This article was first presented as a speech to the Gaza solidarity encampments at La Trobe, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Queensland universities. 
It’s just fantastic to meet with those protesting in support of Palestine and against the war in Gaza, and particularly so as I am one of those Jews who say, “not in my name”.
A couple of weeks ago, Prof Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British plastic surgeon, was due to address the French parliament. But when he arrived at the airport in Paris he was stripped of his possessions, taken to a holding cell under guard and then deported. Why did this happen? The German government had banned him from the Shengen Area, a single visa jurisdiction encompassing 29 European nations. It may seem strange that Germany would ban a British citizen from entering France. But Abu-Sitta was about to report on his 43 days spent at hospitals in Gaza last October and November.
A couple of weeks earlier, he was due to speak in Berlin at a congress about Palestine. The German authorities prevented him from entering the country, supposedly because they “could not ensure the safety of the attendees at the conference”. 
First of all, we have the assumption that a Palestinian is automatically a danger to everyone else. But second, we have what actually occurred at the conference. Far from being concerned about the participants’ safety, 2,500 riot police stormed the stage, shut off the electricity, arrested several people—including Jewish organisers of the event—and declared it banned.
The German government makes opposing antisemitism a core political issue, and so it should given its history. But how have they defined antisemitism? As opposition to Israel.
In Germany today, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are almost illegal. Wearing a keffiyeh is banned in some parts of the country. Using the phrase “From the river to the sea” and displaying the Palestinian flag are now crimes for which you can be arrested. One German state requires applicants for citizenship to declare their support for “Israel’s right to exist”. 
Meanwhile, the right organises in Germany with very few restrictions. The government regularly allows far-right, and even openly fascist, gatherings. This is in spite of the fact that more than 90 percent of all antisemitic incidents in Germany are attributable to the far-right. Real antisemitism is growing largely unchecked while governments attack and arrest anti-Zionist Jews all in the name of preventing antisemitism.
The Germans aren’t exceptional here. Governments all around the world push the line that anything hostile to Israel and Zionism is antisemitic. Let’s unpack that.
First, let’s consider what antisemitism is.
Discrimination and violence against Jews are nothing new. But in the past, this was based on Jewishness as a religion. All Jews had to do to escape was to get baptised. When Spain expelled Jews in 1492, those who converted were allowed to stay as long as they abandoned their religious practices. At the time Karl Marx’s father converted around 1816, this was still the case. But by the late nineteenth century, Marx himself, although he was not born Jewish by attitudes at the time, was again considered to be Jewish. What happened in between?
Imperialism took hold during the latter part of the nineteenth century and pseudo-scientific ideas of race were used to justify the subjugation of supposedly inferior populations in the colonies. It’s no accident that around the same time Jews also came to be viewed as a race—that is something biological, something you were born with and could not change. No longer was it considered to be something in your head—your religious belief—which you could alter. The basis of modern antisemitism is hatred of Jews as an inborn condition. 
The actual word “antisemitism” was invented by right-wing German nationalists who set up an organisation called the League of Antisemites in 1879.
Modern antisemitism became a tool in the capitalist divide and rule handbook. The ruling class wanted to get rid of competitors and during the nineteenth century a significant Jewish bourgeoisie arose in Germany. So, antisemitism was partly economic. But Jews in Europe were an easily identifiable community with a different language and customs, and were perfectly placed to be scapegoats for all sorts of issues. For instance, authorities in Tsarist Russia provoked pogroms to divert attention from the real causes of the misery in ordinary people’s lives.
Hostility to Jews in the late nineteenth century was also a product of their association with socialists and the working-class movement. Jews had been prominent in the 1789 French and 1848 European revolutions and in radical organisations such as the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Right wingers who wanted to attack the left often did this by pointing the finger at Jews.
On the other hand, it was the left and working-class movements that took a stand against antisemitism. Socialist parties, anarchists, the Bolsheviks, trade unions and many other working-class and left-wing organisations and independents in Europe and the US all joined in the fight against antisemitism, and against the right and fascism. Donny Gluckstein and I go into this in some detail in our book, The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands, and show what nonsense it is to talk about antisemitism being an integral and ingrained feature of radical organisations.
So where does Zionism fit into this understanding of what is antisemitic? 
Theodore Herzl, known as the father of Zionism, proposed his ideas in 1895, and in effect turned the argument about being Jewish as inborn on its head. He argued that non-Jews were inherently antisemitic, that they would always be this way and there was nothing you could do about it. This is a core argument of Zionists to this day. Herzl argued that only the creation of a nation state for Jews could provide safety from antisemitism. Because they wanted to argue for a nation, they needed to argue that they represent all, or at least the vast majority, of Jews. 
The reality is that Jews aren’t a single entity, and in no way do the Zionists represent them all. In fact, regarding Jews as a monolithic entity is typical of antisemites.
Rachel Shapiro, a Jewish anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian activist and granddaughter of a holocaust survivor, points this out:
“This designation of all Jews and all Judaism as a single uniform entity, necessarily speaking the same language (modern Hebrew), holding the same values (Zionism) and sharing an identical culture ... is, in fact, the precise definition of antisemitic, Nazistic ... rhetoric.”
Before World War Two, Zionism was a minority point of view in most Jewish communities. Although it later became much more prominent, it has never represented the entire Jewish community. This has become increasingly obvious as Jews around the world are a major feature of the current opposition to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. On the other hand, many supporters of Zionism in the world today aren’t Jews at all—right-wing Christians in the US are a major support base, and the right-wing antisemitic governments in Hungary and Romania are also important international supporters of the Zionist state. 
Zionism is a modern political ideology, and opposition to Zionism is not an attack on all Jews. Modern antisemitism is socially conditioned anti-Jewish racism. In no way can opposition to Israel and Zionists be designated as antisemitic. 
Equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism weakens the fight against real antisemitism and is really about preventing criticism of Israel. 
Zionists constantly invoke Jewish history as a justification for their support of Israel, so an alternative view of that history becomes very immediate and urgent. Basically, Zionists don’t want their own community to know that there is a history of struggle by Jews outside the Zionist movement.
In our book we talk about the “lachrymose [tearful] conception of Jewish history”. That’s the idea that the main element of Jewish experience has been suffering—it’s always been this way and it can’t be changed. In other words, Jews are eternal victims.
There are three ways to respond to this. First, you can say we can’t do anything about antisemitism, so we withdraw into our own ghettoes, customs and religion. We do nothing and remain victims. 
The second option is to get away from being a victim by joining the perpetrators: become an exploiter and an oppressor yourself, or at least side with those who do.
Zionism is a combination of both these options. They start by saying that we can’t do anything about antisemitism and non-Jews will always be antisemitic. But then they say the way to stop being victims is to take lessons and guidance from the colonialists, the imperialists, the ruling class and even the antisemites. Let’s set up our own state and become just like them.
But there is a third option. In our book, we show that while the oppression and suffering have certainly been there, Jews are not just victims. They have always fought back.
The radical tradition is the history of working-class and socialist Jewish struggle against both oppression and exploitation. It’s the tradition that says we can fight to defend ourselves. The tradition that knows what antisemitism is but doesn’t just accept it as eternal or move to set yourself up as the oppressor of someone else. 
Before World War Two, the majority of Jews were working class and part of a wider struggle alongside their non-Jewish comrades on the left. Fighting oppression and exploitation took numerous political forms, including anarchism, left Zionism, Bundism (the Bund was a Jewish workers’ association) and revolutionary Marxism. 
Jews fought back against pogroms in Tsarist Russia and joined strikes and mass struggles in the UK and the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Holocaust, despite what is widely said, they didn’t go as sheep to the slaughter. They established underground resistance organisations and led uprisings in ghettos and concentration camps. Throughout, they acted in solidarity with other socialist and working-class movements. Far from the Zionist stereotype of the ultimate victims, Jews were revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands.
This Jewish radical tradition is a history of resistance and the struggle to change the world. A history of people who didn’t just weep and hide away, who refused to be just victims or to join the oppressors. 
This history matters because the battle for memory is also a battle for the present. The Zionists don’t want us to know there is a different answer to antisemitism than the Israeli state. The ruling class doesn’t want us to know there are ways to defeat their divide and rule scapegoating.
But this history doesn’t just belong to Jews. It belongs to all of us—to the participants in the encampments and Palestine solidarity actions everywhere, and to all who are engaged in struggle against the horrors of our society, of oppression and exploitation, and of war. This isn’t an academic or a sectional history but is avowedly partisan, a history to support and inspire struggle.
I want to end with the words of Marek Edelmann, a Bundist and participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. After the war, Edelmann returned to Poland and remained a radical all his life. During the second Palestinian Intifada, Edelman wrote a letter to the Palestinians, who he compared to the Jewish Fighting Organisation that had led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. He addressed it to “commanders of the Palestinian military ... to all the soldiers of the Palestinian fighting organisation”.
Just as Edelmann linked the resistance fighters in Warsaw, so do I link the Jewish radical tradition with today’s fight of the Palestinians against expropriation, persecution and genocide. I stand with Palestine. 
Janey Stone is an anti-Zionist Jewish socialist and co-author with Donny Gluckstein of “The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters and firebrands”, which is published by Interventions in Australia.

