So it’s official. The Albanese government has appointed former High Court justice Virginia Bell to head a royal commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. It will begin its hearings soon, with a deadline for reporting to the government in mid-December. 
This is a win for the ruling class, which has mounted a weeks-long offensive to use the Bondi massacre to attack the Albanese government, the Palestine movement and civil rights more generally. The royal commission will give them the means to do this.
There can be no overstating the sheer cynicism of this campaign by the ruling class, spearheaded by the Liberal Party, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation and the Murdoch press, but which has drawn in a broad spectrum of establishment bodies, ranging from big business lobby groups, former heads of security agencies, judges and barristers to the ABC and Nine newspapers and university vice chancellors. 
Those campaigning for a royal commission have been united in their determination to link the Bondi killings to a supposed “national crisis of antisemitism”, the blame for which, they argue, lies with the Palestine solidarity movement and the Albanese government’s supposed support for this movement. Everything that might point away from those goals has been pushed to one side.
The leaders of this campaign aren’t really interested in understanding the massacre. They simply brushed aside the fact that the killers had no known identification with the Palestine solidarity campaign. They have dismissed as irrelevant national gun laws to limit ownership of the kind of high-powered guns used in the attack.
No, the popular revulsion at the Bondi killings had to be the springboard for a malicious and much broader agenda—one of crushing the Palestine movement and legitimising a more repressive political and legal environment in the name of tackling “antisemitism” and “religious and ideologically motivated extremism” and protecting “social cohesion”.
We know that by “antisemitism” they mean the unprecedented Palestine solidarity campaign that has brought millions onto the streets since 7 October 2023. By “ideologically motivated extremism”, they mean chants like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” or “Long live the intifada!” By threatening “social cohesion”, they mean Palestine supporters wearing keffiyehs or watermelon earrings.
It’s not like they’ve tried to hide their agenda. The Liberals demanded before Christmas that a royal commission examine “the threat posed by far-left wing and neo-Nazi extremists”, where by “far left” they mean anyone who has marched for Palestine. They wanted a thorough purge of the universities and the arts and cultural institutions. And in response to the Albanese government tabling hate speech legislation, the Liberals will only back this if it’s restricted to hate speech against Jews or Christians. If it identifies Muslims, LGBTI, disabled people or racial minorities as targets of hate speech, well, “freedom of speech” must prevail.
If the architects of this campaign were really so worried about neo-Nazism, they might have tried to do something about it. Instead, Ley has refused to speak out against the rise of One Nation, the far-right anti-immigration marches or the recent Nazi demonstration outside NSW state parliament. If Israel’s supporters in Australia are so opposed to fascism, perhaps one of their leading figures, Alex Ryvchin, shouldn’t have excused Elon Musk’s fascist salute at one of Donald Trump’s inauguration events as an “appreciative gesture”. If they cared about calming community anxieties, why have they cheered on Israel’s barbaric war in Gaza?
Their motivations were clear when they tried to block the appointment of Virginia Bell on the grounds that the NSW Supreme Court had used one of her High Court judgements to overturn the Minns government’s ban on the pro-Palestine march across the Sydney Harbour bridge last year. 
The right will now use the royal commission hearings to attack the Albanese government and demand a crackdown on the Palestine movement. 
The commission is a gift to the Liberals as it will give them a point of unity after nearly a year of internal dissension. Whether supposedly “moderate” or right wing, they all agree in hounding the Palestine campaign and trying to push society in a more authoritarian direction. 
The widening of powers of the security agencies that will result from the royal commission will allow the police and security forces greater leeway to attack the freedoms of the Palestine campaign to organise. Its terms of reference, specifically “strengthening social cohesion”, will legitimise the Minns government’s legislation that allows the police to ban street marches for up to three months, and the Allen government in Victoria which has threatened to do the same.
The racists will be encouraged by the focus on immigration and surveillance of supposed hotbeds of extremism in western Sydney.
The government’s announcement that it will implement all the recommendations of Jillian Segal’s report on antisemitism will stiffen the resolve of university vice chancellors to crack down on Palestine solidarity campaigns on campus.
The focus on strengthening “social cohesion” will give governing bodies of cultural and artistic bodies, like the Adelaide Festival board, even more excuses to cancel Palestinian writers like Rana Abdel-Fattah.
The Albanese government has capitulated to this ruling class offensive, which should come as no surprise. The government has defended Israel’s “right to defend itself” as it slaughters 70,000 Palestinians, turns Gaza into a hellscape and steals more and more land on the West Bank. How could we ever rest our hopes in such people?
The Greens have been no better, with acting leader Senator Hanson-Young welcoming the decision to call a “balanced, careful and powerful” royal commission that might “bring together multicultural Australia” and “tackle antisemitism and all forms of racism”. Can they not read? It’s a royal commission into antisemitism, where “antisemitism” means the existence of the Palestine solidarity movement. 
But we won’t give in to this ruling class offensive. We will continue to march for Palestine and campaign against Israeli atrocities until Palestine is free.

