Will the Bondi massacre result in a new wave of anti-Muslim and anti-migrant racism? Australia’s right-wing politicians certainly hope so. The murders took place on a Sunday evening. The right-wing response was clear within hours. 
By Monday, Liberal MP Andrew Hastie had published a short video manifesto: “The prime minister has failed this country ... What we need to talk about is immigration”. The same day, Pauline Hanson claimed on Sky News that her decades-long attack on “multiculturalism” had been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm6fyDoy98s">vindicated</a>, demanding a “hard look at our immigration”. On Tuesday, she and her new party comrade Barnaby Joyce toured the crime scene like Winston Churchill inspecting wreckage of the blitz. They, two of Australia’s most brazen professional racists, were welcomed as heroes.
Bondi has not been Australia’s Charlie Hebdo, its Bataclan or its Manchester arena. The traditional response to a terror attack—the stifling atmosphere of national unity, in which all dissent is smothered and some kind of patriotic liberalism becomes mandatory—has not been in evidence. Instead, Australia’s broad right-wing political networks have seized the opportunity to supercharge anti-immigrant sentiment and turn it against the Labor government.
The ground was already shifting. Polling indicates a surge in anti-migrant sentiment in Australia in the last five years. For much of the 2000s, only about a third of Australians thought there were too many migrants, but that number is <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/12/immigration-panic-comes-in-waves-data-shows-who-worries-most-and-when">now more than 50 percent</a>, with a steep climb since COVID.
When it comes to racism, Australia is in a peculiar position. Despite the deep roots of racism in official Australian politics, the country has not yet seen the full development of a Trumpian, supposedly “anti-establishment” nativism on a mass scale. For years, Australia’s right-wing politicians have struggled to find a way to initiate a shift like it, and ride it to electoral success.
The lag is sometimes attributed to Australia’s unusual electoral system, which does tend to prop up unpopular but broadly tolerable centre parties. The fact that both major parties, Labor and Liberal, tended to uncritically adopt extreme anti-refugee policies also meant that far-right challenges sometimes seemed superfluous. Trump himself has a strange impact: his success in the USA inspires right-wing co-thinkers around the world, while his conduct in office exposes the disturbing reality behind his demagoguery, as Peter Dutton found out to his disappointment when his Trumpian campaign fizzled after Trump’s second inauguration.
But the biggest factor was likely economic. Australia, almost uniquely in the wealthy capitalist countries, was never seriously affected by the financial crisis. Around the world, the centre-left and centre-right parties alike faced a rising tide of genuine hatred. Australia’s politicians have never faced the same rage that ultimately consumed the Clintons, Bushes and Blairs of the world. Left- and right-wing populism rose throughout Europe and the USA in 2015-16; in Australia, these were the years of Malcolm Turnbull. Australia had neither a Sanders nor a Trump. The neoliberal consensus had a reprieve.
But the logic of capitalism has caught up. The grinding impact of decades of neoliberalism, combined with post-COVID inflation, have created a crisis-like sense of unsustainable pressure on living standards. 
Even before Bondi, right-wingers sensed an opportunity. In early December, polling by the Nine media empire indicated that an astonishing 64 percent of Australians would support a complete ban on all immigration “until our housing situation has caught up”. That poll was, in effect, political research on behalf of the Liberals: the question itself is an anti-immigration slogan, suggesting that housing would “catch up” if migration were stopped. But it proves that a majority might assent to even the most extreme anti-migrant position if they’re told it will improve the housing situation. Around the same time, <a href="https://archive.is/N3EMC">poll</a> after poll showed support for the far-right One Nation surging. At the time of the Bondi massacre, the Liberals were preparing to unveil a new immigration policy focused on “<a href="https://archive.is/EtfiQ">turbocharging deportations</a>”.
Little surprise, then, at the spring in One Nation’s step and the open opportunism of the Liberals in the post-Bondi days. It is a disgrace and a warning that Pauline Hanson, the most consistent extreme racist in the Australian parliament, could claim to be the defender of Australia’s Jewish population when she attended the site of the massacre. Barnaby Joyce—never a model of restraint—felt bold enough to call an anti-migrant rally in defiance of the inevitable calls for calm and national unity.
How far can they go? Joyce’s racist rally, like others called on the same day, was small. It’s less than a year since Dutton’s Trumpian election campaign failed. You don’t need to be a seasoned politico to know that Hanson, Joyce and their gang of creeps are not to be taken seriously.
But whether or not their immediate campaign succeeds, the future is clear. Australia’s conservative politicians want the new brand of ultra-extreme, violent, “populist” racism to dominate political life here, as it does elsewhere. They think the time is near, and they’ll stoop to any low, seize on any tragedy, if it helps them build that project. Whether it’s Hanson, Hastie or some unknown figure who emerges as its leader, the conditions for a hardened racist movement are falling into place.
Around the world, centre-left political forces have collapsed in the face of this onslaught. Yet the Trumpian argument is not hard to beat. Living standards have been run down thanks to decades of policies favouring the wealthy, employers and big corporations. Scapegoating migrants and racial minorities serves those same interests. Anti-immigrant populism can be defeated, but not by mealy-mouthed neoliberal “multiculturalism”: it takes a real attack on the capitalists who make all our lives harder while turning us against each other.
And that is not exactly the Labor Party’s speciality.