Janey Stone

The radical Jewish tradition—the alternative to Zionism

Sexism is so fundamental to our existence that we are not even aware of it much of the time. 
It starts from before we are even born. An experiment described by Annie Murphy Paul in her book Origins highlights the different ways pregnant women interpret the movement of their babies in utero. Those who knew they were expecting a boy were more likely to use words like “energetic”, “vigorous” and “jabbing” to describe the movement, while for girls it was “gentle”, “rolling” and “quiet”. 
This sort of unconscious bias shapes and curtails women’s potential throughout their lives. In her book Delusions of Gender, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine describes an experiment which showed that simply reminding university students about whether they’re a man or a woman at the beginning of a test, by asking them to tick a box, reduces women’s performance on the test compared to that of men; in the absence of such a reminder, men and women perform equally well. Even the “feminine” or “masculine” nature of the décor in the room where the test is held has a measurable impact on performance. If such subtleties can have a statistically significant effect, just imagine the cumulative effect of this conditioning over a lifetime. 
The sexist bias that plagues data collection and design has been documented by Caroline Creado Perez in Invisible Women: Exposing data bias in a world designed for men. Every area of design and technology is affected, from medical testing and drug development to building design, workplace temperature and tool size, all of which have wide-ranging and material effects on women’s health and lives. The male bias built into car safety testing, for example, means women are 49 percent more likely to be seriously injured in car accidents and 17 percent more likely to die than men. 
Then there are all the manifestations of sexism that we are conscious of, like unequal pay, lack of adequate maternity leave, limited access to child care, greater poverty on average for women throughout their lifetimes, greater risk of violence and death from intimate partners, sexualisation and objectification in daily life as well as in popular culture and advertising, to name just a few. 
There is not an aspect of life that isn’t affected by the gendered, and therefore sexist, nature of society in some way, from the most personal to the most public. 
So what can be done about this so all-pervasive form of inequality?
First, we—women and men—need to become as conscious as we can of sexism in our daily lives and strive to minimise it as best we can. We want women to be able to reach their potential and participate in whatever area of society, work and culture they want as equals. That means being sensitive to how the minutiae of behaviour—things like who dominates conversations and who gets listened to and taken notice of—affect women, who are used to being ignored, dismissed and generally treated as less important than men. It means treating women as equals, not sex objects, there merely to be admired or preyed on by men. And it means taking pro-active measures to push against the various subtle ways sexism shapes all sorts of human interactions. 
But even if we do everything we can to be alert to everyday sexism, it doesn’t alter the social reality around us that is reinforcing sexist ideas and norms as fast as we can reject them. 
So we also need a strategy for changing society and the inequalities that are structured into it and which every day normalise the subordinate position of women. 
In the immediate term, this means policies and services that enable women to participate as equals in paid work and the public sphere as much as possible—free, accessible child care and aged care, unlimited maternity leave, greater scrutiny of hiring and promotion to reduce discrimination against women, as well as higher wages in industries dominated by women, to name just a few. 
But on their own, these measures merely support women to undertake paid work more easily while they continue to take primary responsibility for caring as well. Hence the notorious “double burden” that plagues working women’s lives. In themselves, such reforms don’t challenge the idea that women are naturally nurturing and better suited to caring for others than men, who, by their nature, belong in positions of power. 
So, important as measures that enable women to participate fully in paid work and the public sphere are, they are not sufficient to bring about genuine equality or liberation. To achieve this, we need more radical change. In particular, we need to transform the way work is done, including breaking down the division between work in the formal economy and caring work, and the subordination of all work to profit making and capital accumulation. 
As long as most of us are expected to spend 40 hours or more a week performing waged labour—during which our “real” lives are on hold and we are under the control of a boss and doing work to generate profit for those who hire us rather than doing what is needed to keep ourselves and those around us alive, healthy and happy—the division of labour that so effectively supports this economic model will endure. Indeed, this is why it persists more then 50 years after most formal rights for women were won, including the right to equal pay, the right to work while married, the right to financial autonomy, the right to divorce and reproductive freedom. 
The bosses rely on the existence of a sub-class—women— to take responsibility for ensuring workers are looked after and fit for work, and that new generations of workers are produced who are willing and able to work. Women perform the majority of this work for free out of a sense of duty and because they genuinely care about the wellbeing of those around them. But the value to the bosses, who rely on that work to provide a productive workforce, is nevertheless enormous. 
A 2017 PWC report, “Understanding the unpaid economy”, found that unpaid work is worth $2.2 trillion to the Australian economy, equivalent to a third of GDP. Unpaid child care is the largest contributor, worth 25 percent of GDP, and would be by far the biggest industry in Australia if it was part of the formal economy. Domestic household tasks, including cooking and cleaning, are the next biggest category of unpaid labour. 
Having more women in the halls of power won’t be enough to change this. The halls of power are dedicated to strengthening the economy—i.e. generating more GDP through better exploiting workers and maximising the profits of business—and are dominated by the economic interests of the powerful few who control major corporations and industries. Waged labour and the status quo that ensures exploitation continues smoothly serve their interests, and those who challenge that soon find themselves on the outer. So while women have as much right as men to occupy parliaments and boardrooms, this is not a strategy for liberating women. 
To bring about the radical change that is necessary, we need to orient to an alternative source of power: the power the working class has collectively to challenge and transform society by mobilising at the point of production. Workers make everything, and they do it together. Rather than bosses directing this process, workers have the potential to decide democratically how and what to produce and for what purpose. 
Work and production could and should be reorganised to meet need—including the social need to care for everyone as well as the need to protect the planet from destruction. And because it could only be done collectively, cooperation, solidarity and fostering mutual respect are necessary to help strengthen working-class power. This is why we can be confident that the prejudice and inequality that are so rampant in capitalist society would be organically challenged and eventually overcome in the course of workers fighting for a socialist society, as has happened historically at high points of workers’ struggle. 
Working-class women aren’t necessarily conscious of the need for this sort of radical change to solve the problems they experience as a result of capitalism’s need both to exploit them and maintain their caring role. And nor are most male workers, who likewise have an interest in challenging waged labour and exploitation. But the reality is this is the only way to bring about a society of gender, as well as broader, equality, and to have a society that can meet people’s needs as a matter of priority, not as an afterthought or a ritualised hand-wringing every year on International Women’s Day. 
To get there, we need to start with rebuilding working-class consciousness and power from the bottom up. This is the radical origin of what was originally known as International Working Women’s Day when it was founded by socialist women in 1910 and celebrated under the slogan “The vote for women will unite our strength in the struggle for socialism”. 
There is no easy way to do that, and we are currently a long way from the sort of consciousness and organisation needed to overthrow this system of inequality and prejudice. But if we want to avoid the cynicism or despair that comes from watching politicians carp on about women’s empowerment while they maintain policies that keep women down, or CEOs raising champagne glasses at International Women’s Day breakfasts while women languish on low wages in low-status jobs, we need some idea of what could actually transform the position of women. And we need to fight for those ideas wherever we are—at work, on university campuses and in every other area of life—and get together with other people doing the same, so that we can maximise our impact and form a larger pole of attraction for people who are continually pushed to radical conclusions by the injustices and atrocities of the capitalist system. That is the small but important step we can take towards women’s liberation, and the liberation of all humanity, in the here and now.

