This week we’ve seen the clearest indication yet that the Fair Work Commission (FWC) intends to proceed with its plan to cut the pay thousands of community sector workers. 
On 20 October, FWC President Adam Hatcher gave a flat rejection to a request from the Australian Services Union (ASU) to change course. “That’s not going to happen”, he declared in response to the ASU’s request, and an identical one from the Victorian government, at a <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-transcript-201025.pdf">directions hearing</a> on 20 October. The union had asked the FWC to hit pause on their wage-cutting interim decision from April (<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/fair-work-commission-plans-giant-pay-cut-for-community-sector-workers">detail here</a>), and to scrap hearings scheduled for the following week to discuss the disastrous proposal. 
The commission’s rejection of the union’s argument for a complete change of course means the FWC will proceed with hearings next week. These hearings are designed to finalise some version of the FWC’s wage-cutting interim decision from April, rather than scrap it altogether. 
And the news gets worse. 
As well as advocating for a complete rejection of the commission’s proposed wage-cutting plan, the ASU has filed a document outlining what the union believes is the best possible outcome within the strictures of the commission’s wage-cutting interim decision. 
The analysis of this “best case” scenario, done by UNSW Associate Professor Natasha Cortis, is included as an appendix to the union’s “<a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202421-sub-reply-statement-report-asu-151025.pdf">submission in reply</a>” to Fair Work, dated 15 October. It’s shocking. The analysis shows that between 10 and 20 percent of all job roles in the sector will still get a wage cut, even under this best-case scenario, if the FWC proceeds with its plan. 
Breaking this figure down by current employment level, 10 percent of all level four roles are certain to get a pay cut, with most of these positions losing between $80 per week and $350 per week. Another 9 percent of level four roles face a potential pay cut of up to $100 per week, depending on their current pay point within level four. Eighteen percent of current level five staff face a certain pay cut, mainly in the range of $80 to $300 per week. 
Three percent of disability support worker roles would definitely face a pay cut (with another 18 percent facing a potential pay cut, depending on their current pay point within their classification level). Nine percent of other practitioner roles face a definite pay cut, along with 20 percent of policy, research and project workers, and an outrageous 44 percent of office and facility support staff positions. 
And remember this is the very best-case scenario, which assumes that Fair Work decides to accept all of the ASU’s proposed modifications to the commissioners’ disastrous wage-cutting interim decision. There is no guarantee that they will.
Indeed, FWC President Hatcher’s off-hand dismissal of the union case to abandon the FWC’s wage-cutting interim decision indicate that the commissioners, each on more than $10,000 per week, are intent on pursuing their course regardless of the outcome for many thousands of workers.
The threat of wage cuts to tens of thousands of mainly women workers is very real indeed. This attack shines a light on the nature of the “Fair” Work Commission. The FWC is beholden to the profit-driven interests which dominate the national economy. This is why workers have never won gains through just stating a case at the commission and hoping for the best. The eight-hour day, annual leave, higher pay and health and safety have all been won, first and foremost, by workers organising, rallying—and most importantly, by going on strike. 
This means the ASU’s campaign against the commission’s wage-cutting can’t just consist of a single one-off rally—welcome though the ASU’s National Day of Action on 23 October is. A serious response needs, at a minimum, a string of mass meetings and delegates meetings to explain the attacks in some depth. This can equip members and delegates to better recruit their fellow workers to the campaign, and to the union. There’s a need for repeated mass mobilisations (like the ASU campaign which won the Equal Remuneration Order in the community sector in 2012), as well as a serious discussion about strike action.
Both now and in the longer term, there’s an urgent need for workers to take a more combative approach, and to push back against the dominant, pro-Labor politics that have dominated this country’s union movement for far too long. One positive in this regard is the early efforts of <a href="https://www.instagram.com/asusocialists/">ASU Socialists</a>, a part of Victorian Socialists’ <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-launch-socialist-workers-caucus">Socialist Workers Caucus</a>. ASU Socialists’ Instagram page is full of informative takes on crucial questions like “what the hell is going on with Fair Work?” and “Why Social and Community Sector cuts are normal under capitalism”, as well as explainers of the issue, promo for in-person get-togethers and the union’s day of action, and posts about the inspirational general strike for Gaza in Italy.
The FWC isn’t stopping its attacks—so it’s up to workers in the community sector, and beyond, to step up the resistance.

Jerome Small

Sharpening the knife? Fair Work takes another step towards community sector wage cuts