D. Taylor

Australia’s right-wingers want a post-Bondi racist movement

For the past three decades or more, socialism has been a very marginal current in Australian political life. There are signs, however, that our movement’s fortunes might be changing for the better. 
On Tuesday, 13 May, this year, just over a week after the federal election, the Victorian Socialists (VS) executive announced its plan to take the project Australia-wide. It called on people to sign up as founding members of parties modelled on VS in every state and territory. In the following weeks, thousands of people heeded the call. By early June, party branches around the country collectively had more than 3,000 paid members. Since then, the figure has risen to more than 5,600.
This might, on the face of it, not seem very impressive. The New York mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani claimed to have mobilised more than 100,000 volunteers. The Democratic Socialists of America, which Mamdani is part of, claims a membership of more than 90,000. 
In the Australian context, though, an explicitly socialist party growing from a membership of less than 1,000 to more than 5,000 in the space of half a year is something of a breakthrough. No other Australian socialist formation in the 80 years since the end of World War Two has come close to such rapid growth. Even the Greens, in their heyday, didn’t manage it (according to figures provided by Stewart Jackson from the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, cited by Ben Hillier in his 2010 <a href="https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/a-marxist-critique-of-the-australian-greens/">Marxist Left Review article</a> “A Marxist critique of the Australian Greens”, it took the party ten years from its foundation in 1992 to reach a membership of more than 5,000).
What are the factors that made this breakthrough possible? Why is it that Victorian Socialists, and now its sister parties across Australia, have enjoyed such rapid growth—even if, in the bigger picture, still on a very modest scale—where others haven’t?
Around 1930, while he was languishing in one of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s prisons, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. By the old world he meant the kind of liberal capitalist order that had predominated in Europe prior to World War One. By the new world he meant communism. The monsters were primarily those of fascism. 
The same basic schema can be applied, arguably, to the fortunes of the socialist left in many Western countries in the decades since the collapse of the Stalinist eastern bloc states and Soviet Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The 1990s was a time when the “old world” of the left—one dominated, in Australia as (mostly) elsewhere, by the Communist Party and its various offshoots—was dead or rapidly dying. At the same time the “new world”—the promise of a renewal of revolutionary socialist politics unfettered by the dead weight of Stalinism—was very much struggling to be born.
From the perspective of the socialist left, the obstacles and diversions of the 1990s and 2000s were the various shades of small-l liberal politics that appeared to many to be the only realistic alternatives amid the post-Cold War ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism. In Australia this meant, above all, the rise of the Greens and of various social movements and campaigns that, as the years progressed, became increasingly identity-based and suspicious of the kind of “grand narratives” of change and traditional models of organising adhered to by socialists.
The biggest groups on the socialist left in Australia in the 1990s were, by a significant margin, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP—which in 2010 dissolved into the Socialist Alliance) and the International Socialist Organisation (ISO—the Australian franchise of the British Socialist Workers Party-led International Socialist Tendency). The DSP peaked at around 400 members in the late 1990s, while the ISO reached 300.
Looking back on those years, it’s now clear there was significant pressure on the socialist left to water down its politics to appeal better to liberals. This was evident, for example, in the decision of the DSP to wind up its newspaper Direct Action at the end of 1990 and relaunch it as the much more respectable-sounding Green Left Weekly in 1991. It was also apparent in the increasingly desperate attempts made by the ISO to square the circle of its overblown “1930s in slow motion” perspective by downplaying the need for political clarification and argument with supporters and new members.
When the anti-capitalist movement arrived in Australia in 2000, the ISO recruited widely among radicalising student activists. It didn’t, however, attempt to educate them in Marxist politics or even expect them to identify publicly with the group (for example, by selling its newspaper). As a result, it lost the vast bulk of them again in the 2001-02 period—to autonomism, the Greens and other more or less radical-liberal political currents (the remaining, much diminished, rump of the ISO later went on to unite with two other small IST splinter groups to form Solidarity). 
The last significant attempt to build a nationwide socialist electoral alternative in Australia came with the foundation of the Socialist Alliance in 2001—a joint initiative of the DSP and the ISO which, initially at least, was a genuine alliance of the bulk of the organised far left. The immediate context in which it was formed gave some justification for the high hopes of its leading participants. 2001 was the peak of the global anti-capitalist movement and a wave of radicalism was sweeping university campuses and (to a degree) high schools. Zoom out, though, and it’s clear the odds were very much stacked against it.
The period in which the Alliance was founded coincides almost exactly with the moment when the rubber really hit the road for the Greens. The Greens were prominent participants in the anti-capitalist movement and the subsequent mass movement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the year 2000 they had, nationally, a little more than 2,000 members. By 2005 this had risen to just under 8,600 (figures, again, from Stewart Jackson at the University of Sydney). In the 1998 federal election, the Greens received 2.1 percent of first preference votes nationally in the House of Representatives, and 2.2 percent in the Senate. By 2004 this had increased to 7.2 percent and 7.7 percent respectively.
At the same time, major party dominance, though declining, was still much more pronounced than it is today. The combined share of first preference votes going to Labor and the Coalition in the 2004 House of Representatives election was 84.3 percent. In 2007 it was 85.5 percent. Since then it has steadily declined, falling to 68.3 percent in 2022 and 66.4 percent in this year’s federal election.
In 2001, then, the political centre was very much holding strong. And to the extent that there was space opening up to the left of Labor, it was rapidly being filled by the Greens.
When looking, in retrospect, at the 1990s and early 2000s as a whole, it seems there was some truth to Francis Fukayama’s famously triumphalist “end of history” thesis put forward in his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Fukuyama saw in the collapse of Stalinist “communism” “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”. And in the West at least, the overwhelmingly hegemonic view of politics in that period, both on the left and the right, was very much in line with that.
Of course Fukuyama was wrong. However much history may have seemed to have ended in those years, it’s now very much back on. 
The first real revving of its engines occurred with the global financial crisis of 2008, which pulled the rug from under the dominant neoliberal economic and political framework of the time. When Barack Obama was first elected US president in 2008, he was almost universally feted by the global left. By the time he left office in 2016—replaced, shockingly and largely unexpectedly, by the Republican bête noire Donald Trump—he was widely despised.
The GFC exposed the rotten core of a capitalist system built on the exploitation of the many by the wealthiest few. Its impact, in the West at least, was summed up by the slogan of the 2011 occupy movement: “We are the 99%”. Around the world, increasing numbers of people became conscious, for the first time, of the extent to which the system was rigged for “the 1%”, and the role of supposedly progressive politicians like Obama in protecting and advancing their interests. 
The hundreds of billions spent bailing out the banks while working-class people were left to rot. The violent police repression of occupy and other movements for change. The economic “recovery” built on the backs of workers, and the doubling-down of technocratic political elites on all the most hated aspects of the neoliberal order that contributed to the crisis in the first place. All this fuelled a deep-seated anger that gradually ate away at the foundations on which the political centre had rested securely for the preceding two decades.
By the time the VS project was launched in early 2018, we’d already seen some of the consequences of this play out. A new consciousness was emerging on both the left and the right, and new political forces were attempting to relate to it. In 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party. 2016 brought the Brexit referendum in the UK, Bernie Sanders’ insurgent (though ultimately doomed) campaign for nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and the election of Donald Trump.
VS’s growth, in its early years, was far from spectacular. Its vote, however, was from the start better than anything achieved by socialists in Australia in many decades.
Its first test came with the 2018 Victorian state election. In the northern metro region of Victoria’s upper house—encompassing 11 lower-house seats and a voting population of around 500,000—VS came fifth out of nineteen parties, with just over 4 percent of the primary vote. In the working-class lower-house electorate of Broadmeadows in Melbourne’s north, VS candidate Jerome Small got 7.2 percent. 
The 2019 federal election included more good results. In the seat of Calwell in Melbourne’s outer northern suburbs, Jerome Small got 4.6 percent. In the inner north seat of Wills, Sue Bolton (an Alliance member who was running with VS at the time in line with the party’s Victorian branch’s decision to join VS when it first formed in 2018) got 4.5 percent. And in Cooper (formerly Batman), Kath Larkin got 4.2 percent. 
Between 2019 and 2025 VS’s membership and presence within Victorian political life continued to grow. Socialist Alliance members in Victoria decided to leave the party again in 2021, but this did little to slow its momentum. The scope of the party’s campaign work (both at election time and outside it) and its presence in local communities across Melbourne and some regional cities has steadily increased. And, come election time, its vote has risen accordingly.
This process has been accelerated by another major political earthquake of the post-end of history era: the genocide in Gaza. Israel’s war brought the underlying tensions and divisions of society to the fore. This was particularly the case in a country like Australia, which has long numbered among Israel’s closest allies. For more than two years now, a mass movement for Palestine has faced off against the full force of the pro-Israel establishment (not just politicians and police, but also the media, universities, the NGO sector and so on).
Socialists have long played a prominent part in the Palestine solidarity movement in Australia. And the work we’ve done to help build resistance to Israel’s genocide since October 2023 has helped further establish socialism as a visible force in Australian political life. 
Perhaps, in part, reflecting this, VS’s results in the 2025 federal election were its best yet. Kath Larkin got 8.4 percent in Cooper, Omar Hassan got 6.5 percent in Scullin, Jasmine Duff got 6.2 percent in Fraser, and VS’s candidate for the Senate Jordan van den Lamb (widely known by his social media handle “purplepingers”) got 1.5 percent statewide (a total of just over 63,000 first preference votes). Sue Bolton, running as the Socialist Alliance candidate for the seat of Wills and backed (financially and in terms of volunteer “boots on the ground”) by VS, got 8 percent.
The growth of the new Victorian Socialists-affiliated parties across Australia this year has to be seen in this context. Van den Lamb’s nationwide profile as a campaigner for renters’ rights certainly played its part. But the fact that a figure like that would even think of joining and running as a candidate for a party like VS rather than, for example, the Greens, reflects the tireless work of VS members building it up organisationally and politically over many years. 
A big part of this picture is the role of members of Socialist Alternative (SA), publisher of Red Flag. The results VS has achieved in elections, and the profile it has gained, would not have happened without the energy, enthusiasm and, frankly, sheer bloody-mindedness of SA’s growing cohort of youthful socialist activists (and, it must be said, of the less youthful ones too). Nor would the expansion of the project Australia-wide have been possible without the organisational infrastructure and personnel provided by SA branches across the country.
It’s clear now that in the period from the 1990s to today the “new world struggling to be born” was not to be found among the diminishing remnants of the old left, nor among those attracted to the respectable forms of “resistance” offered by the Greens, NGOs and other liberal organisations, and definitely not among the increasingly hollowed-out husks of union bureaucracies but—as has so often been the case throughout history—among students and the youth.
Whatever the exact balance of factors that brought us to the current moment, though, it’s clear socialists now have an opportunity for growth unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. The thousands of people who’ve signed up to the new socialist parties across Australia this year won’t all, of course, be worked-out revolutionaries—willing to devote their lives to the struggle for socialism. Our challenge, made more urgent by the global upsurge of the far right, is to convince as many of them as possible to do just that.