Louise O'Shea

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

The facts are undeniable. Women in 5,000 companies—covering almost five million workers—earn 21.7 percent less than their male colleagues’ median total remuneration. In some companies, the gap is as high as 31.8 percent. This is according to figures released by the Workplace Gender Equity Agency (WGEA) in the lead-up to International Women’s Day this year. 
A significant gender pay disparity in some areas with relatively small numbers of women, such as mining or construction companies, might not be surprising. But others, such as banks and airlines, often have even higher wage gaps. In retail women’s wear, for every dollar a man gets, women’s pay ranges from 42.3 to 79.1 cents. 
Importantly, the WGEA figures compare full-time work, with pay rates for part-time work translated into a full-time rate for the purposes of comparison. But because women disproportionately work part time, the actual amount they are paid—what goes into their bank account each fortnight—is even less compared to their male counterparts than what the pay gap alone suggests. 
Why does the pay gap exist? The problem is well illustrated by Bain Consulting. Bain is a company with a 31 percent wage gap, despite winning awards from the WGEA for gender equality. At Bain, women make up just 31 percent of its highest earning advisers, 45 percent of its second-highest ranks and 71 percent of its bottom quartile. 
A similar situation exists at the Commonwealth Bank, which has a 54.4 percent female workforce. Around 71 percent of the lower-paid customer service roles in branches and call centres are women, which accounts for its 29.8 percent pay gap. The bank may pay the same wage for the same work, but men get the higher paid jobs with all the perks and bonuses that go with them.
The solution, according to Angela Priestley in Women’s Agenda, is to “Bring on the heat around the gender pay gaps ... Bring on the scrutiny ... the awkward discussions” in companies championing the UN’s International Women’s Day slogan “count her in”. 
But while it’s welcome that the WGEA has published business names and matching figures of pay rates for the first time, transparency itself won’t necessarily improve things for women. In Denmark, when similar data was published, the gender pay gap narrowed because bosses responded by holding down men’s wages, rather than increasing women’s. 
Not mentioned by the WGEA, companies or media commentary is the one thing that has won gains for women in the past—militant union organising.
Since the 1800s, Australian unions have been organising for equal pay. As early as 1902, telegraphists and postmistresses in the new federal public service won equal pay after a determined campaign by the union. Later campaigns during WWII saw tram conductors, munitions workers and bread carters win after taking industrial action. 
Two campaigns particularly stand out: one by manufacturing workers in 1969 and the other by insurance workers in 1973. Several industrial campaigns in manufacturing in the early 1960s were instrumental in bringing about the 1969 decision that enshrined equal pay for the same work. This decision triggered a two-year campaign to win full equal pay for 72,000 women process workers. Concerted industrial action, including the unionisation of many new workplaces and joint action with their fellow male workers, got results.
After the second equal pay decision in 1972 broadened the scope for claims by requiring equal pay for comparable work, insurance workers initially relied on the courts to implement pay equality in their industry. When this didn’t happen, they started to organise and in 1973 several thousand workers demonstrated in Melbourne and stayed out for the rest of the day. They then went on to have a stop-work a week later and another strike, and a month later threatened a national strike—the first in the industry. The employers backed down and, though it took another year and a further threat of industrial action, pay equality was won for most of the workforce. 
We’ve now had decades of reports, committees, court rulings, new legislation undoing some of the structural barriers to women’s work—and yet the gender pay gap remains stubbornly high. It remains high because union leaders have forgotten the lessons of the past, relied on all these committees and laws instead of the industrial strength of their members. 
The 1980s ALP-ACTU Accord promised many things for women, but collaboration with the bosses led to women’s wages falling and big job losses in female-dominated industries as the economy was restructured. Unions held back from taking industrial action, unionisation and wages and conditions plummeted, while the bosses reaped the profits.
In the wake of this latest WGEA report, the ACTU released several memes, concluding that “There is much to be done, but union members are no stranger to getting things done”. Where we have actually won equal pay or broken through barriers, it is because we have used our industrial strength, not meme wars. Where is the call from the ACTU or individual unions for a stop-work on International Women’s Day? 
We can’t rely on naming and shaming the bosses into granting equal pay. We have to take on the system that reinforces inequality. If unions were prepared to take on the banks, the supermarkets and the airlines to demand better wages for women and back it up with industrial action—like workers did in the insurance industry in the 1970s—there is every indication it would be popular and they would be under huge pressure to pay up. But for all the talk of “breaking the rules”, there is clearly no appetite for that sort of action.
If we are to break through the gender pay gap, it will be necessary to follow the example of those before us who used their industrial power to win better conditions for women. And to do that, we need to start building power in our workplaces from the bottom up.

