
Stock is quickly returning to Woolworths shelves after the conclusion of a heroic seventeen-day strike. Yet who can afford any of it? <a>Comprehensive research</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for its inquiry into supermarket price gouging calculated a 20 percent spike in grocery prices since 2019. The result is that 56 percent of the population plan to cut back on Christmas food and drink this year, with 48 percent buying fewer gifts, according to <a>a November survey</a> by the Salvation Army.
“Cossie livs” (slang for cost-of-living) Christmas, already last year’s theme, is set to get much worse as price hikes and the housing crisis churn on. Consumers plan to spend 16 percent less on gifts, decorations, travel and leisure over this holiday period than last—a drop to $1,002 from $1,192, according to <a>Deloitte’s Retail Holiday Report 2024. </a>
It’s the opposite story for company executives and shareholders. SANTA (Stopping At Nothing To Accumulate) has been very good to them this year. “Australian families struggling through the cost of living” has meant record super-profits for everyone over at the Australian Industry Group.
Take Woolworths. New CEO Amanda Bardwell has snatched a starting salary of <a>$2.15 million this year</a>, with up to $6.9m in possible bonuses. This would outstrip disgraced ex-CEO Brad “<a>Can’t Get Throughcci One Interviewcci</a>“ Banducci’s total take home pay of $8.6m for 2023. That’s equivalent to almost 150,000 Christmas lunches, based on an average cost of $62 per person calculated by YouGov. 
In fact, the company’s record profits last financial year—an eye-boiling $1.7 billion—could buy a sumptuous meal for every single person in the country. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army’s survey found that half of those forced to access charity over the holiday period will be doing so for the first time. A Perth-based community food program called Backpack Buddies, which provides children in need with food for school, <a>told the ABC</a> in late November that demand has risen “from a handful of children at the start of this year to 135 each week”, and predicted being totally overwhelmed come Christmas.
At least we can all enjoy time spent with our families, right? Wrong. To make up for lost cash, a record 7 million people, or 57 percent of the working population, intend to <a>work through Christmas</a> to make ends meet. According to survey data by jobs listing provider Indeed, this is the first time that 5 million of them have ever considered it. It sounds like, to quote AIG again, the “last thing they need after a stressful year”. But Indeed career expert Sally McKibbin told Sky News it’s “positive news” that so many workers are hustling all the way to December 31 to “weather cost-of-living pressures”.
For the rich, every day is Christmas. For a growing number of workers, Christmas is starting to look like any other day.
That is, if you can get the work. Reserve Bank governor Michelle Bullock has told the country interest rates will remain high over Christmas, until the number of unemployed increases by at least another 75,000. ’Tis the season to be jobless.
“If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population”, Bullock said in a 28 November address. Apologies: I have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol open next to the newspaper. That was Ebenezer Scrooge, not Michelle Bullock. She <a>put it more politely</a>: “Conditions in the labour market remain tighter than what would be consistent with low and stable inflation”.
Looks like everyone who doesn’t exploit another for a living is on the naughty list this year. What surprise will the bosses put in your stocking? A real wage cut? An extra shift on Christmas Day? Or maybe redundancy?
Just don’t expect the traditional lump of coal: they need to burn all that. The federal Labor government on 3 December refused a legal request to consider the climate impacts of three new mines, giving the green light to about 850 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions from the Boggabri, Caval Ridge and Lake Vermont projects, and providing an <a>early Christmas present</a> to the coal companies. It just wouldn’t be a 2020s Christmas without the risk of bushfire Armageddon.
If you’re thinking of cooling off from the record-breaking heat, just be careful where you swim. In an unprecedented move to stop kayak-borne protesters blocking ships to and from the world’s largest coal port, NSW Labor went so far as to impose <a>a four-day exclusion zone</a> around Newcastle harbour in late November, threatening fines and arrests for even setting foot in the water. This Boxing Day dip, ensure no-one nearby is trying to make the world a better place: it might be illegal to paddle there if you aren’t a gigantic coal-bearing SS Grinch.
It could be worse; you could be a little baby born in Bethlehem. None of our Christmas crusaders seem to care about a literal war on the scriptural birthplace of Jesus Christ: surrounded by an apartheid wall and facing down violent settlers <a>accelerating their land theft</a> under cover of an ever expanding genocide. Just last month, Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas at young Palestinian schoolgirls in a village adjoining Bethlehem. “Israeli soldiers hurled the <a>toxic gas canisters</a>
directly as the students entered the school grounds, causing them to experience suffocation and breathing difficulties”, a 17 November report from Middle East news website The New Arab reads. 
Yet for Labor Party leaders, calling attention to the crimes of an ironclad Australian ally is ruining the true meaning of Christmas: gawking at tacky window dioramas of upmarket retail chains. “[They’re] more distressed about Christmas windows than about stopping Israel’s genocide and its war on Palestinian children”, said Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
While millions struggle to eat, drink and be merry—or even just stay alive—this Christmas, be thankful that the strikes are over, the protests are repressed, and the mahogany tables of our betters can once more groan under the weight of champagne, cocaine and caviar. 
If you’re lucky, you might get 31 December off to see in a New Year of price hikes, wage cuts, job losses and record quarterly profits. The Grinch will be gone by then, but Australia’s bosses and their lackeys will be watching the fireworks from helicopters and superyachts, plotting to steal another whole year through.