James Plested

A new beginning for socialism in Australia

The news of the massacre at Bondi piled horror on horror. As the narrative developed, every awful fear was confirmed: yes, there were deaths. Yes, there was a Jewish festival nearby. Yes, in fact, the festival was the target: the attack was motivated by antisemitism. Yes, the death toll would continue to climb: and yes, at least one child was killed. At that point, it seemed hard to imagine how things could get worse. But then Tony Abbott, Jillian Segal, Sussan Ley and Benjamin Netanyahu opened their mouths.
Right-wingers wasted no time in using this massacre for their political ends, facts be damned. There was no need to understand the worldview or motivation of the attackers—the long-term advocates of anti-Muslim, pro-genocide politics began grandstanding with no concern for empirical reality or political logic. 
Australia’s anti-immigrant right wing flooded the internet with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab propaganda of the vilest kind. Defenders of Israel’s genocide immediately blamed the massacre on the pro-Palestine movement. Many right-wingers did both, like Abbott, who blamed the massacre on “terrible marches ... across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and elsewhere” and declared that “we just have to be much more determined not to import hatred from overseas”.
Abbott knows something about importing hatred from overseas. He and his hard-right faction in the Liberal Party have spent a decade trying to radicalise anti-migrant sentiment, inspired by the models on offer from European neo-fascists and the MAGA movement in the US. It is unsurprising that he and his co-thinkers would imply, or declare, that immigration is to blame. 
Equally unsurprising, and equally unacceptable, is the rapid reemergence of figures like Australia’s discredited “antisemitism envoy”, Jillian Segal, seeking to use this massacre to peddle their anti-Palestinian political agenda. The facts: in the hours and days after the massacre, little was known about the attackers’ worldview except a potential years-long interest in ISIS. That interest long predates the emergence of the large-scale global Gaza solidarity movement—Australia’s spies were investigating the younger attacker in 2019.
ISIS and their international supporters oppose the Palestinian national struggle, have perpetrated abominable crimes against Palestinian refugees in the areas they control, and have an implacable hostility to the worldview and methods of the international solidarity movement. Although they may opportunistically refer to Palestine at times in their propaganda, they do so as part of a fundamentally counterposed project that seeks to expose the solidarity movement as a dead end that must be replaced with militarised sectarianism. They denounce the cause of Palestinian liberation as an “idol” and view even the most religious advocates of Palestinian national self-determination as apostates. So it is rather hard to see how, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, the Australian government’s symbolic recognition of a Palestinian state has led to the massacre of Jews in Sydney. Likewise, one struggles to understand the relevance of Segal’s Trumpian proposals to tie Australian university funding to political discipline.
Even more absurd are the widespread attempts to blame the Palestine solidarity movement in general, and the epic Sydney Harbour Bridge march in particular. Dave Rich, a purported expert in “left-wing antisemitism”, conceded in the Guardian that “we are yet to discover the detailed motivations of the Bondi attackers”. But this didn’t stop him from directly blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the massacre: “[T]his movement has generated and sustained a political culture in which violence is both conceivable and enacted”. 
In fact, the political culture of the Palestine solidarity movement is the direct opposite of the sectarian religious violence of the Bondi attack. The Palestine movement transcends religious boundaries and national borders. It is not based on violence, but collective protest. The mass demonstrations in Sydney, the general strikes in Italy, the multinational aid flotilla to Gaza, and the countless peaceful sit-ins and occupations by enormously courageous anti-Zionist Jews in the United States are just a few examples of actions that could only take place on the basis of anti-racist solidarity.
The Palestine solidarity movement is motivated by opposition to racist violence. Its methods are those of peaceful mass action. One of its central claims is the need to distinguish between the Jewish people and the Zionist political project. The Bondi attackers, just like the state of Israel itself, represent the rejection of these ideas and methods.
In truth, many of the publicists and whitewashers of Israel’s genocide know this, and that is why they are so desperate to slander the movement and jump at any opportunity to repress it bureaucratically. Their attempts to reframe the oppression of Palestinians on sectarian lines—the implication that Jews, by virtue of their religious or ethnic background, are effectively identical with the Israeli government’s oppression of Palestinians, and to oppose that oppression is to hate Jews—reinforce the logic of communal violence. 
That many Jews believe that all Palestine solidarity is an expression of anti-Jewish hatred is a tragedy, and one that opportunistic political forces are seeking to intensify and exploit to break down solidarity between Jews and the Palestine movement. But around the world, more and more Jews like me have reacted with revulsion to this propaganda, and have rejected the idea that being Jewish means supporting genocide against Palestinians, and opposing it is antisemitism. 
The reality is that much of the world today is in a death spiral of racist oppression and violence. Western politics is increasingly dominated by a discourse asserting that any and all forms of violence—from arbitrary imprisonment to assassinations—are justified in the struggle against migrants, minorities, drugs and subversion. Some lost souls are drawn to the apocalyptic mirror image of sectarian murder-suicides.
The conditions have been created for sectarian and racial violence in every direction. Jews and Muslims alike have been the victims of massacres by neo-Nazis, religious sectarians, and state actors. Across the world, the forces of reaction are trying to extinguish the principles of internationalist, anti-capitalist solidarity.
The Palestine movement has been a shining light of solidarity and cooperation in a world increasingly darkened by racist and sectarian brutality. Those who opportunistically use the Bondi massacre to slander that movement should hang their heads in shame, and the activists of that movement must redouble their efforts to assert the importance of internationalism, cooperation and resistance to this unending nightmare.