Liz Ross

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

“Sydney’s gay community is rightly hurt and angry. Police should not march in this year’s Mardi Gras.” So said the Sydney Morning Herald editorial on 25 February. By the end of the day, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras board had uninvited the police from marching in Saturday’s parade. By 28 February, they had invited them back, albeit wearing T-shirts with a police logo instead of their uniforms.
The hurt and anger to which the Herald editorial referred arose from the domestic violence-fuelled murders of a Sydney gay couple, Jesse Baird and Luke Davies. Beau Lamarre-Condon, a gay police officer, has been charged with the murders. He allegedly used his police gun.
The only positive to come out of this horrendous crime is that it has re-raised the argument about whether the police should march in the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. Not because an individual cop turns out to be a homicidal stalker, but because they are the police, and not everyone has forgotten their repressive role in society, past and present.
The police have been part of Mardi Gras for 26 years. In that time they have committed, as an institution, egregious crimes against every oppressed group in society. Lamarre-Condon himself was photographed marching in the police contingent at Mardi Gras in 2020. That was the year he was also filmed repeatedly tasering an Indigenous man in the face, neck and chest. He was later cleared by an “internal investigation” in what is standard procedure for police caught enacting violence on and off the job.
The Mardi Gras board didn’t seem to think this—or the other ongoing crimes of the police force—was a good enough reason to question the cops’ participation.
So why this time? Timing played a role. News of the murders came to light ten days before Mardi Gras, and only two months after the police’s refusal to even apologise when an inquiry into LGBTI hate crimes criticised them in December for being “indifferent, negligent, dismissive or hostile” to the investigation. More importantly, while much grief ensued for the victims, there was also from many an angry reaction against the cops in general.
The NSW police commissioner Karen Webb understood what was at stake. She needed to draw a line between the “one bad apple” and the force as a whole. How else to explain that on 24 February she suddenly remembered to apologise for the four decades of LGBTI hate crimes that the police had previously ignored?
The Mardi Gras board decided to make a gesture to assuage popular anger at the police. Yet what has eventuated is meaningless. The logic of “inclusion” based on identity (“don’t you realise there are LGBTI police officers?”) won the day and the cops were back in. When it came down to it, even a one-off absence of the police from the parade raised too many awkward questions. Most importantly, why was this repressive force ever part of an event that had started with a police riot against protesters for LGBTI rights?
The police should never have been invited in the first place.
Mardi Gras at its 1978 origin was a protest in solidarity with the gay liberation movement in the United States. It took place on the anniversary of the Stonewall riots of 1969 that initiated that movement. The first Mardi Gras and the campaign to drop the charges against protesters that followed it gave an enormous boost to LGBTI radicalism and mass mobilisation in Australia.
Yet twenty years later, in 1998, Mardi Gras had been so transformed that the cops were invited to participate in an event that had once chanted: “Stop police attacks on gays, women and Blacks!”.
Had the police changed their spots? Or had Mardi Gras? 
Did, perhaps, the police get let into the parade in 1998 because they made a nice apology in 1997 for the beatings and arrests that they inflicted on the original Mardi Gras protesters in 1978? Nothing like it. That insincere utterance only came in 2016, after they’d already been polluting the parade with their presence for eighteen years (and three years after they physically attacked several gay men on the night of Mardi Gras 2013—something else that failed to move the Mardi Gras board to un-invite them).
The police force is a violent, right-wing institution that plays no role in protecting oppressed people, and an enormous role in holding up structures of oppression and injustice. Police brutality is defended by and entrenched in the entire institution.
What has changed is Mardi Gras’ “management”. Having the police march in the parade is just one sign of what a conservative corporate entity Mardi Gras has become. 
While Marxists, socialists, anarchists and other radicals established Mardi Gras, its nature did not go uncontested. By 1980, the key debate was between those fighting to retain Mardi Gras as a political protest and those (including gay business owners) who wanted to make it a celebration of “our lifestyle”. That the date of the march was shifted in 1981 from the chilly climes of the winter Stonewall anniversary in June to the tourism-friendly warmth of late summer should tell you who won.
Mardi Gras was no longer organised by the radical activists of the Gay Solidarity Group but by a specific Gay Mardi Gras Task Group, the forerunner of today’s board of directors of what is now a registered charity and company with a multi-million-dollar turnover. The parade itself is a huge tourism event from which major profits are made, many of them by the organisation’s corporate backers such as Qantas. Political floats are rare. The 78ers float is now limited to 100 participants—apparently subject to the same numerical restriction as the police who bashed and arrested us throughout 1978.
The only positive about today’s Mardi Gras is that the crowds of people of all genders and sexualities that come to view it—hundreds of thousands lining the parade route, and millions online—remind us of the effect that radical mass campaigns for LGBTI rights, from Mardi Gras to marriage equality, have had on popular attitudes.
The police, on the other hand, have resisted every advance. Normalising this repressive force by including them in the Mardi Gras has not improved them one bit. Instead, it has whitewashed their true nature.
Diane Fieldes is a 78er who marched in the “drop the charges” rally on 27 August 1978 at which more than 100 people were arrested.

Diane Fieldes

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

In 2021 Western Australian mining conglomerate Mineral Resources Limited (MRL) celebrated the launch of its new <a href="https://www.mineralresources.com.au/news-media/new-waalitj-centre-a-real-work-of-art/">Waalitj Centre</a>, a large warehouse in the iron ore-mining township of Koolyanobbing built to store and manage the company’s equipment. The warehouse’s exterior, the company writes, “showcases an impressive mural representing our relationship and respect for Traditional Owners on the lands on which we operate. Commissioned by respected local Aboriginal artist, Aaron Hayden, the artwork draws inspiration from his experience of the Yilgarn region and represents MRL’s ongoing relationships with the local Njaki Njaki people”.
MRL boasts that the Waalitj Centre reflects the company’s focus on “continuous improvement, innovative thinking and working smarter to become more productive every day”. No doubt the mural gives MRL executives a warm feeling on visits to its giant and highly lucrative iron ore mine nearby. How many of the Njaki Njaki people themselves would share that feeling is unclear.
It’s not just mining companies like MRL that are keen to promote their supposed respect for Aboriginal culture. Whether it’s commissioning artworks, publicising their support for the Indigenous Voice to parliament, or promoting Indigenous spokespeople and welcome to countries, much of corporate Australia is keen to foreground its supposed anti-racist credentials.
This, however, is a facade. To the extent that companies want to present themselves this way, it’s so that they can better exploit people and natural resources. MRL’s Koolyanobbing mine is estimated to contain up to 40.8 million tonnes of iron ore, currently worth more than $8.4 billion. The traditional owners of the land these mines are on, apparently so admired by company management, can expect to see only a tiny fraction of this revenue. It’s a similar picture elsewhere in Australia, where mining companies are enjoying massive profits from high commodity prices while the majority of traditional owners live in poverty. A few murals and a cultural centre here and there are a small price to pay to gain the political licence for such a windfall.
Mining giant Rio Tinto is another example. The company’s <a href="https://www.riotinto.com/-/media/Content/Documents/Sustainability/Indigenous-Peoples/RT-Our-commitment-to-Indigenous-Australia.pdf?rev=6431d08025fa49d59a7a9a2e92bb742b">action plan</a> for working with Aboriginal people says “we recognise the cultural, spiritual, and physical connections that Indigenous people have with land, water, plants, and animals”. But in 2020, the company blew up sacred rock shelters at Juukan Gorge to make way for an iron-ore mine. As historian Clare Wright <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-masters-of-the-future-or-heirs-of-the-past-mining-history-and-indigenous-ownership-153879">put it</a>, “In a matter of minutes, eight million tonnes of ore were ripped from the earth, and with them, 46,000 years of cultural heritage destroyed ... For this hefty price we all paid, Rio Tinto lawfully gained access to $135 million of high-grade iron ore”. 
Respect for Indigenous culture takes a back seat as soon as it bumps up against the pursuit of profit.
The 2023 campaign by Western Australian business organisations against the state’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act (ACHA) further illustrates the point. While very moderate, the ACHA was seen by the Pastoral and Graziers Association of WA as a threat to its members’ future profits. The mining industry was similarly concerned. Warren Pearce, chief executive of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC), complained that under the ACHA <a href="https://safetowork.com.au/wa-to-roll-back-cultural-heritage-laws/">mining projects</a> would be “slowed down substantially”. In a meeting of AMEC, mining executives argued that the ACHA would restrict mining companies from obtaining critical materials, metals and iron ore. 
Western Australia’s Labor government ultimately gave in to the pressure, and the ACHA was repealed. This victory of corporate interests against a real (though very limited) example of Indigenous empowerment didn’t stop them, though, from continuing to boast of their commitment to “Indigenous empowerment” in the abstract, non-actionable sense. AMEC head Pearce was <a href="https://nit.com.au/05-12-2023/8915/2023-amec-awards-recognise-first-nations-influence">back at it in December</a>, describing the organisation’s awards night as an opportunity “to showcase the [mining] industry’s commitment to exploration, diversity and inclusion, the environment, [and] First Nations empowerment”.
Corporate Australia’s determination to undermine any attempt to grant Indigenous people control over land is just one part of the picture. Just as important is big business opposition to measures that would help reduce poverty and expand public services, like higher wages, better working conditions, more funding for public health and housing. It’s these measures that, in the short term, would have the most significant impact on the lives of Indigenous people—yet big business consistently uses its clout to argue against them. The policies they favour, such as privatisation, tax cuts for corporations and the rich, and greater “flexibility” and “wage restraint” for workers make it harder for Indigenous people to get ahead. 
Indigenous poverty is both a product and a cause of racism. The entrenched racism of Australian society helps justify the lack of serious government action to improve conditions for Aboriginal people. And the conditions of poverty in which many Aboriginal people live are used, in turn, to reinforce racist stereotypes and justify racist policing and sky-high levels of incarceration. 
Politicians and right-wing ideologues can then point their finger at Indigenous people to show why individual responsibility, rather than social support, is key to improving living standards. Once this is established, it’s an easy slide to apply the same logic to everyone, with all the cuts, privatisation and punitive social measures that go with it. For corporate Australia, this means less of their profits going to wages, public services and welfare via taxes, freeing up more public money to be spent on infrastructure for industry, corporate subsidies and tax cuts. 
None of this can be somehow made right by a bit of funding for cultural centres, regular acknowledgements of country, and other corporate displays of respect for Indigenous people. If we’re to achieve genuine liberation for Indigenous people, we need to see through their attempts at “blackwashing” and abolish capitalism and its racist institutions for good.