April Holcombe

How the rich stole Christmas

This year has experienced the largest campus mobilisations for Palestine in Australian history. Thousands of students have marched, walked out of class, organised occupations and taken part in mass meetings to demand an end to the horrors we’re witnessing in Gaza. 
We attend classes at universities with direct links to companies profiting from genocide. At times this fact confronts us starkly, for instance University of Queensland students who might, between classes, wander past the Boeing Research and Technology Centre—run by one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and a major supplier to Israel. Elsewhere, complicity comes in the form of hidden partnerships and investment portfolios. All of this has sparked justified outrage. 
The first major student actions were nationwide walkouts, organised by Students for Palestine. These started in November last year when thousands of high school and university students ditched class to rally in the city. More than 1,000 students occupied Melbourne Central mall, raising Palestinian flags and chanting to demand that the government drop its support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The strikes continued this year in every major city in Australia. Why should students attend class as usual when every school and university in Gaza has been shut down? 
The right-wing media and politicians campaigned vitriolically against us. After the first student strikes, the Daily Telegraph wheeled out a psychologist to tell us that we couldn’t possibly understand what was happening in Gaza: “Young people’s brains aren’t fully developed yet”. The Victorian and NSW premiers told students that if they wanted to understand and change the world, they should stay in school. We didn’t listen. 
Next came the wave of Gaza solidarity encampments. Brave students at Columbia University in New York fought the Biden administration, university management and the police to maintain their encampment. Students for Palestine activists at Sydney University followed suit, pitching tents and sparking a movement that spread across the country. This movement was about the crimes of the Israeli government. But it was also about the crimes of universities that produce the research for weapons companies that arm Israel’s genocide and partner with the Israeli institutions that produce the propaganda required to generate support for it. 
On every campus where an encampment sprung up, there was an outpouring of community support. Fresh meals, snacks and toiletries were never in short supply. But support didn’t come just in the form of provisions. It was also made visible by the many people who mobilised when our camps were under attack. At Monash University, a dozen pro-Israel thugs attacked the camp on the first night. When they returned the next week, 70 supporters turned out to defend the encampment. At Sydney University, a planned pro-Israel rally of 200 right-wingers was met with a Palestine solidarity demonstration of more than 500 people. 
At Deakin University, management demanded that students leave under threat of disciplinary action after only six days. Students held out and kept their encampment going strong until the end of the trimester. At ANU, management called the police on students, who were then surrounded by a human chain of security guards and threatened with mass arrests if they refused to pack up the encampment. Students held an impromptu meeting, deciding to defend their camp and calling out for community support. Solidarity won out—after a long stand-off, the police were forced to retreat. 
The camps sprung up across the world. In Sydney, we woke one morning to find a video of a young boy holding a sign, hand-painted on a piece of cardboard, reading: “Thank you for the students of University of Sydney. Your voice have reached Gaza”.
More university students got involved in the movement for Palestine in semester two, as student general meetings swept the country. Everywhere they happened, hundreds of students turned out to call on their universities to cut ties with weapons companies and Israeli institutions. 
The University of Queensland kicked things off. On the night of the meeting, the registration line stretched across the campus, and by the time the vote was called students had filled two huge lecture theatres. More than 1,500 students voted to support Palestine and demand the university cut ties with the major arms dealer Boeing. When the meeting finished, students marched to the chancellery in what was probably the biggest ever campus demonstration for Palestine. 
Other campuses followed suit. More than 800 students mobilised at Sydney University, and 300 at the University of Western Australia. Two hundred attended at the University of Adelaide despite the right-wing student union’s attempt to stop the meeting altogether. A similarly obstructionist student union leadership couldn’t prevent 600 students from showing up at Melbourne University. On many campuses, students had to defy management’s attempts to stifle organising attempts. At Queensland University of Technology, university administrators called the police, who told activists they would remove from campus anyone who didn’t fit into the official meeting rooms.
The huge numbers at these meetings demonstrated that support for Palestine has grown rapidly over the past year. But we still have a major fight on our hands. 
Universities have cracked down hard on pro-Palestine activism—dozens of students have faced university disciplinary proceedings due to their activism this year. Now, under pressure from the Australian government and Zionist organisations, vice-chancellors are introducing harsh new rules like the campus access policies at Melbourne and Sydney University. These limit free speech on campus by restricting students’ right to organise protests. We now have less freedom of expression at university than we have in the streets. At Sydney University, the recent Hodgkinson External Review, commissioned to determine how to better repress dissent, recommends banning lecture announcements, the displaying of banners and protesting inside. 
The past year has proved that students won’t give up easily. Gaza has shown us the lengths our government and universities will go to shut down opposition to their support for Israel during a genocide. That they feel compelled to repress the student movement shows us that we are having an impact. We won’t stop fighting for Palestine.