Shame on those using the Bondi massacre to slander Palestine solidarity

If young people didn’t already feel aggrieved enough, having a generation of social-media-obsessed scrolling addicts tell them they can’t watch YouTube must really grate. 
Yet that’s what the federal Labor Party, which by the way gave almost $20 million to tech bros at Meta and YouTube to help get itself re-elected last May, has done. And the worst part about it is not that young people are going to have to use someone else’s account to get access to unproven health and wellness advice, but that this is far from the worst affront to their dignity.
On almost every conceivable measure, young people in Australia are being disadvantaged and excluded. Life milestones that previous generations took for granted are increasingly becoming luxuries, achieved later in life if at all. Society feels stacked against them, organised to enrich an obscenely wealthy elite, and governed by entitled charisma-evacuations without two political principles to rub together. 
This is most glaring in relation to housing. While no political party will even countenance stepping on the toes of property investors or developers, young people are locked out of the housing market, denied economic independence and forced to live with their parents into their late 20s either because they can’t afford rent or because it’s the only way to save for a deposit. If they can afford rent, they have to put up with substandard housing owned by landlords who think being required to remove mould is socialism. 
The result, as the Grattan Institute’s 2019 “Generation Gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians” report notes, is that “younger Australians are now less likely to own a home than young people were in the past. In 2016, 45 per cent of 30-year-olds owned a home; in 1981, the figure was 67 per cent. By contrast, older people are just as likely to own a home now as they were then—with about 80 per cent of 65-year-olds owning a home”. The most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report likewise found that only 18 percent of people born between 1994 and 1997 owned a house before age 28, compared to 26.5 percent of those born between 1974 and 1977. 
And if they do own a house, young people are likely to be in more debt than any previous generation—the average home loan today is $694,000, up from $416,000 ten years ago. Low wage growth is a big factor locking young people out of home ownership, the price of an average house in Australia last December being 16.4 times the average household income, up from 9.5 times throughout the 1990s and 4.5 times in the 1970s. In capital cities, the discrepancy is even worse. 
And while young people are taking on record levels of housing debt, they also have to contend with unprecedented education debt, not having had the benefit of free or very low-cost education that their forebears enjoyed. 
According to the ATO, average student loan debt for people in their 20s has increased 145 percent over the last twenty years, well above the 62 percent total inflation over the same period. Graduates now take 40 percent longer to repay these debts than they did in the early 2000s, reflecting both higher debts and lower wages graduates are saddled with.
Young people are also shouldering a disproportionate burden in relation to tax and government support. Older people have benefited from tax policies that favour investors, such as the capital gains tax concessions introduced by the Howard government, while younger people on average have been further disadvantaged by them. The result, as Robert Breunig from the Australian National University, writing for the Conversation, points out, is that “older Australians have much higher incomes than previous generations of retirees. The average 75-year-old’s post-tax and transfer income 25 years ago was little more than 75% of an average Australian income. Today it equals the average Australian income ... Older Australians also enjoy a post-tax income one third higher than Australians aged 18–30”. 
Older people typically have more assets than the young, but the gap between them has grown significantly over the last 30 years. The Grattan Institute reports:
“The average household headed by someone aged 65-74 now has more than $1.3 million in net assets, up from $530,000 in real terms for a household of the same age in 1994. Wealth for an average household headed by someone aged 25-34 increased only modestly—from an average of $190,000 in net assets in 1994 to $300,000 today. Over the past decade, wealth for younger households has barely shifted.”
Age used to correlate with economic disadvantage in Australia, and it is positive that it no longer does. But aside from the fact that the benefits are not evenly distributed even among older people, this change is in part a product of tax and welfare policies that favour the already wealthy, to the detriment of young people. 
Then there are the social and political values young people have to contend with. A case in point is the unapologetic indifference of those in charge towards the climate catastrophe they are knowingly signing up future generations to endure. Profits from fossil fuel production and export come before any consideration of the irreversible impact these industries will have on people’s lives. The cynical spin and creative accounting that pass for climate action only compound the contempt many young people feel for the political class. 
There is likewise the sense that politicians and the powerful have no human decency, demonstrated most clearly by the almost unanimous official and institutional support for the genocide in Gaza. Add to that callousness towards the plight of refugees, Indigenous people and a general tendency to blame those with the least power for society’s problems. 
Even the changes that supposedly represent the pinnacle of human achievement and that young people are told will improve their lives turn out more often than not to be the opposite. The much-celebrated advances in technology over the last three decades, for example, have not axiomatically translated into improvements in quality of life or wellbeing, especially for those raised entirely in the digital age. 
More often than not, technological innovation seems to work against people—food delivery that further reduces social contact, image-crafting on social media that bears no relation to reality, endless marketing that plays on insecurities and low self-esteem to sell shonky crap. And that’s when it’s not being used by bosses to eliminate jobs and sack people, predators to groom abuse victims, misogynists to humiliate women or right-wing cranks to spread hate. The threat posed by AI to jobs is likewise projected to have the greatest impact on the young: 39 percent of entry level jobs already being replaced by AI according to a British Standards Institution survey of seven countries. 
The net result is that there is no longer a sense that life holds promise—that you can be independent and adventurous when you’re young without jeopardising your later financial security—or that your life, and the life you can offer the next generation, will be better than what has gone before. Society seems like it is working against young people, not for them. 
It is no wonder, then, the level of anxiety and distress among the young is at record highs. Writing for the Conversation, Flinders University academic Intifar Chowdhury notes, “Between 2011 and 2021, distress among 15 to 24-year-olds more than doubled, from 18.4% to 42.3%. For those aged 25 to 34, prevalence reached 32.7% in 2021 ... The 2025 Australian Unity Wellbeing Index survey found young Australians are some of the least satisfied with life, with adults aged 18 to 34 reporting the highest levels of mental distress and loneliness, and some of the lowest levels of personal wellbeing compared to any group across the adult lifespan”. 
In the age of unprecedented connectedness, young people are more isolated, have fewer friends and are lonelier than they have ever been, with loneliness among 15 to 24-year-olds increasing from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 24.9 percent in 2022, according to HILDA.
Being connected to others in real life, accepted for who you are, valued for whatever contribution you are able to make to the collective good, is necessary for people to thrive. But it is anathema to the ideology of capitalism, and increasingly difficult to achieve in spite of it. 
Not surprisingly, all this is having political consequences. 
Young people are more leftish, in voting habits and social attitudes, than any other cohort. A 2024 YouGov poll found 53 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds preferred socialism over capitalism, well above the 27 percent national average. A similar poll taken the year before by the decidedly un-socialist Institute for Public Affairs and Canada’s Fraser Institute, likewise showed 50 percent support for socialism among 18 to 34-year-olds. It also found that Australia had the highest support for communism among under-35s (20 percent), higher than any of the other countries polled (the US, Canada and the UK). 
At the last federal election, Generation Y voters (under 29 years old) had the most pronounced two-party preferred vote for Labor (67-33) and the strongest Green vote at 27 percent, according to the Australian Election Study (AES) report on the election.
And while the traditional pattern is that people become more conservative as they age, the factors that pushed past generations to the right are no longer as strong, if they exist at all. As the AES notes, “Millennials, a group now in their 30s and 40s, are not shifting to the right as they age, rather they have been shifting to the left. Millennials’ support of the Coalition has fallen from 38 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2025”.
Accommodation of older people to the status quo is largely underpinned by a degree of financial security. But less than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds in Australia in 2017 expected to have a higher standard of living than their parents, according to an International Youth Foundation survey, well below the international average of 59 percent. And there is a basis for this sentiment. According to the Grattan Institute, if the long-term pattern of low wage growth in Australia continues, people born in the 1990s will have lower incomes than those born 10-20 years earlier.
The challenge for those holding on to hope that a better world is possible is to organise this sentiment into a force that can challenge the system and the powerful interests that are invested in the status quo. Disgruntlement with capitalism manifests frequently as resignation, partly because there is so little living memory or direct experience of the sort of collective action that can win gains. Two generations now have lived through weak workers’ movements, the advance of the right and the retreat of social movements and living standards. Despite Australia being one of the countries least affected by the global financial crisis, and with relatively high living standards, it is nevertheless unable to give a critical mass of young people confidence in the future.
This represents a challenge and opportunity for the left. History shows that when people do move, when they decide they have had enough, they look to the radical tradition of what has gone before. The more people are already committed to keeping that alive, and fighting for it today, the better are our chances of organising the next generation into a force that can win a better world.