The ongoing crisis and faction fighting in the Liberal Party have included repeated calls for the party to get back to what it was like under the reign of its longest serving leader, Bob Menzies. The Menzies years of the 1950s and 1960s are portrayed as enlightened ones of progress and national unity ruled over by a broad-church Liberal Party in which small l liberals and conservatives worked together in harmony for the collective good.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Menzies years were reactionary, dominated by Cold War authoritarianism, union bashing, red scares, murderous wars from Korea to Malaya to Vietnam and, of course, record profits for the bosses.
As prime minister during this era of white picket fences, sexual prudery and fawning over royalty and everything British, it can be tempting to dismiss Robert Gordon Menzies—who revelled in the titles of Knight of the Thistle and Warden of the Cinque Ports and paraded his devotion to the queen, declaring: “I only saw her passing by, but I shall love her ’til I die”—as a pompous fuddy-duddy.
But that would be to underestimate seriously the man who had been an admirer of Adolph Hitler in the 1930s. Menzies was a hardened class warrior for the Australian capitalist class who advanced their interests with relentless determination for sixteen long years as prime minister from the end of 1949 to January 1966. That’s why John Howard, who presided over another vicious Liberal government that sought to transform society in the interests of the rich and powerful, so admires Menzies.
Menzies came to office with two key aims. First, to take advantage of growing Cold War hysteria to launch a concerted attack on workers’ living standards and union organisation, the aim of which was to ensure that the capitalist class were the chief beneficiaries of the emerging postwar boom. That meant savage repression of the left.
Second, to militarise Australian society in preparation for a new world war. Menzies openly advocated a nuclear strike on Russia and sought to develop Australia’s very own atomic bomb.
Just as Howard and subsequent Liberal prime ministers built on Labor’s attacks on workers, Menzies built on the anti-worker policies of the Chifley Labor government before him. 
The immediate postwar years had brought a sharp swing to the left. Capitalism was seen to have failed. Workers had been seared by the horrors of the Great Depression, fascism and war, and were determined not to let that happen again. They demanded the 40-hour week, full employment, higher wages and improved social services, and aggressively went on strike to back up those demands, with some significant victories initially.
However, after a series of bitterly fought strikes, the Chifley Labor government, backed by the top union leaders, gradually wore workers down. In the late 1940s, Chifley resorted to repression, most notoriously using troops to break the 1949 coal strike.
It was this union-bashing legacy that Menzies built on with harsh anti-union laws and the attempt to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). The CPA led many of the militant unions and was the overwhelmingly dominant force on the left throughout the Menzies years.
Menzies’ 1951 horror budget savaged living standards and slashed jobs in the public service by 8 percent. There was a massive redistribution of wealth to the bosses. Workers’ share of gross national product fell dramatically.
CPA leaders were jailed and their offices raided by police. Legislation was passed (with ALP support) to ban the CPA. Menzies drew up plans to establish concentration camps to intern dissidents. In NSW alone, 45,000 people were listed to be interned.
Along with attacks on living standards and democratic rights came preparations for war. Conscription was introduced, and between 1950 and 1953 the size of the armed forces was expanded from 58,000 to 147,000. Australian troops were sent to fight in Korea, Malaya and, later, Vietnam.
Menzies encouraged the British to test nuclear weapons at Maralinga in South Australia, with terrible consequences for the indigenous inhabitants, in the hope that this would enable Australia to get its own nuclear weapons. On foreign policy, Menzies was a pillar of reaction, providing undying support for the apartheid regime in South Africa.
But despite some important victories, it was no cake walk for Menzies. At every step there was resistance.
The postwar vision of a new, more peaceful and fair social order still held broad appeal. By 1953, Menzies was extremely unpopular. There were sharp swings to Labor in by-elections.
So while workers were on the back foot industrially, Menzies was never able to establish a McCarthyite regime as severe as in the US—where the left in the unions was smashed.
Menzies’ 1951 referendum to ban the Communist Party was narrowly defeated after a massive campaign by the Communists, left unions and civil liberties supporters. Indeed, the CPA, after declining in the late 1940s, grew from 6,000 members in 1952 to 8,000 in 1955, despite its Stalinist politics. 
But as the horrors of Stalinism in Russia were increasingly revealed, there was growing disillusionment within CPA ranks, particularly after Russian tanks crushed the 1956 workers’ revolution in Hungary. This severely weakened its ability to lead working-class resistance to Menzies.
There was every possibility that a genuine Marxist party committed to workers’ control could have at least held its ground during the difficult early years of the Menzies government and then grown steadily in the wake of the right-wing Democratic Labor Party (DLP) split from the ALP. This would have put it in a position to play a decisive role when the political situation improved in the 1960s.
Despite the Cold War anti-Russian hysteria, opinion polls at the height of the Korean War showed 73 percent opposition to the use of nuclear weapons. By 1954, polls showed half the population opposed nuclear testing at Maralinga.
1953 was the real turning point in terms of the postwar boom. From then on, the economy surged forward. It was the most prosperous period in Australian history, with economic growth exceeding 5 percent per year for more than 15 years.
Boom conditions led to a rise in home ownership. Workers for the first time got refrigerators, washing machines and eventually TVs. Most workers withdrew from active political involvement, and, after 1956, the level of strike action fell markedly. This led many on the left to write off the working class as a force for social change. Workers were dismissed as bought off, and most intellectuals blamed the dull conformity of Australia in the 1950s and early ’60s on the masses. The problem in their eyes was not the capitalist class and the Menzies government, which in order to ensure an orderly flow of profits was imposing rigid censorship to prop up authoritarian family values. No, the problem for the oh-so-enlightened liberal intelligentsia was rather the mums and dads in the suburbs who were obsessed with their new refrigerator or getting lino on the floor rather than the higher values of life.
But the Protestant wowserism that Australia was notorious for in these years was a predominately middle-class phenomenon. And below the surface, forces were at work that were laying the basis for a revival in working-class struggle that was to explode at the end of the 1960s.
Mass upheavals don’t burst onto the scene from nowhere. They have their origins in long-term economic and social developments. At the time it can be difficult to recognise the developing ferment, but in retrospect the signs of what was to come were there.
The long postwar boom, even at its height, eliminated neither the working class nor the structural features of capitalism that impelled it to resist. There is no doubting the strident anti-Communism of the Cold War years, but underneath there were deep tensions—tensions that sharply intensified over the course of the 1960s.

Mick Armstrong

Returning to the ‘party of Menzies’ is returning to fascistic reaction

It’s no secret that Australian universities are increasingly enmeshed with the defence sector and weapons companies. Now, TAFEs are being tuned up to serve Australian imperialism and the $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. 
A recent federal government announcement of a $28 million National Security TAFE Centre of Excellence in Adelaide illustrates the trend. The facility boasts “state-of-the-art equipment” to help apprentices develop artificial intelligence and robotics skills. According to the South Australian government, it will be central to fulfilling Australia’s “national security needs”. What this actually means is training young people to build weapons of war and destruction. 
Another example is a recent advertising blitz by Roger Cook’s Labor government in Western Australia. The premier says that, as the country becomes increasingly tied to the US and UK military industrial bases, Western Australia “will play a central role” in building Australia’s military capacities. The state Labor government is spending $11.5 million on an AUKUS Defence Industry Incentive to provide handouts to military corporations and contractors to expand their workforces. 
In January, the state government invested another $14.6 million in a new WA Defence TAFE Centre of Excellence, which significantly expanded the number of military-related courses offered to meet the needs of the Henderson Defence precinct. The precinct, in the southern suburbs of Perth, will service and maintain nuclear submarines and employ 10,000 people. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced another $12 billion in extra funding for Henderson last month. 
Western Australia is key to AUKUS. In 2027, five nuclear-powered submarines from the US and UK will begin rotating through the HMAS Stirling naval base at Garden Island, 5 km off the coast of the Perth metro area. One thousand US military personnel and their family members will soon be based there as well, making the city a potential target in any major imperialist conflict. 
Defence Minister Richard Marles has repeatedly stated that Australia needs to build a “strong and resilient industrial base” to meet the demands of AUKUS. More broadly, the Australian ruling class wants to assert its regional power with a beefed-up military. To achieve this, the plan is to reshape attitudes and sections of the education system to cater to the needs of AUKUS. Strengthening Australian ties to the US military is central to this. 
The normalisation of militarism is also occurring in primary and secondary schools. A 2022 publication, Minors and Missiles, by the Medical Association for Prevention of War, reported an increasing trend for school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) programs being tied to weapons companies, and that the Department of Defence is the lead agency in half of all national STEM initiatives.
This is only the beginning, and none of it is in the interests of working-class students. While governments spend millions of dollars building new military-oriented TAFE programs, they neglect systemic problems in the TAFE system (such as poverty wages for apprentices, old and outdated facilities, and underpaid teachers and staff) and refuse to do anything substantive to address the key issue of economic security facing young people—the housing crisis. 
Instead of militarising our TAFE sector, students should be offered courses to help make the world a better place, not ones geared towards building weapons of mass destruction.