Yasmine Johnson

A year of student activism for Palestine

Labor’s push for a “misinformation bill” collapsed last month under pressure from the political right and social media bosses. Labor’s proposed solution to the proliferation of online misinformation was a series of laws that would have given the Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to monitor digital platforms and require them to keep records about misinformation and disinformation on their networks. 
Opposition leader Peter Dutton, who last month called for Palestine solidarity demonstrations to be banned, described the proposed laws as a “scandalous attack on free speech”. Pretence to lofty principle aside, the Liberals were worried that the laws would be used against the right-wing kooks that are a cherished part of their base. The sort of people who, for example, used social media to argue against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal on the basis that a “Yes” victory would lead to “apartheid” and potentially pave the way for the UN to take over Australian land. 
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also found himself in an unwanted conflict with the incoming Trump administration in the US. Trump plans to pass laws prohibiting social media platforms from removing anything other than unlawful content. The right-wing press seized on this clash with glee. For example, Sky News’s Michael Shellenberger described Labor’s bill as a “very unwise and counterproductive act of aggression” against the White House. 
Albanese’s ALP is pathologically incapable of defending any of its policies against the political right or the business lobby when it comes under pressure. Hence, Labor failed to respond to an inquiry that recommended banning gambling advertising: it’s scared of putting even marginal sectors of capital offside. The only group the party seems confident standing up to is the under-16s, who have been banned from social media after an absurd piece of legislation passed the parliament.
Labor’s proposal was also incoherent. It assumed that social media companies would develop their own industry codes and self-regulate, the government bureaucracy stepping in to impose standards only in “exceptional and urgent circumstances” when there was a threat of “serious harm to the community”. This was defined broadly to include interference in electoral and referendum processes, harm to public health, the vilification of particular groups, and imminent harm to the economy or critical infrastructure. 
The bill’s <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id:%252522legislation/ems/r7239_ems_13b01a0b-4684-4e0e-b336-0028d4c0e3cd%252522">explanatory memorandum</a> said it would cover not only verifiably false claims but also “opinions ... commentary and invective”, presumably with the government to decide what constitutes a “false” opinion. This overreach meant the bill also came under criticism from the Greens for being “half-baked” and from the human rights commissioner for posing genuine risks to free speech. 
The proposed legislation was a mess. But the surrounding discussion—which focused on balancing policing responsibilities between social media bosses and state bureaucrats—largely missed the point. Misinformation and disinformation are hard to root out because they are not simply the products of a few basement-dwelling trolls; they are permanent features of capitalist politics. 
For example, conservative political parties promote lies designed to inflame the reactionary fears and delusions of their right-wing base. When right-wingers claimed during the Voice referendum that a “Yes” victory would result in suburban homes being repossessed under Native Title, they were echoing a racist fear campaign initiated by Liberal PM John Howard in 1998. And during the pandemic, Melbourne anti-vax rallies organised by fascists were addressed by Liberal MPs, who lent legitimacy to the notion that COVID-19 was little more than a pretext for Labor Premier Daniel Andres to establish a communist dictatorship. 
These “culture wars” are essential to mobilising a popular base for parties that exist only to represent business interests. Paul Weyrich, a leader of the “new right” that pioneered this strategy in the US 50 years ago, explained: “We talk about issues that people care about, like gun control, abortion, taxes, and crime. Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation”. 
Business interests are often found lurking in the background of these campaigns. Anti-lockdown demonstrators were the rag-tag shock troops for a push led by the Business Council of Australia and other industry groups eager to return to business as usual and let COVID-19 rip, regardless of the health consequences. Fears of increased Native Title claims if Indigenous rights are advanced have been stoked for decades by big farmers and sections of the mining industry to reinforce their control over resources. 
Fact-checking and media regulation do nothing to challenge these politics—they have to be confronted by challenging the reactionary worldview that underpins them. Labor, typically, is unwilling to do this. Instead, it hopes that presenting itself as a party of “adults” committed to facts and reason will be broadly appealing and result in a second term in government—much like the Democrats did in the recent US presidential elections. 
This approach relies on the wide acceptance that the mainstream political establishment represents “sense” and “truth” as opposed to the “loony” right-peddling conspiracy theories of its opponents. The problem for Labor (and the Democrats) is that there is a “truth deficit” on both sides of capitalist politics. It might not be as unhinged, but the political establishment has always relied on lies and misinformation to rule.
For example, millions across the world who have engaged in Palestine solidarity over the past twelve months have seen first-hand how the establishment presents supporters of Israel as victims and paints critics of the war on Gaza as antisemites. In November, international headlines were dominated by an extraordinary piece of fake news along these lines. 
Mainstream politicians—from the German Greens and Australian Labor to the Israeli far right—united to present a picture of antisemitic pogroms in Amsterdam. Foreign Minister Penny Wong posted on social media: “Violence in all its forms is unacceptable. The Antisemitic attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam overnight are abhorrent”. Israeli President Isaac Herzog claimed: “We see with horror this morning, the shocking images and videos that since October 7th, we had hoped never to see again: an antisemitic pogrom currently taking place against Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and Israeli citizens in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands”.
<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/when-a-zionist-riot-is-reported-as-an-antisemitic-pogrom">But there was no pogrom</a>. Within hours, the truth came out. Israeli football fans had gathered to burn a Palestinian flag, destroyed a taxi, chanted, “Let the IDF win, we will fuck the Arabs!” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” After Israeli fans began attacking houses displaying Palestinian flags, members of the community responded to calls on social media to defend themselves, clashing with the Zionists before police intervened. 
In this topsy-turvy world, Israelis marauding around inciting genocide are painted as victims of racism, while local communities defending themselves from violent attacks are smeared as pogromists. 
Politicians and the media establishment will tell far bigger lies than this in the service of upholding their imperialist interests and alliances. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which killed and displaced millions of people, is just one example. 
In 2001, the Republican administration of George W. Bush seized on the disorientation and fear caused by the 11 September terrorist attacks to launch a campaign of regime change in the Middle East. Bush claimed that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein represented an existential threat to the world and possessed weapons of mass destruction: anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. The administration also tried to link Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, insinuating that the Iraqi president was in league with al-Qaeda. The enemy was clear, Bush argued: “States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”.
But Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction, nor did he have anything to do with 9/11. So they cooked up fake intelligence. Grainy satellite photographs of warehouses, bogus testimonials and ominous rumours of imported “aluminium tubes” were reported earnestly by the world’s media as evidence of the existential threat proposed by Saddam, now dubbed the “new Hitler”.
On 3 February 2003, the Washington Post—which purports to be a great defender of democracy and truth—published an article about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” headlined “Irrefutable”. The article stated: “It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses [WMDs]” and claimed that the evidence was “overwhelming ... powerful and irrefutable”. It went on to assert: “Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe”.
Dodgy intelligence prepared by Bush’s allies in Britain’s Labour Party made the false claim that Iraq possessed WMDs that could be deployed against British citizens within 45 minutes . The Sun newspaper ran the hysterical headline “BRITS 45 MINUTES FROM DOOM”. 
These lies were repeated ad-nauseum in the Australian press. The Australian’s Greg Sheridan claimed in August 2002 that Saddam Hussein possessed a vast arsenal of chemical and biological weapons would obtain nuclear weapons in “one or two years”. 
Sheridan’s gushing support for Bush won him proximity to power, which elicited further gushing. Months later, Sheridan reported on the “dizzying week” he spent in the US capital. “It is the heart of Washington, this display of US strength and pride”, he wrote. “It is imperial Rome without the vomitoriums, greater than London was at the height of the empire ... [This] is the known universe, the most formidable agglomeration of pure power we have ever seen.”
The arguments justifying the war rapidly unravelled. Iraq’s WMD arsenal, the pages of the Australian admitted a few months later, had always been a matter of “speculation”. The false claims about the Iraqi WMD arsenal were, two years later, “perhaps the worst American intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor”.
But the damage had been done. A monstrous and murderous eight-year-long occupation was in progress. The cost? The ensuing wave of war and crisis in the Middle East, organised to reinforce American power in the region, is estimated to have taken 4.5 million lives.
“Misinformation” and “fake news” are often portrayed as modern, algorithmically driven scourges. But there is nothing new about either. 
The Australian state was founded on a lie: that the continent British colonists encountered was “terra nullius”—empty land. Invaders, fully aware of the highly organised cooperative Indigenous society, destroyed evidence of it to justify their claim to the land. This heinous legal fiction stood as a defence of genocide for more than two centuries, perpetuated through history books and the education system until it was finally overturned by the Mabo land rights decision in 1992. 
Dishonesty trickles down in capitalist society. The profusion of misinformation, conspiracy theories and fake news on social media is a symptom of a society ruled by liars. When reputable sources package self-serving and malicious lies as “facts”, why wouldn’t far-fetched conspiracy theories seem credible? The people who run society spend inordinate time and energy beating opponents into submission and justifying their exploitative and unequal system. They have no credibility to be the arbiters of fact and fiction.

Luca Tavan

Who’s to blame for ‘misinformation’?