Louise O'Shea

Capitalism: zero likes from Gen Z

“Melbourne may be an unhappy home for its 24,000 homeless residents”, begins Prosper Australia’s <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/speculative-vacancies-2025-data-update/">2025 Speculative Vacancy report</a>, released on 27 November, “but it remains surprisingly hospitable to the 32,000 dwellings within the metropolitan area that sat entirely empty throughout 2024”.
In a humane world there would be a simple mathematical solution to this problem: 32,000 houses minus 24,000 homeless people equals no-one homeless and at least 8,000 homes to spare. Instead, we live in a world where property hoarders speculate while the homeless are left to die on the streets.
The report uses water usage to map empty homes across nearly 2 million dwellings in the greater Melbourne area. Those using zero litres of water per day over the year are classed as completely empty—that’s the 31,890 dwellings referenced above, the number of which has increased by 16 percent since the previous year. In addition to that there are the houses averaging between zero and 50 litres per day (50 litres is about equivalent to a dripping tap). The average daily water use in a single-person Melbourne household is 200 litres, so these houses are likely occupied for less than a quarter of the year. Many may be empty all year but have water leaks or use water for gardening.
When you factor in these “underused” homes, the total number of vacant homes in Melbourne totals a shocking 100,945. As the report points out, these houses “could theoretically house everyone on the Victorian <a href="https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/applications-victorian-housing-register-vhr">social housing waiting list</a> twice over”. That housing list includes people like Maya, interviewed recently by Kate Ashton in her <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-public-housing-wait-times-victoria-family-violence/105655044">ABC article</a> “Family violence survivors waiting years for social housing as demand surges in Victoria”, published on 15 September. Maya fled an abusive relationship in 2017 and was eligible for social housing as a priority applicant on the Victorian Housing Register. Despite this, she was left waiting eight years for housing for her and her two children.
Thousands pay with their lives for this artificially maintained scarcity of housing. In October the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released its <a href="https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-feature-analysis/contents/about">Specialist Homelessness Services: feature analysis</a> report, which collected data on those who have received support for homelessness. It estimates that in 2023 there were an average of “nine potentially avoidable deaths per day” in this cohort—that is, nine people every day who might have lived had they received the necessary care and support. Their lives are cut brutally short in a society that could have ended homelessness, but instead, politicians continue to allow the number of empty homes to grow while the social housing waiting list grows longer and longer.
So why are so many homes left empty?
Prosper Australia describes it as a “rational decision” on the part of the owners. And it is, in its twisted way. But this seems counterintuitive—surely, they’d want to make money from renting out their properties? The thing is that the real estate market is so hot, and the taxes on it so porous, that in just a few months the potential profits in capital gains can eclipse a whole year’s rent. Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/house-price-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 House Price Report”</a> found that Melbourne house prices rose 2.2 percent from the June quarter, a median increase of $23,045 in just three months. In the same period an owner receiving Melbourne’s median rent of $580 (according to Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/rental-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 Rental Report”</a>) might make around $7,500.
If an owner is leasing their property, then they risk missing a peak in the market while they’re giving a notice of eviction to their tenants—losing potentially tens of thousands in profit. 
Governments aren’t just aware of these problems. Their policies have created them. Capital gains and negative gearing tax concessions have cultivated a financialised housing market that is not primarily about making money from rent, but about the increasing value of capital. The human right to shelter has been made dependent, in Australia today, on the whims of an investor class for whom housing is primarily a commodity rather than something designed to meet basic human needs. Rental properties at least have the side effect of housing people. Investment properties don’t even need to do that.
Taxing empty properties would be a good start. But Labor’s Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT), which applies to residences that are empty at least half the year, was collected on only 1,779 properties in 2024. “It’s a farce”, housing activist and former Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb told Red Flag. “Labor is taxing less than a fiftieth of the 100,000 homes that we know are empty for most of the year. They get to look like they’re doing something while they let property hoarders get away with murder.” 
Van den Lamb, known for his social media handle “purplepingers”, has managed to build a database of more than 1,000 vacant homes in Victoria alone, some of which are squatted by those in need of housing. If he can do that with the help of community submissions, you can only imagine what state and local governments could do if they took this issue seriously. “But they’d rather spend millions <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/israel-gaza-protests-in-melbourne-victoria-police-bill/105792396">policing anti-genocide protests</a> and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/being-homeless-is-not-a-crime-cbd-security-guard-program-under-scrutiny-20250918-p5mw3r.html">hiring security guards</a> to harass homeless people than police the criminals responsible for our housing crisis”, Jordan says.
Even if the VRLT were applied to all the empty houses, though, it’s unlikely it would make a big difference. Properties are taxed 1 percent of their total value for the first year they’re vacant, up to a maximum of 3 percent after three years. Given Melbourne’s median house price rose 7.7 percent this year, this is only a seventh of what property speculators stand to gain. If they’re willing to give up rent, this tax is unlikely to change their minds.
A simple solution would be for empty investment properties to be seized and turned into public housing. This is the kind of drastic measure that would be appropriate for what amounts, in the context of our growing homelessness crisis, to a form of social murder. For Australia’s capitalist governments, though, this would be regarded as the greatest sacrilege against the right of property investors to turn a profit.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

‘We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas’: Labor turns blind eye to Melbourne’s 100,000 empty homes