Ella Marchionda

The militarisation of TAFE

From the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 until the government of Gough Whitlam in 1973, the “White Australia” policy was in place. Following earlier restrictions enacted by individual colonies, under White Australia, all non-white immigration was in effect banned. Around 7,500 Pacific Islander people who already resided in Australia before 1901 were also deported, many having been kidnapped or misled into servitude on Queensland’s sugar cane fields.
Adopted unanimously by the new Australian parliament in 1901 as one of its first legal enactments, the Immigration Restriction Act was the cornerstone of White Australia. The act used a dictation test in a “European language” at the discretion of the Immigration Department to bar anyone not deemed white enough. The Australian Labor Party, far from opposing White Australia, was its most vociferous champion for much of its history. In 1901, the ALP moved amendments to the act to ban Asians outright, making it explicitly racist.
The White Australia policy in common history is presented as a national shame representing the backwardness and bigotry of the past. The National Museum of Australia, for example, says of the period that “many White Australians feared that non-white immigrants would threaten Australian society”.
White Australia has come up recently, the Nazis behind the “March for Australia” justifying their racist dreams of ethnic cleansing by referring to this supposedly glorious past. Support for the policy has remained a touchstone for the Australian far right, from Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech in parliament in 1997 to Fraser Anning’s in 2018. Whether viewed with horror or nostalgia, the consensus is that “White Australia” reflected the wishes of most people in Australia.
The reality is that White Australia was the product, not of an irrational fear or some broad conservatism among “white Australians”, but of the interests of a new capitalist state operating as a European outpost in Asia. White Australia was formulated by the nation’s leading liberals and humanitarian reformers of the late nineteenth century, who pitched it as “progressive” and “democratic”.
Two main elements drove it: First, the emerging Australian ruling class desired to create a unified and independent state, and second, it wanted to build this state in Asia, facing competition from rapidly industrialising and expansionist Japan.
No ruling class can rule without maintaining “hegemony”, which means presenting the interests of the ruling class as those of the whole of society. The Chinese emperors had the “mandate of heaven”, European feudal monarchies had the “divine right of kings”, and modern capitalism rules under the pretence of the “will of the people” and the “national interest”. Just as older ideas justified the social position of nobles and kings, the notion that capitalism is governed “democratically” or that the “national interest” represents everyone serves to maintain capitalist rule today.
Australia’s colonial ruling class, which developed over the nineteenth century as Australia ceased being just a dumping ground for convicts, viewed White Australia as central to a national and “democratic” ideology for the new state.
Alfred Deakin, the first attorney-general and prime minister on and off from 1903 to 1910, explained that White Australia “was the note that touched particularly the Australian born, who felt themselves endowed with a heritage not only of political freedom, but of an ample area within which the race might expand, and an obligation consequent upon such an endowment—the obligation to pass on to their children and the generations after them that territory undiminished and uninvaded”.
The Australian ruling class understood that “White Australia” bound the interests of workers and bosses together, forging a common nationality. The idea that being “white” was a sign of civilisation pitted white workers against foreigners and helped to butter up the populace ideologically for Australia’s own expansionism in the Pacific, under the guise of “national defence”. Alfred Deakin, again:
“Coloured aliens engaging in any occupation subject white men in the same occupation to an utterly unfair and improper competition. The secret of the coloured man’s success was his complete indifference to the moral and social standards of his white fellow citizens. He worked from dawn to dark on seven days a week, he ate little else than rice, he clothed himself in rags, he lived in a hovel. White men through no fault of their own would be driven from employment and production, simply because they adhered to the most elementary ideals of a civilised society.”
It was argued by liberals—including much of the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and the trade unions—that building Australia as a “homogeneous community” of white civilization would preserve its supposed great qualities. By excluding non-white immigrants, mainly Chinese people who tried to immigrate during the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes, Australia would avoid the problems seen in countries like the United States, where importing African people as slaves led to civil war and segregation.
The ALP’s first federal objective was White Australia, supported in these liberal terms: “The cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community”.
When modern liberals explain the White Australia policy, they often claim that ALP and union support meant a genuine working-class interest. For example, Henry Reynolds and Marilyn Lake, in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, suggest achievements like protectionism, industrial arbitration and the basic wage (what we today call the minimum wage) were the fruit of White Australia, benefiting (white, male) workers.
But immigration restrictions, past or present, do not benefit workers. White Australia’s purpose was to create a false “national interest” that in reality propped up bosses’ authority and power.
Protectionism—using tariffs to protect domestic industry—was justified as necessary for high wages, much as we hear today that higher wages depend on bosses’ profits. This means workers pay more for basics, as US workers now see under President Trump.
Arbitration was favoured not just by the ALP and union officials but also by most of the bosses. Capitalists backed arbitration (and still do, as with the Fair Work Commission), because it limits workers’ ability to strike and regulates disputes, hoping to avoid large strikes like those in Australia in the 1890s.
The basic wage, which Reynolds and Lake describe as challenging employer power, wasn’t a product of White Australia any more than similar minimum wages abroad. The minimum wage set what a family could survive on—the literal minimum—and paid accordingly. As socialists said at the time, “There is nothing radical about recognising that human beings require the same as a donkey—enough to live on”.
Arguments blaming the working class for White Australia haven’t changed much in over a hundred years. The only difference: liberals back then believed in White Australia to build an “enlightened and self-reliant community”; today liberals still claim it benefited workers, and try to ascribe responsibility for such blatant racism and discrimination not to their own political forerunners, but to “unenlightened” workers.
Besides providing the early Australian state with an ideology that could bind its population together, White Australia was also necessary because the Australian state confronted a rising Asian power in Japan.
Australia was always an aggressive power, pushing for Britain’s and the US’s involvement in the Pacific and Asia. Australia urged Britain to annex Fiji in 1874; Queensland annexed Papua New Guinea in 1884. During the Cold War, Australian governments supported US intervention in Vietnam and applauded the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia. This aggressive imperialism continues today, with Labor spending huge sums on nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the US war drive against China.
While the fear is now about China, for most of the twentieth century it was Japan. From 1894, when Japan annexed Korea and embarked on its own colonial expansion, it was perceived as Australia’s key rival in the region. This view grew after Japan’s military victory over Russia in 1905, the first modern defeat of a European empire by a non-European state. The rise of Japanese imperialism was perceived as a threat to Australia’s capacity to develop as a white state. As George Pearce, Labor senator and later defence minister in World War One, put it: “The only doctrine that these [Asiatic] races respect is the doctrine of force. Our White Australian legislation is so much waste paper unless we have rifles to back it up”.
Despite fighting alongside Japan in World War One, Australia strongly opposed and defeated Japanese efforts to have the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) support racial equality.
By the time Australia went to war with Japan in 1941, the ideological groundwork was done. Sydney Daily Telegraph headlines in 1933 said that “war with Japan is inevitable”, despite Japan being Australia’s second largest export market behind Britain, absorbing 12 percent of all exports. The parallels with China today are clear.
Racist vilification of Japanese people—always central to the White Australia policy—was pushed to extremes in World War Two. A two-week campaign started by the government claimed Japanese people were warlike fanatics, possessed by an irrational hatred of whites:
“The Japs have been educated to hate you from infancy. They have been preparing for a war like this since they were old enough to understand ... Even when they smiled on us and treated us ever so politely they hated us in their souls ... Young Japan learnt to hate while you were playing with marbles and enjoying the freedom and benefits of your democracy.”
This systematic campaign of dehumanisation was summed up in the slogan: “We’ve always despised them, NOW WE MUST SMASH THEM!”
In the Pacific War, this race hatred played out fully: Japanese soldiers were often executed instead of being taken prisoner, Japanese civilians were killed in the hundreds of thousands by US firebombing, and ultimately, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were devastated by nuclear weapons.
The White Australia policy is neither a glorious page in the nation’s past nor merely a symbol of ignorance. It was a deliberate effort by Australian rulers to manufacture nationalism and unity in a new state; a barbaric, dehumanising ideology to replace class struggle with racial hatred for imperialist aims. It stands as another mark of shame in the history of capitalism in Australia.