Another year on, and the dismal government of Anthony Albanese has continued to deliver nothing much. Having begun its life with about as much mojo as a koala, the government has spent 2024 as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s yes-man. Albanese’s political strategy resembles a 1-2 combination of Joe Biden and Mike Tyson—rule for the rich, screw your supporters, throw the match and walk away with a $4.3 million mansion. 
Albanese came to power in 2022 on the back of the unpopularity of the dysfunctional Scott Morrison Coalition government. In contrast to the Coalition, which was plagued with infighting, obsessed with culture wars and losing seats to the Teals, Labor presented itself as the “sensible centre”, the “adults in the room”. To the ruling class it promised, in Albanese’s words, an “unashamedly pro-business government”. At the same time, most workers hoped Labor might do something to make life a little easier, and progressives hoped for some sort of progress on climate action.
The Liberal Party was in disarray, but the 2022 election was far from a smashing victory for Labor. The ALP recorded one of its weakest results in history, with a primary vote of just 32 percent. In the years since, Labor’s support has steadily eroded, and the government has become increasingly weak and inclined to run for cover. Dutton, the man whose wife once had to clarify to media that he was in fact a human being and “not a monster”, is now competitive in the polls and setting the political agenda.
Living standards have gone backwards at record rates under Labor
The main factor in all this has been Labor’s failure to take any serious measures to address the cost-of-living crisis. 
High inflation has reduced real disposable household incomes by a whopping 10 percent since 2021, more than any other OECD country and the worst fall in Australia in more than 50 years. While supermarkets and energy companies price-gouge their way to soaring profits, Albanese has done nothing to rein them in. While banks and landlords make the cost of housing impossibly expensive, Labor introduces tokenistic schemes like the Housing Australia Future Fund, which after more than a year of operation will have contributed to just 700 new “affordable” homes.
Worse still, the government has presided over a range of measures to increase the squeeze on working-class households. These include scrapping the low to middle income tax offset, which was worth up to $1,500 for people earning up to $90,000, keeping minimum wage growth below the rate of inflation, and huge interest rate rises. Following the playbook of governments around the world, the interest rate rises were explicitly designed to cut the income and spending of the population, while slowing economic growth and driving up unemployment, in order to combat inflation. In other words, making the working class pay for the economy’s problems.
Meanwhile, Labor governments at federal and state levels have maintained a hard line on public sector wages. And if workers step out of line, demand proper pay rises and take industrial action, as Woolworths warehouse workers have been doing, they soon come up against draconian laws, upheld by the Labor government, restricting and banning strikes and picketing.
It’s not as though Labor weren’t throwing money around when it wanted to. Military spending increased to a record $55.7 billion in this year’s budget. Tax cuts, which mostly benefited the rich, are forecast to cost $100 billion over four years. Another $50 billion is given away every year in the form of capital gains tax discounts and negative gearing concessions, mostly to wealthy investors and property developers. A further $14.5 billion went in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry last year. This is 10 times the amount the government spent to give everyone a measly $300 rebate on their energy bill.
By January 2024, <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/shock-poll-we-dont-trust-albo-to-help-us-with-costs-of-living/news-story/e8b7e7b39bedcd2e4c8d14746d6c0a50?amp&amp;nk=ca4b05041b50440fb106b0a6a7873d34-1705729334">polling</a>
was showing that a big majority (71 percent) considered the cost of living to be their main concern, followed by housing (41 percent). Eighty percent believed the government had failed to address the cost-of-living crisis. More than half thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. While inflation has now come down, the damage done over the last few years has by no means been reversed.
While workers have gone backwards, Forbes reports that “despite a weaker Australian dollar, Australia’s 50 Richest on the 2024 list are better off from a year ago. Their collective wealth rose by US$9 billion to $222 billion, from $213 billion in 2023.” The overall share of national income going to profits, instead of wages, remains at record highs. This explains why the ruling class, and the media, have not turned against the Albanese government.
No progress, only spin, failure and regression on social issues
Labor’s progressive supporters have experienced another year of being kicked in the teeth. On climate policy, Albanese has approved another 28 coal and gas projects since being elected. This has exposed the big scam that was Labor’s flagship “safeguard mechanism” climate policy in 2023, which was touted as “ending the climate wars”, and even celebrated by the Greens, whose leader Adam Bandt claimed that “coal and gas have taken a huge hit”. In fact, the policy was adopted from the Business Council of Australia, and backed by the mining and gas companies, which, in 2023, exported the equivalent of another 1.15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Albanese ended 2024 by tearing up a separate deal with the Greens on “nature positive legislation”, at the behest of the Western Australia Labor government, which in turn was doing the bidding of mining companies, and rushing through approval for another three coal mines.
The Albanese government’s climate policy has been based on giving the mining and gas companies whatever they want, while trying to deceive the public that some progress on tackling carbon emissions is occurring, through industrial-scale greenwashing, accounting tricks and fake carbon offsets. Meanwhile energy bills soar. This fuels the cynicism and resentment that Dutton capitalises on to deride the “green agenda” and to blame it for high energy prices. 
Labor’s pro-business approach has been matched by a general political strategy of wanting to avoid any fight with the right about social questions. From his small-target strategy in opposition, Albanese now wants to lead a small-target government. 
Labor supported the Voice referendum only because the proposal was backed by big business and, initially, seemed uncontroversial. The success of Dutton’s racist “no” campaign, which Labor couldn’t stand up to, weakened Albanese further and reinforced his determination to avoid any controversy and, in particular, criticism from the right.
This has led to Labor jumping to adopt increasingly reactionary policies. One particularly pathetic example was Albanese’s move to break an election promise and scrap questions about sexual orientation and gender identity in the national census, only to backflip two weeks later. Here was Labor pre-emptively capitulating to a right-wing culture war that didn’t even exist.
The government’s extreme response to the construction union, the CFMEU, after allegations of corruption aired in the media, probably fits somewhere in Albanese’s Venn diagram between servitude to big business and terror of being criticised by the right, in this case for being too close to the unions. Labor’s complete government takeover of the union and sacking of officials, including in branches not subject to allegations of corruption, is a major attack on one of the few unions perceived still to use workers’ industrial muscle to win decent wages and conditions.
Then we have Labor’s despicable lurch to the right on questions of immigration and refugees, even to the point of trying to out-compete Dutton as “tougher” on denying human rights and deporting people. US President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral success will only encourage Dutton to adopt even more extreme racist, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric. Rather than blaming the billionaires, immigrants have always been the perfect scapegoat for cost-of-living pressures, unemployment and non-existent crime waves. 
Labor has gone along with this argument, culminating in its rush to pass a trio of hideous new anti-refugee bills, in agreement with the Coalition, in the last sitting days of parliament for 2024. In spruiking the bills, Albanese attacked Dutton from the right, saying, “On Peter Dutton’s watch, there was a huge spike in the number of protection visa applications onshore”.
These extreme new laws allow the government to bribe countries to accept deportees from Australia, regardless of their human rights credentials. They make it harder for asylum seekers to get protection visas and allow the Australian government to ban new visa applications from countries that do not accept forced deportations from Australia, which many have labelled a Trump-style travel ban. And they ramp up the isolation and hellish treatment of those in immigration detention, with bans on phones, and more powers to impose ankle bracelets and curfews on anyone released.
After the laws passed, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that the Coalition is now “basically running the immigration system for the government”. And he is not wrong. 
Albanese punches down
While cosying up to big business and out-competing Dutton on racism, there have been some fights Albanese has embraced with passion and verve—against anyone to his left.
Lashing the Greens has become Labor’s favourite pastime. They have labelled straightforward housing proposals like a rent freeze, which the Greens advocate and which have majority support, as “absolute pixie dust”. They have denounced Greens MPs for “grandstanding” by supporting the CFMEU. Most of all, they have attacked the Greens for supporting Palestinian rights. In language you never see Labor politicians use against the right, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, without any evidence, said the Greens “engage in violent and aggressive protests and incite them”. 
This from the government that is continuing to back, including militarily, a state that is committing what even Amnesty International now describes as genocide, led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. You won’t find any strong words of condemnation or denunciation from any Labor politician of Israel or its actions in Gaza. Indeed, the only Labor politician who did begin to offer such criticism, Fatima Payman, was driven out of the party. But there’s been plenty of moral outrage, and repression, directed at those who have protested these crimes.
Albanese won’t fight the right, but he will bravely take on children. Labor governments at federal and state level have either led, or gone along with, hysterical law and order campaigns, often directed against Aboriginal children. And now they are banning social media access for under-16s, while doing nothing to actually regulate or take on the big media and social media barons.
Where to from here?
The Labor government is leading our society into a very bleak situation. It has carried out the ruling class’s wish to get inflation under control by sacrificing working-class living standards and job security. The resentment felt by millions, combined with the government’s right-wing stance on issue after issue, is helping pave the way for Dutton.
Around the world similar stories have played out, whereby centrist governments, overseeing growing inequality and pursuing anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, have fuelled the right and far right. Most recently, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris led to Donald Trump. In the UK, the Keir Starmer Labor government is already tanking in the polls, with a huge growth in support for the Conservatives and the far right. In several countries in Europe, social democratic parties have collapsed and far-right governments have come to power.
The Labor Party may still cling to power in the next election, propped up as a minority government by the Greens, which seems increasingly happy to play this role. Despite Albanese’s best efforts, Dutton is still widely unpopular. But whether it’s Albanese screwing the working class and championing right-wing policies, or the monster Dutton, it remains the case that what is desperately needed is stronger socialist opposition to the rotten Labor Party and the system it represents.