House prices are soaring, and wealthy property investors are making a killing. Over the past year, the median national <a href="https://propertyupdate.com.au/latest-my-housing-market-home-prices-update/">house price</a> has surged 8.3 percent, or $96,424, to $1,253,522. In Sydney, the median house price is now a shocking $1.75 million. Prices have risen fastest in the past couple of months, up by 1.1 percent in October alone. 
This jump in already unaffordable house prices is a consequence of a housing market that subordinates people’s need for a home to the profits of developers, wealthy investors and banks. Within that general framework, Labor’s 5 percent deposit scheme is supercharging price increases, and investors are benefiting at the expense of working-class households. 
Labor’s scheme allows first home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. It is a policy that saddles buyers with more debt, increases competition at the lower end of the market and signals to sellers that they should hike prices to take advantage of purchasers’ increased borrowing capacity. 
Red Flag published <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-scheme-to-worsen-the-housing-crisis">an article</a> about this policy last month, and the prediction that it would raise prices and make the housing crisis worse has already proven correct. Research by Cotality <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-11/the-suburbs-and-towns-where-entry-level-house-prices-are-growing/105996180">reported</a>
by the ABC shows that prices for properties that could be bought using the scheme increased much faster than those that couldn’t. For example, in Melbourne’s inner east, properties under the $1.5 million threshold increased by 1.7 percent in October, while those above it increased by 0.4 percent. 
Despite Labor’s assurances that the inflationary effect of the scheme would be minimal, property investors could spot the obvious: house prices were going to rise. Investors got in early, buying properties before the scheme began, in the expectation that prices would rise. As Greg Jericho reported in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/nov/13/the-5-first-home-buyers-scheme-is-a-miserable-policy-failure-and-the-latest-chapter-in-australias-housing-disgrace">the Guardian</a>, investor lending in September rose 18 percent, the biggest increase in twenty years, and investor loans are at their highest point since 2017. 
Those investors are now making significant gains. If you’re able to buy a third, fourth, fifth or 100th property, a scheme sold as helping struggling working-class families is delivering you windfall returns. The median-priced property you bought in September is already worth almost $20,000 more in just two months, and with prices predicted to keep rising, so too will your profits. 
It is the rich who are benefiting from this Labor-backed investment bonanza, not the “mums and dads” of political myth. “The Everyman Archetype”, a <a href="https://documents.parliament.qld.gov.au/com/CSSC-0A12/HLAB2021-37A9/tp-20july21-2.pdf">2019 study</a> published in the Housing Studies journal, found that households that own investment properties have, on average, double the income and three times the net wealth of those who don’t. The professions that claim the most tax breaks for rental properties are surgeons, anaesthetists and barristers. 
Only around 15 percent of Australian households own an investment property, and the majority of properties are owned by those who have two or more. Only 2,500 investors own more than ten properties, 172 investors own twenty or more properties, and the top 1 percent of investors own 25 percent of all properties. 
Contrary to another myth, these investors are predominantly not foreign buyers or migrants. Data from <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/foreign-buyers-china-hk-india-want-australian-property-housing/104024004">the Australian Tax Office</a> show that in 2023-24, foreign buyers purchased only 1 percent of properties. There are no direct statistics on how many migrants are property investors, but a <a href="https://www.propertyology.com.au/the-truth-about-australian-housing-and-overseas-migration/">Propertytology</a>
report based on Bureau of Statistics data found that, between 2013 and 2023, recent migrants accounted for 7 percent of all property purchases, including owner-occupied purchases, so they can hardly make up a significant number of investors. 
It’s people like Nathan Birch who are getting rich from property, not ordinary mums and dads or migrants. Nathan owns 300 properties worth almost $250 million and dreams of becoming a billionaire. Earlier this year, he told the <a href="https://www.realestate.com.au/news/aussie-who-owns-more-than-300-homes-drops-bombshell/">Daily Telegraph</a>: “My goal is to have 10,000 properties one day ... I hope that when I die, my life will be like a corporate entity”. 
Asked whether she thought that Labor’s deposit scheme was a failure, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil told the<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-12/are-five-per-cent-first-home-deposits-pushing-up-prices/105979708">
ABC</a>, “What these numbers tell us is that this program is working”. Working for who? It’s not working for working-class households, who are being gaslit by Labor policies that promise to make housing more affordable but only increase the profits of the rich.

Martin Barker

Investors are making a killing from soaring house prices

In a public farce, the Liberal federal party room officially abandoned its support for reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Despite the hue and cry in mainstream politics, Australia’s climate trajectory is unlikely to be affected by the decision. As Adam Morton noted in the Guardian, at least there’s some honesty in the decision—the Liberals and Nationals never supported net zero anyway. 
The significance of the Liberals’ abandonment of net zero can be understood as a symbol of bigger political dynamics. It’s a victory for the conservative factions of the Liberals in their battle to pull the party further to the political right. And it’s an indication of the impact that the global far right is having on Australian conservatives. 
Net zero targets took off as a global greenwashing fad in 2021, supported by former US President Joe Biden, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 
Net zero never meant zero carbon emissions, or even reducing carbon emissions. Instead, it involves “offsetting” emissions: net zero is the magical moment when the amount of carbon dioxide released is roughly equal to the amount being “offset”. 
There are three main problems with the approach.
First, the offsetting technologies do not work—at least, not anywhere near the level needed to offset the billions of tonnes of CO2 emitted every year.
Second, even if these technologies did work, the net zero approach assumes it is possible to reduce the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment by simply swapping them in and out, like a Catholic trading repentance for sin each Sunday. 
In reality, the myriad consequences of fossil fuel extraction, refinement and combustion and the subsequent impacts of rising temperatures on the environment and human society are impossible to measure and contain within a spreadsheet equation. 
Last, net zero was designed to allow countries to “commit” to targets that require no disruption to big business profits. They can be agreed on without disrupting production in the coal, gas or oil industries. That the target was unveiled by former PM Scott Morrison four years ago speaks volumes. Morrison, champion of the “gas-fired recovery”, famous for fondling coal in parliament and fleeing to Hawaii while the country burned, viewed net zero as a veil for covering his crimes against the planet. 
Given that the net zero target was meaningless to begin with, but provided a modicum of green cover, it’s reasonable to question why the Liberals would make such a fuss about dropping the policy. As support for it has become somewhat synonymous with action on climate change, the prevailing opinion among political commentators is that dropping net zero is electoral suicide. But there’s more to it. 
For one, polling conducted by the Resolve Political Monitor in early November suggests that public opinion on net zero has shifted since 2021, most notably among Liberal voters. Overall, almost a third of voters preferred ditching net zero; just 17 percent of Coalition voters indicated they want Australia to keep the target and do everything it can to reach it. Among One Nation and National Party voters, support for net zero was even lower. 
It’s not hard to see the electoral logic for the right. Ditching net zero will likely cost the Liberals moderate city voters, but it’s part of a broader right-wing political program aimed at winning back votes from the likes of One Nation, which is polling at record highs. 
Whether this is a viable strategy remains uncertain, as the Liberals have continued to haemorrhage votes to their right since ditching net zero. But for people like Andrew Hastie, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Angus Taylor, there’s more to politics than immediate electoral victory. This confounds mainstream commentators, who have largely maintained since Labor’s 2022 election victory that the Liberal Party must reorient to the moderate centre, cut back on the culture wars and resolve factional bickering if it is to return to government. 
This is not what is happening. Dumping net zero is only the latest step in the long march of the party’s hard right and conservative factions, part of a very public battle to shape the party in their own image. These are people with a vision for society, one that fits with the new hard-right norms of the Western world, and they are seeking to transform the Liberal Party into a vehicle for the world they want to see.
Perhaps the worst outcome of the Liberal Party dumping net zero is the greenwashing service it offers the Labor government. The government’s net zero plan is a hoax, designed to cover for its commitment to expanding fossil fuel production. But with the Coalition as the perfect foil, Labor can carry on its climate wrecking beneath a mask of lesser evilism.
Undoubtedly, Labor’s record of deceit on climate policy and net zero has helped to build widespread scepticism about climate action and renewable energy. Amid the cost-of-living crisis and rising energy prices, in which Labor has overseen the destruction of working-class living standards, the right has exploited net zero scepticism by playing to concerns about the affordability of renewables and linking renewables to the agenda of “woke elites”.
This emerging common sense is far from inevitable. Tackling the climate crisis is fundamentally in the interest of working-class people across the country, who already face the uneven burden of climate disasters. To turn the situation around, we need to ditch the pro-business sham of net zero. Tackling climate change requires challenging the profits of fossil fuel bosses, bringing the fossil fuel industry into public hands and massively expanding public investment in renewable energy.