Duncan H.

What was the White Australia policy?

Fascists in Australia are trying to build a movement. We have to stop them. On 19 October, we will be counter-protesting the next round of “march for Australia” demonstrations—protests that are trying to capitalise on fascism’s international success. 
The far right is no longer just small bands of drunken neo-Nazis praising Hitler and organising small marches and pub gigs. Across the globe, fascists have entered the political mainstream, and far-right groups have become ruling parties. They are in government in the United States, India, Italy, Argentina and across Europe. If elections were held in the United Kingdom, Germany or France today, fascists would likely take key ministerial posts in far-right governments. 
In Australia, the far right has organised some of the largest street demonstrations in decades, and One Nation has gained in the polls. Inside the Liberal Party, there is a battle between the right and the hard right—Andrew Hastie quitting the shadow ministry to further campaign against migrants and climate targets and for increased militarism, and to build the far-right brand as the future of Australian conservatism.
The growth of the far right is, in many ways, inevitable under capitalism. The ideas of the far right are the ideas of capitalism taken to their logical extreme. And the program of the far right can suit the needs of the ruling class. That’s why, in the United States, the Trump regime is not meeting much opposition from the capitalists. 
What isn’t inevitable is the nature of the response to this growth of the far right. The Labour Party in the UK and the Democrats in the US offer one path: acquiesce, do nothing, and <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025">repeat the core messages of the right</a> and by doing so legitimate them. Trump, in <a href="https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-department-of-defense-leaders-quantico-september-30-2025/">a speech</a> to the army top brass, as good as called out the Democrats for their lack of political response to his agenda: “I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up, I must be honest with you. They’ve had it. They’ve had it with Trump”.
Where the centre parties do nothing, we have to stand against the growth of the far right. We need to build mass movements on the streets and take them on in other areas of our society. 
We need to make use of all political arenas that we can. That means organising forums and town hall meetings. It means postering campaigns, painting the town “anti-fascist”. We need left-wing political parties, like the Socialists, to grow everywhere and provide an anti-capitalist alternative to both the status quo and the far right. In 2023, we were able to deny Melbourne neo-Nazis their organising space, a gym in Sunshine, using protests and community pressure. Campaigns like that should be repeated when the far right attempt to set up spaces to build their movements. 
In Australia, we have the chance to push back against the far-right street movement because it still lacks coherent political leadership. 
We have to grow a confident and militant working-class movement. This is central because we cannot defeat the far right without taking on the capitalists. Only by getting rid of the system that breeds fascism can we ensure that this kind of politics cannot rear its head again. We may not be able to defeat the politics of the far right within the framework of capitalism, but we can challenge their current political organisations and build a left-wing alternative.
In Italy, a far-right government is currently in power. Despite this, a mass strike wave has developed against the genocide in Gaza, and crucially against the government’s support for it and its opposition to working-class action. As workers continue to develop their struggles, they can start to create a crisis for the far-right government and hopefully remove it from power. 
This shows us a pathway for defeating the far right. We have a responsibility to build these kinds of movements everywhere. The fight against the far right has to be a fight against this brutal system. 
In Australia, 19 October will be a crucial opportunity to build an anti-fascist movement and build the confidence of our side to take on the whole racist, rotten system.

Anneke Demanuele

The far right is organising—we have to resist

On a sunny Saturday in September, more than two dozen volunteers gathered at a park in Samson, in Perth’s south. As on many afternoons and weekends before, they were meeting there to doorknock for the WA Socialists’ candidate in the City of Fremantle council election. Between them on that day, they managed to knock on more than 1,000 doors, talking to voters about local issues and making the case to vote to elect a socialist to the council.
Victorian Socialists members voted in June to expand their electoral project across Australia, and the WA Socialists was launched in July. It immediately found an audience among those who were eager for a left-wing alternative to the parlous state of politics in Western Australia. Since then, more than 500 people have signed up, and many have gotten active in the council campaign—with good reason.
WA is possibly the worst state in Australia in which to be a renter. According to a recent report from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, the median weekly rent in WA has increased by 76 percent since 2020 and now sits at $740. Anglicare WA’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot found not one single room in the whole of the state, let alone a property, is affordable for people on Jobseeker, youth allowance or the disability support pension.
Investment in public housing has been criminally low. As of May 2025, there were 21,480 current applications for social housing. If you’re one of those applicants, you can expect to wait on average 148 weeks, or just under three years. And in its recent budget, the Cook Labor government wound up several key cost-of-living relief measures, such as electricity credits.
While workers and the poor are struggling, for those at the top it’s a boom time. According to the Department of Jobs, Tourism, Science and Innovation, WA’s iron ore sector generated $128 billion in sales in 2024, of which $36 billion was profit. And politicians themselves are among the winners. They were recently awarded a 4 percent pay rise, increasing a backbencher’s annual pay to $173,393. For comparison, the starting salary for a WA state school teacher is $78,397. 
It’s in the context of this one-sided class war being waged by the rich and their political servants that WA Socialists has embarked on its first serious campaign. Council elections are taking place across the state in October, in most places by postal ballot. With a total of ten candidates running across eight council areas in Perth, the party has presented voters with a genuine, fighting, anti-capitalist platform—proudly taking up issues like housing, the environment, workers’ rights and solidarity with global struggles like that for peace and justice for Palestine. 
Nick Everett, the WA Socialists’ candidate for East Ward in Fremantle, is a long-time socialist activist, former chair of Friends of Palestine WA and a union delegate. In Fremantle, wealth and poverty often rub shoulders. The median rent for a house has increased by nearly 60 percent in the last five years, and public housing levels have sharply declined, replaced with expensive new apartments. 
The state government plans to relocate Fremantle’s 100-year-old port, shedding hundreds of local jobs and destroying the heart of the community. Everett and the WA Socialists are firmly opposed to this, as well as to the plan to turn the nearby suburb of Cockburn into a base for US nuclear submarines as part of the AUKUS deal. Fremantle declared itself a nuclear-free zone in the 1980s. Everett wants to keep it that way.
“Fremantle’s identity is being sold off to developers while working-class people are squeezed out”, Everett says. “We need a council that treasures Freo’s unique working-class history and prioritises housing and services for all, not just the rich.”
In Canning in Perth’s east, the dilapidated Brownlie Towers site has sat empty for years despite its potential to provide much-needed public housing. Rachel Goldsbrough, a public hospital nurse and the WA Socialists’ candidate for Mason Ward in Canning, has made the redevelopment of the towers a key part of her platform. “We need 100 percent public housing at Brownlie Towers, and we need it yesterday”, she says. “The government has ignored this project for too long. It’s a disgrace.”
Rents in Canning have skyrocketed by 84 percent in just five years, and council rates were raised by 6 percent this year—among the highest increase in the state. Among other measures to address the housing crisis, Goldsbrough is calling on the council to impose penalties on owners of properties left empty long-term.
In Bayswater in Perth’s north, gentrification is setting in. The median house price in parts of the suburb has risen 70 percent, with many renters evicted to make way for short-term rentals and Airbnbs.
Lewis Todman, a longtime socialist organiser and pre-service teacher, is running as the WA Socialists’ candidate. “If elected, I’ll be the only renter on the Bayswater council”, Todman says. “We need a local government that stands up for the rights of renters, not the rights of Airbnb owners looking to make a buck from the housing crisis.”
Across all campaigns, the issue of Palestine resonates with voters, with many declaring that their vote will go to the WA Socialists on the basis of the party’s unwavering opposition to the war in Gaza.
While doorknocking in Fremantle, a volunteer met Sally, who said she had been a communist in her younger years. At the end of their conversation, Sally went inside her home and returned, handing the volunteer a pin that said “No Conscription”—a relic from her husband’s days as a draft dodger during the Vietnam War. She explained that she had been uplifted and inspired by some of the young people leading the WA Socialists’ campaign and their anti-war stance.
Whatever the results of this election, the WA Socialists project has significant momentum. It has already achieved the membership required to register as a party with the Western Australian Electoral Commission—a task to which it will turn in the coming months. By bringing issues like housing, public services, and global solidarity to letterboxes, doorsteps and community centres, WA Socialists offers a chance to seriously shake the rotten status quo of capitalism in WA and build a movement to win real change.

