This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.
“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.
Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”. 
Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?
Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.
In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries. 
Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.
If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-are-real-costs-australias-housing-crisis-women">brief</a> last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men. 
Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing. 
And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.
Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.

Clara da Costa-Reidel

Women are no better off under Labor

The University of Technology Sydney has marked International Women’s Day by banning a poster asking the question: “Why are teenage boys so misogynistic?”. 
The meeting was called to discuss rising sexist attitudes among, and the broader right-wing drift of, young men. Numerous indicators point to this reality, including a recent King’s College London survey showing that young men are far more likely than young women, and even older men, to say that men have it tougher than women today. In the United States, Donald Trump increased his support among young men by 15 percentage points last year compared to the previous election; in Australia, young men support Liberal leader Peter Dutton in much higher numbers than young women. Also, a recent Monash University study found that female teachers are facing a rise in misogynistic behaviour everywhere—and many are quitting the profession because of it. 
One woman who attended the meeting told the audience that in her first-year business tutorial, the tutor had to tell off men in the class because they were rating every woman who spoke in the discussion in the zoom chat.
Most universities have put up posters celebrating women and our contributions to society. But the UTS administration has sided with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump stans. 
UTS was alerted to the poster by at least one male student on campus, who also emailed the UTS Socialist Alternative club complaining that he feels “unwelcome and stereotyped” by the mere presence of a poster advertising a campus meeting about the growth of the far right and its expression in the political attitudes of young men. 
For years, the political right called the left “snowflakes”. People wrote hundreds of books and articles lamenting the “coddling” culture in universities and about how the political left and progressives can’t cope with ideas they don’t agree with. Right-wing provocateurs such as Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson made famous phrases such as “facts don’t care about your feelings”.
How the tide has turned. It seems that young men from the political right, like those at UTS, are now the ones who might start campaigning for safe spaces and trigger warnings. 
The Centre for Social Justice &amp; Inclusion handles complaints relating to sex, gender identity, race and disability discrimination. According to its equity policy, it seeks “diversity, fairness, social justice and ethical treatment of others”. The policy seems to have been written with oppressed groups in mind, so it’s remarkable to see it being used against women on campus. 
The directive to remove the poster is also related to the university fad of introducing policies to protect the “psychosocial safety” of staff and students, which were initially designed to silence Palestine solidarity activists. The feelings and emotions of those in positions of power are being protected while those trying to address injustices face disciplinary hearings. 
A staff member from Activate, which manages campus life, instructed the club to remove the posters during a phone call with Yasmine Johnson, UTS Socialist Alternative club president and the woman who hosted the meeting.
“He said to me, ‘You followed all the correct procedures, but unfortunately you are going to have to take these down. This has gotten around the uni top level very fast—the deputy vice-chancellor, the equity department, everyone knows’”, Johnson recounted to Red Flag. “He even said that the deputy VC instructed that the posters be removed as they violate the UTS equity policy.” 
That university management is worried about some men being distressed because people are discussing sexism tells you something about the political shift that is happening. 
Johnson reported being mobbed by Trump supporters while she handed out leaflets for the meeting. They loudly professed their love for the racist and sexist president of the United States. They were precisely the sort of young men who have been politically drawn to the far right and influenced by the violent misogyny of the sex-trafficker Andrew Tate. They are much more confident to express their bigoted attitudes, which will only become worse as institutions like UTS support them.
By not wanting to trigger any boys on campus who have trouble distinguishing between fact (young men are pretty sexist) and their feelings (a poster made me sad), the UTS administration has silenced the free speech of young women who are trying to fight back against the growth of a global far right.