Tom Bramble

Royal Commission a win for the ruling class offensive against the Palestine movement

In the aftermath of the Bondi massacre, nothing says “social cohesion” quite as emphatically as sacking an invited Palestinian-Australian guest from the country’s premier writers’ festival. At a time when the prime minister and political leaders are appealing for unity and calm, they are turning a blind eye to blatant and obvious anti-Arab racism.
This is the only conclusion we can draw from the decision of the board of the Adelaide Festival to “dis-invite” writer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah from the writers’ festival on the grounds that she has previously made comments that might make people uncomfortable. It is worth letting the festival board speak for itself:
“We have today advised scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah that the Board has formed the judgment that we do not wish to proceed with her scheduled appearance at next month’s Writers’ Week.
“Whilst we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s or her writings have any connection with the tragedy at Bondi, given her past statements we have formed the view that it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”
This is a shameful position for the board of a leading cultural festival to take; to argue that removing a Palestinian speaker promotes “community cohesion”.
It’s not clear what the festival organisers were hoping to achieve, but it is clear that board members were pressured into taking this decision. South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas has made clear his opposition to the Palestine movement and support for Israel. While he is legislatively prevented from directly intervening in festival matters, he has made his distaste for Randa well known through extensive media appearances and statements.
In the wake of the Bondi tragedy and the announcement of a royal commission into antisemitism, we can expect the right and pro-Israel politicians to push for more pro-Palestinian voices to be silenced. It is clear that this is what politicians like Josh Frydenberg and the Murdoch media have been pushing for in their relentless campaign for the royal commission.
It is also clear, <a href="https://overland.org.au/2026/01/universities-and-the-arts-after-bondi-from-definitions-to-ambient-antisemitism/">as David Brophy writes at Overland</a>, that the push to censor pro-Palestine voices will be extended across the arts sector and higher education this year. Brophy notes the chilling new phrase “ambient antisemitism” that animates the sinister push to clampdown on cultural and academic activism. Apparently, according to its authors, “ambient antisemitism” is whatever makes a pro-Israeli Jewish person uncomfortable. This is exactly the sentiment behind the Adelaide Festival decision to sack Randa.
In this climate, it would be easy for people to duck and cover. But this is not what has happened. On 8 January, within hours of the board publicising its ban on Randa Abdel-Fattah, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/statement-from-the-australia-institute/">the Australia Institute</a>—a left-liberal think-tank—announced it was withdrawing its sponsorship and participation. By late that day, over 35 participants also withdrew their participation. Within 48 hours, it had grown to more than 50, including several prominent international guests.
Among them are well-known feminist Jane Caro, Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, English author Zadie Smith, journalist and academic Peter Greste, Indigenous writers Amy McQuire and Evelyn Araluen, journalist Amy Remeikis and many others. Significantly, high-profile Russian writer and Putin critic Masha Gessen also withdrew.
Gessen was previously cancelled for comparing <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust">Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Nazi holocaust</a>. In December 2023, in another ironic action, <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/uk/german-foundation-withdraws-from-awarding-jewish-journalist-hannah-arendt-prize-over-new-yorker-essay/">the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought was snatched back from Gessen</a> for criticising Germany’s support for Israel and the suppression of the Palestine movement at home.
It is fantastic that so many writers and artists have joined a protest in solidarity with Randa. It shows we can fight back against the heavy repression and intimidation that pro-Israel forces are trying to impose on us. 
Writers’ week staff have also voiced their opposition to the board’s decision in an email to the guests who have withdrawn. The festival workers are members of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and the union issued a statement condemning the censorship of Randa. But the MEAA could take this further by calling union members working at the festival to take industrial action.
However, while it is worth celebrating that the Adelaide Festival’s attempted censorship of Palestinian voices has blown up in its face, it is not enough. It is vital that we continue our public protests, our union organising and all other forms of solidarity with Palestine. We can take heart from Randa’s own strong statement in the face of censorship:
“This is a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship and a despicable attempt to associate me with the Bondi massacre ... Australian arts and cultural institutions continue to reveal their utter contempt and inhumanity towards Palestinians ... I remain confident that the writing community and the broader public will ultimately respond with principle and integrity.”
We must repay Randa’s confidence with our actions, just as we must recognise that the right will be pushing hard to silence us so that Israel can continue its genocide in the shadows. It is time for all of us to step up. Let’s take the great example of the writers who are standing in solidarity with Randa and build a movement that won’t go away at the first signs of intimidation.
There’s never been a better time to “globalise the Intifada”.
Marty Hirst is the author of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Theres-no-good-news-Journalism-crisis-and-philosophy-of-praxis/Hirst/p/book/9781032758817">There’s no good news: journalism, crisis and philosophy of praxis</a> (Routledge, 2025).