Oskar Martin

How corporate Australia blackwashes its complicity in racism 

<a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">A bombshell report </a>in the West Australian has uncovered details of appalling abuse in Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre in 2022. 
Extreme violence was used by prison officers against a suicidal 16-year-old boy. At one point, he was “folded up” by prison officers into a figure-four hold—when guards lie handcuffed children down on their stomach, fold their legs behind their backs, and sit with their full body weight on top of them. The practice is now banned in some states for its risk of causing asphyxiation.
Video footage of the incident shows the boy moaning in pain and sobbing throughout. While the squad “folded up” the boy, a commanding officer is heard in the background telling the team to “go hard”. 
“The bodycam footage is genuinely shocking”, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org.au/banksia-hill-riot-squad-uses-force-on-16-year-old-boy/">Amnesty International </a>spokesperson Rachel McPhail said in a media release. “It’s devastating to see any young person in this manner, when they really need care and compassion.” 
In a separate incident, a riot squad burst into the room of the same boy and transferred him to another cell with “three-point” shackles, which cuff the wrists and ankles in chains and padlocks, a separate chain linking them all together. The prison officers cut off the clothes he’d been wearing for two weeks and left the boy in the room, shackled. 
“I’m definitely killing myself ... you treat me like a dog in this place”, the boy cried out <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">according to the </a><a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/shackled-hogtied-forced-down-banksia-hill-riot-squad-officers-caught-on-camera-using-extreme-force-on-teen-c-12981783">West Australian</a>. 
This was only the latest act of cruelty that has been brought to light from body cam and CCTV footage. Barely a month goes by without a new revelation about torturous conditions in the state’s prison system.
Last October, another 16-year-old, Indigenous boy Cleveland Dodd, died a week after self-harming in his cell. He was the first young person to die in Unit 18, the abominable youth wing of the adult maximum security Casuarina prison in Perth’s south. 
Cleveland was not under proper observation, even though he had indicated several times that he was intending to self-harm. An internal probe into Cleveland’s death found that prison staff had faked welfare checks on him. When he fatally injured himself, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/10/prison-officers-watched-movies-and-relaxed-as-16-year-old-cleveland-dodd-fatally-self-harmed-minister-says">prison guards were watching movies.</a> 
“This tragedy could have been avoided”, advocate Megan Krakouer <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-26/cleveland-dodds-mother-breaks-silence-on-death-of-son-unit-18/103021576">told the ABC</a>. “We have warned time and time and time again. The West Australian government is not listening.”
Children’s Court President Hylton Quail recently criticised the “unlawful manner” in which the Department of Justice runs Unit 18, including its use of lockdowns, when prisoners can be locked inside their cells for 24 hours or more. Quail described the prison as a <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/court-justice/judge-hylton-quail-blasts-unit-18-as-a-barbaric-dungeon-releases-damaged-teenager-c-13054159">“barbaric dungeon where children are deprived and dehumanised”</a>.
Corrective Services minister Paul Papalia initially reacted to Cleveland’s death by defending the prison officers and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-11/unit-18-cleveland-dodd-paul-papalia-analysis/103050596">bringing makeshift weapons</a> confiscated from Unit 18 detainees to present as part of a speech to state parliament. The implication was that the violence against people inside Unit 18 is justified. Premier Roger Cook displayed a similarly blithe attitude when he described Unit 18 as a “<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-13/wa-premier-under-fire-after-boy-attempts-suicide-in-adult-prison/102970996">necessary evil</a>”. 
Unit 18, Banksia Hill, and the entire prison system in WA is a monstrosity.

Alevine Magila

WA prisons are ‘barbaric dungeons’

