“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.

Tom Bramble

Albanese visits Washington in the service of imperialism and war

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

Jerome Small

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

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

Mick Armstrong

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

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

Ella Marchionda

The militarisation of TAFE

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

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What was the White Australia policy?

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