Marty Hirst

Adelaide Festival reaction shows we can push back the anti-Palestine repression

For more than two years, in a population less than half that of of Sydney, the equivalent of 45 Bondi massacres have been carried out, on average, every week. More than 71,000 murdered and more than 9,000 missing, presumed dead and buried under rubble. The scale of the crimes committed by Israel in Gaza is incontrovertible.
<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds">The United Nations</a> charges Israel with genocide.
<a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/8668/2024/en/">Amnesty International</a> charges Israel with genocide.
<a href="https://www.btselem.org/publications/202507_our_genocide">Israeli human rights group B’Tselem</a> charges Israel with genocide.
<a href="https://www.phr.org.il/en/genocide-in-gaza-eng/">Physicians for Human Rights</a>, another Israeli organisation, charges Israel with genocide.
<a href="https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf">The International Association of Genocide Scholars</a> charges Israel with genocide.
<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza">Human Rights Watch</a> charges Israel with the crime of extermination and acts of genocide.
The International Criminal Court charges Israeli PM <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/netanyahu">Benjamin Netanyahu</a> and former Defence Minister <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/defendant/gallant">Yoav Gallant</a> with war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And yet, within our midst in Australia are racist scum who support, justify or provide aid to the terrorist murderers carrying out atrocity after atrocity in Palestine. Instead of a royal commission into who exactly is complicit in these crimes, who exactly is giving succour to terrorism, who exactly is preaching genocide, the federal government has extended an invitation to Israel’s president to visit and is carrying out a royal commission into the opponents of genocide.
We are governed by sickos. 
Randa Abdel-Fattah, whose people have been starved and exterminated, has been <a href="https://www.adelaidefestival.com.au/news/2025/adelaide-festival-board-statement">cancelled by the Adelaide Festival board</a> because “it would not be culturally sensitive” for her to appear at its upcoming writers’ week. Imagine Gary Foley being cancelled because some racist whites wouldn’t like what he has to say about what this country has done to Aboriginal people. It is unimaginable. But not for a Palestinian in Australia today.
Embedded in every institution of Australian capitalism, even the ones of purported “high culture”, are racist filth for whom Palestinian lives don’t count for shit. Those who aren’t racist scum are cowards who won’t speak up. These middle-class liberal toads are worse than the Andrew Bolts of this world. 
They say all the right things around their dinner tables with all their “sophisticated” friends and their fair-trade coffee beans that give a few extra cents on the dollar to poor Ethiopian farmers. They tut-tut about Donald Trump’s vulgarity and about the bad things that happened in the past—all of them on the right side of history on political questions that were long ago settled. 
They’re anti-racist only when it’s safe; only when anti-racism is officially sanctioned; only when its sponsored by official society and a bunch of NGOs.
You can bet they turn up to Invasion Day marches—now that that’s a popular thing to do, not when it was only handfuls of outcasts—and applaud and sob and nod along. You can bet that they talk admiringly of Nelson Mandela and love how Desmond Tutu was so cheerful, so forgiving. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UTHTszgg1Q">Tutu said more than a decade ago</a> that the situation in Palestine was “in many instances worse” than what he experienced in South Africa. Well, it is now infinitely worse. 
But when it counts, when push comes to shove, Australia’s cultural, political and business elites are siding with Israeli apartheid, with the genocidal ethnostate. 
Polite society? What a scam. A casually racist, cowardly scam. White Australia never really died. It just became more sophisticated. It became social cohesion. It became culturally sensitive. It became a royal commission. It became the Adelaide Festival board.