Thousands rallied across Aotearoa (New Zealand) in protests called by Te Pāti Māori (The Māori Party) as a new conservative government took office in December. Rally organisers have called the movement “Toitū te Tiriti”, referring to the need to uphold and enhance Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) against the new government’s racist attacks. Organisers invited people of all races to participate, and there was a significant minority of non-Māori protesters. 
One protester, Quack Pirihi, told Re: news, an online media outlet: “If we don’t stand up now and protest there won’t be any other opportunities. This is what our future descendants will remember us for”. Another protester, Awhina Twomey, said she was marching “to stand up and be counted and to do something not just for Māori but for everybody”, because the government’s policies “aren’t going to be good for the majority, they’ll only be good for the minority”. 
Protests occurred in Te Tai Tokerau (The North Coast), Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington), Wairarapa, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Hauraki-Waikato, Waiariki, and Te Tai Hauāuru (The West Coast). The protest in Whanganui briefly shut down the main highway into the town. 
The street marches coincided with a protest from Te Pāti Māori MPs inside parliament. Instead of just swearing allegiance to the King, all six Te Pāti Māori MP’s swore allegiance first to their mokopuna (grandchildren or descendants). Some MPs called King Charles “Hare Hare”, which translates to both Charlie and skin rash or scab. 
The protests were called in response to historic attacks on Māori rights by the new government coalition of right-wing racists. Christopher Luxon (prime minister and leader of the National Party), Winston Peters (vice prime minister and leader of New Zealand First), and David Seymour (vice prime minister and leader of Act) have announced a policy platform focused on attacking Māori, workers, the poor and the environment. 
Seymour has over a decade of experience attacking the rights of workers and <a href="https://en.tetaurawhiri.govt.nz/">Māori</a>. He describes himself as a libertarian, same as Argentina’s new far-right president Javier Millei. This brand of politics despises state support for workers and the poor. Seymour cut his teeth in Canada, at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, and the Manning Centre, both conservative think tanks with a long history of racist campaigns denying the ongoing effects of colonisation and capitalism on Indigenous people. 
Seymour has been the MP for Epsom since 2014. Epson is the wealthiest electorate in the country, with a median household income of NZ$118,300. He became a household name during the pandemic, during which he opposed almost all the health measures implemented to stop the spread of the virus. 
Winston Peters is a more familiar face, having been elected to parliament fifteen times. He began his career as a National MP in 1975. After leaving the National Party, he established New Zealand First, a right-wing party. Peters’ support is concentrated among people over 60, and he is known for his racist, anti-immigration and socially conservative rhetoric. He voted against the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1986 and the Marriage Amendment bill that legalised same-sex marriage in 2012.
Christopher Luxon is a boss-turned-politician, having previously been the CEO of Unilever Canada and of Air New Zealand. While in charge of Air New Zealand, the company’s business unit, Gas Turbines, supported Royal Saudi Navy vessels while the vessels were blocking humanitarian aid being sent to Yemen. 
The government is repealing fair pay laws (introduced by Labour to allow minimum pay and conditions across entire sectors), extending 90-day trial periods across more workplaces, introducing sanctions on welfare recipients who fail requirements, and cutting Core Crown spending (spending on social services like welfare, health and education) to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. They are restoring mortgage interest deductibility for rental properties, and attacking renters’ rights, with special attacks on renters in Kāinga Ora (public housing).
At the same time, more funding is being pumped into police and prisons, including creating a new “young serious offender category” and “young offender military academies”, essentially establishing juvenile detention. Māori are already the most incarcerated demographic in Aotearoa (more than 40 percent of incarcerated men and 60 percent of incarcerated women, despite making up only 18 percent of the total population), and these measures will only intensify the oppression of Māori by the state. 
The new government is also embarking on a culture war against Māori people and the gains they have made over the last century. A Treaty principles bill, which puts the content of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) up for debate and amendment, will be introduced to a select committee. Te Aka Whai Ora (The Māori Health Authority) is also being dismantled.
On top of this, Te Reo, the Māori language, will be effectively banned in government. All communication in public service departments, and all departments are to be named (unless related specifically to Māori) exclusively in English. 
These historic attacks on Māori rights are being pushed by Peters and Seymour, themselves both of Māori ancestry. They argue that Te Tiriti, and Māori co-governance, anti-democratically favours Māori and are too expensive to be continued. This conveniently distracts from and defers blame for the cost-of-living crisis onto Māori, who are struggling the most. The reality is Māori are still falling behind in almost every social measure. Nearly a quarter of Māori and Pasifika people are likely to experience persistent deprivation, higher than any other demographic in the country. Life expectancy for Māori men is 7.3 years lower than the national average, and is 6.9 years lower for Māori women. 
Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the founding document between British colonists and Māori, and established tino rangatiratanga, or self-determination, for Māori, among other rights. However, Te Tiriti was purposefully written in vague terms by the British, especially when translated into Te Reo. The document was always intended to subdue the militant Māori war against colonisation, and steal land under legal cover. Subsequent governments, both left and right, have continued to steal land and flagrantly break Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Ninety-five percent of land in Aotearoa has been alienated from Māori. Te Tiriti doesn’t go far enough in defending M<a href="https://en.tetaurawhiri.govt.nz/">ā</a>ori rights, hence the demand to uphold and enhance Te Tiriti. 
The richest 10 percent of Aotearoa’s population owns 25 percent of the country’s assets, while the poorest 50 percent own just 2 percent according to Max Rashbrooke, author of Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis. It is the rich who are anti-democratically favoured, and the policy program of the new government will only exaggerate this.
The coalition only just cobbled together a majority government, with the National Party winning just 38 percent of the vote, Act under 9 percent, and New Zealand First 6 percent. At the same time, support for the Greens and Te Pāti Māori grew. A polarisation is taking place, and support for the centre is collapsing. 
Among those moving to the left electorally, the new government is causing outrage. Māori have a long history of powerful movements winning concessions. From repeated land marches, to protesting the whites-only All Blacks rugby tour of South Africa. Māori are often a defiant, militant minority. But Māori cannot defeat this government alone. The protests that have already brought together Māori and non-Māori people against the government are a hopeful sign for the future.

Elliott Shaw

Toitū te Tiriti! Uphold the Treaty!