Miranda Wood

On the campaign trail with WA Socialists

Over the last two years, Australia has become home to one of the most enduring movements for Palestine anywhere in the world. According to the Armed Conflict Location &amp; Event Data Project, Australia ranks second only to Yemen in the number of mass demonstrations (protests of more than 10,000 people) held in opposition to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. 
Between 7 October 2023 and 5 September 2025, more than 40,000 Palestine solidarity events took place globally, more than 900 of which were in Australia. The figures tell a story of extraordinary resilience and mass political commitment. But the numbers alone can’t capture the depth of this movement, its organisation, its determination and the thousands of lives it has transformed.
For nearly two years, tens of thousands of people have attended protests, fundraisers, teach-ins, film screenings and organising meetings. We’ve stood in the pouring rain, in blistering summer heat and under threats of repression, wrapped in keffiyehs, demanding an end to Israel’s genocide and a free Palestine from the river to the sea.
We have marched through every capital city, and in regional towns from Wollongong to Albany. We’ve blockaded arms manufacturers, tried to shut down highways and ports, occupied university campuses and corporate headquarters. In the process, we’ve built a movement that refuses to back down. 
The explosion of support for the Palestinians since October 2023 has drawn thousands of people into political life, many for the first time. In suburbs and schools, on campuses and in workplaces, entire layers of society have begun to organise. New groups have sprung up everywhere: Students for Palestine, Healthcare Workers for Palestine, Academics for Palestine, Teachers for Palestine. Muslim and Arab community organisations have mobilised at a scale not seen in decades, while long-time socialists and anti-war activists have played critical roles in sustaining the momentum. There have even been strikes for Palestine in Victoria, taken by workers in the Australian Services Union. 
Some people have dedicated every spare moment of their lives to this campaign, organising rallies, making placards, fundraising for medical aid in Gaza, pushing for union motions or simply talking to friends and colleagues about why Palestine matters. People who never thought of themselves as political are waking up to the reality of the world. 
A few months ago, one of the educators at my daughter’s school revealed that she couldn’t sleep because she was so distressed at what was happening in Gaza. She said she had never been political before. She is one of many whose world view has been changed because of Israel’s genocide. 
Along the way, people have learned important lessons.
They’ve learned about the brutal history of Zionism and the Nakba. They’ve learned about 75 years of colonisation, displacement and resistance. They’ve learned to challenge the media’s distortions and to see through the propaganda of Western regimes.
But perhaps just as importantly, they’ve learned a lot about Australia—about the deep and bipartisan loyalty our rulers show to Israel and about the hollowness of their democratic pretensions.
The genocide in Gaza has been enabled by Western governments, including our own. While Labor politicians offer mealy-mouthed statements about “peace” and “restraint”, they have continued to supply weapons components to Israel, to trade intelligence with its military and to lend diplomatic weight to its crimes.
Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong want to present themselves as global humanitarians. The latest declaration of support for a Palestinian state is their attempt to pretend they care. The reality is they are complicit, actively and knowingly, in a campaign of mass slaughter. They have shown time and again that they are more interested in preserving Australia’s alliance with the United States and Israel than listening to the hundreds of thousands of people in this country demanding an end to the bloodshed.
The movement has also learned that words are cheap. Politicians may express “concern”, but what matters is what they do—and what they have done is repress the movement and slander it at every turn.
From the first weeks of protest, we have faced a campaign of lies and defamation. The media accused us of antisemitism, without evidence. A Sydney protest was falsely reported as chanting antisemitic slogans, a claim subsequently debunked by a police investigation. But our leaders have never let facts get in the way of a good story. 
In workplaces and cultural institutions, expressing support for Palestine has been treated as a disciplinary offence. People have lost jobs or funding simply for opposing genocide.
When actors at the Sydney Theatre Company wore keffiyehs on stage, the company condemned them, and donors threatened to withdraw funding. The ABC fired journalist Antoinette Lattouf for sharing a Human Rights Watch post about Gaza. The cricket commentator Peter Lalor was axed by SEN Radio for criticising Israel’s war crimes. The State Library of Victoria terminated contracts with four writers—citing “child safety” as a cover for political censorship—after they expressed solidarity with Gaza.
These attacks are not isolated. They are part of a broader ideological offensive aimed at delegitimising our movement and silencing dissent.
And it doesn’t stop at smear campaigns. Across the country, legal restrictions on protests have increased. In New South Wales, the state government introduced harsh anti-protest laws, using them to threaten organisers with massive fines and arrest. Police have tried to shut down peaceful protests, including attempting to block a Palestine rally on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
University managements have also tried to repress student encampments, with threats of disciplinary action, police eviction and public vilification. In the wake of last year’s Palestine camps, universities have gotten away with the most egregious limits to freedom of expression. At the Australian National University, students are no longer allowed to put up posters. At the University of Western Australia, student lecture announcements have been banned—as has handing out leaflets outside of a very small prescribed area. At Melbourne University, the administration spied on students and staff who support Palestine. McCarthyite-style repression reigns supreme across our universities. 
But none of it has broken our movement.
Despite everything—despite the lies, the job losses, the censorship, the police repression—we are still here. 
This resilience is not just a matter of determination, though we have plenty of that. It’s political. People are not marching week after week because it’s easy or fashionable. They are doing it because they are outraged, at the genocide, yes, but also at the complicity of our own government. They are doing it because they see through the hypocrisy of the “rules-based order”. And because they want to live in a world where justice isn’t defined by imperial interests.
Our movement is one of the most powerful expressions of anti-imperialist politics in this country in decades. 
The genocide in Gaza continues. But so too does the resistance. What the raw numbers show is that we have built something enduring.
We have refused to be silenced. We have stood with the Palestinian people in their darkest hour. And we will continue to do so until Palestine is free.
This movement is not going away. And neither is our rage, our solidarity or our hope.