Anneke Demanuele

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

Transgender rights are firmly in the crosshairs of US President Donald Trump’s second administration. Among the 26 executive actions signed on Trump’s first day back in office was a sweeping order aimed at eliminating the idea of a “gender identity” separate from sex in the federal government. Among other measures, “gender” will be changed to “sex” on all government forms, and funding for anything pertaining to “gender ideology” will be cut.
Three subsequent executive orders encourage the US military to disqualify “individuals with gender dysphoria”, direct the Department of Health to de-fund “chemical and surgical mutilation of children” and compel athletic and educational institutions to “keep men out of women’s sports”. Trump’s language is deliberately brutish. His aim is to vilify and intimidate an already highly stigmatised community, and to send a message to all those who dare not conform to society’s institutions and expectations: be afraid. 
The initial order claims that so-called gender ideologues have used “socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces”. The not-so-veiled implication is that transgender women pose an insidious and potentially violent threat to the rest of the female population. The order on gender-affirming care singles out “impressionable children” as especially vulnerable to “radical and false ... gender ideology”.
Fearmongering around the safety of women and children is a longstanding tactic of the American political right. Jim Crow-era panics about “race mixing” have morphed into modern narratives that link migrant communities to child-trafficking and violent crime. Trump’s anti-trans crusade fits squarely into this playbook, reinforcing and reinforced by simultaneous racist uproars around border control and law enforcement.
Such frenzies create a sense of escalating crisis and imminent danger. The far right presents these as problems that only harsher policing and authoritarianism can resolve. Other executive orders signed upon Trump’s inauguration include, predictably, “Securing Our Borders”, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety”.
Republicans have also incorporated transphobia into economic appeals to voters. The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/us/politics/trump-republican-transgender-ads.html">estimates</a>
the party spent $37 million on election adverts condemning federal funding for gender-affirming care in 2024. The broadcasts focused on trans prison inmates in particular as undeserving of medical support. In a country where 15 million people are saddled with medical debt <a href="https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-finds-15-million-americans-have-medical-bills-on-their-credit-reports/#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.%20%E2%80%93%20The%20Consumer%20Financial,medical%20bills%20on%20credit%20reports.">according</a>
to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Republicans see an opportunity to tap into existing anger about government spending priorities and direct it against the marginalised and oppressed.
In their recent book Who’s Afraid of Gender?, gender theorist Judith Butler outlines how the global far right have incorporated transphobic hysteria into their broader political framework over the past decade. “Intimate fears and anxieties” about personal identity, safety and the traditional nuclear family “become socially organized to incite political passions”, Butler writes. 
US legislative records bear this out. In 2015, according to researchers at <a href="https://translegislation.com/">Trans Legislation Tracker</a>, 21 bills targeting trans rights were brought before US state legislatures. Those proposals mostly sought to restrict trans women’s access to public bathrooms. The number of bills snowballed over subsequent years as a coalition of Christian fundamentalists, conservative think tanks and Republican lawmakers worked together to extend their scope into health and education. 
In 2024, some 674 anti-trans bills were considered in 43 states. This avalanche of persecution now targets trans people and their supporters in almost every sphere of life, from inclusive schooling to workplace rights and gender-affirming medical care.
Anti-trans agitation in public schools is particularly important for Republican politicians because it connects them to a reactionary “parental rights movement”. According to the New York Times, that movement <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/us/parental-rights-school-board-elections.html">gained momentum </a>in 2022 by opposing coronavirus health measures, but it also opposes teachers’ unions, LGBTI-related literature, history curricula relating to slavery and evolutionary theory. US social conservatism weaves together racism and gender oppression with anti-abortion religious sensibilities in reaction against progress on multiple fronts.
Trump clearly places transgender rights under the shadow of a broader “woke” agenda. A White House memo from 27 January directs federal agencies to cease spending on any social programs that “advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering”. In a Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-president-trump-calls-enemy-within-more-dangerous-any-foreign-entity">interview</a>
last October, Trump warned, “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics”. He then suggested that the National Guard or military should be deployed against this “enemy from within”. In a campaign speech last October, he declared “I will take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female”. 
Transgender people are being targeted not only as a specific minority group, but as part of a multifaceted “enemy” that’s been constructed to advance Trump’s reactionary agenda. The notion that “gender ideology” permeates institutions at various levels helps to justify and fuel the new administration’s broader agenda of reorganising government and its priorities. Trump has repeatedly promised to dismantle the Department of Education specifically, which <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-save-american-education-and-give-power-back-to-parents">he says</a> is infiltrated by “radicals, zealots and Marxists”.
Any organisation receiving federal funding can become a target for conservative campaigns if it does not follow strict norms around gender identification and segregation. Any federal employee who supports trans people as part of their job now risks being fired. This is not only a direct attack on trans people, but a way of normalising an atmosphere of heightened repression and surveillance in an increasingly authoritarian United States.
Around the world, the far right are looking to the US as a model for the sort of society they want to create. A fight back is urgently needed both to defend trans people from Trump’s vicious attacks and to take on the reactionary agenda that motivates them and threatens us all.