It is an indictment of Australian capitalism that, more than 230 years since the British Empire’s invasion of this continent and the consequent dispossession and widespread massacres of the original inhabitants, most Indigenous people remain confined to the very bottom of the social pile.
Despite all the talk about closing the gap, the lives of Indigenous people are not getting better. There has been little improvement in the almost 50 years that have passed since the 1975 Henderson report into poverty. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain the most socially and economically deprived and marginalised section of the Australian working class, and continue to face appalling oppression and deep-rooted discrimination.
On virtually every measure—employment, income, health, life expectancy, education, homelessness, savings, imprisonment rates, home ownership and quality of housing—Indigenous people are much worse off than the mass of the population.
Let’s start with incomes. The 2021 census starkly reveals that the median weekly household income for Indigenous adults was $825, compared with $1,141 for non-Indigenous adults. In the Northern Territory, Indigenous adults received less than a third of the amount of non-Indigenous adults (an appallingly low $465, compared to $1,485).
The proportion of Indigenous adults living in households with an income in the lower half of the income distribution declined by only a meagre 2 percent, from 69 percent in 2011 to 67 percent in 2021. Indigenous Australians are vastly over-represented in the lower household income categories, 35 percent of Indigenous adults living in households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes. 
About 30 percent of Indigenous households live in poverty; more than 120,000 Indigenous people live below the poverty line. One consequence of this is that, in New South Wales, Indigenous people account for 6 percent of the entire homeless population.
Indigenous children have the highest rates of poverty of any group in Australia. Half live in families with incomes below the poverty line, compared with 18 percent of non-Indigenous children. 
In 2008, federal, state and territory governments set the goal of halving the employment gap between Indigenous people and other Australians within a decade. That required, by 2018, lifting the employment rate for Indigenous people from 48 percent to 60 percent (the rate for other Australians being 72 percent). But at the time of the 2021 census, there had been barely any improvement—the Indigenous employment rate was still only 51 percent, while that for other Australians was 74 percent. 
The 2021 census also revealed the unemployment rate for Indigenous people was 12 percent, more than double the overall rate. For those living in remote and very remote areas, it is markedly worse, with unemployment rates between 15 and 25 percent. This dire situation in part is due to the federal government’s cancellation in 2021 of the Community Development Program, which threw thousands of Indigenous people in remote areas on to the unemployed scrap heap. 
Even for Indigenous people living in the major cities, the unemployment rate is still double that of other workers, and it is even worse in areas like western Sydney, where many Indigenous people live. 
While over the last quarter of a century a small Indigenous middle class of managers, small business owners, government bureaucrats and well-paid lawyers and other professionals has emerged, Indigenous people who work are still much more likely to be in poorly paid labouring jobs (18.1 percent compared to 11.8 percent of the total population) and in other lower paid blue-collar, sales assistant and clerical jobs than as professionals (14.2 percent compared to 24.7 percent) or managers (8.3 percent compared to 13.7 percent)
Most poverty in Australia is so-called relative poverty, but some Indigenous communities face absolute poverty, which results in high infant mortality rates and severe malnutrition. This is particularly the case in a number of remote communities, which have totally inadequate infrastructure and health provisions and are blighted by diseases that are largely eradicated in the rest of the country. 
Approximately 50 percent of Indigenous adults are reliant on some form of welfare payment. Sole parents are particularly vulnerable to poverty, and a relatively high proportion depend on the Parenting Payment—more than 15 percent of young Indigenous women compared with around 4 percent of non-Indigenous women.
Indigenous people suffer ill health and disability at greater rates than non-Indigenous people. This leads to life expectancy being around eight years less than that for non-Indigenous people. Ill health limits work opportunities and places a significant burden on the individuals and communities that care for the sick and disabled, especially where support services are inadequate or non-existent.
Families relying on public or private rentals are much more vulnerable to poverty. Nearly 60 percent of Indigenous people are housed in some form of rental property, compared to about 30 percent of the total population, and the housing is commonly of poor quality. Conditions are worse for those living in camps on the outskirts of places like Alice Springs.
Indigenous people are much more likely to experience overcrowding or homelessness. Crisis support accommodation for Indigenous women and children escaping family violence is totally inadequate.
Indigenous people are also greatly disadvantaged in the education system. Poverty is a major factor impeding access to quality learning experiences. Indigenous people typically experience rates of school attendance, achievement, retention and completion well below those of the general population. In turn, this contributes to higher unemployment, lower family incomes and a higher incidence of poverty. 
Almost half of Indigenous people (49 percent) do not have a qualification beyond secondary education, compared with 31 percent of other Australians. About 12 percent of Indigenous people attain university qualifications of a bachelor’s degree or above, compared with about 37 percent of other Australians.
For the 6.7 percent of Indigenous people who leave school before year 10, the unemployment rate is more than 25 percent. For those with no qualification beyond secondary school, the rate is 16.7 per cent.
Indigenous people are more likely to suffer reduced quality of life due to ill health, to experience disability and to die at younger ages than the non-Indigenous population. Poorer employment opportunities, education and housing have a decisive impact on health outcomes. Health risk factors (for example, smoking, alcohol misuse) and other risk factors (for example, poor housing, exposure to violence) are much worse for Indigenous people.
The effects of poverty begin at birth. Babies born to Indigenous mothers are much more likely to be of low birth weight compared with non-Indigenous mothers; and Indigenous infant mortality is double that of non-Indigenous infants. Indigenous children have high rates of illness, greater risk of injuries resulting from accidents, higher risk of asthma and lower developmental achievement.
To make things even worse, Indigenous people experience much lower levels of access to health services than the general population, even though they are twice as likely to be hospitalised. 
The Indigenous imprisonment rate is more than 12 times that of the rest of the population—2,470 persons per 100,000 compared to an overall imprisonment rate of 206 per 100,000. In New South Wales alone, where Indigenous people make up slightly less than 4 percent of the population according to the state’s Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, they accounted for a record 29.7 percent of the state’s adult prison population in February 2023. 
The situation is only getting worse. In Victoria, the Indigenous imprisonment rate soared by 42.1 percent between 2012 and 2022.
For Indigenous women, whom police routinely arrest when they are defending themselves in a domestic disturbance and who are at a distinct disadvantage in accessing legal support, the situation is even worse. By June 2023, the imprisonment rate for Indigenous women had surged to 15 times the rate for all women: 467 per 100,000 for Indigenous women, compared to 31 per 100,000 for all women.
Indigenous imprisonment, which is overwhelmingly for minor offences or long periods on remand awaiting a hearing, disrupts both the lives of the prisoner and that of their family. It compounds poverty and increases the risk of family breakdown, violence, homelessness and addiction. 
Poverty—the lack of money, jobs, inadequate housing and lack of proper health provisions—combined with the inter-generational trauma caused by dispossession and the attempted destruction of Indigenous culture—leads to the breakdown of personal and social relations, chronic mental health and addiction problems, domestic violence and high rates of incarceration. This is the “division on the basis of race” that plagues Australian society, not the proposal to increase token Indigenous representation to the parliament that is responsible for myriad policies that reinforce Indigenous disadvantage. 
This situation is not going to change, let alone be overcome, without a massive struggle by both Indigenous people and the mass of the rest of the working class. And while it is vital to fight for specific reforms to improve the lives of Indigenous people, such as improved job opportunities, an expansion of public housing, improved services and health provision in remote communities and basic measures to prevent deaths in custody, the lack of any significant progress in closing the gap over the past 25 years highlights the fact that a few changes around the edges are not going to be anywhere near enough.
Much more fundamental change in the way Australian society as a whole functions will be necessary to eliminate Indigenous oppression. This is not going to happen within the confines of the profit-driven capitalist system. The ruling class and their supporters in all the major parties are simply not going to invest the money and resources needed to improve a health system that fails to meet the needs of the mass of the working class, let alone those of Indigenous people, or engage in the massive expansion of public housing needed to resolve the housing crisis or pay workers adequate wages or boost the child care and aged care systems.
Nor are the bosses going to be prepared to seriously curb the police, let alone defund the prison system, as this repressive state apparatus is vital not just for persecuting Indigenous people but also for keeping the mass of the exploited in their place and protecting the rulers’ capital and investments.
The reality is that the whole existing order needs to be uprooted in a revolutionary struggle. What’s needed is a socialist society that puts human needs above corporate profits and allows Indigenous people to achieve genuine control over their lives. That makes it a vital task to build a movement that unites all of the exploited and oppressed in a class war against the rich and powerful.