Josh Lees

All we’ve got from the Albanese government is Peter Dutton

Living standards in Australia have been pushed down more than in any comparable country over the last three years, the economy has been in a per capita recession for two years, and households are among the most indebted in the world. 
Working-class households have it worse than the most quoted statistics suggest and have been left with little breathing space after decades of increasing net wealth transfers from employees to bosses.
The findings—drawn from Red Flag’s analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Reserve Bank—paint a diabolical picture. The following charts tell the story. 
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According to OECD data, wages have failed dismally to rise fast enough to compensate for consumer price rises, mortgage rate increases and a higher working-class tax burden. Real household disposable incomes are more than 10 percent lower than in 2021.
While that year’s high came from significant government subsidies and historically low interest rates during the worst phase of the global pandemic, incomes today are lower than before Covid-19 swept the world. In fact, they are not much higher than they were ten years ago. 
“The impact on our living standards has been far greater than anywhere else. There is no argument that the fall is bigger than anything we have seen since 1959 [when the living standards’ index was started]”, economist Chris Richardson told the Australian
newspaper last month.
“Real disposable income” measures the money left after inflation, taxes and mortgage payments are subtracted from wages. Household incomes across the rest of the OECD—sometimes called the club of rich countries—have, on average, increased solidly over the last two years. In the US, incomes are about 25 percent higher than in 2014.
For Australian workers, it’s been a lost decade.
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The decline in incomes has not been uniform. Households with more savings than debts have been able to increase spending because of higher interest rates. But households with high levels of debt and those with little savings have copped the worst of rising prices and rates. 
Economists, politicians and the media (Red Flag included) usually highlight the gap between wage growth and the consumer price index. However, the Bureau of Statistics has other measures of price inflation, the “cost of living indexes”, which measure the effects of rising prices and interest rates on different sections of the population.
Its employee living cost index has been running far higher than CPI inflation for more than two years, which helps to explain why household incomes have been destroyed so rapidly. While general inflation peaked at 7.8 percent in 2022, workers’ living costs climbed 9.6 percent per annum at their peak in 2023. 
They increased by almost 2 percentage points above CPI inflation over the last year (to the start of October); they were 3.6 percentage points higher over the previous year.
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The Australian economy has continued to expand, albeit slowly, primarily because of government spending and high immigration. However, economic growth has been slower than population growth, meaning that output and income per person have been declining.
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<a href="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/">In fact, growth has gone backwards in eight of the last nine quarters, the most prolonged per capita recession in decades. “Over the past 44 years, when GDP has remained flat over the year, unemployment rises on average around 1.1 percentage points”, </a><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/dec/05/australia-gdp-figures-economy-september-quarter-abs">Guardian
columnist Greg Jericho points out today</a>.
The unemployment rate is currently 4.1 percent, up from 3.5 percent two years ago. It has been lower in just two of the past 50 years: 2008 and 1974. Which makes it all the more astounding that living standards have gone backwards so much. If people start losing their jobs in greater numbers, the economic pain will only be magnified.
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The more immediate issues noted above should be framed within two longer-term trends. First is the incredible build-up of household debt over several decades. 
The ratio of household debt to annual income is 128 percent higher than 30 years ago. This primarily reflects out-of-this-world increases in property prices, which have climbed much faster than wages over the same period.
Australian households are among the most indebted in the world. But only one-third of households, primarily working class and middle class, are paying a mortgage. They bear most of the debt burden.
In contrast to the US, the UK and the Euro area, where debt levels have declined in the last decade, Australian working households have taken on increasing liabilities to secure a place to live. And with the interest rate on most housing loans changing in line with the Reserve Bank’s “cash rate” (its benchmark interest rate for lending between financial institutions), small movements on such large debts translate into significant changes in mortgage holders’ monthly interest payments.
No wonder the living cost index has climbed much faster than inflation.
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A second long-term trend is the declining share of national income going to the working class. According to ABS figures, the share going to workers is 16 percent lower than 50 years ago; the bosses’ share is 65 percent higher.
The shifts have been expressed primarily in rising income and wealth inequality. For example, a recent Australia Institute research report, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P1689-Wealth-and-inequality-Updated.pdf">Wealth and inequality in Australia</a>, estimated that the richest 20 percent of Australians own more than 63 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 20 percent own just 0.4 percent.
Wealth inequality measures not just the accumulation of riches in fewer hands but the relative decline of working-class economic resources, which resulted in the lack of a significant financial “buffer” for hard times like recent years. 
Recovery?
While real incomes might finally be starting to rise for some groups, many working-class households could struggle to make up lost ground this side of 2030. It is still unclear when the Reserve Bank will begin cutting interest rates and where they will land once the cutting is complete. 
It’s unclear how high unemployment will go, or when the per capita recession will end. Certainly, the huge debts will not be paid down anytime soon (they grew again in the last quarter). And to cap it off, wage growth is now slowing, which means any gains in real wages and incomes will be smaller.
It’s also not clear whether Australia will continue to avoid an absolute economic contraction, as it has, for the most part, for more than 30 years, unlike pretty much every other economy in the world. If that luck runs out, many people will end up pining for the current hard times, which might look like better times by comparison.