Lily Campbell

Understanding the net zero circus

The sound of an exploding flashbang grenade is hard to describe; the noise thunders through your skull and leaves you disoriented. They are violent, dangerous and potentially lethal devices, designed for use as part of military and armed police operations. Yet they are now being deployed regularly on the streets of Melbourne as a tool of protest management. So too is OC spray, a chemical weapon that’s banned from warfare due to its indiscriminate and potentially deadly impact. Then there are the batons, horses, water cannons, bird-shot rounds and rubber-coated steel bullets.
The growing militarisation of police forces around the world is well documented. It is one reflection of the growing disconnect between capitalist governments and the mass of people they supposedly represent and who are increasingly expressing their opposition to genocide, economic inequality, climate inaction, racism and other injustices in significant numbers. Lacking positive reform proposals to address these concerns or improve people’s lives, the state is increasingly responding with brute force, as well as legal restrictions on the right to organise and demonstrate both at work and on the streets. 
This tendency towards repression and violence is a serious threat to left-wing organising. It is an attempt to make disrupting the status quo harder, and it often succeeds. Anti-union laws, for instance, have played a role in taming the workers’ movement and reducing strike activity. The NSW police successfully used the courts to stop a recent pro-Palestine demonstration from occupying the Opera House shore, and regularly deny all sorts of campaign groups the right to march. And most states have introduced laws that specifically target climate activists who dare to disrupt business as usual.
It is possible to push back against these encroachments on our rights, and effective tactics that can be employed to do it. The most obvious is to mobilise significant numbers of people so that crude repression becomes significantly harder. Unfortunately, however, this is not always possible. 
When our numbers are smaller, it still matters what tactics we adopt. Tactics have to have the aim of making the action meaningful to those involved, helping encourage passive sympathisers to get more involved and being defensible to those not already invested in the issue. To do this, our message needs to be clear and our tactics must seem reasonable and effective. When mobilisations have a comprehensible message and approach, it makes it easier to win wider support to the cause. This doesn’t necessarily prevent repression, but it makes the political cost to the authorities much higher. 
Not every person and group involved in protesting the far right subscribes to this approach. The “black bloc”, in particular, does not, and its tactics are worth addressing. 
The black bloc is known for turning up to demonstrations as a distinct contingent wearing uniforms (black outfits, black hoods/helmets etc) designed to hide their identities and shield them from police attack, and with the aim of carrying out anonymous acts of violence. Sometimes this violence is targeted against police, as at the anti-fascist demonstration on 19 October in Melbourne and the attempted blockade of the Land Forces arms fair in Melbourne last year. At other times it has involved fairly random attacks on businesses and property along the path of broader demonstrations.
These activities are justified by black bloc supporters as attacks against authority, fascism, capitalism or whatever the issue of the day may be. And unlike the regular “sheeple” who attend conventional demonstrations, creating “<a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/in-defence-of-black-bloc/">banal spectacles</a>” within the rules, the black bloc sees itself as striking more serious blows against the system. But the truth is they do nothing to challenge the establishment, and often help strengthen it. 
Only a mass movement of the working class can seriously challenge capitalism. The same is true of the far right, which is now an entrenched part of politics in almost every country on Earth and in charge of the US military empire. While we’re not quite there yet in Australia, with Pauline Hanson polling at 15 percent nationally, and repeated street demonstrations numbering in the thousands, it feels like we’re catching up. In this context, thinking seriously about how we can build an anti-capitalist movement based in the working class is vital, even if it is a medium- to long-term prospect. Bashing a few fascists or throwing stones at police is the very definition of performative. It is pure street theatre, a chance for small groups to feel tough and radical by acting out their pseudo-revolutionary fantasies. 
Worse, these black bloc tactics expose the broader movement to violence at the hands of police and slander from the media and the political class, and give the state an excuse to further erode the right to protest. Sometimes such attacks can’t be avoided regardless of our tactics, but to provoke them for no strategic purpose is hugely damaging and irresponsible. 
Such tactics undermine our capacity to mobilise our existing supporters. Only the most committed activists will continually show up to events that end in widespread police brutality. This is especially so when the state then seizes the moment to introduce new repressive measures, as are now being floated in Victoria, confirming yet again to potential supporters that anti-fascism is an extreme sport better left to the experts.
The scandals that follow black bloc actions also end up distracting from the actual issue being addressed by the protest, giving the media a free pass to jump instead to the predictably reactionary terrain of protester conduct and law and order. This then tends to isolate the movement from the wider public who might otherwise have been sympathetic or open to joining.
In the current moment, this is particularly disastrous given that the key task the left faces is to convince larger numbers of people to take the far-right threat seriously, and to turn up when the call goes out. Currently, there are thousands of fascist and far-right scum mobilising on our streets every few weeks. They’re gaining strength inside the Liberals and Nationals, and One Nation has doubled its membership since the election. If the anti-fascist left is to get to the point where we can challenge and reverse these dynamics, we need massively more numbers. 
Sometimes the black bloc is defended on the grounds that a “diversity of tactics” is needed to maintain left unity. And in most movements, there is room for different approaches: fundraising, public forums, public postering, street art and so on are all useful activities with different audiences and rationales. But the black bloc is not some complementary part of a wide-ranging effort: its tactics are inherently counter-posed to it. 
Perhaps the worst aspect of the black bloc approach is how it relies on the very mass movement its adherents dismiss as not radical enough for cover and protection. If a group of masked militants were to attack a fascist event alone, they would easily be crushed by the state. But by deploying their violence within or around broader crowds, the black bloc make themselves safer by using the rest of us as shields when the police reaction inevitably comes—the very definition of parasitic. 
This behaviour is also profoundly undemocratic, in that it imposes the consequences of the block’s tactic—the state’s violent response—on others who did not necessarily support, agree to or carry out the tactic and could not reasonably be prepared for it. 
None of this is to excuse the state’s brutality. But knowing that the capitalists and their political lackeys are violent, anti-democratic scum doesn’t absolve us of agency and responsibility for our actions. Quite the opposite. Any serious approach to building a movement must take into account the way the capitalist system defends the status quo and organise in ways that can overcome it. As long as it has existed, the black bloc has been a barrier to doing that. It’s time for the left to draw a line in the sand and make it clear the black bloc is not welcome at our actions.