Ruby Healer

Trump’s transphobia must be stopped

Should deference to oppressed people be the basis for solidarity? Among progressives, the answer is increasingly yes. 
At the University of Melbourne’s sizeable Gaza solidarity encampment last year for example, events were in effect dictated by a group of about six individuals—the only people involved with “lived experience” of colonial occupation—and who therefore unilaterally decided who could participate in the action and what strategy and tactics participants were allowed to use. 
It is likewise now routine for organisers of events like Invasion Day rallies to draw up authoritarian rules that attendees are expected to adhere to, many of which violate democratic rights in a way that would be vigorously objected to if imposed by the police or government. 
But because they are the dictates of the oppressed to be adhered to by the “privileged”, they are not only accepted by most attendees; they are actively enforced by large numbers for whom deference to such demands has become both second nature and a badge of honour. At Invasion Day, this means in practice white people aggressively policing the rallies.
This fawning approach to oppressed people is so unquestioningly accepted as a moral virtue that it generally escapes interrogation. But in an effort to give it a more solid ideological footing, two UK academics, Kerri Woods and Joshua Hobbs, last year published a journal <a href="https://www.theglobaljusticenetwork.org/index.php/gjn/article/view/274/211">article</a>
titled “The Normative Demand for Deference in Political Solidarity” with the explicit aim of better thinking through this “prevalent” but chronically “under-theorised” practice. The article didn’t make much of a splash, and it’s not likely to enter the canon of journal articles, if there is such a thing. But it is of interest because, in attempting to draw out the theory behind this ubiquitous practice, the authors inadvertently make a compelling case against it.
The problem, according to Woods and Hobbs, is this: “Allies of those experiencing injustice or oppression face a dilemma: to be neutral in the face of calls to solidarity risks siding with oppressors, yet to speak or act on behalf of others risks compounding the injustice.” 
The solution to this dilemma is “a normative demand for deference” to those with “lived experience”, which means “accepting the authority of a given speaker’s testimony or guidance and accepting normative demands arising from that as prima facie action-guiding”. In other words, whatever the oppressed say or say to do about their oppression should be accepted unquestioningly as a matter of principle. 
This, they argue, is “an important corrective to the tendency of the privileged to erase and to fail to understand the experience of oppression, and, alongside this, to deny and diminish the agency of those in disempowered positions”. 
This tendency of the non-oppressed doesn’t just mean that they might sometimes be insensitive or imperfect opponents of inequality, and therefore should exercise caution and be respectful when showing solidarity. Such an approach is denoted by different academic jargon: “epistemic humility”. 
The Normative Demand for Deference, by contrast, involves understanding the “distinct limitations” to the “knowledge or authority to speak and act” on the part of those who do not have “lived experience” of oppression, and therefore the likelihood that any attempt by them to challenge oppression will “compound the injustice”. Only through the complete relinquishing of agency in thought and action on the part of would-be “allies” can there be “authentic” solidarity and the perpetuation of oppression avoided. 
There is no doubt that there is a need for humility, sensitivity and respect in political spaces where people’s experiences of life and society are likely to differ. But the assumption underpinning this argument—that perfect knowledge of the experience of a particular form of oppression is a precondition for effective solidarity and necessary to avoid generating further injustice—does not stand up to scrutiny. Nor does the converse: that first-hand experience of a specific oppression provides the sufferer with some sort of portal into truth and strategic infallibility not available to others.
Oppressed people simply do not uniformly demonstrate a greater understanding of or tendency to challenge their oppression. The very experience of oppression, which by definition degrades and disempowers people, can mean that those experiencing it more readily internalise the ideology of inequality that shapes their reality. Just think of the phenomenon of refugees or new migrants who oppose refugee boat arrivals on the basis that the actions of those refugees attract hostility to already arrived refugee and migrants. 
Or women who spend endless money and time on products and procedures to make themselves look younger or more “attractive”, and who influence or shame other women into doing likewise. 
Oppression can of course also lead to resistance and rebellion, and struggles against oppression almost always are led by members of that group. But even then, the ideologies and strategies those leaders gravitate towards are not necessarily the most effective, “lived experience” notwithstanding. Take some of the early gay rights activists, who argued that invisibility (remaining in the closet) was the best way to be accepted by society. Or the many national liberation struggles that have adopted counterproductive terrorist tactics that have more often than not advantaged the imperialist power that was oppressing them in the first place. 