Ben Hillier

Forty-five Bondis a week in Gaza. Where’s the royal commission to root out Australia’s genocide supporters?

Over the Christmas break, while most people were enjoying big lunches, long walks and engaging in general merriment, every ghoul and ghastly figure from the last five decades of Australian political, sporting and business history came out of the woodwork to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement. 
In print and on the airwaves, in a wall-to-wall media campaign, was a coordinated call for a royal commission following the terrible Bondi massacre. This was not motivated by a desire for “justice” for the victims of the attack. The political right and the Australian ruling class sniffed an opportunity to crack down on civil liberties, reduce the space for democratic protest and shift society further to the right. 
It would take up too much space to list all the has-beens, freaks and opponents of anti-racist activists who were behind this campaign. So I have chosen just three of the more prominent ones. 
Dawn Fraser
Dawn Fraser today is more known for her racism than her sports acumen. She has been an opponent of immigration for decades, and once <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/from-olympic-bans-to-one-nation-dawn-fraser-no-stranger-to-controversy-20150707-gi6sgw.html">told the ABC</a>, “I mean I wish I could be as outspoken, I suppose, as Pauline Hanson and say, ‘Look, I'm sick and tired of the immigrants that are coming into my country’”. 
During one press conference—standing alongside Nova Peris, a fellow Olympian who once<a href="https://nit.com.au/16-06-2025/18575/nova-peris-accused-of-sharing-anti-muslim-content-on-social-media"> shared posts</a> describing Muslims as "Satan worshipping cockroaches [that] need to be eradicated”—Fraser said she had been "accused many times of being a racist”. Well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. In 2015, she went on a racist rant targeting tennis stars Nick Kyrgios and Bernard Tomic, saying, "If they don't like it [Australia], go back to where their parents came from. We don't need them here in this country if they act like that”.
The idea that this bigot has any authority to lecture us about racism or antisemitism is laughable. 
Janet Albrechtsen
After the Bondi massacre, Janet Albrechtsen penned no fewer than eleven articles attacking the Labor Party and calling for a royal commission. She attempted to appeal to good old Aussie larrikinism with a piece in the Australian, “<a href="https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/how-albaneses-political-tactics-on-antisemitism-have-backfired-on-his-government/news-story/6aeb2508c87560ce891aef63f36c302f">Call a fair-dinkum royal commission, Albo, or be forever damned</a>”. Albrechtsen blamed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong for the massacre because the federal government recognised a Palestinian state. 