Mick Armstrong

Indigenous oppression is a product of poverty

In the wake of the victory of the No campaign in the referendum, racists and right-wingers of all sorts have taken special delight pointing out that many Labor-voting working-class suburban electorates voted No. 
This is proof, they hope, that they can drive politics to the right and return the Liberals to power. Their tools of trade haven’t changed since the 1990s. Vicious attacks on unions, workers’ living standards and social services are accompanied by all manner of hate and fear campaigns. 
One of the questions this raises for the left is: What would an effective mass anti-racist campaign look like? 
It’s clear that such a project wouldn’t look anything like the Yes campaign we’ve just seen. Delivering vacuous, forgettable dot-points about “fairness” through a letterbox or social media ad is going to struggle to cut through with many working-class people—especially during a cost-of-living crisis. 
Labor members of parliament were clearly aware of the problem. A month before the referendum, the Australian Financial Review reported that Labor MPs were refusing to campaign for Yes, fearful of getting hammered over the government’s abject failure to address the cost-of-living crisis. According to the AFR, one MP “expressed dread at knocking on doors to press constituents about the Voice when petrol was back over $2.20 a litre”.
Of course, shrinking away from encounters like this isn’t the only possible response. In fact, it’s pretty straightforward to address economic concerns directly—and connect them to anti-racist politics. 
Anyone who has campaigned for Victorian Socialists has no doubt had this sort of conversation at some point. Many people will happily weigh in on the crimes of the billionaires and their political servants, but express misgivings about our policy of welcoming refugees and migrants, or other political issues such as defending rights for trans people. In my experience, the only response that can cut through is to talk the language of class: 
“Well, we’ve just been talking about the billionaires and how they rip us all off. In my opinion, one of the ways they get away with this is through ‘divide and conquer’: ‘No job security? Wages falling behind inflation? No bulk-billing doctor? Don’t blame me—I’m just the richest person in the country! Instead, why don’t you blame ... that refugee, that Aboriginal person, that Muslim over there’.”
Of course, this is only the start of any serious discussion of racism. But it’s clear that an approach like this can connect with a life experience that is structured by class. Many times I’ve had people thank me, and say that they’ve never thought of racism—or politics—in that way before. 
It’s an indictment of Labor and the union movement, and the Greens for that matter, that a straightforward explanation of racism as a tool of the rich and powerful is so rare in Australian political life. Instead, racism is portrayed as a version of impoliteness, or of not caring enough, or of “ignorance”. 
Anti-racism is all too often pitched as an appeal for people to “care more”. When this appeal is coming from a political establishment that self-evidently doesn’t care about working-class people, it can’t connect. And the political right can portray anti-racism as just some elitist snobbery of the “do-gooder middle classes”.
So, hypothetically, what might this approach have looked like for the intrepid political campaigner who knocked on doors despite petrol being above $2.20 per litre? Perhaps something like this:
“Yes, fossil fuel companies are jacking up their prices, piling up their profits, paying pretty much zero tax—and they’re also doing over Aboriginal people to grab their land. And not only that! Plenty of corporations and billionaires and politicians like Peter Dutton want us all thinking that Aboriginal people are the problem, when it’s the super-rich and the corporations who are the ones ripping us off. Don’t fall for the divide and conquer—we’re all getting done over by the rich, and we should be supporting each other, not letting Dutton divide us.”
But the Yes campaign could never talk like this, for two obvious reasons.
First was the weak, tokenistic nature of the Voice proposal itself. It was to be a powerless advisory body that could be ignored or restructured at the whim of the government, and it included no concrete measures that would actually assist Aboriginal people in their struggles for justice. This, after all, was the reason why significant parts of Australia’s corporate elite supported the Voice proposal. 
Second, the Labor Party finds it difficult to speak in class terms (and wouldn’t get taken seriously if it did) because it has spent decades introducing and administering neoliberal “reforms” on behalf of the corporations and billionaires who dominate our society. The Greens also, despite dabbling in talk about the billionaires in recent years, aren’t the sort of party that talks consistently in the language of class.
Along with taking class politics seriously, any effective anti-racist campaign would have to acknowledge that it is, um, a campaign against racism. This point might be thought so obvious it shouldn’t need saying. But the official Yes campaign was so timid it refused even to acknowledge the issue. In fact, the opposite was the case—for instance when the campaign left Marcia Langton isolated after she pointed out the obvious racism of the Liberal/National-led No campaign. 
In the late 1990s, Pauline Hanson did an enormous favour to the ruling class and the political right in this country by reintroducing plainly racist language into Australian political life for the first time in a generation. A lively campaign of protests had a measurable impact in reducing her electoral support, especially in Victoria. It would have been impossible to have this impact if we’d never called her ideas racist and asked people to rally against them on that basis. 
Solidarity is enlightened self-interest: the realisation that if I want to win against the billionaires, the corporate elites and their political servants, I have to help you win. 
The referendum is gone, and the Voice along with it. But if we want to challenge the deep roots of racism in Australian society, we have to be able to call out racism when we see it—and talk in the language of class to challenge it.

Jerome Small

You can’t tackle racism without talking about class

For left-wing people in Australia, support for Aboriginal rights is almost axiomatic—rightfully so in a country where Indigenous people are plagued by over-policing, racist politicians and endemic poverty. But horror at the racism Indigenous people in Australia face shouldn’t stop at the national border, and nor should solidarity. 
Recognition of this fact is increasingly evident in the response to Israel’s war on Gaza. It is reflected in the thousands of anti-racists who have attended protests against the war, as well as the many expressions of solidarity on social media that link the struggle of Indigenous people and the Palestinians. 
But among the self-proclaimed Indigenous rights supporters in the establishment, like Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and most of the Labor cabinet, the opposite is the case. Albanese championed the Voice to Parliament as a way to acknowledge the past injustices suffered by Indigenous people. But he seems to care little about the current injustices happening right now in Palestine. While thousands die from Israel’s bombs in Gaza, Albanese has lined up with the rest of the Western leaders to expound Israel’s “right to defend itself” and give a green light to a possible genocide. 
It is utmost hypocrisy to criticise the long history of genocide, frontier wars and racist discrimination in Australia, while not condemning Israel’s brutal war against the people of Gaza as it unfolds live on our screens. After all, Israel is right now trying to complete the very thing that many rightfully condemn the forerunners of the Australian government for starting in 1788: an ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their own land. 
All the horrors that were visited upon the Indigenous people of Australia, including violent attacks by armed soldiers, land dispossession, social segregation and racist demonisation, have been a feature of life for the Palestinians for decades. The Israeli state was created in 1948 out of a genocidal assault that led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing their homes and the Israeli military seizing most of the historic nation of Palestine. Since then, Israel has constructed an apartheid regime to punish and terrorise the Palestinians who remain. 
Unlike in Australia, the Israeli government was not able to dispossess the Palestinian people entirely in 1948, and nor has it managed to since. In the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinians still retain control over sections of their historic homeland and are fighting politically and militarily to regain their land and establish an independent state.
Many Israeli politicians want to finish what was started in 1948 and drive the rest of the Palestinians from Gaza and possibly even the West Bank. They see the current war as an opportunity to make gains in that regard. As the Israeli MP Ariel Kallner wrote, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48”.
This objective is acceptable to the Western powers that back Israel, and for whom Israel represents an important ally and base of operations in a largely hostile geopolitical region. Australia is one of the most craven. 
The establishment in Australia recognises and accepts this fact, at the same time as many in its ranks profess their support for Indigenous people and acknowledge the history of violence, racism and exploitation they have been subjected to. Of course, they don’t do anything to actually help Indigenous people in the here and now, but they are mostly fine with accepting that there was a genocide a long time ago.
It is far easier to condemn the crimes of the past than it is to confront the horrors of the present, especially when your state is one of the beneficiaries of that horror. To stand on the side of the oppressed when the intense propaganda campaign of the oppressors is in full swing is rarely a mainstream or popular exercise. 
Many of those who fought to abolish slavery, criticised South African apartheid or marched for civil rights and democratic reforms were vilified at the time as deluded criminals or mocked as silly utopians by the establishment, even if today they are venerated. 
We can’t wait for history to make its judgement. We have to throw ourselves into the fight for justice today, no matter how controversial that is with the powers that be.
Thousands who know what it means to support Indigenous rights, and who understand what was done to Indigenous people in Australia and why, are joining the rallies against those same crimes being committed against Palestinians. Those who want to bleat on about Indigenous rights only because they think it might be electorally expedient, are cheering on capitalism’s latest genocide. 
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hrkac

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