Then there are countless examples of non-oppressed people demonstrating meaningful solidarity even when their experience and understanding, or likely understanding, of those they’re standing up for is quite limited. The international solidarity movement against apartheid in South Africa, which provided important encouragement to the struggle within South Africa, is one example. The solidarity meetings and actions in support of the 1966 strike by Aboriginal stockmen and domestic workers at the Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory, which eventually won important gains, including the first iteration of land rights, is another. 
In fact, gains can be won for the oppressed even when there is no understanding at all nor any conscious intention to win gains for the particular oppressed group on the part of the people whose actions win them. When the Family Code was abolished in Russia shortly after the successful workers’ revolution in October 1917, it opened the door to greater acceptance of lifestyles outside the nuclear family. But this was not primarily because people with “lived experience” of homophobia in Russia demanded workers take this action. It was because the workers came to view as intolerable all forms of ruling class social and economic control. This made them natural allies of all the oppressed, whatever they thought they were doing.
If “lived experience” is uniquely able to bestow insight and political wisdom on its subject, and this knowledge is unavailable to those without it, how can we understand how and why all this happens and has happened?
If meaningful solidarity can be measured in its contribution to winning greater rights for the oppressed, the latter examples would have to count as very meaningful, despite the notable absence of deference. If instead solidarity is only “authentic” when those taking part in it are deemed to have prostrated themselves sufficiently to guarantee moral purity regardless of what it means practically for the struggle to end oppression, then solidarity is no longer particularly relevant to the pursuit of social justice. 
Strengthening the fight for liberation and to end oppression notably does not feature in the case Woods and Hobbs make for deference. Instead, they point to deference’s potential to facilitate emotional repair of the psychological damage caused by oppression. As they put it, “There is also an element of moral repair in adopting the appropriate (deferring) attitude or response to persons affected by injustice. To not accept as authoritative the testimony of those with lived experience is to disrespect the person as a knower”. By elevating the “testimony” of the oppressed, their dignity is accordingly restored and trauma to some degree ameliorated. 
The problem with this that the non-oppressed become the potential saviours of the oppressed, despite their ostensible commitment to being dominated by them. The hierarchy might be artificially inverted in the world of deference, but the “privileged” still hold the key to liberation, or, more accurately, the psychological recovery of the oppressed from their oppression. This denies the agency of the oppressed. Oppressed people simultaneously shouldn’t be engaged with as equals, argued with or debated because it takes away their agency, but only the action of allies properly elevating their voices and listening to their “moral knowledge” can alleviate their suffering. 
Another glaring problem with what Woods and Hobbs advocate, and which they acknowledge to be a problem but don’t address, is that it is not even possible to do what they suggest. The reality is that oppressed groups are not homogeneous, and rarely agree on even basic questions. Just think of the referendum about establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament—an utterly bland gesture that was nevertheless a chance for the population to express some minimal sympathy with the plight of Aboriginal people. The referendum was strongly supported but also vehemently opposed by different Indigenous people, for a range of reasons. 
If the task of an ally is to do as an oppressed group says, this situation presents a problem. To decide who to defer to, the non-oppressed must exercise their agency, but the limits of their “lived experience” mean that, in doing so, they are only likely to add to the injustice according to the “deference” schema. When there is no consensus among the oppressed then, there is no possibility of deference and nor therefore of meaningful solidarity. 
The argument for deference also can’t accommodate the overlapping oppressions under capitalism, all with their own peculiar dynamics and manifestations. Working out which combination of oppressions commands the greatest authority within this matrix at any one time, assuming the would-be ally can legitimately make such a determination, is no straightforward task.
A problem with deference that Woods and Hobbs do attempt to solve is the unfairly onerous burden it places on the oppressed to educate and direct the non-oppressed. This has generated its own peculiar backlash in the form of resentment at the “work” the oppressed are expected to do to facilitate solidarity, the nasty flavour of which is encapsulated in the title of this popular 2017 Medium article “White people, stop asking us to educate you about racism. Signed, every POC [person of colour] you’ve burdened with this question”. 