“But the Australian public needs to know whether, when she [Wong] adopted the hugely performative but completely useless decision to recognise a Palestinian state that doesn’t exist, she was advised this could lead or contribute to blood on Sydney’s streets”, Albrechtsen wrote. She continued: “Neither could Albanese use the old ‘conflate anti-Semitism with Islamophobia routine’ to confuse any royal commission or muddy its terms of reference”. 
Albrechtsen wouldn’t want a royal commission into Islamophobia, as she’d be sitting on the “accused” bench. Back in 2001, she wrote: “Pack rape of white girls is an initiation rite of passage for a small section of young male Muslim youths”. She claimed that French psychotherapist Jean-Jacques Rassial had shown this to be true. But, <a href="https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2024/04/20/who-janet-albrechtsen">as the Saturday Paper later noted</a>, this was bullshit.
Albrechtsen has nothing useful to offer on the question of anti-racism, except perhaps as an example of how not to conduct yourself.
BHP chair Ross McEwan 
Ross McEwan is not a household name, but he is the chair of BHP, the Melbourne-based multinational mining company. He’s one of many capitalists who came out in support of a royal commission, illustrating the high level of ruling class support for this anti-Labor, anti-Palestine mobilisation. I could have chosen any number of the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01-02/business-leaders-call-for-bondi-attack-royal-commission/106193032">130 “business leaders”</a> who signed an open letter calling for a commission, but Ross chairs a particularly odious company board. 
BHP is renowned for riding roughshod over Indigenous peoples, from Australia to Brazil, Bougainville to Colombia and beyond. In Colombia, a BHP mine was <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/bhp-backed-coal-mine-in-colombia-rocked-by-human-rights-claim-20200617-p553n5.html">using</a> 24 million litres of water a day and contaminated the drinking water. In Brazil, a mine <a href="https://theconversation.com/they-do-not-respect-our-land-they-do-not-respect-our-people-brazils-traditional-people-take-on-bhp-in-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-class-actions-241777">co-owned by the company</a> collapsed and released toxic mud and waste more than 700km beyond the mine. This led to the death of nineteen people and the contamination of land and rivers. In Australia, BHP has shown disregard for the Indigenous people and their land, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-23/bhp-wa-aboriginal-heritage-site-damaged-pilbara-rio-tinto-juukan/13184826">recently</a> destroying significant cultural sites in the Pilbara. The company has also underpaid its employees in Australia. <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06-01/bhp-wages-underpaid-28500-workers/102419890">In 2023</a>, BHP was ordered to pay almost 30,000 employees backpay totalling $430 million dollars. 
So, again, what does a company responsible for human rights abuses, environmental destruction and exploitation have to tell us about the need or otherwise for a royal commission? 
The royal commission is part of a coordinated campaign led by the Australian ruling class, which has no business lecturing people about anything.