Vashti Fox

Two years into the genocide, Australia’s Palestine solidarity movement is a beacon of resistance

The most glorious moment of this year’s federal election was watching Peter Dutton not only lose his long-desired bid to be prime minister, but lose his own seat in parliament as well. It was almost as satisfying as watching former Prime Minister John Howard suffer the same fate in 2007.
Dutton’s spectacular failure represented a thorough rejection of his right-wing agenda. Buoyed by Donald Trump’s US presidential victory last year, Dutton pivoted to include some soft-MAGA styling in his own campaign—attacking Welcome to Country ceremonies, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, work from home arrangements and, at times, immigration. Voters turned away in droves.
The following leadership battle between Sussan Ley—the more moderate candidate—and Angus Taylor—on the harder right—resolved in Ley’s favour. The commentariat renewed the argument that followed the Coalition’s loss of government in 2022: that for the Liberal Party to regain government, it needed to shave down its harder right-wing edges. It also needed to calm the factional warfare and unite behind a leader.
This is not what is happening. The party’s hard right is asserting itself very publicly to try to shape the party in its own image.
First was Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who shot to the head of Australia’s far-right scene as the leader of Peter Dutton’s No campaign during the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. During this year’s election, she told a campaign rally that she wanted to “make Australia great again”. A few days later, a Christmas snap of Price and her husband in MAGA hats hit the media. Following the fascistic March for Australia demonstrations last month, Price fronted the media to share the rally-goers’ concerns about “mass migration”. She singled out Indian migrants, arguing that Labor allowed higher levels into the country to boost its vote. A week of bitter party infighting ensued, culminating in Price losing her spot in the shadow cabinet after she refused to declare confidence in Ley.
Western Australian Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was the next to break ranks. He threatened to quit the shadow frontbench if the party recommitted to net zero emissions by 2050. Hastie followed this up with a truly MAGA-esque series of posts across social media. In one, he shared a black-and-white picture of a bygone White Australia: mum and dad with their two young sons tending the lawn of a classic 1960s suburban brick home. In the caption, he wrote that the Liberal Party “might even die as a political party” if it doesn’t curb migration, questioning “What is the point of politics, if you’re not willing to fight for something?”. 
In a video titled “Australian First”, Hastie poses with a vintage red 1969 Ford Falcon sedan, bemoaning the loss of domestic manufacturing and “Aussie cars, made by Aussie workers, for the Australian people”. And, of course, there are references to the “evil” and “violent” “radical left”, Christian iconography and the need to fight the decline of the West.
This is all widely understood as Hastie’s first moves in a bid for Liberal Party leadership, a campaign that has been publicly endorsed by Price, Liberal MPs Garth Hamilton and Henry Pike, and backed by a number of other Liberals speaking anonymously to the media. Bear in mind that Ley won the leadership by only four votes: 29 to Taylor’s 25.
There’s some confusion about this posture. If Trump-style politics was so thoroughly rejected by the Australian electorate less than six months ago, why double down on it? Sometimes there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. These are ideological people with a vision for society—and that vision fits with a rising hard-right norm across the Western world. Even if that hasn’t yet filtered into Australia, people like Hastie and Price can still feel like this is their movement’s historical moment and their duty to propagate it. Politics isn’t just about tailing mass opinion—it’s about intervening to shape it.
It’s worth comparing this to how the Labor Party responded to its loss of government in 2013 and subsequent near-decade in opposition. Party leaders concluded that public infighting had been electorally detrimental, so they needed to present a united front. In practice, this meant the more left-wing figures inside Labor shutting up and backing whatever the leader said. Think of MPs like Ged Kearney, who publicly supported refugee rights for years but, since entering parliament, has shut her mouth on the question. Or think of how the party treated WA Senator Fatima Payman who crossed the floor to support a Greens motion recognising Palestinian statehood. 
The far right has failed to enter the mainstream here for several reasons. Primarily, Australia has not experienced the same level of economic and political crisis and chaos as the northern hemisphere. The centre has held—albeit with declining support each election. 
But there is a base for harder right politics: in the most recent election, far-right outfits polled a combined 13.6 percent—almost 2 million votes. Recent polling indicates that support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has increased from 6 to 11 percent since the May election and is now at 16 percent in NSW. But the far right has failed to coalesce around a single party or leader, as with the AfD in Germany, National Rally in France or Trump in the US. This hampers its ability to build a movement.
It’s impossible to predict how a more cohered far-right movement could emerge in Australia. But it’s possible that, rather than happening outside the Liberal Party, it could emerge within it, or as a split from it. As the Teal Independents continue to soak up the more moderate Liberal base, this becomes more likely. And people like Hastie are in many ways the more likely candidates. It’s rarely the street thugs who rise to the top. Hastie, with his SAS soldier background and elite Sydney private school education, is far more typical. Trump, after all, is a billionaire born into wealth.
Again, this is not to predict anything. But it should be read as a warning. The far-right threat exists in Australia, not just on the streets but inside the traditional major party of Australian capitalism.