Omar Hassan

Police are getting more violent, but black bloc tactics make things worse

The federal government’s expanded 5 percent deposit scheme is its latest market-based non-solution to the housing crisis. It will drive up house prices, saddle buyers with more debt, and put billions of dollars in the pockets of banks, investors and property developers. 
First introduced by the Liberals in 2020, it allows first-home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. In addition, the government guarantees 15 percent of the loan, so buyers don’t need to take out lender’s insurance. Labor has expanded this to remove income and participant limits and has raised the cap on the price of properties it can be used to purchase. Announcing the scheme, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/uncapped-5-cent-deposits-available-first-home-buyers-today">crowed</a> that he is “making it easier for young people and first home buyers to achieve the dream of owning a home”. You wonder how he can say it with a straight face.
The median house price in Australia is $800,000, and the median income is $55,000. With a 5 percent deposit, a first home buyer would need to borrow $760,000, paying 71 percent of their income in mortgage repayments. Of course, even the notoriously profit-hungry Australian banks aren’t going to approve that loan; a mortgage lender interviewed by SBS’s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPk_w3yAHFX/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">The Feed</a> estimated that a first home buyer on the median income with a 5 percent deposit could borrow around $250,000. Some car spaces in Sydney sell for more than that. To purchase a median-priced house in Sydney, a household would need an income of more than $300,000, which is three times the average. 
Most first home buyers will not be able to use the scheme to buy a house without taking on unmanageable debt. If people do use the scheme, the effect will be to drive up house prices. A study by <a href="https://insurancecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/HGS-and-LMI-report-Lateral-Economics-final.pdf?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email">Lateral Economics</a> estimates that the inflationary impact on overall house prices will be 3.6 to 6.6 percent by next year. The price increase will be even higher in the bracket of properties that first home buyers might realistically buy, going up by 5.3 to 9.9 percent. As the report notes, most buyers will pay more in increased prices than they will save through the scheme. 
There’s good reason to think these predictions are correct. Deakin University academics estimate that the First Home Buyers Grant (through which the government gives first-time home buyers money towards the purchase price of a home) increased house prices by $57,000 between 2002 and 2012. 
If the aim is to make housing more affordable, then the scheme is perverse. It is not accessible to most first-time home buyers, but the more people use it, the higher the prices will be, shutting out precisely the people the scheme purports to help.
If shifting more wealth from working-class households to the rich is the aim, the scheme is perfect. An article published by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DQAOE47CcJy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">Deepcut News</a> estimated that banks will make $141,000 in extra interest on the average loan, or $24 billion, over the next five years. Investors will be licking their lips—further increases to house prices mean bigger returns when they sell. Developers will also be happy because they can set higher sale prices for properties and increase their profits. 
Labor claims it is taking action on the housing crisis, but in reality, the government is making it worse. It is ideologically committed to the market, the buying and selling of residential property for profit, as the only way to provide and regulate housing. The government’s role is limited to lubricating the market, pumping it up with public money that ultimately goes to increased profits, not more affordable homes. Labor rejects any idea that the government should intervene to undermine the market and profits to bring down prices. 
Instead of driving up house prices, Labor could use public money to build houses that people can afford. Instead of bankrolling debt to the banks, Labor could establish a public lender providing low-cost loans. Instead of protecting and promoting the interests of billionaires, Labor could improve the lives of millions of working-class households. 
Labor won’t do any of this; instead, it will continue to use the housing crisis as an opportunity to increase the profits and wealth of the banks, developers and wealthy investors. If we want homes that are for people, not the profits of the rich, we must fight Labor and its pro-market agenda.

Labor’s scheme to worsen the housing crisis

Pass the sick bucket! You might have predicted that Anthony Albanese’s first White House meeting with Donald Trump would be bad, but it exceeded the worst expectations. 
What made the whole thing so dreadful?
Was it Albanese fawning over Trump and congratulating him for “the extraordinary achievement” of a ceasefire deal in Gaza, even as Israel continues to kill dozens of Palestinians daily with US-made weapons?
Was it Albanese hailing the countries’ military record, claiming the two had “stood side by side for freedom and democracy”? Did that include Vietnam, Anthony? Iraq? Afghanistan? Did that record include Australian and US backing for dictators across the Asia Pacific even as they murdered their citizens? Or their support for Israel as it wages its genocidal war in Gaza? 
Or was the biggest problem Albanese spitting in the faces of the 7 million Americans who had taken to the streets three days earlier in the “No Kings” protests against the right-wing authoritarian Trump regime?
It’s hard to pick which one of these is most offensive.
But that’s not how the national media saw things. 
There, it was celebration all around. The mainstream media praised Albanese to the skies for his achievements where other world leaders had failed. The prime minister had got into the good graces of the president and brought home the bacon. Trump had even called Albanese “a great prime minister”. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Michael Koziol called Albanese’s trip “a raging success”. Opposition leader Sussan Ley initially tried to make ground by demanding Albanese sack Australian ambassador Kevin Rudd for disrespecting Trump, but within 24 hours she too was forced to join in the establishment’s hurrahs.
But what was it that they were celebrating? Nothing other than Albanese walking into the White House and coming out with an agreed plan to take the world closer to war.
Albanese and the Australian ruling class, and the capitalist media that fight for their interests, wanted two things out of this meeting: to get Trump to openly support the delivery of AUKUS nuclear submarines to Australia, and to confirm US involvement in mining and processing Australia’s extensive deposits of rare earths and critical minerals. They got both. 
China’s emergence as a rival hegemon in the Asia-Pacific threatens US domination and, by extension, Australian power. Dealing with the threat from China is now central to American imperialist concerns. But the US is also involved elsewhere, from the Middle East and Latin America to Ukraine and the Baltic states. The Australian government wants the US to prioritise the Asia Pacific to ensure China is prevented from controlling the region. Their job, therefore, is to tie America down in the region and to reinforce in the eyes of successive US presidents Australia’s value as an ally.
This is what the AUKUS pact is about, to convince the US (and Britain) to sell nuclear attack submarines to Australia with delivery to start in 2032 and, eventually, to build some in Australia. Their only purpose is to project Australian power into the South China Sea, the most likely arena for a clash with China, and to integrate Australia into US war plans. 
The cost of the submarines is already estimated at $368 billion, and given the whole history of military procurement, we can anticipate the final figure will be much higher. In the meantime, the Albanese government is paying $3 billion to US shipyards and $20 billion to build port facilities in WA to service the US nuclear submarine fleet. The cost to humanity if the submarines are deployed in a war with China will be incalculable.
Before this week’s meeting, Trump had, from the perspective of Australia’s ruling class, been disconcertingly silent about AUKUS. What’s more, he had sponsored a review of the whole program, to report by the end of this year. So, when Trump told the joint press conference that it was “full steam ahead” with the AUKUS program, there were whoops of joy from Australia’s defence and security establishment. They can keep banging the war drums. Tick one for Albanese.
Then there was the issue of rare earths and critical minerals which are an essential component in the production of a wide range of products, civilian and military. Over the past two or three decades, the Chinese government has invested huge amounts of money in securing for Beijing a virtual monopoly in processing these minerals. Two weeks ago, as part of the escalating tensions with Washington, China announced export controls, confirming US fears that China could cripple America’s military preparations. 
Enter the Albanese government. Over the past five months, Canberra has been working with Washington to expand the extraction and processing of Australia’s rare earth deposits as an alternative source of supply for the Pentagon. 
This week’s meeting saw Albanese and Trump sign off on an agreement to invest in or subsidise up to $8.5 billion into the industry to get things moving. This comes on top of $2 billion of public money paid or committed to two mines in the NT and WA, one of which is backed by Trump’s second favourite Australian, Gina Rinehart. The industry will be guaranteed a minimum price level to ensure the mine owners rake in profits. According to the White House, the agreement will achieve “critical mineral and energy dominance”, with Australia and the US having first pick of the minerals and control over exports, allowing Canberra and Washington to reward friends and punish enemies. Tick two for Albanese.
That the nation’s politicians with few exceptions, foreign and military policy strategists, military chiefs of staff and newspaper editors can all cheer Albanese on for a splendid job in Washington tells us a lot about their priorities. They are cheering for an escalation of war planning in our region, for the diversion of funds from social services, education, health and welfare to military build-up, and for a more repressive environment that comes with such developments. And all in the hands of our Labor government, which is demonstrating once again its devotion to the interests of the ruling class.

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