In keeping with their deferential approach, Woods and Hobbs get around this problem by advocating what they call “second order engagement”, an alternative to active solidarity which relieves the oppressed of this burden. They define this type of engagement as “reading ethnographies, narrative work of any kind (fact or fiction), watching films or listening to podcasts, that offer testimonies or reflections on lived experience—which, to some extent, may be taken as a practice of solidarity that expresses deference to those with lived experience of oppression. This may evolve into not just reading or watching material, but promoting and distributing material: organising exhibitions, screenings, readings (though it may not).”
But even this becomes a minefield, because to work out what material to best engage with should legitimately be done by the oppressed, not those without lived experience. But then that places yet another undue impost on them. So, consistent application of the deference approach leads logically towards disengagement as the ultimate expression of real solidarity. If the first rule is “do no harm” to the oppressed by exercising agency or requiring the oppressed to do the work to fill the void said agency has left, disengagement is the safest bet to ensure authentic solidarity. Happy news for the supporters of the status quo. 
For those of us not keen on the idea that activism is best done by withdrawing or spending inordinate time in front of a television set, there is an alternative: one that involves moving away from the idea that the subjective experience of individuals is the holy grail of truth and that listening to and “elevating” the right ones the pinnacle of political virtue. 
Sensitivity to the reality of oppression, and success in challenging it, is much more effectively forged through the practical and collective experience of fighting society’s various injustices and finding common ground between groups that face the same enemy. The process of developing and testing strategies aimed at achieving a clear and common goal has the potential to build bonds of solidarity between people and groups that otherwise might not have had reason to interact. This is precisely why the bosses and governments so frequently deploy divide and rule strategies to undermine the strength of campaigns or industrial campaigns. 
Working together in this way, whether to maintain a picket line, maximise numbers at a rally or prevent an eviction or deportation, brings people together as equals, in a way the practice of deference cannot. Deference engenders more of a disciple-prophet type relationship than one of comrades as equals in a common struggle. 
This matters, because the type of society we are fighting for is connected with the means adopted to achieve it. If a revolution is brought about primarily through military struggle, for example, it usually does not develop the level of working-class organisation necessary to ensure the resulting society is genuinely democratic and that production is under collective control. 
The way workers’ struggle, and ultimately revolution, rests on the collective power of the oppressed majority is what makes socialism—a society of mass, democratic control over production by the working class—possible. The collective fight against a common enemy necessary to achieve this itself changes people and shapes their political ideas—no-one, not the oppressed or anyone else, starts out with all the answers. The rigid hierarchical nature of the deference model leaves little room for this dynamic to develop. 
Of course, people’s experience of oppression should be respected. If it is not, and activist spaces or struggles just seem to reproduce the same demeaning conditions that the rest of society foist on people, this weakens the struggle. But the deference Woods and Hobbs talk about doesn’t help get us there. It condemns us to a never-ending vigilance over who is where in the pecking order of suffering in order to decide whose perspective should dominate our political thought and practice. 
The accumulation of experiences of fighting alongside others, the conclusions drawn from victories and defeats, and the obvious strength that unity confers shape the consciousness and understanding of all involved, and provide a material reason to be concerned with and sensitive to the suffering of others. The passivity and atomisation inherent to “second order engagement” cannot do this. Nor can deference. Woods and Hobbs have done us a service in highlighting why this widespread practice leads us nowhere.

Louise O'Shea

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

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.

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.

Women are no better off under Labor

University of Technology Sydney stands with boys with big feelings

Trump’s transphobia must be stopped

Deference to the oppressed gets us nowhere

The radical Jewish tradition—the alternative to Zionism

To end sexism, we need to destroy capitalism

Equal pay: the solution is hiding in plain sight

Cops should never have been invited to Mardi Gras

How corporate Australia blackwashes its complicity in racism

WA prisons are ‘barbaric dungeons’

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us