Eleanor Morley

The far-right threat inside the Liberal Party

The Albanese government has released its plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, with a target of 62 to 70 percent reductions by 2035. It is a hoax.
There are two ways to obstruct climate action: denialism and deceit. The Liberals have given us plenty of experience with the former. Labor is trying its hand at the latter. Its “<a href="https://www.dcceew.gov.au/climate-change/emissions-reduction/net-zero">Net Zero Plan</a>” intends to neutralise the political issue of climate action (not the actual emissions) through a smokescreen of good vibes and creative accounting. When Liberal Prime Minister Scott Morrison was dragged kicking and screaming into presenting his net-zero plan in 2021, it was widely derided. Chris Bowen, now federal climate minister, at the time said it was a scam, not a plan. The same can be said for his, which differs very little in its essence.
Like Morrison’s, it is imbued with techno-mysticism, praying that solutions like green hydrogen and carbon capture and storage become commercially viable, to prevent any real costs to capitalists. Like Morrison’s, it cooks the emissions books so long they’ve turned black—claiming that Australia has already reduced emissions 29 percent on 2005 levels (every year Labor and Liberal governments arbitrarily raise the amount of carbon they estimate the land is taking out of the air). Like Morrison’s, it lets companies continue to increase their emissions. All they have to do is pay for some carbon credits to “offset” them.
Labor’s targets, despite what Albanese claims, are not “backed by the science”. In fact, the Climate Change Authority, which developed them, revised its numbers down after consultations with business. The Australian Academy of Science <a href="https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/submissions/2024/aas-submission-cca-2024-issues-paper.pdf">supports a target of 74 percent by 2030</a> and net-zero by 2035 as the only path consistent with the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping well below 2 degrees warming. Yet even this would be insufficient, as either of these targets—as the Academy points out—covers only a fifth of Australia’s emissions: those produced within its borders, never mind all the coal and gas exported overseas!
Yet to say that the target needs to be higher, or the plan more effective, misses the point. The point of the Net Zero Plan is to help us reconcile the irreconcilable—Labor claims to be reducing emissions while expanding
fossil fuel exploitation.
Since Labor formed government in 2022, it has approved 31 new coal, gas and oil projects. In an analysis released this month, “<a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/albanese-governments-fossil-fuel-approvals/">The Albanese Government’s fossil fuel approvals</a>”, the Climate Council estimated that these projects’ total lifetime carbon emissions will be 6.5 billion tonnes, equivalent to fifteen years of Australia’s current emissions. The colossal North West Shelf “carbon bomb” is meant to run until 2070, twenty years after we ought to have entered Labor’s new utopia of “green jobs and growth”.
In squaring this circle, the best thing Labor has got going for it is the Liberals themselves. Incapable of shedding its climate denialism, the Coalition has been the perfect foil, allowing Labor to present itself as a sensible climate pragmatist. It can pull off a feat the conservatives never could—cementing Australia’s climate-wrecking future under the mask of progressivism.
The consequences are extreme, as the first <a href="https://www.acs.gov.au/pages/national-climate-risk-assessment">National Climate Risk Assessment</a> (NCRA) makes clear. After delaying it for almost a year, the federal government released this report just days before its Net Zero Plan, hoping to control the story. It’s no surprise why—the NCRA spares no detail about the destruction the climate crisis will wreak. There are plenty of the ever-reddening heat maps you might expect, but the report also considers the details on the ground, like how heat will warp railways and impede supply lines, and how harsher droughts will increase suicide rates. It’s as close as you get to a totalising view of the cataclysmic crisis we’re facing.
Heatwaves are already the deadliest natural hazard in Australia, and will increase in intensity in the coming decades. At 3 degrees of warming, the NCRA predicts that heat-related mortality will more than triple in Melbourne and quintuple in Sydney and Darwin. Plant life will suffer greatly, swathes of our natural environment being destroyed and some of our most important carbon sinks being crippled. Between 40 and 70 percent of native plant species will be at risk.
More than 1.5 million people in Australia will experience sea level rise and coastal flooding by 2050 (when the NCRA expects us to hit 2 degrees warming), doubling to 3 million by 2090 (at 3 degrees). Combined with the threat of bushfires and inland flooding, 1 million homes will be at “very high risk” by 2050, rendering them uninsurable.
Indigenous Australians will be worse affected. The rate of sea rise in the Torres Strait is almost double the Australian average, and flooding will double by 2050. Remote communities deprived of adequate telecommunications infrastructure, housing and health care will be isolated when disasters strike. At the same time, the poor city suburbs where Aboriginal people are overwhelmingly concentrated are already urban heat islands, barrios of concrete and asphalt (like Blacktown and Sydney’s outer west) where heatwaves will kill the greatest numbers of people. 
Labor is paving the way for this future. Its plans and targets are not half-measures but cover for expanding fossil fuels. We can’t allow them to obscure that fact.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