Anneke Demanuele

Three scum bags behind the royal commission push

The royal commission is a central element in a reactionary campaign by the core sections of the Australian ruling class to cynically take advantage of the Bondi terrorist attack to push society sharply to the right. It needs to be stridently opposed.
This orchestrated McCarthyite assault on the Palestine movement, on the left, on workers, on basic democratic rights and anything seen as vaguely progressive with week after week of wall-to-wall media coverage is the most concerted right-wing campaign in Australia for decades. 
It is a systematic and extremely well organised attempt by the capitalist class to push the major institutions of society—the state apparatus, political parties, the trade unions, the courts, the universities, cultural institutions and so on—further to the right and to greatly strengthen the powers of the police and the security apparatus. They have blamed the murderous actions of two ISIS inspired gunmen on the hundreds of thousands of decent people who took to the streets to oppose genocide.
They want to use manufactured charges of antisemitism against opponents of the genocide in Gaza to severely curtail free speech and the right to protest and to create a harsher more authoritarian climate in society. This sets a very dangerous precedent for the future for campaigns by workers to defend their living standards, to oppose the threat of war between the US and China, to stand up for Aboriginal rights or any progressive cause.
This is not simply a campaign by Zionist forces, far-right figures like Pauline Hanson and the reactionary Murdoch press. The whole of the ruling class has joined forces in a concerted fashion—CEOs and the big business organisations, all of the mainstream media, military figures and the Liberal Party.
They choreographed demands from judges and lawyers to churches to Olympians and other supporting stars and cultural figures to ex-Labor MPs, plus the Teals and an array of small l liberals and do-gooders like David Pocock, with the likes of Lidia Thorpe trailing in their wake.
The Minns Labor government in NSW, a longstanding bitter opponent of the Palestine movement, also played an appalling role by rushing through draconian anti-protest laws, strengthening police powers and announcing its own scapegoating state based royal commission.
The trade union leadership, which has for decades refused to stand up for workers’ living standards and basic rights, played a notably despicable role. They consistently refused to mobilise workers to support the mass movement against genocide.
Then, in the wake of Bondi, the supposedly left-wing Victorian Trade Hall Council Secretary Luke Hilakiri denounced pro-Palestine protesters and rank-and-file workers active in Trade Unionists for Palestine. He declared that “they just need to back off” because they had supposedly “made all the points they need to make about Gaza”.
The Albanese government has strongly backed and armed Israel throughout its war on Gaza and denounced pro-Palestine protests as antisemitic. Then, in the wake of the Bondi attack, Albanese invited Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who a UN Commission has charged with “inciting genocide”, to tour Australia.
Albanese also promised to fully implement the outrageous anti-democratic demands of Jillian Segal, the far-right special envoy on antisemitism. Segal called for defunding broadcasters, universities and other public institutions that don’t ban criticism of Israel; Zionist oversight of the entire media; and compulsory pro-Israel “education” in schools.
However, all of this was nowhere near enough for the mainstream media and the rich and powerful who run this country. They demanded the government launch a full throttle McCarthyite witch hunt.
So when Albanese initially drew the line at calling a federal royal commission into antisemitism they unleashed an all out barrage of attacks to force the Labor government to fall into line and implement the ruling class’s full agenda. The capitalist class clearly is out to discipline Labor and humiliate Albanese to show who the real power in this country is. 
Albanese has officially caved to the ruling class’s demands. This simply further confirms that we can’t rely on Labor governments to protect, let alone advance, the interests of workers and the oppressed.
However, Albanese agreeing to a royal commission will not in any way bring this concerted right-wing campaign to an end. The capitalist establishment is determined that the royal commission will not limit itself to the motivations and actions of the two ISIS inspired terrorists. Behind the spurious rhetoric of combatting “antisemitism” the royal commission will be turned into a ferocious assault on the left and on democratic rights.
They want to curtail pro-Palestinian voices, have the dangerously broad definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance recommended by the royal commission, and severely undermine the right to protest.
We need to stand our ground and resolutely oppose this ruling class offensive.