Ben Hillier

Five charts showing the destruction of workers’ living standards

A former agent of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile has been living in Australia avoiding justice for her role in the aggravated kidnapping, torture and murder of at least seven Communist Party activists in the 1970s. 
Adriana Rivas is accused of being part of a government campaign of terror and genocidal violence unleashed on the left and the workers’ movement by the dictatorship after the coup of 11 September 1973. 
Rivas lived as a free woman in Australia from 1978 to 2006, working and living in Bondi, Sydney. While visiting Chile for a family wedding in 2006, she was arrested and later charged for her role in Pinochet-era crimes. But while released on bail in 2010, she fled Chile, making her way back to Australia. 
In 2014, Chile formally requested her extradition. The Australian government failed to act on the request for five years before arresting her in 2019. While several Australian courts have confirmed the legitimacy of her extradition, Rivas and her lawyers continue to appeal the extradition order in the High Court. 
In 1970, Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition were elected to office in Chile, promising to carry out a parliamentary road to socialism. The election of a left-wing government, and the resistance of the Chilean capitalist class to its progressive reforms, unleashed a wave of strikes across the country. 
The struggle reached revolutionary proportions in 1973, when workers began to form industrial cordones, institutions of working-class power and industrial democracy independent of the government, to coordinate struggle, defend workers’ gains and pressure the government to implement the promised nationalisation of industry, which Popular Unity had retreated on. 
Tragically, the revolutionary process was drowned in blood. In August 1973, Allende invited General Augusto Pinochet into his cabinet in an attempt to appease the Chilean and international capitalist class. On 11 September, Allende was murdered in the Presidential Palace. Militants from the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the revolutionary MIR and working-class activists were rounded up in their thousands, ushered into the National Stadium of Santiago to be tortured and summarily executed. 
The regime continued to hunt down left-wing workers and socialist militants for nearly two decades, while receiving the full diplomatic support of Western governments, including Australia. 
In 1974, the Pinochet dictatorship passed Decree Law 521, which created the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), a Gestapo-like secret political police force reporting directly to Pinochet. DINA became infamous for its apparatus of repression. This included torture centres, extrajudicial murder and the forced disappearances of thousands of civilians. 
The murder of prisoners sometimes occurred through suffocation, the experimental use of sarin gas or injection with cyanide. Survivors have testified that prisoners were killed through beatings, their bodies disposed of in lime mines or thrown into the sea via helicopter in notorious “death flights”.
US support for these crimes is well known. In August 1970, a month before Allende and Popular Unity were elected, Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser for President Richard Nixon, had discussed the feasibility of the US supporting a military coup against Popular Unity. 
After the coup, the US supported DINA significantly. In 1974, CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters hosted a luncheon for DINA Director Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda at CIA headquarters in Virginia. The following year, the CIA briefly put the DINA director on its payroll as a paid asset.
Between 1973 and 1977, Adriana Rivas worked for DINA as part of the Lautaro Brigade, operating under the name “La Chani”. The Lautaro Brigade was an intelligence unit within DINA that targeted Communist Party activists with the aim of liquidating the underground leadership of the resistance to the regime. Rivas was the personal secretary of Army Colonel Contreras, who oversaw DINA. 
Many of the Lautaro Brigade’s crimes and its agents were not exposed until 2007, when a former agent gave evidence as part of the Conference Street I and II judicial processes. These two cases covered the aggravated kidnapping and disappearance of Fernando Ortiz, Fernando Navarro, Lincoyan Berrios, Horacio Cepeda, Hector Veliz, Reinalda Pereira and Victor Diaz, secretary of the Communist Party at the time. Rivas is accused of being a participant in the disappearance of all seven. 
In 2007, a former DINA waiter turned witness, Jorgelino Vergara—whose own guilt led him to expose the Lautaro Brigade torture centre—claimed that Rivas participated fully in the torture as well as the administrative side of the Lautaro Brigade’s work. In an article in El Dinamo, Vergara claimed he saw Rivas in the gym hitting one of the detainees, who was sitting in a chair with his hands cuffed behind his back.
While Rivas denies involvement in kidnappings, beatings and disappearances, she remains unrepentant about the violence of the Pinochet era and DINA. In a shockingly candid interview with SBS Spanish in 2013, she claimed that the torture of Communists was “the only way to break people” and described her time at DINA as “the best years” of her youth. In the interview, she proudly recounted guarding Pinochet’s hotel room door. 
It is a travesty that the Australian government allowed Rivas to live freely in Bondi until 2019 despite knowledge about her crimes coming to light as early as 2006. The Australian government’s indifference to justice for the Chilean victims of Pinochet’s agents should not be surprising, given Australia’s past. 
Despite having a reputation for welcoming Chilean refugees, Australia gave full diplomatic recognition to the Pinochet regime for its entire existence, and Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) spies aided and abetted the CIA in destabilising the Allende government and cultivating conditions for a military coup. 
In 2021, declassified Australian documents revealed that, in 1970, Liberal Foreign Minister Billy McMahon approved an ASIS request to open a base in Santiago. The heavily redacted papers show that Australian spies operated in concert with the CIA, but very little detail has been revealed—in line with Australia’s secretive approach to security documents. 
In 1972, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ordered the closure of the Santiago office, while working strenuously to avoid “embarrassing” the CIA. But after his dismissal in 1975, Whitlam suggested his orders to ASIS may have been ignored. 
The next High Court hearing for Adriana Rivas is on 10 March 2025. Chilean militants with Movimiento Anticapitalista, including Camilo Parad—the grandson of one of Rivas’ victims, Fernando Ortiz Letelier—have called on the <a href="https://anticapitalistas.cl/2024/11/20/el-caso-de-la-represora-adriana-rivas-la-impunidad-como-legado-dictatorial/">Australian left to mobilise to pressure the courts to extradite Rivas</a>. 
The attorney general must act to extradite Rivas without further delay. Every day that she remains in Australia is another insult to the people of Chile, as well as the thousands of Chilean Australians who fled to this country as refugees. In addition, all records relating to ASIS operations in Chile in the 1970s must be fully declassified and released. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Chloe Rafferty