The new climate denialism: Labor’s Net Zero Plan

If someone took $20,000 from you, you’d probably want it back. In fact, you’d probably think it’s worth quite a bit of effort to get it back. That sort of money can mean a lot of extra security, comfort and dignity for most workers. 
And if you and every single one of your workmates had that kind of money taken out of your pay packets, with most of this missing cash flowing to the already filthy rich, it’s pretty likely you’d expect your union to try to organise to win it back.
The reality, however, is that most unions in this country have done very little to organise a fight to reverse the massive hit to our incomes due to inflation over the past four years. Before looking at why this is the case, it’s worth exploring just how much we’ve gone backwards over that time.
Writing in the Guardian in May, economist Greg Jericho <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/may/15/australia-wage-growth-remains-solid-but-now-the-recovery-needs-to-be-sustained">pointed out</a> that a worker on the average wage is 4.4 percent behind where they would be if wages had kept up with inflation over the past four years, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. This means that someone earning the average wage ($93,000 per year in 2021) is around $4,000 per year worse off, in 2021 dollars. Adjusted for inflation (CPI), that’s the equivalent of around $90 per week in today’s money, or $180 missing from each fortnightly pay packet.
But even this is a significant understatement of the financial pain many wage earners are experiencing.
Jericho points out that the CPI is designed to exclude changes in average mortgage costs, which have been a massive burden for many workers over the past four years. These mortgage costs are included in another measure of inflation compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics—the Employee Living Cost Index (ELCI).
Using this measure, Jericho calculates that the average wage earner in Australia is not 4.4 percent behind inflation, but double that: on average each of us is a staggering 8.9 percent behind where we would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021. Put in dollar terms, this amounts to nearly $180 per week or $360 per fortnight.
What if we add up all these weekly losses? How much have we lost in total during the inflationary surge since 2021? <a href="https://github.com/jimb0w/Inflation/blob/master/Inflation.pdf">Detailed statistical modelling</a> carried out for Red Flag quantifies this loss:
<ul>
 <li>Someone on the average wage ($93,898 in 2021) has lost a total of $23,374 since July 2021, compared to if they’d kept up with the Consumer Price Index.</li>
 <li>This figure rises to a staggering $33,919 in wages lost to inflation since 2021 if we use the Employee Living Cost Index instead of CPI.</li>
 <li>Average wages are skewed upwards by a minority of very highly paid wage earners like senior managers. The median wage is $20,000 lower, and is more representative of what most of us earn: half of us earn less than the median, and half earn more. Still, someone on the median female full-time wage ($71,666 in 2021) has lost $12,767 over four years compared to inflation measured by the CPI—or $20,815 if we use the ELCI.</li>
</ul>
Wages set by enterprise agreements will vary from this average, but the big majority will give a similarly bleak picture.
Of course, all of these are average figures. Many of us will have been impacted less than this, others more. But they give us a general picture of the staggering degree to which wages have gone backwards over the past four years.
This money has not simply disappeared. Much of it has been redistributed from wage earners to corporations and the super-rich. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/corporate-profits-increase-inflation-fact-sheet/">study</a> by the Australia Institute in 2023 found that surging corporate profits accounted for more than half of the price increase since 2021.
There’s no austerity for the corporate elite and their super-rich pals. Since 2021, while wages have fallen behind prices by 4.4 percent (CPI) or 8.9 percent (ELCI), the total value of companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange has jumped from $2,500 billion to $3,155 billion. This is an increase of 26 percent, well ahead of the inflation rate. And the combined wealth of the annual Rich 200 list published by the Australian Financial Review has soared from $480 billion in 2021 to $668 billion this year—a jump of 39 percent in just four years.
Companies fattening their profits and their balance sheets while the rest of us go backwards isn’t some law of nature. It’s a policy choice by the rich, by the capitalists, and by the governments that serve them—both Liberal and (mainly) Labor over the past four years.
In the face of this onslaught, our unions have been largely passive. So much so that it no longer goes without saying that it is actually possible to win pay rises: they can be achieved through industrial action, and unions are supposed to play a role in making this happen.
A small number of unions showed this back when inflation was lifting off in late 2021, winning <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/thousands-of-workers-to-get-5pc-pay-rises-off-inflation-spike-20220320-p5a672">a sprinkling of enterprise agreements</a> that included CPI-linked pay clauses at major companies including Toll Global Express, Teys meatworks and STC trucking. These clauses ensured that workers at these companies at least didn’t go backwards relative to CPI. The Australian Financial Review spent plenty of words <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/inflation-guarantees-in-union-deals-trigger-7pc-plus-wage-bumps-20230621-p5di8v">sooking</a> about these results in the months and years that followed; anything that moves the burden of inflation from workers to employers is a scandal, according to them.
But as inflation increased, the union movement actually retreated from pursuing claims along these lines. In 2022 and 2023, there were very few examples of pay rises being won that matched or exceeded inflation. Some of the few in the private sector were from the offshore gas industry in Western Australia. The Offshore Alliance (the MUA and AWU) demonstrated that going <a href="https://awu.net.au/national/news/2022/09/17897/76-days-230-workers-and-15-billion-how-oa-members-won-a-landmark-ea-on-the-shell-prelude/">straight for the jugular</a> of major corporations can still win <a href="https://offshorealliance.org.au/news/phi-offshore-alliance-keeps-moving-up/">spectacular results</a>.
The largest-scale recent example of a union winning an above-inflation wage result is the Victorian branch of the ANMF. Last May, a mass meeting of 3,000 union members employed in public hospitals unexpectedly rejected the government offer of 3 percent per year, along with the nebulous promise of a Fair Work Commission gender equity adjustment at some point.
Faced with the plausible threat of an industrial campaign waged by a large and very popular group of workers willing to defy their own leadership, the government caved in, granting the nurses a pay rise of 28.4 percent over four years. Shortly after, Ambulance Victoria staff won <a href="https://vau.org.au/in-principal-agreement-reached/">increases of 24-33 percent</a> over four years, after a six-month industrial and political campaign.
It’s important to note that the real increase in nurses’ base rate of pay between 2021 and 2028 will total only a little more than 3 percent above inflation, if Reserve Bank inflation forecasts are correct. If we include increased allowances, this figure rises to between 6 and 8 percent ahead of inflation, over seven years. Many senior grades have the largest pay increases concentrated in the last year of the agreement, meaning they will stay behind inflation for most of the period up to 2028. And this is meant to include a historic fix for more than a century of gendered underpayment of nurses too. Despite these limitations, the nurses’ 28.4 percent result has understandably become a benchmark for public sector wage claims more broadly.
But while Victoria’s Labor government may have crumbled at the plausible threat of a prolonged industrial campaign from rebellious nurses, it has refused to move far from its wages policy of 3 percent per year for other groups of workers, preferring to tough out prolonged but low-intensity industrial campaigns. 
Last month, public mental health workers voted to accept a union leadership recommendation to settle for a deal far short of the initial claims rather than escalating the industrial campaign. Thirty-eight percent voted against acceptance, but to win against a government digging in its heels will need a much more vigorous industrial campaign, one capable of creating a crisis for the government.
Outside of Victoria, one of the few other high-profile examples of a successful fight for above-inflation pay rises is government teachers in NSW, who in late 2023 won <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2023/09/20/government-puts-pen-to-paper-inking-pay-rises-for-teachers/">an immediate pay rise</a> of between 8 percent (for top of scale teachers) and 12 percent (for graduate teachers). This followed a lengthy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/26/nsw-teachers-to-strike-next-week-over-pay-and-conditions">industrial campaign</a> under the previous Liberal government, and the teachers’ <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/nsw-teachers-wage-negotiations-stall-after-government-offer/102683528">rejection</a> of a pathetic 2.5 percent offer from the incoming Minns government. This is a significant result, though the NSW teachers’ 2024 <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2024/12/12/significant-gains-for-school-members/">pay deal</a> was only 3 percent per year over three years.
The failure of most unions to pursue wage rises aggressively is painfully squeezing household finances. Added to this, many essential industries—including health care, education and community services—struggle to retain experienced workers because of punishing workloads and low wages, which jeopardises and threatens the many services working-class people rely on. Winning back the money lost to inflation matters: it can be the difference between thousands of experienced staff staying in a vital industry, or being forced to look elsewhere for a living wage, intensifying the spiralling crisis in many essential services.
And whatever industry we’re in, the benchmark we set—by either accepting a massive hit to our pay or by fighting for a real pay rise—has the potential to demoralise or inspire others. Fighting is therefore not just about winning something for ourselves, but for every worker who deserves a pay rise.
A determined fight over wages can also be an important step to rebuilding the sort of unionism we need: the sort of unionism that used industrial action to win breakthroughs in pay, shorter hours, life-saving health and safety—and which didn’t stop there.
Historically strong unions like the Builders Labourers’ Federation, the metalworkers and the maritime unions all developed into powerful industrial units through fights over wages—and then used that industrial strength to fight for a better society, in dozens of different ways.
So why are there so few unions following this path today?
We know from ballooning corporate profits that the money is there. The precious few examples we have of workers fighting show that governments and corporations can be compelled to fund decent wages. We know from these same examples that to shake this money loose requires a serious industrial campaign, sometimes combined with the political pressure that strikes by groups like nurses, teachers and ambulance workers can create.
So the reason this is not being pursued on a wider scale is not that it is impossible. Rather, it’s a political choice. To put it simply: the majority of the leadership of the unions in Australia have a decades-long track record of pursuing a policy of class collaboration rather than conflict. The most notorious example of this is the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7336">Prices and Incomes Accord</a> of the 1980s. 
Under this policy, union leaderships teamed up with a federal Labor government to impose industrial peace and wage restraint. Profit share rose while wages share declined—not by chance but as a matter of state policy, with the union leadership as active partners. With the active or passive assistance of almost all of the top union leaders, it was Labor that imposed the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation and booming corporate wealth that still plagues us today.
This important fork in the road for the Australian union movement wasn’t just a matter of industrial strategy. It was a political choice, one of prioritising the supposed “national interest” rather than the uncompromising pursuit of workers’ interests.
The politics of the union movement’s leadership hasn’t improved since that time. It’s notable that in countries where neoliberalism was imposed by conservative forces such as Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, this produced a somewhat more combative and oppositional legacy in some unions. Both of those countries had a notably <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkstp.pdf">higher level</a> of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave">strikes</a> over the peak of the inflationary wave in 2022 and 2023—the UK <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/bbfw/lms">recording</a> ten times the decade-long average of strikes in those years—whereas the strikes over pay in Australia, while welcome, <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/industrial-disputes-australia/latest-release">barely moved</a> the statistical dial. The legacy of the class-collaborationist approach of the Accord is still entrenched in Australian unions.
There’s an obvious consequence of this for those who want our unions to take a different course: building a more combative union movement is a political project, not simply an industrial one. Of course we should be pushing our unions to fight to win back those missing tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, we need a political strategy: one that rejects the politics of class collaboration, and instead sets out to rebuild the politics of class struggle. Pushing for higher wages has to be one part of this wider project.

Sharpening the knife? Fair Work takes another step towards community sector wage cuts

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