Mick Armstrong

Why we must oppose the royal commission

Since the Bondi massacre, the right-wing press has been saturated with vile slanders against the Palestine solidarity movement and the left. Racist pig Pauline Hanson led the charge, but she’s been followed by a slew of political figures and editorialists blaming the Palestine solidarity movement for the murders. Even former PM John Howard is part of the chorus. Howard savaged the Australian working class and led the country into the criminal invasion of Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. That the corporate media still take this war criminal seriously says it all.
Some are using language that wouldn’t have been out of place in Hitler’s Germany. In one piece for the Australian, John Carrol contrasted the clash of civilisations he claims is at the root of the Bondi shooting with “monocultural Japan, which has preserved its ethnic and cultural purity, helping make its cities today, clean, orderly and smoothly running”. 
Left-wing people must stand up to the vitriol and the disgraceful, cynical slanders. The people and institutions going after us have spent decades stoking racism in Australian society, torturing refugees—or justifying it—and punching down and attacking the vulnerable. For the last two years, they have backed the genocide in Palestine. Those trying to make political capital from the Bondi attack were baying for blood in Gaza as bombs rained down and as people starved. 
Their goal is to shift public opinion hard against the Palestine movement. They want to strike a blow against the political left and the Labor Party—which has backed the genocide, but apparently hasn’t been enthusiastic enough in its support for Israel or open enough in its racism. They want to make up the political ground that they lost over the last two years.
From 7 October 2023, the political right and supporters of Israeli apartheid lost a series of debates on the Palestine question. The depravity of Israel’s genocide has drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets and has shifted broader public opinion against both Israel and the US. Two years into Israel’s offensive, <a href="https://apan.org.au/media_release/poll-finds-australians-back-sanctions/#:~:text=New%20poll%20finds%20widespread%20opposition,without%20being%20attacked%20or%20penalised.">polling showed that</a> 57 percent of Australians supported sanctions on Israel and 58 percent said a genocide was taking place. 
In August last year, despite two years of the right smearing all those who stand with Palestine as antisemites, demonstrations flowered in even the smallest country towns as more than 300,000 took to the streets in the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/australia-rises-for-palestine">largest Palestine solidarity mobilisation in Australia’s history</a>. NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, arguably Australia’s most pro-Israel premier, was defeated twice in the courts by Sydney’s Palestine Action Group and definitively in the streets when 300,000 defiantly marched across the Harbour Bridge. 
Now, he’s joining the right’s crusade to turn the tide. Minns has introduced a law allowing the state government to temporarily ban demonstrations. Antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal and her deputy Greg Craven have taken specific aim at students, claiming that university-based protests contributed to a climate of hatred which led to the massacre. This is the same antisemitism envoy who failed to issue any statement when a Nazi organisation took centre stage at mass racist protests last year.
Segal has used this moment to again insist that the government adopt a raft of anti-democratic measures that would lead to a severe crackdown on freedom of speech in universities, including proposing that she be given the right to block funding to universities and arts organisations. 
We cannot let them turn the political tide. Gaza is strewn with broken concrete and smashed homes, under siege from every direction by the Israeli military. Underneath the rubble are an estimated 9,000 bodies. Tents perch on stretches of land that form valleys surrounded on all sides by shelled buildings. The people are starving; even the animals are going hungry. One mother told news outlet Electronic Intifada: “I stay awake all night guarding my children from the dogs”. 
Israel is refusing to let in anywhere near adequate aid, and has revoked the operating licences of 37 aid groups delivering some relief, including Doctors Without Borders and the Norwegian Refugee Council. But Gaza is not chaos. The Israeli government is a skilled social architect, using the most brutal methods to physically and psychologically torture the entire population. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/17/israeli-military-calorie-limit-gaza#:~:text=13%20years%20old-,Israel%20used%20%27calorie%20count%27%20to%20limit%20Gaza%20food%20during%20blockade,needed%20to%20sustain%20the%20population.">From the beginning of the siege in 2007</a>, for example, the military limited the number of calories allowed into the territory to a bare minimum as part of a campaign of economic warfare. 
In November, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir <a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-ministers-debate-shooting-gaza-children-near-yellow-line#:~:text=Israeli%20ministers%2C%20including%20Ben-Gvir,Mute">reportedly urged troops</a> to shoot “children and donkeys” who stray near the newly established “yellow line”, which has cut Gaza in two and allows Israel to occupy 60 percent of the land. This is what the so-called ceasefire looks like.
As Palestinians suffer through a freezing winter, we must continue to fight for Palestinian liberation. This means standing up to an emboldened and rabid political right, and to any and all attacks on the right to demonstrate for justice in Gaza.

Jasmine Duff

Supporters of Palestine must stand up to the post-Bondi right-wing offensive

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.

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