Australia must extradite Pinochet agent Adriana Rivas

The <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/2024-council-election-results">results are in</a> from Victoria’s local council elections, which took place via postal ballot in October, and there’s some good news for socialists. Victorian Socialists (VS) ran a much bigger campaign than in the last elections in 2020, standing candidates in 78 council wards, mainly across Melbourne but in a number of regional areas too. The party’s candidates received a total of 67,296 first preference votes, up from 20,210 in 2020, with an average vote share of 10.8 percent.
Had VS achieved a result like this under the old, multi-member council ward system, it’s very likely a whole new crop of five or ten socialist councillors would have been elected. This time, though, thanks to changes initiated in 2020 by the then Labor Party minister for local government and subsequently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/20/ministers-breached-codes-in-blatant-and-extraordinary-misuse-of-public-funds-to-fuel-branch-stacking-ibac-finds">disgraced branch stacker</a> Adem Somyurek, the elections were held in single-member wards across Melbourne (with the exception of Melbourne City Council) and in many regional areas. This change was designed to make things harder for small parties like VS, and the results of this election show it worked as intended.
When two or three councillors were elected from a single (larger) ward, minor party candidates were in with a shot even when up against candidates from established parties like the Greens and Labor. In multi-member wards, two higher profile candidates could be elected, and there would still be space for a third candidate to get up. This is what happened in 2020 with VS’s Jorge Jorquera, who was elected in the Yarraville ward of Maribyrnong Council after receiving a first preference vote of just 8.8 percent.
In single-member wards, victory depends on both a high first preference vote and a decent flow of preferences from other candidates. In traditional strongholds of Labor and the Greens, this was always going to be a tough ask for socialists. 
VS went into this election with Jorquera as its sole sitting councillor. To the extent there is bad news in the party’s result this time, it’s that it couldn’t build on that total. Jorquera, unfortunately, narrowly missed out on re-election. About two hours’ drive north from Melbourne, though, in the regional town of Bendigo, VS candidate Owen Cosgriff <a href="https://x.com/6NewsAU/status/1854407601720885695">was elected</a> as the representative for Whipstick ward in the City of Greater Bendigo Council.
In a three-candidate field, Cosgriff received a first preference vote of 40.7 percent, winning with 52.7 percent after the distribution of preferences. This was a significant breakthrough for socialist politics in an area not known, <a href="https://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/story/7290147/inside-the-bendigo-rsls-battle-with-a-communist-trades-hall/">in recent times at least</a>, for its radicalism. 
Cosgriff told Red Flag that the result reflected the fact that “Victorian Socialists was the only progressive option on the ballot” (neither Labor nor the Greens ran a candidate against him). In addition, he said, “I was the only candidate who put forward a program of what I would attempt to do in office ... We promised concrete reforms like undoing the privatisation of aged care [and] lobbying for a commuter timetable for Bendigo trains, and we were rewarded for it”. 
Another bright spot for socialists was the re-election of Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton to Merri-bek Council. Bolton was first elected in 2012 off a first preference vote of 9.5 percent (in a multi-member ward) and this year received a first preference vote of 46 percent in a field of four candidates in the (single-member) Bababi Djinanang ward of Merri-bek, which covers the suburb of Fawkner and parts of North Coburg. Bolton told Red Flag that a big factor in her win was the work she has done to promote Palestine solidarity at a council level. In the last census, conducted in 2021, just under 35 percent of Fawkner residents <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2021/210031237">identified as Muslim.</a>
It’s significant that, even with single-member wards stacking the odds against them, VS candidates came within striking distance of victory in several other places. In the Harvester ward of Brimbank Council (which covers the suburbs of Sunshine and Sunshine North in Melbourne’s west) <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/liz-walsh-council">Liz Walsh</a>, who was the VS candidate for the Western Metro upper house region in the 2022 state election, received a first preference vote of 26.3 percent in a field of four, and ended second on 46.8 percent after the distribution of preferences. This result was particularly encouraging given that VS didn’t campaign in the area.
Other standout results include long-time marriage equality campaigner, local community activist and nurse <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/cat-rose">Cat Rose</a> getting a first preference vote of 32.4 percent in Darebin Council’s West ward (in the inner-northern suburbs covering Thornbury and parts of Preston and Northcote). In a field of three, Rose finished just 36 votes behind the Greens candidate, and less than 200 votes behind Labor. Had she finished ahead of the Greens, there’s a decent chance she would have moved above Labor on preferences and been elected. At the last council election in 2020, the VS candidate in this ward (Darebin had already moved to single-member wards) got a first preference vote of 7.7 percent.
In the Bulleke-bek ward of Merri-bek Council (which covers the area immediately to the west of Sydney Road in Brunswick), VS candidate <a href="https://victoriansocialists.org.au/candidates/louisa-bassini">Louisa Bassini</a>, a community lawyer in the area of renters’ rights, came in second in a field of five candidates with 23 percent of first preference votes (behind the Greens candidate on 36.9 percent and ahead of Labor on 20 percent). Results in other wards in the area of the Victorian lower house seat of Brunswick were also well above the 8.1 percent that VS candidate Nahui Jimenez achieved there in the<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/brunswick-district-results"> 2022 state election</a>.
No doubt some of the 67,296 people who voted for a VS candidate didn’t pay much attention to party affiliation. Council elections in Victoria are carried out in a way designed to depoliticise things as much as possible and encourage engagement with candidates as individuals, rather than representatives of parties or political world views. Holding elections via postal ballot contributes to this, as it precludes the possibility of party volunteers talking to voters at polling booths. And party affiliation isn’t listed next to candidates’ names on ballot papers.
VS pushed against this as much as possible. Its aim isn’t merely to get socialists elected, but to build the profile of socialist politics and to convince more people to join the socialist movement. Unlike many Labor and Liberal-aligned candidates, who (probably sensibly from a purely electoral perspective) preferred to present as “local independents” rather than associating themselves with their party brands, VS candidates put their political affiliation front and centre. Leaflets delivered by VS volunteers to voters’ homes encouraged them to “vote socialist for a council that puts people before profit”.
The main pitch to voters on these leaflets highlighted how “an out-of-control capitalist system is eroding the economic, social and environmental foundations of our society”. “We need councillors”, it went on, “who will stand up to the destructive, profit-driven agenda that dominates politics. Socialist councillors will fight for our communities, for workers and for those in need”. VS seriously campaigned in only a fraction of the 78 wards in which it stood a candidate. In those wards, which were by and large also the wards in which the party got its highest vote, it would have been hard for people to miss the socialist affiliation.
The results of this election will help to further establish VS as a serious socialist electoral alternative in Victoria. Heading into 2025 and the next federal election, the party has a growing membership and a higher profile than ever. In addition to the council campaign, VS members have this year kept up a hectic schedule of activism and organising in the Palestine solidarity campaign, rank-and-file unionism and many other areas.
In recent weeks the Murdoch press has run several hit pieces targeting the party. Most recently, the Australian <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1857577253590401530">published an “exclusive” </a>in which it revealed that the lead VS Senate candidate, renters’ rights advocate and well-known socialist radical Jordan van den Lamb (aka <a href="https://www.instagram.com/purplepingers/">purplepingers</a>), had—in a post on the social media platform X—shockingly labelled police as “pigs” and “Nazis”. Melbourne’s Herald Sun <a href="https://x.com/vic_socialists/status/1847044199021240510">earlier called out</a> VS council candidates for, among other things, speaking at rallies in solidarity with Palestine and “calling for revolution”. This kind of attention from Murdoch’s attack dogs can only bode well for the future.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications manager.

James Plested

Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

The federal Labor government has overseen the biggest fall in living standards in at least half a century. And Australian household income has dropped by more than in any comparable country in the last two years, <a>according to a recent report</a> published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young people in particular <a>have been screwed</a> by rising rents and falling wages.
People are rightly pissed. According to <a>polling in mid-October</a>, Anthony Albanese’s net approval rating has fallen to a new low of negative 14 percent, and the ALP’s primary vote has sunk to 31 percent. 
Yet, if you took the Labor PR machine seriously, you’d think the government was doing all it could to help people economically. There is endless talk about “cost-of-living relief” and bragging about the measures Labor has implemented. But what has the government really done?
The prime minister’s website has a special “cost of living relief” page that highlights every policy Albanese is trying to promote. At first glance, the listed measures appear to be designed to put more money into the pockets of struggling people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a different story. Many big-ticket relief items are just handouts to big business—a transfer of tax dollars to mega-corporations already raking in super-profits from charging higher prices. 
Take the energy rebate, which reduces annual household energy bills by $300. While it has helped millions struggling with eye-watering bills, it is also a $3.5 billion gift from taxpayers to the energy companies that have been ripping us off in the first place. And it’s hardly one they need. AGL, Australia’s largest electricity generator, recorded a 189 percent increase in underlying profit to $812 million in the last financial year. Origin Energy’s profit surged 172 percent to $1.2 billion, on top of an 83.5 percent increase the previous year. They are raking it in. 
The government could have capped energy prices, or imposed a super-profits tax on the energy behemoths, and saved the tax money for something else, like housing. But it is too wedded to the idea that companies have an ordained right to extract as much profit as possible through the market, regardless of the social consequences. 
It took the same approach to child care. Last year, the Child Care Subsidy was lifted and broadened to include more households. Once again, the government is just handing stacks of money—$10.7 billion, to be precise—to, in many cases, private for-profit childcare centres.
A <a>report released at the end of last year</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that any financial benefits from increases to the government subsidy were largely, if not wholly, eroded by increased day-care fees. It also found that “childcare fees across all services have grown faster than inflation and wages since the introduction of the subsidy”.
Like the energy companies, childcare companies are rolling in cash. G8 Education, Australia’s biggest listed childcare company, posted a 53 percent profit increase in 2023 and paid its CEO a $3 million package. That same year, G8 increased its fees by nearly 25 percent. 
So the government’s great plan means that parents are out of pocket just the same, the Treasury is poorer, while the companies increase their margins. Great “relief” if you can get it.
Then there’s the housing crisis, which needs no introduction. Labor promises to fix it by building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade through the $32 billion Homes for Australia plan. It’s already failing: forecasts from Oxford Economics in July showed that the government will miss its target by more than 20 percent. 
More to the point, Labor’s entire plan follows the same investor- and developer-first model that created the housing crisis in the first place.
This is most notable with the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—Labor’s answer to affordable housing. It’s another handout to private developers, construction firms and investors. The HAFF fact sheet repeatedly states that “one of the key objectives of the program is to encourage private investment in social and affordable housing”. The model is designed to get private investors to team up with a social housing provider to purchase, renovate or build new housing stock by handing over government money to ensure each project remains profitable. 
Take it from Conscious Investment Management chief investment officer Matthew Tominc, who has established a $200 million fund to cash in on the plan. He told the Financial Review that the HAFF would likely offer investors a net 8 to 12 percent return, guaranteeing no losses. So the big winner will again be—you guessed it, the investor class.
As for anyone not in the social housing sphere, which is most people, the government is basically hoping and praying that spending money on infrastructure will encourage developers to build more homes. But it’s doing nothing to ensure those homes will be affordable—the generous tax concessions and other incentives for investors remain untouched.
Another category of cost-of-living relief is the Stage 3 Tax Cuts, which could also be called “tax cuts that will help ordinary people a bit, but disproportionately benefit the rich and further entrench economic inequality”. Accurate, if a bit wordy. 
Finally, there are measures that aren’t objectionable but are so small that it’s almost like the government is playing a joke on the rest of us. 
For instance, the government claims it’s “delivering a better deal for renters” by raising Rent Assistance. The payment is available only to eligible welfare recipients—a fraction of the renting population. It’s also minuscule—it was raised by 10 percent to a maximum rate of $211 a fortnight for a single person with no children (the current median fortnightly rent is about $1,250). 
Eligibility for the single-parent payment has been extended to when the youngest child turns 14, up from 8, but still below 16—where it was when the Gillard Labor government reduced it in 2013. It’s also a maximum of $987.70 per fortnight. How anyone is supposed to live on that is one of society’s great mysteries. And despite a recommendation from the government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the below-the-poverty-line JobSeeker payment has hardly been touched.
Wage rises also slide into the “did you even notice?” category. The government congratulates itself for backing a 3.75 percent pay rise for minimum- and award-wage workers and a 15 percent pay rise for aged care workers. It’s good that the workers got a pay rise, but it’s hardly enough. 
Even with two significant wage increases, aged care workers will still receive only $25 to $30 an hour, depending on their role. We’re talking about small bumps to extremely low wages. As of July, average real wages for all workers were still nearly 5 percent lower than before the pandemic.
To top off this list of do-little policies, Labor’s latest offering is banning debit card transaction fees, which banks charge when you buy something with a debit card. Obviously, the move is supportable. But touting it as a game-changing measure is absurd. 
It’s like the Albanese government is parodying itself. In the last financial year, Australian banks made $40 billion in profit, an 8 percent increase on the previous year. Prolonged high interest rates have been a windfall for the so-called Big Four—the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Westpac—which charge a higher interest rate on loans than they pay into savings accounts. 
Debit fees range from 0.5 to 1 percent of the cost of a transaction. Sure, we should all hang on to that money, but will it make the slightest difference to the crushing weight of rising rents, mortgages, bills, groceries and everything else? No.
Labor is taking us for a ride. They know there’s a crippling cost-of-living crisis and they don’t want to take on big business, but they also want to win the next election. So they’re giving handouts to big business, throwing pennies at the rest of us and calling it relief.

Eleanor Morley

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

The term “social cohesion” has had a workout in Australia over the past year. Always a handy staple for those wanting to cast a blanket of conformity over society, the term has particularly been used to attack those protesting Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and its war on Lebanon. 
In late July, the Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as the country’s first special envoy for social cohesion. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that friction in the community over Israel’s war on Gaza was causing a “great deal of concern about disharmony” across Australia.
The use of social cohesion as a weapon to reproach pro-Palestine demonstrations came to something of a climax as Israel invaded Lebanon in late September and with the approach of the first anniversary of its murderous onslaught on Gaza.
On 30 September, Sky News reported breathlessly the claims of shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan that “social cohesion is failing in our country” and demanded punitive action when Hezbollah flags and portraits of assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah appeared at the weekly Palestine rallies in Melbourne and Sydney.
A week later, NSW Premier Chris Minns tried to ban pro-Palestine protests, to the acclamation of Peter Dutton. Echoing these sentiments, Albanese proclaimed 7 October was “not a time for demonstrations to occur ... It’s a time to try to make sure that social cohesion in Australia is valued”.
What is the “social cohesion” that Australia’s political leaders seek to protect against protest? 
Like every attempt to paper over the massive divisions built into Australian capitalism, it begins from the assumption that unity is something both possible and desirable. Further, if social cohesion is natural, then unity can have been disrupted only by troublemakers—the infamous “outside agitator” thesis beloved by every boss who ever faced a strike and every government that inspired rebellion. 
So social cohesion is based on a demand for compliance and demonisation of those who challenge it. In the Cold War 1950s, it was “reds under the bed”; now it’s Arabs and Muslims who are the supposed danger. 
Peter Dutton spelt it out on 19 April: “Central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract. Whatever our background, our faith, or our cultural traditions, we do not allow the problems, the tensions, or the animosity of other parts of the world to manifest in our communities or on our streets ... there are people in our country today who do not subscribe to our democratic values”.
That demand for compliance is backed by a political and legal infrastructure designed to undermine and criminalise protests of all kinds, including strikes. Sometimes it’s been the crushing weight of <a>a media barrage of the dominant ideas</a>, sometimes it’s been threats from university administrations against even using words like “from the river to the sea” or “genocide”, and sometimes it’s a battery of laws against protesting or striking. 
It is “cohesion” only in the sense of those who run society demanding compliance with their rules. As Bernard Keane pointed out in Crikey on 15 August: “Labor tries to make a virtue of supporting ‘social cohesion’, even while demonising pro-Palestinian protesters, cutting immigration, refusing entry to Gazans, and denouncing political organisation by Muslim voters”. All the concern and blame are placed on supporters of Palestine. Where are the headlines calling for supporters of Israel to stop backing genocide because such ideas undermine social cohesion? 
The ALP is the manager of an imposed consensus—from maintaining Australia’s imperialist alliances to centring profitability in the economy—about which it actively works to discourage debate, let alone protest. 
There’s nothing naturally cohering in a class-divided society. At the core of capitalism are irreconcilable competing class interests. Social cohesion is a myth—at our expense. Often the so-called cohesion can be maintained only by exclusion, such as that of Indigenous people, or the ban on marriage equality before 2017. Refugees remain condemned to be permanent outsiders. The attack on the CFMEU coheres the union movement even further around tame cat passivity in the face of the cost-of-living crisis. 
In other words, calls for social cohesion always mean just going along with the status quo. On the other hand, the high points of struggle, such as the successful working-class fight against conscription in World War I or the smashing of the anti-union penal powers in 1969, have involved breaking with the notion of social cohesion and exposing the real divisions in society through mass struggle.
So social cohesion is deserving only of the utmost hostility. Socialists don’t want social cohesion; we want to make the class war visible. As the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared in 1857: 
“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

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Big vote for socialists in Victorian council elections

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

‘Social cohesion’: a weapon to defend the status quo

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